Psychoanalysis, the Legacy of Modernist Love, and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
In 2014, The New Yorker published a profile of Edith Windsor, plaintiff in Windsor v. United States, the Supreme Court case that made significant inroads into the legalization of gay marriage in the United States. This profile of Windsor, “The Perfect Wife,” draws out the most salient feature of the lesbian: she does not threaten the social order because she is associated with the fantasy of romantic love.1 Ariel Levy, the profile’s author, writes, “From the Bible onward, two men having intercourse has been viewed as more disturbing to the social order than two women doing whatever it is that lesbians do. For people to embrace same-sex marriage, they needed to focus on the universal desire for romantic love and committed intimacy.”2 In this chapter I focus on the way the figure of the lesbian exemplifies fantasmatic love, creating coherence and unity. As fantasy, the love of the lesbian poses no threat to society, to love itself, or, as evident, to marriage. “Lesbian fantasy” means that the lesbian loves fantasmatically, conservatively, and nonthreateningly.
The association of love and the lesbian is common in psychoanalysis. In particular, the lesbian is linked not just to fantasy but also crucially to transference. Insofar as the love of the lesbian is fantasmatic, by looking into lesbian love, we also look into the structure of fantasy that aims to produce wholeness, closure, and unity by eliminating negativity. And, most important, the representation of the lesbian as the exemplar of amorous fantasy helps to conceptualize the contemporary, queered love that is the subject of this book. In the first part of this chapter I parse the psychoanalytic theory of transference love (that is, love as such) in its relation to the figure of the lesbian. Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalytic theorists read the lesbian as an intractably conservative figure, sustaining the notion that love thrives on homogeny, coherence, and unity. In other words, lesbian love functions as the coherence-producing screen of fantasy that attempts to elide and erase negativity. Psychoanalysis repeatedly associates the lesbian with love and, I argue, establishes a transferential relationship with her in order to sustain its own sense of “self.” The seemingly inevitable linkage of the lesbian with transference becomes even more important to consider when one takes into account the intimate link between psychoanalysis and transference. To the extent that the lesbian is bound up with transference, the lesbian is also fundamentally bound up with psychoanalysis. At times, psychoanalytic theorists welcome an identification with the lesbian, at others resist it. In both cases the lesbian figures centrally in understanding the function of love in psychoanalysis.
In the second part of this chapter I inquire into the consequences of my observations on lesbian love in Djuna Barnes’s canonical (for both queer studies and modernism) novel Nightwood.3 Barnes takes up the psychoanalytic link between the lesbian and transference to reformulate it, providing a more complex understanding of the structure of transference. In her depictions of lesbian relationships, Barnes exposes two seemingly conflicting structures at the heart of transferential love: metaphor and repetition. Barnes’s depiction of the lesbian does not extricate her from the psychoanalytic understanding of the lesbian as loving, imbuing her, for instance, with the more “radical” element of desire. Rather, Barnes rewrites love, revealing queer forces of disfigurement, heterogeneity, and negativity at the heart of what seems to be the capacity for love and fantasy to redeem and unite. Barnes’s disarticulation of lesbian fantasy becomes an important innovation that sets the stage for the contemporary rewriting of love.
Finally, I turn from psychoanalysis and Barnes’s modernist account of love to contemporary rewritings of lesbian fantasy. I read elements from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal (2008) in order to examine both the continuity and difference between Barnes’s modernist love and these contemporary accounts of lesbian relationships.4 In both of these texts I suggest that the concept of fantasy (inherited both from psychoanalysis and from Barnes) remains central to Smith’s and Catton’s understandings of lesbian love. What makes these contemporary rewritings of love distinctly different, however, is the way in which amorous fantasy can no longer be understood as that which can conceal or erase negativity. Indeed, these contemporary accounts of lesbian fantasy include forms of negativity as central to love.
Observations on Lesbian Love
On the subject of lesbian sexuality, psychoanalysis is not unlike a broken record, repeating over and over again the same equation: female homosexuality = love. Lacan asserts that certain women love “their partner, who is nevertheless homo to the hilt . . . as the same in the Other.”5 And Bruce Fink clarifies the force of this claim by reminding us that Lacan “qualifies lesbianism not as a perversion but as ‘heterosexuality’: love for the Other sex—that is, women.”6 Continuing this reiterative pattern, Jacques-Alain Miller almost identically reasserts, “For women it [homosexuality] is constituted in the domain of love, while for men in the domain of desire.”7 Psychoanalysis in this regard gives new meaning to the phrase “lesbian fantasy,” insofar as the lesbian is intimately tied up with the fantasy screen that unifies and redeems the romantic couple. The moment in the psychoanalytic corpus that speaks most explicitly to this link between lesbian love and fantasy occurs in “The Signification of the Phallus” where Lacan asserts that “male homosexuality . . . is constituted along the axis of desire, while female homosexuality, as observation shows, is oriented by a disappointment that strengthens the axis of the demand for love.”8
This passage is interesting not simply because it reiterates the motive to choose Edith Windsor as the ideal plaintiff to challenge gay marriage laws in the United States; it also clarifies that lesbian love raises the question of clarity. In Gender Trouble Judith Butler reads this passage with an emphasis on Lacan’s phrase “as observation shows” to suggest that there is nothing particularly obvious about the genealogy of lesbian subject formation that Lacan seems able to observe without much difficulty.9 The passage from “The Signification of the Phallus” does not simply index, as Butler’s analysis suggests, the analyst’s pretense to epistemological mastery when faced with homosexuality in women. Rather, that Lacan can “observe” the relationship between female homosexuality and love points to the way that love for psychoanalysis always aims to produce the illusions of transparency, fantasmatic coherence, and unity; it aims to produce, in other words, something that can be unproblematically observed. While it may be the case, as Elizabeth Grosz argues in “The Labors of Love,” that “lesbianism has been left largely unexplained by psychoanalytic theory,” it is nonetheless not quite true that “the topic of lesbianism” stands out as “a point of constitutive incoherence and confusion.”10 Indeed, psychoanalytic theorists quite successfully imagine lesbians so that the image concretizes into immutability. The representation of the lesbian seems to cohere almost too completely, not only forcefully associating the lesbian with love, but also establishing this association on the basis of repetition without difference.11 Since female homosexuality is constituted as love insofar as it finds the same in the other, it seems telling that psychoanalysis cannot move beyond saying the same thing about homosexuality in women over and over again.
Thus, if homosexuality in women is dangerous, as many critics claim, it is not because it is antipatriarchal, resistant, noncompliant, or subversive. Rather, lesbian love comforts and consoles; it offers a sort of closure. And psychoanalysis is most vulnerable to the threat posed by lesbian love insofar as the lesbian has a distinctive relationship to not just love but also psychoanalysis itself. This connection becomes particularly clear when one considers the fact that love in psychoanalysis goes by another name: transference.1 2 Lacan suggests that without transference there would be no psychoanalysis, which Collette Soller glosses as the recognition that “psychoanalytic practice and transference are identical.”13 Beyond simply clarifying the constitutive function of transference for psychoanalysis, this idea has an even more fascinating implication: that psychoanalytic practice and love are identical. After all, Lacan does tell us: “Transference—is love.”14 Lacan would not be alone in taking this position. In Tales of Love Julia Kristeva also suggests that “transference love is . . . the royal road to the state of love.”15
Even as psychoanalysis may be identified with love, it remains somewhat ambivalent about this identification. After all, the point of the transference is ideally to move beyond it; by withholding the love the analysand demands, the analyst teaches her, as Freud argues in “Observations on Transference-Love,” “to overcome the pleasure principle, to give up a satisfaction which lies to hand but is not socially acceptable, in favor of a more distant one.”16 To “give up” the “satisfaction” of the transference is also, as Freud suggests here, to “overcome,” or to move beyond, the pleasure principle. By rejecting the pleasure of a consistent, reciprocal transference, the analysand eschews love for the sake of her desire. For psychoanalysis, the promise of love is that it ends, and its threat is that it might not. For this reason, Laplanche and Pontalis specify in The Language of Psychoanalysis that the transferences “do not constitute aides to cure except in so far as they are explicated and ‘destroyed’ one by one.”17 The analyst approaches these transferences “one by one” in order to demystify the “the One of universal fusion,” dissolving the dream of completion.18
In some instances, then, lesbians make good on the promise of transference love, particularly when the female homosexual is also hysterical, as Jacques-Alain Miller describes in “On Perversion”: “You have to consider female homosexuality in hysteria, which can disappear like magic when a woman enters analysis. As long as she can love the analyst as inaccessible, the longing for love which is realized in female homosexuality may immediately shift into the transference and you may witness a magical cure. Others take a very long time.”19 In the space of two sentences, the lesbian stands in for the whole of the analytic process; the hysterical female homosexual becomes the ideal analysand. She partakes of the transference, overcomes it, and moves beyond the pleasure principle toward the “magical cure.” Miller thus idealizes the ability to divest the female homosexual of her idealizations. Or, in other words, alleviating the lesbian’s love instantiates Miller’s own. It is not simply fortuitous that Miller produces this figure of the hysterical female homosexual who confirms the success of transference in analysis in the same passage that mentions “others” who “take a very long time,” others who may never be cured. These female homosexuals, one presumes, cannot so easily give up on the transference; they remain enfolded in the satisfaction of the pleasure principle; they will not give up their love. The co-presence of analytic success and analytic failure in this passage indicates that these figures are far from separate. Both figures inspire love, as Miller’s idealization of the lesbian who can give up her idealizations suggests.
Miller’s account of lesbians-in-love makes clear the fact that, for better or worse, the lesbian—through her love—is constitutively linked to psychoanalytic theory. That there are Miller’s “others” who “take a very long time” suggests that what psychoanalysis sees in the love of the female homosexual is the potential retardation of the analytic process, its being forever moored in fantasy, in the median stage of a benign, essentially conservative transference love. By doing so, psychoanalysis maintains a certain stubborn attachment to the lesbian not as the same but as other. In the very act of asserting the otherness of these women, psychoanalysis itself seems to fall in love. But how could psychoanalysis fall in love with the lesbian-as-other?
The simple answer to this question is that it cannot. Lacan clarifies that “everyone senses and sensed that the problem is how there can be love for an other.”20 Indeed, for Lacan, there can be no love for an other, only love for the same. But if, by othering the figure of the lesbian, psychoanalysis can disidentify with her love, then it is free to become enamored of the image of itself as not-in-love. Illustrating this interplay of identification and amorous attachment, Lacan tells a story of a “parakeet that was in love with Picasso”: “How could one tell? From the way that the parakeet nibbled on the collar of his shirt and the flaps of his jacket. Indeed, the parakeet was in love with what is essential to man, namely, his attire. . . . The parakeet identified with Picasso.”21 The story of Picasso’s parakeet perfectly depicts the situation of the female homosexual as psychoanalysis sees it, emphasizing especially the absurdity of identifying with something radically different from oneself. Love requires a fantasy so persuasive that a parakeet could see the image of itself in a man, so deceptive that two “others” could see themselves as same. Not being able to recognize itself in another’s image, the lover can love only him or herself.
When faced with the otherness of the lesbian, psychoanalytic anxiety rises to a fever pitch, turning run-of-the-mill resistance into a fully-fledged aggressive negation. Psychoanalysis must distance itself from the lesbian, asserting its position as not-in-love, in order to maintain a coherent image of itself. Even as it attempts to assert distance from the paralyzing force of love, psychoanalysis is seduced by the very state—being completely immersed in passionate attachment—in which it cannot, at any cost, bear to find itself for too long. The distance established between the lesbian and psychoanalysis shores up the boundaries of the latter in its difference from the former or cultivates a sort of narcissistic self-love. Psychoanalysis, in other words, is in love with itself as the demystification of the sort of love in which the lesbian finds herself enthralled. Such psychoanalytic narcissism represses the fundamental relationship between psychoanalysis and the lesbian, represses the implication that lesbian love and psychoanalysis might well be identical. How can psychoanalysis escape from its paralyzed relation to homosexuality in women? Must psychoanalysis always relate to the lesbian narcissistically?
One sort of response to the paralysis of lesbian love from some feminist and queer scholars is to offer a critique of the psychoanalytic understanding of female homosexuality at the level of desire. According to psychoanalysis, to the extent that lesbian sexuality is situated in the domain of love, it is not properly sexuality; it does not partake of desire. Many critics have pointed to this phenomenon either to change or to reject psychoanalysis. Elizabeth Grosz, for instance, points out that in psychoanalytic theory “the lesbian relation must be regarded in desexualized terms, as a regression to the mother-infant relation or a relation of narcissistic mirroring.”22 This failure to grant sexuality where sexuality is due, as Grosz sees it, demands a complete repudiation of the psychoanalytic apparatus to understand or to explain lesbian desire. Others, rather than simply rejecting psychoanalysis, respond more hopefully to its depiction of female homosexuality as “barely sexual at all.”23 They attempt to rethink lesbian desire in psychoanalytic terms, making incoherent and unwieldy the all-too-coherent image psychoanalysis produces.
Too often, adducing the female homosexual’s desire in response to her de-sexualization makes her more palatable not only to lesbian feminist critics but also to psychoanalysis itself. Following from the claim with which her book opens—that “within psychoanalytic discourse, lesbians have been most striking in their invisibility”—Adria E. Schwartz recuperates female homosexuality from the vantage point of psychoanalysis by arguing that “lesbians stand outside the laws of patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality.”24 A position like this one seems to “resist,” as Schwartz puts it, the psychoanalytic circumscription of lesbianism, but, as a variation on a more general theme in feminist criticism, this position turns out hardly to resist psychoanalysis at all.25 Schwartz’s argument resonates with the discordant keynote of lesbian sexuality: its capacity to disorganize the supposed harmony between the sexes. renée c. hoogland gestures toward this disharmony where she claims that “lesbian sexuality, falling outside the terms of the ‘social contract’ inevitably provokes a specific (though usually undefined) anxiety with respect to . . . the stable operation of the system of gendered heterosexuality.”26 This critique ultimately might translate to an assertion not unlike Judith Roof’s: “representing lesbian sexuality conspicuously unmasks the ways gender and sexuality normally coalesce to reassert the complementary duality of sexual difference.”27 Such interventions into psychoanalytic discourse claim, against psychoanalysis, that lesbian sexuality does not “make up for the sexual relationship” through love. Rather, homosexual relations between women expose the sexual as impossible by explicitly evincing the noncomplementarity of all desire, hetero and homo alike. Such an understanding of female homosexuality may well resist the fantasy of sexual fusion, but it does not resist psychoanalysis “as such.” In fact, if female homosexuality is disunified in the way these critics suggest, then it cannot help but offer psychoanalysis a seductive image of itself.
This radical, desirous lesbian might suggest, as Lacan does, “the point is that love is impossible and the sexual relationship drops into the abyss of nonsense,” registering both the futility of love and the failure of sex to make the couple cohere.28 To the extent that the figure of the female homosexual and psychoanalysis butt heads in a narcissistic battle-to-the-death, the lesbian’s simply aligning herself with psychoanalysis cannot alleviate the pressure of this specular anxiety. By becoming the avatar not of love but of the impossibility of all sexual relationships, the “revolutionary” lesbian reflects for psychoanalysis the mirror image of itself, confirming the latter’s theory of desire, giving it substance by bearing the burden of proof. Psychoanalysis might well find itself falling head over heels once again, this time by identifying with the female homosexual. If it is the case, as I have suggested, that psychoanalysis must disidentify with the female homosexual’s threat of retarding the analytic process in an eternal exchange of transference, then understanding the lesbian as not-in-love would seem to remedy this dilemma. But if psychoanalysis has to disidentify with love so as to situate itself as not-in-love, then finding itself face-to-face with the specter of a sexual subject similarly rejecting such an attachment might well become the propulsive force for identification. Even worse than aggressive negation, identifying with the lesbian—at least since Freud’s failed encounter with the “homosexual girl”—is precisely the sort of relationship psychoanalysis cannot brook.29 That is, psychoanalysis suffers less from a lesbian-centered homophobia than from what one might call “philophobia” in which the lesbian is positioned as the indicative figure of love itself.
In Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely Bruce Fink briefly details Lacan’s critique of Freud’s “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” which suggests that Freud fails to achieve his analytic aim because of his countertransference onto the girl.30 Instead of acting from the position of the analyst, he acts from the position of a subject immured in an imaginary relation of narcissistic attachment and aggression. In relation to the homosexual girl, in other words, Freud feels a little too much love. But what Fink does not address is the fact that Freud seems also to identify with her insofar as his position toward the girl is analogous to the girl’s relation to her beloved. Freud’s transference love thus is a sort of lesbian love or the girl’s lesbian love is a sort of transference love; either way, these loves turn out to be a little too similar for comfort.31 “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” makes explicit that psychoanalysis finds in the lesbian the representation of its own analytic apparatus, a freeze-frame of the nightmare scenario that female homosexuality allows us to envision: the potential impossibility of breaking through the fantasmatic content of love. But is there any way to get out of this stalemate between the figure of the female homosexual and the discourse of psychoanalysis? Will psychoanalysis and the lesbian be forever locked in an imaginary impasse, each one condemned either to affirm or to destroy the other?
In The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire Teresa de Lauretis rethinks the position of the lesbian by encouraging an encounter with otherness and “resignify[ing] the demand for love,” especially taking into account the specificity of lesbian desire.32 She wants to open her text—and, more important, lesbian love—to the intrusion of otherness, to the intrusion of desire. A project that first and foremost emphasizes the sexuality of homosexuality in women seems as though it would also value the unconscious currents that shape desiring subjects. But de Lauretis’s argument relies overwhelmingly not on the possibility of an unconscious otherness but rather on the conscious formation of fantasies, both specific and general, that make lesbian sexuality manifest. By engaging with fantasmatic scenarios that account for her own desire, and operationally defining her use of the term lesbian as centrally including “the conscious presence of desire in one woman for another,” de Lauretis’s project in effect resists itself.33 De Lauretis’s focus on conscious fantasy effectively reiterates the coherence-producing fantasy structure on which lesbian love relies.
Elizabeth Grosz refers to de Lauretis’s book as a “labor of love,” but Grosz also censures The Practice of Love as an “insulating” project that keeps psychoanalysis “propped up.”34 Though these characterizations may seem at first to be different, they turn out to be two aspects of one critique. Lacan writes of love as a function of “propping”: “one sees in one’s partner what one props oneself up on, what one is propped up by narcissistically.”35 If love aims to construct and preserve the One, then it’s not for nothing that “one” multiplies in this relatively short formulation. Of course the irony is that, here, five “ones” can make one “one,” as if to demonstrate rhetorically the disunity upon which any pretense to unity is predicated. Even as Lacan ironizes the “one” of narcissistic propping, the more jarring irony is that the untenable fantasy of wholeness that always seems to determine the psychoanalytic relation to the lesbian nevertheless remains imbedded in de Lauretis’s project. Insofar as it brings conscious fantasy to the fore, de Lauretis’s argument provides a narcissistic prop for both psychoanalysis and itself, producing the lesbian as a fantasy screen, which obscures the negativity that might disturb this fantasy. Such recourse to lesbian fantasy becomes nowhere more apparent than in de Lauretis’s oft-repeated equation, “it takes two women, not one, to make a lesbian.”36 With this formulation, de Lauretis returns us to the mathematics of love that I discuss in the introduction. Arguably, she modifies the original formulation, making particular a “universal” formula by turning “1 + 1 = 1” into “one woman plus one woman equals one lesbian.” But even this assertion of specificity does not resist the impulse to universalize. Adding the variable of desire to this formula does not produce the remainder that asserts the divisibility of love; the lesbian now has the privilege of fantasizing fusion for herself, rather than having it fantasized for her. Even the circular displacement of one formula for love onto another suggests the seamless bond that characterizes homosexuality between women.
Disfiguring Love
Djuna Barnes offers yet another sort of answer to the insistent depiction of lesbians as loving, which is, as I have argued, central to the psychoanalytic understanding of the lesbian. It is worth noting here, however, that the lesbian-in-love cannot be restricted to simply the discourse of psychoanalysis. Indeed, this representation of the lesbian has great currency in contemporary culture, as evidenced by, at the very least, that U-Haul joke we’ve all heard, which The L Word glossed in the early years of the twenty-first century as “the lesbian urge to merge.”37 Barnes’s engagement with the question of lesbian love does not have any pretense to novelty; Nightwood eschews the possibility of a “new” form of love in order to work with and work over the old. Lesbians in Nightwood are not somehow more desiring than in other psychoanalytic texts; they are not less “loving.” Indeed, Nightwood continues the psychoanalytic discourse about the lesbian by taking psychoanalysis at its word. Barnes depicts lesbian love through the lens of fantasy; Barnes’s lesbians strive for the merger, union, and coherence that fantasy aims to provide. Interpreting lesbians through fantasy, Barnes represents the love of the lesbian as not just fantasmatic but also transferential. But rather than simply reporting on a narcissistic relation of self-confirmation, sustained by forward displacement in time, Barnes parses lesbian love into the two mechanisms that operate within and as transference: metaphor and repetition. Here two mutually exclusive structures construct Nightwood’s understanding of female homosexuality, two structures that also fundamentally construct love. By rearticulating love in this way, Barnes does not so much provide a new understanding of love and female homosexuality as expose the discontinuity and negativity at the heart of both concepts. In this way, Barnes’s representation of the paragon of love, the lesbian, sets the stage for contemporary writers’ recasting of love in terms of amorous negativity.
Of course, this is not the first time a critic has inquired into Nightwood’s relationship to psychoanalysis. Jane Marcus, for instance, reads Nightwood as “a brilliant and hilarious feminist critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and a parody of the discourse of diagnosis of female hysteria.”38 Carolyn Allen, who identifies narcissism as a “negative construction . . . of the gay and lesbian erotic,” argues that the lesbians in Nightwood “illuminate the gaps” in Freud’s theory of narcissism.39 At least part of the reason for interpreting Nightwood as a rejection of psychoanalytic theory has to do with the concomitant critical desire to read in Barnes’s novel its rejection of love. Elizabeth A. Meese clarifies what is at stake in Nightwood’s purported repudiation of love when she states, “The novel presents a world in which people refuse identification and transference.”40 The imbrication of love and psychoanalysis in Nightwood thus comes explicitly to the fore: to refuse love is to refuse psychoanalysis, to refuse the language of psychoanalysis through which it is impossible to conceive of love without transference. All of these critics could be said to position Nightwood against psychoanalysis, but, contrary to what they suggest, psychoanalysis does not provide the position against which Barnes can articulate a sort of “oppositional politics.” Far from it: Nightwood is not so much against psychoanalysis as firmly grounded within its discourse. Moreover—and this is part and parcel of the novel’s debt to psychoanalytic theory—Nightwood does not repudiate love but yearns for it, dreams of a lesbian sexuality that grows out of complementarity and fusion.
As I write in the introduction, love functions as fantasy by making possible the sexual relationship. It deludes us into believing that we can achieve sexual complementarity, that one person is made for another, that one signifier is made for one signified. Indeed, love provides the ego with the assurance that signifier and signified coincide; two egos, like two signifiers, become One complete unit in the difference-dissolving operation of fantasmatic love. What we should become aware of at this point is that love is not simply a psychic structure but also a figural structure. The fantasy of self-sameness that love provides constructs love as metaphor; like love, metaphor asserts the possibility of identity. If desire is metonymy, as Lacan suggests in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” then love is the metaphor toward which metonymy strives as its impossible telos.41
The other facet of Nightwood’s understanding of love is that which troubles the identity that love would provide: the repetitive elaboration of transference. The other side of love’s metaphoricity, insofar as all love bespeaks transference, is its repetition. Indeed, it is possible to see metaphor and repetition working together insofar as every love object becomes a love object to the extent that, in its repetition “of earlier reactions,” transference attempts to metaphorize past love in the present.42 A “new” love becomes a metaphor for an older one. But repetition compulsion, as Freud and Lacan theorize it, threatens to undo the identity for which love, metaphor, and narrative strive. Peter Brooks suggests that narrative repetitions “may be in some sense painful” insofar as “repetition . . . retards the pleasure principle’s search for gratification of discharge, which is another forward-moving drive of the text.”43 In other words, repetition stifles narrative progress, coherence, and closure.44 Thus, if love seems at first glance to be conservative, simply in the service of complementarity and linguistic transparency, then love also, at the level of repetition, challenges the conservatism of such transparency and the complementary closure for which traditional love stories aim. Against this reading of repetition, I want to suggest that Nightwood details the way in which repetition can itself aim to conserve. After all, what does repetition do if not preserve intact one particular instance by iterating it over and over again? By pitting one version of conservatism against another, Barnes shows us that not only love but also conservatism is not coincident with itself.
Many critics have noted the nonlinear, unconventional narrative structure of Barnes’s novel.45 Some of the early reviews of Nightwood address this issue, as when Dylan Thomas writes that “it can’t be called a novel, because it only has a sort-of-a-plot.”46 Beyond being simply unconventional, Nightwood’s narrative is also nothing if not repetitive. Erin G. Carlston gestures towards this when she writes: “While Nightwood’s narrative structure . . . is quite coherent and even symmetrical, it is also fiendishly intricate, anticipating itself, circling back again and again to the same chronological moment, deferring and baffling temporal resolution and the realization of meaning. Both an aestheticized style and an antirealist narrative structure, then, can express the desire to evade finality.”47 On the one hand, what Carlston describes is Nightwood’s insistent repetition through anticipation, circularity, and deferral. On the other hand, however, this insistence stands in stark contrast to the all-too-accurate description of the novel as “coherent and even symmetrical.” Given the structure of her sentence, it is clear that Carlston opposes coherence to repetition and, moreover, values repetition over coherence in order to make the claim that Nightwood is antifascist in its evasion of “finality.” However, what Carlston does not see in Nightwood is that coherence and circularity, symmetry and repetition are not opposites. Indeed, in Barnes’s novel, these apparent opposites enable each other. That is, the repetitions of Nightwood do not so much derail narrative closure as produce the sort of closure that repetition should trouble.
This drive toward closure seems to be what Jane Marcus refers to when she writes that Nightwood “is such a tightly closed text.”48 Such self-enclosure bespeaks the attempt to shore up narcissistically the boundaries of identity, which characterizes lesbian love in psychoanalysis. But Nightwood also represents female homosexuality in this way. Nora says of Robin: “A man is another person—a woman is yourself . . . ; on her mouth you kiss your own” (143). This passage may prefigure Luce Irigaray’s famous lips, which insist upon the impossibility of a unitary feminine sexual satisfaction, but here Nora does not produce any awareness of difference or multiplicity.49 She understands love as complete fusion, as the identity between two people, and this becomes most apparent when Nora simply says of Robin, “She is myself” (127). Many critics of Barnes’s novel have tried to rescue Nightwood from this lesbian narcissism and have attempted, in a variety of ways, to argue that Nora and Robin’s relationship valorizes difference over and against sameness.50 The reasons for this particular critical tendency make good sense. First of all, even if self-sameness is the goal of love, all relationships will fail to live up to this ideal. Another good, though dubious, reason for insisting on the difference within Nora and Robin’s love emerges from Carolyn Allen’s Following Djuna. She “stress[es] the layering of differences in Nightwood’s erotics between women because lesbian relationships are conventionally described as self-enclosing, and in danger of fusion even in contemporary lesbian communities.”51 Allen’s motivation is understandable indeed, but just because we want something to be true about Nightwood’s representation of lesbians does not mean that it actually is. Indeed, it may well be the case, that rather than producing an unconventional representation of lesbian sexuality, Djuna Barnes cannot help reproducing female homosexuality as narcissistic, identitarian, self-enclosed, and desexualized.
Allen’s fear for the self-enclosed fate of lesbians everywhere should bring us back to Jane Marcus’s assessment of Nightwood as a “tightly closed text.” It’s not for nothing that these critics use virtually identical language to describe lesbian relationships and Barnes’s novel. Indeed, this convergence indicates that at stake in the structure of Nightwood’s narrative is the question of the lesbian relationship. On one level, one could say that the narrative is repetitive insofar as the first four chapters tell the story of how Nora and Robin get together and then how their relationship dissolves. But the following three chapters return to this initial story; rather than moving the narrative forward, these sections of the book retard its progress. For instance, at the end of chapter 5, “Watchman, What of the Night?” Dr. Matthew O’Connor recounts the fight that takes Robin away from Nora by bringing Jenny and Robin together: “And then Robin was going forward, and the blood running red, where Jenny had scratched her, and I screamed and thought: ‘Nora will leave that girl some day; but though those two are buried at opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find them both’” (106). This is the exact moment we read about for the first time in chapter 4, “The Squatter”: “Then Jenny struck Robin, scratching and tearing in hysteria, striking, clutching and crying. Slowly the blood began to run down Robin’s cheeks, and as Jenny struck repeatedly Robin began to go forward as if brought to the movement by the very blows themselves” (76). Some of the phrasing that recurs in these passages has to do with “going forward,” which seems important since this is exactly what repetition should not do. However, in these passages a repeated action—Jenny’s blow—seems actually to produce this forward movement. These moments not only evince the repetition of this event in the narrative but also enact the contradictory way that repetition functions within Nightwood as a whole. Certainly the later passage in chapter 5, to the extent that it is a repetition, moves us backward, but it also nevertheless propels the narrative forward to a point where the repetition finally seems to stop. This end point occurs in the book’s final chapter, “The Possessed,” which resumes the narrative where the first four chapters leave off; here we find out how Robin and Nora reencounter each other after their initial separation. And it turns out that the last chapter is itself a repetition of something that happens earlier.
In the passage quoted from “Watchman, What of the Night?” O’Connor embeds a sort of prediction in the text of the repetition. He claims that Nora and Robin will be reunited by a dog that will “find them both.” This turns out to be not so much a prediction as part of another repetitive structure. O’Connor’s assertion that “one dog will find them both” appears again in “The Possessed” when a dog actually does unite Nora and Robin. Robin wakes up “to the barking, far off, of Nora’s dog,” and follows the sound until the two women meet again (168). Robin then gets “down on all fours” and starts to bark like a dog (169–70). But, as Louis Kannenstine points out, the end of the novel closes a circle that begins much earlier in the narrative, well before O’Connor asserts that “one dog will find them both.”52 When Barnes provides the first extended description of Robin in chapter 2, “La Somnambule,” she describes Robin as “a woman who is beast turning human” (37). Thus, even before Robin seems to turn into a dog, she is already aligned with the nonhuman, making the final scene of the book a return to this earlier moment in the text. The repetition that poses as narrative progress constitutes the moment in which Nora and Robin return to each other; the circular structure of the novel brings the two women back together, concluding the novel with the closure of lesbian love. As if this structure were not enough to emphasize Nightwood’s investment in fantasmatic, narcissistic attachment, the language that Barnes uses to reunite Nora and Robin reinforces this model of love. As Robin travels toward Nora, Barnes writes, “Robin now headed up into Nora’s part of the country. She circled closer and closer” (168; my emphasis). Just as the repetitions provide the road map for the circular self-enclosure of the novel, the route that brings Robin back to Nora is itself made of circles. If, as Brooks suggests, repetition should trouble narrative resolution and closure, particularly those forms of closure associated with the construction of the couple, then repetition in Nightwood produces the opposite effect. Rather than disturbing resolution, repetition produces it; rather than keeping the couple apart, repetition brings them together; rather than calling into question the self-sameness associated with lesbian love, repetition reinforces it.
Metaphor, on the other hand, disarticulates the fantasmatic coherence, closure, and identity for which repetition strives in Nightwood. A number of critics have approached Nightwood’s metaphoricity in sometimes contradictory ways. Shari Benstock writes, “It is significant that critical attention” to Barnes “has focused on style.”53 She expands upon this idea by hypothesizing that “this critical move suggests that readers did not understand the subject matter.”54 For Benstock, matters of style, figure, and signification are not of central importance to Barnes’s work.55 However, I want to argue that style, or figure, is central to the novel’s “subject matter.” Only by investigating the operation of metaphor in Nightwood can we get a suitably full idea of what the novel’s arguments about love and lesbian sexuality are. One possible metaphorical reading would be to follow Victoria Smith’s suggestion that Robin “stands in for the past.”56 In this reading, Robin is a metaphor that transparently points to “the past” as its referent. But, in contrast with this sort of reading, I want to suggest that metaphors do not work to produce identity between figure and referent, signifier and signified, lover and beloved. Counterintuitively, the impossibility of producing identity through metaphor has everything to do with Nightwood’s insistence on self-sameness and closure. In Nightwood, structures of metaphor and repetition, though they seem to conflict, cannot be separated from each other.57
After all, if metaphor were able to make figure and referent, lover and beloved the same, then the structure of metaphor would be fundamentally repetitive; the logical structure of metaphor is tautology. Nightwood’s metaphors thus directly engage with and respond to its narrative; metaphor forces us to rethink the unities produced by narrative and by fantasmatic lesbian love. Barnes frequently describes Nora and Robin’s relationship with figures that can only be called figures of dis figuration. In one instance: “Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the ‘findings’ in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves. In Nora’s heart lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her identity, and about it for its maintenance ran Nora’s blood” (56).
In one way, this is a simple figure: heart as charnel house, death as the mise-en-scène of love. The melancholic construction of identity seems to become the primary focus of this figure. Here, “the fossil of Robin” is carved into Nora as “intaglio of her identity”; identity, in other words, depends upon the lack of identity. Nora’s melancholic incorporation of Robin thus traces an almost too familiar outline of modernist love. But Barnes abjures this apparent simplicity insofar as it is not just “personal identity” but the identity of love that this figure disarticulates. Love, on the one hand, is analogous to “the ‘findings’ in a tomb,” which Barnes likens to “raiment” and “utensils.” As a pharaoh is buried with the accoutrements that he will need in the next life, so too does Nora take love to the grave. At this point, love is an aesthetic object that is, moreover, not associated with any particular referent. On the other hand, as the passage proceeds, “love” becomes aligned with the particularity of “that which he [the lover] loves,” which in the next sentence turns out to be Nora. At the outset of this passage, then, “love” is an abstract, unmoored universal, but the trajectory of the metaphor forces this universality to pass through degrees of particularity: from “that which he loves” to Nora herself. Such a movement from general to specific produces a concept of love that is somewhat more complicated than a love that would be linked to either the abstract or the concrete. And though the passage begins by charactering love as an aesthetic object, it ends by suggesting that love is also organic, a “fossil.” Thus, if this is a figure of disfiguration, it is not primarily because it puts into play a conventional conception of love as melancholic. Rather what Barnes disfigures in this passage is the very idea of love itself; love is both abstract and concrete, both universal and particular, both aesthetic and organic.
Elsewhere, Barnes writes again of Nora and Robin’s love: “As an amputated hand cannot be disowned because it is experiencing a futurity, of which the victim is its forebear, so Robin was an amputation that Nora could not renounce” (59). As another seemingly easily readable figure of melancholia, the amputation of Robin from Nora once again emphasizes the centrality of Robin’s absence to Nora’s “identity.” But what is more astonishing by far about this figure is the strange temporality Barnes employs to make an otherwise banal point about the necessity of loss in love. This figure is as much about something like transference as it is about melancholia. The amputated hand, a remnant of the past, persists into the future as though it is not absent, just as an old love through transference gets recreated anew. In other words, Nora is different from herself through the melancholic incorporation of Robin, and Robin—the amputated love object—by occupying at least two distinct temporal moments at once, is not the same. O’Connor produces a related metaphor when he recounts the story “of a dead horse that had been lying long against the ground. Time and birds and its own last concentration had removed the body a great way from the head. As I looked upon that head, my memory weighed for the lost body; and because of that missing quantity even heavier hung that head along the ground. So love, when it is gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight” (127). In this passage the amputated hand of the previous passage is replaced by the decapitated head, but, despite this difference, they both point toward a similar reading of love. Indeed, though the “content” of all three figures that I cite is different, they seem nonetheless to say, almost compulsively, the same thing: love is about loss, a loss that goes unrecuperated and unmourned.
And what could be more clichéd? These clichés become even more marked when one considers Nightwood in relation to Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch (2006).58 Not only does Waters seem to take the title of her book from Nightwood’s chapter 3, “Night Watch,” but she also plays on the relationship between lesbian love and melancholic metaphors that Barnes evokes. Waters writes, “I’d suffer more pain than this . . . to be sure of Julia! She thought of the things she’d readily give up—the tip of a finger, a toe, a day from the end of her life” (152). Or: “She had often longed, in fact, for her jealousy to take some physical form; she’d sometimes thought, in moments like this, I’ll burn myself, or I’ll cut myself” (159). Of course, these dreams of self-injury and the amputation of body parts aim to ensure that one will not have to amputate the loved one; Waters’s character, Helen, wants to literalize Barnes’s metaphors so that the disconnection they figure does not become the truth of love. The cliché of love as loss is not distinct from the ideal of One in love; rather the two ideas are fully imbricated.
But Djuna Barnes does not simply uncritically repeat commonplaces about tragic lesbians. She also significantly reworks them. This becomes most apparent in a metaphor that is unlike the rest inasmuch as it seems to have nothing to do with loss: “Robin and she, in their extremity, were a pair of opera glasses turned to the wrong end, diminishing in their painful love” (62). If I refer to Barnes’s metaphors as figures of disfiguration, then this is the place where the force of disfiguration becomes strongest. On the one hand, this “pair of opera glasses” brings into focus the discontinuity that inheres in lesbian love. Nora and Robin, as a “pair,” produce a love that is at once both singular and multiple; they are metaphorized as one object that is constituted by more than one. On the other hand, the pair of opera glasses that focuses Barnes’s engagement with the self-contradictory construction of love also functions to unfocus love. The reversed opera glasses as which Robin and Nora figure distort the image of love. Looking through the wrong aperture mars love so that it becomes almost unrecognizable as love. This moment casts in a different light the other, seemingly more conventional metaphors that I have cited. These figures can no longer be understood as simple representations of melancholia. Ostensibly, Nora and Robin’s “love” is the referent of these three figures, which describe the fissures and disjunctions that exist within this love. If these metaphors refer to their love, then this relationship creates an identity between figure and referent. However, the images of the decapitated horse and the wrist without a hand, in particular, seem to suggest that the referent of these figures is nonself-identical or itself disfigured. The problem with Nora and Robin’s relationship is that they cannot achieve the self-sameness that metaphor struggles to establish. In this way, we can think of their relationship as the thematization of not simply the particular metaphors that Barnes produces but metaphor as the privileged trope of fantasy. Just as fantasy aims to produce coherence and identity, so too does metaphor figurally try to achieve the same goal. If metaphor seeks to produce an identity between itself and its referent, and especially if the supposed referent is itself nonself-identical, then metaphor here fails to achieve its identitarian aim. And as metaphor breaks down, so too does fantasy; the fracturing of fantasy disfigures love.
Barnes’s metaphors thus disfigure love because they represent love as discontinuous, ruptured, failed, and fragmentary, even as repetition reinforces the coherence of the “conventional” love plot. But it is not simply the case that there is one structure—repetition—that enables love and another unrelated structure—metaphor—that makes love impossible. Rather, repetition and metaphor are implicit in each other; they are part and parcel of the same movement. Insofar as these two structures dominate transference in particular, and love in general, Barnes suggests that love constructs and destroys unities simultaneously. The moment in which love materializes—and the lesbian is the indicative figure of love for psychoanalysis—it also dematerializes; the moment in which a lover seems to unite with her beloved is also the moment in which the two are most rigorously and violently separated. Though we can only perceive the disfiguration of love by looking the “wrong” way though a pair of opera glasses, Nightwood suggests that this “wrong” way is also the only right way. A distorted picture of love is an accurate one.
Prefiguring Amorous Negativity
With this distorted picture of lesbian love in mind, I would be remiss were I to suggest that such disfiguration is exclusively at issue in this text. Indeed, Barnes offers in Nora and Robin’s relationship a complex and contradictory account of love and the redemption it promises. But it would not be quite true to say that in their relationship Barnes explicitly depicts the impossibility of such redemption. Nora and Robin’s relationship is distinctively modernist in its contradictoriness; we find in this relationship the modernist ambivalence of which I write in the introduction. Nora and Robin’s love certainly is disfigured, but it can still be, and regularly is, redeemed by critics. Centrally important to the possible redemption of Nora and Robin’s love is Jenny Petherbridge, in every way the central figure of negativity in the text.
Petherbridge functions in Nightwood as a desublimated scapegoat. We can blame on her the dissolution of Robin and Nora’s relationship. She becomes the “evil” intruder who interferes in the sanctity of their union. Were it not for her, Nora and Robin’s love might survive. Implicitly, this is what critics address when they heap value judgments upon her or uncritically repeat the attitudes toward her expressed by the other characters.59 Her status as a scapegoat, as the repository of all the text’s negativity, makes Jenny Petherbridge the most compelling (and queer) character in the text. Critics almost universally dismiss Petherbridge. She is “evil,” “foolish,” “horrible,” “odious,” “abject,” “parasitic,” and “mediocre.”60 Or, forgoing value judgments, other critics simply identify her as a minor character. In Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes Andrew Field characterizes Petherbridge as “another distraction from the main play of passion.”61 And, in the 2006 reissue of Nightwood, Jeanette Winterson writes in her preface of the “avid,” “ruthless,” and “predatory” Jenny.62 She also suggests that in Nightwood’s lovers (Robin and Nora) we find “a truth . . . that moves us beyond the negative” (xii). Winterson expands upon this where she writes: “there is great dignity in Nora’s love for Robin. . . . We are left in no doubt that this love is worthy of greatness—that it is great” (xiii). But nowhere in her preface does Winterson manage to redeem Petherbridge’s predation as nurturing, her ruthlessness as mercy. In no way can Winterson make Petherbridge into the paradigm of dignity and greatness as she does for Robin and Nora. Jenny Pether bridge manages to escape having the responsibility of purveying the “truth” that is “beyond the negative” because she is not great, not dignified, not somehow “beyond” the force of negativity; she is “avid and ruthless,” a predator, debased and debasing. Nightwood certainly does not foreclose on these sorts of readings. Barnes, after all, seems less than sympathetic toward her; and it’s true that when one thinks of Nightwood Nora, Robin, Dr. O’Connor, and even Felix Volkbein come to mind more readily than Jenny Petherbridge. Because critics so reliably forget or reject Petherbridge, she deserves closer examination. When one dismisses her, or simply misses her, one also misses the fact that in her are condensed the structures of love that I have already detailed; one misses the fact, in other words, that she is not, as Field suggests, “the powerful petty demon of anti-love,” but she is rather the face of love itself.63
Barnes’s anatomy of love does not actually culminate with her depiction of Nora and Robin’s relationship; it is too easily sentimentalized, too easily redeemed. After all, if one were to valorize Nora and Robin’s love as the epitome of lesbian sexuality, that reading could quickly fall into the trap of attributing to it either success or failure, fusion or noncomplementarity. I want to suggest, instead, that Barnes’s portrait of Jenny Petherbridge, the woman who “steals” Robin from Nora, provides the most concentrated and most persuasive example of Barnes’s interpretation of the lesbian. With Petherbridge, Djuna Barnes queers love—here, specifically lesbian love—by depicting it as the embodiment of the negative. Barnes’s text is therefore unmistakably ambivalent about love. On the one hand, love becomes associated with the negative through Jenny Petherbridge. On the other, however, love can still be redeemed in Nora and Robin’s relationship (particularly, if one does not look too carefully at its disfiguration). But, in the midst of Barnes’s modernist ambivalence, we find in Petherbridge a precursor to contemporary amorous negativity. Whereas in Nightwood the negative love for which Petherbridge stands has to be vilified in order to sustain the possibility of amorous redemption, contemporary writers will do away with this ambivalence in order to focus exclusively on the negativity of love. We would do well, then, not to dismiss Petherbridge as the negative against which we can pose the possibility of redemption but rather to examine how Barnes represents her in relation to love.
Condensed into Barnes’s representation of Petherbridge are the structures of love: metaphor and repetition. Petherbridge undoubtedly constitutes the most “transferential” figure in the text. Her physical appearance is not identical with itself: “She had a beaked head and the body, small, feeble, and ferocious, that somehow made one associate her with Judy; they did not go together. Only severed could any part of her have been called ‘right’” (65). Here Petherbridge embodies the disjunctive logic of Nora and Robin’s love; her figure might be more appropriately, if awkwardly, called a dis figure. She is bricolage become body; she is Frankenstein’s lesbian monster. But, beyond her appearance, it seems that her whole life is an aggregate of collected parts. “She has a longing for other people’s property,” Barnes writes, and we read about a number of objects that she takes, or wants to take, from others: a child (104), the portrait of Felix’s fake grandmother (114), Robin’s mind (124), plaster virgins (124), and photographs from the past (102). Most important, however, she steals love: “When she fell in love it was with a perfect fury of accumulated dishonesty. . . . She appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora’s for Robin” (68). These are the keynotes of Jenny Petherbridge; she steals other people’s lives, other people’s loves. And what is this if not the hyperbolic culmination of the logic of transference? Petherbridge metaphorizes others as herself and repeats the past, though not her own, in order to construct the present.
Though none of her parts fit, Petherbridge seems like she could become complete; O’Connor suggests that “one is always waiting for the rest of it, for the last impurity that will make the whole” (98). The tension between her discontinuity and the expectation of her accession to wholeness perfectly captures the dilemma of modernism’s ambivalent love. She is neither one thing nor the other, but moving toward both diametrically opposed poles simultaneously. And, in the movements toward wholeness and disarticulation, everything she touches turns to shit: “what she steals she keeps, through the incomparable fascination of maturation and rot” (98). The pursuit of oneness produces what exceeds enumeration, waste matter, “rot.” Moreover, she thrives on excrement: “Jenny the bird, snatching the oats out of love’s droppings” (101). This passage evokes what becomes most important about Jenny Petherbridge. It is not simply that what she touches she turns to shit, but rather that whatever she touches is already shit. It is almost as if only a body as monstrous as hers, as piecemeal, as hybrid, can metabolize waste in order to produce more waste. This is, of course, not to say something so absolute, so totalizing as “Jenny Petherbridge exposes the way that all love is shit.” Rather the fact that Barnes insistently associates her with decay, corrosion, and waste points to her function as the repository of negativity in the book, a function that Nightwood and its critics cannot do without.
But just as Petherbridge cannot be sublimated, so too she cannot be fully desublimated. In addition to making her the most reprehensible character in Nightwood, Barnes also seems to condense into Petherbridge all the central characters in the novel.64 After all, it is not just Jenny Petherbridge who steals other people’s pasts to make them her own. Felix’s father, Guido, makes up his own and, by extension, Felix’s history: “he had said that he was an Austrian of an old, almost extinct line, producing, to uphold his story the most amazing and inaccurate proofs” (3). And the portraits of relatives that adorn Felix’s home are simply “reproductions of two intrepid and ancient actors,” which “Guido had found . . . in some forgotten and dusty corner and had purchased . . . when he had been sure that he would need and alibi for the blood” (7).65 But beyond this, Felix at times sounds strangely like Petherbridge, who “could not participate in a great love, she could only report it” (68). Felix also seems able only to report: “He tried to explain to her what Vienna must have been before he was born; yet his memory was confused and hazy, and he found himself repeating what he had read, for it was what he knew best” (43).
Moreover, Petherbridge is not the only character in the book in whose home is a collection of “wrong things,” as O’Connor puts it (104). The description of Nora and Robin’s home together sounds equally “wrong”: “There were circus chairs, wooden horses bought from a ring of an old merry-go-round, Venetian chandeliers from the Flea Fair, stage-drops from Munich, cherubim from Vienna, ecclesiastical hangings from Rome, a spinet from England, and a miscellaneous collection of music boxes from many countries” (55–56). When we are introduced to this scene, it is romanticized in a way that Petherbridge’s “wrong things” never could be. Barnes writes of Nora and Robin’s home, “In the passage of their lives together every object in the garden, every item in the house, every word they spoke, attested to their mutual love, the combining of their humors” (55). But in less than a page these “humors” turn to bile: “When the time came that Nora was alone most of the night and part of the day, she suffered from the personality of the house, the punishment of those who collect their lives together” (56). By recasting Nora’s and Robin’s humors as bile, Barnes prefigures the waste matter with which Jenny Petherbridge is insistently associated. This decadence also extends to Dr. O’Connor’s abode, which Barnes describes as another collection of wrongness, but here, “a swill-pail . . . brimming with abominations” is actually represented (79). Barnes also aligns O’Connor with Petherbridge where the former says, “I have always thought I, myself, the funniest-looking creature on the face of the earth; then I laid my eyes on Jenny—a little, hurried, decaying comedy jester, the face on the fool’s stick, and with a smell about her of mouse-nests” (98). Nightwood and its critics generally attempt to distinguish Jenny Petherbridge from the more laudable characters—Felix, Robin, Nora, and Dr. O’Connor—but ultimately we are forced to see that in Petherbridge the commonalities among them become most apparent. She is the scapegoat who can’t be fully scapegoated, the laudable character who cannot quite become laudable herself.
Because Barnes collapses into the figure of Jenny Petherbridge the two foundational structures of transference, which we see operating separately elsewhere in the text, she leads us to see Petherbridge and love as synonyms for each other. And, in so doing, we derive a very different notion of love from the conception with which this chapter begins. If the fantasy structure upon which love is built aims to produce merger and coherence, then Petherbridge encourages us to begin to modify these conceptions of fantasy and love, paving the way for contemporary rewritings. The love Petherbridge figures more closely resembles the negative queered love of the contemporary novel: a love that does not bind, that insists upon difference, that relies on a heterogeneous and unredeemable fantasy.
Fantasizing the Negative
Unlike the ambivalent modernists, contemporary writers foreground the negativity of love without giving us the opportunity to take recourse in amorous relations that seem safe and redemptive. However, fantasy is no less a feature of love in contemporary novels than it is in their literary precursors’ accounts of love; the crucial difference is that contemporary writers include negativity as part of fantasy rather than conceiving of the negative as that which must be erased by love. I want to offer two examples of how the terms that have been central to my discussion of lesbians, love, and fantasy in psychoanalysis and modernism undergo changes in contemporary novels. The following two examples are drawn from very different contemporary novels by Zadie Smith and Eleanor Catton: White Teeth and The Rehearsal, respectively. I focus in Smith’s novel on a passing reference to a minor lesbian relationship made by the character Joyce Chalfen. Chalfen couches this relationship in terms that draw explicitly on the association of lesbians with nondesirous loving relationships. Smith, however, recasts this seemingly safe bond in the negative context of histories of violence and racism. Eleanor Catton, on the other hand, approaches lesbian relationships within the context of psychoanalysis, depicting lesbian love as fundamentally transferential. Catton rewrites lesbian transference, experimenting with the ways that seemingly nonthreatening lesbian bonds can be corroded and corrosive.
In White Teeth Zadie Smith plays on the association of lesbians with fantasmatic, safe love and shatters our expectation of a redemptive fantasy that erases negativity. Parodying the anodyne reading of lesbians as loving and without desire, Joyce Chalfen anxiously questions the lesbian couple, Neena and Maxine, with a complete non sequitur: “‘Do you use each other’s breasts as pillows?’” (290). This question seems to evoke all the nonsexual, domestic, loving associations with the lesbian “urge to merge,” calling forth as well the specter of lesbian “bed death.” In this way, Chalfen’s depiction of lesbian relations could not have more in common with the lesbian of psychoanalysis or the redemptive possibility for lesbian romance that we see in Nora and Robin’s relationship in Nightwood. However, Smith goes on to explain the reasons for Chalfen’s question; it does not express the safe, redemptive notion of lesbian fusion but rather evinces orientalist aggression and negativity. Smith explains of Chalfen, “She was cut of the same cloth as the frontier ladies who, armed with only a Bible, a shotgun, and a net curtain, coolly took out the brown men moving forward on the horizon toward the plains” (290). Chalfen’s question turns out to be a weapon of sorts, analogous in Smith’s estimation to a shotgun used to kill indigenous people.
However, most interesting is not the homophobic and racist motivations for Chalfen’s question. Rather, the explanation that Chalfen produces to make sense of her bizarre question tellingly indicates the shift in the contemporary novel from the redemptive version of lesbian fantasy to a much more negative vision of love: “‘It’s just, in a lot of Indian poetry, they talk about using breasts for pillows, downy breasts, pillow breasts. I just—just—just wondered, if white sleeps on brown, or as one might expect, brown sleeps on white? Extending the—the—the—pillow metaphor, you see, I was just wondering which . . . way . . .’” (290). The fantasy that at first seems to express the least dangerous, most comforting version of love—using breasts not as erotic objects but as pillows—turns out to be buttressed by another sort of fantasy. The latter fantasy scenario is imbued with myriad forms of negativity: difference where there should be merger (brown versus white), a struggle for dominance where there should be equality, and a history of colonial strife and aggression that marks the fantasmatic appearance of difference and dominance. Lesbian love here—“pillows, downy breasts, pillow breasts” and all—is rife with explicit negativity and cannot be redeemed by images of safety and merger. Indeed, those images are themselves informed by aggression, inequity, and difference.
If Zadie Smith represents love as disarticulated by histories of colonialism, racism, and political strife, then Eleanor Catton depicts the redemptive potential of lesbian love as encumbered and ultimately halted by loss and pain that inaugurates rather than ends a relationship. In The Rehearsal Catton experiments with the transferential structure of love. Catton’s novel tells the story of the scandal that follows in the wake of a relationship between a high school student and her older music teacher. But in the novel we never hear the story directly from the student, Victoria, or the teacher, Mr. Saladin. The only information we get is reported at a remove, and the person through whom we receive all this information is the private saxophone teacher who instructs many of the girls who go to school with Victoria. While the scandal of Victoria and Mr. Saladin’s relationship is the glue that makes the whole story cohere, more interesting are the relationships on the periphery of this scandal about which we learn during the course of the novel. One such relationship occurs between Victoria’s sister Isolde and another girl at the school, Julia, both of whom take private lessons with the saxophone teacher. The saxophone teacher encourages Julia to pursue Isolde romantically, and they eventually come together. It is unclear precisely what actually occurs between them, whether the erotic encounters we read about them are purely imagined, and we do not know who might be imagining such encounters. The reason for this lack of clarity is that throughout the narration of their relationship it is apparent that theirs is not the only relationship at issue. That is to say, when the saxophone teacher encourages the bond between Julia and Isolde, she seems to understand their sexual relationship (imagined or not) as a version of her own relationship with her saxophone teacher, Patsy, in the past.
In a sort of flashback, Catton explains the saxophone teacher’s feelings for Patsy: “‘Patsy,’ the saxophone teacher says finally, ‘Do you know something? Whenever I am alone and intimate with anybody else, whenever I am at ease, or making someone laugh, or kissing somebody, or making someone feel truly good—whenever I feel like I am being really successful as a lover, doing it right—at all those times, part of me is wishing that you were watching me’” (271). Transference love: perhaps not all that surprising, given that Catton here depicts a teacher/student relationship, which is certainly possible to see as structurally similar to the analyst/analysand relationship. However, the transferential structure that Catton here illustrates is important less because of the teacher/student relationship than because of the lesbian love transference here encodes.66 Transference love is indicatively linked to lesbian relationships in The Rehearsal, echoing the psychoanalytically inflected representation of lesbian relationships in Barnes’s Nightwood. How frumpy and chaste lesbian love here seems; the saxophone teacher can only imagine transferentially the presence of Patsy during intimate encounters that do not involve her. The chasteness of this love becomes particularly apparent when immediately after the saxophone teacher expresses her exhibitionist fantasy it must be disavowed: “‘I don’t mean that I wish you were there’” (271). Given the insistence upon the chaste—almost courtly—love that frames lesbian attachment in Catton’s novel, it can hardly be surprising that the saxophone teacher is regarded as much safer than Mr. Saladin. A student reports to the saxophone teacher what her mother says: “‘She said thank God you’re a woman’” (94).
But Catton, like Smith, does not let us simply take comfort in the safety of women and lesbian love; she also modifies our understanding of what precisely this love consists. Speaking of her relationship with Isolde, Julia’s account of her love might remind us both of the clichés about love and loss and of Barnes’s reinterpretation of them: “And it’s a weird idea, the idea that loss—the massive snatching tearing hunger of loss—is something that doesn’t start when a relationship ends, when she melts away and disappears and I know that I can never get her back. It’s a feeling that starts at the very beginning, from the moment we collide in the dark and we touch for the very first time. The innocence of it—the sweetness and purity of it, the shy and halting tenderness of it—that is something that I am only ever going to lose” (274–75). Again, we find a lesbian love divested of desire: all “sweetness,” “purity,” and “tenderness.” But what is most important about this love is that there is nothing pure about such “purity.” From the very beginning, as Julia suggests, the “purity” is marred by the stain of loss, “sweetness” dominated by pungent bitterness. Moreover, Julia does not eventually encounter this bitterness, this loss, but it is there at the start of the relationship. Catton depicts love as defined by negativity from beginning to end.
Thus Smith and Catton rewrite the lesbian love we see in both psychoanalysis and modernism. These contemporary novelists depict lesbian love in a way such that it provides a template for the contemporary, queered loves that are the focus of this book. Even as this chapter has focused specifically on the figure of the lesbian in psychoanalysis, in modernism, and modernism’s legacy in contemporary literature, the consequences of this argument extend well beyond this figure. Insofar as the lesbian is the paradigmatic figure of love, Unmaking Love is most concerned not with the lesbian as such but with the love that she figures. The lesbian of these contemporary novels lays bare a nonredemptive love, providing an important counterpoint to the anodyne fiction in which Edith Windsor stands for “romantic love and committed intimacy” in the fight for marriage equality.67 In the following pages I will explore the ways that contemporary literature contests almost all the central terms of this phrase: romantic love, commitment, and intimacy.