On Nightwood

Night-Life

On Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes

Lindsay Lerman

Intro by Leza Cantoral

Nightwood is a 1936 novel by Djuna Barnes. It is notable as one of the early prominent novels to portray explicit homosexuality between women. It is also notable for its intense, gothic prose style. The novel employs modernist techniques such as its unusual form or narrative and can be considered metafiction. T. S. Eliot championed the work and wrote a glowing introduction included in the 1937 edition. In letters between the editors, Elliot described Nightwood as “the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.” (T.S. Elliot Editorials)

I first read this book years ago while wandering through my college library. I was drawn by the title, being fascinated by all things having to do with the night and darkness. Upon reading it I was carried away by the spell cast by its words. It reminded me of reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Wolf in that there was a floating sense of action—no clear through narrative, and yet, found myself, just as I had upon reading Wolf, completely engrossed to the point of obsession with the characters, completely wrapped up deeper and deeper in their interior worlds. I did not read it again for years and yet the sense of it remained in my mind. This strange book that read more like a poem than a novel and yet was still a novel and indeed one that made me want to write something half as haunting and original myself, one day.

I recently moved from New Hampshire to upstate New York. I was welcomed to my new home by a moveable feast of family and friends coming over to help me housewarm. One of such friends who just happened to be traveling up to Vermont, which is not too far north, was Lindsay Lerman. She was acting as an outside examiner for a student at the college I once attended, in one of the many odd synchronicities of life. She is one of the authors we have published with CLASH Books. Her novel I’m From Nowhere, which we published last year, was a breath of fresh air. A novel, like Nightwood, that is very much a novel and very much something indefinable in how it dives deep into the interior world of its characters, leaving the reader haunted and raw from the experience.

 She came over. We drank some wine, read some Tarot cards, talked about life, about being writers, she perused my deskside bookshelf and, just as Nightwood had jumped out to me it jumped out for her. She took it and asked me about it. I was truly amazed she had not read it. It is one of those lit nerd books that not many people hear about but Lindsay literally is one of those lit nerds. I sang its praises and insisted she take it home with her.

About a week later she told me she had already finished reading it and was so happy I had given it to her. She mentioned she felt she could write an essay about it and I said PLEASE DO OMG. So here it is. This is what she wrote. If you are also a lover of the nontraditional novel in all its forms, I highly recommend you also check out Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. It is a book that I believe is experienced by every reader differently. Like all great novels, it is a living organism that becomes a dark mirror to whomever is reading it.

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Night-Life

On Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes

Lindsay Lerman

“I used to think,” Nora said, “that people just went to sleep, or if they did not go to sleep that they were themselves, but now” —she lit a cigarette and her hands trembled—“now I see that the night does something to a person’s identity, even when asleep.”

Sleep and I have never had an easy relationship. For most of my life I considered this fact a problem, something to be fixed, solved. But in the past few years I’ve begun to understand: sometimes the night just offers too much to ignore. 

What do I mean? What is the night? The question of what the night is and what it does haunts Nightwood. I’m not talking about the version of the night that is drinking at the bar, or dancing in a club, or feeding a baby alone in the dark, or working somewhere under fluorescent lights, or sleeping in the middle of a party because you’ve smoked too much hash, or undressing with someone new, or, even, wandering the streets with no particular destination in mind. I’ve known all these versions of the night. I’m talking about something else—I believe Djuna Barnes is talking about something else. 

Barnes is talking about a particular relationship to the world and one’s place in it. It can’t be expressed in something as easily identifiable as “a night out on the town.” Barnes is such a fine writer, you should read this passage twice:

“‘But,’ said one fellow, ‘it’s the faces that you tell by.’ ‘Faces is it!’ I screamed, ‘the face is for fools! If you fish by the face you fish out trouble, but there’s always other fish when you deal with the sea. The face is what anglers catch in the daylight, but the sea is night!’”

The sea is night, faceless. In Nightwood, the night has a seeping quality. It cannot be contained. It has no identity, no face, no distinct location. Robin Vote, the accidentally devastating character at the center of the novel (who is barely present in any of the novel’s action, it’s worth noting), might just be the night in flesh, as flesh. Robin, the night incarnate. She wanders from life to life, has few needs, is often silent, communicates with her eyes what she cannot bring herself to speak, seems entirely unrestrained but is somehow sort of poised. She drives those around her to madness, to petty gossip, to physical abuse, but for reasons that are unclear to the reader, and to the characters in the novel. Her existence itself is what terrifies and compels her lovers, her friends, her enemies. She seems to do nothing, to drift, to live unrecognizably.

The night is not a simple metaphor for darkness or shadow in Nightwood. Barnes is not drawing rigid lines between daylife and nightlife, suggesting that one is proper and good and the other is improper and immoral. Nor is she suggesting that we are all both day and night, good and bad. Something else is going on.

“I’m so miserable, Matthew, I don’t know how to talk, and I’ve got to. I’ve got to talk to somebody. I can’t live this way.” She pressed her hands together and, without looking at the doctor, went on walking. [...] While the doctor had been speaking Nora had stopped, as if he had got her attention for the first time. “Once Father Lucas said to me, ‘Be simple, Matthew, life is a simple book, and an open book, read and be simple as the beasts in the field; just being miserable isn’t enough—you have got to know how.’”

What Robin knows—lives—that the rest of the characters do not is how to be miserable. She knows how to live in the abyss, or just at its edge, and make a home. (I think of that Songs:Ohia lyric, “You’ll never hear me talk about / one day getting out / Why put a new address / on this same old loneliness”) Robin’s “engagements were with something unseen.” She has no clear identity and does not wish for one (part of the reason, I think, that not much is made of her queer love/s; Nightwood isn’t a queer love story first and foremost, it’s the story of Robin first and foremost). She has no clear plans and does not wish for them. By the end of the book, Robin has done the unthinkable: left her child, countless loves, and material comfort to wander, to be very, very lost, and to literally fight and sleep with dogs. Robin-as-night: the impossible, impossibility made possible, over and over again. If the night is itself a kind of knowing how to be miserable, it is also about facing the impossible. Facing the horror. 

“She who stands looking down upon her who lies sleeping knows the horizontal fear, the fear unbearable.”

I was staying with a friend recently when I had one of my nights with the night, and I explained it to my friend like this: I had been unable to sleep because I was guilt-spiraling, thinking about my daughter, following the spiral down to the bottom, looking back up. At the top of the spiral is the simple, basic hope that she’s okay, that she’s sleeping well as I’m lying awake. At the bottom of the spiral is an unmanageable guilt that I’ve created a consciousness, something that needs to live with the weight of itself—a weight that is often unbearable—and she didn’t ask for any of it. My friend said, “Huh, well that doesn’t seem like a good spiral.” It is not a good spiral, in fact. It is miserable. It fucks my body up, each time—the stress of it, the speed of it, the intensity of it. But it is the night for me. It’s facing the night, or living in the night. It’s an experience with the night itself, a reminder that I matter so little in the face of it and have few reasons to take myself and my own concerns seriously. When I lie in bed following the spiral up and down and back up again, I am expressing a desire for the impossible, looking at it, hoping to meet it. Here’s what’s impossible: not being immobilized by the guilt of having created a consciousness. To have created a consciousness that—somehow—won’t have to bear the weight I am straining under in those very moments. To shed the I that brings me so much trouble. Impossible. All of it.

The night permeates. Nightwood wonders how we can live, knowing this. But “we” —people, humans, selves, identities—are not what’s important in the book. Something much bigger is the concern of Nightwood. Something more important and enduring, something that we have to get out of our way in order to see, know, feel, live within: “Only the impossible lasts forever.”

GET NIGHTWOOD BY DJUNA BARNES

GET I’M FROM NOWHERE BY LINDSAY LERMAN

Lindsay Lerman

is a writer and translator. Her first novel, I’m From Nowhere, was published by CLASH Books last year. Her first translation will be published in 2020. She has a PhD in philosophy and is a co-editor at Black Telephone Magazine.