From down this black pit where my heart is sped/ A sombre universe ringed round with lead/ Where fear and curses the long night explore. Baudelaire
In writing about Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire extolled his genius and unique temperament, “Which allowed him to paint and explain, in an impeccable, arresting and terrible fashion, the exception in the moral order.” These very words could be used to describe Baudelaire himself, and they also appertain to the enigmatic, caliginous fictions of Djuna Barnes. Her exotic life in Paris and New York life was viewed as an “Exception in the moral order,” and this is reflected in her writing, which served as a palliative, transcending the tempestuous events in her life by entering the reality of literature.
When I first read her masterpiece Nightwood, my intrigue and fascination was coupled with bemusement. I did not really understand nor could I hope to explain what I had just read. Reading her recently published book of short stories, I Am Alien to Life, allowed me to begin to perceive certain recurring themes, which illuminated a rereading of Nightwood. However, it wasn’t until reading about Baudelaire’s notion of Spleen, and revisiting some of his work, that I began to obtain a clearer construal for lifting the veil, so to speak, from her fictions.
Spleen is complex and not easily distilled into a simple description. The philosopher Charles Taylor’s exegesis on Baudelaire in his recent book on poetry and cosmic consciousness provides a useful summary. Spleen represents a state of deep melancholy, despair, and acedia engendered by disenchantment with one’s existence. Lived time, so to call it, is a meaningless repetition of routines and shallow experiences lacking depth and meaning. This malady of purposelessness threatens to overwhelm and suffocate one’s spirit. Invoking Baudelaire, “Time engulfs me in its steady tide’” or even more starkly, he feels trapped in “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.”
One response to this seemingly unendurable ennui and spiritual vacuum is in Baudelaire’s words, a “thirst for the unknown and a taste for the horrible.” There is an ongoing struggle between virtue and the lure of the forbidden. According to Poe, the progenitor of this kind of literature, “The very perversity of evil exercises a great force of attraction on human beings.” This counterpoint between searching for meaning in life and succumbing to depravity creates inner turmoil.
These ideas pervade the work of Djuna Barnes. In Nightwood, Nora Flood visits the Doctor who functions as a one-man Greek chorus commenting on the state of humanity and the world in a series of rambling, raving monologues. Nora’s question, “What of the night?” leads to his pontificating on the essential ideas of the book. Nora, betrayed and abandoned by her lover Robin Vote, cannot understand Robin’s unwavering fealty to the darker side of life.
Her inscrutable behavior is paradigmatic of the ambivalence between “Good” and “Evil.” In one scene, after going to church ostensibly to seek redemption, Robin returns to her room to read the Marquise de Sade. In the Doctor’s words, given an “Eternal incognito [with no] thumbprint against our souls,” we would “Sink into depravity and abominations.” Robin is one of those condemned to “Drinking the waters of the night at the waterhole of the damned.”
The stories in I Am Alien to Life reiterate the themes of Nightwood. The main protagonist Nelly Grissard in The Robin’s House “Had been depraved at an exceedingly early age, if depravity is understood to be the ability to enjoy what others shudder at.” Her erstwhile lover, Nicholas Golden confesses, “I love what is low and treacherous and cunning, because there is nobility and uneasiness in it for me.” In another story, remaining undefiled is proclaimed a “terrible virtue” and elsewhere Barnes contemptuously speaks of the “cult of the terribly good.” To be “Tragique, triste, and tremendous all at once” while experiencing everything is preferable to a good, virtuous, and societally acceptable life.”
People find themselves buffeted by the aleatory winds of life, while grappling with feelings of hopeless estrangement from an unintelligible world. They long for “soul-making” in the sense of Keats. In the opening story A Night Among the Horses, the mistress of the house wants to make the groom for the horses, her lover, into a gentleman. For him their dalliance had become a “Game without pleasure…. debased lady, debased ostler.” He flees a society party she makes him attend in horror of what ultimately awaits him, asserting to himself, “I can make my mark!’ He ends up being trampled to death by wild horses, a startling ending worthy of Poe.
In fact, the essential question is, how is one to make one’s mark in the world. “What are we all doing here? I must know, I must know;” so proclaims Emma in one of the best stories, Oscar. She bemoans her life which she fears has been false. “A little abyss from which I shall crawl laughing at the evil of my own limitation.” This phrase could have been written by Baudelaire in one of the poems in Flowers of Evil.
In his introduction to Nightwood, T. S. Eliot describes the essence of the novel, “The deeper design is that of the human misery and bondage which is universal.” In these stories it is coupled with the longing for meaning, purpose, and immanence. As the Doctor pronounces, “We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery.” Although Baudelaire can envision the possibility of escape from Spleen, in momentarily attaining “supernatural states of the soul,” for Barnes there is no assuagement, no redemption, nor happy endings. The final pronouncement of Nightwood is that in the end there is “Nothing, but wrath and weeping !”
References
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, New Directions, 2006 (with Foreword by Jeanne Winterson and Introduction by T.S. Eliot).
——————, I Am Alien to Life, McNally Editions, 2024 (Edited by and with an Introduction by Merve Emre).
Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections (Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment), Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024
Kimmo Rosenthal, after a long career of teaching and publishing mathematics, has turned his attention to writing. He has forty literary publications and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Recent work has appeared in Tears in the Fence,Tiny Molecules (Observations), The RavensPerch, The Fib Review, After the Art, and BigCity Lit.
