SOURCE: "Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and 'the Experience of America,'" in Critique, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, Winter, 1993, pp. 100-12.

[In the following essay, Nimeiri discusses the symbolic significance of the Americanness of the characters in Barnes's Nightwood.]

Since the American publication of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood in 1937, critics have focused on the formal aspects of the novel and have paid little attention to its content. This tendency has prompted Lynn DeVore to complain that "The book's linguistic complexities … have … directed critics to analyze especially the form and structure of the text as well as to speak only of its verbal tapestry in terms of imagistic, expressionistic, cubistic, or surrealist affinities while slighting its altogether human dimensions" (71). Even when critics find meaning in the novel, it is often abstract with no bearing on any particular situation, as if the story occurs in a void or a dream-world where the characters move about in a landscape of metaphors, images, and myths. This view of the novel ignores, regards as irrelevant, or even denies the existence of the obvious experiential context and its decisive effect on determining the theme. Leslie Fiedler, who virtually dismisses Nightwood as being little more than verbosity and expressionism, in his brief discussion of it in Love and Death in the American Novel, exemplifies this kind of criticism in its extreme form. Noting "the dislocated lyricism, hallucinated vision, and oddly skewed language of Miss Barnes's black little book," he concludes that "Linguistically, Nightwood is too complex, and thematically, it is too little concerned with the experience of America to achieve even the belated and limited success of West's work" (490). This reading of the novel, which is paraphrased and only slightly modified in the majority of subsequent criticism, is more appropriate to John Hawkes's The Cannibal, a book that portrays, in difficult personal idiom, Europe after the Second World War and that deals minimally with America, than it is to Nightwood. But what Fiedler says about Barnes's novel is still important because he inadvertently draws attention to its main theme. A careful reading will show that Nightwood is primarily concerned with "the experience of America" and that its real achievement is in expressing an original though dark and desperate vision of this experience. Gerald Nelson is the only critic who sees Nightwood as centrally concerned with America. Yet his "versions of America" in Nightwood are more abstractions than real expressions of the "experience of America." O'Connor, for example, represents "the entire history and soul of mankind in one body" (103).

The novel pictures the American, who migrates to Europe to find the nourishment for and fulfillment of the humanity he is deprived of at home, as encountering and embracing, in Europe, forms of the American experience that oppose his efforts to achieve a human stature and that finally strip him of his humanity. American expatriation, therefore, is not a pilgrimage to a new life away from America but an experience that ends in a retreat and entrapment into a life more sinister than that which has initially prompted the American to leave his country.¹

Barnes gives enough clues to her concern with America so that the careful reader will not miss it. The major characters, with the exception of Felix, are American and their Americanness is not incidental but the hallmark of their personalities and the aspect that explains their actions and relations. Robin's Americanness, for example, draws Felix to her. When Matthew O'Connor asks him about the woman he wants to marry, Felix says "the American" and explains that "with an American anything can be done" (39). Thus he indicates that innocence is the essence of the American character. Similarly, Nora's Americanness is obviously central to an understanding of her character and role. She is described in terms that recreate the characteristic images of the American past (although Barnes may be making fun of Nora and what she represents):

She was known instantly as a Westerner. Looking at her, foreigners remembered stories they had heard of covered wagons; animals going down to drink; children's heads, just as far as the eyes, looking in fright out of small windows, where in the dark another race crouched in ambush….

At … meetings [in Nora's salon] one felt that early American history was being re-enacted. The Drummer Boy, Fort Sumter, Lincoln, Booth, all somehow came to mind; Whigs and Tories were in the air. (50-51)

The significance of Jenny's Americanness becomes clear when she takes Robin back to America and thus makes a significant part of the action shift and conclude there. With such a conclusion it is difficult not to consider the effect of the specific identity of the characters on the meaning of the book.

O'Connor seems to be the one character whose nationality is irrelevant to his role as seer, commentator, and interpreter of experience. But O'Connor himself insists, occasionally, on being an American and describes himself in a way that indicates that, in essence, he is not different from the other American characters. When Felix says to him, "But you are American, so you don't believe," the doctor answers, "because I'm American I believe anything …" (40). This qualification of himself becomes meaningful when we have a deeper sense of his role, and the aspect of his personality he stresses here will be seen as more real and permanent than other aspects. His Catholicism, homosexuality, and intellectualism give the sense of being assumed to protect him against the chaos in the middle of which he lives.

A more important clue to Barnes's concern with "the experience of America" is in the conversation between the doctor and Nora in "Watchman, What of the Night" where the doctor speaks of the night and the realities excluded from normal civilized life. He contrasts two ways of apprehending reality, one American and the other French or European; he argues that unlike Europe, America banishes from its life some of the essential aspects of experience and consciousness because it cannot tolerate them. Later in the novel when O'Connor discusses Robin with Felix and, in another conversation, with Nora, we realize that this contrast is an index to both Robin's character and the novel.

But perhaps the most important clue is that the introduction of Robin, as a somnambulist and an American, marks the dramatic beginning of the book. The account of the marriage of Guido and Hedvig, which T. S. Eliot in his introduction to Nightwood calls the "opening movement" that is "slow and dragging" (xii), is a prologue to a story that really begins when their son, Felix, meets and marries the American somnambulist. The complications in the narrative develop after this point. The marriage and its breakdown lead to the series of actions, relations, and speculations that makes up the main body of Nightwood.

The structure of the novel clarifies the meaning that these clues only hint at or refer to broadly. Critics of Nightwood have observed that its structure rests on the relationship between two plots: one centers around Robin Vote and the people who are attracted to her, and the other deals with Dr. Matthew O'Connor and his effort to bring Felix and Nora to an awareness of the magnitude of their predicaments and to help them free themselves of the traumatic effects of their love of Robin. But the structure of the book is more complex than this. In addition to the two plots, there is the story of Felix that begins as a separate story, then merges into the Robin plot, but reaches a separate resolution in the final "bowing down" of Felix, which presages O'Connor's disintegration and Robin's descent into bestiality. Nora and Jenny each have chapters ("Night Watch" and "The Squatter") that, because of their focus on the characters of the two women, are almost complete in themselves. This fragmentariness has induced Joseph Frank to claim that Nightwood lacks a narrative structure in the ordinary sense and that its eight chapters "are like searchlights, probing the darkness each from a different direction, yet ultimately focusing on and illuminating the same entanglement of the human spirit" (438). The narrative in Nightwood is a complicated one that defies efforts to find coherence in it. Sharon Spencer expresses a typical reaction when she remarks that "there is absolutely no explanation of surprising or even bizarre events or relationships" (41) in the novel. This, however, is only partially true. The book may lack logical development, yet its parts are bound together by the thought and meaning that its story only insinuates but that come out more clearly in the speeches and conversations. Barnes concentrates on ideas and develops them carefully and in such a manner that the novel reads like an argument that moves from one chapter to the next achieving coherence gradually.

The progression of the novel is thematic. Narrative, which is subordinated to theme, illustrates and clarifies ideas and gives them logical form. O'Connor who says, "I have a narrative but you will be put to it to find it" (97), draws attention to the peculiar character of Nightwood. He acts minimally and talks all the time; although his conversations and monologues are sometimes vague and incomprehensible, they reveal clearly the novel's emphasis on ideas and stress the precedence of thought over action. In "Watchman, What of the Night," O'Connor spouts a long disquisition on the night in answer to Nora's inquiry about the subject. What he says provides the groundwork of ideas on which the novel stands. But in another and more immediate sense O'Connor's dissertation on the night paves the way for the story that O'Connor tells when Jenny steals Robin from Nora. He says, reminding Nora of the purpose of his talk: "'But I'm coming by degrees to the narrative of the one particular night that makes all other nights seem like something quite decent enough …'" (99). The implication here is that without O'Connor's exposition, that is, without a prior statement of ideas, his narrative is incomprehensible because it has no inherent meaning. The elucidated narrative reciprocally clarifies the ideas in O'Connor's speech. This strategy is employed repeatedly and makes the novel virtually locked in thought.

Nightwood may best be described in the terms that Melville uses to distinguish two modes of expression in The Confidence-Man, a book that resembles Barnes's novel in many ways, as a "comedy of thought" rather than a "comedy of action" (71). This dominance of thought and the sense of the novel's developing an argument rather than a narrative gives the characters clear symbolic roles. When the symbolism of the characters is examined, one understands that Nightwood cannot be explained completely without taking into consideration the fact that the characters are American. The novel is structured in such a way that the characters, in their symbolic roles, reveal aspects of and make statements about the American experience. This is why Nora and Jenny are given whole chapters and greater prominence than they would have in a realistic novel. The difficulties Nightwood poses are resolved when one sees its structure as deliberate and necessary. The first chapter seems redundant and not part of the novel unless we see the pathetic situation of the Jew as providing an appropriate explanation and a frame of reference for the predicament of the American innocent who strives to transcend his innocence and achieve a human identity. The Jew and the innocent, being close to each other in their positions on the periphery of history and experience, come together in a doomed union that inevitably fails in "La Somnambule." The American is then thrust back into his native experience represented by Nora and Jenny in the following two chapters. The next chapter, in which O'Connor discourses on the night, provides insights into the preceding chapters and expresses ideas that form the philosophical basis of the novel. At this point O'Connor emerges as the alternative to Robin, representing the American intellectual who has gone through experience but only in his mind. The rest of the novel—the last three chapters—constitutes a resolution and reveals the failure and disintegration of the main characters. The fall of Felix in "Where the Tree Falls" prefaces that of O'Connor in "Go Down, Matthew" and Robin in "The Possessed." It is notable that, at the end of their tragic experiences, the American characters return to America. Twice Barnes specifically concludes chapters with Robin's going back to America to start a new life after failing to find fulfillment in Europe. Following the breakdown of her marriage, Robin returns to America where she meets Nora; "La Somnambule" concludes with O'Connor explaining that during her three or four months' absence from Paris Robin has been "In America, that's where Nora lives" (49). Again after breaking up with Nora, Robin goes to America with Jenny and "The Squatter" ends with: "it was not long after this that Nora and Robin separated; a little later Jenny and Robin sailed for America" (77). At the end of "Go Down, Matthew," when the doctor breaks down, the ex-priest who has bought him a drink twice offers to take him home: "The ex-priest repeated. 'Come, I'll take you home'" (165). In the context of the novel, "home" becomes more than the doctor's dingy room.

The structure of Nightwood conveys strongly the sense of the inevitable return of the American to America, which, translated into thematic terms, expresses the failure of American expatriation. At the end of the novel we become aware of two related images of the American in search of a meaningful experience outside America: one case ends in a retreat to America and regression into the most primitive forms of the self, and the other case, ends in total estrangement from himself and from other human beings and a fall into a void of meaninglessness. In both cases the questing American discovers that he is as constricted in Europe as he has been in America. Barnes indicates the tragic consequences of expatriation from the beginning through nature imagery, especially animal imagery that illustrates the descent into bestiality and the retreat to a primitive life as the end result of American expatriation. The central image is that of the "tree of night", which gives the novel its title. The image comprehends the realities that are excluded from American life and suppressed in the American consciousness. O'Connor argues that

To think of the acorn it is necessary to become the tree. And the tree of night is the hardest to mount, the dourest tree to scale, the most difficult of branch, the most febrile to the touch, and sweats a resin and drips a pitch against the palm that computation has not gambled. (83-84)

Nightwood delineates the effort of the American expatriate to climb the "tree of night," his plight and failure, and the final draining of his humanity as a result of the endeavor. The sense that the American in his country faces a dearth of experience that threatens to make his life vacuous and senseless is strongly suggested not through realistic details or drama, because the novel obviously eschews realism, but in general through its form, language, and mode. The thin plot with its scanty action and the heightened language that blurs what little narrative there is combine with the self-reflexivity to produce a distinct impression that the world the characters inhabit has little significant life and much mental activity. O'Connor's incessant talk has the added structural function of filling the recurring gap created frequently by the absence of story, but his words only make what is missing conspicuous.

The plight of the American expatriate is prepared for by a description of the predicament of the Jew in "Bow Down" that serves to put the position of the expatriate in proportion.³ By characterizing Guido and Felix Volkbein in extreme terms Barnes illustrates the futile effort of the alienated Jew to come into history and experience. Guido's life expresses "the sum total of what is the Jew" (2), that is, the degradation and dehumanization that have made up the fate forced on the Jew. The image, in Guido's memory, of Jews in 1468 led with ropes about their necks into the Corso for the amusement of Christians sums up that fate and is an image that foreshadows Robin's transformation into a beast at the end of the novel. Guido's endeavor to free himself from this fate is a costly venture that leads to the distortion and effacement of his character. His marriage to "a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty" (1) should earn him a place in society and history but only makes his position sad and ridiculous: "He tried to be one with her by adoring her, by imitating her goose-step of a stride that by him adopted became dislocated and comic" (3). He lives in a sham world of deception and gives the unmistakable sense of burlesquing life rather than living it. The son fares worse than the father and expresses the hopelessness of ending the alienation of the Jew. Felix is a degenerate version of Guido and more emphatically an outcast. Described as a Wandering Jew who goes everywhere without belonging to any place, he mixes, in his perception of the world, history and experience with make-believe and legend and avoids the rigor of his father's life by associating himself with the "pageantry of the circus and the theatre" where "he had neither to be capable nor alien" (11).

The pathetic situation of the Jew anticipates a worse and more tragic fate for the American. Felix's attraction and marriage to Robin and his steadfast friendship with O'Connor expresses the connection of the Jew and the American. The role of the Jew in Nightwood is similar to that of the Jew in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Both characters are placed at the beginning of stories of American expatriation, thus indicating an affinity between the Jew and the expatriate. In both novels the Jew represents the fate that the American strives to avoid by leaving his country in quest of life and awareness; instead he falls into a worse one. Felix Volkbein is more complex than Robert Cohn and represents the historical experience of the Jew more clearly, but the two characters do not go beyond the stereotype of the Jew.

The first chapter of Nightwood also describes the milieu in which American expatriation exists. It teems with images of extreme alienation and decadence: Guido walking "incautious and damned" (2), Hedvig "moving toward him in recoil" (3), Frau Mann who "was as unsexed as a doll" (13), and the false barons, duchesses, princes and kings of the circus and theatre. Such a description makes clear from the beginning that the American who seeks to replace America by Europe as his right and proper experience is inadvertently opting for spiritual death and is doomed to be an outsider in Europe allying himself with the alien and decadent. This condition finally brings out the primitive in him—the aspect of himself he strives to transmute into human qualities—and allows it to dominate his character. This is precisely what Robin is ensnared in and cannot escape.

Robin represents a simple and common form of American expatriation. She is the American innocent (somnambulist) who goes or is taken to Europe to be free of the parochialism of her country and to get a cosmopolitan experience, a descendant of Henry James's innocent migrants exemplifying the trait in its most extreme form. Robin is first introduced in a fainting fit from which she cannot be brought out until Dr. O'Connor is summoned. Later the doctor and Nora characterize her innocence more clearly. O'Connor, referring to Robin, states that "to be utterly innocent … would be to be utterly unknown, particularly to oneself" (138), and Nora remarks that "Robin can go anywhere, do anything … because she forgets" (152). This lack of awareness of the self and the world indicates that Robin is, as the doctor describes her, "outside the 'human type'" (146). Hers is a state of being that precedes human experience and that is connected with animal and plant life. The room where she faints, which is a jungle of exotic plants and flowers, symbolically expresses this connection, and the description of Robin in the room emphasizes her relationship to primitive life. "Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface" (34). Barnes speaks of Robin's innocence as mixed with depravity—Robin is "meet of child and desperado" (35)—and presents it as inert and almost lifeless. These are perhaps the normal features of innocence given an extreme form, but Barnes adds to the familiar picture the suggestion that the trait has now lost its human content. The general manner and the poetic language she uses to describe Robin in "La Somnambule" have the effect of abstracting human qualities from the character and insinuating that Robin has no palpable presence in the world. Barnes wraps her in an anonymity that effaces her almost completely and, instead of referring to her directly and specifically, she speaks of "the woman," "such a woman" and "such a person." The rest of the novel continues to suggest that Robin does not exist independently in her own right, although she is often the fulcrum of the story. She is never characterized clearly; instead we have mediations on her by the author and the other characters.⁴ In this way, Barnes shows that American innocence in the twentieth century has become so entrenched in itself and so removed from human intercourse that it has turned into an inhuman condition.

Robin cannot attain humanity in America and thus has to become an expatriate because America condemns and excludes the dark realities that are associated with her innocence and that are represented in the novel by such metaphors as the night, the forest, the beast and "filthiness." Conversely, Europe accommodates and regards these traits as an integral part of man's being. This is, in fact, the main point of O'Connor's discourse on the night in "Watchman. What of the Night." He tells Nora:

The night and the day are two travels, and the French … alone leave testimony of the two in the dawn; we tear up the one for the sake of the other; not so the French … because they think of the two as one continually. (82)

and

The French have made a detour of filthiness—Oh, the good dirt! Whereas you are of a clean race, of a too eagerly washing people, and this leaves no road for you. (84)

Robin's tragedy, however, is that her expatriation does not vindicate and accommodate her essential innocence. Like most American expatriates in the 1920s, she lives in Europe without being involved in its life, associating mainly with other American expatriates, and therefore never experiencing Europe.⁵ Her significant relationships in Europe are limited to Felix, O'Connor, Nora, and Jenny. None of these characters is truly European.

Robin's marriage to Felix and the breakdown of the marriage indicate that, outside America, the American is doomed to share the perpetual alienation of the outcast and never to become a part of a meaningful experience. The marriage is a traumatic affair for Robin because, instead of realizing herself in it, she is more terribly exploited than her antecedent. Isabel Archer in Henry James's A Portrait of a Lady. Felix wants to reproduce and perpetuate himself without bowing down, that is, without the effort of adjusting himself to forms and conventions. But at the same time he wants Robin to give up her otherness and become part of him. This negation of her otherness, which is repeated in a sinister form in her relationships with Nora and Jenny, becomes the main feature of her experience in Europe. Felix only offers her a travesty of the values that make life meaningful; and, unlike his father, he is not even good at deception. The perversity and the futility of the marriage are evidenced by its product, the sickly child Guido, the most alienated character in Nightwood and the one associated with death more than life.

Awareness of the reality of her situation after the birth of her child does not prompt Robin, as in the case of Isabel Archer, to put her life in order. She sinks into despair and moves about blindly and purposelessly, thus exposing the inadequacy and helplessness of her innocence before the complexity of life. Felix sums up her position later in the novel when he describes her as one "who must get permission to live, and if [she] finds no one to give her that permission, she will make an innocence for herself; a fearful sort of primitive innocence" (117). Robin, indeed, makes for herself "a fearful sort of primitive innocence" after her separation from Felix. The trauma of her marriage throws her back to the American experience and into herself: she relates to her own race and sex. A lesbian affair, as described by Nora, is a relation to oneself that precludes otherness: "A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own" (143). Robin's lesbian affairs with American women are endeavors to attain humanity by identifying with aspects of the American experience represented by Nora and Jenny.

Nora, who is presented in "Night Watch" in such a way as to suggest a composite image of early America (Puritan, pioneer, and, in a sense, romantic and transcendentalist), represents the persistence of the past in the present. By this symbolic role she demonstrates that the past is not an invigorating influence on the present and that its immanence in the present does not bestow firmness and solidity on the fluid and, perhaps, volatile, living reality. At first Nora offers Robin an apparently meaningful life, but soon this life becomes senseless and empty because of Nora's protean and alienated character. Her love for Robin is really self-love. She tells the doctor that Robin "is myself" (127) and that "I thought I loved her for her sake, and I found it was for my own" (151). This possessiveness sometimes takes the form of an intolerance of Robin's occasional displays of vitality and joy, especially when these occur in contexts that Nora condemns as corrupt and evil. She tells O'Connor that she has tried to save Robin when Robin was drunk and gay and people were laying "dirty hands" on her. The scene ends in Nora's house where Robin falls asleep, and Nora is kissing her and saying, "Die now, so you will be quiet, so you will not be touched again by dirty hands, so you will not take my heart and your body and let them be nosed by dogs—die now, then you will be mine forever (144-145). The same idea of Robin's death being a condition of Nora's love has been expressed before in "Night Watch": "Nora knew … that there was no way but death. In death Robin would belong to her" (58). Nora is like Emily Grierson in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" in conceiving of love as the negation of freedom and otherness. But Nora's spiritual necrophilia, which is more extreme than Emily's because of Nora's rationalization of it, becomes meaningful when seen as stemming from her symbolic role as a representative of the American past. This past is pictured in Nightwood as a life-killing legacy that destroys all the vestiges of humanity in the American. Significantly, the last scene in the novel takes place in Nora's estate and describes Robin's transformation into a beast. The sense of an America dominated by the past and dehumanizing its people is unmistakable and strong.

In opposition to Nora, Jenny has no sense or relation to the past. Presented in extreme terms, she has no real being; what she has is either borrowed or stolen. Four times a widow, she is not a giver but a robber of life. She stands for emptiness and vacuity and represents a persistent reality in America that is mediocre and lethal. Barnes maintains a steady invective tone in presenting and describing Jenny Petherbridge as if she is disclaiming her and wants to purge the narrative of her.⁶ Robin's choice of Jenny, in spite of what Jenny represents, expresses a despair that speeds her to her end as a human being. The forfeiture of her humanity is prefigured in "The Squatter" when Jenny strikes and scratches her until she bleeds and sinks down. That the scene ends in Nora's garden indicates that Nora's repression is responsible for Robin's falling into Jenny's grip.

O'Connor seems at first to avoid Robin's fate of being trapped in certain positions and disintegrating as a result. Unlike the other characters he appears in control of experience and of his destiny. The compound name that he gives himself, Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor and his characterization of himself as one who knows everything suggest an effort to be all-encompassing. But we realize from his first appearance that his character is assumed and his situation unreal. He is introduced as taking the place of Count Onatorio Altamonte, who is "related to every nation" (14), as host to a group of people. The Count shows up only to dismiss the party, and the fatuity of O'Connor's situation becomes apparent. Later in the novel Felix is shocked to see the doctor looking old and exhausted. Then "the Baron hailed him, and instantly the doctor threw off his unobserved self, as one hides hastily, a secret life" (110). O'Connor is engaged most of the time in cultivating an image of himself as a sage and seer. Although he talks a great deal about himself, he seems concerned with great and universal experiences. Sometimes this contradiction makes him absurd, especially when he turns simple common remarks into poetic statements charged with meaning. When Felix asks him, in their first meeting: "Are you acquainted with Vienna?" He answers: "Vienna … the bed into which the common people climb, docile with toil, and out of which the nobility fling themselves, ferocious with dignity—I do but not so well but that I remember some of it still" (17). He frequently presents his opinion "with such conviction and in such general terms that the reader has little cause to doubt it" until the author expresses its fallaciousness by presenting instances of the truth (Greiner 51). We realize at the end, when O'Connor breaks down, that his speeches are carefully worked out to produce a calculated effect. He describes himself as being "damned and carefully public" (163), suggesting that he strives by talk and expatriation to avoid falling into particular experiences and becoming limited by them. He implicitly justifies his expatriation—in the contrast he makes between Europe and America—as an option for the right way of living and apprehending life. In his speeches he endeavors continuously to demonstrate his apprehension by transforming particular experiences into abstract ideas.

O'Connor's talk is the hallmark of his character and an important clue to understanding his role. He brings to mind at once Melville's confidence-man who is described (125) by a character he meets as "a talking man—what I call a wordy man. You talk, talk," and as a "punster" who puns "with ideas as another may with words."⁷ Like Melville's protagonist he assumes different guises. Even his profession, compulsions, and sexual inclinations suggest that they are parts of a persona more than real aspects of a character. O'Connor is a degenerated and vulgarized form of the confidence-man as conceived by Melville. He lacks the control and mastery over experience and people and the sense of purpose that distinguishes the original character. The difference between the two characters appears in the way their talk functions in each novel and the effect it produces on the ethos of their world. In The Confidence-Man, talk takes the form of a colloquy in which the confidence-man, by the adept use of words, brings a person to his position and persuades him to accept his assumptions about the human condition or, failing this, exposes the inconsistency and absurdity of the other's situation. By this procedure the confidence-man strips the community of its prejudices and pretensions and brings out the evil in man's heart, revealing at the same time the snares of language and thought that lay waiting to trap and lead astray the unwary and the simple. But the confidence-man's activity and its result imply that there is shared language and values between the trickster and his victims—even if they are revealed to be false values. Not so in Nightwood. There is no true communication between the novel's confidence-man and those he tricks into listening to him. Sometimes we feel that Barnes deliberately intends that the difficulty and vagueness of O'Connor's speeches should alienate the reader in order to stress the absence or impossibility of communication in the modern world. The doctor often seems to be speaking to himself even when he is addressing other people, and we get the impression that his talk is developed independent of and uninfluenced by his listener. But if we take his talk seriously and examine it carefully, we discover that it addresses current topics and the plights of his listeners, although in an abstract manner, often commenting on them obliquely. For example, his stories and parables of Nikka, Mademoiselle Basquette, and his parents and his views of the Catholic and Protestant churches in the first chapter express in imaginative and intellectual terms the sense of Felix's predicament as a Jew and an outcast, which has been presented in the preceding pages. O'Connor's main effort, however, is to comprehend and contain experience so that he is not swallowed by it. He is, finally, a confidence-man who plays his own tricks on himself. He says, characterizing himself effectively: "I am my own charlatan" (96).

By serving as the alternative to Robin, O'Connor completes the picture of American expatriation. Whereas the motive of Robin's expatriation is to embrace the experience that would awaken her humanity, the purpose of O'Connor's expatriation is to live and maintain a free and uninhibited life and, at the same time, by rationalization and the exercise of pure reason, to endeavor to keep it from overwhelming and shattering his being. O'Connor is the American intellectual and artist who seeks to be free of the American repression of the mind and the imagination by migrating to Europe, accomplishing, at best, an intellectualism unconnected to any meaningful experience and a verbalism that blunts the mind and dims the imagination. But O'Connor, aware of the futility and desperate essence of his position, is ill at ease in it. His desire to be a woman, expressed practically and verbally several times, indicates this uneasiness as well as a yearning for the self-contained innocence of Robin. The strongest expression of his longing for innocence occurs when he treats Robin for her fit of fainting. He engages in a series of "honesties" while using her perfume and rouge and stealing her money. Symbolically O'Connor attempts to rob Robin of her innocence and identity and wear them himself.

O'Connor's concentration on himself, which his talk and his homosexuality express, shows that he is, as alienated in Europe as Robin and the other American characters. This fact stares him in the face when his American compatriots and Felix bring their miseries to him. In the end, pursued and touched by the American experience as when Nora comes to him with her questions about the night, he disintegrates. His volubility proves useless before the onslaughts of reality, and he finally breaks down when he realizes the emptiness and senselessness of his life. The spiritual and emotional hollowness that O'Connor reaps from his expatriation is no better a fate than Robin's bestiality, because it, too, implies a forfeiture of one's humanity.

In drawing O'Connor's character Barnes clearly echoes T. S. Eliot, especially in "The Waste Land" and "The Hollow Men," and the writers that influenced these poems, notably Dante and Conrad. O'Connor's Tiresias-like character is an appropriation to modern experience and a vulgarization of the ancient seer. Barnes uses Tiresias similarly to Eliot's use in "The Waste Land": as a consciousness that comprehends the experience she deals with.⁸ O'Connor owes his hollow character—his "deliberate disguises" and his end "not with a bang but with a whimper"—to "The Hollow Men." The similarities to Eliot's poems are abundant, and the debt to Eliot is obvious. But such a comparison is not the important point. It is significant that Nightwood does not end with O'Connor and Europe to compel us to give these similarities great weight and to conclude that the novel is another modernist text that repeats the characterization of life between the two wars and the apocalyptic sense peculiar to modernist literature. That the novel ends with Robin and Nora in America indicates that it is more concerned with the experience of the United States during a time of crisis after the old certainties and values have been tested and proved inadequate.

notes

1. A number of critics refer to expatriation in Nightwood without seeing it as the main theme of the novel. Walter Sutton maintains that the "chief burden is the oppressive time-consciousness of a particular place and time in history—the cosmopolitan world of displaced Europeans and expatriated Americans in the post-World-War-I years—the place and time which also formed the poetry of Eliot and Pound to a very marked degree" (120). Sharon Spencer states that "Expatriation is another life condition that is shared by Miss Barnes's characters and is revealed by their drifting from one European capital to another, and from Europe to America and back again" (43), Louis F. Kannenstine observes that Nightwood "holds up as a rendering of continental bohemia of the twenties, a distillation of the despair and estrangement of expatriation …" (103-104).

2. See Charles Baxter 1176 and Alan Williamson 66.

3. Andrew Field reports that "Berenice Abbott asked Barnes why she had chosen to open the novel with this strongly etched portrait of someone who turns out to be so unimportant in the novel. She answered quite directly that it was done simply to confuse and draw some attention away from the lesbian love between Nora and Robin that looms so large in Nightwood" (78). Surely, Barnes's view of the first chapter of her novel cannot be taken seriously. It is obvious, as I argue in this essay, that, when placed in the context of the novel, Felix's story is an appropriate and necessary introduction to a tale of alienation and disintegration. If Nightwood were a realistic novel, then not only Felix but also O'Connor would be unnecessary distractions. Andrew Field, making this fundamental error, remarks: "Given what we know about the way in which Barnes used the story of Felix Volkbein as a distraction from the too painful centre of her short tale, it may well be that the figure of Dr. O'Connor was strategically deployed to be a distraction as well" (140).

4. Kannenstine notes that "Robin is seldom directly available to the reader but is nearly always presented in terms of the sensations she arouses in those with whom she becomes involved" (91).

5. "The majority of expatriates did not read European writers and did not have or use the opportunity to meet them, either. William Carlos Williams asked Robert McAlmon to present him to some young French modern poets when he came to France in 1924 and was puzzled when McAlmon replied that he didn't know any" (Field 39).

6. Kenneth Burke says of the fourth chapter of Nightwood: "built upon the portrait of Nora's rival, Jenny Petherbridge, 'The Squatter' is most accurately characterizable as invective" (340).

7. A. Robert Lee describes The Confidence-Man in a way that suggests its obvious similarity and relevance to Nightwood: "The Confidence-Man, willfully (or knowingly, at least) eschews plot, character in any conventional sense, even action; it offers instead talk, irrepressible, necessary human talk, as plausible yet as inconsistent and equivocal as human kind at large, and all of it worked into a superb dissonance of voices, a colloquium at once literal-seeming and fantastical …" (159).

8. Cf. T. S. Eliot's note to line 218 of "The Waste Land": "Tiresias although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character' is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest…. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem" (72).

works cited

Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood, New York: New Directions, 1961.

Baxter, Charles. "A Self-Consuming Light: Nightwood and the Crisis of Modernism," Journal of Modern Literature, 3 (1974).

Burke, Kenneth. "Version, Con-, Per-, and In- (Thoughts on Djuna Barnes's Novel, Nightwood," Southern Review, 2 (April 1966).

De Vore, Lynn. "The Backgrounds of Nightwood: Robin, Felix, and Nora," Journal of Modern Literature 10 (March 1983).

Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems, 1909–1962. New York: Harcourt, 1966.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Stein, 1982.

Field, Andrew. Djuna: The Life and Times of Miss Barnes. New York: Putnam's, 1983.

Frank, Joseph. "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," Sewanee Review 53 (1945).

Greiner, Donald J. "Djuna Barnes' Nightwood and the American Origins of Black Humor," Critique 17 (1975).

Kannenstine, Louis F. The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation. New York: New York UP, 1977.

Lee, Robert A., Ed. Herman Melville: Reassessments. London and Totowa, N.J.: Vision and Barnes, 1984.

Melville, Herman. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP and the Newberry Library, 1984.

Nelson, Gerald. Ten Variations of America. New York: Knopf, 1972.

Spencer, Sharon. Space, Time, and Structure in the Modern Novel. New York: New York UP, 1971.

Sutton, Walter. "The Literary Image and the Reader: A Consideration of the Theory of Spatial Form," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 17 September 1957.

Williamson, Alan. "The Divided Image: The Quest for Identity in the Works of Djuna Barnes," Critique, 17 (1975).