SOURCE: "'That Savage Path': Nightwood and The Divine Comedy," in Renascence, Vol. XLIV, No. 2, Winter, 1992, pp. 137-58.

[In the following essay, Reesman compares Barnes's Nightwood to Dante's The Divine Comedy.]

Among the many interesting problems raised by Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936), is that of placing this complex and mysterious novel in a literary-historical context. Many critics describe Nightwood as an example of the post-modernist "new novel." Joseph Frank, for example, views it as a striking example of literary spatialism, a "richly experimental" novel that goes beyond other similar works in its post-cubist exploration of narrative form and narrative consciousness (Frank 46). Following Frank, Sharon Spencer calls it an "architectonic" novel that attempts "to liberate character from the restrictive traditional unities by means of new structural principles based upon juxtaposition in space" (Spencer 39). Yet although Nightwood clearly emerges out of the literary attitudes and trends of its time, it also progressively assimilates and coordinates itself with the literature of the past. T. S. Eliot, for example, whose introduction to Nightwood drew favorable attention to a relatively unknown author, praises the novel's "great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation," but adds to these virtues "a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy" (Nightwood, xvi).

Indeed, like Eliot himself and like James Joyce, who, as George Steiner puts it, produced works "crammed with quotations from, allusions to, pastiches and parodies of the best art, music and literature of the previous two thousand years" (Steiner 134), Barnes should be regarded as both custodian of tradition and innovator, and Nightwood's experimental form should not be set apart from the rich literary tradition that informs it. As Louis F. Kannenstine notes, Nightwood is "steeped in the literary-historical past as thoroughly as it is grounded in its concrete present." It particularly draws upon the sacred literature of Christian and pre-Christian tradition, as does Barnes's first novel, Ryder (Kannenstine xi). By re-presenting the past in the present, Nightwood addresses all that has gone before it as well as that culture in which and for which it was composed, but its jarring juxtapositions of past and present become even more meaningful as it also becomes part of a literary past. Indeed, now, after fifty years, Nightwood's juxtaposition of contemporary cultural concerns with broader themes and archetypes can be more clearly seen and described. Despite its revolutionary chic, many of the important questions about Nightwood—and it is a novel that has baffled and even outraged literary critics—can be taken up in light of its relation to much older literary modes. It is fitting that a cunning book like Nightwood should present such a paradoxical universalism.

Perhaps in part because the reclusive Barnes was so unavailable for questioning about her life and career, Nightwood's sources in past literature have never been adequately addressed. There are tantalizing suggestions, however, of such sources in various critics' comments. Besides Eliot's and Kannenstine's remarks, Frank, for example, despite his post-modernist approach, writes that this "amazing book" combines "the simple majesty of a medieval mystery play with the verbal subtlety and refinement of a Symbolist poem" (Frank 46). Others have noted the book's significant references to the poetry of John Donne. Yet the one name which emerges repeatedly in the criticism is that of Dante Alighieri, though it comes up casually and without explanation. Kannenstine says of Dr. Matthew O'Connor (whose full name is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor) that "the Dante in O'Connor is a chronicler of purgatory" (Kannenstine 95). Similarly, in his 1937 New Yorker review of Nightwood, Clifton Fadiman calls the characters of the novel "the denizens of Dante's Inferno" (Fadiman 103), and Stanley Edgar Hyman describes Dr. O'Connor as "the mad, tormented Dante of our sexual underworld" (Hyman 61). An examination of Nightwood with Dante's The Divine Comedy in mind confirms the association sensed by these critics and reveals the Dantean influence in theme, structure, characterization, and imagery. The much-disputed meaning of the last chapter of Nightwood, in particular, is made clearer through the comparison with The Divine Comedy. The likenesses appear to indicate a conscious memory of Dante's poem, but I have been unable to locate any biographical evidence to indicate Barnes's knowledge of it. It is, however, their significance not their origin that concerns me. To see Barnes's novel as a mirror for Dante's poem is to see it illuminated in a significant way.

As in The Divine Comedy, in Nightwood duality is the overriding thematic as well as structural pattern. To begin with, it is and is not a novel: "only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it," as Eliot remarks (xii). Dr. O'Connor describes the unusual structure and development of the book when he claims that he has a narrative, "but you will be put to it to find it" (97). The eight chapters of Nightwood each focus on a single character, and this preference for multiple points of view formally contextualizes the novel's other dichotomies of day and night, of dual forms of being, of sexuality, of love and hate, consciousness and unconsciousness, descent and ascent, spirituality and bestiality, soul and flesh, salvation and damnation, linear and simultaneous time. Most importantly, a "reverse morality" pervades every aspect of the book. What is usually considered "good" is no longer in Nightwood. What is grotesque is beautiful. Morality and aesthetics are problematic and even dangerous in this dualistic universe, as Doctor O'Connor warns:

"Have you," said the doctor, "ever thought of the peculiar polarity of times and times; and of sleep?…. Well, I … will tell you how the day and the night are related by their division. The very constitution of twilight is a fabulous reconstruction of fear, fear bottom-out and wrong side up. Every day is thought upon and calculated, but the night is not premeditated. The Bible lies the one way, but the nightgown the other. The night, 'Beware of that dark door!'" (80)

The characters of Nightwood occupy a "middle condition" that seems to presuppose a lack of understanding as a condition of tentative existence in a seemingly empty universe. How odd and how oddly appropriate, then, is Barnes's use of the moral architecture—the resolved and unresolved dualisms—of The Divine Comedy.

Like The Divine Comedy, Nightwood's thematic focus is on love, human and divine, and this is informed throughout by the insistence on duality and reversal. Love is generally inversion in Nightwood. Nearly all of Barnes's love relationships in all her works involve a search for self-completion—this love is symbolized in relationships that are either strictly familial or homosexual. In Nightwood the most "perfect" love thus appears to be that which allows the lovers to be mirror-images of each other. As Barnes wrote in "Six Songs of Khalidine," an early elegy to a dead lover:

      It is not gentleness but mad despair
      That sets us kissing mouths, O Khalidine,
      Your mouth and mine, and one sweet mouth unseen
      We call our soul…. (Barnes, A Book, 145)

Similarly, in Nightwood, Nora remarks that "… a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own" (143). Indeed the story of Nightwood traces how Nora's obsessive love for Robin is revealed as a selfish personal design on Nora's part. Her sin is that she treats Robin not as another human being but as a facet of herself. In Nightwood, whether between man and woman, woman and woman, or man and man, love that could be joy fails because of narcissistic self-containment. Nora's attempt to become one soul with Robin, to abolish their duality, is her great failing, and she painfully learns that when one "loves" anyone in a possessive, egotistical way—that is, when one's love is a demand on the loved one to function as a mirror of one's own personality and desires—the love is doomed. Nightwood thus suggests that all love is in danger of becoming merely a selfish, auto-erotic quest, but it also just hints in its conclusion at awareness of another kind of love, a love that would not be the less for allowing the "other" her identity and freedom. As The Divine Comedy portrays the limits and possibilities of Dante's and Beatrice's relations as they occur in Dante's spiritual journey, Nightwood similarly explores such possibilities and limits of human and Divine love; much more tentatively than The Divine Comedy, Nightwood offers a redefinition of love as salvation from self-absorption.

Perhaps like Dante at the beginning of the Inferno, the characters of Nightwood are in revolt against the facts of their physical realities as human beings; these "perpetual protagonists" of Barnes's represent to Alan Williamson an extreme form of "the tragic encounter between an aspiring hero and a limiting universe, in that the antagonist is the protagonist's own nature rather than some external force pitted against him" (Williamson 61-62). The great sins of The Divine Comedy, Incontinence, Violence, and Fraud, are also the sins of Nightwood: all the characters are morally incontinent, but they come to represent individual besetting sins as well, all involving failures to love brought on by their self-absorption and alienation. As Ulrich Weisstein comments, "sooner or later in the novel, the characters of Nightwood are judged according to their spiritual age" (Weisstein 9). For both Dante and Barnes, the theme is that of "the agonized heart" (Hyman 62), the pilgrim soul on its way to death—or salvation—on the "grim path of 'We know not' to 'We can't guess why'" (101). "Agony" in Nightwood takes on the meaning of a struggle between well-defined but seemingly impossible choices. Like Faulkner's portrayal of the "human heart in conflict with itself," the struggles of Barnes's heroes and heroines suggest that if understanding within the self is next to impossible, how much more difficult is communication—especially loving communication—between oneself and others. Language is suspect; it can falsify reality by substituting "a word [for everything seen, done or spoken] and not its alchemy," as the Doctor puts it. "We swoon with the thickness of our own tongue when we say 'I love you …'" (83), he adds. Since in our modern wasteland, our "night wood," one cannot know the beloved's inner life, the Doctor suggests, one cannot love or be loved.

It is this seemingly insurmountable condition of ignorance of self and others in Nightwood which has furnished the evidence for the standard reading of Barnes's novel as utterly despairing, but to read the novel this way would be like reading only Dante's Inferno and not the complete Comedy. Nightwood is an Inferno for the modern world; like the Inferno it offers in its mysterious conclusion an enhancement of the possibility of hope by leaving the issue of interpretation, of belief, up to the reader. There is hope in Nightwood's savage portrait of modern failures at love, but it is like the hope offered at the end of Eliot's The Waste Land—it is subtly suggested, not directly presented. Such "incompleteness" actually offers the more "complete" reading of Nightwood.

Barnes's "negative" method specifically reflects the novel's dependence upon the Christian myth of a redemptive Fall: love is possible here on earth, but paradoxically one must first face one's failures at love. Fittingly, Spencer calls Nightwood a "form of the Christian message in disguise" (Spencer 39), and Williamson suggests that in Nightwood, because love seeks "to heal fragmentation, to overcome solitude, and to deny mortality," love is the most perfect act of revolt against earthly despair (Williamson 65). But the Doctor says it best: "We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it" (83).

The love so great "that even the earth should roar with it" is the same love Dante beholds in The Divine Comedy, "The love that moves the sun and the other stars" (Pur., XXXIII, 145). The structures of The Divine Comedy and Nightwood seek to trace the way of the soul on the path through damnation and purgatory to paradise. Nightwood stops short at purgatory, just at the precise moment, in fact, of the turn from hell into purgatory and the beginning of the way to salvation, while The Divine Comedy portrays the soul's ascent as well as descent. Dante encounters all manners and degrees of degradation and despair, but ends with a vision of God as changeless Light. Led by the wise Virgil and then taken into heaven by his projected soul, the animal figure Beatrice, the pilgrim is in the end united with himself and with God. His mission now, we are given to understand, is to return to earth and tell the tale of his salvation. Although Nightwood's inhabitants trudge the "savage path" (Inf., II, 142) Dante's pilgrim started down, it reverses the moral structure of The Divine Comedy and confirms it at the same time. Both works are full of inversions (as in Canto XIX of the Inferno, which describes the upside-down popes), perversions, and, as Kenneth Burke theorized about Nightwood, "con-versions" as well. In both works, one's puzzling out these structural movements and counter-movements causes one to participate fully to the very end of possibilities, or, particularly in Nightwood's case, to their real beginning.

The structures of The Divine Comedy and Nightwood exhibit movement not so much through plot but through an overall spatial design. Dante's readers have always delighted in trying to "draw" in their minds his amazing geography of hell, purgatory, and heaven, and some editors have gone further. The Dorothy Sayers translation, for example, contains complicated notes and diagrams explaining where the poet and his guide are at a particular moment. The basic mythic description of death and destruction as downward and of new life and resurrection as upward emerges in The Divine Comedy as the structural statement of the Middle Ages, but modern Nightwood's metaphorical structures are also dominated by these Dantean features of images of descent, ascent, and turning. Characters in Nightwood are always falling down (for example, the "go down" or "bow down" phrase so often repeated refers to several things at the same time—it is a naughty joke, a suggestion of bowing down to an aristocratic past, a sleep, a falling, a dream, a death, a prayer). Like stage directions, Nightwood's frequent movements of turning call attention to the book's spatial relationships as well as its gradual abandonment of chronology (Kannenstine 124). Such a spatial organization calls for a reconstructive reader who is willing to put together what is presented as fragmentary, to build what is smashed, to find meaning where meaning seems at best confused or illusory or, at worst, absent.

Like The Divine Comedy, Nightwood presents a "static situation" in addition to its logical/chronological narrative; according to Frank, the reader will find facets of the situation explored from different angles: "The eight chapters of Nightwood are like searchlights, probing the darkness each from a different direction yet ultimately illuminating the same entanglement of the human spirit" (Frank 31-32). Much the same could be said of Dante's Cantos: the sins he sees in hell, for example, may be meticulously differentiated but are all the same human weaknesses in different guises—it may even be suggested that they are all Dante's sins. Dante carries several image clusters throughout his trilogy, as Sayers notes, including the Wood, the City, the Path, the Fall, and the Ascension. In a similar way, Nightwood contains patterns of meaning connected independently of time-sequence. What Frank says of Nightwood is just as true for The Divine Comedy: meaning is generally located in "reference and cross-reference of images and symbols that must be referred to each other spatially throughout the time-act of reading" (Frank 49).

And yet it is not true that Nightwood is "timeless," that if one is lost in the night wood the year and city do not matter (Spencer 43). These things do matter very much: Nightwood tells us, especially with Dante as a background, that the traditional kinds of salvation (Dr. O'Connor's Catholicism, for example) seem utterly impossible in the modern world. In spite of what some critics claim about the book's "timelessness," Nightwood is set in a very particular time, precisely in "the cosmopolitan world of displaced Europeans and expatriated Americans in the post World War I years," as Walter Sutton describes it. The world of Nightwood is largely Djuna Barnes's world. Yet Nightwood's structure is also "flexible and adaptable, accommodating itself to every altered perspective in time" (Sutton 117, 120). Similarly, Dante tells his readers in Cantos I and II of the Inferno exactly what time of day it is, "Day was departing and the dusk drew on" (Inf., II, 1), and further that the day is his thirty-fifth birthday, "Midway this way of life we're bound upon" (Inf., I, 1). It is Easter Week, 1300. Dante continues throughout the entire poem to label each Canto with the time of day—"Good Friday, a.m.," or "Holy Saturday, p.m."—emerging from hell into purgatory at precisely 5 a.m. Easter Sunday. Dante means for his readers to realize that his universal and timeless poem also occurs in their own time.

The time overlay in Nightwood, though buried, is also very precise: one finds a chronology scattered throughout the 170 pages of Nightwood that begins with Felix, born in 1880 and married to Robin in 1922. Robin goes to live with Nora until she leaves for America with Jenny, whom she first meets in 1929. The final portions of the book take place in the 1930s. But time in Nightwood is charted very carefully up to the point of the separation of Robin and Nora, after which occurs a descent into a world "ultimately preconscious and ahistorical" (Kannenstine 94). This movement parallels Dante's leaving off of his careful chronology as he gets further and further into heaven, and perhaps the doctor in Nightwood thinks of Dante's redeeming dawn: "Dawn, of course, dawn! That's when she came back frightened. At that hour the citizen of the night balances on a thread that is running thin" (139).

In both works, the night wood is the scene of the descent of the soul, and the novel's whorled, rococo pattern of descent is carefully connected to its wood imagery—such a connection exists in the chapter title, "Where the Tree Falls," for example. In the Inferno, the image of woods appears at regular intervals in the descent into deeper and deeper rings of hell. At the very entrance to hell appears the frightening Dark Wood in which the pilgrim is lost:

     Ay, me! How hard to speak of it—that rude
     And rough and stubborn forest! the mere breath
     of memory stirs the old fear in the blood;
 
     It is so bitter, it goes nigh unto death
     Yet there I gained such good, that, to convey
     The tale, I'll write what else I found therewith.
       (Inf., I, 4-9)

Turned aside from escape to the "right road" by three animals symbolic of the sins he will have to face in Hell, a Leopard (Incontinence), a Lion (Violence), and a Wolf (Fraud), and fleeing back into the wood, Dante meets the shade of Virgil, who tells him that one day a Greyhound (Christ) will come to drive the beasts away. For now the only escape is to travel a longer way, led by Virgil through hell and purgatory to be finally guided by Beatrice through heaven.

The woods reappear in Canto IV, when Dante describes the Limbo of the Great Pagans and Poets as "the wood (as'twere) / Of souls ranged thick as trees" (II. 65-66). Canto XIII, which takes place in Circle VII, Ring ii, of hell, the Violent Against Self, portrays the Wood of the Suicides, a dismal, pathless wood of withered trees that enclose the souls of suicides:

      No green here, but discolored leaves and dark.
      No tender shoots, but writhen and gnarled and tough,
      No fruit, but poison-galls on the withered bark.
        (II. 4-6)

The gloom of the woods is disturbed by the shades of two profligates, flying through the forest eternally pursued and torn by black hounds and screeching Harpies. In this night wood of total despair Dante, urged by Virgil, tests the trees to discover what they are:

      So I put forth my hand a little way,
      And broke a branchlet from a thorn-tree tall;
      And the trunk cried out; "Why tear my limbs away?"
 
      Then it grew dark with blood, and therewithal
      Cried out again: "Why dost thou rend my bones?
      Breathes there no pity in thy breast at all?
 
      We that are turned to trees were human once;
      Nay, thou shouldst tender a more pious hand
      Though we had been the souls of scorpions."
        (II. 31-39)

As the Florentine explains, "I am one that made my own rooftree my scaffold" (II. 151). The denizens of the Wood of the Suicides committed the same sin the characters of Nightwood commit: they wantonly destroyed their own lives "turning to weeping what was meant for joy" (Inf., XI, 45). Perhaps this is what O'Connor has in mind when he declares, "… now nothing, but wrath and weeping" (166). The connection between Nightwood and the Wood of the Suicides becomes clearer when one realizes that Dante and Virgil's next stop is the Burning Sand and the woods that fringe it—there they discover the Sodomites, located after the suicides in hell and just before the crossing of the Great Barrier into the lower third of hell, which contains those who committed the sin of Fraud. Violence and Incontinence are left behind, but these sins form a backdrop to the Sins of Fraud which will come. The Suicides and Sodomites in The Divine Comedy and Nightwood symbolize the sin of lovelessness, and lovelessness, we learn, underlies Fraud in both works as well.

In order to make the transition from Violence to Fraud, at the edge of the barrier cliff Virgil instructs Dante to throw down his rope girdle, which Dante remembers he had used earlier to capture the Leopard. The girdle is a symbol of his last holding onto and subsequent shedding of the lesser two sins he has so far faced. When the monster Geryon is called up by the girdle from the depths of hell, Dante and Virgil climb on his back and descend into the pit of Fraud. Geryon is an image of duality, his man's face belied by his "wyven's trunk." He is "painted with ring-knots and whorled tracery," "such dyes in warp and woof" as "Arachne's web." He is propelled by his tail, "twisting the venom fork in air / Wherewith, like a scorpion's tail, its point was tipped" (Inf., XVII, 10-27). Geryon continues The Divine Comedy's pattern of turning and serves as a figure of Satan as well. He also has a correspondent in Purgatorio: the Gryphon of Canto XXXI in whom duality of form is resolved.

But resolution does not mean stasis in either Nightwood or The Divine Comedy. Each work has at the center a static, still figure around which the other characters and action move; for human beings, movement, not stasis, is offered as the life-giving force in both works. In hell, Dante finds the strange, three-sided, frozen figure of Satan, immobile in the center of the earth, caught forever in a vast lake of ice. Dante and Virgil actually climb down his trunk and at his center, his loins, find themselves reversed and climbing up to purgatory. As Virgil explains:

      "Thou think'st," he said, "thou standest as before
      You side the centre, where I grasped the hair
      Of the ill Worm that pierces the world's core.
 
      So long as I descended thou wast there;
      But when I turned, then was the point passed by
      Toward which all weight bears down from every where.
      The other hemisphere doth o'er thee lie—
      Antipodal to that which land roofs in…."
                                        (Inf., XXXIV, 106-13)

The still center that paradoxically causes movement, reversal, even eievation, appears again as the Vision of the Light at the center of the Heavenly Rose: the Unmoved Mover, God Himself. Dante has gone down through hell to get to the still Satan, up through purgatory to get to the still God. Ironically, Satan furnishes Dante the avenue upwards; God sends him back down to earth to sing of heaven.

Robin Vote is the still center of Nightwood. All characters act through her and against her and because of her. She is something different to each character, and, although she is "La Somnambule," the unmoving sleeper, she is a catalyst for either damnation or salvation, a frightening figure to those who behold her. As Dante turned in disgust away from the frozen Satan, Nora sees in Robin her own worst designs of wrongful domination of another. She cannot stand to view Robin—and yet craves the sight of her. Perhaps Nora eventually learns merely to accept what she cannot assimilate, just as Dante tells us he accepts the too-bright Light of God without being able to stare into its secrets, but Nightwood ends on the "down note" of the climb down Satan's torso, before everything reverses and the possibilities of purgation are revealed.

I shall return to the question of Nightwood's ending, but first I wish to address exactly how the novel's characters enact their Dantean journeys. Some characters are central: Dr. O'Connor, Nora, Robin. Others are representatives of the larger world of the story. Jenny and Felix, Robin's other lovers, stand out most clearly from the rest of the inhabitants of the might wood, the freaks, whores, transvestites, circus actors, and midgets. But as noted earlier, like Dante's characters, all of the characters of Nightwood are symbolic and must always be viewed in relation to one another; because of their symbolic nature, they take on reflexive meaning like the parts of a poem, a meaning found only in juxtaposition and cross-reference, not in logic. It is possible to arrange the major characters of both works in such a way as to point out their echoing interrelations:

O'Connor	Nora	Robin
Speaker	Heroine	Soul
Virgil/Prophet	Dante/Pilgrim	Beatrice/Satan
Sin of Incontinence	Sin of Violence	Sin of Fraud
Leopard	Lion	Wolf

Dr. O'Connor has been singled out as the hero of Nightwood by some writers, but although he is heroic in his attempt to hold onto his Catholicism in order to be saved, he knows he has failed and can only interpret his failure as instruction for others. His constant sin of Incontinence damns him, as does his condemnation of the others at the end of the chapter called "Go Down, Matthew." And yet perhaps he is not so much damned as set apart from salvation. The doctor is a prophet who can show the way but who cannot live in the Promised Land, a priest who can hear confession but who cannot grant absolution, a Virgil who can lead Dante only as far as the gate of heaven before returning to his Limbo. Dr. O'Connor is strongly associated with Tiresias, the blind hermaphroditic prophet of Greek mythology who was damned by Zeus for his garrulousness, particularly his foretelling of Zeus's own downfall. Like Tiresias, O'Connor sees the future but cannot change it; he must wander in his horrible awareness of the other souls through a wasted earth, as does Tiresias in Eliot's The Waste Land. Nora recognizes this role: "Doctor, I have come to ask you to tell me everything you know about the night" (79). Dr. O'Connor is the "Watchman of the Night."

Eliot emphasizes the doctor's "hypersensitive awareness" of other people's pain, his "desperate disinterestedness" and "deep humility." What "sends him raving" in the end is his "squeezing himself dry" and getting no sustenance in return (Introduction to Nightwood xiii). Frank sees the doctor as damned (by his excessive knowledge of evil, "which condemns him to a living death") and innocent at the same time (Frank 44-47). O'Connor's despair allows him to recognize despair in others and to help them, but there is nothing else he can do but talk to them. The doctor attempts to save Nora from her obsessive attachment to Robin through talk when she visits him in his one-room flat. She surprises him, finding him in tawdry dress and wig in his filthy, cramped bed. He speaks in long, chapter-length monologues on the state of the soul in the night world: at his feet sits a pail of excrement, fitting accompaniment to his spewing of words. As a chorus chants, as a prophet raves, O'Connor goes on and on—his woman's gown, symbol of his sexual disorientation, becoming the "natural raiment of extremity" worn by "infants, angels, priests, the dead" (80).

The doctor's agony is genuine, his lack of self-consciousness laudable. Yet too often his talk is not offered as the way to salvation, but merely as a distraction to help the listener endure. The doctor's monologue is not about how to overcome a loss, but how to bear it to death. Dr. O'Connor's Catholicism is much the same to him, since for him it offers comfort but no hope. He cannot attain the state Eliot prays for in "Ash Wednesday": "Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still." His deep involvement in the sufferings of others binds him to their fates, despite the pain that bond causes him:

"Look here!" said the doctor … "the liar I am!…. I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you're keeping hushed…. Do you think, for Christ's sweet sake!" he said, and his voice was a whisper. "Now that you have all heard what you wanted to hear, can't you let me loose now, let me go? I've not only lived my life for nothing, but I've told it for nothing—abominable among the filthy people—I know, it's all over, everything's over, and nobody knows it but me—drunk as a fiddler's bitch—lasted too long—" He tried to get to his feet, gave it up. "Now," he said, "the end—mark my words—now nothing, but wrath and weeping!" (165-66)

The doctor has failed because he has found selfless love impossible to maintain toward other people and has long ago given up as hopeless any other kind of love.

Before turning to the other characters of Nightwood, let us note the position of Dr. O'Connor in Ryder, Barnes's first novel, since his spiritual agony there is carried over and expanded in Nightwood. His role as spiritual guide is formed in Ryder; his one monologue (the Doctor is a minor character) recalls the words of a priest, Father Lucas, at the funeral of the Doctor's younger brother:

Look up, he says, and there you will see the Lamb of the Lord trampling out the small clouds and the great clouds and the indifferent clouds of heaven, grazing without sin, go thou and do likewise. I'll do that, Father, says I, and please Moses it's in my strength, but what with a dilator on my hip and the disease and distresses and distempers of man, and what they are prone to, coming into my mind, and before my eyes, and me restless, it's a devil bit of peace I'll get, says I, banging my head against the scrofula and the tapeworm and the syphilis and the cancer and the pectoris and the mumps and the glut and the pox of mankind, I says, and me with my susceptible orbs staring down into and up through the cavities and openings and fissures and entrances of my fellowman, and following some, and continuing others, and increasing many, and them swelling and opening and contracting and pinching like the tides of the sea, and me a mortal like the sea with my ebb and flow, and my good heart, and my thundering parts and my appetites and my hungers. (Barnes, Ryder, 174)

The doctor enters all the orifices of the human body as the Earth itself, leading as Virgil does down tunnels and up fissures to the very gate of heaven. His eyes become the searchlights to guide others; his knowledge of the deep allows him to show other lost souls the way out. Father Lucas answers:

Visit me often, he says, and I'll give you comfort and kind words and a little consolation that shall inch thee on thy way a bit, and bring thee nearer the Celestial Gate, slip by slop, cleansing your soul as you go, that you may not enter altogether dusty and dirty and mucked before the Judgment Seat, with its two in front and its two behind and the four singing Holy! Holy! Holy! God save the behind. I said, and staggered out into the life and traffic of my days…. (Barnes, Ryder, 174)

In Nightwood, if the doctor himself does not discover hope, he at least helps Nora to the path of purgation, for Nora is the real pilgrim. A seeker of the Word held back by her sin of selfish Violence, Nora is fascinated by depravity, repressive in response perhaps to a Puritan ethic. Nora's fascination with degradation is rather like Dante's open-mouthed awe of hell's various grisly sins and punishments, and, like Dante, she identifies strongly with the sinners, and she finds harsh judgment of them difficult to abandon. Nora's selfish identification with Robin, her clutching recognition of the "double" she finds in Robin, leads eventually to Robin's annihilation. O'Connor warns Nora against her attentions to Robin, especially her giving Robin dolls and other toys to play with: "We give death to a child when we give it a doll—it's the effigy and the shroud; when a woman gives it to another woman, it is the life they cannot have, it is their child, sacred and profane …" (142). Nora and Robin represent the paradox that only through another can the pilgrim find herself, and yet if she does not find the strength to continue her search for her soul alone—alone in the last extremity and freed of her selfish personal designs on the other—she will destroy the other person, the vessel of her search. But Nora is afraid to let go of Robin. Attempting to convince her of this, the doctor calls up Dante's handling of Beatrice, which for him apparently represents a notable attempt to love and yet to continue the search for selfhood separately from the beloved:

The doctor brought his palms together. "If you, who are bloodthirsty for love, had left her alone, what? Would a lost girl in Dante's time have been a lost girl still, and he had turned his eyes on her? She would have been remembered, and the remembered put on the dress of immunity…. The uninhabited angel! That is what you have always been hunting!" (148)

Nora loves in the only way she knows, and she loves too much; eventually, unlike Dante with Beatrice, she violently forces Robin into reacting to her possessive needs.

But like Dante, the pilgrim Nora's need for a journey downward to a confrontation with a demonic Robin is a need for confrontation with her soul. "Robin disfigured and eternalized by the hieroglyphics of sleep and pain" (63) becomes Nora's love object. Frustrated by Robin's lack of response to her designs and particularly irritated at Robin's immersion in a numbing round of night-time partying with people whom Nora considers depraved, Nora attempts the psychological rape of Robin. She forces Robin into a moment of intense contact in which Robin suddenly feels overwhelming guilt towards Nora. Nora then cruelly tries to "slap her out of it." Nora becomes for Robin an inaccessible Madonna of redemption and unspoken accusation, and Robin feels she must leave Nora to escape insanity—which condition overtakes her anyway, as one critic emphasizes, by the end of the book (Williamson 71).

After Robin leaves Nora for Jenny, Nora turns to the Doctor, who, in spite of himself, does shed light on Nora's predicament and helps her gain insight on what has happened to her. Like Dante with Virgil, Nora begins to assert herself more and more during the course of the Doctor's monologues—these monologues finally become dialogues in which Nora speaks as much as the Doctor, defining more and more clearly the nature of her problem. She seems much better able to address her guilt, loneliness, and failure by the end of their talks than when she first came to him in a broken state. What happens to her after she leaves him furnishes the last chapter of Nightwood.

Waking into consciousness in the first chapter of the novel and slipping down into darkness in the last chapter, Robin is immobile like Satan in his ghastly ice; but she is also a Beatrice shining with the eternal light of heaven. She is whatever the other characters of Nightwood perceive her to be, for, as Frank notes, she is a "creation" symbolizing a state before good and evil—she is "meet of child and desperado." She is a "sleepwalker living in a dream from which she has not awakened—for awakening would imply a consciousness of moral value—Robin is at once completely egotistical and yet lacking in a sense of her own identity" (Frank 32-34). Felix says Robin is looking for someone to tell her she is innocent. Robin needs "permission to live" as a human being, for in the story she never rises above the state of moral possibility. Seemingly, only in the others', especially Nora's, acting through her can she effect any progress at all, and then only for the person associated with her. Robin's fall is the reverse of Nora's rise; Robin's role as inverted exemplum makes her very similar indeed to the sinners of Dante's hell.

In Nightwood Robin embodies the legend of humankind's "true history"—she is the carrier of the primal past nearly forgotten by civilized people. In her transformative state, however (she is Geryon and Gryphon), she also represents the possibility of a future, good or evil, for Robin suggests the soul in all its possibilities. This helps explain why she is so often presented in animal images. Her sin is Fraud, the sin of the Wolf in Dante's scheme; and yet because she herself is not capable of moral or immoral action, her Fraud occurs through another person—Jenny, the woman who steals her away from Nora. It is really Jenny's fraud which pervades Robin's personality, just as Nora's love is harmfully thrust upon her from outside. The doctor is right to contrast Nora's love for Robin to Dante's immortalizing of Beatrice and to recognize that Nora must learn to release Robin, as Dante learns not to desire conventional control over Beatrice as he did on earth, but to love her and himself in a new way.

As Dante's and Barnes's characters portray humanity debased and elevated, the image patterns uphold the dualism and simultaneous interconnectedness thematically and structurally implied. As I have mentioned, both Dante and Barnes weave a pattern of reflexively related symbols and images throughout their work; in their fragmented worlds, identity is an unstable process, a becoming instead of a having become. Meaning thus occurs through the juxtaposed, not the synthesized image: "An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties," as the Doctor defines it (III), and there are many of them. Images echo and reflect allusively instead of speaking in single certainties. Uncertain, and even dark, such an insight helps explain the situation in which the characters of Nightwood find themselves caught. Meaning will be, but will be as open to possibility as is Nora's spiritual state.

Nightwood evokes Dante's use of figurae that present an event or figure in sacred history as prefiguring another, as the burning bush is a figura of the Virgin Mary, the Virgin a figura of the spotless tomb. Such images illustrate what Jacques Maritain calls "intuitive" meaning to be found in the "preconceptual life of the intellect and the imagination. Two things are not compared, but rather one thing is made known through the image of another … by the same stroke their similarity is discovered" (Maritain 329). James B. Scott discovers figurae in Nightwood when he calls the novel's imagery an "apprehended tableau" (Scott 106), which also describes Dante's vast setting for the salvation of a human soul.

The most significant shared image patterns of Nightwood's and The Divine Comedy's "tableaus" are the night and wood images and the striking animal images. Dante's woods, I noted, form an extensive pattern in the Inferno and are carried over to the Purgatorio. The woods images are equally important in Nightwood. The characters are lost in the night wood of the novel's title, but beyond that wood in Nightwood is the wood of the cradle, church door, cross, and coffin. It is further associated with the "feminine principle of matter and mother (materia, mater)" (Burke 339). This association calls for attention, for in its link with blood, wood takes on greater mythic meanings. In Eliot's "Sweeny Among the Nightingales," Agamemnon "cries aloud within the bloody wood," and in Nightwood, wood is also tragic and deadly. It appears as a symbol of the loss of spiritual life in the richly carved furniture (such as Frau Mann's "bloody wood" cabinet, the toys, and the picture frames of Nightwood) (Weisstein 6). Kannenstine suggests further meanings for wood: it carries the connotation of "being out of one's mind, a condition which merges with being beyond or out of time." The night wood is in short "the medium for recurrence of all lost phenomena" (Kannenstine 125-26).

Images of animals remarkably similar to those of The Divine Comedy haunt Djuna Barnes's night wood. Like The Divine Comedy, the novel is full of descriptions of people as snakes, of bestial acts, of animals evolving into humans. Most significantly, Dante's Leopard, Lion, and Wolf take human forms in Nightwood. The doctor daubs himself with gaudy makeup like the Leopard with "painted skin" in Dante's poem (Inf., XVI, 108). Like the gamboling Leopard, the doctor incontinently talks away in empty speculation his real chance to help those who call out to him. Nora is associated with the Lion of Violence. When she first meets Robin at the circus she leads her away from a lioness:

… she turned her furious great head with its yellow eyes afire and went down, her paws thrust through the bars and, as she regarded the girl, as if a river were falling behind impassable heat, her eyes flowed in tears that never reached the surface. At that the girl rose straight up. Nora took her hand. "Let's get out of here!" the girl said, and still holding her hand Nora took her out. (54)

The image comes up again when Nora is trying to explain herself to O'Connor. He responds to her "explanations" of her feelings towards Robin that "Lions grow their manes and foxes their teeth on that bread" (151). The Doctor refers to these two animals in their Biblical comparisons to Satan, whom the prophets call a raging lion and whom Jesus calls a wily fox. As Robin's animal is the Wolf of Fraud, she is repeatedly associated with dogs, especially in the conclusion. Nora fears to rearrange anything in their house, for fear that "if she disarranged anything Robin might lose the scent of home" (56). Mythologist Erich Neumann characterizes the dog as the animal of the Great Mother in her guise as Gorgon, or Artemis/Hecate, "mistress of the night road, of fate, and of the dead." The Gorgon's principal animal is "the dog, the howler by night, the finder of tracks,… the companion of the dead"; as "mistress of the way down and of the lower way," the feminine Goddess keeps by her side the Cerberus-like dog (Neumann 170).

There are other important parallels in the animal imagery of The Divine Comedy and Nightwood. The Harpies in Dante's Wood of the Suicides are remarkably like the characters Barnes describes as haunting the underworld of Paris and preying on the unwary traveller in its depths; furthermore, Jenny's association with birds of prey casts her as the novel's most destructive "Harpy." The dualistic Geryon/Gryphon figures, as I have noted, are quite significant to Nightwood. The Gryphon, an apocalyptic animal, is Dante's first sight after his immersion in the River Lethe:

      Thus did they chant, and thus they led me, right
      Up to the Gryphon's breast, where watchfully
      Beatrice gazed, and we stood opposite.
 
      "Take heed," said they, "spare not thine eyes, for we
      Have set thee afore the orbs of emerald
      Whence Love let fly his former shafts at thee."
 
      Myriad desires, hotter than fire or scald
      Fastened mine eyes upon the shining eyes
      That from the Gryphon never loosed their hold.
 
      Like sun in looking-glass, no otherwise,
      I saw the Twyform mirrored in their range,
      Now in the one, now in the other guise.
 
      Think Reader, think how marvellous and strange
      It seemed to me when I beheld the thing
      Itself stand changeless and the image change.
      (Pur., XXXI, 112-26)

Dante stares into the eyes of Beatrice, which individually mirror the Gryphon; when the duality is reconciled, the divine and human Gryphon proceeds in a pageant to a newly flowering Tree of Knowledge on the way to the gate of heaven. Interestingly, Barnes alludes to this Canto when in her poem The Antiphon she describes a wooden table decoration which consists of the two halves of a gryphon which had once been a carousel car. This symbol of childhood was halved by the father in the poem with his saw, but it becomes the vehicle of the mother and daughter's "voyage" to mystical union. Dante's "beast / Which in two natures one sole person is," we recall, is a symbol of incarnation, of divine and human natures in the process of resolving themselves. In Nightwood Nora furnishes her house with Robin with "circus chairs, wooden horses bought from a ring of an old merry-go-round,…" and she sits in them, staring out of the window for Robin's return and crying for forgiveness (55). Robin, on the other hand, thinks of her life with Nora and her life in the streets as a "monster with two heads" (59).

Thus it seems Nora cannot forget her sin, as Dante forgets his in the River Lethe. But what happens to Nora in "The Possessed," the final scene of Nightwood? The description in this short coda is deliberately sparse and difficult to follow. We know Nora has been living for some time alone in America. Apparently, Robin has left Jenny and has been circling around Nora's house for days. Nora hears odd noises outside and follows "things rustling in the grass" to a chapel on top of a hill, described as a modern Chapel Perilous. "[C]ursing and crying," Nora "blindly, without warning, plunged into the jamb of the chapel door" (169). There she sees Robin cavorting before the altar with a frightened dog, then grovelling on the wooden floor of the church with the dog, "whining and waiting." All we hear of Nora is that "at the moment Nora's body struck the wood, Robin began going down." What is the outcome of these two falls?

Though this "sacrament" Nora witnesses in the lonely church seems an unusually bleak vision of despair, not everyone reads this ending as completely dark. Donald J. Greiner, for example, argues that Barnes's use of black humor, nowhere more explicit than in the final pages, offers a more positive reading of Nightwood than most approaches: black humor in Nightwood "… uses comedy to encourage sympathy as well as to expose evil; it suggests futurity; it celebrates comic distortion as an indication that anything is possible…." Black humor provides the opportunity to face up to ugliness and failure in the post-World War I world of Nightwood, and in so doing it offers hope for the characters' central thematic struggle to become human beings (Greiner 44-45). Alan Singer's analysis of metaphor and narrative claims that the act of creating artistic language itself offers hope in Nightwood; he suggests that "the true 'tragedy' of Nightwood lies not in the characters' failures but in the critical interpretation that fails to acknowledge the reconstructive possibilities latent in authorial self-consciousness" (Singer 87). Lynn DeVore claims, in a similar attempt to redress the "unbalanced and tarnished image" Nightwood has retained, that a biographical study of the novel, particularly the identification of Nora with Barnes herself, allows the reader to "humanize" the novel. He also mentions the positive ramifications of the conclusion's "allegorical intentions," though he does not specify what these intentions are (DeVore 71, 86-89). Despite these insights, however, Nora's reaction to her vision of Robin in the conclusion has not been fully addressed.

One needs the Dantean context to read the ending. In the conclusion Barnes orchestrates all the dualisms of the descent/ascent pattern in the book with the Dantean wood and animal imagery; Robin's going down is carefully linked to Nora's hitting the wooden door of the church. What happens is simultaneously very precise and quite unresolved. Doorways have been important throughout Nightwood and The Divine Comedy. Nora earlier describes the streets of Marseilles, Tangiers, and Naples: "In open doorways nightlights were burning all day before gaudy prints of the Virgin" (157). The action of the last chapter takes place "on a contrived altar, before a Madonna, two candles … burning" (169). The doorway suggests the chapel as a place of transition, a place of hope—a new kind of wood. While Robin is lost, Nora falls not into death but into a transformative state which leaves open the possibility that she has come to terms with her own sin, her abuse of Robin's freedom. She is at last able to fall down, to "bow down" or "go down"; symbolically she is ready to enter purgatory and move towards the cleansing waters of forgetfulness and salvation. The wood of the chapel door is no longer the Wood of the Suicides, but the wood of the Gryphon, the Tree of Knowledge Dante rises to behold on the way from purgatory to heaven. There is even a suggestion in the narrator's "struck the wood" of the phrase "knock on wood," which comes from the belief that the wood of the True Cross could protect the person who touched it. Nora has left the haunted night wood and entered the woods of the transformative Gryphon, a wood that becomes a garden.

This reading of the ending of Nightwood is prefigured by several earlier statements in the book. Nora thinks thoughts of the "resurrection, when we come up looking backward at each other …" (58). We are reminded in the ending of the Doctor's statements that "A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself—and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment?" (119-20) and "The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy" (117). Nora's vision of Robin's fall may serve to lift her up and free her from her selfish misunderstanding of Robin's nature—and more importantly of her own soul's nature. She may become a real self through self-knowledge—instead of through possessive, designing self-satisfaction. Earlier the Doctor tells Felix that "… [A]ll dreadful events are of profit" (119), and here in the conclusion he recognizes what Nora will eventually comprehend when she awakens: "O Widow Lazarus! Arisen from your dead!" (137).

The last paragraphs of Nightwood ask, "What happens now?" It seems that Dante will return to earth to write his poem of heavenly love, while we do not know what will become of Nora. But in this last scene, the Dantean model teaches us that, after this fall in the transformative wood of the church door, Nora can rise to continue living—and perhaps, if we take the metafictive view suggested by DeVore, to write the story itself. The act of turning, of movement upwards and outwards, is there for the reader, too, who is forced to turn away from the dual vision of the end, of Robin collapsed with a dog on the floor, of Nora held in the church door in a trance of stillness, just as Dante turns away abruptly from his supreme evil, the motionless Satan, and his supreme good, the motionless God. There is hope for reader as well as character in Nightwood's Dantean dualities, for its end is clearly a call for a movement towards futurity.

works cited

Alighieri, Dante. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, The Florentine: L'Inferno, Il Purgatorio, Il Paradiso. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1949.

Barnes, Djuna. The Antiphon. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1958.

――――――. A Book. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923.

――――――. Nightwood. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. 1937; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1961.

――――――. Ryder. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1956.

Burke, Kenneth. "Version, Con-, Per-, and In-: Thoughts on Djuna Barnes's Novel, Nightwood." Southern Review 2 (1966–67): 329-46.

DeVore, Lynn. "The Backgrounds of Nightwood: Robin, Felix, and Nora." Journal of Modern Literature 10 (1983): 71-90.

Fadiman, Clifton. Review of Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. The New Yorker (13 March 1937): 83-84.

Frank, Joseph. "Spatial Form in Modern Literature." In his The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literatures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963. 3-62.

Greiner, Donald J. "Djuna Barnes' Nightwood and the American Origins of Black Humor." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 17 (1975): 41-54.

Hyman, Stanley Edgar. "The Wash of the World (Djuna Barnes)." In his Standards: A Chronicle of Books for Our Time. New York: Horizon Press, 1966. 58-62.

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

Maritain, Jacques. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. New York: Pantheon, 1953.

Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963.

Scott, James B. Djuna Barnes. Boston: Twayne, 1976.

Singer, Alan. "The Horse Who Knew Too Much: Metaphor and the Narrative of Discontinuity in Nightwood." Contemporary Literature 25 (1984): 66-87.

Spencer, Sharon. Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel. Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1971.

Steiner, George. "The Cruellest Months." The New Yorker (22 April 1972): 134-42.

Sutton, Walter. "The Literary Image and the Reader: A Consideration of the Theory of Spatial Form." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 16 (1957): 112-23.

Weisstein, Ulrich. "Beast, Doll, and Woman: Djuna Barnes's Human Bestiary." Renascence 15 (1962): 3-11.

Williamson, Alan. "The Divided Image: The Quest for Identity in the Works of Djuna Barnes." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 7 (1964): 58-74.