SOURCE: Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Modernism as Exile: Fitzgerald, Barnes, and the Unreal City.” In Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity, pp. 185-242. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

[In the following excerpt, Kennedy discusses F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night in light of some American writers' attempts to go into voluntary exile in Paris in order to refresh their cultural perceptions.]

Gertrude Stein remarked that modernist writers and artists of her time had converged on the capital of France because “Paris was where the twentieth century was.” The city not only incorporated within its diverse cultural life the most distinctive projects and features of modernism, but (as her claim implies) it had also become a geographical sign of the modern. Other European cities—notably Vienna, Berlin, and London—had harbored important avant-garde coteries during the two decades bracketing the turn of the century, but by 1910, Paris had achieved preeminence as a site of modernist production. Stein suggests that she became an exile in order to position herself at the center of a historical phenomenon—as if the temporal (the twentieth century) had suddenly assumed a spatial form which might be located and occupied. The conflation of time and space in Stein's observation itself reflects a distinctively modern tendency to problematize categories of thought and perception. New ways of conceptualizing time, space, form, distance, speed, and direction emerged, as Stephen Kern has shown, from revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, science, and technology during the years between 1880-1918. Kern demonstrates how these changes radically altered the general meaning of the past, present, and future as frames of experiential reference. His analysis also redefines aspects of modern consciousness in ways which seem especially apposite to the problem of exile, and his account of the interplay between material culture on the one hand and intellectual and aesthetic life on the other offers a fresh perspective on the narrative construction of identity and experience in the city where (as Stein believed) the twentieth century first revealed its distinctive qualities.¹

To be sure, every age witnesses changes and marks transitions; even in apparently quiescent phases, culture on some level remains astir, dynamic. There is, moreover, another sense in which every period seems modern in relation to an earlier time; each era defines itself by its innovations, by its distinctive crises, and by its repudiations of outworn conventions, philosophies, and practices. Yet no previous “modern” age had ever brought such precipitous and sweeping change to everyday life and to human understanding. Within a few years, new technologies of communication and transportation changed the pace of daily activity, widened the horizons of personal consciousness, broke down geographical barriers, and made these changes instantly perceptible to a mass culture linked by electronic media. Writers variously expressed a recognition of unprecedented, fundamental transformations: Henry Adams believed that the year 1900 marked the onset of a new historical epoch; Virginia Woolf speculated with mock precision that “on or about December, 1910, human nature changed”; Charles Peguy declared in 1913 that “the world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years.” Diverse as such claims may be, the peculiar urge to specify a date for the advent of the modern age reflects an awareness of new conditions of being, coinciding (very roughly) with the turn of the twentieth century. Whatever the discrepancy between the estimates of Adams, Woolf, and Peguy, their efforts to designate the exact moment at which the Western world entered into this phase testifies both to a consciousness of historical liminality—a sense of living (and writing) on the threshold of a new era—and to a recognition that this epoch had arrived abruptly rather than gradually, through cataclysm rather than through evolution.

The various inventions and technologies which helped to produce new forms of modern consciousness had, as Kern notes, manifold effects on literary and artistic expression. For example, the establishment of World Standard Time in the 1890s, the “universal diffusion of pocket watches” about 1900, and the introduction in 1916 of electric clocks all served to intensify the distinction between public time and inner, subjective time—the very distinction upon which Henri Bergson had developed his theories of duration. Thus, as Kern points out, Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu and Joyce's Ulysses both entail deliberate though contrasting explorations of the psychological experience of time (16-18). Likewise the telephone enabled journalists of the late 1890s to report events unfolding almost as the paper rolled off the presses. This mind-boggling simultaneity of experience also occurred on the level of personal communication as long distance lines made possible direct conversations with far-flung acquaintances. Obviously, the consciousness of other peoples and cultures did not itself arise from the technological advances of the late nineteenth century; but the capacity to converse with those far away endowed the remote with a presence and tangibility it had never before possessed. As Kern speculates, this new consciousness of events unfolding at the same instant in different places probably influenced both Joyce's representation of a “temporally thickened present” in Ulysses and Stein's effort to expand the present moment with verbs in the continuous present and with successive reiterations of opening lines (85-86).

Concurrent developments in transportation had a comparable effect on the perception of space and place. In the 1890s the popularization of the bicycle and the subsequent introduction of the automobile stimulated leisure travel and altered basic conceptions of speed and distance, dramatically extending what might be called the proximate landscape while fostering an expanded sense of geographical contiguity. Motorized trams, subways, and elevators accelerated personal movement within urban spaces; high-speed passenger steamers plied the Atlantic in record time, and airplanes flew over topographical and national boundaries, dissolving notions of remoteness and separation while producing a new consciousness of global relations. Reflecting on the emerging “technology of speed,” Octave Uzanne commented in 1912 that “the rapid movement which sweeps us in space and piles up a variety of impressions and images in a short time gives life a plenitude and a unique intensity” (128). After the Great War (which saw fearsome applications of the new technology), these forms of transportation produced a tremendous vogue for international travel which helped to spawn both the American expatriate movement and the great exodus of writers from Great Britain during the twenties and thirties. The ease and relative swiftness of international travel contributed to the notion of place as a commodity of tourism and as an arbitrary locus of experience. When Hemingway's Robert Cohn proposes to Jake Barnes that they abandon Paris for South America, he typifies the modern notion of travel as an easy collapsing of great distance to obtain (like some consumer product) a fresh view or a new range of possibilities. As a result of what Paul Fussell terms the “unceasing kinesis” of postwar travelers, the “travel sense of place” soon yielded to “the touristic phenomenon of placelessness,” the perception of the external scene as an unreal spectacle.²

The various types of transportation and communication which emerged in the modern period thus produced new ways of conceiving and experiencing time and space. Rapid, incessant travel and immediate electronic contact with distant places and cultures broke down provincial perspectives and helped to generate a cosmopolitan consciousness which transcended national themes and issues. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane argue that “the essence of Modernism is its international character,” and this confluence of sensibilities promoted the formation of a synthetic culture infused with the sense of its absolute modernity. The inescapable multiplicity of twentieth-century experience—its inherently pluralistic, multicultural nature—seemed to substantiate Ortega y Gasset's concept of perspectivism which held, as Kern reminds us, that “there are as many realities as points of view” (151). Cubism provided a visual corroboration of sorts, breaking objects into geometrical shapes viewed, seemingly, from several perspectives at once. The idioms of modern painting from Impressionism to Fauvism and Cubism also suggested a corollary consequence of multiplicity: the dismantling of representation as the unitary function of visual art and the liberation of painting from a rational system of proportionality.

Everywhere the proliferation of theories and viewpoints bore out the realization that knowledge itself had become relative and problematic; one could no longer assume the existence of essential, objective truths behind surface phenomena. Alan Bullock has noted that “between 1895 and 1915 the whole picture of the physical universe, which had appeared not only the most impressive but also the most secure achievement of scientific thought, was brought in question and the first bold attempts made to replace it with a new model.”³ This intellectual upheaval caused a general disorientation in which the conditions of everyday life became suddenly defamiliarized by the collapse of assumptions once thought to be secure. McFarlane describes three discrete stages in what might be called the reformulation of reality under modernism:

Initially, the emphasis is on fragmentation, on the breaking up and the progressive disintegration of those meticulously constructed “systems” and “types” and “absolutes” that lived on from the earlier years of the [nineteenth] century, on the destruction of belief in large general laws to which all life and conduct could be claimed to be subject. As a second stage … there came a re-structuring of parts, a re-relating of the fragmented concepts, a re-ordering of linguistic entities to match what was felt to be the new order of reality. … Finally, in its ultimate stages, thought seemed to undergo something analogous to a change of state: a dissolving, a blending, a merging of things held to be forever mutually exclusive. A sense of flux, a notion of continuum, the running together of things in ways often contrary to the dictates of simple common sense (though familiar enough in dream) alone seemed able to help in the understanding of certain bewildering and otherwise inexplicable phenomena of contemporary life.⁴

From a formalist perspective, these phases roughly correspond to the tendencies of modernist art which Roger Shattuck has identified as fragmentation, juxtaposition, and superposition.⁵ But beyond such aesthetic implications, the stages outlined above suggest important correlations with expatriate experience and indeed permit us to regard modernism itself as a kind of exile.

In the first phase of modernism—a disintegration of intellectual systems and laws governing “life and conduct”—we see a loss of orienting structures comparable to the exile's renunciation of the functional security of homeland: the familiar geography, language, and customs which enable one to negotiate more or less unconsciously the routines of everyday life. The phase of restructuring, the assimilation of a “new order of reality,” likewise corresponds to the experience of immersion in an alien culture and the metabolizing of differences at virtually every level of consciousness, beginning with the problem of renaming reality itself in the dominant language of the country of exile. In the third stage of modernism, marked by a strange dissolving of differences, a merging of conceptual opposites, and a dreamlike confusion of categories, we find an analogy to the bemusement of the expatriate for whom the foreign has become familiar while remaining paradoxically unreal. This third stage recalls Stein's comment that writers needed a second country that was “not real” yet “really there.” Modernism effects displacement through “future shock” (in Alvin Toffler's phrase) when the rate of change in a customary environment exceeds one's capacity to assimilate change. Thus, insofar as exile marks a rupture with the past, a loss of the familiar, a relocation amid alien surroundings, and a persistent sense of estrangement, it thus provides a suggestive model for the experience of modernism.

In its dizzying third phase, this reformulation of reality produces disorientation both through the appearance of new forms and conditions and through the collapse of previous barriers, boundaries, and oppositions. McFarlane observes that under modernism, human nature could no longer be contained or explained by “vast and exhaustive inventories of naturalistic detail arranged and sorted under prescriptive heads” but instead revealed itself to be “elusive, indeterminate, multiple, often implausible, infinitely various and essentially irreducible.”⁶ Perhaps the most basic human distinction to be challenged and “demolished” by modernist thought was that between subject and object, between “man the observer and nature the observed.” Just as Virginia Woolf wrote of Mrs. Ramsay (in To the Lighthouse) that she “became the thing she looked at,” so other modernist writers explored the suddenly ambiguous relation between self and other, sometimes figured as a convergence of the internal and the external. As McFarlane notes, the philosopher Ernst Mach insisted on “an intimate interpenetration between things inner and things outer” in which the terms “within” and “without” no longer marked an absolute breach. In psychoanalysis as well as in quantum physics, entities once conceived as opposites—love and hate, matter and energy—proved to be interrelated, even indistinguishable. Influenced by Nietzsche, much of Western thought—certainly the domain of metaphysics—underwent a skeptical reexamination of its suppositions. Kern describes a corollary “breakdown of old forms” which “leveled hierarchies” and undermined a range of conceptual dichotomies: “solid/porous, opaque/transparent, inside/outside, public/private, city/country, noble/common, countryman/foreigner, framed/open, actor/audience, ego/object, space/time” (209-10). The crisis of modernity perhaps arose less from the fragmentation of reality into discrete phenomena than from the erasing of those distinctions which seemed to hold in place the conventional order of things. With some urgency Yeats asked, “How can we tell the dancer from the dance?” This blurring of traditional oppositions—social, moral, physical, and psychological—pervaded the culture of modernism and informed its most distinctive literary texts.

In one such work, The Waste Land, Eliot evokes a teeming “Unreal City” in which life and death have become indistinguishable; he thereby calls attention to the undeniably urban nature of modernism itself. The various transformations of culture bracketed by this concept of course first manifested themselves within the great cities of Vienna, London, Berlin, New York, and Paris. Reminding us of the metropolitan character of “experimental modernism,” Malcolm Bradbury points out that with vast, heterogeneous populations, cities inevitably became “places of friction, change and new consciousness.”⁷ This multiplicity attracted a new kind of artist or writer seeking to escape regional influences, to absorb the diversity of cosmopolitan life, and through self-conscious displacement to achieve a more intimate involvement with art or writing. Raymond Williams has sketched the way in which the cities of modernism thus fostered a poetics of exile:

The key cultural factor of the modernist shift is the character of the metropolis … in its direct effects on form. The most important general element … is the fact of immigration to the metropolis, and it cannot too often be emphasized how many of the major innovators were, in this precise sense, immigrants. At the level of theme, this underlies, in an obvious way, the elements of strangeness and distance, indeed of alienation, which so regularly form part of the repertory. But the decisive aesthetic effect is at a deeper level. Liberated or breaking from their national or provincial cultures, placed in quite new relations to those other native languages or native visual traditions, encountering meanwhile a novel and dynamic common environment from which many of the older forms were obviously distant, the artists and writers and thinkers of this phase found the only community available to them: a community of the medium; of their own practices.⁸

Attempting to free themselves from the influence of familiar, native settings, writers and artists underwent dislocation to achieve a new relation to their work and to the verbal or visual language of its composition. The city of exile combined for them the strangeness of the foreign and the unreality of the modern, producing an alienation from the immediate environment while at the same time endowing it with the sort of imaginary power which only the unreal can possess. Works from the mid-thirties by Scott Fitzgerald and Djuna Barnes convey the unreality of Paris from this perspective of modernist displacement.

Whatever its residue of personal calamity, Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1934) stands as a tortured record of the psychic and cultural confusions of modernism. As Matthew J. Bruccoli has shown, this novel underwent twelve drafts in three separate versions, emerging over a period of nine frantic years spent mostly abroad.⁹ In its portrayal of Dick Diver's disintegration and his wife Nicole's recovery from mental illness, the narrative also captures the reckless unreality of the twenties, a condition metaphorized throughout by allusions to movie-making and acting as the construction of illusion. Chaotic in its stylistic excesses, its bizarre episodes, its shifts of perspective, and its lapses of chronology, the novel betrays distraction even as it displays hard-won insight into the contradictions of desire and the ironies of American optimism. Most revealingly, the work depicts the situation of modernist exile as a struggle against deracination and historical discontinuity; Diver's collapse results both from the loss of his American roots (symbolized by his father's death) and from the destruction of fundamental certainties by the violence of the Great War. The novel finally suggests that expatriates of the twenties faced the double jeopardy of spatial and temporal dislocation.

Fitzgerald's biographers have provided an ample account of the author's four visits to Europe from 1921 to 1931. We know, for example, that his first extended stay (from mid-1924 through the end of 1926) grew out of a need to free himself from the Long Island social circuit—from what James Mellow has called “continuous and extensive weekend partying” and from resultant debt and emotional exhaustion.¹⁰ Afflicted by a sense of his own “deterioration,” Fitzgerald sailed for France with his wife and daughter to test his friend Edmund Wilson's theory that the cultural density of France made that country a more propitious place to complete his new novel, The Great Gatsby. “We were going to the Old World to find a new rhythm for our lives,” Fitzgerald wrote, “with a true conviction that we had left our old selves behind forever.” But if he believed that one could become a different person in another country, he nevertheless avoided the sort of cultural immersion that some of his contemporaries sought. André LeVot notes that Fitzgerald had

very little communication with the French writers of the period and does not seem to have taken any interest in the literary movements (Dada, Surrealism) of the time. Unlike Hemingway, who shared for a while the life of the poor, his relationships with the French were those of a rich tourist who spoke the language badly and dealt mostly with paid employees—taxi-drivers, restaurant and bar waiters, servants, and nurses and policemen when things were getting out of hand.¹¹

As a Minnesotan educated at an Eastern prep school and then at Princeton, Fitzgerald remained curiously indifferent to those aspects of daily life in France which intrigued Stein, Hemingway, and Miller. Part of this indifference may be attributed to the drinking which especially during 1925—the summer of “1000 parties and no work”—left him oblivious to a great deal of what was happening around him. Another factor was his essentially bourgeois conventionality; as Wilson had observed in 1921, he was “so saturated with twentieth century America, bad as well as good, … so used to hotels, plumbing, drugstores, aesthetic ideals and vast commercial prosperity” that he could not readily appreciate the ancient and foreign.¹² While Fitzgerald later assured Wilson that he had “gotten to like France,” what he liked most was his relative affluence (in 1925 a dollar bought twenty-two francs), the availability of liquor (while America endured Prohibition), and the presence of lively American friends like Gerald and Sara Murphy.

The three later sojourns nevertheless produced inexorable changes in the Fitzgeralds. Their first extended stay witnessed Zelda's 1924 affair with a French aviator, Scott's completion of Gatsby, his acquaintance with Hemingway, his preliminary work on the book to become Tender Is the Night, and his developing obsession with the Murphys, the original models for Dick and Nicole Diver. During this visit, the Fitzgeralds made merry in St. Raphaël, Rome, Capri, Cap d'Antibes, Juan-les-Pins, and for much of 1925 in a luxury flat (14, rue Tilsitt) near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. During a five-month visit to France in 1928, they occupied an apartment (58, rue de Vaugirard) opposite the Luxembourg Gardens; Zelda studied ballet, Scott met James Joyce, and the Fitzgeralds plunged into social activities which included evenings at the sapphic salon of Natalie Clifford Barney (20, rue Jacob). Scott's work on the new novel sputtered, and “desolate” side trips to the battlefields at Verdun and Rheims did not relieve a domestic discontent rooted in his drinking, Zelda's compulsive dancing, and mutual suspicions of homosexuality.¹³ The third excursion (March 1929-September 1931) began with a sodden summer in Cannes and culminated in Zelda's mental collapse in Paris in early 1930. While she received treatment for schizophrenia at a Swiss clinic above Lake Geneva, Fitzgerald weathered her confinement mostly in nearby towns, shuttling to Paris periodically to visit his daughter.¹⁴ In such places as Vevey, Caux, and Lausanne, he grappled with despair over Zelda's illness and with his own concomitant guilt and self-pity.

He also worked on several short stories, including two which indicate progress toward the still-unfinished novel. In the first of these, “One Trip Abroad,” Fitzgerald traces the effect of prolonged expatriation on a young, affluent American couple, the Kellys. The story unfolds over several years; in the first scene, set in Algeria, Fitzgerald contrasts the couple's innocence with the jaded attitude of an older couple named Miles. Mrs. Miles acknowledges what Fussell has called the “touristic phenomenon of placelessness” when she comments: “Every place is the same. … The only thing that matters is who's there. New scenery is fine for half an hour, but after that you want your own kind to see. That's why some places have a certain vogue, and then the vogue changes and people move somewhere else. The place itself never really matters.” For such exiles, foreign settings are meaningless backdrops for social transactions, and soon Nelson and Nicole Kelly likewise succumb to the movement and merriment of an existence as unreal as it is enervating. After a Parisian scene in which they have been duped into hosting an expensive riverboat party on the Seine, Fitzgerald shows them at Lake Geneva, trying to recover their health as they confront in yet another young couple the mirror image of their own debauchery. To underscore the danger of placelessness, Fitzgerald remarks: “This is the story of a trip abroad, and the geographical element must not be slighted. Having visited North Africa, Italy, the Riviera, Paris and points in between, it was not surprising that the Kellys should go to Switzerland. Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.”¹⁵ He thus locates in the itinerary of their travels a symptom of some underlying malaise.

As Fitzgerald came to recognize, the glamorous lifestyle of the expatriate leisure class concealed certain insidious risks, including not only the loss of innocence and optimism but also the danger of a pointless, ungrounded existence which might finally threaten both sanity and selfhood. In “One Trip Abroad” we see him moving toward Tender Is the Night through an analysis of expatriate corruption figured as symbolic geography. Meditating on the causes of Zelda's breakdown and his own dissipation, he came increasingly to associate expatriation with a compulsive yet random quest for absolute freedom and pleasure, for a life based on hedonistic impulse, facilitated by wealth, and conducted without regard for those local customs or cultural differences which might by comparison afford insight into one's own values and practices.

In a subsequent story, “Babylon Revisited,” he offers closer analysis of this rootless existence, exposing both its inherent unreality and its potentially tragic toll. Set in Paris shortly after the stock market crash, the story depicts the dilemma of Charlie Wales, who wishes to escape the memory of past dissolution but who must return to the site of those escapades to reclaim his daughter Honoria, who has been raised since his wife's death by his sister-in-law, Marion, and her husband, Lincoln. Transparently the story thus portrays Charlie's effort to recover his honor; yet he cannot quite shake the dissolute past personified by his tipsy friends Duncan and Lorraine, who disrupt a crucial meeting with Marion and scuttle his negotiations. Noting that Charlie invites trouble by leaving Marion's address for Duncan at the Ritz, Roy R. Male points out the protagonist's ambivalence: “He still wants both worlds,” the world of family and respectability and the world of irresponsible pleasure.¹⁶ Fitzgerald compresses the fantastic quality of the “crazy years” in the story of Helen Wales' death, which—following a hysterical outburst at the Hotel Florida where she has just “kissed young Webb at the table”—results from her wandering about Paris in a snowstorm, “too confused to find a taxi.” For his part, Charlie is one of those negligent revelers “who locked their wives out in the snow, because the snow of twenty-nine wasn't real snow.”¹⁷

As a sketch for Tender Is the Night, “Babylon Revisited” anticipates the fate of Dick Diver, who (like Charlie) loses his wife and family, “everything [he] wanted.” Indeed Fitzgerald would repeat almost verbatim in the novel his summary of Charlie Wales's misfortune: “He wasn't young any more, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself” (633). Perhaps more importantly, the story sheds light on the disjointed Parisian section comprising the last half of book one in the novel. Returning to Paris, Charlie now sees the city as an alien place and laments, “I spoiled this city for myself” (618). He finds the Ritz “strange and portentous” and remarks that the bar is no longer American, having “gone back into France” (616). His taxi ride also betrays a basic topographical confusion; in a passage echoed in the novel Charlie travels from the Right Bank to the Left: “The Place de la Concorde moved by in pink majesty; they crossed the logical Seine, and Charlie felt the sudden provincial quality of the Left Bank” (617). Yet in the next sentence he directs the driver back to the avenue de l'Opéra—to the Right Bank from which he has just come—before again rolling “on to the Left Bank.” Whether intended or inadvertent, this zigzag route contributes to the sense of Charlie's ambivalence and disorientation. For him the bars and cabarets of Montmartre seem menacing: “Zelli's was closed, the bleak and sinister cheap hotels surrounding it were dark. … the Café of Heaven and the Café of Hell still yawned—even devoured, as he watched, the meager contents of a tourist bus” (620). Unlike the crazy years, when wealth insulated him from the foreign, Charlie now perceives himself as a stranger in a strange land. But the effect of strangeness conceals the irony that he now sees Paris more or less as it is, not as it appeared during the alcoholic binges of the twenties.¹⁸

By representing the city as a “Babylon,” a scene of riotous living and emotional betrayal, Fitzgerald anticipates key elements of the Paris section in Tender Is the Night. Charlie Wales looks back on a dizzying epoch just reaching its peak when Dick and Nicole Diver arrive in Paris in 1925. Projecting a more intricate sense of time and place, the novel effects a distorted but revealing image of the city. Indeed, insofar as this section depicts a pivotal phase in the career of Dick Diver, it also reflects the crisis of modernity itself and suggests that the city, in its fantastic unreality, embodies the terms and conditions of this immense upheaval. The improbable events which transpire in Paris typify the irrationality, violence, and uncertainty which in part define the climate of modernism. As Bruce L. Grenberg has argued, the city here represented by Fitzgerald constitutes “the image and substance of modern, postwar life-in-death.”¹⁹

Although the novel contains only a few formal traits which might be associated with modernism—such as the cinematic foreshortening of time in book two—the story of the Divers and their relationship to Rosemary Hoyt incorporates many signs of modernist culture and its discontents which cohere in the image of Paris.²⁰ Among these, the most evident is the psychoanalytic matrix within which Fitzgerald frames the narrative. Via Yale, Oxford, and Johns Hopkins, Dick Diver has trained as a psychoanalyst in Vienna, presumably under “the great Freud” himself (115). At one point Doctor Dohmler gives Nicole “a little Freud to read,” and though Dick does not cite specific Freudian texts, concepts associated with psychoanalysis (such as hysteria, schizophrenia, transference, and repression) traverse the novel and inform its crucial scenes. For example, the so-called “father complex” evoked by the title of Rosemary's film “Daddy's Girl” clarifies the incestuous coupling between Nicole and Devereux Warren and elucidates her subsequent attraction to Dick, an authority figure whom she addresses in letters as “captain.” Similarly, when Collis Clay alludes to the “heavy stuff going on” (88) between Rosemary and a Yale man aboard a train, he constructs a primal scene which for Dick becomes a virtual fixation. Glimpses of clinical work call attention to the etiology of neuroses and suggest the curious ways in which childhood relationships with parents affect later emotional and sexual experience. The case of Señor Pardo y Ciudad Real and his intractably homosexual son (243-45) marks one such demonstration. But Fitzgerald's psychoanalytic perspective achieves a larger purpose than simply documenting the subculture of a Swiss psychiatric clinic; he suggests that the exploration of the unconscious in modernism has radically problematized identity and sexuality by calling into question the boundaries which had previously circumscribed both self and gender.

As a consequence, Tender Is the Night presents personality as an unstable and indeterminate nexus of tendencies. The novel relentlessly questions the distinction between self and other, and even as Nicole receives treatment for a “split” personality, Fitzgerald implies that all personalities are multiple and that people tend to “become” the persons with whom they associate. In the stream-of-consciousness section which cinematically telescopes Nicole's transformation, she thinks: “When I talk I say to myself that I am probably Dick. Already I have even been my son, remembering how wise and slow he is. Sometimes I am Doctor Dohmler and one time I may even be an aspect of you, Tommy Barban” (162). Lest we construe this as evidence of her derangement, the narrator himself later tells us that “somehow Dick and Nicole had become one and equal, not opposite and complementary; she was Dick too, the drought in the marrow of his bones. He could not watch her disintegrations without participating in them” (190-91). As the preceding sentence implies, Nicole is not alone in her psychic assimilations; Dick too possesses a composite personality and feels “condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves” (245). When Nicole's lover Tommy Barban calls her “a little complicated after all,” her ironic reply sums up Fitzgerald's implicit theory of personality: “No, I'm not really—I'm just a—I'm just a whole lot of different simple people” (292). In a novel informed by an obsessive attention to psychoanalytic patterns of relationship—to conflicted ties between fathers and daughters, fathers and sons, or mothers and daughters—Fitzgerald suggests that unconscious incorporation makes it impossible to say precisely where one's own personality ends and others begin.

Through various strategies he also represents the distinction between male and female as relative rather than absolute, fluid rather than fixed; as in The Garden of Eden (a work surely influenced by Fitzgerald's novel) androgynous metamorphosis surfaces repeatedly, and scenes of gender ambivalence mirror the broader sexual confusion of the culture of modernism. Early in the novel, Rosemary witnesses an odd episode on the beach in which Dick goes into his dressing tent and emerges wearing only a pair of “transparent black lace drawers” which Nicole has handed him. Albert McKisco's quip—“Well if that isn't a pansy's trick!”—crudely associates Dick's stunt with homosexuality, perhaps to taunt the homophiles, Campion and Dunphry, who witness the display. Yet the joke (Nicole has lined the panties with flesh-colored cloth) literally invites closer examination. Dick's gratuitous exhibitionism, really a transvestite performance, signals not only his own tendency to assume conventionally female functions but also the pattern of gender reversal which runs through the novel. One notable transposition has occurred prior to the opening of the novel: Fitzgerald had initially conceived of the Rosemary Hoyt character, the young American with the overbearing mother, as a boy named Francis Melarky.²¹ Traces of this sex change remain in Mrs. Spears' advice to Rosemary about pursuing a relationship with Dick: “Whatever happens it can't spoil you because economically you're a boy, not a girl” (40). Mrs. Spears' own name too obviously implies the phallic authority which she assumes in her daughter's life. Conversely Dick plays a maternal role with respect to Nicole, who continues “her dry suckling at his lean chest” (279). Later, in a symbolic metaphor, she severs the umbilical cord which links her to Dick, deciding to “cut the cord forever” (302). Her presenting the black lace panties to Dick in the opening scene may thus be seen as a prefiguration of the sexual transformation which she must effect in him to free herself from the dominating father.²²

But sexual reversal may also be associated, as McKisco insinuates, with homosexuality. Thus Fitzgerald tells us that Luis Campion affects a “disinterested motherliness” (34) and that the son of Señor Pardo y Ciudad Real flaunts his inversion as “the Queen of Chili,” whereas Mary North and Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers dress as French sailors to pick up two girls. These instances of deviance belong to a larger pattern of aberration which includes Mr. Warren's incest and Dick's late problem with nympholepsy in which “he was in love with every pretty woman he saw” (201). Fitzgerald tells us that in Rome, an angry crowd mistakes Dick for “a native of Frascati [who] had raped and slain a five-year-old child” (234). Through such details he hints at the ubiquity of perversion in a novel marked by sexual turmoil, ambiguous erotic relations, and indefinite gender roles. In this sexual economy, desire itself seems inevitably displaced, deflected, or deformed.

Linked to his emphasis on psychoanalysis, Fitzgerald's treatment of the Great War also posits a modernist perspective in Tender Is the Night. With the exception of a battlefield visit which colors the events of the Paris section, the war emerges almost entirely through oblique, fugitive references. Fitzgerald sums up the doctor's war experience in two meager sentences: “After he took his degree, he received his orders to join a neurological unit forming at Bar-sur-Aube. In France, to his disgust, the work was executive rather than practical” (117-18). Yet the conflict remains for Dick an obsession manifesting itself in dreams; on one occasion he awakens from “a long dream of war” which Fitzgerald summarizes: “His dream had begun in sombre majesty; navy blue uniforms crossed a dark plaza behind bands playing the second movement of Prokofieff's ‘Love of Three Oranges.’ Presently there were fire engines, symbols of disaster, and a ghastly uprising of the mutilated in a dressing station.” Analyzing his own dream, Dick arrives at a “half-ironic” diagnosis: “Non-combattant's shell-shock” (180). This dream of uniformed men juxtaposed against the “ghastly” image of mutilés de guerre resonates with his later experience of waking to find passing beneath his window “a long column of men in uniform” who were “going to lay wreaths on the tombs of the dead” (200). Through such brief and seemingly incidental touches, Fitzgerald establishes the idea that although Dick did not see action at the front, he—like others of his generation—has been traumatized by the horrific carnage. The story of Dick and Nicole unfolds specifically within “the broken universe of the war's ending” (245), and Grenberg contends that the novel even implies a “precise” analogy between Nicole's illness and American involvement in the conflict.²³ Be that as it may, Fitzgerald's broad implication is that as a consequence of the Great War, the Divers move within a sphere of pervasive disillusionment and pent-up violence. Noting the postwar tendency among combat veterans toward escapist fantasy, historian Modris Eksteins makes a comment strikingly relevant to the world of Tender Is the Night: “What was true of the soldiers was true with somewhat less immediacy and poignancy of civilians. The crowded nightclubs, the frenzied dancing, the striking upsurge of gambling, alcoholism, and suicide, the obsession with flight, with moving pictures, and with film stars evinced on a popular level these same tendencies, a drift toward irrationalism.”²⁴

The various eruptions of violence or insanity which mark the novel thus contribute to its modernist, postwar vraisemblance. Fitzgerald also represents the culture of modernism through his attention to new conceptions of time and space. For example, the Bergsonian notion of personal or subjective time forms the implicit basis of a comparison between Dick and Nicole: “For him time stood still and then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick rewind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday” (180). The reference to the rewinding of a film as a metaphor for time implicitly recalls the tropes which Bergson used to describe the uncoiling or unwinding of time in “real duration.”²⁵ In another passage, Fitzgerald alludes to a new, modern mode of keeping time when he describes Dick sitting “in the big room a long time listening to the buzz of the electric clock, listening to time” (171). Like Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and Faulkner's Sound and the Fury, Tender Is the Night reflects a peculiarly modernist concern for the psychological experience of time; as critics have often observed, the narrative structure calls attention to the effects of time by bracketing the story between two beach scenes, set five years apart, which dramatize basic changes in the principal characters. According to Alan Trachtenberg, the disintegration of Dick Diver results in part from his “dislocated sense of historical time.”²⁶

In a less obvious way, the novel also embodies certain modernist attitudes about space and place. Fitzgerald depicts the Gare St. Lazare, for example, as a locus of metamorphosis for homebound Americans: “Standing in the station, with Paris in back of them, it seemed as if they were vicariously leaning a little over the ocean, already undergoing a sea-change, a shifting about of atoms to form the essential molecule of a new people” (83). This comment resonates with his later observation that “on the long-roofed steamship piers one is in a country that is no longer here and not yet there” (205). That is, international postwar tourism effects a displacement by problematizing the very concept of place. To some extent, Dick suffers from that sense of “placelessness” expressed by Mrs. Miles in “One Trip Abroad.” In Rome, when Dick visits the house where Keats died, Fitzgerald notes that “he cared only about people; he was scarcely conscious of places except for their weather, until they had been invested with color by tangible events” (220). Elsewhere the author implies that an indifference to place may reflect a specifically American tourist mentality; he observes about Rosemary and her mother that “after lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here” (13). Their inability to respond to “quiet foreign places” reveals not only a crass preference for excitement (“the clamor of Empire”) but also an indifference—endemic to the moneyed expatriate—to the physical realities of daily life in ordinary European towns and cities.²⁷

In the incessant movement of his major characters, Fitzgerald implies the superficiality of their grounding in the world. When Dick flies to Munich, he gazes down on the landscape from an implicitly abstract, modernist perspective which yields delight: “It was simple looking at the earth from far off, simple as playing grim games with dolls and soldiers” (195). As this glancing allusion to soldiers implies, Fitzgerald sees the Great War itself as a product of the technology of power which has placed Dick far above the countryside he surveys with detachment. From a certain height, human beings shrink to nothingness, communities become indistinguishable, and geography assumes a fantastic unreality which bears no relationship to an earthbound sense of scale and distance. Dick's gaze from the airplane in fact epitomizes Fitzgerald's treatment of place in Tender Is the Night, which is not so much realized as sur-realized by the experience of displacement.

Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in the bewildering Paris section of the novel, which arguably marks a decisive turn in the Divers' marriage, in Dick's loss of professional discipline, and in Nicole's reliance upon Dick as a source of emotional protection. Yet these crucial developments unfold within the context of scenes that seem disconnected, hallucinatory, and even incoherent. When the action shifts to Paris, Fitzgerald discloses through a chaotic sequence of events the impulsive, irrational forces at large there. The two shootings which punctuate this section seem grotesque and initially reveal little except the presence of racial and sexual hostilities beneath the dreamlike surface of life in the capital of modernism. Ostensibly the Divers have come to Paris with Rosemary to see the alcoholic Abe North off to America. During five momentous days which blur together through a surfeit of movement and scene-shifting, we witness a developing romance between Dick and Rosemary, played out against an increasingly fantastic urban backdrop. In this treatment, the palpable unreality of place objectifies the confusion and ambivalence felt most keenly by Dick; the kaleidoscopic settings represent Paris as a locus of volatile change and cultural multiplicity.

In an opening scene in a Right Bank restaurant, Fitzgerald alludes to the touristic dislocation of his characters: “They had been two days in Paris but actually they were still under the beach umbrella” (52). For the Divers, the Norths, and Rosemary, actual surroundings scarcely matter; place is the immaterial context for social pleasure. At Voisin's (261, rue St.-Honoré), the group seems mainly concerned with distancing themselves from other Americans: Dick amuses them by pointing out American men lacking “repose,” while Fitzgerald observes that “their own party was overwhelmingly American and sometimes scarcely American at all” (52), thus raising the problem of American identity which becomes associated with their various destinies. But the crux of this chapter lies in a conversation between the Divers, overheard by Rosemary from a telephone booth:

“—So you love me?”

“Oh, do I!”

It was Nicole—Rosemary hesitated in the door of the booth then she heard Dick say:

“I want you terribly—let's go to the hotel now.” Nicole gave a little gasping sigh. For a moment the words conveyed nothing at all to Rosemary—but the tone did. The vast secretiveness of it vibrated to herself.

“I want you.”

“I'll be at the hotel at four.”

(53-54)

While revealing the Divers' passion for each other, the dialogue enables Rosemary to imagine an “assignation” which she soon wishes to reenact with Dick, just as Collis Clay's story of Rosemary on the train later excites Dick's longing for her. Through these reciprocal moments of voyeuristic arousal, Fitzgerald advances the tacitly Freudian theory that desire originates in a primal scene which evokes rivalry and which persists through a mimetic doubling which, among other results, generates the symbolic repetition apparent throughout Tender Is the Night. For Dick and Rosemary, the formation of their mutual sexual fantasies significantly begins in Paris, a city linked increasingly with the eruption of forbidden impulses.

After a brief shopping trip with Rosemary in which Nicole indulges in material excess, Fitzgerald transports his characters from Paris to a French battlefield near Amiens. Between the villages of Thiepval and Beaumont Hamel, where in 1914 the British had engaged the Germans in the bloody Battle of the Somme, Dick explains to Rosemary (though apparently not to Nicole) the human cost of the campaign; “his throat straining with sadness,” he expounds the notion that it was “a love battle” fought to preserve nineteenth-century nationalistic values. Melodramatically Dick announces: “All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love” (57). Little does he guess the personal, prophetic implications of his reference to the “explosive” potentialities of love. Partly confession, partly romantic posturing, Dick's remark expresses a conventional sentiment about the loss of traditional certainties, but he also portrays himself as a victim of the war's violence. His battlefield commentary reflects a sympathetic identification with the “Wurtemburgers, Prussian Guards, Chasseurs Alpins, Manchester mill hands and old Etonians” who “pursue their eternal dissolution under the warm rain”; yet it also betrays an awareness of his effect on the tearful Rosemary, who tells him, “You know everything” (57). If Dick's historical consciousness enables him to grasp the significance of the battle, however, his sense of place seems pretentious, markedly less genuine than that of Abe North, who has at least seen combat. At the end of the chapter Fitzgerald confides that to impress Rosemary, Dick has used a battlefield guidebook to make “a quick study of the whole affair, simplifying it always until it bore a faint resemblance to one of his own parties” (59). The gentle derision implies that Dick has exploited the sentimental possibilities of place to launch his own “love battle” for Rosemary's affections.²⁸

His tactic meets with quick success: following their return to Paris, Nicole retires to the hotel while Dick, Rosemary, and the Norths visit an exposition and then sip champagne at a houseboat café, enjoying the picturesque view: “The river shimmered with lights from the bridges and cradled many cold moons” (60). Shortly after learning that Dick is a medical doctor—like her own deceased father—Rosemary attempts to seduce him. Despite his infatuation Dick resists, but the effort exposes his vulnerability: “He was suddenly confused, … and for a moment his usual grace, the tensile strength of his balance, was absent” (65). At the battlefield Dick had waxed eloquent about the “tremendous sureties” destroyed by the war; now in his private life he confronts for the first time a wavering sense of appropriate conduct. Rosemary's charms have aroused in him an unconscious need to become the lover of yet another eighteen-year-old girl with a father complex, to reenact with Rosemary his romance six years earlier with Nicole. On this night he fights the temptation, but after a few more days in the unreal city he will be ready to yield to desire.

Fitzgerald stretches out the next day over three chapters, depicting events which intensify the strangeness of the Parisian scene and expose the unconscious urges at work on the principal characters. When Rosemary and Nicole meet in the morning for “a series of fittings,” the author implies a developing rivalry: in the taxi Rosemary “looked at Nicole, matching herself against her” (67). The twinning implied here finds a geographical correlative, as Rosemary and Nicole discover that as girls they have both lived on the rue des Saints-Peres, the street of the Holy Fathers, an address hinting at the father-fixation which they share. After a luncheon at the Norths' apartment on the rue Guynemer (where the Murphys lived in 1928), Dick, Nicole, Rosemary, Abe, and Mary meet young Collis Clay at Franco-American Films in Passy for a screening of Daddy's Girl. Here and elsewhere in Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald's representation of the film industry, the cult of stardom, and the phantasm of cinema itself bears witness to that “flight from reality” which Eksteins associates with the twenties. Dazzled by Rosemary's Hollywood aura, Dick begins to see her as a glamorous incarnation of modernity itself.²⁹ If his clinical training exposes the crude psychoanalytic meaning of her film role—which involves “a father complex so apparent that he winced for all psychologists at the vicious sentimentality” (69)—the screening also quickens a desire to be “united” with Rosemary like the father in the film.

After the Norths and Nicole leave to run errands, Dick and Rosemary attend a tea party on the Left Bank. This hallucinatory episode offers a glimpse of the lesbian community there and plunges Rosemary into the confusion of sexual ambiguity. Again the street name carries a suggestive connotation: the women's salon is located on the rue Monsieur. Through a bit of creative geography, Fitzgerald hints at the dissolving of sexual difference which occurs at this address.³⁰ At the moment of entering the house, Rosemary feels that she has entered a new age:

Once inside the door there was nothing of the past, nor of any present that Rosemary knew. The outer shell, the masonry, seemed rather to enclose the future so that it was an electric shock, a definite nervous experience, perverted as a breakfast of oatmeal and hashish, to cross that threshold, if it could be so called, into the long hall of blue steel, silver-gilt, and the myriad facets of many oddly bevelled mirrors.

(71)

Perceiving the unreality of the place, Rosemary has the momentary sensation of being on a motion-picture set. The physical setting creates the impression of crossing a boundary or threshold into a realm of sensation in which “oddly bevelled mirrors” fragment reality into multiple, incongruous images—in effect, into the perspective of modernism. Fitzgerald depicts an interior room which conveys the idea of ambiguous change: “no one knew what this room meant because it was evolving into something else, becoming everything a room was not” (71-72). Rosemary faces a crowd composed mostly of women and notices a striking trio sitting on a bench: “They were all tall and slender with small heads groomed like manikins' heads, and as they talked the heads waved gracefully about above their dark tailored suits, rather like long-stemmed flowers and rather like cobras' hoods” (72). These stylish yet venomous lesbians are gossiping about the Divers, and as Rosemary masks her indignation she finds herself talking to “a neat, slick girl with a lovely boy's face” who begins to “play up” and beg for a date. Confused by the odd ambience and by sexual advances from a girl who looks like a boy, Rosemary quickly departs with Dick, “moving over the brief threshold of the future to the sudden past of the stone façade without” (74). In a scene which anticipates Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Fitzgerald represents a lesbian subculture which in its appropriation of bourgeois conventions embodies the subversive force of modernism itself.³¹

Another kind of unreality typifies the moveable feast which Dick stages later that night, presumably for Rosemary's benefit. The party involves “a quick Odyssey over Paris” in a caravan featuring a jeweled car owned by the shah of Persia. The Norths, the Divers, and Rosemary attract an international group which includes “the heir to a Scandinavian throne.” Fitzgerald reprots that “people joined them as if by magic, accompanied them as specialists, almost guides, through a phase of the evening” (76). Dick's organization of events, his “technic of moving many varied types” into position, as if he were commanding “an infantry battalion,” delights Rosemary, who compares the evening to a Hollywood party. At the Ritz bar, the Americans dupe the waiters into singing war songs for Abe North, who impersonates General Pershing. The revelers insist that the general “brooks no delay. Every man, every gun is at his service” (78). The reconnoitering of Paris, the use of “guides,” Dick's marshaling of his “battalion,” and the evocation of Pershing all suggest that the party in some obscure way unfolds as a parodic military exercise in which Dick and his friends turn their recent, melancholy visit to Thiepval and Beaumont Hamel into madcap escapism. Their hilarity obliquely implies the emotional and psychological burden which the war has imposed.

On another level the pace and extravagance of the party, together with the associations of royalty, underscore Fitzgerald's familiar claim that the rich are different because they lead unimaginably fabulous lives. For Dick and his cohorts, Paris provides an ideal space for the staging of fantasies: it offers a visual spectacle which for a certain amount of money can be requisitioned as image or illusion. The denouement of the party illustrates this point: after Dick and Nicole have returned to their hotel, Rosemary finds herself atop a market wagon filled with “thousands of carrots,” rolling along with the Norths, Collis Clay, and two improbable nouveau riche types, “a manufacturer of dolls' voices from Newark and … a big splendidly dressed oil Indian named George T. Horseprotection” (79). Fitzgerald's giddy expatriates have commandeered a farm wagon en route to market, not to indulge in agricultural nostalgia but precisely to flaunt their privileged status as rich Americans and their class difference from the wagon's owner. The economic reality expressed by the fresh produce never impinges on Rosemary's fantasy: “The earth in the carrot beards was fragrant and sweet in the darkness, and Rosemary was so high up in the load that she could hardly see the others. … Their voices came from far off, as if they were having experiences different from hers, different and far away” (79). The external scene seems a mere extension of her desire, and when she notices at dawn's early light a truck transporting “a huge horsechestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs-Elysées,” she sees it as a “lovely person,” identifies herself with it, and imagines that “everything all at once seemed gorgeous” (79). Paris has on this evening become the narcissistic reflection of her all-American loveliness.

The following morning, though, a darker fantasy envelops Fitzgerald's characters. At the Gare St. Lazare …, a dissipated Abe waits “under the fouled glass dome” for the boat train which will take him back to the United States. His sullen demeanor betrays his “will to die” (83), and as events later confirm, he will indeed disappear “into the dark maw of violence,” beaten to death in an American speakeasy.³² On this occasion, however, violence erupts in Paris; just as the train is pulling out, a young American woman, Maria Wallis, pulls a revolver from her purse and shoots a man on the platform. Signaling a theme of mounting importance, Fitzgerald notes that the victim, an Englishman, has been shot “through his identification card” (84). The attack seems unmotivated, and we never discover what “dark matter” precipitated it; yet we may infer that a relationship has gone horribly awry. The shooting has a temporary, estranging effect even upon the would-be lovers, Dick and Rosemary: “For a moment each seemed unreal to the other.” Through rhetorical hints, Fitzgerald indicates that Dick experiences “a loss of control” and feels “panic” while Rosemary suffers from “a totality of shock.” The scene at the station has “ended the time in Paris” and stunned Fitzgerald's characters:

The shots had entered into all their lives: echoes of violence followed them out onto the pavement where two porters held a post-mortem beside them as they waited for a taxi.

“Tu as vu le revolver? Il était très petit, vraie perle—un jouet.”

“Mais, assez puissant!” said the other porter sagely. “Tu as vu sa chemise? Assez de sang pour se croire à la guerre.”

(85-86)

Once again the author invokes the memory of the war, here to suggest an implicit connection between the shooting at the Gare St. Lazare and the bloodshed of 1914-18. A contagion of violence has infected the world, and its eruption at the train station—at a precarious moment in the intimate relations between Dick, Nicole, and Rosemary—displays the deadly force of “high-explosive love.”

At an alfresco luncheon “across from the Luxembourg Gardens,” the three subsequently try to forget the morning's horrors. But Rosemary develops menstrual cramps, Dick feels “profoundly unhappy,” and even Nicole exhibits testiness. They dine in an atmosphere of tension and mounting suspicion; Dick privately wonders, “What did Nocole think?” The afternoon takes a Freudian turn, however, after the departure of Rosemary and Nicole; Collis Clay happens along, shares some wine with Dick, and casually relates the story of Rosemary and a Yale man on the train to Chicago. “Seems they locked the door and pulled down the blinds,” Clay says, “and I guess there was some heavy stuff going on when the conductor came for the tickets and knocked on the door.” The story has an immediate, unnerving effect on Dick:

With every detail imagined, with even envy for the pair's community of misfortune in the vestibule, Dick felt a change taking place within him. Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send him through waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary's cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret warmth within.

—Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

—Please do. It's too light in here.

(88)

Through successive reiterations of the last lines, Fitzgerald implies the obsessive force of the story as a primal scene. When Dick later drops by his bank to cash a check, his manner implies agitation; he tries to calculate which clerk “would guess least of the unhappy predicament in which he found himself and, also, which one would be least likely to talk” (89). Even if he is withdrawing funds to finance an affair, it is hard to imagine how a bank clerk could surmise the specific nature of Dick's “predicament.” As he sorts through his mail, finding a letter for Rosemary, a distressing question flashes through his consciousness: “Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?” In the wake of the shooting, the story of her presumed deflowering has shattered Dick's composure, triggering desire as well as prospective guilt.

At this juncture Fitzgerald uses Parisian topography to signal Dick's disorientation. Instinctively pursuing Rosemary, he hires a taxi to take him to her studio in Passy. “Go to the Muette,” he tells the driver. “I'll direct you from there.” Yet Dick does not give directions: “He was rendered so uncertain by the events of the last forty-eight hours that he was not even sure what he wanted to do” (91). He gets out at La Muette, a park near the Bois du Boulogne, and brandishing his briefcase and walking stick—signs of his precarious respectability—he walks along “swayed and driven as an animal.” Soon he finds himself in the midst of a “melancholy neighborhood,” surrounded by strangely portentous signs: “‘Vêtements Ecclésiastiques,’ ‘Déclaration de Décès’ and ‘Pompes Funèbres.’ Life and Death” (91). Clerical clothing, death notices, funerals: Dick, the minister's son from Buffalo, perceives in these signs a reflection of his fateful errancy.³³ “He knew that what he was now doing marked a turning point in his life,” Fitzgerald remarks. “It was out of line with everything that had preceded it—even out of line with what effect he might hope to produce upon Rosemary.” His behavior represents, instead, the “projection of some submerged reality”; Dick, the psychologist, has surrendered to the irrational, to the unconscious urges which have been exposed and activated by the unreal city in which his dreamlike experience unfolds.

For three-quarters of an hour, Dick paces the rue des Saintes-Anges, an invented street which ironically evokes the image of Rosemary as one of Dick's “holy angels.”³⁴ At this acknowledged “turning point,” Fitzgerald stages a puzzling confrontation in which an American war veteran with a “sinister smile” accosts Dick on the sidewalk. Though his “menacing eyes” seem to bespeak criminal intent, the stranger boasts that he has “made plenty money” in Paris selling newspapers to American tourists; he carries a cartoon depicting “Americans pouring from the gangplank of a liner freighted with gold” (93). The fellow obviously typifies that swarm of American opportunists which inundated Paris in the twenties; Fitzgerald here suggests a vast qualitative difference between the two compatriots.³⁵ Yet late in the novel, he undercuts this contrast: on the Riviera, at yet another turning point, Dick again meets the same American “of sinister aspect,” recognizing him by the clipping with “cartooned millions of Americans pouring from liners with bags of gold” (309). While the man is still hawking newspapers to rich tourists, Dick himself has now become an antithetical caricature of the American moneybags—a ruined and depleted expatriate about to return to the United States.

As he languishes in Passy, Dick has already yielded to that complex “submerged reality” which will effect his deterioration. At a corner café, his telephone call to Rosemary (who is back at the hotel) reveals his “extraordinary condition”; when he asks if she is alone, the primal scene again flashes through his mind (94). Under its spell, he has only one desire: to be alone with her, to pull down the curtain himself as a prelude to lovemaking. As they talk, Dick imagines her room and remembers the “dust of powder over her tan,” surrendering to the fantasy constructed by his own longing. When he emerges from the café, still carrying the accoutrements of class and profession, his disorientation seems complete: “In a minute he was out in the street marching along toward the Muette, or away from it, his small brief-case still in his hand, his gold-headed stick held at a sword-like angle” (94, my emphasis). With his stick poised for action, announcing his sexual readiness, Dick's topographical confusion betrays a concomitant loss of moral direction. Ironically, he makes his way back to the hotel only to discover that Rosemary, feeling “not very well” at the onset of her period, has elected to dine alone.

The last nightmarish day in Paris begins, appropriately, in confusion, as Nicole awakens to find Dick's bed empty (a sign of his unrest) and a police officer at the door looking for one “Mr. Afghan North.” Though Nicole declares that Abe has “gone to America,” she learns that he is indeed still in Paris; the officer explains that North has been robbed by a Negro and must identify a suspect. “Mystified” by the account, Nicole sends the officer away; she brusquely slams down the receiver when the hotel office calls to ask whether she will speak to a Negro named “Crawshow,” whose friend Mr. Freeman has been mistakenly put in prison. The situation becomes more muddled when Abe later explains to Dick that he has “launched a race riot” and that he intends to “get Freeman out of jail” (98). Abe's predicament offers further evidence of his dissolution, leading Nicole to wonder why “so many smart men go to pieces nowadays” and to ask Dick pointedly: “Why is it just Americans who dissipate?” Abe's disintegration of course prefigures Dick's decline; and both in effect herald the crash of the American stock market in 1929. But Nicole's question goes to the very heart of Fitzgerald's critique of American identity and implies the existence of a self-destructive contradiction at its very core.

At lunch downstairs, the three find themselves surrounded by “families of Americans staring around at families of Americans”; a waiter identifies them as “gold-star muzzers”—mothers of the American war dead. Again an incidental detail evokes a remembrance of combat casualties; slipping into a reverie Dick recalls not only the Great War but also the Civil War: “Momentarily, he sat again on his father's knee, riding with Moseby while the old loyalties and devotions fought on around him” (101). The presence of the Gold Star mothers puts Dick in touch with “an older America” and briefly stirs his faith in the nineteenth-century ideals of his father. But Dick is caught between two sets of values, one belonging to an idealistic past and the other to a crass, acquisitive present; in Fitzgerald's mythography he embodies the contradictory essence of the American self. If the Gold Star mothers represent an old-fashioned gallantry, Nicole and Rosemary epitomize “the whole new world in which he believed”—the world of pleasure, wealth, glamour, and power. Ironically as he dines in the company of “sobered women who had come to mourn for their dead,” an overwhelming question stirs his brain: “Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?” (101). Here Fitzgerald again hints at the potent connection between death and desire, helping us to understand how the slaughter of 1914-18 might have triggered what he elsewhere called the “precocious intimacies” of the twenties.³⁶

After an uneventful chapter which depicts Abe North in the Ritz bar, drinking to forget the “nightmare” in which he has become involved, Fitzgerald resumes Dick's libidinal quest, noting the early stages of his psychic fragmentation: “Dick moved on through the rain, demoniac and frightened, the passions of many men inside him and nothing simple that he could see” (104). Troubled by the events of the previous twenty-four hours, Rosemary, too, has been “playing around with chaos,” yet when Dick enters her room, the sexual consummation of their romance seems imminent. They are not exactly in love with each other; rather, they are in love with the illusions each has created about the other. Rosemary presses her lips “to the beautiful cold image she had created” and then in a moment of rare insight tells Dick, “Oh, we're such actors—you and I” (105), perhaps suspecting the psychoanalytic truth that each is acting out a rehearsed, fantasized scene with the other. But a knock at the door interrupts their tryst and plunges them both into the racial nightmare excited by Abe North.

Incongruities multiply when North introduces “a very frightened, concerned colored man,” a “Mr. Peterson of Stockholm” (105), who has witnessed “the early morning dispute in Montparnasse” (106). This is the very man earlier identified as “a Negro from Copenhagen” in Abe's report of “a race riot in Montmartre” (98). Peterson has falsely accused one black man who was not even present at the time of the robbery; when those charges were dropped, the police then wrongly arrested “the prominent Negro restaurateur, Freeman.” A third black man, the actual “culprit,” has surfaced to explain that he had grabbed a “fifty-franc note to pay for drinks that Abe had ordered.” The net effect of this wild account is that “Abe had succeeded in the space of an hour in entangling himself in the personal lives, consciences, and emotions of one Afro-European and three Afro-Americans inhabiting the French Latin quarter” (106). Fearing retribution from Freeman, the “Afro-European” Peterson begs Dick for help and then withdraws to the hall to let Abe plead his case. When Rosemary returns to her room moments later, looking for her wristwatch, she discovers “a dead Negro … stretched upon her bed” (109).

This unlikely sequence of events, which most critics have ascribed to Fitzgerald's thematic overreaching in Tender Is the Night, raises a number of disconcerting issues.³⁷ The principal difficulty concerns the relation of Peterson's murder to the intrigue involving Dick, Nicole, and Rosemary. This problem seems linked, moreover, to the larger question of Fitzgerald's construction of racial and ethnic difference. In the elegant milieu of the Divers, Abe North has committed an expatriate social blunder by “entangling himself” with black people, by crating the situation of “unfamiliar Negro faces bobbing up in unexpected places and around unexpected corners, and insistent Negro voices on the phone” (106). These intrusions of the black into the privileged space of the (white) American expatriate are made to seem both offensive and threatening. Dick fails to “appreciate the mess that Peterson's in,” because he regards the whole affair as “some nigger scrap” (110); a dispute between two blacks can have no claim to his attention. He tries to stereotype Peterson as “a small, respectable Negro, on the suave model that heels the Republican party in the border states” (106). Yet as a Scandinavian black, Peterson represents an ethnic anomaly, perhaps even an affront to some unspoken notion of Nordic purity. (One recalls Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby spouting racist theory.) For Dick, Peterson is a nuisance not simply because he has attached himself to Abe North but also because he represents the potential collapse of those social barriers which have long kept the darker races in their supposed “places.”³⁸

Thus when Rosemary finds Peterson's bloody corpse in her bed, Dick acts quickly to remove the body, to reinscribe the boundaries of racial difference, and thus to restore order. He knows that the discovery of a black man, even a dead one, in the bed of the white, putatively virginal “Daddy's girl” would generate a scandal disastrous to Rosemary's career. But the bizarre coincidence of Peterson's being found precisely in that place where Dick had hoped to be raises a more complicated issue, compelling us to ask what it means when a black man displaces a white at the site of erotic fantasy. Does it disclose a fear of sexual encroachment by the dark-skinned Other? Does it imply that Rosemary's status as a cultural goddess is assured by a system of patriarchal domination which requires the sacrifice of the black? Fitzgerald offers no explanations, and it seems highly unlikely that he even considered such theoretical implications. But with an instinct for suggestive “grotesquerie,” he places Peterson in Rosemary's bed so that the black man's blood saturates her coverlet and blanket, effecting another intriguing substitution—here, for the menstrual (if not hymenal) stain which might have resulted from her intercourse with Dick.

The stained coverlet and blanket of course produce another, more perplexing substitution. Dick disposes of the bedding by handing it to Nicole, who carries it to the bathroom where she suffers a mental relapse at the sight of the blood. Releasing a torrent of “verbal inhumanity,” she accuses Dick of intruding on her privacy with his bloody bedspread, thereby alluding to yet another primal scene, that of her father's incestuous violation. Because the bedding which precipitates this breakdown actually comes from the bed of “Daddy's girl,” Nicole's outburst obviously reinforces the symbolic parallel between her situation and Rosemary's. But what does Nicole's loss of virginity have to do with the bloody death of Jules Peterson, the Afro-European? Perhaps the clue lies in Peterson's role as a “small manufacturer of shoe polish,” driven into exile because he refused to divulge his formula in Stockholm. If Devereux Warren is the prototype of the successful white capitalist, Peterson represents the emerging black entrepreneur bidding to compete for wealth and power. As the dark rival of the white capitalist, Peterson has been driven from Scandinavia; as the black counterpart of Devereux Warren, he also functions as a scapegoat, undergoing an absolute reversal of Warren's fate in what René Girard would call an act of “sacrificial substitution.” Innocent of any impropriety with Rosemary, he sheds his own blood in the bed of Daddy's girl, suffering the death that Warren “didn't have the nerve” to inflict upon himself. Far from causing psychological damage to Rosemary, Peterson by his death frees her from Dick's paternal attachment; after the crime, she moves to another hotel and leaves Paris without saying good-bye to the Divers. Patently a sacrificial figure, Peterson also restores at least a semblance of devotion to the marriage of Dick and Nicole; by his blood they are redeemed, temporarily at least, from suspicion and enmity.

The histrionic scene which unfolds in the Divers' bathroom caps a sequence of confrontations and discoveries which occur in Paris and which associate the city with a dreamlike or hallucinatory unreality. These uncanny scenes expose unconscious desires and anxieties, fantasies of power or sexual conquest, and nightmares of violence or powerlessness. Through such episodes as the lesbian party on the rue Monsieur, the “fabulous” mobile fête, the shooting at the Gare St. Lazare, Dick's disorientation in Passy, and the assassination of Jules Peterson, as well as through the evocation of three secret sexual scenes, Fitzgerald exposes the social and psychological chaos beneath the seemingly ordered surface of everyday life. The recurrent intrusion of the unconscious manifests those forces which are commonly repressed or denied: the irrational urges and volatile tensions masked by legal constraints and hierarchical social practices. Fitzgerald allows us to glimpse, in the Paris section, an impending explosion; Nicole's breakdown in the hotel bathroom seems emblematic insofar as it represents the return of the repressed, the eruption of chaos. Three times Dick tells her, “Control yourself.” Yet what the bloody bedspread has summoned forth is precisely the irrepressible and uncontrollable. In the Freudian scheme of the novel, this scene acknowledges the power of the unconscious, and throughout the Paris section, a relaxed morality allows the unconscious to manifest itself repeatedly.

Within the novel's historical framework, this moment also discloses on the social level a ubiquitous violence. The bloody result of a “race riot,” Peterson's death implies the presence of a rage which rarely obtrudes upon the comfortable world of the Divers. Yet Fitzgerald means by this and other details to uncover a seething, revolutionary fury loosed upon the dying Western world. His references to Russians displaced by the Bolsheviks or to ethnic types (like George T. Horseprotection) who appear in unlikely places all point toward a vast social upheaval, implicitly disconcerting to the Dick Divers whose sense of personal security is grounded in a notion of “the exact relation that existed between the classes.” Tender Is the Night calls attention to the breakdown of class differences and expresses alarm at the transgression of social boundaries. Jules Peterson personifies the social transformations associated with the modern age, with what Fitzgerald (following Spengler) assumes to be the decline of the West. The shoe polish manufacturer defies the stereotype of Nordic racial purity, threatens the hegemony of white capital, and at last violates the sanctum of the all-American white goddess. He embodies the principle of social chaos which figures to disrupt the caste system to which Dick Diver subscribes.

The Paris section occupies roughly one-fifth of Tender Is the Night; yet it marks a pivotal phase, a point of crisis, for the Divers. If their respective destinies form a criss-crossed plot through the reciprocal stories of Nicole's recovery and Dick's collapse, the vectors of change intersect in Paris. Clearly, by pursuing Rosemary, Dick commits himself to a project as compulsive as it is destructive; his yearning for “Daddy's girl” soon becomes a generalized obsession for young women which undermines his professional discipline.³⁹ As we see in the bathroom scene, Nicole likewise suffers a crisis in Paris. Whereas her hysteria on the Riviera had not been so serious, “the collapse in Paris was another matter, adding significance to the first one. It prophesied possibly a new cycle, a new pousse of the malady” (168). In her bathroom ravings, Nicole seems to confuse Dick with her father, telling him, “I'll wear [the bloody spread] for you—I'm not ashamed, though it was such a pity” (112). This breakdown of the distinction between the wounding, biological father and the nurturing, symbolic father implies an erosion of Nicole's trust. The week in Paris changes her relationship to Dick and injects an element of doubt which paradoxically opens the way to her eventual self-reliance.

Judged by locodescriptive criteria, Fitzgerald's representation of Paris in Tender Is the Night seems comparatively superficial. The author did not possess that attentiveness to the inner life of the city which excited Miller; he never shared Hemingway's fetish for geographical precision. Jean Méral characterizes the Paris of Fitzgerald's novel as “a vague limbo in which characters hang suspended.” In only two incidents—the party on the rue Monsieur and the shooting at the Gare St. Lazare—do tangible places assume interpretive significance. The third-person Frances Melarky version of the novel included a wild scene with the Norths, George T. Horseprotection, and the manufacturer of dolls' voices carousing at a Montmartre night spot called the Georgia Cabin.⁴⁰ But in the published version, that episode becomes a mere allusion to Montmartre by Abe North. The novel offers glimpses of Voisin's restaurant, the Ritz bar, the Hotel Roi George (the Georges V), the Muette quarter of Passy, the Luxembourg Gardens, the rue de Rivoli, and the Champs-Elysées. Expressing a French perspective, Méral insists that these backgrounds possess “the unreality of a theater set.”⁴¹ But that is exactly Fitzgerald's point: the city is fundamentally a locus of the imaginary. For Dick and his expatriate cohorts, Paris is a theater of dreams, a scene of fantasy and excess which becomes a terrifying site of violent change.

Fear and loathing also pervade the Parisian setting of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936), a novel which propels us into an even stranger and denser atmosphere of unreality. For all of its Gothic flourishes and Elizabethan sonorities, the narrative projects an unmistakably modernist vision of exile as it juxtaposes the problem of gender against the dilemma of American identity. In this formulation, nocturnal Paris objectifies the libidinal confusion of the novel's personae, who move in seemingly random fashion as if caught in a circular dream of longing and betrayal. Their various journeys home (or to places once conceived to be home) help to illuminate the experience of exile, yet Nightwood resists the operations which would reduce it to paraphrase. Its modernity resides in its representation of ambiguous, undecidable relations and in its insistence upon the enigmatic duality of the human animal. Barnes raises the latter issue repeatedly by collapsing the distinction between the human and the bestial. Andrew Field has commented on the clash in Barnes's writing between “contrary forces of bestiality and rectitude,” a conflict which produces odd tensions and perplexing contrasts.⁴² Yet despite its singularities, the novel nevertheless affords a suggestive comparison with Tender Is the Night as a reconstruction of American disorientation in Paris in the late twenties.

After establishing herself in New York as a free-lance journalist linked to the bohemian community of Greenwich Village, Barnes began to find newspaper features a limited genre; she left for France in 1920 under an informal agreement with McCall's to act as a European correspondent.⁴³ In her 1922 essay “Vagaries Malicieux,” she recounted her first trip abroad (at age twenty-eight) on a boat jammed with “disappointed teachers from the Middle West, who sat on deck eating gift fruit sarcastically.” Arriving at the Gare St. Lazare, Barnes confronted the foreignness of Paris and what sounded to her like the gabble of the French language. “It took me several days to get over the sensation of dangerous make-believe,” she confessed, expressing the essential dislocation of the exile. From her hotel on the rue Jacob, Barnes visited the church of St. Germain des Prés, met James Joyce at Deux Magots, and admired “the chic of Paris, the beauty of its women, the magic of its very existence.” Yet she refused to romanticize the city, informing a Frenchman that “the multiplication of Paris had been its destruction.” She feared that “too many people had reported Paris,—it had the fame of a too beautiful woman.” Dismissing such touristic sites as Napoleon's tomb, the Luxembourg Gardens, and the Folies-Bergère, she conceded a liking for men's walking styles and women's cosmetics, for cafés, for religious paintings (“dwindled Christs and Madonnas”), and for churches. She also liked the Cluny museum where amid its medieval treasures she sought an effigy of the mythical Thaïs. “I was told,” she confesses, “that in one museum or other, there lay the body of the most beautiful woman,—brief of flesh and of legend immortal, and … I had come to Paris more on her account than she on mine, and herein lay my pleasure and my pain.”⁴⁴ As this remark implies, Barnes had come to Paris in part to search for female beauty and to explore her lesbian inclinations, confronting the pleasure and pain of her attraction to women.

Apart from three relatively brief visits to America, Barnes lived in Paris continuously from 1920 until 1932. During those dozen years she published numerous magazine and newspaper articles; a score of short stories (collected in three different volumes); a parodic illustrated survey of lesbianism in Paris (The Ladies' Almanack); and a baroque, mock-epic novel (Ryder), which served roughly the same function in Barnes's career that The Making of Americans did in Stein's: to throw off the patriarchal influence of her American past through a disguised version of family history.⁴⁵ Paris provided the requisite distance from which Barnes could satirize the bucolic childhood world of Storm-King mountain near Cornwall-on-Hudson, a world dominated in the novel by the polygamist-patriarch, Wendell Ryder, a figure palpably inspired by Wald Barnes. Field suggests that in Ryder Barnes grappled with the dominance of her father, whose unorthodox notion of an extended family apparently induced him to offer his teenage daughter as a sexual “gift” to his brother-in-law, with the collusion of Djuna's grandmother, Zadel Barnes Gustafson.⁴⁶ Whether or not Barnes suffered precisely this fate, she detested her father, assumed thereafter a loosely feminist view of gender relations, and struggled throughout much of her adult life with a deeply conflicted sense of affectional preference. After a three-year heterosexual affair with a New York journalist named Courtenay Lemon, Barnes lived during the twenties in Paris (at 9, rue St.-Romain) with Thelma Wood, an American sculptor and silverpoint artist. In a famous remark Barnes later declared: “I'm not a lesbian. I just loved Thelma.” Biographical evidence partly supports her claim: the liaison with Thelma Wood was Barnes's only significant love affair with a woman; by contrast, she had many briefer, intimate relationships with men.⁴⁷ Yet as she hints in “Vagaries Malicieux” and elsewhere in her writing, she felt irresistibly attracted to certain women and stirred by desires which she was reluctant to name or to acknowledge publicly.

Nowhere did Barnes articulate more brilliantly the contradictions of her own situation as an American exile of uncertain sexual affinity than in Nightwood (1936). Composed mostly in England in the aftermath of her break with Thelma, the novel rewrites that troubled romance as a “haunted” relationship between two radically dissimilar women, Nora Flood and Robin Vote, who are separated by a meddlesome intruder, the “squatter” Jenny Petherbridge. Yet Barnes's text goes far beyond a roman à clef: to this trio of American women the author links Felix Volkbein, an Austro-Italian Jew obsessed by the idea of aristocracy and consumed by the need to beget and protect the son who will carry on his spurious nobility. As a commentator on the dark universe inhabited by these characters, Barnes retrieves from Ryder Dr. Matthew O'Connor, the homosexual obstetrician, who emerges in Nightwood as a garrulous poseur, a transvestite whose raging, impossible desire is to be a mother.

As several critics have remarked, O'Connor's role resembles that of Eliot's Tiresias insofar as he witnesses the sexual rivalry provoked by Robin Vote and though male displays an empathetic understanding of female experience. The parallel seems deliberate; Barnes admired The Waste Land, later acceded to Eliot's editorial ideas about cutting the novel, and welcomed his suggestion for its eventual title. As Donna Gerstenberger has noted, Nightwood “stakes out the same territory as Eliot's poem, which is that of a civilization (particularly Western European) in decay, an aristocracy in disarray, a people estranged from a sense of identity.” But she goes further, arguing that Barnes's novel is “a more radically experimental work than The Waste Land.”⁴⁸ Initially this last claim seems extravagant: Nightwood followed Eliot's poem by fourteen years (as it did another influential text, Joyce's Ulysses). More than a decade of subsequent literary experimentation—much of it conducted in the little magazines published in Paris and elsewhere—helped Barnes to achieve the modernist effects of her second novel.⁴⁹ In some respects her novel seems, moreover, scarcely innovative: Barnes divides the narrative into separate chapters which form a chronological progression; the characters' lives connect intelligibly; an effaced, seemingly omniscient narrator tells much of the story; certain motifs (such as animal imagery, or the gesture of “bowing down”) give the story a modicum of formal unity.

Yet there can be no question about the novel's status as an innovative modernist text. Despite the role of Barnes's narrator, Karen Kaivola rightly remarks that “many voices speak in Nightwood, undermining the authority of any one position and producing a contradictory and heterogeneous discourse composed of an amalgam of styles.” Judith Lee perceives the novel as “distinctively modern … in its consideration of what our concepts of masculine and feminine imply,” while Jane Marcus discusses Nightwood as “the representative modernist text, a prose poem of abstraction, tracing the political unconscious of the rise of fascism.”⁵⁰ While all of these claims have validity, Gerstenberger locates the quintessential, modernist feature which distinguishes Nightwood from The Waste Land: “It is a novel that rages against the imprisoning structures of the language and narratives of the ‘day,’ which create a history built on the oppositions of night/day, past/present, reason, madness, ‘normal’/‘abnormal,’ truth/falsehood, gender, and origins (both historical and textual). It is a book that relentlessly undermines grounds for categorization. The ideal and the real, the beautiful and the ugly, subject and object become irrelevant distinctions.”⁵¹ Her observation resonates with a claim by Jane Marcus, that “Nightwood is about merging, dissolution, and, above all, hybridization—mixed metaphors, mixed levels of discourse from the lofty to the low, mixed ‘languages’ from medical practice, circus argot, church dogma, and homosexual slang.”⁵² That is, Barnes's novel relentlessly subverts those “rational” distinctions and differences which, until the advent of modernism, held in place traditional notions of moral and social order and conventional ways of defining the self.

Precisely in the way that it challenges the concept of identity, Nightwood exposes a crisis symptomatic of modernism and justifies Barnes's attention to the experience of exile. In some sense all of her expatriate characters suffer from a profound uncertainty about who they are, where they “belong,” and what they desire. Apart from portions of the first chapter set in Vienna and Berlin and some brief American scenes, the drama of their various anxieties takes place—significantly—in what Marcus calls “the night world of lesbian, homosexual, and transvestite Paris.” In the chapter entitled “Watchman, What of the Night?” Barnes suggests that the nocturnal world over which O'Connor presides is figuratively the region of the irrational, the unconscious, and the bestial. The doctor himself explains that “the very constitution of twilight is a fabulous reconstruction of fear, fear bottom-out and wrong side up” (80). Fantastic metamorphoses occur in this shadow world where the self becomes another. Nora tells O'Connor, “Now I see that the night does something to a person's identity, even when asleep” (81). More radically the doctor describes an “unknown land” where the dreamer, in the company of anonymous “merrymakers,” commits unspeakable acts “in a house without an address, in a street in no town, citizened with people with no names to deny them” (88). In the Freudian logic of the narrative, these phantom conspirators are always projections of the dreamer: “Their very lack of identity makes them ourselves.” The night world thus dissolves the difference between subject and object, making the other a double of self even as that self remains anonymous and unknowable; it is the place where, as Karen Kaivola says, “one most directly encounters the instability and contradictions of identity.”⁵³

Nightwood thus projects the condition of uncertainty as the distinguishing sign of modernist experience. “There are only confusions,” O'Connor tells Nora, “confusions and defeated anxieties” (22). In her fictional analysis of the turmoil of modernism, Barnes returns insistently to the question of identity, tying the ontological perplexities of her characters to the enigma of self. This question arises at a dinner party in Berlin when the Duchess of Broadback asks Felix Volkbein, “Am I what I say? Are you? Is the doctor?” (25). Later, Felix formulates what appears to be the author's skeptical conclusion when he observes that “the more we learn of a person, the less we know” (111). More pointedly O'Connor frames the issue as an exclamation, a cry of exasperation, rather than a query: “Who is anybody!” (154). Yet this elemental uncertainty marks the speculative crux of Nightwood; Barnes engages the problem at several levels and contemplates not only the fate of identity under modernism but also the general dilemma of the exiled self and the specific vicissitudes of the American exile, male and female. Her exploration of the problematic aspects of modernist identity emphasizes three constituent features, indicated by one's relation to gender, to memory, and to place, respectively. By linking the stories of her principal characters, Barnes suggests ways in which these conditions of being impinge upon the sense of self. Ultimately she examines three kinds of dissociation which destabilize personal identity. Paris provides the essential context for this study, insofar as its nocturnal unreality evokes those compulsions and fears which expose the inherent confusions of modernism.

Within what James B. Scott calls “the inverted and introspective world of Nightwood,” gender and the ambiguities of desire pose the most formidable problem for Barnes's characters.⁵⁴ Her representation of “deviance” can scarcely be summarized, for each figure incorporates an idiosyncratic notion of gender and acts out a different search for love; indeed, her characters represent an array of alternative sexualities, implied by specific preferences, fetishes, and fantasies. Yet this novel so manifestly about gender and sexuality has little to do with eroticism.⁵⁵ Barnes glosses over the impregnation of Robin by Felix and depicts only fleeting scenes of passion between women, such as the groping of Jenny and Robin in the carriage, which prompts O'Connor to voice what may have been the author's own cynical view of desire: “Love, that terrible thing!” (75). In some sense, all of her characters are prisoners of the flesh, alienated from their own bodies and their own sexualities. The recurrent animal imagery connects the carnal with the bestial, suggesting Barnes's underlying perception of lust as horror.

But her characters suffer as well from other forms of alienation. Effectively cut off from the past and from history itself, they are exiled in the modernist moment; the marginality of these misfits excludes them from what Julie L. Abraham calls “the history of the official record.”⁵⁶ Moreover, each has an ironic relation to memory which complicates the construction of identity and the articulation of a gendered role. As in Tender Is the Night, a psychoanalytic matrix focuses attention in Nightwood upon repetition mechanisms which betray repressed material. But Barnes's characters are typically unable to reconstruct the past in ways which free them from its effects; they remain only obscurely aware of prior events which might explain present confusions. They seem likewise displaced geographically and circulate in the city of exile in ways which which suggest the ironies of their dislocation. That is, their patterns of movement and association within the Parisian milieu provide an index to their alienation from themselves.

Felix Volkbein, who clings to the title of Baron “to dazzle his own estrangement,” suffers because he has no real past and no meaningful attachment to his native Vienna except as a locus of illusion. Orphaned from birth, his passion for history springs from an anxiety about his antecedents—a problem represented by the portraits said to be of his grandparents, which in fact depict two “ancient actors” whose likenesses his father Guido purchased to provide “an alibi for the blood” (7). Guido has in fact concealed his Jewish heritage with a fraudulent Austrian pedigree; this ambiguous fiction of nobility, passed on to Felix by his aunt, comprises all that the son understands of his origins. Tormented by insecurity, he launches a patriarchal project: “He wished a son who would feel as he felt about the ‘great past’” (38). At age forty Felix plans to validate his dubious claim to aristocracy through descendants; he hopes to define the paternal line by extending it. His need for self-legitimation thus leads him to France, where he seeks the wife destined to bear “sons who would recognize and honour the past” (45).

Judging Paris to be the center of European social elegance, Felix thus arrives in 1920 “bowing, searching, with quick pendulous movements, for the correct thing to which to pay tribute: the right street, the right café, the right building, the right vista” (9). He delights in the “old and documented splendour” of the Musée Carnavalet and finds lodging in rooms hallowed because “a Bourbon had been carried from them to death” (9). But the location of this apartment remains unspecified, suggesting his attachment to a dream of history rather than to a tangible place. We see Felix only fleetingly in the sixth arrondissement: “fate and entanglement” lead him to the Hôtel Récamier, where (with O'Connor) he first gazes upon the literally unconscious American, Robin Vote. Carrying two volumes of “the life of the Bourbons,” he next meets Robin on the rue Bonaparte (a wry historical irony) and walks with her in the “bare chilly” Luxembourg Gardens, describing his banking position with Crédit Lyonnais. They visit unnamed museums and “an antique shop facing the Seine”; their perfunctory courtship ends—in a subplot reminiscent of Henry James—in marriage between the European and the American.

Yet here Barnes dismantles the international romance: after an abortive wedding journey to Vienna which bores Robin and disillusions Felix (who finds how slight his connections to that city really are), they return to Paris to take up the chore of producing an heir.⁵⁷ The heterosexual contact is a trial for both: “He came and took her by the arm and lifted her toward him. She put her hand against his chest and pushed him, she looked frightened, she opened her mouth but no words came. He stepped back, he tried to speak, but they moved aside from each other saying nothing” (47). Felix must overcome his own “lack of desire” (8) and his “unaccountable apprehension” of sensuality (42) to sire an heir, while Robin responds to his advances by cursing. She expresses her aversion to marriage and maternity by leaving Paris after the birth of her sickly son.

What then does the sad case of Felix Volkbein reveal? Lacking any memory of a significant past, Felix suffers from a confusion of identity which impels his scheme to beget a son. This contradictory project, undertaken despite his own sexual reticence with a woman uncertain of her gender, produces the ultimate expression of his alienation, a boy “too estranged to be argued with” whose existence entails the “demolition of [Felix's] own life” (108). Realizing that young Guido will never justify his own nobility, Felix appeals to the church to accept his son into a sacred order. The irony of this strategy lies in the recognition that Felix attempts to relieve his alienation by delivering his son into Christendom. But from the outset Barnes indicates that Felix, a veritable Wandering Jew, will never solve the problem of his exile and displacement: “No matter where and when you meet him you feel that he has come from some place—no matter from what place he has come—some country that he has devoured rather than resided in, some secret land that he has been nourished on but cannot inherit, for the Jew seems to be everywhere from nowhere” (7). Detached from history, bereft of a homeland, and obscurely alienated from his own sexuality, Felix suffers the classic ruptures of modernity. Clinging pathetically to traces of the Bourbon monarchy in Paris, he tries to assert the difference of his nobility in a period marked by the dissolving of such archaic distinctions.⁵⁸

Explaining his attraction to Robin Vote, Felix declares his preference for an American wife because “with an American anything can be done” (39). In some way she epitomizes American democracy, for her surname alludes to the Nineteenth Amendment, which belatedly extended the ballot to American women. Her ambiguous, indefinite personality makes her (in the eyes of Felix) the mother of all possibilities. She indeed tries “to make everyone happy” (155), yet she remains distracted and desperate, the victim of ineradicable difficulties with gender, memory, and place. Barnes characterizes her as a “born somnabule, who lives in two worlds” (35), and of all the characters in Nightwood, Robin seems caught most precariously between the human order and the bestial, “a wild thing caught in a woman's skin” (146). As implied by her androgynous first name, her sexuality partakes of both genders; recurrently associated with white trousers, she is “a tall girl with the body of a boy” (46). Profoundly conflicted, she seems at once unsexed and promiscuous, devoid of desire yet wanton in behavior. In Paris she seeks out bars and churches, moving between the profane and the sacred; she shuttles between France and America, between heterosexuality and lesbianism. She moves from Felix to Nora, then to Jenny, then briefly to a girl named Sylvia. To all she remains a riddle; even the possessive Jenny admits: “I don't understand her at all, though I must say I understand her better than other people” (115).

Barnes displays this confusion most tellingly in Robin's peculiar fugue-like travel and compulsive cruising of the Parisian night world. When Felix begins to force his patriarchal, heterosexual will upon her, she reacts in singular fashion: “Robin prepared herself for her child with her only power: a stubborn cataleptic calm, conceiving herself pregnant before she was; and, strangely aware of some lost land in herself, she took to going out; wandering the countryside; to train travel, to other cities, alone and engrossed” (45). Nightwood projects her crisis of gender and identity in specifically geographical terms, as the search for a “lost land” within herself, perhaps some dreamed-of female utopia or simply the surrendered terrain of her privacy. When she returns to Paris, Robin takes “the Catholic vow” and attempts to find a literal sanctuary: “Many churches saw her: St. Julien le Pauvre, the church of St. Germain des Prés, Ste. Clothilde. … She strayed into the rue Picpus, into the gardens of the convent of L'Adoration Perpetuelle” (46). Her anxiety returns after the birth of Guido: “Robin took to wandering again, to intermittent travel from which she came back hours, days later, disinterested” (48). Then her search—a differently motivated, female version of Felix's quest for “the right street, the right café, the right building”—leads to her incessant prowling in bars and cafés among “people of every sort” (49). After visiting the United States, Robin returns to Paris with Nora and gradually resumes her roving ways; in the cafés she moves from “table to table, from drink to drink, from person to person,” into the “night life” of the city. (59). Much later, she goes back to America with Jenny Petherbridge but again strays: “She began to haunt the terminals, taking trains into different parts of the country, wandering without design, going into many out-of-the-way churches, sitting in the darkest corner or standing against the wall” (167).

From the outset, Nora senses in Robin a profound disorientation and worries, after setting up housekeeping with her new companion, that “if she disarranged anything Robin might become confused—might lose the scent of home” (56). Barnes points out that even people on the street recognize Robin's displacement: “It was this characteristic that saved her from being asked too sharply ‘where’ she was going; pedestrians who had it on the point of their tongues, seeing her rapt and confused, turned instead to look at each other” (60). Through their intimacy Nora realizes that “Robin had come from a world to which she would return” (58); she sings songs of a secret unknown life, “snatches of harmony as tell-tale as the possessions of a traveller from a foreign land.” Yet Robin's actual provenance remains unidentified; though she has (according to Felix) a certain “‘odour of memory,’ like a person who has come from some place that we have forgotten and would give our life to recall” (118), she has no remembrance of that place of origin. Nowhere does she reflect explicitly upon her past; it seems not to exist. O'Connor observes that “she has difficulty in remembering herself” (121) and Nora suggests a connection between amnesia and errantry: “Robin can go anywhere, do anything … because she forgets” (152). This gap between present and past, so characteristic of modernism, estranges Robin Vote from any sense of American identity and leaves her exiled within a Parisian scene which fails to provide the refuge that she seeks. Hinting at this lack, Robin keeps “repeating in one way or another her wish for a home” (55). Her relentless, unconscious travels through the cities of Europe and America bring her no closer, however, to that “lost land” which stirs her nostalgia.

Her radical displacement and loss of memory seem linked ultimately to the gender confusion which complicates her emotional life. We know that Robin's indefinite sexuality and ambivalent desire make her a puzzle to others; Nora speculates that she “wants to be loved and left alone, all at the same time” (155). Robin indeed desires both “love and anonymity” (55), relationship and separateness, and the strange pattern of her compulsive wandering may be the acting out of this uncertainty. For we see that in each instance, her journeys coincide with new emotional encumbrances; they manifest her bid for the freedom of solitude. More poignantly, they perhaps reflect her effort to solve the dilemma of gender by avoiding the scene of desire.

Just as Robin's anguish arises from the undecidability of her sexual orientation, her repetition of symbolic infanticide expresses the very ambivalence which impels her wandering. Robin's first violent gesture occurs just after the birth of Guido: “One night, Felix, having come in unheard, found her standing in the centre of the floor holding the child high in her hand as if she were about to dash it down, but she brought it down gently” (48). Explaining her desperation to Felix, she exclaims furiously, “I didn't want him!” (49). She later repeats this gesture to different effect with Nora, who tells O'Connor: “Sometimes, if she got tight by evening, I would find her in the middle of the room in boy's clothes, rocking from foot to foot, holding the doll she had given us—“our child”—high above her head, as if she would cast it down, with a fury on her face” (147). To hurt Nora, Robin eventually smashes the doll, hurling it to the floor and “crushing her heel into it” until the china head has been reduced to dust. Marcus sees this violence as a reaction to Nora's love, said to be “possessive, patriarchal in its insistence on monogamy and control of the beloved.”⁵⁹ But this reading conflates the original scene of threatened violence with its truly violent sequel, reducing Robin's act simply to a female resistance to male oppression. Through the “boy's clothes” that Robin wears, Barnes indicates, however, that the smashing of the doll has a different meaning than her threat to Guido. O'Connor speculates that “the last doll, given to age, is the girl who should have been a boy, and the boy who should have been a girl.” He sees the doll as a sign of the gender trouble which causes its destruction. But his subsequent comment exposes the crux of Robin's problem: “The doll and the immature have something right about them, the doll because it resembles but does not contain life, and the third sex because it contains life but resembles the doll” (148). By suggesting a resemblance between the homosexual or lesbian and the doll, Barnes points to the paradox of the “third sex”: that it both “contains life” and precludes procreation; that its members are alive but unable to reproduce. Nora later remarks that when a woman gives a doll to a woman, “it is the life they cannot have” (142). What Robin destroys is a figure of lesbian sterility, and the repetition of her gesture implies the despair of her bisexual androgyny: because she is both male and female, she can be neither homosexual nor heterosexual. Her tormenting ambivalence, projected in her wandering between intimacy and anonymity, makes Robin in some sense a victim of modernism and its erasure of difference.

The other androgyne of Nightwood presents quite a different version of the problem of modernist identity. Ironically Matthew O'Connor idealizes the maternal role which Robin rejects. The fantastic doctor tells Nora: “No matter what I may be doing, in my heart is the wish for children and knitting. God, I never asked better than to boil some good man's potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months by the calendar” (91). This “womb envy” perhaps explains his blatant transvestism; when Nora comes to learn about the night, she finds him surrounded by cosmetics and lingerie: “From the half-open drawers of this chiffonier hung laces, ribands, stockings, ladies' underclothing and an abdominal brace, which gave the impression that the feminine finery had suffered venery” (78-79). With his cheeks “heavily rouged” and his “lashes painted,” the doctor lies in bed wearing “a woman's flannel nightgown.” This spectacle of cross-dressing, a travesty of the “feminine,” reinscribes sexual difference only to imply that conventional markers of gender (rouge, stockings, painted lashes) are superficial, arbitrary, and potentially ludicrous.⁶⁰

The doctor's transvestism forms but part of his complicated, ambiguous sexuality. As his monologues indicate, he possesses an extensive knowledge of homosexual Paris; he haunts the pissoirs and boasts that he can tell a man's arrondissement and quarter by the “size and excellence” of his sexual equipment. In matters anatomical he insists upon a geographical determinism: “Sea level and atmospheric pressure and topography make all the difference in the world!” (92). For O'Connor the “best port” for such trade is the place de la Bastille, though he himself inhabits the quarter around the Eglise St. Sulpice, lives on the rue Servandoni, and patronizes the Café de la Mairie du VI^e. When Robin awakens in the Hôtel Récamier, she cannot quite identify the doctor: “She had seen him somewhere. But, as one may trade ten years at a certain shop and be unable to place the shopkeeper if he is met in the street or in the promenoir of a theatre, the shop being a portion of his identity, she struggled to place him now that he had moved out of his frame” (36-37). The doctor's “frame,” the place St. Sulpice, indeed forms “a portion of his identity”; he has been seen there “buying holy pictures and petit Jésus in the boutique displaying vestments and flowering candles” (29). Barnes's designation of this neighborhood with its ecclesiastical shops as “the doctor's ‘city’” helps to account for the tension between O'Connor's homosexual lubricity and his tirades against modern love and its maculate forms. The full extent of O'Connor's conflict with his own sexuality becomes apparent in the chapter “Go Down, Matthew,” which (as its title suggests) functions as a prophetic utterance, a jeremiad against this “bloody time” (165).

In the café a defrocked priest extracts from O'Connor a clue to his contradictory sexuality. Asked if he has ever been married, the doctor claims that he has but adds, “What if the girl was the wife of my brother and the children my brother's children?” He subsequently demands, “Who's to say that I'm not my brother's wife's husband and that his children were not fathered in my lap?” (159-60). These allusions to incest, which might otherwise be dismissed as characteristic prattle, echo his self-incriminating question to Jenny and Robin: “What manner of man is it that has to adopt his brother's children to make a mother of himself, and sleeps with his brother's wife to get him a future—it's enough to bring down the black curse of Kerry” (73). This implied sexual transgression may explain both O'Connor's self-loathing and his homosexual orientation: he associates heterosexuality with the violation of a taboo.

Such a view reduces his gender confusion to an intelligible psychosexual complaint. But clearly the problem is more complicated, as we see when O'Connor (commenting on Nora's preference for “a girl who resembles a boy”) delivers his most challenging analysis of sexual difference and desire:

What is this love we have for the invert, boy or girl? It was they who were spoken of in every romance that we ever read. The girl lost, what is she but the Prince found? The Prince on the white horse that we have always been seeking. And the pretty lad who is a girl, what but the prince-princess in point lace—neither one and half the other, the painting on the fan! We love them for that reason. We were impaled in our childhood upon them as they rode through our primers, the sweetest lie of all, now come to be in boy or girl, for in the girl it is the prince, and in the boy it is the girl that makes the prince a prince—and not a man. They go far back in our lost distance where what we never had stands waiting; it was inevitable that we should come upon them for our miscalculated longing has created them.

(136-37)

Barnes here reformulates the fairy-tale romance to show that its conventional grounding in heterosexual difference implies an equivalence between the “girl lost” and the “Prince found.” In O'Connor's tortuous reading, the powerful fascination of the Prince lies precisely in his incorporation of the feminine. The doctor's critique effaces sexual difference to suggest that the androgynous Prince arouses “the prince” in the girl and “the girl” in the boy, producing by this transposition a longing for the same-sex figure in the romantic paradigm.⁶¹

This modernist version of the fairy-tale romance helps to explain the rampant sexual confusion of Nightwood and the particular difficulty of O'Connor, who persistently refers to himself as a “girl” and fancies that long ago he has been female: “In the old days I was possibly a girl in Marseilles thumping the dock with a sailor, and perhaps it's that memory that haunts me” (90-91). The doctor's alienation from his own sexuality becomes obvious in the darkness of the Eglise St. Merri when, weeping in anguish, he holds his penis (Tiny O'Toole) and asks, “What is this thing, Lord?” (132). For all of his theorizing with Felix and Nora, O'Connor is unable to fathom the mystery of himself and can only sigh: “C'est le plaisir qui me bouleverse” (it is pleasure which undoes me).⁶² Like Robin, he vacillates between the night world of homosexual Paris and the churches within which he seeks to reconcile his male anatomy with his female longings. However, unlike Robin, who expresses gender ambivalence through evasions of sexuality, the doctor flaunts both his homosexuality and his transvestism. Though he inhabits the St. Sulpice quarter, his true domain is the “Town of Darkness” and the “unknown land” of night (81, 87); within this unreal, nocturnal world he acts out his estrangement from the world of everyday reality. The doctor articulates his fundamental displacement by insisting that “he's been everywhere at the wrong time and has now become anonymous” (82). Alienated from his American roots (the Barbary Coast of Pacific Street, San Francisco), from a past made unthinkable by incest, and from the sexual mistake of his male body, he lives out his exile in the shadow of St. Sulpice, apocalyptically warning fellow patrons of the Café de la Mairie du VI: “It's all over, everything's over, and nobody knows it but me. … Now, … the end—mark my words—now nothing, but wrath and weeping” (165-66).

In contrast to the grotesque afflictions of the doctor, the confusions of Nora Flood seem more plausible, perhaps because insofar as Nightwood carries autobiographical resonances, Nora most closely resembles Barnes herself.⁶³ Nora's significant connections with an American past and a native landscape appear in the chapter “Night Watch,” where we learn of her estate near New York—a house “couched in the centre of a mass of tangled grass and weeds,” a burial ground, and a “decaying chapel.” In her home Nora hosts a strange salon “for poets, radicals, beggars, artists, and people in love; for Catholics, Protestants, Brahmins, dabblers in black magic and medicine” (50). At these “incredible meetings” of “paupers” and misfits, the mood is retrospective: “one felt that early American history was being re-enacted.” In this singular ambience,

the Drummer Boy, Fort Sumter, Lincoln, Booth, all somehow came to mind; Whigs and Tories were in the air; bunting and its stripes and stars, the swarm increasing slowly and accurately on the hive of blue; Boston tea tragedies, carbines, and the sound of a boy's wild calling; Puritan feet, long upright in the grave, striking the earth again, walking up and out of their custom; the calk of prayers thrust in the heart. And in the midst of this, Nora.

(51)

Whereas Robin Vote recalls American democracy and women's suffrage, Nora becomes more broadly identified with the land and its settlers. She somehow personifies the idea of the “Westerner,” conjures up images of “covered wagons,” and has “the face of all people who love the people” (50-51). Thus rooted in a specific place and involved in American history, Nora seems an unlikely exile.

But when she meets Robin at the Denckman circus in New York in 1923, her orientation begins to change. Significantly Robin's first words to Nora at the circus initiate escape: “Let's get out of here.” Outside, Robin's destination seems uncertain: “She looked about her distractedly. ‘I don't want to be here.’ But it was all she said; she did not explain where she wished to be” (55). Although this remark indeed signals the dislocation from which Robin can never escape, Nora with characteristic generosity assumes the impossible task of providing shelter, first in her home and then abroad. Their European travels take them “from Munich, Vienna and Budapest into Paris,” where Nora buys an apartment—chosen by Robin—in the rue du Cherche-Midi.⁶⁴ The courtyard contains a symbolic figure, “a tall granite woman bending forward with lifted head,” her hand “held over the pelvic round as if to warn a child who goes incautiously.” The apartment amounts to a physical emblem of their relationship: “Every object in the garden, every item in the house, every word they spoke, attested to their mutual love, the combining of their humours” (55). After the onset of Robin's straying, however, this “museum of their encounter” becomes a source of suffering and “punishment” for Nora. While Robin wanders the cafés at night, Nora either stays home or stalks the streets “looking for what she's afraid to find,” searching for “traces of Robin” yet “avoiding the quarter where she knew her to be, where by her own movements the waiters, the people on the terraces, might know that she had a part in Robin's life” (61).

Nora's relationship to Robin thus determines her movements and evasions in Paris. But the meaning of Nora's exile from America emerges only through the cryptic dream which recurs one night while she waits for Robin to return from her nocturnal adventures. This intricate dream re-presents Nora's American past, the house of her childhood, and a confusing encounter with her grandmother. Nora sees herself upstairs in her grandmother's room, which though full of furnishings seems empty, as “bereft as the nest of a bird which will not return.” On the wall are “portraits of her uncle Llewellyn, who died in the Civil War,” linking the place both to family history and to nineteenth-century America. From this room Nora looks down into an interior space, sees Robin, and calls out: “From round about her in anguish Nora heard her own voice saying, ‘Come up, this is Grandmother's room,’ yet knowing it was impossible because the room was taboo” (62). As Nora cries out, Robin seems to recede from her, and the room becomes suddenly strange and haunted: “This chamber that had never been her grandmother's, which was, on the contrary, the absolute opposite of any known room her grandmother had ever moved or lived in, was nevertheless saturated with the lost presence of her grandmother, who seemed in the continual process of leaving it.” This bent, spectral figure recalls to the dreaming Nora an earlier incarnation of her grandmother, whom she had run into “at the corner of the house—the grandmother who, for some unknown reason, was dressed as a man, wearing a billycock and a corked mustache, ridiculous and plump in tight trousers and a red waistcoat, her arms spread saying with a leer of love, ‘My little sweetheart.’” Nora subconsciously links the image of her grandmother disguised as a man with “something being done to Robin, Robin disfigured and eternalized by the hieroglyphics of sleep and pain” (63).

As improbable as any sequence in Kafka, this dream bears witness to a complex estrangement. It stages the conditions of Nora's exile from her own past and from the proprieties of her American childhood through the bizarre transformation by which her cross-dressed grandmother seems to express some form of sexual danger. While she is in the upstairs room, in the place of the grandmother, Nora makes an overture to the woman whom she loves; but she instantly recalls the “taboo” which places the room off limits and proscribes lesbian lovemaking.⁶⁵ Though she feels an attraction to Robin as the symbolic counterpart of her grandmother, whom she “loved more than anyone” (148), such a relationship literally has no place within the American setting: Robin, in the floor below, seems increasingly remote. In her apparition as a male, the grandmother subsequently acts out the confusion of gender and the deformation of desire, producing an image which may express the grandmother's experience of denial within marriage or (alternatively) the threat posed by Robin's androgyny or by her vulnerability to a disfiguring desire.

Ironically, as Nora awakens from this dream, she sees Robin outside her window in the embrace of Jenny Petherbridge. This moment marks a decisive turn, for as Barnes reports, “It was not long after this that Nora and Robin separated; a little later Jenny and Robin sailed for America” (77). Nora thus finds herself alone in Paris, an exile for love yet deserted by her lover. Devastated by loss, she expresses her alienation through travel which seems aimless: “I sought Robin in Marseilles, in Tangier, in Naples, to understand her, to do away with my terror” (156). She also consults O'Connor, hoping to learn from him something about the unconscious urges which have led Robin away from her into the night world. Noting that “the day and the night are two travels,” the doctor explains that while the French accept creatureliness and “filthiness,” thinking of the day and night “as one continually,” the American, obsessed by cleanliness, “separates the two for fear of indignities” (85). By this line of reflection, O'Connor means to suggest that Nora's own puritanical tendencies have alienated Robin. Later, Nora herself recalls a night in Montparnasse when Robin has reproached her: “‘You are a devil! You make everything dirty!’ (I had tried to take someone's hands off her. They always put hands on her when she was drunk.) ‘You make me feel dirty and tired and old!’” (143). Ironically, though Nora has left America (presumably) to find the cultural freedom in which to pursue her unconventional relationship with Robin, the moral instincts of her American past obtrude to complicate her life in exile.

But Nora's problem goes beyond the puritanical inhibitions which she has carried to France. In a subsequent conversation with O'Connor, she tries to comprehend her continuing fixation upon Robin—her compulsive fascination with “a girl who resembles a boy” (136). Increasingly she understands the narcissistic aspect of this attraction: “A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own” (143). She later asks O'Connor: “Have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?” (152). Nora's discovery of her own narcissism exposes a paradox, however, for while she recognizes that her desire for Robin lies in the fact that she is not male and that in kissing this woman Nora kisses herself, still Robin “resembles a boy” and thus on some level represents to Nora the possibility of kissing and loving a male or, more radically, of becoming a male so that she can love a woman without encountering in her own guilt the resistance of patriarchal law. In Robin's androgyny, that is, Nora confronts the unresolved problem of her own unconscious sexual ambivalence. Through O'Connor's revelations of the bestial night world, she also glimpses the fearful aspect of her American rectitude: “There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation—purity's black backside!” (135). These insights reveal Nora's estrangement from her prior American identity and suggest the emergence of an exilic self more attentive to the ambiguities which mark her relation to gender, memory, and place.

Out of these stories of obsession and displacement, Barnes constructs her haunting, dissonant novel. While Felix Volkbein embodies, almost prophetically, the fate of the Jew as the outcast of European modernism, O'Connor, Robin, Nora, and even the contemptible Jenny Petherbridge—about whom it is said that “the places [she] moults in are her only distinction” (97)—reflect the peculiar confusions of the American who is both exiled from homeland and marginalized in Paris as a denizen of the homosexual/lesbian night world. Although Nightwood closes with an American homecoming which reunites Robin and Nora in the deserted chapel, Barnes avoids romanticizing the exile's return, projecting it instead as a revolting event: into the night the distraught Nora runs “crusing and crying,” only to find Robin “in her boy's trousers” in the throes of bestial frenzy, apparently attempting to mate with Nora's dog. In this scene, the “confusions and defeated anxieties” of Nightwood reach a grotesque climax; long alienated from her body, emptied of memory, and dislocated geographically, the anonymous Robin has at last become estranged from her own humanity, abandoning herself to animal instinct. In an age profoundly influenced by Freud's privileging of the id and his foregrounding of sexuality as the crucial determinant of psychic adjustment, Robin's “obscene” barking perhaps serves as Barnes's sardonic reminder that the unconscious, that locus of unspeakable urges, is not a pretty site.

During the early 1930s, Fitzgerald and Barnes both worked under heavy emotional burdens to complete novels which indirectly summarized their responses to the experience of exile and to the culture of modernism. Away from France, both portrayed characters caught up in and to some extent corrupted by the decadence of Paris (and Europe generally) in the late twenties and early thirties. Neither writer presumed to analyze the crisis of values which ensued in the decade after the Great War; rather, both took for granted an undercurrent of cynicism and despair, a revolution in sexual attitudes and practices, a pervasive sense of drift, and a widespread rootlessness, borne of the recognition that one could not go home again because there was no place of retreat from the violent, alluring transformations of modernism itself. Their respective novels portray a period of experiential perplexity, marked by the breakdown of those conceptual oppositions which seemed to give structure and certainty to everyday life.

Within this cultural matrix, Fitzgerald and Barnes saw Paris as a physical emblem of unreality; both portrayed the city through incongruous images reminiscent of dreams and nightmares, thereby reinforcing the psychological—and at times patently Freudian—implications of the stories they told. Though neither writer had much interest in geography for the sake of verisimilitude, both found the context of Paris in the twenties, particularly the city at night, conducive to the representation of les années folles, the crazy years. In the titles of their respective novels, these authors alluded to a nocturnal world at times seductive but more often chaotic or irrational. Tender Is the Night and Nightwood project an oneiric unreality through seemingly random movement, bizarre encounters, and disconcerting settings. For Fitzgerald, the house on the rue Monsieur which generates an “electric-like shock” with its unusual decor and “oddly bevelled mirrors” typifies his dreamlike distortion of Parisian places. Barnes likewise depicts an unreal scene when Nora looks out on the garden “in the faint light of dawn” to see “a double shadow falling from the statue, as if it were multiplying” (64). In Nightwood, as in Tender Is the Night, the strangeness of Paris conveys the alienation and confusion of characters who are themselves displaced and thus psychically detached from the city of exile.

The sense of place in these novels may be contrasted with the hallucinatory versions of Paris by French surrealist authors of the twenties and thirties. In narratives by Aragon, Breton, Soupault, Desnos, and Péret, the effect of strangeness emerges not from the perceived unreality of the material environment but conversely from an intimate knowledge of its particularity. For example, Aragon's Paysan de Paris transforms the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont into a fantastic site partly through a summary of inscriptions on an obelisk containing a directory of the nineteenth arrondissement.⁶⁶ This meticulous scrutiny of banal municipal “facts,” in the context of a nighttime quest for mystical illumination, has the effect of defamiliarizing the obelisk and exposing its oddities—including the disclosure that the project was concocted by a traveling salesman. Similarly in Nadja, Breton exhibits his knowledge of Parisian places while recalling encounters with the visionary title character; in the place Dauphine, which Breton calls “one of the most profoundly secluded places I know of, one of the worst wasterlands in Paris,” a distracted Nadja seems to see a crowd of dead people massing in the darkness.⁶⁷ The dull, “wasteland” aspect of the place Dauphine contributes to the sinister impression which the narrative thus evokes. In Soupault's Dernières Nuits de Paris the narrator remarks that “places and environment have a profound influence on memory and imagination,” and for several years the peculiarities of Paris obsessed the surrealists. Despite their disdain for certain aspects of French society and politics, they consistently manifested what Relph would call the perspective of “insideness” in their projections of a city rife with esoteric metaphors and signs.⁶⁸

Their method of defamiliarizing a place understood in intimate detail helps to clarify the exilic perspective of “outsideness” in Fitzgerald and Barnes. By projecting a strangeness upon an obscure and sometimes incomprehensible cityscape, both writers suggest the anxieties of central characters afflicted by problems of American identity. Unfamiliar or threatening aspects of the Parisian scene objectify their intensely personal dilemmas. The surrealists represent the city mindful of its complex cultural meanings (which their works often subvert or challenge), whereas Barnes, Fitzgerald, and their American contemporaries inevitably write from the outside, even when they affect—as Hemingway does—what Relph aptly calls “vicarious insideness.”⁶⁹ Allowing for obvious differences of style and content, we can see that both Tender Is the Night and Nightwood portray the experience of exile as a crisis in which the expatriate, opened to new desires in a seemingly unreal place, discovers internal contradictions and tensions. Paris thus figures as a fantastic scene of conflict and possibility, presenting those dilemmas of choice through which the self constructs and defines itself.

This is perhaps only an exaggerated version of the situation recreated in the narratives of Stein, Hemingway, and Miller. For them, Paris was the indispensable “world elsewhere” (to appropriate Richard Poirier's phrase), a city foreign enough in architecture, customs, and language to seem on some level exotic and thus to grant them a freedom from the constraints and inhibitions of American life as well as from the failures, real or imagined, of an American past. (It is worth noting that all of the writers discussed here had reached vocational impasses in America.) Paris granted the American a certain anonymity, a release from old routines and responsibilities, even an exemption from the duty to be one's old self. It presented the expatriate with the opportunity for metamorphosis, for the reformulation of ambitions, habits, and inclinations; the city thus nurtured an exilic identity, a different way of conceiving one's connections to place and populace. Paris also provided the conditions for writing, its very indifference to the foreigner ensuring the privacy essential to creative work. Finally, the strangeness of the French-speaking milieu produced a heightened consciousness of language itself and the tenuous relation between words and things which can be altered by crossing a linguistic border.

For these American writers, the city of exile thus remained to some extent alien and illegible. Amid the novelties of the modernist era, they gazed upon the same physical surroundings and social transformations observed by their French contemporaries. But they did so from a position of exteriority, tending to regard the city on some level as an illusory spectacle. Displaced from a native setting which though forsaken continued to determine their perception of difference, these writers developed attachments to Paris reflecting various levels of geographical understanding, cultural awareness, and linguistic competence. None, however, became entirely assimilated; none lost altogether that residual habit of mind which, for want of a more precise term, might be called “American.” Repeatedly encountering those differences which set Paris and France apart from remembered American scenes, Stein, Hemingway, Miller, Fitzgerald, and Barnes all composed works which directly or indirectly contemplated the relationship between place and identity. These writers faced a common predicament: far from the homeland which once formed the ground of being, they found themselves in a great foreign city which remained ultimately elusive or inscrutable despite the local knowledge each had acquired. In texts as diverse as their own experiences, they portrayed the dilemma of the expatriate self, projecting imaginary versions of Paris which in their differing particulars suggest each writer's accommodation to the possibilities and risks of modernist displacement. Insistently, these narratives of exile also evoked the nagging question of American identity, because the encounter with cultural difference typically exposed—as it did for James's Lambert Strether—the presence of an obstinate American self. Reflecting upon his return from Europe in “American Letter,” Archibald MacLeish examined his simultaneous longing for “a land far off, alien” and his bone-deep ties to a country that is “neither a place nor a blood name.” Summing up these contradictions he observed: “It is a strange thing to be an American.” Nowhere was that strangeness more keenly felt or more brilliantly translated into modernist texts than in the Paris of writing.

Notes

1. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). Subsequent references to Kern's study will be given parenthetically.

2. The standard accounts of these movements appear in Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return, and Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), in which the comment on placelessness appears (70).

3. Alan Bullock, “The Double Image,” in Modernism, 1890-1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (New York: Viking Penguin, 1976), 66.

4. James McFarlane, “The Mind of Modernism,” in Modernism, 1890-1930, 80-81.

5. See Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage, 1958), 340-45.

6. McFarlane, “The Mind of Modernism,” 81.

7. Malcolm Bradbury, “The Cities of Modernism,” in Modernism 1890-1930, 98-99.

8. Raymond Williams, “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism,” in Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art, ed. Edward Timms and David Kelley (New York: St. Martin's, 1985), 21.

9. See Matthew J. Bruccoli, The Composition of “Tender Is the Night” (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963). Bruccoli provides an indispensable reconstruction and analysis of the various manuscript and typescript versions.

10. James Mellow, Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 168.

11. André LeVot, “Fitzgerald in Paris,” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1973, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr. (Washington: Microcard Editions, 1974), 49-50.

12. Edmund Wilson, letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 5 July 1921, Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972, ed. Elena Wilson (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), 63.

13. See André LeVot, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography, trans. William Byron (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), 235-37.

14. Scottie, a Parisian schoolgirl, was left in the custody of a nursemaid. In addition to his trips to Paris, Fitzgerald also made a hasty journey to the United States in early 1931 to attend his father's funeral in Maryland.

15. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Scribner's, 1989), 580, 594.

16. Roy R. Male, “‘Babylon Revisited’: A Story of the Exile's Return,” in Modern Critical Views: F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), 94.

17. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 633. Subsequent parenthetical page references to “Babylon Revisited” correspond to this edition.

18. For an analysis of parallels between “Babylon Revisited” and Tender Is the Night, as well as a discussion of two other Fitzgerald stories thematically related to the novel (“Two Wrongs” and “The Rough Crossing”), see Richard D. Lehan, “Tender Is the Night,” in “Tender Is the Night: Essays in Criticism,” ed. Marvin J. LaHood (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 61-85.

19. Bruce L. Grenberg, “Fitzgerald's ‘Figured Curtain’: Personality and History in Tender Is the Night,” in Critical Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Tender Is the Night,” ed. Milton R. Stern (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 221.

20. See F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (New York: Scribner's, 1934), 159-62, for his emulation of cinematic montage. Subsequent parenthetical page references to the novel correspond to this edition.

21. From 1925-30, Fitzgerald worked on the Melarky version, which hinged on a young Hollywood technician's hatred of his mother and on his attraction to a glamorous expatriate couple, Seth and Dinah Roreback (or Piper). Bruccoli insists that “nothing of Francis' personality clings to Rosemary,” who is a “completely feminine creature.” See Bruccoli, The Composition of “Tender Is the Night,” 95-96.

22. Commenting on Dick Diver's own ambivalent sexual impulses, James E. Miller, Jr. notes the “strange element in Nicole's relationship to him,” presaged by a passage in one of her early letters to him: “I have only gotten to like boys who are rather sissies. Are you a sissy?” See Miller, “Tender Is the Night,” in “Tender Is the Night”: Essays in Criticism, 98.

23. Grenberg, “Fitzgerald's ‘Figured Curtain,’” 213-15.

24. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 293.

25. See Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 25.

26. Alan Trachtenberg, “The Journey Back: Myth and History in Tender Is the Night,” in Critical Essays on “Tender Is the Night,” 172. The problem of time also created nagging doubts for Fitzgerald about the proper arrangement of the novel—whether (as in the original version) to use a long flashback in book two to recount Dick's career and his romance with Nicole, or whether to tell the story chronologically, as in Malcolm Cowley's 1951 revised version.

27. Fitzgerald referred to a similar American deracination in his notebooks: “In England, property begot a strong sense of place, but Americans, restless and with shallow roots, needed fins and wings.” See The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 35.

28. Fitzgerald indulges here in subtle sentimentality; as Grenberg points out, the “red-haired girl from Tennessee” looking for the grave of her brother marks an anachronism: the American army did not fight at the Somme; the U.S. did not enter the war until 1917.

29. See Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 257-58. Grenberg sees Dick's “infatuation with Rosemary” as a symptom of his brief “love affair with modernity.” See Grenberg, “Fitzgerald's ‘Figured Curtain,’” 225.

30. Noting that the same setting was used in Fitzgerald's 1929 short story “The Swimmers,” André LeVot points out Fitzgerald's topographical “mistake”: although the house is said to be “hewn from the frame of Cardinal de Retz's palace,” the seventeenth-century prelate never lived on the rue Monsieur, a street created in the eighteenth century. See LeVot, “Fitzgerald in Paris,” 65.

31. In an early version of the novel, Francis takes a romantic interest in a young woman named Wanda Brested, who is associated with a lesbian coterie. In one scene, Francis finds Wanda in the company of three other girls with mannequins' heads. See the facsimile edition of the Melarky-narrator version, Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald Manuscripts, Tender Is the Night, vol. 2 (New York: Garland, 1990), 164.

32. Fitzgerald speaks of this wave of American violence in “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” in The Crack Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), 20.

33. The same signs and shop windows appear in the opening paragraphs of the 1929 short story “The Swimmers.”

34. There was no such street in the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement near Passy, but there was a passage St.-Ange (masculine) near the Porte de St. Ouen in a working-class neighborhood in the seventeenth arrondissement. By placing the Films Par Excellence studio at 341, rue des Saintes-Anges, Fitzgerald makes the angels feminine and plural, again implying the doubling of Dick's relationship to Nicole in his attachment to Rosemary.

35. In 1931 Fitzgerald superciliously noted the influx of American ethnic types in Paris about 1928: “There was something sinister about the crazy boatloads.” See “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” 20.

36. See Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” 15-17.

37. Typical of extant criticism is Mary E. Burton's remark that “the inclusion of the Negro murder remains mysterious.” She speculates that since earlier versions of the novel included a homicide, Fitzgerald “felt impelled to include a murder somehow—perhaps quickly to bring the reader up against the unreality and ‘enchanted’ quality of the Divers' lives by a shocking intrusion of reality from the passions and problems of another class and race.” See Mary E. Burton, “The Counter-Transference of Doctor Diver,” Journal of English Literary History 38 (1971): 469.

38. This same anxiety recurs later when Dick worries about the bathwater his children have shared with the Indian stepchildren of Mary North Minghetti. Mary's Asian husband is said to be “not quite light enough to travel in a Pullman south of Mason-Dixon” (258). My own understanding of the race problem in this novel has been enriched by the work of Felipe Smith, who argues persuasively that the author's symbolic treatment of race in Tender Is the Night “amounts to an elaboration of the racial holocaust he had hinted at in The Beautiful and the Damned and The Great Gatsby.” See Felipe Smith, “The Dark Side of Paradise: Race and Ethnicity in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1988, 207.

39. At a Swiss ski resort about five months after the Parisian episode, Dick becomes briefly fixated upon a “special girl” at the table behind him (174); subsequently Fitzgerald reports: “He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on a wall” (201).

40. See F. Scott Fitzgerald Manuscripts, Tender Is the Night, vol. 4, part 2, 251-55.

41. Jean Méral, Paris in American Literature, trans. Laurette Long (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 162, 176.

42. Andrew Field, Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1983), 29.

43. As Field points out, Barnes's earliest contribution to McCall's did not appear until 1925; she may also have had an arrangement with Vanity Fair, where her articles, poems, plays, and satires began to appear in 1922. See Djuna, 104, 129. Throughout his eccentric book, Field rarely provides specific documentation for such biographical details; yet his is the only full-length study of Barnes' life currently available.

44. Djuna Barnes, “Vagaries Malicieux,” The Double Dealer 3 (1922): 249, 251, 256, 258.

45. Barnes's short stories from this period appeared in A Book (1923), A Night Among the Horses (1929), and Spillway (1962).

46. See Field, Djuna, 43. Some of the evidence for the impromptu marriage rests on literary inference. In the original version of Nightwood (titled Bow Down) and in The Antiphon (1958), Barnes's late verse drama, there are scenes suggesting that the author experienced the “wedding” as a rape. See also Mary Lynn Broe, “My Art Belongs to Daddy,” in Women's Writing in Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 42-43, 69-73.

47. For the remark about Thelma Wood, see Field, Djuna, 101. Barnes had friendships with a number of lesbian women, including Mary Pyne in New York and Natalie Clifford Barney in Paris. But there was apparently no cohabitation or sustained intimacy. Such matters are, of course, crudely speculative; they arise here only because Barnes's sexual ambivalence figures crucially in Nightwood.

48. Donna Gerstenberger, “The Radical Narrative of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood,” in Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction, ed. Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 130.

49. Carolyn Burke points out that “Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, which she followed closely as Work in Progress, confirmed Barnes in her own idiosyncratic modernism.” See Carolyn Burke, “‘Accidental Aloofness’: Barnes, Loy, and Modernism,” in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 73. To date, the most authoritative study of the little magazines is Hugh Ford's Published in Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris, 1920-1930 (New York: Macmillan, 1975).

50. See Karen Kaivola, All Contraries Confounded: The Lyrical Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Marguerite Duras (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 63; Judith Lee, “Nightwood: ‘The Sweetest Lie,’” in Silence and Power, 207; Jane Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman's Circus Epic,” in Silence and Power, 231.

51. Gerstenberger, “The Radical Narrative of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood,” 130.

52. Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus,” 223.

53. Kaivola, All Contraries Confounded, 94.

54. James B. Scott, “Reminiscences,” in Silence and Power, 344.

55. Studies of the original, uncut manuscript suggest that Eliot may have excised some provocative material. But on the basis of the published text alone, we can infer that Barnes was not much inclined toward erotic relations; what matters, at least for the women in Nightwood, is the difference between solitude and companionship.

56. Julie L. Abraham, “‘Woman, Remember You’: Djuna Barnes and History,” in Silence and Power, 257. Attributing a prescience to Barnes, Jane Marcus goes further, seeing the “lesbians, blacks, circus people, Jews, [and] transvestites” of Nightwood as a prophetic grouping of “soon-to-be-exterminated human types,” in “Laughing at Leviticus,” 231.

57. Felix betrays the limits of his own memory when he shows Robin historical sites: “He tried to explain to her what Vienna had been before the war; what it must have been before he was born; yet his memory was confused and hazy, and he found himself repeating what he had read” (43).

58. Our last glimpse of Felix finds him back in Vienna, bowing madly and pathetically to a man he assumes to be the Grand Duke Alexander of Russia (123).

59. Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus,” 234.

60. Benstock points out that this transvestism “calls attention to woman's role as ornament in society.” See Women of the Left Bank, 258.

61. Insisting that the “prince-princess” personifies not androgyny but narcissism, Judith Lee construes “the myth of romantic love” as “the sweetest lie” to support a circular argument that “male and female are inherently and inevitably incompatible.” See “Nightwood: ‘The Sweetest Lie,’” 209, 212.

62. Marcus speculates plausibly that O'Connor is a parodic version of Dr. Freud and that his “womb envy is so strong that it parodies Freudian penis envy mercilessly.” See “Laughing at Leviticus,” 233.

63. In a reminiscence, Hank O'Neal reports that Barnes identified the model for Nora as Henrietta Metcalf. See Silence and Power, 351.

64. Barnes doubtless chose the rue du Cherche-Midi because it was around the corner from the apartment she shared with Thelma Wood at 9, rue St.-Romain.

65. Mary Lynn Broe underscores the patently lesbian intimacy between Barnes and her grandmother, Zadel Gustafson Barnes, in “My Art Belongs to Daddy,” in Women's Writing in Exile, 42. We may expect further elaboration of this issue in the forthcoming volume of Barnes' letters, Cold Comfort, being edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Frances McCullough.

66. Louis Aragon, Nightwalker (Le Paysan de Paris), trans. Frederick Brown (1926; Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 133.

67. André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (1928; New York: Grove Press, 1960), 80, 83.

68. Philippe Soupault, Last Nights of Paris, trans. William Carlos Williams (1928; New York: Macaulay, 1929), 53, 73, 129. Marie-Claire Bancquart speaks of the veritable “cult of Paris” developed by surrealists for whom the city was a site of quest and initiation as well as a source of metaphors and signs. See Bancquart, Paris des Surréalistes, 186, 189, 199.

69. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 52-53.