If ever a story depended more on its telling than on the tale, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is that story. The plot of Nightwood contains traditional elements such as an array of interesting characterizations, narrative twists that are suspenseful if no doubt also puzzling, and a not inconsiderable measure of humor and insight into the human condition. Yet those elements seem to be present only in the most elliptical manner, as if the author’s real aim is not to be telling a story at all.

Barnes is, by most definitions of the term, a modernist writer essaying modernist themes and issues. Like other avant-garde literature of the period, Nightwood includes confrontations of cultural values; breakdowns in the social order as traditional class structures decay; daring sexual-psychological interpretations of human character and motivation; and a keen, almost morbid attention to eccentric and morally outrageous behavior. Even Nightwood’s surrealism, as in O’Connor’s monologues, is in keeping with contemporary literary trends and techniques.

Yet Nightwood is a rare creation even for an epoch of experimentation in fiction. The novel nags the reader with the suggestion of a meaning that is, like that of the more traditional novel, inherent in the characters and in the way they work out their moral dilemmas. It is possible that Nightwood’s real achievement is the almost perfect blending of form and content, so that the story and its telling are inseparable and all enveloping, while at the same time, the vigor of the language belies the paucity of moral imperatives.

Language—both the language of the author’s narrative line and the language within that narrative in which the characters communicate their feelings, values, and ideas (and misgivings, confusions, and desires)—is so much a theme of the novel that it is almost a character. It is by and through language that the night, an age-old metaphor for mystery and terror, is given human shape and made a human habitation.

The novel’s two ethical poles are Matthew O’Connor, the closet insomniac who cannot stop talking, and Robin Vote, the sleepwalker who hardly seems to be alive except in the most amorally mindless, animalistic way. The other characters are located somewhere between those two extremes and are as surely caught up in this “nightwood” as anyone else. The players can penetrate that darkness to illuminate it momentarily for others, but no one can dissipate or overcome it.

The power to select one’s victimhood is all each person has. That is what Felix accepts almost by virtue of circumstance, and it is certainly what O’Connor preaches in his efforts to overcome the darkness. Those in the novel who, either through a stubborn willfulness or a blind disregard, cannot accept this precept, such as Nora Flood and Jenny Petherbridge, become its victim. Robin, meanwhile, the antiprotagonist, appropriately embodies night’s mindless power to victimize.

The novel ends with Robin selecting her own victimhood by becoming, in imitation of a dog, the amoral beast nature had made her. She has, however, at least made the moral choice to break free of Jenny, the possessive opportunist, and return to Nora, who is devoted to her. Such an ambiguity of action seems to be the most the reader can expect from the rich maelstrom of words and ideas that swirl through the pages of Nightwood.