Djuna Barnes: The Book of Repulsive
Women and other poems
‘What an autopsy I’ll make, with everything
all which ways in my bowels’
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Djuna Barnes (1892 - 1982) is one of the twentieth
century’s most interesting and elusive authors.
She wrote short stories, journalism, drama, poetry,
three experimental novels and she illustrated much of
her own work. She once described herself as the most
famous unknown writer and this was an astute remark.
During her lifetime her name was widely familiar, but
her work was little read. She was partially responsible
for her lack of a readership. From the 1950s until her
death in 1982, she lived in Greenwich Village in seclusion.
Editors approached her to request the republication
of her work but she flatly refused. In the latter years
of her life she seemed determined to keep herself out
of print. Since her death her work has appeared in new
editions, including my collection of her poetry, The
Book of Repulsive Women and Other Poems (Carcanet).
I wrote my doctoral thesis on Djuna Barnes (Oxford
University, 2002). Newspaper City: Djuna Barnes’s
New York Journalism looked at the relationship
between Barnes’s writing in New York newspapers
and the urban space of the city. The newspapers and
the city beyond its edges shaped each other; Barnes’s
writing was a creative medium between the two.
Nightwood appeared in 1936. This carnivalesque
novel is the story of a tangled web of personal obsessions
set in between-the-wars Europe and America in an atmosphere
of spiralling anti-Semitism, rising fascism, and an
underground bohemian expatriate community peopled by
outsiders: Jews, transvestites, lesbians, First World
War veterans, circus freaks and disinherited aristocrats.
Barnes once remarked that ‘there is more surface
to a shattered object than a whole’, and this
applies to her novel, which has no centre, being a series
of fractured edges instead. Following its publication,
Nightwood attracted much favourable attention.
Between the 1940s and the early 1980s, however, the
book languished at the very edges of the literary world.
It gained the status of a cult classic and was trumpeted
by those who were themselves on the edge of the literary
canon. William Burroughs said, ‘I consider it
one of the great books of the twentieth century.’
Nightwood is now rightly regarded as an important
twentieth century text.
See my essay on Nightwood in D. Bradshaw &
K. Dettmar (eds.), A Companion to Modernist Literature
and Culture, (Blackwell, 2006)
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