Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes

A review of the restored version of Nightwood,

by Djuna Barnes (edited by Cheryl J. Plumb)

Published July 28th, 1995, in

The Minnesota Daily’s Nightly Magazine

Classic Novel Nightwood

Improved in Restored Version

Nightwood
The Original Version and Related Drafts
By Djuna Barnes

Edited by Cheryl J. Plumb

Dalkey Archive, $23.95

Djuna Barnes’s classic 1936 novel Nightwood has influenced everyone from William Gaddis to Jeanette Winterson, but among the general public it remains largely unread. Why? Because like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, it’s an extremely challenging read. For those who have made their way through it, it’s a life-changing experience, and for Barnes scholar Cheryl J. Plumb, editor of this restored version, it was the foundation of an entire academic career.

Begun in 1927, Nightwood went through numerous versions until 1934, when Barnes submitted the finished book to editor T.S. Eliot. Eliot loved it but found much of it “unsuitable” for publication, and he proceeded to hack away considerable chunks of the text. After two years of editing, Barnes finally agreed to some of the cuts. The finished product has become a classic, but Barnes’s reluctance to the changes sparked debate over the artistic integrity of the published version.

Now, after years of studying the original texts, Plumb has restored Nightwood to its pristine version. In addition, Plumb has included twenty pages of annotations explaining Barnes’s literary and historical reference and has documented all the changes made in her own restoration. Plumb has also compiled seventy-five pages of original typed and handwritten drafts to illuminate Barnes’s creative process.

A work of art of the highest order, Nightwood is as groundbreaking in its content as it is in its style. It’s possibly the first lesbian novel to be published in America, and like Zora Neale Hurston’s centralization of African Americans, Barnes deals with homosexuals as normal people rather than as anomalies.

Djuna Barnes

Of course Barnes doesn’t ignore the problems of homosexual life in a straight world, and as in Proust she focuses more on the grotesque and comical and tragic aspects of it than on the joyful and liberating, but her treatment of her queer characters makes them seem universal and as immediate to the outsider as to the insider. This commanding presence gives her the freedom not only to write from a very central point of view, but also to question existing notions of normality and centrality.

At the heart of all this is a love story. In telling Nora and Robin’s tale, Barnes re-examines love and loss in a way that makes the reader think of it as a completely new idea. Her treatment of desire, memory, alienation, and fear all give love a new but frighteningly familiar face, and Nora’s obsession with the transient Robin seems to reflect Barnes’s own battle to understand her past. Throughout Nightwood we see our own misgivings about the nature of love played out in this ill-fated relationship, and Barnes never lets the reader fall back on illusory notions of idealized romance.

Barnes never succumbs to misanthropy or cynicism, either. Her characters are warped and often pathetic, but Barnes actually does care about them. They exhibit a rare humanity that lifts them above their awful crises (although it doesn’t necessarily save them), and even at their most tragicomic, we recognize them as our own.

I have to admit that this is the first time I’ve been able to get the whole way through this novel, so be warned. It’s not easy, but the rewards for your effort are innumerable. If you’re willing to relinquish a large chunk of time (and sanity), this short book just might change the way you read novels.

—David Wiley