Nightwood

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:56:45 GMT

I never read Djuna Barnes' Nightwood before. I had always been intrigued, especially after I met a professor who had based his entire career on her. I vaguely knew she was a proto-feminist. I had no concept though, of how wacky, in a free associative, poetic way, her prose really is:

"The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a "picture" forever arranged is, for the contemplative mind, the cheifest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person's every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its beast to its prey."

I have no idea what that means, but it's a rush of purple prose that goes right to my head. Chapleted. OK, now I understand why she's not commonly read these days. That type of prose is not very fashionable. Durrell comes to mind, but Djuana is writing from a more unconscious level. She is first draft incarnate. Of the sort I'd spend 10 years refining into concrete statements, but she just leaves it there, raw and bloody. I'm swept away.

Diane

Nightwood