*Nightwood* is a novel composed in poetic prose, as T.S. Eliot asserts in his preface, the kind of writing that "demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give." Most novels are not composed at such white-hot intensity, at a level of personal emergency such as Djuna Barnes has conveyed in *Nightwood.* This is a book that doesn't let you rest for a moment, the rare sort of novel that is all conflict and climax. It's a work that you don't doubt was torn living from the author's very being, less a "novel" per se, than an organic and all-but-impossible to dissect whole that loses more the more you attempt to analyze it.
What Barnes records in *Nightwood* is the experiential agony, as opposed to merely the "story," of a love-lost. Robin Vote is a Sapphic femme fatal, an androgynous, alcoholic, nymphomaniac enigma who is beloved, successively, by three different characters, who she subsequently leaves an emotional wreck. Nora Flood, who stands in for the author, is the narrative center of *Nightwood* and the woman around whom the others orbit, with Robin, like a doomsday asteroid, orbiting them all. It is Nora who struggles and suffers and indeed understands Robin better than anyone, even if that only means understanding better the tragedy inherent in knowing her at all. Her utter despair at losing Robin is stunningly captured by Barnes who, it is said, based *Nightwood* closely on a real-life love catastrophe from which she never recovered. One can believe it reading *Nightwood.* A good deal of the novel's intensity comes from its unquestionable authenticity. In Robin Vote, Barnes has created the personification of the unsolvable mystery of every beloved who, as if by destiny, eludes, indeed must elude, our grasp.
Much is made--and rightly so--of *Nightwood's* most famous character, Dr. Matthew O'Connor, an impoverished, drunken, charlatan with dubious medical credentials and a penchant for cross-dressing. A good deal of the novel is devoted to O'Connor's rambling monologues which vibrate between madness, comedy, and transcendent wisdom...sometimes all three together. But the transgendered O'Connor is only the most flamboyantly unconventional of *Nightwood's* inhabitants. All of Barnes's characters are misfits and outsiders, sexually and/or socially; interestingly it is the very displacement they feel within their own time and place that most enables the contemporary reader to sympathize with them. The sense of being out-of-step is, perhaps, timeless. But it's more than mere sexual and social deviance that connect the contemporary reader to these characters--it's a sense of the secret life of us all, the inherent "deviance" of our private lives from the "normal" daylight existence of moderated emotions, rational desires, and objective viewpoints we all pretend to share. "Nightwood" is the country we inhabit when the sun goes down, "society" dissolves, and the inexplicable, uncontrollable, and irrational in us emerges.
I found the first chapter of *Nightwood* dull and dated and almost considered putting the book down. Don't do it. Hang in there until the second chapter...if Barnes doesn't catch your attention at that point, chances are she won't. This is a challenging text, elusively and elliptically written, ejaculatory, jumping from peak to peak, a shout from the soul of despair, a cry from the dark night. The characters don't so much interact with each other, but, as in real life, they are merely declaiming to themselves, using the declamations of others as cues to their own speeches. They affect, deflect, and "aggravate" each other in a sort of vacuum, forcing them to even greater degrees of solitude and despair. And yet, through all these characters, we hear one voice, one lament...the author's, ours, every lover's. As uniquely particular and personal *Nightwood* may be, as idiosyncratically composed, and as inimitable, it is nonetheless an emotional document as common and identifiably human as any kidney or pancreas.
A rare thing, a "novel" that is also a work of art -*Nightwood* is a gnomic utterance of the apocalypse of love.
