Nightwood (Paperback)

Barnes's elliptical descriptions of her characters create a sense that she knows as little about the characters in their narration as the reader knows reading of them. This is not a failure to properly think out the characters, but a condition intentionally created to blur the character's past and relinquish control of the character's enactment of their identity. The authorial descriptions of the characters are largely metaphorical, but as the identities of the characters become more layered the descriptions become more actual than metaphorical. An example is the description of the Duchess of Broadback (Frau Mann): She seemed to have a skin that was the pattern of her costume: a bodice of lozenges, red and yellow, low in the back and ruffled over and under the arms, faded with the reek of her three-a-day control, red tights, laced boots-one somehow felt they ran through her as the design runs through hard holiday candies, and the bulge in the groin where she took the bar, one foot caught in the flex of the calf, was as solid, specialized and as polished as oak. The stuff of the tights was no longer a covering, it was herself; the span of the tightly stitched crotch was so much her own flesh that she was as unsexed as a doll. The metaphor becomes more than an artistic way to relate the characters to reality. The characters absorb them and they transform into the thing described. This creates a space where the distinction between stage and reality is also blurred and the character can thus create a reality built on their own terms. Frau Mann's erased sexual being can now choose to assume the identity of a male or female. Reality and performance become inextricable linked to each other. The absorbed descriptions of the characters create a distance between the author and character so that the characters create their own identities to perform. In this way the characters are given as much creative freedom as the author. Just as the author's imagination in the creation of the story is limitless, so is the character's scope of their identity. Thus they are able to perform as they like while giving and withholding bits of their own identity.

The purpose for performing identity originates in the character's belief that there is something essential about their identity that does not work within the social mode they inhabit. In Nightwood characters are revealed to be Jewish, homosexual and transgendered. They have all found ways to express facets of these parts of their identity in ways that are safe within the community they inhabit. Because the character's past is obscured, there is no concrete sense of the identities they abandoned or the circumstances under which it did not fit into a set of social norms. Doctor O'Connor's physical identity does not coincide with his belief of what his essential identity is and so he must create a sense of being through words and by dwelling in places that are uninhibited by social norms. The creation of an identity that is closer to the self is based upon a dismantlement and reconstruction of identity.

I doubt highly I've misread it either, as I read it twice just to make sure. If I could say anything good about it: I enjoyed pages 26, 57 and 60.

There's one character who can't utter a single sentence unless it's an aphorism: 'Sorrow fiddles the ribs and no man should put his hand on anything...the foetus of symmetry nourishes itself on cross purposes, this is its wonderful unhappiness...oh Lord, why do women have partridge blood and set out to beat up trouble?' Relentless verse posing as dialogue.

Mind you, there is an inane line later in the novel where a character says: 'there's no last reckoning for those who have loved too long so for me there is no end. I can't live forever,' she said frantically. 'I can't live without my heart!'I suppose if you pick the odd good sentence and enjoy marvelling at the awfulness of the others, this might just be a good way to spend some time. For everyone else: watch some telly instead.