ENG3ALT Associate Professor Alison Ravenscroft Darryl Ephraums 16302631 Workbook

Contents
1. A meditation on Modernism 2. Trees and Fields - the search for God 3. Djuna Barnes Nightwood and the deferral of meaning

A meditation on Modernism

For nearly twenty years my father has fetishised a list from a newspaper. It is tucked away in a filing cabinet amidst financial paraphenalia, to be retrieved from time to time in dogmatic pursuit of an acculturated self. No year passes without mention of the list. It is dominant; it is essential. It is the yardstick by which this man might enact his own sense of racial uplift. What then, of the list? Nothing less than the one hundred greatest literary works in history. Lo, the human is invented. But the list confounds my father. Route one demands an inhuman degree of mental vigour! Yet whosoever mounts Everest and lives to tell the tale is imminently respectable. And that is why his son must read Ulysses.

My father has not read Ulysses. I believe he has tried and failed (several times) just as I have tried and failed (once) to explain to him the problematic political implications of literary canon-making. Of course, this is not to say Ulysses is undeserving of exaltation. I would not know. I have not read it. But the inevitability of its malevolent(?) presence at the summit of the omnipotent list exemplifies the conundrum of the average reader: the impenetrability of the Modernist artefact, which I shall now briefly and rather inadequately demystify.

Literature does not foment within a vaccuum. We must therefore acknowledge the social conditions that have spawned Modernism. Of central importance is the transition from what Deleuze would call the 3

neurotic nation-state of the despot to the schizophrenic, capitalist, marketsociety of the bourgeoisie. The conversion of scientific knowledge into technological capital revolutionises the means of production.

Industrialisation and new modes of global communication arise; political economies manifest and millions of colonised subjects are displaced. A new order surges like a colossal wave only to shatter itself upon the rocks, retreating back into the sea before reforming and shattering over and over and over again. In the immortal words of Marx:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to facethe real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.1

Modernism responds to this flux of human relations by unsettling traditional, dialectical conceptions of time, space, history, gender, sexuality and race. However, it is the manner of the Modernist rupture which commands our attention, that is, its revolution of literary style. It is the literature of technology, claim Bradbury and McFarlane.
2

In the

materialistic market society the aesthetically self-conscious Modernist narrative attempts to resist commodification through its own selfrealisation, outside and beyond established orders3 a totality unto itself albeit one that is bleak, alienated, fractured held together by the internal
1

F Engels, K Marx, [1848], The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, Verso, London, 1998, p.38. 2 M Bradbury, J McFarlane, Modernism: 1890-1930, Penguin Books, Hammondsworth, 1976, p. 27. 3 Ibid., p. 25.

force of its style 4. We might playfully understand it in psychoanalytical terms as the epitome of the ultimate hysteric, resisting the symbolic coordinates of the dominant ideology.

But in doing so, the Modernist text (and its imperialisation think Eliot on Barnes) hoards artistic capital from the population, thereby negating its own political currency.5 It epitomises (for Marxist critics like Georg Lukcs in particular) a bourgeois aesthetic to be studied if one has but the time, space and capital. Or in other words: a room of ones own. In saying that, my father has now had a room of his own for many years since leaving behind third-world poverty. It hasnt helped him figure out how to read Ulysses. How truly privileged then I must be to study Modernism! Nevertheless, Joyces masterpiece and the immutable list will remain for my socially-conscious father an elusive spectre of cultural capital beckoning him upwards into the light.

4 5

Ibid. T Eagleton, Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism in New Left Review, vol. 152, no. 1, 1985, p. 67.

Trees and Fields

I am not religious. But I may as well be. Because I keep looking for God! So where is he then? Maestro Alpha-Omega? Somewhere up high no doubt. Yes. I suppose he is capering atop some frightfully tall, ivory tree a transcendental penis splitting the heavens; all arrogative rage; virile excitement. In his treehouse Almighty writes an immeasurable tale. He labours over an endless roll of parchment that floods his workspace like a swollen river. In order to make further room to write, God hurls the scroll off the edge of the world and into the abyss below. Where I am waiting on the ground. In the dark wood. I catch the scroll and sit down eagerly to read, underlining passages that catch my eye and making vaguely penetrating comments next to ideas that trigger flickers of recognition within my mind. But life at the base of the tree is poor. Static. The shadows of trees make the words difficult to decipher. And I begin to think, and I dont know why, of the closed gardens of the world where all people can make their thoughts go up high because of the narrowness and beauty6 Fortunately I have been rigidly schooled in that most puissant art of treeclimbing. Sometimes it is the only rational thing one can do. Not least because the view is much better from way up high. Plus I really want to meet the big guy. When I reach the top of the tree, no one is there. What else can one do but light an arboresecent taper, honouring whatever trace of divine residue remains before carefully making ones way back down the tree to the ground. I try again with another tree. From beginning to end in one tremendous gulp of words. This time I am reassured that I can weave meaning from the scroll. But the light could still be better and so I climb the tree. Once more there is naught but the faint metallic waft of arborescent fervour in my nostrils. I descend the tree. I repeat this process again and again; and again; and again and again. And fall into a deeply troubled and exhausted sleep. Gods laughter reverberates in my dreams. But soon the disembodied voice dissipates upon
6

D Barnes, Nightwood, Faber and Faber, London, 2007, p. 89

the advent of another figure, a lady with peculiarly short hair, faraway eyes and a pleasant face. She speaks Open each text at random, read in the middle, on the sides. Let it rise. Take two sentences, one short, one long, listen to their music.7 I awake to an unusual sense of calm. Wherefore once I saw only sturdy tree trunks stretching powerfully toward the sky I now fathom a certain base and limpid quality to their strength. Thus I retrieve the voluminous reams of parchment that have fallen at the base of each tree and instead take them out to the wide fields where the heart can spread out and thin its vulgarity.8

H Cixous, Hlne Cixous Professor of Feminist Philosophy Lectures, The European Graduate School, 2012, < http://www.egs.edu/faculty/helene-cixous/lectures/>, viewed 8 April 2012. 8 D Barnes, p. 89.

Djuna Barnes Nightwood and the deferral of meaning

In reading and re-reading Nightwood by Djuna Barnes I am painfully aware of the impotence of my own rigid mental structures. I am somewhat like the character Felix, beholden to the frameworks imposed by human history and its institutions, the constructed truths that create the structures the rationality of the day has imposed.9 As such, the purpose of Trees and Fields is two-fold. Firstly, it invokes Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattaris rejection of the aborescent model of linear thinking10 in order to evoke the manner in which a reader might imprison meaning, reducing it to something merely manageable, degrading the narrative into the eternally disfigured whipping-toy of critical scrutiny. An aborescent structure grows upward from a root-source culminating in branches that continuously subdivide into smaller structures. The nineteenth century novel is arguably aborescent. We read it from beginning to end with a pseudo-phallic thrusting in pursuit of the obligatory climax whereby all is revealed. Thus satisfied, the exemplary book-elf rolls over and begins to snore. But to what finite root do we flee when traditional narrative form itself is tired of trees? We should stop believing in trees, roots and radicles, write Deleuze and Guattari. Theyve made us suffer too much.11 But more importantly, Trees and Fields can be understood as an exercise of personal therapeutic penance that recapitulates some of the ways in and out of Nightwood. To explicate the method, I shall
9

D Gerstenberger, The Radical Narrative of Djuna Barness Nightwood in E Friedman and M Fuchs (eds.), Breaking the Sequence: Womens Experimental Fiction, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989, p. 136. 10 G Deleuze, F Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 1987, p. 22. 11 Ibid., p. 15.

focus on the chapter Watchman, What of the Night? and trace a line of thought through Jacques Derrida and Hlne Cixous that demonstrates how Nightwood slips the dominant phallocentric discourse.

In Watchman, What of the Night? Doctor Matthew-mighty-grainof-salt-Dante-OConnor unleashes a euphoric inquiry into the patriarchal binary thought of day/night that has colonised Western discourse. The day, which signifies the various meanings of white, masculine heteronormativity etc, projects an unconscious fantasy: a fabulous reconstruction of fear, fear bottom-out and wrong side up.12 Therefore the day not only constitutes the night or the other, but devastates the others quest for selfdetermination in the endless battle for signifying hegemony. When OConnor blithely proclaims that [m]an makes his history with the one hand and holds it up with the other13 he similarly implies that Western history is not only written by victors but that the discursive act itself embodies a subjective violence which traumatises human identity from the very moment a person lies down in The Great Bed14 Barnes Symbolic order. This is evident in the Jewish Felix, who clings to the farcical vestige of an imperial identity that paradoxically wants to destroy him, and Matthew, the bearded lady 15 who never asked better than to boil some good mans potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine mongths by the calendar.16

12 13

D. Barnes, p. 72. Ibid., p. 80. 14 Ibid., p. 72. 15 Ibid., p. 90 16 Ibid., p. 82.

How then does Nightwood subvert phallocentric discourse, thereby opening up a positive space in which the other can prosper? This becomes clear if we study Barnes radical narrative through the converging thought of Derrida and Cixous and the concept of diffrance. If the early structuralists construct meaning through binary oppositions, a term can only signify what it is not. As such, the day cannot be meaningful without the corresponding binary of night. But for Derrida meaning (signification) is not produced in the static closure of the binary opposition. Rather it is achieved through the free play of the signifier. 17 The Saussurian phoneme, as the smallest linguistic differential, cannot produce signification through a binary opposition. In fact it cannot signify any type of meaning on its own. The way in which the signifier then operates is by deferring meaning to other differentials within language. What we should infer from this is that language does not culminate in some kind of transcendental signification. Meaning is always postponed or deferred and therefore incomplete.

Is this not precisely then the function of the narrative in the chapter Watchman, What of the Night? whereby the Doctor performs an endless deferral of meaning which he cloaks under the seductive shroud of language itself? A traditional phallocentric reading systematically pieces meaning together in a linear progression leading towards enlightenment? But what do we do when the the Doctors wisdom that the search for signification is

17

T Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, Routledge, New York, 2002, p. 104.

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like a dog chasing its own tail is not only the truth, but also the price?18 [emphasis mine] As Donna Gerstenberger states: the reader who comes wholly to Nightwood must be willing to pay the same price OConnor has paid for his, at best, contingent wisdom. And for many readers the price has been unthinkable. 19 It is at this stage that we should remember Cixous memorable method of reading: Open each text at random, read in the middle, on the sides. Let it rise. Take two sentences, one short, one long, listen to their music. For the impotent reader-addict who regularly overdoses on the delirium of Barnes language, such a mode of reading Nightwood will help to evade the Symbolic coordinates of the phallocentric system and open up a positive space for the other within patriarchal binary thought.

18 19

D Barnes, p. 81. D Gerstenberger, p. 137.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Barnes, D, Nightwood, Faber and Faber, London, 2007. Bradbury, M, McFarlane, J, Modernism: 1890-1930, Penguin Books, Hammondsworth, 1976. Cixous, H, Hlne Cixous Professor of Feminist Philosophy Lectures, The European Graduate School, 2012, < http://www.egs.edu/faculty/helenecixous/lectures/>, viewed 8 April 2012. Deleuze, G, Guattari, F, A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 1987. Eagleton, T, Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism in New Left Review, vol. 152, no. 1, 1985, pp. 60-73. Engels, F, Marx, K [1848], The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, Verso, London, 1998. Gerstenberger, D, The Radical Narrative of Djuna Barness Nightwood in E Friedman and M Fuchs (eds.), Breaking the Sequence: Womens Experimental Fiction, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989. Moi, T, Sexual/Textual Politics, Routledge, New York, 2002.

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