Nightwood’s Freak Dandies: Decadence in the 1930s

In the first chapter of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, Baron Felix Volkbein “owe[s] his first audience with a ‘gentleman of quality’” to the Duchess of Broadback, the trapeze artist otherwise known as Frau Mann.¹ Like the “Duchess” and the “Baron,” Count Ontario Altamonte’s claim to aristocracy is suspect, and among the “impossible people” who gather to receive him, only Felix, devoted as he is to the “great past,” seeks to pay him homage (N, 13, 9). When Felix arrives, however, he finds that instead of the Count, it is Dr. Matthew O’Connor who is holding court. Rather than being received by royalty, Felix becomes part of an “audience” for an entirely different performance: the discursive dexterity of the putative doctor. The centerpiece of that performance is O’Connor’s account of Nikka, “the nigger who used to fight the bear in the Cirque de Paris” (N, 16). “Tattooed head to heel with all the ameublement of depravity” (ibid), Nikka’s body brings together the tattooed man and the African savage, two standard exhibits of the American freak show stage. Like O’Connor, Nikka is a performer, and O’Connor’s account of him is thus a meta-performance in which the Coney Island freak shows that Barnes knew so well converge with the decadent aesthetic which informs virtually everything she wrote.²

As embodied in Nikka, the freak show performer becomes heir to the Decadent Aesthetics of the fin de siècle as read through the historical context of the 1930s, the decade in which avant-garde modernists witnessed the simultaneous consolidation of fascism in Europe and the culture industry on both sides of the Atlantic.³ Like Nikka, Nightwood’s neo-Decadent performance is inseparable from the discursive and material effects that attend both of these historical events. For if, in Nightwood, a critically appropriated version of the Decadence of the 1890s paradoxically registers the novel’s protest against fascism, its debt to the traditions of the American freak show underscores the extent to which the novel recognizes the famed aesthetic autonomy of the Decadent subject as dependent upon the liberal capitalism from which it emerged. Despite the fact that writers associated with Decadence in the last decades of the nineteenth century variously negotiated commodity culture, as Walter Adamson has recently argued, avantgarde modernists, particularly throughout the interwar period, came to understand their own projects as breaking with Aestheticist “religions of art” dependent upon “the illusion of autonomous control over culture by intellectuals.”⁴ Equally informed by the changes in the American culture industry observed by Barnes in her journalism and by a Decadent Aesthetic borrowed from abroad, Nightwood presents a dandy that is always and inevitably a freak.

Celebrating Nikka as a “depraved” savage, O’Connor complicates the discourse of the “noble savage” particular to the modernist avant-garde, its appropriation of the “primitive” as an alternative to the ossified forms of Western art and subjectivity, and he does so by rendering Nikka not only the object of his art, but a decadent performer in his own right. A juxtaposition of eclectic quotation, Nikka’s tattooed body can surely be seen as a “mimesis of subjection,” for written on his body is “an iconography of Western racist and colonial discourses.”⁵ In addition to the Shakespearean “Desdemona” tattooed on his penis and the words “I can” tattooed across his knees, O’Connor reveals that Nikka has adorned his body with an angel from Chartres, a Jansenist quotation from a book of magic, two “arrow-speared hearts” dripping blood, a trade ship, and references to both the Houses of Tudor and Rothschild (N, 16). Yet while Nikka’s subjection is written on his racialized and sexualized body, as a textual performance his body can also be seen as a parodic resignification of Church and State in which the borders between the spiritual, the erotic, and the aesthetic are themselves subject to decay.⁶ With Jansenist allusions across his buttocks, the angel of Chartres on his belly, Desdemona on his penis, and the “swart rambler rose copied from the Hamburg house of Rothschild...