Dr. Matthew O'Connor: the unhealthy healer of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood

Dr. Matthew O'Connor: the unhealthy healer of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood Miriam Fuchs Nearly fifty years after the publication of Nightwood, critics are still arguing over the merits of this strange and powerful novel. Many agree with T. S. Eliot, who was Djuna Barnes's editor at Faber and Faber, that "beauty of phrasing" and "brilliance of wit and characterisation" are two of the qualities that make Nightwood an important American novel.1 Other critics tend to agree with Leslie Fiedler that "dislocated lyricism, hallucinated vision, and oddly skewed language" may be interesting, but not enough for Nightwood to be considered more than a curious example of modern fiction.2 No doubt as readers continue to study the language, inscrutable characters, shifting points of view, and spatial organization, they will continue to disagree. However, one aspect of the novel is rarely disputed, and that is its focus on suffering and the need to be healed. Each character's particular suffering is hard to analyze. Robin is afflicted with somnambulism; her son Guido is born with an unexplained mental deficiency; Matthew O'Connor seems schizophrenic. The first reader to discuss this focus on illness was perhaps T. S. Eliot, who wrote the well-known introduction to Nightwood. In it, he warned other readers to avoid thinking of the novel as "a psychopathic study," but rather to view it as a heightened dramatization of the degree of human misery that usually remains well hidden.3 Eliot did not feel it was necessary to explain each mysterious illness rationally or to subject each character's behavior to meticulous analysis. Each affliction is instead an additional metaphor for the loss of control and predictability, and each method of healing serves as a metaphor for regaining control. When the healer himself, Dr. Matthew O'Connor, is overcome by illness and cannot effect a cure, Barnes's statement of twentieth-century civilization becomes clear. If she wants to suggest that healing in the modern world is an impossible task, 226 DR. MATTHEW O'CONNOR a sentimental vestige from another age, she does so with unforgettable force. Whether Nightwood is merely a curious novel or, in fact, a highly significant novel, its ending is one of the most devastating scenes in all of modern literature. Barnes accomplishes much of her message through the figure of Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor. Although he is larger than life, emerging from the realm of myth, O'Connor is also an American who practices medicine in Paris during the 1920s. His realistic qualities include being skilled, locquacious, and clever. His fantastic qualities include his ability to be everywhere at the right time (though later he insists it has been at the wrong time) and to know the motives and whereabouts of others. Somewhere between O'Connor's realistic and fantastic qualities fall his role-playing talents. He serves as general practitioner, seer, father confessor, psychologist, and all-around savior. In addition, he insists he was the doctor who delivered Nora Flood, Robin's first female lover. O'Connor manages to accomplish all this without a license to practice medicine in the first place. Gradually, though, the line between the healer and the healed becomes tenuous, and the healer is forced to realize that he is no longer immune to various afflictions. When O'Connor concentrates on himself, he decides that his personal disease has been a compulsion to play a life-long charade of falsehoods; he confesses to being a sham, a coward, a buffoon, a transvestite. Thus, for each of his public roles, this healer has possessed a private role, and when the metamorphoses become dizzying and debilitating, the healer collapses. Dr. O'Connor neither develops nor deteriorates in a vacuum. Robin Vote is his patient, and when he is helping her or when he isn't, he is inextricably tied to her, even when they are on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. For part of Nightwood, the dividing line between the healer and his patient is assured; we first meet Robin as O'Connor, like a magician, masterfully treats her disease during a house call; they seem antipodal in almost every way. As...