Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes's Bewildering Corpus (review)

Djuna Barnes once told Hank O'Neal, eager to record his impressions of her for posterity, "Don't think for a minute this is the real Djuna Barnes. The real Djuna Barnes is dead."¹ In Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes's Bewildering Corpus, Daniela Caselli takes assertions of this kind seriously. Rather than condemn Barnes's bewildering language or seek to clarify it by force, Caselli enters into the confusion, engages and entertains it, discovering in the process extraordinary cohesion in Barnes's life work. The result is a book of meticulous research and argument that draws deeply on archival sources, other Barnes and modernist scholarship, and feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic theory to make its case. Among the benefits of this approach are Caselli's appreciative accounts of French, German, and Italian scholarship on Barnes—typically neglected by American critics—and her careful correlation of lines in Barnes's own oeuvre with passages marked and annotated in the books of Barnes's personal library. This sleuthing adds much to established accounts of Barnes's densely intertextual style. At the same time, Caselli's approach breaks sharply with two previous schools of Barnes criticism, both of which have informed most feminist and queer readings of her work: one that seeks to refer the work to the life (and vice versa) in order to resolve indeterminacies in each and another that seeks to marry the work to current critical and reformist agendas.

Caselli's reading of Barnes starts from a different place. She argues that "Barnes's work is both a resource and a problem for feminism; it offers an uncompromisingly ruthless analysis of sexual politics but it also refuses to produce a model for redressing past wrongs" (p. 247). The value of Barnes's analysis inheres not in the truth of her life but in the power of her language: "Barnes never assumes reality to be there, ready to be unveiled and shown in literature, but regards it instead as the product of interpretation" (p. 128). As a result, author and reader are forever caught inside "an inherently treacherous language" (p. 234) in which "the powerful myth of innocence is always tainted by the mark of gender and intertextuality" (p. 119). Utterly un-innocent, Barnes "stag[es] a language which makes you pay the price, feel implicated, tainted, and complicit" (p. 82).

This linguistic stance rubs uncomfortably against modernist as well as feminist agendas. "Refusing the modernist purity of original creation" (p. 88), Barnes gives us "a queerly anachronistic modernism" (p. 4) whose rampant intertextuality "questions the genealogical narratives that gave birth to modernism itself" (p. 81). Impure, her works become "agents of genealogical counterfeiting" and "expose how a tradition of originals never existed but always needs to be invented as such" (p. 86). As a result her "anti-modern modernism" is always improper, "untimely, posthumous, and illegitimate" (pp. 88, 86).

Caselli consistently locates her argument at the formal as well as narrative level of the text, yielding plausible readings of the genealogical mischief lodged in Nightwood's "structures of repetition" (p. 190) and The Antiphon's "implosive uncreating" (p. 247). The same method yields a beautiful reading of Ryder, whose formal commitment to "unoriginality" and "overabundance" renders a text that "figures itself as colluding with the politics it critiques" (p. 205) and greatly enriches our understanding of the early and late poems, which "question legitimacy by proliferating from a single line" (p. 88).

Caselli's own argument draws on numerous scholarly intertexts whose contents, on closer inspection, help to illuminate some of her claims. For instance, the claim about the "posthumous" nature of Barnes's oeuvre, introduced at the outset, makes much more sense when Caselli quotes directly from Jeremy Tambling's Becoming Posthumous (2001) late in the book (p. 250). There is one set of intertexts largely bypassed in the book though strongly evoked by Caselli's arguments: the ongoing debate about modernist assignations of value, recently given new life in Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz's...