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

Daniela Caselli's book on Djuna Barnes's writing is impressive for two reasons. First, her close and subtle readings of a nearly complete corpus of works—including her journalistic pieces, interviews, poetry, and short stories, as well as her better-known publications, Nightwood and Ladies Almanack—is a feat in and of itself, given the author's notorious and, as Caselli suggests, purposeful obscurity. Second, Caselli meticulously and extensively uses archival material, including Barnes's drawings, personal correspondence, press clippings, and the like. She argues that although her subject has been always nominally a part of modernism, she is "ineluctably severed from it" because her texts cannot be assimilated to it (258). They neither fit neatly into categories of canonical modernism, nor can they be subsumed within labels like lesbian or feminist literature. Instead, the author explains, "Barnes's disenchanted texts are neither marginal nor subversive" because they tirelessly interrogate conceptual antitheses and in so doing wage "war against the common sense of the straight mind" (259, 258).

One might contend, however, that Barnes simply wages war on common sense, regardless of the kind of mind one possesses. This approach might be a problem not only for the author but also for her readers, including Caselli herself; for if we buy into the notion that her works resist assimilation into any sort of category, then Barnes becomes fairly incomprehensible. For example, in addition to rejecting modernist or lesbian labels, Caselli is uneasy with biographical material. Like Barnes herself, Caselli wants to discourage biographical readings of her subject's oeuvre; or, rather more precisely, she wants "to read personal documents" not as the road to some truth or the revelation of psychic trauma (130), as critics such as Mary Lynn Broe and Phillip Herring have done, but as simply another set of texts that employ sophisticated representational strategies not at all guaranteeing any revelation of the "real." On one hand, I applaud this move; personal letters and other similar artifacts are indeed not transparent accounts of life. On the other hand, barring us from some factuality regarding Barnes's complex familial and romantic relationships that might facilitate an understanding of her published texts cuts away much of the already slim ground of interpretation on which we stand.

Further, the book's very strengths—the intense close readings, the sophisticated connections among the texts, and the attention to archival details—are undermined when there is no biographical scaffolding on which to hang ideas. While the book offers extraordinarily dense reading, at times matching Barnes's own difficulty and opacity, it also offers keen insights; as Caselli remarks in a discussion untangling what is at stake in an early interview of Barnes by Guido Bruno, "[W]hen Barnes speaks she cannot be believed, and her self-portrait is considered not to resemble, let alone coincide, with the beautiful, lively, 'picturesquely' dressed woman" who is being interviewed (7). (The self-portrait is literally one Barnes presented to her interviewer and figuratively her verbal self-representation.) The statement frames a general critical problem for the author's oeuvre: Her work repeatedly "challenges representational habits by troubling Bruno's notion of reality" (7). Despite fine observations like these, readers without as intimate and deep a knowledge of Barnes's lesser-known texts as Caselli has might well be bewildered.

While this book will be of particular interest to Barnes scholars, especially those teaching or taking graduate classes in modernism or in courses that include novels like Nightwood, it will be less useful to those interested in situating this "bewildering corpus" in the context of American women writers. Barnes is, as the author points out, not interested in being recuperated into any system (33). As Caselli writes about Nightwood, "Its relentless analysis of positionality . . . makes this novel 'positionless' and devoid of a proper 'philosophy,' therefore difficult either to recuperate under an inclusive agenda or to condemn as hiding dubious ideological affiliations" (169). Instead, what this and other texts demand...