Djuna Barnes' Consuming Fictions (review)

What happens to artists formerly known as marginal? Thirty-some years on, Djuna Barnes looks like one of feminist criticism's success stories. All her texts are now available—even ephemera and drafts—and critics need no longer choose between caring about sex and caring about style. We need not locate ourselves in a wrangle about "positive images" nor (as Nora puts it in Nightwood) "argue about sorrow and confusion too easily."¹ The genius is out of the bottle. Now what?

One good answer is provided by Diane Warren's solid, workman-like book, which treats the sweep of Barnes's career from the earliest apprentice journalism through The Antiphon—something slightly unusual among a recent spate of books which place Barnes as one among three.² Warren emphasizes Barnes's myriad "negotiations with literary and cultural tradition" (p. x), tracing a concern with the way received stories and images are on the one hand energizing and legitimating and on the other hand "corrosive and disabling" (p. ix). Barnes's early work, Warren argues, uses the anarchic and celebratory power of the carnivalesque to dissolve cultural boundaries, destabilize gender, call into question the public "gaze" of celebrity, and problematize representation itself. However, Nightwood, and particularly its ending, marks a shift toward a more pessimistic concern with the damage done by subversion, and The Antiphon returns to the value of some cultural boundaries as necessary "in a fallen and corrupted world" (p. 169). Warren's questions are solidly feminist ones, and she shows clearly that Barnes's agenda throughout her career was solidly feminist as well, marked by an interest in the relation between textuality and identity (as constructed and/or performed) and by a sustained "defamiliarization of the concepts of home and the domestic" (p. xvi). Along the way, Warren provides a useful, nontendentious recapitulation of scholarly approaches—from the first argument that Barnes should be rescued from her status as cult figure and one—book wonder to her current canonization as feminist modernist—with accompanying controversies about her views on racial and sexual identity and her relationship to the sexual ideologies of her day. The strength of Warren's book is in close reading of textual and intertextual detail and exploration of how each text works out its internal problematic.

It is perhaps some sign of success that Barnes's work can be treated as a coherent system of philosophical ideas that has a consistency over the course of her life and develops according to its own logic. The archival work that was foundational to early interpretations seems no longer necessary, and certain key authorities and tropes for feminist criticism—Mikhail Bahktin, Nancy Chodorow, écriture feminine, and gender as performance—seem here to be in place for use, rather than in development and evolution. Warren's book will be helpful to nonspecialists planning to teach Barnes; it has the virtue of not relying on biographical "data" (many of them contested) and, most especially, of presenting Barnes first and foremost not as a colorful figure of Paris in the twenties, a "difficult" person, or a "character," but as a serious writer.

Indeed, throughout her life, Barnes worked with, and reworked, received discourses—ranging from Leviticus to Havelock Ellis—to the point where asking whether she "subverts" or "upholds" the views she voices begins to feel like a fool's errand; it seems possible that Barnes herself neither knew nor cared where exactly the text, not to say the author, is standing when all the ideological balls fall out of the air. One must, then, praise Warren for not answering the questions she raises in any over-simple way. She is right, for instance, that Ladies' Almanack, "shifting between insider and outsider perspectives. . .both draws on and parodies sexological discourse" (pp. 74, xiv), and that Nightwood does the same for psychoanalysis; and I think she is right that insofar as Ladies Almanack makes an argument or offers a description of women and/or lesbians, it is an unsentimental account that values diversity of experience...