The Apocalypse for Barnes

Djuna Barnes is not an easy figure for most Gay Pride proponents to rally around. Her writing is generally saturated by an aesthetics of melancholy and despair, more jubilant texts such as Ladies Almanack notwithstanding. Issues rooted in homophobia, racism, and misogyny find no resolution. To the outward eye, the author’s queer negativity puts her at odds with Gay Pride’s affirmative political agenda, offering readers neither redemption nor a way out of impossible love.

But when was literature ever obliged to accommodate such ideological impulses? In mainstream lesbian-feminist criticism, the tendency to gloss over Barnes’s nihilism and to draw out feel-good elements—the mere presence of sexual deviance, the overtly (and fleetingly) anti-patriarchal—gets in the way of reading Barnes’s oeuvre holistically, that is, as a whole in terms of form and context. Writing in 2013, Mary I. Unger, for instance, makes the extravagant claim that Barnes’s early chapbook, The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), “celebrates” its “disabled” bodies as emblems of a spiritually freer, more egalitarian America. Beyond an implicit critique against societal norms that value women according to their beauty, age, and class, Repulsive Women, in Unger’s eyes, exerts a self-conscious effort to “defy national and local campaigns to exterminate ugliness, disability, and other forms of non-normativity from public space” (135) by virtue of its women being, unsurprisingly, “repulsive.” The circularity characterizing this appeal combined with its broadness (virtually all grotesque literary images located in American cities at this time would suffice) and unfounded assumptions leave me unconvinced, though. Unger conceives of Barnes’s characters as somehow choosing their wretchedness to make a political statement against “the American System.” To say that these women “embrace human difference within the American System rather than conform to the standardizing practices of modern art and culture” (145) is akin to positing that the average mendicant lives to be an anti-capitalist visionary.

We can’t go this far with Barnes, and my essay begins at this impasse. Barnes’s writing is too doggedly apocalyptic to support unequivocally redemptive exegeses. “Not until the 1920s and 1930s would [Barnes] begin to imagine and narrate the futurity of such extraordinary bodies” (127), Unger says, but Barnes actually negates their futures and imaginative faculties. For extraordinary bodies, particularly queer ones, fall outside ordinary reproductive narratives and, in a more abstract sense, psychic exchanges.

Interpretations that overstate Barnes’s celebratory gestures turn Barnes into too much of a homo-affirming role model to do justice to her antisocial outlook. Or worse, interpretations that take Barnes to task for not doing enough for the lesbian-feminist cause miss the point of what art is. Like the Woolf critic Toni A. H. McNaron, who expresses “regret” at her author’s unappealing lesbian portraits (13–14), Joan Joffee Hall, in a 1972 review of Ladies Almanack, attacks the roman à clef for its “playfulness,” which she considers “irresponsible” toward the gay rights movement (qtd. in Lanser 164). In a similar vein, Karla Jay accuses Barnes of “present[ing] a reductionist vision” (191) of the pseudo-almanac’s real-life models, simply for portraying them in a less-than-flattering light. She notes at one point, “Had Barnes been willing or able to accept her lesbianism, the Almanack might not have existed or might have been different. The same could probably be said for Nightwood and some of her other works” (193). Some of Barnes’s texts, in short, are “problematic” because not unambiguously “prolesbian” (Jay 193). Aside from misjudging the book’s purpose and tone (Ladies Almanack is far from a documentary homage to Natalie Barney’s salon), Jay and like-minded academics prompt us to interject: why must queer writers invent only winning queer characters and adopt only socially conscientious attitudes toward the queer? We hardly expect straight writers to create only well-adjusted straight men and women.

Such questions seek to counter the vacuity of certain recuperative reading practices in queer studies. If literary criticism becomes nothing more than a salvational modus operandi, it ceases to be literary. As Harold Bloom laments in The Western Canon, “To read...