Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism ed. by Elizabeth Pender and Cathryn Setz (review)

To reread Djuna Barnes is to revise academic literary modernism. Absent for decades from the defining accounts of modern literature despite Nightwood receiving T. S. Eliot's imprimatur at its launch, Barnes's oeuvre speaks to gaps and aporia at the heart of canonical modernist studies, which long kept Barnes a marginalized figure and midcentury cult phenomenon. It is useful to identify the history of these critical omissions, but a more pressing question may be, does Barnes speak to a twenty-first century audience? Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism, a bracing new collection of essays, answers with a rousing affirmative. Edited by Elizabeth Pender and Cathryn Setz, published in the Pennsylvania State University Press's "Refiguring Modernism" series, the book's eleven essays address Barnes's entire body of work both in terms of genre and chronology, and they deploy a range of critical lenses—queer studies, film studies, poetics, affect studies, and more—to bring us a rich portrait of Barnes's accomplishment.

The book's title speaks directly to its editors' belief that Barnes must be read on her own terms. When a critic friend dismissed Nightwood as lacking "cheer," Barnes explained to fellow writer Emily Holmes Coleman that "there is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole object, and likewise the surfaces of a fragment are less 'cheering'" (quoted in Shattered Objects, 1). Pender and Setz interpret this observation as an aesthetic credo, a defense of her quirky and challenging works. But Barnes's explanation raises more questions than it elucidates; the "shattered object" is a puzzling, logic-defying object, seemingly substituting surface for depth while foregrounding and valorizing imperfection and loss, the very qualities so often affiliated with substance. Indeed, Peter Nicholls in his afterword admits to being "haunted" by the book's title, which confounds us with ontological uncertainties (207). Here is not the modernist fear of the human slipping beast-ward but an unblinking vision of the beast becoming un-redemptively human. In order to accommodate our reading practice to Barnes's worldview, we would do well, this collection suggests, to move away from modernist "ambiguity" and acculturate ourselves to Barnes's preference for the uncertain or incomprehensible.

Shattered Objects envisions a different modernism, redefined and sufficiently capacious to admit Barnes's striking and iconoclastic visual/verbal works. The essays gathered here are by leading scholars in what we might call the "New Barnes Studies." In the book's first section, "Modernism in Print," Alex Goody argues that if we place Barnes's early mass-market journalism pieces in situ—that is, in their original contexts flanked by advertising and haphazard spatial arrangements on the page—we can see how they created a gulf between Barnes's strong authorial voice and the editorial exigencies outside her control. This unresolvable tension would become a key "modernist" element of her mature work. Pender's chapter reveals that, when Barnes revised some of her early short fiction for re-publication in the 1960s, she did so under the influence of academic modernism, which had become popularized and mainstreamed. In making her stories more ambiguous and less uncertain, Barnes erased the "heady, vivacious uncertainty" that ran afoul of later canonical criteria (56). Among the essays gathered in "Human and Beast" (one of Barnes's favored tropes), Rachel Potter's chapter compels us to rethink a central challenge of reading Nightwood: that is, the failure of its characters to arrive, to develop. It is a novel of actors who live like beasts "turning" human outside the law and nation state, and Nightwood's stasis repudiates the dynamism of the bildungsroman in order to reimagine a "humanist" story that would otherwise exclude these characters. Bruce Gardiner directs us toward Barnes's relatively under-analyzed Creatures in an Alphabet (1982) filled with verse and curious illustrations of chimerical beasts composed of conflicting parts and competing identities, not unlike...