1 2 4 .
3  ]
Dazzling Estrangement: Modernism, Queer
Ekphrasis, and the Spatial Form of Nightwood
brian glavey
Brian glavey is an assistant professor of
En­glish at the University of South Carolina,
Columbia. He is writing a book manuscript
on aesthetics and sexuality entitled “The
Sissy Arts: Modernism and Mimesis.”
W hen Djuna Barnes pronounced herself “the most fa-
mous unknown” of the twentieth century, she offered a
diagnosis that would ring true even into the twenty-­first.1
Despite its influence and notoriety, her novel Nightwood (1936) often
seems shrouded in an aura of oblivion, “strangely canonized and
unread,” as Jane Marcus describes it, as though it were always to
be remembered as a forgotten classic (87). To a certain extent, the
book’s curious status can be attributed to the challenge it poses for
literary historians. As Tyrus Miller explains, “Essential to Barnes’s
whole literary corpus is a certain ‘positionless’ quality, its generic
and categorical uncertainty and its correlative unsettling of literary
historical oppositions” (124). Joseph Allen Boone offers a similar as-
sessment when he cautions that “despite its modernist affinities—
which include its experimental narrative style, intricacy of literary
allusion, thematics of alienation, and representation of the power of
unconscious desire—the novel can only with the greatest difficulty
be assimilated into the canon of high modernist practice” (233). For
Boone, the key to the book’s inassimilable character is a queerness
reflected as much by its representational strategies as by its cast of
characters. As if anticipating the anti-­identitarian refusals of con-
temporary queer theory, Nightwood stymies any attempt to catego-
rize or label. Queerness and modernism seem to pull the novel in
equal and opposite directions.2
Without denying the intransigence of this dilemma, I’d like to
suggest that Nightwood’s queerness and its modernism must be un-
derstood together. Likewise, neither its aesthetic strategies nor its
sexual politics can be comprehended without attending to its fame
and anonymity side by side. This dual focus complicates the received
[  © 2009 by the moder n language association of america  ] 749
750 Dazzling Estrangement: Modernism, Queer Ekphrasis, and the Spatial Form of Nightwood
view that the book represents a “modernism

of marginality.”3 The remarkable list of affini-
ties that precedes Boone’s caveat—like Mil­
ler’s suggestion that uncertainty is “essential”
to Barnes’s work—suggests a more ambiva-
lent relation between center and margin. It is
not its refusals alone that make the book so
challenging; it is the way these refusals bristle
against the fact that the novel seems so recog-
nizably modernist. This tension is not a mere
accident of Barnes’s critical reception. Night-
wood is devoted at once to recognition and
obscurity, a difficult combination that renders
it simultaneously lustrous and hard to grasp.
To borrow another of Barnes’s characteristic
phrases, the novel is animated at once by “love
and anonymity,” twin spirits “so ‘haunted’ of
each other that separation [is] impossible”
(Nightwood 55). Nightwood enacts the charge
between these opposing forces on the level of
form through a strategy of queer ekphrasis:
a tense and trembling vibration between mo-
tion and stasis that aestheticizes moments of
loss and withdrawal, giving aesthetic form
to experiences of stigma in order to transfig-
ure—but not transcend—them.4
On a formal level, Nightwood affirms and
refutes the aesthetics of high modernism. The
work has affinities not only with modern-
ism’s subversive, destabilizing characteristics
but also with aesthetic features more closely
associated with T. S. Eliot and the New Crit-
ics. After all, Barnes’s novel, and not Ulysses
or The Waste Land, inspired Joseph Frank to
formulate his influential thesis about spatial
form in modern literature. Little attention
has been paid to this surprising fact, and even
less to the complicated history of its suppres-
sion. Correcting this omission reveals that
modernism’s experiments with spatiality
are potentially a good deal queerer than has
been recognized. It will also help highlight
the limitations of a particular tendency in
modernist studies. Although an important
strain of politically attuned criticism has re-
claimed form as an important object of study,
[  P M L A
in general this development has focused on
aesthetic effects aligned with destabilization,
defamiliarization, and disruption. This has
meant that certain kinds of aesthetic experi-
ence associated with modernist form—a to-
talizing vision, for instance, or the attempt to
forge complex unities from fragments and ru-
ins—have been relegated to an old-­fashioned,
reactionary tradition.5 Critics have tended to
divide early-­twentieth-­century aesthetic pro-
duction into good and bad modernisms: on
the one hand a movement wholly devoted to
subversion and provocation, on the other an
elitist set piece of well-­w rought urns.6 Night-
wood’s experiment with form calls for a more
capacious understanding of modernism, one
that attends to its political implications and
investments without divvying the aesthetic
up into the good, the bad, and the ugly.
My reading of Barnes also highlights
a similarly stark rift that now runs through
queer studies. Recent work in this field tends
to be defined either by a willfully affirmative
stance or by defiant and total negativity. Work
defined by negativity, identified as “antisocial”
in the recent PMLA forum “The Antisocial
Thesis in Queer Theory,” develops from Leo
Bersani’s insights about the potentially anti-
social impulse he locates in same-­sex desire.7
Such work extends queer theory’s critique of
identity to include a critique of the social in
general. This trend is embodied most emphati-
cally in Lee Edelman’s controversial No Future
(2004), which argues for an understanding of
queerness as an all-­out refusal of any form of
affirmation or futurity. Of course, other crit-
ics have questioned the privilege such work
affords to refusal and self-­shattering. Eve Ko-
sofsky Sedgwick, for instance, insists on the
need for reparative criticism, suggesting that,
for subjects who do not see their identifica-
tions and desires reflected in the culture at
large, constructing meaningful wholes rather
than embracing self-­negation is by no means
necessarily conservative (123–52).8 Nightwood
illuminates the contours of this debate, show-
1 2 4 .3   ] Brian Glavey
ing that the desire for unity, the longing for
order and meaning, are not always the cul-
prits of heteronormativity. But it also insists
that such insight should not obfuscate the
ways that illusions of identity are generated
from the disavowal of difference and of queer
sexual logics.
Both of these arguments are brought to-
gether by my sense that Nightwood offers a
vocabulary for talking about queerness, mod-
ernism, and the aesthetic that is less Man-
ichean, and consequently more useful, than
much of the current critical discourse. There
are excellent reasons for forwarding a vision
of queerness as either total refusal or repara-
tive affirmation. Likewise, cordoning off a
subversive vision of modernism from the for-
malist variety has helped revitalize modern-
ist studies. However, these sorts of divisions
are not particularly useful for thinking about
aesthetic experience. Indeed, the value of the
aesthetic, for Barnes, has much to do with the
way it enables a shuttling back and forth be-
tween sense and dissension, between utopian
and antisocial energies. Nightwood’s most lo-
quacious character, Dr. Matthew O’Connor,
offers an ars poetica for this interstitial for-
malism: “In time everything is possible and
in space everything forgivable; life is but the
intermediary vice” (126–27). Barnes’s inter-
media art recognizes the redemptive appeal
of the spatial and its repressive potential.9 It
is caught between a redemption that is im-
possible and a possibility that is damned, a
situation aptly characterized by the multiple
senses of vice: a sin or falling away; a deni-
grated pleasure; a tool that clamps down on
something to hold it in place.
Barnes’s aesthetic resembles, for instance,
Murray Krieger’s “ekphrastic principle,” which
Krieger defines as “the still movement of po-
etry,” a form “to be viewed only as movement,
though as movement that the aesthetic would
permit us to grasp even as it was slipping away”
(“My Travels” 221–22). In this broader sense,
ekphrasis is not merely description; rather, it
751
represents literature’s attempt to usurp the so-

lidity of the plastic arts as a stay against the
ravages of time. Placing Nightwood’s images of
clutching and withdrawal at the heart of the
modernist tradition of spatial form, however,
yields a different understanding of the aes-
thetic attempt to grasp at loss. Modernism’s
desire to endow literature with the spatiality
of an art object is typically read as an attempt
to preserve text from context. But the fact
that such ambition is pursued through imita-
tions of other art forms itself suggests a less
hermetic interpretation. To the extent that it
models itself after well-­wrought urns and Chi-
nese jars, ekphrasis can seem like a confusion
of poetry with pottery: all literature aspiring
to the condition of ceramics. Though usually
understood as writing that maximizes au-
tonomy, ekphrasis could just as easily be seen
as literature at its most mimetic, as a copy of
a copy, an imitation with no original. Barnes
reveals precisely this queer potential within
ekphrasis, a form that emphasizes the impos-
sibility of coherence and identity even as it tes-
tifies to the power of their appeal.10
A queer reading of spatial and other ek-
phrastic forms does not see them as trump-
ing temporality with eternal transcendence.
Whereas Krieger proposes that “ekphrastic
completeness allows us to transfer the human
conquest of time from the murky subjec-
tive caverns of phenomenology to the well-
­w rought, well-­l ighted place of aesthetics”
(Ekphrasis 287), Barnes reminds us that the
aesthetic can help us get a handle on expe-
rience without taking the next step of rescu-
ing it from its subjective caverns. She seems
to suggest that a spatial poetics might be well
wrought without being well lit. However, her
treatment of the relation between human suf-
fering and the aesthetic is more complicated
even than this. Indeed, despite the selva os-
cura of its title, Nightwood is a work oddly
dedicated to visibility. The fluorescence that
Krieger (and most other theorists of form) as-
sociate with the aesthetic becomes for Barnes
752 Dazzling Estrangement: Modernism, Queer Ekphrasis, and the Spatial Form of Nightwood
not a force of enlightenment but a force that

stuns and blinds in a process she refers to as
dazzling estrangement.
Barnes explicates this transfiguration
through the history of her character Baron
Felix Volkbein. His father, Guido, “a Jew of
Italian descent,” had sought to escape anti-
­Semitism by inventing an aristocratic Aus-
trian lineage and the “pretence to a barony”
(1, 3). Guido dies six months before his son is
born, and when Felix’s mother dies in child-
birth, Felix is “thrust” (1) into the world an
orphan without connection to the past, inher-
iting nothing but his fabricated lineage and
two portraits of phony grandparents. Con-
templating the manner in which he clutches
at this trumped-­up barony, the novel distin-
guishes Felix’s motivations from those of the
circus and theater crowd: “They took titles
merely to dazzle boys around town, to make
their public life (and it was all they had) mys-
terious and perplexing” (11). Felix and these
performers share the condition of inescapable
publicity, of being forced to perform their
alienation before prying eyes. But whereas the
actors and trapeze artists direct their perfor-
mances outward, Felix directs his inward: he
clings “to his title to dazzle his own estrange-
ment” (11). Syntactically, Barnes’s unusual
phrasing places estrangement parallel to boys
around town, assigning a curious ontology
and even agency to an abstract condition. To
dazzle one’s estrangement is both to make it a
thing, an objet d’art, and to make it beautiful
through illumination. But it is equally to stun,
to temporally immobilize one’s alienation.
Indeed, dazzle also refers to a particular form
of early-­t wentieth-­century camouflage that
works not by hiding its object but by confus-
ing the spectator with bold and fantastic pat-
terns of color.
As an aesthetic, dazzling becomes a sort
of provisional self-­d efense. Estrangement
is not overcome, it is merely tricked—and
tricked out. Barnes emphasizes the dialectical
quality of such an aesthetic, which fetishizes
[  P M L A
even as it affords power and authority. Karen
Jacobs, in her study of literary modernism and
visual culture, demonstrates that the trans-
parent gaze implicit in modernist aesthetic
theories came to be treated with increasing
skepticism in the first half of the twentieth
century. At the same time, she points out, this
period “may equally be regarded as a moment
when those Others who had been historically
conceived as cultural bodies or objects sought
to realign themselves with a viable, ‘pure,’ sub-
ject gaze” (14). Barnes makes especially clear
many of the difficulties of this tension be-
tween a vision that functions as an instrument
of power and a vision that promises subjective
viability. Jean Gallagher writes, for instance,
that “Nightwood positions its characters and
readers within a visual field characterized by a
drastic, menacing, and unavoidable constraint
or entrapment” (281). And yet, in the face
of this pessimistic account of surveillance,
Barnes does not altogether dismiss the pos-
sibilities and pleasures of the visual. Instead,
she attempts to imagine an explicitly aesthetic
mode of visuality that might exist even within
the sightlines of the panopticon—a way of
seeing that doesn’t transform the visible world
into an object to be classified and controlled.
Animated by a desire for a vision that at-
tends to nonnormative subjectivities without
classifying or mastering them, the project of
imagining this way of seeing might itself be
described as queer. In his discussion of the
queer cultures of the sixties, Douglas Crimp
describes a similar desire as an aspiration to-
ward “ways of making queer differences and
singularities visible without always entail-
ing the charge of violation” (58). Likewise,
Barnes’s treatment of the conflicts bound up
in being seen has implications for contempo-
rary debates about the politics of visibility. In
a sense, the political goal of achieving recog-
nition in the public sphere involves the same
tension Nightwood presents between redemp-
tion and reification. For to be represented
in the public inevitably leads to a sort of
1 2 4 .3   ] Brian Glavey
alienation—one can only achieve recognition
through identification with an image, and so
one must become a social type to be seen at
all. Such an imaginary identification can be
validating and alienating at once. Instead of
choosing one horn of this dilemma, Barnes’s
text oscillates in between, even as it enacts
what it feels like to be gored by both.
Dr. O’Connor provides a good example of
this aestheticization, this identification with an
image, in his first appearance. Explicitly calling
attention to the digressive logic that governs
his speech throughout the novel, he describes
how the sexless body of the trapeze artist Frau
Mann brings to mind “something forgotten
but comparable” (15): the tattooed body of
Nikka, a black circus performer. He exclaims,
“Garlanded with rosebuds and hack-­work of
the devil—was he a sight to see!” (16). As if to
underline this vision, the doctor produces an
extended ekphrasis of the performer’s body:
[O]n each buttock, half public, half private, a
quotation from the book of magic, a confirma-
tion of the Jansenist theory, I’m sorry to say
and here to say it. Across his knees, I give you
my word, “I” on one and on the other, “can,”
put those together! Across his chest, beneath a
beautiful caravel in full sail, two clasped hands,
the wrist bones fretted with point lace. On each
bosom an arrow-­speared heart, each with dif-
ferent initials but with equal drops of blood;
and running into the arm-­pit, all down one
side, the word said by Prince Arthur Tudor, son
of King Henry the Seventh, when on his bridal
night he called for a goblet of water (or was it
water?). His Chamberlain, wondering at the
cause of such drought, remarked on it and was
answered in one word so wholly epigrammatic
. . . that he was brought up with a start, and that
is all we will ever know of it, unless . . . you are
as good at guessing as Tiny M’Caffery. (16)11
He concludes his reverie by noting, “And just
above what you mustn’t mention, a bird flew
carrying a streamer on which was incised,
‘Garde tout!’ I asked him why all this barbar-
753
ity, he answered he loved beauty and would

have it about him” (17). Beauty is by these
lights a form of self-­d efense—of dazzling
one’s estrangement—but it is also ever entan-
gled with barbarism. The doctor’s brazen bla-
zon fetishizes racial difference as it objectifies
Nikka and renders him “a sight to see.” At the
same time, however, O’Connor’s extravagant
description might be said to preserve some-
thing of Nikka’s autonomy—insisting on an
ineluctable difference even as it renders him
“comparable” to others. As always, the doc-
tor’s emphasis is ultimately on his own verbal
performance (“I’m sorry to say and here to say
it,” “I give you my word,” and so on). The rela-
tion here between speaker and visual object is
arguably less combative than in the agonistic
interpretation of ekphrasis propounded in
W. J. T. Mitchell’s seminal work. The doctor’s
description does not master or contain an im-
age of Nikka’s body. Instead, its periphrastic
digressions preserve the performer’s enig-
matic singularity, allowing Nikka to remain
inassimilable even while on display. Repeat-
edly pointing to what cannot be said or must
not be mentioned, what remains unknown or
only guessed, this queer ekphrasis preserves
the object’s anonymity, leaving it “half public,
half private.” Nikka, like the doctor and like
his creator, remains famous and unknown.
Although the novel is rife with paintings,
statues, and relics, few passages are ekphras-
tic in the strict sense delineated by James
Heffernan: “the verbal representation of vi-
sual representation” (3). Early on, however,
Barnes does present an ekphrastic description
of the paintings Felix holds to be portraits of
his grandparents. Though the figures bear a
striking resemblance to Felix’s father, in fact
“the likeness was accidental” (7): they repre-
sent two costumed actors. Both images are
nonetheless described at some length:
The deep accumulation of dress fell about her in
groined shadows; the train, rambling through
754 Dazzling Estrangement: Modernism, Queer Ekphrasis, and the Spatial Form of Nightwood
a vista of primitive trees, was carpet-­t hick.

She seemed to be expecting a bird. The gentle-
man was seated precariously on a charger. He
seemed not so much to have mounted the ani-
mal as to be about to descend upon him. The
blue of an Italian sky lay between the saddle
and the buff of the tightened rump of the rider.
The charger had been caught by the painter in
the execution of a falling arc, the mane lifted
away in a dying swell, the tail forward and in
between the thin beveled legs. (6)
Running on to some 250 words, this passage
is remarkable not because it represents a vi-
sual artifact but because it is so difficult to
distinguish from the descriptions of Barnes’s
flesh-­a nd-­blood dramatis personae. Indeed,
all of Nightwood’s characters develop more
like Polaroids than people. These ekphrastic
descriptions rely on a rhetoric of still move-
ment, according to which a figure is “caught”
in a “falling arc” between “expect[ation]” and
“execution,” that resonates throughout. The
description of these portraits is thus emblem-
atic of the novel as a whole. Appearing in the
work’s opening pages, they hold narrative
time in stasis—that is, they freeze time into
space. This ekphrastic interruption risks over-
riding the novel’s plot and threatens to arrest
the story’s forward momentum from the out-
set. Indeed, it defines the “point [where] exact
history stopped for Felix” (7).
Nightwood in this sense performs over
and again a gesture that aligns it with what
detractors and champions of high-­modernist
literature often identify as one of its central as-
pirations, the refusal of narrative temporality
in favor of simultaneity and presence. This as-
pect of the novel would seem to be what Frank
had in mind when he set out to compose his
essay on spatial form in modern literature.
Considering the influence of his argument, it
is worth discussing in some detail the relation
between his thesis and Barnes’s novel. Since
its first appearance in the Sewanee Review in
1945, the essay has inspired decades of discus-
sion and debate on the relation between ver-
[  P M L A
bal and visual media.12 Its elaboration of G. E.
Lessing’s distinction between the temporal
character of literature and the spatial charac-
ter of the plastic arts remains one of the most
influential articulations of modernist aes-
thetic theory. According to Frank’s account, a
text such as Ulysses or In Search of Lost Time
should be read as a constellation of fragments
rather than a story unfolding in time. Each
component resists sequential understanding,
so that looking for narrative in a modernist
work is like reading for plot in a Picasso. Only
once the text stands as a whole in the mind
and the pattern of interior relations holding
it together is apprehended spatially will its
meaning be revealed.13
Frank’s articulation of this stance is es-
pecially useful because it clearly connects this
formal synthesis with broader ideological as-
pirations shared by a wide range of modernist
writers and critics. Not merely a question of
aesthetic form, according to Frank, modern
literature’s spatiality seeks to stitch past and
present into “a timeless unity,” an apotheosis
that transforms “the historical imagination
into myth—an imagination for which histor-
ical time does not exist, and which sees the
actions and events of a particular time only
as the bodying forth of eternal prototypes”
(653). Echoing Eliot’s suggestion that the
“mythic method” might bestow order on “the
immense panorama of futility and anarchy
which is contemporary history” (177), Frank
suggests that aesthetic experience might af-
ford the value and meaning that are taken to
be missing from modern, secular time.14
These theological overtones help explain
why the spatial-­form thesis is generally as-
sociated with a conservative political ideol-
ogy, why it exemplifies what Frank Kermode
has famously labeled a “totalitarian theory
of form” (108). In this view, the spatial-­form
thesis is synonymous with an elitist version
of modernism whose quest for wholeness and
autonomy in the realm of art is analogous to
attempts to preserve identity and suppress dif-
1 2 4 .3   ] Brian Glavey
ference in the social world. But it is possible
to derive a more capacious understanding of
aesthetic form from Frank’s approach, given
its primary indebtedness to Nightwood rather
than to the explicitly redemptive repetitions of
a text like Four Quartets.15 As Frank explains
in a 1981 commentary, he was “haunted” after
first reading Barnes’s book and set out to write
the essay to account for its captivating power:
My preoccupation was never abstract or the-
oretical. I did not set out to write a theory of
modern literature—far from it—and the idea
that I might be engaged in doing so, given my
sense of general ignorance, never crossed my
mind. I only wished to see if I could say some-
thing helpful and enlightening about a particu-
lar work; and I remained focused on that work
and that aim throughout. (Foreword 7–8)
Regardless of this singleness of purpose,
Barnes’s role in the formulation of the essay
was almost immediately forgotten. When
the essay was first anthologized in 1948, its
lengthy exegesis of Nightwood was left on the
cutting room floor, an amputation repeated
ever since.16 Likewise, the critical discourse
surrounding Nightwood rarely offers Frank
more than a footnote.17 Frank himself came
to sympathize with these elisions, downgrad-
ing his youthful enthusiasm for Barnes in the
revised essay printed in The Widening Gyre
(1963) and eventually blaming the essay’s
shortcomings on “the accidental circumstance
that [his] work took its origin in a preoccu-
pation with Nightwood.” It is a work, he con-
tinues, “not destined, as the passage of time
has shown, to exercise a major influence on
the course of the novel; quite on the contrary,
its metaphoric texture, which transforms the
world into ‘soliloquists’ images,’ has remained
something of a sport, technically speaking”
(Idea 109).18 Ironically, the paradigm of spatial
form is dismissed on account of the “passage
of time.” Other novels such as Ulysses osten-
sibly escape being mere technical “sport” be-
cause they are seen to be fruitful: their refusal
755
of history engenders a literary history of its

own. Barnes’s spatial form, by contrast, is fig-
ured as a dead end, a curiosity coded as non-
productive, decadent, and, implicitly, queer.
Barnes’s narrative experiment is thus
dismissed as too particular, a fate that, as
Jaime Hovey and Ed Madden demonstrate,
dogs queer modernism (Hovey 3; Madden
176–88). The images into which it transforms
the world will not unfold, in Frank’s phrase,
into “a bodying forth of eternal prototypes.”
Instead, they body forth as bodies. His dis-
missal is all the more interesting because this
problem of embodied particularity is what
Barnes explores with her own spatial forms.
Consider this image of Nora Flood:
There is a gap in “world pain” through which
the singular falls continually and forever; a
body falling in observable space, deprived
of the privacy of disappearance; as if pri-
vacy, moving relentlessly away, by the very
sustaining power of its withdrawal kept the
body eternally moving downward; but in one
place, and perpetually before the eye. Such a
singular was Nora. (51)
Against the backdrop of a universal welt­
schmerz, Nora is caught in an ekphrastic
vice, defined by an image and bound to a sin-
gular identity. To be such a singular is to be
denied the possibility of transcending one’s
specific embodiment, forced to be a “body . . .
in observable space.” This singularity is not
a complex, subjective particularity but rather
one that belongs to an object, that can be ob-
served and classified. The uncharacteristically
terse sentence that concludes the quoted pas-
sage signals the tension in this form of par-
ticularity: to be “such a singular” is in a sense
not to be singular at all but instead to stand
for a type, to be one example among others.19
Through Barnes, we can understand queer­
ness as a contradictory position in which one
is both a minoritized particular and a repre-
sentative emblem. This form of estrangement
involves being singled out: thus, “from the
756 Dazzling Estrangement: Modernism, Queer Ekphrasis, and the Spatial Form of Nightwood
crux of a thousand impossible situations, Felix

had become the accumulated and single—the
embarrassed” (8–9). But it also involves hav-
ing to become a symbol of one’s accumulated
embarrassments. As Cheryl Plumb explains,
Barnes uses the term “disqualification” to in-
voke “an awareness of a sense of shame, a sug-
gestion that individuals who incurred public
dismissal or scrutiny suffered because of what
had happened to them or what they were, that
is, Jewish, homosexual, or alienated from the
values of a dominant culture.” To further ex-
plain the term, Plumb quotes a 1935 letter in
which Barnes describes a “poor demented dog,
who knew he was being looked at for what had
happened to him, for his disqualification, you
could see it in the way he would not turn his
eyes aside, too damned to make his eyeballs
turn from you” (xvii). According to these ac-
counts, the very identity of the disqualified be-
comes synonymous with their disqualification.
As Barnes attempts to explain of her own fa-
mous anonymity, “I can’t account for it, unless
it is that my talent is my character, my character
my talent, and both an estrangement” (qtd. in
Benstock 234).
The collapsing of character and talent
operates according to the logic of visibility
demonstrated by Barnes’s canine analogy. Her
own talent for estrangement capitalizes on
this fact to create a kind of passive resistance.
Barnes banks not on the epistemological gaze
that promises to master and classify but on
the power of an aesthetic vision that dazzles
and stuns, driving a wedge between seeing
and knowing. As Henry Wotton instructs in
another masterpiece of queer ekphrasis, The
Picture of Dorian Gray, “The true mystery
in the world is the visible, not the invisible”
(Wilde 23). Even as they appear to capitulate
to reification, Nightwood’s images of public
disqualification transform the experience of
being on display, as if trying to imagine a way
one could carve out a small space of privacy
while remaining “perpetually before the eye.”
The peculiar spatio-­temporal logic of ekphrasis
[  P M L A
helps foster the transformation of this experi-
ence, lending the never-­ending withdrawal of
privacy its “sustaining power” (51). Because it
never reaches completion, this still movement
introduces a temporal disjunction that pre-
vents an identity from ever cohering. Robin
exemplifies this disjunction. In an explicitly
aesthetic comparison, she is described as “a fig-
urehead in a museum, which though static . . .
seemed yet to be going against the wind; as if
this girl were the converging halves of a broken
fate, setting face, in sleep, toward itself in time,
as an image and its reflection in a lake seem
parted only by the hesitation in the hour” (38).
Although present as a unity before the eye in
space, the image is divided from itself by time.
Never identical with itself, such an object
cannot be possessed. Felix explains the effect
of this paradox when he describes his desire
for Robin: “If I should try to put it into words,
I mean how I did see her, it would be incom-
prehensible, for the simple reason that I find
that I never did have a really clear idea of her
at any time. I had an image of her, but that
is not the same thing. An image is a stop the
mind makes between uncertainties” (111). An
image is not, after all, what the contemplative
mind seeks. It is only a hesitation of what Wal-
lace Stevens calls “the never-­resting mind,”
which inevitably desires so much more than
an image’s illusory promise of wholeness. Un-
like an idea, Barnes suggests, an image may
be possessed (“I had an image of her”) with-
out being comprehended. Felix admits that it
is impossible to put into words how he saw
Robin, and yet the rest of the novel is dedi-
cated to this ekphrastic project, an attempt to
grasp what is incomprehensible.
To the extent that Nightwood could be
said to have a plot at all, we might understand
it as an account of the psychological dynam-
ics driving this sort of ekphrasis, a literary
mode that is often, Wendy Steiner reminds
us, “an admission of failure” (42). Accord-
ing to Mitchell, the ekphrastic image is “a
sort of unapproachable and unrepresentable
1 2 4 .3   ] Brian Glavey
‘black hole’ in the verbal structure, entirely
absent from it, but shaping and affecting it in
fundamental ways” (“Ekphrasis” 158). Robin
Vote is the singularity around which Barnes’s
other characters circle, a woman described as
though she were a picture, a two-­dimensional
character whose attractiveness is linked with
her silence. From her first appearance in a
mise-­en-­scène set up to mime “a painting by
the douanier Rousseau” (35), she is figured in
explicitly aesthetic terms, a fetish in both the
anthropological and psychoanalytic senses.
Robin is the ekphrastic object par excellence, a
bride of quietness that does not so much tease
out of thought as into it. The novel warns,
“The woman who presents herself to the spec-
tator as a ‘picture’ forever arranged is, for the
contemplative mind, the chiefest danger. . . .
Such a person’s every movement will reduce
to an image of a forgotten experience; a mi-
rage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial
memory” (37). The first half of the novel sets
up a series of situations in which characters
succumb to this chiefest danger. Each specta-
tor is captivated by Robin’s silence and passiv-
ity, and each seeks to interpret the image she
presents in order to control her. But Robin
refuses to participate in the narratives these
other characters—not to mention readers—
devise for her. Thus, these stories stall midway
through the book. The remaining chapters
consist almost entirely of reported speech, as
an exegetical tug-­of-­war ensues to transform
Robin’s mirage into meaningful discourse.
The overall structure of the book is in a sense
ekphrastic, attempting to fill with an endless
profusion of words the void left by a black hole
of images.
The novel is thus not only a cautionary
tale about desire but also a critique of the sex-
ual politics of modernism. Barnes brings to
light the fetishistic tendency to treat people as
pictures, offering an allegory of the belief that
form, “forever arranged,” might redeem his-
torical experience. Robin represents a conden-
sation of history, of “forgotten experience,”
757
into “the eternal momentary” (127): a dream

of a transcendent present that figures promi-
nently in theories of modernism from Frank
to Michael Fried.20 But the eternity promised
by such an image cannot save anyone. It is in-
stead, Barnes suggests, “a fixed dismay . . . the
‘indecent’ eternal” (156). Determinedly cor-
poreal and not a matter of Kantian disinter-
est, the longing for the eternal momentary is a
longing for “an eternal wedding,” a union that
might fill once and for all the asymmetries of
desire. Barnes’s project illustrates what it feels
like to be caught in the vice of this longing.
Consider, for instance, the two women
described in this passage:
[T]hey presented the two halves of a move-
ment that had, as in sculpture, the absurdity
of a desire that is in flower but that can have
no burgeoning, unable to execute its destiny;
a movement that can divulge neither caution
nor daring, for the fundamental condition
for completion was in neither of them; they
were like Greek runners, with lifted feet but
without the relief of the final command that
would bring the foot down,—eternally angry,
eternally separated, in a cataleptic frozen ges-
ture of abandon. (69)
The passions of these lovers are reified, trans-
formed into a spatial configuration that
brings together “movement” and “sculpture,”
the retreat of “abandon” with the grabbing
hold of “catalepsy” (from the Greek katalam-
bein, to seize). Here the vibration between
conflicting impulses is not reconciled but pre-
served, embodying the ambivalence and mel-
ancholia that draw the two women together
and push them apart. Barnes’s sculptural
rhetoric invokes Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian
Urn,” with its combination of “mad pursuit”
and “struggle to escape.” But whereas Keats’s
lovers are “winning near the goal,” Barnes’s
never make it off the starting blocks. The ode’s
erotic charge might be said to derive from the
aestheticization of conquest, the anticipation
of an approaching—but forever forestalled—
758 Dazzling Estrangement: Modernism, Queer Ekphrasis, and the Spatial Form of Nightwood
consummation. Barnes does not aestheticize

courtship or anticipated pleasure but instead
proliferates images of separation, violation,
and anger. The violence of these images is
amplified by the different temporalities—dif-
ferent senses of expectation—brought to the
ekphrastic encounter when one identifies with
both the spectator and the spectacle. Intro-
ducing Jenny Petherbridge, the novel returns
to an ekphrastic image of motion snared:
There was a trembling ardour in her wrists
and fingers as if she were suffering from some
elaborate denial. She looked old, yet ex­pec­
tant of age; she seemed to be steaming in the
vapours of someone else about to die, still she
gave off an odour to the mind (for there are
purely mental smells that have no reality) of a
woman about to be accouchée. . . . But put out
a hand to touch her, and her head moved per-
ceptibly with the broken arc of two instincts,
recoil and advance, so that the head rocked
timidly and aggressively at the same moment,
giving her a slightly shuddering and ex­pec­
tant rhythm. (65)
According to Lessing, the spatial limitations
of painting require the visual artist to choose
his subject carefully, to represent a “pregnant”
moment that the imagination must deliver
(93), a scenario frequently played out in the
ekphrastic lyric. Describing Jenny as “suffer-
ing” and, twice, as “expectant,” as about to be
taken to bed to give birth (accouchée), Barnes
hints at the consequences of this aesthetici-
zation of sexuality for those who are subject
to it. Prompted by the imaginative attempt to
reach out and touch, the shudder of recoil and
advance in this passage is an attempt to reject
a poetics organized around the trope of par-
turition, a refusal to allow one’s desires and
identifications to be subsumed by a narrative
of pregnancy and birth.
Throughout Barnes’s career, her refusal to
allow narrative to deliver these pregnant mo-
ments is mirrored by a thematic treatment of
suffering and sacrifice accompanying child-
[  P M L A
bearing. Susan Gubar notes that, in Night-
wood, “childbirth only results in death” (499).
Both of Barnes’s novels begin with scenes of
difficult birth: Nightwood with the death of
Hedvig Volkbein, who expires while bringing
Felix into the world, and Ryder (1928) with
the traumatic birth of Cynthia Ryder’s four-
teenth child. As her biographers have shown,
Barnes’s own childhood provided her ample
evidence for the difficulties and oppressions
of maternity.21 She wrote to a friend later in
life, “[F]ather and his bastard children and
mistresses had thrown me off marriage and
babies” (qtd. in White 110). On a formal level,
Nightwood is an argument against the tradi-
tion of making matrimony and procreation
the central, structuring principles of the novel,
an attempt to throw out the bathwater of an
outmoded aesthetic along with the baby.
Barnes’s spatial form is not a rejection
of history or narrative tout court, however,
but rather a protest against the suffering
that results when one’s identifications and
desires do not match up with the roles one
is expected to play in a culture’s stories of
succession. The queerness of O’Connor, the
amateur obstetrician, has less to do with his
desire for men—Nightwood takes same-­sex
love as a given—than with the fact that he is
the novel’s improbable representative of ma-
ternity. He explains his predicament: “God,
I never asked better than to boil some good
man’s potatoes and toss up a child for him
every nine months by the calendar” (91). The
doctor’s desires are organized according to a
queer temporality, an impossible relation to
the calendar. Robin’s queerness, on the other
hand, is linked with her refusal of mother-
hood, a refusal figured as though it were a
refutation of futurity itself.
Robin’s relation to procreation and narra-
tive might usefully be compared to Edelman’s
theory of queerness. In his view, queerness in-
volves a rejection “of every substantialization
of identity . . . and, by extension, of history
as linear narrative (the poor man’s teleology)
1 2 4 .3   ] Brian Glavey
in which meaning reveals itself—as itself—
through time” (4). Queerness short-­circuits
the regenerative, linear logic of the social, a
logic that continually defers meaning and
wholeness. This deferral functions, Edelman
suggests, to sacrifice the present in the name of
the future, a transaction that implicitly privi-
leges heterosexual reproduction. This sleight
of hand is often perpetrated in the name of
the innocent child. By stepping aside from the
lockstep of reproductive sexuality, the queer
challenges this faith in the future. Tellingly,
Edelman illustrates the oppressiveness of the
logic of futurism with an ekphrastic allusion
of his own: “Like the lovers on Keats’s Grecian
urn, forever ‘near the goal’ of a union they’ll
never in fact achieve, we’re held in thrall by a
future continually deferred by time itself, con-
strained to pursue the dream of a day when
today and tomorrow are one” (30).
O’Connor elaborates the aesthetic and
sexual aspects of the desire for such a union,
Barnes’s “eternal wedding,” in one of his dis-
cussions of Robin’s queerness. In another pas-
sage that compares Robin to a painting, he
asks, “What is this love we have for the invert,
boy or girl? It was they who were spoken of in
every romance that we ever read. The girl lost,
what is she but the Prince found? . . . And the
pretty lad who is a girl, what but the prince-
­princess in point lace—neither one and half
the other, the painting on the fan” (136). Elic-
iting the fantasy that gender difference might
be erased, Robin conjures the dream that the
narrative structure of desire might be col-
lapsed—folded like a fan—as the pursuer and
the object of pursuit fuse into a single image,
difference completely subsumed into identity
in an instantiation of the happily ever after.
Such an image would fill the lack that consti-
tutes desire in the first place, suturing once
and for all the mad pursuit and the struggle
to escape captured on Keats’s urn.
To be this painting on the fan, however,
is to be trapped in someone else’s romance.
Robin’s bold gesture is to identify with this
759
condition, refusing to have a story of her

own, as if to say, “If I am to be treated as a
picture I won’t pretend to be a person.” Her
refusal prompts the doctor to compare her to
“the par­a ­lysed man . . . who had to lie on his
back in a box, but the box was lined with vel-
vet, his fingers jeweled with stones, and sus-
pended over him where he could never take
his eyes off, a sky-­blue mounted mirror, for
he wanted to enjoy his own ‘difference’” (146).
Such a condition involves a profound loss of
agency, lying in state and in stasis. The dazzle
of velvet and jewels may not compensate for
entrapment, but in its extremity the doctor’s
image suggests a means of transforming one’s
affective relation to the experience of reifica-
tion, of experiencing one’s “difference” as a
form of value. The cost of this identification
with paralysis, however, renders Robin, again
according to the doctor, “outside ‘the human
type’ . . . monstrously alone, monstrously
vain. . . . She can’t do anything in relation to
anyone but herself ” (146). Robin appears to
represent a radical withdrawal from any com-
munal relation, a secession labeled monstrous
and inhuman. This rejection of the logic by
which the social reproduces itself becomes a
rejection of the social as such. Refusing the
future, Robin thus seems a perfect example
of the tenets of the “antisocial thesis in queer
theory.” But although Nightwood might be
read in terms of Robin’s refusal of sociabil-
ity, it might also be interpreted as a book
about the unlikely communities that coalesce
around her refutation. As Tim Dean notes in
his discussion of the antisocial thesis, acced-
ing to the nonrelational aspect of the queer is
not sufficient. “The second, correlative step,”
he notes, “is to trace new forms of sociability,
new ways of being together” (827). The power
and beauty of Barnes’s novel has much to do
with the connections it creates from experi-
ences of estrangement and isolation. Thus,
according to the doctor’s aesthetic theory of
inversion, Robin’s fate as a mannish woman,
a “prince-­princess in point lace” is linked to
760 Dazzling Estrangement: Modernism, Queer Ekphrasis, and the Spatial Form of Nightwood
that of Nikka, whose chest bears a tattoo of

clasped hands “fretted with point lace” (16).
Isolation and shame become catalysts for new
forms of community without necessarily be-
ing transfigured into acceptance or pride.22
For Barnes, this catalysis occurs in the
realm of aesthetic experience, of the imagina-
tion. One of the novel’s most touching passages
enacts this process by demonstrating, through
the friendship of Felix and O’Connor, how one
person comes to participate in, and even to
make possible, the imaginary life of another:
As the altar of a church would present but a bar-
ren stylization but for the uncalculated offer-
ings of the confused and humble; as the corsage
of a woman is made suddenly martial and sor-
rowful by the rose thrust among the more deco-
rous blooms by the hand of a lover suffering the
violence of the overlapping of the permission
to bestow a last embrace, and its withdrawal:
making a vanishing and infinitesimal bull’s
eye of that which had a moment before been a
buoyant and showy bosom, by dragging time
out of his bowels (for a lover knows two times,
that which he is given, and that which he must
make)—so Felix was astonished to find the
most touching flowers laid on the altar he had
raised to his imagination were placed there by
the people of the underworld, and the reddest
was to be the rose of the doctor. (30–31)
Despite the melancholy tenor of this image—
or perhaps because of it—the sustaining
power of withdrawal creates a space of poten-
tial participation and connection. Felix and
the doctor forge their unexpected friendship
through this pervasive and spreading loss.
What “astonishe[s]” Felix is his discovery that
the doctor and other denizens of the night
come to dazzle his estrangement with him.23
This is not to say that dazzling estrange-
ment converts it into friendship and thus
redeems it. What is lost remains lost. In the
passage above, the lover bearing this loss
may make his own time to complement that
which is given him, but this act of creation is
not idealized. Barnes’s spatial form does not
[  P M L A
transcend time but roots it squarely in the
gut, at once poetic (from poesis, to make) and
excremental, suggesting a scatological, rather
than eschatological, modernism. Indeed, as
if to prevent one from overestimating the
redemptive power of imagination’s altar, the
novel circles back to this image at its devas-
tating and frustrating conclusion. In this fi-
nal scene, Nora encounters Robin in a barren
church at night, illuminated by two candles
and standing before another “contrived altar”
decked with “flowers and toys”:
Her pose, startled and broken, was caught at
the point where her hand had reached almost
to the shoulder, and at the moment Nora’s
body struck the wood, Robin began going
down. Sliding down she went; down, her hair
swinging, her arms held out, and the dog
stood there, rearing back, his forelegs slant-
ing; his paws trembling under the trembling
of his rump, his hackle standing; his mouth
open, his tongue slung sideways over his sharp
bright teeth; whining and waiting. (169)
The novel concludes with Robin literally going
to the dogs, falling onto all fours and emitting
a bark-­l ike laughter that is, like O’Connor’s
red rose, “obscene and touching” (170). With
this enigmatic gesture, Robin seems to com-
plete her withdrawal from the social. The nov-
el’s queer conclusion refuses to deliver from
this pregnant moment the satisfaction of nar-
rative closure, but it does assert a certain for-
mal coherence. The final scene not only echoes
the image of O’Connor’s touching and unex-
pected offering, it also resonates with an ear-
lier moment in which Nora falls to her knees
as she witnesses Robin’s betrayal (64); with
Nora’s eternal plummet through “observable
space”; with Jenny’s “trembling ardour”; and,
with the ekphrasis of Felix’s imagined grand-
father, his “rump” “about to descend” upon
his charging horse. Weaving together these
various images, the novel creates a form,
“startled and broken,” to catch Robin’s “pose.”
Nightwood doesn’t merely narrate her loss, it
1 2 4 .3   ] Brian Glavey
clutches at her as she falls away, anonymous
but perpetually before the eye. By stitching
its brilliant pattern from betrayal and loss,
Barnes gives shape to estrangement, making
it something that might be shared, that might
be recognizable if forever unknown.
Notes
1. This claim, itself one of Barnes’s more famous
proclamations, is found in a 1963 letter to Natalie Bar-
ney: “There is not a person in the literary world who has
not heard of, read and some stolen from Nightwood. The
paradox that in spite of all the critical work flooding the
press since 1936, not more than three or four have men-
tioned my name. I am the most famous unknown of the
century!” (qtd. in Benstock 234).
2. The “new modernist studies” seem to offer one way
to avoid this dilemma. A major impulse across this new
field has been to recapture the variety of early-­t wentieth-
­century aesthetic production, identifying a multitude of
modernisms often connected with the marginalized sub-
ject positions of their practitioners. To a certain extent,
accounts of queer modernism participate in this gesture
of demarcation. But the very queerness that makes it dif-
ficult to classify Nightwood also complicates such divi-
sions. The definitional instability highlighted by the term
queer makes locating the boundaries of queer modernism
a tricky proposition. In addition to Boone’s, important
studies dealing with queer modernism include those by
Scott Herring; Herrmann; Hovey; Lamos; Love; Madden.
3. This claim, made by Marcus (88), has been echoed
by numerous critics. Love offers an important caveat
about modernism and the margins: “As important as it is
to be aware of the real difference between ‘dominant’ and
‘marginal’ modernisms, it is also important to remember
how difficult it can be to tell the difference” (54).
4. Seitler invokes ekphrasis as a way of understanding
Barnes’s treatment of embodiment, noting that “the body
is produced as an ekphrasis of sexual perversion—that is,
a lucid, self-­contained animation of the grotesqueries of
modern life” (526). The focus of her excellent essay, how-
ever, is quite different from the focus of mine, treating
the novel’s atavism and the discourse of degeneration.
5. The distinction between good and bad aesthetics
might be understood in various terms: modernism versus
the avant-­garde (Bürger), aesthetics versus paraesthetics
(Carroll), activist versus normative formalism (Levinson).
It might also be said to hinge on spatial versus temporal
understandings of the aesthetic. Boone’s defense of mod-
ernism against critics who would see it as inherently con-
servative is instructive. He claims that this charge only
761
makes sense if one views the field “through the lens of the

New Critical practice instituted by Eliot. But to those read-
ers who have approached the period primarily through its
prose fiction, I suggest, modernism has never seemed to
fetishize ‘totality’ or uphold the ‘autonomy’ of the artifact
to the extent that others have charged” (6). According to
this account, the liabilities of modernism have to do with
the “New Critical practice” of reading poetry according
to spatial metaphors of stability and control, presence and
plenitude. Such an understanding of poetry supposes it to
be a holdout of identity in the face of its dissolution, a ges-
ture that has come to seem highly suspicious. By contrast,
the Bakhtinian openness of the novel, of narrative unfold-
ing in time, seems to embody mutability, contingency, and
the unruly potential for change. Much is lost, however, if
we assume that spatial categories are inherently conserva-
tive and temporal ones subversive.
6. Edited by Mao and Walkowitz, the excellent recent
collection Bad Modernisms is attuned to the nuances of
modernism’s badness. Friedman provides another inter-
esting discussion of this dialectic.
7. Much of the debate over the antisocial thesis has in-
volved interpreting Bersani’s challenging oeuvre. His work
since “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (including Homos) has ar-
guably moved away from an interest in self-­shattering per
se to focus on radical ways of being based on similitude.
8. In addition to the responses of Dean and Muñoz
printed in the PMLA forum, Snediker’s exciting work on
queer optimism and Nunokawa’s non-­Bersanian vision of the
antisocial are important alternatives to the negative strain.
9. Boone cites the first half of O’Connor’s sentence to
argue that “the emphasis on the spatial over the temporal
in Nightwood tends to open up pockets within the text
where its outcast subjects may flourish in full ‘forgive-
ness’ for their non-­normative behaviors” (240). But this
is only half right, missing the darker insight that such
forgiveness is, without time, not possible.
10. In this sense, ekphrasis replicates the logic of gen-
der performativity outlined by Butler (21).
11. Extrapolating from this passage, Marcus argues
that modernism is “a tattoo on the backside of a black ho-
mosexual circus performer” (94). Although it overstates
the case, her choice to position the doctor’s description
as emblematic of a new understanding of modernism is
extremely suggestive.
12. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Frank’s
essay will be to the original Sewanee Review version.
13. See Mitchell, “Spatial Form,” for an account of the
debates surrounding Frank’s thesis.
14. In Ekphrasis, Krieger analyzes the theological as-
sumptions underpinning Frank’s argument (197–232).
For a provocative analysis of this impulse, see Bersani,
Culture of Redemption.
15. This is not to say that Nightwood does not have
its own troubled relation with fascism, as Carlston ably
demonstrates.
762 Dazzling Estrangement: Modernism, Queer Ekphrasis, and the Spatial Form of Nightwood
16. This first anthologized appearance was in 1948

in Criticism. In the same year another telling example of
Barnes’s disappearance occurred in Wellek and Warren’s
influential Theory of Literature, which, though listing
Nightwood as an example of the self-­reflexive novel, at-
tributed it to someone named Dunya (389).
17. Important exceptions include Kaup; Singer; Ger-
stenberger.
18. Whereas readers in the 1945 version of “Spatial
Form in Modern Literature” were informed that “[s]o far
as the novel is concerned, this tendency [toward spatial-
izing language] reaches its culmination in Djuna Barnes’s
remarkable book Nightwood” (225), the same sentence in
1963 downgrades the novel from culmination to curios-
ity. There the spatial tendency merely “receives an origi-
nal development” in Barnes (8–9). Frank’s assessment of
Nightwood’s lack of influence is itself belied by the ge-
nealogy Allen traces in Following Djuna. See White for
a discussion of the debt many mid-­c entury writers felt
they owed Barnes.
19. See Nieland for a suggestive reading of Nightwood
and publicness.
20. Fried proposes a timeless “presentness” as the
hallmark of the modernist work in the conclusion of “Art
and Objecthood” (168).
21. Her father practiced and preached a philosophy of
bigamy, siring numerous children in and out of marriage
with a belief in the ultimate good of procreation. After
his children’s conception, however, he seemed to demon-
strate little concern for the consequences of his actions, a
situation bitterly satirized in Ryder. See Phillip Herring.
22. For a discussion of shame and queer community
formation, see Crimp; Sedgwick 35–65.
23. Following Flatley, we might say that Barnes’s mel-
ancholy aesthetic attempts to get a hold on the historicity
of modernity’s losses and even on historicity itself. Al-
though Moglen and Forter see such a process in terms of
mourning rather than melancholia, they also offer impor-
tant accounts of modernist form and the politics of grief.
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