1. Faithful Infidelity

When I was an undergraduate I wrote two essays for Bruce. The first, for a course called “Modes of the Gothic”, sought to relate the concepts of the sublime and sublimation through a reading of Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, a novel Bruce lectured on with the electrifying relish that has always been a hallmark of his teaching style. I was taken with Edmund Burke’s expository catalogue of sublime phenomena in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and equally with Radcliffe’s aching dilatoriness; and with the course as a pretext for knitting these wayward instances of explanation together. The second essay was for a course Bruce taught with Penny Gay, called “Feminine and Masculine”, and it attempted a reading of Hemingway’s Fiesta alongside Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume 1. When I picked up my essay from the General Office I was agitated to see not only that I had misspelt the names of both Hemingway and Foucault in every instance of their usage (I still need to check “Hemingway” from time to time), but also that Bruce had put a line through the misspelt words every single time they occurred.

My essays were the first that I wrote on a typewriter (a Canon Typestar), rather than by hand, and the drumming persistence of my errors, and their correction, felt to me technologically assisted or even obscurely motivated. The modernist promise of the typewriter was to create more rapid, reliable, legible (if nondescript) text, and yet it revealed itself to be the means to compound rather than eradicate error and eccentricity. Between the books’ covers and my typing hand a slip had occurred and become profusely visible across three thousand or so carefully scripted words: a parapraxis, Fehlleistungen. This term from Freud I was only to learn years later as a form of consolation for such moments of psychical betrayal, and reflecting on this episode I am struck by the way the infidelity of my typing was in fact also a form of faithfulness, as for Laplanche and Pontalis “it transpires that what appear to be bungled actions turn out in fact – on another level – to be quite successful ones, and that unconscious wishes are fulfilled by such behaviour in a manner that is often very plain to see”.1 These misspellings, unfaithful to the letter, were faithful instead as a successful redirection from purported to repressed goal, and in their reiteration a form of solidarity, or fidelity arose, as it did, too, from Bruce’s painstaking corrections. Fidelity to meaning became a more obscure goal than might be supposed, if even the most patently “bungled” action of textual infidelity could be so tenaciously tied to another realm of interpretative possibility.

Nowhere else might the problem of indeterminate meaning better resolve into an encounter between infidelity and its surprising other, fidelity, than in characteristic strategies of literary interpretation where (for example) purported disciplinary innovation may in fact be faithful to (or worse, reducible to) earlier disciplinary norms. Reanimating this relation productively generates interpretative possibilities through precisely the irresolvable fact of their similarities and differences: their faithfulness and unfaithfulness. Heather Love opens her introduction to the PMLA issue on Queer Modernism, “Modernism by Night”, by asking, “Is Queer Modernism simply another name for Modernism?”2 Love’s question, less or more than rhetorical, identifies less the way in which Modernist texts can be understood to identify “queer” as a central problematic and more the way in which the canon of writing about Modernism has been pressured by a “non-normative” imperative sufficiently dominant in the critical field that few Modernist texts, in her words, “appear to have stayed high and dry ... bad modernism, outsider modernism, and marginal modernism begin to look more and more like modernism itself”.3 Love argues that

Instead, the very “pervasiveness” of non-normativity produced a state of “permission” where queer becomes the “uninvited guest, unexpected but not totally unwelcome, that shows up without visible relations or ties”.5

In his essay on Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood so introduced by Love, Brian Glavey lights on the phrase “queer ekphrasis” to situate Nightwood between recent formulations of “queer indeterminacy”. This it does by staging a rendezvous, if not reconciliation, between the current preoccupations of queer and an earlier aesthetic regime, one that sought to find formal expression for the novel’s stylistic complexity in Joseph Frank’s influential concept of “spatial form”.6 Glavey’s phrase exemplifies what Heather Love calls a “merging”, in this case of a revived, historical, formalist reading of the novel (Joseph Frank’s 1945 coinage “spatial form”) with the preoccupations of queer theory.7 This reconciliation or “merging” performs at the level of a motivated textual analysis a move comparable to the one I will make here, merging “queer” with “adultery” through the singular marriage or “unexpected” reconciliation of the two in Barnes’ novel. Where queer “shows up without visible relations or ties” (Love) in the Modernist novel (that is, with only a history of repressed or closeted representation), adultery constitutes precisely the opposite, the assertion of a visible relation through contracted fidelity and its equally visible disruption as evidence of contractual dereliction.8 Nightwood, in fact, offers a way to think through the relation of the two, a faithful infidelity or “queer adultery” that also advances a way of thinking through late Modernism’s interest in historicising the novel and in quelling the momentum of Modernist experimentation. Queer adultery, as it is formulated in Nightwood, facilitates the novel’s formal project of considering history – what might be termed, after Love, “visible relations or ties” – as a context for its formal experimentation.

Of the many ways in which Nightwood has come to be regarded as a disruptive, late modern text, its formal eccentricity is never far from the front. The novel, whose plot mostly concerns a failed relationship between two women, Nora Flood and Robin Vote, begins with an extended historicising prologue that narrates the marriage and deaths of Robin Vote’s husband’s parents, Guido and Hedvig Volkbein. This narrative, given in a mock-genealogical form alongside a dense account of the material cultures of fin-de-siècle Vienna and 1920s Europe, is a puzzling one despite all the ways in which the novel has been close read over the decades. The marriages of the Volkbeins, father and son, progress the story only by moving us historically forward to the point where Robin, straying from her marriage – the adultress – comes into contact with Nora. The saga of the Volkbeins, senior and junior, stages adulterous transgressions in a “historicising” way, where marriage does the work Tony Tanner requires of it – stitching together social and affective obligations as they abide in descriptions of bourgeois domesticity. To quote Tanner:

It is the failure of marital mediation that is generated by the topic of adultery, and consequent upon that the “possible patterns of historical and political change”.10 Adultery in that respect performs cognate service to queer, denaturing the “normative” indices brokered by any such social-cultural contract. Reading Nightwood under the rubric of adultery then offers a generic way to align its conventional disruption of norms through adultery with its unconventional disruption of norms through “queer”, precisely as it sutures the two: its distended historical “prologue” presenting the Volkbeins and its revision in the “queer adultery” of Robin and Nora’s relationship. Attending to its interest in adultery requires an historicised response to the generically conventional association between adultery and the novel, where the disruption of the contract of marriage threatens other kinds of social contracts, and where adultery becomes a generative topos for the making of novelistic stories qua stories. While substantial critical labour has been exerted to articulate the way in which Nightwood figures an isomorphism between non-normative sexual practice and experimental writing, its interest in marriage, class and adultery offers another way to articulate Barnes’ relationship with, on the one hand, the realist novel, and on the other, convention and women’s sexual sociality.

For all the ways in which queer readings of Nightwood have relied on a non-normative imperative – for example, in their contemplation of its highly eccentric formal properties – a same-sex relationship, that is a baldly queer thematic – constitutes its central object of analysis. At the same time, that relationship is bracketed from the novel’s diffuse representation of social life in a cosmopolitan European demi-monde, but not therefore isolated. Instead, it is given infrastructural support by being textually generated through its interpellation as a family history of adultery. This thematic, rather than interpretative queer “merging”, sets the stage for a late Modern recontextualisation of the conventions of putatively transgressive adultery. Adultery could be understood as simply the most conventional of the various forms of errancy that destabilise bourgeois life in Nightwood. But what if adultery is, in fact, critical to the novel’s experimentation with formal convention as much as its experimental representations of queer sexuality and unsettled domesticity? In this sense, adultery in its late Modern context offers a way to articulate relationships between realist and non-realist narrative structures.

Nightwood uses experimental representations of adultery as conventional trespass to frame an engagement with the history of the adulterous heroine in realist novels. In particular, the serially narrated carriage ride at the heart of Nightwood’s distortion of narrative temporal flow in favour of “spatial form” maps Emma Bovary’s famous, adulterous carriage ride onto the novel’s modernist timeline. Where Madame Bovary’s 1857 carriage ride facilitates a metaphorisation of adultery as a vehicle of a future-oriented momentum (plot progression), Nightwood’s serially narrated carriage ride – in which Robin Vote unlocks herself from the intimacy of her partnership with Nora to have a queerly adulterous liaison with Jenny Petherbridge inaugurated in the carriage and uncomfortably witnessed by a child – inhibits any similar sense that this transgression facilitates movement forward. The carriage ride produces the stasis of Frank’s spatial form, an inset tableau of sexual action covert according to the prim realist conventions borrowed from Bovary (that is, only obliquely depicted), but inhibiting the temporal flow of the novel in favour of its spatial reorganisation.

Despite Tanner’s framing of adultery athwart this magnificent instatement of “patterns” it is scarcely credible to see adultery as transgressive per se, given its centrality or even canonicity as novelistic topos. Although accounts of the novel and adultery are typically structured around generic and conventional claims regarding realism, it’s no accident that the “major” novel of High Modernism, Ulysses, pivots its day around adultery in action or in report – Molly Bloom’s adulterous liaison with Boylan. Adultery, far from simply indexing transgression, indexes formal convention and familiarity. Its citation in Nightwood, far from boding disruption, makes a more subtle engagement possible – it facilitates a queer “patterning” that both reproduces and departs from the patterns Tanner identifies, where Barnes formally and structurally argues equivalence between the adultery committed by Robin in her marriage to Felix and that performed in her relationship with Nora, a kind of argument, in “bad modernist” vocabulary, for a queer marriage equality.

Formally, then, such a pivot is instated by Nightwood’s otherwise inscrutable but dense contextualisation of its central story, the queer romance of Nora Flood and Robin Vote, with two heterosexual marriages: the first, of Guido Volkbein senior, in Schorskian fin-de-siècle Vienna, the second, of Robin Vote and Guido’s son Felix.11 The first marriage is not marked by adultery, but the second marriage, between Felix and Robin is, and the progressive decline of marital “mediation” between generations becomes a condition for the novel’s account of its central relationship; it is only adulterously that Robin makes a partnership with Nora and it is queerly adulterously that she ends that relationship as well.

2. Museal Modernism

Nightwood’s extended introduction of the Volkbein parents of Felix in its first chapter moves against the implicitly forward momentum of the novel. Between the Volkbein opening and the narration of Nora and Robin’s love affair, no progress is made in the novel without an associated drag structured by reminiscence, allegorical anecdote, and other forms of situated quelling. Most distinctly this arrest and delay is personified in the figure of Matthew O’Connor, the doctor whose virtuosic anecdotes derail interpersonal transactions even as his “gynaecological” activities support them.12 In its dilatory and dilettante prose Nightwood reframes late Modernism as a pivot towards historicising that Modernist drive by drawing attention instead to its recalcitrance. Given its centrality in an account of queer Modernism, Nightwood’s lapidary prose and dense description, its accumulation of ekphrastic passages with the momentum of molasses, and its circling, circuitous narrative contest the ethos of modernist representations of futurity itself as a discernible elsewhere in favour of an implicit injunction to read momentum as historical and driven by memory.

Nightwood’s attention to the practice of recollection and its materialisation in objects that concretise or arrest memory provides a succinct example that demonstrates memory and repetition as the key alliance brokered between queer and adultery, fidelity and infidelity. Early in the description of the marriage of Hedvig and Guido Volkbein their house is described as “a fantastic museum of their encounter”.13 This “museum” forms a material hold or crypt for the objects that facilitate the marriage and also describes this vault in terms of display and spectacle, the show of the marriage. Its collection is made up of counterfeit and misrepresented items which Guido has used to generate a material context for his own prosperity. Later in the novel, the apartment that Nora buys for Robin is similarly described:

These two premises are each described as a “museum of their encounter” with the unexpectedly pivotal word being “their”. Here, it ambiguously encompasses all three couples: Guido and Hedvig, Felix and Robin, and Robin and Nora. Barnes’ compression of these separate couples into two separate premises and one intact metaphor interlaces the sentimental adultery plot and the queer romance, a form of marriage equality avant la lettre that guides the extended Volkbein prelude.

One other effect of the novel’s abutment of a story of marriage and adultery with its queer romance is that it encourages a desire to read its adulterous Volkbein prologue “historically”, and the rest of the novel “affectively”. In its pairing of the two, an extended historicising introduction “merges” with the narrative of queer devotion and infidelity to “merge” the adulterous and the queer as forms of historical transgression. Daniela Caselli writes:

Caselli’s take identifies the same problematic Love identifies in her PMLA introduction (published the same year); it displaces the centrality of the minoritised precisely while trying to analyse the queer effects of the novel. Here “distrust” in mimesis manifests itself in a prose style that analogises and extends into absurdity the functional value of analogy. At the same time, the claim that Barnes’ circumlocution primarily rides on a distrust of mimesis has to reckon with Barnes’ tactical interest in precise repetition and doubling, as for instance in the transposition of the phrase “museum of their encounter” across two generations of Volkbeins and into the domestic heart of the queer couple’s home and hearth. Encounters across generations process the same sets of novelistic tropes even if, as Tyrus Miller says, these engagements generate “regressive unravelling” as a symptom of Nightwood’s “late” Modernity.16 Nightwood’s merging of adultery and queer carries with it a significant set of encounters within and concerned with literary history as such. The first is between realism’s fictional preoccupation with adultery as moral turpitude, and infidelity as excess and its distorted or “regressive” second order recurrence in (late) experimental Modernism. The second is between adultery as transgression of contract and adultery as compliance with convention. The third is late Modernism’s critical engagement with the implicitly future-oriented fantasy of High Modernism’s “make it new”, where recourse to an earlier regime of conventional representation detours such a fantasy of forward momentum. The fourth is the coupling of historicist (realist, contractual) description with the lapidary prose of a text whose utter purpose would otherwise seem to be the entire occultation of historical context in favour of its flawed, unfaithful recollection. The last is a meta-textual arbitration of the grounds upon which adultery can encounter queer, where “strange museums of encounter” demonstrate that the non-normativity of Modernism’s queer relies on something other than queer (its adulterous shadow) and with the drive to document queer adultery.

It is on a divan that Robin Vote is first encountered in Nightwood, when Dr Matthew O’Connor is called to a hotel to attend to her. O’Connor, who has been ensconced with Felix Volkbein for the duration of a lengthy monologue at Café de la Mairie, brings Volkbein with him as he takes a few steps to the Hôtel Récamier. By bringing Felix along he puts into motion the encounter between Felix and Robin that provides a point of contact between the 1880s history of the Volkbeins and 1920s Paris. Accompanying O’Connor, Felix arrives like the “uninvited guest” of queer, in Love’s words, “unexpected but not totally unwelcome”, and he “shows up without visible relations or ties”.17 Were it not for the careful foregrounding of similarity between his parents’ marriage and his wife’s later adulterous liaison with Nora the relation might remain more obscure, but the representation of these intimacies as “spatial” entities (museums), as visual and concrete representations of intersubjective “encounter”, is proleptically installed by the description of Robin’s chamber.

The proper noun Récamier identifies not only the hotel but also an association between the divan and David’s 1800 portrait of Madame Récamier, although the sparseness of ornament in the painting is not reproduced in the description of Robin’s bed. This extended ekphrasis figures the sight of Robin as a textual birth, within a prose figured precisely as a stylistic ornament, too much, “oversung”:

In Barnes’ description, the unconscious body “threatens consciousness” as the unremembered birds create “oversung” text, left uncovered, and thus unsilenced, a return of the repressed. The cloaking of songbirds is funereal in the passage’s simile; the “unseen birds” are “forgotten” by the woman who even in her introduction promises to be a distracted femme au foyer, not merely (as she is evoked in the title of the chapter, La Somnambule) a sleepwalker but, more pertinently, inattentive. Robin’s inattention is the symptom of her infidelity, where she roams and drifts in Paris apparently without a conscious drive for cohesive motion or interaction.

Robin’s errancy is mimicked by the incorporation of an accidental, a stray closing parenthesis that like the birds is left without its “cover”, the opening parenthesis that like the cover “seems” to have been forgotten. Or perhaps this stray random parenthesis, unfaithful to the text, is a parapraxis that instates the typesetter as also “inattentive” and “threatening consciousness” precisely in her or his unconscious slippage. This inexplicable, single parenthesis betrays the otherwise painstaking authorial stamp, as if to demonstrate that never-ended possibilities are, in fact, the consolation of writing and that errors or infelicities provide as Barthes writes “the site of fantasy”;19 writing of Flaubert he says:

Barthes’ formulation identifies failure and fantasy’s interrelation as something that becomes in itself an intransitive grandiosity:

The divan is metonymy for a writing praxis which is inalienable from living as praxis, a writing not confined or oriented by publication – cessation – or by the notion of style as essentially finalising (“le mot juste”). That grandiosity, of the writing life, describes Barnes’ practice through her career but especially in her later years, when she devotes herself to the great work of what Scott Herring describes as a “geriatric avant-garde” full of erasure, addition, subtraction, failure and fantasy.22 Editorial trespass is a way to keep alive, and also at bay, the prospect of publication as a form of “final word”, one that must necessarily be both faithful to the prospect of the work’s endurance and unfaithful to its capacity to “threaten” consciousness, the insistence of the potential to fulfil wishes rather than curtail them.

Such a writing praxis requires error, parapraxis, the very faithfulness to the inevitability of error and its correction as the “marinade” that defines a writing life. A writing life is the occasion for erroneous felicity, where faithfulness to a more subterranean end can only be encountered through unwitting reversals and infidelities. Bruce’s chapter on Creatures in an Alphabet, Djuna Barnes’ last book and as late as Modernism gets, opens by observing that “Some of its creatures are odder than odd”.23 The “odder than odd” is a paradoxical figure that neatly identifies the problem of unfaithfulness as itself a “marinade” or writing life, a sequestration that like Robin Vote on her couch at the Hôtel Récamier can grant the permeability of conscious states to their unconscious intruders. Such a state of abnegation is represented in Barnes’ abecedarium by one of those “odder than odds” Bruce identifies, the letter X who “has crossed himself away”.24 This gesture remains one of fidelity to the task: of editing, correction, addition and subtraction, fidelity and infidelity.

Bibliography