The Aesthetics of Perversion: Between Dreaming and Waking in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

Abstract

This essay examines the stylistic and political ramifications of the radical aesthetics of Nightwood, focusing on Barnes’s strategic deployment of inversion and abjection. Nightwood makes specific references to sexual inverts and the third sex, but its world encompasses more than sexually marginalized beings. It is also made up of inverted spaces, where conventional signification of spatiality—especially the home and the church—is radically overturned and critiqued. By shuffling meanings ordinarily attached to corporeality and spatiality, Nightwood redefines reality itself; by tracing the work of desire that reveals the abjection of desiring beings, it also redefines subjectivity as that which is already marked with perversion. Nightwood also uses two women’s same-sex relationship as a metonymic instance figuring desire in general. In that sense, the use Nightwood makes of inversion liberates same-sex desire from the pigeonhole of a particular pathology. This is another significant achievement of Nightwood that I find in its stylistic and political appropriation of the sexological discourse in currency in the early twentieth century.