Homo-aesthetic Inhumanities: Affect, History, and Community in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood

147 Pages·2013·0.92 MB·English

by  Drew Hereford

Homo-aesthetic Inhumanities:
Affect, History, and Community in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

A Thesis
Presented to
The Division of Literature and Languages
Reed College

In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Bachelor of Arts

Andrew Hereford
May 2013

Approved for the Division
(English)

Jay Dickson

Acknowledgments
There is no further feeling of the pleasure of company than when one is most alone.
This is what I have discovered in the writing of this thesis. Therefore, though I wrote a
great deal of it in withdrawal, both unintended and created, I have a great many thanks
to make.

First, my interminable gratitude goes to my advisor Jay Dickson, without whom this
thesis would not have been possible. The first instances of what has become this project
were the discussions I had with and the papers I wrote for him while taking his course
on modernism and the British novel. I want to sincerely thank him for his constant
support and productive feedback, and for putting up, in his own gracious way, with my
admittedly frustrating style of work. It is because of his encouragement and passion that
I see this thesis, not as an end to be lamented, but as the beginning of an invigorating
academic career. I look forward to meeting him again somewhere along the line.

And to all of the other professors who have given me, whether directly or circuitously,
the fervor I have for my intellectual work: to Kris Cohen, Ann Delehanty, Becky
Gordon, Maureen Harkin, Hugh Hochman, Robert Knapp, Charlene Makley, Luc
Monnin, Bill Ray, Pancho Savery, and Michael Taylor. I am also indebted to the
Eddings Opportunity Grant for English Majors at Reed College for funding the
research I did in developing this project.

To my mother and my father, I am so very fortunate to have your love and support.

To all of my friends, I count myself in nothing else so happy—to embrace words—as in
a soul remembering you. I would particularly like to thank: Patrick Lyons, in whose
brilliance it has been my pleasure to bask, and whose self-sacrificing friendship I could
not have made it without; Nick Irvin, whose quiet virtuosity I can only but fail to live up
to, and who was always there when my caustic bitchiness needed a fellow pair of eyes;
Cora Walters, to whom I could always turn when I needed a bit of unrelenting warmth;
Andrew Pritzkau, who has been with me since the beginning and who will be there until
the end; and Janelle White, whose recent absence in my life has not attenuated my love
for her.

…

And to my pink narcissus, never have I made a more beautiful world than with you.

Table of Contents
Introduction. Headways: Nightwood & Queer Thought ............................................. 1

Nightwood as Minor Literature ...................................................................................... 2

T. S. Eliot, Affect, and Impersonality ............................................................................ 4

Affect/History/Queer: A Methodology for Reading .................................................... 7

Schizoanalysis, Psychoanalysis, and the Intermezzo .................................................... 10

Chapter One. “History at night”: Affective Relationality .......................................... 13

Introduction .................................................................................................................. 13

History Without Affect: Several Inadequacies ............................................................ 18

Sodom/Gomorrah: Affective History, Queer Relations .............................................. 32

Chapter Two. Love’s Becomings .................................................................................... 43

Introduction .................................................................................................................. 43

The Possessed: Becoming-Animal as a Theory of Love .............................................. 45

Is Writing Inhuman?: An Emerging Love .................................................................. 62

Chapter Three. Narcissistic Aesthetics (Reflections on Subjectivity & Art) ........... 71

Introduction .................................................................................................................. 71

Impersonal Narcissism and the Aesthetic Subject (Reflection 1) ................................ 77

The Great (Aesthetic) Bed: Communities of Incest (Reflection 2) .............................. 94

Conclusion. An Appealing Community ....................................................................... 113

Appendix. Plot Summary of Nightwood .................................................................... 119

Bibliography. .................................................................................................................. 123

Abstract
This thesis argues that Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) demands a
reconsideration of current queer theoretical paradigms, not by rejecting or discrediting
these paradigms, but by insisting that thought, by its very nature, lives in the
intermediacy of critical practice; it uses community as the point of departure for thinking
through and between issues of queer belonging, becoming, and relating. The first
chapter argues that Nightwood outlines a framework of historical affectivity as the basis
for queer community in which we necessarily encounter the past as enacted upon the
body in moments of negative or depraved affect. In turning to the work of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the second chapter develops this in order to show that a
modality of ethical engagement emerges within the novel in which inhumanity is
queerly reestablished as the basis of relationality in general. Love—both as a mode of
becoming that tends toward the nonhuman and as an instance of writing—will be my
name for this relation. Chapter Three then abruptly turns to the work of Leo Bersani
and Ulysse Dutoit. In so doing, it argues that Nightwood promotes a version of
narcissism in which the subject continually reaches beyond itself to find inaccurate
replications of its own being, thus producing a virtual community of aesthetic
associations. This thesis, therefore, sees within Nightwood (and in the critical
conversation it posits between Deleuze & Guattari and Bersani & Dutoit) a possibility
for the improbable task of queer thought—a possibility that connects us, in art, to the
impossibility of our mutual existence.