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Nightwood is a 1936 novel by Djuna Barnes.

Plot summary

 * "I have a narrative but you will be put to it to find it"

Style, themes, and characters
Nightwood is written in an ornate, poetic style that layers image upon image and that often speaks in generalizations or maxims, as in this passage about Robin Vote:

"The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a "picture" forever arranged, is for the contemplative mind the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person's every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey."


 * omniscient narrator
 * Robin as cipher
 * animal and plant metaphors (see Edmund White); Rousseau; Nightwood; ending
 * the night
 * filth, excrement
 * O'C's torrential monologues
 * lies/"parallel reality"; implausible stories like Basquette; Catherine the Great

Religious, philosophical, and scientific content

 * "Disqualification" (see Plumb xviii; connects to portrayal of Jewish characters)
 * O'Connor as parodic therapist and confessor
 * Catholicism: Robin's conversion, young Guido, "Tiny O'Toole" scene
 * Jane Marcus; "heterogenous figure of abjection" (see Kaup 100-101 and Chisholm 186, 195)
 * "no vision of the 'normal'" (see Altman & Marcus, 223)
 * generalizations about classes of people; anti-Semitism and anti-Fascism
 * abstruseness of generalizations
 * O'Connor's unreliability; rusted instruments, etc.; quasi-scientific theory of cottaging
 * sexual inversion; invert as "doll" and as fairy-tale prince/princess
 * maternal vs. gendered model
 * "a woman is yourself"
 * romance; bleakness; love as loss

References to other literature

 * Divine Comedy dark forest
 * Blake (title)
 * choice of title, Eliot (see Plumb viii-ix)
 * Anatomy of Melancholy (vs. "Anatomy of Night")
 * Webster
 * Influence of Joyce??

Autobiographical content



 * "my life with Thelma" (Plumb vii)
 * "nigh T. Wood" (Plumb ix/Taylor 162)
 * but final scene was Fitzi (Herring 168)
 * merger of Nora and Catherine (Plumb xii)
 * Felix/Guido and Guido Bruno; Felix Paul Greve (Herring 216)
 * O'Connor and Dan Mahoney (Herring 210-213)
 * Wood's (Herring 165) and Mahoney's (Herring 213-215) reactions to the novel
 * "now she is not Robin" (to Coleman, Jul 36) (Herring, 217)

Writing, revision, and publication
Barnes began writing the novel after her breakup with Thelma Wood, at a time when she was still not sure whether they would be reunited. Much of the first draft was written during the summers of 1932 and 1933, while she was staying at Hayford Hall, a country manor rented by the art patron Peggy Guggenheim. Among her fellow guests was the novelist and poet Emily Coleman. The two did not hit it off at first; indeed, Barnes spent much of one summer afraid to leave her manuscript unattended because Coleman had threatened to burn it. But once she had read the book, Coleman became its champion. In 1935, when the book had been rejected by at least five publishers, Coleman's critique led Barnes to make major changes to the book's characters and organization, "hurl[ing] chapter after chapter into the fireplace". This version too was turned down by Liveright -- their third rejection of the book -- and by Clifton Fadiman of Simon and Schuster, who told Barnes that "no standard publishing house could take it". Coleman made further suggestions for revision and began to act as an unofficial literary agent. With the help of the critic Edwin Muir, she persuaded T. S. Eliot, then an editor at Faber and Faber, to read the typescript. After meeting with Coleman, Eliot accepted the novel, and it was finally published in 1936.

In her critiques, Coleman argued that the novel lacked unity because it shifted its emotional focus from chapter to chapter. For her, the tragedy of Nora and Robin was the heart of the story, and the attention paid to other characters simply obscured it. This concern led Barnes to tighten Nightwood's structure and reduce the number of characters, eliminating Nora's two sons and combining Nora with another character named Catherine. She eventually agreed to the cutting of some of the Doctor's stories, which Coleman thought would bore readers. Coleman could not, however, persuade her to cut the two chapters centering on Felix. She wrote:

"Robins marriage to Felix is necessary to the book for this reason... that people always say, 'Well of course those two women would never have been in love with each other if they had been normal, if any man had slept with them....Which is ignorance and utterly false, I married Robin to prove this point, she had married, had had a child yet was still 'incurable'."

Coleman made the suggestion directly to Eliot as well, but Eliot's view of the novel was different. He found the Doctor to be the most vital character, and wanted to cut the final chapter so that the Doctor's line "nothing, but wrath and weeping" would be the last words. This too Barnes resisted. After repeated reading, Eliot gained greater appreciation for the other characters and came to see the final chapter as essential. Nightwood, as finally published, remained true to Barnes's vision of a novel united by the theme of disqualification rather than by focus on a single character or relationship.

Eliot also wanted to ensure that Nightwood would not be banned for its content. He and his colleague Frank Morley met with Barnes to discuss changes that might help the book avoid prosecution; no major cuts were made for this reason, but some sexual references were softened. Faber also gave Nightwood a high cover price in order to limit the book's circulation. Despite these efforts, Morley was sure he would go to jail for publishing Nightwood (and said he was proud to), but the book was never legally challenged.

In 1937 Harcourt, Brace brought out an American edition of Nightwood with an introduction by Eliot. The book never sold well, and by 1945 Harcourt had let it go out of print. After a difficult search for a publisher, Barnes sold the U.S. rights to James Laughlin, the founder of New Directions Press. Nightwood also appeared in her 1962 omnibus volume Selected Works. In 1995, Dalkey Archive Press published a critical edition, reversing the changes made for fear of censorship and reproducing the surviving fragments of earlier drafts.

Critical response and influence

 * ? Eliot's intro and early reviews

In the decades after its publication, critics often treated Nightwood as a cult classic of Modernism that -- as Joseph Frank put it, summarizing the views of others -- would appeal "chiefly to connoisseurs of somewhat gamy literary items". It was known for its high reputation with other writers, particularly T. S. Eliot, but little criticism appeared; according to Jane Marcus, it was "canonized but unread". What criticism did appear during this time focused on the novel's style and its formal qualities. For instance, Frank used Nightwood as the paradigmatic example of what he called "spatial form": an ordering principle akin to poetry, in which the novel is meant to be understood as a pattern of images rather than as a sequence of events.


 * second wave criticism (feminist & new historicist)
 * influence on writers (see Allen's Following Djuna)