A tender and obscene carnival: Siri Hustvedt presents 'The Forest of Night'

There is a kind of book that tells us something about ourselves that, before reading it, we did not know, or that perhaps we knew at some subliminal level but had no words with which to express it;

books that give us the key to a door that, once opened, will never be closed again.

by Djuna Barnes has been one of those books for me, a novel that I have read six times and that each time I have felt dancing within me like a brutal, ironic, tender and obscene carnival, full of insurrection; a work that dismantles inherited taxonomies, those natural and fixed categories that we are supposed to take for granted and that tell us what and who each is. The novel refutes the ontology of substance, the concept of the immutable essences of things, and calls into question all immovable definitions of being, in particular the stable divisions between man and woman: one more, the other less, one tall, the other low. The text blurs the conceptual borders and hierarchies that make up the world, borders imposed by the authority of the State and the Church, which have the power to punish transgression.I was a twenty-five-year-old graduate student living in New York City when, in 1980, I first read the novel and wrote an article about it for a feminist seminar. “This is not a novel with a gender twist —I underlined then—, but where the genre itself is discovered as a disturbing myth”.

On the cover of my old copy of

, the second edition published in America by New Directions in 1946, a decade after its first appearance in England, is a black-and-white photograph of three sheets on a dull gray background. The bland image hides the content, as does the preface by TS Eliot, a consecrated poet of modernism who, with his imprimatur and the sometimes severe editing work he carried out on the manuscript, helped the book to be published after being rejected several times. times and escape the obscenity trial feared by its publishers, Faber & Faber. There is no doubt that Eliot admired the book, that Djuna Barnes was grateful to him, and that a friendship developed between them. However, Eliot's introduction for the American edition is suffused with sexual anxiety and omission:an attempt to fit the revolution within the tradition with reverential homages to its poetic style. Despite his sympathy for the poet, Djuna Barnes confided to a friend that Eliot, in his introduction, had "missed the mark."

Since I first read the book, Djuna Barnes studies have spawned a thriving little industry that feminist,

trans studies have done nothing but support.

Since I first read the book, Djuna Barnes studies have spawned a thriving little industry that feminist,

, and recently trans studies have done nothing but support.

However, outside the specialized compartments of the academic world,

has remained on the margins of literature, as if, like its characters, it was condemned to the status of a historical outcast, a text that, despite periodic declarations about its “genius”, cannot be integrated into the great narrative of literature and its "great" authors. One element of this exile has been simple sexism. Although women were both influential and essential to modernism, they were pushed to the margins. As Susan Stanford Friedman writes in her book on the HD poet,

, “Writers may have had an experience of themselves as individuals, but women writers could rarely afford to forget their gender in a literary world that, precisely because of he idolized or forgot them”.

However, sexism and homophobia only partially explain the fate of the novel. Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde are literary heroes of the first line. The language of

is difficult, but no more so than Joyce's

, which was a true brick in the construction of the literary pantheon. Djuna Barnes, however, did not hang his story on a Homeric skeleton. If

generated a series of concordances, keys and authorized reading guides,

caused confusion. Like Joyce, Djuna Barnes mixes languages ​​- archaic, demotic, grandiose and eschatological - and his novel is full of allusions to other texts, but his slippery phrases cannot be unraveled through references. Each sentence questions the one that precedes it. This is how a paragraph concludes: “The world and its history were for Nora like a ship inside a bottle; she was outside, unidentified, eternally locked in worry without a problem”. The first two parts of the sentence reduce “the world” to a miniature ship encased in glass, with Nora Flood as an anonymous spectator looking inside. Although "concern," as does "problem," implies attention, they are not interchangeable terms, and the reader may have to pause to digest what is being said.Start a new paragraph: "Then he met Robin."

The writer Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) in an undated image.

Robin is the itinerant problem not only of Nora but of the novel, an

for three of the book's four main characters, a wandering cipher in the Heraclitean flux that escapes all definition.

Robin Vote —

from Latin

—, to make a wish, make a vow. Her wish is to wander on her own and not be frustrated on her way aimlessly. It is the vows, desires, longings and stories of others that fill the void of the almost mute object of love, a liminal creature that is neither one nor the other, but stands on the threshold of the human and the animal —”a woman who is a beast becoming human”—, sleep and wakefulness —the sleepwalker—, and gender, “a tall girl with a boy's body”. She is Nora's lover, but also her “son” and, as such, a taboo: “incest”. It is unlimited, from it emanates the mycological and what Freud called the "oceanic": "The perfume that his body exhaled had the quality of that meat of the earth, the mushroom, which smells of captured moisture and yet is so dry, wrapped in the scent of amber oil,that it is an intimate disease of the sea, and that gave it that air of having invaded a reckless and absolute dream”. (!) Robin is a mass of pronominal confusion: she, he, but also it. "I have been loved by something strange," says Nora, "that has forgotten me." That "something" is obscure, plural and untraceable.

One of the novel's many ironies is that Baron Felix Volkbein (his surname literally means "leg of the people"), whose story begins the novel, marries Robin in his quest to get exactly what she cannot give him. : stability and clarity. The son of a Viennese Jew posing as a baron and the gentile Hedwig (described as an ideal of fascist masculinity, "a woman of great vigor and military beauty," whose "goose-stepping strides" her husband tries in vain to imitate). ), Felix is ​​fascinated by the lavish pageantry and regalia of the nobility, as if a reverent attitude toward the spectacle of the aristocracy could secure him a rightful place in a patrilineal tale of procreation told by the winners of history, not by your losers,a mirage that comically has its foundations in the univocal. “My family has been preserved because I am only linked to it by the memory of a single woman, my aunt; for this reason it is singular, clear and unalterable”. Felix wants a son to keep that immutable but fictitious past alive. Robin gives birth to a boy, after which she utters one of her rare lines: "I didn't want it!" She leaves him and her husband and meets Nora, with whom she begins an intense and tormented love relationship that ends when she runs away with Jenny Petherbridge, a woman who, like Felix, accumulates props from the lives of others and fictional characters from the theater. in his search for a Self. It is not Robin that Jenny wants, but a show of love: she wants what Robin had with Nora.“My family has been preserved because I am only linked to it by the memory of a single woman, my aunt; for this reason it is singular, clear and unalterable”. Felix wants a son to keep that immutable but fictitious past alive. Robin gives birth to a boy, after which she utters one of her rare lines: "I didn't want it!" She leaves him and her husband and meets Nora, with whom she begins an intense and tormented love relationship that ends when she runs away with Jenny Petherbridge, a woman who, like Felix, accumulates props from the lives of others and fictional characters from the theater. in his search for a Self. It is not Robin that Jenny wants, but a show of love: she wants what Robin had with Nora.“My family has been preserved because I am only linked to it by the memory of a single woman, my aunt; for this reason it is singular, clear and unalterable”. Felix wants a son to keep that immutable but fictitious past alive. Robin gives birth to a boy, after which she utters one of her rare lines: "I didn't want it!" She leaves him and her husband and meets Nora, with whom she begins an intense and tormented love relationship that ends when she runs away with Jenny Petherbridge, a woman who, like Felix, accumulates props from the lives of others and fictional characters from the theater. in his search for a Self. It is not Robin that Jenny wants, but a show of love: she wants what Robin had with Nora.Felix wants a son to keep that immutable but fictitious past alive. Robin gives birth to a boy, after which she utters one of her rare lines: "I didn't want it!" She leaves him and her husband and meets Nora, with whom she begins an intense and tormented love relationship that ends when she runs away with Jenny Petherbridge, a woman who, like Felix, accumulates props from the lives of others and fictional characters from the theater. in his search for a Self. It is not Robin that Jenny wants, but a show of love: she wants what Robin had with Nora.Felix wants a son to keep that immutable but fictitious past alive. Robin gives birth to a boy, after which she utters one of her rare lines: "I didn't want it!" She leaves him and her husband and meets Nora, with whom she begins an intense and tormented love relationship that ends when she runs away with Jenny Petherbridge, a woman who, like Felix, accumulates props from the lives of others and fictional characters from the theater. in his search for a Self. It is not Robin that Jenny wants, but a show of love: she wants what Robin had with Nora.a woman who, like Felix, accumulates props from the lives of others and fictional characters from the theater in her search for an I. It is not Robin that Jenny wants, but a show of love: she wants what Robin had with Nora.a woman who, like Felix, accumulates props from the lives of others and fictional characters from the theater in her search for an I. It is not Robin that Jenny wants, but a show of love: she wants what Robin had with Nora.

The ironies in

, while fierce, are never cold. They are passionate. The novel is a song to the people the world rejects: the dispossessed, the misguided, the heretics and the rebels.

Dr. Matthew O'Connor serves as witness and commentator on the string of calamities that the forgetful Robin leaves behind as she passes from one person to another. His unleashed verbosity, in contrast to her silence, makes him the grandiloquent Scheherazade of the book with a penis and a beard: "I have squandered my destiny for garrulence." He/she, the gynecologist-queen pontificant and without a title, man by day/woman by night, functions as the parody of the novel of the Greek chorus and oracle in a single trans being: “the woman that God forgot”. Matthew's intention is not to expose Felix as a false baron but to expose the farce of the patriarchal lineage itself. “Nobility, all right,” Matthew says to Felix, “but what is nobility?” The doctor answers for him: “Wait a minute! I know: they are the few about whom many have lied more than talked,and with all the beard, until making them immortal”. But Felix can't hear him. And Nora, seeking O'Connor's advice on the meaning of "the night," can't listen to the doctor either. “Can't you just let it go?” Matthew asks Nora as he writes a letter to Robin that she knows will go unanswered. "Why don't you rest, now that you know what it's all about in this world, now that you've learned that it's nothing?" Nor can Jenny assimilate the gospel according to wicked Matthew, which she cruelly rejects as the words of “a man”: “What do you know of love? Men never know anything about love, they don't have to know anything. Instead, a woman should know... they are more subtle, more sacred; my love is sacred, and my love is great!” In Jenny's mouth,the Victorian heterosexual platitude that women are morally and sentimentally superior to men is more than hollow. A few moments later he punches and scratches his great holy love until blood runs down Robin's face.

The ironies in

, while fierce, are never cold. They are passionate. The novel is a song to the people the world rejects: the dispossessed, the misguided, the heretics and the rebels. It is also an indictment of the gaudy certainties that accompany representation itself, the deluded notion that the world will stop if we name it right, that pure identities, unmixed and unsullied, are possible and can be classified by quality into a chain of being That was the fascist dream, after all, a dream of purity strictly codified in the Nazi racial and sexual ideology that was on the rise in Germany when Djuna Barnes began writing

in 1927. Jews and "sexual deviants" had to be mass murdered in the name of such classification. Purist ideology is on the rise again, transmuted by time but just as dangerous and potentially bloody. It is to Matthew that Djuna Barnes gives the last word, but not the last scene of the book. He delivers a drunken spiel late at night in a cafe, to an audience that listens amused but not understanding. “Now,” he says, “it is the end… mark my words… now

!”

When TS Eliot wanted to delete the last chapter of the book, "The Possessed", Djuna Barnes stood up to him.

Not a word is spoken in those four pages, which end with canine barks and whimpers.

Robin is a human who turns into a beast.

The chapter has both horrified and baffled critics, who seem to forget that human beings are animals too, born mute and helpless, and part of the natural world, not outside of it.

It is a conclusion that is both “obscene and tragic”, to quote the last paragraph of the novel.

The two adjectives serve to describe

.

Siri Hustvedt,

'

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