Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction Broken Hearts and Bleeding Wounds – Traumatic Modernism?
- 1 ‘The Excellent Arrangement of Catastrophe’: Witnessing and Performance in The Antiphon
- 2 Djuna Barnes Beside Herself: Mixed Feelings, Sentimental Modernism and Ryder
- 3 ‘The Infected Carrier of the Past’: Nightwood, Shame and Modernism
- 4 ‘That Magic Reiteration’: Ladies Almanack and Happiness
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - ‘The Infected Carrier of the Past’: Nightwood, Shame and Modernism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction Broken Hearts and Bleeding Wounds – Traumatic Modernism?
- 1 ‘The Excellent Arrangement of Catastrophe’: Witnessing and Performance in The Antiphon
- 2 Djuna Barnes Beside Herself: Mixed Feelings, Sentimental Modernism and Ryder
- 3 ‘The Infected Carrier of the Past’: Nightwood, Shame and Modernism
- 4 ‘That Magic Reiteration’: Ladies Almanack and Happiness
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
His dark shaved chin was lowered as if in a melancholy that had no beginning or end. The Baron hailed him, and instantly the doctor threw off his unobserved self, as one hides, hastily, a secret life.
(Nightwood, 99)You were ruined and you kept striking your hands together, laughing crazily and singing a little and putting your hands over your face. Stage-tricks have been taken from life, so finding yourself employing them you were confused with a sense of shame […] For the demolishing of a great ruin is also a fine and terrible spectacle.
(Nightwood, 128–9)In Nightwood (1936), Djuna Barnes teaches us that one feeling often leads to another. Specifically, feeling itself – the experience and display of affect – produces the (decidedly mixed) feeling of shame. The melancholic attitude adopted by Dr Matthew O'Connor resembles the downwards pose of shame, a repeated physical trope in Nightwood. As a sign of feeling, O'Connor's pose is both a marker and producer of shame that must be cast off to avoid yet further humiliation. As imagined by the doctor, Nora Flood's hysterical reaction to the loss of her lover, Robin Vote, is an embarrassing yet strangely pleasing spectacle. Nora's sense of shame in this scene derives from the knowledge that although such emotional ‘stage-tricks’ involve a theatrical performance and perhaps even a clichéd representation of feminised grief, they are, nonetheless, significantly and complexly affecting.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism , pp. 110 - 144Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2012