Sophia, the grandmother in Djuna Barnes's 1928 best-selling family chronicle Ryder, covers the walls of her salon with ‘multitudinous and multifarious crayons, lithographs and engravings’: images of the people and things she has both loved and abhorred in her public and private lives (Ryder, 13). This image of irreducible besideness, of a multiplicity of narratives, texts, relations and feelings, is suggestive of the richly ambivalent reading experience provoked by Barnes's novel: apparent contradictions need not be resolved but sit in productive tension. In suggesting that Ryder resists any totalising reading, I want to challenge the critical impulse to decode the novel in a singular manner through reference to the author's biography, an impulse that has tended to guide those addressing themes of trauma and sexuality in the novel. In Ryder, auto/biography and fiction sit beside each other in a non-dichotomous relationship, a relationship that can attributed in part to the slippery distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘imagination’ that, as we have seen in the case of The Antiphon, characterises the trauma response. And just as Ryder offers fascinating insights into the affective complexities of childhood trauma, it is also characterised by a playful and pleasurable ‘witnessing’ of the literary past. I am interested in how traumatic witnessing sits beside Barnes's repetitions of literary history, how the complex affective relationships to trauma that her novel imagines provide a critical language for describing these repetitions, in particular her generative performances of the nineteenth-century sentimental tradition.