Repulsive Modernism: Djuna Barnes' "The Book of Repulsive Women" Author(s): Melissa Jane Hardie Source: Journal of Modern

Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1, Modernist Afterimages (Autumn, 2005), pp. 118-132 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831625 Accessed: 05/04/2010 15:08
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"Repulsive Djuna Barnes7

Modernism: The Book of Repulsive Women"

Melissa Jane Hardie UniversityofSydney

"The only exact knowledge there is," said Anatole France, "is the knowl? edge ofthe date of publication and the for mat of books." And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion ofa library, it is the order of its catalogue. (Benjamin, "Unpacking my Library," Illuminations 60)

1952, Djuna Barnes wrote to Margaret Insome early work of hers:

Anderson,

who had asked to reprint

I feel it is a grave disservice to letters to reissue merely because one may have a name for later work or for the unfortunately praised earlier work,?or for the purpose of nostalgia or "history" which might more happily be left interred. (Djuna Barnes to Margaret Anderson, 30.4.52)1 As one ofthe times wished more famous shut-ins ofthe modernist movement, Barnes some? She interprets the func?

merely because one may have a name for later work or for the unfortunately praised earlier work"; the authorial name becomes in Barnes's words "a name for later work", a prolepsis. Reissue suggests "merely" the fortuity ofa lack of symmetry between text and its author, a relationship whose negotiation is routed through and thus colwith the principle of textual intermediation lapsed variously embodied by the and public. publisher, editor, Barnes opts, with irony, for the language of death; the "grave disservice" puns on the trope of text as corpse, an abject object which can only speak of history as vicissitude. The metaphorics of the dead text charge the lack of

a similar fate for her early publications. tion of reissue as a doubly negative one: "to reissue

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symmetry ofthe relationship between author and text with the profitable func? tion of instituting the agency ofthe "living" author. Textual desuetude is reread of agency for the author to instantiate authorial vitality: a useful institution whose texts threaten to have a healthier In fact, in her own practice petuating texts whose bodies republication careful rewriting; of numerous life in the public sphere than she does.2 Barnes was singularly adept at creating and per-

spoke of change, and she was responsible for the texts which charted the diversity of history through Barnes preferred the reissue of texts she had herself sedulously

labor of revision, which provided the occupation of her post-expatriate in New York, structurally stands to her writing, and years in particular her poetry, as an attempt to erase the degree zero of the moment of publication.4 This erasure was effected through two principal strategies: the total revision that resists any abiding resemblance between drafts and the act of revised.3 Barnes's notorious revision as an act of endless deferral, a structure writer. If the pseudo-historical proposition that the disinterred text resemble its earlier public sphere manifestation?look the same as it used to?Barnes is at odds, in various ways, with this proposition. In her work, as it were, nothing looks the same as it used to. perhaps more familiar to any embedded in Anderson's request is

Barnes's sharp note to Anderson "the unfortunately mentions praised earlier work," an oblique aside that may be traced to a similar moment of disinterrment which had occurred three years previously: the republication of her 1915 chapbook, The Book of Repulsive Women, in 1949. In Barnes's sixteen pages of vita, prepared for Who's Who, she simply leaves The Book of Repulsive Women out of her list of publications (Series 1, Box 1, Djuna Barnes-vita). Barnes wrote to its new publisher, Oscar Baron: you do not have my permission for this publication [...] I categorically forbid you to make such publication, and [...] if you proceed with such publication it will be at your own risk and peril. (Djuna Barnes to Alicat Bookshop 13.10.48) The republication of The Book of Repulsive Women, a text Barnes specifically to repress within her writing career, is a return of the repressed that mimics in the sphere of publication the text's own representations of literary and its figurative returns, a representation that poses such returns as

wished

history

deadening. Barnes wrote: [. ..] I most certainly do not want any republication of that book of Repulsive Women [sic]. I hope no other person will ever get the unhappy idea. (Djuna Barnes to Oscar Baron 29.1.48) The edition was printed, to Barnes's "horror."5 Ironically, a number of people have had that same idea, leading to a series of republications of Barnes's earliest book, which make it the most reprinted, with the exception of Nightwood!*

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Agitating against the reappearance ofthe chapbook, Barnes characterized the reissue as an "[. ..] act of piracy" (Djuna Barnes to Oscar Baron, Alicat Bookshop 13.10.48). Oscar Baron argued to Barnes that The Book of Repulsive a very fine collection of verse, not at all dated Women was "[. ..] intrinsically by the transition of 33 years" (Oscar Baron to Djuna Barnes 13.10.48). He to com? described his desire to reprint as "[. . .] the desire of a bibliophile municate a good piece of writing to another" (Oscar Baron to Djuna Barnes with a connoisseurship that contingently aligns his publication the author as her text's "owner" in favor of an exchange of disenfranchises Baron's letter signifies precisely how The Book property between bibliophiles. of Repulsive Women may be "dated" by virtue of such an act, which precisely isolates and establishes the book's status as an "object" or "piece of writing" to be circulated among fetishist-connoisseurs; in this case such an identification is particularly marked given the text's status as a livre compose. This discourse of connoisseurship curiously mingles with Baron's desire to republish an arcane text in a modern edition. Baron's edition, in which the poems and illustrations are reproduced in white print on murky colored and coarse-weave paper, with? out page numbers, announces its own eccentricity as a boutique publication. 17) already Similarly, its republication as an "Outcast Chapbook" (Kannenstine coded it as marginal, "east out," at once situating the text as an exemplar of the (now) dispersed field of modernist practice and marking its strangeness or In Baron's edition, it joins a collection curiosities. Barnes's wish, that the "ancient" text remain ancient and forgotten, is proleptically coded in its status as a chapbook, an ancient or recondite textual offering.7 In all her references to the volume, Barnes rarely estrangement of bibliophile canons. gets the title right, calling it "that book of repulsive women," as if by doing so she limits the possibilities of its position within her own vita. In one letter the reissue, Barnes wishfully describing suggests that the book as material object had vanished: about the copyright" "I did not know that it still existed, and so did nothing (Djuna Barnes to Erich Linder, 18.11.48). Barnes comfrom modernist 13.10.48). Baron

prehensively represses the existence of the text as object, referring here not to the historical existence of the text, but to the enduring existence of copies of the publication. or fantasizing its non-existence in this way?as Postulating historical, of copyright protection?mimics her repression of the text implicit in sequestering it from her vita and continupublished ously misstating the title revisions: an elaboration of her writerly principle that nothing looks the same as it used to.8 exercise an extreme

Barnes's use of the metaphor of the dead text is echoed by critics of The Book of Repulsive Women, even as they pursue disparate analyses of the text. Carolyn Burke, in a reading of The Book of Repulsive Women as a generative

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text for women's modernist writing, suggests that uThe Book of Repulsive Women reveals its author's awareness that she has, in fact, reached a dead end in the New York of 1915" (Burke 71). Louis Kannenstine, in an unremittingly unfavorable account ofthe a discourse poems, places the question of their survival firmly within on modernism as a practice of supercession and improvement: he that"[i]t is doubtful that most of the early poems could survive by (Kannenstine in his negative 18). account ofthe text, suggests that

suggests modern standards" Kannenstine,

[t]he tapering off of Djuna Barnes's productivity as a poet corresponds more or less to the decline in her output of essays and commercial writing. (Kannenstine 18) there is a curious relationship between Barnes's early her least commercially oriented practice during her pre-expatriate career, poetry, and her journalism of that period.9 Barnes worked as a successful journalist during the period in which The Book of Repulsive Women was first published, although its contents are only distantly (though I will suggest significantly) allied to that practice. This oxymoronic match between a commercial quotidian prose and ersatz decadent verse can be theorized through an understand? ing of their dialectical relationship "productivity." This was certainly use ofthe term signalled in Kannenstine's the period in which Barnes published the not necessarily the occasion of her most sustained work For Kannenstine

most poetry, though with poetic genres, which more probably occurred during her post expatriate "exile" in Manhattan.10 Kannenstine's model of productivity, then, returns us to the problematic relationship between the marketplace and the writer, and publication as the moment of textual and authorial production. Baron's introduction ofthe ancient text into a modern marketplace, subtended by the discourse of the book connoisseur, represents a moment in the cultural life of Barnes's poetry which reproduces precisely those tensions between modernity and its history, publication, and privacy, which feature throughout publishing can be extended her texts. In linking the title of The Book of Repulsive Women to its and to its figurative strategies, the notion ofa textual return history,

with

to the way in which Barnes's verses employ figures associated modernity in a diction borrowed from the writings of tht fin-de-siecle. Both the verses and the illustrations that accompany them are clearly derivative oifin-de-siecle 19-20), although Scott reads them as styles (Kannenstine

(Djuna Barnes 132). Guido Bruno, the original publisher of the chapbook, describes Barnes through the paradox of such an association in an interview published in 1919: "Imagist" She is only one of many: a new school sprung up during the years of the war. Followers ofthe decadents of France and of England's famous 1890s, in vigorous, ambitious America. (Barnes Interviews 388)11

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Bruno's title for the interview, "Fleur du Mal a la Mode de New York." captures the intriguing association made by him between "vigorous, ambitious America" and the 1890s, and does so in part by doing it in French, mixing his citation of Baudelaire with an expression au courant precisely because it is in French. Bruno's macaronic epithet represents modernity in or as an act of transla? central issue in the analysis of Barnes's writing, the question of stylistic atavism and derivation. The "return" of The Book of Repulsive Women, despite Barnes's efforts to repress it in her vita, is matched recourse to the diction and style of by the return in her texts ofa symptomatic earlier generations of writers in English. One ofthe most consistent features tion. It also marks another of Barnes's work is her manipulation of old genres and styles, a feature that has led to her perception as an oddity within modernism.12 Accounts of Barnes as an historical oddity or "throwback" haunted her career.13 Barnes's use of tradi? tional verse structures and a diction usually associated with decadent writing is one demonstration ofthe text's manipulation ofthe overdetermined relation? ship between modernism Calinescu (151-221).14 and decadence, a relationship explored at length by

The process of cultural "salvage" in Barnes's work may be aligned with one of Calinescu's defining parameters of kitsch; he quotes Wedekind's contention that kitsch is "the contemporary form ofthe Gothic, Rococo, Baroque" (225).15 This is a series of styles with which characterized writing is frequently Barnes is frequently associated: Barnes's as Elizabethan, Restoration, Rococo, either thematically, or generically. Gothic, Decadent, Augustan, stylistically Barnes's use of archaism in her texts similarly figures the tension between modernism as a practice of cleansing and a practice of salvage (Benstock) (Ross).16 In particular, Barnes's use of both literary antiquities and the work of her contemporaries marks the dialectical relationship between modernity and history as its returned repressed, if we accept the interpellation of stylistic atavism within Barnes's poetry under the rubric nothing looks the same as it used to. of kitsch process of reclamation may be allied with definitions

and with definitions of camp such as Ross offers in No &s "a rediscovery of history's waste, the re-creation of surplus value from Respect of forgotten forms of labor." (151). By this definition, the reissue-as-resurrection The Book of Repulsive Women in 1949 figures a "camp liberation" ofthe collectible "piece of writing." Baron's reissue ofthe text in a form that figured archa? ism was nonetheless a new edition and as such may be read as a prophylactic an old text but a new commodity. In this sense, Baron's piracy, modernizing: as Barnes chose to describe it, is a return of her own textual piracy through? out the volume, and perhaps Barnes's displeasure with Baron sprang in part from her sense of ambivalent identification with the project. In particular, the of copyright, interpellated as a discourse of material textuality, translates piracy the plagiaristic piracy of the ersatz?or immaterial?decadent text precisely

such as Calinescu's

Barnes' Book Repulsive The of Women Djuna as expatriation, the modernity

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for Barnes, will become a trope of historicity, "translating" of Paris, "Capital of the Ninenteenth Century" (Benjamin American modernism. Baudelaire 155) as a nascent, twentieth-century The problem of return for modernism is thematized through both the

of poems in The Book of Repulsive Women. subject matter and the disposition The poems describe the antics and practices ofthe "repulsive women," who are variously in homage to decadence, lesbians, and corpses, and they do so through a protocol of rehearsal. Poems are referred to each other both through subject matter and placement in the volume: "From Fifth Avenue Up" is followed by On"; "In General," the second poem, is followed some later by "In Particular." "Corpse A" is matched by "Corpse B," and so on. pages Similarly, the poems' movement or oscillation between the figure ofthe lesbian or discourse on woman, and the female corpse, a figuration as a meta-woman, of poetic femininity, of the stasis or immobility describes the text's shuttling between imitation or plagiarism as embodied discourses and critique, inverting the logic of disinterrment or reissue to suggest instead that where generational critique takes place, nothing looks the same as it used to. The title of The Book of Repulsive Women offers a reading of its women which the poems explore through the figurative manifestation of female corporeality. It was a title Barnes was to refer to in later years as "idiotic" (Djuna Barnes to 19.1.69), but it succinctly demarcates the tropological Wolfgang Hildesheimer ofthe volume. Repulsion figures the trope as a "turn" or repul? investigations sion, but also figures the "repulsive" women as corporeal representatives in the text ofa troping that is also a repulsion or anti-troping. In this sense, the effect of repulsive woman is in dialectical relationship to the function of the figure as tropism, as a form of inclination or attraction. They both participate in, and are differentiated women its transcendental of representation from, a reading of the trope that relies upon the phallus as signified, the subject of inclination or desire. The "repulsive" are turned, but also turn away, their bodies acting as both the ground "From Third Avenue

and as apotropaic, a "turn off," guarding against the very figurative strategies through which they are described. Repulsive women also ofthe rhyme, as it works to discern resemblance or figure the unpredictability attraction between or similarity them, whilst words, proposing an attraction or resemblance their semantic, if not phonetic difference. instituting revision. For Burke, Barnes's use of rhyme is "satiric" (71), between

"verse patterns whose repetitions mock the very matter that they are in the process of unfolding "(71). Mocking imita? subject tion between poems?Barnes's and others'?is subordinated to the oscillations within the text; The Book of Repulsive Women not merely to satirize the model, but more importantly employs parodic rhyme to investigate the aural logic of rhyming. The dependence, in other words, of necessarily her texts upon some never-specified decadent "original" is negotiated through of rhyme located

Rhyme instantiates and her poetry manifests

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of rhyme as an internal system of derivation. Rhymes, insofar as they are always similarly dissimilar, operate to attract and repulse words from each other, proposing a poetic logic in which nothing looks (sounds) the same as it used to. of poems Not surprisingly, this process is most trenchantly formulated in the pair titled "In General" and "In Particular." These poems exemplify the

complex rhetorical work offered throughout the sequence, but curiously enough they avoid entirely the question ofa gendered body, speaking instead of, or to, cloths and rags. With an elliptical and complex form of address, they each ask two questions ofan unmarked addressee.

What altar cloth, what rag of worth Unpriced? What turn of card, what trick of game Undiced? And you we valued still a little more than Christ. ("In General" 11,11.1-6)17 "In Particular" follows the structure of "In General" almost exactly.

What loin-cloth, what rag of wrong Unpriced? What turn of body, what of lust Undiced? So weVe worshipped you a little More than Christ. (15,11. 1-6) The poems are abrupt, even peremptory, apostrophes; each operates as much as an interruption as an interlocution. This shared address, from "we" to "you," the paradox of each poem's content. Each poem is abrupt and hypostatizes seemingly random, apparently at odds with the contextual material ofthe col? lection. And yet, in their specificity and directness, as in their titles, which sug? is overdetermined in terms gest elaboration, demonstration, pointedness?each of address; Each addresses a "you" who is both "general" and "particular," both ultimately ambiguous, "general," and pointedly specific, "particular." Rather than forming a pattern of enhanced detail, from general to particular, both are equally general, equally particular, shifting detail only as a matter of repetition. The title ofthe collection alone suggests that the poems are addressed to, and speak of, "repulsive women." And yet, in each of these two poems, the logic of their tropological operations produces an apostrophic address whose sub? ject (without agency) is consistently repulsed; insofar as the address presumes intimacy, its rehearsal promotes repulsion. Both poems thematize value, chance, and random effect; rather than offer the figure of Christ as a point of ideological reference, it becomes a trope of here as much to structure the preceding rhymes as to pure value, functioning

Barnes' Book Repulsive The of Women Djuna suggest any question of spirituality. The movement principally as sheer antithesis:

125 charted from "general" to "altar cloth" becomes "loin

"particular" proceeds cloth," "worth" becomes "wrong." The metaphorical movement from "altar" to "loin," or from "worth" to "wrong," could hardly be described as from general to particular; each seems to depend upon aural similarities that override precise lematic This antipodean model of revision is made more probthe retention of the same rhyme in both poems: in demonstrating by the "turn" from "altar" to "loin," from "worth" to "wrong," the poems remain identical in their rhymes, which link "unpriced" "undiced" and "Christ." If the semantic functions. direction from rule to move from general to particular implies a teleological from wide angle to microexemplar, or from abstraction to concrete entity, scopic, the two poems suggest instead that such a movement finds in similar? difference, or sheer overriding premise of such a formulation?sheer The move from a fairly usual use of the prefix "un" in "unpriced" repulsion. to a more novel "undiced" marks the migration of a principle of negativity ity?the is the work the repulsive women will do throughout the as (in general) the corporeal representatives of revul? sequence, simultaneously sion (repulsive feminine corporeality) and (in particular) the principle of nega? and negation, which these representations, negativity as the mark of a supplementary of corporeality. inscription The rhymed shift from "undiced" to "unpriced" in each poem is paralleled tion within by a shift in the use of each word between and pricelessness, figures both worthlessness Asking "What the two; "unpriced worth," which degenerates into a "trick of game." points to a future calibrated only

trick of game/Undiced?" through its potential for more "dicing," which stands here equally for a practice of random iteration (iteration of the particular to ramify the general) and for a principle dissection. accident examination, calibration, "dicing" become division and These two meanings are in turn antithetical, as they equally figure from "undiced" to "unpriced" transfers the and destination. Shifting of infinite

usual locating of rhyme from the beginning to the end of the word, a shift whose catachrestic novelty, indexed by the novelty ofthe prefix "un," proposes another motion ofthe repulsive turn from the end to the beginning ofthe line. is inverted, another movement that structurally instates the repulsive potential ofthe "invert" woman. By locating two poems in such obvious and yet opaque dialogue, the col? lection situates a series of problematics congruent with the "problem" of the Rhyme earlier. On the one hand, it raises the se: what logic, or at least post hoc formulation, question per might be adequate to formally and contextually relate diverse poems once they are collected? How might one address the paradox of a collection of repulsive of the collection items, blance, each moving repetition, resem? against the other even as propinquity highlights closeness? On the other, it raises an ancillary issue that historical status of the text discussed

126 becomes fundamental to an historical

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of the tropological investments that implicates material ofthe collection: given the premise ofan intertextuality both internal to the collection and external to it (the issue of derivativeness), how reading might the idea of movement or migration between texts be formally analyzed? In the case of these poems these issues are adduced through those morphological shifts noted above, and more specifically through their incorporation with a semantic shift from questions of chance to questions ofthe body. An analysis of these metatextual concerns with location and iteration tion of repetition and divergence that I am suggesting of "repulsion," is enumerated, or exemplified, in "particular," perhaps, through a return to a discourse ofthe body. The renovation of "turn of card [. . .] trick of as "turn of body, what of lust/Undiced?" suggests both caprice game/Undiced?" and a foreclosure an inexorable of meaning. Returning to the body is a "trick of game" and yet turn, in which the physical gesture ofa turned card is "turned" to turn the body. "Lust" as the index par excellence ofthe physical and its powers of attraction and repulsion, stands alone, unmodified and "undiced". account ofthe syntactifor the reader, oriented to the text. The irony of the title could not be lost for a project of republication?what made this "repulsive" book so attractive to Baron and others? Per? cal and structural haps it remained attractive at least partly because repulsion, irrespective of its of reader; it is an orienting term even in valence, does suggest the positionality its antipathy. Barnes dedicated the chapbook to her mother: To Mother Who was more or less like all mothers, but she was mine, ? and so ? She excelled. (7) "More or less," an equivocation that tropes oscillation as neutral effect, trans? lates the simultaneous as a singular and plural cat? ascription of motherhood egory. If Barnes's dedication ironizes the singularity of any category, her play with the address of her poems?singular and plural?is uncannily matched by Kannenstine's "In General": Since the point of view ofthe narrative "we" in these poems is unvarying, it does not matter whether these women are taken individually or "In General," as this brief poem is titled [.. .]" (Kannenstine 22) Kannenstine voice ofthe is correct in noting the unvarying use ofa first person plural as the poems; his collapse of this voice with the subjects ofthe poems is conflation of subject and object as he turns to discuss the poem In the same way that repulsion work of poetry, offers a suggestive it offers direction shows that the ques? is a formal registration

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more unusual, displacing the kinds of complex relays in evidence in the poems discussed above as a sheer translation of subject and object. Barnes's dedication figures above all the syntax ofthe shift from general to particular and its relevance to the topoi ofthe poems. The dedication provides orientation for one of the collections most explicit thematizations of its own project. "Twilight ofthe Illicit" addresses its apostrophes to an immaterial, metaphorized lesbianism, an "illicit" practice, matched by the "illicitness" of addressing an immaterial bodily practice. It does so through tropes of maternity, suggesting both a genealogical feminine sexual practices and the relationship between tropes of self-sufficient fecund female lesbianism body, a familiar convergence, as a generative custom: and the genealogical routing of

You, the twilight powder of a fire-wet dawn; You, the massive mother of Illicit spawn; While the others shrink in virtue You have borne. (1711. 25-30) This poem suggests the oxymoronic practice of decadent modernism through the trope of a "fire-wet dawn"; dawn and twilight chiastically link modern? ism and decadence to figures of maternal and lesbian corporeality in a scheme that perversely reconfigures light" and "dawn"?through practice. Barnes describes: offers two lines the liaison of modernism and decadence?"twi? an impregnating lesbian this corporeal catachresis:

of figuration for the bodies of the women she of stillness, which are themselves repulsive to an account of figures the trope as a "turning" movement, and figures of repulsion, a turning away to be contrasted with the trope as a figure of inclination or desire. The logic of

these poems is intricate: they argue both the difference of action and inaction and the difference between actions in their figurative register. Acts of figuration produce an instance ofthe gendered nature of figurative description, offering a representation of differences between tropes of action and inaction?mas? culine and feminine?which is subtended by an account of differences within of tropological as feminine in the text. action, thematized representations This simultaneity of reference instantiates a simultaneity that is also at work in repression; repression and its return are simultaneous (Freud, "Repression" 154). The figure of the repulsive woman simultaneously tropes inclination, desire, and apotropaic repulsion. The effect of these poems in describing an oscillation between the function of trope and anti-trope limns the text's deictic and figurative strategies, a relationship foregrounded throughout Barnes's writ? ing. The "turning" ofthe trope may be seen as a turning towards and away, in other words, as a metaphorization of action. One way to figure the movement

128 antithetical

of Literature Journal Modern to tropism is through stillness: a stillness that features in Barnes's of women in the book. In "Suicide" (21), she writes of two women's as "Corpse A" (1.1) and "Corpse B" (1.7). The movement to a morgue is described as antithetical to their stillness: of

descriptions corpses identified these bodies Corpse B

They gave her hurried shoves this way And that. Her body shock-abbreviated As a city cat. She lay out listlessly like some small mug Ofbeer gone flat. (2111.-13) Barnes's figure resembles the famously bathetic simile that opens Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to offer a similar effect of inaction: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table. [. ..] (1-3) In "Suicide," however, it closes the poem, with a figuration of stillness that, like Eliot's, guards against figurative "fancy" even as it is perversely figurative. The still, "flat" beer "flattens" the body of the woman as a consumable with a use-by date. This figure relies upon the "repulsive" body ofthe corpse as marker of temporality; repulsion, here figured describes the body of the dead woman. Barnes's ekphrasis as stillness, closes the poem which of "The

figures of stillness are indebted particularly to the tradition and in particular to Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn":

Though her lips are vague as fancy In her youth? They bloom vivid and repulsive As the truth. Even vases in the making Are uncouth. ("Seen From the L/" 1411.21-26) Barnes relies upon the point of view offered by the "L" to describe her womanThe "L," an elevated train line that bisected Manhattan, is the turning-vase. place where stillness and movement meet, in the body of the pumalist-voyeur moved, but not moving, through the city streets. Barnes's text orients us to by orienting us to the poems as observers whose "general" and "particular," singular and plural vision of them is panoramic. Bruno described the poems as singular, and their audience as plural; the poems become the vehicle which, in exchange, offers transportation between these two positions. He suggests that the chapbook is the bodies of her women

Barnes' Book Repulsive The of Women Djuna a chant which could be sung by those who are in the daily procession through the streets and highways of our metropolis but which could also be sung by those who are on balconies and house-tops viewing the eternal show of daily life. (Bruno in Kannenstine 20)

129

the place Barnes makes use ofthe "L" as the locomotive site of spectatorship, where the city is observed by the fldneur.12 The fldneur, the solitary male fig? ure of high modernity who strolls and gazes, is automated as the passenger, not cultural: a point of view described by whose prospect is topographical, transit, the passage of time, rather than voyeurism, the act above all of still? ness.19 Locomotion institutes the passive orientation ofthe erstwhile strolling of Barnes's anonymous fldneur is represented as a The spectatorship voyuer. process reproduced in the turning ofthe woman into a vase, as the vagueness of "fancy" is contrasted with the "vivid" and "repulsive" nature of "truth" before the transformation through the anachronism and ofthe "L." The point of stationary observation is nevertheless always misposition also a point of transport; the fldneur, like the suicide, is motionless and moving. The stillness ofthe voyeur, whether figured through the act of voyeurism itself or through the implication of the locomotive as a mechanical representative of modernism, is ultimately the agent positioned by the giddying turns of the repulsive women, whose logic of antithesis collects him as its delayed referent. This move proleptically forestalls the bibliophile?1949's simulacrum of the his appreciation ofthe "object" of poetry. Her transformation of fldneur?and flaneur?as the reproduces one ofthe key topoi of modernism?the representative ofa gendered logic of surveillance, and in positioning him on the "L" she ironizes his ambulatory stretch. As their historical movement is circumscribed by the logic of their own positions, the position of stillness is transposed from the repulsive women, whose bodies even when still are turning, to the fldneur, bibliophile, erstwhile publisher, Baron, and Bruno alike. Barnes's figures suggest that what is never possible is the reproduction ofthe text: the stationary is indexical to the rotations of the text position of the^w^wr-cum-bibliophile which render it unreproducible even, or especially, in facsimile. To reissue is not to reproduce. This historical disarticulation lies at the heart of Baron's reissue ofthe and through the boutique chapbook, under the auspices of dilettantism, mechanism of late capitalism's fetish of the reproducible text. This failure of reproduction is chiastically structured by the text's original boutique publication and its piracy of decadence. Barnes's move to suppress the text was her failed tactic in a disengagement from Baron; the text's own figurative strategies do the work in any case. Precisely because, like a corpse, Barnes' unrevised chapbook lay "still," "repulsive" for all those years, its reissue as a self-similar artifact of early modernism "merely" showed that nothing looks the same as it used to. observation by observation. Barnes returns to the fldneur his locomotion enacted

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1. The analysis offered in this paper is based in part upon materialheld as the Djuna Barnes Col? lection, Universityof Maryland at College Park.I thank the Authors League Fund for permissionto quote from this material.All referencesto unpublishedletters and typescriptswill be given paren? thetically in the text. A directoryof unpublishedmaterialswill be found in the bibliography.Part of this letter is quoted in Broe, Silence Power251. and in 2. With the exception of her last book, Creatures an Alphabet(1982), Barnes'spublicationsafter 1958 to her death in 1982 were all republishedearlierwork. 3. Her short story,"Alleret Retour"(which, in replyto the requestthat opened this paper,she offered to Anderson in place ofthe storyAnderson wished to reprint)is emblematic.It was publishedin four versions over nearlyforty years, from 1924 to 1962. 4. For a somewhat grudging account of Barnes'slabor of revision, see in particularO'Neal (1990). 5. In 1949, Barnes wrote to her Italian agent at the Agenzia LetterariaInternazionale: Yes, unfortunately,and to my horror,and againstprotests,one OscarBaronhas re-printed a booklet of ancient origin (1915 to be exact) called "TheBook of Repulsive Women".I did not know that it still existed, and so did nothing about the copyright. (Djuna Barnes to Erich Linder, 18.11.48) 6. Most recently republishedby the Sun and Moon Press, and Bern Boyle Books (both 1989), The BookofRepulsiveWomen also, accordingto the copyrightdata, includedin the Bern Boyle edition was republishedin 1976 by Rob Doll (8). 7. For "ancient," Barnes'sletter to Linder, n4. see 8. One other consequenceofthe reprintwas registeredsome twenty-five yearslaterin the form ofa for 1972 edition of LadiesAlmanack, which Barnesgave approval,accordingto Susan SniaderLanser, "allegedlyfearing the kind of literary piracy that had already occurred with TheBookof Repulsive " Women (Lanser 165). Barnes'spermission to reprint LadiesAlmanackrepresentedan abstraction of the ideas of prophylaxisand consent; it implied these principles only through the case of their transgression. 9. Fora summaryof Barnes's careerduringthis period,see Field (1983). Barnesworkedas ajournalist through the earlyteens to the late twenties, although herjournalism shifted significantlyduring this (1989). period. Selectedjournalism is collected in Interviews(1985) and in New York 10. Barnes'slast book, Creatures anAlphabet(1982), as noted above,was her only one new publica? in tion after 1958. Suggestively,it was a collection of verse and illustrationsat least superficiallysimilar to The Bookof RepulsiveWomen. 11. Kannenstinetracesthtfn-de-siecle effect of these poems directlyto Guido Bruno, their publisher, "achampion of aestheticism"(19); as Barnes feared,with the republicationofthe book the publisher becomes the locus ofthe aesthetics ofthe text. 12. Schenck states this problemmost cogently in her outline ofa polemic for her analysisof genre in modernism: My polemic throughout this essay is the dismantling ofa monolithic modernismdefined by its iconoclastic irreverencefor convention and form, a differencethat has contributed to the marginalisationof women poets during the period and even division among them (244) [. ??]? 13. This is particularlywell demonstratedin Messerli'sdescriptivebibliography(1975). 14. See also CassandraLaity in "H.D and A.C. Swinburne:Decadence and Sapphic Modernism" (1990) and Marilyn Gaddis Rose in "Decadence and Modernism: Defining by Default" (1982) for analysesof this relationshipsensitive to issues of gender.

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15. Calinescu's quotation, his translation, is from Frank Wedekind Gesammelte Werke (Munich: George Muller, 1924) 9: 210. 16. Benstock writes: "Fearof contaminationis the founding premise of modernism"(186-187). the 17. All referencesareto the 1989 Ben Boyle edition of The BookofRepulsiveWomen; 1989 Sun and Moon edition is un-paginated. 18. See Orvell (1989) on William Dean Howells, the "el"and spectatorship(36). See Buck-Morss (1989) on Benjamin'scomplex theorizations of these relationships. 19. See Wolff (1985) on the gender specificity ofthe historical and tropologicaly?tf#??r.

Works Cited MaterialsAll unpublishedmaterialsare part ofthe Djuna Barnes Collection at the Uni? Unpublished versity of Maryland at College Park. Referencesfollow the McKeldin Librarycatalogue data. Barnes's letters are cataloguedunderthe name ofthe recipient.Letters are carboncopies of typescript. Series I, Box 1: Djuna Barnes?daybooks; Djuna Barnes?vita. Series I, Box 1: Agenzia LetterariaInternazionale(Erich Linder);Alicat Bookshop (Oscar Baron); MargaretAnderson. Series I, Box 9: Wolfgang Hildesheimer 1959-1970. Review 1 (April 1924): 159-67. Rpt inA NightAmong Barnes, Djuna. "Alleret Retour."Transatlantic Works Djuna Barnes,and Spillway. theHorses,Selected of -. -. A NightAmongtheHorses.New York:Liveright, 1929. Creatures an Alphabet.New York:The Dial Press, 1982. in . Interviews.Ed. Alyce Barry.Forewordand Commentaryby Douglas Messerli. Washington: Sun and Moon Press, 1985. -. -. -. -. -. -. -. LadiesAlmanack.1928. New York:Harper and Row, 1972. New York. with commentaryby Alyce Barry.Foreword Douglas Messerli.Los Angeles: Ed. by Sun and Moon Press, 1989. Selected Works Djuna Barnes: 1962. London and Boston: of Spillway/TheAntiphon/Nightwood. Faberand Faber,1980. Spillway.London: Faberand Faber,1962. BookofRepulsiveWomen. The 1915. Los Angeles: Sun &Moon Press, 1989. Bookof RepulsiveWomen. The 1915. New York:Alicat Bookshop, 1949. Bookof RepulsiveWomen. The 1915. New York:Ben Boyle Books, 1989.

Baudelaire. LyricPoet in theEra ofHigh Capitalism. A Trans. Harry Zohn. Benjamin,Walter. Charles 1973. London: Verso, 1985. -. Illuminations.Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York:Schocken Books, 1969.

Benstock, Shari. "ExpatriateSapphic Modernism: Entering Literary History."Jay and Glasgow 183-203. Broe, Mary Lynn and Angela Ingram, eds. Women's Writingin Exile. Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1989.

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Broe, Mary Lynn ed. Silenceand Power:A Reevaluationof Djuna Barnes.Carbondaleand Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Bruno, Guido. "Fleursdu Mal a la Mode de New York?An Interviewwith Djuna Barnesby Guido Bruno."1919. Reprintedin Barnes Interviews383-388. and Dialectics Seeing:Walter Buck-Morss,Susan. The Benjamin theArcades Project. Cambridge,Mass.: of The MIT Press, 1989. Burke, Carolyn. "Accidental Aloofness': Barnes, Loy, and Modernism." Broe, Silenceand Power 67-79. Modernism Avant-GardeDecadence KitschPostmodernism. Calinescu, Matei. Five Facesof Modernity: Durham: Duke UP, 1987. Poems1909-1962. London: Faberand Faber,1974. Eliot, T.S. [ThomasStearns]. Collected Field, Andrew. Djuna:theLifeand TimesofDjuna Barnes.NewYork: G.P. Putnam's,1983. Published Miss Barnes. London: Martin, Secker 5c Warburg, 1983. Rpt. with new as TheFormidable Formidable Miss Barnes.Austin: U of Texas P, 1985. materialas Djuna: The 1915. On Metapsychology 139-158. Freud, Sigmund. "Repression." -. OnMetapsychology: Theory Psychoanalysis. Trans.James Strachey.Ed. Angela Richards. The of Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1984. The Pelican FreudLibrary11.

Gaddis Rose, Marilyn. "Decadence and Modernism: Defining by Default." ModernistStudies4 (1982): 195-206. RadicalRevisions. New York and Jay, Karla and Joanne Glasgow, eds. Lesbian Textsand Contexts: London: New YorkUP, 1990. Art Kannenstine, Louis F. The of Djuna Barnes:Duality and Damnation. New York:New YorkUP, 1977. Decadence and SapphicModernism." and Glasgow Laity, Cassandra."H.D. andA.C. Swinburne: Jay 217-240. Lanser, Susan Snaider."Speakingin Tongues: Ladies Almanack and the Discourse of Desire."Broe Silence Power156-168. Revisedversionof "Speakingin Tongues:Ladies Almanack and the and Frontiers4 (Fall 1979): 39-46. Language of Celebration." A Messerli, Douglas. Djuna Barnes: Bibliography. Rhinebeck, NY: David Lewis, 1975. is O'Neal, Hank. KLife painful, nasty,and short- in my caseit has onlybeenpainful and nasty": Djuna Memoir.NewYork: ParagonHouse, 1990. Barnes,1978-1981: an Informal Real Thing: ImitationandAuthenticity American in 1880-1940. ChapelHill Orvell, Miles. The Culture, & London: The U of North Carolina P, 1989. Schenck, Celeste M. "Exiledby Genre:Modernism, Canonicity, and the Politics of Exclusion."Broe and Ingram 225-250. Scott, James B. Djuna Barnes.Boston: Twayne, 1976 Women and the Literatureof Modernity."Theory Cultureand Wolff, Janet. "TheInvisible Fldneuse: 2 Society (1985): 37-46.