30 - The Byzantine Modernism of Djuna Barnes

Summary

IT WOULD BE easy – if it weren’t tricky – to connect Nightwood to Christian texts. Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel is salient with religious imagery, symbolism and rhetoric. It frequently turns to religion and faith, and for some critics it even reads like some kind (admittedly a very unorthodox kind) of Christian parable. And yet it is also and so very clearly a heretical, blasphemous novel, a text, as Daniela Caselli puts it, mixing understatement with Barnesian excess, ‘not untouched by the bawdy, the blasphemous, and the obscene’. Nightwood is not only irreverent but it is also a dense and slippery work, a work which resists productive meaning, prioritises surface over depth, and which therefore refuses any one reading – let alone a ‘Christian’ reading. Nightwood, in case it needs saying, is not a Christian text. This is not what I’d like to suggest here, nor is it to read Barnes’s novel through the prism of Christian texts, finding similarities and differences along the way. What I’d like to do, rather, is read Nightwood and the fascinating characters that populate its world with some late antique and Byzantine Christian texts and the unlikely saints that these texts commemorate.

Why Byzantine? It has, of course, been common and natural for those interested in modern literature and religion to look back to earlier (and early) religious texts. Those within British and North American modernism have customarily looked to Western religious tales and sources. But what if we were to look eastwards and bring into our discussion of anglophone modernism, religion and myth texts of a different culture, geography and language? What would happen to our reading of Nightwood – and to our reading of modernism and religion more broadly – if we ventured towards Byzantium? What might this spatial and vertical expansion yield? What new unorthodox readings?

The texts I will be discussing alongside Nightwood are ‘Byzantine’ in the historical sense that they were written and spread within the Byzantine Empire, founded in 330 ce and taken over by the Ottomans in 1453. They are ‘Byzantine’ in the other sense of the term, too.