In Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Nora Flood sees Robin Vote by way of deflection, looking away from the beloved to better see her. This article will discuss the conditions of perception in Nightwood: how the act of seeing, as a product of knowledge (rather than a means of knowing the world), is forsaken for an alternative modality of seeing that moves away from identification and brings the less visible into view. The narrative of the sexual deviant is rearranged to resist straight reading practices. By developing a lens of negative perception, this article argues that seeing the world in perpetual negativity, at a slant, and as bent bodies in Nightwood is a queer response to the experience of being excluded from the positive, heteronormative narrative and yet still enduring and existing within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the character of Robin Vote, the heroine in Djuna Barnes' novel 'Nightwood.' Reputation of the cinema vamp; Model of female power; Vamp's marginal status as a woman and as a citizen.

Djuna Barnes's 1936 novel Nightwood functions as narrative theory or 'metafiction' avant le lettre, and as a novel whose narrative practice is shaped by the repeated disruptions of 'melancholia.' This warped form of mourning produces compulsive repetition even as it facilitates powerful insights and a new mode of knowing and telling. Barnes let melancholia loose upon her novel's narrative, where it hampers teleological momentum and reveals the problems of novelistic telling: the domination of the narrator, the submission of suffering characters, the compulsions of narrative desire. While Peter Brooks (1984) argues for the persistence of plot and narrative desire in fiction, Barnes interrogates our insistence upon narrated meaning. In Nightwood, Barnes put melancholia to work at the very center of the novel: displacing 'proper' narrative form, revealing fundamental compulsions to retell, read, and know. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Leah Lynch discusses Djuna Barnes' queer manipulation of narrative temporalities in her 1936 novel Nightwood. Reading this modernist novel through queer and psychoanalytic lenses, Lynch suggests that it displays the reciprocal, albeit uneven, construction of normative modes of being, and normative, novelistic conceptions of narrative. The novel offers not so much a model of how one might live time, affiliation, and language differently, but rather an unsettling of those norms that have, through gradual growth, come to figure as 'natural'. Using syntactical and narrative contortion, Barnes creates relationalities and subjectivities for her characters that are not consonant with linear time, but rather align with those spatiotemporalities (existences within both space and time) in which lives can be lived differently, or queerly. As queer narrative, Nightwood is therefore less about a return, retrieval, or other essentialist methodology, than it is with providing a stage for those particularities that can be elided by 'straight' images and understandings of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Review begins, "The spring after I turned 24, I discovered Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, a slender, dense novel that I read with the aching intensity of a person possessed."