Repulsive Modernism: Djuna Barnes' "The Book of Repulsive Women"Author(s): Melissa Jane HardieSource: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1, Modernist Afterimages (Autumn, 2005),pp. 118-132Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831625Accessed: 05/04/2010 15:08

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"Repulsive Modernism:

Djuna Barnes7 The Book of Repulsive Women"

Melissa Jane Hardie

University ofSydney

"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)

In 1952, Djuna Barnes wrote to Margaret Anderson, who had asked to reprint

some early work of hers:

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 more famous shut-ins ofthe modernist movement, Barnes some?

times wished a similar fate for her early publications. She interprets the func?

tion of reissue as a doubly negative one: "to reissue 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 col-

lapsed with the principle of textual intermediation variously embodied by the

publisher, editor, and public. 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

Djuna Barnes' The Book of Repulsive Women 119

symmetry ofthe relationship between author and text with the profitable func?

tion of instituting the agency ofthe "living" author. Textual desuetude is reread

to instantiate authorial vitality: a useful institution of agency for the author

whose texts threaten to have a healthier life in the public sphere than she does.2

In fact, in her own practice Barnes was singularly adept at creating and per-

petuating texts whose bodies spoke of change, and she was responsible for the

republication of numerous texts which charted the diversity of history through careful rewriting; Barnes preferred the reissue of texts she had herself sedulously revised.3 Barnes's notorious labor of revision, which provided the occupation of

her post-expatriate years in New York, structurally stands to her writing, and

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

revision as an act of endless deferral, a structure perhaps more familiar to any writer. If the pseudo-historical proposition embedded in Anderson's request is

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.

Barnes's sharp note to Anderson mentions "the unfortunately praised earlier work," an oblique aside that may be traced to a similar moment of dis-

interrment 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 wished 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

history and its figurative returns, a representation that poses such returns as

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!*

120 Journal of Modern Literature

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 Women was "[. ..] intrinsically a very fine collection of verse, not at all dated

by the transition of 33 years" (Oscar Baron to Djuna Barnes 13.10.48). He

described his desire to reprint as "[. . .] the desire of a bibliophile to com?

municate a good piece of writing to another" (Oscar Baron to Djuna Barnes

13.10.48).

Baron aligns his publication with a connoisseurship that contingently disenfranchises the author as her text's "owner" in favor of an exchange of

property between bibliophiles. Baron's letter signifies precisely how The Book

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.

Similarly, its republication as an "Outcast Chapbook" (Kannenstine 17) already 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

estrangement from modernist canons. In Baron's edition, it joins a collection

of bibliophile 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

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

describing the reissue, Barnes wishfully suggests that the book as material

object had vanished: "I did not know that it still existed, and so did nothing about the copyright" (Djuna Barnes to Erich Linder, 18.11.48). Barnes com-

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. Postulating or fantasizing its non-existence in this way?as an extreme exercise of copyright protection?mimics her repression of the

historical, published text implicit in sequestering it from her vita and continu-

ously misstating the title revisions: an elaboration of her writerly principle that

nothing looks the same as it used to.8

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

Djuna Barnes' The Book of Repulsive Women 121

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 unfa-

vorable account ofthe poems, places the question of their survival firmly within

a discourse on modernism as a practice of supercession and improvement: he

suggests that"[i]t is doubtful that most of the early poems could survive by modern standards" (Kannenstine 18).

Kannenstine, in his negative account ofthe text, suggests that

[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)

For Kannenstine there is a curious relationship between Barnes's early

poetry, her least commercially oriented practice during her pre-expatriate career, 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 quotid- ian prose and ersatz decadent verse can be theorized through an understand?

ing of their dialectical relationship signalled in Kannenstine's use ofthe term

"productivity." This was certainly the period in which Barnes published the

most poetry, though not necessarily the occasion of her most sustained work

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, sub-

tended 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 her texts. In linking the title of The Book of Repulsive Women to its

publishing history, and to its figurative strategies, the notion ofa textual return

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

"Imagist" (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:

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

122 Journal of Modern Literature

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?

tion. It also marks another 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

by the return in her texts ofa symptomatic recourse to the diction and style of

earlier generations of writers in English. One ofthe most consistent features

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 and decadence, a relationship explored at length by Calinescu (151-221).14

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 Barnes is frequently associated: Barnes's

writing is frequently characterized as Elizabethan, Restoration, Rococo,

Augustan, Gothic, Decadent, either thematically, stylistically or generically. Barnes's use of archaism in her texts similarly figures the tension between

modernism as a practice of cleansing (Benstock) and a practice of salvage (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 poetry under the rubric nothing looks the same as it used to.

Barnes's process of reclamation may be allied with definitions of kitsch

such as Calinescu's and with definitions of camp such as Ross offers in No

Respect &s "a rediscovery of history's waste, the re-creation of surplus value from

forgotten forms of labor." (151). By this definition, the reissue-as-resurrection of

The Book of Repulsive Women in 1949 figures a "camp liberation" ofthe collect-

ible "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

modernizing: an old text but a new commodity. In this sense, Baron's piracy, 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

piracy of copyright, interpellated as a discourse of material textuality, translates the plagiaristic piracy of the ersatz?or immaterial?decadent text precisely

Djuna Barnes' The Book of Repulsive Women 123

as expatriation, for Barnes, will become a trope of historicity, "translating" the modernity of Paris, "Capital of the Ninenteenth Century" (Benjamin Baudelaire 155) as a nascent, twentieth-century American modernism.

The problem of return for modernism is thematized through both the

subject matter and the disposition of poems in The Book of Repulsive Women.

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 "From Third Avenue On"; "In General," the second poem, is followed some

pages later by "In Particular." "Corpse A" is matched by "Corpse B," and so on.

Similarly, the poems' movement or oscillation between the figure ofthe lesbian

as a meta-woman, or discourse on woman, and the female corpse, a figuration of the stasis or immobility of poetic femininity, 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

Wolfgang Hildesheimer 19.1.69), but it succinctly demarcates the tropological

investigations ofthe volume. Repulsion figures the trope as a "turn" or repul?

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 from, a reading of the trope that relies upon the phallus as

its transcendental signified, the subject of inclination or desire. The "repulsive" women are turned, but also turn away, their bodies acting as both the ground of representation and as apotropaic, a "turn off," guarding against the very

figurative strategies through which they are described. Repulsive women also

figure the unpredictability ofthe rhyme, as it works to discern resemblance or

attraction or similarity between words, proposing an attraction or resemblance

between them, whilst instituting their semantic, if not phonetic difference.

Rhyme instantiates revision. For Burke, Barnes's use of rhyme is "satiric" (71), and her poetry manifests "verse patterns whose repetitions mock the very

subject matter that they are in the process of unfolding "(71). Mocking imita?

tion between poems?Barnes's and others'?is subordinated to the oscillations

of rhyme necessarily located within the text; The Book of Repulsive Women

employs parodic rhyme not merely to satirize the model, but more importantly to investigate the aural logic of rhyming. The dependence, in other words, of

her texts upon some never-specified decadent "original" is negotiated through

124 Journal of Modern Literature

a thematized interest in the structure of rhyme as an internal system of deriva-

tion. 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.

Not surprisingly, this process is most trenchantly formulated in the pair of poems 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,"

hypostatizes the paradox of each poem's content. Each poem is abrupt and

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?

gest elaboration, demonstration, pointedness?each is overdetermined in terms

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

pure value, functioning here as much to structure the preceding rhymes as to

Djuna Barnes' The Book of Repulsive Women 125

suggest any question of spirituality. The movement charted from "general" to

"particular" proceeds principally as sheer antithesis: "altar cloth" becomes "loin

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 semantic functions. This antipodean model of revision is made more prob- lematic by the retention of the same rhyme in both poems: in demonstrating 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

move from general to particular implies a teleological direction from rule to

exemplar, or from abstraction to concrete entity, from wide angle to micro-

scopic, the two poems suggest instead that such a movement finds in similar?

ity?the overriding premise of such a formulation?sheer difference, or sheer

repulsion. The move from a fairly usual use of the prefix "un" in "unpriced" to a more novel "undiced" marks the migration of a principle of negativity and negation, which is the work the repulsive women will do throughout the

sequence, simultaneously as (in general) the corporeal representatives of revul?

sion (repulsive feminine corporeality) and (in particular) the principle of nega? tion within these representations, negativity as the mark of a supplementary

inscription of corporeality. The rhymed shift from "undiced" to "unpriced" in each poem is paralleled

by a shift in the use of each word between the two; "unpriced worth," which

figures both worthlessness and pricelessness, degenerates into a "trick of game."

Asking "What trick of game/Undiced?" points to a future calibrated only

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 of infinite examination, calibration, "dicing" become division and

dissection. These two meanings are in turn antithetical, as they equally figure accident and destination. Shifting from "undiced" to "unpriced" transfers the

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.

Rhyme 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

historical status of the text discussed earlier. On the one hand, it raises the

question of the collection per se: what logic, or at least post hoc formulation,

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

items, each moving against the other even as propinquity highlights resem?

blance, repetition, closeness? On the other, it raises an ancillary issue that

126 Journal of Modern Literature

becomes fundamental to an historical reading of the tropological investments

ofthe collection: given the premise ofan intertextuality that implicates material

both internal to the collection and external to it (the issue of derivativeness), how

might the idea of movement or migration between texts be formally analyzed? In the case of these poems these issues are adduced through those morphologi- cal 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 shows that the ques? tion of repetition and divergence that I am suggesting is a formal registration 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

game/Undiced?" as "turn of body, what of lust/Undiced?" suggests both caprice and a foreclosure of meaning. Returning to the body is a "trick of game" and yet an inexorable 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".

In the same way that repulsion offers a suggestive account ofthe syntacti- cal and structural work of poetry, it offers direction for the reader, oriented

to the text. The irony of the title could not be lost for a project of republica- tion?what made this "repulsive" book so attractive to Baron and others? Per?

haps it remained attractive at least partly because repulsion, irrespective of its

valence, does suggest the positionality of reader; it is an orienting term even in

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 ascription of motherhood as a singular and plural cat?

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 conflation of subject and object as he turns to discuss the poem "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 is correct in noting the unvarying use ofa first person plural as the

voice ofthe poems; his collapse of this voice with the subjects ofthe poems is

Djuna Barnes' The Book of Repulsive Women 127

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 rel-

evance 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

relationship between tropes of self-sufficient feminine sexual practices and the

fecund female body, a familiar convergence, and the genealogical routing of

lesbianism as a generative custom:

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 the liaison of modernism and decadence?"twi?

light" and "dawn"?through this corporeal catachresis: an impregnating lesbian

practice. Barnes offers two lines of figuration for the bodies of the women she

describes: figures of stillness, which are themselves repulsive to an account of

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

representations of tropological action, thematized as feminine in the text.

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 Journal of Modern Literature

antithetical to tropism is through stillness: a stillness that features in Barnes's

descriptions of women in the book. In "Suicide" (21), she writes of two women's

corpses identified as "Corpse A" (1.1) and "Corpse B" (1.7). The movement of

these bodies to a morgue is described as antithetical to their stillness:

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 "The

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 as stillness, closes the poem which

describes the body of the dead woman.

Barnes's figures of stillness are indebted particularly to the tradition of

ekphrasis 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 woman-

turning-vase. The "L," an elevated train line that bisected Manhattan, is the

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

the bodies of her women 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

Djuna Barnes' The Book of Repulsive Women 129

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)

Barnes makes use ofthe "L" as the locomotive site of spectatorship, the place 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, whose prospect is topographical, not cultural: a point of view described by

transit, the passage of time, rather than voyeurism, the act above all of still?

ness.19 Locomotion institutes the passive orientation ofthe erstwhile strolling

voyuer. The spectatorship of Barnes's anonymous fldneur is represented as a

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 enacted by observation.

Barnes returns to the fldneur his locomotion through the anachronism and

misposition ofthe "L." The point of stationary observation is nevertheless always 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

fldneur?and his appreciation ofthe "object" of poetry. Her transformation of

observation reproduces one ofthe key topoi of modernism?the flaneur?as the

representative ofa gendered logic of surveillance, and in positioning him on the

"L" she ironizes his ambulatory stretch. As their historical movement is circum-

scribed 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

position of the^w^wr-cum-bibliophile is indexical to the rotations of the text

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 boutique chapbook, under the auspices of dilettantism, and through the

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.

130 Journal of Modern Literature

Notes

1. The analysis offered in this paper is based in part upon material held as the Djuna Barnes Col?

lection, University of Maryland at College Park. I thank the Authors League Fund for permission to

quote from this material. All references to unpublished letters and typescripts will be given paren? thetically in the text. A directory of unpublished materials will be found in the bibliography. Part of this letter is quoted in Broe, Silence and Power 251.

2. With the exception of her last book, Creatures in an Alphabet (1982), Barnes's publications after 1958 to her death in 1982 were all republished earlier work.

3. Her short story, "Aller et Retour" (which, in reply to the request that opened this paper, she offered to Anderson in place ofthe story Anderson wished to reprint) is emblematic. It was published in four versions over nearly forty years, from 1924 to 1962.

4. For a somewhat grudging account of Barnes's labor of revision, see in particular O'Neal (1990).

5. In 1949, Barnes wrote to her Italian agent at the Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale:

Yes, unfortunately, and to my horror, and against protests, one Oscar Baron has re-printed a booklet of ancient origin (1915 to be exact) called "The Book 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 republished by the Sun and Moon Press, and Bern Boyle Books (both 1989), The Book of Repulsive Women was also, according to the copyright data, included in the Bern Boyle edition

republished in 1976 by Rob Doll (8).

7. For "ancient," see Barnes's letter to Linder, n4.

8. One other consequence ofthe reprint was registered some twenty-five years later in the form ofa 1972 edition of Ladies Almanack, for which Barnes gave approval, according to Susan Sniader Lanser, "allegedly fearing the kind of literary piracy that had already occurred with The Book of Repulsive Women "

(Lanser 165). Barnes's permission to reprint Ladies Almanack represented an abstraction of the ideas of prophylaxis and consent; it implied these principles only through the case of their

transgression.

9. For a summary of Barnes's career during this period, see Field (1983). Barnes worked as a journalist through the early teens to the late twenties, although her journalism shifted significantly during this

period. Selected journalism is collected in Interviews (1985) and in New York (1989).

10. Barnes's last book, Creatures in an Alphabet (1982), as noted above, was her only one new publica? tion after 1958. Suggestively, it was a collection of verse and illustrations at least superficially similar to The Book of Repulsive Women.

11. Kannenstine traces thtfn-de-siecle effect of these poems directly to Guido Bruno, their publisher, "a champion of aestheticism" (19); as Barnes feared, with the republication ofthe book the publisher becomes the locus ofthe aesthetics ofthe text.

12. Schenck states this problem most cogently in her outline ofa polemic for her analysis of genre in modernism:

My polemic throughout this essay is the dismantling ofa monolithic modernism defined

by its iconoclastic irreverence for convention and form, a difference that has contributed to the marginalisation of women poets during the period and even division among them [. ? ?]? (244)

13. This is particularly well demonstrated in Messerli's descriptive bibliography (1975).

14. See also Cassandra Laity 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 analyses of this relationship sensitive to issues of gender.

Djuna Barnes' The Book of Repulsive Women 131

15. Calinescu's quotation, his translation, is from Frank Wedekind Gesammelte Werke (Munich: George Muller, 1924) 9: 210.

16. Benstock writes: "Fear of contamination is the founding premise of modernism" (186-187).

17. All references are to the 1989 Ben Boyle edition of The Book of Repulsive Women; the 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's complex theorizations of these relationships.

19. See Wolff (1985) on the gender specificity ofthe historical and tropologicaly?tf#??r.

Works Cited

Unpublished Materials All unpublished materials are part ofthe Djuna Barnes Collection at the Uni?

versity of Maryland at College Park. References follow the McKeldin Library catalogue data.

Barnes's letters are catalogued under the name ofthe recipient. Letters are carbon copies of typescript.

Series I, Box 1: Djuna Barnes?daybooks; Djuna Barnes?vita.

Series I, Box 1: Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale (Erich Linder); Alicat Bookshop (Oscar Baron); Margaret Anderson.

Series I, Box 9: Wolfgang Hildesheimer 1959-1970.

Barnes, Djuna. "Aller et Retour." Transatlantic Review 1 (April 1924): 159-67. Rpt inA Night Among the Horses, Selected Works of Djuna Barnes, and Spillway.

-. A Night Among the Horses. New York: Liveright, 1929.

-. Creatures in an Alphabet. New York: The Dial Press, 1982.

. Interviews. Ed. Alyce Barry. Foreword and Commentary by Douglas Messerli. Washington: Sun and Moon Press, 1985.

-. Ladies Almanack. 1928. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

-. New York. Ed. with commentary by Alyce Barry. Foreword by Douglas Messerli. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1989.

-. Selected Works of Djuna Barnes: Spillway/TheAntiphon/Nightwood. 1962. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1980.

-. Spillway. London: Faber and Faber, 1962.

-. The Book of Repulsive Women. 1915. Los Angeles: Sun &Moon Press, 1989.

-. The Book of Repulsive Women. 1915. New York: Alicat Bookshop, 1949.

-. The Book of Repulsive Women. 1915. New York: Ben Boyle Books, 1989.

Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire. A Lyric Poet in the Era ofHigh Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. 1973. London: Verso, 1985.

-. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

Benstock, Shari. "Expatriate Sapphic Modernism: Entering Literary History." Jay and Glasgow 183-203.

Broe, Mary Lynn and Angela Ingram, eds. Women's Writing in Exile. Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1989.

132 Journal of Modern Literature

Broe, Mary Lynn ed. Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Carbondale and Edwards- ville: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

Bruno, Guido. "Fleurs du Mal a la Mode de New York?An Interview with Djuna Barnes by Guido Bruno." 1919. Reprinted in Barnes Interviews 383-388.

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989.

Burke, Carolyn. "Accidental Aloofness': Barnes, Loy, and Modernism." Broe, Silence and Power 67-79.

Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism Avant-Garde Decadence Kitsch Postmodernism. Durham: Duke UP, 1987.

Eliot, T.S. [Thomas Stearns]. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1974.

Field, Andrew. Djuna: the Life and Times of Djuna Barnes. NewYork: G.P. Putnam's, 1983. Published as The Formidable Miss Barnes. London: Martin, Secker 5c Warburg, 1983. Rpt. with new material as Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes. Austin: U of Texas P, 1985.

Freud, Sigmund. "Repression." 1915. On Metapsychology 139-158.

-. On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. Ed. Angela Richards. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. The Pelican Freud Library 11.

Gaddis Rose, Marilyn. "Decadence and Modernism: Defining by Default." Modernist Studies 4 (1982): 195-206.

Jay, Karla and Joanne Glasgow, eds. Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions. New York and London: New York UP, 1990.

Kannenstine, Louis F. The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation. New York: New York UP, 1977.

Laity, Cassandra. "H.D. and A.C. Swinburne: Decadence and Sapphic Modernism." Jay and Glasgow 217-240.

Lanser, Susan Snaider. "Speaking in Tongues: Ladies Almanack and the Discourse of Desire." Broe Silence and Power 156-168. Revised version of "Speaking in Tongues: Ladies Almanack and the

Language of Celebration." Frontiers 4 (Fall 1979): 39-46.

Messerli, Douglas. Djuna Barnes: A Bibliography. Rhinebeck, NY: David Lewis, 1975.

O'Neal, Hank. KLife is painful, nasty, and short - in my case it has only been painful and nasty": Djuna Barnes, 1978-1981: an Informal Memoir. NewYork: Paragon House, 1990.

Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940. ChapelHill & London: The U of North Carolina P, 1989.

Schenck, Celeste M. "Exiled by Genre: Modernism, Canonicity, and the Politics of Exclusion." Broe and Ingram 225-250.

Scott, James B. Djuna Barnes. Boston: Twayne, 1976

Wolff, Janet. "The Invisible Fldneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity." Theory Culture and

Society 2 (1985): 37-46.