'The plain reader be damned': Confusion as method in the works of Djuna Barnes

Though the work of Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) is beginning to receive substantive critical attention, the analysis is overwhelmingly subject-centered: such issues as expatriate American writers, lesbianism, feminism, Modernism, carnival, and incest studies are routinely the focus of these recent critiques. Though indispensable, these analyses often cannot also provide a close, careful reading of the texts they employ, and rely instead upon selective textual support. In the few cases where careful scrutiny is attempted, the language quickly becomes one of frustration: Barnes is "difficult," "obscure," "monological," "impossible."; Intrigued by this alleged inscrutability, I set about first to determine why her texts (early short stories and journalism, one-act plays, Ryder, The Antiphon, and Nightwood) are frustrating, and then to propose reading methods which might ameliorate the difficulty. Using theories of communication and non-communication (e.g. studies of silence, fragments, ellipsis, displacements, and conversational non-collusion) and psychoanalytic explorations which suggest that underneath obscurity may lie sense, I discerned a number of consistencies in Barnes' texts which, when made explicit, reveal Barnes' own passionate interest in the adequacies and inadequacies of language. I argue that all of Djuna Barnes' work, through such techniques as aborted dialogues, generalizations, displaced and/or missing contexts, panoptic viewpoints, and linguistically-conscious narrators, meaningfully, and often brilliantly, explores that which her critics imply she produces unwittingly: difficulty, veiling, and conversational non-collusion. Barnes writes not "failed language" but successful pieces about failed language. This makes her work relevant not only to subject-centered readers, but all those concerned with the "unspeakable" and the illocutionary and perlocutionary force which lies underneath the superficial content of utterances.