“The Second Person Singular”: the (Impossible) “Being-With” in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

Abstract

This article argues that being singular—both one of a kind and alone—is at the heart of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. In this novel that resists classification, Barnes ostensibly explores the implications of being sui generis in relation to both gender and genre. She rejects the heteronormative pressures of bourgeois society, bringing to the foreground a group of queer, marginal beings. Yet, she does not transform then into an alternative community, making the possibility of amorous and spiritual union between them problematic. A figure of mute, enigmatic singularity and “monstrous” solitude, Robin Vote leaves the other characters in a frustrated longing for erotic and emotional union with her. An unsettling cross between feminine and masculine, human and animal, she emerges as the emblem of the novel’s baroque singularity. With her solitary wandering, she leaves the other characters enmeshed in a collective dream of yearning for her. Through this figure that eludes both the heterosexual and the homosexual couple, the novel questions the need of the individual to bond with another as an essential aspect of the human condition, a search for meaning and fixity that proves illusory and has a devastating impact on the integrity of the self. The solitary, androgynous doctor, whom the characters turn to in search of consolation, is both the double and the opposite of Robin, who remains deaf to the suffering she causes. The doctor’s monologues, initially meant to console and create a spiritual union, foreground instead the limits of empathy, and the futility of communication and human existence as a whole. He voices the existential anguish of being radically singular, becoming the mouthpiece of Barnes’s queer existentialism.