“I’ve Told It for Nothing”:

Narrating the Psychological Exile of Americans in Paris

In Nightwood and The Sun Also Rises

by

Julia Horwitz

Thesis Advisor: Stuart Burrows

Second Reader: Stephen Foley

Thesis

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Bachelor of Arts

in the Literatures Honors Program in the Department of English

at Brown University
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April 17, 2008
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“LIVING PSYCHOLOGICALLY BEYOND OUR MEANS”: READING

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BARNES AND HEMINGWAY AGAINST FREUD AND DURKHEIM

America: 1900

At the turn of the twentieth century, America was primarily a

country of immigrants. So much of the country remained unexplored,

or had only been newly inhabited, that the possibility of escaping to

America was still extremely attractive. This influx of immigration

formed a peculiar counterpoint to the established American families

who had lived for some generations in east coast cities. Boston,

Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and New York were all well-inhabited,

thriving social venues in which an upper-middle class had developed,

and boasted universities even more impressive than some of their

European counterparts (Barone 223). The new waves of immigration

into the east coast cities, which in turn fueled the burgeoning industrial

revolution, polarized many of these cities (Hatton 37). The Victorian

middle class, suddenly confronted with the realities of industrial

growth, increasingly sent their sons and daughters back to Europe for

culture and education. As the American lower class accumulated, then,

the American upper class emigrated, creating an opposing wave of

expatriation (Croly 28).

In spite of- and perhaps due to- the weakness of its economy,

Paris was one of the most appealing locations for expatriate Americans
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to move (Kulischer 217). The Realist movement was well established in

France at the end of the 19th century, and the reactionary Symbolist

movement was well under way. Between such Realist writers as Emile

Zola and Guy de Maupassant, and such burgeoning Symbolists as Paul

Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, literary-minded Americans had ample

opportunity to find intellectual sanctuary in Paris. As a result, many

chose to remain in Paris to write and create. Victor Séjour wrote his

most popular plays during his years in Paris, and died there in 1874.

The next year, Henry James began his two-year stay in Paris before

making permanent residence in England; by the beginning of the

twentieth century, his friend Edith Wharton had established herself in

Paris as well, frequenting the literary salons of Natalie Clifford Barney

and Harriet Monroe.

While educated and artistic Americans steadily continued to

travel to Paris in the early 1900s, the onset of World War I caused a

dramatic increased in emigration rates. Many Americans who had gone

to Europe to support the war effort as soldiers, nurses, ambulance

drivers, and volunteers found that the horror of the war bound them to

the continent; historians like to say that they “lost their innocence”

during the war, and for the most part, they are correct. After the shock

of WWI, many American writers and artists could not readjust to life in

America, and some never left Europe at all. Instead, they traveled to
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the pre-established hub of American intelligentsia in Paris,

accompanied by a variety of other Americans who also found the

prospect of living in America too traumatic. Seeking to reconcile their

feelings of post-traumatic stress, detachment and isolation, a core of

expatriates moved to Paris to write and create. Although the city

became the home to expatriates from many different European

countries, the Americans experienced the continent in a different way.

They had not only changed countries but continents; they found

themselves literally an ocean away from their birthplace. Old World

sensibilities meshed with the nascent imagery of the “American

Dream,” allowing the displaced American authors to create characters

who embodied the conflict, homelessness, and confusion of their

generation.

This thesis will explore Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and Ernest

Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: two semi-autobiographical novels in

which traumatized Americans escape to Paris. It will examine each

novel individually and then both together, in order to demonstrate two

different ways in which American authors with completely different

upbringings and backgrounds find refuge in writing about the same

people. Barnes’ Nightwood explores the appeal of Paris to Americans

who are traumatized by their gender identity and sexual impulses,

whereas Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises expresses the necessity of

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psychological detachment in the aftermath of wartime trauma. Both

books investigate the reasons that very different kinds of American

characters travel to Paris, and both books demonstrate the way that

the expatriate culture of Paris prevents Americans from returning

home. The significance of the particular kinds of trauma investigated

by these two novels becomes much clearer with some knowledge of

the authors’ biographies.

Hemingway, The Star, and the Red Cross

Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a somewhat

rural yet gentrified suburb of Chicago. After writing for both his high

school yearbook and newspaper, and serving as the newspaper’s

senior editor, Hemingway decided to begin work as a professional

journalist immediately after high school. His father, a middle-class

doctor, could afford to send him to college but instead accepted a

position at the Kansas City Star in Kansas City, Missouri. Although he

only worked there for about six months, he attributed his writing style

to “The Star Copy Style,” the publication’s style guide, throughout his
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career (Meyers 2-26).

When he turned 18, Hemingway tried to enlist in the armed

services so that he could fight in World War I, but he did not pass the

physical health screen because of poor vision in his left eye. He

therefore volunteered to be an ambulance driver with the Red Cross,

who sent him first to Paris, and then stationed him in Italy. On his first

day in Milan, Hemingway witnessed the explosion of a munitions

factory, and spent the day trying to salvage bodies from the wreck.

Throughout his experience in Italy, Hemingway proved to be an

excellent ally on the battlefield; in spite of some serious injuries caused

by shrapnel, he consistently looked after more seriously wounded

soldiers before tending to himself (26, 79).

As a result of these experiences in Europe, his return to rural Oak

Park left him feeling disconnected and detached. His friend and mentor

Sherwood Anderson suggested that Hemingway and his wife, who he

married a year after returning from the war, suggested that they move

to Paris. J. Gerald Kennedy writes, “As he encouraged Hemingway to

go to Paris, [Sherwood] Anderson also taught him how to see the city-

how to discover its distinctiveness in the features of everyday life”

(Kennedy 82). Using Anderson’s letters of introduction in order to

integrate himself into the existing American literary circle in

Montparnasse, Hemingway quickly established himself as the protégé

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of Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Although Hemingway

later denied that he derived any literary influence from Anderson, the

two writers remained in contact throughout Hemingway’s seven-year

stay in Paris. Describing one of their epistolary exchanges, Kennedy

writes, “…when Anderson asked if the artist planned to return to the

United States, he replied: ‘Not now. I have blown about too long. I’m an

empty thing.’ In 1921, neither Anderson nor Hemingway could have

grasped the portentousness of this comment about exile and

deracination” (83). In the chapter on The Sun Also Rises, the idea of

“emptiness” and being hollow will be particularly significant. The

chapter will explore the ways that language and characters, perhaps

like Hemingway himself, are rendered as “empty things,” deprived of

their normal narrative and linguistic substance. When Hemingway

refers to himself as an “empty thing,” however, he refers more to the

way that the combination of his experience as journalist, ambulance

driver, war veteran, and expatriate, aged him prematurely.

Furthermore, his experience positioned him to write the most

poignantly about the “deracination” that occurs when young people

experience trauma abroad and lose their orientation and sense of

“home.”

Barnes and the Idea of Family

Djuna Barnes arrived in Paris at almost exactly the same time as

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Hemingway. Like Hemingway, she began her career as a journalist,

and arrived in Paris in 1921 on an assignment for McCall’s magazine.

Her role in Paris was to interview expatriate writers, and to correspond

with several magazines about the literary activity emanating from

Paris. Vanity Fair supplied her with a letter of introduction to James

Joyce so that she could initiate an interview, and this introduction

resulted in a close literary and professional friendship. By the end of

1922, Barnes had taken up residence with Thelma Wood, and was

publishing stories, plays, and novels, mostly focusing on the lesbian

communities of Paris and New York (Grobbel 20).

Although Barnes and Wood shared a tumultuous relationship that

ended unhappily, the true sexual trauma in Barnes’ life occurred

during her childhood and adolescence. Her father was an advocate of

polygamy, and invited his mistress to move in with his wife and

children during Barnes’ early childhood. Between his wife and mistress,

Wald Barnes had eight children. His mother, Zadel Turner Barnes lived

with them as well, and shared a bed with Djuna. Zadel encouraged

Wald to express himself, sexually and artistically, and supported his

polygamist lifestyle and other extramarital activities. Djuna Barnes was

raped at 16, either by her father or by a neighbor who had been given

her father’s consent; there is also some suggestion in her work-

including Nightwood- that her sleeping arrangement with her

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grandmother may have been incestuous as well (Scott 15-9). Just

before her eighteenth birthday, Barnes’ father arranged her marriage

to the fifty-two year old brother of his mistress- a marriage that lasted

less than three months.

Barnes’ emotional trauma continued into her adulthood. Her

fiancé Ernst Hanfstaengl left her to become Adolph Hitler’s press

secretary; a common-law marriage to a socialist philosopher ended in

tortured secrecy; her love affair with a journalist named Mary Pyrne

ended when Pyrne died of tuberculosis. Living under this sexual and

emotional trauma, Barnes found a haven in Paris. As her friendship

with Joyce grew, he introduced her to the other literary figures in

Montparnasse, many of whom she and Hemingway had in common.

Although it had different origins, Barnes’ feelings of detachment and

homelessness found their counterparts in the war veterans,’ enabling

her to fit in perfectly with the crowd of Left Bank expatriates.

Freud on “Consciousness” and “Exile”

Having settled in France, both Hemingway and Barnes created

characters through which their respective traumas can be glimpsed.

Since it had only been twenty years since the sociologist Emile

Durkheim and the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud helped form the basis
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for the modern definition of “consciousness” and “alienation,” the

experience of international warfare provided immediate evidence for

their work. This thesis will rely heavily on the terms “consciousness”

and “exile” or “alienation,” by which I mean to refer to the then-newly

accepted conceptions of the mind, which are best explained in the

works of Freud and Durkheim.

Although Freud was not the first medical doctor to differentiate

between the active, aware, or “conscious” mind, and the

uncontrollable “unconscious” portion of the mind reserved for impulses

and dreams, his investigations into the nature of this separation were

certainly the most thorough and comprehensive. Furthermore, Freud

took issue with the standard accepted use of the term “unconscious”

and challenged this usage in a series of books and lectures at the turn

of the 20th century. In a lecture entitled “Resistance and Repression,”

Freud said, “ ‘Unconscious’ is no longer a term for what is temporarily

latent: the unconscious is a special realm, with its own desires and

modes of expression and peculiar mental mechanisms not elsewhere

operative” (188). Freud attributes to the “unconscious” mind a system

of thinking that exists both in conjunction with and independently from

the subject’s “conscious” mind. It is active, and furthermore its actions

are unique, “not elsewhere operative.” The schism between the

conscious and the unconscious can thereby be perceived as a multi-

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layering of mental processes, in which the subject’s unaware brain

activity is just as significant as his conscious thoughts. Fred continues

to explain, however, that in spite of their distinct functions, the

conscious and the unconscious are fundamentally connected. His

lecture continues:

The unconscious system may therefore be compared to a

large ante-room, in which the various mental excitations
are crowding upon one another, like individual beings.
Adjoining this is a second, smaller apartment, a sort of
reception room, in which consciousness resides… The
excitations in the unconscious, in the ante-chamber are not
visible to consciousness, which is of course in the other
room, so to begin with they remain unconscious (260).

He finishes this analogy by noting, “When they have pressed forward

to the threshold and have been turned back by the door-keeper, they

are ‘incapable of becoming conscious’; we call them then repressed”

(260). In this way, the activity of the “unconscious” is not unknowable

to consciousness; in fact, “mental excitations” must first manifest

themselves in the unconscious before passing into the “apartment” of

the conscious. Even then, the subject does not necessarily notice these

“excitations,” but they become capable of being noticed. In other

words, by passing through the “door” that both unites and separates

conscious from unconscious, thoughts present themselves for

awareness. “Awareness” itself is complicated, however, by the idea

that the “ante-chamber” and “apartment” are guarded by some kind of

“door-keeper.” Some part of the mind must be aware, if not conscious,

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of deciding whether or not a thought is allowed to present itself for

conscious awareness; in this way, the brain exhibits the capacity for a

kind of “unconscious awareness.”

As a result, the process of “repression” plays a significant role in

linking the conscious to the unconscious. A “mental excitement” that is

powerful enough, with enough force to push at the “door” between the

two parts of the mind, must encounter equal resistance in order to

remain contained in the unconscious. Freud’s lecture notes, “A

vehement effort must have been exercised to prevent the mental

process in question from penetrating into consciousness and as a

result it has remained unconscious…” Since this “effort” cannot occur

within the brain without creating some disturbance, the subject will

often react consciously to an unconscious struggle. According to

Freud’s description of repression, the reaction of the conscious mind

cannot reflect the nature of the repressed thought, which “remains

unconscious.” Instead, the subject reacts irrationally to an element

that is already in his consciousness. This irrational reaction, says

Freud, is a “symptom”: “it follows from the existence of a symptom

that some mental process has not been carried through to an end in a

normal manner so that it could become conscious; the symptom is a

substitute for that which has not come through” (259). In this way,

“symptoms” of mental “disease” – which for Freud include obsessions,

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compulsions, and irrational rituals- are really the “substitutions” for

unconscious repression manifested in the realm of the conscious. This

vocabulary of “substitutions,” “repression,” and “ritual” will be

particularly helpful in the chapter on Hemingway, whose characters’

experience as post-war expatriates puts uniquely forceful strain on

their ability to keep conscious and unconscious separate, and to

prevent their substitutive rituals from revealing the “mental

excitement” that they are repressing.

In this thesis, it will also be important to understand the way that

consciousness develops both within the life of an individual, and within

the growth of a culture. Freud asserts that dreams are the key to

understanding the development of consciousness and the

discrepancies between conscious “symptoms” and “repressed”

thoughts: “In the first place: the regression in dreams is not one only of

form but of substance. Not only does it translate our thoughts into a

primitive form of expression, but it also re-awakens the peculiarities of

our primitive mental life” (188). This assertion remains consistent both

with the theory that there are different but equally significant

processes present in the conscious and the unconscious minds, and

with the theory that conscious thought is dependent on unconscious

activity. It also adds the idea that the various stages of consciousness

are always accessible. Although more of the unconscious is permitted

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to enter into consciousness throughout a person’s life, “primitive

mental life,” the state in which most of the mind’s activity occurred in

the unconscious, is easily accessible through dreams. In the chapter on

World War I in his On War, Sex, and Neurosis, Freud writes:

with the development of the mind…one can describe the

state of affairs, which is quite a peculiar one, only by
saying that in this case every earlier stage of development
persists alongside the later stage which has developed
from it; the successive stages condition a co-existence,
although it is in reference to the same materials that the
whole series of transformations has been fashioned (259).

In this way, all stages of the mind’s development are always

accessible- primarily through dreams and hypnosis- for the conscious

mind that is willing to exert some effort. Freud refers to memories, and

the accessible but not fully conscious stages of mental awareness, as

the “preconscious.” Since consciousness builds upon itself, using the

same material to construct each new layer of awareness, it is always

possible to grow psychologically without destroying existent

awareness; that is to say, the mind does not replace states of

awareness as it develops, but instead embellishes. Freud adds, “This

extraordinary plasticity of the evolution that takes place in the mind is

not unlimited in its scope; it might be described as a special capacity

for retroversion- for regression” (259). The idea that dreams allow for

“retroversion” and “regression” into one of these earlier states in the

“evolution” of consciousness will be particularly significant in the

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chapter on Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood.

My analysis of both Nightwood and The Sun Also Rises will

depend equally on a conception of psychological “exile” that I derive

from both a Freudian conception of self-alienation and from

Durkheim’s discourse on “anomie” and suicide. In this thesis, the

question of “exile” is meant to be symbolized by the displacement of

the American expatriates, but interpreted as the instances of internal

exile manifest in the individual characters. In this way, Freud’s

discussion of the alienating effects of World War I, combined with

Durkheim’s analysis of the disintegration of social order, demonstrates

the possibility of reading external social displacement as a Freudian

“symptom” of a “repressed” sense of alienation.

A Sociological Approach to Exile

Emile Durkeim, who was born two years after Freud, and who

wrote his significant sociological works at about the same time that

Freud was developing his own, published an anthropological

investigation into the causes of suicide in 1897. In Suicide, Durkheim

not only addresses the mental states that result in individuals killing

themselves, but also the metaphoric “social” disease that “infects”

members of a nation or group. He writes, “If… man is double, that is

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because social man superimposes himself upon physical man. Social

man necessarily presupposes a society which he expresses and serves.

If this dissolves, if we no longer feel it in existence and action about

and above us, whatever is social in us is deprived of all objective

foundation” (213). He continues:

All that remains is an artificial combination of illusory

images, a phantasmagoria vanishing at the least reflection;
that is, nothing that can be a goal for our action. Yet this
social man is the essence of civilized man; he is the
masterpiece of existence. Thus we are bereft of reasons for
existence; for the only life to which we could cling no
longer corresponds to anything actual; the only existence
based upon reality no longer fits our needs (213).

Read against Freud, Durkheim’s “social man” and “physical man”

correspond roughly to the “conscious” and the “unconscious” mind in

terms of their duality of existence. In the same way that the mind is

comprised of two interdependent but distinct parts, one of which

contains the primal “mental excitement” and the other of which turns

that “excitement” into usable awareness, so is Durkheim’s “man”

comprised of the “physical” and the “social.” Since the “social man” is

the “essence of civilized man and the “masterpiece of existence,” this

aspect of man is dependent on some kind of external social structure.

“Civilization” comes to stand for the basic social rules that allow man’s

physical side to integrate with the circumstances and resources around

it; furthermore, these circumstances and resources are the very

structure around which the “social man” forms. In times of crisis, then,
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when “civilization” collapses and the rules of conduct that governed

“social man” no longer apply, the physical and the social can no longer

work in conjunction. “Civilization,” having formed “our needs,”

abruptly denies us this social mediation, and man becomes isolated

within himself. If “all that remains” of civilization “is an artificial

combination of illusory images, a phantasmagoria vanishing at the

least reflection,” then social man is left trying to reform himself around

phantom constructs. In reality, nothing is left for him to work toward,

no moral or existential goal is left toward which to strive, and the

physical must try to survive by maintaining the shape, but not the

substance, of the social.

This self-alienation is perhaps easier to think about in terms of

Freud’s topography of the mind. A devastating crisis, like the First

World War, is sufficient to disengage the social from the physical,

resulting in an internal exile, as though the conscious, unable to cope

with the trauma, closed itself off from the unconscious. Durkheim

prescribes this phenomenon to a culture of people, rather than to

individuals: “But this is not all. This detachment not only occurs in

single individuals… For individuals share too deeply in the life of

society for it to be diseased without their suffering infection” (213). He

sums up: “Thence are formed currents of depression and

disillusionment emanating from no particular individual but expressing

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society’s state of disintegration. They reflect the relaxation of social

bonds, a sort of collective asthenia, or social malaise, just as individual

sadness, when chronic, in its way reflects the poor organic state of the

individual” (214). In this way, the “disease” of a society, whether that

disease is war, economic depression, or some other national tragedy,

manifests itself on the level on the individual, separating him from the

normal stability of societal roles and rules, and rendering him detached

and “disillusioned.” Since this “disillusionment” occurs on so many

levels, it becomes clear that “individual sadness” could refer both to

the collapse of a social bond between a person and his society, and the

collapse of a psychic bond between his social, conscious mind and his

physical primitive “unconscious.” In this thesis, the “asthenia” to which

Durkheim refers explains the weakening of the separation between

conscious and unconscious in Barnes’ Nightwood, and the weakening

of the connection between conscious and unconscious in Hemingway’s

The Sun Also Rises. In both novels, the characters become exiled by

and within their own minds, but in Nightwood this exile results from an

inability to escape the preconscious, whereas in The Sun Also Rises, it

results from an inability to access the preconscious at all.

Ascribing a reading of Durkeim’s sociological theory to a reading

of the effects of WWI on modernist literature may seem premature;

after all, Suicide was published almost twenty years before the war
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broke out. Freud, however, echoes much of Durkheim’s terminology

and analysis in his 1915 essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and

Death,” which specifically treats the phenomenon of WWI. He writes,

“our unconscious does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if

immortal. What we call our “unconscious” (the deepest strata of our

minds, made up of instinctual impulses) knows nothing whatever of

negatives or denials- contradictories coincide in it- and so knows

nothing whatever of our own death… It follows that no instinct we

possess is ready for belief in death” (272). He continues by describing

the way in which primitive man, though equally unable to conceive of

his own death, was sufficiently independent and isolated from other

men to register the fear of death at all. If that fear derives from

observing death in a loved one and ruminating on the implications of

the fact that others die- and therefore, that we must also die - then

early man was free of that fear in the same way he was free of society.

With the structuring organization of civilization, however, man

developed a similarly “civilized” interpretation of death. He becomes

aware of the implications of the death of an enemy, as opposed to the

death of a loved one, and assumes the accepted cultural mindset for

thinking about and mourning death. In modern times, “Our

unconscious is just as inaccessible to the idea of our own death… as

was man in earliest antiquity. But how far we have moved from this
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primitive state in our conventionally civilized attitude toward death!”

(275) Here, Freud resumes Durkheim’s discussion of the division

between primal and social man in the face of crisis. The “primitive

man,” who, Freud asserts, always exists in the preconscious, is still

incapable of understanding its own death, but his means of interacting

with this impossibility has developed. His consciousness of death

thereby assumes a “duality,” in which his “physical man’s” fear

remains in its primal state, but his “social man’s” conduct treats death

with cultured circumspection. In the face of the First World War,

however, Freud writes:

It is easy to see the impact of war on this duality. It strips

us of the later accretions of civilization, and lays bare the
primal man in each of us. It constrains us once more to be
heroes who cannot believe in their own death; it stamps
the alien as the enemy, whose death is to be brought
about or desires; it counsels us to rise above the death of
those we love (275-6).

War, then, reduces the civilized man to his “primal” state- particularly

in his attitude toward death. Death becomes distant and unrelated to

consciousness; it is something that happens to others, but remains

distinct in that otherness. In this way, Freud’s analysis echoes

Durkheim’s theory of twenty years earlier. Like Durkheim’s “social

man,” Freud’s “civilized man” conditions himself to the “accretions of

civilization,” molding his awareness of death to a social convention.

When the world becomes “infected” with the World War, however, the
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“individual” suffers the disease as well as society; both individual and

society lose the social moorings which shaped their consciousness of

death, and become stranded living in a primitive mental state that

does not correspond to the demands of contemporary civilization.

Freud inquires, “Is it not for us to confess that in our civilized attitude

toward death we are once more living psychologically beyond our

means, and must reform and give truth its due?” (276) It is this

necessity of “living psychologically beyond” one’s means that defines

my usage of “exile” in this thesis. I focus on the American characters

because they are expatriates, not just nationally but internationally,

and therefore are the most displaced from their native, “primitive”

origins of all the international characters in these two novels. In this

way, the precarious balance between their social selves and primitive

selves highlight the same instability in their “conscious” and

“unconscious,” all of which mirrors the national and cultural instability

of trying to live in Europe after a brutal war which turned European

nations against each other.

Comparing Barnes and Hemingway

This thesis will explore the way that two novels with such distinct

approaches to writing about the phenomena of consciousness and

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exile can find common ground in the expatriate literary moment. It

focuses on the American characters, not only because the authors

themselves were American, but because the physical and

psychological displacement of Americans in Paris render them more

disconnected and rootless than their European counterparts.

Furthermore, it focuses on Paris specifically, contrasting France with

other European countries in order to explore one particular place-

oriented literary moment. In this thesis, I will perform close readings of

Nightwood and The Sun Also Rises in order to demonstrate their

distinct methods for developing a system of expatriate consciousness,

and then I will read the novels together in order to show the ways that

their individual discourses converge in the shared experience of being

a post-war, educated American in Paris.

This thesis will focus on the fictional characters rather than the

authors, since I explore the ways that two literary texts, rather than

two historical personalities, converge in the commonality of Paris. I will

instead introduce each of the three chapters with a brief history of the

literary, social, and biographical influences that informed the authors

in the writing of the novels. These influences will inform my readings of

the novels, as well, providing the framework for my arguments in each

chapter. The analysis itself, however, will investigate exile and the

divide between conscious and unconscious in literary Paris through an

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investigation of the two novels’ language and characters. In this way, I

will show how the effect of Paris on the unconsciousness of writers

such as Hemingway and Barnes was so similar that their first novels-

dissimilar as they are- focus on the same themes, motifs, and

existential dilemmas.
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BARNES AND “REGRESSION IN DREAMS”

In the early 1930’s, when T.S. Eliot was working as a publisher at

Faber & Faber in London, his friend and fellow author Djuna Barnes

brought him a manuscript originally entitled “Night Beast.” After many

revisions and a change of title, Faber and Faber published the first

edition of Nightwood. In his introduction to the 1937 edition of the

book, Eliot wrote, “To say that Nightwood will appeal primarily to

readers of poetry does not mean that it is not a novel, but that is so

good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly

appreciate it.” He notes particularly that the novel seems to be “alive”

in a way that few other prose works are; “A prose that is altogether

alive,” he writes, “demands something of the reader that the ordinary

novel-reader is not prepared to give.” This profound duality (the book

is both a novel and a prose poem, yet neither wholly a novel nor a

prose poem) is the characteristic that renders Nightwood unique and

uniquely difficult. Like the text itself, the characters in the world of

Nightwood are composed of a double consciousness that both

completes and negates them. They are turn-of-the-century

homosexual Americans living in Paris whose waking hours are

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increasingly driven by a subconscious, primitive instinct; they are both

Parisian and American, male and female, conscious and unconscious,

and none of these things, all at once. This pervasive and self-reflexive

duality is the feature that allows Nightwood to arrive at no conclusion,

and the confusion of its language to clarify so much for its reader. It is

also the feature that draws the American characters to Paris, and then

imprisons their consciousness so that they cannot function anywhere

else.

In the universe of Nightwood, the characters all possess a

consciousness that is divided into “day” and “night” halves. During the

daytime, they are aware, alert, and capable of rational decision-

making. Their “day selves” have some control over their interactions;

during the day, at least initially, the characters are the agents of their

own behavior. Once they arrive in Paris, however, their “night selves”

begin to emerge. At night, the characters degenerate psychologically

in a process that psychology refers to as “reverting to type.” They

become the most primitive, undeveloped, atavistic versions of

themselves, as if they were each an individual species whose earliest

origins show themselves only at night. In an essay which discusses the

role of history in Nightwood, Catherine Whitley comments that Barnes

“uses the trope of the nightworld as a means of questioning both

personal and national identity and history” (Whitley 84-5). She adds,
 29

“Barnes …operates on the level of the image, and constructs

sentences of multiple, discontinuous images which seem to digress

from rather than to clarify a point” (89). The self, then, is a sort of

infinite evolution, which can solidifies itself in the daytime and then

succumbs to its “personal identity and history” in the “nightworld.”

Like the text itself, whose imagery “digresses” or devolves as the

novel develops, the characters move backward in their personal

histories as they move forward in the narrative.

“A PHANTASMAGORA VANISHING”: DAY AND NIGHT IN

NIGHTWOOD

The novel, however, best explains its own premise. The character

of Matthew O’Connor, the loquacious American “‘medical student’”

whose diatribes comprise the bulk of the novel’s narrative, says, “Well,

I, Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor, will tell you how

the day and the night are related by their division. The very

constitution of twilight is a fabulous reconstruction of fear, fear bottom-

out and wrong side up. Every day is thought upon and calculated, but

the night is not premeditated” (Barnes 87). In this passage, Matthew

 30

provides the reader with a guide for interpreting the novel as a whole.

He acknowledges the psychological division between the “calculated”

day self and the “not premeditated” night self, and identifies the

moment of separation between the two as hazy, backward, terrifying,

and yet majestic. The difference between the two selves is “twilight,”

“fear,” “wrong side up” and a “fabulous reconstruction.” Even in

naming himself, he adheres to this guide: his name is comprised of his

day time identity (“Dr. Matthew O’Connor”), an acknowledgement of

the original poet from whom his linguistic proficiency descends

(“Dante”), and a warning to his listeners to question the very language

he uses to inform them (“Mighty-grain-of-salt).

Most importantly, however, Matthew informs his listeners that

the phenomenon he describes is unique to his particular moment in

Paris. He says that “‘the nights of one period are not the nights of

another. Neither are the nights of one city the nights of another. Let us

take Paris for an instance, and France for a fact. Ah, mon dieu! La nuit

effroyable! La nuit, qui est une immense plaine, et le coeur qui est une

petite extrémité ’” (88)! Only in Paris does the night become the

“dreadful” and “immense plain” that only has room for the wishes of

the human heart at its “smallest edge.” The rest of this plane is

populated by what Matthew calls “the people of the underworld,” or

those who are completely overtaken by the “night” part of their psyche
 31

(34). The night, then, which is different in Paris from the night

anywhere else, is the seductive force which releases the atavistic

tendencies in the American characters’ subconscious. They become

foreign to themselves, confused and interdependent, relying on each

other for the constant confessions and self-analyses that will help them

understand their own psychological devolution. As their day-time

behavior becomes increasingly dictated by the unfamiliar power of

their primitive night-time selves, they remain in Paris, the site of their

degeneration, trying to piece their lives back together.

Although they are not the only characters who are affected by

the Parisian night, the characters of Matthew O’Connor, Robin Vote,

and Nora Flood are the most intricately rendered American figures.

Their psychological devolutions demonstrate most clearly not only the

phenomenon of the emergence of the night self, but also the futility of

the American’s struggle to rationalize it. They manifest their devolution

in different ways, each returning to his or her own “personal history,”

or origin, at night. Robin Vote regresses back biologically, alternately

envisioned as a child, an animal, and fossilized organic matter; Nora

Flood regresses to the primal mother, envisioned at first as the bosom

of history, then as the womb for the embryo of Robin’s devolving night

self, and finally as the fertile earth in which the organic matter of

Robin’s night self can rot; Matthew regresses to the essence of

 32

womanhood, cross-dressing in order to enact his nocturnal impulses,

and ultimately relying on the behavior of Robin and Nora as a basis for

defining his womanhood. In this way, the night selves of these three

American characters are interconnected in Paris. In the process of their

devolution, they turn to each other to try to understand their own

struggles. They remain in Paris, desperately trying to understand the

effect of the night on each other in order to solve the mystery of the

chasm between the primal and the conscious, until the moment of

their mutual destruction at the very end of the novel.

Matthew O’Connor: The “Bearded Lady”

Just as the language of the novel advances the flow of the

narrative while leading the characters backward toward their primitive

origins, so does the verbose Matthew O’Connor self-consciously dictate

the circumstances of his own degeneration. Charles Baxter writes, “If

the reader feels… that O’Connor’s and the novelist’s voices may be

merging, or mixed up, it is partly because both have tried to

accomplish the impossible” (Baxter 1187). While it is certainly true that

O’Connor sometimes seems to be the mouthpiece for Barnes’

commentary on modernism, it is probably more accurate to say that

O’Connor seems to be speaking not for the “novelist,” as Baxter

suggests, but for the novel itself. His awareness of the way that
 33

Americans transform in the Parisian night both fuels and tries to

control his own nocturnal transformation. As he articulates the process

of his degeneration in an attempt to understand and conquer it, he

unwittingly gives it the attention it needs to infiltrate his waking,

conscious self as well. His devolution, then, is visible both in his

adopting the outer trappings of womanhood, and in his self-aware

descriptions of the influence of the night on his primal instincts.

In Matthew’s first monologue on the influence of the night, he

stresses the significance of Paris in the process of devolution. He tells

Nora, “‘The night and the day are two travels, and the French … alone

leave testimony of the two in the dawn ; we tear up the one for the

sake of the other ; not so the French’” (Barnes 89). He continues, “’The

French have made a detour of filthiness…Whereas you are of a clean

race, a too eagerly washing people, and this leaves no road for you.’”

He then introduces himself by contrasting his circumstances to Parisian

“filth” and Nora’s “cleanliness.” He states, “‘The American … separates

the two for fear of indignities, so that the mystery is cut in every cord’”

(91). In this description, Matthew explores the idea of uniting the two

parts of a split consciousness by tracing the source of the atavistic

persona. He asserts that Americans are too quick to “separate” their

“day and night travels,” to destroy the evidence of one “for fear of

indignities” when recalling the other. These “indignities” are the

 34

recollections that are left over after an abrupt evolution from the

origins of “personal history” to the conscious, waking mind. An

American’s day self does not want to be reminded that he devolves at

night and returns to his most primordial essence, so he “tears up” in

the daytime all the evidence of his nightly regression.

This evidence, which Whitley refers to as “the excrement of

history,” is envisioned in several ways throughout the novel. For

Matthew, the daytime’s evolutionary remains are literally “filthiness,”

or fecal matter, but will later be portrayed as fungus, decay, or rot for

the women. Matthew suggests, however, that this “filth” is perhaps

“too eagerly washed.” If, as he suggests, the French “make a detour”

by allowing the excess of their nightly selves to spill over into the day,

they can easily trace their conscious mind back through the

evolutionary process and into their original states. Instead, the

American must contend with a lifelong habit of “washing,” obsessively

removing all evidence of a duality of consciousness, leaving “no road”

by which to unite personal history and present awareness. As a result,

Matthew advises, “‘Be as the Frenchman, who puts a sou in the

poorbox at night that he may have a penny to spend in the morning –

he can trace himself by his sediment, vegetable and animal, and so

find himself in the odour of wine in its two travels, in and out’” (91). In

this passage, Matthew compares excrement to money; “wine,” on its

 35

way “out,” is as valuable to the Frenchman as the penny he has left for

himself the night before. Both are evidence of the continuity of the

body, in spite of the constant regression and evolution of the mind.

Both the “sou” and urine indicate a symbiosis of the day and night

selves, since the awareness of one provides for the recollection of the

other.

Several pages later, in the same monologue, Matthew reiterates

his argument, as if to will his understanding of the process into

existence. He says to Nora, “‘A European gets out of bed with a

disorder that holds the balance… L’Echo de Paris and his bed sheets

were run off the same press. One may read in both the travail life has

had with him- he reeks with the essential wit necessary for the ‘sale’ of

both editions, night edition and day’” (96). Matthew continues to toy

with the idea of filth, but here in the context of sexual activity. His

argument is wrought with wordplay: he uses the word “sheets” to refer

both to paper and to bedclothes; “Echo” names a daily Parisian

newspaper, and also indicates the resonating noise of the night life;

“sale” refers both to the economy of newspaper sales and also to

prostitution, with the possible third pun on “sale” as the French word

for “dirty.” This duality of language, which unites the obvious and the

hidden meanings of each word, reflects exactly the kind of process by

which Matthew hopes to unite his double consciousness. He tries to

 36

articulate the careful dirtiness of Paris which provokes the powerful

emergence of the night self in the American, to explore his own

duality, and by knowing it, to conquer it. Whitley paraphrases

Matthew’s exposition:

What is required is the proper relationship to history,

one that neither ignores nor dwells exclusively on its
messiness, but which rather takes the past into
account in looking forward… Barnes connects shit and
history; a proper relationship to one’s own excreta is
analogous to a proper relationship to one’s own
personal and national history (Whitley 96).

Evidence of the truth of Matthew’s thesis appears in all parts of the

novel, even when the “sediment” of history does not manifest itself as

“excreta” or “shit.” His articulation of the Parisian’s relationship with

filth is not a direct metaphor for “a proper relationship to one’s own

personal and national history,” but rather as an illustration of the way

that this history is viewed by Americans in the light of day. Although

his attempt at rationalizing the dysfunction between his night and day

selves does not succeed in uniting the two parts of his psyche, and in

fact only makes the discrepancy more apparent, it provides both Nora

and the reader with a method by which to understand the

degeneration that occurs in Matthew, Robin, and Nora throughout the

rest of the novel.

The truth of Matthew’s discourse becomes increasingly apparent

 37

in his own life as, through Nora, the reader discovers the ever-growing

influence of his night self upon his consciousness. At his core, Matthew

is a woman, and at night he “reverts to type,” putting on makeup and

dresses, and desiring men. At the beginning of the novel, before

Matthew has begun to think through the process of devolution, he too

tries to cover up the traces of his night self during the day. When

Matthew first meets Robin, he tries to steal some of her makeup

without being seen. He is caught making a sudden movement “for the

purpose of snatching a few drops from a perfume bottle picked up from

the night table; of dusting his darkly bristled chin with a puff, and

drawing a line of rouge across his lips, his upper lip compressed on his

lower, in order to have it seem that their sudden embellishment was a

visitation of nature” (Barnes 39). Even though Matthew cannot yet

articulate the force that drives him to steal Robin’s makeup, the text

itself recognizes the “naturalness” of Matthew’s inclination. Rather

than “disguised,” or even “modified,” the narration recognizes that, for

Matthew, the addition of makeup is an “embellishment.” He visits

Robin’s room in a medical context, trying to help her recover from a

fainting spell, but the lateness of the hour forces his night self to

emerge. The “darkly bristled chin” that suits the male Dr. O’Connor of

the day hours is no longer a suitable representation of Matthew’s

atavistic self. Almost outside of his own volition, he is compelled to add

 38

the “rouge,” “perfume,” and “powder” that he finds on Robin’s

nightstand; they are the trappings of the feminine persona that

overtakes him at night, and even though he acts covertly at first, he

nevertheless cannot repress the impulses of his night self.

Later, when Nora comes to his room in the middle of the night,

his nighttime devolution becomes much more visible. As she enters his

room, Nora notices:

On a maple dresser… lay a rusty pair of forceps, a broken

scalpel, half a dozen odd instruments that she could not
place, a catheter, some twenty perfume bottles, almost
empty, pomades, creams, rouges, powder boxes and puffs.
From the half-open drawers of this chiffonier hung laces,
ribands, stockings, ladies’ underclothing and an
abominable brace, which gave the impression that the
feminine finery had suffered venery. A swill-pail stood at
the head of the bed, brimming with abominations (85).

This passage illuminates both the true nature of Matthew’s night self

and his attempts to forge a “detour of filth” through the two parts of

his consciousness. His dresser, Nora notices, is covered with the

medical apparatus that evidence his professional, daytime self; but,

like this daytime self, the instruments are broken and rusted. They

seem to belong to another era, as though they were artifacts in the

museum of Matthew’s life. Further, the first of the tools the text

mentions are Matthew’s “rusty forceps” – an instrument that can only

 39

be used in a gynecological exam, and whose purpose is to help

investigate vaginal functions. Lying among the other remains of his

medical gear, these forceps demonstrate the accuracy of Matthew’s

analysis. If the night is a time when the primordial self can emerge and

bloom, and if the American has “cleaned” away the pathway from his

consciousness to this night self, then the artifacts of the waking hours

belong to a future existence that is outside the timeline of the night.

They are waiting at the other end of an evolutionary process, and so

they have time to rust while waiting for Matthew’s primordial

womanhood to re-evolve into Dr. O’Connor.

These forceps also indicate Matthew’s conscious effort to explore

his atavistic tendencies during the day- even in the realm of his

medical life, he literally tries to search inside the human vagina.

Juxtaposed against the “perfume bottles, almost empty, pomades,

creams, rouges, powder boxes and puffs,” the forceps, catheters, and

other medical instruments display a focused effort to understand the

night self during the day, and to embrace it at night. The text pays

tribute to Matthew’s advice concerning French “filth,” as well, noting

the “swill-pail at the head of the bed, brimming with abominations”

and the “feminine finery” which seems to have “suffered venery.”

Taking his own advice to the letter, Matthew surrounds himself with

the evidence of his bodily secretions, both sexual and fecal.

 40

Additionally, Matthew leaves his swill pail right next to his head, as if

literally to watch the “wine” he earlier referred to metaphorically pass

through his body and to keep the evidence of this function close to him

at all times.

Matthew is dressed and made up in evidence of his efforts, as

well. Barnes writes, “In the narrow iron bed, with its heavy and dirty

linen sheets, lay the doctor in a woman’s flannel nightgown. The

doctor’s head…was framed in the golden semi-circle of a wig with long

pendent curls that touched his shoulders…He was heavily rouged and

his lashes painted” (85). Lying among “dirty sheets” that foreshadow

his later references to the economy of a Frenchman’s bedclothes,

Matthew is displayed here in the entirety of his devolution to the

primordial self. He is underdeveloped, incongruous in appearance and

surrounded by the evidence of an evolutionary process that has no

visible resolution. “Heavily rouged,” “lashes painted,” clown-like in

appearance, Matthew is most fully himself in the disquieting

juxtaposition of gynecological equipment and makeup, and semen-and

sweat-covered clothes and swill pails. Caught in the full garb of his

night self, Matthew freely admits to Nora that “‘it was a high soprano I

wanted, and deep corn curls to my bum, with a womb as big as the

king’s kettle, and a bosom as high as the bowsprit of a fishing

schooner’” (97) . Later, he tells her, “‘no matter what I may be doing,
 41

in my heart is the wish for children and knitting. God, I never asked

better than to boil some good man’s potatoes and toss up a child for

him every nine months by the calendar’” (98). Matthew, who will prove

to be the only character in the book who is so deeply aware of the

profound discrepancy between his day and night selves is also,

perhaps ironically, the voice that dictates the terms of his own

psychological division. Through his cross-dressing and his confessions

to Nora, it is abundantly clear that Matthew believes himself to be, at

his core, a woman, and the essence of femininity. He senses in himself

the set of stereotypically female sensibilities: the motherhood that

results from “a womb as big as the king’s kettle” and “tossing up a

child every nine months,” the vanity of “a high soprano” and “deep

corn curls,” and the domesticity of “children, knitting,” and “boiling a

good man’s potatoes.” These very terms, however, are the words that

prevent Matthew from ever reconciling his day and night selves.

Even though primitive womanhood is the origin of his personal

history, and even though he leaves ample clues for his day and night

selves by which to forge a path of understanding between two,

Matthew was not born a woman. Veltman writes:

His is a life and a story of nothing, for nothing, because,

although Matthew is dressed in the garments of the known,
he is ultimately unknowable, even to himself. Patriarchal
language refuses to “gender” Matthew, but neither will it
ever “let him go.” His sidestepping of the constraints of the
 42
masculine/feminine binary does not end his misery, then,
because the night no longer seems to offer him much
refuge (Veltman 221).

Ultimately, then, Matthew has to discover that the origin of his

personal history – although he regresses to it every night- must remain

“unknowable” to him. He can, as Veltman suggests, try to “sidestep

the constraints of the masculine/feminine binary,” but his dilemma is

inherent in the very language he uses to express it. The articulation

that could, perhaps, help him to find the pathway between his night

and day selves eludes him. Though Robin tries to find a way of

articulating the naturalness of his cross-dressing: “She said to herself:

‘Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? … why should not

the doctor, in the grave dilemma of his alchemy, wear his dress?’”

(Barnes 86), it is clear that trying to understand and articulate

Matthew’s nightly regression is not achievable through language. It is

not necessarily, as Veltman indicates, the “patriarchy” or gender

binary inherent in speech that isolates Matthew’s night and day selves;

language in itself is not the key to unlocking Matthew’s paradox.

Instead, as Matthew and Nora each try to express the normalcy of his

night time state, they realize how fully “unknowable” the problem is.

Like the text of the novel itself, the more they try to articulate

Matthew’s transformation, the more profoundly mysterious the

transformation becomes. Language here could never fix Matthew’s

 43

dilemma, but it can certainly burden the transformation with gendered

rhetoric.

Nora first acknowledges this unknowable quality when she refers

to Matthew’s confusion about his nighttime transformation as “the

grave dilemma of his alchemy.” Matthew soon reprises this language,

reiterating, “‘Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look

well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely

because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy” (90). In these

passages, Matthew and Nora use the word “alchemy” to identify the

nature of Matthew’s confusion, to move it outside the realm of

language, and to condemn their own attempts to use words to explain

the nightly devolution. They realize that the transformation that occurs

each night is beyond the explanation of modern science. They turn

instead to the language of medieval mysticism, in which powers

outside the realm of Newtonian physics could take the crude material

of everyday life and release the inherent precious metal within.

Matthew’s transformation cannot be explained using the rational

language of medical or intellectual discourse, nor can it be discussed in

the context of Irish Catholicism. It requires its own, unique brand of

pre-historic language

Even as he tries to apply the language of “alchemy” to his

dilemma, however, Matthew denounces the very linguistic system he

 44

uses to produce it. He cautions Nora (and through her, the reader), to

“doubt everything seen, done, spoken,” including the language of his

own discourse and the text of the novel itself. In this way he

acknowledges, as Veltman notes, that language will not “let him go;”

but he also extends the terms of this statement. He is not condemned

to permanent unknowability because language is “patriarchical” but

rather because it can only acknowledge one aspect of its referent at a

time. Regardless of the amount or kind of language that Matthew uses,

he can never find words that will encompass Dr. O’Connor, the daytime

gynecological student, and the primitive essence of womanhood at his

core. Baxter picks up the thread of this discourse in his article, writing

of Matthew, “He is, however, totally conscious of his own inadequacy,

and his silence (going beyond the book’s conclusion) arises from a

careful self-examination which, paradoxically, only he can make”

(Baxter 1186). Ultimately, the final effect of the “alchemy” that

Matthew and Nora both mention is that of turning Matthew’s words into

silence. Through his analyses of himself and his analyses of his own

self-analysis, Matthew negates every word he speaks, rendering his

understanding impossible.

As Baxter notes, Matthew is “totally conscious of his own

inadequacy,” yet he is beholden to his own atavistic tendencies. Since

his installation in Paris, he has turned from a secret transvestite,

 45

covertly snatching his patients’ makeup, to a man in despair over his

impossible dual consciousness. His last efforts in the book to reconcile

his day and night selves manifest themselves, ultimately, as an appeal

to God.

In a particularly harrowing recollection, Matthew tells Nora about

going to church and holding his penis (which he has named “Tiny

O’Toole) in his hands in a supplication to God. Matthew relates, “‘I said,

“It is I, my Lord, who know there’s beauty in any permanent mistake

like me… So tell me, what is permanent of me, me or him?” ...And

there I was, holding Tiny, bending over and crying, asking the question

until I forgot and went on crying, and I put Tiny away then, like a

ruined bird’” (Barnes 141). Matthew, acutely conscious of both parts of

his psyche but unable to trace the root of his personal history either

through a literal trail of filth and artifacts or through the force of his

discourse, finally returns to the Catholic God he was raised to believe

in. Having taken on the role of the confessor and priest of the “night

people,” and the supreme, God-like authority on the unknowability of

the night self, Matthew tries to appeal to a higher authority to unravel

that which “he cannot know.” In the church, Matthew reveals the

extent of his awareness of himself. He calls the duality of his psyche “a

permanent mistake,” yet he knows that if he could find the link

between the self he becomes at night and the ineffective, useless and
 46

“ruined” self he sees symbolized in his flaccid penis, he could find

something “permanent” and “beautiful.” In his confusion and despair,

however, he loses track of the question he wanted to ask, and

abandons himself in grief, “holding Tiny, bending over and crying,

asking the question until I forgot and went on crying.”

By this time, Matthew is permanently stranded in Paris. On his

knees, penis in hand, in the tiny Parisian church of St. Merri “toward

the Ile,” in the glow of “the show windows of Our Lady,” Matthew asks

help of the God that he had given up, “‘because,’” he says, “‘I had

tried everything else.’” (140) What he finds, however, is that the dirty

nights of Paris brought his atavistic core to life and released his

awareness and acknowledgement of it, but will not allow him to trace

its origin back to a psychological state he can recognize. He simply

devolves at night, and this devolution “haunts him” during the day.

Whitley observes that “Matthew can accept both sides of a binary,

holding them in his mind without finding them mutually exclusive or

trying to reject one side, like the French;” unlike the French, however,

he cannot perceive both sides of the binary as two halves of a whole

(Whitley 97). Perhaps this is the “permanent mistake” that Matthew

refers to in the church; instead of the mistake of his gender, perhaps

Matthew grieves his inability to encompass both his conscious and

unconscious selves. He “can accept” both parts of himself without

 47

“rejecting one side,” but he can only confront them one side at a time.

It is an impossible problem that only entered into his consciousness

after living through Paris nights, and it never allows him any peace.

During the last of his conversations with Nora, he tries to

communicate the desperate pain, irony, and futility of his struggle. He

says to Nora, “‘So we come back to the place from which I set out;

pray to the good God; she will keep you. Personally I call her “she”

because of the way she made me; it somehow balances the mistake’”

(Barnes 159). When Matthew refers to “the place from which I set

out,” he is referring to the beginning of their dialogue, the start of his

quest for understanding, and the origins of his personal history all at

once. Each of these processes is infinite and recurring, taking Matthew

back to his starting point every time he tries to confront them. He is

doomed to repeat his discourse indefinitely, negating the veracity of

his pronouncements with every iteration; he is incapable of embodying

his regressions and evolutions in complete awareness of the process,

no matter how many ways he tries to understand it; and he is, most

significantly, destined to return to his primordial state every night. In

his impotent frustration, he reflects that God will “keep” him- both in

the sense of salvation and of imprisonment- and wryly refers to God as

a woman, knowing as Nora does that his inversion of pronouns will in

no way “balance the mistake.” He is trapped in the awareness of his

 48

ignorance, and therefore trapped in the city where he first realized it.

Nora, powerless to help him, still recognizes the impossible

pain of his situation. She tells him, “‘You know what none of us know

until we have died. You were dead in the beginning’” (161). For Nora,

who throughout the novel remains, deliberately, as ignorant as

possible about her own nightly devolutions, Matthew’s epistemological

awareness of his ignorance is literally unfathomable. Even filtering her

own experiences through an analysis of Robin’s nightly digression,

Nora cannot allow herself to acknowledge the impossibility of

understanding. That is the kind of awareness that Nora believes will kill

her, so she can only envisage Matthew as dead from the beginning.

Nora Flood and the “Gap in World Pain”

This reading of Matthew’s interpretation of the night is crucial to

understanding the emergence of Nora’s night self. By the end of Nora’s

final conversation with Matthew, she is overwhelmed by a fear of self-

awareness. She is unwilling to try to understand the difference

between night and day selves, as Matthew attempts, and simply

unable to acknowledge Matthew’s failure, preferring instead to think of

him as “dead.” The novel prepares the reader for Nora’s fear, however;

from the text’s first encounter with Nora, she is described as a fertile
 49

breeding ground in which other things can thrive, and which needs to

be nourishing something constantly. The earliest descriptions of Nora

in the novel envision her as the detached protector of American

history. Barnes writes:

She was known instantly as a Westerner. Looking at her,

foreigners remembered stories they had heard of covered
wagons; animals going down to drink; children's heads, just
as far as the eyes, looking in fright out of small windows,
where in the dark another race crouched in ambush; with
heavy hems the women becoming large, flattening the
fields where they walked; God so ponderous in their minds
that they could stamp out the world with him in seven
days. (56)

In Paris, Nora is so infused with her “personal and national history”

that “foreigners” can read the history of her home country in just a

glance. The novel is careful to point out, however, that Nora is not a

stand-in for America, but for the palate upon which history can be

read. Barnes writes, “There is a gap in ‘world pain’ through which the

singular falls continually and forever; a body falling in observable

space, deprived of the privacy of disappearance; as if privacy, moving

restlessly away, by the very sustaining power of its withdrawal kept

the body eternally moving downward, but in one place, and perpetually

before the eye. Such a singular was Nora.” She adds, “There was some

derangement in her equilibrium that kept her immune from her own

descent” (56-7). Nora, then, is a singular not in the “privacy” of her

 50

existence, but in the fact that she alone is deprived of that privacy.

She cannot partake of “world pain” because she is suspended in a

“gap,” unable to sense pain and self-awareness first hand, yet doomed

to live among those who can sense them. It is this quality of being part

of the world but outside of it; of lagging ever further behind in her

understanding of the human experience but partaking in the

experience nonetheless, that allows her to embody a sense of America

when she first holds her salons in Paris. Barnes reiterates, “The world

and its history were to Nora like a ship in a bottle; she herself was

outside and unidentified, endlessly embroiled in a preoccupation

without a problem” (59). In these passages, it becomes clear that for

Nora, time and space have always been transmutable. Although

unacknowledged, her proclivity for taking in some part of the world

and allowing it to grow in the rich emptiness of her psyche has always

been a fundamental aspect of Nora.

It is this quality that makes her such an appealing conversational

partner for Matthew, who needs to feed his discourse to a receptive

and nourishing mind, even though he realizes that the more he lets his

ideas flourish, the less they will help him understand his dual self. In

confiding so much to Nora, however, he exposes Nora’s true night self.

Nora, at her most atavistic, is the primitive womb. She is never a

mother, neither literally nor metaphysically, but in the same way that
 51

she nourishes Matthew’s nighttime womanhood, providing him with an

accepting and receptive mind, so does she nourish her lover Robin’s

night self once they arrive in Paris. Her nocturnal devolutions are

dependent on Robin’s and Matthew’s; like her conscious, waking self,

her night self can only emerge when it is needed to support someone

else’s.

Nora’s mind is frequently imagined as the container for Robin’s

body, particularly when she is asleep. She seems to feel both herself

and Robin best at night, which further evidences the true nature of her

night self. During one particularly lengthy dream, Barnes writes,

“Nora…fell into a dream which she recognized; though in the finality of

this version she knew that the dream had not been ‘well dreamt’

before. Where the dream had been incalculable, it was now completed

with the entry of Robin” (67). In her sleep, Nora becomes aware of her

own interior. Her realizations that she has had the same dream before,

and that it was somehow a less complete dream, demonstrate the

gradual emergence of her night self. The narration begins to highlight

more clearly the idea that her mind is a vessel, and that prior to

moving to Paris with Robin, it was only partly filled and largely ignored.

Only by taking Robin into her mind and holding her there can Nora feel

that her mind is “dreaming well,” somehow “completed with the entry

of Robin.” At the conclusion of this dream, her dream self “closed her
 52

eyes, and at that moment she knew an awful happiness. Robin, like

something dormant, was protected, moved out of death’s way by the

successive arms of women; but as she closed her eyes, Nora said ‘Ah!’

with the intolerable automatism of the last ‘Ah!’ in a body struck at the

moment of its final breath” (70). In this way, Nora, confronted in her

dream by the sensation of Robin being taken from her, experiences the

feeling of death. She feels “struck at the moment of her final breath”

not only because, in her dream, Robin’s removal from her protective

shelter deprives her night self of the sustenance it needs to survive,

but also because feeling this loss of Robin forces Nora to acknowledge

the existence of her night self at all.

For Nora, who has already demonstrated her incapacity to hear

that Matthew has failed in his desperate attempts to unite his divided

self, certainly cannot accept a similar division in herself. For this

reason, Nora fears the night – both because feeling Robin’s night self

within her own makes Nora acknowledge that she devolves into

something primitive just as Matthew does, and because she knows

from her conversations with Matthew that she will never be able to

reconcile her two selves. Nevertheless, writes Barnes, “Nora would

wake from sleep, going back through the tide of dreams into which her

anxiety had thrown her, taking the body of Robin down with her into it”

(62). The watery quality of the space between Nora’s wakefulness and
 53

her dreams corresponds to the “gap in world pain” in which her

conscious mind remains suspended. In her dreams at night, Nora must

confront her fear of her night self, which she recognizes by feeling the

presence of Robin in it, and in the day Nora and Robin can interact

physically; but this moment of waking or falling asleep, when Nora is

submerged in “the tide of dreams” she can go “back” through her

devolution to the origin of her personal history “taking the body of

Robin down with her into it.” In this space, she remains in the process

of devolving, or “perpetually moving downward,” feeling completed by

the presence of Robin’s body contained within her own.

As long as she and Robin can stay together in Paris, Nora has

continual relief from the emerging inevitability of living with a dual

consciousness. Although Robin and Paris have incited the emergence

and expansion of her night self, they are also the only hope she has of

forgetting this psychological division. For this reason, she stays home

at night, “ realizing that if she herself were not there Robin might

return to her as the one who, out of all the turbulent night, had not

been lived through” (64). Nora knows that if she were to venture out

into the night with Robin, she would discover that Robin fulfills the

“gap” in many people other than herself, and since she cannot be fully

herself without encompassing Robin as well, she waits for Robin to

“return to her.” Nora rests reassured in the fact that her absence will
 54

require Robin to “live through” other women- a phrase that adopts

multiple meanings in this context. Robin must “live through” others in

the sense that they shelter and nourish her, temporarily providing a

place for her night self to emerge and thrive; but she, inevitably, will

also “live through” these people in the sense that she will eventually

cease to need them. Once they are no longer of use to her (once she is

“through” with them), Robin always returns to Nora, knowing that she

can live inside Nora without ever “living through” her.

Matthew, who remains perpetually conscious of his own desire

for a “womb as big as a king’s kettle,” is best able to account for

Nora’s role as the container for Robin’s body by imagining Nora as

Robin’s mother. He first attempts this explanation early in the novel,

when he sees Nora roaming the streets at night. He says aloud to

himself, “ ‘She sees her everywhere. Out looking for what she’s afraid

to find- Robin. There goes mother of mischief, running about, trying to

get the world home’” (66). In this passage, Matthew diagnoses the

reason for Nora’s alienation from her night self: left to devolve alone at

night, Nora cannot support the emergence of her atavistic self without

taking Robin back through history with her. Without Robin, her

devolution is incomplete; she needs Robin in order to transition

successfully from day into night. Nora, however, does not want to

acknowledge the difference between her day and night selves, so she
 55

is “afraid to find” Robin. Like the “mother of mischief,” Nora is trapped

in a cyclic dilemma: without Robin, Nora becomes a frantic mother and

“sees her everywhere,” but when she takes Robin back in, she must

face the consequences of supporting and nourishing the “mischief” of

Robin’s night self.

For Matthew, however, Nora’s instinctive need to sustain Robin

and keep her encompassed within herself is the perfect image of

motherhood. He reiterates this imagery when he tells Nora about

Robin’s initial encounter with Jenny Petheridge, a character whom both

Matthew and the text itself characterize as a “squatter,” feeding off of

other people’s emotions and identities. He re-diagnoses the dilemma

of Nora’s night self, telling her, “‘in the end, you’ll all be locked

together… you and Jenny and Robin. You, who should have had a

thousand children, and Robin, who should have been all of them; and

Jenny, the bird, snatching the oats out of love’s droppings’” (107). For

Matthew, the intrusion of Jenny into Robin’s life does not signal the end

of Nora’s role as a mother figure, but instead illuminates it. Instead of

one child, Robin becomes “a thousand children,” reflecting the

substantiality of the “gap” her absence leaves in Nora. In this

sentence, Matthew identifies the true atavistic selves of both Nora and

Robin, acknowledges the magnitude of Nora’s loss, and describes

Jenny’s total inability to protect Robin’s personal history. If, as Matthew

 56

suggests, fecal matter can be used to trace the conscious mind back

through its nightly devolution and into its prehistoric form, then “love’s

droppings,” which Jenny feeds from, are the daytime evidence of Robin

and Nora’s nightly codependence. This “excrement of history” does not

align with Matthew’s perception of Nora as the primitive mother,

however, but instead reintroduces the imagery of decomposition.

Nora cannot adopt this idea of herself as a mother because,

without Robin, her “motherhood” leaves no trace. She cannot become

aware of her primal core because she has no evidence of its existence,

except for the profound, identity-draining lack that she feels upon

Robin’s departure. In this way, Nora cannot begin to identify the

duality of her consciousness until she is separated from Robin. Nora’s

return to her primal origins at night depended on Robin’s; without an

atavistic Robin to protect and shelter, Nora would become the very

“gap in world pain” through which she and Robin regress at night. In

Paris, Robin becomes the mould around which Nora’s night self is

formed, leaving Nora hollow and incapable of functioning after their

separation.

Such is her fear of discovering and failing to unite the opposing

parts of her consciousness, however, that she puts off learning about

her own nightly transformations until she is forced to confront the

despair of her night self’s demise. In an attempt to prepare Nora for

 57

this inevitable confrontation, Matthew warns her, “‘think of the night

the day long, and of the day the night through, or at some reprieve of

the brain it will come upon you heavily – an engine stalling itself upon

your chest, halting its wheels against your heart; unless you have

made a roadway for it” (90). At this point, however, Nora has already

experienced the “reprieve of the brain” in the form of Robin’s

abandonment. Since Nora failed to “make a roadway” between day

and night, her unconscious mind cannot complete its return back

through history after Robin leaves without “stalling itself.” Although

Matthew’s own struggle to embody both elements of his consciousness

proves futile, he does not “stall” as Nora does; even upon realizing the

impossibility of being both male and a woman, the very awareness of

his struggle allows him to continue devolving and re-evolving

smoothly.

Nora, however, realizes the importance of understanding the

night too late. Whitley writes, “Conditioned to appreciate only the light

of day as an American, in her frenzies over Robin she has come into

belated awareness of the night and all that it represents- irrationality,

beastliness, disorder” (Whitley 97). It is only after Robin leaves, then,

that Nora’s unconscious mind finds that it can no longer sustain the

“irrationality, beastliness,” and “disorder” of the night. Like rot itself,

though, this unconscious mind reveals itself to Nora in the form of lack;
 58

in the same way that rot is generative in its consumption of dead

material, Nora’s “belated awareness” of her unconscious mind can only

develop when it loses its ability to transform itself at night- when,

essentially, the life of her night self is extinguished.

The novel anticipates this crisis early in the second chapter and

introduces the vocabulary of rot and decay, in preparation for Nora’s

impending discovery. In a description of Nora and Robin’s relationship,

the text states that, “Love becomes the deposit of the heart,

analogous in all degrees to the “findings” in a tomb… In Nora’s heart

lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of identity, and about it for its

maintenance ran Nora’s blood. Thus the body of Robin could never be

unloved, corrupt, or put away” (61-2). Although this description of

Nora clashes with Matthew’s early references to Nora’s primordial

motherhood – which, naturally, are informed by his habit of

investigating what it means to be “woman” - the novel takes

Matthew’s advice in following the primal selves of Nora and Robin

back through history. As in a “tomb,” where archaeologists uncover

“fossils” and other “findings” in order to inform themselves about the

history of the person buried, Nora’s mind becomes a repository for the

evidence of her nighttime identity, like “love’s droppings” or

Matthew’s bucket of “filth.”

This metaphor prepares both Nora and the reader to make sense
 59

out of the vocabulary of decay a hundred pages later, when Robin she

returns to America with Jenny. Deprived of the possibility of regressing

into her night self, Nora is forced to acknowledge that her mind

behaves differently at night, and that Robin’s presence in Paris has

brought forth this schism in her consciousness. Soon after, Nora admits

to Matthew, “ ‘now I see that the night does something to a person’s

identity, even when asleep’” (87). She has discovered that without

Robin, her “blood” has nothing to run around and “maintain,” leaving

her suspended in the liminal space between awareness and

unconscious.

When Matthew changes perspectives and explains what “the

night does… to a person’s identity” in terms of decomposition, Nora is

able to identify her own dilemma in his rhetoric. He tells her, “‘Night

people do not bury their dead, but on the neck of you, their beloved

and waking, sling the creature, husked of its gestures. And where you

go, it goes, the two of you, your living and her dead, that will not die;

to daylight, to life, to grief, until both are carrion” (95). Matthew’s

distinction between “night people” and “waking” people recalls Nora’s

earlier revelation that Robin goes out to “live through” the night. Robin

exists almost continually in the form of her night self, seeming to Nora

to be “dead,” but a kind of living dead that “will not die.” This

explanation resonates with Nora, who tells Matthew, “‘… all of us die
 60

over again in somebody’s sleep. And this, I have done to Robin: it is

only through me that she will die over and over’” (158). Robin’s

atavistic core is a paradox: by its very nature, her night self must be a

kind of origin or pre-historic self, yet the form it takes is of something

dead, “husked of its gestures,” and in the process of decomposing.

Robin’s primordial self manifests itself to Nora and Matthew as a

generative and substantive, yet the substance being produced is not

living, but “carrion.” For Nora, whose night self emerges and develops

during the novel in response to Robin’s, this cycle of generative death

in which Robin “will die over and over” is the mould around which

Nora’s unconscious forms. In this way she cannot escape from Paris as

long as Robin is with her; since the constant rebirth of decomposition

cannot be “lived through,” she must continue to harbor and conceal

the process of decay, in the same way a “tomb” harbors the

decomposition of its contents. Matthew resumes this discourse of

death as regeneration when he tries to explain to Nora why she finds it

impossible to return to a state of ignorance about her own dual

consciousness:

‘or lies upon the floor, face down, with that terrible longing
of the body that would, in misery, be flat with the floor; lost
lower than burial, utterly blotted out and erased so that no
stain of her could ache upon the wood, or snatched back to
nothing without aim – going backward through the target,
taking with her the spot where she made one-’ (101)
 61

In this passage, Matthew offers an account of a woman’s return to her

primitive self that could describe both Nora and Robin. He also keeps

his pronouns vague and leaves the referents open, creating a scenario

in which the women’s nightly regressions are codependent and

inseparable on the level of the sentence structure. It also offers an

image of nighttime devolutions as a process of decay so profound that

it erases itself. A woman whose “misery” is so “terrible” that she

“would be lower than burial” has surpassed the pain of impossible, yet

co-dependent, primitive selves. Whether the “she” is Nora or Robin,

the “stain of her” is the by-product of the pain of separation: the

“love’s droppings” that Matthew refers to earlier in the novel. The

women merge to become one “terrible longing” which tries to retreat

further back in history than the creation of the original stain of

decomposition- an indefinable point at which Robin’s atavistic self first

began to decompose within the nurturing haven of Nora’s.

This explanation’s very vagueness and impenetrability allow

Nora to identify her predicament in it; by “going backward” every night

“through the target” and taking with her the “stain” that signifies her

love of Robin, she can exist as a “waking” person without any

awareness of her night self. She can remain ignorant of her

transformations because the traces of regression devolve along with

her, and are simply regenerated as new decay every night. In her
 62

essay on “excremental history,” Whitley notes, “In tutoring Nora on the

history of the night, Matthew is actually trying to integrate her sense of

self to include both aspects of human personality- the clean

consciousness and the dirty, but vitally necessary, unconsciousness”

(Whitley 97-8). Matthew cannot “include both aspects of human

personality” in his own sense of self, but as a doctor, tries to prescribe

a solution for Nora’s confusion. He cannot, however, be successful in

his treatment since he does not really believe that Nora can be cured.

Although in his own discourse Matthew illustrates Nora

simultaneously as the source of life and the source of death- a kind of

“mother of decay” – Nora’s primal self cannot withstand the absence of

Robin’s unending disintegration. The two night selves are so

interdependent that, in the absence of one, the other will eventually

dissolve itself. He even admits this to Nora, telling her that when he

saw Robin’s attention begin to drift toward Jenny Petheridge, “‘I

screamed and thought: “Nora will leave that girl some day, but thought

those two are buried at opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find

them both”’” (Barnes 113). Ultimately, it is irrelevant whether Nora

exists at night as the womb in which decay can thrive or as a part of

the decay itself, if Nora and Robin are apart. Their separation is both

the signal and the cause of the deaths of their dual consciousness- a

process which does not reveal itself completely until the end of the
 63

novel. Matthew predicts this destiny, however, in his final words to

Nora. Even after their subconscious selves begin to blend into their

“waking” selves, the remnants of their atavistic symbiosis will remain

connected. The image of “one dog,” something less than human and

closer in the evolutionary path to their “buried” primal origins, evokes

the sense that in the death of their dual consciousness, Nora and Robin

will be able to achieve the unity of unconsciousness that becomes both

“vitally necessary” and completely impossible in Paris. Beyond the

limitations of rational thought, only a “dog” could be distanced enough

from rational thought to identify the primitive connection between

them.

In the last chapter that takes place in Paris, it becomes clear that

Nora has internalized Matthew’s explanations of the existence and

nature of her night self. Before returning to America, Nora returns his

discourse to him, this time applying it specifically to her relationship

with Robin. She tells Matthew, “‘And then that day I'll remember all my

life, when I said: “It is over now”; she was asleep and I struck her

awake. I saw her come awake and turn befouled before me, she who

had managed in that sleep to keep whole’” (154). In this passage, Nora

reveals that she could not recognize Robin’s “wholeness” in sleep until

she “struck her awake.” The moment of detaching Robin from herself

is therefore both the moment when she realizes the way that she and
 64

Robin are connected, and also the moment when she realizes that their

separation will “befoul” Robin, forcing her decay from the protection of

Nora’s womb. She continues, “‘No rot had touched her until then, and

there before my eyes I saw her corrupt all at once and withering,

because I had struck her sleep away’” (154). Here, Nora recalls

Matthew’s metaphor of the “one dog” that will “find them both,” in

that she distinguishes the “rot” of which Robin’s night self is composed

from the “rot” that will overtake Nora and Robin upon their separation

from each other. When Nora says that “No rot had touched” Robin until

Nora “struck her sleep away,” she imagines Robin as something which

creates, but does not become, decay. If every day, the “stain” of Nora

and Robin’s love can “go backward through the target” and renew

itself for the coming night, effectively regressing through its own

decomposition to its origin, then Robin is not herself the rot, but

instead its source and conduit. She causes the rot to ferment, but it

does not touch her, leaving her ready to create new rot within the

tomb of Nora’s primitive self during the night.

This perception of Robin unites them even more closely in Nora’s

rhetoric; in this imagining, the two unconscious minds become one

night self, mimicking a biological process that regenerates itself

nightly. Nora voices this sentiment to Matthew, asking, “‘have you ever

loved someone and it became yourself’” (161)? In Nora’s conception of

 65

her night self, she is not just connected to Robin, but rather she

becomes the manifestation of that connection. Although Robin’s night

self provokes the emergence and development of Nora’s, and although

Nora dreads and fears this aspect of herself, still she recognizes the

disastrousness of cutting herself off from Robin. She mourns to

Matthew, “She wanted darkness in her mind- to throw a shadow over

what she was powerless to alter- her dissolute life, her life at night; and

I, I dashed it down’” (165). Finally, Nora recognizes that, within the

shelter of her own night self, Robin could find a way “to throw a

shadow over” her “dissolute life.” Like Nora, Robin is “powerless to

alter” to destructiveness of her insinuation into Nora’s unconscious

mind, and therefore, Nora realizes belatedly, does not deserve to be

“dashed down.” If by the end of the novel, loving Robin “became”

Nora, this act of loving was as “powerless” to be altered as either

Nora’s or Robin’s individual existence. Whether mother or tomb, Nora’s

unconscious night self is defined and shaped by Robin’s, yet is

unknowable to Nora without the destruction of this symbiosis.

In this way, Paris is fatal to Nora: with Robin, she is forced to

become the “mother of mischief” and nourisher of decay, all without

her knowledge. Then, finally, she must suffer the awareness of her

night self by the fact of its disintegration without the decay of Robin to

nourish. This discovery, too late to be remedied, is almost as painful to

 66

witness. Matthew articulates, “‘The people in my life who have made

my life miserable, coming to me to learn of degradation and the night.

Nora, beating her head against her heart, sprung over, her mind

closing up her life like a heel on a fan, rotten to the bone for love of

Robin’” (171). Without Robin, Nora’s mind “closes up her life” and rots

her “to the bone,” but in a way that is entirely distinct from the

symbiotic rotting and rebirth that develops Nora’s night self. Instead,

this “love for Robin” is a permanent “degradation,” marked by a

“misery” that, unlike her earlier love, contains no possibility of

regeneration.

Robin Vote: “A Beast Turning Human”

Although an exploration of Nora’s night self appears to describe

Robin as much as it describes Nora, the novel’s conception of Robin

Vote is much more elusive. Nora looks back on her formation around

Robin using one particular set of vocabulary, in order to achieve a

more definitive sense of herself, but the novel as a whole imagines

Robin in a number of different ways. She is explicitly referred to as “a

night person,” implying that she is most knowable in her atavistic,

unconscious self. Her original history informs other characters’ daytime

impressions of her, imbuing them with a sense of vague primitiveness.

 67

No two characters describe their sense of Robin’s night self in the

same way, and in fact most of the characters describe her in several

different ways throughout the novel. They are attracted to her because

they sense that she is always closer to her own origins than they are;

that somehow she has found a way to bring a sense of her night self

into the day time.

Rather than making her a more cohesive character, however, the

uncertain boundary between her day and night selves makes her

utterly unknowable - without a separation between the dual parts of

her consciousness, neither part can have any definition. Whitley best

articulates this phenomenon in her essay, writing:

Yet, although Robin is described several times in lavish

terms… she remains an enigma, never quite coming into
focus as a person, because the images which Barnes uses
to portray her never quite add up, but seem instead to be
pointing beyond themselves to an unknown and
unknowable referent (Whitley 90).

In this passage, Whitley offers the most effective way of reading

Robin’s night self: it is primitive and atavistic in the same vein as

Matthew’s womanhood and Nora’s fertile earth, but the form itself is

constantly shifting. Robin’s night self both encompasses all attempts to

define it, and also rejects them; her primitive self is the essence of

atavism, or the fact of devolution. The form itself “never quite comes

into focus,” as Whitley notes, but this blurred vision of Robin is, in fact,
 68

the most accurate description of her at her most primitive. Victoria

Smith writes that “Robin speaks few lines in the novel, and they are

mostly recounted by others; she is as anonymous and enigmatic as the

Paris night in which she wanders” (Smith 199). The distance that the

novel places between Robin and her “few lines” is significant, because

Robin is only describable in terms of other characters’ need for her.

She adapts herself to the night selves of the characters that surround

her, so that the novel’s descriptions of her change depending on the

chapter’s narrator. Throughout Nightwood, she is alternately

envisioned as decay, the remnants of history, a child, and an animal.

Although the combination of these descriptions appears to “add

up” to nothing, “pointing beyond themselves,” they are significant for

producing the “anonymous and enigmatic” figure that both highlights

other characters’ night behavior, and feeds off of that behavior to

nurture her own. Nora’s understanding of Robin as decay is therefore

particularly apt, since it highlights the parasitic nature of Robin’s

unconscious. Although it is not the only way she will describe Robin

before the end of the novel, it is perhaps the most acute metaphor,

since it describes itself. Robin can be read as “rot” because Nora needs

to use this imagery to explain the tomb or grave-like qualities of her

own night self, but Robin should also be read as “rot” because she can

only be described subjectively. Like rot, her atavistic unconscious is

 69

constantly growing and shifting, “going back” through history, but

dependent on a host in order to thrive.

In the same way that Nora perceives Robin to be at the same

time the decomposition of a biological substance and the possibility for

its regeneration, the novel frequently portrays Robin as the remnants

of history’s origins. It locks her into a descriptive cycle of ancient

youth, situating her both at the beginning and at the end of time. One

of the book’s first descriptions of Robin reads, “The perfume that her

body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells

of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil

of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea.” It continues, “Her flesh

was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad,

porous, and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath

the visible surface” (38). Within the first moments of introducing Robin,

the novel already alludes to the “decay” that Nora will use to define

both Robin and herself later in the novel. Even as it refers to the

process of “fungi” and organic material aging after death, however, it

also invokes images of birth and growth. “Oil of amber” unites the

various elements of this passage in a complex play of connotations:

although it is a substance that can only be distilled in a very dry

environment, using “dead” sap that has been removed from its source,

it is most commonly used for increased circulation to the uterus to

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enhance sexual pleasure and fertility. In the time period in which

Barnes was writing, however, oil of amber was one of the most easily

accessible ways to induce a miscarriage, since a superfluity of blood to

the uterus can kill a foetus. In this way, Robin is imagined as both fluid,

like menstruation or “the sea,” and completely “dry;” and as a “broad”

and “porous” plant, and a “fungus” that feeds off of dead vegetation.

Catherine Whitley responds to this passage in terms of its

opposition of generation and degeneration. She writes, “…although it

is not clear in what way ‘sleep’ is like ‘decay’ or how ‘decay’ can pull

someone beneath the surface… Robin is likened to something giving

off phosphorescence as it rots under water, but what decays is Robin’s

life: the novel’s initial introduction of her thus signals that even as a

young woman, she is like an ambulatory corpse rotting away” (Whitley

91). In this way, “the novel’s initial introduction of her” only provides

the reader with a series of conflicting and almost unrelated

descriptions. Rather than obscuring Robin’s true nature, however, this

introduction gives an accurate picture of Robin’s night self. It is

primitive and prehistoric, but ancient and decaying; it gives off

“phosphorescence as it rots under water.” Robin is both birth and

death, and neither birth nor death. The very vagueness of this initial

description allows Robin to be described over and over without

conclusion. The novel tells that reader that “Such a woman is the
 71

infected carrier of the past: before her the structure of our head and

jaws ache- we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death

returning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the

lips of our forefathers” (Barnes 41). The text itself, then, predicts

Robin’s role in the novel: she is the night self who offers to the other

characters the possibility of accessing their own unconscious minds.

She makes “the structure of our head and jaws ache,” as though

looking at her one could literally feel one’s physical evolution in

progress. The past seems to run through her like “blood,” and it is this

quality that attracts all the other characters to her. Nora certainly feels

that she “could eat her” by taking her inside herself, and Jenny feeds

off of Robin’s atavism the way she feeds off of “love’s droppings.” To

Felix, her husband and the father of her son, Robin is best understood

not as the sense of pre-history, but as a manifestation of history itself.

Felix is a false baron with pretensions toward ancient lineage and

historical birthright; if he were American, the Paris night would

probably bring out in him an atavistic self that was more closely

connected to his yearning for history. Instead, however, the novel

offers him Robin, whose night self is defined both by its constant

production of history and by its malleability. Felix’s descriptions of

Robin are therefore informed by his desire to grow into the past and

produce a lineage. He observes that “her attention, somehow in spite

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of him, had already been taken by something not yet in history. Always

she seemed to be listening to the echo of some foray in the blood that

had no known setting” (48). In this way, the future of his life with Robin

holds the potential for the creation of “history.” She seems “to be

listening to the echo” from a source which has not yet made noise,

which offers Felix the opportunity to create a new ancientness.

When he tries to explain this to Matthew later, he recalls the

novel’s introduction of Robin, saying, “‘The Baronin [Robin] had an

undefinable disorder, a sort of ‘odour of memory,’ like a person who

has come from some place that we have forgotten and would give our

life to recall’” (126). By referring to Robin’s atavism as “an undefinable

disorder,” Felix offers a description that mirrors the very “disorder” he

tries to describe. Robin’s atavism is both a condition which cannot be

defined or clearly explained, but also that condition is undefinability

itself. In other words, Felix identifies Robin’s “disorder” as a problem of

being “undefinable” even as he claims not to be able to define it.

This contradictory statement mirrors the ambiguity of Robin’s

odour of memory, so that the cyclic construction of Felix’s assessment

corresponds to the cyclic patterns of Robin’s shifting identity. He

continues by telling Matthew, “‘There was in her every movement a

slight drag, as if the past were a web about her, as there is a web of

time about a very old building… about the Baronin there was a density,
 73

not of age, but of youth’” (127). Barnes is careful to call attention to

Robin’s age in the novel- she is significantly, deliberately young. At one

point Matthew says that “she can’t be more than twenty,” but her

exact age would be, perhaps, too definitive a detail to include. Instead,

she is a “young woman,” characterized somehow by a “density of

youth” that seems to trap her young age within her in spite of the

passage of time. In a different character, this quality would seem to be

perpetual childhood, or a kind of innocent arrested development.

Instead, Robin is weighed down by the accumulation of ages of youth,

creating “in her every movement a slight drag.”

This perpetual regeneration of history both explains Felix’s

attraction toward her, manifest in his vocabulary of “blood” and

“Barony,” but also illustrates the impossibility of maintaining this

attraction. As long as Robin retains her youth, Felix cannot construct a

sense of chronologically accurate history, since even an ancient kind of

youth creates a “slight drag.” Even when Robin gives birth to their son,

Guido, the child is weak, asexual, and unengaged with his past.

Whereas at night, Robin can exist as both the beginning and the end of

history, her son can encompass neither. Ultimately Guido must bear

the onus of old age while Robin seems to be continually reborn,

corresponding to Nora’s observation that “through me she will die over

and over.”
 74

In this way, Robin and Guido exchange places, so that she more

resembles youth than her own son. For Jenny Petherbridge, whom the

book describes as a “squatter,” the fact that Robin seems to be more

childlike than any real child is particularly resonant. Her self-image is

based upon the fragments of identity that she gleans from other

people, and from her observation of Robin’s interaction with children,

Robin seems to glean youth in the same way. The novel prepares the

reader for this portrayal of Robin during Guido’s birth. Barnes writes,

“she rose up on her elbow in her bloody gown, looking about her in the

bed as if she had lost something. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, for Christ’s

sake!’ she kept crying like a child who has walked into the

commencement of a horror” (52). Although Robin is the person giving

birth, she is still the character in this passage who experiences the

shock of emerging from the womb. Instead of describing the angry wail

of her newborn, the novel focuses on Robin’s “crying,” as though she

has just “walked into the commencement” of the “horror” of waking

life, rather than her child. From her first interactions with children,

then, Robin attracts the language of childhood. In addition to the

vocabulary of history, then, descriptions of pilfered childhood (as Jenny

perceives them) also contribute to the novel’s portrayal of Robin’s

atavism.

This portrayal is most visible to the reader after Jenny introduces

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Robin to a child whom she claims is her “niece.” Barnes writes, “A little

girl… sat at the far end of the room. She had been playing, but the

moment Robin entered she ceased and sat, staring under her long-

lashed eyelids at no one else, as if she had become prematurely

aware” (76). In this passage, it seems that Robin has almost stolen the

ability to “play” from the “little girl.” Her reaction to Robin’s entrance

speaks more to the nature of Robin’s unconscious than it does to the

child’s personality; at the moment of Robin’s entrance, the little girl

becomes “prematurely aware,” as if she gains maturity in presence of

Robin’s profound youth. Although she is both a wife and mother,

Robin’s youth so exceeds the boundaries of chronology that only the

extremely young can sense it in her. For Jenny, however, it is not the

condensed air of youthfulness that makes Robin so attractive, but

instead the instantaneity with which she absorbs the child’s innocence.

She is fascinated by Robin’s connection with the little girl, and

extremely jealous of the way that the child freely surrenders her youth

to Robin. Barnes writes, “Jenny had shrunk into her rug and was not

listening. Her eyes followed every movement of Robin’s hand, which

was laid now on the child’s hand, now stroking her hair, the child

smiling up into the trees” (81). In this moment, Jenny begins to realize

that Robin is not really stealing from her niece, since the little girl,

“smiling up into the trees” is perfectly content to be loved by Robin.

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She sees instead that Robin cannot love her the way she loves the little

girl. Jenny’s night self reaches out to Robin’s for completion, sensing

that Robin carries with her the origin of “squatting.” Through Jenny’s

eyes, Robin is constructed as a squatter who binds other people to her

in the act of taking something from them.

Although Jenny’s conception of Robin is farther removed from

Felix’s, it nevertheless illustrates the effects of Robin’s malleable

atavism. The veracity of Jenny’s perspective is, in fact, confirmed by its

utter removal from Robin. Toward the end of the book, Felix tells

Matthew about his conversation with Jenny, in which Jenny describes

Robin and her niece. Felix says, “it appears that this little girl Sylvia

had ‘fallen in love’ with the Baronin and that she, the Baronin, kept

waking her up all through the night to ask her if she ‘loved her’” (123).

Felix thereby validates Jenny’s sense of Robin in his retelling. The story

itself illustrated Robin’s regressive night time habits, painting her as a

frightened child turning to her mother for comfort in the dark. The fact

that the “mother” figure is also the “lover” figure, and that these adult

roles are enacted by a little girl, only highlights the truth of Jenny’s

suspicion: Robin does, in fact, take on the role of a child in her

interactions with Sylvia. Jenny’s jealousy prevents her from seeing the

greater significance of this role reversal. Robin does not take Sylvia’s

youth away from her, but instead brings to the relationship a youth
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that is more primitive than Sylvia’s; it is an earlier, baser kind of youth.

In contrast, Sylvia seems mature and motherly, as though exposure to

Robin caused her to grow up “prematurely.” Felix has enough distance

from Robin to recognize the significance of this story, and lends

credibility to Jenny’s perspective by showing that Robin’s primitiveness

is just a striking even after being filtered through three layers of

storytelling.

This primitiveness, which exists as rot in Nora, as the renewal of

history for Felix, and the supremacy of ancient youth for Jenny,

becomes so dependent on the Paris night that once Robin returns to

America, this night self turns upon her. No longer sheltered by the

interior of Nora’s unconscious, and away from the city that coaxed her

atavistic unconscious into perpetual regeneration, Robin must revert to

animalistic tendencies - the only kind of conscious, waking regression

she knows how to imitate. The book juxtaposes Robin with animalism –

both literally and metaphorically - several times during the course of

the novel, but does not fully develop them until Robin returns to

America. Charles Baxter notes that “Djuna Barnes’s characterization of

Robin Vote persistently emphasizes that she is something (a force,

nature, or bestiality) disguised as a human being” (Baxter 1179).

Indeed, this “bestiality” manifests itself from the first description of

Robin. After characterizing her as exuding an “odour” of “earth-flesh,

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fungi,” and “oil of amber,” Barnes continues:

Sometimes one meets a woman who is a beast turning

human. Such a person’s every movement will reduce to an
image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal
wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy
as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of
trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a
hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the
trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is
neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger
pressing its breast to its prey (Barnes 41).

While this passage claims to identify Robin as a “beast turning

human,” in fact it describes more closely a beast as imagined by a

human. The sentient “eland” who treads “in the economy of fear,

stepping in the trepidation of flesh what will become myth”

understands that it is fated to become a human construct. To cast

Robin in a human form is tantamount to placing a “bridal veil” upon an

antelope and forcing it into the farce of an “eternal wedding.” Every

step of the eland “coming down an aisle of trees” would be another

step toward the deliberate self-deception. The urgency of the need to

understand and relate, a drive that Barnes characterizes as “human

hunger,” deranges the logic of the reader and other characters so

profoundly, however, that instead of allowing Robin to exist outside of

communicable language, she is forced to take a form. This form is the

“unicorn,” based on a bestial structure but altered by the fancy of

man, and exists neither as a true animal nor as a purely fantastical

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construct. Instead he unicorn exists as “myth,” relatable but inhuman,

accessible to the imagination but wholly absent from reality. This

passage is impossible to take in before reading the rest of the novel; it

is dangerous to read Robin as a “unicorn” without an intuitive sense of

the many addled constructs that the novel uses to describe Robin, all

of which are based on reality but existing outside of it. She is not the

“unicorn” of a little girl’s fantasy, but a warped version of a once-

elegant eland that could not compete with the “human hunger” that

pressed upon it.

Robin is again imagined as an animal altered under the human

gaze during the next chapter, when she first meets Nora. Watching

some lions in a cage during a circus act, Nora notices, “as one powerful

lioness came to the turn of the bars, exactly opposite the girl [Robin],

she turned her furious great head with its yellow eyes afire and went

down, her paws thrust through the bars and, as she regarded the girl,

as if a river were falling behind impassible heat, her eyes flowed in

tears that never reached the surface” (60). In this passage, the

behavior of the lioness predicts Robin’s later interaction with Jenny’s

niece, Sylvia. The lioness “went down” before Robin, both in the sense

that she prostrates herself before a being who is clearly closer to her

primitive origins, and in the sense of “going backward.” In the same

way that Robin manifests a more primitive youth than the child Sylvia,
 80

she also projects a more primal bestiality than the lioness. Before this

example of primitivism manifest, the lioness “goes down,” becoming

more in touch with the wildness that connects her with Robin, and still

acknowledges the superiority of Robin’s atavism. Further, this image of

the lioness is informed by human perspective in the same way as the

unicorn; the lioness is caged and paraded around in a parody of

Robin’s own captivity within language. Just as the eland of Barnes’

metaphor is pressed into existence by the insistence of “human

hunger,” the lioness in her cage transforms from a true beast into a

spectacle for show. She becomes the symbol for savagery rather than

a true threat, and remains in this way suspended between fantasy and

reality. In Robin, however, the lioness finds a being who is perhaps

even more horrifically contained. She recognizes the discrepancies

between Robin’s unconscious and her human body, and this moment

of recognition makes her own primal self-awareness more

sophisticated even than Robin’s. The “tears that never reached the

surface” wash the “fire” from her gaze and render her more human,

more in control of her behavior, then Robin herself. Tellingly, this is the

moment in which Nora asks Robin to leave the circus with her.

At the end of the novel, when Nora returns to America to find

Robin and try to piece their shared identities back together, she

discovers that this animalism has overtaken Robin in Nora’s absence.

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Soon after their arrival in New York, Jenny discovers Robin in an open

field, “speaking in a low voice to the animals. Those that came near,

she grasped, straining their fur back until their eyes were narrowed

and their teeth bare, her own teeth showing as if her hand were upon

her own neck” (177). Accustomed to adapting her unconscious to other

people’s night selves and then sheltering it within Nora’s mind, Robin

is unprepared for the psychological wilderness of America. She finds no

protection in Jenny, whose night self is as determined by her

companions as Robin’s, and no outside perspective with which to

interpret herself. As a result, she turns to animals, which are capable of

recognizing the atavism in her unconscious. She imitates their fury,

trying to turn her own human gaze upon herself, “as if her hand were

upon her own neck.”

Her self-awareness is infused with the bestial nature of her

unconscious, however, and she slips easily away from her self-

conscious scrutiny and into the atavistic. She begins literally to live like

an animal- Barnes writes, “Sometimes she slept in the woods; the

silence that she had caused by her coming was broken again by insect

and bird flowing back over her intrusion, which was forgotten in her

fixed stillness” (177). Like the lioness, “insect and bird” are only

temporarily disturbed by Robin’s apparent humanity. They quickly

resume their normal behaviors, indicating that “her fixed stillness”

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possesses the same qualities that caused her Paris acquaintances to

describe her as a “plant,” as “decay,” and as an “animal.” The same

“indefinable disorder” that is envisaged in so many different ways

through the novel allows her to sleep undisturbed in a primitive

context. This stillness is unnatural for Robin, however; her unconscious

is not tranquil and fixed, but constantly changing.

When Nora arrives in America to find Robin, the repressed chaos

of her unconscious can finally release itself. Ironically, as Matthew

predicted, Nora’s dog ultimately leads her to Robin, “finding them

both.” Nora follows her dog to a wooden church, in which she discovers

Robin: “at the moment Nora’s body struck the wood, Robin began

going down. Sliding down she went; down, her hair swinging, her arms

held out, and the dog stood there, rearing back, his forelegs slanting…

And down she went, until her head swung against his; on all fours now,

dragging her knees” (179). The moment of seeing Nora allows Robin to

return to her most natural state of mind- primitive and prehistoric,

modeled in this moment after the animals she has been living with.

Safe within the protective presence of Nora, she can “go down” the

way the lioness did. She is finally able to regress and devolve as she

used to in Paris, only now her unconscious mind has taken over her

waking mind as well. As soon as Nora finds her, Robin is so

overwhelmed by her atavism that she is forced to enact it. She “goes
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down” literally, in the sense that she “slides down” the wall and onto

the floor, but she also “goes down” through her own personal history,

taking her human behavior along with her. She mimics the dog’s

behavior for the rest of the novel, until finally, Barnes writes, “she

began to bark also, crawling after him- barking in a fit of laughter,

obscene and touching… He ran this way and that, low down in his

throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him… until she gave

up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and

the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head

flat along her knees” (179-80). Although this ultimate devolution

consists of Robin performing the behavior of a dog, it is clear that she

has regressed to something less than- or beyond- animal. She frightens

Nora’s dog, which “ran this way and that,” as though to try to escape

her, “low down in his throat crying” with fear. She is crazed, “grinning

and crying” along with the dog, and only acknowledging Nora’s

presence in the frenzy of her tortured devolution.

In the novel’s last moment, she “lies out, her face turned and

weeping” recalling Matthew’s earlier discussion of “lying along the

floor, face down.” In this moment, she encompasses all of the

metaphors used to describe her atavism: she dissolves into the floor

like rot, weeping like a child, “going down” through her own history

and taking the reader back along the pages of the novel with her. Her
 84

primordial self responds to Nora in an accumulation of language and

metaphor, yet, as Catherine Whitley notes, these images “do not quite

add up.” She is more authentically primitive than any physical or

linguistic comparison can portray, and it is ultimately this identity that

makes her “go down.”

“Now nothing, but wrath and weeping.”

Although the reader only witnesses the consequences of Robin’s

return to America, the novel addresses the fates of all three

characters. Trapped in the cycle of devolving and re-evolving, the

women’s departure from Paris leaves them suspended in a semi-

conscious state, futilely fighting to control and repress the tyranny of

their night selves. The uselessness of Robin’s attempt plays out before

the reader- all her attempts at “stillness” fall apart at the sight of Nora.

The novel predicts this catastrophe, however, from the first moments

of their meeting. Just after the two women move in together, Barnes

writes, “Nora was informed that Robin had come from a world to which

she would return. To keep her… Nora knew now that there was no way

but death. In death Robin would belong to her. Death went with them,

together and alone; and with the torment and catastrophe, thoughts of

resurrection, the second duel” (63). In Robin, Nora finds “an echo of
 85

her unknown life more nearly tuned to its origin,” which can only be

“kept” or possessed in death. Meeting Robin both allows Nora to sense

more “nearly” the origins of herself and her lover, which in turn forces

her to prevision the destiny of that origin. Their love follows the pattern

of Robin’s own night self, constantly bringing them back to “death,”

which will mark the origin of Robin “belonging to Nora.” In Paris, such

belonging is certainly impossible, since Robin exists within Nora but

regresses and changes form too often to become part of her. Matthew

articulates this best when he tells Nora, “‘Robin is not in your life, you

are in her dream, you’ll never get out of it’” (155).

Matthew, the character most aware of the distinction between

his night and day selves, recognizes the inevitability of becoming

submerged in the atavism inherent in Paris nights. Tellingly, he is the

only American who remains in the city by the end of the book; only in

Paris can he even glimpse the possibility of reuniting the two selves

that came apart when he arrived there. After Robin leaves, he is

therefore the only voice that can guide Robin toward survival. He tries

to convince her to remain in Paris, telling her to “be still, now that you

know what the world is about, knowing it’s about nothing” (132). Nora

is too aware of her unconscious identity to “be still,” as Robin attempts

to be, even though that awareness also informs her of the futility of

following Robin to America. She tells Matthew, “‘Once, when she was
 86

sleeping, I wanted her to die. Now, that would stop nothing… I can only

find her again in my sleep or in her death; in both she has forgotten

me’” (137). In the same way that the rupture caused by leaving Robin

forced Nora to become aware of the existence of her unconscious,

Robin’s departure from Paris forces Nora to become aware of the

nighttime behavior of her unconscious as it relates to Robin’s.

The catalyst for her awareness, then, is the very obstacle

preventing her from regaining her ignorance of her dual consciousness,

and she is forced to remain fractured and “forgotten” by Robin. In this

way, the two women become permanently estranged from themselves.

The “hunger” of Nora’s atavistic womb guides her back to Robin

almost without her awareness. Her atavistic nature is so strong in her

waling self at this point that she senses Robin’s presence in the

wooden church almost as well as her dog. Robin, of course, has

reverted herself to a pre-human, animalistic state. Barnes writes that

“it was as if the motive power which had directed Robin’s life, her day

as well as her night, had been crippled’” (175). Like Nora, Robin is no

longer capable of existing as a sentient being. Her primitivism

overcomes her “motive power,” and she and Nora remain suspended

outside of themselves.

Matthew, too suffers the horror of separating his night self from

Robin and Nora’s, even though he remains in Paris. His primitive

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womanhood does not depend on Nora, as Robin does, but in her

primitive fertility he finds a nurturing haven for his discourse. His

words are not exactly penetrative; his language does not sexually

engage with Nora’s unconscious. Instead, she operates like a human

journal, allowing Matthew’s ideas to articulate themselves by the fact

of asking for them. When Nora leaves, then, Matthew not only

witnesses objectively the inevitable doom of the women’s reunion, but

he also feels the pain of his own separation from them. He calls them

“the people in my life who have made my life miserable,” repeating

the word “life” in order to give it two connotations. Robin, Nora, and

Matthew are “in” each others’ lives in the sense that their interactions

at night have made them, to varying degrees, codependent. This

iteration of “life” refers to his “vitally necessary” subconscious. Their

presence, and then their absence, however, have caused this “life” to

run into the other, daytime “life” that he used to be able to control.

He expresses the anguish of having succumbed to the Paris night

in his last prophecy, which is also his last line in the novel. Drunk and

“miserable,” sitting in a café alone at night, he mourns, “‘I’ve not only

lived my life for nothing, but I’ve told it for nothing’” (175)! As he gives

up his last attempt to exit the café into the Paris night, he cries in the

same passage, “‘Now, the end – mark my words – now nothing, but

wrath and weeping.’”

 88

HEMINGWAY AND “THE NOTHINGNESS INSIDE”

Ernest Hemingway was living in Paris in 1925 when his friend F.

Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby. He had been working on

his own first novel, and was very much impressed both by Fitzgerald’s

style, and by his portrayal of American identity. He had also admired

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which used allegory in a way he had never

encountered. With these authors in mind, and under the tutelage of

Gertrude Stein, Hemingway published his 1926 novel The Sun Also

Rises to much critical confusion. Many critical readers, accustomed to

the easy vernacular of Mark Twain and the engaging prose of Henry

James, dismissed the novel entirely. Its characters seemed two-

dimensional and uninspired; the literary reviewer for The Dial famously

commented that the characters were as shallow “as the saucers in

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which they stack their daily emotion.” D.H. Lawrence believed that the

novel served as a kind of brochure for the consequence-free life of an

expatriated derelict, and wrote of Hemingway: “he doesn’t want to go

anywhere, he doesn’t want to do anything. He just wants to lounge

around and maintain a healthy state of nothingness inside himself, and

an attitude of negation to everything outside himself” (D. H. Lawrence

94).

Many, too, read only the first epigram of the novel, a quotation

from Gertrude Stein which diagnosed Hemingway and his compatriot

friends as “a lost generation,” and saw the novel as a sort of moral

lament over the degradation of this “generation perdu. ” They glossed

over the second epigram, a quote from Ecclesiastes in which Solomon

states that “One generation passeth away, and another generation

cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.” This juxtaposition frames the

novel as a response to Stein’s injunction, explicitly providing an

indication that the reader should search below the “lost,” errant

surface of the book and search for that which “abideth forever.”

When Hemingway joked to Fitzgerald that he was going to call

his book “The Greater Gatsby,” then, there was more than an element

of truth. The Americans in The Sun Also Rises struggle with the same

problems of money, class, impossible love and displaced identity,

except that they do not seek resolution in America. Instead they turn
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to Paris, where they – along with Hemingway - find that language

seems to be able to shape and transform their identities. Language

takes on different properties in Paris; it becomes performative, and the

words no longer behave as descriptors. For the novel’s Americans, who

are all writers, this property of language allows for enormous amounts

of control. Aside from their actual literary endeavors, the characters

believe that they can control reality according to what they say,

redefining both individual words and the function of language itself.

For this reason it is significant that the novel is narrated in the

first person, and that the narrator, Jake, is a journalist and aspiring

writer. His language self-consciously mediates the reader’s perception

of the narrative, teaching the reader to recognize the significance of

certain words without ever describing them. In Paris, Jake’s meticulous

control over words allows him to create characters that the reader can

recognize, using the code of his words as a guideline; without the

slightest description of a character or a behavior, Jake can convey its

significance and its meaning using one of the coded words. Even when

he relates the dialogue of other characters, the reader remains

consistently aware that Jake controls the narrative. The reader’s

experience of the novel is therefore just as informed by the

transformative function of language as the characters’ experience of

Paris.
 91

The Dial’s reviewer, then, was right to label Hemingway’s

characters “shallow.” If the reader relies upon the descriptive nature of

Jake’s narrative, they are shallow; they seem to be caricatures of

themselves, or, at the very least, symbols substituting for actual

people, which refer to certain sets of characteristics without creating a

full person. Robert Stephens explains, “Because of their knowledge of

something too obscene to say openly, they speak obliquely. They say a

name and imply the qualities that go with the name, or mention an

attribute and suggest the unspeakable name” (Stephens 56). This

technique, then, is not a result of laziness, or of Hemingway’s desire to

“simply lounge around and maintain a healthy state of nothingness.”

Instead it is his method for permitting Jake to take advantage of

language in Paris. Jake can instead use the allegorical techniques of

Eliot’s Waste Land to create the shape of characters while leaving

himself room to define and redefine the significance of their basic form

– a literary inclination that Malcolm Cowley describes as Hemingway’s

“instinct for legends” (Cowley 50).

Through this malleability of language, Jake and his expatriate

friends can exist in Paris without the need to confront their

psychological or physical pain. They establish routines and mantras

that lull them into a dependence on words that, as long as they are in

Paris, successfully shield them from themselves. They can escape the
 92

horror of their experience and their internal desolation by hypnotizing

themselves with constant iterations and repetitions. Robert Stephens

describes this inclination to deflect introspection as the process of

“escape.” He writes, “Protagonists choose escape when the menace of

the world seems too great and the stature of man too small to

challenge the order of things and when man is still too rebellious or too

horrified to accept things as they are” (Stephens 52). Malcolm Cowley

adds, “Their only chance of safety lies in the faithful observance of

customs they invent for themselves” (Cowley 48). Furthermore, by

reducing their self-image to a set of “stereotypes” and allegorical

tropes, they are able to use each other as substitutes for deficiencies

in their own character. Since Jake is too “traumatized” to investigate

the reasons for their flaws, he conflates descriptions of two characters

into one, more balanced character. In this way, he can avoid

confronting the truth about himself and Robert directly, instead

gesturing toward similar but opposing flaws in their European

counterparts.

Although almost every character could serve as a substitute for

any other, the most intricate character substitutions occur between

Jake and Brett, his would-be lover, and between Robert Cohn and Mike,

Brett’s fiancé. John Aldridge explains that, in this way, “language is a

provisional barricade erected against the nihilism that threatens to

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engulf Hemingway’s characters, the nihilism that is always seeking to

enter and flood the human consciousness” (Aldridge 129). The mantras

developed by the repetition of words and motifs thereby dissolves the

boundaries between character descriptions and, fortifying the

characters with each others’ descriptors, shields them from “the

nihilism.”

The terse, effective efficiency of the novel’s book one, which

takes place in Paris, is completely undone in book two, when the

characters travel to Spain. There, the system of rituals and mantras

they establish in Paris slowly break down, exposing the vulnerabilities

of each character, and rending apart the substitutions that prevented

Jake and his friends from needing to articulate the truth about

themselves. In Spain, each experience is tactile, sensuous, and bound

to a sense of primitivism that contrasts sharply with the linguistic

acrobatics that define the expatriates’ Paris experience. All their

techniques for avoidance and deflection fall apart in Spain, threatening

the precarious balance of their own psychological survival.

Jake and Robert must therefore return to Paris; it is the only

place where language- something that they can control and

manipulate- has the power to remove them from the threat of their

“nihilism.” Language can be a productive force again, and they can

feel that they have some control over their identities. They can deflect
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and avoid truth indefinitely, narrating the terms of their inter-personal

substitutions in an affective way. Aldridge comments that “language…

will not, in spite of everything, give up its hold on basic sanities, will

not give up and let out the shriek of panic, the cry of anguish, that the

situation logically calls for” (Aldridge 129). This is not true in Spain; the

country’s immediate physicality, represented most obviously by the

bull-fights, threatens to expose the charaters’ “panic” and “anguish,”

which are too “obscene to say openly.” Paris, however, offers them a

haven of linguistic power, where the rhythm of their language and their

lives can sustain them, significantly not “lost,” but temporarily

suspended between narration and reality. Robert Stephens writes that

“Escape must thus be understood as a technique or process, not an

end in itself” (Stephens 52), suggesting that this state of suspension

can sustain them indefinitely. They can remain safe in Paris, avoiding

their pain, until their generation “passeth away,” and “another

generation cometh.”
 95

“TURNED BACK BY THE DOOR KEEPER”: THE UNSPEAKABLE

UNCONCIOUS IN THE SUN ALSO RISES

From the beginning of the novel, Jake uses the repetition of

seemingly unimportant words, familiarizing the reader with the

particular rhythm and time-keeping of his narration. This rhythm is

significant both because it begins to tune the reader’s ear to the beat

of the text’s language, but also because these individual words are a

part of the linguistic construction that forms a barrier between Jake

and his perception. Linda Wagner articulates this concept in her essay

on the role of Imagism in The Sun Also Rises: “That Hemingway was

cognizant of the effects single repeated words or phrases might have

is evident not only in his fictional techniques but in his comments

about this repetition” (Wagner 110). She adds, “the kind of idiom
 96

Hemingway uses is terse and cryptic, but primarily because the

emotions are too big to handle in abstract words, not because no

emotions exist, or because there is no desire to communicate”

(Wagner 114). Hemingway’s word choices are therefore both a way of

hollowing out language, removing the weight of established

connotations from the words he uses, and an assertion of the

importance of using that language.

One of the earliest examples of this kind of repetition occurs on

the novel’s second page. Jake relates, “Robert Cohn had two friends,

Braddocks and myself. Braddocks was his literary friend. I was his

tennis friend” (Hemingway 13) In three sentences, Jake repeats the

word “friend” three times. Clearly, Jake needs to keep repeating this

word to himself in order to validate the fact of Robert having “friends”

– somehow, Robert’s friendships are dependent on Jake articulating

them. This is literally true in the sense that Jake is the novel’s narrator,

and without his voice nothing could be established, but his reiteration

of “friend” is so unusual that “friend” begins to lose its familiarity. The

reader begins to question not only whether Jake’s repetition ironic,

indicating that Robert really has no friends, but also the signification of

the word “friend” in the novel. “Friend” is such a common, ordinary

word that its isolation from the rest of the novel’s vocabulary is

unsettling and quickly alerts the reader to the importance of word

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patterns.

This kind of repetition spans the kinds of narration in the book as

well, shifting from Jake’s first-person narration and into dialogue as

well. During Jake’s first outing in the novel, he hires a prostitute to eat

dinner with him. Dancing in the restaurant’s club afterward, Jake

comments:

“ ‘It’s hot.’
‘Hot, my God!’’

He continues, “It was really very hot and the accordion music was

pleasant in the hot night. I drank a beer, standing in the doorway and

getting the cool breath of wind from the street” (27). Whatever else

Jake and Georgette, the prostitute, said to each other in the night club

is less important to Jake than the fact that the word “hot” is spoken

multiple times. It is unlikely that “hot” has sexual connotations for

Jake, who was genitally crippled during World War I. Hemingway later

related that Jake was meant to have his testicles intact but the penis

itself destroyed, meaning that Jake could feel sexual urges without

being physically able to act upon them. With this knowledge, it

becomes clear that Jake’s constant repetition of the word “hot” is

significant for him in a complex way. He states explicitly that he picks

up Georgette because it would be nice “to dine with a poule” (24),

rather than for any sexual motivation. The omission of the language of

desire is obvious in the context of hiring a poule – a transaction that

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has no other connotation than sexual desire. Still, he rejects

Georgette’s advances, telling her, “I got hurt in the war” (24).

By the time they have eaten and danced for a while, then, it is

entirely possible that Jake is feeling “hot” for Georgette, but can

neither act upon his desire nor address the dilemma directly. He

therefore relates the part of his conversation with her that stood out

the most for him- the part in which they exchange the word “hot” – in

lieu of explaining his thwarted desire and frustration. He hollows out

the word “hot,” taking it out of the obvious context of the stuffiness of

a nightclub, and imbues it with a different kind of meaning. In four

lines of text, the single word “hot” suddenly encompasses a whole

strategy of deflected self-awareness. Aldridge comments, “Jake’s

strength as a character derives in large part from his capacity for

withholding information. We are constantly aware in the novel of the

presence of what we are not told, of what Jake refuses to acknowledge

and judge because it is too dangerous to make a judgment and thus

bring the danger to the surface of consciousness” (Aldridge 127). Even

as Jake deliberately diverts his “judgment” from both the reader’s and

his own “consciousness,” he trains the reader to investigate “what we

are not told.” The repetition of the word soothes Jake, and allows him

to fixate on the word “hot” rather than on the “information” he is

withholding. Still, the presence of a linguistic fixation at this point

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begins to indicate the necessity of reading into Jake’s silences.

While the significance of the words “friend” and “hot” is certainly

ambiguous, these words are not repeated enough during the text to

enter into the characters’ vocabulary of linguistic code. There are

several words throughout The Sun Also Rises that serve as deliberate

placeholders for emotion, used so liberally and varyingly that after

being repeated a number of times they no longer signify anything.

They acquire the special kind of transformative power that allows them

to do what they are; they come to represent the process of de-

signification.

Perhaps the most troubling example of this phenomenon is Jake’s

insistence on pointing out the many times that Brett, the woman he

loves, is described as “nice.” When Robert Cohn first falls in love with

her, Jake tells him that “she is a nice girl,” and then repeats a moment

later, “she’s very nice” (Hemingway 46). His landlady agrees, telling

him,“ ‘In the end I find she is very nice.’” She even translates the word,

saying “ ‘She was very nice. Very, very nice… Last night I found her

not so gentille. Last night I formed another idea of her. But listen to

what I tell you. She is tres, tres gentile” (59). Jake’s friend Bill concurs:

“ ‘Quite a girl,’ Bill said. ‘She’s damned nice’” (81). Descriptions of

Brett Ashley invoke the word “nice” so often, and so compulsively, that

the word begins to take on a sinister quality. It is such a vague and

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bland descriptor in a normal context that an insistence on its use

highlights its potential to mean any number of things. Eventually, the

possibilities for the meaning of “nice” in the novel become so diverse

that the word begins to mean both nothing, and the process of turning

a word or a character into nothing. Martin comments that “‘nice’…

become[s] the pervasive but hollow designation of moral judgment in

the novel, and the hollowness is perfectly constant with the theme”

(Martin 126). While the tendency to class The Sun Also Rises as an

inherently moral novel might add excessive weight to this observation,

the novel completely supports Aldridge’s analysis of “nice” coming to

“designate” something “pervasive but hollow.” After many repetitions,

the reader comes to identify “nice” as a word that creates hollowness.

Aldridge continues, “the omissions make a statement that there is

some acute unpleasantness here that cannot be directly confronted

because it is a threat to psychic equilibrium and might cause a

dangerous ‘flooding’ of consciousness” (Aldridge 128). It develops its

own agency for destruction, and the frequency with which Jake isolates

the word reveals his obsessive fear of his delicately balanced “psychic

equilibrium” and its potential to tip, revealing the “flooding of

consciousness” that the word “nice” conceals.

Remembering that Jake is a subjective first-person narrator is a

particularly important key to understanding the selectiveness of his

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memory for dialogue. Although the reader could misconstrue the other

characters in the novel as linguistically hampered and incapable of

expression, Jake reveals his personal tendency toward repetition and

reiteration so clearly that the reader becomes conscious of the extent

to which Jake mediates the other characters’ dialogue. While relating

an argument between Robert Cohn and his lover Frances, Jake says of

Frances, “She looked up, very bright-eyed” (Hemingway 54). In the

next paragraph, he repeats, “She looked at me very brightly” (54), and

then, “She looked at me again, very brightly” (54). Two pages later,

“She turned to me with that terribly bright smile” (56) before asking

Robert,“ ‘Don’t you think that’s bright of me to figure that out’” (58)?

As Jake escapes the argument, he notes that even in his retreat,

“Frances was talking on to him [Robert], smiling brightly” (58). By

repeating this description, Jake accomplishes several different effects.

He maintains the rhythm of speech that creates a hypnotic effect on

himself and the reader, so that the actual confrontation between

Robert and Frances almost becomes secondary to the consistent

articulation of her “bright smile.”

Like the word “nice,” “bright” also becomes both hollowed out

and its own agent for destruction; by the end of the chapter, anything

described as “bright” would evoke the tense discomfort of the

argument. Additionally, Jake introduces the problem of codifying body

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language. In a book characterized by its lack of attention to physical

descriptions, Frances’ constant smile is an unsettling introduction to

the separation between a gesture and the connotations it signifies.

While the idea of smiling through an insult is hardly a new concept, the

act of “looking brightly” is never in itself a destructive act. Like

“bright” as a word, “bright smiles” also become symbols that actively

rob a signifier of its meaning. Lastly, Jake’s obsessive invocation of

“bright” demonstrates his tendency to limit his vocabulary. A journalist

and an active reader, he obviously has an extensive vocabulary at his

disposal, but he rejects other words in favor of constant repetition. In

this way, Jake informs his reader of his selectivity; in Paris, Jake is not a

passive vessel for carrying the story, but an active participant in

shaping its form. Alrdridge notes, “The emphasis given to individual

words and phrases that seem so much larger than they are just

because they have escaped rejection makes it appear that a verbal

artifact is being constructed or salvaged” (Aldridge 125-6). The act of

rejecting vocabulary thereby imitates the act of rejecting

consciousness, and alerts the reader to the likelihood that, in a

passage which contains five repetitions of the same exact phrase, Jake

is actively trying not to give language the power to bring the

significance of the argument “to the surface.”

Instead of confronting the “nihilism” lying behind the patterns in

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his narration, Jake instead makes himself accountable to the external,

unchanging patterns of location and money. For Jake, these are

constants; Paris’ physical layout hardly ever changes, and certainly not

in Jake’s lifetime, and the city’s relationship to money is objective and

unemotional. Jake finds solace in keeping careful track of both his

money and his location. Jacob Leland writes that “his [Jake’s]

ownership of commodities is secondary to his relationship with the

money form itself” (Leland 37). Indeed, Jake seems not to care what

his money can buy, but that he gets its full value. He knows he can rely

upon economics to mean exactly what they say- in Paris, a franc can

buy you the value of a franc, with no possibility of alternate meanings

or signification.

Jake’s accountability to money pervades the novel, and

descriptions of his transactions are often described in meticulous

detail. At one point, after an unpleasant conversation with Brett, he

chooses not to reflect on the implications of their fight (even

obliquely), but instead to go over his mail. He opens his letters,

narrating, “One was a bank statement. It showed a balance of

$2432.60. I got out my check-book and deducted four checks drawn

since the first of the month, and discovered I had a balance of

$1832.60. I wrote this on the back of the statement” (Hemingway 38).

Many critics have highlighted the significance of this passage, focusing

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mainly on the amounts that Jake spends (Leland, Stephens,

Donaldson). He begins the month with $2432.60, meaning that it only

took him a matter of weeks to spend $600 –literally a fortune in francs.

Critics tend to focus on the fact that this money disappears

mysteriously, and that Jake offers no proof of his purchases. The

significance of this observation, however, lies in the fact that Jake

proves himself to be liberal with spending.

To be so detailed about specific monetary amounts in a novel

which uses words so sparsely seems to indicate that Jake obsesses

over expenses. His interest does not lie in hording money, however; as

this passage demonstrates, his real passion is keeping his accounts in

order. Jake’s friend Bill articulates this idea shortly afterward, when

discussing his interest in the taxonomy business. He tells Jake, “ ‘Mean

everything in the world to you after you bought it. Simple exchange of

values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog’” (78). The

“everything in the world” in this passage does not refer to the “stuffed

dog,” but instead to the “simple exchange of values.” The absurdity of

the item in discussion here is actually the key to understanding Jake’s

interest in money. Jake has no interest or reason to be interested in

taxonomy, and the idea of his buying a stuffed dog is completely

inconsistent with his character. The absurdity thereby sheds light on

the significance of Bill’s statement; not only would it mean “everything

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in the world” for Jake to participate in an unemotional, detached

financial transaction, but this kind of transaction is also the only thing

that anything “in the world” can “mean” to Jake.

It is not only an example of the exchanges he can consciously

account for, but in fact his whole philosophy of accounting. In his essay

on economy in The Sun Also Rises, Jacob Leland writes:

The simple procedures of spending and earning that

required accounting are thus juxtaposed with strategies of
commerce and advertising in the urban marketplace;
Jake’s careful attention to the first is brought into sharp
relief against his indifference to the second. Clearly, then,
it is not toward objects themselves, or even accumulation
and possession, that Jake’s spending strives (Leland 40).

Jake therefore does not need to account for “objects” nor for

“accumulation and possession.” His “spending strives” toward the

stability of business transactions. If, as Aldridge has noted, “Jake’s

strength as a character derives in large part from his capacity for

withholding information,” then these moments of indulgence in the

vocabulary of finance signify his most vulnerable moments. In the

same way that “nice” comes to signify the suppression of “flooding

consciousness,” discussions of money function as substites for a

system of psychological accountability. Jake cannot talk about Brett

except to call her “nice,” and cannot think about his obligations except

in terms of money.

Although the character Bill Gorton is thought to have been based

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on Hemingway’s friendship with Bill Smith, his decision to retain the

name “Bill” may also indicate the source of Jake’s friendship with

Gorton throughout the novel. At several separate moments, Jake

makes a point to relate that he and Bill are both examining “the bill.”

Just before they leave for Spain, Jake and Bill go to eat at

Madame Lecomte’s restaurant, which Jake describes as “crowded with

Americans… Some one had put it in the American Women’s Club list as

a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans,

so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table” (Hemingway 82). The

irony in this passage is more symptomatic than it first appears. The

restaurant functions as a direct response to a demand, supplying

American tourists with an “authentic” Paris dining experience. Its very

pronouncement of authenticity, of course, renders it instantly

inauthentic; part of the fundamental nature of authenticity is its

inability to be aware of itself. The restaurant, then, suffers from the

kind of “dangerous flooding of consciousness” that Jake’s mantra of

finance seeks to avoid. By articulating the restaurant’s unspoken

appeal, the Women’s Club list brings that appeal to the surface, and

makes it marketable.

For Jake, the tragedy of the restaurant’s loss of authenticity

causes him to focus even more meticulously on his “bills.” He

remembers, “After the coffee and a fine we got the bill, chalked up the
 107

same as ever on a slate, that was doubtless one of the ‘quaint’

features, paid it, shook hands, and went out” (82). The constant

iteration of the word “bill” throughout this passage suggests that

Jake’s interest has shifted from the enjoyment of the meal to the

finances of buying and selling food. Not only is his companion’s name

“Bill,” but the owner of the restaurant is named “Lecomte,” French for

“the bill.” He also makes a point to discuss the receiving, paying, and

finalizing of “the bill” at the end of the meal. The selectiveness of

Jake’s memory, combined with the omnipresence of the language of

economy, suggests that his narration is somewhat biased. Although

the crowding of so many Americans provokes Jake into commenting on

their presence, he immediately shifts the discussion away from his

sentiments. When he described the “slate” as “‘quaint,’” in quotation

marks, his irony reveals the presence of a suppressed emotion. Rather

than exploring it, however, he recites his mantra of economic

exchange, and accounts instead for “payment.” Jake later summarizes

this dependence when, referring to Robert Cohn, he notes laconically,

“I could reach him always, he wrote, through his bankers” (75).

As with his obsessive accounting for money, Jake makes

extensive notes about the various streets, routes, bars and landmarks

that he encounters in Paris. In this way he is able to propel the

narrative forward and evoke the sensation of forward motion without

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turning that scrutiny on himself. Stephens mentions the visit to

Madame Lecomte’s restaurant as an example: “When he describes the

walk he and Bill take back from Madame Lecomte’s restaurant, he

mentions the landmarks they pass as though they are totally familiar

and need only to be mentioned to be evoked” (Stephens 57). In this

way, Jake’s mantra of localities takes over from his mantra of money.

He is able to deflect self-reflection by deliberately reflecting instead on

Paris’ streets. He recounts:

We turned to the right off the Place Contrescarpe, walking

along smooth narrow streets with high old houses on both
sides. Some of the houses jutted out toward the street.
Others were cut back. We came onto the Rue du Pot de Fer
and followed it along until it brought us to the rigid north
and south of the Rue Saint Jacques and then walked south,
past Val de Grace, set back behind the courtyard and the
iron fence, to the Boulevard du Port Royal (Hemingway 83-
4).

The constant repetition of the street names mimics Jake’s obsessive

attention to money. Since these streets “need only to be mentioned to

be evoked,” they are stripped of individual significance. A street map

of Paris reveals that this is a long walk, but one of the most efficient

ways of arriving at the Boulevard Port Royal. Just as Jake holds himself

accountable for accurate records of his finances, so does he insist on

the precise recording of his routes through Paris- and he keeps both

accounts efficiently and thoroughly. It is unlikely that a walk of this

length, however efficient, would be conducted in total silence, but Jake

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chooses not to narrate his conversation with Bill. Their talk is sparse

throughout most of their interactions in Paris, so that the few lines of

dialogue that they share are therefore conspicuous and self-conscious.

This conspicuousness serves to highlight the hypnotic mantra of Jake’s

recital. The reader comes to expect him to name streets and buildings,

diverting both Jake’s and the reader’s attention from the information

he is omitting.

This continual account of Paris’ streets is particularly effective

because the streets are entirely knowable. Aldridge notes that, like

Jake, Hemingway “could recite the names of all the streets; he knew

the exact location of all the good places and the best route to take to

get to them; and he was on friendly terms with the best bartenders

and waiters who worked in them” (Aldridge 123). Jake finds safety in

knowing the intricacies of the city- the “exact locations” and “best

routes” – because they can be known in their entirety without

unearthing anything “too obscene to be spoken.” Jake can understand,

process, and speak about Paris without fear; he can exercise his

cognitive faculties by contemplating something that is both literally

and psychologically external.

Jake hints of the imminent breakdown of this precarious

psychological compromise only by mentioning various manifestations

of time. Time is the only element that, in reality, is completely

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unalterable; although Jake avoids his linguistic pitfalls by accounting

for the seemingly solid presences of streets and cash, both of these

substitutes are potentially subject to change. Monetary values

fluctuate, and street are renamed, but only time passing is truly

constant. Jake gestures toward this assumption of reliability during his

cab ride with Georgette. He relates:

“The cab passed the New York Herald bureau with the window full of
clocks. ‘What are all the clocks for?’ she asked.
‘They show the hour all over America.’
‘Don’t kid me”’ (Hemingway 23).

The clocks in the newspaper office’s window provide an excellent

juxtaposition of stability and ambiguity in time and in language. Jake

shares a complicated economic relationship with words: he uses them

sparingly, and when he does offer descriptions, they usually signify

something different than their literal meaning. Still, he is a journalist by

profession, and his checking account balances indicate that he is

probably quite successful in his work, since, as Donaldson writes, “He

is, presumably, unsupported by money from home” (Donaldson 75). As

a successful writer, then, he is both indebted to language and

independent from it. Words perform multiple functions: they are both

constant, reliable work tools, and hollow, malleable materials for

psychological self-defense. In the window of the newspaper stand, time

is similarly multifaceted. The multiple clocks display times “all over

America,” meaning that each time displayed is different, but all are
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accurate. Like the language of journalism, time is reliable and

constant; and like the language of Jake’s narration, one moment could

signify many different times. Georgette, however, is a character who

does not risk “engulfment by nihilism.” The themes Jake relies upon in

order to divert his consciousness are the everyday facts of existence

for Georgette. Streets are not mantras, but places to find clientele;

money is not exchanged for the sake of accounting, but for a service

rendered. Jake’s explanation thereby elicits skepticism from Georgette,

who tells him not to “kid” her. Her reaction thereby elicits a vague

sense of discomfort for the reader, who cannot yet understand why

time is out of joint for Jake, but who recognizes time as a potential

source of destruction.

“Too Obscene to be Articulated” : Jake’s System of

Substitutions

Jake’s narrative does not return to time until he and his friends

travel to Spain. While they remain in Paris, Jake describes himself and

his Robert Cohn by juxtaposing and conflating the Americans with the

Europeans, Brett Ashley and her fiancé, Mike Campbell. Jake’s

portrayals of Brett and Mike appear to be overly simplistic, depicting

characters as vacant as the deflated language he uses to describe

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them. Jake, however, is a skilled writer with a selective memory for

detail; by the time he begins to depict Brett in the middle and Mike at

the end of Part 1, his audience should be accustomed to his evasive

narrative habits. It becomes clear that his rendering of Brett and Mike

reflect the same tactics of deflection that he uses on a minute scale

with individual words, and on a slightly larger scale with money and

location. In the case of his characterizations, he uses this tactic to

avoid describing himself and Robert. He can avoid his fear of self-

reflection by selectively describing Brett’s behavior in place of his own.

In the same way, he renders Mike by highlighting the elements of his

behavior that correspond to a lack in Robert’s character. Jake can

thereby round out his descriptions of the principal American characters

without having to internalize traumatic information.

This process is perhaps best visible in Jake’s portrayal of Brett as

masculine. Although Jake never discusses the exact nature of his war

wound, he makes several vague, half-hearted jokes about it

throughout the novel. Looking at himself in the mirror one night, he

comments, “Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny”

(Hemingway 38). His injury, of course, is one of the truths “too

obscene” to be articulated. Jake must therefore displace his discourse

of both manliness and sexual potency onto the framework of another

character; unable to diagnose his lack of virility, he instead uses his

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narrative to highlight the moments in which he and Brett seem to

exchange gender. The indications of this substitution emerge even

before Brett is introduced. When Jake first meets Georgette, for

example, and she asks him to buy her a Pernod, Jake says:

“ ‘That’s not good for little girls.’

‘Little girl yourself. Dites garcon, un pernod’” (22).

Although Georgette could not have understood the significance of her

retort, she inadvertently gestures toward the lack that Jack must fill in

using Brett as his substitute. He cannot directly confront his fear that

he has been reduced to a “little girl,” but by remembering Gerogette’s

retort, he can gesture toward his crisis of virility. This lack becomes

much clearer once he and Georgette meet Brett in a bar. Jake

describes a crowd of people entering:

A crowd of young men, some in jerseys and some in their

shirt-sleeves, got out. I could see their hands and newly
washed, wavy hair in the light from the door. The policeman
standing by the door looked at me and smiled…. With them
was Brett. She looked very lovely and she was very much
with them.
One of them saw Georgette and said: ‘I do declare.
There is an actual harlot. I'm going to dance with her, Lett.
You watch me.’ The tall dark one, called Lett, said: ‘Don't
you be rash.’ The wavy blond one answered: ‘Don't you
worry, dear.’ And with them was Brett (28).

The “newly washed, wavy hair” and pale “hands” are the features that Jake

associates with femininity. The policeman “looks at Jake” and “smiles” as if

to include him in mocking the group of “young men;” the policeman has

identified them as homosexuals, and believes himself, Jake, and the other
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heterosexual men in the bar to be more respectable for their “manliness.”

For Jake, however, the arrival of this group represents a far more

complicated- and therefore unutterable- crisis of masculinity. Although

homosexuality and genital mutilation are almost completely unrelated

categories, both represent to Jake an inability to be sexually involved with

women. He therefore becomes angry when he sees this group enter, seeing

an image of himself in the “young men.” Linda Miller writes, “Brett’s

alignment with the homosexual men angers Jake, both for Brett’s sake and

for his own… Jake’s anger is complicated by impotence, of which the

effeminate men remind him, and also by their sham appearance, which the

wavery, almost dreamlike description of them emphasizes” (Miller 173). For

a narrator so completely incapable of self-reflection, this kind of encounter

threatens his control over his consciousness. Furthermore, the presence of

Brett in the crowd exacerbates this threat. She “looked very lovely,” and is

distinctly female, yet keeps company with a group of men. Her behavior and

choice of company provoked Mark Spilka into diagnosing her as “released

from her womanly nature” and “exposed to the male prerogatives of drink

and promiscuity” (Spilka 130) - an extremely problematic commentary on

gender roles, but nevertheless an accurate reflection of Jake’s insecurities.

Brett seems to belong on both sides of the novel’s gender binary; her

name rhymes with “Georgette,” but lacks the end “e” that feminizes French

names. Her name instead looks like “Lett,” one of the men with whom she
 115

enters. Hemingway’s ear for dialogue would not permit three characters to

have rhyming names unintentionally; clearly, these three characters are

bound their contradictory images of femininity. Jake also notes that Brett is

“very much with” the group; the men do not pretend to flirt with her as they

do with Georgette, but instead assimilate her into their crowd. Like Jake,

Brett and the homosexuals are masculine figure with no sexual desire for

women, but unlike Jake, the entire group can act on their sexual impulses.

Jake’s repetition of the phrase “with them was Brett” creates a wistful refrain

throughout the passage. As Miller observes, Jake is disturbed by the series of

“shams” that mark the evening. Lett’s interest in Georgette, Brett’s

masculinity, his own shared look with the police officer, his date with

Georgette- all are symptomatic of a displaced sexuality that would be

devastating to confront.

For this reason, Jake finds comfort in narrating the gender

substitutions. Through his narrative voice, the elements of Brett that

highlight his own dysfunctions provide him with a method for

explaining the full extent of his trauma. He highlights specifically the

instances in which Brett “aligns” herself with groups of men by

referring to herself as a “chap.” In the bar, she tells the waiter, “ ‘I say,

give a chap a brandy and soda,’” and then later, in Jake’s living room,

she asks him, “ ‘I say, can a chap sit down’” (Hemingway 29, 40)? As

she drinks and smokes in his room, she adds, “ ‘I say, Jake, I don’t
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want to ruin your rugs. Can’t you give a chap an ash-tray’” (64)? By

juxtaposing himself with Brett’s repetitions of the word “chap,” Jake

surrounds himself in a masculine atmosphere. Jake drinks, but never as

much or as often as Brett, and he never explicitly depicts himself

smoking. Brett, however, is frequently depicted with hard liquor and

cigarettes – Spilka’s “prerogatives of men.” Her continual repetition of

the word “chap” becomes its own kind of mantra of gender for Jake.

Every time she repeats the word, she affirms an identity that Jake

cannot grasp. He does not perceive himself to be truly a “chap,” since

his impotence prevents him from consummating his love for Brett or

even accepting the services for which he paid Georgette. He cannot

account for his manliness, as he can for his money or his location, and

this emasculation binds him even further to Brett. When she

repeatedly names herself “chap,” then, she is naming Jake as well.

Jake’s commitment to accountability will not allow him to articulate

something he does not believe to be true, so he cannot talk himself

into manliness. If Brett speaks the words, however, Jake can remember

them in his narration, and appropriate them accordingly.

The physical appearance of Brett’s hat and hair aids the illusion

of gender substitution. Jake remembers, “her hair was brushed back

like a boy’s. She started all that” (30). She often covers up this haircut

with hats, as well: “She pulled her man’s felt hat down and started in
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for the bar” (35). In Jake’s narration, hair and hats always signify the

roles a character is playing. In the way that people are said to “wear

many hats” if they have various kinds of duties, Jake makes several

references to the actual “hats” that his friends wear. When Brett walks

into the bar with the homosexuals, she literally puts on her “man’s

hat.” Spilka extrapolates, “With a man’s felt hat on her boyish bob, and

with her familiar reference to men as fellow ‘chaps,’ she completes the

distortion of sexual roles which seems to characterize the period. For

the war, which has unmanned Barnes and his contemporaries, has

turned Brett into the freewheeling equal of any man” (Spilka 130).

While in the context of Spilka’s essay this passage is meant to

demonstrate how Brett “overcomes” her womanly nature in order to

become a man’s equal, it highlights some crucial points about the

function of Brett’s appearance. Her hat and “boyish bob” succeed in

“distorting sexual roles” which characterize, if not the period, than at

least Jake’s narration.

Additionally, Spilka is correct in insisting that the war

“unmanned” Barnes’ contemporaries as well as Jake himself. Spilka’s

word choice is troubling, since he uses the word “unmanned” in order

to underscore Brett’s masculinity. This word is important, however, in

its connotations of powerlessness and fear. Although Jake is also

physically “unmanned,” the more important suggestion is that he and

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his friends are defeated by their fear. They cannot face the “horror”

that haunts them, so they escape into the deliberate detachment that

allows them to use words like “nice” as a placeholder for words that

they cannot articulate and to keep track of expenses in lieu of

accounting for their fear. In this way, Spilka is right to juxtapose a

discussion of Brett’s hat and hair with a discussion of her “unmanned”

male friends. In the absence of their “masculine” agency, she must

take on the role of the surrogate male.

The sensation of powerlessness that Spilka labels “unmanning” also

explains the seeming vacuity of Mike’s personality. He appears to embody

the stereotype of an old-world aristocrat gone bankrupt: he is not only aware

of his fiancée’s liaisons with other men, but even derives some amusement

from them; he is “sophisticated” in a manner reminiscent of Daisy

Buchanan’s lament, “ ‘Sophisticated - God, I’m sophisticated’” (Fitzgerald

12)! He lives off of an allowance, occasionally “sending a wire to the keeper”

(Hemingway 88) for more, and borrows against his title. The fact of his

bankruptcy seems to be enough to explain him, and Jake frequently relates

dialogue containing references to Mike’s money. Early in the novel, for

example, when Robert decides to vie for Brett’s love, Jake warns him, “

‘She’s a drunk,’ I said. ‘She’s in love with Mike Campbell and she’s going to

marry him. He’s going to be rich as hell some day’” (46). While Jake

obviously knows Brett and Mike much better than his description indicates,
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his quick character sketch informs the way the reader approaches Mike and

Robert. From this passage, Robert can infer only that Mike is an aristocrat,

since he stands to inherit money and is engaged to a titled lady, has no

money at the moment but will be “rich as hell,” and that he is accustomed to

an independent lifestyle, since he has agreed to meet his fiancée- “a drunk”

– in Paris in the company of several other men.

From this sketch, it would be easy to infer that Mike is little more than

a stereotype of himself- an accumulation of the worst traits of old-world

European aristocracy. Brett reinforces this assumption when she introduces

Mike to Bill, saying, “‘This drunkard is Mike Campell. Mr. Campbell is an

undischarged bankrupt’” (85). In this way, Brett characterizes her

relationship with Mike in terms of his finances. Instead of introducing Mike as

her “fiancé” – or even using the vague, hollowed out place holder “friend” –

Brett chooses Mike’s bankruptcy as his most defining feature. Although it is

clear from Mike’s reaction that she is teasing him, this characterization

prevents Mike from being described in any other way. When he needs to be

illustrated, Jake’s narrative alludes to his bankruptcy. Donaldson adds that

“Mike continually banters about his bankruptcy, as if making light of the

obligations might somehow cause them to disappear” (Donaldson 82). While

Donaldson is correct in pointing out that “Mike continually banters about his

bankruptcy,” Mike is not as concerned about his “obligations” as Jake. By the

time Mike is introduced to the reader, Jake has already established his
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mantra of money and accountability; the reader is aware that Jake

scrutinizes money in the place of “unspeakable” truths. If Jake only allows

Mike to be described in terms of his bankruptcy, Mike must therefore serve

as a kind of surrogate himself- not for Jake, whose unspeakable truths are

embodied in Brett, but for Robert Cohn.

In Jake’s narrative, Robert’s American heritage renders his

characterization more complex and complicated. In certain ways, his

lineage seems to parallel Mike’s: “Robert Cohn was a member, through

his father, of one of the richest families in New York, and through his

mother of one of the oldest” (Hemingway 12). Also, like Campbell,

Robert receives money from his family: “Robert’s mother had settled

an allowance on him, about three hundred dollars a month” (13). His

life appears to mirror that of Mike Campbell, except that he is not

bankrupt. Were his family, money, and life story the only elements of

his character, he would seem to be the successful embodiment of the

“American Dream.” He can live abroad because he has conquered the

obstacles presented to American entrepreneurship, and in spite of his

failure to publish a successful magazine, has established himself in the

literary world. Wendy Martin affirms, “He appears to have achieved the

American dream: prestigious Jewish family, Princeton graduate,

magazine editor and publisher, successful published writer, and

European traveler” (Martin 62). In opposition to the worldly

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“sophistication” of Mike Campbell, however, Robert is further identified

as American by his ignorance and naïveté. He has not inherited the

same disillusionment as the rest of the expatriates, futilely believing

that, like his accomplishments, his ideals can be achieved through

persistence and money.

This naiveté is perhaps most obvious in his attitude toward Brett.

He tells Jake, “ ‘I shouldn’t wonder if I were in love with her”

(Hemingway 46). When Jake mentions Mike, Cohn replies, “I don’t

believe she’ll ever marry him” (46). Although in America, Cohn was

able to leave his wife and children for his mistress, once he arrives in

Paris he assumes a kind of emotional innocence. He believes that

marriage should be based on love, and cannot fathom that Brett could

marry Mike without it. He assertion that he doesn’t believe “she’ll ever

marry him” is intimately connected with his announcement that he is

“in love with her,” since together they illustrate Robert’s idealization of

love. Martin writes, “Brett is Cohn’s Daisy Buchanan, she has become

the repository of his Romantic illusions of true love, fidelity, and

chivalric honor, which have been stimulated by his success in

American culture” (Martin 62). By building his own success in America,

then, Robert comes to believe that he can create a place for himself in

the old-world courtship system embodied by the novel’s Europeans.

By juxtaposing Robert’s naïveté with his bankruptcy, Jake can

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thereby convey a truth about Robert that he would not otherwise be

able to articulate. In the same way that Jake cannot confront his own

emasculation, neither can he confront the futility of Robert’s ambitions.

Jake is perhaps the only character in the novel who could predict

Robert’s failure- he is both American, and therefore possesses an

innate understanding of Robert’s goals, but he is also a permanent

expatriate, and understands the impossibility of integrating into

European social networks. He reveals his understanding when, in an

act of compassion, he tells Robert that Brett “is in love with” Mike, as if

to persuade Robert that the marriage between the two Europeans will

meet even his naive standards of morality.

The reader, however, can recognize that this is untrue. Brett may

be engaged to Mike, but their relationship is not founded on “love.” In

this light, Jake’s constant invocation of Mike’s “bankruptcy” becomes a

way to avoid confronting the “unspeakable” truth of Robert’s tragedy.

In the same way that gender substitution allows Jake to adopt Brett’s

masculinity, social substitution allows Robert to adopt Mike’s

sophistication. In this way, Jake does not have to address the futility of

the “American dream” or the catastrophe of Robert’s inevitable

disillusionment. Instead, he insists on Mike’s “bankruptcy,” as though

he could impart to Robert some measure of awareness by naming and

re-naming his counterpart.

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The Breakdown of Accountability

Jake’s reiteration and mantra are effective in Paris, where his control

over language allows him as much success in his narration as in his business.

He can train his readers to recognize certain words and patterns, and

conveys a sense of their significance without ever explaining them. In Paris,

Jake can satisfy his instinct for accountability by naming streets, bars, and

prices, since here, they are fixed and constant, giving him factual

touchstones in a narrative that is otherwise rife with coded meaning and

diverted consciousness. Once he and his friends arrive in Spain, however, he

loses the mathematical exactness of Paris.

For Hemingway, Spain is a country dominated by the physical and

sensual. In his book on Hemingway’s heroes, Bhim Dahiya examines the

differences between Paris and Spain. He describes their voyage as a “journey

of the expatriates from a modern cosmopolitan city into an almost primitive

Spain,” adding, “In short while France is a kind of ‘waste land,’ Spain, with its

traditional values, is still rooted in the pastoral past” (Dahiya 82, 88). The

very nature of their destination in Spain speaks to the novel’s perception of

the country’s physicality: the running of the bulls in Pamplona. The festival

that surrounds the bullfight – and, naturally, the fight itself – is completely

focused on bodies. This is a kind of elemental interaction that excludes

language, and therefore does not allow room for mediation. Commenting on
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different kinds of physicality, Spilka writes, “for Hemingway they represent

the kinds of degradation which can occur at any point in modern society- and

the violence at Pamplona is our current sample of such degradation” (Spilka

135). As in Djuna Barnes’ night world, Hemingway’s Pamplona is a place of

regression and “degradation.” In the context of Jake’s narrative, the

“degradation” takes the form of the “violence” of the bullfight – violence

which manifests itself not only as the death of men and animals, but also in

the pre-linguistic mode of communication that breaks apart Jake’s delicate

system of diverted consciousness.

Hemingway intervenes in the chronology of the novel just as Jake

and his friends leave for Spain. He conflates years, scrambles dates,

and generally confounds the novel’s historical accuracy. In Michael

Reynold’s biography of Hemingway’s years in Paris, he observes:

He’d fixed it so that none of the time references worked

out right. Not a single one. He changed the date of the Kid
Francis-Ledoux fight, moved the calendars around
randomly, had William Jennings Bryan dying a month early
and collapsed the days at Burguete. No matter what year
you thought it might be in Pamplona, it would not fit the
calendar (Reynolds 322).

In this way, Hemingway frames Jake’s Spain narrative within an impossible

timeline. Even though the inaccuracy of his dates would only be evident to

his friends and fellow writers, or to extremely attentive readers with

knowledge of the time period, he nevertheless insinuates a thread of discord

into Jake’s arrival in Spain. His recital of dates and days of the week also

recalls Jake’s earlier conversation with Brett about the clocks in the Herald
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office. Georgette told Jake not to “kid” her, whereas, in fact, the joke is on

the reader. Hemingway “kids” both Jake and Jake’s audience, since both

would lose themselves if they tried to organize the passage of time in Spain.

This recital also echoes Jake’s list of streets and bars in Paris, accounting for

every definable date the way Jake names each road he passes. Unlike his

account of location, however, his discourse about time is inaccurate and

unreliable; for the reader attentive enough to notice it, the dissolution of

Jake’s code of accountability begins with his recollection of time.

The novel offers the first accessible evidence of the breakdown in Jake’s

code, however, when his accountability to money begins to falter. Instead of

the reliable exchange of money for specific goods and services, Spain’s

economy includes an element of interpersonal contact. When Jake and Bill

stop in Burguete to fish before continuing on to Pamplona, Jake recalls, “We

each had an aguardiente and paid forty centimes for the two drinks. I gave

the woman fifty centimes to make a tip, and she gave me back the copper

piece, thinking I had misunderstood the price” (Hemingway 112). For the first

time in the novel, Jake has a miscommunication concerning a financial

transaction. This is a serious incident for Jake, who pays scrupulous attention

to his bills and accounts, and who relies on this attention in order to prevent

introspection. Jake never “misunderstands the price;” he is, in fact, the only

character in the novel who consistently examines the value of his money.

This kind of breakdown in communication, then, predicts a breakdown in

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his tactics of psychological diversion. The break in Jake’s system of

accountability continues even before he and Bill leave Burguete. The

Americans make friends with an Englishman named Harris, and the three of

them frequently dine together. On their last night in Burguete, Jake writes,

“We had a bottle of wine apiece. Harris would not let us pay. He talked

Spanish quite well, and the innkeeper would not take our money” (133).

Once again, Jake tries to rely on the routine of bill-paying that had become

such a steady mantra for him in Paris, and once again his sense of order is

upset. In this passage, even the vocabulary of the sentence indicates that

the free wine troubles Jake. Rather than describing the interaction in terms of

generosity, Jake presents Harris and the innkeeper as obstacles to a

functional economy. They “would not let us pay” and “would not take our

money,” as if refusing to allow Jake to enact payment of a bill were a breach

of propriety. Instead of an act of generosity, then, offering Jake and Bill

drinks is actually a threat to Jake’s measured self-alienation.

The failure of money as a constant unit of exchange continues

throughout Jake’s trip in Spain, including his stay in Pamplona. At one

point, Jake tries to buy wine-skins for himself and Bill, so that they can

carry drink around with them. When he goes to a tannery to buy the

skins, the proprietor asks him:

“ ‘What are you going to do? Sell them in Bayonne?’

‘No. Drink out of them.’
He slapped me on the back.
‘Good man. Eight pesetas for the two. The lowest price’” (160).
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Without warning, the tanner subjects Jake to a kind of test of financial

honor. For Jake, who cannot even bear to have his friend Harris buy him

a bottle of wine, this interaction with a total stranger is unsettling. In

the many controlled monetary exchanges that occur during the

“France” section of the novel, the terms of debt and payment were

always clear: Jake would owe a certain amount for food or services, and

he would pay exactly what he owed. In this interaction, however, the

price of the wineskins depends upon Jake’s response to an impromptu

test. One of his few sources of stability begins to waver. Jake’s

discontent at the terms of this transaction become more visible in his

narration of his trip to a bar to fill the newly purchased skins. He writes,

“Some one at the counter, that I had never seen before, tried to pay for

the wine, but I finally paid for it myself. The man who had wanted to

pay then bought me a drink. He would not let me buy one in return, but

said he would take a rinse of the mouth from the new wine-bag” (161).

Having been denied the right to a fair exchange of money for a product,

Jake tries to reinstate his system of financial accountability with the

“man at the counter.” This man tries to thwart Jake’s attempts to pay

for drinks twice in this passage, and both times Jake must struggle in

order to make a “fair” exchange. Since Jake communicates more by

repetition than by description, he makes clear his uneasiness about the

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instability of trade by recalling several occasions in which money’s

value waver.

The breakdown in Jake’s system of accountability becomes

increasingly threatening with each city that Jake visits, until his final trip

through Madrid yields his greatest crisis. When he arrives at Brett’s

hotel to retrieve her after she has broken off with her Spanish lover,

Jake tries to restore order to the chaos of her situation by paying her

hotel bill. He writes, however, “The woman who ran the hotel would not

let me pay the bill. The bill had been paid” (247). This breakdown is the

most destructive for Jake, since he can account for neither Brett’s

financial debts, nor for the source of the payment. He has been

summoned by the woman he loves in the aftermath of an affair he

could never have conducted; now more than ever, Jake needs to

redirect his accountability to economic exchanges.

When he is robbed of this diversion of consciousness, it becomes

clear that he must return to Paris to prevent facing the horror of his trip

to Spain. Leland discusses the grammar of Jake’s loss of control, noting,

“When the bill has been paid, in the passive voice, Jake is

grammatically disempowered, surely the worst death a Hemingway

writer-hero can die” (Leland 45). He continues, “Paying the bill

anonymously prevents Jake from exercising his economic agency and

calls attention to the limits of that power in a situation that requires

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money but not performative social currency” (46). In his analysis of

Jake’s crisis in Madrid, Leland stresses the fact that the person who paid

the hotel bill “has no need to make [his] identity known” (45). He

reinforces the “performative” aspect of Jake’s spending by highlighting

the bill payer’s “anonymity.” He notes that “the bill has been paid, in

the passive voice,” implying that the act of paying was equally

“passive.” In contrast to Jake’s proactive, purposeful spending, this

passivity isolates Jake’s behavior among the novel’s spenders, and

reminds the reader of the way in which Jake’s narrative skews the

function of money. He removes the agency of money itself, focusing

instead on the agency of spending- a focus that is only possible in a

character who does not suffer financial burdens. In this way, even as

Jake recounts his discomfort at his loss of economic accountability, he

demonstrates the peculiarity of his approach to spending.

Jake’s struggle to maintain his Parisian relationship to money is so

consuming that he remains ignorant of the kind of accountability that

Spain will allow him. He does not necessarily have to turn inward to

account for his own behavior, but in Spain- and in Pamplona

specifically- he is expected to take responsibility for the behavior of his

friends. His ignorance of this shift is best exemplified in the corruption

of the bullfighter Pedro Romero, for which the Spanish hotel owner

Montoya holds Jake accountable. His trust in Jake is established toward

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the beginning of the festival in Pamplona, when Jake discusses the

concept of aficion, which Jake describes as “passion. An aficionado is

one who is passionate about bull-fights” (Hemingway 136). He

continues:

Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could

not have aficion. He might simulate it or confuse it with
excitement, but he could not really have it. When they saw
that I had aficion, and there was no password, no set of
questions that could bring it out…there was this same
putting the hand on the shoulder… nearly always there
was the actual touching. It seemed as though they wanted
to touch you to make it certain (137).

Since Jake is one of the rare Americans who has aficion, he is expected

to live by its moral standard. There are no “passwords” for access to

the aficionado’s code; it exists outside of language, only confirmable

through “the actual touching” of “putting the hand on the shoulder.”

There is no room for mediation in aficion. It is such a primal and

primitive instinct as to be unutterable, and indeed Jake relates that

Montoya “always smiled as though bull-fighting were a very special

decret between the two of us; a rather shocking but really very deep

secret that we knew about” (136). In fact, Jake does not regard his

aficion as remarkable or unspeakable. He finds pleasure in disproving

the rule that “an American could not have aficion,” and an equal

amount of displeasure at being touched in order to confirm his status

as the unusual American.

The extent of the trust that the aficionados place in Jake is

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further exemplified by Montoya’s indulgence of Jake’s company. Jake

relates, “Montoya could forgive anything of a bull-fighter who had

aficion. He could forgive attacks of nerves, panic, bad unexplainable

actions, all sorts of lapses. For one who had aficion he could forgive

anything. At once he forgave me all my friends” (137). In this passage,

Jake proves that the “secret” of bull-fighting in neither “very special”

nor “shocking.” He goes so far, in fact, as to enumerate the

“unspeakable” things that could go awry in a corrida: “attacks of

nerves, panic, bad unexplainable actions.” For Jake, the hazards of

aficion are not particularly troubling. His pattern of diverting his

attention from the “nihilism” of his unconscious should make the

prospect of a pre-made code of behavior appealing. Montoya

effectively hands him a set of rules to live by, making it known through

gestures and glances that he expects Jake to abide by these rules. If

the finances of Paris are appealing to Jake because bill-paying

embodies a process of neat, even mutual exchange, and the finances

of Spain are troubling because of the unknown elements of affection

and camaraderie that sometimes change the value of his money, than

a set of rules without any language or currency is utterly impossible for

him to follow. As a result, he ignores his accountability to Montoya and

aficion.

When Montoya introduces Jake to the young star of the bull-ring,

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Pedro Romero, he assumes that Jake will help him keep Romero from

losing his dedication to aficion. Montoya worries that during the

festival, Romero will be seduced by the wild, unruly behavior of the

tourists. Jake relates, “‘He’s such a fine boy,’ said Montoya. ‘He ought

to stay with his own people. He shouldn’t mix in that stuff.’” Jake

replies simply, ‘Won’t you have a drink’” (176)? In this passage, it

becomes clear that Jake will not abide by the unspoken code that

Montoya expects of him. He offers Montoya alcohol as a way of

distracting him from concerns about rampant alcoholism - an irony that

Montoya interprets as a non sequitur, and politely declines. Still, it is

obvious to the reader that Jake is entirely uncommitted to keeping

“that stuff” away from the bull-fighter, since alcohol is his first reaction

to Montoya’s concern.

When Jake introduces Pedro to Brett, then, he knowingly “mixes

that stuff” in Pedro’s life. He plies Pedro with the alcohol that he and

his friends share, and even attempts to encourage a liaison between

Pedro and Brett. During their group’s interaction with Pedro, however,

Jake remembers, “Just then Montoya came into the room. He started to

smile at me, then he saw Pedro Romero with a big glass of cognac in

his hand, sitting laughing between me and a woman with bare

shoulders, at a table full of drinks. He did not even nod’” (181). It is not

until Jake breaches the code of bull-fighting morality that he realizes

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the extent to which he was held accountable. This passage vaguely

echoes Jake’s earlier enumeration of the “sins” which Montoya could

forgive, listing now the “big glass of cognac,” “sitting laughing,” “a

woman with bare shoulders,” and “a table full of drinks.” Unlike an

“attack of nerves” or “panic,” these sins are irreconcilable with a

person who has true aficion.

By introducing corruption into the brilliant potential of Pedro

Romero, Jake loses his place among the aficionados, no longer meriting

“even a nod.” Later, when Jake and his friends are leaving the hotel,

he narrates, “We passed Montoya on the stairs. He bowed and did not

smile” (213). By the end of Jake’s stay in Pamplona, he has alienated

himself from Montoya, and therefore from the culture of Spanish

aficionados that Montoya represents. This self-alienation is not,

however, altogether unwelcome; for Jake, there is no possibility of

remaining accountable to a system that has no mediation. If bull-

fighting is a “ very deep secret” and too “shocking” to have a

vocabulary, then Jake cannot develop a sufficiently steady mantra or

rhythm. He cannot hollow out words to give them new meaning, since

the only recognizable word in the code of bull-fighting is aficion.

“Passion” is raw and physical, and therefore unfathomable to Jake; not

only his physical disability but also his psychological crippling prevent

him from identifying with such an emotion. Even though the bulls and
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the fighters are removed from him, and he is not forced to interact

with them personally, the intimacy of a code which requires “touching”

for confirmation automatically eliminates the possibility of Jake’s

participation.

In this way, Spain breaks apart Jake’s systems of accountability.

He does not expect respite from consequences during his visit, but in

fact best articulates his philosophy of accountability in Pamplona. He

writes, “You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid

my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time.

Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking

chances, or by money” (152). Jake’s trouble in Spain, then, is not that

he wants to escape accountability and cannot; instead he is unsettled

by the fact that he cannot pay. It undermines his dependence on

economics while promoting an emotional investment in aficion,

thereby removing the possibility of using either to “pay his way” into

the bull-fights. Jake therefore “pays” with his membership to the group

of aficionados, whose code he never truly followed. Dahiya clarifies,

“He ‘flees from Pamplona’ not… because ‘he has proved unworthy of

the elite of afficionados,’ [sic] but because he knows that with complex

awareness of life he cannot regress to the level of unawareness at

which the ‘elite of afficionados’ [sic] have the privilege to live” (Dahiya

90). His exile from Pamplona is thereby a self-imposed decision, rather

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than the consequence of “bad behavior” - a sin that Montoya could

have forgiven. Dahiya continues, “The point is that the significant

distinction between France and Spain is not so much on the level of

financial attitude as on the level of consciousness; between, that is,

the Pamplona of traditional rituals and the Paris of post-war

consciousness” (89). In this way, Spain is not defined by its relationship

to money, so the breakdown in Jake’s economic system is symptomatic

of a bigger disconnect. Jake’s overall Parisian “post-war consciousness”

forces him away from facing the consequences of trying to rely on

economics in “traditional” Spain.

The Breakthrough of the “Horrors” and “Obscenities”

The corruption of Pedro Romero is representative not only of the

breakdown in Jake’s accountability, but also in the failure of his system

of substitutions. Whereas in Paris, Brett bears the onus of masculinity

in Jake’s place, their exchange of gender roles falls apart in Spain. The

same kind of chaotic confusion of gender and sexuality that manifests

itself in Paris, when Jake, Brett, Georgette, and the homosexual men all

exchange partners, resurfaces in Pamplona when Jake meets Pedro

Romero. He is instantly attracted to the Spaniard: “He was the best-

looking boy I have ever seen… ‘You know English,’ I said, feeling like
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an idiot” (Hemingway 167). Although Jake has made it clear that he is

heterosexual, he is still ruffled and embarrassed when he meets Pedro.

Not only is Pedro “the best-looking boy” Jake has “ever seen,” but he

also surprises Jake with his ability to communicate. Jake “feels like an

idiot” talking to Romero, reminding the reader of the initial

embarrassment in romantic encounters. Jake continues to be

overwhelmed by Pedro’s beauty, repeating, “ ‘He’s a good-looking

kid’” (167). A short while later, after Jake is permitted to visit with

Pedro while he prepares for a bull fight, he tells Brett,“ ‘He’s a damned

good-looking boy,’ I said. ‘When we were up in his room I never saw a

better-looking kid’” (170). In this moment, Jake both explicitly

sexualizes his attraction to Romero, and tries to displace it onto Brett.

He contextualizes his admiration by placing it “up in his room,” thereby

allowing the reader to draw inevitable conclusions. He also conveys

this information to Brett, who can act as his surrogate in Pedro’s

seduction.

When discussing the love triangle between Brett, Jake, and

Pedro, critics often refer to the moment when Robert Cohn calls Jake a

“damned pimp” (194). In fact, Jake does pimp Brett in a way- he finds a

“client” in Romero and relies on Brett’s promiscuity when encouraging

her to meet the bull-fighter. Unlike a “pimp,” however, Jake does not

expect money in compensation for his service. Instead, he detaches

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himself from his attraction to Romero and superimposes it onto Brett.

By the time Pedro and Brett meet, then, Brett is ready to be

awed by Romero. Jake has sexualized his attraction by sharing it with

her, and hopes to benefit by proxy from their liaison. Indeed, when

Romero and Brett move to leave the bar where they first meet, Jake

recalls, “He looked at me. It was a final look to ask if it were

understood. It was understood all right” (190). This passage is

ambiguous enough to allow for multiple interpretations. While it seems

obvious that the “it” that is “understood” refers to Pedro and Brett’s

impending sexual encounter, there is no grammatical referent for “it.”

What is “understood” might therefore be more complicated that simply

Jake’s permission; “it” could encompass any level of understanding

about the sexual dynamics between the three characters. The fact that

Jake does not explain “it” underscores the unspeakable quality of the

interaction. Like Brett’s constant iteration of “chap,” her seduction of

Pedro encompasses and involves Jake. She fulfills their collective desire

for Pedro, since Jake cannot physically act on his attraction, nor would

he even without his physical disability. The horror of displaced

attraction and frustrated sexuality is too great to be articulated; as a

result, Pedro merely gives Jake a “look,” and Jake, in turn, refers to the

significance of the “look” merely as “it.”

This kind of substitution cannot sustain itself indefinitely in Spain,

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however. Instead, Pedro’s “traditional” Spanishness eventually

dissolves the link between Brett and Jake’s sexuality, instead seeking

to develop Brett’s “feminine” qualities. Romero’s desire to render

Brett more physically “feminine” is perhaps most obvious in his

opinions about her hair. When Jake comes to Madrid to retrieve Brett,

who has just left Romero, she says, “ He wanted me to grow my hair

out. Me, with long hair. I’d look so like hell… He said it would make me

look more womanly. I’d look a fright” (246). This discussion of her hair

recalls the moment in Part 1 when Jake first observes her hair,

“brushed back like a boy’s.” That hair, which could easily be covered

by her “man’s felt hat,” reintroduces her gender confusion at the end

of the novel. As a bullfighter, Pedro recognizes his obligation to live by

the code of aficion. Even though his behavior is temporarily corrupted,

he tries to rectify his breach of conduct by transforming the “post-war

consciousness” of Brett’s gender substitution into a more “traditional”

image of womanhood. For Brett, however, this is a sign of the

“degradation” Dahiya discusses; Brett says that she would look “like

hell” and “like a fright” not because her physical beauty is

incompatible with long hair, but because it would misrepresent the

ambiguity of her gender.

Jake’s narrative could not support a Brett with long hair, since

“growing it out” would represent a concession to the suppressed truths

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about herself and about Jake. She tells Jake:

“ ‘He wanted to marry me, finally.’

‘Really?’
‘Of course. I can’t even marry Mike’” (246).

Pedro’s desire to “legitimize” Brett’s transformation into someone

“more womanly” only highlights for Brett the impossibility of such a

transformation. She “can’t even marry Mike,” who himself serves as a

substitute, and makes no demands on her gender performance. Mike

understands the “waste-land” of Parisian consciousness, and even then

Brett cannot fathom officially fixing her gender and sexual obligations

for him. To make such a commitment to Pedro would therefore

embody the worst kind of “degradation” for her consciousness, and for

Jake’s. Mark Spilka comments on this scene as well, noting, “For when

Brett refuses to let her hair grow long for Pedro, it means that her role

in life is fixed: she can no longer reclaim her lost womanhood” (Spilka

137). Although Spilka makes some troubling assumptions about

women’s inherent obligation to enact their gender, his attention to

Brett’s refusal is not misplaced. There is no indication in the novel that

Brett seeks to “reclaim her lost womanhood,” nor that “her role in life

is fixed,” but her decision to leave Pedro does signify her refusal to

embody the “traditional” female. If she “fixes” her identity, it is only by

exclusion; in Spain, she discovers definitively what she is not.

This decision is horrifying both for her and for Jake, who makes
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no effort to comment on her affair in his narrative. He relates instead, “

‘I’m going back to Mike.’ I could feel her crying as I held her close.

‘He’s so damned nice and so awful. He’s my sort of thing’”

(Hemingway 247). By reintroducing the word “nice,” Brett underscores

her decision to “go back to Mike.” Of course, the intended significance

of this statement is that she will resume her courtship with Mike, but

“going back to Mike” also implies a reversion to a former way of life.

Her life with Mike was “nice” in the hollow, repetitive sense of the

word; it made no demands on her to define herself, either sexually or

linguistically, and allowed her to remain an object of sexual desire, a

fellow “chap,” and the embodiment of surrogate masculinity all at the

same time.

Still, her interaction with Pedro has jostled the precarious

balance of Brett and Jake’s identity exchange. When she asks Jake for

a drink in the bar at her hotel, she says “ ‘Don’t be an ass. Would you

buy a lady a drink’” (248)? This question is startling after so many

iterations of “Would you buy a chap a drink?” in the first chapter. The

structure of her question is the same, and the intent is the same, but

by changing the word “chap” to “lady,” she reveals the shift that has

taken place in Spain. This comment might be delivered ironically; she

and Jake have just finished discussion the impossibility of growing out

her hair for Pedro, and she might be replacing “chap” with “lady” in
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order to call attention to the transition she cannot make. It is also

possible that she means “lady” seriously, having realized that she does

not need to conform to Spain’s traditional code of femininity in order to

think of herself as a woman. Still another interpretation might be that

Jake himself has replaced “chap” with “lady” in his narration of the

conversation, in order to emphasize the fact that Brett’s femininity is

both the foil for his own masculinity, and a property he indirectly

associates with himself.

The narrative further emphasizes the word “lady” when she

compliments the bartender. He replies, ‘Thank you, ma’am’” (248). In

this way, Brett and Jake realign in their agreement to remove the

presence of sexuality from their interactions with each other. Brett

liberates herself from the confines of Spanish womanhood while

retaining her self-image as a “lady,” and Jake refrains from involving

himself in her sexual affairs. Linda Miller notes, “Through her

involvement in Pamplona with Pedro Romero, Brett comes to realize

what Jake already knows about the significance of the bullfighter, who

is real” (Miller 175). In Miller’s reading of the text, “real” means

physical and immediate, unmediated by rhetoric or “mantras.” “The

significance of the bullfighter,” then, refers to the debt to the body that

the expatriates encounter in Spain. Jake “already knows” about this

debt through the unsettling physicality of the aficionados, and Brett

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discovers it when Pedro asks her to account for her gender. The

immediacy of physicality precludes Brett and Jake’s participation, and

they must therefore return to Paris to reclaim their mediated identities.

The trip to Spain also unsettles the balance between Mike’s

aristocracy and Robert’s American Dream, as well. Just as Brett fails to

embody Jake’s masculinity in Spain, Mike fails to embody Robert’s

social status. Mike loses his composure at several moments, allowing

the reader a glimpse at the “horror” of the consciousness that lies

beneath the surface of his apparent two-dimensionality. This loss of

control prevents Robert from appropriating Mike’s easy social

sophistication, and exacerbates his own sense of hopelessness.

This cyclic behavior is perhaps best exemplified in Jake’s

metaphor of the gored steer. Early in the Pamplona festivities, the

expatriates all go to watch an event in which two bulls kill one of two

steers, and then adopt the other steer into their little herd. Jake writes,

“The steer who had been gored had gotten to his feet and stood

against the stone wall. None of the bulls came near him, and he did not

attempt to join the herd” (Hemingway 145). Immediately after this

event, Michael begins to lose his temper with Robert for the first time.

He yells, “ ‘Tell me, Robert. Why do you follow Brett around like a poor

bloody steer? Don’t you know you’re not wanted? I know when I’m not

wanted. Why don’t you know when you’re not wanted’” (146)? To
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which Brett responds, “ ‘Shut up, Michael. Try and show a little

breeding’” (146). Although Mike instantly assumes that, within their

foursome, Jake is the wounded steer, the fact of his outburst calls the

terms of the metaphor into question. Whereas in Paris, Mike is

accustomed to Brett’s ever-present herd of male admirers, when he is

confronted with the physical evidence of herd dynamics and animal

fighting he can no longer redirect his anger. He therefore accuses

Robert of acting like a “poor bloody steer” who has been gored by

other members of the herd but will not “stand alone” like the steer

they watch in the bullring.

In this sense, Robert “doesn’t know when he is not wanted;” like

an expatriated Jay Gatsby, he continues to believe that he can climb

up into a European social network. Brett, however, complicates this

outburst when she refers to Mike’s “breeding.” With this comment, she

encompasses several different admonitions. Certainly, her comment

reminds the reader that Mike’s function in the novel has been that of

the aristocratic degenerate. The reader expects him to “show a little

breeding” in the way that high-born nobles are said to be “well bred.”

This comment, however, also indicts Mike as the real gored steer in the

metaphor, in the sense that “breeding” also refers to raising livestock.

If a buck fails to “show a little breeding,” he will be gored by the

animals in the bullring who have better pedigrees.

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In this way, Brett’s comment reminds Mike that his outburst both

deviates from his aristocratic façade and also threatens his

membership in the “herd.” Spilka addresses Mike’s jealousy in his

essay: “The tension is created by Brett’s fiancé, Mike Campbell, who is

aware of her numerous infidelities and who seems to accept them with

amoral tolerance. Actually he resents them, so that Cohn… provides

him with a convenient outlet for his feelings” (Spilka 133). As Spilka

notes, “the tension” that results from the breakdown of Robert and

Mike’s substitutions does not originate with Robert, as Mike suggests.

Instead, accusing Robert is the act that creates the tension, revealing

Mike’s inner horror at Brett’s “numerous infidelities” and the numbing

effect of his pretense of “amoral tolerance.” The sheer physicality of

the steer’s death overwhelms Mike, so that his “breeding” falters and

Robert’s clueless ignorance is further exposed.

The problem of Mike’s jealousy emerges frequently throughout

the characters’ dialogue, discrediting him as a surrogate for Robert’s

social position and thereby highlighting Robert’s major social faux pas.

Toward the end of Mike’s lengthy outburst, he yells, “‘Haven’t you any

manners? How do you think it makes me feel?’” Brett replies, ‘You’re a

splendid one to talk about manners... You’ve such lovely manners’”

(Hemingway 147). If, as Brett suggests here, Mike’s “manners” fail,

then his identity is compromised. Since Jake’s portrait of Mike consists

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of aristocratic stereotypes, Mike needs his both “manners” and his

“breeding” in order to maintain his legitimacy as a character.

Furthermore, when Mike’s demeanor fails him, it becomes increasingly

obvious that Robert, in fact, does not have “any manners.” Instead of

Mike’s social position illuminating Robert’s social ignorance, it instead

disguised it, so that in Paris Robert could mix with the rest of the

expatriates.

As Mike dissolves, however, Robert’s shield is torn down, and his

naïveté is rudely exposed. Jake becomes alarmed at the men’s

dissolution, and tries to encourage Brett to refrain from yelling at Mike.

He says, “It’s been damned hard on Mike, having Cohn around and

seeing him with you’” (185). Of course, it is not Cohn’s fault that Mike’s

jealousy shows in Spain- the cumulative experience of feigning “amoral

tolerance” simply overwhelms him and Robert, “the perennial Jewish

scapegoat” (Spilka 133), provides him with a target for his frustration.

As their stay in Pamplona progresses, Robert feeds Mike’s

escalating hysteria by clinging to Mike all the more in Brett’s absence.

Due to this constant presence, Mike starts to become aware of his role

and of Robert’s parasitism, although he cannot confront it directly. He

therefore misdiagnoses his fear about Robert, believing that it is his

proximity to Brett that is causing his inner desolation to become

visible. He becomes crazed with his need to rid himself of Robert: “

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‘Jake,’ Mike said. He was almost crying. ‘You know I’m right. Listen,

you!’ He turned to Cohn: ‘Go away! Go away now!’” (Hemingway 182).

In his panicked desperation, Mike cannot realize that the very jealousy

that drives him to tears in public is the same characteristic that he

shares with Robert. They are linked in Spain through their jealousy for

Brett, but their fear of emotion, of Aldridge’s “flooding of human

consciousness,” causes them to redirect that jealousy onto each other.

Robert, who continues to hide behind Mike’s social comportment

even as their symbiotic existence dissolves around him, allows himself

to mimic Mike in his own breakdown later in the chapter. When Jake

goes to Cohn’s room to reason with him, he relates, “Cohn was crying.

There he was, face down on the bed, crying” (197). In the same way

that Mike’s becomes increasingly hysterical until he finally breaks into

tears, Robert’s response to Mike becomes equally hysterical. Spain

thereby breaks down any possibility of Mike’s substitution for Robert;

as long as they remain in Pamplona, Mike retains none of the

“aristocratic” qualities that made him such an easy figure to identify in

Paris, and the utter hopelessness of Robert’s ambitions permeates the

text. Faced with this failure, both Robert and Mike leave Pamplona

immediately after the festival to return to France, where substitutions

can regain control over their unconscious.

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Return to Paris

In the final pages of The Sun Also Rises, Jake tries to regain his

composure and his control over the narrative. He loses track of most of

the other characters, assuming that they returned to Paris to

recuperate from their respective breakdowns in Spain. When Bill asks

Jake about Cohn’s whereabouts, for example, Jake writes:

“ ‘Oh, to hell with Cohn,’ I said.

‘Where do you suppose he went?’
‘Up to Paris’” (226).

It is likely that Cohn has gone back to Paris, since at this point even

Jake is ready literally to write him off, and in Paris he will be able to

remove himself from his hysteria and find his equilibrium. Bill follows

suit, and travels with Jake to Bayonne to catch a train to Paris.

While he is in Bayonne, Jake indulges in a startlingly frank

episode of reflection. He writes, “At a newspaper kiosque I bought a

copy of the New York Herald and sat in a café to read it. It felt strange

to be in France again. There was a safe, suburban feeling. I wished I

had gone up to Paris with Bill, except that Paris would have meant

more fiesta-ing” (236). While he is in the café, he reflects that the

waiter will probably like him for giving a good tip. He thinks, “It would

be a sincere liking because it would have a sound basis. I was back in

France” (237). While these passages may be tinged with some

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bitterness, Jake articulates several important features of his

relationship with France. It is significant, for example, that the first

place he goes in France is to a newspaper kiosque. After the debacle in

Pamplona, Jake needs to re-arm himself with language in order to

salvage his consciousness. He instantly reverts to his dependence on

words rather than looking back to review what he has lost in Spain.

Although he “wishes he had gone up to Paris,” he cannot afford to do

any “more fiesta-ing.” Instead, he must take some time to collect

himself, and reestablish his accountability to words and money.

His reflection that the waiter would have “a sincere liking” for

him based on his gratuity seems ironic at first, but actually summarizes

Jake’s economic philosophy. Leaving Spain, Jake does not have a

“sincere liking” for anyone except, perhaps, Bill; he is glad to be rid of

Mike, and sweeps away thoughts of Robert with his “to hell with Cohn.”

In Spain, where no one adheres to the rules of accounting and bill-

paying, Jake must take on the burden of using his narrative to convey

all the breakdowns of substitution and diversion without defining the

thing that threatens him.

His account of Pamplona only narrowly escapes confronting the

“horror” from which money and language normally shield him; if the

trauma of the war and its aftermath were not enough, Jake must also

suppress awareness of the trauma of Spain. He begins to adapt once

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more to the kind of language he introduced at the beginning of the

novel, relating, “Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France.

It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated

by becoming your friend for any obscure reason” (237). By reengaging

the word “friend,” Jake indicates that he will be able to reconstruct the

balance of consciousness that depends on the repetition of hollow

language.

In the last part of the novel, then, when Jake must return to

Spain to fetch Brett from Madrid, he begins to use the words “France”

and “Spain” as the same kind of mantra of location that he used during

his walk with Bill two hundred pages earlier. He writes, “I hated to

leave France. Life was so simple in France. It felt I was a fool to be

going back into Spain. In Spain you could not tell about anything”

(237). As cold and impersonal as France might be, the intimacy and

physicality of Spain is much more painful. Jake reflects that life is

“simple” in France, contrasting the word “simple” with the concepts of

“becoming your friend for an obscure reason” and not being able to

“tell about anything.”

France, then, is a knowable country; it allows Jake, Bill, Robert,

and the other Americans to exist there indefinitely without requiring

that they engage themselves profoundly. They can use words however

they like, since, in France, they must only be accountable for knowing
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where they are and how much they owe. In Spain, they cannot “tell

about anything” both in the sense that Spain is unknowable to them,

and also in the sense that they cannot talk about Spain. It is a country

based on intimacy, feeling, and bodies- all the elements that Paris

allows them to hide. After Jake finds Brett in Madrid, he is well on his

way to recovering his lost control. He has begun to reintroduce his

evasion tactics, and he has distanced himself from the vestiges of

Spain. Brett, similarly, breaks off her liaison with Pedro, consciously

“deciding not to be a bitch” (249) by returning Pedro to the bosom of

the aficionados. She, too, chooses silence over self-exploration,

begging Jake, “Oh, please let’s never talk about it!” (247) When Pedro

resurfaces later in their conversation, Jake reminds her:

“‘I thought you weren’t going to ever talk about it.’

‘How can I help it?’
‘You’ll lose it if you talk about it.’
‘I just talk around it’” (249).

Neither Jake nor Brett defines exactly what “it” is, but both recognize

the importance of avoiding its articulation. In the context of this

conversation, “it” probably refers to a variety of referents: Brett’s

memories of Pedro, the suppression of her emotions, her control over

language, and her ability to avoid the “flooding of consciousness.”

They are both ready to reintegrate into their Parisian lifestyles, in

which they can “talk around” anything without “talking about it”
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directly.

In this way, they end the novel just as they started it,

suppressing the trauma of Spain beneath their old survival tactics.

Dahiya notes in his essay, “Hemingway’s characters are modern

isolates who destroy or restore their own houses that are their

personalities. As we see them at the end of the novel, both Brett and

Jake seem to have set their houses in order” (Dahiya 83). Like many

critics, Dahiya tries to find a moral in the end of the novel. He believes

that Brett and Jake have “restored” their “personalities,” taking their

experiences in Spain and using them to learn more about themselves.

In fact, Spain is not a “learning experience” for Jake or Brett; it is a

trial, and the efficacy of Jake’s deflected consciousness emerges as the

novel’s true hero. As Aldridge has noted, “language… will not, in spite

of everything, give up its hold on basic sanities, will not give up and let

out the shriek of panic, the cry of anguish, that the situation logically

calls for.”

Ultimately, this language proves to be innate to Paris, and Jake’s

only real method of survival. Although several characters disappear

during the course of the novel, and Mike vanishes into some city on the

Atlantic coast, the Americans all deliberately return to Paris as soon as

they can. Jake summarizes this attitude in his recollection of a

conversation with Brett in Part 1. He narrates, “Brett looked at me. ‘I

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was a fool to go away,’ she said. ‘One’s an ass to leave Paris’”

(Hemingway 81).

“DEPRIVED OF ALL OBJETIVE FOUNDATION”: THE PROCESS OF

WRITING PARIS

Hemingway’s Forty-Eight Days

Although Hemingway generated several drafts of The Sun Also

Rises before the novel’s publication, the writing process proceeded

relatively quickly. Carlos Baker, in an essay on Hemingway’s early

writing, notes, “The first draft of The Sun Also Rises was set down in
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approximately forty-eight writing days, but Hemingway nearly killed

himself in the process” (Baker 9). Baker, among many other critics,

recalls that Hemingway wrote “straight on through” the text, emerging

at the end of the forty-eight days with a novel that explained its

characters and their behavior rather explicitly.

In one draft, Jake interrupts a moment of dialogue between

himself and Robert Cohn early in the second chapter to comment:

“[Cohn] was quite frank and artless. That was what was nice about

him” (The Hemingway Collection, Item 202c). This passage, removed

during subsequent edits, reveals much more about Jake than the

reader might otherwise have observed this early in the novel. The

passage offers an explicit demonstration of Jake’s overwhelming

bitterness, ironic sense of humor, and scorn for Cohn, which, in the

novel’s published version, must be inferred from the content of their

dialogue alone. In the initial “forty-eight days” of draft-writing, this kind

of text was probably a useful model for Jake’s attitude; since Jake

controls the narrative of the novel and offers only very mediated

glimpses of his internal life, Hemingway must have found it nearly

impossible to maintain a sense of Jake during the writing process

without including this kind of textual reminder to himself. He did not,

however, allow these more revealing passages to remain in the final

version. He pared down the descriptive language and most of the

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wordier sentences, leaving only the most basic outline of the narrative.

In this way, Jake has the freedom to redefine the language of the text

and construct his system of substitution and repetition.

Hemingway’s vision of Paris is similarly revealed by all of the

poetic descriptions of the city are replaced in the final version by Jake’s

constant iterations of street names and bars, and the tortured

complexity of the characters’ relationship to Paris must be inferred

from the barest account of their nightly activities. The wealth of

confusion that Hemingway’s characters face in Paris is thereby

submerged beneath a layer of silence. J. Gerald Kennedy, in his

examination of the effect of Paris on the modernists, refers to

Hemingway’s style as “his omission of exposition- the so-called

“iceberg” theory by which he…produced an almost systematic

displacement of emotional content onto the terrain of fictive

experience” (Kennedy 111). In Kennedy’s reading, language in The Sun

Also Rises functions only as a means of indicating hidden “emotional

content.” The words that describe the “experience” or actions of the

characters each signify a wealth of referents that comprise the omitted

“emotion” of the novel. Kennedy’s emphasis is thereby on the surface

of the text; he recognizes the one-dimensional nature of the novel’s

language, but unlike such critics as The Dial’s reviewer, he posits that

this flatness serves as a “displacement” for the novel’s invisible

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content.

In his book Exile’s Return, Malcolm Cowley offers a similar

interpretation of alienation and displacement in modernist fiction.

Addressing the effect of place- and Paris, specifically- on the fiction of

the 1920s, Cowley writes, “Before a man can feel at home in any

surroundings… he must first transform the objects around him by

connecting them with human emotions, by finding their purpose and

direction, by making them understandable” (Cowley 298). This

reflection, read against Kennedy’s analysis of language in The Sun Also

Rises and applied to a reading of Jake’s Paris as a city of mantras and

continual displacement, provides a key to understanding Hemingway’s

editing decisions. Before he could become altogether “at home” in his

text, Hemingway first had to “transform the objects” within his text by

“connecting them with human emotions.”

Before he could create the distance between Jake and Cohn’s

dialogue from its narrative context, for example, he first had to

establish that context. In other words, he had to identify Jake’s

“purpose and direction, by making him understandable” in order to

submerge that “purpose” under the surface of the narrative. The

“iceberg effect,” then, is perhaps more complicated than Kennedy

imagines; rather than simply “omitting exposition,” Hemingway

developed his novel quickly and organically, “almost killing himself” to

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produce his draft in forty-eight days, before beginning the careful

process of concealing the novel’s natural exposition behind Jake’s

narrative of displacement.

Barnes’ 10 Year Struggle

Djuna Barnes, conversely, spent almost 10 years writing and

revising Nightwood. Although she first submitted the text to publishing

houses in 1930, it was repeatedly rejected until, six years and several

drafts later, T.S. Eliot persuaded Faber & Faber to publish the novel.

Her difficulty finding a publisher stemmed from her reputation as an

unreadable author; she had published various plays and stories before

Nightwood, all of which were characterized by a dense, effusive

language. Janet Flanner, the Paris correspondent for the New Yorker

during its first years of publication, describes a particularly difficult

work: “Djuna wrote a play that she showed to T.S. Eliot; he told her

that it contained the most splendid archaic language he had ever had

the pleasure of reading but that, frankly, he couldn’t make head or tail

of its drama” (Flanner xvii). She continues, “She gave it to me to read,

and I told her, with equal candor, that it was the most sonorous

vocabulary I had ever read but that I did not understand jot or tittle of
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what it was saying” (xvii-i). By the time she tried to publish Nightwood,

then, the reputation of Barnes’ writing style was the inverse of

Hemingway’s. Whereas his prose was criticized for its repetitiveness

and his characters were dismissed as shallow caricatures, Barnes’

writing was criticized for its overwhelming language. Her writing,

although “sonorous” and “splendid,” was opaque to her

contemporaries; they could appreciate the beauty of her phrasing, but

they “couldn’t make head or tail” of the story it told. Hemingway’s

readers believed that his characters were transparent and their

behavior obvious; Barnes’ readers believed that her characters and

their behavior were drowned in the language used to describe them.

Although Flanner recalls that Barnes reacted badly to her friends’

criticism of this unnamed earlier work, she clearly listened to their

advice. By 1936, when Faber and Faber agreed to publish Nightwood,

the novel was both “sonorous” and readable; Barnes had tempered her

inclination toward grandiose wording and had produced a coherent

manuscript that retained the complexity of her language.

In T.S. Eliot’s introduction to the 1937 second edition, he

identifies this balance as the key to the novel’s success. He writes, “In

describing Nightwood…, I said that it would ‘appeal primarily to

readers of poetry’… I do not want to suggest that the distinction of the

book is primarily verbal, and still less that the astonishing language
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covers a vacuity of content” (Eliot xvii). He continues soon afterward,

“Unless the term ‘novel’ has become too debased to apply, and if it

means a book in which living characters are created and shown in

significant relationship, this book is a novel. And I do not mean that

Miss Barnes’s style is ‘poetic prose.’ But I do mean that most

contemporary novels are not really ‘written’” (xvii-i). Here, Eliot

reiterates his praise for Barnes’ “splendid archaic language,” pointing

to the poetic language as one of the book’s “distinctions.” For Eliot,

“readers of poetry” are aware of “real writing” in a way that readers of

novels are not, and are therefore better equipped to interpret

Nightwood.

Still, he insists, Nightwood “is a novel,” and therefore

encompasses both poem and prose while exceeding both. Flanner

writes that Nightwood is “…a difficult book to describe, since the only

proper way of dealing with its strange, nocturnal elements is to have

written it in the first place, which surely no one but Miss Barnes could

have done” (Flanner xvii). J. Gerald Kennedy agrees, noting,

“Nightwood resists the operations which would reduce it to

paraphrase” (Kennedy 219). While Nightwood retains the cohesive

structure of a novel, then, it distinguishes itself from the other

American novels of Paris in its contained expansiveness. Flanner notes

that the book is “difficult to describe,” and indeed Eliot does not
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attempt a description in his introduction. Instead he provides a

psychological and literary framework in which to read the novel and

encourages the reader not to allow the “real writing” to overwhelm the

“significant relationship” between the characters, their behavior, and

Paris.

Nightwood and The Sun Also Rises: “Physically Uprooted”

The substantial stylistic differences between The Sun Also Rises

and Nightwood should render them utterly dissimilar. The Sun Also

Rises embodies “the iceberg effect,” in which its meaning is

submerged beneath its silence; Nightwood can neither be described

nor paraphrased. Hemingway received the most criticism for the

sparseness of his language; Barnes, for the effusiveness of hers.

Similarly, Hemingway found that, in order to represent his vision of

Americans exiled in Paris, he needed to write out his characterizations

more explicitly in his drafts and then pare down his manuscript

afterward; Barnes found that she needed to monitor the amount of

characterization she allowed in her drafts, and then allow her

“astonishing” language to embellish the manuscript afterward. The

behavior of Hemingway’s characters dictates the narrative, whereas

the narrative of Barnes’ characters dictates their behavior. Stylistically,

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the two books are each others’ inverse, and it would seem likely that

their conclusions about Paris- and the roles of expatriated Americans in

Paris- would be similarly opposed.

In reality, the books are remarkably similar in the ways that they

explore alienation and escape. The American characters become

dependent on Paris’ nightlife as both a venue for displacing their self-

awareness -into history in Nightwood, and onto other characters in The

Sun Also Rises – and as the means of keeping this displaced self-

awareness from flooding their consciousness. They become stranded in

Paris; the city disengages them from their senses of national and

personal identity, but does not offer them alternatives. Malcolm

Cowley describes this profound sense of alienation in his book: “And

that, I believe, was the final effect on us of the War; that was the

honest emotion behind a pretentious phrase like ‘the lost generation.’

School and college had uprooted us in spirit; now we were physically

uprooted, hundreds of us, millions” (Cowley 55). The expatriates’ exile

in Paris, then, was not only a problem of psychological disengagement,

but also significantly connected to place. If the war effort initially

brought Americans to France and their post-war trauma prevented

them from leaving, then their continued presence in Europe triggered

the subsequent migration of Americans seeking a similar escape.

Hemingway and Barnes, for all their stylistic differences, both sought
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to investigate the nature of this displacement. This investigation

manifests itself most clearly in their descriptions of the roles of alcohol

and religion in their characters’ expatriate experience.

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“THE HUMAN SUFFERING AND BONDAGE WHICH IS

UNIVERSAL”: SIMILAR AMERICAN BEHAVIOR IN DISIMILAR
NOVELS

“Escape By Hedonism”: Alcohol in Hemingway

Both The Sun Also Rises and Nightwood explore the

pervasiveness of alcohol and drinking in the lives of their expatriated

American characters, and both novels arrive at the same conclusion

about its role as a means of blurring the boundaries between the

conscious and the unconscious. This theme is widely recognized in

Hemingway’s fiction; many critics found the novel’s display of

alcoholism distasteful enough to interfere with the quality of its writing.

Hemingway, however, does not treat alcoholism in the novel as an

addiction to substance. Instead, ordering and consuming drinks

become another of Jake’s ritualistic repetitions in the text; his narrative

is just as dependent on repeating the names of drinks as Jake is

dependent on consuming them.

Throughout the novel, Jake responds to the threat of tension

between himself and his friends through drinking. He does not

necessarily want to induce drunkenness, either in himself or the

others, but instead relies on the neutrality of drinking to ease his

friends through the strain in their conversations. One of his narrative’s

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earliest encounters with Brett, for example, describes her visit to Jake’

apartment. As they discuss her current love affair, Brett realizes that

she is drinking significantly more than Jake: “‘I say, you are slow on the

up-take,’ she said. I had only sipped my brandy and soda. I took a long

drink” (Hemingway 41). Since the topic of Brett’s love life is so difficult

for them to discuss, it is important that they establish some sort of

equality for the duration of the discussion. Their “brandy and sodas”

are a perfect solution; whereas Brett has a distinct advantage in a

discussion about sex, she and Jake have the same relationship to

drinking. Once Brett points out that Jake’s drinking has lagged behind,

he is quick to catch up to her; he “takes a long drink,” possibly

because he wants to get drunk, but also to ensure that Brett keeps

talking to him. At this point, the reader, too, has become familiar

enough with the drinking habits of Jake’s friends to realize that a

shared drink has significant social implications in the narrative. In this

way, alcohol serves as their equalizer, both in the context of their

conversation and in the structure of the narrative.

Soon afterward, while discussing literary trends with his friend

Harvey, Jake finds himself at a loss for words. He recalls:

“‘Sure,’ said Harvey. So we sat and thought deeply for a while.

‘Have another port?’
‘All right,’ said Harvey” (50).

When Cohn tries to join the conversation, he and Harvey begin to

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quarrel. Jake’s responds by encouraging Harvey to have yet another

drink: “‘Come on Harvey,’ I said. ‘Have another porto’” (51). Jake’s

dependence on talking about alcohol becomes even more apparent

during this encounter with Harvey, since he uses the same tactic of

crisis evasion twice in the same conversation. The moment that Jake

must confront a moment of self-reflection, he suggests that he and

Harvey continue drinking; without a reliable method of redirecting his

conversations, Jake must face the threat of Aldridge’s “flooding of

consciousness.” He therefore returns to his reliance on drinking, not to

“forget his troubles,” but to guide his social interaction away from the

kind of reflection that threatens his careful psychic neutrality.

Encouraged by his success, he reattempts this tactic when Harvey and

Cohn begin to fight. The overall success of this evasion allows both

himself and the reader to believe that Jake can diffuse tension between

his friends through the suggestion of alcohol. Aldridge articulates this

idea in his essay, noting, “For the elaborately polite because clearly

traumatized characters of this novel, consciousness is so precarious

and fragile that any kind of tension is to be feared and, if possible,

ignored” (Aldridge 127-8). For this reason, Jake automatically reverts

to the suggestion of alcohol, even in the moments when drinking would

be most inappropriate.

Additionally, by continually suggesting drinks Jake can include

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another set of words in his system of ritualistic repetitions. Drinking,

like the names of streets and bars, are universal truth in Paris; Jake can

lull himself and his reader into reassurance through the constant

repetitions of the words “port,” “brandy,” “fine,” “wine” and “Pernod.”

Applying the principle of the “iceberg” narrative to Jake’s tendency to

account for his location, money, and drinking, Kennedy writes “To

suggest the torment of his characters, Hemingway created a nocturnal

city, a nightmarish whirl of bars, cafés, taxis, restaurants, and dance

halls” (Kennedy 97). In this way, Kennedy highlights the sinister aspect

of Jake’s narrative repetitions. Mixed into the “nightmarish whirl” of the

places Jake visits are the drinks that Jake consumes; both in the

universe of the novel and in the text itself, the abundance of alcohol

blurs the boundaries between one location and the next. The

distinctions between social interactions become less defined, so that

Jake’s “nocturnal city” is both confused and supported by his group’s

constant drinking.

Furthermore, this mantra of drinking engages other aspects of

narrative rituals: he can allow himself to account for drinks the same

way he accounts for his money. Jake’s constant invocation of drinks

demonstrates a phenomenon that Malcolm Cowley calls the ““escape

by hedonism- not neglecting the pleasures of the mind” (Cowley 233).

Although the “pleasures of the mind” that Cowley invokes refer to the
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pleasures of literature and plastic arts enjoyed by the artists, rather

than the “pleasures” of their characters’ minds, this passage indirectly

offers an insight into Jake’s obsession with drinking. The “escape of

hedonism” for Jake does not focus on the effects of drunkenness, but

instead on the social and rhetorical hedonism of consumption. Jake, in

fact, is often repulsed by being drunk- at one point during his trip to

Pamplona, he recalls, “I was very drunk and I did not want to shut my

eyes because the room would go round and round” (Hemingway 151).

Jake clearly does not drink for the effects of inebriation; he is cognizant

of alcohol’s distasteful effect of making “the room go round and

round,” and instead tries to find a balance between ordering drinks

(and therefore articulating them) and being drunk.

It becomes clear, however, Jake’s relationship to alcohol changes

when he leaves Paris. In Spain, Jake continues to rely upon alcohol to

ease him through the increasingly tense atmosphere of his social

group, only to find that alcohol has different effects outside the city.

Rather than providing Jake and his friends with common social ground,

creating a sort of brotherhood of drinkers, alcohol is isolating and

depressing in Spain. In Paris, the worth of any social venue was

determined by the alcohol available; during a lunch date with Robert

Cohn at the beginning of the novel, Jake recalls:

“ ‘This is a good place,’ he said.

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‘There’s a lot of liquor,’ I agreed” (19).

In this passage, “liquor” becomes synonymous with “good.” Although

in a different conversation Jake’s affirmation might seem to be a non

sequitur, commenting on the presence of “liquor” is a perfectly

reasonable way to “agree” with a positive assessment in the context of

Jake’s friendships. Jake knows that his interaction with Robert will

progress safely, since any suggestion of antagonism or tension can be

dissolved with “a lot of liquor.”

In Spain, however, the presence of liquor does not guarantee a

solution to social strain. After Mike Campbell and Robert Cohn quarrel

in Pamplona, for example, Jake recalls, “It was beginning to get dark.

The fiesta was going on. I began to feel drunk but I did not feel any

better” (226). The argument between Mike and Robert recalls Robert’s

earlier dispute with Harvey; in both scenarios, Robert’s presence

triggers the breakdown of a precarious social dynamic. Jake’s usual

method for preventing this breakdown fails in Pamplona however.

Despite the many drinks he orders and consumes, he “does not feel

any better,” and furthermore “begins to feel drunk.” Externally,

nothing changes as his group begins to quarrel: it begins “to get dark”

and “the fiesta” is “going on.” Additionally, the normally neutral Jake

begins to participate in the quarrel as well. He loses control of the

social dynamic, and resorts, like the rest of his friends, to projecting his

fear and anger onto Cohn. Jake thereby deprives his narrative of a list
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of drinks, leaving the reader equally unsettled and alienated from the

characters.

This phenomenon becomes most obvious when Bill tries to use

Jake’s escape tactic on Jake himself. Having witnessed Jake’s

burgeoning anger toward Cohn, Bill suggests:

“ ‘Have another?’
‘It won’t do any good’” (226).

Here, Jake acknowledges that Cowley’s “escape by hedonism” will not

allow him social or psychological refuge in Spain. Instead, alcohol’s

effect is purely physiological; regardless of the amount that Jake and

his friends drink in Spain, their social tensions remain, and become

exacerbated by drunkenness. As the “uprooted” American, however,

Jake cannot take advantage of this drunkenness to “forget.” Instead,

his drunkenness alienates him from the rest of his group. During a

conversation with Mike about Robert’s bad behavior, Jake recalls, “‘I’m

rather drunk,’ Mike said. ‘I think I’ll stay rather drunk. This is all awfully

amusing, but it’s not too pleasant. It’s not too pleasant for me’” (207)

For Mike, a situation can be rendered “more pleasant” by staying

“rather drunk.” He does not worry about the world going “round and

round;” instead, social tension can be resolved by being drunk. Since

he is responsible neither for the narrative, nor for maintaining social

order, his sole concern is the physical effect of alcohol and the way it
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fuels the irony with which he confronts uncomfortable situations. At

this point, however, Jake knows that another drink “won’t do any good”

in escaping from the “submerged” truth in both his mind and his

narrative. Instead it will disable him physically, thereby threatening to

tilt the balance of his deflected self-awareness and exile him in his own

unconscious.

“The American Approximates it with Drink”: Alcohol in

Nightwood

Djuna Barnes’ narrative similarly examines the role of alcohol in

the social interactions and language of her characters. Like Jake and

his friends, Barnes’ characters recognize that alcohol’s greatest

physiological effect is to blur the distinction between their conscious

and unconscious minds. Unlike Hemingway’s characters, however,

Barnes’ Americans constantly attempt to achieve this kind of blurring.

In a complete inversion of Jake’s relationship to alcohol, they drink in

order to find some kind of a pathway between their night and day

selves. They too must find a balance between drinking and being

drunk, but the purpose of this balance is not rhetorical as it is for Jake;

instead, Barnes’ characters drink in order to try to regress during

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waking hours. They seek to use drinking to induce a conscious

devolution. Like a Freudian regression, their attempts at conscious

devolutions are based on words; they drink in order to access the

language of their nighttime primordial selves. Matthew O’Connor

articulates this best during one of his conversations with Nora, when

he tells her, “ ‘Oh, God, I’m tired of this tirade. The French are

disheveled and wise; the American tries to approximate it with drink. It

is his only clue to himself. He takes it when his soap has washed him

too clean for identification’” (Barnes 96). This comment, which

immediately follows Matthew’s analysis of the French “filthiness” which

allows them to trace their night selves during the day, provides the key

to understanding Barnes’ characters’ alcoholism. In the same way that

Hemingway’s expatriates drink to escape from the “horror” of their

unconscious, Barnes’ expatriates drink to escape the horror of a

divided consciousness. “Too clean for identification,” the American

must find the “clue to himself” in the breakdown of inhibitions that

results from drinking.

Hence Nora, who tries to learn from Matthew how to discover her

night self during the day, constantly provides Matthew with drinks.

When he comes to her apartment to talk to her about Robin, the novel

relates, “He eyed the tea-tray and, seeing that the tea-pot had long

since become cold, poured himself a generous port” (132). Soon

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afterward, when he has finished his glass, Nora unthinkingly gives him

more: “ ‘Have you got any more port?’ he inquired, putting the empty

bottle down. Mechanically, Nora brought him a second decanter. He

took the stopper out, held it to his nose a moment, then poured

himself a glass” (138). For Nora, who knows that Matthew can only

communicate through a sprawling, diffuse discourse, it seems only

natural that Matthew should need “more port.” Matthew facilitates his

understanding of night and day selves through both extensive rhetoric

and dialogue, and abundant alcohol. In this way, the social necessity of

alcohol is linked to the psychological burden of alienation through

conversation; Matthew needs alcohol, not because he becomes less

inhibited when drunk, but because the effect of drunkenness almost

allows him access to the unconscious he wants to talk about.

Understanding this, Nora’s movement to “bring a second decanter” is

“mechanical” - Matthew’s drunkenness does not alienate him from the

other Americans, but instead provides the hope of escaping alienation.

Furthermore, the knowledge of the effects of drinking is as

intuitive to Americans as the knowledge of “filthiness” is to the French.

When Matthew first meets Baron Felix Volkbein, before either of them

have met Nora or Robin, he offers Felix a fine:

“ ‘Sit down.’ He refilled his glass. ‘The fine is very good,’ he said.

Felix answered, ‘No, thank you, I never drink.’

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‘You will,’ the doctor said’” (23).

A short while later, during the same conversation, Matthew tries to

offer Felix another drink:

“ The doctor lifted the bottle. ‘Thank you,’ said Felix, ‘I never drink
spirits.’

‘You will,’ said the doctor” (26).

Finally, after Robin has left for America with Jenny, leaving Nora

desolate and Felix with an infirm and mentally challenged son, Felix

and Matthew go to dinner to discuss Felix’s options. Matthew notices

that Felix has fulfilled Matthew’s prediction:

“Felix ordered a fine. The doctor smiled. ‘I said you would come to it,’
he said, and emptied his own glass at a gulp.

‘I know,’ Felix answered, ‘but I did not understand. I thought you

meant something else.’

‘What?’

Felix paused, turning the small glass around in his trembling hand. ‘I
thought,’ he said, ‘that you meant that I would give up’” (128).

Although Felix eventually becomes the heaviest drinker, the novel’s

true drunkard is Matthew, the Californian, who knows from the onset

that drinking is his only hope of finding a “clue” to the primitive female

of his night self. His repeated prediction “you will” and the narrative’s

reference to him as “the doctor” in this context recalls his medical

qualifications. As a doctor, Matthew is the most likely character to

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diagnose correctly the psychological instability of other characters;

knowing that drink offers “a clue to himself,” he is also the most likely

to predict the eventual attempt to resolve the problems of

consciousness with drink.

The American nature of this knowledge becomes most evident in

Felix’s comment to Matthew when he finally takes a fine - “I thought

you meant that I would give up.” For non-Americans exiled in Paris, the

inclination toward alcohol might seem the way it did to D.H. Lawrence:

the desire to “maintain a healthy state of nothingness inside” oneself.

In fact, Matthew did not “mean that Felix would give up,” nor was he

advocating a “healthy state of nothingness;” on the contrary, he

recognized, with his innate sense of displacement and homelessness,

that eventually Felix would follow the path of trying to reunite the

fragmented parts of his consciousness through drink. Felix further

proves the Americanness of this attitude in the fact that, rather than

seeking clues” to his own identity through drinking, he comes to

resemble Matthew in his habits. The novel describes a trip that Felix

takes around Europe with a friend from Austria, named Frau Mann:

“Felix drank heavily now, and to hide the red that flushed his cheeks

he had grown a beard ending in two forked points on his chin. In the

matter of drink Frau Mann was now no bad second” (130). Like

Matthew, who allows his beard to grow during episodes of drunkenness

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and whose face is often flushed with wine, Felix becomes Matthew’s

European mirror. “Frau Mann” serves as a kind of conflation of Robin

and Nora; like Nora, she drinks alongside Felix and supports his

alcoholic tendencies, and like Robin she is notable for the ambiguity of

her gender (her name is German for “Mrs. Man”). This parody of

Matthew’s drinking highlights the futility of his project. Matthew admits

even to himself that the American attempt at uniting consciousness is

just an “approximation,” in the same way that Felix’s addiction

becomes an “approximation” of Matthew’s habits. Just as Felix can

never attain the authenticity of the Americans’ search for their night

selves, Matthew’s search can never attain the authenticity of French

“filthiness.”

During Nora’s conversation with Matthew, it becomes clear that

Robin also understands the significance of drinking. Nora reflects,

“‘That’s the terrible thing, that finally she was mine only when she was

dead drunk’” (154). Since alcohol is the most effective way for

Americans to try entering into their night selves, Robin needs the

nourishment of Nora the most when she is closest to this unconscious.

Nora recalls the images of Robin as a fossil or as rot by referring to her

drunkenness as “dead,” and in this way reminds the reader that

Robin’s nightly devolutions render her dependent on the fertility of

Nora’s unconscious. Although Nora probably intends to suggest that

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Robin is “hers” while “dead” because she can only take care of Robin

physically when she is drunk, Nora unintentionally identifies the truth

about alcohol’s role in American exile. In Paris, where Americans are

subjected to a psychological alienation from themselves that results in

a social alienation from each other, alcohol is their only chance at

bringing themselves closer to their unconsciousness, and therefore to

each other.

As Nora continues, it becomes clear that Robin, who of all the

characters is the most removed and isolated from the narrative,

understands this truth with the same clarity as Matthew. Nora recalls

that, while taking a drunk Robin back to their hotel in the company of

several other drunk women, Robin stops to give money to a prostitute:

“They are all God-for-saken, and you most of all, because

they don’t want you to have your happiness. They don’t
want you to drink. Well, here, drink! I give you money and
permission! These women- they are all like her,” she said
with fury. “They are all good- they want to save us!” (153)

By telling the prostitute that she is “God-for-saken” because she

cannot “have her happiness” in the form of “drink,” Robin implies that

drinking is a plausible solution to misery. The “good” women like Nora,

who try to prevent drinking, are therefore damning the people they

deprive of alcohol, since without it, women are “forsaken” by God.

Drinking thereby establishes a new standard of morality, in which

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“good women” become the condemners and the drinkers become

those who are remembered by God.

“The Escape to Christ”: Religion in The Sun Also Rises

It is significant that Robin invokes God in her tirade on “escape,”

since ambivalence toward faith is another major similarity that unites

The Sun Also Rises and Nightwood. In Hemingway’s novel, religion is

frequently invoked as the counterpoint to drinking and “hedonistic

escape”; Cowley, for example, refers to Jake’s Catholicism as the

“escape by religion, the escape to Christ” (Cowley 233). This “escape,”

however, is significantly more hazardous in The Sun Also Rises than

the “escape to hedonism.” Hemingway’s Americans are continually

uncertain about the way they should approach faith; although it seems

to be a potential source of comfort- the kind of “escape” that Cowley

suggests- it also seems to bring them uncomfortable close to some

primitive knowledge of themselves that they wish to avoid. Reflecting

on this ambivalence while he is still in Paris, Jake confesses, “I was a

little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but

realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and

maybe never” (Hemingway 103). Clearly, Jake does not attempt to

deflect his consciousness away from thoughts of religion, since he

allows himself to feel “shame” and “regret” at being “such a rotten

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Catholic.” Unlike the war, Catholicism is an element of his

consciousness that can be talked about. He does not refer to it

obliquely, couched in a neutral discourse of substitution, but instead

confronts his concerns directly.

He does not, however hollow out the language of religion in order

to use it as a placeholder, either. God and Catholicism are perhaps the

most significant theme in the novel in which the language used to

describe it means exactly what it says. The honesty of Jake’s

statement is startling- not only does he rarely discuss feelings of

“shame,” he also seldom admits that there is “nothing to be done.”

The authenticity of despair in this passage provides the key to reading

American faith in the novel: it is neither so repetitive that it loses its

meaning within the narrative, nor is it so taboo that it must be

deflected in order to be examined. Instead it straddles the boundary

between escape and confrontation, serving as a kind of bridge

between the language of the novel and the “emotional content” hidden

beneath it.

Jake’s faith is portrayed more clearly as “American” through

several conversations with Brett, in which her indifference to religion

becomes evident. Although Jake is fairly certain that there is “nothing

to be done” about his shaken faith while he is in Paris, once he arrives

in Pamplona he decides to try praying in the more “primitive” Spanish

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atmosphere. He relates that when he tells Brett that he wants to go to

church, Brett “said she wanted to hear me go to confession, but I told

her that not only was it impossible but it was not as interesting as it

sounded, and, besides, it would be in a language she did not know”

(154). Clearly, “language” takes on more than one meaning in this

passage; the “language” barrier between Brett and the confessional is

not only that of Spanish, but also that of respect for religious practices.

In spite of his ambivalence, Jake still recognizes the sanctity of

“confession,” and tries to protect the church from Brett’s influence, in

a way that he does not protect Pedro.

A third interpretation of “a language she did not know” is the

idea that in confession, Jake must speak directly about his guilt. For

Brett, who is accustomed only to Jake’s evasive rhetoric, hearing him

speak directly about his sins would be utterly unfamiliar; she “does not

know” the “language” of unmediated discourse. The directness of

confession keeps Jake away, as well. Instead he takes a “walk out to a

gypsy camp, and Brett had her fortune told” (154). Avoiding confession

out of a sense of respect and fear, Jake turns to the paganism of gypsy

camps, where Brett experiences an entirely un-Catholic spiritual ritual.

In this way, the tenacity of American hope is juxtaposed with British

cynicism and Spanish paganism. Christianity itself becomes exiled in

Jake’s consciousness, isolating him, in turn, from the Europeans in his

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company. At one point, Brett tries to relate to Jake’s religious

inclinations by praying for a positive outcome to the bullfight. Jake

relates, “Brett looked up at the tree-tops in the wind. The praying had

not been much of a success… ‘I’m damned bad for a religious

atmosphere,’ Brett said. ‘I’ve the wrong type of face’” (212). In this

passage, Brett highlights Jake’s religious isolation by acknowledging

not only that she is “damned bad for a religious atmosphere,” but also

that she only takes the rituals of religion at “face” value. In spite of the

humor of her comment, telling Jake that she has “the wrong type of

face” for a religious atmosphere speaks to her unwillingness to look

beyond the surface of religious inclination. Religion cannot be

authentic for Brett, and her “prayer” can only be a “face value”

imitation of Jake’s genuine attempts at a renewal of faith.

By the time Jake and his friends return to Paris, however, Jake’s

faith in humanity is so shaken that he can barely recall how he used to

believe in God. In a final attempt to align her lifestyle with Jake’s

alienated faith, Brett tells Jake:

“‘You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch…
It’s sort of what we have instead of God.’
‘Some people have God,’ I said. ‘Quite a lot.’
‘He never worked very well with me’” (249).

It is significant in this passage that Jake distances himself from any

declaration of faith, referring to the faithful as “some people,” and not

including himself. He tries to protest Brett’s assumption that he is a

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part of the “we” who explicitly do not “have God,” but he cannot group

himself with “some people,” either. Tellingly, he responds to Brett’s

comment by asking, “‘Should we have another Martini?’” (249) This

thwarted attempt at rekindling his faith only emphasizes that, rather

than serving as a means for “escape,” religion only causes confusion

and ambivalence for Jake, exiling him from both the faithful and from

the godless. As a result, he must revert at the end of the novel to the

tactic of ordering drinks in order to ease him through the impasse in

this conversation. This evasion is particularly tragic, however, since the

promise of faith seemed to be a possible source of comfort for Jake

throughout the novel; nevertheless, faith is ultimately reduced to a

tense moment in a conversation that can only be avoided through

rhetorical substitution.

According to Cowley, this reduction of faith to a somewhat

embarrassing artifact of Americanism is an integral part of American

expatriation. He writes,

“In the midst of this process the burden of inferiority somehow

disappeared… Nobody even felt the need for inventing an American

god, a myth to replace that of the business man; instead the exiles

invented the international myth of the Lost Generation” (Cowley 106).

In this way, Cowley addresses Hemingway’s concerns both about

religion and about the fallacy of the “lost generation.” If, as Cowley
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suggests, “god” is lost in the process of becoming “uprooted” and

transplanted into France, then the instinct toward faith remains intact,

and transforms itself into a belief in humanity. Although Hemingway

objected to the phrasing of the term “lost generation,” Jake Barnes

certainly relies upon some kind of brotherhood of exile to take the

place of faith.

If religion is the only significant theme that Hemingway’s

characters can discuss directly, however, it is the one that Djuna

Barnes’ characters do not know how to address. In a narrative

primarily dominated by conversation and retelling, the characters’

relationship to the Church is one of the few interactions that must be

enacted, and not discussed. Matthew O’Connor, of course, attempts to

address his tortured relationship to Catholicism with Nora on several

occasions. Ironically, he manages to convey more about the

unspeakable nature of his relationship with the Church during these

conversations than about the content of the relationship itself.

Matthew predicts this trend early in the novel when he tests out his

narrative abilities at a party in Vienna, saying, “ ‘But turn to the

Catholic church, go into mass at any moment – what do you walk in

upon? Something that’s already in your blood’” (Barnes 24). If

Catholicism is already “in his blood,” then any attempt that Matthew

makes at describing the church is doomed from the start. He can no

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more explain what is “in his blood” than he can explain what is in his

subconscious; he can gesture at it and attempt to reach it, but, like his

primordial woman, his Catholicism is too primal to be analyzed directly.

Later, when he tries to tell Nora about the way he turned to God for the

solution to his crisis of identity, he relates, “So then I whispered, ‘What

is this thing, Lord?’ And I began to cry; the tears went like rain goes

down on the world without touching the face of Heaven” (140-1). Even

in a moment when Matthew wants to describe the role of faith in his

life, he only manages to articulate his despair. The focus in this

passage is not on the “whisper” that constitutes his supplication to the

“Lord,” but instead on his futile but torrential “tears.”

Nora, too, has a primitive and therefore inarticulable relationship

to religion, which both binds her to Matthew and keeps her separated

from him: “By temperament Nora was an early Christian; she believed

the word” (56). The “earliness” of her Christianity is the very quality

that renders it unutterable; she “believes the word,” which is the

essence of Christian faith, and therefore not subject to paraphrase. Her

faith is mediated neither by dogma nor even by the Church. Instead, it

consists of a direct connection to God, and therefore too fundamental

to be articulated.

Her treatment of this faith mirrors Brett’s, however, in that she

tries to find ways to align herself with Matthew’s more developed

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sense of religion. During her talks with Matthew later in the novel, she

attempts to verbalize the origin of their faith: “ ‘Man,’ she said, her

eyelids quivering, ‘conditioning himself to fear, made God; as the

prehistoric, conditioning itself to hope, made man’” (145) In this

passage, Nora uses the familiar concept of the “prehistoric” as a basis

for formulating a rationale of religion. For the Americans in the novel,

“prehistoricism” is a universal concept; every American in Paris

devolves at night, so every American in Paris understands the process

of “going back” into history. The “hope” in Nora’s comparison is

analogous to “fear” since the possibility that the daytime self could

find a way to unite with the night self is always present but never

realized. Nora therefore understands “God” in the same way that she

understands “man” - the daytime manifestation of consciousness - to

be the detached culmination of nights spent in “hope.”

Matthew similarly tries to find ways of explaining his own

conception of “God” to Nora. At one point, he exclaims, “‘Jehovah,

Sabaoth, Elohim, Eloi, Helion, Jodhevah, Shaddai! May God give us to

die in our own way!’” (97) In this passage, Matthew tries to recite the

seven Hebrew names for “God,” but only remembers three of them.

Exegeses of the Torah usually contend that God is given seven

appellations for seven different kinds of relationships between God and

the faithful. By incorrectly reciting these names, Matthew turns this

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scholarly discourse into a biblical parody, distancing himself from his

faith even as he tries to imitate the sacred process of naming God.

Both Matthew and Nora thereby encounter obstacles to discussing

religion with each other; rather than providing them with a measure of

commonality, it becomes another obstacle in their attempts to

communicate.

Of the three Americans who establish some kind of relationship

with the Church, Robin is the one whose faith is the most “prelogical.”

Her decision to explore Catholicism is marked by silence in a way that

sets it apart from the faith of any other character in the novel. Just

after her marriage to Felix, the text relates, “Suddenly she took the

Catholic vow. She came into the church silently. The prayers of the

suppliants had not ceased nor had anyone been broken of their

meditation” (49-50). In this passage, Robin’s “coming into the church”

refers both to her physical entrance into a Parisian cathedral, and also

to her taking “the Catholic vow.” Neither her physical nor her spiritual

entrances, however, interrupts the “meditation” or “the prayers of the

suppliants.” The church remains unchanged by Robin, as though her

silence renders her invisible as well.

In the same way that Cowley reads Hemingway’s “cast of mind”

as half “pre-Christian,” the reader begins to read Robin’s “cast of

mind” as something more inclined toward the elemental. The

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invisibility caused by her silence indicates a kind of primitivism that

sets her apart from both the “suppliants” in the church, and from

Matthew and Nora. The text continues, “Many churches saw her. St.

Julien le Pauvre, the church of St. Germain des Prés, Ste. Clothilde,

Even on the cold tiles of the Russian church, in which there is no pew,

she knelt alone, lost and conspicuous” (50). By emphasizing that

“many churches saw her,” the text underscores her invisibility to other

people. Instead of entering into a community of faith when she “comes

into the church,” Robin becomes visible only to the churches

themselves.

Significantly, it is Felix Volkbein, the European, who has the most

straightforward relationship to the church. When Felix’s sickly son,

Guido, tells his father that he wants to become a priest, Felix “began to

look into the matter of the church. He searched the face of every priest

he saw in the streets; he read litanies and examined chasubles and

read the Credo; he inquired into the state of monasteries” (115). For

Felix, the church is symbolic of his family’s sterility. Having married

Robin in order to produce sons, and thereby begin the process of

establishing a family legacy, Felix discovers the futility of this desire in

his son. Guido is ill and likely to die in childhood, and even if he were to

survive, he would immediately take a vow of chastity as an adult.

Felix’s hopes for establishing a family legacy are thereby derailed, so

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he redirects his attention to the institution that his son wishes to enter.

He proceeds methodically and thoroughly, “searching” and

“examining” in order to ensure that he remains involved in his son’s

future. This calm, methodical approach to the church recalls Brett’s

disinterested curiosity about Jake’s confession- in order to learn more

about Jake’s interests, she too attempts to “search the face” of the

Catholic church.

Additionally, Felix is Jewish, and has no personal affiliation with

the church. Like Brett, then, he is able to approach discussions of

Christianity with a measure of distance that contrasts sharply with the

desperate confusion of Matthew and Nora. Later in the novel, Matthew

encounters a French ex-priest in a bar: “An unfrocked priest, a stout

pale man with woman’s hands, on which were many rings, a friend of

the doctor’s, called him and asked him to have a drink” (169). By

referring to the priest’s “woman’s hands” and describing his status as

an “unfrocked,” the narrative recalls Matthew’s transvestitism and

gestures toward the priest’s ambiguous sexuality. His “frock” could

refer both to his priest’s robes or to women’s dresses- Matthew’s

“natural raiment” that Nora attempts to justify earlier in the novel. The

priest’s explicit break with the church exacerbates the distance

already established through Volkbein’s academic detachment.

Furthermore, once Matthew becomes truly drunk, the priest insists on

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escorting him out:

“The ex-priest repeated, ‘Come, I’ll take you home.’

The doctor tried to rise. He was exceedingly drunk and now extremely
angry all at once” (174).

By the end of the chapter it becomes clear that the priest is not

only “a friend of the doctor’s,” but probably one of his sexual partners

as well. This kind of relationship takes Felix’s distance from the

Catholic church a step further; whereas Felix is simply a detached non-

believer, the “ex-priest” knowingly abandoned the Catholic church. The

ex-priest’s relationship with the church is therefore as straightforward

as Felix’s – both men calmly accept their independence from Catholic

faith.

Confusion about faith unites these two novels since it interrupts

their respective narrative patterns. In The Sun Also Rises, a text that

depends upon silence in order to convey the magnitude of implications

hidden behind each word, faith must be confronted directly. Jake’s

conflict with Christianity is distinct from the rest of his discourse

because it can be articulated. Similarly, the Americans in Nightwood

either cannot or do not properly address their conflict with faith. In a

novel that advances its narrative through broad, circular metaphors

and multiple, often conflicting perspectives on the same few events,

the narrative’s silence about Christianity becomes all the more

conspicuous. When crises of faith appear in the text, they are usually
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addressed directly, and the starkness of this silence isolates the theme

of religion from the rest of the narrative. In this way, both novels rely

on omission to convey the difficulty of faith. Religiousness becomes

exiled in the narrative the same way the Americans are exiled in Paris;

both form integral part of their environment, yet both are distinct

within it.

Robin’s presence in Paris is crucial to the text; the narrative can

only progress as a result of her interactions with the other characters.

She is, however, different from them, alienated from both her home

country and from her fellow expatriates. In the same way, the

narrative’s account of her relationship to Catholicism is noticeably free

of dialogue. It stresses the fact that religion makes her “lost” and

“alone;” furthermore, none of the other characters ever mention her

church visits or her faith. In this way, Robin is exiled in Paris the same

way her faith is exiled in the text, and this parallel underscores the

desolation of both.
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The Self-Awareness of the Texts

This suggestion about the role of the text in mimicking its own

characters exemplifies the most overarching similarity between the

two novels: the self-reflexivity of the narratives. The characters in both

novels continually establish rules for reading and interpreting the

texts, and then comment on these rules. The novels are both self-

contained, and do not require outside sources to interpret them; the

reader can learn to interpret the text from the text itself. T.S. Eliot’s

introduction to Nightwood provides an excellent example of this

phenomenon in its lack of instruction. Eliot praises the writing of the

novel and comments on his own reading of it, but explains neither the

narrative nor the best way to approach the novel. The fact of this

omission speaks particularly highly of the novel’s ability to explain

itself since The Waste Land, Eliot’s most famous poem, includes

several pages of author’s notes.

The same self-sufficiency can be used to describe Hemingway’s

novel. In spite of much negative critical reception after the publication

of the first edition, Hemingway did not offer justification or explanation

for his literary choices. Instead, he allowed The Sun Also Rises to
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explain itself. The reflexivity of these novels and their ability to

establish rules for their own interpretation thereby comprise a third

point of contact between the two novels. Furthermore, this spirit of

independence on the level of the text influences the reader’s

perception of the characters; as isolated and “exiled” as the American

characters are, the stubborn self-sufficiency of their isolation is

demonstrated through the self-reflexive nature of the text.

In The Sun Also Rises, Jake’s narrative continually offers the

reader clues about the level of the text’s mediation. Although Jake

deliberately avoids an awareness of his own accountability and

continually deflects this accountability onto other elements of his life in

Paris, he is nevertheless aware of this process on some level. He

therefore invites the reader to explore the way that he manipulates the

text by including in his narrative a discussion of reality and

manipulation. At the beginning of the novel, Jake’s clues to the reader

about the mediated nature of his narrative are couched in his ironic

humor. When Robert Cohn, for example, tells Jake that he wants to go

to South America and Jake replies that they can see South Americans

in Paris, Robert says:

“‘They’re not real South Americans.’

‘They look awfully real to me’” (Hemingway 17).

At a first reading, Jake’s reply seems to be an ironic play on words.

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Obviously, Robert means to say that the “South Americans” in Paris

are taken out of their context, and that the “real South Americans”

that Robert wants to see are the ones who still live on their native

continent. By taking Robert’s use of the word “real” literally, however,

Jake emphasizes the flexibility of language in the novel. Although it

would be easy to interpret his humor at face value, assuming that he is

using irony to avoid committing to traveling with Robert, he

nevertheless offers the suggestion that the reader question what it

means to be “real” in the novel. Later in this same conversation, after

telling Robert that he will not go to South America, Jake adds, “‘Cheer

up,’ I said. ‘All countries look just like the moving pictures’” (18). This

comment is particularly relevant is a novel that not only takes place in

two countries and mentions several others, but also offers lush

descriptions of landscapes and natural scenery. By telling Robert that

“all countries look just like the moving pictures,” he anticipates those

moments later in the novel in which he describes his environment in

much the same way that a “moving picture” camera would capture

and “describe” it. By asking Robert to interpret the image of a country

as literally as an actual view of the country, Jake allows the reader to

recognize the level of mediation in his own descriptions of Paris and

Spain.

In Pamplona, his feelings of dissociation and detachment from

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the “reality” of his experience become even more explicit. He recalls,

“Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though

nothing could have any consequences… All during the fiesta you had

the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout any remark

to make it heard. It was the same feeling about any action” (158). In

this passage, Jake provides a kind of justification for the breakdown of

his accountability. He posits that the “unreality” of “the fiesta” makes

it seem “as though nothing could have any consequences,” thereby

stripping him of his ability to control his behavior. By addressing the

fiesta’s effect on communication, he links this attitude of recklessness

to the process of narration, suggesting that the same freedom from

consequences that governs every “action” applies to the language he

uses to describe these actions as well. He also warns the reader that

his narrative might be excessive, “shouting any remark to make it

heard.” In this way, he implicitly warns the reader of the narrative’s

potential for exaggeration, “unreality,” and disconnectedness.

Even as he supplies the reader with permission to question the

“realness” of his narrative, Jake attributes the transparency of this self-

doubt to an American sensibility. Although all of the characters in The

Sun Also Rises substitute words consistently, Jake takes care to

emphasize that the American characters do not conceal their

dishonesty. He portrays the European characters as more discrete and

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covert about their manipulation of the “real;” according to Jake’s

narrative, the European characters try to repress and displace the

demands of their unconscious while appearing not to have

psychological struggles at all. Jake offers an initial indication of this

trait when he tells Georgette, the prostitute, that he wants to introduce

her to some of his friends. He recalls, “Georgette opened her bag,

made a few passes at her face as she looked in the little mirror, re-

defined her lips with the lipstick, and straightened her hat” (25).

Although this routine is by no means atypical, Jake’s attention to the

details of her toilette is conspicuous in his otherwise sparse narrative.

Jake rarely comments about appearances unless his observations

serve a particular purpose, indicating that Georgette’s beautification

ritual illustrates a larger point for Jake. With the knowledge that she

will be making a first impression on a new group of people, Georgette

tries to modify her appearance. The “passes at her face,” “lipstick,”

and “straightening” of “her hat” all contribute to the process by which

she disguises herself, modifying her own “reality” and presenting

Jake’s friends with a disguised version of herself.

This tendency becomes more obvious in the next chapter, as

Jake is walking to work. He narrates: “I passed the man with the

jumping frogs and the man with the boxer toys. I stepped aside to

avoid walking into the thread to which his girl assistant manipulated
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the boxers. She was standing looking away, the thread in her folded

hands” (43). Here, “the man with the boxer toys” intends to make

money from his deception, and Jake’s awareness of the illusion

therefore distinguishes him from the other, potentially gullible

Americans in the text. He is privileged with the knowledge of “the

thread” which invisibly links the “folded hands” of the “girl assistant”

to “the boxers,” and by unveiling the toy seller’s trick, he encourages

the reader to seek the other moments in which the source of a

behavior and the behavior itself are covertly tricked. He also aligns

himself with the reader as a witness to the process of mediation, since

by telling about “the thread,” Jake both establishes his knowledge

about mediation and educates the reader.

If the tendency to use narrative substitutions overtly is an

innately American behavior, then the process of exposing the

Americanness of that tendency only underscores its validity. Jake

identifies this quality in the other Americans, as well. When Robert

Cohn first meets Bill, for example, Jake recalls: “ ‘I’m awfully glad to

meet you,’ Robert said to Bill. ‘I’ve heard so much about you from Jake

and I’ve read your books” (95). Rather than concealing “the thread”

that connects Robert to his knowledge of Bill, Robert is perfectly frank

about his existing awareness of Bill. He admits to “hearing about” Bill

“from Jake,” and to reading Bill’s “books,” rather than keeping that
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knowledge secret. He does not “make himself up” the way Georgette

does before meeting Jake’s friends, but instead tells Bill directly that

their interactions will all be informed by prior knowledge.

Jake further underscores the value of this kind of openness later,

once he arrives in Burguete. A man who works at Jake’s hotel says,

“You must have been in a motor car.” When Jake asks how he knew,

the man replies, “ ‘I knew you were in a motor-car from the way the

dust was.’ So I gave him two copper coins” (102). This interaction both

mirrors and opposes Jake’s observation of the “man with the boxer

toys.” Whereas the toy-seller earned money by concealing his

manipulations, Jake rewards the man at the hotel for revealing the

source of his discernments. Rather than appearing to have some

mysterious knowledge of Jake’s voyage, the hotel worker offers Jake

both his commentary and its source. In the same way that Robert

volunteers the means by which he already knows about Bill, the man

at the hotel complies with Jake’s request to reveal the means by which

he knows about Jake’s trip. For Jake, this behavior is valuable enough

to give the hotel worker a monetary reward.

Just as The Sun Also Rises is openly aware of its own obscurity

and encourages the reader to seek the information connecting its

language to the “iceberg” of meaning beneath it, Nightwood is also

aware of its difficultness and encourages the reader not to become

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mired in the complexity of the language. Since Eliot and Flanner-

probably among others- had both criticized the impossibility of Barnes’

ability to narrate, the text is infused with self-consciousness, and, in

the guise of dialogue between characters, pre-empts further criticism

from potential detractors. Like Hemingway, Barnes invites the reader

to question the validity of the text’s language from the beginning of

the novel. In the same way that Jake introduces the vocabulary of

“reality,” Nora asks Matthew and Felix at the end of the second

chapter, “ ‘Are you both really saying what you mean, or are you just

talking?’” (Barnes 21) In this way, the text anticipates the reader’s

inclination to doubt its extensive, “sonorous” language. Like Jake, Nora

identifies a source of tension in the text itself, and addresses this

concern before the reader even has time to formulate the question.

When Nora wonders if Matthew is “just talking,” she is both asking a

question as a character, and answering a question as a representative

of the text; by articulating the reader’s question, she demonstrates the

novel’s control over its own complexity.

While the novel accounts for its own circularity initially through

Nora’s voice, Matthew ultimately supplies the most explicit

commentaries. During his first talk with Nora, Matthew notices Nora’s

confusion at the seemingly random progression of his discourse and

says to her, “ ‘I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it’”
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(104). Later in this conversation, he adds, “‘I’m coming by degrees to

the narrative of the one particular night that makes all other nights

seem like something quite decent enough’” (106). Since most of

Matthew’s monologues are erratic and seemingly disorganized, it is not

surprising that Matthew should notice Nora’s impatience with his

discourse and try to reassure her. Nora thereby serves as a stand-in for

the reader at this point in the novel; even though Matthew’s

monologue in these pages is supposedly his response to a question

Nora poses, his reply seems irrelevant and unrelated. Instead of

addressing Nora’s concerns, Matthew departs on an independent quest

for self-expression, leaving both Nora and the reader behind.

Barnes, however, has not lost control of the narrative, and keeps

the reader engaged through Matthew’s reaction to Nora. When he tells

Nora explicitly, “I have a narrative” and “I’m coming by degrees to the

narrative of one particular night,” he tries to reassure Nora, his

listener, and by extension, the reader. By allowing Matthew’s

monologue to comment on itself, however, Barnes invites the reader to

comment as well. The level of the novel’s self-reflexivity must be

balanced carefully; without being aware of its complexity, the novel

risks alienating the reader, but by exposing itself, the novel risks

inviting the reader’s impatience. Barnes keeps this balance in mind,

and when Matthew’s monologue continues on another seemingly

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unrelated tangent, he interrupts himself to say, “ ‘Don’t get restless,

I’m coming back to the point’” (106). Like Jake’s narration in

Hemingway’s novel, Nightwood thereby demonstrates openly its

control over the circularity of its narrative.

Furthermore, in counterpoint to the way that Jake rewards the

hotel worker for explaining the logic of the dust on his jacket, Matthew

often praises himself for achieving the proper balance of self-aware

opaqueness. During his first extended conversation with Nora, he tells

her, “ ‘my mind is so rich that it is always wandering!’” (111) Then

later, while eating dinner with Felix, Matthew uses the word

“maladjusted” to describe Guido. Quickly he adds, “ ‘Wait! I am not

using that word in the derogatory sense at all; in fact my great virtue is

that I never use the derogatory in the usual sense” (124). It becomes

clear in these passages that, through Matthew, the text of Nightwood

values its unusual treatment of language.

At this point, it might be significant to recall that Barnes’ earlier

untitled play was criticized for using beautiful language but an

unnavigable story line. Since the narrative of a play is propelled

exclusively through speech, Eliot and Flanner’s criticisms specifically

address Barnes’ ability to write dialogue. When Matthew boasts that

his conversational “wandering” stems from an overly “rich” mind, and

that his unusual use of the “derogatory” is his “great virtue,” he is

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justifying both his conversation with the other characters, and his

communication with the reader. Both of these comments, of course,

are somewhat ironic; Matthew, in fact, thinks very poorly of himself. In

his introduction, Eliot notes, “At first we only hear the doctor talking;

we do not understand why he talks. Gradually one comes to see that

together with his egotism and swagger – Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-

salt-Dante-O’Connor – he also has a desperate disinterestedness and a

deep humility” (Eliot xix). The “humility” and “disinterestedness”

manifest themselves clearly in Matthew’s self-congratulation. It

becomes clear that the very fact of his self-awareness represents his

humility; nothing could be more ironic and self-conscious than adding

the moniker “mighty grain of salt” to one’s name. In this way, the text,

through Matthew, recognizes both the inherent value and the

limitations of its unusual linguistic choices. The “mind” of the text is

indeed “rich,” but it also understands its tendency to “wander.”

This self-deprecating reflexivity, however, is unique to the

speech of the Americans, and only while they remain in Paris. The first

chapter of the book, which accounts for the history of Felix Volkbein’s

family, contains little dialogue, and even this is fairly straightforward. It

is not until the introduction of the doctor that the conversation begins

to “wander,” and when it does, Felix and the other Europeans become

as lost in Matthew’s language as the reader. Then again at the end of

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the book, when Jenny, Robin and Nora all return to America, the

dialogue ceases. Matthew is given the last, prophetic spoken words,

and the remaining pages are silent except for the barking of Nora’s

dog.

Additionally, the circular speeches and expansive language of

the chapters in between are reserved for Robin, Nora, Matthew and

Jenny, and when Felix and other incidental European characters speak,

they provide the conversation’s stability. Felix is particularly notable

for his direct communication; like his relationship with the Church,

Felix treats speaking deliberately and methodically. His discourse is

straightforward, thereby highlighting the eccentricity of Matthew’s

rants and the illogic of Robin’s outbursts. In this way, Nightwood

allows the reader to distinguish between the author’s conception of the

differences between American expatriate and European language. Like

its American characters, the text is displaced and seeks to be

understood even in an environment of European traditionalism. The

novel situates itself in its era, labeling itself “rich,” “wandering, and

“American,” even as it gives the reader instructions for interpreting

those terms.
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FINALLY CHOOSING LITERARY PARIS

Ultimately, the juxtaposition of The Sun Also Rises and

Nightwood offers an unexpected insight into the expatriate American

literary moment. On a first reading, Hemingway’s novel appears to be

as dry and shallow as Barnes’ novel appears to be impenetrable, and

both provoked significant critical negativity. In addition, Hemingway’s

novel dedicates certain passages to an openly hostile criticism of

homosexuality, while Barnes’ novel unashamedly portrays

homosexuality, lesbianism, transvestitism and gender confusion.

Furthermore, Nightwood does not treat questions of gender and

sexuality as objects in themselves, but rather as one of the bases for

examining a different set of themes and identities. The novels embody

different philosophies of dialogue and narrative; their treatment of

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style, humor, intertextuality, and theme create a sharp contrast. It is

because of these differences, however, that the similarities in their

renditions of Americans in Paris can emerge.

In spite of their differences, the novels agree about the need for

American escape, and the simultaneous appeal and danger of choosing

Paris as the destination. They agree on the usefulness of drinking- both

in the universes of the novels and on the level of the texts themselves-

in developing their narrative schemes. Both explore the way that

alcohol allows the Americans to believe that they can establish some

sort of identity in Paris even as their drunkenness exacerbates their

isolation. Since the question of religion cannot be avoided, both

Hemingway and Barnes allow the desolation of broken faith to create a

sense of alienation that emanates from the characters in the novels

and pervades the texts.

As religion and alcohol collide thematically while contributing

equally to the atmosphere of exile, both narratives reflect on their own

effectiveness. The texts invite the reader to question their narratives,

even as they assert their own value through this self-consciousness.

Both narratives manipulate the reader while allowing the reader to

witness the process of this manipulation, thereby proving a larger point

about American exile in Paris: although the destructive effects of Paris

on the American might be transparent, the expatriate is nevertheless

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drawn into exile, like the reader into the text. Both expatriate

characters and reader experience the sensation of consciously repress

and displace portions of their consciousness in order to survive

psychological exile in Paris. In the world of the novels, the unconscious

as Freud described it can be sensed, and as it approaches the

“doorway” between the two realms, the characters have an enhanced

control over the “admission” of the unsconscious into the conscious.

In his preface to Nightwood, Eliot writes of the novel, “The

miseries that people suffer through their particular abnormalities of

temperament are visible on the surface: the deeper design is that of

the human misery and bondage which is universal” (xxi). This

philosophy applies equally to The Sun Also Rises, in which the

“particular abnormalities of temperament” are even more explicitly

rendered as deflections from the “universal” truth of “human misery

and bondage.” In this way, the differences between the two novels are

not only incidental to a greater unity of theme and message, but are

also essential for demonstrating the commonality of their authors’ –

and characters’ - expatriate experiences.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
 204
Primary Sources

Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood [Introduction by T.S. Eliot]. New York: New

Classics, 1937.

Durkheim, Emile. “Egoistic Suicide.” Suicide. Trans. John A. Spaulding

and George Simpson. New York: The Free Press, 1951. 210-6

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1925.

Freud, Sigmund. “Resistance and Repression.” A General Introduction

to Psychoanalysis. Trans. Joan Riviere. Ed. Ernest Jones, M.D.,
and G. Stanley Hall. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation,
1935. 188, 253-266.

Freud, Sigmund. “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” On War,
Sex, and Neurosis. Ed. Sander Katz. New York: Arts and Science
Press, 1947. 245-76

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 1926.

Secondary Sources by Chapter

I.

Barone, Michael. The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work
Again. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2001. 223.

Croly, Herbert. “Henry James and His Countrymen.” The Question of

Henry James. Ed. F.W. Dupee. New York: Octagon Books, 1973. 28-
39.

Grobbel, Michaela M. Enacting Past and Present: The Memory Theaters

of Djuna Barnes, Ingeborg Bachman, and Marguerite Duras.
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004. 19-23.

Hatton, Timothy J., and Williamson, Jeffrey G. The Age of Mass

Migration. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 32-
40.

Kulischer, Eugene M. Europe on the Move. New York: Columbia

 205
University Press, 1948. 217-8.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Da Capo Press,

New Ed edition, 1999. 2-26, 50-79.

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

15-21.

II.

Baxter, Charles. “A Self-Consuming Light: Nightwood and the Crisis of

Modernism,” Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 3,
Number 5, 1974. 1175-1187.

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