Quantcast
Channel: Notes from 21 South Street » Fiction
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 5

From the Archives: Djuna Barnes

0
0

“Reading Djuna Barnes is like reading a foreign language, which you understand,” said Marianne Moore about her friend and contemporary near the end of Barnes’s career. “The Perfect Murder,” printed by The Harvard Advocate in its 1942 75th Anniversary Issue, exemplifies the curious linguistic prowess that Moore praises. In fact, the study of “foreign [languages], which you understand” is the very occupation of Barnes’s protagonist, Professor Anatol Profax, a dialectologist (specialist of tongues). A crossbreed between Middlemarch’s intellectually stubborn Casaubon and Baudelaire’s voyeuristic flaneurs, Profax harbors his cherished work in the crook of his elbow as he haunts the streets with a removed aspect and attentive ears. He records the “figures of speech and preferred exclamations in all walks of life” in order to classify species of speakers. He bunch-indexes (Barnes’s term) the inarticulate of England, France, and America as “The Inveterates” and devises other groupings—among them “Excitable Spinsters” and “The Impulsive”—along lines of fanaticism, eloquence, and verbosity. Profax’s scrupulous science literalizes what Moore recognized as Barnes’s genius: she paid close attention to the subtleties of expression, and did not underestimate the potential of a single language to spawn multitudinous variations.

Djuna Barnes lived first in Greenwich Village, and then in Paris, during both cities’ bohemian heydays. It was in Paris that she became acquainted with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, like-minded contemporaries who together heralded the rise of the avant-garde. By the time “The Perfect Murder,” her last published story, appeared in The Harvard Advocate in 1942, Barnes was an established author. Her reputation at the time (at least within the Advocate) can be surmised from her inclusion in the anniversary issue, which the editors dedicated to “new material from the important figures in literature today.”

The Perfect Murder

 

The Perfect Murder 2

The Perfect Murder 3

The Perfect Murder 4

 

By the time she wrote “The Perfect Murder,” Barnes had evidently honed her quirky voice and experimental aesthetic. The story reaches its surrealist climax when Professor Profax meets the “Elephant Woman.” What might become a romantic affair spirals into a scene of absurdity. Profax is preoccupied with the woman’s lips, but only insofar as they articulate a language that transcends his categorical science. She speaks in paradox and nonsense: “I’m a little knock-kneed … and I want to be good.” The Elephant Woman is extraordinary, an aberrant speaker, like none Profax has met or studied. But rather than cherish his discovery of a beautiful outlier, he draws a slit through her throat and so firmly delineates the categories of his dialectology. Having done the deed, the stubborn tongue-academic realizes that has forgotten to learn the single word that would have distinguished the woman from his other human specimens: her name. In the end, Professor Profax remains regretfully unchanged, regarding his human subject as a scientist would, from “behind the mists of … two sheets of glass.”

In reference to Nightwood, one of her most renowned works, T. S. Eliot commended that Barnes’s “prose has the prose rhythm that is prose style, and the musical pattern which is not that of verse.” Djuna Barnes’s peculiar rhythm and musicality shines through in “The Perfect Murder,” whose ethereal “Elephant Woman” seems at times to speak in a nonsensical logic guided by sound alone: “It makes all the difference in the world. I am as aboveboard as the devil. I’d like some caramels.” Statements like this, delicious despite their incomprehensibility, pervade the text, contributing to the specific and mildly foreign effect of Barnes’s prose. We must wonder about the romantic escapades of Djuna Barnes; clearly she, following in the footsteps of her Professor Profax, made a “Mistress of Sound.”

 

By Liza Batkin ’15



Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 5

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images