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Original Publication: 1928<\/p>\n
Original Publisher: Boni & Liveright<\/p>\n
First Dalkey Archive Edition: 1990<\/p>\n
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This is a baggy novel of excess, and as someone who finds it nearly impossible to keep the thread\u2014or develop a coherent thesis (any and all AI grading systems would plant my writings firmly in the C to C+ range)\u2014and who, by natural gift, or curse, likes to overstuff every post with footnotes and asides and self-references, I\u2019m willing to bet that this appreciation of Barnes\u2019s playfully polyamorous novel of Wendall Ryder, his mother Sophia, his wife Amelia, his lover Kate (aka Kate-Careless), and all their myriad kids, isn\u2019t going to follow from point A to Z, but instead follow a more natural path of observation and exclamation, admiration and exhalation, repetition and repetition, all with the singular (maybe I can<\/em> stick to something<\/em>?) goal of convincing anyone who braves these paragraphs to read this book, or, if nothing else, at least skip-around in it.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n I\u2019m convinced that Djuna Barnes is about to have her (overdue and deserved) renaissance.<\/p>\n By sheer coincidence (and laws about public domain), not only is Dalkey reissuing Ryder <\/em>in a splashy new \u201cEssentials Edition\u201d this summer\u2014with a new printing of Ladies Almanack <\/em>coming early next year\u2014but New York Review Books Classics is bringing out a Collected Stories <\/em>in 2024 (?\u2014as I write this, I can\u2019t find a proper listing), with an introduction by Merv\u00e9 Emre.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n And thus, the pieces are in place and the stage is set. But Barnes’s lasting appeal goes far beyond business machinations of the marketplace. She was a singular writer, with an approach and style so many readers of today will likely delight in discovering. The Lispector rediscovery comes to mind, although, on a stylistic level, Barnes is frequently compared to Nathalie Sarraute, another author ripe for rediscovery\u2014and another Dalkey author.<\/p>\n Barnes is primarily known for her 1936 masterpiece, Nightwood<\/em>, which is published in paperback by New Directions, and in a different, hardcover, version by Dalkey Archive, and is probably the only one of her books regularly taught in college classes across the U.S. And yet! She was a pioneer, perfect for the academy. A Rabelaisian writer, who, in the words of Paul West\u2014whose afterword deserves to be read by all and sundry\u2014\u201cwanted to undo <\/em>all readers, to deflower them in one way or another, to stop them from expecting fiction to behave like some well-bred social organism.\u201d He goes on in that same afterword to state:<\/p>\n Early, she discovered the principle of addictiveness, meaning that she could always add something to something else, not because the first something was inadequate but because the observing or defining mind required such elbowroom. Her writing delineates, often with mordant accuracy, but she bloats it too, just to tell us she is there, serving the cause of plenty. She is among those rare souls, the phrase-makers, to whom a phrase no one else could have dreamed up is more precious than whole sequences of action or talk. Her work is there to evince her own mind, and to overface ours. Sometimes you have to read her with tweezers, other times with a trowel and a scoop, especially when she has let someone loose in a soliloquy. I think she sometimes thought of the novel as the supremist form of soliloquy, which is to say the novel at its closest to poetry. She has a superb sense of rhythm, so much so that she hears the rhythm long before the words arrive and the rhythm brings the combinations into being. Her prose evokes Wendell\u2019s longing for \u201can extra large English pudding with whacking diamond-shaped goblets of suet shot through.\u201d Above all, she is the virtuoso of the sentence, the ability to make which kept her going to the age of ninety. She built with bricks when others trifled with straw. She remained intense. She attuned herself to the constant ambience of heroic voice. She was serious, critical, and terminal, like an illness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n *<\/p>\n Djuna Barnes was born in 1892, and was a highly sought after journalist and illustrator\u2014the Dalkey edition of Ryder <\/em>includes almost two-dozen of these illustrations\u2014who moved to Paris at the start of the 1920s (like some other American authors you may have heard of, who are taught in an array of English classes), and had a run of consecutive works\u2014The Book of Repulsive Women<\/em> (1915), A Book <\/em>(1923), Ryder<\/em> (1928), Ladies Almanack<\/em> (1928), Nightwood <\/em>(1936\u2014the <\/em>year of grand literary works), and The Antiphon <\/em>(1958)\u2014that\u2019s almost unprecedented. (And, like West alludes to in his afterword, isn\u2019t everything she left behind: she died at 90 and wrote for her whole life.)<\/p>\n The \u201cplot\u201d of Ryder<\/em>\u2014<\/em>so much as there is one\u2014is basically what I put in my opening ramble of a paragraph: It’s set around the turn of the nineteenth century, and features Sophia Grieve Ryder, a scandalous character who marries over and again, and breeds like her fore-mother (who had fourteen kids of her own), including by giving birth to one Wendall, the second of her sons, who, in England with his mother, meets Amelia, and eventually brings her back to America to be his wife. They wed. They start procreating. He immediately gets involved with Kate\u2014who has her own non-traditional past of lovers and whatnot\u2014and the three (four, counting Sophia) live together as separate from society as they can be (for not only is their bigamist\/poly-situation a thing <\/em>with the locals, but they don\u2019t believe in sending their kids to school, which, again, pisses off the law-abiders), raising their eight (I believe that\u2019s right) kids, having philosophical (and comic) conversations about love and life, squabbling with one another, roaming and repenting, and just making do.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a great fable\u2014a playbook if you will\u2014for our troubled times. For the freedom-seekers looking for liberation and to transcend traditionally imposed, and most definitely male-centric, models of being.[3]<\/a> Although incredibly complicated\u2014no one’s relationship in this book is clean or “chill”\u2014there’s a thread of outlaw joy from the deconstruction of societal assumptions that is both logical and a potential pathway to more open, human-to-human, relationships.<\/p>\n But putting aside the sociological import of the book and its desire to break free from everything\u2014including expectations of what constitutes a “novel”\u2014I want to focus on the fun, free-flowing frolic of Barnes\u2019s prose, which, in every way, on every page, throws itself to the front of the stage, taking precedent over plot and “moral messages.\u201d<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n This book cycles through styles like a postmodern Dreamachine, entrancing and dazzling the reader in a way that\u2014maybe it\u2019s our age, our attention spans, or maybe it always was this way\u2014forces one to read and reread, to figure out how to parse the sentences, or, more accurately, how to hang on<\/em> to the paragraph’s momentum, and, to throw out a reference point, although it predates Miss MacIntosh, My Darling <\/em>by decades, there\u2019s an affinity, a sort of roller-coaster vibe that rewards with every swerve, with every loop, every phrasing that feels anachronistic, or maybe stodgy? on the surface, but is just evidence of a high-wire act that\u2019s almost inconceivable if you\u2019re wedded (poly reference totally intended) to today\u2019s dominant form or American neo-realism.<\/p>\n Let me try to explain.<\/p>\n But first, let me try and scare you off.<\/p>\n Or, rather, let me let Barnes simply show off. Here\u2019s the opening of Chapter 1, \u201cJesus Mundane,\u201d subtitled \u201cBy Way of Introduction,\u201d which is wonderfully <\/i>not for those who blush at unbridled ambitiously\u00a0Biblical\u00a0prose:<\/p>\n Go not with fanatics who see beyond thee and thine<\/strong>, and beyond the coming and the going of thee and thine, and yet beyond the ending thereof,\u2014thy life and the lives that thou begettest, and the lives that shall spring from them, world without end,\u2014for such need thee not<\/strong>, nor see thee, nor know thy lamenting, so confounded are they with thy damnation and the damnation of thy offspring<\/strong>, and the multiple damnation of those multitudes that shall be of thy race begotten, unto the number of fishes in thin waters, and unto the number of fishes in great waters. Alike are they distracted with thy salvation and the salvation of thy people.<\/strong> Go thou, then, to lesser men, who have for all things unfinished and uncertain, a great capacity<\/strong>, for these shall not repulse thee, thy physical body and thy temporal agony, thy weeping and thy laughing and thy lamenting. Thy rendezvous is not with the Last Station, but with small comforts<\/strong>, like to apples in the hand, and small cups quenching, and words that go neither here nor there, but traffic with the outer ear, and gossip at the gates of thy insufficient agony. [Boldface mine.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n First time through, that can be daunting. A clause-heavy opening sentence coming in at 102 words, which include three thee<\/em>\u2019s, two thy<\/em>\u2019s, and a begettest<\/em> (!). Also, a lot of damnation. So much damnation. And a phrase set off by em-dashes that sounds like it\u2019s coming right out of the mouth of a preacher: \u201cThy life and the lives that thou begettest, and the lives that shall spring from them, world without end\u201d . . . You can almost hear the unwritten \u201cAmen!\u201d)<\/p>\n But, like every great book, it\u2019s demonstrating how you can learn to read it, letting you in on what this book is all about.<\/p>\n Go not with fanatics who see beyond thee and thine, for such need thee not, confounded as they are with thy damnation and the damnation of thy offspring.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In short:<\/p>\n Hey, Wendall? Tell all those moralizing townies hating on your life, your wife, your mistress, and your kids <\/em>to go fuck themselves! And don\u2019t worry: those shit sippers aren\u2019t actually paying attention to you: they\u2019re all about \u2018salvation.’ \ud83d\ude44 Hang out with the riffraff.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Again, this is the backbone of the \u201cplot\u201d that a reader might like to know up front; off this clothesline hang tons of asides, set pieces, and musings that aren’t always \u201cfunctional\u201d in a strict “advance the plot” sense, but instead tend to be where the fun and frolicking is at.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n *<\/em><\/p>\n I’ll admit: Returning to\u00a0Ryder\u00a0<\/em>almost a quarter decade after the first (and only) time I read it, one of my initial thoughts was, “oh, shit, this book is going to be\u00a0difficult<\/em>.”<\/p>\n Ryder <\/em>is a novel that can be \u201cdifficult\u201d to read because of the conflict between current patterns of speech and communicative gestures (texts, Instagram reels, emoji, directness), and the more baroque, labyrinthine way of articulating a journey instead of a message<\/em> evidenced in every paragraph of the book, a style which tends to require such patient parsing. The reader has to attune themselves. And, frequently, be willing to release their grip on rules of concision and grammar (Struck & White <\/em>can fuck themselves with those shit sipping townfolk of above) to allow a voice <\/em>to lead them.<\/p>\n And sometimes, a literal voice helps.<\/p>\n