Nightwood in On Paths Unknown

Dec 07, 2015 Ronald Morton rated it it was amazing

Shelves: dalkey-archive, by-women, half-of-1001-books, read-in-2016

We swoon with the thickness of our own tongue when we say, ‘I love you,’ as in the eye of a child lost a long while will be found the contraction of that distance - a child going small in the claws of a beast, coming furiously up the furlongs of the iris. We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cu

We swoon with the thickness of our own tongue when we say, ‘I love you,’ as in the eye of a child lost a long while will be found the contraction of that distance - a child going small in the claws of a beast, coming furiously up the furlongs of the iris. We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to despair. Life, the permission to know death. We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it. 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.

Third time is apparently the charm for this, as I finally feel like I grasped the majority of what Barnes is doing throughout my reading. I'm not sure if it's a growing familiarity with the text, or this specific version - the Dalkey version is the original version prior to Eliot and Coleman's edits and suggestions to get the book past the censors - and it would take a fourth read (going back to my NDP paperback) to suss out the truth of it. That doesn't mean it all is clear - I particularly like some of the textual endnotes that quote Barnes about specific passages where she claims the intent is "obvious" but she still restates the line in a different way, each time her restatement does nothing to un-obscure the meaning.

I'm not sure if Barnes was coming from the same place as Joyce, but it strikes me that Barnes appears to make the same connection between obscurity and the night that Joyce did when he was intentionally obscuring passages in the Wake. There is this idea of unknowability tied in with the night - Barnes has O'Connor speak to this in the "Watchman, what of the Night?" chapter.

There is a great deal of anguish in this book, especially around failing/failed destructive relationships - the book is in part written in response to Barnes' failed relationship with Thelma Wood - and the pain Barnes pours out on these pages is at times overwhelming. I'm not sure that one could describe this book as a "joy" to read, but I'm in awe of it each time I pick it up. There are chapters and passages that are merely well written, but so much of this book is staggeringly good, with paragraph after paragraph of prose poem brilliance, I'll likely continue to revisit this as the years go by.

And this version is out of print, but well worth tracking down. Not just for the version itself, but for the absolutely indispensable appendices (and a great introduction) that track the textual changes through versions, provide in depth background into the changes, and (finally) actual annotations for the text. The last portion of the book is a reproduction of the only remaining fragments (72 pages) of the earlier editions of Nightwood. This really is a lovely scholarly edition of this work, I wish more books of its kind existed.

"Now, [...] the end - - mark my words - - now nothing, but wrath and weeping!"

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Feb 24, 2016 Ronald Morton rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book has a lot going for it. It contains, at a sentence level, some of the best prose I've ever come across. T. S. Eliot, in his introduction to the book (oh, yeah, Eliot introduces it, that's another thing it has going for it) say that it will "appeal primarily to readers of poetry", and it does have that impeccably curated feel of poetry in its prose. The character of the Doctor (Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor) is in an incredible literary creation - much as Zeno in Zeno' ...more

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