from Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 21, Number 1

Circuses and Spectacles: Public Culture in Nightwood

Laura Winkiel

University of Notre Dame

Laura Winkiel, "Circuses and Spectacles: Public Culture in Nightwood," Journal of Modern Literature, XXI, 1 (Fall 1997), pp. 7-28. ©Foundation for Modern Literature, 1997.

---

Permission to Copy

You may download, save, or print for your personal use without permission. If you wish to disseminate the electronic article, or to produce multiple copies for classroom or educational use, please request permission from:

Copyright Clearance Center
Professional Relations Department
222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers MA 01923

FAX: 978-750-4470/4744
Web address: www.copyright.com

For other permissions, use our online reprint request form.
 

---

The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

--Walter Benjamin "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" ¹

Whereas you are of a clean race, of a too eagerly washing people, and this leaves no road for you. The brawl of the Beast leaves a path for the Beast. You wash your brawl away with every thought, with every gesture, with every conceivable emollient and savon, and expect to find your way again.

--Dr. Matthew Mighty O'Connor in Nightwood ²

---

Stage-drops from Munich, cherubim from Vienna, a spinet from England, ecclesiastical hangings from Rome, Venetian chandeliers from the Flea Fair, and a miscellaneous collection of music boxes from various countries--all these items collected by Robin Vote and Nora Flood, the lesbian lovers in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, correspond to the actual inventory of Djuna Barnes's flat on rue St.-Romain in Paris during the 1920s. But Barnes broke from the strictly autobiographical setting and added to Robin's and Nora's apartment some circus chairs and a pair of wooden horses bought from an old merry-go-round.³

Barnes added the circus not simply to the fictional apartment decor, but as a key element throughout Nightwood. All of Nightwood's central characters negotiate their relationship to the circus over the course of the novel. Nora Flood is employed as a circus publicist and meets her lover, Robin Vote, at the circus; Robin is a "beast turning human" (p. 37); the transvestite Matthew O'Connor, an unlicensed gynecologist, frequents the circus and narrates perverse, erotic circus stories to his listeners; Felix Volkbien, an assimilating Jew who has adopted the false title of an Austrian baron, enjoys the circus because he feels at home among the "splendid and reeking falsification" of the circus performers. The circus performers took their titles "to make their public life (and it was all they had) mysterious and perplexing" (p. 11).

Barnes contrasts the mysterious and perplexing public life of the circus performers to the alienating effects of spectacle as they are figured by Robin Vote, a contrast that critiques the transformation of public culture from local, heterogenous sites of entertainment to the capitalized, homogenized culture industry.⁴ On the level of plot, Robin's solitary wanderings are an aspect of her self-destructive alcoholic behavior, yet the language used to convey her character and her explicit rejection of the circus (she flees the circus and later abandons her circus-decorated apartment) link her to Barnes's earlier critiques of mass culture spectacle. Barnes interrogated aspects of mass culture as early in her career as 1915, when she interviewed Arthur Voegtlin, the artistic director of the Hippodrome, an enormous theatre that subsumed the circus into its spectacular displays. This historical transformation from circus to spectacle rematerializes in Nightwood as its hybrid (what Barnes terms "Elizabethan") aesthetic provides the theatre for the combination of spectacle and circus.⁵ This aesthetic compensates for mass culture's alienating effects even while, at the narrative level, it expresses the loss and isolation endured by the main characters. Nightwood concerns itself with larger historical transformations even as it is also a loosely autobiographical novel of Barnes's relationship with Thelma Wood. Reading Barnes's early journalism within its context--the decade of 1915-1925, in which sweeping changes in the entertainment industry occurred--both makes this personal point and situates historically Nightwood's representations of circus and spectacle and their ability to affect public culture. ⁶

Between 1913 and 1931, Barnes supported herself financially as a journalist by writing for mass periodicals and daily newspapers such as the New York Press, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Vanity Fair, Theatre Guild Magazine, McCalls, and The New Yorker. She interviewed both directors--Florenz Ziegfield, the producer of the Ziegfield Follies; the early filmmaker D.W. Griffith; and Arthur Voegtlin, the artistic director of the Hippodrome--and actors, singers, and dancers in film and on the Vaudeville, Music Hall, and Broadway stages. ⁷ Barnes's interviews document the fulcrum of the shift from live, interactive forms of entertainment to mass culture spectacles. During the pivotal decade of 1915-1925, live entertainment, especially American circus, music hall, and vaudeville, succumbed to the increasing economic and popular pressure of film. For example, circus street parades almost entirely disappeared during the 1920s.⁸ By 1928, there were only four theatres in the United States offering vaudeville without films. ⁹ Barnes's interviews are hardly objective regarding this shift: she provides a barbed narrative of the disastrous trajectory of Alla Nazimova's career from stage to film, and she presents ironically Voegtlin's authoritarian rule over the Hippodrome. ¹⁰ In these interviews, Barnes critiques what was lost when public culture underwent its transformation from the rowdy, participatory crowds that attended popular cultural events to the modern audience of the spectacle. Implicit in the entertainment industry is the lure of attracting larger audiences and, by so doing, gaining greater profit. The place which Barnes seeks to recover, then, has its beginnings in the nineteenth century, before circus and vaudeville owners, motivated by profit, demanded that the shows be cleaned up in order to make them acceptable to the middle classes.

* * * *

In 1842, P. T. Barnum opened his American Museum in the heart of New York City. The museum featured freak shows that fascinated its audience. The freak show expanded the known range of human forms. Its freaks displayed the limits of body size (Tom Thumb, the Connecticut Giantess), interrogated gender differences (the bearded lady), demonstrated cultural constructions of the body (the tattooed man), blurred the boundary between human and animal (the Fejee Mermaid, the Dog-Faced Boy, and the Siamese Missing Link), and questioned individuality (Siamese twins or, more freakishly, the undeveloped twin embedded in the viable other twin). ¹¹ The freaks required interpretation from their audience, challenging it to decipher their grotesque human forms as part of the social body. In contrast to the mass culture spectacle, which presented an unchallenging, pleasant, uniform show, the circus broadened the social horizon to include the most outrageous specimens of humanity. The circus audience was a collective, interactive public that was ethnically diverse, class-specific, socially unruly, sexually mixed, and mutually desiring. ¹² The performers adapted their show depending on the location (country, small town, or city), the class (farmers, shopkeepers, or industrial workers), and the temperament (hostile or welcoming) of the audience. As such, the circus was uneven, local, and contested.

To understand why Barnes, nonetheless, uses the circus to suggest a different kind of public culture, it is necessary to see how that public had become homogenized. The circus was cleaned up and assimilated at an earlier date than vaudeville. P.T. Barnum's American Museum at its inception "featured animal acts, acrobats, ventriloquists, melodramas, panoramas, notable persons, and men and women clad in revealing tights--dubbed 'living statuary.' Aware of the theatre's reputation for immorality, and perhaps of the prurient interpretations of living statuary, Barnum claimed that he purged his shows of sin, and banished drinking and prostitution from his hall." ¹³ Meanwhile, vaudeville or "voix de ville," voices of the city, drew its acts from the rowdy Bowery shows, concert salons where scenes of female and male prostitution, crime, and drunkenness ran rampant. Tony Pastor, the founding father of vaudeville, began to clean up his vaudeville shows for the benefit of family audiences in the 1870s by moving his theatre from the Bowery to uptown. In 1900, the new vaudeville magnate B.F. Keith, whose theatres were nicknamed "the Sunday School Circuit," displayed signs warning his performers that:

Your act must be free from all vulgarity and suggestiveness in words, action, and costume . . . all vulgar, double-meaning and profane words and songs must be cut out of your act before the first performance. . . . Such words as Liar, Slob, Son-of-A-Gun, Devil, Sucker, Damn and all other words unfit for the ears of ladies and children, also any reference to questionable streets, resorts, localities, and bar-rooms are prohibited under fine of immediate discharge.¹⁴

The cleaner, more wholesome acts appealed to wider audiences and reduced the pressure from vice reform agencies. Although vaudeville retained its heterogenous, local appeal even after its cleanup, the bureaucratic and hierarchical owners, in search of ever-greater profits, eventually replaced vaudeville with film, which was more reliable and controllable. Mary Cass Canfield, writing for The New Republic in 1922, defends vaudeville's threatened public space:

A vaudeville comedian in America is as close to the audience as Harlequin and Puncinello were to the Italian publics of the eighteenth century. He is, like them, an apparent, if not always an actual improviser. He jokes with the orchestra leader, he tells his hearers fabricated, confidential tales about the management, the other actors, the whole entrancing world behind the scenes; he addresses planted confederates in the third row, or the gallery and proceeds to make fools of them to the joy of all present. He beseeches his genial, gum-chewing listeners to join in the chorus of the song; they obey in a zestful roar. The audience becomes a part of the show and enjoys it. And there is community art for you. . . . Mr. Percy Mackaye can write pageants, celebrating civic virtue and so amply supplied with parts that they can only be acted by an entire township; he will never achieve the unforced and happy communion which reigns within the fifty-cent walls of the local Keith's and Proctor's. ¹⁵

Canfield's opposition to pageants, a form similar to the Hippodrome's spectacles, stems from their taming effect on the audience. The spectacle's actors made no effort to communicate with their audience, which gazed with wonder at the spectacle, its sheer immensity of scale and exotic costuming, scenery, and animals. As vaudeville's rowdy jokes and interactions vanished, so did a public that was communicative and participatory.

Profitability came by attracting larger audiences. Large vaudeville theatres catered to assimilating families of varied class backgrounds. The assimilating audience learned how to become a homogenous group of spectators. In 1915, Keith theatre employees carried cards printed with the following request: "Please don't talk during the acts, as it annoys those about you, and prevents a perfect hearing of the entertainment." Other requests admonished against any other sign of appreciation besides applause, such as laughing too loudly or smoking. ¹⁶ The audience learned the cultural practice of a presumably more mature mode of reception--the segregation between the spectator and the entertainment spectacle--achieved by fixing their gaze on the show and remaining quiet. ¹⁷ A how-to-run-a-vaudeville-theatre manual by Edward Renton, published in 1918, instructed theatre managers to expect "all classes of people" and to plan accordingly:

The clientele should be sufficiently well known to the treasurer to enable him to avoid seating persons of questionable repute next to those of high social standing; he should be careful not to seat the mechanic in overalls, who now and then strolls up to the window, in a section where he may be conspicuous to his own discomfort or to the displeasure of those about him. A drunken man or woman should be absolutely refused a ticket. This individual falls asleep during the show or snores; or he insists on talking to the persons seated next to him, or becomes ill. . . . Passes which call for seats in the best sections should not be issued to individuals who are likely to smell "garlicky" or be poorly dressed. ¹⁸

Vaudeville owners consolidated their empires by catering to the middle classes. They avoided middle class displeasure without losing the working classes. Managers rewarded working class spectators whose behavior corresponded to the ideal of a homogenous group of spectators: "a tense, well-knit, immobile mass of human faces, with eyes fixed alertly on the screen." ¹⁹ Embodied particularities were to be hidden and discouraged: clothes that displayed working or poor bodies, sleeping or drunken bodies, and ethnic "garlicky" bodies.

* * * *

Circus and vaudeville increasingly became residual forms of popular entertainment which were embedded in commercial entertainments. In 1915, Barnes wrote two newspaper articles about the Hippodrome, a crucial instance of the transition from circus to spectacle because it combined elements of circus, vaudeville, tableau, opera, and burlesque into spectacular extravaganzas. The spectacle bridged the two entertainment forms by incorporating circus and vaudeville elements into live but distanced performances in which the audience merely looks on and does not participate. The spectacles were so amazing that they often seemed to stun the audience into obedient, mute subjection. Their high-priced tickets attracted a mostly middle-class audience. When the Hippodrome was built in 1905 in New York City, it was then one of the largest theatres in the world. While "Specs," or spectacles, had been performed for at least three decades prior to this, the Hippodrome's spectacles were choreographed on a stage that was a technological wonder. It was 110 feet deep and 200 feet wide, a span big enough to hold six-hundred people easily. The stage presented marvelous special effects: streams, lakes, waterfalls, oceans. Its spectacles ranged from H.M.S. Pinafore, featuring a life-sized pirate ship, to Wars of the World and The Romance of a Hindoo Princess, ²⁰ all of them designed to be performed for huge crowds. The story enfolded as grand troupes of performers and animals paraded through an elaborate stage setting. Barnum and Bailey's equally extravagant Cinderella, staged at Madison Square Garden in 1916, required a cast of 1,370 (including sixty clowns), 735 horses and five herd of elephants. ²¹ The inability to see the characters' facial expressions hardly mattered because it was not psychological motivation that moved the plot. Instead, audience foreknowledge of what was meant by "romance," "war," or "Cinderella" created a frame of reference that did not depend on intricacies of character or plot. ²² These familiar stories were presented as amazing spectacles and consistently attracted sell-out crowds. However, the spectacle eventually became obsolete precisely because it tended to be slow-moving and massive rather than cinematically thrilling or psychological. In 1923, the Hippodrome was sold to Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO), the film company, which kept the Hippodrome alive until 1939 by using it as a theatre to show first-run films mixed with small vaudeville shows. ²³

In her interview with Arthur Voegtlin, the artistic director of the Hippodrome, Barnes moves backward from the spectacle's familiar displays to the enigma of its production. She refrains from reproducing a popular view of the spectacle: the frame of reference that the audience already knows. Rather, she interviews the director and walks around the empty theatre in order to reveal to her readers another, less accessible view of the spectacle. Her article is titled "Interviewing Arthur Voegtlin Is Something Like Having a Nightmare." In it, Barnes attempts to get Voegtlin to reveal the sources of his ideas, but he refuses to reveal anything about the spectacles. He tells her that the shows which he creates are just "a study in anatomy played by the masses for the classes." ²⁴ During the interview, the anatomies of the performers' massed bodies are absent; for neither a rehearsal nor a performance takes place. What we are left with is the anatomy of the stage apparatus, the organizational structure of the spectacle. The biggest difference between the Hippodrome and the circus is the technology of the stage production. Rather than rely on the freaks, human daredevils, and clowns to interact with the audience, the Hippodrome depends on Voegtlin to produce technological wonders in which the circus is merely one element. See, for instance, Figure 1, in which Jumbo the circus elephant is embedded in and rather overwhelmed by the spectacle. Like the cinematic apparatus which supplements human visual abilities, the Hippodrome stage supplies a fantastic organizing principle that supplements live performances: "The whole flooring is a mass of traps and steel bridges," wrote a theatre critic. ²⁵ Figure 2 provides an illustration of the Hippodrome's stage technology.

In the interview, Voegtlin dismisses the spectacles which he creates: "It's the classes that don't want to think that love mass work. . . . We drill the mass, and the mass masters the drill, and that's about all" (pp. 81-82). He insists on the show's compulsory meaning--the spectacles are mechanical and alienated from the workers who produce it and from the masses who perform it at a distance from the audience. Voegtlin reproduces the detachment of the audience by generalizing the show to mean "a drill" of "massed bodies," and the "display of limbs." The viewers are already familiar with the plot's meanings, and so they are encouraged to consume the spectacle with a preconception of what the product will be. Voegtlin's interpretation does not rob mass culture audiences of intertextual or resistant readings, but it does emphasize the homogenizing effect of the spectacle's commodified form. The spectacle's preliminary promotions and generic precursors encourage a predetermined apprehension of the spectacle. ²⁶ In addition, the viewing public learns to watch quietly the already familiar spectacle which is presented as a prepackaged, uniform product.

Furthermore, Barnes shows that this uniform, commodified entertainment casts the performers into mechanized, anonymous roles and hides the labor of the behind-the-scenes production. No performers stand out. Voegtlin says matter-of-factly: "All girls get about the same position, and so there is no jealousy and also, incidently, there is no real great acting" (p. 81). The show is reduced to its technology. Its human component is mechanized and endlessly reproducible. Each limb fits in with the others; the show erases specificity. Show girls never become stars although they "drill like animals" (p. 82). But Barnes takes a more sympathetic view of the girls. She wonders about their lives after the performances are over. She speculates about the fragments of costumes that lie about, wondering what dim memories they hold of the anonymous heads and bodies that wore them. She evokes pathos for the empty disappearing diving pit, into which girls dive and then swim through an underwater secret passage to re-emerge offstage: "Down, down they go . . . down into the dark and the cold" (p. 80). Worst of all:

Under lights that glowed like oppressed glowworms trellised in, and under the strain of the hums of many machines, some twenty tailors and dressmakers sat, backs toward us, like people in a dream. They did not turn around at our approach, they never missed a stitch in the long seam, they never lost a rhythmic pressure of the booted foot. They turned and sewed and turned again, and always silently, but for the sound of the wheel--the machine went on--a half-circle of half-finished garments for the season 1915.

The arc lights sweated clammily above and shone ingloriously down upon the ceaseless watchers over a thing not complete, ever catching up to a perfection that would never be quite understood as it lay in the brain and heart of the "Silver King." (pp. 82-83)

Voegtlin, the "Silver King," assumes absolute authority over his employees. They labor to achieve what he has planned. The show is a projection of his ideas and does not depend on the performers' particular abilities and creativity. The sweat-shop work leaves the tailors and seamstresses "like people in a dream." Moving like automatons and sleepwalkers, the workers are alienated from consciousness. The description reverses human and technical attributes: the lights "sweat" and show their misery, while the workers toil like machines. Barnes's rhetorical strategy is comparable to the anatomy of the stage and the way in which the technological apparatus takes on a life of its own. This description anticipates the gaze of the camera and the alienation of filmic actors from their audience.

Voegtlin is contemptuous of the spectacle. He is its master and presents the spectacle as a commodity fetish: "We drill the mass, and the mass masters the drill, and that's about all" (p. 82). The spectacle is reduced to a drill, a repetitive communication. The drill ensures that reception of the spectacle is condensed into foregrounded elements that meet the consumer's preconceptions and desires. But not every viewer reacts in the same way; indeed, Barnes is not satisfied with so reductive a reading. She wants to push at Voegtlin's inscrutability to force him to reveal the reductiveness of commodity fetishism. She asks him:

"How do you get your ideas?" . . . .

"Upon the elevated--in trains--along the road."

"Is that true?"

"Yes, no."

"Please, Mr. Voegtlin, be nice."

"I am nice, the nicest man in New York--everyone likes me."

"Please, Mr. Voegtlin, I want you to talk about the stage." (p. 80)

She prods Voegtlin's insistently reductive readings of the spectacles by pressing him to talk about the stage. Finally, he gives in: "Ah yes. Nice place, the stage--only, if I had an affection for a cat I would not let it chase a stage rat; if I had a pet flower I would not let it breathe stage air; if I loved a woman I would not let her know me as a stage genius" (p. 80). Barnes forces Voegtlin's reading of the spectacle as a drill to open up into a play of meaning. The chain of metaphoric substitutions (cat, flower, woman: all can be pets in some way) undercuts the spectacle: in place of one fixed meaning, he suggests that feminized "pets" may go astray on the stage. In Voegtlin's new picture of the stage, the mechanized, anonymous space becomes a place of desire and corruption. Voegtlin's insistence on the spectacle as a drill gives way to a fear that the stage may encourage a flux of substitutable and perversely pleasurable meanings. Barnes supplies the circus-like atmosphere that is missing from Voegtlin's reductive reading in order to stress the unpredictability and heterogeneity of live performance. The actors and animals may at times upset the director's creation of a stable, uniform, commodified entertainment.

In addition to dismissing his spectacles, Voegtlin does not like the audience for which he creates. Indeed, what he wants to produce are "weird, wonderful, Elizabethan things, with poetry of conception, with wizardry of movement, with a glowing, growing, wonderful lure. . . . And I'd play to empty seats" (p. 81). Voegtlin wants to produce complex, difficult performances but that would be at the expense of losing his audience; he cannot combine mass culture appeal with artistic integrity. For him, the two terms are mutually exclusive, the production of entertainment as a commodity is not art. His solution is to reproduce older forms of art. "Elizabethan things" suggests a time when art was produced through a patronage system and was relatively free from commodification.

Barnes too favors an Elizabethan aesthetic. Unlike Voegtlin, however, she attracts a wide audience for her journalism by representing the circus in such a way as to stand in for the ideal of Elizabethan art. In Barnes's articles, the residual entertainment of the circus is in critical dialogue with mass culture spectacle. For example, she wrote another article soon after the Voegtlin interview entitled "Djuna Barnes Probes the Souls of Jungle Folk at the Hippodrome Circus," in which she features an element from the historical three-ringed circus--the animals: "[The animals] are suddenly transported from the animals into the actors. . . . They could fulfill the three-ringed circus's mission alone if they wanted to. We feel that." ²⁷ Barnes's focus on the animals reads a prior time into the commodified space of the Hippodrome: "Once more it was the old tent ground again" (p. 191). Her reminiscence suggests that commodified entertainment does not have to be read uniformly. Despite the technological novelty of the spectacle, it also contains elements of a prior time when less uniform entertainments were produced. Just as the circus is part of the Hippodrome's mass culture spectacle, so too is Modernist literary practice part of commodity culture. The "Elizabethan" richness and allusiveness of Barnes's literary style offers the same sort of utopian compensation and symbolic resolution for the encroaching commodification of art that her reading of the circus animals offers the mass audience at the Hippodrome. ²⁸

The historical and hardly uniform circus sideshows and menageries offered real or fake monsters and hybrids--whatever was unique or abnormal and hence unclassifiable in a scientific taxonomy: a five-legged sheep, a dog boy, an ape man, a giant or dwarf animal or human. These shows were concerned with variety and exceptions, not uniformity. They restored a biological continuity denied by scientific thought and, in general, by modernity. ²⁹ Similarly, Barnes's "Jungle Folk" are humanized circus animals who mock the hierarchy of humankind over the natural world. Barnes reads the circus back into the Hippodrome--a move that frames the spectacle in order to challenge her readership to question the boundaries and interrelationships between animals and humans. The elephant is "gorgeously cynical. . . . Its wink produced terror; its smile bred doubt" (p. 192). The animals produce skepticism and not nostalgic romanticism. They also put humans at an uneasy disadvantage, hinting at "a possible knowledge of those corners of the human mind supposed to be secret" (p. 193). The circus animals evoke memories ("secrets") in the subjects who gaze at them. Unlike the spectacle's reliance on technological innovations and an unshaken belief in the future, the circus animals arouse skeptical, uneasy, "possible knowledge" that contests the future-oriented, homogenous, sound-bite features of mass culture. ³⁰ The circus, as Barnes recounts it, checks an uncritical optimism for modern progress. Barnes's memories of circus animals arouse fear and doubt which trouble an easy acceptance of the modern present.

* * * *

On 24 August 1936, Djuna Barnes wrote to Natalie Barney: "I am, of course, being an Elizabethan--quite indifferent to the Mass, tho [sic] I do not doubt (much to my sorrow) that they will shortly be ruling the roost." ³¹ Indeed, in Nightwood, the mass culture spectacle overruns the characters' early enjoyment of the heterogeneous circus. The impending domination of spectacle over circus in Nightwood can be seen most clearly in the transformation of Robin's and Nora's relationship. While the circus animals serve as mnemonic device for a resistant reading of spectacle in the "Jungle Folk" article, in Nightwood the device is the collected artifacts in Robin's and Nora's apartment. Articles from theatres, flea fairs, and circuses--residual public spaces which Robin and Nora visit during the height of their love affair--transform their shared apartment into a "museum of their encounter" (p. 56). Robin asks Nora to create such an apartment so that she will not forget that she belongs to Nora (p. 56). But Robin Vote (her last name alludes to the masses' democratic power) does forget. Initially torn between "love and anonymity" (p. 55), she eventually leaves her lover for the anonymous, alienated spaces of the late night bars and streets. Robin's forgetfulness allows her to be absorbed into the public culture of the spectacle. She circulates in anonymity, alienation, and isolation, recalling Guy Debord's description of the spectacle's public culture:

Spectators are linked only by a one-way relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another. The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness.

The spectator's alienation from and submission to the contemplated object . . . works like this: . . . the more readily he recognizes his own needs in the image of need proposed by the dominant system, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The spectacle's externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual's own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere. ³²

Unless members of the audience impose resistant readings to counter the alienation of the spectacle, they run the risk of becoming what they see. Similarly, Robin participates in both sides of the spectacle: she is both an object of desire, a blank screen on which Nora and Felix project their desires, and part of an alienated public searching for the spectacle's promise of happiness, a promise that constantly evades them. In this way, Nightwood continues the work performed by the Voegtlin interview. Robin sleepwalks through her life. The Hippodrome's "masses who master the drill" and the seamstresses who move "as if in a dream" are condensed in Nightwood into Robin.

While Robin displays the negative effects of spectacle, Nora Flood enacts Barnes's resistance to mass culture spectacle. In the Hippodrome articles, Barnes's memories and reflective personal responses resist an uncritical reading of the spectacles. In Nightwood, Nora Flood takes over this role. Significantly, her job as a circus publicist is not unlike Barnes's career as a journalist. Following Robin, Nora unwillingly moves from circus spaces to isolation as their relationship is transformed from participating in the heterogenous public spaces of circus, theatre and flea fairs to becoming a dark drama of loss and betrayal in the streets of Paris. This drama ends with Robin's horrific dehumanization in the final chapter (in a manner directly contrary to the circus animals' humanization). Although Barnes protests the ill effects of mass culture, she knows that it will become the dominant form of public culture, as her letter to Natalie Barney confirms. As a result, all Nora can do is remember their early relationship and their travels to heterogeneous public spaces, mourn its loss, and helplessly witness Robin's alienation. Tradition, that nom de guerre of Modernism, emerges in Nightwood not as sentimental, bourgeois banality, but as the circus: a heterogenous, participatory, local form of public culture that is quickly vanishing.

Robin and Nora meet at an American circus. Nora's attention is drawn to Robin because the circus animals attempt to communicate with Robin: "[S]he looked at her suddenly because the animals, going around and around the ring, all but climbed over at that point" (p. 54). The animals' efforts to interact with Robin break the spectator/performer divide. The circus performers directly address the audience, unlike the spectacle's performers and film actor's whose direct look at the audience/camera had become taboo by the 1910s. ³³ A powerful lioness bows down before Robin: "[H]er eyes flowed in tears that never reached the surface" (p. 54). The lioness arouses fear in Robin, who is visibly shaken and stands up. Nora watches Robin's interaction with the animals and, perceiving her turmoil, takes her hand. Robin effects the performance and then she and Nora interact with each other. The participatory public space of the circus has unanticipated results, not just on the performance, but among the audience. But unlike Barnes in her "Jungle Folk" article--in which she enjoys the humanization of animals at the circus--Robin is unsettled by the animals and flees the circus. Nora joins her, and their relationship begins.

The interactive, communicative space of the circus allows Robin and Nora the opportunity to meet. The circus also attracts most of Nightwood's principal characters: Matthew O'Connor, the transvestite, unlicensed doctor; Felix Volkbien, the false Austrian baron, as well as Robin and Nora. As opposed to the spectacle's prepackaged, familiar plot, the circus thrives on performative dissimulation and heterogeneous, contradictory knowledge. The circus performers in Nightwood take on fake aristocratic titles in order to make themselves mysterious: Princess Nadja, Baron von Tink, Principessa Stasera y Stasero, King Buffo and the Duchess of Broadback. They are at home in the disquiet and falseness of entertainment--their identities are never natural but are performed in complex, multiple and dynamic ways. The circus freaks and performers open a space so that their audience can engage in varied and contradictory interpretations. The circus in Nightwood is not the big business that commodifies bodies into images and cleans up acts to offer a familiar, uniform performance to mainstream culture. Instead, the performers and audience participate in the complexities of the circus's heterogenous space, a space that can accommodate the unusual, the marginal and the grotesque. It is the place where Matthew O'Connor finds material for his perverse stories and where Felix Volkbein initially finds comfort.

Nightwood begins with the death of Felix's mother and the birth of Felix, the son of Baron Guido Volkbein. His mother had believed in her husband's barony, "yet somewhere there had been anxiety. . . . She had believed it as a solider 'believes' a command" (pp. 4-5). The false title hid the Volkbeins' outcast status as Jews in fin-de-siécle Austria. While Felix also adopts the false title, he strives all the more to hide its fabricated nature. He searches for a place in society in which he feels comfortable, and he finds it at the circus. The circus performers who adopt Felix into their circle attend a party thrown by a real aristocrat, Count Altamonte. At the center of the gathering is Matthew O'Connor, who entertains his audience by telling stories. The first story he tells is about Nikka the Nigger, the bear wrestler at the Cirque de Paris. O'Connor revels in the eroticism and outrageousness of Nikka's performance. Nikka is tattooed from head to the knees with the history of his racial construction and commodification. The tattoos force his audience to make sense of an entire set of cultural narratives that, taken one at a time, stereotype black men:

There he was, crouching all over the arena without a stitch on, except an ill-concealed loin-cloth all abulge as if with a deep sea-catch, tattooed from head to heel with all the ameublement of depravity! Garlanded with rosebuds and hackwork of the devil--was he a sight to see! Though he couldn't have done a thing (and I know what I am talking about in spite of all that has been said about the black boys) if you had stood him in a gig-mill for a week, though (it's said) at a stretch it spelled Desdemona. Well then, over his belly was an angel from Chartres; on each buttock, half public, half private, a quotation from the book of magic, a confirmation of the Jansenist theory, I'm sorry to say and here to say it. Across his knees, I give you my word, 'I' on the one and on the other, 'can,' put those two together! Across his chest, beneath a beautiful caravel in full sail, two clasped hands, the wrist bones fretted with point lace. (p. 16)

Nikka exposes his body to an audience that sees him as a freak, a bizarre object of exaggerated virility and exotic tattoos. But Nikka re-inscribes the easy meanings by which the audience reads him as a black man and circus freak. The essentialized and condensed knowledge of race thereby opens into a multi-layered and contradictory range of meanings that anchors modern narratives of progress from primitive savage to civilized white man. When Nikka tattoos his penis "Desdemona," he makes ironic that process by which black men are categorized as primitive and excessively sexual. O'Connor confides to his audience that Nikka is impotent around women and that he could not perform in a gig-mill where young women work. A gig-mill is a textile factory in which the naps or interstices of the weave are pulled up, thereby fracturing the smoothness of the fabric and exposing the loose ends. Like the work of the gig-mill, Nikka disconnects the smooth surface of Western culture's racial narratives. Through his lack of desire for women, especially white women (Desdemona), Nikka negates white fears of miscegenation. His stereotypical threat to dominant kinship structures is ironic given O'Connor's inside knowledge that Nikka's sexual interest lies elsewhere, probably with men.

The stereotypical black man contains multiple layers of meanings which derive from many historical sites and social positions. Nikka's tattoos combine pre-modern African culture with Western culture's myths about Africans so as to create a contradictory, hybrid subject. The tattoos--said to confirm the Jansenist theory of evil and magic quotation--refer to categories of irrational superstition and depraved criminality into which Africans are placed. The slave ship (the caravel), the elegant wrists of wealthy slave owners, and the "I" "can" allude to the historical positioning of black labor and black obedience to domination. The Angel of Chartres also suggests the black man's childlike innocence and obedience under the missionary impulse to bring Christianity to the "primitives." ³⁴ The gesture of tattooing "I" and "can" on Nikka's knees implies the hiding of the threat of sexuality, the penis, and the adoption of a prepubescent role of docile willingness. Nikka makes both stereotypes about black men evident at once--his threatening sexuality and his docile servitude. Thus, he contradicts his assigned position as bearer, not maker, of meaning. His multi-layered, ironic use of history inserts ambivalence and uneasiness into the circus performance. This alternative history checks an easy optimism in modern progress which depends on positioning black peoples as primitive, ahistorical "others" against which to measure modern Western culture. ³⁵

At this point in O'Connor's story, Felix prods him reluctantly and uncomfortably to continue describing Nikka's tattoos. Like early efforts to clean up entertainments of their profanity and obscenity, Felix is uneasy with the eroticism and strangeness of Nikka's performance. In fact, he eagerly takes up the assimilative gaze appropriate to the spectacle when he meets Robin. Felix' ability to pass as part of mainstream society depends on appearing proper and real as opposed to the impropriety and falseness of the circus. Felix' precarious social position is made glaringly visible by circus performers such as Nikka, who unsettle supposedly natural assumptions about race, class, sexuality, and gender. When Felix cautiously asks the Duchess of Broadback, the trapeze artist, if Count Altamonte were really a Count, she responds: "'Herr Gott! Am I what I say? Are you? Is the doctor?'" (p. 25). This response is not what he is hoping for.

Turning from the circus, Felix soon afterwards accompanies O'Connor into a hotel on an emergency medical assignment. O'Connor, the quack doctor, is asked to revive Robin, who has passed out. Once in the room, Felix eagerly gazes at Robin, who presents herself as a spectacle; her unconsciousness assures a unidirectional gaze, and her self-arrangement on the bed invites fantastic projections:

On a bed, surrounded by a confusion of potted plants, exotic palms and cut flowers, faintly over-sung by the notes of unseen birds, which seemed to have been forgotten . . . half flung off the support of the cushions from which, in a moment of threatened consciousness she had turned her head, lay the young woman, heavy and dishevelled. Her legs, in white flannel trousers, were spread as in a dance, the thick-lacquered pumps looking too lively for the arrested step. (p. 34)

The scene seems to conflate two images of Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932): the first is the scene in which Lola Lola abandons her flight from the law and her husband and gives up her child. She surrenders in a hotel room filled with plants and unseen, chirping birds. The second image is the famous Paris cabaret scene in which Lola Lola sings in a white tuxedo. Further, the light in Robin's room takes on a filmic quality: "About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorus glowing about the circumference of a body of water--as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations--the troubling structure of a born somnambule, who lives in two worlds--meet of child and desperado" (pp. 34-35). Robin combines the docile spectacle with a rebellious, desperate outsider. The spectacular star resembles a child. She suggests her easy availability by appearing innocent, naive and facile. The desperado suggests otherwise, namely, that she must always circulate as a sign of desirability, a promise that is never delivered and that never stays in one place for very long. But while Robin is unconscious, Felix can gaze at her all he likes. Her immobility and inscrutability allow Felix to project his desires upon her. A sense of impending disaster accompanies the meeting of the desperate, wandering woman and of a man determined to worship his false past (the aristocracy of "Old Europe") in order to build a future: "The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a 'picture' forever arranged is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger" (p. 37). When Robin awakes, she returns Felix' gaze, and the irises of her eyes are like those of untamed beasts, a remnant of a mythic past outside human history. But Barnes is not content to leave the mythic past outside history; it accompanies the spectacle into the present in order to annihilate history. The spectacle is a negation of life, as Guy Debord writes: "The spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance." ³⁶ History is erased, and the present moment alone exists. Robin's lack of memory and her static appearance threaten to engulf the present with a mythic atemporality. Felix is drawn to her because she is flesh that will become myth:

[H]e felt that he was looking upon a figurehead in a museum, which though static, no longer roosting in its cutwater, seemed yet to be going against the wind; as if this girl were the converging halves of a broken fate, setting face, in sleep, toward itself in time, as an image and its reflection in a lake seemed parted only by the hesitation in the hour. (p. 38)

Robin is, first, an artifact, a mythic talisman to protect a ship from harm. Then, she becomes a sleeping girl who would wake or suddenly jerk forward, bringing the past into the present as the image and reflection (only another image) join together. To Felix, she reflects his misguided desire blindly to worship and mythologize the past so as to erase its disdain for him, and Robin is also the talisman which assures him that he will be accepted by mainstream society.

Looking back after Robin leaves him, Felix reflects, "I find that I never did have a really clear idea of her at any time. I had an image of her, but that is not the same thing. An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties" (p. 111). What he could equally be describing here is film technology: film is made of a series of images flashed so quickly that human consciousness filters out the breaks (uncertainties) between the images. But Robin also serves as a blank screen; she carries the "quality of the 'way back'" (p. 40) to which Felix projects his fabricated, idealized past and his bourgeois aspirations of solid citizenship and steady employment at Crédit Lyonnais. His image of Robin is one which complements his aspirations. But while he tells Robin everything about his false past, she remains silent, walking beside him like a figure of doom (p. 41). In fact, Robin does not respect the weight of history and tradition. When Felix and Robin visit museums, Robin indiscriminantly admires both high art and the cheap and debased (p. 42). Just as mass culture absorbs both high and low art into its industrial production, Robin makes no distinction in her taste. Robin's lack of critical judgment accompanies a lack of will which allows her to play whatever part Felix desires: "Robin's life held no volition for refusal" (p. 43). Felix places her in the role of Baronin. He marries Robin to produce a child that will feel as he does about the great past: "With an American anything can be done" (p. 39). The elevation of America suggests Felix' efforts to assimilate into mainstream culture, his belief in mass culture's homogenizing, melting-pot possibilities.

Indeed, from the moment he meets Robin, Felix never again seeks the company of his circus and theatre friends. He abandons the "reeking falseness" of his circus friends in the hope that he can assimilate into mainstream society; his friendship with Matthew O'Connor continues, but it centers on the melodramatic outcome of Felix' disastrous marriage. Felix marries Robin and sires a son in an effort to make his fabricated barony and lineage real. He seeks entry into bourgeois society by erasing his Jewish specificity, and he believes that Robin's anonymity and ahistoricity will help him achieve his goal. However, Robin leaves her marriage and child, and Felix is left to care for the mentally deficient child. Despite his best intentions, the "great past" will end with him. The promise of assimilation is never realized; Robin leaves, and with her go Felix' projected hopes and desires. Robin's betrayal is akin to the false hopes and illusions that accompany the public culture of the spectacle as Horkheimer and Adorno describe it: "The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory." ³⁷ In contrast to the false hopes that Felix attributes to Robin as he gazes at her in the hotel, Matthew O'Connor refuses to idealize Robin. Instead, he turns aside to perform a circus sideshow act "common to the 'dumbfounder,' or man of magic" (p. 35). First, he snatches a few drops of perfume, dusts his darkly bristled chin with a powder puff, and then rouges his lips (p. 36). Unobserved, Felix next watches the Doctor steal a hundred franc note:

With a tension in his stomach, such as one suffers when watching an acrobat leaving the virtuosity of his safety in a mad unravelling whirl into probable death, Felix watched the hand descend, take up the note, and disappear into the limbo of the doctor's pocket. He knew he would continue to like the doctor, though he was aware that it would be in spite of a long series of convulsions of the spirit. (p. 36)

While Felix enjoys the theatricality of the circus performers, whose behavior is not codified and decorous, his belief in circus illusion is destroyed by the theft. O'Connor's action goes beyond illusion and has real impact as a criminal act. The theft also suggests that no circus performer is immune from monetary demands. If one does not sell one's act, then one is forced to steal. For Felix, the doctor's theft destroys the utopian compensation of circus life. At that moment, Felix subscribes instead to the illusions of the mass culture spectacle and turns his attention back to Robin.

Even for those who do not turn away from the circus, its effects are fleeting and ephemeral. Robin's and Nora's love affair occurs between the lines of the text. After meeting at the circus, Robin stays with Nora in America; then they travel around Europe, all within two paragraphs of text. The love affair is already fraught with difficulties as the story resumes. As before mentioned, two spirits work in Robin, "love and anonymity" (p. 55). While the impulse towards love is stronger, Robin begs Nora for a home so that she will be grounded in the past. But the memories are not enough to keep Robin. The spirit of anonymity wins out, and "singing of a life that she herself had no part in" (p. 57), Robin abandons Nora for the namelessness and isolation of the streets and bars of Paris. When Robin and Nora are alone in their apartment,

there entered with Robin a company unaware. Sometimes it rang clear in the songs she sang, sometimes Italian, sometimes French or German, songs of the people, debased and haunting, songs that Nora had never heard before . . . just as she was leaving the house, Robin would break out again in anticipation, changing the sound from a reminiscence to an expectation. (p. 57)

Robin anticipates her circulation among the multilingual crowds of the "debased" metropolis, the alienated masses. A "company unaware" suggests a semi-conscious takeover by other thoughts, a sleepwalking alienation from the domestic setting in which Nora tries to keep Robin. Robin looks to the night world, the bars and streets, to find the forgetfulness which she seeks. As their love affair disintegrates, the lovers' relationship shifts from the circus to the spectacle. The domestic space, already privatized, becomes a cinematic space. Nora attempts to hold onto the object of her desire through a specular economy (watching and looking for Robin in the streets and out the window), and Robin flees her still further.

Matthew O'Connor reproaches Nora: "'Do you think that Robin had no right to fight you with her only weapon? She saw in you that fearful eye that would make her a target forever'" (p. 148). Nora wants to make Robin hers alone, clean and untouched, forever preserved as an image and seen through the light of a film projector: "'You've made her a legend and set before her head the Eternal Light'" (p. 125). But the filmed image is endlessly reproducible and circulates in ways that Nora cannot control: Robin wanders the streets, meets beggars, and visits bars. Nora comes to realize that Robin's continuous circulation in the streets and underworld of Paris can only be stopped through her death. Gazing at an unconscious (drunken) Robin, Nora tells her: "'Die now, so you will be quiet, so you will not be touched again by dirty hands, so you will not take my heart and your body and let them be nosed by dogs--die now, then you will be mine forever'" (pp. 144-45). Nora's reliance on first the past and then the image to preserve their relationship cannot cope with Robin's wandering and forgetfulness. Robin's desire for anonymity eventually severs their relations completely.

The final blow to Nora's and Robin's relationship occurs after Robin has stayed out all night. Waiting for her, Nora sinks into the circus chairs in despair, the memory of the circus now ineffectual. Then she dreams, and, in the dream, her gaze becomes identical with the camera:

Nora looked down into the body of the house, as if from a scaffold, where now Robin had entered the dream, lying among a company below. Nora said to herself, "The dream will not be dreamed again." A disc of light, which seemed to come from someone or thing standing behind her and which was yet a shadow, shed a faintly luminous glow upon the upturned still face of Robin, who had the smile of an "only survivor," a smile which fear had married to the bone. (p. 62)

The scaffold suggests a film setting. The walls are open structures which allow the camera to see all parts of the house. The disc of light films Robin's face, capturing her isolation and loss, as if she has already forgotten Nora and their relationship. Her "only survivor" smile suggests that she will leave Nora entirely: "The dream will not be dreamed again." While Nora realizes that memories alone are not enough to hold Robin, her desire to capture Robin as an image is equally impossible. When Nora wakes up from the dream, she looks out onto the garden, and again her gaze finds Robin frozen in a cinematic image:

Standing motionless, straining her eyes, [Nora] saw emerge from the darkness the light of Robin's eyes, the fear in them developing their luminosity until, but the intensity of their double regard, Robin's eyes and hers met. So they gazed at each other. As it that light had power to bring what was dreaded into the zone of their catastrophe, Nora saw the body of another woman swim up into the statues's obscurity. (p. 64)

Robin looks straight at the camera, breaking the rule against the camera's direct look. The shock of seeing another woman with Robin brings Nora to her knees "so that her eyes were not withdrawn by her volition, but dropped from their orbit by the falling of her body. . . . With the intolerable automatism of the last "Ah!" in a body struck at the moment of the final breath" (64). Nora is struck by the violence of the cinematic gaze which undoes her. The shock at what she sees leaves her lifeless. At that moment, she and Robin share a sleepwalking consciousness. Nora sees Robin only once again, in the last scene in Nightwood, when Robin interacts with a dog, a gesture which recalls the earlier encounter with the circus animals:

Then she began to bark also, crawling after him--barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching. The dog began to cry then, running with her, head-on with her head, as if to circumvent her . . . she grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, 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. (p. 170)

Nora slumps to the ground, overwhelmed at what she sees. Robin's performance crosses the boundary between human and animal but only to acknowledge her dehumanization within the public culture of spectacle. The knowledge produced at this site is enigmatic, full of passion and bitter defeat.

Robin's and Nora's relationship shifts from the heterogenous space of the circus to the public culture of the spectacle where the promise of happiness is never achieved and where Robin can never feel at home. The more Nora insists on the memories of their shared experiences and then on a static image of Robin, the more Robin seeks a sleepwalking forgetfulness. Just as other Modernist writers, such as Horkheimer and Adorno, feared that the masses would become mechanized, solitary, and alienated through their absorption of mass culture spectacle, Barnes uses Robin to express her fear of mass culture's empty promise of happiness and isolating effects that rob subjects of memories, emotions, and ties. In her monthly column for The Theatre Guild Magazine, "The Wanton Playgoer," Barnes directly protests mass culture's effects:

Out in Hollywood, the managers of picture houses leave the lights off several moments at the close of a sad or harrowing film that the audience--film stars and beauties of all kinds and sorts--may repair the ravages of emotion (if any) without being observed of the vulgar public. I have been puzzled all my life as to why I never wanted to be an actress, and now I know. When I cry, low lights or high, it's one and the same. Cry I will and let who will be handsome. ³⁸

Indeed, in Nightwood, it is Matthew O'Connor who resists the public and private division of emotion. The circus trickster, quack doctor, and transvestite never relinquishes his ties to the circus, where all is made public. He is last seen bellowing his grief and rage to whomever will hear him: "now nothing, but wrath and weeping!" (p. 166). The public culture of spectacle occasions alienation, loss, and fear. In response, the novel's aestheticized grief and loss provides some formal compensation for a homogenized culture.

Djuna Barnes repeatedly spoke against the dangers and drawbacks of mass culture. In 1930, she interviewed Alla Nazimova, the great Russian stage actress most famous for her performances of Ibsen's A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler. Later, she became a film actress in such popular films as Camille and Salomé and performed as a conventional stage vampire. Barnes writes this article in a straightforward tone--much different from her earlier aphoristic, ironic voice. Barnes reviews Nazimova's career before recording the interview:

She received, and took, bad advice. Her artistry was so extraordinarily flexible and persuasive that she could make a common vampire of melodrama seem, for the moment, as great a creation as Hedda. And the great public preferred vampires. . . . And yet, like someone walking in the slow, narcotic sleep of those banished to hell, for less than hell's requirements or reason, she moved on in an ever narrower path of distaste. . . . Like the gentleman he is, the devil leaned out and gently pulled her into Hollywood and catastrophe. ³⁹

Overacting and selling her talents for greater public exposure, circulating among wider, more commodified versions of public entertainment, Nazimova sleepwalks through her career. Barnes asks her only one question, astonishing in its forthright bluntness. It comes at the end of the interview: "'It's one of those quiet questions, Alla Nazimova. When was it you frightened yourself with what you are?' She started; she turned halfway about. 'Oh,' she said . . . 'that night when I first saw my name in lights. I went up to my hotel room, way up under the roof, and I opened the window and leaned on my arms; and I was afraid, terribly afraid. Then. It was then!'" (p. 359). The commodification of the spectacular star occasions fear and sleepwalking alienation. Barnes's critique of mass culture spectacle gives pause to optimistic belief in the benefits of unceasing modern progress. She reminds her readers that earlier entertainment forms helped to foster an engaged, participatory, and heterogeneous public culture. While mass culture spectacle has indeed come to be dominant, Barnes's recollection of the past critiques the present in which the smooth, polished surfaces of commodified spectacle allow for an all-too-easy forgetfulness.

Notes

The author would like to thank the American Academy of University Women for their generous support of this project. Thanks also to Gloria-Jean Masciarotte, Joseph Buttigieg, Barbara Green, Kathleen Biddick, Glenn Hendler, Christine Doran, and Jessica Shubow for many insightful readings of this essay.

1 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Harcourt Brace, 1968), p. 223.

2 Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New Directions, 1937), p. 84. All subsequent references are cited parenthetically.

3 Andrew Field, Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes (G.P. Putnam, 1983), pp. 150-51.

4 Guy Debord defines the spectacle as "not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images" (Society of the Spectacle [Zone Books, 1994]), p. 12. Further, "For one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings--tangible figments which are the efficient motor of trancelike behavior" (p. 17). Those who accept without resistance the administration of mass culture spectacles become automatons. While Debord formulated this theory of the spectacle in 1967, earlier and equally pessimistic views of the danger of administered, late capitalist society were put forth most notably by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Continuum, 1994), and by Adorno in "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Arato and Gebhardt (Urizen Books, 1978), pp. 270-99.

5 Jane Marcus describes Nightwood's hybrid form as a direct descendent of Rabelaisian "grotesque realism." She writes: "Nightwood is about merging, dissolution, and, above all, hybridization--mixed metaphors, mixed genres, mixed levels of discourse from the lofty to the low, mixed 'languages' from medical practice, circus argot, church dogma and homosexual slang." ("Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman's Circus Epic" in Silence and Power, ed. Mary Lynn Broe. (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), p. 223.

6 The term "public culture," as I use it, denotes the impact of social institutions--here, the spectacle and circus--on the production, distribution, and reception of discourses and activities within a wider social context. For example, in Nightwood Robin Vote is described as an image (p. 111) and as a film actor: "A disc of light . . . shed a faintly luminous glow upon . . . Robin" (p. 62) which associate her with filmic spectacle. The effect of this association is that Robin is restless, amnesic, and alienated. In her wake, Nora, Matthew O'Connor, and Felix have much to say in response to her. Their response to Robin is also a response to the transformation of public culture when spectacle comes to dominate.

7 For a full listing of Barnes's articles and interviews, see Douglas Messerli, Djuna Barnes: A Bibliography (David Lewis Press, 1976).

8 John and Alice Durant, Pictorial History of the American Circus (A.S. Barnes, 1957), p. 216.

9 Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 158.

10 For more on Barnes's journalism, see Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace, Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (im)positionings (Routledge, 1994); Barbara Green, "Spectacular Confessions: 'How It Feels To Be Forcibly Fed'" The Review of Contemporary Fiction, XIII (1993), pp. 70-88; Nancy J. Levine, "'Bringing milkshakes to bulldogs': The Early Journalism of Djuna Barnes," in Broe, Silence and Power, pp. 27-34.

11 John and Alice Durant, Pictorial History of the American Circus, pp. 51-125.

12 Miriam Hansen characterizes other popular culture audiences, namely those who frequented the nickelodeon, with these characteristics, see Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991), p. 16.

13 Robert W. Synder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York, p . 7.

14 Edwin Milton Royle, "The Vaudeville Theater," Scribner's Magazine 26 (October 1899), p. 488. Reprinted in Selected Vaudeville Criticism, ed. Antony Slide (Scarecrow Press, 1988), p. 205.

15 Mary Cass Canfield, "The Great American Art," New Republic, XXXII (22 November 1922), p. 335. Reprinted in Selected Vaudeville Criticism, ed. Antony Slide p. 225-26.

16 Edwin Milton Royle, "The Vaudeville Theater,"Scribner's Magazine, XXVI, p. 489. In Selected Vaudeville Criticism, ed. Antony Slide, p. 206.

17 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 28.

18 Edward Renton, The Vaudeville Theatre: Building, Operation, Management (Gotham Press, 1918), p. 12. Cited in Snyder, The Voice of the City, p. 33.

19 Lux Graphicus, "On the Screen," Moving Picture World, V (4 September 1909), p. 774. Quoted in Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 66.

20 Norman Clarke, The Mighty Hippodrome (A.S. Barnes, 1968).

21 John and Alice Durant, Pictorial History of the American Circus, p. 178.

22 John Fiske, in "Popular Discrimination," Modernity and Mass Culture, eds. James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger (Indiana University Press, 1991), writes that "the conventionality of plot lines . . . enables readers to write ahead, to predict what will happen and then to find pleasure (or sometimes frustration) in comparing their own projected 'scripts' with those actually broadcast" (p. 109).

23 Norman Clarke, The Mighty Hippodrome, pp. 126, 135.

24 Djuna Barnes, "Interviewing Arthur Voegtlin Is Something Like Having a Nightmare," I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes, ed. Alyce Barry (Sun & Moon Press, 1985), p. 81. All subsequent references are cited parenthetically.

25 Norman Clarke, The Mighty Hippodrome, p. 28.

26 Barbara Klinger, "Digressions at the Cinema: Commodification and Reception in Mass Culture," in Naremore and Brantlinger, p. 131.

27 Djuna Barnes, New York (Sun & Moon Press, 1989), ed. Alyce Barry, p. 194. All subsequent references are cited parenthetically.

28 Fredric Jameson interprets literary Modernism as a symbolic resolution and utopian compensation for the dehumanizing mass culture of which it is part. See The Political Unconscious (Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 42.

29 Paul Bouissac, Circus and Culture (University Press of America, 1985), pp. 118-19.

30 Indeed, Barnes use of memory as a counter to the amnesia of modern progress, its celebration of the endlessly "new," follows a line of critical thinking that Andreas Huyssen traces in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (Routledge, 1995): "Nietzsche was a utopian modernist, standing at the beginning of an intellectual trajectory from Bergson to Proust, from Freud to Benjamin, that articulated the classical modernist formulations of memory as . . . cure to the pathologies of modern life. Here memory was always associated with some utopian space and time beyond what Benjamin called the homogeneous empty time of the capitalist present" (p. 6).

31 Phillip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (Viking, 1995), p. 229. Italics are Barnes's.

32 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, pp. 22-23.

33 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 37.

34 My exegesis of Nikka's tattoos is indebted to Jane Marcus's essay "Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Women's Circus Epic," in Broe, Silence and Power, pp. 221-50.

35 See Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Modern Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1993) for the impact of the Black Diaspora on revising theories and temporalities of modernity that have been locked for too long in the manichean logic of binary coding.

36 Society of the Spectacle, p. 14.

37 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 139.

38 Djuna Barnes, "The Wanton Playgoer," The Theatre Guild Magazine, VIII, 12 (September 1931), pp. 20-21.

39 Djuna Barnes, "Alla Nazimova, One of the Greatest of Living Actresses, Talks of Her Art," I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes, ed. Alyce Barry (Sun & Moon Press, 1985), pp. 356-57.