#Shellshock live partitions mission series

Matthew O'Connor, 'alone in a gallery of dummies' (xiv) nor is it 'simply a collection of individual portraits' (xiv). This pattern is not merely imposed by a single 'vital' character, Dr. It is not a collocation of fragments but constitutes 'a whole pattern' (xiii). Nightwood, in Eliot's view, is not simply a sample of literary extravagance, a rhetorical display without the motivation of an equally rich content: 'I do not want to suggest that the distinction of the book is primarily verbal, and still less that the astonishing language covers a vacuity of content.' Following from this point, it is not 'poetic prose' (xii).

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Eliot wastes no great time in preliminaries he gets fight to work with a series of negative judgments, informing the reader what Barnes's book is not. Eliot thus seeks to preempt a number of 'false' interpretations to which Barnes's otherwise autotelic text, minus his supplementary preface, might easily give rise. Wherever Barnes's extravagance threatened to slip the bonds of modernist discipline, Eliot preempted her errancy, shepherding her back with a cautionary wag of the finger toward the antechambers of the modern literary canon.Įliot begins his preface with an almost obligatory gesture of humility before Barnes's work its autonomy and self-sufficiency render anything that he might say not just superfluous but even 'impertinent.' Yet while he can add nothing to the work, he may clear up a few misunderstandings (misunderstanding for Eliot being, like sin for Augustine, purely privative in nature). His editorial benevolence, however, extended to a bit of well-meant management of Night-wood's image. Eliot was acutely aware of the 'priority' he had as editor and literary king maker, and here he adopts the posture of the celebrated author offering a critical introduction, to be read before the unaccommodating creative work it discusses. He was aware that his preface could and would intervene between the book and its readers, steering them toward certain ways of understanding and protecting them from error. In his skittish engagement with Barnes's text, Eliot brings to light key concepts and expectations that any up-to-date reader of modernist writing would likely have shared with the author of 'Prufrock' and 'The Waste Land.' Moreover, as Eliot himself underscores, his prefacing remarks are not simply an exemplary response to Barnes's book but a privileged one. For that reason alone the preface has an ineffaceable documentary value, as a striking testimony to the assumptions of that criticism in the face of a work that challenges modernist precepts. For it represents not just any response to Barnes's book but that of the single most influential figure in the modernist criticism of the 1930s and 1940s. Nonetheless, I believe it is necessary to take Eliot's preface at its word, as a historically important 'guideįor the perplexed' reader of Barnes, rather than dismiss it as mere 'posturing,' as does Barnes's biographer Phillip Herring.

It is not my purpose here either to rehearse or refute the arguments against Eliot's reading of Nightwood. In recent criticism, indeed, Eliot's preface has been much maligned, either as representing a supposedly hegemonic 'male modernism' or as seeming a kind of joke, the phlegmatic Eliot so far missing the point of Barnes's passionate prose as to be comical. One has the impression of true minds at cross-purposes of incongruities between what Eliot says the book is and what the book, as read today, would seem to be. For the present-day reader, however, it is difficult to deny that something is amiss in Eliot's preface.

Barnes, for her part, was sincerely grateful for Eliot's help and for the tribute he rendered her. Though the famous poet-editor had been finicky and (in his own words) 'lacking in imagination' during the editorial process, Eliot genuinely admired the power and integrity of Barnes's writing and supported the book as wholeheartedly as a man nicknamed 'Possum' could manage. Eliot lent the prestige of his name to her novel, with a short preface. In 1937, as most readers of Nightwood are aware, Djuna Barnes's friend and editor T.

Letter of Djuna Barnes To Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Christmas 1965 I'm Completely Lost-an Island Floating Away Over the Horizon.