英文摘要 |
The paper examines the tropes of primitivist discourse prevalent in Djuna Barnes’s modernist classic Nightwood (1936) in conjunction with an analysis of Barnes’s aestheticism of decadence and its interrelationships among lesbianism, modernity, and fascism. It looks into how modernism’s obsession with primitivism complicates and destabilizes the hierarchical definition of the civilized vs. the savage, the normal vs. the abnormal, and the natural vs. the artificial. It argues that, by valorizing artifice over nature, Nightwood challenges the humanist/essentialist claims of sexual discourse in general and the category of “inversion” in particular. Moreover, the novel’s antiteleological drive manifest in the frequent tropes of sterility, illness, decay, and degeneration illustrates the defeat of systematic and patrilineal continuity. Reading Nightwood in its political climate of the 1930s, the paper concludes that the novel’s proud parading of the non-Aryan, non-heterosexual bodies and carnival freaks is politically transgressive insofar as it mocks fascist promotion of an identification that inscribes the power and purity of the Aryan model as the hegemonic, normative paradigm. |