Parables and the Picaresque: On Djuna Barnes’s “Ryder”
Djuna Barnes | Ryder | Dalkey Archive Press | June 2024 | 250 Pages
Djuna Barnes is difficult to categorize. A multidisciplinary writer and visual artist, she is best known today for Nightwood (1936), a queer modernist cult classic infamous for its ornate and supposedly unreadable prose. During her long life, she moved between the literary circles of Paris and New York, was a visionary advocate for the expression of queer sexuality, and possessed a precarious and shifting critical reputation that largely excluded her from the modernist canon. Barnes’s slippery reputation is also a result of her own self-mythologizing and evasion of classification: she avoided labels, experimented wildly with style and genre, confronted and skirted censorship, battled with the literary establishment, and spent her later years as a recluse in her Greenwich Village apartment. “It’s terrible to outlive your own generation. I wish I could be dead,” Barnes is said to have remarked in the 1970s. When she died in 1982, six days after her ninetieth birthday, she was the last surviving member of the original modernist generation.
This year, Barnes is experiencing a minor renaissance: McNally Editions will publish a collection of her short stories, I Am Alien to Life, in September, and Dalkey Archive Press is reissuing her debut novel Ryder (1928), which it previously published in 1990. This was followed five years later by Dalkey’s publication of Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts (1995), an edition which restored the queer and sexually explicit material her editor T. S. Eliot had removed prior to the book’s publication. Critical interest in Barnes previously peaked following her death in the 1980s as part of a wave of feminist scholarship, such as Shari Benstock’s seminal Women of the Left Bank (1986), which sought to recover and re-evaluate neglected female modernists. Now, nearly a century after Ryder’s publication, the time is ripe for the novel’s critical reappraisal and a reignition of public interest. The previous censorship of queer and sexually explicit content in Barnes’s work particularly resonates with a contemporary literary landscape destabilized by a wave of book bans primarily targeting works with LGBT themes.
Ryder is perhaps the oddest work in Barnes’s incredibly strange oeuvre. A nonlinear experimental novel with a strong autobiographical bent, it is narrated in a pastiche of literary styles, combining decadent prose with wild digressions. The plot centers on the novel’s namesake and patriarch Wendell Grieve Ryder, who lives on a farm named Bull’s Ease with his mother, Sophia; wife, Amelia; mistress, Kate-Careless; and the eight children he fathers with both women. Scholar Bonnie Kime Scott memorably compared the novel to the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter in Ulysses, “a nightmarish version of a graduate comprehensive exam.” It reads like a kaleidoscope of the recurring themes Barnes would return to throughout her oeuvre: an autobiographical narrative, subversive depictions of sexuality, stylistic experimentation, familial drama, a country house setting, and experimental language are brought together in a reading experience akin to a fever dream.
Born in 1892 in a log cabin on Storm King Mountain near Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, Barnes’s early life closely resembles the sprawling family drama of Ryder. Like the Barnes family, the Ryders live in a “small log cabin of two rooms, one above the other, in the pine woods of the hill” on the same mountain. Barnes’s grandmother, Zadel, a writer, journalist and suffragist, likely inspired Sophia, while Wendell is modeled on Barnes’s father, whom Zadel considered to be a misunderstood artistic genius. He was an open advocate of polygamy and married Barnes’s mother in 1889 before moving his mistress in with them in 1897, producing several children with each woman. Similarly, Wendell possesses an “idealistic vision of himself as a natural beast with a spiritual purpose to deliver women from the asexual state of virginity,” and Eugene Jolas went so far as to suggest that he would “go down in American literature as the archetype of the swashbuckling super-male.” But women are by far the most interesting and dynamic characters in Ryder, from the domineering matriarch Sophia to the endlessly squabbling Amelia and Kate to Amelia’s daughter, Julie, whose implied rape is said to be based on Barnes’s own experience.
The opening chapter of Ryder, narrated in the style of the King James Bible, introduces the reader to Wendell Ryder, or “Jesus Mundane.” From there, each chapter varies between bawdy Rabelaisian parody, ornate Middle English, Chaucerian poetry, sentimental fiction, epistolary form, parables and the picaresque. This makes for an engaging if disorientating reading experience; Ryder can prove difficult to follow. The first biblical-style paragraph, for instance, comprises the entire first page:
Go not with fanatics who see beyond thee and thine, and beyond the coming and the going of thee and thine, and yet beyond the ending thereof,—thy life and the lives that thou begettest, and the lives that shall spring from them, world without end,—for such need thee not, nor see thee, nor know thy lamenting, so confounded are they with thy damnation and the damnation of thy offspring, 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. Go thou, then, to lesser men, who have for all things unfinished and uncertain, a great capacity, 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, 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.
From there, the prose hardly becomes more clear, although it is interspersed with chapters narrated in a realist style. Barnes maintained a lifelong fascination with Middle English and language of the Elizabethan and Restoration periods, drawing on it for both the Restoration-inspired roman à clef Ladies Almanack, published the same year as Ryder, and her later verse tragedy The Antiphon. Contemporary reviews of the prose style were largely admiring; Jannet Flanner compared Ryder to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, praising the novel’s “historical richness and tradition.” A review in The Nation identified echoes of Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding, while critic Ernest Sutherland Bates compared Barnes to Aristophanes, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. Barnes notably employs this intricate, layered prose style to play with language, as in the case of the name Wendell Ryder. The Middle English term “wend,” meaning to go or to make one’s way, is combined with the seventeenth-century word “dell,” or “wench,” and a homonym for “rider,” suggesting the protagonist’s countryside sexual exploits. Barnes further disorients the reader’s experience of both the style and the spatiotemporal setting of Ryder in her accompanying illustrations inspired by French folk art. Several of the illustrations are based on the engravings and woodcuts collected by Pierre Louis Duchartre and René Saulnier in the 1926 book L’Imagerie Populaire, images that have been reproduced by different artists since the medieval era.
As a work of fiction, Ryder is perhaps the most indebted to James Joyce’s Ulysses: both are a pastiche of literary styles, feature a male protagonist on picaresque sexual jaunts around his hometown, and contended with censorship for their language and sexual content. After reading an excerpt of Ulysses in The Little Review, Barnes is said to have exclaimed: “I shall never write another line. Who has the nerve after this!” Barnes interviewed Joyce in Paris soon after the publication of Ulysses in 1922, sparking a longtime friendship; Joyce even gifted her the original annotated manuscript. The ongoing seizure of Ulysses by the United States Postal Service throughout the 1920s would foreshadow Ryder’s eventual fate, but Joyce’s unapologetic response to censorship likely influenced her own attitude toward her writing: “The pity is, the public will demand and find a moral in my book—or worse, they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it,” he told Barnes in his interview. Barnes, who praised the “fine lyric beginning that great Rabelaisian flower Ulysses had,” was also influenced by Joyce’s proclamation that “all the great talkers have spoken in the language of Sterne, Swift, or the Restoration,” drawing on the Rabelaisian tradition of bawdy and parodic fiction for Ryder. Unlike Ulysses, however, Ryder offers a feminist critique of the protagonist’s sexual bravado. Contemporary reviews indicate the anxiety surrounding Barnes’s supposedly masculine language and subject matter: “Ryder is certainly the most amazing book ever written by a woman” and “a book that absolutely baffles classification, but surely is a most amazing thing to come from a woman’s hand.” The obviously parodic tone resists lionizing Wendell Ryder, and as Ann Martin claims, “Barnes’s ironic deployment of the techniques of her precursors is thus more a critique than a celebration of patriarchy.” By satirizing and demonstrating the “failure” of the literary styles of her forefathers, she refocuses attention on domestic matters pertaining to women: marriage, sexuality, polygamy, childbirth and sexual violence.
The domestic space of the ancestral home is central not only to Ryder but to Barnes’s oeuvre. She demonstrates an enduring preoccupation with the country house as a setting for the destruction of familial and romantic relationships—in Nightwood, the climactic final confrontation between Nora and Robin takes place at Nora’s secluded New York estate, and in The Antiphon, Burley Hall, which has been destroyed by German bombs, is the site of a dramatic implosion of an aristocratic family. Ryder can be compared to three other novels published in 1928 that also examine the country house as a space of subversive sexuality: Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending Orlando, Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian bildungsroman The Well of Loneliness, and D. H. Lawrence’s depiction of an extramarital affair and female sexuality in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Similarly, Barnes frames the twentieth-century country house as a haven for sexual freedom and polygamy in her irreverent treatment of familial dynasty. While Woolf, Hall, and Lawrence largely preserve the customs and traditions of aristocratic tradition, Ryder can be read as a specifically American intervention into British notions of ancestral legacy. Wendell transports Amelia and Kate from their native London to a state of lawlessness on a farm in the backwoods of New York state, where his children are forced to attend a dilapidated rural school with dead animals floating in the well. The Ryders are scorned by the community, who send an official to investigate the rumors of polygamy and the parentage of the children. The mayor says “gallantly enough, that Wendell should go to jail,” and the school authorities say “still more gallantly, that unless the various children now living on what was known as ‘Bulls’-Ease’ farm did not attend school, it would be not only much worse for them, but for their parents, whoever they were!” The Ryders are an antithesis of an aristocratic dynasty, closer to modern-day rednecks than the ancestral tradition Barnes pays homage to in her Elizabethan prose.
The salacious subject matter of Ryder, like Ulysses, proved vulnerable to censorship under the 1873 Comstock obscenity laws, prompting Barnes to participate in a deliberate stylistic form of self-censorship. In August 1927, she signed a contract with Boni & Liveright stipulating that “the publisher agrees to make all cuts necessary to Ryder to enable it to appear in America and indicate every excision by the insertion of asterisks.” According to the scholar C. F. Creasy, Barnes and her editor “sat in her attic in Paris going over her new book and substituting asterisks for every letter of every word [they] felt would have to be cut out of the book if it were to get by the censors.” Ultimately, Barnes replaced twelve passages with asterisks and removed five illustrations “relating for the most part to bodily fluids,” resulting in a text both materially illegible and opaque. She added an indignant foreword decrying censorship: “This book, owing to censorship… has been expurgated. Where such measures have been thought necessary, asterisks have been employed, thus making it matter for no speculation where sense, continuity, and beauty have been damaged.” Nevertheless, in June 1928, New York Postal Service inspectors seized the final corrected proofs of the text Barnes had mailed from Paris to her New York publisher, although the text was permitted to be published with the excision of two additional illustrations.
While Barnes’s foreword strongly proclaims her opposition to censorship, there is ample evidence to suggest she controlled the nature of its appearance in Ryder to contribute to the material texture of the novel. Existing proofs of Ryder reveal that, in fact, both the asterisks and the foreword were added prior to the novel’s publication, suggesting Barnes not only anticipated the challenges of censorship, but utilized them to exaggerate the bawdy reputation of the novel. This is supported by the fact that she declined the opportunity to restore the censored passages for St. Martin’s Press reprint in 1979—allegedly, according to her agent, because it simply wasn’t worth the effort. The original manuscript was destroyed during the Second World War, so the asterisks now form a permanent part of Ryder’s text. However, St. Martin’s Press restored the two original censored illustrations, one in which Sophia is seen urinating into a chamber pot and another in which Amelia and Kate-Careless knit codpieces. The new edition adds the five other drawings intended for Ryder, including an unfinished one, that are now in the Djuna Barnes Collection at the University of Maryland. The asterisks are therefore not an authentic form of censorship, but another experimental choice intended to contribute to Ryder’s purposely disorienting style. Barnes, who engaged in a similar pre-publication revision process for Nightwood, intended to suggest censorship without losing the meaning of the text. Asterisks appear only a few times throughout the novel, replacing descriptions of body parts or bodily functions, and their intention is often obvious from contextual clues and illustrations, such as Wendell’s nickname “‘Cock o’ the Walk’ or * * *.” As one contemporary reviewer observed, “There are only a few asterisks, and, as they invariably occur after passages that are certain to be considered particularly obnoxious by the smut-researchers, it may be assumed that Miss Barnes is merely thumbing an uptilted nose at censorial obtuseness.”
Despite the disorientating, dream-like experience of reading Ryder, it briefly became an unlikely bestseller upon its publication, something the author of the afterword Paul West attributes to its scandalous reputation. The first edition of 3,000 sold out quickly, and the advance allowed Barnes to buy a new apartment on Rue Saint-Romain in Paris. It’s difficult to imagine such an experimental novel being widely read today, though, like Ulysses, its notoriety preceded it. Although Ryder’s legacy has largely been eclipsed by Nightwood, its preoccupation with the free expression of sexuality and non-traditional family structures still resonates. West writes of Barnes: “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.” More than any of her other works, Ryder is perhaps the most ambitious testament to one woman’s singular imagination and literary vision.