Modernism at night: The space of theater in Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka (Ireland)

In Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Franz Kafka's "Investigations of a Dog," theatrical episodes raise questions about aesthetic and political concerns addressed by modernism. These works mark off a physical and epistemological space of theater in which jarring, often uncanny performances stage narrative, temporal, and epistemological interruptions that threaten the coherence of linear narrative and the fragile unity of the subject. Barnes, Joyce, and Kafka stage the opposition between the normative and the rational on the one hand and, on the other, the irrational, the bodily, the bestial, and the unintelligible. Performances take place in carefully-circumscribed night spaces that map out borders and limits. They confront ways of knowing---deductive reasoning, empirical observation, linear narrative, aesthetic forms---with elaborate figures for what cannot be comprehended by the rational mind limited by the dictates of civilization: the primitive, the unconscious, and the abject. These works stage conflicts that resemble what Julia Kristeva calls abjection. While Kristeva imagines abjection as a by-product of a universal psychoanalytic model of psychic development, in Nightwood, Ulysses, and "Investigations of a Dog" stylized, overdetermined figures of the erotic, the abject, and the racially and sexually other act out their differences in performances that suggest collective, culturally-scripted dynamics rather than individual psychic disturbances.; This project reads Joyce, Barnes, and Kafka with Antonin Artaud and Walter Benjamin as well as more recent theories of performance and performativity that point to the ideologically-charged relations implicit within mimetic representation, and explore the potential of theatrical repetition to defamiliarize concepts, categories, and structural relationships. Ulysses, Nightwood, and "Investigations of a Dog" share with more recent feminist theory a focus on the skewing or perversion of mimicry. Ideology, epistemology, and the constitution of gendered subjectivity overlap and become visible in the space of performance. Like many "postmodern" performances, Barnes, Joyce, and Kafka call into question some of the basic categories on which individual and cultural identities are based: race, gender and sexuality, and national identity.