an institution invested with the mythology of the American dream: the 'Black Sox' scandal over the fixing of the 1919 World Series. Nick Carraway's negotiation of the attractions and repulsions by the glamorous world of Gatsby and the Buchanans is conducted through a poetic language charged with moral complexity. Of Daisy Buchanan's seductive voice, Nick Carraway tells Gatsby:
'She's got an indiscreet voice,' I remarked. 'It's full of — 'I hesitated.
'Her voice is full of money,' he said suddenly.
That was it. I'd never understood it before. It was full of money — that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it…. High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl…
Like Conrad,'s Marlow, Nick Carraway too is ultimately confronted with a choice of nightmares, and like Marlow, who sides with the demonic idealism of Kurtz against the hard greed of the Company, Carraway sides with the doomed and self-corrupting questing of the -325- impostor Gatsby against the hard amorality of the rich Buchanans: 'I found myself on Gatsby's side and alone.'
Fitzgerald achieves both Nick's and the reader's troubled repulsions in the world of Gatsby by producing spiritually resonating distortions and symbols that defamiliarize the world and make it strange, and that we associate with the techniques of Expressionism that James Joyce had already incorporated into the brilliant and shocking Nighttown section of his modernistic 1922 novel Ulysses. The valley of the ashes that separates West Egg and New York — 'a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens' — is such an expressionistic device, as is the ghostly giant oculist's billboard of 'the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg,' whose function as a blind panopticon inserts an image of an ineffectual conscience (ironically created by advertisement) into the amoral spiritual landscape of America. Fitzgerald's brilliant early promise was not sustained, even though his long-anticipated Tender Is the Night, with its more opulent and richly poetic prose, was considered by many a second masterpiece. This tragic story of the dissolution of the doomed marriage of a beautiful, wealthy, glamorous couple, in which many readers saw a reflection of the Fitzgeralds' own struggles with alcoholism, infidelity, madness, and institutionalization, failed in 1934 to make its panorama of the private angst of an American moneyed elite, disporting itself on the Riviera, relevant to an America in the grip of the brutal Great Depression. When Fitzgerald died prematurely in 1940 of a heart attack hastened by alcoholism and depression, none of his books were in print.
Modernism, then, changed during the thirties, with the Depression, the New Deal reforms, the Federal Writers' Project, and other WPA projects that followed in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929. Although that year saw the publication of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, a book that overtakes The Great Gatsby as a great modern American novel, the politicalization of American fiction by such writers as Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, Meridel Le Sueur, and John Steinbeck marked the end of American high modernism, as stylistic experimentation was put increasingly in the service of revolutionary and protest literature. During this period the critical voice of Partisan Review, especially, promoted an engaged literature organized around a new 'proletarian' fiction that would -326- make art socially responsible to the economically and racially oppressive times reflected in such events as the coal miners' strikes of Harlan County, Kentucky, and the 1931 trial for rape of a white woman by eight African American men, the 'Scottsboro boys,' sentenced to death by an Alabama court and eventually pardoned. The remains of a more purely logopoetic American fiction of the kind associated with high modernism took an avant- garde form inspired by the German expressionism and French and Spanish surrealism of the early twentieth century, and issued in the thirties in an American version strongly marked by gothic elements. The high modernistic prototype of this neogothic mode of fiction was created by Sherwood Anderson, who wrote his 'Book of the Grotesque,' a collection of tales of hidden, anguished, small-town lives published as Winesburg, Ohio (1919), under the influence of the pure syntax and language he had first encountered in the writing of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives and Tender Buttons. Anderson, who in 1932 joined fifty-one other writers in signing a 'manifesto' backing a Communist presidential ticket, in turn influenced William Faulkner and Nathanael West (Miss Lonelyhearts [1933] and The Day of the Locust [1939]), two other American novelists in whose fiction the lives of simple, poor, and alienated people are dilated, by sometimes fantastic narrative and stylistic distortions, into subjectivities invaded by nightmare, criminality, and madness.
It was James Joyce, whose A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had served in the teens as model of the verbal purity of high modernistic prose, who led the way into the stylistics of verbal excess and derangement with the neologistic, densely allusive, hallucinogenic nightlanguage of his avant-garde 1939 dream text, Finnegans Wake. Published throughout the thirties in installments in Eugene Jolas's magazine transition, an avant-garde publication committed to 'the revolution of the word,' Joyce's new work revitalized the surrealistic tendencies that were to mark the avant-garde maturity of modernism at the same time that they inaugurated the self-consuming, selfexhausting, self-conscious fictionality of postmodernism. Samuel Beckett, who served as Joyce's amanuensis and friend during the writing of Finnegans Wake, became the first of the Wake's postmodern heirs, which later included Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges. Of American novelists, it was Djuna Barnes who brought this strange -327- subversive amalgam of nightmare and unreality, of verbal illogicality and brilliant discursive excess, of philosophical destruction and nihilism saved only by pure, nonsensical language itself, to fruition in her own 1936 night-novel, Nigbtwood. Trained as an artist in New York — she would later illustrate some of her texts with fine woodcuts — Barnes, like Hemingway, worked as a journalist (albeit a very different sort of journalist) in the United States before going to Paris on assignment for McCall's magazine in 1919. Her feature writing covered circus and vaudeville, and prompted her occasionally to participate in both sensationalistic and serious 'stunts' — jumping from a skyscraper into a fireman's net or allowing herself to be forcefed in order to articulate the plight of imprisoned, hunger-striking suffragists. Before coming to Paris, she had several one-act plays produced by the Provincetown Players, and during her two decades in Paris she was a lively member of Natalie Barney's lesbian salon, whose coterie she celebrated and lampooned in the hilarious eighteenth-century pastiche of lesbian eroticism she had privately printed and circulated as Ladies Almanack in 1929. Barnes enjoyed as well the patronage of two powerful modernist giants, James Joyce, who granted her a rare interview for Vanity Fair in 1922, and T. S. Eliot, who wrote an admiring introduction to Nigbtwood: 'What I would leave the reader prepared to find is the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.'
Nightwood (1937), whose biographical core is thought to have been Djuna Barnes's disastrous affair with the American sculptor Thelma Wood, uses the setting of the lesbian demimonde of Paris in the twenties as the venue for the decline and fall of Western civilization. The aimless plot, as unfocused as Robin Vote's nocturnal prowling, presents the collapse of the heritage of the House of Hapsburg through miscegenation and imposture, culminating in the sterile issue of the celibate child of Felix Volkbein's marriage to the mad and mysterious Robin Vote. Robin Vote, who leaves Felix for a series of women whom she in turn abandons and betrays, emerges as an emblem of human 'otherness' in the text, as the concentration of everything dark and strange, unintelligible and alien, in a suffering nature reduced by novel's end to that of a crawling beast: 'Then she -328- began to bark also, crawling after him — barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching.' Barnes's philosophical subversiveness resides in her comprehensive dismantling of the symbolic order, the system of everything that signifies in a culture and a society. In Nightwood every aristocrat is a phony, every doctor a quack, every priest defrocked, every story a lie, every vow a betrayal, every caress a blow, Europe is a circus and America a zoo, and Nightwood itself a novel that destroys its own coherence in the telling. The figure who embodies all these self-negations is the magnificent creation of 'Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor,' whose medical books are dusty and unread, his forceps rusty, his room a degraded den of filth ('A swill-pail stood at the head of the bed brimming with abominations'), as he lies in bed in woman's wig, rouge, and flannel nightgown, spewing a torrential logorrhea at Nora Flood on the subject of the night: 'Though some go into the night as a spoon breaks easy water, others go head foremost against a new connivance; their horns make a dry crying, like the wings of the locust, late come to their shedding.' Nora Flood thinks, as she looks at him and listens to him, 'God, children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding
