Document Type
Article
Abstract
Engaging the language of psychoanalysis through a “spectropoetics” while attempting to interpret the ghosts operating both inside and outside characters in Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood, this essay addresses issues of modernity, queerness, and autobiography which act in a sort of spectral dialogism between text and reader, author and autobiographical impetus, trauma and well being. The influence of ghosts residing both within and without these characters evokes an ontological inquiry into the alternating dialectic of psychic and bodily haunting, and thereby sheds new light on Barnes’ marginal modernism. The novel suggests that rather than merely acting as agents of trauma, specters as conceived by theorists like Derrida as well as Abraham and Torok may create a “hauntological” place necessary to address the wounded subject. As opposed to the talking cure, which seeks psychic coherence, Barnes’ novel suggests a model of subjectivity existing in conversation with specters.
Repository Citation
Baumgartner, Brad. "The Spectropoetics of Trauma: Ghosts, Language, and the Wound in Nightwood." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 11, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–21. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol11/iss1/7