ABSTRACT
Although many studies have examined space and time in Nightwood, none have discussed how varying spatiotemporal perspectives work alongside Barnes’ prose to craft the affective tone within and radiating from its narrative. The chapter argues that Djuna Barnes’ poetic narrative illustrates the flux of modernism via fundamental collisions within the experience of spacetime. The reverberations of these collisions emanate outward from the disorientation of the characters and culminate in the novel’s overall sublime tone. Examining contending forms of space and time—the “old” of Newton butting up against the “new” of Einstein—the chapter observes characters’ metaphysical disorientation and suggests it breeds intensities that palpably radiate a sublime dichotomy of pleasure and terror. Characters configure, reform, and transform themselves according to the times and rhythms colliding around Robin Vote’s pivotal mass. By revisiting space and time in Nightwood through the theory of relativity and touching on queer phenomenology, this chapter demonstrates the disorienting affects of Einsteinian rhythms on a populace that still sways to the Newtonian. Affects of disorientation pervade the novel, creating one of the most prolonged experiences of the sublime in the American modernist collection.
