`Tendency to precocity' and `childish uncertainties' of a `virago at fourteen': Djuna Barnes's `The Diary of a Dangerous Child'.

Philip Herring's introduction to his edition of Djuna Barnes's Collected Stories (1) claims that `there is a quality of strangeness in a typical Barnesean story' (p. 7), adding that the characters of these short stories `are largely opaque to our scrutiny' (p. 8), and that Barnes is often `indelicate' and `insensitive' (p. 10), occasionally even `comically inept' (p. 12). Just when all this begins to sound slightly off putting for an introduction to a volume that presents itself as having collected these stories `for the first time', the Barnes persona is evoked. The negative critical judgements are tempered by reassuring comments on the author's ignorance and revitalized by hinting at her angst. `Despite Djuna Barnes's skill at portraying the agony which she herself felt, few American writers of the century could be described as less politically correct or more insensitive to the nuances of racial stereotyping than Djuna Barnes, but this was a function more of ignorance than mean-spiritedness' (p. 8; my italics). From his higher moral ground, the omniscient narrator suggests a link between the `odd mental states, sexual repression, and inexplicable behaviour of Barnes's walking wounded' and `Djuna Barnes's own sense of privacy [which] seemed paradoxically to affect her ability or willingness to reveal the psychological motivation of her characters' (p. 8). The textual strangeness is coloured by dark biographical shades.

`Murkiness' pervades Herring's account of these texts; even the stories defined as `most successful', such as `Spillway' (1919), `evoke a metaphysical complexity that remains murky at the end' (p. 15). `Mother', however, is `superior to many' not only because it is `basically a slice of life', but also because `no murky metaphysical question rises to the surface to smile like a Cheshire cat' (p. 16). At the opposite end of the spectrum, `Cassation' (1925), published originally as `A Little Girl Tells a Story to a Lady', is `one of the stranger, murkier stories' (p. 19). The reference to the Cheshire cat ascribes a childish, teasing, and whimsical quality to the insubstantial and unnecessary obscurity of most Barnes's stories, while a biographical root hinting at Barnes's lesbianism is grafted onto the story of seduction told by the `little girl' in `Cassation'. (2)

In this article, I would like to investigate how the notion of child works on the one hand in Barnes criticism and, on the other, in the short story `The Diary of a Dangerous Child'. (3) The quoted passages from Herring can work as an example of how the child pervades Barnes criticism in unexplored ways. The latent `murkiness' of some stories is associated with a disturbing whimsicality, unnecessary and yet disquieting, while the most overt `murkiness' is declared as belonging to the little girl's narrative of seduction.

Seduction pervades Barnes criticism. Barnes is not simply the `most famous unknown of the century', (4) she also is the seductress of the avant garde: `With her aloof good looks, her superb confidence and wit she captured the avant garde'. (5) I have analysed elsewhere how the Barnes persona has been canonized as `the Garbo of letters' (6) and how the constantly evoked textual murkiness, opacity, and seductive elusiveness are reproduced in biographical narratives. (7) Once located in the realm of `the real', these shadowy traits not only become a source of unending speculation, but are also transformed into a resource for explaining the previously lamented textual opacity. Murky texts are those in which a muddy bottom has surfaced, clouding the clear waters of the rational exercise of critical reading. When murkiness is instead located in allegedly non-textual biographical `reality', then the muddy waters become either the turbulent and fascinating source of subversive anti-patriarchal activities or the destructive force at the bottom of an art of despair.

Mary Lynn Broe, for instance, claims that `most of Barnes' major writings [...] encode the sexual violations and erotic entanglements in the patriarchal family. In a 1935 letter to Emily Holmes Coleman, Barnes wrote of the complex but empowering legacy from her grandmother, with whom she had an extraordinary cross-generational bond.' (8) In Broe's narrative, Barnes the child is both the victim of patriarchy and the active participant in what Broe calls `an ethics of care', which she infers from the correspondence between young Djuna and her grandmother. (9) Both passive victim of abuse and precocious agent of subversive anti-patriarchal activities, Barnes `encodes' the childhood trauma in her writing.

Ann Marie Wagstaff contrasts even more explicitly the `childhood reality' to `formal and stylist strategies'. Finally not afraid of plunging into the real mud of the author's childhood, the critic can wipe the nuggets of `childhood reality' clean of the protective, but sullying debris of formal strategies.

This childhood abuse is the basis not only for her autobiographical works, Ryder and The Antiphon, but also for the more elusive Nightwood. [...] In each case Barnes uses creative expression to contact and communicate childhood memories and emotions embedded in her psyche. Because each contact was painful, potentially explosive, and dangerous to her psychological equilibrium, she adopted various formal and stylistic strategies to distance herself from the emotional intensity of the material. While these strategies tend to make her work more obscure, this obscurity should be seen not as an obstacle between the reader and the content of her work, but as one expression of that content. My approach in this study is to search out and identify with the child within Barnes and to expose and explore the childhood reality within her work. (10)

Philip Herring reads `the desire for a return to the lost innocence of childhood' as `indeed a common theme in Barnes'. Taking `violation' as the key to her texts, Herring claims: `Seen from this perspective, the enigmatic poem `From Fifth Avenue Up' in The Book of Repulsive Women, which Barnes published at the age of twenty-three, can now be seen as a revelation of the violated self longing for infantile innocence. [...] Her readers are beginning to know Djuna Barnes for the woman that she was, a woman whose trauma in girlhood created in her art brilliant wit intermingled with haunting cries of despair.' (11)

I am not concerned with analysing the archive material referring to Barnes's childhood, nor to enter the debate on the different ways in which these texts can be and have been read. I would like to point out, nevertheless, the self-defeating nature of a debate that, while disputing over the `right' interpretation, refuses to acknowledge the textuality of biographical narratives. (12) In these accounts, the `real' Djuna can be known only through her violated childhood; if the critic can identify sufficiently `with the child within Barnes', s/he will be able to hear her `haunting cries of despair'.

The above examples indicate how the murkiness of difficult texts is projected onto the authorial persona, produced as the child holding, and even hiding, a terrible secret from the zealous and benevolent critic. According to Herring's and Wagstaff's problematic logic, once the secret of Barnes's childhood has been `discovered', then the texts can be read as a more or less veiled `expression' of it. (13) Readers can sigh with relief; muddy waters have in the end proved to be the very source of clear transparency, and, since textual anguish has been firmly located in the author's childhood, Djuna can finally be known `for the woman that she was'.

The author's violated childhood becomes the key to her troubled texts. Barnes as precocious child, (14) haunted incest victim, and teenage player in the `queendom of nanophilia', (15) is able to generate interest in the opaque texts. Since the Barnes canon has been constructed as unusual, hybrid, and queer, the image of the precocious child at the root of the writing concurs with the idea of a `modernism of marginality', (16) stimulating a criticism in which margin and subversion work as the norm.

However, within a canon established as eccentric, there is another aspect of the notion of the child, which hinders, rather than stimulating, criticism. When childhood is associated with simplicity, it serves to dismiss a text as not worth belonging to the same marginal and disruptive area. For instance, Barnes's last work, published posthumously, Creatures in an Alphabet, functions as the `normal', simple', `childish', `elementary' liminality of an eccentric system. (17) Hank O'Neal, after Philip Herring, has written that the old Barnes was able to produce only a `slight work', adding that it was a work `intended for children'. (18) Described as incapable of writing a final masterpiece, the aged author stuttered her alphabetical list of animals, a work, allegedly, on the verge of `in-fancy'.

The short stories, although not sharing the temporal and canonical marginality of Creatures in an Alphabet, have generated from the late 1960s a criticism concerned with defending them against the charge of being `severely limited in their vision'. (19) Although generally read as anticipating major works to come, only a few of the stories are catalogued as promising predictions of better things, while others are cast away as `comically inept' nonsense. Both the precocious child and the silent child are central tropes in the available criticism on the short stories. `Cassation', originally published as `A Little Girl Tells a Story to A Lady', and `The Grande Malade', originally published as `The Little Girl Continues', are often grouped with `Dusie', a story which, according to Anette Bretschneider, is entitled in a typescript version `Third of "A Little Girl Tells a Story to a Lady"'. (20) They have generated criticism mostly concerned with `their increasingly overt sexual content' and with the `precocious and perverse' nature of the protagonists. Carolyn J. Allen, for instance, writing on `Cassation', asserts:

Of course the narrator is not a little girl at all, but a precocious young woman who implicates herself and her sexuality even when she seems with innocent nonchalance to be recounting some other woman's story to the presumably attentive `Madame'. Her three stories, increasingly overt in their sexual content, are themselves a fictional seduction of the older `Madame' by the young narrator, Katya. (21)

Louis F. Kannenstine writes:

In the first place, they [the short stories] have none of the rhetorical excess of either the novels of 1928 or the earlier Book of Repulsive Women and the Lydia Steptoe vein of literary sketch, although from the last follow the stories that are narrated by a precocious and perverse `little girl'. [...] [`Cassation'] is the monologue of a young girl in a cafe, addressed to a silent lady who is again the presumed interlocutor in `The Grande Malade', formerly called `The Little Girl Continues' when it appeared in This Quarter in 1925, its only publication prior to Spillway. A third of these stories, `Dusie', appeared in Americana Esoterica, an anthology of 1927, but was never reprinted. The narrator is again one of Miss Barnes's young girls on the verge of womanhood, part innocent yet insouciantly and intuitively involved in adult perversity and sophistication. (22)

While the figure of the innocent young girl `intuitively involved in adult perversity and sophistication' is presented as able to stir the interest and is itself duplicated into narratives of the author's own precocity, the figure of the simple, innocent child is involved in a criticism that invokes silence. Kannenstine employs the same expression used by O'Neal to dismiss Creatures in an Alphabet when writing on `A Boy Asks a Question':

Included in the Faber and Faber edition, it was omitted from the Selected Works, evidently by an editorial decision with which Miss Barnes readily complied. There is no doubt that it is a slight piece, and its placement between `The Doctors' and `Spillway' tends to diminish the impact of the latter. It is thematically relevant, however, and one moment in it serves to prepare for the somewhat ambiguous last line spoken by the princess. (pp. 84-85)

The idea of childish simplicity is to be found, in a different form, in James B. Scott too, who writes:

We are reminded by `No Man's Mare' of the child's fairy tale with its linear plot and by its tendency to present the bizarre and the monstrous as off handedly as if they were completely natural. We do not question in a fairy tale the presence of giants, ogres, or mermaids. [...] We have also the child's-tale formula, traditionally magical, in the coming of the third sea wave which obliterates all traces of Pauvla and the mare; and we have a reconciliation with nature in Tasha's praying to the sea (after unsuccessfully praying to other things) and of finding comfort `this time'. (23)

On the one hand, then, the precocious little girls of the murkiest short stories are made to reflect the author's prematurely lost innocence and her powerful seductiveness. On the other hand, the child is the trope adopted to dismiss some works as valueless because too simple, formulaic like a `child's fairy tale', or `slight' like alphabetical lists of animals.

In both cases, the child becomes the threshold of criticism. Rape, incest, and utopian `nanophilia' become the keys to the texts, simultaneously producing and repeating them as origin. These positions construct their higher moral ground in `the real suffering of the child', leaving unexplained how it should be easier to reach this allegedly pure materiality when textual analysis is proving to be such a difficult task. Furthermore, they never address the question of which instruments should enable this direct access to the child's `experience'. (24) The real is thus produced as the declaration of an ultimate, unquestionable truth, which serves to interpret Barnes's oeuvre as the `expression' of that trauma. In other words, the real suffering of the author as a child works not only as an origin for the writings, but also as a confirmation that their value depends on their coinciding with that fundamental truth.

When the child is instead made to function as pure simplicity, the texts become `bad literature', slight works, and even, as in the case of Creatures in an Alphabet, not literature at all, but pure materiality. A childish work becomes then a work of which nothing needs be said. If the perverse and precocious child is deployed in the production of biographical narratives claiming their status as `reality', the innocent `childish child' is produced in a limited number of critical interventions which invoke the necessity of silence, and declare themselves and their subject as redundant.

The trope of the child in Barnes criticism in general, and in the secondary literature devoted to the short stories in particular, reflects, without analysing it, the preoccupation in Barnes's oeuvre with the relationship between innocence and experience and with the production of the child in writing. In particular, a number of short stories address the problem of writing childhood.

If read as the `expression' of Djuna's most intimate secrets, `The Diary of a Dangerous Child' (as many other texts, no doubt) can easily be declared, as Herring does, `comically inept' or a `slight work'. In my discussion I want neither to celebrate this text, and the short stories in general, as an overlooked masterpiece, nor to declare it a `key' to other texts. Rather, I am interested in analysing how the furtive, dangerous, and seductive child in this text, which has been diagnosed in the biographical readings discussed above, can be interpreted as challenging the notions of `reality', `nature', and `expression'. `The Diary of a Dangerous Child' investigates how these notions produce the `already there' and explores the limit between the idea of the natural child as the innocent child and that of the non-child. Moreover, the `precocious child' of this text questions a gendered construction of childhood.

In this sense, a reading focused on the relationship between language and innocence might be the starting point for a further reflection on the child in Barnes's texts. Children put into question the production of innocence and experience in many of Barnes's texts, from the three `little girl stories', including the `buzzing' child of `Cassation', to `The Diary of a Small Boy' and `A Boy Asks a Question [of a Lady]'; from `Behind the Heart' to `Run, girls, run!' (a short story that appeared in the bootleg publication Vagaries Malicieux). (25) Moreover, in Nightwood, Sylvia, the `little girl', puts into question notions of the natural, the sylvan, and the innocent which are scrutinized through the `earth-fleshed', `fungi'-smelling Robin, whose `turning' into the howling dog indicates the impossibility of unmediated language and re-inscribes her in the `learned corruption of language'. (26)

`The Diary of a Dangerous Child' consists of nine diary entries, in which the child of the title writes as a first-person narrator:

September first:

Today I am fourteen; time flies; women must grow old.

Today I have done my hair in a different way and asked myself a question: `What shall be my destiny?'

Because today I have placed my childhood behind me, and have faced the realities. (p. 327)

The text's fictional device is to have the child writing her secret thoughts to herself, placing its implied reader in a voyeuristic position, overlooking these furtive exercises. However, the possibility of directly accessing the child is questioned in the very first line. `Today I am fourteen; time flies; women must grow old.' The child of the title is fourteen years old, she is placed on a threshold (her birthday) which is produced, through the comment on the passing of time and on `women', as the passage between childhood and womanhood. While the genre of the diary seems to promise direct access to the child, it also constructs the child as secretive, hiding her thoughts and confessing them to these written pages only. The child's outpourings are also `dangerously' non-spontaneous, indirect, untrustworthy, unchildlike.

Moreover, just as the definition `dangerous child' places this child on the opposite side of innocence, `today' is produced as the impossible presence of time flying. The child has already `placed [her] childhood behind [her]', questioning the definition given to her by the title. She also has a general knowledge on what women `must' do in relation to time, indicating, through what will be seen to be a recurrent move in this text, a knowledge of the social construction of femininity and its rules.

The present of the child speaking is therefore questioned; its `childish' identity already lost. It could be hypothesized that the no-longer child of the title begins to speak from the threshold of adulthood, and that the text constructs the time of her innocence as prior to itself, outside language. In other words, the `dangerous child' can write herself only when she is a child no more. However, this `turning' (27) from one state into another entails a choice between two options; to decide to place one's childhood behind one implies a prior knowledge of the opposition between childhood and non-childhood.

In the passage quoted above the narrator opposes childhood and having `faced the realities', constructing childhood, by contrast, as the realm of fancy. `The realities', in the plural preceded by the definite article, are familiar, material, and soundly non-whimsical. The present perfect also points out that these `realities' have been already faced and are part of the present of the narration; the speaker is the child of the title, and yet she knows what she is no more (a child) and what she has faced (the realities). The child is familiar with both a model of childhood, which she willingly `places behind herself ` and a model of `the realities' of adulthood.

Anette Bretschneider has argued that this short story builds an irony through the contrast between the involuntary naivete of the narrator and her assumption of sophisticated models of femininity (pp. 118-19). This point is part of her larger argument on how the two decadent tropes of the femme fatale and the femme fragile play one against the other in this and other Barnes texts, critiquing the production of femininity. Bretschneider states that this `child', with her `tendency to precocity', (28) is the figure through which the cultural options available to women, which are conventionally represented as successful, are unveiled as childish and superficial behaviour, doomed to fail. Bretschneider reads the narrative as the `Psychogramm' of a pubescent girl, which, by exposing the narrator's naive and `exaggerated' efforts to imitate models and roles from books and images, formulates the question `How Women Get the Way They Are'. (29)

In Bretschneider's account the naive and still unsophisticated child can uncover the artificiality of successful feminine models, which, however, remain valid options for the construction of femininity. It is my contention that, through the use of intertextual references (which Bretschneider calls `models'), the text problematizes not only the mechanisms that produce femininity, but also those constructing childhood, and, more specifically, the female child. In other words, this child does not expose the nudity of the emperor; it cannot operate as the non-constructed basis from which artificiality is questioned, because in this text the child can never occupy the position of absolute innocence.

Moreover, by definining the text as a `Psychogramm eines pubertierenden jungen Madchens', Bretschneider reads this text as an accurate representation of a human state (pubescence) implicitly defined as oscillating between childhood innocence and feminine awareness. I would argue instead that the modalities according to which the oppositions between naivete and complexity and innocence and experience are set one against the other critique the very idea of a real model to be accurately represented. The naivete of the child can be produced in this text only from the position of knowing; innocence is fashioned as a comparative term within a system.

Bretschneider, like Kannenstine and Herring, reads this child as `precocious', as sexualized before her `time'; however, the text can be interpreted as an interrogation of the very term `precocious' in relation to an idea of normality and naturalness. If the dangers of the Lolita are, as Bretschneider convincingly points out, ironically constructed as the space of a decadent femininity in opposition to naivete, there is no safe child-like position from which these dangers can be avoided. The child in this text is dangerous because she cannot write herself as childish innocence.

The text does not produce a certain form of writing as the accurate representation of how children, or even of how this specific child, speak(s), thus building a basis from which to question models of femininity. From the opening lines, the appropriately `childish' language is produced as the secret of adulthood.

My uncle from Glasgow, with the square whiskers and the dull voice, is bringing pheasants for my mother. I shall sit in silence during the meal and think. Perhaps someone, sensitive to growth, will ask in a tense voice, `What makes you look thoughtful, Olga?'

If this should be the case, I shall tell. Yes, I shall break the silence. For sooner or later they must know that I am become furtive. By this I mean that I am debating with myself whether I shall place myself in some good man's hands and become a mother, or if I shall become wanton and go out in the world and make a place for myself. Somehow I think I shall become a wanton. It is more to my taste. At least I think it is. I have tried to curb this inner knowledge by fighting down that bright look in my eyes as I stand before the mirror, but not ten minutes later I have been cutting into lemons for my freckles. `Ah woman, thy name, etc.' (pp. 327-28)

The familiar figure of the uncle, set in the present tense of his masculine action, is contrasted by the future of the hypothetical dialogue. The narrator's claim `I shall tell. Yes, I shall break the silence' multiplies the possible meanings of this silence. On one level, the silence of the child can be read as being broken by the voice of maturity. However, the child is silent because she is holding a secret, the secret that she is not a child any longer. Furthermore, the silence is not silence at all, but written words on a page that present themselves as the confession of this child/non-child. The text produces itself as the written words of a child who claims to be silent, holding the silence of a child who claims not to be one (at least not one any more).

Further complexity is added by the statement `For sooner or later they must know that I am become furtive'. The secret on which silence is held duplicates itself; the secret is that she is invisibly furtive, secretive, and evasive. Olga does not simply claim to have a secret and disclose it, but asserts that her secret on which she is still silent (but writing about) is the fact that she is acting in a secretive manner. Paradoxically, this text produces itself as silence to be broken, secret to be unveiled, and unseen furtiveness. The narrator eventually `explains' her furtive behaviour as coinciding with a question about her future. Before analysing this passage, it can be observed that, if in the first entry of this diary `open' furtiveness is declared to be the mark of change and adulthood, in the September tenth entry textual silence, represented by the seven-day gap, is tentatively defined as the sign of change: `Many days have passed; I have written nothing. Can it be that I have changed?'. In the September eleventh entry the secret is, again, being secretive:

Imagine how it might look to the outer world if I should go around looking as if I held a secret. If the human eye were to fall upon this page I might be so easily misunderstood. What a shame I might bring down upon my father's head--on my mother's too, if you want to take the whole matter in a large sweeping way--just by my tendency to precocity. I should be an idiot for their sakes. I will be!

In the September first entry the paradoxically open furtiveness is the mark of a change, later explained as her questioning her future options. In the September tenth entry the change is identified with silence; and in the September eleventh the narrator hides her secret by remaining silent, and `being' `an idiot'. At first, the changing child wants to break the silence of her childhood; then, silence indicates that very change. Later, the silent child is defined `an idiot' and the ability to keep silent is the adult skill of holding a secret, deceptively looking like a child while no longer being one. (30) The equivalence between either silence and childhood or silence and adulthood is short-circuited.

This indicates how what Bretschneider reads as the narrator's ironically naive position in the tale and Herring sees as `the desire for a return to the lost innocence of childhood' indicating `a common theme in Barnes', (31) is produced in this text as the impossible position of innocence in language. Reading it either as an ironic critique based on the representation of the `real psychology' of an adolescent (or even representative of adolescence tout court) or as a failed nostalgic longing for the innocence of childhood, (32) means having to overlook the extent to which this text goes to destabilize the position of the narrator. Both Bretschneider's and Herring's positions assume that the child can work in the text as the prelapsarian space. However, this text, which produces itself as the silence of a child who is confessing to being furtive, blurring the divide between innocence and experience, problematizes the `fiction of childhood' as necessarily producing `what it claims to describe.' (33)

At different stages of the narrative, the narrator knows that she is no longer a child and, conversely, that she is still a child; she also does not know that she is either still a child or not a child any more. Through an examination of the production of all the above mentioned positions, I will argue that in this text there is no innocent space, no pre-linguistic position from which to criticize corruption or artificiality. The child's `inner knowledge' is produced as necessarily textual; in order not to know, the narrator has to enter the realm of language, in which (not) being aware of being still a child or being aware of (not) being a child any more are equally non-innocent positions.

As observed in relation to the opening paragraph of the short story, the narrator claims to know that she is no longer a child. The two alternatives of wife or wanton, provided as an explanation of Olga's furtiveness in the September first entry, illustrate how the `dangerous child' is the trope of the impossibility of innocent writing and of writing innocence. The narrator claims that `wanton' `is more to my taste. At least I think it is'. If her acknowledgement of not knowing works as guarantee of both innocence and lack of experience, it is also a disingenuous claim. The child can assert her not knowing only from a position of knowledge, even if it is the knowledge of what is not known. By demonstrating an awareness of the alternative between knowing and not knowing, the narrator cannot speak from the position of absolute lack of knowledge, of untainted innocence.

Moreover, to claim a lack of experiential knowledge (`at least I think I do'), also means to avow having what is constructed at this point as `common sense' understanding. If the opposition between experiential and textual knowledge could be surmised as functioning as the limit between innocence and experience, the text soon turns this conjecture upside down.

Being aware of the available alternatives is defined as `inner knowledge', which has to be `curbed' and fought against, since it manifests itself in the reflected image of the narrator's bright eyes. The text both juxtaposes and identifies Olga's claim of not knowing, and yet being aware of not knowing, and that of possessing an `inner knowledge' brightly shining through a particularly `spiritual' part of her body. `Innocence' and `experience' are produced as mutually dependent and constructed notions through the assimilation of the two Romantic figures of the child as the non-knower, the innocent picture of ignorance, and of the visionary all-knower, who experiences directly, in an unmediated form.

The last paragraph of the September first entry continues this `back and forth' game between `outer' and `inner' knowledge. Femininity as vanity, a concept introduced in the very first paragraph, is reiterated in the image of her bright eyes reflected in the mirror, and further developed through the idea of the masquerade. `"Ah woman, thy name, etc."--' is a misquotation from Hamlet, (34) which concludes the first entry of this diary. The quotation marks and the closing `etc.' and following dash produce it in the text as a familiar alterity, which does not need to be completed to be known. The child's `inner knowledge' of her cultural options is the `outer' knowledge of the textual production of identity, and, more specifically, the familiar cultural production of femininity as vanity. In this respect, Bretschneider's suggestion relative to the textual construction of femininity is in line with my reading of how, by making the textual knowledge coincide with the inner knowledge, this story questions the notion of experience as non-constructed, directly accessible, springing from within, shining through determinate bodily parts. However, the text can be read as a critique not only of the textual construction of femininity, but also of childhood, and, more specifically, of the female child. The latter becomes the figure of the impossibility of writing the natural child.

The narrator's claims that `childhood is but a memory' are, however, joined by statements in which she fashions herself as knowing that she is still a child, therefore problematizing her own innocence.

September third

I could not write in my diary yesterday, my hands trembled and I started at every little thing. I think this shows that I am going to be anemic just as soon as I'm old enough to afford it.

This is a good thing; I shall get what I want. Yes, I am glad that I tremble early. Perhaps I am getting introspective. One must not look inward too much, while the inside is yet tender.

Knowing that she trembles `early' implies a comparison to some given notion of childhood as separated from adulthood, and claiming that her `inside is yet tender' implies that the child states its own `childness', thus undermining from within the presuppositions of innocence and tenderness on which such a notion rests. (35)

This is further developed later. The October eighth opening line claims to be a faithful description of events: `But let me tell it as it happened'. However, this phrase is followed by images of full moon, laburnum bushes, and thrilling shivers, produced as literary deja vu. Any notion of an authenticity of the voice is problematized further by intertextual references. The narrator writes: `I thought thoughts of Duse and how she had suffered on balconies a good deal; at least I gathered she did from most of her pictures' (p. 331). The overt lack of knowledge (`at least I gathered') once again presupposes knowledge, and the claim of having interpreted literally Duse's stage pictures as suffering is disingenuously produced as naive. The notion of authenticity is also questioned by the poses the narrator assumes: `I too stood on the balcony and suffered side-face.' Just as the affordable anaemia, the suffering is produced as fictional, derivative, aping the picture of a theatrical representation. The child becomes the actress of her own play.

At this point the narrator places herself on the side of artificiality and dark sentimental femininity, since she defines herself as `a high-strung woman [who] must remember her duties to the malicious' (p. 332). But the text does not condemn the sophistication of femininity through what has been read as the naive and yet already adulterated child (Kannenstine, p. 69). Olga, narrating her plans to ride at midnight to encounter Don Pasos Dilemma and whip him, (36) writes `I tried to become agitated, my bosom refused to heave. Perhaps I am too young' (p. 332). One could be tempted, along the lines of Bretschneider's interpretation, to read the declaration of innocence at face value. However, the text clearly underlines the self-defying quality of the claim to innocence by producing it in the language of romance (`my bosom refused to heave'). Once again, the inner knowledge of the `child' fashions itself as the already said, the literary. (37) The place of alleged truthfulness, the refusal to act the part according to the script, becomes the place of literary artifice.

`The Diary of a Dangerous Child' also explores the position of being unaware of still being a child, which Bretschneider has described as the naive but instructive failure of the narrator. There are some instances in which the child seems to occupy the position of innocence, not knowing that she is still a child. For instance, in an `ob-scene' (38) episode the narrator recounts `sitting behind the victrola [...] reading Three Lives', unseen by Don Pasos Dilemma and her sister. Don Pasos Dilemma, one of the many intertextually foreign characters in Barnes's oeuvre, is the sexually `dangerous man', the perfumed, monocled Russian (39) with a `Southern heart'. She hears noises that she construes as those of kisses exchanged between her sister and `this Spaniard, this Brazilian', followed by her sister's softly spoken `You are a dangerous man'. This passage follows:

With that I sprang up and said in a loud and firm voice: `Hurrah, I love danger!' But nobody understood me. I am to be put to bed on bread and milk. Never mind, my room in which I sleep overlooks the garden.

The external recognition of the child's naughtiness and the suitably childish punishment, the lamentation of not being understood, and the language used by the narrator in her exclamation and response to the punishment (40) concur to produce an appropriately childish child. However, the genre of the diary creates an obstacle in this respect, since the promise of direct access to the child's thought that it proffers goes hand in hand with the necessity that the child produces herself and her language. In other words, in such a passage, which seems to promise a child who is unaware of being one, the child has to write her own spontaneity, has to draw the picture of her own innocence, and contrast it with different kinds of language, conventionally associated with adult literature.

The issue of the intertextual production of childhood is expanded by the narrator's `reviewing her whole childhood'. The dangerous child, after having planned to be a `vixen' or a `virago', (41) and to whip Don Pasos Dilemma at midnight (imagined as having `tricked himself out for the occasion'), fabricates her dangerous moment, her `standing between life and death', (42) and produces a series of commonplaces about childhood.

I thought of the many happy hours spent with my youngest sister putting spiders down her back, pulling her hair, and making her eat my crusts. I thought of the hours I had lain in the dust beneath the sofa reading Petronius and Rousseau and Glyn. I thought of my father, a great, grim fellow standing six feet two in his socks, but mostly sitting in the Morris chair. Then I remembered the day I was fourteen, only a little over a month ago. (p. 333)

The `unnaturally' sexualized little girl remembers childhood as the golden age of appropriately childish naughtiness. The memories of childhood are the memories of a non-sexualized past which, however, clearly constructs itself as reproducing the model of an only apparently gender-neutral but actually masculine childhood. As Valerie Walkerdine has argued, the `natural child', although `taken to be gender-neutral, [...] is always figured as a boy, a boy who is playful, creative, naughty, rule-breaking, rational' (p. 169). The appropriate childhood is fabricated as memory by a narrator artificially masquerading as both child and adult. Moreover, this memory of spontaneity includes the memory of reading, in an appropriately childishly secluded spot, a book on childhood spontaneity, a book that militates against children reading. (43) By reading Rousseau, the child ironically learns the model of her spontaneity, thus highlighting its constructed quality. What should function as the `real' childhood, the naughty spontaneity, is a textually produced memory. I would therefore argue that the position of the innocent, unselfconscious, spontaneous child is produced in this text as impossible, secondary, textual. In other words, the little girl can never simply `describe' her own innocence, even when she produces her own spontaneity.

The trope of self-taught innocence is reiterated in another short story, `A Boy Asks a Question [of a Lady]', in which Carmen la Tosca, actress, replies to the boy who has asked her about innocence and power: `We are all waiting for someone who will learn our innocence--all over again.' As in the case of `The Diary of a Dangerous Child', the boy, in order to formulate the question on his own innocence to the `woman of the world', must have entered the tainted realm of language.

`The Diary of a Dangerous Child' is followed by `The Diary of a Small Boy', whose protagonist is also fourteen years old. The active `small boy' accompanies his cousin Elda, at first defined as `obnoxious' but later no longer disliked, into the woods and `protects' her with a gun. (44) This different construction of a masculine `dangerous childhood' can be read as forming a pair with the previous story. The interdependence of innocence and experience is duplicated in the relationship between the two stories, and further mirrored by the position of the boy in `A Boy Asks a Question [of a Lady]'.

The production of innocence and experience as comparative terms can also be read in an intratextual and an intertextual light. The two short stories on the `dangerous child' and on the `small boy' produce themselves as mirroring the question about how innocence can speak itself formulated in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. Many of Barnes's texts produce themselves as the `already said', articulating the impossibility of innocence through intratextual and intertextual repetition. In Creatures in an Alphabet the opening line of the `Tyger' poem metamorphoses Blake's question on origins into an intertextual question on the secondariness of animality: `"Tyger! Tyger!"--Who wrote that?'. In the same volume, the Raccoon poem produces itself as an echo of one of the chapter titles of Nightwood, `Watchman, what of the night!', modified into the question `What of raccoon, animal?'. Blake's lines in `Dream': `What wailing wight | Calls the watchman of the night?' are therefore multiplied in a game that mirrors the exploration of the relationship between animality and language, innocence and experience. A number of Barnes's texts, including the short stories, also produce themselves as the derivative, impossible production of innocence through Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Further intertextual references can be found in `The Diary of a Dangerous Child': even when occupying the `child-like' position of being hidden behind the gramophone, the child does not read an appropriately childish book, but Three Lives by Gertrude Stein, an experimental investigation of the production of femininity published in 1909. This could be read as another position possibly occupied by the child, the opposite of the one often professed in the diary, that of not being aware of no longer being a child. In this instance, the position of unselfconsciousness becomes that of adulthood, thus shifting the value of the two poles, depriving them of their power to work as opposites. This is a paradoxical mirroring of the definition of the furtive child, which works, I have argued, both as the image of childhood secrecy and as the sign of change. (45)

The position of being unaware of being no longer a child is further investigated towards the end of the text, in which the narrator, after having changed her mind about the available options, declares: `I am going to run away and become a boy' (p. 334). The dangerous Lolita, playing with the decadent tricks of feminine sexuality in order to climb `from stable boy to prince, [since] such has been the route of all fascinating women' (p. 332), is `left' to `face disillusion and chagrin at a late hour at night, when no nice girl should be out, much less facing anything' (p. 334). Having learnt the role of the `nice girl' and having thrown away the `silver handled whip' does not translate itself into the possibility of finally occupying either the place of grown-up stability or of child-like innocence. The option now formulated is that of becoming a boy. The last entry reads: `November third: In another year I shall be fifteen, a woman must grow young again. I have cut off my hair and I am asking myself nothing. Absolutely nothing.' The `inversion' of the process of `natural growth' from a state of innocent childhood towards womanhood works as a further critique of an idea of innocence opposed and temporally followed by experience. Growth in this passage means either adopting an eternally childish femininity or attempting to `cut off [one's] hair' and `become a boy'. However, becoming a boy would mean embracing the traditional model of childhood; this, as conjured up in her `childhood memories' is that of the rational and spontaneous, mischievous boy able to run away freely. Cutting off one's hair is an ambivalent trick, an insufficient masquerade, (46) and therefore `a woman must grow young again'. Forced to embrace her sexuality as childishness, but unable to be the rational boy on which the very idea of childhood is modelled, the dangerous child can ask herself `absolutely nothing'. The decadent Lolita could use her paraphernalia, her long hair, her `common sense' and knowledge about `the kind of trick those foreign men are always up to' (p. 333), her modish hat and whip, even her anaemia, to buy into the model of `from stable boy to prince'. However, the `nice girl' has learned her lesson; she is no longer a dangerous child, having placed her memories of rational and spontaneous childhood beyond her. Not quite managing to become a boy by cutting her hair off, she must ask herself `absolutely nothing'. This coerced silence is different from that closing `The Diary of a Small Boy', in which the narrator, now wounded, declares `I am not going to write any more in my diary, it is a girl's pastime' (p. 343). Although masculinity is not produced as simply an act of wilfulness, it nevertheless implies the `courageous' silence that, by distancing itself from whimsical femininity, can claim to `be' the sign of masculinity. The boy's silence is the birth of man and of childhood as femininity ('girl's pastime').

The silence evoked at the end of `The Diary of a Dangerous Child' cannot function as the silence of wholesome, unselfconscious, spontaneous childhood, silent because outside the tainted realm of language. Rather, `The Diary of a Dangerous Child' foregrounds the mechanisms according to which childhood is furtively constructed as innocence, explores the never innocent processes of writing the child, and problematizes them in view of a gendered question.

(1) Djuna Barnes, Collected Stories, ed. with introduction by Philip Herring (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1996), pp. 7-24.

(2) `Barnes seems to have heard this story from a Paris friend Tylia Pearlmutter, who helped color illustrations in Ladies' Almanack. Tylia and Bronja were Polish-Jewish sisters. Barnes was anxious about the story in later years; in a letter to Rolf Ekner she denied that the story was about lesbians' (p. 19). Herring gives no further indication of the source for this information.

(3) Collected Stories, pp. 327-35. This short story first appeared under the pseudonym of Lydia Steptoe in Vanity Fair, 18 (July 1922).

(4) Djuna Barnes to Natalie Barney, 31 June 1963, Correspondence of Djuna Barnes, Special Collection, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, quoted by Anne B. Dalton, `"This is obscene"': Female Voyeurism, Sexual Abuse, and Maternal Power in The Dove', The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13.3 (Fall 1993), 107-16 (p. 117 and p. 136 n. 1).

(5) James Baird, `Djuna Barnes and Surrealism: "Backward Grief"' in Individual and Community: Variations on a Theme in American Fiction, ed. by Kenneth H. Baldwin and David K. Kirkby (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975), 160-81 (p. 161). Baird is one of the few critics who problematizes the tale of Barnes's legendary seductiveness: `This legend is exotic, rather in conformity with her "Portrait of Alice" which she lent with other paintings and drawings to Peggy Guggenheim for an exhibition in 1943. The image at the centre is seemingly inscrutable. Was the legend made as a studiously conceived mystery, like the self-made mystery of Garbo in seclusion? Willed or not, in America the mystery holds' (p. 161).

(6) `Il bestiario eccentrico' (see n. 17) Baird, p. 161; Herring, The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995), p. xvii.

(7) Ambiguity, elusiveness, and opacity pervade Barnes criticism. Louis F. Kannenstine, for instance, when discussing the short story `The Nigger' writes: `The final result is ambiguity' (p. 63); `Equally elusive and marked by fragments of sensation is "Mother"' (p. 63); `A sense of elusiveness is gained here by moving around the outer edges of a human relationship' (p. 64). Anne B. Dalton writes: `Barnes was able to depict, albeit in a masked form, the sexual abuse to which her grandmother Zadel subjected her' (p. 120). For a recent critique of the biographical approach to Barnes's texts, see Mary E. Galvin, Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2000), especially the chapter `"Dropping Crooked into Rhyme": Djuna Barnes' Use of Form and the Liminal Space of Gender', pp. 83-103. Galvin, however, argues that Barnes, like all the writers examined in her study, `constructed a persona to interact with the world [...] behind which they live their inner lives' (p. 85). In other words, although critical towards Herring's patronizing and misogynist biographical approach, Galvin believes in a fundamental, real essence; on the contrary, in this study I am arguing that `experience' or `inner life' is constructed.

(8) Silence and Power. A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. with an introduction by Mary Lynn Broe, with an afterword by Catharine Stimpson (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), p. 4.

(9) Mary Lynn Broe, `My Art Belongs to Daddy: Incest as Exile, The Textual Economics of Hayford Hall', in Silence and Power, pp. 41-86. Broe writes: `I read the Zadel-Djuna correspondence first as a violation, not a protection, of the daughter; an abuse, not a potential "gesture of care". I failed to see the complicated processes of a historically specific family, often a concealed set of family gender relations at work creating powerful ambivalences' (pp. 46-47). She refers to Joan C. Tronto, `Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care', Signs, 12 (Summer 1987), 644-63.

(10) The Backward-Looking Prophet: An Examination of the Consequences of Childhood Exploitation in the Work of Djuna Barnes (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Davis, 1987). Wagstaff follows Alice Miller's approach in Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child (New York: Meridian, 1986).

(11) `Djuna Barnes and the Narrative of Violation', in Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction, ed. by Reingard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte (Wurzburg: Konigshausen and Neumann, 1990), pp. 100-09. The last section of the article is entitled `Animality and Innocence' (pp. 106-07). Herring merely quotes the poem, as if it were self-explanatory in the light of his biographical account of Barnes. Anne B. Dalton, who reads The Dove as a `dramatization of incest', entitles the last section of her article, `"This is obscene"' `The Critical Key to the Locked Box'. She does not show any awareness of the ironic position in which she places the well-meaning, but somehow menacing critic, which mirrors that of the condemned abuser(s).

(12) For instance, in his article `Zadel Barnes: Journalist', Herring claims: `Regardless of whether or not the relationship was sexual--and given Zadel's exuberance and freedom from convention it may have been--my view is that these letters were written primarily as bawdy entertainment [...]. Whatever happened, incest is surely too strong a word.' Although he argues that `the letters should be examined more as literary texts than as conclusive proof of incest', he tries to demonstrate that, in fact, the relationship between Zadel and Djuna was not incestuous, and produces a narrative of playfulness and excitement when he surmises: `What fun it must have been to transgress the taboos against pornography by sending through the United States mail drawings of female breasts with bug-eyed nipples reading suggestive letters!' (pp. 112, 114).

(13) However, critics, as noted above, strongly disagree on how this `secret' or `riddle' can be interpreted. Mary Lynn Broe, moreover, begins her discussion of the 21 December 1909 letter from Zadel Barnes to Percy Faulkner, `Djuna's husband to be', by declaring that this text is `more powerful for its gaps and indirections than for what it says' ('My Art belongs to Daddy', p. 42).

(14) Djuna, married off at seventeen, is a precocious child in Mary Lynn Broe's introduction to Silence and Power, p. 4.

(15) `Temporarily safe from the violations of the patriarchal household, Zadel and Djuna played in their symbolic, marginalized world, a queendom of "nanophilia"' (Broe, `My Art Belongs to Daddy', p. 53).

(16) Jane Marcus's definition of `modernism of marginality', elaborated in her article `Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman's Circus Epic', in Silence and Power, pp. 221-51, is subscribed to by many, including Mary Lynn Broe, in her introduction to Silence and Power, and Marilyn Reizebaum, `A `Modernism of Marginality': The Link Between James Joyce and Djuna Barnes', in New Alliances in Joyce's Studies, ed. by Bonnie Kime Scott (Newark: Delaware University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1988), pp. 179-92.

(17) For a full discussion of Creatures in an Alphabet and its position in the Barnes canon, see my article `Il bestiario eccentrico di Djuna Barnes: Creatures in an Alphabet', in Bestiari del Novecento, ed. by Enza Biagini and Anna Nozzoli (Rome: Bulzoni, 2001).

(18) Life is Painful, Nasty and Short ... In my Case it has Only Been Painful and Nasty. Djuna Barnes 1978-1981 (New York: Paragon House, 1990), p. 91.

(19) Suzanne C. Ferguson, `Djuna Barnes's Short Stories: An Estrangement of the Heart', The Southern Review (Louisiana State University), 5.1, n.s. (January 1969), 26-41 (p. 26).

(20) Anette Bretschneider, Decadent Djuna: Eine Untersuchung dekadenter Themen und Motive im Werk von Djuna Barnes (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1997), p. 113, n. 55. See Typescript Ser. II, box 4, Special Collection, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland Library.

(21) `Sexual Narrative in the Fiction of Djuna Barnes', in Sexual Practice/Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, ed. by Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 184-98 (p. 189).

(22) The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation (New York: New York University Press, 1977), pp. 59; 68-69.

(23) Djuna Barnes (Boston: Twayne, 1976), p. 39.

(24) On this problem, see Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

(25) Vagaries Malicieux: Two Stories by Djuna Barnes (New York: Hallman, 1974), pp. 29-41. Five hundred copies were printed at the Stinehour Press. The other story in the book is dated 1922, while `Run, girl, run!' is from 1936.

(26) Erin G. Carlston, in Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), develops an argument in some respects similar to mine in relation to the frequently debated issue of fascism in Nightwood. She writes: `If fascism represents the ultimate allegiance to the Father, into which individuals are seduced by the appeal of the semiotic register--the omnipresence of the voice, the erotic thrill of rhythm and repetition, the oceanic fusion of the crowd--then Nightwood expresses the hopeless longing for a return to the maternal, which can only be signified within the symbolic order--in Barnes's "Learned corruption of language"' (p. 77). And `the only unmediated language, Barnes implies, is the howl of the dog; the text that attempts to achieve such a language will self-destruct' (p. 79). Her critique of Jane Marcus's notion of marginality in Nightwood is also persuasive, since she points out that in the novel there is no `outside', no `normal', or `innocent' term of comparison: `Just as there is no organic, unmediated, "healthy" sign in Nightwood, there are also no healthy human beings, with an unmediated relation to blood, culture, or history. [...] If Nightwood is antifascist, it is so not because it opposes the absent Aryan Superman, but because it denies that he exists, or ever could' (pp. 80-81).

(27) For a discussion of this term, see Kenneth Burke, `Version, Con-, Per-, and In-(Thoughts on Djuna Barnes's Novel, Nightwood)', The Southern Review, 2 (Spring 1966), 329-46. See also the chapter `Barnes's Beast Turning Human' in Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism. Postmodern Feminist Readings of Woolf, West, and Barnes (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 71-122.

(28) `What a shame I might bring down upon my father's head--on my mother's too, if you want to take the whole matter in a large sweeping way--just by my tendency to precocity' (Collected Stories, p. 329).

(29) `Eine besondere Variante, in der die verschiedene Auspragungen dekadenter Weiblichkeit verkurzt und konzentriert in einer Person vorgestellt werden, ist die unter dem Pseudonym Lydia Steptoe erschienene ironisch-heitere Erzahlung im Stil eines Tagesbuchs, `The Diary of a Dangerous Child' (1922). Die vierzehnjarige Heldin, eben jenes `gefahrliche Kind', spielt mit der Kultivierung verschiedener Posen, die sie galbt nachahmen zu konnen. Auf der einen Seite sieht sie in sich die Anlage zum schwachlichen, anamischen Typus und eifert darin dem Rollencharakter der Schauspielerin Eleonora Duse nach, die zum einem ihrer Vorbilder wird (`I thought thoughts of Duse and how she had suffered on balconies a good deal', p. 56); auf der anderen Seite erinnert sie sich ihrer dunklen, `subterranean' Natur und ihrer `duties to the malicious' und glaubt in der Verkorperung einer der Manner Unheil bringenden `virago' oder `vixen' ihre Bestimmung zu sehen. Das so vorgestellte Psychogramm eines pubertierenden jungen Madchens entlarvt die Naivitat der Erzahlerin und die ubertriebenen Versuche der Nachahmung von Rollenvorgaben, die Buchern und Bildern entnommen werden. In der ironischen Prasentation dieses Stoffes erkennt der Leser, dass in dem Kind, mit seiner `tendency to precocity', die alternativ dargestellten Lehnshaltungen hier noch zu einer kindlich oberflachlichen Attitude reduziert werden und daher vordergrundig zum Scheitern verurteilt sind, wahrend sie bei der Darstellung von Frauen immer noch als erfolgreiche Vorlagen erscheinen. Trotz des Spottes, dem sich die Schreiberin des Tagesbuchs preisgibt, verlieren die vorgestellten Typisierungen, an denen sie sich orientiert, weder an Gultigkeit noch Wilkungskraft, denn sie bleiben mogliche Variante bei den Figurenbildung bzw. der Frage "How Women Get the Way They Are"' (Decadent Djuna, pp. 118-19).

(30) In both cases, the silence is a textual, written silence; the gaps are attributed a meaning, the writing is named as silence by the narrator.

(31) `Djuna Barnes and the Narrative of Violation', p. 106.

(32) James Baird argues that Barnes is an American Surrealist, and sees affinities between the Surrealist child and the Romantic child; he maintains that the underlying craving for innocence in Barnes's works can exist thanks to the alienation that must necessarily have taken place. Unlike Baird, I am not reading this text as working with nostalgia and alienation, but, rather, with the problem of producing the very notion of innocence in writing; that is to say, I am focusing on the text's preoccupation with the production of meanings.

(33) Valerie Walkerdine, Schoolgirl Fictions (London: Verso, 1990), p. 11. Walkerdine also writes `I have argued that "the nature of the child" is not discovered but produced in regimes of truth created in those very practices which proclaim the child in all his naturalness' (Daddy's Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1997), p. 168).

(34) `Frailty, thy name is woman!', Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2.

(35) See also: `His evil mind has already pictured me falling into his arms, a melting bit of tender and green youth', (Barnes, Collected Stories, p. 331).

(36) `I bribed the butler to give a note to Don Pasos Dilemma, and I've frightened the groom into placing at my disposal a saddled horse. And I have a silver handled whip under by bed. God help all men!' (p. 330).

(37) In this sense, the text not only employs tropes of feminine decadence, but also creates a tension between the sexualized danger of the little girl and a language that produces itself as innocuously and boringly deja vu.

(38) `Obscene' is an important term in the Barnes oeuvre, which plays one against the other some of the functions of ob-, potentially denoting both exposure and concealment. In this scene the text negotiates the outside/inside divide while foregrounding an element of voyeurism. Barnes `persisted in using the word "obscene", which he [T. S. Eliot] had changed to "unclean"' (Dianne Chisholm, `Obscene Modernism: Eros Noir and the Profane Illumination of Djuna Barnes', American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 69.1 (March 1997), pp. 167-206 (p. 171). Chisholm refers to Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, ed. by Cheryl J. Plumb (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), p. 210.

(39) The text reads `it is Russian' (p. 330, my emphasis).

(40) The grammatical awkwardness of the sentence adopts the post-romantic literary convention of using ungrammatical English to produce the idea of the genuine and spontaneous child.

(41) She calls them `my words', again playing with idea of inner and outer knowledge, p. 331.

(42) The text reads: `When one is standing between life and death (any moment might have been my last), they say one reviews one's whole childhood. One's mind is said to go back over every little detail. Anyway mine went back. The distance being so short it went back and forth' (p. 333). The sentence between brackets, which has a persuasive function, fabricates danger through an overtly artificial rhetorical device.

(43) `Rousseau's pedagogy constantly warns us that the child must learn by seeing and doing, and not by reading. Reading, on the other hand, has the vexatious habit of reasserting itself' (Stephen Thomson, `Substitute Communities, Authentic Voices: The Organic Writing of the Child', in Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood, ed. by Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 248-73 (p. 254)).

(44) Towards the end of the story the gun goes off. Cousin Elda is described in the following entry as `having gone', maintaining the ambiguity of a possible death through the child's self-confessed forgetting (Collected Stories, p. 342).

(45) At first the text claims to be the silence of the child that needed to be broken to disclose an invisible furtiveness, mark of the change to adulthood. Later, the narrator identifies a gap in the diary as the silence that marks her change, and later still she asserts she is pretending to be as silent as an idiot, in order to assume deceptively the aspect of a child in order to show no sign of furtiveness to the family.

(46) According to a process similar to that taking place in Nightwood, the emphasis on gender as constructed, which can be observed in the characters of Frau Mann and Nikka, is part of the larger problem of the production of meaning. For a persuasive discussion of the pun on `Nikka', the `nigger', the `negre', with its French meaning of hackwriter, see Elizabeth Bernager, Une epoque de transe: l'example de Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys et Virginia Woolf (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Universite de Paris VIII, 1978). See also her `Nightwood ou du sexe d'une belle indifferente', Revue francaise d'etudes americaines, 30 (October 1986), 437-48. For a discussion of the difference between the constructed notion of gender and either a simplistic materialism or a utopian role-swapping, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).

DANIELA CASELLI
Manchester Metropolitan University