Reading For Monsters: Transgressive Corporeality in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
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In her book on the performative effects of language (Excitable Speech) Judith Butler draws our attention to the fact that, as linguistic beings, we become somatically involved in the process of subject formation. Butler contends that the body instantiates an individual’s social becoming by being named as “girl,” “boy,” “black,” or “other.” The body hence originates a specific relationship between language and a subject’s place in the world. In this chapter, I take a closer look at the somatic dimension of reading. The process of reading is analysed as a performative event in which the reader’s body initiates the production and the re-production of meaning. Reading hereby becomes an act of “writing” or co-authoring cultural knowledge. Specifically, the aim is to reveal the reading body as a significant agent in the construction of monstrosity or sexual “otherness.” With this objective, I read for monsters in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. I suggest a particular reading experience with this novel concerning the cultural production of monstrosity. The literary monster here figures as a trope for the performative enactment of linguistic representations of transgressive corporeality. I argue, that it is the relationship between what is read in Nightwood and an affective reading experience of the novel that makes its reader complicit in the construction of monstrous embodiment.