Sarah Hayden

What happens when a transvestite gynaecologist usurps the narrator?: Cross-gendered ventriloquism in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

The story of Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel, Nightwood, is ostensibly concerned with the ecstasies and torments endured by three individuals, each consumed by their fascination with an enigmatic young American woman named Robin Vote. It is also the story of the infamously verbose quack gynaecologist Doctor Matthew Dante O’Connor who narrates much of the novel. The intricately entangled trio consists of the Baron Felix Volkbein, who marries Robin; Nora Flood, who loves her best; and Jenny Petherbridge, who appropriates this love of Robin. For them, the doctor is both confessor and interpreter; repeatedly called upon to mould words around Robin’s uncompromising silence. Matthew is compelled to enunciate, for his less self-aware companions, the narrative of their thwarted love.

Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère: Francis Picabia’s anti-art Anti-Christ

This article analyses the imprint of Nietzschean philosophy on Picabias negotiation of embodiment, art and religion in Jesus-Christ Rastaquouere (1920). Presenting this text as a critically neglected masterwork of avant-garde literature, this article demonstrates how Picabia enlisted Dadaist suspicion of organized religion as the vehicle for his disavowal of the official art world. Picabia and Nietzsche were united in their scorn for Christ and the disembodying pieties of Christian morality. However, whereas Nietzsche proffers art as redemptive antithesis to religion, Picabia launches an all-out attack on the sanctity of art and, with it, on the notion of the artist as redeemer. Via close textual and comparative analysis, this innovative reading of Jesus-Christ Rastaquouere exposes its significance as a philosophical treatise which exists in formal and conceptual dialogue with a constellation of Dadaist artworks. It uncovers how Picabia co-opts and, ultimately, exceeds Nietzsches Anti-Christ rhetoric in his idiosyncratic prose modelling of Dadas Anti-Art revolution.