Gourmet is hardly the most memorable thing that Nightwood’s Doctor Matthew O’Connor calls himself. Djuna Barnes endowed her Tiresian abortionist with a taste for language as ornate as her own and a penchant for self-description. So when Dr. O’Connor calls himself a gourmet—in an interrupted monologue near the middle of the book, during one of the many spasms that substitute for a singular climax in this novel of frustrated and broken patterns—he is claiming more than a sophisticated palate (in either the literal or figurative sense).Footnote 1 The question of Dr. O’Connor’s knowledge or lack thereof is not a new one, though it is more often considered in the context of his status as a doctor, a role he inhabits with more élan than expertise. But to be a gourmet is to have expertise in élan: to be knowledgeable not just about food but also about pleasure. The doctor’s relationship to pleasure is every bit as complicated as his relationship to expertise, though it is more often considered in the context of sex, which is unsurprisingly relevant to his claim to gourmandise and the bawdiness it encodes. It is my contention, though, that when he calls himself a gourmet (claiming it as a term of identity and an orientation toward pleasure) and a sodomite (which is also, of course, both of those things) and a woman (which is an identity, at the very least), the doctor is doing something more radical than simply making yet another dick joke. If the power that cemented Nightwood’s status in the canon of modernism comes—as Jane Marcus contends—from “mixed metaphors, mixed genres, mixed levels of discourse from the lofty to the low, mixed ‘languages’ from medical practice and circus argot, church dogma, and homosexual slang” (146), then much of that power must be located in the doctor’s speech. Mingling knowledge and pleasure in the mode of gourmandise in order to satirize doctors’ and sexologists’ claims to understand sexuality, Dr. O’Connor suggests that prioritizing sensation and pleasure might afford us better ways of knowing and allow us to inhabit terms of identity more deliciously.
Pleasure is not a word often associated with Nightwood. Before the novel’s publication, Emily Holmes Coleman wrote to Barnes that “your book is the result of the most dreadful suffering” (Barnes et al., 112) and critics have largely taken Coleman at her word.Footnote 2 As Emma Heaney notes, feminist critics have studied the novel not only “to learn about the feminine” but more specifically to learn about “the trauma of female sexuality” (New Woman 101). Yet the playful, aestheticized tone in which many critics (feminist, queer, and otherwise) write about the novel makes it evident that its language is a rich resource for pleasure, proffering an invitation that is hard to refuse. Marcus is the most unabashed, but even the comparatively buttoned-up Joseph Frank gives in occasionally, such as when he chides his readers to understand the doctor’s final words “not as the maudlin mouthings of a self-pitying degenerate” but instead as “masochistic exultation” (453). Like Frank, part of my aim is to, in Elizabeth Freeman’s words, “wrest Nightwood out of its frame of degenerate literature and high modernism”—the latter rarely being considered a site of much pleasure either—while retaining a sense of it as a novel that “understands that history hurts” but within which “the gustatory trope allows for other experiences of history, including that of satisfaction” (Beside You 173, 185). Barnes’s letters to Coleman affirm this project, as we find Barnes chiding Coleman for “mak[ing] love so difficult,” since “fundamentally, man likes to make love, eat a sandwich, and turn to the wall” (Barnes et al. 128). While the satisfaction offered by the sandwich is fairly straightforward (and deeply unromantic), the trope of gourmandise allows for much more.
The most famous and verbose of nineteenth-century gastronomes, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, defines gourmandise as “an impassioned, rational, and habitual preference for all objects which flatter the sense of taste” (109).Footnote 3 While the circularity of this construction is worthy of the doctor himself, it does helpfully illuminate the centrality of pleasure to gourmandise; to be a gourmet is to have cultivated both the precision of one’s taste and one’s ability to enjoy the experience of eating. By this logic, Dr. O’Connor’s status as a gourmet is less doubtful than his medical credentials. The doctor is a person who knows what he likes: men, monologuing, and tortuously extended metaphors. Images, in his metaphors, are accretive and not always illuminating, and the relationship between vehicle and tenor is often vexed. Given all this, it is surely perverse to try to disentangle his metaphors, but that is nonetheless my intention. The doctor, he tells us himself, is a very particular kind of gourmet, not an expert in cuisine but a connoisseur of cocks. To be a gourmet is to cultivate the capacities of the body in accordance with one’s tastes—to refine one’s ability to enjoy and to allow this enjoyment to shape the body and to affect social relations. The doctor takes up this possibility in a way that enfolds his embrace of impossibility, rendering the discourse of gourmandise simultaneously ridiculous and compelling and offering a vision of what it might mean to be simultaneously sodomite and woman.
It is worth noting from the outset that one of the terms of identity that would be central to another version of this essay is largely absent from this one. One reason to avoid using the term transgender is that it “increasingly functions as the site in which to contain all gender trouble, thereby helping secure both homosexuality and heterosexuality as stable and normative categories of personhood” (Stryker 214). Another reason is the way the term threatens to flatten out historical difference in the ever-shifting relationships between these categories.Footnote 4 I read Nightwood as a novel that sits—historically and theoretically—at the cusp of queer and trans, resisting the tendency to shift toward the normate by taking up a fading model of femininity and revealing the radicalism of the idea that desire can shape a body. Contemporary scholarship often resists the mingling of queer and trans theory, framing the former as a field invested primarily in sex and desire and the latter as a field invested primarily in embodiment and identity. This rhymes with the ways contemporary politics requires that we “bracket, if not … totally deny, the role of desire in the thing we call gender” (Chu). But, as David Valentine argues, “erotic desires expressed in speech can conflate, confuse, and contradict” the seemingly neat system in which queer and trans “identities are seen to flow from distinct kinds of ontological sources—transgender identity from ‘gender,’ and homosexual or heterosexual identity from ‘sexuality’” (409). I cite a public intellectual and an anthropologist here in order to demonstrate the ways in which this scholarly division is still challenged by the lived experience of queer and trans people.
Instead of differentiating neatly between queer and trans, I follow Susan Stryker’s insight that “gender categories (like man and woman)” can “enable desire to take shape and find its aim” (212). As Andrea Long Chu insists in a long list of desires that motivated her transition, and Nightwood makes evident through the doctor’s gourmandise, the desire that Stryker names is not solely sexual. Specifically, this essay is invested in the way the language of gourmandise allows the doctor to—if only momentarily—enjoy gender transitivity without falling into the clutches of what Heaney calls the “trans feminine allegory.” This theoretical and literary tradition distills the familiar “medical conceit of the woman trapped in a male body” into a “single entrapped figure that novelists and theorists then installed in fictional and theoretical narratives about gender, desire, and historical change” (New Woman 5). Mine is certainly not a cis reading of Nightwood; while I do use he/him pronouns for the doctor, this is because they are what the text uses and because my argument is not at all about pronouns.Footnote 5 My aim is to think instead with what Mo Moulton calls a “non-binary historical methodology” (76), a mode of thought that invites us to “hold our own categories more lightly” in order “more easily to perceive other ways of knowing about bodies, the reproduction of society, and the creation and maintenance of the self” (77). Working this way requires embracing the non- in nonbinary, not as a site of negativity but as a kind of suspension. This goal is in keeping with Kadji Amin’s sense that “nonbinary is not a true social category but rather a vast umbrella with no positive social content” and that understanding this might help us to “develop a tolerance for contamination and for the inevitable misfit of identity categories” (“We” 117). The social categories I discuss here should be held very lightly indeed. Gourmet, sodomite, and woman are rough and ill-fitted categories, and Nightwood invites us to savor their mingling.
Appreciating the unlikely overlap between the categories of gourmet, sodomite, and woman requires a form of attention that Barnes often demands of her readers; we must simultaneously take the doctor’s ramblings seriously and with the proverbial grain of salt embedded in his name.Footnote 6 Much has been said about the relationship between the doctor’s diagnostic fancies and the Freudian discourses to which they respond. The same complexity of tone is palpable here in the way Dr. O’Connor concatenates these three terms of identity, which cluster together in what is essentially one monologue. Ostensibly attempting to console a heartbroken Nora, the doctor answers her implicit query about how “the night does something to a person’s identity” (70). Just in case the biblical allusion in the chapter’s title—“Watchman, What of the Night?”—does not do enough to suggest that the night in question is both ancient and modern, made timeless by endless repetition, he reminds her that “the night has been going on for a long time” (71).Footnote 7 Everything he says is as old as it is new and as serious as it is absurd.
The same might be said of Barnes herself, who consistently employed old-fashioned forms in ways that we now recognize as distinctly modernist, grinding history against itself and then sifting the wheat and the chaff back together again. In the doctor’s metaphors, Barnes counterposes bodily knowledge against a multitude of discourses that attempt to describe or delimit the relationship between self and body.Footnote 8 The Freudian, the sexological,Footnote 9 and the CatholicFootnote 10 are the most obviously present, but the discourse of gourmandise offers a few things that the others do not. First, gourmandise is essentially a socially constructivist theory of embodiment (a gourmet is made, not born). Second, it is a wholly affirmative socially constructivist theory of embodiment (“How to Bring Your Kids Up Gourmet” could be a best seller). Perhaps most importantly, gourmandise is all about pleasure and does not take itself too seriously. Even when it is lofty, it is fun. My reading limns the pleasures that emerge within Nightwood’s atmosphere of suffering and argues that desire itself might be one of them. So while the doctor’s gourmandise does not lead him to any kind of new theory, it does suggest that theory might be the last thing we need. We would do better to trust our palates.
Gourmet
Dr. O’Connor’s detour into gourmandise may be an elaborate intertextual joke, inspired by a line that Brillat-Savarin borrows from Molière’s Le médecin malgré lui (The Physician in Spite of Himself).Footnote 11 At the end of a passage in which he enthuses about the varieties of truffles found in different regions of France, Brillat-Savarin regretfully notes that the ones in Burgundy and Dauphiné are disappointing, concluding that “there are truffles and truffles, as there are ‘faggots and faggots’” (68). In French, fagot is not and was not the same kind of homophobic slang that it is in English, so the original line really is about bundles of wood. Barnes, with her keen ear for double meanings and suggestive slang, would have read it differently: for her, a faggot would have been—as it is now—a slur for a male homosexual, but it also would have been—in a now archaic usage—a term used to disparage a “troublesome, useless, or slatternly” woman (“Faggot”). She brings these new meanings into the passage when she mimics it in the doctor’s monologue.
As the doctor says, he is not like the “normal fellow” who has no sense of nuance and thinks “all are alike in the dark, negro or white.” No, he insists:
I say you can tell them, and where they came from, and what quarter they frequent, by the size and excellence—and at the Bastille (and may I be believed) they come as handsome as mortadellas slung on a table.
Your gourmet knows for instance from what water his fish was snatched, he knows from what district and to what year he blesses his wine, he knows one truffle from another and whether it be Brittany root or if it came down from the North, but you gentlemen, sit here and tell me that the district makes no difference—is there no one who knows anything but myself? And, must I, perchance like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers? (79–80)
The doctor says this while “trying to stop [Nora] crying,” which is a context worth noting, in part because there is nothing obviously consolatory about this particular speech and in part because of the odd shift in address that turns away from Nora and to a set of unnamed gentlemen. He goes on to tell Nora (who remains inconsolable) that “it’s the same” for women, though the forms of consumption at stake shift dramatically because the women between each other’s legs are participating in some kind of religious rite, “drinking the waters of night at the water hole of the damned” (80–81).Footnote 12 We queers are all, apparently, eating each other, but we do so quite differently.
The doctor’s monologue does more than reframe Brillat-Savarin’s joke. There is a deep irony in his substitution of the Bastille for Brittany and the juxtaposition of an Italian sausage with the French discourse of haute cuisine. While some white modernist writers drew on the discourse of terroir—the way soil and other elements of a vineyard’s climate impart flavor into wine—to convey an idealized image of Europe as a space where the “sensuous immediacy” of eating could “convey the flavor of place to the tourist who wishes to belong” (Keyser 76), Barnes seems determined to puncture such pleasant illusions. The use of French draws attention to the mort in mortadella, a reminder that the terroir of the quartier de la Bastille is inescapably bloody. Here, the doctor turns the gourmet into a figure who understands the flavors of the underworld instead of those that are formed underground—even if Paris is, as Brillat-Savarin claims, “a city to be admired for its many gourmands, who are especially fond of truffles” (68). We might think of the doctor as a figure who reveals the “unexpected underside” of those fantasies, the bon vivant who “illicitly inserts the private into the public” and reveals sophistication to be a house of cards, lacking a sturdy foundation (Litvak 17, 75). These observations could lead to an account of this moment that jibes with many readings of Nightwood, especially those that follow Marcus in understanding the novel as “a study in abjection” and “a book of communal resistances of underworld outsiders to domination” (144). I think this is right, but I also think there is more to it.
Reading Barnes with Brillat-Savarin suggests that we ought to be extra attentive to both slang and food, especially to mortadella and its unsubtle referentiality. Though it does not require much imagination to make the connection between a sausage and a penis, to do so is to partake in a surprisingly rich linguistic tradition. Fin-de-siècle French sex slang offers one illustrative example. According to John Stephen Farmer’s 1896 Vocabula Amatoria, a French-English glossary of popular sex slang, andouille, boudin, boudin blanc, cervelas, saucisse, and saucisson were all used to refer to the penis; lier le boudin (“to tie his sausage”) was a way of describing penetrative sex, and the journey to male orgasm could be described through another set of sausage metaphors, beginning with the attempt to gonfler son andouille (“inflate his sausage”) and ending with an explosion (to be “overwhelmed by sexual ecstasy” is to faire péter la saucisse) (Cleves 1330–35).Footnote 13 As Rachel Hope Cleves notes in her introduction to the text, the “glossary suggests that vernacular English had far fewer food metaphors for the penis than French did,” but andouille is an exception, paralleled by the English slang use of chitterlings (1329). Because chitterlings sausages use intestines for both casing and filling, they have their own mythology; as Doris Witt explains, “as that which transgresses the boundaries between food and excrement, phallus and anus, origin and decay, chitterlings point to the fragility of the system through which privileged identities such as whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality are maintained” (86). It is not just the shape of the sausage that matters, but also what it is made of.Footnote 14
Mortadella—despite being referred to in Italy as the Pink Queen—has a tamer myth attached, one that focuses primarily on Italian regionalism and historical pigs.Footnote 15 Nonetheless, the form of the sausage itself merits attention. While it does come in varying sizes, the most common kind of mortadella needs to be sliced to be eaten; the whole cannot fit in a mouth. D. H. Lawrence described it as “the enormous Bologna sausage, thick as a church pillar” (118). Mortadella is also fairly mild in flavor, requiring a subtle palate to discern its nuances; the food writer Elizabeth David remarks that “it is a pasty sausage lacking the bite and stimulating character of the raw salt-cured salame” (208). More recently, Antoni Porowski from Queer Eye has described it in a way that gets right to the point: “fancy Italian bologna” (Porowski and Fox 246). Bologna, yes, is also Italian. But the actual point here is that the doctor’s hyperbolic comparison is deflated both by the comic impossibility of the image and by the implication that it is—in case the pun is not already evident, I will let the spelling do the work—baloney.Footnote 16 Mortadella points us in two directions: toward the penis and toward language itself, specifically the kind of inflated nonsense that might earn the baloney epithet. Like the mortadella, some discourse needs to be cut down to size.
But what discourse is this? And who are the gentlemen to whom he speaks? While it may seem at first as if the doctor’s gourmandism operates in the service of racial or ethnic essentialism—especially given that opening salvo, in which he dismisses the most literal possible version of “I don’t see race”—his emphasis on geography in the lines that follow suggests that race is simply one aspect of a larger system of difference, and a crude one at that. Race is (mostly) a red herring here. The passage is about the categorization of people and about the relationship between three categories: gourmet, sodomite, and woman. In the preceding paragraph, the doctor begins with a rhetorical question about his own knowledge—“do I know my Sodomites”—before telling us precisely what he does know—“what the heart goes bang up against if it loves one of them, especially if it’s a woman loving one of them” (79). Because he is talking to Nora about her romantic troubles, it is tempting to assume the woman in question is a lesbian, but the syntax suggests that the woman in question, the paradoxical lover who “has committed the unpardonable error of not being able to exist,” is the doctor himself.Footnote 17 And if this is the case, one discourse that requires intervention—by way of the gourmet’s tools—is that of sexology.
Sodomite
Sodomite is a word that appears only once in Nightwood, while gourmet appears twice, emerging once from the doctor’s mouth and once from the narrator’s. On the novel’s first page, we learn that Felix Volkbein’s already-dead father, Guido, “had been both a gourmet and a dandy” (3). The dandy, of course, is a figure inextricably wedded—by the specter of Oscar Wilde—to the sodomite, and the description that follows further links Guido’s gourmandise with his sartorial extravagance and an implicit queerness. His gustatory indulgences have produced a body that is recognizable by his protruding stomach, which “brought into prominence the buttons of his waistcoat and trousers, marking the exact centre of his body with the obstetric line seen on fruits” (3). The word “fruits” is doing a lot of work here. In an example of the “sliding movement” that Daniela Caselli attributes to Barnes’s language (159), it doubles the linkage between Guido’s body and his gourmandise; he is shaped both by foods and like foods. Beyond that, and like “faggot,” it is already homophobic slang, and several other kinds of offensive slang as well, potentially indicating “a person who is easily deceived” or “a woman who is easily persuaded to engage in sexual activity” (“Fruit”). Deception and sex are central to Guido’s role as Nightwood’s unlikely patriarch. Guido is a man who attempts to “be one with [his wife] by adoring her, by imitating her”—though notably, what he imitates is her Germanic masculinity, “her goose-step of a stride” (5). Intriguing as Guido is, my point here is not about him but about the ways that Nightwood’s opening concatenates gourmandise, sodomy, and gender transitivity, introducing connections upon which the doctor will later expand.
Barnes does not allow us to enjoy the expected chronology of homosexual identity, in which the “temporary aberration” of the sodomite gives way to the newly legible species that is the homosexual (Foucault 43), a progression that might otherwise be tempting to map onto Guido and Dr. O’Connor. Instead, by linking these two characters through their slangy gourmandise, Barnes emphasizes that there is something old-fashioned or out-of-date about the doctor’s sexuality, gender, or both. In turning to the discourse of sexology for this term of identity, Dr. O’Connor turns back the clock to a time when such minor sins as “overindulgence in food” might not simply be linked with queer sexuality but numbered among its causes (Kahan 102). As Benjamin Kahan argues, the hard lines we draw between the sexual formations of the homosexual and the sodomite are illusions, they are “more interconnected with, more serially constructed through adjacent formations, than is ordinarily discussed,” and one result of this critical tendency is that “we have narrowed the domain of sexuality as it existed at the turn of the twentieth century and into the mid-twentieth century” (113). Nightwood offers a potent lesson about the dangers of this narrowing, a reminder that “the new cultural and institutional formations of modernity are themselves the product of historical process” (Friedman 504) and that this is as true of categories of sex, gender, and sexuality as it is of literary genres. While Barnes’s most famous statement about her own sexuality is one of narrowing—“never a lesbian,” “only loved Thelma” (Herring 167; emphasis added)Footnote 18—here Barnes explores the interconnections between identities and makes visible the logic of serial construction by linking the methods and practices of sexology and gourmandise.
The doctor’s claim to gourmandise is founded upon his ability to distinguish between objects (body parts, foodstuffs) that appear completely alike to the nonexpert. Arguably, this is also the project of the sexologist. Both the gourmet and the sexologist are invested in the task of discerning the nuances of their objects: telling truffles from truffles and faggots from faggots. In an unforgettable moment of critical narrativization, Marlon Ross portrays the methods of sexology as those of comparative inquiry: “the sexologist seems to ask: What makes this other man’s body sexually different from my own, given that we both seem to have the same sex organs?” (167). The gourmet and the sexologist both generate knowledge by accumulating examples: one by eating meals, the other by collecting case studies. In both fields, knowledge is actively produced through an ongoing process of comparison and collation; in neither field is this a process that produces stable, unchanging definitions. As Dana Seitler argues, attending to sexology’s methods reveals the ways that sexuality “emerges as a category of personhood specified and made intelligible through contiguous relationships with other productions of personhood conceived as deviant or perverse” (74–75). These other categories include both gender transitivity and race, and this can help us understand the importance of the doctor’s purported ability to see race in the dark.
By making race central to the doctor’s gustatory expertise, Barnes offers an alternative to the racialized logics and methods of sexology. The context of the question Ross attributes to the sexologists is, crucially, one of assumed racial sameness, as he makes evident when he fleshes the question out, a few lines later: “[G]iven that the homosexual subject is a racially normal Anglo-Saxon male with sex organs like my own, what is it that makes him sexually different from me?” (168). The danger of forgetting that this is the question, Ross explains, is that we risk losing track of the ways modern sexuality is constructed through and against race. But this is not the question that interests Dr. O’Connor. Nor does he partake of another tendency that Seitler notices in Ellis, in which “blackness does not act as an unequivocal sign of a sexual disorder; it is deployed as a trope of gender indeterminacy” (89). Barnes’s doctor does not make either of these moves; perhaps because they are baloney. No, this doctor has the instincts of a gourmet, so he considers another set of questions entirely: Which of these sex organs is the most delicious? Where do the best ones come from? How can their consumption be made the most pleasurable? Who likes to put what in their mouth? What most flatters my taste?
The classificatory methods of sexology are evoked only to be supplanted by the pleasure-seeking methods of gourmandise. The point is not to understand sexuality, but to enjoy sexuality. This shift in perspective does not circumvent the question of race; Vincent Woodard’s description of the “epicurean implications” of “the cultivated taste the white person developed for the African” resonates painfully here (18), as does Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s account of the way “the libidinal logic of American racism leads to the extreme image of the black body itself as food” (90). It should also be noted that these are specifically American ways of racializing the culture of taste, from which French gastronomes, beginning with Brillat-Savarin, distanced themselves. For French abolitionists, Robert Fanuzzi argues, writing about food was an ethnographic method of political commentary in which “taste was the positive statement of their political commitment, their gesture of solidarity with minority races of the US” (575). Dr. O’Connor, of course, is American, but his taste is coded as French, aligning him with a culture of taste in which “the table in turn becomes the abolitionist’s political medium for imagining the civility and legitimacy of mixed-race sexual unions, and for initiating otherwise occluded gender relations and forbidden forms of intimacy” (Fanuzzi 595). But intent does not always equal impact, and the gestures of the white abolitionist may reinforce “Black exclusion from sex/gender through the appearance of contesting that exclusion” (Awkward-Rich 46). This context only ups the stakes of the doctor’s vision as it explores the occluded, forbidden, and delicious erotic possibilities of the Paris night.
The doctor’s taste is not solely attuned to race; it allows him to discern black from white and to appreciate both, but it also moves beyond these quasi-scientific categories as he emphasizes instead his ability to tell “where they came from, and what quarter they frequent” (80). Like the gourmet who can taste the water in which the fish swam, the doctor is attuned to qualities that accumulate through experience and aware that the body itself is mutable, shaped by the world it inhabits (including the food it eats and the sex it has). The way the doctor “knows [his] Sodomites” is the way the gourmet knows his truffles. Thus, the mortadella reorients us toward sexology and toward the body of the sodomite. Implicitly, the penis makes not the man but the sodomite. Brian Glavey argues that “the difficulty with which Barnes’s characters cope is not simply being consigned to embodiment and denied abstraction, but rather to be assigned an embodiment that is already an abstraction” (70). Dr. O’Connor copes with this difficulty by rewriting its terms. The focus remains on the sex organ, but he invites us to attend to it not as a site of scientific differentiation but as a site of sexual delectation. But who is the us that he invites? Barnes’s readers, to be sure, but also those gentlemen the doctor addresses, the “careful writers” who must guard themselves against the vagaries of interpretation. These gentlemen inhabit the conversations he recounts; they have written the “medical books, and volumes of a miscellaneous order” that are stacked so high they reach “almost to the ceiling, water-stained and covered with dust” (68); and they gain further specificity through his many literary allusions. In short, these gentlemen represent certain forms of discourse: the production and dissemination of knowledge through science and publishing. No matter how much he likes to talk, these are not the doctor’s methods.
As a gourmet, the doctor relies on the knowledge of the body. He knows his sodomites because he has “shut [his] eyes with the added shutter of the night and put [his] hand out.” His hand, working in concert with his mouth, has discovered a gap in the knowledge: the “unrecorded look” of the girls “who turn the day into night” and whose features change as a result of their desires (80). The changeability of these girls evokes the question of his own gender, as another rhetorical question elides the third person into the first; ventriloquizing the girls, the doctor asks, “For what do you know of me, man’s meat?” (81). The meat points back to the mortadella and links the sausage with the bodies of queer women, offering a new meaning to the doctor’s description of himself as a “physiognomist that can’t be flustered by the wrong feature on the right face” (78). While the meat may make the sodomite, that does not mean it unmakes the woman. If discourse turns the penis into nonsense—if the mortadellas are some kind of “fancy Italian baloney”—then why can that sodomite not be a woman, as long as she knows how to have and enjoy the kind of sex that pleases her taste?
Woman
If we take Barnes at her word, the category of woman is, for the doctor, a site of impossibility. A woman cannot love a sodomite. If she tries, what happens is this: “this lover has committed the unpardonable error of not being able to exist—and [the Sodomites] come down with a dummy in their arms.” (79). Considering a sexologist’s questions about sexual differentiation and sex organs, it might be tempting to assume that a mismatched set of organs is at the root of the impossibility that emerges when a woman loves a sodomite. The act of sodomy, after all, requires a mortadella. Yet because the woman in question is Dr. O’Connor, it is not the act that becomes impossible, but the woman herself, a paradox that sits at the crux of acts and identities. The dummy’s ontological blankness contests the distinction between gender and sexuality, a distinction that, as Amin explains, “was always a sexological invention—a taxonomical principle masquerading as an ontological distinction” (“Taxonomically Queer?” 93). The dummy—an inanimate body without organs—evokes the novel’s recurring play with dolls, prefiguring the extended comparison later in the novel between Robin and the doll that is Nightwood’s most quoted engagement with the concept of “the third sex” (123). In this and other moments, the inanimate humanoid body mediates the violence of the gender binary by turning to the past. But where the doll conjures the imaginary idyll of childhood as it mediates between girl and boy, the dummy, conjured up by proximity to the old-fashioned figure of the sodomite, mediates between man and woman and reveals more about what is (including both what is possible and what is not) than about what “should have been” (123).
The dummy is a figure of blankness, a body waiting to be animated. Like so many of Barnes’s most used words, dummy is a slur; a dummy is a person perceived as stupid because they cannot or do not speak. In this sense, the doctor is the opposite of a dummy: he never shuts up.Footnote 19 And, indeed, stopping the flow of language is crucial here. But Barnes never lets a word mean just one thing, and, given her time as a journalist, we must consider not only the ventriloquist’s dummy and the dressmaker’s dummy but also a dummy sheet, the gridded page on which a newspaper’s layout is built. Language offers one way of filling in blanks and making meaning, but all of these possible meanings draw our attention to the insufficiency of mere words. A newspaper needs a visual structure, a ventriloquist’s dummy needs a voice and a straight man, a dressmaker’s dummy needs a dress. The dummy’s blankness becomes meaningful through context and through physical and sensory interaction with the world around it. And this dummy is not any of these objects but is instead a person in a state of unaccustomed blankness, a person who might be newly made to mean when embraced by the sodomite.
For Brillat-Savarin, meaning is made through the senses, which he defines as “organs by which man communicates with external objects.” Strikingly, he posits sexual desire (or “the genesic sense”) as the sixth sense, listing it after taste and touch and noting that while it has historically been “confounded or rather annexed to touch,” it has more in common with taste (3). Moreover, the purpose of all six senses is to work together “for the utility and the happiness of … the individual.” As we strive to find new ways to satisfy “the demands made by our senses, which always, and in turn, require to be agreeably occupied,” we produce art, culture, good food, and perfume (4). Our attempts to satisfy that sixth sense result in “romantic love, coquetry, and fashion,” which recall all the things that animate the dummy (5). Pace the sexologists, perhaps what matters is not the body but the desire embedded in the senses themselves. Gourmandise says that it is not just what we eat that makes us who we are but also what we want. What the doctor wants is frankly surprising. Before claiming the title of gourmet, he confesses to a humbler set of culinary aims: “I never asked better than to boil some good man’s potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months by the calendar” (Barnes, Nightwood 78).
In the doctor’s fantasy of cooking potatoes, Barnes satirizes a particularly tired version of the gender binary: woman cooks, and man eats. This binary might seem to be exaggerated even further by the presumed masculinity of the gourmet and the gentlemen who accompany him. But being a woman, Brillat-Savarin promises his readers, is not a problem for a gourmet. In a section reassuringly entitled “Women are Gourmandes,” he informs his readers that “the desire of the fair sex for gourmandise is in some sort instinctive, because it is favorable to beauty,” a point he follows with a list of all the ways that eating well produces an appealing physique (115). If sexual desire leads to coquetry and fashion, and gourmandise to beauty and sex, then the doctor’s taste for mortadella might offer another kind of coherence to his claim to womanhood. Rather than by physical organs, this claim is shaped by the metaphysical organs of the senses themselves. It is not just that wanting to be a woman makes a person a woman, it is also that wanting the things that women want makes a person a woman. Same with sodomites. To be a sodomite is to want to enjoy the act of sodomy.
But surely, you may well be thinking, no one yearns for a life of endless pregnancy and potato peeling.Footnote 20 And, indeed, this might be one of the best examples of Heaney’s claim that Nightwood “suggests the similarity between the female experience of being recognized in the degraded term of the male/female binary and the trans female experience of being unable to be recognized as the degraded term in this binary” (New Woman 141). This reading is bolstered by a comparison between the doctor’s desire in this moment and the mixed feelings Nora experiences later in a rare and brief moment of domesticity during which she feeds Robin eggs (120). By this logic, love makes women want to play mother, and playing mother means feeding the beloved simple, bland foods suited to the tastes of a finicky child.Footnote 21 This, I think, is not wrong—Barnes knows that love is degrading—but it is only one of the ways this desire signifies.
Despite his name, Dr. O’Connor’s Irishness is as slippery an identification as his gender. Barnes introduces him as an “an Irishman from the Barbary Coast (Pacific Street, San Francisco)” (Barnes, Nightwood 13),Footnote 22 an origin borrowed from the real-life figure of Daniel Mahoney,Footnote 23 and he consistently links Irishness with the experience of degradation. In this context, the potato takes on a new luster. Backward, it seems, is the doctor’s favorite way to feel, and his Irishness is deeply identified with the potato famine, the context that informs his anti-Semitic remark that “the Jew and the Irish, the one moving upward, and the other down, often meet, spade to spade in the same acre” (31). In this image, the Irish might be burying bodies or digging for potatoes, and that ambiguity is a reminder that there are those for whom an infinite supply of boiled potatoes might be as thrilling as an infinite supply of truffles.Footnote 24 Here is another parable about desire: What we want can make us who we are, but our desire is also a product of who we have been and who we have been allowed to be. If this is what the doctor wants—and that is a big if, given the layered ironies of everything he says—he wants it not because he is a trans woman but because he is an Irish woman, the “Lily of Killarney” (81). In another version of this essay, Irishman might get a section of its own, which would show the complexities of the term’s entanglement with gourmet, sodomite, and woman. Instead, I let it rest here, unresolved and irresolvable, as a mark of all the possibilities I have left unexplored and of the way Barnes’s concatenation of these three terms invites us to understand axes of apparent incompatibility through the serial logic of sexology and the pleasure-seeking logic of gourmandise.
Gourmandise, Brillat-Savarin tells us, is a social glue that binds societies and joins couples; it can even serve as a substitute for sex, “for even those who have separate bedrooms—and in France there are a great number who have—eat at least at the same table” (116). I argue that gourmandise also serves as a conceptual glue, one that fuses modes of existence that seem incommensurable; gourmandise makes it possible to be simultaneously woman and sodomite. Caselli describes Nightwood as a novel that “refuses to be contained, to occupy a position of unadulterated modernist resistance” (156). The same is true of the doctor: he takes pleasure in adulteration, and he mixes and mismatches historical terms of identity with gusto. This, after all, is the gourmandise of the Bastille, not that of the gentlemen who have authored the tomes of sexology and gourmandise, those who have given names to the predilections and identities that the doctor braids together into a new mode entirely.
If those careful writers need protection, it is from the doctor, from Barnes herself, or from writers like her, who use their ideas as the materials of a kind of queer theoretical collage. Many queer women writers of the modernist period turned to the materials of the past as a way of writing, performing, and inhabiting queerness: in the world of poetry, H. D. “revive[d] the Sapphic corpus and the Sapphic chorus in order to envision a new kind of Lesbian eros” (Kubic 301); in that of the novel, Virginia Woolf plundered the history of the Sackville-West family and English imperialism to write a so-called biography in which “the protagonist him/herself experiences historical change as a set of directly corporeal and often sexual sensations” (Freeman, Time Binds 107); and in her garden, Natalie Clifford Barney erected a bust of Sappho that watched over neoclassical performances by Barney and her lesbian coterie and the “lived performance of a queer ancient Greek ethos” that permeated Barney’s daily life (Dorf 49). These are only a few examples. Barnes herself simultaneously partook of this trend and parodied it in Ladies Almanack when she populated the early modern genre of the almanac with characters from Barney’s salon. These characters borrow from “early modern and classical models of malleable embodied gender identity” in order to “seek creative, fantasy-oriented means of escaping the weight of the pre-existing knowledge of their bodies” (Schnur 438). By turning to the past, all of these writers resist the (now) “century-old Modernist assertion of the scandalous newness of queer and trans existence” (Heaney, New Woman 238), but Barnes goes a step further.
Barnes’s innovation in Ladies Almanack and Nightwood is that she does not just invoke and rewrite historical discourses of gender and sexuality but also shows her characters doing so. The doctor’s creative deployment of the nineteenth-century discourse of gourmandise (and its references to seventeenth-century drama) suggests that he might feel right at home at one of Barney’s parties. But Dr. O’Connor claims gourmandise not at a party but during a moment of intimacy and shared suffering. Nora’s tears remind us that Nightwood is not exactly a happy novel, and the doctor is not exactly a happy character. When he talks about his womanhood, it is often to lament the ways that it has been denied him, and his poverty makes it impossible for him to develop his palate for truffles and other fine foods. But for a moment—just for a moment—he is able to take on the impossible, paradoxical identity he desires, and to relish it.Footnote 25 And perhaps there is also some consolation for Nora: she might draw from his ramblings just as he has drawn from those he so delightfully revises, fashioning a bespoke set of sexual possibilities, just as he has.
To be simultaneously sodomite and woman is a possibility that gourmandise affords Dr. O’Connor, providing a way to access gender transitivity outside the medicalized logic that attempts to delimit and organize the possibilities inherent in bodies. Instead of organization, gourmandise is a method of cultivation, of making those possibilities come alive, and the doctor’s linguistic promiscuity allows him to turn that method to his own ends. Even more importantly, this moment suggests the potential for other, similar moments, in which the pleasure and expansiveness that the doctor locates in gourmandise might be found elsewhere, and felt with equal glee. Marcus contends that “the body of the Other”—whether racially, ethnically, or sexually minoritized—is “presented as a text” in Nightwood, mixing her metaphors when she notes that the novel “paints the Paris underworld and demimonde with its own colors, not a specifically American palette” (144–45). The doctor invites us to mix those metaphors even further and to read with a palate attuned to the ingredients—both textual and embodied—that Barnes’s characters chop and whisk and fricassee as they become themselves. The novel also offers a reminder to us as readers and critics that it is not only our own categories of gender and sexuality that we must hold lightly in order to apprehend the past in all its richness but also those of the past itself; we must be willing to listen as hungrily as the doctor talks and to read as expansively as Barnes writes.
