Bent on the Dark: Negative Perception in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

ABSTRACT In Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Nora Flood sees Robin Vote by way of deflection, looking away from the beloved to better see her. This article will discuss the conditions of perception in Nightwood: how the act of seeing, as a product of knowledge (rather than a means of knowing the world), is forsaken for an alternative modality of seeing that moves away from identification and brings the less visible into view. The narrative of the sexual deviant is rearranged to resist straight reading practices. By developing a lens of negative perception, this article argues that seeing the world in perpetual negativity, at a slant, and as bent bodies in Nightwood is a queer response to the experience of being excluded from the positive, heteronormative narrative and yet still enduring and existing within it.