Modern Allegory: Reading Nightwood through the Forms of the Baroque Trauerspiel
The opening section of this chapter contains 2,500 words from my published Textual Practice article as the definitions of allegory from Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama are crucial to my discussion of allegory and to the Trauerspiel as a critical framework for my monograph as a whole. I do, however, apply Benjamin’s theory to a very different argument here, moving away from the traditional use of allegory as it appears in the journal essay and towards a modern reinterpretation of the baroque original and its peculiar relevance to a modern commodified society. The connection between allegory and commodification is also a significant one for Barnes in her novel Nightwood, and I will argue that this relationship can be used to explain many of the text’s difficult references to value, price and its most puzzling character, Jenny Petherbridge. The objects within the modern court of allegory are degraded, forgotten, and the context in which they vie for attention is above all destructive, connected to the baroque through the Trauerspiel’s instruments of torture and murder. This section will also examine Nightwood’s character Dr. O’Connor as a modern incarnation of the baroque allegorist in his den.