The Limits of Critique? Reading the Wild Psychoanalyst in Djuna Barnes’ <i>Nightwood</i>

Since its publication, literary critics have commonly read Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood as a novel that resists interpretation. Even where scholars have applied, for example, psychoanalytic theory to the text, critics have debated whether Barnes realistically could be seen as an advocate of Freudian psychoanalysis proper. Much of the existing scholarship on Nightwood and interpretation assumes that Barnes desired good faith readings of her text (if any at all). But how true is it that Barnes’ book resists literary critics’ interpretations – even bad ones? By reading Nightwood as a novel that invokes and celebrates the figure of the wild psychoanalyst, I argue that Barnes’ narrative embraces the value of a failed, dodgy, amateur style of theoretical interpretation. Through this, I will show how the novel disrupts postcritical narratives surrounding the novel (and literature more widely) from the twentieth century to the present day.