Critical Inquiry — Volume 34, Number S2

Teresa de Lauretis

Nightwood and the “Terror of Uncertain Signs”

“In every society,” writes Roland Barthes, “various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs.” That is the function of the linguistic message in the (advertising) image, whose polysemy would otherwise produce a traumatic suspension of meaning. Such an anchoring function is provided by narrative in literary fiction, where the rhetorical/figural dimension of language, in disrupting the stability of meaning, carries what Paul de Man calls “the persistent threat of misreading.” Or, as de Man puts it elsewhere, reading a literary text “leaves a residue of indetermination that has to be, but cannot be, resolved by grammatical means.”
Narrative, like grammar and logic, refers to an extralinguistic and generalizable set of phenomena; even as fiction, disbelief suspended, narrative reaffirms the stable, familiar ground of referential meaning. When narrativization, the construction of a narrative in the literary text, is not working properly, whether by fault or by design, “the terror of uncertain signs” threatens the reader as would an incomplete sentence or an illogical statement, and all the more so if the novel is figurally dense and highly wrought grammatically. Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is such a novel, written in a style both stark and intensely allusive, at once lucid and obfuscating, as if only language—to paraphrase Barnes—could dress life in the garments of the unknowable.

Teresa de Lauretis is professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her most recent books are Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory (2007) and the forthcoming Freud’s Drive: Readings in Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Film (2008).