``Obscene and touching''-the tainted aesthetic of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood

A number of scholars have viewed obscenity in Djuna Barnes's writing as primarily a question of eluding institutional and societal constraints. Her novel Nightwood (1936) was partially bowdlerized at editorial stage to avoid censorship on account of its male homosexual content. But obscenity also lies elsewhere in the novel, in the figuring of the author's probably incestuous childhood liaison with her grandmother. It is a relationship which haunts the narrative, constituting a form of collusion with, and witness to the past and one with which the reader becomes unwittingly complicit.