11/23: Nightwood, Day 3

Notes:
1. First paper set due today!

Next due date is 12/7.


2. Alice B. Toklas Potluck
Friday, Dec 11

Please sign up!!!!

I. Last Time

La Sommanbule
Robin the sleepwalker:
1. She’s unconscious when we meet her
2. She sleepwalks through life
3. Awakens during childbirth into a nightmare
4. Becomes a nocturnal animal that prowls (keeps Felix awake too)

Imagery:
1. The anti-fairy tale of Robin embowered in a jungle of carnivorous plants
2. A bird in a nest

Is Robin human?
When we meet her, she is neither alive nor dead — some place in between

Does she ever become human?

• The book becomes an ongoing discussion of the enigma of Robin
• Everyone talks about what/who she is
  
  Chapter ends with Robin leaving Felix and the child and when she is next seen, she is with Nora Flood
• the next chapters will go back in time and tell us what happened when she was gone
  
  
  
  
  II. Nightwatch

Fall 1923

Robin has gone to America and meets Nora at the circus (53)

• the lioness is crying (?) and Robin weeps as well
  
  A. A Problematic Love Affair

Their love affair is entirely problematic

• We only get negation and loss of it
• absences
• Passionate love affair seen only in its destructiveness — no golden age

(59)Predatory Prowling

• Nora stays at home to protecting the nest
• Drive to find a missing limb
• “Beside herself” — upset but also w/Robin; Robin is part of herself

B. Ending in Catastrophe
(62) Dream with Grandmother — seduction
Nora sees Robin with another woman in the garden

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11-23-09