Meeleheide ja morbiidne vitaalsus Djuna Barnesi „Öömetsas” ja Reed Morni „Andekas parasiidis”
Despair and morbid vitality in Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood” and Reed Morn’s “Talented Parasite”

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on American writer Djuna Barnes’s novel “Nightwood” (1936) and Estonian writer Reed Morn’s novel “The Talented Parasite” (Andekas parasiit, 1927). Specifically, the article analyses how the two novels represent bodies, affects and materiality, relying on the notion of affective modernism (Taylor 2012). English­ language modernist texts have been frequently portrayed as aiming for impersonal­ity and the rejection of emotions and sentiment. Authors like Julie Taylor have chal­lenged this assumption, demonstrating the presence of emotions, drives and sensa­tions in modernist texts. New research on modernism has shown modernist texts both portraying and theorizing bodies (Watts et al. 2019), discussing the relationship between the human and the non­human (Ryan 2015) as well as the Anthropocene (Adkins 2022). This article focuses on affects and senses, in particular the way affects move between bodies, being simultaneously creative and disruptive (Taylor 2012: 1). Both authors analyzed here employ affective ambivalence (Taylor 2012: 2). The article uses Tim Clarke’s (2021) concept of morbid vitalism to analyse how the two novels engage with a central problem of modernity: how to live in the context of despair. This question is viewed from a gendered perspective. The article builds on Taylor’s and Clarke’s analysis of Barnes, enriching their interpretations with insights from other scholars to bring the notion of affective modernism into the study of Estonian literature. The analysis shows that Barnes’s novel provides an excellent example of morbid vitalism, showing recognizable affective tensions between life and death, felt espe­cially keenly in the social margins where gender trouble does not permit characters to identify with normative social fantasies. Marginality becomes a privilege that per­mits the characters to see the contradictions in ideologies promising coherent subjected and to create modes of being that are oriented towards death while remain­ing open to the presence of others. The morbidity of Morn’s novel does not come to a similar understanding of affects and embodiment or embrace the vital potential of morbidity. “Nightwood” challenges the binary gender system, while “The Talented Parasite” fails to break out of the culturally prescribed internalized misogyny.

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