本文探討巴恩斯現代主義經典小說《夜林》中的原始主義修辭，且分析巴恩斯的頹廢美學與女同性戀、現代性、法西斯主義的相互關係。論文審視現代主義對原始主義的著迷如何複雜化及顛覆西方傳統對文明 vs.野蠻、正常 vs.變態、自然 vs.矯造的階級性定義。藉由崇尚矯造及貶抑自然，《夜林》挑戰了人文主義／本質主義對性論述的主張，特別是所謂「倒錯」這個範疇。此外，小說的逆目的驅力及其瀰漫的頹廢修辭如不孕、疾病、衰敗、返祖退化等，闡明了父系承傳體系的無效與挫敗。將《夜林》放在 1930 年代的政治風氣來閱讀，本論文最後斷定：小說中充斥、炫示的非亞利安、非異性戀身體及馬戲團怪胎，的確是深具政治顛覆性。原因在於，這些異端身體的誇耀，嘲弄了法西斯主義所提倡的純淨亞利安模式與其認同霸權。

he paper examines the tropes of primitivist discourse prevalent in Djuna
Barnes’s modernist classic Nightwood (1936) in conjunction with an
analysis of Barnes’s aestheticism of decadence and its interrelationships
among lesbianism, modernity, and fascism. It looks into how modernism’s obsession with primitivism complicates and destabilizes the hierarchical definition of the civilized vs. the savage, the normal vs. the abnormal, and the natural vs. the artificial. It argues that, by valorizing artifice over nature, Nightwood challenges the humanist/essentialist claims of sexual discourse in general and the category of “inversion” in particular. Moreover, the novel’s antiteleological drive manifest in the frequent tropes of sterility, illness, decay, and degeneration illustrates the defeat of systematic and patrilineal continuity. Reading Nightwood in its political climate of the 1930s, the paper concludes that the novel’s proud parading of the non-Aryan, non-heterosexual bodies and carnival freaks is politically transgressive insofar as it mocks fascist promotion of an identification that inscribes the power and purity of the Aryan model as the hegemonic, normative paradigm.