[Nightwood] is most often remembered for its high reputation with writers like T. S. Eliot. Apart from this sort of recognition it is examined either as a cache of modernism or, because it is rather tangled and obscure, it is sometimes rewarded with an extravagant explication de texte. In short, it has not been much appreciated by critics while among novelists, notably Hawkes and Pynchon, it resonates. Hawkes picks up on the blighted landscape and the fictive detachment which allows Barnes to make comedy of violence, and Pynchon parodies her style in V while attending closely to her view of history as a bowdlerized version of human damnation. (p. 179)

Throughout Nightwood the theme of de-evolution or of bowing down ("Bow Down" is the title of the first section and was originally meant to be the title for the whole book) has implications for the act of writing. The...