"It is a thing beyond the end of everything," she tells him. "It's suffering without a consummation, it's like insufficient sleep; it's like anything that is without proportion." Yet her suffering fills her with a hysterical joy— with the ecstasy of having become "alien to life."
The worldly Madame von Bartmann of "Aller et Retour" takes pleasure in informing her timid daughter that life "is filthy; it is also frightful." "There is everything in it," she says, "murder, pain, beauty, disease-death.... God is the lig
Barnes's characters may be alien to life, but they are alive—spectacularly, grotesquely alive, and preserved by their illicit desires and obscene thoughts.
There is mystery in their talk—like that of her contemporaries Mary Butts and Mina Loy, Barnes's language is at once sensational and veiled— but no spirituality.