“My terrible predicament”

Riding in a carriage, Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor tells Jenny Petherbridge that God has made him a liar:

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936).

Dr. O’Connor (an unlicensed gynecologist) is the novel’s great talker, a man who knows he should have been born a woman (we would call him trans), a teller of his own troubles, a confessor to his friends, a philosopher of the night. This recounted reconciliation of father and son is the only moment of human reconciliation in Nightwood. And as so often happens in the novel, one character is talking past one another: “Jenny had shrunk into her rug and was not listening.”

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[It doesn’t matter if the doctor said what he said to his father only to comfort him: it’s still a moment of reconciliation.]