This is how the narrator introduces Baron Felix Volkbein, the orphan whose narrative opens Nightwood (Djuna Barnes, 1936). Felix is preoccupied throughout the novel with locating himself in the cultural fabric, via his researches into the ‘great past’ (37) and his attempts to found a dynasty. Yet the narrator's comments position Felix's search for origins as an ever-receding project, which can never be accounted for, as it comprises ‘mingled passions’, ‘a diversity of bloods’ and ‘a thousand impossible situations’, none of which escape the plane of generalisation. The detail of kinship bonds therefore eludes him, remaining just out of reach, much as he thinks of the circus as ‘a loved thing that he could never touch’ (11). Nevertheless, subjectivity forms from these contrasting and conflicting fragments, and Felix becomes the ‘accumulated and single’ (9), in a manner which recalls the identity bricolage seen in Pound's ‘Portrait d’une Femme’:

Felix's predicament: the ‘embarrassment’ caused by the tension between accumulation and singularity, resonates with modernist writers’ tensioned reception of inheritance, and its relationship to originality. Consider, for example, the rival representations of the past seen in Woolf's criticism. The rejection of the conservative and passive inheritance seen in ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919) and ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924), contrasts sharply with the dynamic relationship to inheritance, seen in Woolf's analysis that ‘a woman writing thinks back through her mothers’ (A Room of One's Own 88). Since A Room of One's Own begins the process of piecing together a tradition of women's writing, to create literary place, it implies that the woman writer is a species of cultural orphan, and that orphanhood can be ameliorated by awareness of the work of other women writers. Tradition, in this more dynamic sense, offers access to an imaginative home through literary inheritance.