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A Story beside(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Victoria L. Smith
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Abstract

Djuna Barnes's experimental text Nightwood offers a difficult narrative shaped around a sense of loss. Barnes outlines a loss of access to history, to language, and to representation in general for those consigned to the margins of culture. By using a torrential and Byzantine language—a language of indirection—Barnes creates a lexicon of loss that acts as a strategy for recuperating what has been unspeakable, particularly the culturally disempowered: in this text, Jews, women, and homosexuals. Her psychic and textual strategies work through analogy to recover unrecorded history and to show the unrepresented. Barnes reconfigures the culturally privileged discourse of melancholia and in doing so articulates a structure of loss for those whose histories have been effaced.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 114 , Issue 2: Reenactments of Memory's Power , March 1999 , pp. 194 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1999

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