Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-sh8wx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-22T02:15:16.577Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Abraham, Julie “‘Woman, Remember You’: Djuna Barnes and History.” Broe 252–25.Google Scholar
Allen, Carolyn “‘Dressing the Unknowable in the Garments of the Known’: The Style of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood.” Women's Language and Style. Ed. Butturf, Douglas and Epstein, Edmund L. Akron: U of Akron P, 1978. 106–10.Google Scholar
Allen, Carolyn “The Erotics of Nora's Narrative in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19 (1993): 176–200.10.1086/494866CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allen, Carolyn Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Allen, Carolyn “Writing toward Nightwood: Djuna Barnes' Seduction Stories.” Broe 54–65.Google Scholar
Altman, Meryl “A Book of Repulsive Jews? Rereading Nightwood.” Levine and Urquilla 160–16.Google Scholar
Barnes, Djuna Nightwood. 1937. New York: New Directions, 1961.Google Scholar
Baxter, Charles “A Self-Consuming Light: Nightwood and the Crisis of Modernism.” Journal of Modern Literature 3 (1974): 1175–11.Google Scholar
Benstock, Shari Women of the Left Bank. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.Google Scholar
Broe, Mary Lynn, ed Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Brown, Laura S “Not outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma.” Caruth, Trauma 100–10.Google Scholar
Burke, Kenneth “Version, Con-, Per-, and In- (Thoughts on Djuna Barnes's Novel Nightwood).” Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968. 240–24.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Caruth, Cathy, ed Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Caruth, Cathy Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Crowley, John W The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S Introduction. Barnes, Nightwood xi-xvi.Google Scholar
Field, Andrew Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes. Austin: U of Texas P, 1985.Google Scholar
Frank, Joseph “Djuna Barnes: Nightwood” The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1963. 25–49.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund The Ego and the Id. Trans. Riviere, Joan. Ed. Strachey, James. New York: Norton, 1962.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and Ed. Strachey, James. Vol. 14. London: Hogarth, 1914-16. 243–24.Google Scholar
Gerstenberger, Donna “The Radical Narrative of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood.” Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction. Ed. Friedman, Ellen G. and Fuchs, Miriam. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. 129–12.Google Scholar
Gilmore, Leigh “Obscenity, Modernity, Identity: Legalizing The Well of Loneliness and Nightwood.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4 (1994): 603–60.Google Scholar
Harris, Andrea L “The Third Sex: Figures of Inversion in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood.” Genders 20 (1995): 233–23.Google Scholar
Harris, Bertha “The More Profound Nationality of Their Lesbianism: Lesbian Society in Paris in the 1920s.” Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian Feminist Anthology. Ed. Birkby, Phyllis, Harris, Bertha, Johnston, Jill, Newton, Esther, and O'Wyatt, Jane. New York: Times Change, 1973. 77–88.Google Scholar
Herring, Phillip Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes. New York: Viking, 1995.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gill, Gillian C. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Kaivola, Karen “The ‘Beast Turning Human’: Constructions of the ‘Primitive’ in Nightwood.” Levine and Urquilla 173–17.Google Scholar
Kannenstine, Louis F The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation. New York: New York UP, 1977.Google Scholar
Lee, Judith “Nightwood: ‘The Sweetest Lie.‘” Broe 207–20.Google Scholar
Levine, Nancy J., and Marian Urquilla, eds. Djuna Barnes Centennial Issue. Spec. issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.3 (1993): 1–250.Google Scholar
Marcus, Jane “Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman's Circus Epic.” Broe 221–22.Google Scholar
Marcus, Jane “Mousemeat: Contemporary Reviews of Nightwood.” Broe 195–204.Google Scholar
Meese, Elizabeth (Sem)Erotics: Theorizing Lesbian: Writing. New York: New York UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Michel, Frann “Displacing Castration: Nightwood, Ladies Almanack, and Feminine Writing.” Contemporary Literature 30 (1989): 35–58.Google Scholar
Michel, Frann “‘I Just Loved Thelma’: Djuna Barnes and the Construction of Bisexuality.” Levine and Urquilla 53–61.Google Scholar
O'Neal, Hank Life Is … Painful, Nasty, and Short …. New York: Paragon, 1990.Google Scholar
Perry, Constance M “A Woman under the Influence: Djuna Barnes and Nightwood.” Dionysos 4 (1992): 3–14.Google Scholar
Phelan, Peggy Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. London: Routledge, 1997.Google Scholar
Plumb, Cheryl, ed Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts. Normal: Dalkey Archive, 1995.Google Scholar
Pochoda, Elizabeth “Style's Hoax: A Reading of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood.” Twentieth Century Literature 22 (1976): 179–17.Google Scholar
Schiesari, Juliana The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Scott, Bonnie Kime “Barnes Being ‘Beast Familiar’: Representation on the Margins of Modernism.” Levine and Urquilla 41–52.Google Scholar
Silverman, Kaja The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Singer, Alan A Metaphorics of Fiction: Discontinuity and Discourse in the Modern Novel. Tallahassee: UP of Florida, 1983.Google Scholar
Sprengnether, Madelon The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Steiner, George Introduction. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. By Walter Benjamin. Trans. John Osborne. London: NLB, 1977. 7–24.Google Scholar
White, Hayden The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Wittig, Monique “The Point of View: Universal or Particular?” Feminist Issues 3 (1983): 62–69.Google Scholar