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

Abstract

Djuna Barnes's experimental textNightwoodoffers 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.

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