The Metaphors She Lived By: Language in Djuna Barnes’s "Nightwood"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22364/BJELLC.04.2014.08Keywords:
language, heteroglossia, metaphor, catachresis, sublimeAbstract
This paper inquires into how Djuna Barnes foregrounds language in Nightwood and then posits its limits through the intimation of a transcendent form of ineffability. Multiple strategies concur for language’s prominent position: a catachrestic use of metaphor, dense intertextuality and metafictional reflection on language. A hiatus marks the narrative in the last chapter which, stylistically different from the rest of the narrative, evokes the sublime. In this last chapter, Barnes conspicuously gives up the previous strategies that turn the reader’s attention to language in order to suggest the impossibility of language to convey the extreme joy and pain of love.
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