Melancholic Remedies: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as Narrative Theory

Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood functions as narrative theory or “metafiction” avant le lettre, and as a novel whose narrative practice is shaped by the repeated disruptions of “melancholia.” This warped form of mourning produces compulsive repetition even as it facilitates powerful insights and a new mode of knowing and telling. Barnes let melancholia loose upon her novel’s narrative, where it hampers teleological momentum and reveals the problems of novelistic telling: the domination of the narrator, the submission of suffering characters, the compulsions of narrative desire. While Peter Brooks (1984) argues for the persistence of plot and narrative desire in fiction, Barnes interrogates our insistence upon narrated meaning. In Nightwood, Barnes put melancholia to work at the very center of the novel: displacing “proper” narrative form, revealing fundamental compulsions to retell, read, and know.