![]() ![]() Barnes’s medium is symbolic abstraction her brush is the width of a single hair and she expects her readers to be able to remember how each stroke fits together.įor example, here are two paragraphs describing Nora Flood, one of Barnes’s more straightforward characters: By temperament Nora was an early Christian she believed the word. Yet I could frequently recognize what I was missing through my own inattention. Eliot, I guess, could keep it up for the whole novel. But the price of access to Barnes’s characters is a sustained intelligence for fine abstractions. ![]() “I cannot think of any character in the book who has not gone on living in my mind,” he writes. Eliot’s introduction to the novel praises Barnes’s characterization. My primary impression of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is of reading an author whose mind naturally operates about five levels above my own, and to whom I can pull myself up occasionally, with great effort. ![]()
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