"Creatures in an Alphabet (1962-1982): Djuna Barnes between genre and late style

Abstract

When she died in June 1982 Djuna Barnes had just turned 90. A few weeks earlier she had sent to her publisher the final manuscript of Creatures in an Alphabet, a collection of poems structured as a medieval bestiary. In this paper I argue that analyzing Barnes’s bestiary in the light of Edward W. Said’s hypotheses collected in his highly influential book On Late Style (2006) would offer only a partial explanation of Barnes’s last published work. By highlighting the unstable and contradictory meanings associated with “late style” as a critical category, this essay rejects its transhistorical, universalizing view of the relationship between biography and creative practice. If we read “late style” in the context of its critical reception, gender emerges as a powerful, fruitful category of literary analysis. As a consequence, Barnes’s obscurity and her antagonism towards literary conventions emerge as examples of stylistic features long associated with modernist women’s writing.