Unfathered Connections: Samuel Beckett and Djuna Barnes

Abstract

This essay explores Beckett’s engagement with Djuna Barnes, starting with their epistolary exchanges in the 1970s and working back to his reading of her work in the 1930s in order to position Barnes as yet another modernist woman writer who, along with Gertrude Stein, facilitated Beckett’s transition away from Joyce in the 1930s. It explores their shared connection with James Joyce before developing on two key comparative critical readings of their aesthetics by Tyrus Miller and Daniela Caselli in order to situate Barnes as a valid aesthetic counterpoint to Joyce, a development on the ‘Nominalism’ versus ‘Realism’ dyad Beckett establishes between Gertrude Stein and Joyce in the 1937 Kaun letter. Borrowing from Barnes’s own late reflection on Nightwood, this article builds on extant criticism of Beckett and Barnes to situate Barnes’s ‘histrionic’ and ‘verballistic’ writings within the constellation of women authors whose work facilitated the development of Beckett’s ‘literature of the non-word’, and an important progression on from the (Steinian) ‘nominalistic irony’ Beckett identifies in the 1937 Kaun letter as a ‘necessary’ step towards his desired aesthetics. The essay argues that Barnes’s work represents a significant point of contact within this transitional period in Beckett’s aesthetic development, and that his identification of Barnes’s work as ‘verballistic’ in 1938, specifically the ‘shattered’ surfaces visible therein, provided Beckett with a glimpse of ‘that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing’ so central to his post-1937 aesthetics.