SOURCE: "Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and 'the Experience of America,'" in Critique, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, Winter, 1993, pp. 100-12.

In the following essay, Nimeiri discusses the symbolic significance of the Americanness of the characters in Barnes's Nightwood.

Since the American publication of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood in 1937, critics have focused on the formal aspects of the novel and have paid little attention to its content. This tendency has prompted Lynn DeVore to complain that "The book's linguistic complexities … have … directed critics to analyze especially the form and structure of the text as well as to speak only of its verbal tapestry in terms of imagistic, expressionistic, cubistic, or surrealist affinities while slighting its altogether human dimensions" (71). Even when critics find meaning in the novel, it is often abstract with no bearing on any particular situation, as if the story occurs in a void or a dream-world where the characters move...