SOURCE: "'That Savage Path': Nightwood and The Divine Comedy," in Renascence, Vol. XLIV, No. 2, Winter, 1992, pp. 137-58.

In the following essay, Reesman compares Barnes's Nightwood to Dante's The Divine Comedy.

Among the many interesting problems raised by Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936), is that of placing this complex and mysterious novel in a literary-historical context. Many critics describe Nightwood as an example of the post-modernist "new novel." Joseph Frank, for example, views it as a striking example of literary spatialism, a "richly experimental" novel that goes beyond other similar works in its post-cubist exploration of narrative form and narrative consciousness (Frank 46). Following Frank, Sharon Spencer calls it an "architectonic" novel that attempts "to liberate character from the restrictive traditional unities by means of new structural principles based upon juxtaposition in space" (Spencer 39). Yet although Nightwood clearly emerges out of the literary attitudes and trends of its time, it also progressively...