Animality and the Limits of Discourse in Djuna Barnes and Georges Bataille

Abstract

Abstract: In the works of Djuna Barnes, and particularly the enigmatic final paragraphs of Nightwood , animals and animalistic qualities represent the terminal incapacity of language to encompass reality. Georges Bataille's concept of "animality," considered as a comparative heuristic, allows for a more coherent articulation of the theoretical underpinnings and implications of this presentation of the animal as a limit to the logical, sequential ordering of coherent meaning through language, or what Bataille refers to in shorthand as "discourse." Ultimately, Bataille theorizes and Barnes embodies an animal poetics that gives expression to that which is not strictly amenable to human sense, and both mark the literary as the site where it becomes possible to gesture beyond the human toward a mode of bestial expression that emerges from the breakdown of human signification.