პერსონაჟთა სახეების სიმბოლური და ასოციაციური მრავალნიშნადობა ჯუნა ბარნსის პროზასა და დრამატურგიაში

The thesis aims to discuss symbolic and associative suggestiveness of characters in the prose and drama of the American modernist writer Djuna Barnes.The four main works of Barnes: Ryder, Ladies Almanack, Nightwood, and The Antiphon embodyarchetypal/mythical and/or literary figuresfrom ancient times to the present. With the suggestiveness of characters, the language barriers, and the rejection of the temporal liminal space, the authorshapes uniquely modernistic chronotopic configurations.
Djuna Barnes, in her first novel, Ryder, presents a paradoxical model of family structure. The story of the Ryder family is a kind of prequel to both the author's later works and their characters. The novel's main character offers a modernist interpretation of the New Adam.Wendell Ryder, engaged in polygamous relationships and obsessed with transcendental philosophy, is only a source of perverse relationships for his children, wife, and lover. Wendell's mother, Sophia Grieve Ryder, isjuxtaposed with Virgin Mary for contrasting/parody effect.Matthew O'Connor is an iconic character in Barnes' work. He is a modernist incarnation of hermaphrodite Tiresias, first introduced to the reader in Ryder. Dr. O'Connor who lives in America is a hero with a prehistoric memory. He helps Wendell's children to be born and relieves the pain of the women.
Djuna Barnes' most experimental work, Ladies Almanack, is a parody of the traditional almanac. It provides descriptions of the meetings held in Natalie Clifford Barney's salon "Women's Academy" (L'Académie des Femmes). The text also includes poems, songs, and sketches composed by the author.Natalie Barney's fictional image is the hermaphrodite Evangeline Musset. Barnes places her next to the statue of Venus, the patroness of heterosexual love, which reveals her ironic intention. Gatherings of women with non-traditional sexual orientations give rise to a new ideology. Characters who use archaic vocabulary and focus only on the present and the past situation are fictional embodiments of the author's contemporaries.
The characters of Djuna Barnes’ most famous novel, Nightwood, being in captivity oftheir unconscious,arepersonifications of archetypal metamorphoses.T.S. Eliot in his preface to the novel emphasizes the poetic nature of the text and entrusts its reading to readers better practiced in poetry. In Nightwood we meet Matthew O'Connor for the second time, this time in the role of an unlicensed doctor living in the 1920s Paris. With nocturnal conversations and a prophetic tone, the doctor reveals the essence of eternal suffering, his own and that of other characters’. All other central or secondary characters of the novel are archetypal personifications of the child, animal, and goddess, whose phantasmagoric existence serves to create the effect of timelessness.
Barnes' rearmost work, the three-act tragedy The Antiphon, is a summary and final chord of her literary heritage. In the play, we meet the characters of both Ryder and Nightwood, but with different names and experiences. The tragedy shows the modernist transformation of Hamlet's image.Barnes’ Hamlet has nothing to do with Renaissance ideals; The metamorphosis of Prospero and Miranda, is the key event of the fable. The breakdown of the mother's image, can be interpreted as a variant representationof Demeter and Jocaste in one character.The sadistic brothers, with traumatic experiences,are transfigurations of characters who satisfy their desires with the lyrics of children's poems or song lyrics.