ABSTRACT

In addressing the role of half-remembered songs, musical structures, and metrical patterns in staging the tragedy of a family “key-gone” and for whom “Everything is a little out of context,” this chapter identifies the employment of musical patterns, most notably antiphony—call and response—as central structural devices in the play. Attention to the intersection of the textured musical patterns at work in The Antiphon thus offers an illuminating point of connection “between events within the text and the construction of the text.” The extent to which Djuna Barnes was herself familiar with developments in musical experimentation can be inferred from her letters and her immersion in the cultural life of Paris in the 1920s. In his earlier introductory essay to Nightwood, T. S. Eliot made a distinction between “poetic prose” and the “musical patterns” at work in Barnes’s writing, highlighting the centrality of the patterns of this prose rhythm in raising “the matter to be communicated to the highest intensity.”