Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)
Studies - Szilvia Nagy: I Can Operate in the Dark—Bodies are Phosphorescent... Occult Modernism and Myth-Making in Djuna Barnes 's Nightwood
review some of the relevant cultural and spiritual developments of the 1920s. In the 1920s public culture started to develop an attraction to all things exotic, a current that was in part facilitated by the discovery of geographical sites that had long captured the imagination of modern culture. One was the 1911 discovery of the lost Inca city of MacchuPichu in the Peruvian Andes, and the other, more impressive one took place in 1922, as British Egyptologists Carnarvon and Carter unearthed the tomb of King Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings ("Mixing Art With Exotic Culture"). At the same time, the public sites of entertainment popularized shows that combined the old fascination with the 'freakish' with the new commodified spectacle. Productions featuring wild and exotic animals were still quite popular, and the foreignness of black skin combined with an eroticized body made a star of the Black singer and dancer Josephine Baker. The trend spread over to art, and James Clifford notes that this modernist aesthetic worked to "provoke manifestations of extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic, and the unconscious" (qtd in Kaivola 172). The Russian mystic and dancemaster George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff was one of the few gurus to make an impact on female modernists, including Barnes. Gurdjieff is explicitly linked in several studies of the occult to some Left Bank women, including Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Janet Flanner, Solita Solano, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Djuna Barnes —all attending the study group at least a few occasions but most of them devoted 'pupils' (Mapel-Bloomberg). Jacob Needleman's essay on his life and teachings reveals that he was born in Armenia in 1866 and spent his youth journeying to Central Asian and Middle Eastern monasteries and schools of awakening, "searching for knowledge about man that neither traditional religion nor modern science by itself could offer him" (Needleman). Gurdjieff settled in Paris in 1922, and his teachings inspired several of the modernist women to form a study group in order to get acquainted with his doctrines and hopefully implement in their own lives some of what they successfully sorted out. Gurdjieff came in a time of crisis in modern culture. The crisis and disillusionment of modern existence that characterized the era of modernism were all the more unbearable as they were preceded by 67
