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
Barnes 's Night Sky In Nightwood, Barnes presents the reader with an intricate cosmology that is largely derived from the several spiritual teachings and ancient mythologies that she was familiar with. This cosmology is made up in such a way that she establishes associations and makes cross-references between concepts from a variety of sources, to the effect that in the end each one seems inherently related to another, sometimes helping, other times hindering understanding. In Louise DeSalvo's wording, Barnes has a style "which simultaneously masks and reveals" (qtd in Michel 54), well illustrated in the following passage, spoken by Matthew O'Connor, which sets Nightwood's own special mythology going: Have you ... ever thought of the peculiar polarity of times and times; and of sleep? Sleep, the slain white bull? Well, I, Doctor MatthewMighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor, will tell you how the day and the night are related by their division. The very constitution of twilight is a fabulous reconstruction of fear, fear bottom-out and wrong side up. Every day is thought upon and calculated, but the night is not premeditated. The Bible lies the one way, but the night gown the other. The Night, 'Beware of that dark door!' " (Barnes and Plumb 70) 2. This passage is the first one in a succession of musings by the doctor about the nature of the night, in which Matthew invokes an Indo-Iranian creation myth involving a white bull. The myth, which is the central episode of the cult of Mithraism, involves the sun god Mithra, or Mithras, who was born under a sacred tree and beside a sacred stream, holding a torch and a knife. The sun god Sol sent a raven to Mithras with the order to slay the mysterious white bull. When Mithras killed the bull with his knife, the bull became the Moon and Mithras' cloak turned into the sky. As the myth goes, thus came the alteration of day and night, animals and plants started to form and time was created ("The Legend of Mithras"). Barnes simultaneously hints at the initial nonexistence of day and night, and the moment of their split into binary opposition: the instant the world was created, it 2 All subsequent quotations from Nightwood are cited parenthetically with page numbers only. 72
