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

instinctive, a process that was probably facilitated by the spreading of machinery and the automation of work tasks as well. Whereas the French find themselves even "in the odour of wine," just as "[ajnimals find their way about largely by the keenness of their nose" (101), most other cultures "have lost [theirs] in order not to be one of them" (101). Robin, however, has no problem reconnecting with her Beast; she has that "odour of memory" (100) which modern peoples are missing. In her eyes she has something like "the long unqualified range in the iris of wild beasts who have not tamed the focus down to meet the human eye" (36). Robin is different írom the French in that the latter build a path backward to their Beast, while Robin is already there, "[carrying] the quality of the 'way back' as animals do" (39): The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a 'picture' forever arranged, is for the contemplative mind the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person's every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey" (36). Figure 1. 79