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

which he loves. In Nora's heart lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her identity, and about it for its maintenance ran Nora's blood. Thus the body of Robin could never be unloved, corrupt or put away (51). Nora's world revolves around her emotions for Robin; Robin's world revolves around herself. Matthew confesses that he does not like her; Robin is unlike him, but he has to "admit that much: sort of fluid blue under her skin, as if the hide of time had been stripped from her, and with it, all transactions with knowledge" (113). Her animal consciousness is much emphasized, and in accordance with this fact, Robin seldom utters anything in the course of Nightwood, and nothing in the last chapter, on which Carolyn Allen comments that Robin moves "back into the preverbal world" (qtd in Mylin). Indeed, Robin's presence is much more pronounced in the passages about the beast than anywhere else, and, accordingly, Matthew and Nora dominate their respective territories of intellect and emotion; all three characters easily offer themselves up for such interpretation. Their nostalgia for a mythic and highly hypothetical moment before Creation, before the alteration of day and night, indeed suggests that their fears were similar to Gurdjieff s, and naturally Barnes's: that modern life at the dawn of the twentieth century only furthered the dusk of true selfawareness. WORKS CITED "The Legend of Mithras." 1999. Web Page. URL: http://www. woodberry.org/acad/hist/CLASSICS/religion/mleg.htm. (30 September 2001). "Mixing Art With Exotic Culture." Vive La Vie. 2000. Web Page. URL: http://www.vivelavie.com/mastergate/secured/collectibles /deco.htm. (15 January 2002). Baker, George, and Walter Driscoll. "Gurdjieff in America: An Overview." Web Page. URL: http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/people /rhodges/html/G-baker.html. (30 September 2001). Barnes, Djuna, and Cheryl J. Plumb. Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, ed. Cheryl J. Plumb. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. 84