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

SZILVIA NAGY I CAN OPERATE IN THE DARK—BODIES ARE PHOSPHORESCENT...

1 OCCULT MODERNISM AND MYTH-MAKING IN DJUNA BARNES'S NIGHTWOOD Abstract Djuna Barnes's ties with spiritualism and ancient traditions of transformation have suffered undeserved critical neglect and studying these influences would enlighten any discussion of Nightwood. In what follows I will lay out the foundations of such an undertaking. Nightwood has much more

—or more precisely, something else

—to offer than a stylized opinion about homosexuality and woman's place in patriarchal culture, as many critics have argued. I suggest that we need to see Nightwood as a critique of the alienating public culture and of modern society, reflexive of the definitive socio-cultural and spiritual activity of its time. I will be looking at Robin's and the other characters' existence in, and attempt to break away from, a cultural framework that decreasingly tolerates a non-binary mode of being. Thus, the end

—in both senses of the word, 'goal' and 'fate'

—of Robin's quest is a detachment from a society grounded in 'either/or' choices in favor of a long-lost 'neither/nor' possibility. Robin, the unsexed "beast turning human" (Barnes and Plumb 36), is descending in her mind into the only setting where such form of being was last possible: prehistory. 1 Photo inscription by Barnes from the 1920s, taken from the Djuna Barnes collection in Maryland. 65