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
The Mystic's Path A little researched field within female modernism in general and Djuna Barnes scholarship in particular is the intense interest in ancient traditions and occult notions. Barnes had a long standing affair with things beyond ordinary understanding and sensation. She grew up in the same house where Zadel Barnes, her grandmother and a distinguished medium, conducted her channeling sessions. For Barnes, the affection for the exotic and the unconscious was early provoked by the outings to the circus with her grandmother when she was a child, and her fascination with the circus animals surfaces in her later journalism as well. Bonnie Kime Scott, discussing the beast motive in Barnes's works, examines some of the illustrations Barnes made for her works, noting that the images Barnes based her drawings for Ryder on is L 'imagerie populaire, a 1926 collection of images dating back to the fifteenth century. Those images that Barnes loved the most, continues Scott, depict animals posing in human roles in reverse power relations. Her acquaintance with the humanized circus animals of the famous Hippodrome Circus "who mock the hierarchy of humankind over the natural world" (Winkiel 15) are reverberated in some of these drawings. She was moved by the gaze of the animals that she encountered in the circus, their promise of secret knowledge unveiled, and the idea of a distant bestial past that humans have the inner knowledge, albeit secret, to reconnect with. On other occasions, she drew mythic beasts, and in Ladies Almanack she depicted some of the human characters as animals. One picture, drawn to accompany The Book of Repulsive Women , published in 1915, shows a creature that is a cross between animal and human, and Scott calls attention to its striking resemblance with Robin of Nightwood. Her countless mythic references that appear from time to time in pictures as well as words thus make certain what Donna Gerstenberger calls "an emphasis on ontology [as] central to an understanding of Barnes's work" (33). Barnes's body of work as journalist, writer and occasional illustrator shows that she not only lived in an era of increased attraction to ancient philosophies, but she herself actively sought the opportunity to study some of them. Let me take a short detour here to 66
