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

much optimism. Mapel-Bloomberg identifies a "transformation from a more positive and Utopian Spiritualism practiced in the latter part of the nineteenth century to a more nihilistic and distopian, or occult spiritualism in the years after the Great War." The modernist writers suffered the personal and economic tragedies of the times as harshly as anyone, and for them, "Modernism became Morbidity" (MapelBloomberg). In 1919, Djuna Barnes was asked in an interview, "Why such morbidity?", and she answered: Morbid? You make me laugh. This life I write and draw and portray is life as it is, and therefore you call it morbid. Look at my life. Look at the life around me. Where is this beauty that I am supposed to miss? The nice episodes that others depict? Is not everything morbid? I mean the life of people stripped of their masks. Where are the relieving features? Often I sit down to work at my drawing board, at my typewriter. All of a sudden my joy is gone. I feel tired of it all because, I think, 'What's the use?' Today we are, tomorrow dead. We are born and don't know why. We live and suffer and strive, envious or envied. We love, we hate, we work, we admire, we despise... .Why? And we die, and no one will ever know that we have been born, (qtd in Mapel-Bloomberg) In the aftermath of the horrors of World War I, the devaluation of human life and worth and the shifting emphasis from the 'individual' to the 'mass'

—as appearing in the varied forms of war casualties, workers in factories, or commodities on assembly lines

—called for a spirit of guidance in the lives of modernist women writers. Gurdjieff offered a clear view of the causes of the fallen state of the individual, of which Needleman gives a useful summary. According to Gurdjieff, for life to be lived to its full potential, humans need the balanced and fully realized presence of three faculties: the intellectual or thinking, the emotional, and the instinctive or moving centers. Contrary to that, the scientific, technical and material progress that has been taking place in modern civilization has "[pushed] the individual further into only one of the centers

—one third, as it were, of one's real self-nature" (Needleman). Technological inventions like the assembly line drove workers into the moving center, and participation in the war required the same faculty from the soldiers in the front. Similarly, modern society honored clothing that emphasized the individual's commitment to one end of the man/woman polarity, hence hiding 68