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

am' (Needleman) or the "alchemy" (72) by virtue of explaining it with words: "To think of the acorn it is necessary to become the tree. And the tree of night is the hardest tree to mount, the dourest tree to scale, the most difficult of branch, the most febrile to the touch, and sweats a resin and drips a pitch against the palm that computation has not gambled. Gurus

... expect you to contemplate the acorn ten years at a stretch, and if, in that time, you are no wiser about the nut, you are not very bright, and that may be the only certainty with which you will come away ..." (72). Matthew contends that the nature of night and sleep has to be an object of continuous examination and contemplation, because they are what stand between individuals and their true self-realization and spiritual awakening, processes that are hindered by the cloud of deceptions through which modern culture operates. In Barnes's literary cosmology, then, the night often alludes to 'suppression' as well. With the creation of the binary of day and night, the unified One was split into two converging halves. Ever since, at 'night' there can be no 'day,' and vice versa. In this sense, then, the 'night' suppresses its other half, and all binaries inherently contain this same either/or scenario. The doctor tells of the French that they "alone leave testimony of the two in the dawn; we tear up the one for the sake of the other, not so the French," because "they think of the two as one continually" (71). Conceptualizing the two as One whole thus interrupts the working of the binary oppositional scheme and facilitates the attainment of forgotten harmony. In modern Western thought grounded in binary oppositions, the 'night' has associations not only with 'sleep,' 'darkness' and 'suppressed', but many other notions as well. Traditions of transformation work with three pairs of polarities whose balancing are mutually important in many ancient systems of spiritualism: masculine and feminine, good and evil, and human and animal consciousness. In modern society, there are usually different values attached to each side of these dualities, and a huge emphasis is placed on their clear and unambiguous separation within the pairs. The shift in public culture toward fixed meaning caused a split in the way humans' animal descent was treated, and fashion also began to show commitment to distinctly sex-specific clothing. As far as the third pair 75