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

in the hotel room, when she was taken by Felix, when she gave birth to Guido, her "first position in attention" (113) was invaded by a force she had no concept of, as she had no concept of anything beside herself. Culture's successive arms plotted to dress her in the "garments of the known" (114) and started to forget her sleep, asking Nora to remember her, "[pjrobably because she has difficulty in remembering herself' (102). As I already noted, in Gurdjieffian theory the phrase 'remembering oneself denotes that state in which the individual reconnects with their primordial consciousness, and I take the word 'remember' to have a double meaning here: someone who forgets cannot re-member themselves, because their authentic selves are in pieces. Robin, too, is 'dis-membered' in this sense, for "[s]he would kill the world to get at herself if the world were in the way, and it is in the way" (128). Gurdjieff s idea is that in modern societies people lost connection with all three of their faculties that they need in order to keep up an integrated, authentically conscious self-awareness: the intellectual, emotional and instinctive faculties are not equally developed within one person. Robin, Matthew and Nora all suffer from the peculiar modernist malady of fragmentary selves. Matthew's speeches occupy almost half of the novel, and true to the watchman that he is, he speaks, and keeps record of everything: "The reason I'm so remarkable is that I remember everyone even when they are not about" (135). In his "priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind" (124), he has all the secret and obscure deeds of nature figured out, but only to be able to say, "[t]o think is to be sick" (131). He speaks with longing about being an animal, "born at the opening of the eye, going only forward, and at the end of the day, shutting out memory with the dropping of the lid" (113). But his tragedy is that he 'knows' but cannot 'do'. Of Nora he says, she is "beating her head against her heart, sprung over, her mind closing her life up like a heel on a fan, rotten to the bone for love of Robin. My God, how that woman can hold on to an idea!" (133). Her preoccupation is not with the matters of the mind but rather those of the heart: Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the 'findings' in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that 83