Night Passages

Philosophy, Literature, and Film

Elisabeth Bronfen, David Brenner

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231519724
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out.

Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown.

PART I

COSMOGONIES OF THE NIGHT

CHAPTER 1

NYX AND HER CHILDREN

Cosmogenetic narratives revolve around the notion of formless darkness informing the beginning of all things. The world takes shape only in contrast to and in separation from the deep darkness from which it has emerged, engendering an incessant interplay of day and night, light and shadow, becoming and passing away. In creation stories, the terrestrial difference between night’s dark and day’s light that fundamentally structures the order of the everyday world recalls the nonexistence preceding it by positing a primordial night as the precondition from which all ordinary nights are distinguished. In this chapter, I will first explore how classical antiquity imagined the creation of the world from darkness, limiting my discussion to the figure of Nyx as she appears in Hesiod’s Theogony and the religious poetry attributed to Orpheus and his followers. I will then look at the way the mythologist Karl Philipp Moritz reinterprets her epistemological function at the same historical moment Schikaneder created his star-flaming queen, thereby illustrating how, at the height of the Enlightenment, primordial night was given a feminine shape. I will close by looking at two modern philosophical engagements with the offspring of this primordial nocturnal force—Horkheimer and Adorno’s idiosyncratic reading of how Odysseus came to outwit the Sirens and Maurice Blanchot’s equally idiosyncratic rethinking of Orpheus’s descent into nocturnal Hades. In all the narratives discussed, Nyx and her daughters are positioned on the threshold between a formless darkness that can never fully be grasped and its reconfiguration as a dark feminine shape: mysterious, omniscient, awe-inspiring, and sometimes fatal, embodying a point of contact to this unknown.

In Hesiod’s Theogony, no deity stands at the beginning of the world; rather, it is dark Chaos that presides, from which three entities are born: Gaia (the broad-chested earth), Tartarus (the dismal abyss), and Eros (the most beautiful of the immortal gods). Yet Chaos is also the progenitor of a second family branch, bringing forth Nyx (the dark night) and Erebus (the lightless darkness of the deep underworld). As these two siblings unite in love, they in turn bring forth Aither (heavenly air) and Hemera (the day). In Hesiod’s description of the creation of the world, light thus comes into being only after Earth and its periphery, the underworld, have been created out of the gaping void of Chaos. The day is clearly marked as a child of the night. Even if Nyx is not the actual origin of the cosmos and comes into being only as a rival to her sister Gaia, the night represents a creative power, obtaining her singular importance from the fact that she autonomously gives birth to all her other children. Having initially coupled with her sibling, Erebus, she will require no further partnering with another masculine deity. Instead, her other offspring—including odious fate, black doom, death, sleep, and the family of dreams—are all self-engendered. Antiquity’s nocturnal deity thus emerges as the mother of a lineage that not only creates the day, but also everything that makes the ordinary dreadful. Equally significant is the fact that the two beings she creates with her brother, Erebus, are conducive to earthly existence. By contrast, her self-generated children are not only the toxic inversion of day and air, but also pertain primarily to the psychic life of humans—their desires and their transgressions, as well as the laws regulating their dreams. Hesiod names Nyx’s descendants as Momos (blame), Oixyn (complaint), Moros (destiny), the three Moirai (fate), the avenging Keres and Furies, retaliatory Nemesis, Apathe (deception), Gera (age), and Eris (discord).

Ever since, night has come to trigger in human beings transgressive desires as well as a fear of being haunted by fate’s punishment. Other psychic conditions ascribed to the family of Nyx include violence, lawlessness, and delusion, as well as quarrels, lies, oaths, and perjury. Hesiod attributes everything that is terrible about terrestrial existence to the realm of the night, but also everything that renders visible the laws of day by virtue of their transgression. Only the experience of perjury allows us to recognize the importance of oaths; only the experience of delusion makes us recognize the value of true insight. The fact that Nyx is the mother of both Hemera and all the Fates serves, furthermore, to illustrate that moral darkness is a sibling of the bright day. Hesiod not only speaks about this nocturnal deity as one of two mothers, who, together with her sister Gaia, creates something out of the depths of darkness; as mother to the fates and furies, his Nyx also emerges as the prerequisite of moral knowledge. Even though her seductive (if punitive) children reside in the underworld, they incessantly return to earth to hound human beings with the consequences of their deeds, imposing on them as much a sense of guilt as a desire for retribution. Their punitive law leads humans in the other direction as well. Nyx and her progeny give shape to the line of demarcation between earthly existence and its periphery, Tartarus, not least because one is banished to the underworld for committing crimes.

In Hesiod’s narrative, Nyx is thus the first to introduce into the gaping emptiness of formless chaos both the ordered alternation of night and day as well as a plethora of divine laws that regulate everyday suffering, the punishment of transgressive desires, and the duration of earthly existence. As a result, her own status is constantly in flux. On the one hand, because she resembles the deep formless darkness of chaos that brought her forth, she is part of the primordial night that precedes the creation of the cosmos. On the other hand, in her function as an earthly manifestation of nature and the counterpoint to the day, she is also part of the ordered cosmos, which Nyx herself helped produce and her offspring so poignantly influence. Given her dual positioning, belonging both to the world and to a condition preceding the world, Nyx can be seen as having helped shape the groundless foundation at the beginning of the world in two ways. Although her daughter, daylight, allows the world to emerge from this darkness, her own mysterious darkness offers intimations of the chaos that preceded all manifestations of being. As a creative principle and the precondition for the emergence of a recognizable world and because she precedes the world, its concepts, and its language, Nyx represents an entity that is itself ungraspable. This nocturnal deity could be conceptualized in retrospect by virtue of her earthly manifestation, as the ordinary change of night and day. Thus conceived by cosmogenetic narratives as the line of demarcation between chaos and order, Nyx embodies the point of transition from an unordered potentiality of all possible manifestations of being to the actual shaping of all distinct aspects of the world, separate from this dark point of origin. Hesiod’s casting of the night as the point of contact between a knowable world and its unknowable precondition is particularly seminal for my discussion of subsequent cosmogenetic narratives that implicitly refigure his creation of the world. In her cultural survival Nyx continues to function as a personified portal between the inaccessible primordial ground of all existence and the incessant transformation of earthly phenomena, as the force of transition subtending the interplay of ordinary daylight and dark night, and of life’s emergence and destruction.

ON THE THRESHOLD BETWEEN THE KNOWN AND THE UNKNOWN

Whereas Hesiod’s nocturnal deity is primarily a figure of awe and terror, Orphic poetry predating his Theogony emphasizes not only a more benevolent side of the night, but also a cosmogony that elevates her above all other deities. The third of the hymns attributed to Orpheus places the night at the beginning of the creation of the world and celebrates her as the mother of all gods and men. In this version she is celebrated not as the dreaded dark mother of the day and the fates, but rather as a “blessed goddess” whose “bluish sparkling, star-blazing” appearance promises restorative rest. Remaining vigilant in the darkness of a world after sunset, she offers both reflection and solace after the day’s toil and brings on the sleep that relieves humans of their diurnal worry. She is primarily conceived as the mother of consolation and replenishment, as the friend of all earthly creatures. The hymn also draws attention to her scintillating appearance. Riding across the sky in her carriage, she belongs to the earth even while she is perceived as a “being of heaven—circling playfully through the mists in a whirling dance.” In her earthly manifestation, the Orphic Nyx also ensures an illumination of the world after dark, even while this is itself contingent on her connection to the underworld: “You send light into the dark and yourself flee down to Hades.” Although in this poem the cyclic all-nightly emergence and disappearance of an illuminated night also recalls the “dreaded necessity” of death, the poet addresses his “beseeching words” to Nyx, the sacred and most blessed mother of sleep and death, in hope of consolation. As a merciful figure sought by all, she is seen as being endowed with apotropaic magic. The poet calls upon her to “come and frighten away the images of fear gleaming here in the darkness.”

In contrast to Hesiod, the Orphic hymns thus cast the terrestrial illuminated night as a protection from precisely those more primordial anxieties that are also attributed to Nyx, wrapped in her dark cloak. Where Hesiod imagined a neutral chaos at the beginning of the world, the Orphic cosmogony elevates the night to the status of a primordial mother. In this version, Chaos and Nyx reign together, accompanied by Erebus and Tartarus. In the shape of a bird with black wings, the primordial night lays a silver egg in the enormous lap of Darkness, so that her brother Erebus in fact functions as the ground in which she can plant her seed; he provides the material support for her creative power. Fertilized by the wind, Eros, decked with golden wings, emerges from this egg. His glowing, shining appearance gains its affective force only against the backdrop of nocturnal blackness. In this he recalls the way the light of Hesiod’s Hemera also becomes visible only in distinction from the all-encompassing darkness of Nyx and Erebus, her two parents. In the Orphic version, the first-born child of the night, also known as Phanes (because his rays bring everything to light that up to this point had been lying concealed in Nyx’s silver egg), takes on the role of animating all the elements of the world order that were dark before his birth. Seminal for the difference between these two versions of classic cosmogony in turn is that, in contrast to the Nyx of Hesiod’s Theogony, the egg laid by the Nyx of the Orphic hymns already contains the entire world. Its hollow interior corresponds to the wide open void of Chaos, from which it is separated only by its outer shell. Night is thus cast as the decisive creative principle. Although the Orphic Nyx does not exist before Chaos, Erebus, and Tartarus, it is only the animating light of her first-born son that brings with it a visible connection between these other primordial elements, even while this illumination in turn brings forth the sky, the ocean, the earth, and the race of gods.

Common to both versions, however, is that they cast Nyx as a chatoyant deity, a black mother, on the one hand either pregnant with day or giving birth to radiant Eros, on the other, as the progenitor of human fate in all its tragic facets. Furthermore, even if Hesiod conceives her merely as the counterpart to the great vitality of Gaia, in her cultural afterlife she is repeatedly represented as a nurturing mother with one light and one dark child in her arms. The former, Hypnos, reinvigorates humans with the sleep he brings; the latter, Thanatos, puts an end to all earthly happiness and sorrow. Equally seminal is the twofold role she plays in the cosmogenetic narratives revolving around her. She exists as a personified deity dwelling on the periphery of the world, from where she reappears when day declines. Yet she is also conceived as a purely abstract principle, the entity that helped bring forth world out of chaos in the first place, even while determining the fortune and misfortune of all those who inhabit the world of mortals. Equally seminal to her cultural afterlife (as will be shown in more detail in the following chapters on both Hegel and Freud’s recourse to mythopoetic thinking), is that Nyx embodies an all-encompassing primordial deity. This is made particularly clear in the Orphic cosmogony, given that the egg from which radiant Eros springs forth is conceived as harboring the pure potentiality of the world that will emerge from it. In contrast to the vastness of Chaos, Nyx does not stand for a void, but rather a plenitude of manifestations still to be realized. As a figure who brings forth the light that allows shapes to become perceptible, even while bearing within herself all possibilities that have not yet been realized, she comes to stand for the force of contingency. The figures she engenders, directly or indirectly, can be beneficial or harmful. In all cases, however, both her daughter Hemera and her other more fateful offspring guarantee that the history of the world will unfold as a constant variation of figurations, in which generations of mythical figures and earthly phenomena come into being and again pass away in an incessant cycle. Put another way, as the begetter of both light and fate, the Nyx of antiquity embodies an irrevocable law. Once light has entered the cosmos, day and night alternate as inevitably as life and death.

The fact that Nyx also has a concrete place of residence in the world while functioning as a point of contact to the dark primordial unknown at the origin of all terrestrial existence needs further elucidation. According to Hesiod, even the Olympian gods are afraid of her place of abode, located at the outermost edge of the world. Enveloped by blue-black fog, her cave hovers on the enormous molding abyss of the bottomless depth of Tartarus, where “the origins and boundaries of everything” are juxtaposed. On the big ebony threshold to the place in which Nyx resides with her daughter, night and day meet and converse peacefully with each other. Never, however, does their joint residence contain both at the same time. When one of the two crosses over the threshold to descend into its inner chambers, the other one passes out into the world. With day and night sharing the world in equal parts, the one outside the mansion flies around the earth, while the one inside awaits the hour of her ascent. The difference in their terrestrial effect lies in the light they cast. Hemera, with her sun, brings with her “an all-seeing light for all those living on earth,” whereas Nyx, carrier of both ruin and solace, rides across the nocturnal heaven in a carriage drawn by black horses, surrounded by an entourage of dreams and stars.

There is, however, more to the terrestrial abode of this night goddess. A terra incognita, in which sky, sea, earth, and the underworld come together, the residence Nyx shares with her two children Hemera and Eros is also close to chaos, and thus in close proximity to all the unrealized potentiality the latter contains. For this reason, this nocturnal deity is also seen as a conveyor of divine pronouncements. Her daughter, day, is not the only one she has friendly conversations with on the threshold to her home; in mythic representations, she can also be seen standing in front of her dark abode with Dike, the goddess of justice, offering prophecies and dictating laws. In an Orphic fragment, Zeus himself makes his way to her cave to ask what he is destined to accomplish. She counsels him to devour Phanes and the world so as to bring about a new world order. Thus, even the most powerful of the Olympian gods visits the house of the primordial mother to acquire the wisdom he needs for his sovereign rule to hold. In chapter 14 of the Iliad, Zeus even refers to her as the conqueror of gods and men, while admitting that he is afraid of doing “anything to offend Night, the swift one.”

To summarize: In cosmogenetic narratives of classical antiquity, Nyx plays a decisive role both in creating light and the sky as well as introducing fate, punishment, and justice into the world. At the same time, she also influences the constitution of the race of gods, even while restricting their power. Although for the Orphics she is a benevolent primordial mother and gentle friend, conferring rest and pitting her nocturnal light against what would otherwise be perceived as an impenetrable darkness, in the writings of Hesiod and Homer she is primarily associated with ruination and doom. What Nyx initiates above all for Western culture is an association between the night and the feminine that is at once dangerous and rewarding, mysterious and illuminating. Decisive for her duplicitous survival in our image repertoire is the fact that in her personification of the powerful night, she represents an embodiment of the threshold between being and nonbeing. She functions as the fulcrum between a primordial night, conceived on the one hand as an originary darkness that conceals everything yet already contains all phenomena that will emerge from it, and, on the other, as the terrestrial night, the phenomenological chronotopos between dusk and dawn. Although closely related to the darkness of chaos, she is the mother both of actual daylight and of all illumination during the night. The duplicitous position she occupies, so crucial to her cultural survival, can be formulated as follows. Personifying the time period between the setting of the sun at dusk and its rising again at dawn, she also recalls the emergence of the first day from primordial darkness. As such she allows us to conceive in hindsight, from the position of an already created world, the originary chaos that existed before the distinction between darkness and light; she recalls the primordial fusion of all forms. Her separation from this originary chaos is not only conceived by cosmogenetic texts as the prerequisite that there is world and no longer nothing; the personified night, Nyx, also makes it possible to think, in retrospect and from the position of the world that emerged from it, about the precosmic nothing. The knowledge inspired by this figure, veiled in mysterious and fascinating darkness, serves to intimate traces of this formless origin.

THE RE-EMERGENCE OF NYX AT THE HEIGHT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The fact that Nyx comes to experience a re-embodiment, albeit obliquely, in Schikaneder’s star-flaming Queen illustrates the direction that the idea of a primordial feminine power located at the edge of the world took at the height of the Enlightenment. A renewed interest in mythic narratives surrounding this nocturnal deity can also be found in Karl Philipp Moritz’s Teachings of the Gods (1791). The title he chooses for his discussion, “The Night and Fate that rules over gods and man,” indicates that his interest lies in foregrounding her superior power. Beginning his revisitation of Nyx in an allusion to Homer, Moritz explains that in ancient thought there is something “that the gods themselves dread. It is night’s mysterious darkness, within which something lies hidden that reigns over both the gods and humanity, something that exceeds the concepts of mortal beings.” It is not only that this nocturnal deity rules over everything that is decisive for Moritz, but also that her power cannot be fathomed by the human mind. The concealment embodied by night’s darkness thus refers to what becomes mysterious precisely because it cannot be seen directly. It also gestures toward the limits of what can be known and represented. Given that Moritz celebrates both of these aspects of Nyx and her envelopment by darkness, one gets the sense that he seeks to combine the blessed maternal figure of the Orphics with Hesiod’s terrifying one: “Night conceals and veils; that is why she is the mother of everything beautiful and everything horrific.” Equally decisive about Moritz’s reconception of Nyx around 1800 is the fact that her gesture of veiling something is what determines her children. She is a maternal figure because she conceals. Furthermore, his rewriting of the ancient mythic narrative poignantly names the beautiful emerging from her before it names the horrific.

Moritz’s rethinking of the classical Nyx thus illustrates how, at the height of the Enlightenment, night’s darkness was conceived not only as a source of fear, but also as a source of the aesthetic. Indeed, in contrast to Hesiod, he pointedly highlights the creative aspect of her first child: “From her lap is born the brilliance of the Day, wherein all earthly shapes unfold.” He privileges the act of formation. The creation of the world, all emotional and moral education, and the imagination as well as representations of any kind, are all derived from the birth of day out of the night. Only in a second step does Moritz name ni...