www.pouvoir-magazine.fr
A chacun son empreinte !
Power
puts words to,
your commitments,
your actions and your passions!
Womens & Words
by Tyna Geronimi
Cultural mediator, painter and poet
World Citizen
Home port Sète
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"Then I wanted to leave him. There was still, in some secret recess of my body, a disgust. And he feared my reaction. I wanted to run away (...) And I didn't want to hurt him by running away. But right now, after the passion, I had to at least go back to my room, be alone.
I felt poisoned by this union."
Anaïs Nin ( Incest)
"I am not a woman who belongs to one man. I am a woman who belongs to love."
Anaïs Nin, Le Feu 1935
"My only religion, my only philosophy, my only dogma is love. All the rest I am capable of betraying if passion takes me to a new world".
The unexpurgated diary of Anaïs Nin,
Journal of love October 23, 1939
I've chosen to immerse you in the world of Anaïs Nin, who invented a new way of writing: erotic female introspection. Her prolific, late-published work is a source of growing interest for all 21st-century women who find themselves in this need to put their desires into the right words, but also a source of interest for men, who are often lost when faced with the complexity of feminine feelings.
As a woman who claims to be a free spirit, Anaïs Nin dares to take every liberty to satisfy her desires, yet always seeks the gaze of men and sometimes the women around her. She is an accomplished seductress who likes to control her intimates, and constantly plays the role of loving, even submissive wife to her husband and lovers. She constantly lies to each of them, while respecting their sensitivity and dignity. For Anaïs Nin, even though she adapts the truth for everyone's benefit, does not seek to do harm. She has a big heart and sincerely loves the men and sometimes the women she seduces. She's attached, yet amoral.
"I HAVE NO MORALS.
I KNOW OTHERS ARE HORRIFIED. NOT ME.
NO MORALITY UNTIL THE EVIL I CAN DO MANIFESTS ITSELF.
MY MORALITY ONLY EXISTS WHEN I'M CONFRONTED WITH SOMEONE'S PAIN."
Anaïs Nin, Incest Diary, october 30, 1932
My feeling on reading her diaries, especially the now unexpurgated Diary of Love, is ambivalent. Anaïs Nin has a constant need to please and be loved, probably linked to the lack of a father, even a violent and incestuous one, but she also has the need to control her love relationships, to manage her personal theater. She reveals herself to be perverse and mocking, an almost pathological liar, afflicted by a feminine Donjuanism, which constantly propels her into countless adventures that feed her work as a writer. She also had a low opinion of the men she dated, all of them intellectuals or artists, many of whom would become famous or even iconic, like her great love and lover, the sulphurous Henry Miller. She didn't always find them manly enough. She also declares:
"I HATE MEN WHO ARE AFRAID OF FEMALE PASSION.
THEY'RE LIKE CHILDREN AFRAID OF THE DARK."
Diary VI, Despair, january 20, 1940
She writes this implacable verdict which she uses constantly to legitimize her lies:
"MEN DEVOTE ETERNAL ADORATION TO ILLUSION.
THEY NEED TO BELIEVE THAT THEY ARE LOVED FOR WHAT THEY ARE,
NOT FOR WHAT THEY CAN GIVE (...)
THEY NEED TO BELIEVE THEY ARE GODS."
Diary, november 27 1932
Correspondence between Anaïs Nin and her father.
(Mai 1933)
In my opinion, Anaïs Nin's entire life, at least in its excesses, is linked to her father Joaquim, with whom she identifies completely. This father, who introduced her to carnal pleasure as a child and who, twenty years later as an adult, has become a man she desires. This total incestuous fusion takes place within the framework of a shared passion for love, revealed in unambiguous epistolary exchanges, true love letters, the words of a "chosen" incest, at least a consensual one. Even today, Anaïs Nin remains a scandalous person in her words, which do not fit in with the current discourse of free speech to combat the scourge of incest. Reading her, we realize that these words are like the confessions of a patient in a psychoanalyst's office, and that they were not necessarily intended to be read. To claim to be in love with incest and to love sharing one's loves remain the words of an extraordinary personality, an incredible author with a wide erotic range and certainly an overflowing imagination that many psychoanalysts have been and still will be able to concern themselves with.
Beyond all these erotic experiences, Anaïs Nin was a woman of her time, who knew she had to develop her creative impulses, and who felt she had the makings of a writer with a different sensibility. She is always hopeful that her poetry, short stories and novels will be appreciated.
"IT'S AN APPALLING CONFLICT BETWEEN MY FEMININE SIDE,
WHO WANTS TO LIVE IN A WORLD RULED BY MEN
BY MEN, TO LIVE WITH A MAN,
AND MY CREATIVE PART, CAPABLE OF CREATING A WORLD OF HER OWN,
A RHYTHM OF HER OWN, A RHYTHM THAT SUITS NO MAN."
Anaïs Nin, November 13, 1935
Anaïs Nin offers a genuine reflection on the writer and writing, nourished by the exciting period in Paris she shared with Henry Miller, notably at the Villa Seurat in Montparnasse:
"WE WRITE TO TASTE LIFE TWICE,
IN THE MOMENT AND IN RETROSPECT."
Diary, february 1954
Anyone seeking to write a story or a book receives powerful messages from Anaïs Nin:
"IF YOU DON'T BREATHE THROUGH WRITING,
IF YOU DON'T SHOUT THROUGH WRITING,
IF YOU DON'T SING BY WRITING,
THEN DON'T WRITE,
BECAUSE OUR CULTURE HAS NO USE FOR IT."
Anaïs Nin, Diary, february 1954
That same year, she explains:
"THE DIARY IS LIKE LIFE ITSELF,
AN UNFINISHED WORK.
SOMETIMES I WISH I COULD LIVE LONG ENOUGH
TO FINISH IT IN DETAIL,
TO MAKE IT A PROUSTIAN WORK.
As for me, I retain this beautiful, more global thought on art:
"ART'S FUNCTION IS TO RENEW OUR PERCEPTION.
WHAT IS FAMILIAR, WE STOP SEEING.
THE WRITER DISRUPTS THE FAMILIAR SCENE AND,
AS IF BY MAGIC, WE SEE A NEW MEANING."
The Novel of the Future
In fact, his literary fame came with the publication of his redacted diaries in 1964.
By 1966, he was already a success. Venus Erotica, his erotic short stories written in New York in 1940 as a purely dietary endeavor, would earn him worldwide success by the time of his death in 1977. Under the original title, Delta of Venus: Erotica, they were published in New York by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. They were published in France in 1981.
In conclusion, I'd like to end this article on Anaïs Nin's poetic language with an extract from her first publication
« The House of Incest » 1936,
published in French in 1979, and considered a surrealist poetic reverie, a feminine "Season in Hell". Claude Louis-Combet's gripping translation of the text is a delight.
