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House of Incest is Anaïs Nin's first and primary text. It is a text about
her texts, a why-I-write. It is a prose-poem—at once prose and poetry, at
once plagiaristic of everyday discourse and cutting into it with a second edge, a
second meaning, a poetry. The edge is where the death of language is glimpsed.
Prose can no longer be prose, it has to be made poetry. Woman can no longer
be woman, she has to be made artist. Father and brother can no longer
remain lovers, a past has to be exorcized and a future realized in the present. This
is the artistic immolation of the self, of the present for a future. Neurosis is
the longing for the impossible, it blocks the poet from life; orgasm of the text
alone is bliss. The `I' in the House of
Incest, the Anaïs Nin-persona, is writing
against madness from the center of madness: "Fear of madness drives us out of
the precinct of our sacred solitude."
Anaïs Nin appears in her text as Proust or Genet do in theirs but not in
the guise of direct biography (which would exceed the body, give a meaning to
life, and forge a destiny). The author is necessary to the meaning but herself
deprived of all meaning; plunged into non-profit, the Zen mushotoku, desiring
nothing but the perverse bliss of words (but bliss is never a taking; nothing separates
it from satori, from losing) (Barthes, p. 35). The `I' says that everything to her
was "full of significance." What is significance? It is meaning in so far as it is sensually produced. Desensualize the world (Eluard), sensualize the intellect (Nin), be
an enemy of sexuality (Artaud). The Nin-persona tells the lesbian and
therefore metaphorically "incestuous" Sabina: "I never dissolved before man. I
praised my own flame in you. THIS IS THE BOOK YOU WROTE AND YOU ARE THE
WOMAN I AM." Frigidity, culture, society, pleasure vs. orgasm, loss, bliss, the text.
But Nin's Sabina, like Djuana Barnes' Robin in Nightwood, is a killer; she lies. |
