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they tore through the streets of New York [— ] The first time he looked at her he felt:

everything will bum!' (Nin 1978f, p.362). Her identity as a destructive adulteress is

repeatedly over-performed within the narrative. Yet, the recognition of this image as a

stereotype is hard to ignore and is played on later in the text when it is repeated almost

word-for-word, and, for added emphasis (if any were needed), it is placed in italics (Nin 1978f, p.445-446). This is then (almost) repeated once again in Ladders to Fire (Nin 1978e, p.89-90). The effect of this repetition is to foreground the textuality or discursive production o f identity as the narrator and the ‘lie detector’ literally try to materialise Sabina via a process o f repetition.

Sabina’s body literally becomes the canvas or paper upon which the gaps, conflicts and fissures of ‘woman’ are both written and erased. The undecidablity between the ‘body’ and the ‘text’ is most vividly portrayed in the following passage in which Sabina literally ‘makes-up’ her face before the mirror:

The eyebrow pencil was no mere charcoal emphasis on blonde eyebrows, but a design necessary to balance a chaotic asymmetry. Make up and powder were not simply applied to heighten a porcelain texture, to efface the uneven swellings caused by sleep, but to smooth out the sharp furrows designed by nightmares, to reform the contours and blurred surfaces of the cheeks, to erase the contradictions and conflicts which strained the clarity o f the face’s lines, disturbing the purity of its forms. (Nin 1978f, p.365)

I would argue that Sabina embodies the paradox of ‘writing the self; whilst traditionally the self and identity are characterised by sameness and unity, it is this very action which threatens to (ef)face Sabina from the text. The face is ‘made up’ to disguise or veil over a supposed ‘impurity’, that is, the presence of the contaminating ‘other’ within the selfsame. It is significant that it is the face that Sabina chooses to ‘rewrite’ because, as Doane has suggested, the face operates as ‘the mark of individuality’ (1991, p.47). This, she argues, is because, ‘[t]he face is that bodily part not accessible to the subject’s own gaze (or

accessible only as a virtual image in a mirror) - hence its over-representation as the instance of subjectivity’ (Doane 1991, p.47). Sabina demonstrates that the face, like the book, is a product o f discourse not an internal essence, and, as such, can be rewritten and resignified. The eyebrow pencil, like the pencil of the writer, attempts to write over the gaps and fissures and to smooth over the ever-present split between the conscious and the unconscious. The pencil tries to create symmetry out of a radical asymmetry, and, in the process, paradoxically threatens the very existence of the subject and the possibility of resistance. In more ways than one, Sabina’s face does not fit in the eyes of the detective, nor within the discourses of ‘woman’, both of which demand an either/or identity as feminine/masculine, mother/whore, wife/mistress. However, Sabina constantly seems to evade such binaries, and, in the process, becomes a ‘monstrous’ figure: a spectacle or code that must be cracked.

However, because language is not referential but polyvocal, the face as a text is open to varying and divergent readings. From one angle, Sabina can be seen as being both aware o f her own objectification and complicit within the very project of self- objectification. She after all continues to make a spectacle o f herself: she redraws her face to suit dominant conventions o f ‘woman’; she encourages the lie detector to watch and follow her; and she continues to publicly chase the men she desires. Yet, viewed from another angle, Sabina’s foregrounding of the cultural limitations placed on the female subject, gestures towards some ‘other’ (im)possible space. The reader might envisage this alternative space as Teresa de Lauretis’ ‘space-off’, a term borrowed from film theory to depict: ‘the space not visible in the frame but inferable from what the frame makes visible’ (1989, p.26). By re-marking (upon) the absence necessary in the constitution of the ‘inside’ framed space, this ‘outside’ excluded ‘space-off, paradoxically, becomes visible and/or conceivable as a space of resistance. De Lauretis argues that it is this ‘movement between

and the space-off, the elsewhere, of those discourses’ that marks the very subject of feminism (1989, p.26). This in/visible space, this movement between an ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the genre or discourse of gender, as it is culturally and historically produced, foregrounds a certain gap or ‘elsewhere’ between the female subject and the feminine subject position offered within a particular discourse.

Although the reader (and Sabina herself) is unable to visualise precisely who Sabina might actually be, what is apparent is the mis-fit within the framework of ‘woman’. This reiteration o f ‘woman’ never wholly coheres, and, as such, undercuts and continually escapes both the voyeuristic ‘I/eye’ of the reader/narrator, and the very categories to which she seems to belong. For instance this ‘ seamless ’ fabrication of the face within the mirror is juxtaposed with the already unraveling fabric of ‘a dress with a hole in its sleeve’ which Sabina selects to wear (Nin 1978f, p.366). As such, the borderline between the ‘material’ body and the ‘material’ or fabric o f her dress becomes unstable. Indeed, Sabina seems to live in this perpetual discursive tension as she tries to straddle the slowly expanding space that unravels between ‘female’ and ‘feminine’ gesturing towards both a possible alternative space and an impending dissolution. Yet de Lauretis writes, ‘to inhabit both kinds of spaces at once is to live the contradiction which [...] is the condition of feminism here and now: the tension of a twofold pull in contrary directions [...] is both the historical condition of existence of feminism and its theoretical condition o f possibility’ (1989, p.26).

Yet, as Nin was well aware, the price that women had to pay for ‘troubling’ or transgressing the genres or spaces identified as ‘belonging’ to women was high. In A Spy Sabina, familiar with the scripted ending for the femme fatale, notes the eagerness with which her surveyors sought her (dis)closure. She states:

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they seemed to be awaiting her hour of punishment after living like a spy in the house of many loves, for avoiding exposure, for defeating the sentinels watching definite boundaries, for passing without passports and permits from one love to another. Every spy’s life had ended in ignominious death. (Nin 1978f, p.411)

In The Novel o f the Future Nin remarks on the ‘troubling’ character of Sabina whose multiplicity seems to defy the very conventions of language itself leaving Nin searching for some ‘other’ way of expressing identity. She writes:

Sabina caused me a great deal of trouble because I wanted to describe fragmentation without the disintegration which usually accompanies it. Each fragment had a life of its own. They had to be held together by some tension other than the unity we are

familiar with. (Nin 1986b, p. 162-3 my emphasis)

Perhaps this ‘other’ tension is this ‘tension of a twofold pull’ between the representable subject position of ‘woman’ and the ‘other’ unrepresentable possibilities that inhabit the ‘space-off (De Lauretis 1989, p.26). Nin’s exploration o f feminine subjectivity within her diary/fiction writing consistently conflicted with the dominant discourses of self and identity proposed by psychoanalytical theory. Nin writes in her diary:

How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities? Allendy [her first analyst] may have said: ‘This is the core,’ but I never feel the four walls around the substance of the self, the core. I feel only space. Illimitable space. The effect of analysis is wearing off in this way. (1979a, p.209)

Nin goes further and suggests that this ‘core’, this central anchor of the self as ‘origin’, might not be singular but multiple and therefore neither fixed nor untransmutable. She states that, ‘[w]hat interests me is not the core but the potentialities of this core to multiply and expand infinitely. The diffusion o f the core, its suppleness and elasticity, rebound, ramifications. Spanning, encompassing, space-devouring, star-trodden journeys, everything around and between the core’ (Nin 1979a, p.209-210). This refusal to accept her place as ‘woman’, as reproducer of culture as opposed to cultural producer (or ‘artist’), incites

allegations of ‘perversity’ from her lover Henry Miller. In the diary Nin quotes Henry as saying: ‘The first day I saw you [Nin], I felt and believed you perverse, decadent, as June was. I still feel in you an immense yieldingness, I feel there is no limit to you, to what you might be or do. An absence of boundary, a yielding that is limitless in experience’ (1979a, p.209). However, Nin goes on to challenge the values implicit in this depiction of excessive femininity, and demands, ‘But why call this perverse? Henry has it too’ (p.209). It would appear that Nin’s persistent transgression or devaluation of unity in her exploration of feminine subjectivity was perceived as fundamentally ‘perverse’ and profoundly threatening to a phallocentric economy of sameness.