Mesures preventives

‘Life is a process of becoming’ (Nin 1964: 11)

Ambivalently described as ‘feminist smut’ (Carter n.d.: 97), Anaïs Nin’s erotic writings have been contentious ever since the publication of Delta of Venus (Nin 1981). These privately commissioned tales were written at a dollar a page for a male client in the 1940s and include some ideas from male authors. Yet, in a milieu where feminists were celebrating gynocentric literature, many women readers (myself included) found pleasures in their ‘ambulant and bohemian’ style and in an erotic expres-sion different from masculinist material (Nin 1981: 117). A male liter-ary assemblage can obviously be mapped between Nin and Deleuze and Guattari via her lovers Henry Miller and Antonin Artaud, as well as D.

H. Lawrence, on whom she wrote a eulogistic book (Nin 1964). Though it is necessary to refer to Lawrence and Miller, here I want to explore Nin’s signifi cance for a Deleuzian project on sexuality in her own right.¹

Some men writing on female-centred erotica are patronisingly dismiss-ive. For Andrew Ross, women’s material features ‘stylised romantic set-tings, more intricate narrative frames and build-ups, extended foreplay, and scenarios of mutual pleasure’ (Ross 1993: 239). Revisiting Nin’s prose for a Deleuze-infl ected study, I become very conscious of the dif-fi cult nature of the research process. A decade ago, my work on obscene poetics was informed by Laura Mulvey’s study of cinematic voyeurism as well as the transgression theory of Georges Bataille and his 1990s avatars (Powell 2002). Writing today from a Deleuzian perspective is a very different experience. I scan these opulent words and musical prose rhythms with my eyes and feel them rushing through body and mind in assemblage with the text. I dip in and out of thought, into affect and back, in the spreading systole and diastole motions of the crystalline text and its milieu.

For fi ction writers expressing their ideas via the logic of sensation, aes-thetic affects take primacy, whereas Deleuze and Guattari express their philosophical and political concepts affectively. I will, however, fi nd conceptual common ground between Deleuze, Guattari and Nin. This includes the championing of literary modernism and the self-refl ective critique of Oedipal ‘slavery to a pattern’ (Nin underwent psychoanaly-sis and practised it herself) (Jason 1973: 92). Despite the retention of certain conventionally patriarchal attitudes in her thought, she neverthe-less prefi gures Deleuze and Guattari’s evocation of erotic multiplicity via the conjunctive synthesis. Although more infl uenced by Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank and Carl Jung than Melanie Klein, Nin’s writings express the particular erotic vitality of part-objects that exceed individual lovers in congress. This area of her work has particular relevance to Deleuze and Guattari’s own speculative use of part-objects, as we shall see.

My further aim is to consider the aesthetic impact of Nin’s sensuous and evocative prose. As well as her erotic tales and autobiographical fi ction, I will reference other self-consciously literary works including journals and letters. Nin asserts her lasting commitment to bringing images into sensual life, asserting that she will not be ‘just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which [she] cannot live in, make love to’ (Stuhlmann 1974: 262). She sets a transformative erotic vitalism in perpetual motion, evoking life as ‘a process of becom-ing, a combination of states we have to go through’, and for her, people fail to embrace life when they ‘elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death’ (Nin 1964: 11). I will also explore the ideological ten-dencies and contradictions of Nin’s heterotica, its affective force on the reader’s mind-brain-body, and critique its implications for a Deleuze and Guattarian sexuality.

My title term ‘heterotica’ recalls other words sharing the same root, such as heterodoxy and heterogeneous. It also recalls het(a)era, the Greek word for an educated courtesan and Nin’s self-conscious descrip-tion of her role as the ‘madam’ of a ‘house of literary prostitudescrip-tion’ (Nin 1981: xiv). This is, of course, exactly the purpose of her erotic writing.

She writes as a lover to arouse and seduce the reader. I begin by con-sidering more overt links between Deleuze and Guattari and Nin via a common conceptual assemblage with Lawrence and Miller, both of whom were attacked for their macho sexuality by feminist Kate Millet (Millet 1971). The relations between these writers could, of course, easily constitute studies in themselves, so I will limit myself to discuss-ing salient features relevant to the libidinal plane and to Nin’s literary expression of them.

Lawrence’s literary presence threads through much of Deleuze’s anti-Oedipal thinking both alone and with Guattari. Of particular relevance here is Lawrence’s concept of the ‘passional’, the mobilisation of erotic forces in his work to combat the imposition of a cold and affect-less

‘reason’ on the sexual sphere and to spread libidinal energy abroad.

Deleuze and Guattari stress libido as an omnipresent force of machinic energy not reducible to the Freudian phallus and its ‘anthropomorphic representation’ of sex in psychoanalysis (Deleuze and Guattari 1984:

323). In Lawrence’s writing, the potency of unconscious desire escapes the psychoanalytic constraints of this human-centred sex ‘unifi ed and identifi ed in the molar constellation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 323).

Deleuze and Guattari follow Wilhelm Reich in opposing Freud’s concept of Thanatos, the death drive, as inimical to desire. By establish-ing the binary dynamic between Eros and Thanatos, Freud deprived sexuality of its generative role, reducing it to ‘the autonomous cause of sexual repression’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 332). According to Freud’s model, the entropy of the death drive blocks desire, so that libidinal energy is inevitably stymied and ‘sexuality as desire no longer animates a social critique of civilisation’ but remains cut off behind the bedroom door (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 333). Like Reich, Deleuze and Guattari regard the libido as fundamentally socio-political as well as personal and it is this aspect that they, like Lawrence, work to extend.

In her very different context and manner, and often contradictorily, Nin also endorsed the potential force of Lawrentian sexual energy to libidinise the social. Part of this process is the initial need for the lover to relinquish the subjective ego. In a heavily Lawrentian passage from one of Nin’s most ‘troubling’ (Carter n.d.: 97) stories, the protagonist Hilda responds to her lover Rango ‘with a great feeling of being taken out of herself, of having no will and no knowledge of what was happening to her, merely a pervading sense of fl ow’ (Nin 1979: 115). This description is typical of the uneasy tension in Nin’s writing between deterritorialisa-tion and reterritorialisadeterritorialisa-tion. Receptive openness to erotic forces is reter-ritorialised by a romanticisation of the woman’s submissive embrace of the phallic order embodied by her macho Latino lover.

Given that Lawrence’s phallocentrism and essentialism obviously shaped some of Nin’s images of heterosexual relations, how does he impact more broadly upon her erotic writing?(Williams 1993). Nin locates Lawrence as a seminal springboard from which to launch her own (here, essentialist) expression of ‘the mysteries of woman’s sexual-ity, so different from man’s and for which a man’s language was inad-equate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the

senses was yet to be explored’; when Lawrence ‘began to give instinct a language, he tried to escape the clinical, the scientifi c, which only captures what the body feels’ (Nin 1981: xiii). Yet Nin is very aware that such early infl uence needs to be outgrown for a writer to develop her own inimitable style. This process passed though an interim phase which developed via a ‘sifted Lawrence, a great part of which I have outgrown’ (Stuhlmann 1974: 71). Overall, the potential of Lawrence for re-imagining sexuality as ‘an infi nity of different and even contrary fl ows’ inspires the common thought of Nin and Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 351).

The mutual interchange of Miller and Nin, long-time lovers and fellow travellers, cannot be overestimated and has already been documented by scholars (and adapted for cinema as Henry and June by Philip Kaufman in 1990) (Bair 1995). Their assemblage crosses sexual, intellectual and literary planes. Both modernists, they initially lionised Lawrence and opposed ‘the dead-formula-making psychoanalysts’, though Nin’s own engagement with analysis fl uctuated (Nin 1990: 44). Nin’s fi ery images of Miller from their ‘honeymoon’ period stress his ‘incendiary’ ability to induce ‘an unquenchable fever’ in her with his passion that ‘rushes like lava through a chill intellectual world’. She admires his originality and creative energy, for ‘he is no Proust, lingering and stretching. He is in movement. He lives by gusts’ (Nin 1990: 101, 127, 112).

Above all, it is Miller’s restless energy and lebenslust that aroused Nin, as for both of them ‘there is always movement, renewal, surprises.

I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection is a still expe-rience’ (Nin 1990: 244). For Deleuze and Guattari, Miller’s broader perspectives were likewise exemplary of a life-affi rming capacity for becoming. Nin also notes the empathic impressionability of Miller, for whom ‘every potency, from the whip of the wind to a revolution belongs’ (Nin 1990: 150). Nin glories in his chameleon tendencies, writing: ‘Paris. Henry. I did not think of him as a man, but as life’ (Nin 1990: 226). Deleuze and Guattari, too, reference his creative openness to life, citing his multiple affi rmations, like the dictum ‘get drunk on pure water’ or his urban nomadism in Brooklyn (Goddard 2005). Nin likewise writes: ‘I walk like a somnambulist, but he is smelling the street, his eyes are wide open’, for he is unaware of ‘what it is to live in a world where the only distinct person is oneself’; but she remains ambivalent about his lack of self-refl exivity (Nin 1990: 222).

Elsewhere, she uses this same nomadism to repudiate what she consid-ers to be Miller’s lack of pconsid-ersonality. Later, she deviates sharply from Deleuze and Guattari’s approbation of his dérives as a proto-Situationist

‘man of the crowd’. She attacks what she perceives as the depersonalis-ing tendency of ‘your collective life, your constant life with others, your incapacity to create nearness of relationship with a person, always with a crowd’ (Stuhlmann 1974: 308). Concomitant to this, she reprimands him for his sexist treatment of all women as one common vaginal organ, asserting that in Tropic of Capricorn ‘you harp on the collective . . . the general “cunt world” . . . the great anonymous, depersonalised fucking world. Instead of investing each woman with a different face, you take pleasure in reducing all women to an aperture, to a biological sameness’

and thus as potentially interchangeable (Stuhlmann 1974: 308).

Deleuze and Guattari’s repeated citation of Lawrence and Miller in tandem locate them fi rmly within a masculinist canon of Anglo-American male literature, from Thomas Hardy, through Malcolm Lowry and the Beats, as ‘men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause fl ows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 132–3). They enlist another of Millers’ attributes to the anti-Oedipal cause, his (eventual) opposition to psychoanalysis. They cite his dictum: ‘from this intel-lectual world in which we are swimming there must body forth a new world . . . it is only through desire that we bring about the immaculate conception’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 299). They endorse this with the unqualifi ed assertion that

everything is said in these pages from Miller . . . the expressive forms – myth and tragedy – denounced as conscious beliefs or illusions, nothing more than ideas . . . the matrical fi ssure in opposition to the line of castra-tion; the splendid affi rmation of the orphan- and producer-unconscious;

the exaltation of the process as a schizophrenic process of deterritorialisa-tion that must produce a new earth. (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 299) Conversely, Miller’s own observation on Nin’s writing stresses its quintessential psychoanalytical tenor with fascinated disapproval, as

‘the language of modernity, the language of nerves, repressions, larval thoughts, unconscious processes, images not entirely divorced from their dream content; it is the language of the neurotic, the perverted’

(Nin 1990: 265). Nin’s relationship with psychoanalysis was, like much of her work, contradictory. Working in the intellectual ferment of the Surrealist movement, though not directly aligned, she was an early enthusiast for psychoanalysis (and for analysts themselves as objects of her desire) as a means to explore her subjective specifi city and potential as a writer. Both René Allendy and Rank were her lovers, and the latter encouraged her practice as a lay analyst in New York.

Allendy’s analysis of Nin is heavily patriarchal. He stresses the need for traditional feminine roles, leading her to observe ‘I must not overstep the bounds of my nature, create dissonances, deviations, roles (as June has done) because it means misery’, though she did not remain obedi-ent to this ruling (Nin 1990: 196). Allendy diagnosed her with a ‘Diana complex, the woman who envies man his sexual power’ (Nin 1990:

131), and encouraged her sexual passivity, counselling ‘don’t be afraid of dependency. Don’t try to tip the scales. The man must be the aggressor in the sexual act. Afterward, he can become like a child and depend on the woman and need her like a mother’ (Nin 1990: 189). He also seems to have provoked her obsession with ‘real’ vaginal orgasms and her concomitant anxiety that her sexual response was not ‘a true climax but is disseminated in a spasm that is less centred, more diffuse’ (Nin 1990:

130). This diagnosis was obviously shaped by the analyst’s own sexual preferences as a lover as well as by phallocentric Freudianism. Allendy’s rigid application of Freud’s approach to dreams and to transference also sought to impose conservative norms on the deterritorialising aspects of Nin’s erotic imagination.

It is interesting to speculate how this Oedipal analytical relation might have infl uenced a particular decision taken by Nin. After her fi rst visit to Allendy, she notes her own early Oedipal damage and its later repercussions: ‘Father’s insuffi cient love and abandonment remain indelible. Why was it not effaced by all the loves I inspired since then?’

(Nin 1990: 166). Later, she claims to have freed herself from the Oedipal yoke: ‘I am not the slave of a childhood curse. The myth that I have sought to relive the tragedy of childhood is now annihilated’ (Nin 1990: 234). Yet her Oedipal training cannot but be associated with her embarkation, not long after entering analysis, on an actual rather than mythical sexual relationship with her father, as documented in her diaries and The House of Incest (Nin 1992). This seems to have been both the climax of a series of deliberately transgressive acts and an adult continuation of possible abuse in childhood. Whatever its status, the relationship with her father at once underlines the profound ambivalence of Nin’s life and work, being simultaneously both liter-alised affi rmation and radical defi ance of the Oedipal code’s mythical displacements.

Nin was also intellectually aware of the shortcomings of analysis and its practitioners. Miller’s infl uence seems operant here, and her comments are congruent with the anti-Oedipal thrust of Deleuze and Guattari. She typically mixes erotic and intellectual relations in her observation that ‘analysis makes me feel as if I were masturbating

instead of fucking. Being with Henry is to live, to fl ow, to suffer even. I do not like to be with Allendy and to press dry fi ngers on the secrets of my body’ (Nin 1990: 128). In a more schizoanalytical mode, she notes the inculcation of ressentiment in the analytical relation, asking, ‘if psy-choanalysis is going to annihilate all nobility in personal motives and in art by the discovery of neurotic roots, what does it substitute in place of them?’, and feels that ‘the only thing psychoanalysis achieves is to make one more conscious of one’s misfortunes . . . it has taught me not to laugh’ (Nin 1990: 196, 252). Continuing in this vein, she asserts that

‘pain is something to master, not wallow in’, and (temporarily) resolves to mobilise her own capacities to be ‘healed by the sheer courage of continuing to live. I could heal myself. I don’t really need you, Allendy’

(Nin 1990: 36, 133). Yet she returned to analysis, taking another analyst of higher professional status as lover, Otto Rank, thus consolidating her interest in Jung, whose theories underpinned the gender archetypes that thread through Nin’s work and make her an icon of essentialist feminism particularly in the USA (Harms 1973).

Later in life, Nin asserted the need to change consciousness (through analysis) prior to, and as a necessity for, wider social change. One com-monality with Deleuze and Guattari points to anti-psychiatry and the work of R. D. Laing, particularly his widely infl uential The Politics of Experience (1964) (Laing 1973). Deleuze and Guattari saw Laing as a precursor of their own schizoanalytical thinking and a fellow-traveller to  Guattari’s own more radically anti-psychoanalytical practice. For them, he ‘grasped what process signifi ed, and its fulfi lment – and so escaped the familialism that is the ordinary bed and board of psy-choanalysis and psychiatry’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 131), and he also advocated ‘the breakthough of [the] schizophrenic wall or limit’

(Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 135).

Despite Deleuze and Guattari’s overall enthusiasm for Laing, they fi nd limitations in his conceptualisation of politics ‘in terms of the struc-ture and the event, rather than the process itself’, as Laing and David Cooper ‘localize social and mental alienation on a single line, and tend to consider them as identical by showing how the familial agent extends the one into the other’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 320). Finally, they regret Laing’s interest in ‘alternative’ practices: shamanism, rebirthing, and ‘retreat to the Orient’ in Sri Lanka and India to follow transcenden-tal philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 320). Nin likewise endorsed Laing’s teaching that the creative will of the artist offers ‘a possibility, and a potential to change ourselves, and doing that is not an egocentric or turned-in activity. It is an activity that ultimately affects, infl uences,

and transforms an entire community’, so that ‘the great changes in the world will come from a great change in consciousness. We have become aware; we must not despair’ (Nin 1982: 2). At this point in her life, Nin’s views were shaped by the Californian personal growth milieu rather than by Deleuze and Guattari’s very different European Marxist traditions, yet a common link with existentialism can be traced between the four perspectives.

One intriguing element of Nin’s erotic writing for a Deleuze and Guattarian application is its evocation of part-objects in the amorous consciousness. Despite the damming up and diverting of libidinal forces in late capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari posit more fulfi lling and productive erotic possibilities. To facilitate this they draw on Klein’s schema, which gives primacy to the infant’s phantasmatic relations with the maternal breast as split into good and bad part-objects. As the bad breast is subject to sadistic phantasies, the good one is over-invested and idealised. For Klein, the schizophrenic denies the bad object and repudiates psychic reality as compensation, to develop ‘strong feelings of omnipotence’ (Klein 1988: 2). Nin’s fi ction depicts the perversity of such adult fetishisation of body parts. Mathilde’s lover, for example, would ‘only make love to her breasts [so] she was left with the lower half of her body completely disregarded [which] would writhe in space, legs

One intriguing element of Nin’s erotic writing for a Deleuze and Guattarian application is its evocation of part-objects in the amorous consciousness. Despite the damming up and diverting of libidinal forces in late capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari posit more fulfi lling and productive erotic possibilities. To facilitate this they draw on Klein’s schema, which gives primacy to the infant’s phantasmatic relations with the maternal breast as split into good and bad part-objects. As the bad breast is subject to sadistic phantasies, the good one is over-invested and idealised. For Klein, the schizophrenic denies the bad object and repudiates psychic reality as compensation, to develop ‘strong feelings of omnipotence’ (Klein 1988: 2). Nin’s fi ction depicts the perversity of such adult fetishisation of body parts. Mathilde’s lover, for example, would ‘only make love to her breasts [so] she was left with the lower half of her body completely disregarded [which] would writhe in space, legs