Auto/Erotica in the Writings of Anais Nin
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Embodied Borders: Auto/erotica in the Writings of Anais Nin Chris Michael Ph.D in Critical and Cultural Theory Cardiff University 2006 UMI Number: U584122 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U584122 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ii Declaration This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not being concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree. Signed . (candidate) STATEMENT 1 This thesis is the result of my own investigations, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by footnotes giving explicit references. A bibliography is appended. (candidate) Date STATEMENT 2 I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations. Signed .. .. (candidate) Date For Lyn, with love. iv Contents Title Page i Declaration ii Dedication iii Contents iv Acknowledgments v Abstract vi List of Illustrations vii Introduction 1 ‘Auto/erotic’ Foreplay Chapter One 32 Bordering on Subversion: Sexuality and the Body Chapter Two 66 ‘ Gender/Genre Trouble ’: The Female Autobiographical ‘I’ Chapter Three 120 Surrealism and ‘Writing the Body’: A Discourse on the Frame Chapter Four 190 The Ob/scene (Between) Body: Pornography and Erotica Chapter Five 248 Curious Inter-Views: Delta o f Venus and the Diaries Conclusion 296 Looking for/in the Gaps Bibliography 303 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory for the departmental studentship which has made this piece of research possible. I would also like to give a special thank you to my supervisor, Chris Weedon, for her continued encouragement, support and guidance throughout the past four years. Thank you also to all the staff at the Centre for Critical and Cultural theory from whom I have learnt a great deal. In particular I would like to thank Laurent Milesi and William Spurlin. I would also like to thank my friends and research colleagues whose knowledge I have drawn from over the last four years. Thanks go in particular to Elaine Brennan; Charlotte Boyce; Gareth Gordon; Irene Ragaller; Mair Rigby; Roberta Magnani and Jodie Poppleton. I would also like to give a special thank you to Anne McMonagle for all her advice and encouragement. I also feel it is fitting to pay tribute to Paul O’Flinn for his role in shaping and influencing my passion for literature and theory. His knowledge and enthusiasm was inspiring to me as an undergraduate and his support and encouragement played no small part in my academic achievements. Finally, without a doubt, my biggest thanks go to Lyn whose patience and support has been ‘saintly’, and whose bad jokes and good humour have kept me going over the last four years. Chris Michael, September 2006 vi Abstract This thesis brings together the two genres for which Nin has become so (in)famous: her autobiography and her erotica in what I have termed ‘auto/erotica’. By reading her autobiography and her erotica in and against each other I attempt to explore her development of a feminine aesthetic, or ‘womb writing’ as a strategy of resistance with which to challenge dominant discourses of ‘woman’ and the ‘feminine’, and her exclusion from cultural production. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, this thesis explores the role of the border in the cultural production of bodies and sexual difference within Western discourses of sexuality, with particular reference to the discourses of psychoanalysis, modernism and pornography/erotica. My focus is on the trope of the borderline within Nin’s texts, which, I argue is less a marker of radical difference than a site of instability offering the possibility of ‘other’ or ‘between’ spaces of resistance. This study engages with the politics of gender and genre by drawing on various feminist rewritings of autobiographical theory and Jacques Derrida’s ‘The Law of Genre’ and the Ear o f the Other in order to explore the tension between the ‘auto’ (the selfsame) and the ‘graphy’ in the formation of the ‘bio’ and gender identity. I explore how the threat of the other within the selfsame, the tracing of the dijferance of desire, affects the generic self- identity of ‘autobiography’ and ‘erotica’ as representations of (sexual) identity. Nin utilises the radical instability of the autobiographical genre to put into question the ‘genre’ of gender identity, the gendering of genre and the undecidable border between the ‘body’ and the ‘text’, the ‘life’ and the ‘work’. Drawing on various psychoanalytical feminist film theories of the female spectator and the masquerade I explore how Nin performs the ‘feminine’ or ‘woman’ of (male) Surrealist and mainstream heterosexual pornography/erotica in order to emphasise the gaps, to hold at a distance, the female from the feminine. The concern of this thesis is the ‘ob/scene’ margins of ‘erotica’ and the trace of ‘otherness’ that threatens the single and self-identical body/text. The ‘outworks’ or prefaces of Nin’s work not only disrupt fixed generic boundaries but also echo the desiring subject’s fantasy of gender identity, wholeness and unity. By drawing attention to the role of vision in the constitution of gendered subjectivity and the (re)production of the phallus as the primary signifier of desire, I explore how Nin’s erotica undermines a position of phallic certainty by drawing attention to the out-of-sight spaces, of ‘ob/scene’ pleasures that disturb and disrupt the illusion of ‘masculine’ phallic mastery. I argue that it is in the ‘inter view’, this dialogue or movement between (at least) two genres - autobiography and erotica - that other possible representations might be glimpsed. List of Illustrations Figure 1 Man Ray Mannequin, 1938 Photograph of Andre Masson’s Le Baillton vert a bouche de pensee Figure 2 AnaTs and Rupert at the ‘Come as Your Madness’ Party Figure 3 Val Telberg, Untitled photomontage from House o f Incest Figure 4 Val Telberg, Untitled photomontage from House o f Incest 1 Introduction: ‘Auto/Erotic’ Foreplay ‘It is feminine to be oblique. It is not trickery.’ (Nin 1979a, p.65) Anai's Nin has become in/famous for two achievements: autobiography and erotica. This thesis attempts to bring these two genres together in what I have termed ‘auto/erotica’ in order to explore her development of a ‘feminine’ aesthetic, and her appropriation of the borderline as a strategy of resistance in her experimental ‘womb writing’. To a large extent Nin’s ‘reputation’ as a writer has been constructed by a certain ambiguity between her ‘life’ and her ‘texts’. This has meant that her somewhat unorthodox lifestyle has tended to obscure the process of writing in her exploration of gender, sexuality and desire. One of the major concerns of feminist theory of the last thirty years has been the relationship of the female subject to language, femininity, the body and desire. According to mainstream psychoanalytical theory, it is women’s relationship to the phallus, and ultimately the symbolic, that has left women lacking in language and their erotic faculties. One of the key questions this thesis explores is: how does one particular writer, Anais Nin, attempt to represent a desiring female subject within discourses founded on the exclusion of the female body and feminine sexuality. Indeed, ‘how can the recognition of a hitherto repressed female eroticism embody itself in texts that might be called “feminine”?’ (Suleiman 1986, p. 13). As a woman and a writer, Nin occupies a precarious borderline position that is both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ phallocentric discourse. This thesis explores the possibility of rewriting and rethinking the female body and sexuality by concentrating on the concepts of the borderline, the limit and frame as engendering an alternative perspective from which the relationship between the female body, language and the feminine might be represented otherwise. 2 The focus of this thesis is the borderline in the ‘framing’ of knowledges and meanings pertaining to the (female) body, sexuality and gender. My aim is to displace limits and margins, to investigate the limits of the borderline and the ‘(in) the between’ of writing (Cixous 1996b, p.86). In order to do this I will be drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida as well as the feminist psychoanalytical theories of Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. The drawing of borders in the constitution of meanings and knowledge also has far reaching affects on the material relations of class, race and ethnicity. Indeed, the border has played a major role in more recent developments in postcolonial, race and queer studies, which concentrate on the important debates around the racialisation of bodies, colonialism and transnationalism.1 However, this thesis focuses specifically on the borderline as an important textual trope in the development of Nin’s feminine aesthetic. Certainly, the issue of transnationalism and race is pertinent to Nin as a writer. Bom in France to her Cuban-born father and her mother of Danish and French-Cuban parentage, Nin’s multiracial heritage and trilingualism becomes an important factor in her developing sense of ‘foreignness’.