Cities of Her Own Invention: Urban Iconology in Cities of the Interior

Abstract

When a friend laughed at Anaïs Nin’s title Cities of the Interior, saying it would be taken literally as a geographic study, Nin decided the symbolism appealed to her and kept it. The apt title for the ‘geographic’ citytext of Nin’s roman ville goes beyond symbolism, however, to represent her way of ‘envisioning information,’ of escaping the ‘flatland’ of the two-dimensional surface on which ‘all communication between the readers of an image and the makers of an image must take place’.¹ The fictional world in Cities of the Interior, at first glance flat ink impressions on a flat page, is given depth and plasticity by Nin’s ‘geographical’ solution not only to naming her novels, but to the challenge she faced in simultaneously rendering the multiple worlds of text, city, psyche and human relationships in them. She knew ‘we must continue to make the contents of the unconscious as clear as the contents of the conscious mind’.² This awareness, and her claim of readiness, at the time she worked on Cities, for ‘a more developed interrelation between the characters and between the cities of Paris and New York’, enables a reading of this continuous novel as citytext: multivalent, intertextual, hypertextual and iconological weaving of experiential layers. Here the city is not merely inserted as motif, but used for structural organization of the three interlocking systems of story settings, emotional states and human relationships.