Art, The Dream, The Self

Abstract

Adam Begley, a contributing editor to the lively journal Lingua Franca, defined rather crisply what he called ‘postmodernists’ notions of the self’ as ‘a fractured entity composed of socially constructed attitudes’. How unlike the conception of the self of Anaïs Nin. To Nin, the self is authentic only as it expresses that ‘city of the interior’, and in the real world of the diaries and the fleeting, wavering, shaped world of her fiction, the self, hardly postmodern, is not socially constructed, not fractured at all but a coherent home, a hearth, a womb of the senses. But this interiority is built upon a trust in a reality and is essentially the consequence of an acceptance of outward experience that is transformed as it turns inward. That transformation is never made dull in Nin’s work by passivity. Nin builds architectonically from the dream outward.¹ It is as if her fiction is built upon dialectic, a tension between the outer and inner worlds. How unlike the Maoist psychoanalyst and semiotician of desire, the French Julia Kristeva, who, in her novel The Samurai, looks for ‘the calm safety of classical architecture and the rare equilibrium that transmutes geometry into happiness’.²