[In the following essay, Kamboureli distinguishes between purveyors of erotica from those of pornography, attempting to establish Nin's Erotica as pornography wherein she focuses as much on poetry as on sexuality.]

In the following excerpt from the "Preface" to Little Birds, Anaïs Nin distinguishes between erotica and pornography:

It is one thing to include eroticism in a novel or a story and quite another to focus one's whole attention to it. The first is like life itself. It is, I might say, natural, sincere, as in the sensual pages of Zola or of Lawrence. But focusing wholly on the sexual life is not natural. It becomes something like the life of the prostitute, an abnormal activity that ends up turning the prostitute away from the sexual. Writers perhaps know this.¹

While both erotica and pornography acknowledge the significance of sexuality and aim to arouse sexual feelings, they differ from each other insofar as their aesthetic and sociocultural perspectives are concerned.

Erotica deals primarily with the dialectics of desire: desire as the articulation of the tension that exists between a lover's emotions and the cravings of his body, and desire as the tendency to give aesthetic form to sexual experience. Erotics and aesthetics, then, depend on each other: as desire gives shape to man's life so does language enact or amplify the semantics of his sensual gestures. Sexuality is evoked both by the depiction of entangled naked bodies and by devices that enhance the lover's identity. Thus the sexual act in erotica is not an end in itself; it is only one of the forms that eroticism takes. Pornography, on the other hand, according to the OED, is about the "description of the life, manners, etc. of prostitutes and their patrons." Pornography reduces the ramifications of desire to one aspect of sexuality. Its material is located within a minimal context which not only undermines the complexities of sexuality, but also deprives man of the feelings necessary for the arousal of "natural" desire.²

These differences between erotica and pornography, as Nin is implicitly aware, make Delta of Venus and Little Birds more pornographic than erotic. In an oblique way, she advises her readers against comparing or confusing these stories with her other writings. In this respect, Erotica, the collective title of Delta of Venus and Little Birds, is a misleading index of their contents.³ Yet Nin has deliberately chosen to call her pornographic stories erotic, for, as I intend to show, she is innovative within the genre of pornography. She creates a context where, even though the focus is exclusively on the sexual life, sexuality is far from being "not natural." Nin, however, does not allow her readers to wonder why she is engaged in an "abnormal activity."

The two volumes of her stories open with prefaces that both obfuscate and illuminate this engagement. The prefaces come as a surprise to a reader who has been already initiated into pornography or to a novice who is solely interested in titillating experiences. It is not conventional to find literary prefaces to pornographic stories or novels, first, because they cause a confusion of the pornographic genre with more serious literature and, second, and more importantly, because they delay the promised pleasure. A notable exception is Pauline Réage's The Story of O which bears a "Note" by its translator Sabine d'Estrée, a "Note" by the critic Mandiargues, and lastly a "Preface" by Jean Paulhan, a member of L'Académie Française. But this is in France, where erotica and pornography have a long and serious tradition, claiming, among others, George Bataille whose novels Madame Edwarda, Histoire de l'Oeil and his studies L'Érotisme, Les Larmes d'Éros and La Literature et le Mal deserve an important place in the history of sexuality as an expression of human nature.

Nin, having lived both in France and in the States, is familiar with the differences that characterize the traditions of the two countries in terms of perceiving, and writing about, sexuality. As she notes in her Diary,

The joke on me is that France had a tradition of literary erotic writing, in fine elegant style, written by the best writers. When I first began to write for the collector I thought there was a similar tradition here, but found none at all. All I have seen is badly written, shoddy, and by second-rate writers. No fine writer seems ever to have tried his hand at erotica.⁴

In writing her Erotica, Nin confronts the established French tradition of erotic writing and the American tradition of pornography that makes no claim whatsoever as literature. She is conscious of addressing an American audience. Given this, the two prefaces reveal her intent to present Delta of Venus and Little Birds in a different light: they read as apologias and as disguised manifestos about pornography.

In the "Preface" to Delta of Venus, which is an excerpt from the third volume of the Diary, Nin provides us with the context that generated the writing of these stories. Henry Miller was writing erotica "at a dollar a page" for an old collector and one of his rich clients (vii). But because he found this "writing to order … a castrating occupation" (ix), he quit after a while and asked Nin, who also claimed to be in financial need, to continue. This incident constitutes not only the occasion of her pornographic stories, but also the beginning of her apologia.

In the "Preface" to Little Birds we read,

In New York everything becomes harder, more cruel. I had many people to take care of, many problems, and since I was in character very much like George Sand, who wrote all night to take care of her children, lovers, friends, I had to find work. I became what I shall call the Madame of an unusual house of literary prostitution. It was a very artistic "maison"….

Before I took up my new profession I was known as a poet, as a woman who was independent and wrote for her own pleasure…. Yet my real writing was put aside when I set out in search of the erotic. (LB, viii, ix)

Nin presents the conditions that led her to the writing of Erotica as the continuation of two cultural paradigms. The first one is, of course, New York City which, besides offering artists an exciting environment to live in, makes life "harder" for them. In short, Nin justifies herself by evoking the theme of survival: the poor artist sacrifices her moral principles for the sake of her altruism. The second cultural paradigm she employs is notably French again, that of George Sand. Nin is not alone in the game that "cruel" conditions force her to play. George Sand, a writer of status, was engaged in, more or less, the same activity. Nin feels that by writing pornography her reputation as a literary writer is at stake. The analogy she draws between herself and Sand and her statement that she put aside her "real writing" when she "set out in search of the erotic" make her latent anxiety quite obvious.

Nin "prostitutes" herself by writing, as she claims, not for her "own pleasure," but for the pleasure of the collector. The result is that she becomes a "Madame" who is, paradoxically, not a lover or a friend, but a mother figure as "matron." J. S. Atherton, in his review of Delta of Venus titled "The Maternal Instinct," says that "it is rather unfortunate that the latest book by her to appear here [Britain] is a book of frankly dirty stories of which she herself disapproved and only produced under pressure."⁵ Atherton emphasizes, to a greater extent than Nin, the occasion of the stories in order to justify their "dirtiness." He has obviously read the "Preface" only as an apologia.

In the story of "The Basque and Bijou," the madame of a house in a red-light district is described as "A maternal woman … but a maternal woman whose cold eyes travelled almost immediately to the man's shoes, for she judged from them how much he could afford to pay for his pleasure. Then for her own satisfaction, her eyes rested for a while on the trouser buttons" (DV, 159). The profession of this madame is apparently different from Nin's profession of "literary prostitution"; Nin does not apply this "maternal" image to herself. As a mother figure, she has different intentions.

Although Nin was undoubtedly taking care of her lovers and of her friends whenever needed, as her Diary testifies, she is obviously manipulating in the "Preface" the nurturing aspects of the maternal role because of their positive ethical connotations. Thus Nin exonerates herself socially.

As for her literary role, she makes it clear that she is the "madame" of a "very artistic 'maison.'" She is engaged in "literary prostitution." The word "literary" is revealing both of her intent to justify herself and of the changes she brings in the pornographic genre.

Even though Nin "hated" the old collector, and could not afford typing paper or the repairs of broken windows, and could not pay the expenses of Miller, Duncan, Gonzalo, etc., she could somehow afford the time for background research. She proceeded to write the stories in an almost scholarly fashion: she "spent days in the library studying the Kama Sutra, listened to friends' most extreme adventures" (DV, ix). In spite of her reservations, Nin is not writing pornography "tongue-in-cheek"; she "caricatur[es] sexuality," but she does so only to the extent that she makes it the single theme of Delta of Venus and Little Birds (DV, ix).

Nin's focus on sexuality emphasizes the pornographic aspect of Erotica. Yet the biographical elements that occasionally permeate her stories cause a shift of her gaze from the mere pornographic to a more inciting look at the sexual lives of people she knows. Nin is being deceptive when she says that "I did not want to give anything genuine, and decided to create a mixture of stories I had heard and inventions, pretending they were from the diary of a woman" (DV, ix). This straightforward statement becomes baffling when we see it in its original context which is the third volume of the Diary. In the same volume, we read about incidents which echo almost identical incidents in Erotica. I will limit myself to two examples of this kind:

             (from the Diary, vol. III)

I visited Hugh and Brigitte Chisholm in their East River apartment. The place is so near the water that it gave me the illusion of a boat. The barges passed down the river while we talked…. Hugh is small in stature, with curly hair, soft greenish eyes, an impish air. He is a good poet.

As I enter they treat me like an objet d'art….

She shines steadily, under any circumstance. Not intermittedly as I do, because I can only bloom in a certain … warmth…. That afternoon, in the warmth of their appreciation, I blossomed….

From the objects I could divine their life in Rome, Paris, Florence; Brigitte's mother; the famous haute couture designer, Coco Chanel; Vogue; the pompousness of their family background and their effort to laugh at it. (22)

I knew no woman as easily persuaded to go to bed who had obtained so little from her play-acting. The extent of her frigidity appalled me, and I persuaded her it would get worse, and finally become incurable if she so deadened her contact with men. I gently took her by the hand and led her to an analyst.

But this woman, who could undress at the request of any man, make love with anyone, go to orgies, act as a call girl in a professional house, this Beth told me she found it actually difficult to talk about sex! (21-22, 24)

          (from "Mandra" in Little Birds)

I am invited one night to the apartment of a young society couple, the Hs. It is like being on a boat because it is near the East River and the barges pass while we talk…. Her husband, Paul, is small and of the race of the imps. Not a man but a faun—a lyrical animal, quick and humorous. He thinks I am beautiful. He treats me like an objet d'art…. She is a natural beauty, whereas I, an artificial one, need a setting and warmth to bloom successfully….

Everything is touched with aristocratic impudence, through which I can sense the Hs' fabulous life in Florence; Miriam's frequent appearances in Vogue wearing Chanel dresses; the pompousness of their families; their efforts to be elegantly bohemian; and their obsession with the word that is the key to society—everything must be "amusing." (144)

She is being analyzed and has discovered what I sensed long ago: that she has never known a real orgasm, at thirty-four, after a sexual life that only an expert accountant could keep track of. I am discovering her pretenses. She is always smiling, gay, but underneath she feels unreal, remote, detached from experience. She acts as if she were asleep….

Mary says, "It is very hard to talk about sex, I am so ashamed." She is not ashamed of doing anything at all, but she cannot talk about it. She can talk to me. We sit for hours in perfumed places where there is music. She likes places where actors go. (140-41)

The diary which Nin "pretends" to have invented is actually her published Diary, the edited version of the diaries she kept all her life. She uses some of its material concerning her friends practically verbatim, an act that suggests that she is far from writing a caricature of sexuality; she records in detail sensual settings and recollects the way sexuality manifests itself in her milieu. Reality is embedded in fantasy and vice versa.

But Nin does not limit herself to using only her friends' sexual adventures. What enhances her fusion of the real with the imaginary is her personal presence in Erotica, a presence hardly disguised. In "Marcel" we read about a woman who lives in a houseboat (DV, 250); in "A Model" we read about a young woman whose mother "had European ideas about young girls," who "had never read anything but literary novels" (LB, 67), who "knew languages," who also "knew Spanish dancing," who "had an exotic face" and "accent," who posed as a model for New York artists (LB, 68). A reader of Nin's Diary will recognize immediately Nin herself. I am not arguing here that Delta of Venus and Little Birds are Nin's disguised, or "anonymous" (DV, xii), autobiography. What is of great interest is that Nin does not distance herself from her pornographic writing, a distance she should have kept had she thought of her pornography in purely negative terms. Nin's self-portrait in Erotica is her signature as artist. It is a signature that falsifies her apologetic tone while it verifies her belief that her pornography is not completely devoid of art.

This brings us back to the occasion of Erotica. Nin has to comply with the collector's persistent demand: "leave out the poetry … [c]oncentrate on sex" (DV, ix). In Nin's words, he wants her to "exclude," from her writing her "own aphrodisiac—poetry" (DV, x). Here we have two different attitudes toward pornography. As D. H. Lawrence says, "What they are [pornography and obscenity] depends, as usual, entirely on the individual. What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another."⁶ The collector, in this respect, and his client (whether real or fabricated, he is an extra-textual device designed to create the occasion) deprive Nin of her sensuality. They collect (steal) her fantasies, her longings, her actual experiences. They deprive her of her memories, and of her imagination as a person and as an artist.

The collector wants Nin to reduce discourse to the level of mere intercourse. Yet, ironically, it is language he is solely interested in. He is not like Elena and Pierre in "Elena" whose reading of erotic books keeps them in touch with their bodies:

He bought her erotic books, which they read together…. As they lay on the couch together and read, their hands wandered over each other's body, to the places described in the book….

They would lie on their stomachs, still dressed, open a new book and read together, with their hands caressing each other. They kissed over erotic pictures. (DV, 115-16)

The process of reading erotica amplifies Elena's and Pierre's desire. The real (Elena's and Pierre's lovemaking) merges with the imaginary (the content of the books). They not only re-enact what they read, but they also "embrace" the books themselves. Their response to erotica is different from the response of the pornographic reader, which usually results in vicarious sexuality.

In contrast, the collector represents one of the two stereotypes of the pornographic mind. He is the one who fears, and thus has to forget, the reality of the body. His stance toward sexuality divorces the body (eros) from the head (logos). Not being able (potent) to face the body naked, he wants the pornographic discourse to be naked instead, namely unadorned with poetry. By avoiding, therefore, an encounter with the presence of a real lover, the collector, or the stereotype he represents, destroys the flesh of the body: he goes to a skeletal outline which is a fabrication and as such empty of spirit. As Nin says when she addresses him in the Diary, "You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood" (DV, xiii). The collector is not like Donald who says to Elena that "[t]alking together is a form of intercourse" (DV, 104; my emphasis). The collector desires a discourse that will entirely replace intercourse.

The second stereotype of the pornographic mind is the lover who worships the body while, at the same time, wanting to silence it. Nin provides us with an example of this in "The Queen." The narrator of the story talks about a painter who sees women only as whores:

He was saying "I like a whore best of all because I feel she will never cling to me, never get entangled with me. It makes me feel free. I do not have to make love to her….

"The women who are unabashedly sexual, with the womb written all over their faces … the women who throw their sex out at us, from the hair, the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the whole body—these are the women I love." (LB, 101, 104; my emphasis)

This character is receptive only to the sexuality of the body. His exclusive love for its sensual qualities erases all the features that give life and character to a woman. Unlike the collector, whose fear of the body makes him a lover of a surrogate body, the body of language, the painter of this story reduces discourse to one level only of signification, that of sex. Accordingly, the sexual act for him is solipsistic. This solipsism expresses the painter's narcissism as well as his reluctance to accept the presence of woman during the act of lovemaking. He is afraid of her feminine psyche.

This kind of pornographer, as Susan Griffin says in Pornography and Silence, "reduces a woman to a mere thing, to an entirely material object without a soul, who can only be 'loved' physically."⁷ The painter, afraid of the loss of his freedom, kills the individuality of woman: he sees her mouth only as the surfacing of her sex. Yet this phenomenology of female sexuality and pleasure is deceptive. The mouth seen only as metaphor is reduced to an orifice, an orifice though that remains mute. Nin, aware of this, renounces this attitude toward pornography within the story itself: the painter's most favorite whore, Bijou, is "colder than a statue" (LB, 101); her sexuality is static; moreover, it is the painter who "clings" to her as he follows the "tiny trail of semen" that she leaves behind her from all the lovers she took, except him (LB, 106). The painter is betrayed both by his whore and by his own erotics of detachment.

Nin herself is a pornographer of a different kind. She transforms her contempt for those who focus "only on sexuality" into "violent explosions of poetry" (DV, xii). The metaphor of explosion is pertinent here. What is a physical orgasm for the pornographic mind is for Nin both a physical act and the release of poetic language. As Roland Barthes says in talking about Sade's writings, "there [is] no distinction between the structure of ejaculation and that of language."⁸ Nin's fusion of discourse and intercourse is evident in most of the stories in Delta of Venus and Little Birds.

We read, for instance, in "Linda":

André had a particular passion for the mouth. In the street he looked at women's mouths. To him the mouth was indicative of the sex. A tightness of a lip, thinness, augured nothing rich or voluptuous. A full mouth promised an open, generous sex….

Linda's mouth had seduced him from the first…. There was something about the way she moved it, a passionate unfolding of the lips, promising a person who would lash around the beloved like a storm. When he first saw Linda, he was taken into her through this mouth, as if he were already making love to her. And so it was on their wedding night. (DV, 232-33)

There are some subtle differences here between André and the painter mentioned earlier. For André, the mouth is not a projection of the female sex, but the entrance itself into the being of a woman. The mouth as the source of language reveals a woman's potentiality both as a lover and as a person who can articulate her imaginings. Thus André does not see woman as a whore, as the painter does, but as a "beloved" who eventually becomes his wife.

What illustrates even better the relationship that Nin establishes between discourse and intercourse is, again, the story of "Elena":

She [Elena] moved quicker to bring the climax, and when he saw this, he hastened his motions inside of her and incited her to come with him, with words, with his hands caressing her, and finally with his mouth soldered to hers, so that the tongues moved in the same rhythm as the womb and penis, and the climax was spreading between her mouth and her sex, in crosscurrents of increasing pleasure, until she cried out, half sob and half laughter, from the overflow of joy through her body. (DV, 96; my emphasis)

Here erotics and poetics merge. The lovers' desire for each other engulfs their whole selves. Intercourse is not a mechanical operation but an act both of love and speech. As George Steiner notes, "Sex is a profoundly semantic act."⁹ The semantics of lovemaking communicates the lovers' sexuality in language that has a dialectic structure: it is the "crosscurrent" of the body (the sexual organs/the tongues) and of the spirit (the sob/the laughter/the joy); it is the expression of sexuality as it is contained in the psyche.

By presenting the sexual face of the psyche, Nin reveals the animal in man. The fiercer the desire of the lovers and the greater their abandonment, the closer they come to the instinctive world of the animals. Elena and Pierre reach this level of sexual existence:

His caresses had a strange quality, at times soft and melting, at other times fierce, like the caresses she had expected when his eyes fixed on her, the caresses of a wild animal. There was something animallike about his hands, which he kept spread over each part of her body, and which took her sex and hair together as if he would tear them away from the body, as if he grasped earth and grass together. (DV, 94)

The two lovers transgress their consciousness as their animality manifests itself. They are dehumanized, becoming thus aware of their own limits and consequently of the limits of their sexuality. As Michael Foucault says in his discussion of sexuality and Bataille in the essay "Preface to Transgression," transgression "serves as a glorification of the nature it excludes: the limit opens violently onto the limitless, finds itself suddenly carried away by the content it had rejected and fulfilled by this alien plenitude which invades it to the core of its being."¹⁰ The excess of Elena's and Pierre's desire, like that of most of the characters in Nin's Erotica, becomes the measure of a double recognition: they encounter their profanity and its limits, a profanity that designates the finitude of their consciousness, in other words, the effacement of their egos during the sexual act.

What further indicates the prominence of animal profanity and the absence of an overtly conscious self in Nin's Delta of Venus and Little Birds is her diction, which is pointedly different from the diction we see in traditional pornography. Nin never uses words like "cunt," "cock" and "fuck." Instead, she expresses the profanity of the sexual organs by describing them in terms of natural and animal imagery.

In "Mathilde," Mathilde's sex is "like the gum plant leaf with its secret milk that the pressure of the finger could bring out, the odorous moisture that came like the moisture of the sea shells" (DV, 15). Similarly, we read in "Two Sisters" that "[t]he fur had opened to reveal her [Dorothy's] whole body, glowing, luminous, rich in the fur, like some jeweled animal…. John did not touch the body, he suckled at the breasts, sometimes stopping to feel the fur with his mouth, as if he were kissing a beautiful animal" (LB, 44).

The profanity of the body and its multifarious significance are further reinforced by Nin's usage of the word "ass," which is the most apparent word in her sexual discourse, pointing as it does to the boundary line between body and spirit. Octavio Paz in his Conjunctions and Disjunctions compares the face with the ass and thus illustrates the "soul-body dualism." He sees the conflict between the two as representing "the (repressive) reality principle and the (explosive) pleasure principle."¹¹ We find a good example of this dualism in "Mathilde": "she lay on her left side and exposed her ass to the mirror" (DV, 15). As Paz says, "the mirror reflects the face of an image";¹² in Mathilde's case, then, the mirror image of her ass is symbolic of the "other" face of homo eroticus. Nin reconciles the profanity of the body and the unconscious power it imbues with the self-consciousness of the face.

Nin's sexual discourse avoids the vulgarity of hard-core pornography. Her lyrical language emphasizes the poetics of sexuality. She transgresses the limits of the body's anatomy by stressing its eroticism. The semantics of the sexual act, therefore, signifies the lovers' transgression of the boundary of the human as they enter the realm of the animal. We should not overlook at this point the paradox of the fact that the human element, even when it is transgressed, is quite often described in utterly civilized terms, for example, the fur of the animal is a sign of luxury, the woman that is a jeweled animal. This civilized form of sexuality indicates that the lovers in Nin's Erotica estrange themselves from the familiar (their egos) in order to discover a strangeness that reconciles them with their sexual instincts. Sexual transgression has now come full circle. To quote from Foucault again, "Sexuality points to nothing beyond itself…. It marks the limit within us and designates us as a limit."¹³ As Elena says, "it [is] a strange transgression" (DV, 104).

Transgression destroys the relationship of ethics to sexuality. Foucault observes that "A rigorous language, as it arises from sexuality … will say that he [man] exists without God."¹⁴ When Elena notes about Leila that she has "acquired a new sex by growing beyond man and woman," that she is like "a mythic figure, enlarged, magnified" (DV, 135), she describes a human condition that signifies the "death of God." The same concept is also implied by the "naked savage woman" that Reynolds talks about in "A Model" (LB, 84). According to Foucault, "it is excess that discovers that sexuality and the death of God are bound to the same experience."¹⁵ Indeed it takes Leila's fierce desire to experience both male and female sensuality and the "panther" qualities of the "naked savage woman" to annual the unethical connotations of obscenity that make God unnecessary. As Henry Miller observes in The World of Lawrence,

Obscenity is pure and springs from effervescence, excess vitality, joy of life, concord, unanimity, alliance with nature, indifference to God of the healthy sort that takes God down a peg or two in order to reexamine him….

Obscenity figures large and heavily, magnificently and awesomely, in all primitive peoples…. The savage is not a sick man. The savage retains his sense of awe, wonder, mystery, his love of action, his right to behave like the animal he is….¹⁶

This "pure" nature of obscenity explains why Nin's characters, by crossing beyond their limits, challenge the existence of God.

Yet the "death of God" does not imply an absence of the sacred. The lover as transgressor creates his own version of the sacred out of the intensity of his profanity. This is what Elena has in mind when she says to herself, "I talk almost like a saint, to burn for love—for no mystic love, but for a ravaging sensual meeting" (DV, 144; my emphasis). The same "saintly" abandonment is expressed by the clairvoyant in "The Basque and Bijou":

His dance for the three women took place one evening when all the clients were gone. He stripped himself, showing his gleaming golden-brown body. To his waist he tied a fake penis modelled like his own and the same color.

He said, "This is a dance from my own country. We do this for the women on feast days."… He jerked his body as if he were entering a woman…. The final spasm was wild, like that of a man giving up his life in the act of sex. (DV, 184; my emphasis)

The motif of sacrifice that we see in both cases is the natural consequence of the latent presence of the sacred. The light that surrounds the two lovers signifies that they have already gone beyond their profane limits and they are now ready to transgress another boundary, that of death. Sexual transgression as sacrifice reinstates God's presence, only now his presence inspires no awe, for he is experienced as a divine power that dwells within the body. Thus the body as a vehicle of the divine receives all the acts of worship offered to it.

The infliction of death on a lover during the sexual act is the most extreme blow that the lovers' sexual drive can direct against the prohibitions that our culture imposes on sexuality. Bataille, in discussing the nature of sexual prohibition, says,

What is forbidden urges transgression, without which such an action of transgression would not have had that evil glimmer that seduces. It is the transgression of what is forbidden that bewitches.

But this glimmer is not only one that radiates from eroticism. It lights up the religious life every time it involves an action of utter violence, an action which is triggered the moment death slits the throat of a victim.

Sacré!

But, as for me, the ultimate form of death brings a strange sense of victory. It bathes me in its light, and stirs within me an infinitely joyous laughter. This is the laughter that allows one to disappear!¹⁷

The disappearance that Bataille talks about is the ultimate form of transgression, a sacred transgression this time, that transforms the sexual act into a miracle: what inhibits sexuality is forced to disappear by the power of sexual desire. It is not accidental, for instance, that Mathilde is given incense; "[i]n Lima she received much of it, it was part of the ritual. She was raised on a pedestal of poetry so that her falling into the final embrace might seem more of a miracle" (DV, 12). The incense that Mathilde receives and its rapturous effects present her as a "victim" because they cause her fall "into the final embrace." Contrary to what is observed in traditional pornography—an abuse of the myth of the fallen woman—Nin sees Mathilde's fall through different eyes: Mathilde's profane self disappears in order to emerge (to be "raised") as a source of joy and illumination. Accordingly, death, or orgasm seen as une petite mort by Bataille,¹⁸ kills the lover while it restores the power and significance of sexuality.

Thus when Nin says that "[w]riting erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery" (DV, xii), she suggests that man does not necessarily blind himself when he focuses on sexuality if he manages to transgress the sexual limits prescribed by our culture. Transgression, in this context, is ultimately both positive and negative: sexual desire connects but its fulfillment separates.

It is obvious by now that Nin's treatment of pornography results in a sexuality that is considerably different, both in intent and content, from the sexuality described in traditional pornography. Nin explains this herself by saying that she "was intuitively using a woman's language, seeing sexual experience from a woman's point of view" (DV, xv). Most of the stories, indeed, display a woman's sensibility, and a number of them, when they are not narrated in the third person, which is usually the case, are told in a woman's voice. Nin challenges the assumption that women repress their sexuality and that they do not like reading pornography. The point she tries to make, and I think that she does so successfully, is that there is a difference between pornography and, what I called earlier, the pornographic mind. Pornography as writing pertaining to prostitution, and erotica as writing pertaining to eroticism, can be appealing to both sexes when they take into account both man's and woman's points of view.

But I think that Nin's contribution to the genre of pornography owes less to her feminism and more to the fact that she is an artist. When she says that her own aphrodisiac is poetry and that her pornography consists of explosions of poetry, she announces, I believe, a new kind of pornography which links the lover with the artist and the body with the artist's creative work. The predominant artist figure in Erotica is the painter.

The world of the artists and their models in Nin's stories is both erotic and pornographic in the generic sense of the terms. One of the stories that illustrates that is "A Model." Nin works here with the paradox inherent in the male chauvinistic tradition that views woman as an object. The first-person narrator of the story is a young model who poses for New York artists. Some of them see and treat her as an aesthetic and sexual object. Others, like Reynolds, see her in aesthetic (object-I've) terms but in a manner that does not erase her individuality. On the whole, however, Nin's intent is to show that for the artist design and desire, like discourse and intercourse, go together. When the artist depersonalizes the model by focusing solely on the aesthetics of her body, he proves to have a pornographic mind. When, on the other hand, he interprets her external beauty in conjunction with her personal qualities, he is then an artist/lover for whom the aesthetics of his art reveals woman not as a sexual object but as an objet d'art. He sees her as subject matter, as a person out of whom art is made.

The story that illustrates this conflict of woman-as-object versus woman-as-subject is "The Maya." "The painter Novalis was newly married to Maria … with whom he had fallen in love because she resembled the painting he most loved, the Maja Desnuda, by Goya" (LB, 59). Novalis cannot make love with his wife because he sees her not as a real woman but as the projection of his favorite painting. What he asks of her is "not the caprice of a lover, but the desire of a painter, of an artist" (60). The result is that he can make love only to the paintings he makes of Maria. He is, in short, the artist as Pygmalion reversed.

Novalis' resistance to the real Maria derives from his belief that she is art personified. Besides evoking Goya's Maya, Maria is the muse who opens Novalis' way toward his desired subject-matter, namely herself. Nevertheless, the identification of these two orders of reality, art and life, is a form of fulfillment that threatens Novalis with the elimination of his concept of the muse as a figure that stands somehow outside the territories of life and art. Only when Maria unfolds her controlled sexuality does she manage to "efface the paintings from his emotions, to surpass them" (64).

Sexuality, as it is presented here, is the artist's inspiration. Yet the artist has to transgress the limits of his medium before he is able to realize this inspiration. He has to demystify the figure of the erotic muse by sacrificing it to his real lover. Moreover, he has to distinguish between the woman he paints and her image on the canvas. He has to destroy this frozen image in order to be able to embrace the real woman. The sacredness of sexuality is to be found at the point where the limits of the real and the imaginary meet. The artist must realize that his art is meaningful only when it is grounded in life.

Nin realizes this point by having many women characters evoke actual erotic paintings. In "Pierre," the visitor to Pierre's mother who has to dry her clothes and thus takes off her stockings, evokes, for me, Courbet's Woman with White Stockings. Pierre, when he looks at her, discovers the "pose he had pictured…. [T]he first naked woman he had seen, so much like paintings he had studied in the museum" (DV, 208). In "Elena," when Elena goes with Leila to an opium den which is like an "Arabian mosque," they hear the "voice of a woman which began what seemed to be at first a song, and then turned out to be another sort of vocalizing … a vaginal song" (DV, 128). Nin might have had in mind Ingres' Odalisques with the Slave which makes material the two pairs of concepts that she is working with in Delta of Venus and Little Birds discourse and intercourse and design and desire.

This intermingling of works of art with Nin's discourse amplifies her signature in Erotica. The allusions to Goya, Lawrence, Balzac, and Freud, to mention only a few, give to Delta of Venus and Little Birds a greater perspective than is normally given to pornographic writings. Had Nin been "exclusively" interested in the mechanics of the sexual act, she would neither have written in a lyrical language nor would she have made the artist the focus of her stories. As her own aphrodisiac is poetry, so her stories are exciting to her readers because their sexual content is enriched by her poetic sensibility.

notes

1. Anaïs Nin, Little Birds (Bantam Books, 1979), p. viii. All further references to this book, abbreviated LB, will hereafter appear parenthetically in the text.

2. See Peter Michelson, The Aesthetics of Pornography (Herder and Herder, 1971), for an indepth analysis of the genre. See also Cathy Schwichtenberg's semiotic analysis of Nin's Delta of Venus, "Erotica: The Semey Side of Semiotics," Sub-Stance, No. 32 (1981), pp. 26-38.

3. Nin's Erotica consists of two volumes, Little Birds, mentioned above, and Delta of Venus (Bantam Books, 1978), cited hereafter in the text under the abbreviation DV.

4. The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. III, edited and with a preface by Gunther Stuhlmann (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1969), p. 147. Further references to the book will appear in the text.

5. J. S. Atherton, "The Maternal Instinct," Times Literary Supplement, July 1978, p. 756.

6. D. H. Lawrence, "Pornography and Obscenity," in Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (London: Mercury Books, 1956), p. 32.

7. Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence (Harper and Row, 1981), p. 3.

8. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Hill and Wang, 1976), p. 129.

9. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 38.

10. Michel Foucault, "Preface to Transgression," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed., and introduction Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (1977; rpt (Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 34.

11. Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions, trans. Helen R. Lane (The Viking Press, 1974), p. 4. Paz's study has as its point of departure a woodcut by Jose Guadalupe Posada titled "The Phenomenon," which shows "a dwarf seen from the back, but with his face turned toward the spectator, and shown with another face down by his buttocks," and Francisco Quevedo's Gracias y Degracias del Ojo del Culo [Graces and Disgraces of the Eye of the Ass], which is "a long comparison between an ass and a face" (3).

12. Paz, p. 11. Paz uses here as a paradigm Velazquez's "Venus of the Mirror," and "a variant of the sex/face metaphor," in order to discuss the "miraculous concord" of the face and the ass.

13. Foucault, p. 30.

14. Foucault, p. 30.

15. Foucault, p. 33.

16. Henry Miller, The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation, ed. with an introduction and notes by Evelyn J. Hinz and John J. Teunissen (Capra Press, 1980), pp. 175-76.

17. Georges Bataille, Les Larmes d'Eros (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1964), p. 60 (my translation).

18. Bataille, p. 35.