Ian "Marvin" Graye's Reviews > Delta of Venus

Less Poetry!

Most of the stories in "Delta of Venus" were written under a quasi-Oulipean constraint: they were commissioned by a collector of erotica who specified, "Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry."

Anais Nin initially complied. However, she admits, "I began to write tongue-in-cheek, to become outlandish, inventive, and so exaggerated that I thought he would realise I was caricaturing sexuality."

Back came the response, "Less poetry." The collector was looking for explicit, clinically precise description of sexual activity.

Pandora's Box

Nin duly complied, within limits, and what we read on the page is the result. However, notwithstanding the brief, she wrote with a simple, economical elegance that qualifies as both literature and erotica. The intrinsic quality of her writing couldn't help but intrude.

Nin was trying to escape "the clinical, the scientific, which only captures what the body feels". She wanted to go beyond the flesh into the senses and the heart, and via them into the essence and ecstasy of a sexually voracious woman:

“I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from a man's and for which man's language was so inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored.”



A New Language

Apart from any erotic appeal, what's stimulating about "Delta of Venus" is the sense that we're witnessing the invention of a new language.

There's also a different perspective on sex.

Only one story is written in the first person. As a result, in the remainder, "they" are doing this to each other, and therefore it's implicitly "you and I", "we", doing it, not an implied male "me" doing it to an implied female "you". While the reader might be gendered, the writer allows us to witness both aspects of the one act, the two sides of the one coin. We don't automatically adopt the perspective of the male, we don't look through the peep-hole of the male gaze.

This Little Kernel

The stories as a whole focus on a woman's "sex", the vulva, the delta of Venus (the goddess who was "born of the sea with this little kernel of salty honey in her, which only caresses could bring out of the hidden recesses of her body").

For all the anatomical detail, much attention is still given to the surroundings within which sexual activity takes place and fantasies are realised:

"Just as you felt like making love on top of my fur bed, I always feel like making love where there are hangings and curtains and materials on the walls, where it is like a womb. I always feel like making love where there is great deal of red. Also where there are mirrors."

The characters are realistically drawn, not just caricatures, and we accumulate enough biographical detail over the course of the stories to feel we know them as well as any protagonists in literary fiction. We just know more about their sex lives.

Into the Groove

Whether inevitably or by design, more and more lyrical sentences slip past the embargo on poetry. Here are some of Nin's interjaculations that I noted on my journey through her sensuous world:

"His decisiveness in small acts gave her the feeling that he would equally wave aside all obstacles to his greatest desires."

"Talking together is a form of intercourse. You and I exist together in all the delirious countries of the sexual world. You draw me into the marvellous. Your smile keeps a mesmeric flow."

"The first time I felt an orgasm with John, I wept because it was so strong and so marvellous that I did not believe it could happen over and over again."

"She marvelled at the continuity of their exultation. She wondered when their love would enter a period of repose."

The Exquisite Torment of the Ecstatic Wound

Then there are descriptive phrases like these:

"ripe for the final possession...the sensitive opening...the little cry of the ecstatic wound...the core of her sensations...the shadowy folds of her sexual secrets...all the fluids of desire seeping along the silver shadows of her legs...a connoisseur, a gourmet, of women's jewel boxes...that first tear of pleasure...this gradual and ceremonious courtship of her senses...[an orgasm that] came like an exquisite torment...the full effulgence of their pleasure..."

Even if some of them sound familiar from more recent porn or sexually explicit fiction, what is special is that the style was created or appropriated by a woman for a woman's purposes over and above the male commission and the Oulipean constraint. Some of the artist remains in the output.

This is a ground-breaking and thoroughly enjoyable collection of stories.

More stories from this period were published in the sequel "Little Birds".




Footnote: "L'Origine du Monde"

For anyone familiar with Courbet's "L'origine du monde", the last story contains an interesting allusion:

"Courbet...painted a torso, with a carefully designed sex, in contortions of pleasure, clutching at a penis that came out of a bush of very black hair."

This version of the painting might well be apocryphal. However, whether or not it ever existed, it's a metaphor that gives equal weight to all comers in the contest documented by Nin's stories.


SOUNDTRACK:

Madonna - "Into The Groove"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52iW3...