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, "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 BoxNin 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 LanguageApart 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 KernelThe 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 GrooveWhether 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 WoundThen 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...
I was rereading bits of this last night after seeing several one- or two-star reviews of it pop up in my feed recently. And scanning through some of the other GR reviews here, there's a lot of people objecting that it's ‘icky’ – one reviewer lists all the things that feature in Delta, things like incest, rape, paedophilia, and then just says, ‘Ew, right?’WELL NO NOT EW ACTUALLY. I mean yes, ew, if you like, of course a lot of these things may not be very appealing depending on your tastes, but more fundamentally I just think this is a misunderstanding of the genre. The whole point of erotica is often not so much to turn you on as to go to places that other writing cannot – to break down taboos. Like other kinds of genre fiction, it should be mind-expanding. In the same way that, for instance, science-fiction or fantasy tries to conjure up other civilisations in order to contextualise our own, so erotica is the one genre which gets to look at social conventions one by one and imagine what would happen if they didn't exist or if they were systematically ignored. The idea is to open you up to new experiences, and it's often meant to be unsettling and challenging rather than arousing – although certainly one key motive is to prompt that unexpected jolt from the reader where an internal voice says, Whoa, why do I find that idea so hot? I thought I'd dealt with all this in therapy.Having made the counter-intuitive case that good erotica isn't necessarily sexy – Exhibits A and B being de Sade and Bataille – I should say that Anaïs Nin is nowhere near as far along the scale as those two. Her writing is – well I won't say ‘sexy’, because that's so subjective (one man's boring theme exercise being another woman's dependable two a.m. go-to), but it is definitely rich and sensual and I think there is a lot to admire about her prose style. Here we go, let's check out some hot Pierre-on-Elena action:He was in France without papers, risking arrest. For greater security Elena hid him at the apartment of a friend who was away. They met every day now. He liked to meet her in the darkness, so that before they could see each other's face, their hands became aware of the other's presence. Like blind people, they felt each other's body, lingering in the warmest curves, making the same trajectory each time; knowing by touch the places where the skin was softest and tenderest and where it was stronger and exposed to daylight; where, on the neck, the heartbeat was echoed; where the nerves shivered as the hand came nearer to the center, between the legs.This is typical of her approach, which makes use of a lot of short, simple clauses, either separated into different sentences, fairytale-like, or strung together with semicolons into long, dreamy bouts of poetic description. She applies this ruthless sensuality equally to the sex and to the moments of violence or sadism that crop up in the book. I am far from the world's biggest Anaïs Nin fan, but I do think it is important that we have a woman finally writing about this kind of thing, rather than what we had for hundreds of years previously, viz. men guessing what women thought about it. I'm thinking John Cleland, Pierre Louÿs, et hundreds of al.Nin always prompted a lot of varied reactions from other women, some thinking, Finally someone is saying it, and others being more like, Whoa there, speak for yourself, sister. Meanwhile men's excitement was split between the stuff they recognised (‘women think like us!’) and the stuff that seemed new (‘women don't think like us!’). I do think it's interesting that you can draw a line from Delta of Venus in the 1940s right through to, let's say, Nancy Friday's Women on Top in 1991, and see that most of the themes have barely changed at all.I don't think Delta of Venus is a great book, but I do think it's an interesting and important one and I have a real soft spot for it. Of course in real life Anaïs Nin was as mad as a box of frogs, but she was the right person at the right time and I like a lot of what's in here – as the reviews show, it still has the power to challenge people today, when you might think the whole thing would have seemed rather passé.‘Don't burn someone's genitals...it is NOT OK,’ says one reviewer earnestly. Well, yes, fair enough…it's just as well then that this isn't fucking reportage, it's a piece of creative writing. Jesus. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be in my bunk going over page 117 again.
What do You think about Delta Of Venus (2006)?
this book is super hot. Didn't realize it was all erotica till i cracked it open on the plane ride home from France. Felt a little warm under the collar for the whole ride ;)Deals with some scandalous themes. Incest, necrophilia, pedophilia, rape, bestiality, voyeurism, exhibitionism, some low key BDSM, homosexuality, etc etc. Not quite the abundance of themes you might find on the interwebs, but markedly better written than most of what you'd find there. Even if the thing she is writing about would other wise be distasteful, she somehow manages to make it seem hot.
—Suzanne
Anais Nin and a few of her writer friends were asked by an anonymous wealthy collector to write a series of Erotic short stories for $1.00 per page for his pleasure. However the collector was specific in the kind of erotica he wanted. Anais was to omit any warmth, emotion or poetry to her writing and only concentrate on the sex.Even though these restrictions were in place I don’t think I’ve ever read erotica so well written, it was polished, bold and wildly daring. She covers a range of sexual fetishes; from the innocent ones who are happily aroused just by being observed, others who like to get most of their sexual experience through experimentation, and then you have the sick psychopaths whose desires are risky and sometimes dangerous. You don’t know what you will experience for from one story to the next, but each and every one of them will get under your skin and tantalise you in the most sensual and sometimes disturbing ways. This took me a while to get through. The stories are so rich in content and description that it took so much out of me, I was exhausted. I could only dabble on a few pages every night.If you have not read Anais Nin and you like erotica, this is a must read. She’s a fascinating woman and so ahead of her time. It has made me want to read more of her work in the future, and to know everything I can about her.
—Mish
AUTHOR WEBCAM!!-tHi there… my name’s Anais, what’s yours?-tOh, er… hi Anais! My name’s Pau---- Manny. My name is Manny.-tHi Manny. How are you tonight?-tOh I'm fine thank you. Er.... you have a great laptop there.-tWhy thank you! It’s a Lenovo Ideapad. Do you think it looks cute?-tOh…yes.-tYou should see the things I can do with it.-tMm hmmm.-tWhat would you like to see me do Manny? Would you like to see me … type? Or…correct a manuscript? Do you want me to call my publisher? I can complain about royalty payments if you want – I complain really well. You know - if you have a publisher we could complain together.-tCould you… could you compose some erotica right now?-tOf course I could, Manny! Now, would you like that to be in long luxurious leisurely sentences with metaphors clustered like grapes hanging from a vine turning golden pale in the Tuscany sun? Or would you like it to be urgent, short, sharp, like a James Ellroy sex doll, no word over four letters?-tPlease… just do what you feel you’re into, Anais.-tWhy thank you Manny, you’re a gentleman. All right. Let's see now...
—Paul Bryant
