House of Incest
by Anaïs Nin
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Description
"The genesis of House of Incest was in the dream. The keeping of dreams was an important part of that exploration of the unconscious. But I discovered dreams in themselves, isolated, were not always interesting. Very few of them had the complete imagery and tension to arouse others' interest. They were fragmented. The surrealists delighted in the image themselves. This was satisfying to the painters and to the film-makers. But to the novelist concerned with human character dramas, they show more seemed ephemeral and vaporous. They had to be connected with life. It was psychoanalysis which revealed to me the constant interaction of dream and action. It was a phrase of Jung's which inspired me to write House of Incest. He said: "Proceed from the dream outward." In other words, it was essentially a matter of precedence. To capture the drama of the unconscious, one had to start with the key, and the key was the dream. But the novelist's task was to pursue this dream, to unravel its meaning; the goal was to reach the relation of dream to life; the suspense was in finding this which led to a deeper significance of our acts. "Meanwhile a batch of dreams kept for a year served as a takeoff for House of Incest. They supplied the atmosphere, its climate and texture. At the same time I discovered that the dream had to be expanded, recreated, could not be told literally for then it became as flat and one-dimensional as representational realism. One had to find a language for it, a way of describing atmosphere, the colors and textures in which it moved. [...]" "The dream taught me not only the delight of sensory images, but the fact, far more vital, that they led directly into this realm of the unconscious which Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Proust attained in various ways--Joyce by free association, with words, play on words, Proust by trusting the free associative process of memory and staying lingeringly in the realm between sleep and waking which resembles the waking dream, Virginia Woolf by accepting the vision of the poet as reality. House of Incest was, like a poem, visionary symbolic dream sequences which were woven together." --Anaïs Nin, "The Novel of the Future," (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 118-119 Originally published in 1936, House of Incest is Anais Nin's first work of fiction. The novel is a surrealistic look within the narrator's subconscious mind as she attempts to escape from a dream in which she is trapped, or in Nin's words, as she attempts to escape from "the woman's season in hell." In the documentary Anais Observed, Nin says House of Incest was based on dreams she'd had for more than a year.Nin's usage of the word incest in this case is metaphorical, not literal. In this book the word incest describes a selfish love where one can appreciate in another only that which is similar to oneself. One is then only loving oneself, shunning all differences. At first, such a self-love can seem ideal because it is without fear and without risk. But eventually it becomes a sterile nightmare. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
TheSpecialistsCat A much longer dream-like prose poem, in the guise of a fantasy novel. It is cryptic and dense and may require some familiarity with English dialects and folklore, but if you get past that, it's another book to keep by the bed and read over and over.
Member Reviews
“If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other." Nin's first published novel differs from most of her other books since it does not deal in her sexual experimentation nor reveal any obvious secrets. But when you're having sex with your shrink (Otto Rank) - which she was supposedly doing at the time - you get caught up in going as far back as you can...In this case all the way back to her birth.
Perfection. This novella is like a dream. I have it by my bed and read it always. Loved it so much I tattooed it's words on my waist. (Not ALL of it's words, just a few...)
Nin is more widely read for her diaries than her fiction, but the student of literature can find value in her fiction, because she was a writer's writer. She influenced writers from Henry James to Lawrence Durrell to Gore Vidal. She had her own unique idea of surrealist fiction, which she called "extended prose poems". House of Incest is an example of Nin's unique, fluid, spontaneous way of writing, in which only internal psychological and emotional events stood as notes in her composition.
i love your work
Jag flyter med i språket och läser snabbt utan eftertanke, som om orden var hastigt rinnande vatten. Efteråt minns jag inte mycket av det jag nyss har läst. Inte heller förstår jag, men jag hittar ingenting som lockar mig att försöka förstå. Jag bläddrar lite, skummar lite (och då bara flyter jag med i orden igen) och läser efterorden igen (började med att läsa dem). I ett av efterorden står det att Henry Miller frågat Nin om dessa sidor var mer än brokad, mer än ett vackert språk, och sagt att man måste läsa det hundra gånger eftersom man helt oväntat kastas in i något totalt främmande. Nin blir upprörd över att han inte förstår. Om hon ännu hade levt hade hon fått bli upprörd även över min show more oförståelse. Texten intresserar mig inte tillräckligt för att jag ska läsa om den hundra gånger... show less
Apr 3, 2010Swedish
813.52 NIN
Apr 16, 2020Italian
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Author Information
239+ Works 24,739 Members
Anaïs Nin 1903-1977 Writer and diarist Anaïs Nin was born February 21, 1903 in Neuilly, France to a Catalan father and a Danish mother. She spent many of her childhood years with her Cuban relatives. Later, she became a naturalized American citizen. Nin is best known for her journals,"The Diary of Anais Nin, Vols. I-VII" and her erotic fiction. show more In fact, Nin was one of the raliest writers of erotica for women. She also wrote the book Henry and June, which was made into a movie of the same name in 1990. In 1973 Anaïs Nin received an honorary doctorate from the Philadelphia College of Art. She was elected to the United States National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974. She died of cancer in Los Angeles, California, on January 14, 1977. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- House of Incest
- Original title
- House of Incest
- Original publication date
- 1936
- Related movies
- Bells of Atlantis (1952 | IMDb)
- Quotations
- If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other, if only I could save you all from yourselves, said the modern Christ.
- Disambiguation notice
- DO NOT ADD/COMBINE if Winter of Artifice is included.
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 492
- Popularity
- 61,357
- Reviews
- 7
- Rating
- (3.71)
- Languages
- 8 — English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 19
- ASINs
- 8
