thursday, September 21, 1978
daily nebraskan
page 13
Nin's 'Delta of Venus' presents sensitive view of sex
By David Wood
Delta Of Venus: Erotica by Anais Nin Bantam, $2.50
There are endless stories of visionary artists struggling
and inspired in Paris, their greatness only known inside
the circle of their artist-friends, who let minor master
pieces go for the price of a meal or for a pittance that
they might buy a bottle to share among comrades. So
many stories, it is less the exception than the rule.
book
review
It is in its way tragic, yet not so tragic that the art
works do not mostly, eventually, and to someone's profit,
surface for public perusal and preservation. One example
of such a stolen and recovered gem is Delta of Venus by
Anais Nin, out now in paperback for the first time.
Back in 1940, her money down, Anais Nin joined
with Henry Miller, her celebrated lover, in supplying
drafts of erotica to an anonymous patron Henry had been
told of. They wrote for a dollar a page.
Even at that thankless wage the buyer griped. "Con
centrate on sex," he demanded, "Leave out the poetry. . .
Just story -telling, no analysis, no philosophy."
Erotic summery
Anais agonized to comply. But in the end she sub
mitted him a letter in place of another erotic summery.
"Dear Collector" the letter read in part, "We hate
you. . . You have taught us more than anyone I know how
wrong it is not to mix sex with emotion, hunger, desire,
lust, whims, caprices, personal tics, deeper relations that
change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities. . . aspects
which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imagina
tive, romantic, emotional. This is what gives it its sur
prising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac
elements."
But for a woman whose soul is art, the poetry could
not be entirely voided from her narrative, only hidden.
As a result her several stories are classics in that inglorious
genre usually sanctioned to hack writers. Neither brazenly
sexy or lusty, her pornography is sensitively libidinous.
Sensual ambience
Neither makedly mechanical or photographic, her blue
scenes are clothed in sensual ambience. Not explicitly
Dylan, Star Trek top interest list
Each year it's the same -students compare courses and
find one is in biology, another in freshman English, a third
is taking the Philosophy of Bob Dylan.
The Philosophy of Bob Dylan?
Yes. Also the Philosophy of Star Trek, the Philosophy
of Psychic Phenomena, the Philosophy of Sport, the
Meaning of Death, the Meaning of Suicide. . .the list goes
on and on.
All are courses offered by UNL's philosophy depart
ment. Each lasts five weeks and is worth one credit hour.
Professor Robert Anderson, who interchanges teaching
mini-courses on the Philosophy of Bob Dylan and the
Philosophy of Star Trek with Communism vs. Religion
and the Philosophies of the American Revolution, Ayn
Rand and Martin Luther King, said the courses are offered
in response to a survey taken to determine student
interests.
Already interested
While some people might wonder what value such
courses have, Anderson said each is useful because it ac
quaints students with philosophy and gives them some
basics in that discipline while pointing out that they are
already involved in philosophy through their interests. An
initial interest in one of the mini-courses may lead stu
dents to a more advanced class, he added.
Last spring and during summer school, Anderson
offered the Philosophy of Star Trek, and is now teaching
the Philosophy of Bob Dylan. He said he decided to teach
the courses because both topics were rated high on a sur
vey of student interests.
"I looked into each and found -somewhat to my surprise-that
there is certainly enough philosophy there for
a one-unit course," he said.
In the first class of each course, Anderson explains
what philosophy is and what its parts are. Students then
move ahead with their particular interests.
Anderson said that in the Dylan course, the growth of
Dylan's philosophy is traced from his early life and idols,
through his protest songs to the present.
Performer and philosopher
The many aspects of Dylan draw a wide range of stu
dents to the class.
"Some see him primarily as a performer and are orien
ted to his less philosophical works' Anderson said.
"Others think of him as a social critic and want to get at
that more deeply. I find it interesting that when 1 offered
the course last fall, the enrollment was about 70, and this
year it's about 100."
If the variety of students drawn "to the Dylan course is
wide, the range of students attracted by the variety of
mini-courses is wider, Anderson said.
"For example, the Star Trek students on a whole are
different from those who take the philosophy of Bob
Dylan. The former see everyone in the class as a fellow
participant in the world of Star Trek."
This feeling of participation in the world of Star Trek
is one of the reasons Anderson says the series' popularity
continues.
Ongoing adventure
"In space, the adventure goes on and on, encountering
other peoples, making discoveries. Captain Kirk (a Star
Trek character) calls it the last frontier.' Star Trek ap
peals to children at ages of three and four who like the
characters and the gadgetry, but it appeals to NASA
grownups too," he said. "It's an expression of the atti
tudes of the space scientists themselves. They believe in
this. It's a happy fictional experience of what they expect
Sheldon Art Gallery,
12th & R
ANGOLA: VICTORY OF HOPE
Directed by Jose Massip.
An excellent Cuban documentary about the Angolan
fight for independence and a Cuban explanation of their
presence in Africa.
-Plus a second Film
tuc MfUiTP I AAftER
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A United Nations production detailing the nistory or
the colonization of South Africa and the development
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to find in space."
Anderson identifies three areas Gene Roddenberry,
Star Trek's creator, philosophized on in the series for class
discussion. They are racial intolerance, war and the idea
of paradise. His class also discusses how the series' three
main characters-Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy-represent
three aspects of self which can war with each other.
The philosophy of Star Trek drew the largest enroll
ment of any other philosophy mini-course, Anderson said.
Some students would like him to offer Star Trek II to
explore the secondary literature written by Star Trek fans.
"To a lot of us, Star Trek seems more than fiction,"
Anderson said. "In a way it's real. We can't explain it."
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worked, she lets ambiguity play, a true expression of
emotive sex. Her characters are more than engaged bodies
of flesh. They have senses and sensitivities. They have
submerged inside hearts and minds real enough to be
mysterious.
Nin's concise, glinting prose-styli , stripped of judgment
or bare statement, raped of analysis and philosophy, has
effectually the narrow scope of a key-hole. She only
suggests the situations, the forces, the acts, the bodies,
which are incidentally twined together, seducing readers
to enter in their own sexuality to fill in what is left open.
The sketchiness of the stories evokes in reading an
uncertainty and speculation like what accompanies actual
sexual encounter.
Some cf the stories are but sensual nothings, others
are obsessive to exhaustion, some simple antecdotes,
others case-histories of widening, pulsing sexualities. Few
have beginnings, none have ends. The reader is aroused to
seek knowledge and resolution in them, but is spurned.
They remain only physical fact. As in the sexual act,
one can sense in the stories a fertility, a multi-leveled
virginity, an endearing perversity, that tempts an instinct
to plunge and impossibly possess them.
Various drives
Unlike typical pornography, where sex is a conquest
and fulfillment, Delta of Venus shows it as a network of
endless roads for various drives. It shows sex as an indi
vidual's inherited vulnerability, one's senses being the vic
tim and reward of one's drives. Nin suitably uses the
imagery of man "stabbing" at woman's "wound", while
in another instance it is a "wild wind" discovering a
"flower."
Sex is not graphic. It is sensual. It is not simply the
contact of genitilia, hands, and mouths. It is the play
of senses. It is vision, smell, moods, attitudes, places,
surprise, fear, subconscious embodiments, kharmic associ
ations, creative invention, symbolic ritual, disguise, always
new, always allure to more curiousity, forever mysterious,
singular yet in everything.
It is an orchestration unique in experience, tradition
ally private, a conversation not of words. "The language
of sex," writes Nin, "had yet to be discovered."
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