To live or not to love: “The moment of non-living, non-Desiring” in Anaïs Nin's A Spy in the House of Love

Résumé 0

My paper will focus on negation in Anaïs Nin’s novel A Spy in the House of Love. In what she terms “symphonic” writing, Nin uses negation under various forms, to musical ends. In this respect negation will often be felt as sforzandi or as fortissimi.At first it would seem that the narrator tends to conceptualize things according to what they are not rather than what they are. Negation is then resorted to as a means of drawing a intaglio engraving based on a standard that would be a state of WITHOUT or NOT. This strategy may be used either as a humorous device underscoring irony or as a way to protract the utterance and not to endNegation tends to make the literary text close to the argumentative genre, in that negation appears as a means of pre-empting what the reader might think. As such negation rests upon an artificial anaphora on the part of the narrator, which seeks to create a sense of familiarity with the reader.Finally this paper will attempt to show to what extent A Spy in the House of Love is akin to fugue. In this piece of music a tune, namely negation, is repeated regularly in different keys, e.g. syntactically, semantically, etc. by different instruments. Conjuring up images of disappearance, disintegration and detachment, the fugue rises to a crescendo illustrating an apparently paradoxical freedom of the self in negation, and eventually culminates in a musical pause: “the moment of non-living, non-desiring.”