Content area
Full text
So now we are inextricably woven. . .
I AM THE OTHER FACE OF YOU
Our faces are soldered together by soft hair,
soldered together,
showing two profiles of the same soul.1
There is an intriguing congruence between this poetic description of merged identities in Anais Nin's prose-poem House of Incest (1936) and an identical visual image in Ingmar Bergman's film Persona (1966).2 The similarity extends beyond an overlap of image. There are many commonalities between these disparate artists and works-as well as interesting differences-which are illuminated by this imagistic convergence. Both film and book present a "distillation" of the themes which haunted the artists in many other works. "It is the seed of all my work, the poem from which the novels were born,"3 Nin has said about her first work of fiction. Bergman has also described Persona in poetic terms,4 but this masterpiece came after more than twenty years of prolific filmmaking, and hence, has an artistic maturity which is lacking in Nin's first effort. Yet there is an intuitive, visionary quality to House of Incest which gives it an extraordinary luminosity.
Bergman has referred to Persona, along with Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence, as a "chamber work." This description applies to House of Incest as well: "They are chamber music-music in which, with an extremely limited number of voices and figures, one explores the essence of a number of motifs. The backgrounds are extrapolated, put into a sort of fog. The rest is distillation."5 Nin describes House as containing the "purest essence" of her meaning, the "distillation of her experience."6 In this "EDIFICE WITHOUT DIMENSION," she focuses on a small number of figures and puts the background into a "fog." The same could be said for later works, including Winter of Artifice and the five-volume Cities of the Interior, but House of Incest is the most condensed and poetic.
It is also the most unconventional of Nin's books, and the least amenable to analysis and definition. The same is true for Persona, which marks a radical departure for Bergman from more traditional forms and subject matter. Both works may have discouraged critical approach, because they tend to resist analysis and definition, as part of their meaning. Nin and...