Being You from Another Point of View:
Anais Nin provides another glimpse of the human mind
Review of Seduction of the Minotaur
Anais Nin
Originally Published by Swallow Press, 1961
Kindle Edition with Comments by the Author: Sky Blue Press, 2010
Anais Nin is a unique figure in literature. She is as famous for the way she lived her life as she is for her writing, perhaps because her writing is autobiographical and her most well-known work is her multi-volume Diary. Prior to reading Seduction of the Minotaur, I was mostly familiar with her pornographic stories, published in the books, Little Birds and Delta of Venus, and her story, Henry and June, about her relationship with Henry Miller and his wife, because it was made into a film.
I came upon Seduction of the Minotaur by happenstance. I was re-reading Anil Seth’s Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, as part of my preparation for a book I’m working on about machine consciousness and the future relationship between humans and AI. While looking up a reference in Seth’s book’s index, I noticed that Nin’s novel was also referenced. I didn’t remember coming across the reference in the text, and I was curious as to why a non-fiction science book on the brain and consciousness would reference a novel. It turned out that Seth only used a single line from Nin’s book, to introduce one of his chapters, but I became intrigued enough to buy the novel and begin reading it. I was quickly hooked and took a break from my non-fiction reading long enough to finish Seduction of the Minotaur. I was struck by the contrast between it and the science I had been reading, although both address the same subject: the human mind and how it works.
Nin introduces her book by saying, “In Seduction of the Minotaur I finally succeeded in absorbing the vision of the analyst with the novelist.” She, herself, had been analyzed by Otto Rank, with whom she had an affair. Her introduction leaves the strong suggestion that the main character of the novel, Lillian, is a stand-in for Nin in many ways.
Seduction of the Minotaur is the final of five novels, all of which are related, and I only read this one, so I may have missed some themes that were carried through from the earlier novels. This story concerns a three-month period in which the main character, Lillian, a 30-year old woman from the U.S., but who had spent part of her childhood in Mexico, visits a coastal Mexican city, bordered by the jungle, where she has a contract to play jazz piano with a group at a hotel bar. The novel mostly consists of lush descriptions of the colorful, relaxed, tropical atmosphere of the city and its surround, as well as the people, both the local population and several memorable individuals. There is no real plot, except Lillian’s psychological journey as she analyzes the visible exterior presentation of each of the other characters and the hidden interior, which each of them is running from and is afraid to face. She does the same for herself.
While such deep psychological examination might sound academic and boring, it is hardly so because of the artistic, poetic, and highly descriptive manner in which Nin approaches both the people and the environment, which plays an active role in shaping the mood and behavior of the people. With Lillian, the main character, we are able to see, both in how she relates to others and how she makes choices for herself, that she is maintaining a facade of nurturance, adventuresomeness and superficial attachments to others, which keeps her safe by not allowing her to face the needs and fears that underly her behavior. Paradoxically, Lillian analyzes herself, mostly accurately, as she does these things, and tells us about the dynamics behind her behavior, although she is powerless to alter how she behaves. She does the same for other characters, as an astute observer of how they relate to others and to her. Central to her observations and analyses is Doctor Hernandez, who is fatherly, kind, and perceptive, but consumed by his own unresolved issues that eventually lead to his death. Lillian feels guilty when he dies because she saw the internal drama he was playing out in his life but never tried to break through his defenses and save him.
I was swept up in both the luxuriant prose and the intimate and intricate psychological analyses portrayed in the novel. As a psychologist, I was deeply familiar with the dynamics displayed and described by the author in her characters. By presenting these in novelistic form, demonstrated by the behavior of each person, and simultaneously analyzed, in a reflective way by Lillian, we gain an understanding of how a person’s mind works. Because the presentation is of the conscious workings of the mind of Lillian, we can look into ourselves and see how close to the mark it all feels. In a novel, we allow ourselves to accept truths about the characters that might provoke our own defenses and obscure our insight if we encountered them in real life and they were about ourselves. They also ring truer than a similar analysis presented in the abstract as a psychological theory in a textbook.
In order to read Seduction of the Minotaur, I had to interrupt my re-reading of Anil Seth’s Being You (which I reviewed on December 15, 2022). Seth’s book explains his theory of how the brain works to produce our conscious experience of the world and ourselves. Although his presentation is elegant, and for someone like me, who is intensely interested in the subject, riveting, its description is of a different dimension of consciousness than Nin’s. Hers is what it feels like to be conscious. All the various aspects of consciousness that Seth analyzes so meticulously, in terms of how they may be generated by the brain, are integrated in an ongoing stream of thoughts, feelings, and sensations, by Nin. What is going through her character’s mind is what Seth is trying to explain in terms of brain mechanisms. That what we think and feel is sometimes motivated by unconscious goals, which psychoanalysis attempts to describe, is another aspect of consciousness that is real. Psychoanalysis overly anthropomorphizes the process, inventing unconscious entities that act with purpose and have their own motivation, but however it’s explained, we conceal, lie, rationalize and otherwise obscure to ourselves some of the reasons for our behavior.
Both Seth and Nin tell a part of the story of consciousness. Nin’s writing in Seduction of the Minotaur has been criticized for being overly descriptive, lacking in plot, and self-indulgent. I found the story entrancing, the writing evocative, and filled with human truth. It made me want to read more of her work, and I plan to.
Interested in scif-fi about conscious AIs solving moral dilemmas in a future that has them exploring our galaxy? Read Casey Dorman’s Voyages of the Delphinovels: Ezekiel’s Brain and Prime Directive. Available on Amazon. Click Here!
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