Djuna
The woman whose thoughts open and close the third novella. She lives in the same hotel as the analyst, absorbs everyone else's confessions through the walls, and is the only person in the book who can tell Lilith the truth.
To keep moving fast enough that the past cannot catch her — which is what she is doing when she walks faster than the person beside her simply to feel herself pass them.
The book
At a glance
- A patient of the analyst, and the consciousness that frames "The Voice"
- The same New York hotel the analyst practises in
- An earlier life on the other side of an ocean, whose addresses she destroyed
- She reappears through Nin's later novels, including Children of the Albatross
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeDjuna frames "The Voice", the last of the three novellas in Winter of Artifice, the 1939 book by the French-born American writer Anaïs Nin. She lives in the same vast hotel as the analyst, is one of his patients, and is the one whose perceptions the story keeps returning to between the case histories.
What Nin gives her is porousness. Everything reaches her: the confessions coming through the carpeted corridors, the footsteps in the street, the music she cannot listen to because she is already too full of other people. She describes herself as an immense music box, and the joke is only half a joke.
The other thing she carries is the past. The hotel lobby frightens her because she believes the people she left behind are sitting in it waiting to introduce themselves again, and the whole reason she crossed an ocean was to be rid of them. She is also the only clear-eyed person in the story: when Lilith announces she has fallen in love with the analyst, Djuna names it in two words.
This profile is drawn from the Swallow Press edition of 1948, read in the Internet Archive's scan of the book. Djuna recurs across Nin's later fiction, including the five-novel sequence she called the continuous novel.
How the book draws them
- The lift that should not stopShe is certain hers will go through the ceiling into open space, the way her feelings do. When it stops dead on the ground floor she feels a moment of anguish, convinced it will carry on down instead into wells, prisons and tombs.
- The lobbyHer throat tightens every time she crosses it. Behind every palm and every half-lit face she expects somebody from the first half of her life, waiting for a crack to get back in. She tells herself they lost her tracks years ago and crosses it afraid anyway.
- Having her hair washedShe goes to the hairdresser's cubicle instead of crying, because water running through the roots of the hair does the same work and puts her back into rhythm.
- The sound from the roofA dull, heavy sound with no echo goes through the whole building, and everybody knows at once what it was. A woman has thrown herself from the twenty-fifth floor onto the garage roof. She had taken a room that morning under a false name and stayed in it five hours without moving.
- What she says to the analyst afterwards"A woman killed herself, right there, under your window; that noise you heard was the fall of her body. She was pregnant. And she was alone. That is why she killed herself."
- Too full for musicAt a concert in the hotel she cannot hear the music. Every confession that reaches the analyst's room reaches her too, and she is saturated: brimming, spilling over, unable to receive anything more.
- The night with LilithThey lie talking in the dark, and Nin writes it as relief rather than event — the marvellous silence of twinship, an end to falling into space, the whole world reduced to a strand of hair held in the palm. It is one of the passages the book is most explicit in.
- Her verdict on the love affair"It's a mirage," said Djuna. She repeats it as a mystical illusion, and warns that a woman who has an affair with a mirage will find her body revolting against it.