Asking for it🫵🏼👹🖕🏼
says the retard who pulled/plagiarized the bulk of their Ask from fucking Wikipedia (and probably had to look up the word "semiotics", too)
a Wikipedia article that relies on a biography that emphasized biographical psychology over literary analysis. The Bair bio interprets Nin’s fiction through her personal history, which isn't what it was; it was life transformed into myth/symbol.
Huh, kind of like how the dumbest of my critics assume that Afterburn is autobiographical wish fulfillment from Donovan's POV when it's not. Weird how illiterate idiots think alike.
Winter of Artifice isn’t a simple, disguised autobiographical work; it’s a surrealist, modernist exploration of identity, performance, and symbolic feminine archetypes. Nin used real emotional material but the stories aren't straightforward portraits of those relationships; reducing it to just Freudian shit misses the point, and yes, there is meaning in art and actions (like sharing this art), something that your illiterate fucking ass has no brains to understand.
But what you all need to try to fucking understand is that a work of fictional literature should not be interpreted only through the author’s life or intentions.
Once the text exists, readers experience it independently from any biographical background; a reader doesn’t need to know Rainer, Joaquín Nin, or her psychs to understand the themes of identity, performance, artifice, and fragmented selfhood. Do you know everything about an author's life that could have inspired their fiction before you read it? I mean, this is just the fundamentals of reading and I can hardly believe that I have to explain such simple shit to you, Anon.
Now, there's a reason that Ortega's douchey Dane recommended it, and it has nothing to do with Nin fucking her father or her therapists, or any Daddy Issues Ortega may have.
People take away what they take, see what they see, relate to what they relate:
Stella is an actress, which makes her life literally built around performance. The opening scene here where she watches herself on screen immediately introduces the core theme: the split between inner identity and public image. Sound familiar?
She feels small, melancholic, and fearful, but the cinematic image of her appears luminous, powerful, and seductive. She can't reconcile the two versions of herself. Sound familiar?
In archetypal terms she represents the woman who has become an object of representation. Her identity exists partly outside herself shaped by lighting/framing/interpretation and Stan™ audience perception. Sound familiar?
This is why her narrative repeatedly emphasizes artifice: stages/screens and the visual construction/stylization of such. She is the woman who experiences the horror of realizing that the world may know her only as an image.
Does any of that fucking sound familiar at all to you?
Or are you just a fucking moron desperate to cling to the idea that "it doesn't mean anything" on any layer except for the superficial and reductive Daddy Issues! take (that isn't even your own conclusion)? Modernist writers built entire careers on layers of meaning and symbolic construction. That should sound fucking familiar to you as well, especially if you're an Ortega Stan.
Now, do you need me to continue with the other two women who represent different psychological configurations of feminine identity in this edition? Or should I just wait for your next turd rocket in my inbox about how I'm just not as smart as I think I am? I'll leave you with this short n' sweetie from my copy because you're not worth any more of my precious time
"She was a child carrying a very old soul and burdened with it, and wishing to deposit it in some great and passionate role. In Joan of Arc, or Marie Bashkirtseff...or Rejane, or Eleanora Duse.
There are those who disguise themselves, like Stella's father, who disguised himself and acted what he was not. But Stella only wanted to transform and enlarge herself and wanted to act only what she felt she was, or could be. And Hollywood would not let her. Hollywood had its sizes and standards of characters. One could not transgress certain limited standard sizes."
— "Stella", Winter of Artifice ed. 1945