Zora has more power in The Four-Chambered Heart because her motivations are the same as Rango’s. She is protecting Rango from confronting his failure, whereas Djuna is inciting him to test his strength. As a victimized, devoted husband, he could still admire himself. As a political influence, he knew (unconsciously) he could not achieve anything. I had often seen couples in which the emotional person dominated the so-called logical or rational person because the logical person did not understand the irrational behavior and therefore could not grapple with it. Zora was a symbol of the power of negative force. There is a symbolic waking dream scene at the end of the book. Djuna contemplates sinking the houseboat because there is no liberation in sight from Zora’s tyranny. Djuna would have to continue to sink with them into blind, irrational destructiveness (as they lived out their unconscious, it was dark and uncreative). Djuna decides not to sink (drown in the dark unconscious). She suddenly understands the game. She is saved by awareness.

The survival of the houseboat on a troubled river is the symbol of Noah’s Ark in the flood of events. Two people are able to flow in rhythm because of the harmony of their love, but they are constantly arrested, prevented from flowing by the static, paralyzed life of the third character who represents death in life. The houseboat, anchored to the shore for good, is a symbol. The flowing of water has always been a symbol of the unconscious. The book takes its lulling rhythm from the river; its beauty and its moments of arrest are expressed in the houseboat’s inability to break away from its moorings, to go on a long voyage. Only in their dreams at night do they see themselves traveling, wandering, free of such burdens.

—Anaïs Nin, from Novel of the Future, 1968

Beginning

THE GUITAR DISTILLED ITS MUSIC.

Rango played it with the warm copper color of his skin, with the charcoal pupil of his eyes, with the underbrush thickness of his eyebrows, pouring into the honey-colored box the flavors of the open road on which he lived his gypsy life: thyme, rosemary, oregano, marjoram, and sage. Pouring into the resonant box the sensual swing of his hammock hung across the gypsy cart and the dreams born on his mattress of black horsehair.

Idol of the night clubs, where men and women barred doors and windows, lit candles, drank alcohol, and drank from his voice and his guitar the potions and herbs of the open road, the charivaris of freedom, the drugs of leisure and laziness.

At dawn, not content with the life transfusion through catguts, filled with the sap of his voice which had passed into their veins, at dawn the women wanted to lay hands upon his body. But at dawn Rango swung his guitar over his shoulder and walked away.

Will you be here tomorrow, Rango?