Anaïs Nin

A Myth of Her Own

Clara Oropeza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351675475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Anaïs Nin: A Myth of Her Own traces Nin's literary craft by following the intimacy of self-exploration and poetic expression attained in the details of the quotidian, transfigured into fiction. By digging into the mythic tropes that permeate both her literary diaries and fiction, this book demonstrates that Nin constructed a mythic method of her own, revealing the extensive possibilities of an opulent feminine psyche.

Clara Oropeza demonstrates that the literary diary, for Nin, is a genre that with its traces of trickster archetype, among others, reveals a mercurial, yet particular understanding of an embodied and at times mystical experience of a writer. The cogent analysis of Nin's fiction alongside the posthumously published unexpurgated diaries, within the backdrop of emerging psychological theories, further illuminates Nin's contributions as an experimental and important modernist writer whose daring and poetic voice has not been fully appreciated. By extending research on diary writing and anchoring Nin's literary style within modernist traditions, this book contributes to the redefinition of what literary modernism was comprised, who participated and how it was defined.

Anaïs Nin: A Myth of Her Own is unique in its interdisciplinary expansion of literature, literary theory, mythological studies and depth psychology. By considering the ecocritical aspects of Nin's writing, this book forges a new paradigm for not only Nin's work, but for critical discussions of self-life writing as a valid epistemological and aesthetic form. This impressive work will be of great interest to academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, literary studies, cultural studies, mythological studies and women's studies.

Chapter 1

Anaïs Nin

Self-life writing, myth and literature

Introduction

She is the mermaid with her fish-tail dipped in the unconscious. Her creation will be to make articulate this obscure world which dominates man, which he denies being dominated by, but which asserts its domination in destructive proofs of its presence, madness.

(Anais Nin 1937)

Writer and diarist Anaïs Nin (1903–1977), born in Paris to a French-Cuban- Danish mother and a Cuban father, believed that the intimate connection to one’s subjective subtle and intricate developments, if well-tended, could guide the way to the convergence with the rest of humanity. As Nin writes, “the theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story… . The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic” (3:153). Nin echoes not only the then-emerging field of psychology, but also alludes to cherishing the irresolvable voices that speak to the plurality of truths evading a single identity, which her literary works keenly examine. Nin’s diaries are a “playground of subjectivities” where self and myth meander, and where death of one aspect of the self births another (Podnieks 66). In this way Nin, the diarist, engages in nature’s truest cycle: life, death and rebirth. Nin quotes literary critic Leon Edel in his claim that “the Diary was nothing but a narcissus pool.” To which Nin replied, “I have never seen a narcissus pool in which a thousand characters appeared at the same time” (A Woman Speaks 156). By referencing the medium of her diary as a many-voiced theatre where “a thousand characters” perform, Nin’s overemphasis is on the creative process of interlocking an ontology of self, including mystery and fantasy, as recorded in both her diary and fiction.

The diary offered Nin the freedom that an artist seeks to discover the polyphony of voices that literature, in turn, explores, as seen in her fiction. In her essay “Speaking in Tongues,” Zadie Smith draws our attention to the arduous progression of acquiring the many voices of self in both art and life. In reflecting on the worlds that both language and identity set forth, including the voices we “pick up along the way,” Smith reminds us that in literary communities, the artist has been valued for having the flexibility required to speak in various “tongues” (133). To illustrate the pivotal point that literature has the capacity to “speak simultaneous truths,” she quotes Keats on the gift of Shakespeare’s creativity:

At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously … that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching, after fact and reason.

(Smith 134)

Nin’s diarist and novelist credos value a polyphony of voices often irresolvable – and speak to a plurality of truths and experiences, often against a mythic backdrop. These characteristics are suited for more than the psychological and literary potentials of her art. They speak to Nin’s perpetual interest in the convergence of art and life as narrative; she began writing in a diary at age 11, and continued until almost the end of her life, at age 73. Nin describes how her initial resolve to write a diary was the synthesis of disparate situations: “it was the way I was going to rebuild the bridge that was broken by the separation of my parents and by the uprooting to a foreign country” (A Woman Speaks 157). The diary, for Nin, held the “inner journey” that aspiring towards life and art demands. It was a place where “fictionalizing” was “helping the uprooting. To look at it as an adventure was the answer” (A Woman Speaks 223). The “fictionalizing” of a sense of the multiplicity of self is a concept this book thus examines.

This book proposes an analysis of the mythopoesis, the making of myths, by using Nin’s diaries, fiction and theory as a conduit, in the works of a female writer. I submit that one should not simply define Nin’s work as an attempt to codify an exclusive female aesthetic, or to portray a female artist who successfully integrates her art and her life. Rather, I argue that the continual process of the re-making of a personal myth, the subjective, symbolic and imaginative stories that construct her personal history, may be more fruitful than any single appropriate, authentic achievement.

Early in this book, my analysis explores Nin’s work, specifically the prima materia in her diaries, and is initially contextualized within C. G. Jung’s notion that the inner experiences pave the path towards becoming conscious of one’s psychic process, contributing to self-realization. Jung used the term “personal myth” to suggest that his own personal history of the self-realization of his unconscious was told as a myth, thus indicating a more-than-individual context for meaning. Contextualizing Nin’s early works within the conceptual framework of the Jungian paradigm seems to be an organic starting point, for Nin, though younger, was Jung’s contemporary and shared some similar views. For example, just as Nin understood that “the personal life, deeply lived, takes you beyond the personal,” C. G. Jung assumed that “true art resides in the fact that it has escaped from the limitations of the personal and soared beyond the concerns of the creator” (Jung 71). As a contemporary to Jung, she was also well-engrossed in the budding theories on psychic development, including sexuality, trauma and the life of the artist in the 1920s and 1930s. Importantly, Nin’s emphasis on gender construction in personal myth may parallel the role of male subjectivity in that of Jung’s work. Yet Nin’s work does not contain the same authoritative tone or structure of a grand theory in her work.¹ For it was never Nin’s intention, or style, to be objective. Also, one significant distinction between Jung and Nin lies in the scope of time spent probing the inner-self. Nin’s diaries span from 1914 to 1974, 60 years. This makes Nin’s diaries an important example of the depth and range of self-exploration, perhaps more so than in previous writers. In contrast, Jung’s Red Book, while not structured as a diary, records 15 years of his life, from 1915 to 1930.² Moreover, this book does not seek to simply provide a parallel analysis of Nin’s and Jung’s personal myths; rather, a central question is, what does a close reading of Nin’s work reveal about the epistemological and aesthetic methods that comprise a sense of self of a writer?

About this book

The questions raised in Anaïs Nin: A Myth of Her Own focus on Nin’s mythic structure not only as a mode of inquiry, but as poetics of self-construction. Nin includes the personal, the textual, cultural, political and social in a space for the polyphonic sense of self to be created and re-created. In my study, I consider the expurgated editions of Nin’s diaries, Volumes One through Seven (1931–1974), and Nin’s unexpurgated posthumously published diaries, specifically, The Early Diaries Volume Four (1927–1931) and Incest: From a Journal of Love (1932–1934). Also, by closely reading Nin’s novelettes House of Incest, Winter of Artifice and Seduction of the Minotaur, including the critical perspective of a New Historicist,³ I trace the ways in which Nin, the weaver of myth, created a mythic method of her own.

In Chapter 2, I situate Nin as a late Modernist writer; from a historical perspective, Modernism characterizes the life and literature of Europe and the Americas in the era roughly between 1914 and 1940. I include a feminist approach to Modernism, which demonstrates that regardless of the claims to impersonality and universality, Modernism as defined by the conventional literary canon encrypts a white, male, heterosexual perspective. This book shows how Nin inevitably worked within male myths and plot structures constructed for the Modernist female artist while creating her own voice and method. By considering the diaries as a “playground of subjectivities” where personal myth is tended and a literary text is shaped, we could better understand how aesthetics of self-construction in an imagined private space, and at times performed, is nonetheless made public through the mediation of language. An analysis of Nin’s mythopoetic method should not be equated with a mythologizing of Nin the historical figure. Rather, it is my hope that this mythic paradigm will expand the ontological possibilities from which to value Nin’s literary oeuvre, the cultural milieu in which she wrote, and the embodied woman who created them.

Nin imagined that the female artist has access to two metaphorical worlds at once: the conscious and the unconscious, as “the mermaid with her fish-tail dipped in the unconscious” (2:235–236). Chapter 2 will further analyze the two symbolic worlds Nin references from the perspectives of sky-father and earth-mother consciousness, as first proposed by Baring and Cashford in The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. Sky-father consciousness values logos, and abstract knowledge. In contrast, earth-mother consciousness values myths and relates to “the moral order of the goddess culture, inherited from the Neolithic.” Earth-mother consciousness is “based on the principle of the relationship of the manifest to the unmanifest” (Baring, Cashford 159).

I examine the folktale of Scheherazade from Arabian Nights and the Sumerian myth “Inanna and the God of Wisdom,” and show how these characters rely on their cunning and intelligence through the use of trickery and storytelling, as an example of archetypal characteristics that relate to the myth of the diarist. Chapter 3 demonstrates how fitting this mythic perspective is to understanding deeper meaning of the literary diary. My analysis illustrates that the myth of the trickster/trickstar as an archetypal phenomenon provides a clearer understanding of the polyvocal texture of Nin’s diary, as well as the ways in which the diarist includes an inherent earth-mother consciousness to construct a sense of self.

In 1992 Nin’s unexpurgated diaries, written in 1933–1934, were posthumously published under the title Incest: From a Journal of Love. Chapter 4 will contextualize these diaries within the emerging theories in the field of psychoanalysis, and Nin’s tumultuous relationship with her father. It is within this context that I also analyze Nin’s preoccupation with an incest metaphor in House of Incest, written between 1930 and 1933. The 1920s and 1930s were years between wars ravaging Europe, and paralleling critical decades in which Nin worked on crafting a literary style encompassing resultant paradoxes of terror, beauty, love and destruction. Also, as I offer my conjecture as to Nin’s motivation for the posthumous publications of her diaries, I consider Nin’s own responses to queries involving the editing process of the diaries, as noted in interviews given toward the latter years of her life.

Chapter 5 extends the historical and cultural context established in Chapter 4, by further exploring the intersection of Nin’s diarist and novelist credos. Here I investigate Nin’s creative process, including the incest metaphor, which is initiated in House of Incest, as it transmogrifies from the posthumously published diaries (1933–1934) into the short story Winter of Artifice. I propose that rather than allowing Nin’s posthumously published diaries to be the last word buried in scandal, Incest: From A Journal of Love should be considered within a greater scope of Nin’s creative process, and the historical, cultural and literary time period in which they were written, along with intricacies, which I point to, in the final handling of them.

Chapter 6 evaluates Nin’s novelette Seduction of the Minotaur as Nin’s feminist re-visioning of the ancient minotaur myth. I begin by outlining the literary interests in the minotaur myth prevalent in the backdrop of Nin’s own novel. By making Ariadne the protagonist, who is associated with the mazes and labyrinths in the myth of the minotaur, Nin captures protagonist Lillian’s capacity to embrace her inner landscape as a feminine-embodied and spiritual journey. My analysis shows Nin’s ontological understanding of recovering the embodied feminine psyche to suggest that biological bodies do indeed reflect psychic influence.

Anaïs Nin: A Myth of Her Own concludes by considering a recent example of mankind’s lost sense of reciprocity with nature, as is evidenced in the developing relationship between the industrialization of food and patenting elements of nature. Here I propose that, as we learn to better live on this planet, diary writing has an eco-minded aspect that may contribute to changing human treatment of non-human nature. I demonstrate that Nin’s diaries are a model of exploring the link between language, inner ecologies and self-disclosure, which invites us – often compels us – to take new risks as we reflect on our mythologies. An eco-minded diary can be used as a tool for community building by risking the personal, not merely as an ego-driven effort, but through sensibilities including mythic tropes that link art and life. It is in this way that Nin’s work demonstrates a relationship between myth, life and literature that contrasts with other Modernist mythic methods.

Scholarship and the vector of the literary diary

Anaïs Nin’s diaries unveil the process of constructing self, and highlight the relationship between life, myth and narrative. To better understand Nin’s contributions to diaries as a literary genre, as well as the theoretical framework I’m proposing through which to understand diaries, including the myth of the diarist, it is first necessary to situate the theoretical definitions of autobiography and to understand when and how diaries enter this debate. This literary and historical context reveals both what autobiographical critics have valued, and how they have defined what constitutes self through the mediation of language. While theoretical definitions of autobiography, constructed by white, male critics, exclude the specific mention of diaries, feminist scholars have challenged those early definitions. I am interested in charting this shift. Prior to the 1970s, women’s autobiographical writings were trivialized as a purely confessional mode of writing, not complex enough to warrant literary criticism. The double bind of treating women’s self-life writing as merely confessional, and holding them to different standards than self-life writings authored by male writers, particularly in the genres of autobiography and memoir, persisted well in to the 1990s. It is then necessary to first examine general autobiography scholarship, before proceeding to specific scholarship about the diary as a literary and historical context for my own entry into the construction of Nin’s mythopoesis.

While women have been writing and contributing to the literary canon for decades, in the 1960s and 1970s, theories of autobiographies continued to dismiss, exclude and misidentify women’s self-life writings. An early seminal essay defining autobiographical writing is “A Theory of Autobiography,” published in 1972, by James Olney. According to Olney, autobiography is the place where man sets forth his uniquely creative impulse precisely because autobiography is “an attempt to describe a lifework … a man’s autobiography is thus like a magnifying lens, forcing and intensifying that same peculiar creative vitality that informs all his collected works” (4). Olney argues that the meaning-making process, for each autobiographical writer, is exclusive to his selected metaphors. That is, it is only through metaphors that meaning is constructed. He defines metaphor as “something known and of our making, or at least of our choosing, that we put to stand for, and so to help us understand, something unknown and not of our making” (30). The importance of Olney’s contribution to the definition of autobiography is that he posits that metaphor is essentially a way of knowing. By revealing the process in which the psyche realizes itself through metaphor, Olney is also suggesting the link between myth and autobiography, for myth is also a way for the psyche to experience the self metaphorically. Also, the autobiographer, as is true for the diarist, will use the myths central to their being in order to further depict the uniqueness of their subject position.

In a later essay dated 1980, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical and Bibliographical Introduction,” Olney argues that “the act of autobiography is at once a discovery, a creation, and an imitation of the self” (4). Olney raises questions about identity, creation (as through fiction), and myth in autobiography. He reveals the possibility of broadening the definition of autobiography to include “creation,” “discovery” and fiction. Yet in this essay, he excludes the possibility of other forms of autobiography, such as the diary.

In his essay “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography” (published in 1980, originally dated 1956), George Gusdorf posits that the goal of the autobiographer is to reach a conscious understanding of himself. He understands an autobiography as “one of the means to self-knowledge, thanks to the fact that it recomposes and interprets a life in its totality” (38). The notion that an autobiography can hold the totality of a life story does not take into account one of the most fascinating qualities of self-life writing: the ability to which “totality” and “self” might coincide neither in consciousness nor in language. Gusdorf’s definition also does not encompass the forms of self-life writing that include the creative unconscious, and those that are not intended to create a cohesive sense of self over time. Gusdorf adds, “each of us tends to think of himself as the center of a living space” (29). The emphasis is thus placed on the “I” as a singularity of importance, for according to Gusdorf, “he is not engaged in an objective and disinterested pursuit but in a work of personal justification” (39). Gusdorf’s constricting definition of self-life writing raises issues of self-construction and res...