4.

Anaïs Nin and contemporaneity

By Dahlia Berg

In 1988, a major book appeared in the United States: “The courage to heal, a guide for women
survivors of child sexual abuse”. This pragmatic book written by women who had suffered
incest reported the investigation and testimonies of hundreds of women and was based on
scientific research. Its symbolic importance was immense, not only because it questioned a
basic Freudian tenet1 but also because of its anti-patriarchal or even feminist viewpoint.

Although the biography of Anaïs Nin by Deirdre Bair dates from 1994, it smells strongly of
Freud´s suggestion that the woman is necessarily seductive (especially vis-à-vis her
psychoanalysts) and therefore necessarily guilty. Deirdre Bair declares in her preface she
deliberately ignored “the scholar who disrupted a lecture to insist that I apply a litany of
clinical and pathological terms to Anaïs Nin’s personality” and also: “As a biographer in the
postmodern age, I still believe in trying to capture what others may consider anachronistic
concept – the impugned, much disputed concept of objectivity.”

Yet the French philosopher Alain once said that any description which claims to be neutral is
actually a plea in favour of the status quo. Paradoxically, however, in her own anachronism,
Deirdre Bair remains faithful to Anaïs Nin.

Is is certainly difficult to measure Anaïs´s “asynchronism” without taking into accout its
spatial dimension: by 1925, she had already experienced two relocations, both violent (at the
age of 11 from Europe to the United States, then, aged 21, from New York to Paris). In 1925,
there was a deep gap between the continents: art movements, theories and thought bends were
more developed in Europe, particularly in Paris. Her biography also shows very clearly how
this “advance” shifted during World War II, with the accompanying exodus of the majority of
European artists and intellectuals.

1
Freud identified early in his career childhood sexual abuse as a cause of mental and emotional illness in adults.
By listening to his patients he learned that many of the men and women he treated had been sexually
traumatized. When he explained his findings to his colleagues, Freud was criticized and ridiculed and quickly
backtracked by proposing the theory that his patients had fantasized about or desired sex. Ferenczi, who later
bravely explored the traumatic consequences of incest, was ostracized by the psychoanalytic community.

1
Upon her arrival in Paris in 1925, Anaïs Nin and her husband were soon accepted by the
international business community, but Anaïs did not submit happily to fashion: “I have not
cut my hair, I have never worn pearls, we don’t drink cocktails, we don’t like the radio, we
have not ridden an aeroplane, we have no ultramodern furniture in our house.”

Later, in 1937, even though she hangs out with the surrealists, she is not close to them and
does not artistically blossom in their circle: “Nothing to say about Breton – no music, no
spark in him. He is just a HEAD.” And in 1939: “I never took surrealism seriously. Today,
Henry [Miller] and others are beginning to see what is wrong with it. Breton´s visit was the
final confirmation I needed. Breton´s attitude towards music, his hatred of it, his deafness,
undoubtedly betrays him as an intellectual ´manufacturer´, a laboratory clerk.”

Anachronism, culture, sensitivity, or gender difference?

Certainly Anaïs Nin wanted to do in 1940 what others did in 1960-70 (especially Fluxus), that
is to say conceive of live as if it were a dream or as a total art form. “Often great works of art
are prophetic, ahead of their time, written for the future. True creation always is”, she wrote.
Yet, even though Anaïs was aware of this, it does not prevent her visceral pain in not being
recognized, and this incomprehension weighs heavily on her identity and her artistic
development.

In the same way that she could not commit to surrealism, so Anaïs Nin also remained
detached from feminism. Indeed she created a form of “post-feminist” thought which does
not call for equality between the genders, but for the respectful enhancement of the value of
the differences between them, in a utopian, egalitarian society.

This time warp (sociological and artistic) cannot be dissociated from the spatial gap. For
Anaïs Nin, the two are intimately linked, as shown in this paragraph: “I felt born on the rim of
an eternally elusive world...abandoned by those who are talking and laughing, as if they had
left me out, whereas it is I who get cut off by my own nature and separateness.” The writer
James Leo Herlihy perfectly expresses this: “It was as if there was a wonderful party going
on, and Anaïs was invited, but she went to sit outside on the fire escape because she could not

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enjoy it. She wanted the party to be for her, she wanted really to be the party. Nothing else
would do.”

An interesting perspective could connect this spatial-temporal gap to a fundamental element

of Anaïs Nin´s personality, the trauma of incest. This causes both a structural sense of not
belonging to humanity and a break in time. “Incest breaks the lapse of time”, the French
psychiatrist and sexologist Philippe Brenot wrote in 1994.

Anaïs Nin replies in 1939: “I do not belong to my time. Those who, like me, remember the
past and also live in the future – beyond any notion of class, race or time – can sometimes
meet the world at some points, but they are not part of it.”