Writing an Icon. Anita Jarczok

Aaron Jaffe aptly illustrates in his study Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity, modernist authors controlled the marketplace by promoting only certain authors and establishing a well-regulated economy of scarcity and originality—“an economy in which a sparse selection of literary names of the past becomes a means of conferring value on select modern works-of-art.” They were involved in establishing standards of what should count as literary and valuable. The creators of this promotional system—predominantly male writers—need to be held responsible, at least partially, for Nin’s failed career in the modernist marketplace. The gender bias of the modernist milieu is well illustrated by Jaffe, who, in comparing the status of men writers with the status of women authors, asserts that “the literary reputations of women modernists were poorly served by the restrictive promotional system . . . for which men like Eliot, Pound, Marsh, et al. served as gatekeepers.” Later, the process of selection and canonization of modernist works was taken over by scholars. New Critics, who exerted an incredible influence on academia from the 1940s on, played a significant role in establishing the modernist canon, from which they excluded many women writers.¹⁴

      Despite the fact that it was not the culture of modernism that put Nin on the literary map, she was greatly interested in and deeply influenced by the modernist movement. When she arrived in Paris in late 1924, the spirit of modernism had already taken hold. Always an avid reader, Nin gradually immersed herself in modernist literature. Her Diary serves as an invaluable record of her changing attitude toward contemporary writers. For instance, Nin was initially unimpressed with Marcel Proust, noting in October 1926 that she hoped “not to read [his works] again.” Two years later, however, Proust constantly occupied her thoughts. In one entry she recorded, “I have so much sympathy for Proust and so much admiration. What intellectual energy, patience, and lucidity.” Apart from Proust, Nin also read and commented in her diary on Sherwood Anderson, Ford Maddox Ford, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, and Katherine Mansfield.¹⁵

      She also kept up with the latest literary developments by reading the Parisian literary journal transition—which Mark S. Morrisson deemed “the most famous of all American expatriate modernist magazines.”¹⁶ Founded in 1927 by Eugene Jolas and his wife, Maria McDonald, it ran until 1938 and enabled the circulation of experimental literature and the exchange of modernist ideas. Nin devoted a few of her diary entries to transition, making note of its huge significance to her. On November 1930, she observed, “Reading the last number of transition has been tremendous for me. I read all these things after I have done my work and then find an affinity with modernism which elates me” (ED 4, 359). A month later, she described the magazine as “the island I had been steadily sailing to—dreaming of—but I was not so very certain of its existence. I thought I would have to build it up alone. No. Here is my group, my ideas, my feelings against banal forms” (ED 4, 370). Nin felt that she had much in common with modernist expression.

      Many Nin critics have noted this affinity and tried to restore Nin’s place alongside modernists. The first one to do so, albeit to a limited extent and rather unintentionally, was Suzanne Nalbantian. Her Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin is admittedly interested in the analysis of the transformation of life into art rather than the exploration of the modernist movement and Nin’s place in it; nonetheless, it does link Nin with the big names of modernism.

      In 1998, another study was published, this one more firmly dedicated to the exploration of Nin’s place within the modernist framework. Anaïs Nin and the Remaking of Self: Gender, Modernism, and Narrative Identity, by Diane Richard-Allerdyce, aims to prove that “Nin is an important Modernist writer, deserving recognition within the literary canon.” Helen Tookey’s monograph sets a similar goal: “[T]o reassert Nin’s place within the feminist-modernist nexus, to show that there are clear links between Nin’s works and that of other, now ‘canonical,’ women modernists.” Both studies succeed in achieving their aims, although each one in different way and with a different purpose. Richard-Allerdyce focuses mainly on “Nin’s affinities with a psychoanalytically informed Modernism” to examine the ways in which Nin used the creative process to work through traumatic experiences. Helen Tookey, in turn, analyzes Nin’s writings within the broader cultural context of modernism. She points out how certain social trends and cultural developments characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century influenced Nin’s aesthetics. For that reason, her study is more useful here.¹⁷

      Tookey undertakes the analysis of Nin’s relationship with modernism in four case studies. In the first one, she discusses Nin’s fascination with transition and shows that the aesthetic agenda of the magazine has many parallels with Nin’s own concept of an ideal poetic language. Tookey then moves on to Nin’s preoccupation with dreams and the unconscious—realms significant for both Freud and some surrealists such as André Breton—thus indicating another point of convergence between Nin and her modernist contemporaries. In the third case study, Tookey tackles two issues: Nin’s attempts, inspired by D. H. Lawrence, to create a sensory language; and her efforts, in line with modernist experiments, to fuse different art forms. In her final case study, Tookey investigates Nin’s fascination with film by drawing parallels between Nin and other modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who also regarded this medium as offering enormous potential for a literary expression. All in all, from Tookey’s analysis Nin emerges as a writer who not only was conversant with modernist ideas but also actively shaped the discourse of modernism.

      Another study that contributes greatly to resituating Nin in the modernist period is Elizabeth Podnieks’s Daily Modernism. In a chapter devoted to Nin, Podnieks, like Tookey, mentions modernist figures (Proust, Lawrence, Freud) and phenomena that influenced Nin’s views and writings. Podnieks, however, does more than that. She proposes to regard the diary as a genre as “a classic modernist text” that allowed women writers to define themselves and argues that modernism “had to mean more for women than for men, because in ‘making it new,’ women were being innovative in terms not only of how they wrote but of how they lived and conceived themselves.”¹⁸

      My own interest in Nin in relation to modernism is quite specific and informed by recent studies that discuss modernism in terms of the marketplace and celebrity culture. A traditional view of modernism, as many scholars point out, understands it as resistant to economic pressures and the commodification of art. In the introduction to their collection of essays, Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt note that “critical accounts of modernism and modernist writing frequently excavate, or are theorized across, a chasm or ‘great divide’ between modernism . . . and the larger marketplace.” The “great divide” they reference here alludes to the concept developed by Andreas Huyssen in his highly influential study After the Great Divide, in which he famously declares that “modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture.”¹⁹

      Dettmar and Watt, together with numerous other scholars, do not agree with this oppositional model of high versus mass culture. Instead, they show how modernist writers were implicated in popular culture and explain why modernists and their supporters endeavored to maintain the illusion of this division and their own indifference, or even antagonism, toward mass culture and the market. They claim that “modernist writers and many of their first-generation proponents in the academy wanted for us not to think too deeply about their work in light of marketing and market concerns. For such an interrogation would tend to contradict notions of the aesthetic purity of the modernist artifact.”²⁰

      As could be expected, such an interrogation is carried out by contributors to Dettmar and Watt’s volume Marketing Modernisms, who, along with a steadily increasing number of scholars, examine the complexities and ambiguities of the modernist encounters with the marketplace and claim that the apparent disregard for mass culture was in fact just another marketing strategy. Dettmar and Watt provide a broad definition of marketing—one that encompasses both material and intellectual production. In an attempt to reveal marketing tactics, contributors to Dettmar and Watt’s volume identify several strategies that modernists employed to market and disseminate their writings, such as the establishment of small presses, the publication