Nin not only employed the same techniques of self-promotion as many of her contemporaries but also used modernism itself to create her image and further her career. Her published Diary is full of stories and anecdotes about famous modernists, and Nin presents herself as a writer who takes to heart the modernist motto “Make it new.”
THE IGNORED GENRE OF THE DIARY
Despite the fact that women kept diaries for many centuries—as Margo Culley and Harriet Blodgett make evident in their studies of, respectively, American and English women diarists—serious critical interest in their output did not emerge until the 1980s. In a way, women diarists were doubly excluded—by virtue of their gender and by virtue of the genre they practiced. Laura Marcus explains, “Not only were women autobiographers self-evidently outside the ‘Great Men’ tradition with which many autobiographical critics operated; generic definitions served to exclude forms of ‘life writing’ such as diaries, letters and journals, often adopted by women and those outside mainstream literary culture.”21
The omission of women and forms of daily inscription was arguably due to historical developments in autobiography criticism. Sidonie Smith, a noted life-writing scholar, divides the history of autobiography studies into three waves. She explains that the first theorists of autobiography were influenced by Georg Misch’s multivolume A History of Autobiography in Antiquity (1907), translated into English in 1951. Misch regarded important public personae—reputed leaders and famous personages—as “the ‘representative’ and appropriate subjects of what he designates as autobiography.” As a result, by the 1960s certain autobiographical texts—such as the confessions of St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography—achieved canonical status and became subjects of scholarly debates. And although Misch helped establish autobiography as a valid subject of study, his aid in shaping the canon of great autobiographical works came at a price. His focus on the representative value of autobiography and on prominent individuals meant leaving out other forms of life narratives (such as diaries, journals, and letters) and people who did not achieve the status of eminent individuals (such as women, slaves, and the colonized).22
Misch along with other first-wave critics treated autobiographical narratives as a verifiable record that reflected the writer’s life more or less successfully, and they did not question the relationship between the author, the narrator, and the narrated I. This relationship between the life lived and the narrated one was problematized by the second-wave critics, represented by Georges Gusdorf and Francis R. Hart. They suggested that autobiographical narratives are acts of creation rather than straightforward records of past events, thus elevating autobiographies to the status of literary genre. But just like the first-wave scholars, they were mainly preoccupied with the lives of great people.23
Early feminist critics of literary autobiography concentrated on the absence of women writers from the canon by recovering autobiographies of distinguished women. They too, however, frequently ignored other forms of life narratives. It was only the critics of the third wave of autobiography criticism, informed by postmodern and postcolonial theories, who challenged Misch’s identification of autobiography with greatness and individuality, and these critics broadened the range of autobiographical texts by including forms of writing that had been considered trivial and marginal and by focusing on stories of “common” people.24
In the 1980s, studies devoted solely to diaries started to emerge. For instance, Margo Culley’s A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present was published in 1985, and it was followed three years later by Harriet Blodgett’s Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries. Diaries were also given a proper critical consideration, and theorists began demonstrating a great diversity of diary forms and structures as well as the multitude of roles that diaries serve for their authors. In their edited volume entitled Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, published in 1996, Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff thus comment on the change of status of the diary in academic circles:
Within the academy, the diary has historically been considered primarily as a document to be mined for information about the writer’s life and times or as a means of fleshing out historical accounts; now, however, the diary is recognized by scholars as a far richer lode. Its status as a research tool for historians, a therapeutic instrument for psychologists, a repository of information about social structures and relationships for sociologists, and a form of literature and composition for rhetoricians and literary scholars makes the diary a logical choice for interdisciplinary study and a prime exemplar for interrogating the future direction of academe.25
Most studies devoted to the diary genre tend to assert that the diary, like any other autobiographical narrative, is not an uncomplicated record of reality but a construction of it. However, this tendency to view diaries as constructs, so prominent in academe, is not necessarily reflected in the outside world. Many readers take the veracity of diaries for granted and choose to believe that diaries are truthful reflections of a person’s daily existence and that they capture the essence of their creator. Diaries are commonly regarded as the most private and honest of autobiographical writings, written for personal purposes rather than publication. Even some scholars perpetuate this common misconception. For instance, the prominent feminist and literary critic Elaine Showalter in her book A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx states that she decided to omit diaries, together with letters, journals, recipes, and wills, from her discussion because her objective was to focus on women who had written for publication.26
Despite its title, The Diary of Anaïs Nin does not conform in many respects to its generic standards—for example, the entries are very elaborate and only roughly dated—which led many critics to wonder how best to characterize Nin’s endeavor. The need to define the published journal was especially pressing among its early critics, who either were denied access to the original or were allowed, like Sharon Spencer, a limited and private viewing. Subsequent critics, who had access to Nin’s archive, gave up attempts to provide Nin’s published Diary with an appropriate label. They focused instead on the complexity of her oeuvre as a whole.
In the early stages, the Diary was frequently classified as a hybrid form somewhere between autobiography and fiction. For example, in her study of Nin’s works, Collage of Dreams: The Writings of Anaïs Nin, Sharon Spencer acknowledges that parts of Nin’s Diary were rewritten and edited, and she maintains that the Diary “is neither a diary in the usual sense—a candid, uncensored record of the events of a life—nor is it a work of fiction like the frankly autobiographical ‘novels’ of writers like Leiris, Celine, or Henry Miller.” From Spencer’s account emerges a common view of the diary as a truthful and unedited record, a concept that has since been challenged by many diary critics.27
Benjamin Franklin V and Duane Schneider in their Anaïs Nin: An Introduction propose to distinguish between the original diary and the published version although they never had access to the former. They encourage readers to bear in mind the three following points when reading the Diary: “(1) editorial responsibilities in creating the Diary, and the implications of these responsibilities; (2) the question of genre, that is, to what extent is the Diary ‘pure notebook or journal’ and to what extent has it been consciously structured, rearranged; and (3) the function of time, composition, and organization upon the finished product.” Consequently, they point to the contributions of Gunther Stuhlmann in the editing of it; they ponder how the thirty-year gap between the actual writing of the diary and its editing might have influenced its form and content; and they propose to regard Nin’s Diary as “a new and created work of art,” “a piece of literature.”28
For another Nin critic, Nancy Scholar, Nin’s work is “part autobiography, part journal”—a view that echoes Lynn Bloom and Orlee Holder’s claim that Nin’s Diary is “a hybrid form, alternately functioning as diary, writer’s notebook, and autobiography.” This tendency to regard Nin’s Diary as a form of autobiography or a work of art, also