Recent Nin Criticism: Who’s on First?

Recent NinCriticism: Who's on First? Rose MarieCutting. Anais Nin: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, [1978J.218+xxvipp. Ben1amin Franklin V and Duane Schneider. Anais Nin:An Introduction. Athens: Ohio Umversity Press, 1979.309pp. Bettina L. Knapp. Anais Nin. NewYork: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc., 1978. 168 +viiipp. Sharon Spencer. Collage of Dreams: The Writings of Anais Nin. Expanded Edition. New York:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. 213 +ixpp. Evelyn]. Hinz "Whyshould we too not enjoy an original relationship to the universe," askedRalph Waldo Emerson, articulating that desire to be first, that selfreliance , which is perhaps the definitive characteristic of the American psyche.AnaYsNin too was a champion of the self and the avantgarde, and that she should have achieved fame in America is therefore not ultimately surprising. What Nin also came to understand, however, is the extent to whicha rebellious commitment to the new is symptomatic of the adolescent mentality: "At twenty we all created our ownmanifestos. Wewere eager to be innovators. But the more culture we have, the more we know that everything hasroots in the past." 1 That, in the early part ofher career, she and America wereat odds can in turn be traced to a kind of immature arrogance on both sides,with Nin complaining that Americans could not appreciate her work because she was too far ahead of the times and American critics and publishersrejecting her work on the grounds that her values were those of the oldworld and not sufficiently in tune with contemporary American realities. Taken collectively, one major value of three of the books under review here lies in the way in which they serve to place Nin in a context whereby both the generation gap and the intercultural gap are bridged. Thus in Anais NinBettina Knapp observes the similarities between Nin's world view and those of Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Einstein, Jakob Boehme, Isaac Luria and Henri Bergson. Benjamin Franklin V and Duane Schneider Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 13, Number 3, Winter 1982 374 Evelyn]. Hinz draw repeated analogies between Nin's concerns and those of Emerson Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, Thomas Wolfe and the major British romantics'. Sharon Spencer focuses largely upon Nin's French connections, particularly the Symbolists and Proust, while she also bridges the gap between the arts byillustrating the relationship betw~en Nin'stechniques and those ofModernist painters and musicians. If the effect of these comparisons is to make Nin seem less revolutionary than she might at first appear, however, the very need to have recourse to analogues also paradoxically suggests that her work has an unprecedented dimension, since what is involved here isthat one can talk about the unknown only in terms of the known. Or to put it another way, once an author's works have been made available, they can be-and usually are-treated autonomously : criticism moves away from the more historical or comparativist approaches in the direction of a variety of New Criticism. But with thisobservation one also comes to a way in which the recourse to analogies in two of these books on Nin may also be indicative of an ignorance of where she actually stands today and reflective of the adolescent component of the American desire to be first. Benjamin Franklin V and Duane Schneider, for example, title their 1979 study Anais Nin: An Introduction, and the opening words of their "Preface" are: "Anai:sNin's fiction is among the most neglected substantial literature of the century." Similarly, in the "Preface" to the expanded edition of her study, Sharon Spencer explains that her "attraction to this remarkable yet neglected body of work led me to write Collage of Dreams, which was published in December 1977 .... " Considerably before Spencer published even the first edition of Collage, however, two critical books on Nin were extant.2 Also, as early as 1970,the Anai:sNin newsletter, Under the Signof Pisces, had been founded; in 1973,the Anais Nin Reader (which includes introductory commentary) was published; and in 1975,A Casebook on Anais Nin appeared in print. Compounding the questionability of Franklin's and Schneider's 1979claims, in turn, is all this criticism plus Spencer's first edition of Collage. In...