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Anaïs Nin and fiction

By Dahlia Berg

All her life, the author Anaïs Nin struggled with two apparently irreconcilable aspirations:
her diary and fiction.

The journal was what she felt inside herself as her most authentic writing. In the ´50s she said:
“No more novels. I was given enough time to write, god knows, more than anyone else, and I
failed at it! I think what I should do is devote the rest of my time preparing the diaries for
publication.” When part of her diary was published towards the end of her life, the immense
impact it made shows that Anaïs’s intuition was correct – (doesn’t each author know in his
heart when he has achieved his own artistic truth, whether or not society is yet ready for it?)

Anaïs’s struggle with fiction was a constant war that spoiled the pleasure of writing and
hampered her talent: the style is certainly beautiful, chiseled, but the construction is weak, the
characters - except the central female ones – are inconsistent. And there is, as Anaïs Nin
herself admits, a tendency to “lecture” which makes the text heavy.

There are certainly several reasons for this fiction block. She tried to overcome it through her
subsequent psychoanalysts, but as she was both intellectually and emotionally stronger than
they (René Allendy and Otto Rank), they failed in this task and beached in her bed.

What interested Anaïs Nin foremost was reality. Reality certainly embellished, transformed,
staged, but reality nonetheless. The diary has a different function for Anaïs Nin than for
Virginia Woolf.

But we cannot mention Anaïs Nin´s journal versus her fiction dilemma without first noting
that:

1. Anaïs Nin's life surpassed, by a long way, most fiction.

2. Her reality was built around what she called the “vital lie” and what others called the
“Nin-lie” (because the tradition of lying began with her father).

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However, isn’t all fiction a socially acceptable lie contained within a well-restricted
framework and form, literature? (We may also say that the socially acceptable lie expanded
into 1917 to the world of visual arts when the ready made of Duchamp became the foundation
of contemporary art.)

Her mother was the first to speak of the “Nin-lie” in connection with Anaïs’s father. His lies
were intended to conceal his infidelity and, above all, to maintain a socially acceptable image
as a parent, even though he had abandoned his family with no resources whatsoever. But his
biggest lie, the “original lie” that he transmitted to Anaïs, a lie which she made her own for
the rest of her days and which influenced both her life and her writing, is the one concerning
incest. When reconstructing her memories much later, at the age of 47, Anaïs recalls with
great guilt (shame-tinged pleasure) and a deep ambivalence (to be compared with her
bigamy?) the spankings her father gave her until she reached the age of eleven. The blows are
mixed with what Anaïs calls “fondles” but the clinical name is digital penetration and the
legal name rape. “I would do anything to keep him from lifting my dress and beating me,”
wrote Anaïs at 17.

The psychological mechanism by which the child represses the trauma in a well protected part
of his/her unconscious is a veritable “Pandora's box”. The fact that the child continues to build
psychologically “around” it is by now well-known: it is called “denial” or “dissociation” and
it is accompanied within the structural life and personality of the child by a profound feeling
of falsehood. Developed by the father in order to maintain the appearance of a normal family
(one that is not primitive in the sense of pre-civilized, or monstrous, an adjective which is
moreover often applied to Anaïs) does this lying not constitute a particularly violent fiction
imposed upon to the child?

Anaïs´s writing (the diary began when she was 11, the age of her separation from her father)
tries to retrieve a truth irremediably lost, like the lost paradise of Adam and Eve. Anaïs, under
prevalent social pressure, takes on the guilt of her father; unconsciously assuming the burden
of the monstrousness of the father to protect a patriarchal society threatened with collapse by
the incest. It is no coincidence that her first published book, a “poem”, bears as title “The
House of Incest”.

So, if that particular truth is unacceptable in the eyes of society, Anaïs will at least try to find
her own inner truth to surround her Pandora's box; and this long before all the research into

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the traumatic consequences of incest was made public. “Truth and reality are the basis for
everything I write. Reality deserves to be described in the vilest terms.”

Is it a coincidence that the writers who have experienced incest (Anaïs Nin, Virginia Woolf)
are precisely the ones who have most questioned and revolutionized fiction?

For fiction suggests family fiction, or the Nin-lie, the one which odiously imposes silence,
loneliness and guilt upon the child.

Anaïs Nin writes in “The House of Incest”: “What is it allotted me to say? Only the truth
disguised in a fairytale. [...] I'm wrapped in lies which do not penetrate my soul, as if the lies
I tell were like costumes. LIES CREATE SOLITUDE.”

In her case, writing and artistic creation are an attempt to recreate the self – a self destroyed
by incest.