I like her alright...
but overrated, right?
I mean, if she wasn't an attractive woman writing a lot about sex, would anyone have noticed her for her style?
Sex is an easy sell, even in literature. It is harder to garner attention and admiration when you are writing about stuff like morality, ethics. Give me Flannery O'Connor over Anais Nin anyday.
Theresa, Michael, random people from Malaysia. Please weigh in on this.
I didn't know who this woman was pre-Wikipedia lookup.
ReplyDeleteAll I've gathered from a cursory glance is that she was a diarist for far too long, and that she was baller at erotic literature.
But who gives a shit about erotic literature? A subset of the same group that buys into the mass market paperback legion of New York Times Bestsellers by the venerable Koontz, King, Steel, Crichton (R.I.P.), etc. I'm being awful dismissive, but I can't help it. Erotic lit? I mean, sex has played a big role in the expansion of theme in the Western Canon, but eroticism is a tricky game to play. Was she terribly "literary"? That's a real question, by the way--do answer :).
Also, even though I don't necessarily adore Flannery O'Connor, her method of presenting clashes of moral realities is always hard-hitting, and effectively so.
Ultimately, my ignorance of Anais Nin is vast and that won't change. I'm terribly uninterested. But, to "weigh in" on your statement that sex is an easy sell--well, ultimately, no weighing in is necessary. It is easy--easy to do, easy to relate to, easy to read. For a good chunk of her life, television didn't take as much time out of our lives as it does now, and neither television or film had superseded the imagist capabilities of traditionally printed literature. That, coupled with the post-1934 Production Code (which eventually lead to the creation of the craziness that is the MPAA), probably contributed to the appeal of not just sexual literature, but sexual literature from a fresh point-of-view. Easy. So easy.
Now, we have an interesting mutation of this drive toward sexual literature: in the U.S., it's been a tradition that expressions of sexuality onscreen are worse than expressions of violence (for God smote far more things than he had sex with, biblically speaking). So, we have porn and premium cable to fight off this problem. There is also literature: whether high- or low-brow, it seems that books have been a good place to stick dicks and twats in. Compounding this, (in my leaping opinion) is the fact that people DON'T REALLY WANT TO READ. We've got TV adaptations, cinematic adaptations, videogames, audiobooks, etc. Who the fuck NEEDS a book? Well, if it's got sex, any sort of explicit sex, then it's probably an EASY read, right? I can read it relatively quickly while on a subway ride (given that most readers, assuming people are the busy sort, probably slip their reads in during a commute), right? Maybe get it in a half-hour before bed, and hopefully I'll have slaughtered half the book. I'll give it to those MMP writers: they flow. They flow in the most lacking-in-style way, but dammit, they flow.
So. I say this, without knowing shit about this Ms. Nin. I feel like Bill O'Reilly.
She was capable of a good line or two. I enjoyed Henry and June which had the occasional sentence that jumped off the page. But a lot of the appeal was the mythology that surrounds Anais Nin and Henry Miller. So I think you’re right Nin is somewhat overrated.
ReplyDeleteOf her novels, I’ve only read A spy in the house of Love which was not particularly interesting and despite being about an adulterous women was decidedly unerotic (the line“the joyous implement of a woman on man’s sensual mast” stuck in my mind on that account).