Writing an Icon. Anita Jarczok
celebrity author is the one who is both commercially successful and capable of remaining a cultural authority, in other words, able to maintain a balance between being an artist and being a star. Nin, as will become evident in the course of this book, managed to maintain such an equilibrium. Her self-presentation as an extraordinary artist, as exhibited in her Diary, was later softened by Nin herself in interviews and lectures during which she presented herself as “one of us”—a ploy frequently used by stars to suggest intimacy with their audiences. Nin’s presentation of herself as an Everywoman was essential to her public persona at a time when women were searching for role models.5
Regarded from this perspective, Nin’s self-presentations in the Diary become a significant component of her celebrity. Arguing that literary celebrities are partly produced through their own writings and their self-marketing strategies, Moran highlights the complicity of authors in constructing their own image. A central argument of his study is that “authors actively negotiate their own celebrity rather than having it simply imposed on them.” Nin was an active agent in creating and distributing her image, and she can be regarded as a powerful formation force in the production/consumption dialectic, which, as many cultural critics (such as Richard Dyer and P. David Marshall) indicate, is typical of celebrity development.6
Nin’s self-constructions on the pages of her Diary are, however, just one aspect of the making of her public persona. A “star’s image,” as eminent film studies scholar Richard Dyer notes, “is also what people say or write about him or her, the way the image is used in other contexts such as advertisements, novels, pop songs, and finally the way the star can become part of the coinage of everyday life.” The coproducing role of readers/viewers in creating the celebrity image is therefore paramount. P. David Marshall, the editor of The Celebrity Culture Reader and author of many articles on media and cultural studies, explains it thus: “To make sense of celebrity culture inevitably leads us to a study of how an extended industry helps construct the celebrity as a text—what we could call the cultural economy of celebrity production—as well as how audiences transform, reform, and remake these texts and meanings.”7
In his seminal study, Stars, Dyer puts texts that constitute a star image into four categories: promotion, publicity, films, and criticism and commentaries. These categories can be easily adapted to discuss Nin’s celebrity. Films that feature a given star correspond in a way to Nin’s Diary because, as I have already indicated, it contains a carefully constructed character. Dyer’s “commentary and criticism” can be taken to correspond to evaluations of Nin’s works by scholars. “Promotion,” Dyer remarks, “is probably the most straightforward of all the texts which construct a star image, in that it is the most deliberate, direct, intentioned, and self-conscious.” In the case of film stars, promotion involves studio announcements, fashion pictures, ads, and public appearances. In the case of Nin, it entails blurbs, advertisements of books in the press, and book-signing tours. Publicity, as Dyer observes, is not, or at least does not appear to be, deliberate image making, and it includes interviews, gossip columns, and articles—in brief, “what the press finds out.” Focusing on literary celebrity, Moran reveals, however, that nowadays many of the marketing strategies that fall under the category of publicity (such as reviews, cover stories, and interviews) are in fact carefully managed by publishing houses, which can go as far as securing a book review or prearranging an interview with the author.8
Nin is not only a literary celebrity but also a female literary celebrity, and gender, as many critics point out, is an essential factor that determines how a writer is represented in the marketplace. Although academia for some time now has attempted to conceptualize gender not in terms of two opposite binaries but rather in terms of fluid and unstable identities, in popular consciousness the woman/man dichotomy is still very ingrained and was even more so back in the 1960s. The fact that Nin is a woman writer is crucial to the way she has been portrayed and received.
Charlotte Templin in her study of Erica Jong, Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation: The Example of Erica Jong, provides a historical overview of the response to literary works authored by women writers and demonstrates that the assessment of women’s writings in terms of their lives has been a common practice. Following Joanna Russ’s argument that women writers, especially in the nineteenth century, were judged on the basis of what is appropriate for a woman, Templin asserts, “Jong’s sin is not being a proper woman,” and she further explains, “The one period during which criticism of her softened was when she became a mother, which happened during the writing of her novel, Fanny. Not only was Fanny well-received, but journalistic articles about her at this time portrayed a new Jong: the happy mother and suburban matron.” Motherhood is a particularly crucial element in portraying and judging women writers, and Nin is no exception. The harsh criticism of her abortion, discussed in chapter 4, proves the case.9
Toril Moi is another critic who regards gender as a significant variable that determines the response to a writer’s works. In the part of her study Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman devoted to an analysis of Simone de Beauvoir’s reception, Moi shows that Beauvoir’s status as an intellectual woman involved in politics has provoked much hostility from the reviewers. Moi claims that what a woman writer thinks, says, or writes becomes of secondary importance and that she is frequently reduced to a personality, to who she is. A similar phenomenon is apparent in the case of Nin. Although Nin and Beauvoir stand for extremely different types of femininity—while Beauvoir is frequently accused of being “unfeminine,” Nin is often regarded as the essence of femininity—they are both regularly discussed in terms of their looks, characters, and lives. Moi also points to another interesting fact, namely, that Beauvoir’s multivolume autobiography has been frequently regarded as evidence of relentless narcissism, which, Moi argues, is not the case in reviews of male autobiographies. Accusations of self-absorption have also been made against Nin and her Diaries.10
Likewise, Brenda Silver in her examination of Virginia Woolf’s iconic status makes gender one of the focal points of her analysis. She emphasizes the role of the women’s movement in the canonization of Woolf and indicates that discussions on Woolf often become a pretext to articulate “fear of feminization” or “fear of feminism.” The response to Nin and her Diaries similarly serves as a departure point for cultural debates about femininity and, to a lesser extent, feminism.11
NIN AND THE MODERNIST MARKETPLACE
The position of Nin as a modernist writer is still very precarious. In her 2003 monograph, Helen Tookey points out that Nin has been largely overlooked in modernist scholarship. She demonstrates that Nin’s name appears in general outlines of the period but that Nin’s works are rarely subject to in-depth examinations.12 Although some of the studies devoted to Nin consider her place in modernism, a review of scholarly books published after 2003 that specialize in comprehensive introductions to the modernist period confirms Tookey’s observation and indicates that Nin is still obstinately disregarded by those critics who examine modernism in general.
It might be tempting to think of Nin’s failure in the modernist marketplace in terms of some inherent qualities of her books, to regard her writing as not sufficiently modernist or, worse, not good enough, but neither is the case. As for the first potential charge, two arguments can be brought to dismiss it. First of all, Nin’s works, as many of her critics have demonstrated, are very much in line with certain modernist ideals. Second, in recent years there have been numerous attempts to broaden the traditional modernist canon. As Kevin Dettmar explains, “[M]odernism was never really just one thing, never really unified,” and as a result we tend to talk about modernisms rather than Modernism.13 We may refute the second charge with the commonly agreed-upon idea that (broadly understood) culture influences our tastes and establishes literary values that determine what is deemed good or bad. In other words, what is regarded as good or bad literature is culturally bound, serves specific purposes and audiences, and can change with time.
This is, however, a contemporary, postmodern view of literary value—a result of critical dismantling of traditional modes of thought, modes that, in many instances, were established