Anais Nin Essays - House Of Incest, Anas Nin, Free Essays

Anais Nin Essays - House Of Incest, Anas Nin, Free Essays Anais Nin Anais Nin was a passionate woman, not only in her works but also in her life. The fact that she lived life to the fullest is what made her books so intriguing. Although her diaries were a chronicle of her experience, her fiction showed the reader sides of her while displaying everyone's innermost desires. In her own words Nin says, "the role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say" (Rollins), and she does exactly that. For this reason her works take one on a journey through one's soul and allows the pondering which may never have been considered. This feeling of self discovery is quite powerful and erotic; the enpowerment supplies a feeling of utter enjoyment. This is why Anais Nin's books are ageless, and they are impossible to parallel or surpass. Though many author's draw their story ideas from life experiences. Anais takes most directly in order to make them pure and unclouded by the imagination. This is why her favorite method of writing was the use of her actual diaries. She wrote of her many love affairs and personal traumas in order to educate the reader as well as to examine her true self. For it is known that one person could not experience all that is possible, and therefore one must learn from others mistakes as well as their own. Nin is greatly renown for her diaries, especially for her famous letters of her affair with Henry Miller . This later amounted to a movie based on the relationship "Henry and June" in 1986 (site 1). Yet her fiction, although quite intellectual and harder to grasp than her diaries, also reveals a lot about the writer and open views on all aspects of living. She is creative enough to allow all to draw something personal from her writings, and this makes reading her novels an experience that one could associate with some aspect of their own life. Nin's heightened "sensitivity and perception" (site 1) are derived from her fiery lifestyle which started when she was very young. She was born in France, a country of vast influence, and she traveled throughout Europe for most of her childhood. When She was twelve years old she was relocated to New York, where the culture and diversity is unparalleled. She experience d so many lifestyles as various occupations: a dancer, a teacher, and later on even a psychoanalyst (Scholar 5). She lived a very "free" life style for the time period, and she enjoyed this liberation to the fullest. She had many affairs, but she also had many great relationships that helped her improve and most of all "experience". Through all of this she never lost the ability to appreciate her solitude. As her fictitious novels are analyzed it will be shown that a large part of Anais Nin resides in every one of her works, but she made sure to leave enough to allow a little piece of every reader to fit.! In this way the reader may be alone but in good company. Anais creates this aura by using the literary device known as negative capability, which is basically concurrence with the philosophy of "saying less is saying more" (Walsh). She writes in such a way that allows one to see a general idea that does not cheapen a complicated idea by trying to isolate and define it. The theories which she attempts to explain are often too complicated for words, so Nin often turns to surrealism when she can think of no other way to address them. Human emotion and existence is not something that can be black or white, and Nin describes it as somewhere in the gray area (Knapp 39-68). The use of poetic and stream-of-conscientiousness phrasing allows the reader to find there own relative truth, since absolute truth in these situations are impossible. Her metaphors are powerful and shocking, but Nin was not an extreme surrealist. She believed in the fusing of the conscious and unconscious minds to allow one to see the total picture, instead of only looking from one point of view. Negative capability is best displayed in The House