Not living, not writing
I suspect William Boyd’s article about the diary form will be welcomed by just about everyone. He asks “What is the strange allure of the journal? What does it do to your life?” and provides the answer we all want to hear: it is about honesty and truth; it’s about charting one’s “wayward passage through time” allowing one to see how it developed without the hindsight of other literary forms. In other words, the more writing is stripped of artifice, the more valuable it is. This is a typical example of Romantic assumptions finding their way into apparently commonsense articles. For example, the other day Waggish claimed that “Gabriel Garcia Marquez used [narrative shuffling] … to move away from literary artifice”. One wants to ask: if one uses, rather than is used by something, how is it less artificial? As if to jump onto the cultural bandwagon of this belief, Boyd’s latest novel Any Human Heart is a fictionalised diary. Here’s something less, he seems to be saying, and therefore more, than fiction.
Boyd continues the Romantic theme by saying that it is only posthumous diary publications that have any real value: “Only a posthumous appearance guarantees the prime condition of honesty”. Otherwise, he writes, one cannot escape “the various charges of vanity, of special-pleading, of creeping amour-propre.”
What is it about this perfectly reasonable analysis of the form than bothers me? Perhaps it is because it’s so obvious, and so uncontroversial. Who can argue? One reads it like those editorials taking “the middle way” by calling for a second UN resolution to sanction mass murder of civilians in Iraq. The diary form, I sense, is also a cop out.
Luckily, an essay called Diary and Story appears in my current reading. I skipped ahead to read it. Blanchot writes that the diary is a “convenient way of escaping both silence and the extravagance of speech”. “Each day” because of the diary, he says “is a preserved day” and thereby lived twice. Yet, he goes on, the time spent on the diary, thing of insignificance, is actually time not lived (one is writing after all), and its insignificance means also that the work is insufficient � an illusory reflection of a life as one quoted diarist laments. So, Blanchot concludes, the diarist has neither lived nor written! Writing a diary is “a double failure” (I can vouch for that. See the entry for August 18th). In fact, far from being about honesty and truth, the diary is a safeguard against the danger of writing: that is, confronting “the risk of a work in which one has to disappear.” Boyd says that diary writing is about observance of the self and knowledge of the self � alluding to the well-known Socratean injunction “Know thyself”. “But” Blanchot says “Socrates did not write”. He died; disappeared.
One suspects Boyd would have none of this. French pretention. Yet as he says himself, death “guarantees the prime condition of honesty.” There are no degrees of death.
Other SpikeMagazine.com posts of interest:
- Orwell’s Diary Goes Blog
- Books of Time Two weeks ago tonight, I wrote in…
- I see a diary
- FFS! The Telegraph on litblogs
- Adaptation Frustration
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