Diaries, letters and novels

 

Virginia Woolf once began a diary entry by saying that the day had been dreary and that nothing happened. Then she reproached herself: this was no way for a writer to treat even a day on which nothing seemed to happen. She compared such days to trees in winter. The glory of the tree, the leaves, have fallen, and all that is left are bare branches and the trunk. One tends not to see the tree, then. And yet it is in this state that you can most see the tree, its growth against the damage of insect, lightning strike, impoverished soil, and weather – in short, what it had become.

I think that is a rather brilliant comparison, even though writing for others is all about brilliant and hyperreal days, where the criminal is escaping the police, where the adulterous love affair begins to germinate at the party, where Madame Bovary takes poison and spontaneous cumbustion claims the ragman. But the forest in which these events take place is vast, and consists of dreary or happy days where nothing happened, and nobody looked.

I like the fact that Woolf knew that is exactly where she should look.

Given the diary’s chronographic power, there is an obvious allure here for the novelist, ever alert to find among text types in real use – catalogs, memos, or the diary’s cousin, letters – matter with which to incorporate story. In the 18^th century, at least, letters – in Les liaisons dangereuses, in Clarissa, in Die Leiden der jungen Werther, in La nouvelle Heloise – were inseparable from plot. But the realistic novel pulled away from the allure of diary and the letter for the main part. The realistic novel, and its multiple permutations, liked to find an escape route marked in the social – hence the image of a mirror carried down a road – where self-reflection and action could pierce through happy days, sad days, and nothing days to give us the larger picture. That picture was heroic – even if the modern hero was not at all the ancient hero. The former was not the founder of the city, but a dweller within it, or a renegade without it. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show” – the first sentence of David Copperfield – was emblematic of the realistic novel, which was attached by every social bond to the hero of some type.

The diary and the letter are marked by a different affordance– the affordance of the detail. The detail, in the novel, pulls us in the direction of inertia, and is used as a counter-force to heroic action, which pulls us towards the heroic social position: even Raskolnikov’s, as a repentant murderer. There is a certain narcissism that administers the diary and letter, and that whittles the detail to its proportions. Narcissism, in the Freudian schema, precedes the ego. It is all partial objects and the tentative advance into language, the pulling back to the I from investment in the outer object. In Freud’s essay, Introduction to the Theory of Narcissism, Freud plays with the idea of  hypochondria as having a moment in every form of neurosis – and being itself a kind of neurotic process, shaped by an anxious play  with the erogenous dynamic of the object.  The detail that creeps into the diary – however that detail reveals itself, as conversation recalled, choses vues, a family, love, or job situations  – has this hypochondriac aura. “…. Hypochondria stands in a similar relationship to paraphrenia [schizophrenia} as the other active neuroses stand to hysteria and compulsive disorders, and thus depends on the I libido as the other from the object libido: the hypochondrial fear being the counterpart of the I-libido elevated to neurotic anxiety.”

 A flat materialist  history of the novel and its form might see the diary and letter as simply available text types to make the fiction plausible. But that plausibility, in Freudian terms, is shot through with the socialization of the libido, which provides a hidden dynamic within each form: the direction of the libido in diaries and letters is, on this account, something that is difficult to colonize under the realistic regime, and resists the escape route through the social.  Rather, it exists, with its insistence on the something there of blank days, as a continual temptation and taunt, standing just outside  fiction’s playing field.