Reading the Ordinary Diary

Abstract

In the spring of 1995, I inherited a diary that very few would care to read.1 It is boring, repetitious, and very, very bare. Annie Ray, my great great great-aunt and a woman who homesteaded in the Dakotas in the late nineteenth century, was clearly not invested in creating a out of her days. While the diary scholar Elizabeth Hampsten warns that often nothing happens in the diaries kept by nineteenth-century women, I was convinced that Annie's was a story that had to be heard. Following the lead of other diary scholars, I edited Annie's diary into a narrative of loss, crafting scant entries into dramas of infidelity and barrenness. While I think I moved my readers with the tale, I have only recently come to understand what remains in the wake of such a recovery. By turning what was ordinary into what was not, I lost sight of the fact that the inscription of nothing is as complicated a rhetorical act as the fabrication of something. We do not know how to read what I call ordinary writing: writing like Annie's that is not literary, writing that seems boring, barren, and plain. My initial reading was heavily influenced by the study of nineteenth-century diaries, a tradition that regards diaries as literary texts. More pointedly, my reading participated in a scholarly tradition that prefers reading only those diaries that exhibit literary features. I have outlined this tradition elsewhere and have argued that reading diaries through a literary lens privileges diaries that are coherent, crafted, and whole, excluding ordinary diaries like Annie's that define the diurnal form in their dailiness. Here my goal is to demonstrate what is gained by reading an ordinary diary through a lens that is shaped by the daily rather than the literary. Dailiness, the act of writing in the days rather than of the days, is the single quality that marks the diary as a distinct form of writing. It is what prevents the diary from being reflective and forces both writer and reader into the immediate present, a place from which the critical distance a reader/writer is typically taught to obtain and value is impossible. Dailiness means that the diary does not cohere around an organizing event or principle, but by documenting the everyday, makes these measured (and typically unmarked) moments available for the diarist's use. Dailiness also prevents the privileging of some events over othersinstead always resting in the middle. Schooled to appreciate occasioned texts