What Can Be Done with Diaries?

Abstract

Reading other people's intimate papers-mostly, diaries and letters--has long been a privilege of students of history and literature. In many ways, diaries and letters are similar: both are archived intimate writings of potential historical as well as literary value. Scholars have defined private, or familiar, letters as literary writings and as forms of sociability.' Diaries seem to present more of a difficulty. Many scholars have commented on uncertain situation of diary. To use a recent statement, the diary, as an uncertain uneasily balanced between literary and historical writing, between spontaneity of reportage and reflectiveness of crafted text, between selfhood and events, between subjectivity and objectivity, between private and public, constantly disturbs attempts to summarize its characteristics within formalized boundaries.2 (The list of dichotomies can be revised and extended.) On this basis, diary has been both condemned to exclusion from analysis as a specific and privileged for its ability to reveal tension between opposites and to highlight marginality. Yet, over years, scholars have read, and used, diaries as a historical testimony, a literary form, or an autobiographical document. The success of diaries of Samuel Pepys, Marie Bashkirtseff, Anais Nin, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Mikhail Kuzmin, Witold Gombrowicz, Anne Frank, and Victor Klemperer demonstrate never-ending fascination diaries hold for readers. In these and other capacities diary belongs to overlapping domains of history and literature. What is diary as a mode of writing, or as a genre? (I use word genre in broad, Bakhtinian, sense, not limited to belles lettres: as a complex form that shapes representation of experience into a whole.) There is no consensus about definition.