In a practical criticism supervision on Mark O’Connell’s fourth issue of Tolka: The City of the Dead, the topic of diary writing came up. We began talking about the age at which we each took to the habit. One of my peers recalled first writing during the pandemic and imagining her work being featured in future history textbooks or archives. It is this thought that calls into question the very founding principle of the diary – the belief in its own privacy. If we’re beginning to write with publication in mind, the intimacy and freedom that distinguishes the diary as its own thing ceases to exist.

Instead, we might define the piece in terms of its commitment to the calendar. The English ‘diary’ or ‘journal,’ German ’Tagebuch,’ French ’journal intime’ and Russian ’dnevnik’ all derive from the same root word, meaning ‘day.’ Even as the addressee becomes ambiguous, the first person quotidian narrative style remains. With the exception of these qualities, it is difficult to say anything about diaries which is true for almost all of them. We realise this when we try to categorise by genre. Take its imbalances between literary and historical writing, the spontaneity of reportage and reflectiveness, selfhood and events and subjectivity and objectivity, for example. By disturbing attempts to summarise its characteristics within formalised boundaries, the diary proves to be a misfit form of writing.

Having derived from bookkeeping and the practice of daily religious self-examination, the early modern diary can be seen as an account of one’s personal economy – financial, emotional, and spiritual. In the age of the Enlightenment, Puritans and Pietists used diaries to monitor their sinful selves (and as far as the latter was concerned) to bring about an internal conversion that might lead to salvation. Romantic diarists were inspired by a new historicist sense whereas Fin de Siècle positivists used them for scientific self-observation, tracing connections between the physical and the psychological. Only in the twentieth century does the diary completely absorb itself in the modernist impulse for deliberate self-creation.

“The diary proves to be a misfit form of writing”

Clearly, pains are taken to produce pieces for historical testimony, self-fashioning, and self-improvement. The first of these motives gives the mundane tasks of everyday life a new colour. In times of distress, victims have sought to log incidents to fully understand their effects and make sense of what’s happened. In both cases, diarists write with the intention to publish for posterity. Only if the latter is primarily concerned with survival, there is little reason for their being inauthentic. Calamities strip individuals of their identity so their writing becomes at once, historical testimony, and a means of self-construction.

Susan Sontag describes the diary as that which enables her to express herself more openly than to any person:

“The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood… Therefore it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather – in many cases – offers an alternative to it.”

This alternative is what appealed to Virginia Woolf, who began diary writing at fifteen all the way up to her death at 59. Right before her suicide, she left a note asking her husband to destroy all her papers. Instead, he sorted and saved a vast mass of materials, including manuscripts, essays, and most pertinently, diaries. The many mean and offensive remarks made the publisher at Granta declare that the “language used and views expressed in the diary… are those of the respective authors in their time.” If her diary was never intended for reading, her thoughts were never supposed to be criticised. As such, we cannot police her thoughts without being wrong ourselves.

“Clearly, pains are taken to produce pieces for historical testimony, self-fashioning, and self-improvement”

W.H. Auden is also among supporters of the diary for the sake of disciplining “laziness and lack of observation.” This concern is the reason Tolstoy kept a diary from age eighteen to 82. His early diaries tried to develop a narrative template that would create an ordered account of his time. Each evening, he made an account of how today measured against the plan for tomorrow made yesterday. Their never matching left him in search of himself. The old Tolstoy however, attempted to transgress the confines of the temporal order imposed by the first person narrative form. Plath too began keeping a diary at the age of 11. Six years before her suicide, she captures its role:

“Just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper’s (no less! – – – and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her, somehow. I love her – – – from reading Mrs. Dalloway for Mr. Crockett.”

What might’ve been dull to Woolf is vibrant to Plath. Woolf’s diary is just as consolatory as her own and proves to be more than the mere ‘warm up’ she deemed it. What was once a superfluous feminine pastime has proven worthwhile – taking new form entirely.

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