# Philippe Lejeune (2009). *On Diary*. : Published for the Biographical Research Center by the University of Hawai'i Press. > [!INFO] > Type:: [[book]] > Title:: On Diary > Author(s): [[Philippe Lejeune]] > Year:: 2009 > Tags:: > DOI:: > Citekey:: lejeune_diary_2009 > ZoteroURI:: [Open in Zotero: On Diary](zotero://select/items/@lejeune_diary_2009) > ReviewedDate:: [[2023-08-29]] ## Citation ```latex [@lejeune_diary_2009] ``` ## Related ```dataview TABLE file.aliases AS "Title" FROM [[@lejeune_diary_2009]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ``` ## Summary - ## Annotation “As in the case of the autobiography, Lejeune knew the hostile legends that circulated about this unexplored territory. It was said to be a region of arid, barren landscapes, devoid of aesthetically satisfying monuments. Rumor depicted the inhabitants as primitive savages, going about naked and spending too much time and energy contemplating their own navels to produce anything worth bringing back to civilization” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 10) “Philippe Lejeune thus confirmed that the most important outcome of any voyage of exploration is not so much knowledge of the Other as new insight into ourselves” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 11) “The diary is the point where life and literature meet, and Philippe Lejeune's highly accessible essays speak both to students and scholars of the art of writing and to the millions of people who engage in the practice of recording their thoughts and actions.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 11) “One can hardly improve on the autobiographical account of the development of his interest in diaries than Lejeune himself has provided in his essays “The Practice of the Private Journal: Chronicle of an Investigation, 1986–1998” and “Composing a Diary.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 11) “He gave up his own diary when he discovered the autobi- ography as a form of literature: “Autobiography meant growing up. Becoming an adult (good-bye to immaturity) and a writer (writing 'well')” (“Composing” 168).1 It took a “road to Damascus moment” to change his perspective and make him take up the practice again” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 11) “In his work on autobiography, Lejeune had already refused to limit him- self to the study of canonical texts by famous authors” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 12) “He was similarly determined not to limit his exploration of diaries to those rare works that have been accepted as literature” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 12) “Testimonies about personal diaries]. Reading other diarists' accounts of their writing habits revealed to Lejeune the remarkable variety of diary-keep- ing practices. Some diarists are motivated by a need for intense self-explora- tion; others want to keep a record of their thoughts or actions for their own purposes or to pass down to their descendants. Lejeune realized that diarists also differ widely in what they record, in the routines they develop for their writing, in their choice of bound notebooks versus loose sheets, in their pref- erence for writing by hand versus the use of the typewriter, or more recently, the computer, and in what they envisage doing with their diaries. “Cher ca- hier . . .” convinced Lejeune that the published diaries of recognized authors revealed only a tiny corner of a much larger landscape.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 12) “Lejeune's next diary-related book, Le Moi des demoiselles [The “I” of young ladies]” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 12) “But Lejeune pushed the boundaries of conventional scholar- ship by presenting his research in the form of a “research diary” that recorded the development of his project and his ongoing reactions to the material he was studying” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 12) “The fact that private diaries can now be instantly shared with unknown readers all over the world, and that diarists can receive reactions to their musings as they write, has created radical new possibilities for this long-established form of writing.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 14) “Since his personal road to Damascus moment in the 1980s, he has been an unabashed evangelist for the diary. By writing about his own diary-keeping practices, he has made it clear that he is not merely exploiting an understudied subject: he is writing about something that has deep meaning for him person- ally” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 14) “As he writes in “Composing a Diary,” he now realizes that he will never write an autobiography himself, and that he would not even want to: “How could I have wished for that unifying utopia?” (168). But he proudly affi rms his identity as a diary writer, because the diary, unlike the autobiography, allows for change and growth” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 14) “Lejeune thus rejects some of the arguments that have been made in the past about the benefits of diary-keeping. Some of his essays dissect moralistic arguments about the value of personal record-keeping as a means of self- improvement: Marc-Antoine Jullien's proposal for panoptical diaries that would drive their authors to make maximum use of their time each day, or the French Catholic Church's dissemination of a model of diary writing as a form of spiritual training for young women in the nineteenth century” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 15) “The only constraint on the diary that Lejeune accepts is that of time: if writers do not date their entries, they are not keeping diaries” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 15) “This is not a moral or aesthetic constraint, but an ex- istential one: by recognizing the inexorable fl ow of time, the diarist confronts the inevitability of change, and ultimately of death, and fi nds in the practice of writing a way to cope with this realization” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 15) “Although the diary is often taken to be a spontaneous expression of individuality, it is in fact a cultural practice that has a history, as the essays in the section on “Origins” demonstrate.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 15) “The development of the diary also depended on the development of a collective consciousness of time as something linear and measurable” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 16) “While this may be true to some extent in Protestant England, across the Channel, Lejeune concludes in his essay “Spiritual Journals in France,” “the personal diary, which developed in France beginning in the late eighteenth century, does not seem to owe much to Protestantism or the spiritual journal” (76)” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 16) “The diffusion of the practice of writing to one's “dear diary” is signifi cant: even though each diarist wrote in private, the spread of the formula indicates that diarists were increasingly aware that they were following a widely diffused model” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 16) “While Lejeune is concerned with the history of the diary and the evolu- tion of journal-keeping practices, he is also deeply involved in the problems of diary writers in the here and now, and in thinking about the meaning of this kind of writing” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 17) “Critics have damned it as “unwholesome, hypocritical, cowardly, worth- less, artifi cial, sterile, shriveling, feminine, etc.,” as Lejeune shows in “The Diary on Trial” (147)” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 17) “The study of the diary calls for an answer to the simple question, “What is a diary,” with which Lejeune begins his essay “Composing a Diary.”” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 17) “Despite the fl uidity of the diary form, all diarists face certain choices, which Lejeune explores in “The Continuous and the Discontinuous.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 17) “The notebook “operates at the level of the fantasy that [[Paul Ricoeur]] calls `narrative identity': it promises some minimal measure of unity,” Lejeune writes (176), but he himself initially preferred loose sheets, each independent of the oth- ers. A” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 18) “in any event, he claims, diary writing is necessarily discontinuous, a matter of stringing together disconnected entries” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 18) “Certainly diaries are subjective, but this does not mean that they are essentially false” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 18) “In “Auto-Genesis: Genetic Studies of Autobiographical Texts,” Lejeune compares the problem of studying the evolution of an autobiography with the seemingly impossible challenge of studying the development of a diary text.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 19) “Published diaries, however, almost always undergo some kind of editing, and,, often, rewriting, either by their authors or by someone else, and, as Lejeune shows, the study of these transformations is often quite interesting.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 19) “Trapped in her family's hiding place, Anne Frank was nevertheless in the mainstream of the European world's diary-keeping traditions. She was given the blank notebook she wrote in as a gift, with the expectation that she would use it for a diary; she drew some of her inspiration from books she read, and she knew that her journal might well be published when the war ended” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 20) “We cannot assume that diaries have the same signifi cance all over the world.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 20) “In “Diaries on the Internet: A Year of Reading,” he sums up his own experience of reading other dia- rists' online productions, concluding that the new medium suits the personal journal better than any form of paper. Online, “the diary can fi nally breathe, stretch out on a chaise lounge, and relax” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 21) “As I mentioned, Philippe Lejeune is mainly known in the English-speaking world as the inventor of “the autobiographical pact,” a tacit agreement a read- er makes with the author of a text which has non-fi ctional truth claims” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 26) “For one thing, Lejeune has become an interdisciplinary researcher in a unique way. Excerpts in On Diary show Lejeune's interest in the historical origins of the diary in France and in the rest of Europe which create a genealogy of the form as a trace rather than as a history” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 27) “Lejeune's approach to this problem includes a social history of the diary which links it to other so- cial innovations in the west, including the advent of the clock, the watch, the calendar, the account book, and the spiritual journal, and which sketches some classical origins from the materiality of daily composition on tablets in ancient Rome” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 27) “It is obvious that the work of Philippe Lejeune on diaries is in dialogue with the narrative theory of [[Paul Ricoeur]] and Gérard Genette, as he says himself in this volume.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 27) “he lets us see how he composes his own diaries as a record of what the process can look like, and he shows the compositional process of other diarists in concert with his own” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 29) “Lejeune's descriptions of his own process does not narrate his life story so that his experiences explicate the meanings of other texts or other experiences” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 29) “How can a researcher know how to identify and analyze material which is not bounded by an archive, particularly when so much material is so easily available?” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 30) “For the study of popular print culture, Lejeune's method is important because it creates an archive that circumvents the problem of studying un- published (and therefore uncollectible) contemporary materials” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 30) “As Philippe Lejeune himself has observed at various times, the study of dia- ries has been met with indifference, incomprehension, and hostility.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 31) “But generally, diaries have been a minor area of study in a number of fi elds because they are, like letters, not written with a mass audience in mind, and yet they do address an audience and cannot be read as transparent, ob- jective documents” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 32) “In the work of Philippe Lejeune, diaries have an eloquent and passionate champion who is interested in theoretical questions of diary composition, writing, and circulation. One of the challenges of working on diary writing in the English language has been the lack of theoretical investigation avail- able on the process of diary writing” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 32) “Lejeune's approach to the diary links it to temporality: diaries are only diaries because they have dated entries. But, more signifi cantly, paper diaries are not ad- dressed to others” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 32) “A diary is a way to “account” for oneself and to manage time: in that sense, as Lejeune observes in the essay “Rereading Your Diary,” it is a type of narrative time which Paul [[Paul Ricoeur|Ricoeur]] describes, but its rhythm is that of discon- tinuity rather than of continuity” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 33) “Diaries do not present consistent pictures of a life: they show an identity in process, even as they are part of the process itself of creating identity, day after day” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 33) “In 1987, I realized that these studies included a sort of blind spot, a point of view which ignored part of reality.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 39) “Can one ever know when one has arrived at the end of a research project? Never at any moment did I know where my project would lead me in sub- sequent years” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 52) “So up until the sixteenth century, the journal was basically a community affair.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 61) ### From Tablets to paper “태블릿은 학교 연습 문제, 회계 장부, 편지, 메모, 관리자, 사업가, 개인이 작성한 초안 등 현재 우리가 '일상적인 글쓰기'라고 부르는 모든 것을 위한 주요 물리적 매체이었습니다.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 56) > “마르쿠스 아우렐리우스의 사상은 개인적인 경험에 대한 수많은 언급에도 불구하고 결코 연대가 정해지거나 시간적 순서가 부여되지 않습니다. 그는 죽음과 항상 같은 거리에 있는 일종의 영원한 현재에 몰입했습니다. 2세기 후, 최초의 기독교인들이 스토아학파의 영적 수련을 좀 더 '억압적'으로 변형하여 자신들의 목적을 위해 부활시켰을 때 비로소 일기 쓰기 관행의 첫 번째 흔적이 나타나기 시작했습니다. 이 시기의 일기는 보존되어 있지 않다는 점을 다시 한 번 말씀드리겠습니다.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 54) ### ON TODAY’S DATE > “요점을 바로 말씀드리자면, 현대의 일기는 날짜가 enunciated의 영역에서 enuncitation의 영역으로 이동하는 그 점에서 문자와 비슷해지기 시작할 때까지는 진정한 의미의 일기가 되지 못합니다.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 79) the date는 날짜를 지정할뿐만 아니라 enunciation 시간을 증명한다 “오랫동안 *linvres de raison*, 가족 책, 연대기, 심지어 일기까지, 보관하는 사람들은 글을 쓰는 날짜에 상당히 관심이 없었으며 독자에게 그것이 무엇인지 알려주는 수고를 거의하지 않았다.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 88) 즉 글을 쓰는 날짜는 중요하지 않았고 쓰여지는 이벤트의 날짜가 중요했다.“ in the historical past tense” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 80)“그 결과 사람들은 사건에 대해 내레이션은 하지만 comment는 거의 달지 않습니다. 감정은 are already at a distance” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 89) "화가 났었어요"는 정보의 일부이지만 "화가 났어요"는 분노입니다! 그러므로 “날짜가 발화되는 내용에만 관련된 경우, 연대기 작성자가 일인칭을 사용하더라도 발화 행위 자체는 음소거되며, 이는 여전히 건조한 형식에 불과합니다.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 80) “On the other hand, setting the date off at the top of the page to indicate the time of writing is a crucial gesture, one that separates the enunciator from his narration and paves the way for the personalization of the subject matter.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 80) 날짜에 대한 나의 연구는 일기 나 일기의 경우, 결국 중요한 날짜는 기록 된 날짜가 아니라 보고 된 사건의 날짜뿐인 연대기 또는 회계 장부 시스템과의 전환을 분석해야합니다. ### O My Paper! > 프랑스에서는 19세기 중반이 되어서야 일기에 대한 공적인 이미지가 생겨나기 시작했지만, 그 이전 반세기 동안 사적인 관행으로 잘 정착되어 있었습니다. > “In France, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that a public image of the diary began to emerge, although it had been well established as a private practice for half a century before that.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 93) 그래서 아자이스는 독창적이었습니다. 그러나 그는 자신의 진정성을 끝까지 가져가지 않았습니다. 출판된 일기는 선별되고, 날짜가 거슬러 올라가고(1800년이 아닌 1797년), 마지막에 정교한 환상으로 장식되어 있습니다(182-207), 우리는 그의 비평가들과 동의해야 합니다. 차라리 있는 그대로의 매력적이고 독창적인 일기를 쓰는 것이 더 나았을 것입니다. > “Pierre-Hyacinthe Azaı¨s” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 131) “So Azaı¨s was being original. But he did not take his sincerity all the way: the published journal is selected, backdated (1797 instead of 1800), and embellished with elaborate fantasies at the end (182–207) that, we must concur with his de- tractors, are not the most successful pieces of writing. He would have done better to stick to a diary that is engaging and original as is.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 126) ### “THE PHYSICAL MEDIUM” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 175) > “I’ll leave aside the computer (and come back to it later). Two major types of media can be used: the notebook and loose-leaf pages— in other words, the continuous and the discontinuous” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 175) > “저에게 일기는 삶에서 멀어지는 방법이었으며, 노트를 통해 또 다른 연속성과 즉시 다시 연결함으로써 위로는 이미 쓰여진 글의 무게와, 아래로는 채워져야 할 빈 페이지의 미래가 주는 엄청난 공허함을 마주할 수 있었기 때문에 일기가 주는 거리를 망칠 수 없었습니다.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 186) > “Because while the notebook might be continuous, diary writing certainly is not. It is fragmentary.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 178) > “I have focused too much on the diary as a product, whereas it is an act.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 181) “Throughout this exploration, continuity and discontinuity have often seemed to me to be linked to changes in means of communication or measurement.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 185) “And here I am slipping into philosophy—never my strong suit—right through to Deleuze and his image-movement analyses, and wondering how the diary, which projects discontinuous views of life, manages to recapture its movement.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 184) “I'll leave aside the computer (and come back to it later). Two major types of media can be used: the notebook and loose-leaf pages— in other words, the continuous and the discontinuous” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 184) “This notebook—sewn, glued, stapled, or bound with spiral wires—on which people often write their names, operates at the level of the fantasy that [[Paul Ricoeur]] calls “narrative identity”: it promises some minimal measure of unity.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 185) “The ideal would be to write in a never-ending notebook. Since there is no such thing, canny diarists keep a stock of extras on hand to make sure they never run out” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 185) “Am I not confusing continuous/discontinuous with regular/irregular and homogeneous/heterogeneous—that is, confusing problems of space with problems of rhythm or content? And isn't it precisely the datebook used as a diary that raises the essential problem, the problem of rhythm, which the notebook disguises?” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 186) “For me the diary was a way of detaching myself from life, and I could not spoil the distance this gave me by immediately reconnecting to another continuity through a notebook that would bring me face to face, up- stream, with the weight of the already-written, and downstream, with the immense emptiness of a future of blank pages demanding to be filled.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 186) “Because while the notebook might be continuous, diary writing certainly is not. It is fragmentary.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 187) “So each entry is a microorganism caught up in a discontinuous whole: between two entries, a blank space” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 187) “Certain writers, such as James Joyce, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Serge Doubrovsky, have constructed im- mense fi ctions to represent the continuity of one day in a life” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 187) “Far from being a sorcerer's mirror, the diary is a fi lter” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 188) “am proposing a more general and economical definition of the diary, one that fi ts into three words: a diary is a series of dated traces [série de traces datées]” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 188) “The date is essential” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 188) “Discontinuity, for that matter, is part and parcel of the diary's rhythm” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 202) “1. To express oneself. I divide this fi rst function in two: to release and to communicate” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 203) “This activity of refl ection is often associ- ated with the functions of expression and of memory, in diaries that are kept a long time. But refl ection is also at the heart of diaries maintained in times of crisis” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 204) “To build a memory out of paper, to create archives from lived experience, to accumulate traces, prevent forgetting, to give life the consistency and continuity it lacks.” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 204) “Let me be clear: I do not mean that autobiographies are false and diaries are true. I am talking about the dynamics of these two writing postures, both of which are present in varying proportions in all personal texts” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 210) “Since Barthes is after literature at all costs, he solves the problem with the idea that there is an “art of the present” or “art of notation”: the “haiku.” It seems to me that he is only half right. The haiku is an art of the moment, not of the present” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 211) “There is no need to sign a pact with the reader. It is a mystical alliance with Time. I have avoided defi ning the diary in terms of privacy or secrecy: that is an important dimension, but a secondary one that is optional and recent (dating from the late eighteenth century)” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 213) “Michel Braud, a friend of mine who specializes in diaries, went down that road and came back empty-handed: there are a few autofi ctions that include the diary form, but he had to acknowledge that they were not real diaries. Even when they use the author's real diary, it is always from a position of hindsight: the diary used is not a fi ction, and the fi ction is not produced under diary condi- tions” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 214) “On the insanity side, Patricia Highsmith's wonderful novel Edith's Diary (1977) springs to mind” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 214) “The computer reverses this beautiful structure: word processing, like painting in oils, makes it possible to rework a piece indefi nitely and unde- tectably” (Lejeune, 2009, p. 300) ### Related ```dataview LIST FROM [[@lejeune_diary_2009]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ```