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Biography Monographs
On Diary
On Diary is the second collection in English of the groundbreaking and profoundly influential work of one of the best-known and provocative theorists of autobiography and diary. Ranging from the diary's historical origins to its pervasive presence on the Internet, from the spiritual journey of the sixteenth century to the diary of Anne Frank, and from the materials and methods of diary writing to the question of how diaries end, these essays display Philippe Lejeune's expertise, eloquence, passion, and humor as a commentator on the functions, practices, and significance of keeping or reading a diary.
Lejeune is a leading European critic and theorist of diary and autobiography. His landmark essay, The Autobiographical Pact, has shaped life writing studies for more than thirty years, and his many books and essays have repeatedly opened up new vistas for scholarship. As Michael Riffaterre notes, Lejeune's work on autobiography is the most original, powerful, effective approach to a difficult subject. . . . His style is very personal, lively. It grabs the reader as scholarship rarely does. Lejeune's erudition and methodology are impeccable.
Two substantial introductory essays by Jeremy Popkin and Julie Rak place Lejeune's work within its critical and theoretical traditions and comment on his central importance within the fields of life writing, literary genetic studies, and cultural studies.
Lejeune is a leading European critic and theorist of diary and autobiography. His landmark essay, The Autobiographical Pact, has shaped life writing studies for more than thirty years, and his many books and essays have repeatedly opened up new vistas for scholarship. As Michael Riffaterre notes, Lejeune's work on autobiography is the most original, powerful, effective approach to a difficult subject. . . . His style is very personal, lively. It grabs the reader as scholarship rarely does. Lejeune's erudition and methodology are impeccable.
Two substantial introductory essays by Jeremy Popkin and Julie Rak place Lejeune's work within its critical and theoretical traditions and comment on his central importance within the fields of life writing, literary genetic studies, and cultural studies.
360 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2009
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May 20, 2025
Checked it out due to my mentor, Barbara Lounsberry, referencing it in her trilogy on Virginia Woolf's diaries and the diaries she read.
Lejeune curated a 1992 exhibit in Lyon, which "allowed him to show how much more there is to a diary than just the words of its text . . . [the catalogue] demonstrated the amazing variety of forms that a diary can take, and the ways in which authors have combined words, pictures, and sometimes documents or other objects, to create journals that sometimes amount to veritable works of art." In 2003's _Un journal a soi_, one can see the way in which handwriting and formatting individualize diaries, and the many ways in which authors express themselves" (4).
Lejeune began as a scholar of autobiography, which he claims requires /becomes "a unifying utopia" while the diary allows for "change and growth. This, fo rLejeune, is the essential attraction of diary writing: it is a realm of freedom, whose pratitioners can decide for themselves how to behave, and then change the rules as they please. . . [they] can start and stop keeping their journals. They can write about anything they want. They can keep their texts to themselves, share them with intimates, aspire to see them published, share them with the world on the Internet, or destroy them." They can use as a place to polish literary form, or ignore all literary style. Lejeune is gleeful when those assigned diary practice to improve themselves and as a panopticon for their superiors find ways to subvert the practice.
His only requirement: if entries are not dated, the text is not a diary. (6)
The genealogy of the diary is more complicated than I would have supposed; while, as the author of The Notebook indicates, it has some roots in Italian accounting practices. Material practices were important - diaries require paper, as papyrus is too expensive and wax tablets too fleeting (6). "The development of the diary also depended on the development of a collective consciousness of time as something linear and measurable. Lejeune sees a close connection between teh emergence of the diary, at the beginning of the early mdern era, and the development of clocks and calendars." (7) Also connected to "other modern cultural practices, such as bookkepping, that rationalized other forms of memory. He thus takes issue with a long tradition that associates the diary above all with teh development of spirituality in the early modern period." Thus it wasn't all about development of spirituality - was maybe true in Protestant England, but the personal diary "which developed in France beginning int he late eighteenth century, doe snot seem to owe much to Protestantism or the spiritual journal" (7)
"The diary may be in part an illusion - a dream of defeating death - but it is not, Lejeune insists, a fiction." Unlike autobiography, it "does not borrow from the realm of literary imagination. 'An imaginary reconstruction of the present could only be viewed and experienced as a lie, or insanity, and would be difficulty to keep up over time.'" Diaries are subjective but not false.
For this reason Lejeune finds novels presented as diaries false - "they cannot have the open-ended quality of real diaries, which are necessarily 'written without the knowledge of where it will end. A diary-novel is always written to lead to the ending'" The attraction of reading a diary is "the feeling of touching time," a sensation that can only be generated if we sense that the diary author was recording his or her real experiences and thoughts (9, 209).
Lejuene: "a diary is not only a text: it is a behavior, a way of life, of which the text is merely a trace or byproduct" (22)
There are three versions of The Diary of Anne Frank: her original version, the version that she was recopying herself, and the version her father published (in which he reinserted parts about the romance with Peter, which he had opposed). Other parts of the diary were lost in the arrest (40) - comment Anne Frank a reecrit le Journal d'Anne Frank, Le Journal personnel [item 6]: 157-80]
Lucille Desmoulins also wrote a journal from 1788-1793
Un journal a soi - catalogue of an exhibition with about 250 diaries presented behind glass, with transcriptions and history of the diary
From the essay, Counting and Managing: "To keep an account means that you can write and that you own something: it is a way of exercising a modicum of power, however limited." First Florentine merchants kept family books as an offshoot of their account books, "some religious journals kept by girls in the nineteenth century are laid out in columns like account books. one page /week, one line/day, V for victory, D for defeats.
Wax tablets had fallen out of use in Europe by 1500, replaced by paper, which later superseded parchment as easier to use in printing. (57) Journal meant daily, because paper was inexpensive enough that one could write on it frequently. No one said journal tablets or journal parchments.
Excellent section on time, and the diary not coincidentally arising in conjunction with the development of the mechanical clock (early 14th century, in church bell towers), then smaller as a "chamber clock" - at home, and then smaller as a watch.
In England, folks were advised to reread as a learning and spiritual practice; in France in the 19th century, journaling was part of spiritual guidance and under strict supervision (67).
"[I] assumed that all diaries are interesting. They don't have to be evaluated like literary works, which they are not." (134).
Girls kept diaries in the 1780s, but then mostly stopped during the Revolution (135). But diaries can be hard to find (or perhaps have been destroyed). Finding them depends on their preservation and knowledge and communication of their existence. They may perhaps have been lost, destroyed, or burned by themselves or their descendants (135).
In 1881 Edmond de Goncourt asked young women to send him their reminiscences about their lives, and his book Cherie contains diaries that strike Lejeune as closer to the diaries of real girls he's read as closer to reality than the instruction manuals. Marie Bashkirtseff's diary has not all been transcribed yet, created a shock, "it is a violent, invigorating explosion of narcissistic sincerity, a rebellion against the conditions imposed on girls and women . . . looking for love first, but trying to escape both marriage and free love . . . looked for self-realization in artistic creation" She wrote a preface to her diary about how she hated to disappear (before her death from tuberculosis at 26).
diary is a series of dated traces: no date, not a diary. trace can be writing or image or cigarette butt. isolated dated trace is a memorial, a diary is a series. "The diary begins when traces in a series attempt to capture the movement of time rather than to freeze it around a source event" (179)
diary is "first and foremost a piece of music, meaning an art of repetition and variation" (180) - examples: one on springtime and death, the other on "who am I" and "what should I be?"
Functions of diary: to express oneself, release, destroy, communicate, 2. to reflect, deliberate, examine, mediate 3. freeze time "create archives from lived experience" - the accumulated series is always incomplete, ideally always stopped by events from outside (death). 4. to take pleaure in writing "It is good and pleasant to give shape to what you live, to make progress in writing, to create an object in which you recognize yourself
Lejeune curated a 1992 exhibit in Lyon, which "allowed him to show how much more there is to a diary than just the words of its text . . . [the catalogue] demonstrated the amazing variety of forms that a diary can take, and the ways in which authors have combined words, pictures, and sometimes documents or other objects, to create journals that sometimes amount to veritable works of art." In 2003's _Un journal a soi_, one can see the way in which handwriting and formatting individualize diaries, and the many ways in which authors express themselves" (4).
Lejeune began as a scholar of autobiography, which he claims requires /becomes "a unifying utopia" while the diary allows for "change and growth. This, fo rLejeune, is the essential attraction of diary writing: it is a realm of freedom, whose pratitioners can decide for themselves how to behave, and then change the rules as they please. . . [they] can start and stop keeping their journals. They can write about anything they want. They can keep their texts to themselves, share them with intimates, aspire to see them published, share them with the world on the Internet, or destroy them." They can use as a place to polish literary form, or ignore all literary style. Lejeune is gleeful when those assigned diary practice to improve themselves and as a panopticon for their superiors find ways to subvert the practice.
His only requirement: if entries are not dated, the text is not a diary. (6)
The genealogy of the diary is more complicated than I would have supposed; while, as the author of The Notebook indicates, it has some roots in Italian accounting practices. Material practices were important - diaries require paper, as papyrus is too expensive and wax tablets too fleeting (6). "The development of the diary also depended on the development of a collective consciousness of time as something linear and measurable. Lejeune sees a close connection between teh emergence of the diary, at the beginning of the early mdern era, and the development of clocks and calendars." (7) Also connected to "other modern cultural practices, such as bookkepping, that rationalized other forms of memory. He thus takes issue with a long tradition that associates the diary above all with teh development of spirituality in the early modern period." Thus it wasn't all about development of spirituality - was maybe true in Protestant England, but the personal diary "which developed in France beginning int he late eighteenth century, doe snot seem to owe much to Protestantism or the spiritual journal" (7)
"The diary may be in part an illusion - a dream of defeating death - but it is not, Lejeune insists, a fiction." Unlike autobiography, it "does not borrow from the realm of literary imagination. 'An imaginary reconstruction of the present could only be viewed and experienced as a lie, or insanity, and would be difficulty to keep up over time.'" Diaries are subjective but not false.
For this reason Lejeune finds novels presented as diaries false - "they cannot have the open-ended quality of real diaries, which are necessarily 'written without the knowledge of where it will end. A diary-novel is always written to lead to the ending'" The attraction of reading a diary is "the feeling of touching time," a sensation that can only be generated if we sense that the diary author was recording his or her real experiences and thoughts (9, 209).
Lejuene: "a diary is not only a text: it is a behavior, a way of life, of which the text is merely a trace or byproduct" (22)
There are three versions of The Diary of Anne Frank: her original version, the version that she was recopying herself, and the version her father published (in which he reinserted parts about the romance with Peter, which he had opposed). Other parts of the diary were lost in the arrest (40) - comment Anne Frank a reecrit le Journal d'Anne Frank, Le Journal personnel [item 6]: 157-80]
Lucille Desmoulins also wrote a journal from 1788-1793
Un journal a soi - catalogue of an exhibition with about 250 diaries presented behind glass, with transcriptions and history of the diary
From the essay, Counting and Managing: "To keep an account means that you can write and that you own something: it is a way of exercising a modicum of power, however limited." First Florentine merchants kept family books as an offshoot of their account books, "some religious journals kept by girls in the nineteenth century are laid out in columns like account books. one page /week, one line/day, V for victory, D for defeats.
Wax tablets had fallen out of use in Europe by 1500, replaced by paper, which later superseded parchment as easier to use in printing. (57) Journal meant daily, because paper was inexpensive enough that one could write on it frequently. No one said journal tablets or journal parchments.
Excellent section on time, and the diary not coincidentally arising in conjunction with the development of the mechanical clock (early 14th century, in church bell towers), then smaller as a "chamber clock" - at home, and then smaller as a watch.
In England, folks were advised to reread as a learning and spiritual practice; in France in the 19th century, journaling was part of spiritual guidance and under strict supervision (67).
"[I] assumed that all diaries are interesting. They don't have to be evaluated like literary works, which they are not." (134).
Girls kept diaries in the 1780s, but then mostly stopped during the Revolution (135). But diaries can be hard to find (or perhaps have been destroyed). Finding them depends on their preservation and knowledge and communication of their existence. They may perhaps have been lost, destroyed, or burned by themselves or their descendants (135).
In 1881 Edmond de Goncourt asked young women to send him their reminiscences about their lives, and his book Cherie contains diaries that strike Lejeune as closer to the diaries of real girls he's read as closer to reality than the instruction manuals. Marie Bashkirtseff's diary has not all been transcribed yet, created a shock, "it is a violent, invigorating explosion of narcissistic sincerity, a rebellion against the conditions imposed on girls and women . . . looking for love first, but trying to escape both marriage and free love . . . looked for self-realization in artistic creation" She wrote a preface to her diary about how she hated to disappear (before her death from tuberculosis at 26).
diary is a series of dated traces: no date, not a diary. trace can be writing or image or cigarette butt. isolated dated trace is a memorial, a diary is a series. "The diary begins when traces in a series attempt to capture the movement of time rather than to freeze it around a source event" (179)
diary is "first and foremost a piece of music, meaning an art of repetition and variation" (180) - examples: one on springtime and death, the other on "who am I" and "what should I be?"
Functions of diary: to express oneself, release, destroy, communicate, 2. to reflect, deliberate, examine, mediate 3. freeze time "create archives from lived experience" - the accumulated series is always incomplete, ideally always stopped by events from outside (death). 4. to take pleaure in writing "It is good and pleasant to give shape to what you live, to make progress in writing, to create an object in which you recognize yourself
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