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THE PRACTICE OF THE PRIVATE JOURNAL: CHRONICLE OF AN INVESTIGATION (1986–1998) For twelve years now I’ve been investigating the reasons why, and the ways in which, so many “ordinary” people, who are not writers, write a diary. This investigation has given rise to about thirty publications of different varieties. Today I feel that I have reached a conclusion. Here I intend to go back over my research by telling its story. This narrative will thus form, essentially, a sort of auto-bibliography. References to the publications will punctuate my narrative like the beads of a rosary. I’d like to start by saying why I began with these investigations—and why so late. * * * * * It is not common practice to speak of oneself in presenting one’s research. But I have often questioned others about their own journals: it is simply a matter of honesty to contextualize, at least briefly, my own situation as a diarist. I was born in 1938. I kept a private journal, from the age of fifteen, for a good ten years. Then I decided to put my adolescence behind me, and with it, my habit of keeping a journal. I became a teacher and researcher. When, in 1969, I chose a research area, I turned not towards the diary, but towards autobiography . At the same time, after an interruption of several years, I returned to a personal mode of writing, trying to compose, parallel to literary criticism, autobiographical texts. In my mind, the journal continued to be associated with ideas of anguish and lack of direction: it was a very immediate form of writing, and marked by distress. I wanted to regain control of my life, capture it at the roots, and reconstruct it. Moreover, my adolescent journal was badly written—indeed, utterly unwritten. I considered it rubbish. I wanted to move on in my writing style, to become presentable in public. As a result, from 1969 to 1986, I threw myself into the study, and the practice, of the autobiography against the journal—doubtless keeping in mind, meanwhile, the secret intention to return one day, better equipped, to the territory of my adolescent years. The diary of those bygone years hibernated in a cardboard “Tenir un journal.” Poétique 111 (Sept. 1997): 359–81. Trans. Russell West. Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History. Ed. Rachel Langford and Russell West. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. 185–202. 30 On Diary box, awaiting retrieval. From L’Autobiographie en France (1971) to Moi aussi (1986), I published six or seven books on autobiography, without ever paying the least attention to the genre of the journal. The only work that might have favor in my eyes, in that it provided a sort of solution to my dilemmas, was Claude Mauriac’s Le Temps immobile: fifty years of private diaries, published by Mauriac in ten or so volumes between 1974 and 1988, but without chronological order, a labyrinthine circuit allowing the separate strata of the past to resonate with one another, an autobiographical act constituted of a massif of diary fragments. In 1986, after the publication of Moi aussi, I found myself one day, pen in hand, paper before me, writing a date at the top of the page and starting to narrate: my journal began to follow its course once again like a river welling up after a long underground trajectory. Since then I have hardly stopped writing, first of all on my antiquated typewriter, then on the computer. It was this return to a practice, which I will mention again in my conclusion, which abruptly brought to my awareness a critical absence. * * * * * Around 1969, I chose to work on autobiography as, apart from the inaugural study by Georges Gusdorf (“Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie,” 1956) and Jean Starobinski’s essays, there were in French almost no studies on autobiography as a genre. On the other hand, regarding the private journal , there was Alain Girard’s excellent 1963 book, Le Journal intime (Paris: PU de France, 1963), followed by Béatrice Didier’s study, also titled Le Journal intime (Paris: PU de France, 1976), both well-documented syntheses. But were they really so well documented? In 1987, I realized that these studies included a sort of blind spot, a point of view which ignored part of reality. For there are two possible methods of studying private diaries. The first, obviously, is to read the texts. This is the method of the authors mentioned...

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