Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-Century French Writing by Sam Ferguson (review)

This book, derived from Sam Ferguson's doctoral study, is divided into two large sections: Part 1 is on French author André Gide's diary-writing practices, and Part 2 details diary-writing after Gide, namely by French authors Raymond Queneau, Roland Barthes, and Annie Ernaux. A well-crafted introduction and a brief but to-the-point conclusion complete the work along with a detailed bibliography and an index.

In his introduction, Ferguson explains the objectives of his study—to examine developments in the writing of real and fictional diaries in a particular period, twenty-first century France. He explains the transformations diary-writing has undergone, its formats, writing practice (regular or sporadic; long or short entries), subject matter (events, reflections, social commentary), and the diarist's function (confession, self-portrait, chronical, tool for reflection, or literary exercise). A detailed historical overview is given about various approaches to diary-writing, both real and fictional, in France. Ferguson explains his own approach, which starts at the generally accepted pivotal years of 1887–1888, as proposed by Pierre Pachet in Les Baromètres de l'âme: naissance du journal intime. This has been identified as the point of time when the journal intime (as well as the autobiographical genre) emerges in France as a result of various factors, such as the acceptance of the notion of the "person" according to Alain Girard's Le journal intime (1963), religious practices of introspection and confession according to Pachet (1990), and the growth of the "intime" (the personal and private). All of these factors fall under the common denominator of what Michel Foucault identified as the start of modernity, which places man at the center of all endeavors. The shift in writing style, format, and content also occurred because diarists noted the potential of the personal and private writing being published. Béatrice Didier's 1976 Le Journal intime combines three approaches—sociocriticism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism—and highlights the diary's characteristics of spontaneity and authenticity, which allow, in her view, "artistic elaboration" (8) because the diary is linked to an author's oeuvre. Ferguson's historical overview includes early twenty-first-century studies by Catherine Rannoux (Les Fictions du journal littéraire), who demonstrates the public and intertextual nature of diaries based on the Bakhtinian principle of dialogism. Ferguson also notes Michel Braud's 2006 La Forme des jours, which considers the diary's literary status, and Françoise Simonet-Tenant's 2009 Journal personnel et correspondance on the ties between letter-writing and diaries.

Ferguson's analysis of real and fictional diaries (in the form of novels, for example), is based on the work of Pachet, Girard, and Foucault, but also on Philippe Lejeune's lifelong work on autobiography and other lifewriting genres. The first part of the book examines André Gide's experimentation with the diary in the fictional works Les Cahiers d'André Walter (1891) and Paludes (1895), in Le Journal des Faux-monnayeurs (1926), and in his Journal 1889–1939 (1939). The three chapters that constitute the second part discuss diary-writing after the Second World War: an analysis of Raymond Queneau's fictional diary Oeuvres complètes de Sally Mara (1947–1962) is followed by discussion of Roland Barthes's formal experiments with the diary (1977–1979), and the last chapter focuses on Annie Ernaux's published diaries (1993–2011), which exemplify the role of the diary today.

After noting that the first studies on French fictional diaries were written in English (Valerie Raoul's The French Fictional Journal in 1980) and that very few Francophone critics have analyzed these types of texts (Ferguson mentions two major studies: one is Jean Rousset's 1986 work Le Lecteur intime: de Balzac au journal, and the other is Japanese critic Yasusuke Oura's unpublished 1986 PhD thesis, Introduction aux romans journaux français), Ferguson convincingly shows the importance of the positions of Gide...