Category Archives: Audience

Proximity or posterity?

To figure out a diary’s intended audience, start by examining the amount of background information a writer includes. If the diary, especially in its first few entries, appears to introduce itself to a stranger by explaining basic facts that everyone around the writer probably already knows, that creates a different effect from a diary that jumps right in with comments on people, places, and situations assuming a reader who already has familiarity with them.

The history of diaries includes plentiful examples of both. Samuel Pepys begins his diary by summarizing the previous year. He lists the members of his household and shares with the reader the address of his home, the primary assets he owns, the name of his employer, the “condition of the State” and some notes on his own recent health. Other diaries omit such introductions and take the reader in hand with a familiarity that suggests prior acquaintance and no need to explain the life’s context.

People who come along and read the diary can be divided into two groups: those who know the writer personally and those who lack direct acquaintance with the writer. (This useful division between an initial group of intended or unexpected readers and a secondary audience that inherits the diary later was developed by Kaitlyn Goss-Peirce in her 2019 research on Iowa diaries.)

For the first group, whom we’ll call “proximate” readers—including the diarist’s spouse or intimate partner, friends and family, neighbors, acquaintances, co-workers, teachers and others—the diary will never represent the whole person. This book, however revelatory, remains a single item among many sources of knowledge, including their own personal interactions. The diarist may describe events that the two of them attended together, conversations they had—the diary may even comment on their relationship. Proximate readers could have memories of the same events—perspectives that may not match what’s recorded in the diary.

And somewhere in this group of proximate readers—whether or not they ever actually read the diary—may be found individuals who have in real life the close, trusting connection that a diary narrative tends to establish with an implied (or imaginary) reader. For proximate readers, we see that the very existence of the diary begs a question: “If your relationship with me is truly close and trusting, why would you need to keep a diary? Why not simply share your ideas directly with us, your friends and family?”

The existence of a diary may uneasily suggest that the writer has certain thoughts and feelings they aren’t comfortable revealing to friends and relatives. Just knowing that a member of the household keeps a diary can feel odd, even a little threatening.

Some journal-keepers write with proximate readers in mind, thinking of them as the intended audience. These journals may even take the form of a letter addressed to a spouse or family member. A long tradition of the journal-letter—sometimes with entries initially drafted in a bound book, then copied and mailed to the recipient—blurs the line between letter and diary. Or a pair of writers may agree to share and exchange their diaries for each other to read.

In other situations, it’s easy to understand why proximate readers may have their access restricted. Depending on what’s selected to include, the writer may realize that to come across this diary may lead to strife and hurt for proximate readers who don’t understand or agree with what they find on its pages. A proximate reader could challenge the writer’s account, feel shocked to find their own secrets revealed in the diary, or believe that their behavior or words were misrepresented. To avoid such potential confrontation and conflict, the diary may be hidden, locked, or otherwise made off-limits to them.

But even when kept secret, the diary is composed in acute awareness that one of these potential proximate readers, especially living within the household, might come across the diary and read it. (Of course, this particular threat can shrink nearly to zero in the age of the password-protected electronic diary). For proximate readers to find and read the diary could undermine the intimacy, confidence, and trust that the two individuals enjoy in real life.

Such considerations affect the diary by leading to entries that are encoded, elliptically written, self-censored, or phrased in a careful way that partially conceals their meaning. Potential proximate readers, then, have a shaping influence on the diary’s composition even while a writer exerts effort to avoid having them read the diary—and even if, in fact, they never do end up reading it.

All other readers might be called “posterity” readers. They’ve never met the diarist in person, though they may feel that they come to know this person intimately just from having read the diary. Their relationship, their entire acquaintance, is conducted by means of the diary. Posterity readers may fish for supplemental context in other personal documents and historical records, but for them, the totality of the person they know is the voice speaking to them through the diary. They have no comparisons to exercise between a flesh-and-blood human being and the diary’s persona or narrator.

The diary may be encountered by a posterity reader long after the diarist’s death, or as a published book. Either way, when a posterity reader opens the diary, they have no choice but to step in and occupy the space opened for them through the diary’s construction of an implied reader.

If a diarist uses the strategy of addressing a confidant—real or imagined—the posterity reader absorbs the diary material by “standing in” for that addressee. As Goss-Peirce puts it, these later readers have no choice but to take on the role, to “format themselves to the space” created for the diary’s intended audience (11). From the first page, the posterity reader experiences the closeness and trust set up by the diarist—arguably in a more immersive way than a proximate reader, who will inevitably be distracted by their own real-life relationship with the writer of the diary and can’t help but project onto its pages extraneous details, conflicting views of the same events and conversations, and their personal opinions and attitude toward the diarist.

Note that I’m writing about the diary as a literary form—as a genre. Otherwise I’d admit what seems obvious: that the proximate reader doubtless knows the diarist much better than the posterity reader. After all, they’ve met the person in real life, and spent time together. No matter how much a posterity reader tries to fill in with external information, parts of the diary will never make sense to them. As Goss-Peirce writes, “because no amount of research can fully substitute the contemporary knowledge drawn from experience, [posterity readers] must settle some of the gaps as a loss” (12).

But for this very reason, it might be easier for a posterity reader to make the full leap into a special, intimate connection with the diarist. The posterity reader has no personal ties to complicate the reading experience. While a proximate reader may worry about coming across an entry that could disturb, anger, or hurt them, a reader who never even met the diarist can reach out unhesitatingly to trust this connection. This later reader may even feel flattered or privileged to gain access to another person’s most private thoughts, reflections, and feelings—those that the diarist couldn’t or wouldn’t express to their own family and friends at the time—but that they willingly expressed to the diary.

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Writing for Elderly Virginia

Diaries intrigue us because by looking inside one, we cross a threshold into private space, with a sense that maybe it was written solely for the writer to read.

In the middle of an entry, we might even see the writer pause to envision an older self who opens the book and reads it. At the age of 36, Virginia Woolf imagined this scene, and defined her future self as “Virginia Woolf at the age of 50, when she sits down to build her memoirs out of these books [the diaries]” Contemplating that moment, she added, “How I envy her the task I am preparing for her! There is none I should like better. Already my 37th birthday next Saturday is robbed of some of its terrors by the thought” (Diary I, 234).

As Barbara Lounsberry notes in Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path, at this moment “a new persona enters the diary, an appreciative future reader and working writer” (20). This overseeing persona lends a new sense of purpose to the diary for the next several years, as Woolf writes:

Partly for [the] benefit of this elderly lady (no subterfuge will then be possible: 50 is elderly, though, I agree, not old) partly to give the year a solid foundation I intend to spend the evenings of this week of captivity in making out an account of my friendships & their present condition, with some account of my friends characters; & to add an estimate of their work, & a forecast of their future works. The lady of fifty will be able to say how near to the truth I come” (Diary I, 325).

From her vantage point across the years, old Virginia or elderly Virginia (as Woolf calls her) encourages the diarist to keep on writing: “I fancy old Virginia, putting on her spectacles to read of March 2020 will decidedly wish me to continue. Greetings! my dear ghost; & take heed that I don’t think 50 a very great age. Several good books can be written still; & here’s the bricks for a fine one” (Diary 2: 24).

As Lounsberry explains, Woolf envisions a future self who “will not only relish but also use Woolf’s diary prose. In that, this projected older self spurs the diarist on” (Lounsberry, 35).

The concept of addressing the diary to your future self comes recommended by many journal-keeping guides. Christina Baldwin, author of One to One, acknowledges that “most of the time, I write to the self that is just ahead of me in evolution—the person I am becoming” (51). Baldwin advises calling upon this “internal [projected] self” as a “friend,” “mentor,” and “guide.”

The author of The New Diary, Tristine Rainer, agrees: “In most cases, the best audience is your future self. If you think of your reader as the person you will be in five, ten, or even fifty years, it will encourage you to write concretely and to include details that make the experience interesting to reread. In ten years you won’t remember the situation unless you capture all its sensual vitality now” (24).

While some diary-keepers claim that they never look back at old entries, others frequently reread their diaries or plan to do so. Frances Burney insisted to a friend in a letter that she needed him to return the diaries he had borrowed, which she wanted back because “to you they can only furnish entertainment . . . but to me, who know all the people & things mentioned, they may possibly give some pleasure, by rubbing up my memory, when I am a very Tabby, before when I shall not think of looking into them” (The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, 58).

For those preparing to revisit their own diaries, authors of journal guides suggest numerous ways to “harvest” past volumes. Alexandra Johnson’s Leaving a Trace lists ten patterns to map as you go back through a set of journals. Johnson also gives examples of how writers use their diaries as sources for published work. Ron Klug, in the revised edition of How to Keep a Spiritual Journal (2012), discusses methods for indexing, “gleaning,” creating end-of-year summaries, and “bringing things forward”: “When you find some especially interesting insight while rereading a journal, copy it in your present journal and add some thoughts, showing how your thinking has been reinforced or changed” (125).

Most guides to journal harvesting describe the diary as holding scraps of insight, image, and memory that gain significance as they accrete and form thematic patterns. But the value of addressing a diary to one’s older self also connects with the special time-axis of a diary. The future reader will inevitably know more than the present writer about how current issues and situations will play out.

“Elderly Virginia,” then, will possess not just the general wisdom of experience that Woolf could just as well seek from her older friends and acquaintances, but also very specific answers about Woolf’s life, based on her later position in time and its retrospective capacity.

In 1924 Woolf described her diary as a place to “practise writing; do my scales” for her work as a novelist. She imagined that “[I] shall invent my next book here; for here I write merely in the spirit—great fun it is too, & old V. of 1940 will see something in it too. She will be a woman who can see, old V.: everything—more than I can I think” (Diary 2, 319-20).

The diary’s perpetual existence in the present that can’t see ahead helps to explain why one’s future self, “who can see,” represents an ideal reader. Cutting through a fog of uncertainty about the future, a diary writer can invoke the clarifying spirit of this reader as a balancing presence, one that hovers lightly over the page with yet-unseen wisdom—who offers (or at least will accrue) a more mature perspective.

Someday, this presiding presence implicitly assures us, more will be known about the future that preoccupies the diarist, clarifying and settling everything that matters to them.

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Writing for Miss Nobody

Something about the diary suggests that no one reads them—or at least, that they aren’t supposed to be read. Like a prayer written on a tiny scroll to roll up and burn, or a penny dropped into a wishing well, the diary seems to carry a message into the universe, unheard by human ears.

If the diary has any reader at all, we seem to accept most readily a fictional reader conjured up by the writer. Anne Frank addressed her diary to an imaginary friend she named “Kitty”; in her book Anne Frank: the book, the life, the afterlife (2009) literary critic Francine Prose comments that a character named Kitty in a popular book that Anne Frank read may have inspired the fictional confidant (90-91).

Other diarists before and since Anne Frank have addressed their diaries to an imagined person they explicitly invent and name. As he starts writing the fourth entry in his “private diary for the public,” Looking in on Lockdown (2010), Dortell Williams, incarcerated in a California prison for more than 20 years, declares that he will write to an imagined woman named Lourdes:

Lourdes. I think that’s what I’ll call you. I’ve always liked that name. And since I don’t know any Lourdeses personally, you can be my Lourdes. A new female friend who I can build an intimate friendship and open up to more deeply than when I share with the fellas. (7)

More than 200 years earlier, a fifteen-year-old Londoner named Frances Burney penned a diary prologue that cleverly combines both conventions: the notion that a diary is addressed to “Nobody” and the custom of addressing the diary to an imagined friend:

To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal, since to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved, to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity, to the end of my life!

To further complicate Burney’s playful paradox, these diaries weren’t even intended to remain private. All three diarists mentioned above—Anne Frank, Dortell Williams, and Frances Burney—make a point of conjuring up the secret confidant (Kitty, Lourdes, Miss Nobody) even while acknowledging that they intend to publish their diary for a wide readership.

Anne Frank revised and edited her diary even while still living in the Secret Annexe. She dreamed of a writing career and predicted that after the war, there would be interest in her story. Dortell Williams announces in the introduction to his book that his diary aims to educate members of the American public who labor under misconceptions about the prison system. Frances Burney published her address to Miss Nobody as a preface to her collected letters and journals.

As Francine Prose notes, “it was Kitty on whom Anne decided when, during her last months in the attic, she began to revise her diary and focused on one imaginary listener” (90-91). “This device,” Prose adds,

gave Anne a way of addressing her readers intimately and directly . . . Reading Anne’s diary, we become the friend, the most intelligent, comprehending companion that anyone could hope to find. Chatty, humorous, familiar, Anne is writing to us, speaking from the heart to the ideal confidante, and we rise to the challenge and become that confidante. She turns us into the consummate listener, picking up the signals she hopes she is transmitting into the fresh air beyond the prison of the attic. (91)

Note the key phrase, “we [readers] become the friend.” Through its words the diary constructs its reader, tilting audience sympathies and receptivity in the direction of an accepting, supportive friend, someone willing to absorb intense personal feelings and reactions that, in a more formal relationship, might remain ambiguous or, if expressed, prompt negative judgment.

The diary, then, sets itself up as an encounter between close friends, chatting about a variety of subjects as people do who know each other well. That comfortable tone solidifies the relationship between reader and writer, especially if they have never met in real life. Addressing an imaginary friend, then, appears to serve a distinct purpose for the diary at the very moment when its writer contemplates the challenge of how best to reach an unknown public audience.

Despite Frances Burney’s playful insistence that she trusts Nobody, the script of the imaginary confidant doesn’t mean the writer lacks an audience; rather, this device trains a future audience in how to perform their role. The imaginary friend acts as a stand-in for that future reader. This strategy of discourse develops a relationship of trust between writer and audience, based on the template of a solitary diarist addressing an imagined friend.

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