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Even before the evolution of the blog as literary device, the journal was an anomalous form, promiscuously mingling autobiography, literature, philosophy, history, and the occasional really good recipe for making a pick-me-up cocktail in both senses of that now-antique adjective.
I forget momentarily (but I bet someone will remind me) the name of the classical literary form that mingles poetry, prose, elements of farce and tragedy, coarse and contemplative passages. I doubt if it’s Menippean satire and it certainly isn’t macaronic verse, so it probably doesn’t begin with “m” at all. But a good journal is that sort of utter hybrid, and at its best, it works like a novel, though some would say like a bad novel.
Mircea Eliade’s journals are of more interest to me than his scholarly volumes for that reason. Eliade edited the entries carefully before publishing them late in his life, but the interspersal of penetrating insights with utterly self-absorbed private moments is an essential part of the self-mythologizing of a man who, once he got past the political revolutions and wars and exile of his youth, really didn’t do much but write, teach, vacation in interesting places, and go to various conferences. Of course, some of his supernatural/fantastic fiction is based on the theme of the narrator whose seeming ramblings slowly pull the hearers into an increasingly strange and unexpected world, so one sometimes begins to suspect the journals, in spite of recounting documentable events, are constructed from time to time with something like this in mind.
Walter Benjamin’s collected writings have the feeling of a multi-volume journal for largely accidental reasons. The man wrote for money, but far less often than he would have wished, and most of what he wrote otherwise was short, unfinished, and unpublished. The few essays that our cultural critics flog to death with their line-by-line explications were rare exceptions, and some of them never saw print in his lifetime, either. Had he been born eighty years later, Benjamin would have been an excellent blogger. He might even, though I doubt it, have solved the problem he expressed in terms of “There are places where I can earn x amount of money, and there are places I can live on x amount of money, but they are not the same places.” Anyone who turns out frequently inconsequential topical prose for a fixed sum per piece, and they are many, can relate.
There is much that could be said about the journals of introspective novelists as a hybrid form (they allow for the recording of real-life moments that resemble their fiction without having the necessity of going in a specific narrative direction), but not in this post. There is also Bart Ehrman’s offhand suggestion that the Gospel of Mark is constructed like a postmodern novel, but that is not for this post either.
I forget momentarily (but I bet someone will remind me) the name of the classical literary form that mingles poetry, prose, elements of farce and tragedy, coarse and contemplative passages. I doubt if it’s Menippean satire and it certainly isn’t macaronic verse, so it probably doesn’t begin with “m” at all. But a good journal is that sort of utter hybrid, and at its best, it works like a novel, though some would say like a bad novel.
Mircea Eliade’s journals are of more interest to me than his scholarly volumes for that reason. Eliade edited the entries carefully before publishing them late in his life, but the interspersal of penetrating insights with utterly self-absorbed private moments is an essential part of the self-mythologizing of a man who, once he got past the political revolutions and wars and exile of his youth, really didn’t do much but write, teach, vacation in interesting places, and go to various conferences. Of course, some of his supernatural/fantastic fiction is based on the theme of the narrator whose seeming ramblings slowly pull the hearers into an increasingly strange and unexpected world, so one sometimes begins to suspect the journals, in spite of recounting documentable events, are constructed from time to time with something like this in mind.
Walter Benjamin’s collected writings have the feeling of a multi-volume journal for largely accidental reasons. The man wrote for money, but far less often than he would have wished, and most of what he wrote otherwise was short, unfinished, and unpublished. The few essays that our cultural critics flog to death with their line-by-line explications were rare exceptions, and some of them never saw print in his lifetime, either. Had he been born eighty years later, Benjamin would have been an excellent blogger. He might even, though I doubt it, have solved the problem he expressed in terms of “There are places where I can earn x amount of money, and there are places I can live on x amount of money, but they are not the same places.” Anyone who turns out frequently inconsequential topical prose for a fixed sum per piece, and they are many, can relate.
There is much that could be said about the journals of introspective novelists as a hybrid form (they allow for the recording of real-life moments that resemble their fiction without having the necessity of going in a specific narrative direction), but not in this post. There is also Bart Ehrman’s offhand suggestion that the Gospel of Mark is constructed like a postmodern novel, but that is not for this post either.
