Introspection versus Observation: the Great Louis Menand
Louis Menand’s article on diaries and diarists, “Woke up This Morning,” (The New Yorker,
“The impulse to keep a diary is to actual diaries as the impulse to go on a diet is to actual slimness.”
“It’s not that we imagine we would be happier if we kept a diary; we imagine that we would be better—that diarizing is a natural healthy thing, a sign of vigor and purpose, a statement, about life, that we care, and that non-diarizing, or worse, failed diarizing is a confession of moral inertia, an acknowledgement, eve, of the ultimate pointlessness of one’s being in the world.”
“The ego theory holds that maintaining a diary demands a level of vanity and self-importance that is simply too great for most people to sustain for long periods of time. It obliges you to believe that the stuff that happened to you is worth writing down because it happened to you. This is why so many diaries are abandoned by circa January 10th: keeping this up, you quickly realize, means something worse than being insufferable to others; it means being insufferable to yourself. People find they just can’t take themselves seriously enough to continue. They may regret this—people capable of taking themselves seriously tend to go farther in life—but they accept it and move on to other things, such as collecting stamps.”
Do we learn more about a person reading their diary? Or does the impossibility of accurate self-representation mean we only get the feeling we know intimately who a person really is by reading about them in other people’s diaries? Menand says, “[Virginia] Woolf described from the outside by another person is likely to give us a more vivid picture of what Virginia Woolf was really like than Woolf described from the inside by herself. Introspection is not as reliable as observation. (That’s why we have shrinks.)
And, I’ll add: that’s why we have creative writing courses. Not to teach the art of introspection but to practice the science of observation of everyone else.
Inside, Menand claims, we are all pretty much the same. “It’s the outside, the way people look and the things they say, that makes them distinct.”
He notes that Woolf is “one of those writers who keep the instrument in tune: she wrote, sometimes just to be writing, whether there was anything of significance to write about or not.”
“’Never discriminate, never omit’ is one of the unstated rules of diary-keeping. The rule is perverse, because all writing is about control, and writing a diary is a way to control the day—to have, as it were, the last word. … If it doesn’t contain a lot of dross, it’s not a diary. It’s something else—a journal, or a writer’s notebook, or a blog (blather is not the same as dross).”
“The memorializing of the mundane is part of the flattening of foreground-background contrast that makes diaries different from memoirs and other forms of historical narrative. It’s also a sign of the diary’s absolute fidelity to the present…. The just-the-facts elimination of perspective, discrimination, and reflection…”
This what we’re trying to teach our students. Yes, they must write what they know; unless they are particularly gifted. When they write further from home, they have to be careful television isn’t filtering their observation. Creative writing can’t be just-the-facts. It has to be close observation, combined with perspective, discrimination, and reflection.
An example? Menand himself on Schlesinger: “…he was a golden retriever: he like being liked much more than he disliked being disliked….” And “…he dreamed of writing a novel…but despite a fair amount of self laceration…he never made much headway. (Not many people who have that particular dream do make much headway.)”
Writing a diary may keep us from completing our novels, and it may be the only way we get to them too. Self laceration and failure to write everything down—you are for sure not writing now.
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What a sad view Louis Menand has of diaries I thought.
But in a diary we just “write”,don’t we? And there is value in just writing. I feel as if I need to defend “writing”.
To put it very simply, writing I feel is the documentation of different aspects of our existence through language.
And our existence in general is described as thinking, feeling and doing.
Putting all those aspects in language(on paper, in a word doc. whatever)documents our existence and may (or not) generate meaning and further thought.
Just because someone’s diary is a plain personal record of events and experiences that are supposed unreliable by someone else doesn’t make reading that diary a less valuable way of knowing that person.
There really are different ways of knowing.
There is so much to who we are that both observation and introspection are needed to get the full picture I think. I don’t know if we learn more or less about a person if we read their diary vs. observe them and draw our own conclusions about them.
There are different ways of Knowing, each equipped with limitations and strengths. I did say that already didn’t I.