"How can I expect to include all I want from a day or part of a day I’ve just lived through if I meekly follow the line that leads from a beginning to an end? That line can only oversimplify. It sticks to the obvious and reasonable, avoiding all that lies outside its “inevitable” progress, avoiding what I most hope to record, the then and then that might not have led here at all and that, even if they did, had anyway their own momentary savor and deserve better than to be flattened into stepping stones on the path to another night’s sleep. To follow chronology means fitting things into place, making sure that nothing has happened. How to see things out of place? Analysis will subvert the illusory naturalness of memory left to its slippered self."
Other than my YA class, this is the first piece of fiction I have been asked to read since entering grad school. That in and of itself is bizarre for me, I keep expecting to have to dust off the Nortons at any minute but I think I'm finally ok with relegating those to personal reference. Don't worry Nortons I will always love you better than the rest. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised by this read - which is essentially a claustrophobic ride along in the consciousness of someone going slowly and obsessively insane. If our unnamed journalist is to be believed, he was asked to start a journal chronicling the details of his life as part of recovery from a recent nervous breakdown. Instead of adopting the kind of style and habit of a diarist, with a focus on impressionistic and personally significant events, the journalist attempts to record the "facts" and minutiae of everyday life, down to the cost of his coffee and his caloric intake. As he goes deeper and deeper into the record keeping process, the process overtakes his living of life and his need to classify and index moments becomes untenable.
I have often thought about the double edged sword of observation. As an obsessive reader and a lifelong journal-er myself, I can sometimes feel that observation creeping into all realms of life. Moments automatically become significant when observed, transcending from an action to a narrative. The attribution of meaning to minutiae can take its toll, this concept taken to its extreme is embodied in the journalist. As he records, the actions of those around him take on heightened significance, he becomes paranoid and resorts to following people, hiding and speculating. He loses all ability to interact with people significantly as his need to record a moment trumps the experience of that moment. He often finds himself asking someone to slow down their conversation so that he can "accurately" capture it. His attempts at classification function to separate facts from interpretation, dreams from thoughts and people from each other; the classification scheme collapses under the weight of his own observations, each category reducing itself into bits of data, meaningless in the absence of context.
In spite of this the novel is hilarious, reaching almost slapstic moments when his pathological need to record overtakes sanity. A coworker of mine was talking broadly about communication yesterday - and the changes that social media have implemented in our methods of communication. Although I think she is making mountains out of molehills in some respects, or at least the wrong mountains - she was talking about how frustrating things like facebook are because they give us the illusion of constant communication but what they essentially do is act as a clearinghouse for statements and validation, a record of single moments, reducing our daily lives to single bits of data. Her obvious stress concerning what she perceives as a profound loss of connectivity and all important context reminded me of the journalist = that tendency to constantly record in place of experience.
In another more basic sense, the journalist strikes at the heart of the diary/memoir vs. fiction debacle. The attribution of truth or authenticity to the format of a diary or a memoir is an easy categorization but a false one (as we all know deep down because of countless public scandals concerning popular memoirs). The fact that there are scandals about memoirs that are uncovered as having fictional elements is telling, we aren't quite ready to embrace the impressionistic aspects of human memory. Writing in its essence can only capture versions of events, versions of moments filtered through consciousness - the real in this sense is a contradiction. The fact that this diary is a prescription designed to help the journalist come to terms with his own fractured self is the ultimate joke.
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