¹ I want to stress the conditional nature of these assertions. I mean to define, not a given aspect of a genre, but rather a potential that an author may or may not capitalize on and that is latent in the combination of literary strategies I discuss. If, however, one is seeking to define the generic intentions of this combination, I would say there are two: suspense and an augmentation of that principal feature of the novel which György Lukács calls “inferiority.” I cannot think of any examples in which the form is not motivated by one or both of these intentions, but I can think of a number in which the vital role of the text I discuss is not realized (e.g., Poe's “MS Found in a Bottle,” Steen Blicher's “The Parson at Veijlbye,” Hugo's Last Day of a Condemned Man, James's “The Diary of a Man of Fifty”).

² Nin, On Writing (Yonkers, N.Y.: Oscar Baradinsky, 1947), p. 21.

³ Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Aylmer Maude (New York: Simon, 1942), p. 483.

⁴ The English romantics did not specialize in the poetic diary (though Childe Harold comes close to being one), but they did specialize in what could be called the diaristic moment. Coleridge's conversation poems and Wordsworth's Lucy poems are essentially fragments of poetic diaries. The latter, considering their subject, form a suggestive precedent for Tennyson's elegy.

⁵ All quotations from In Memoriam are taken from Christopher Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson (London: Longmans, 1969).

⁶ The chronology of the sections—the order in which they were composed—is still far from clear. See Stuart F. C. Niermeier, “The Problem of the In Memoriam Manuscripts,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 19 (1971), 149–59, and Joseph Sendry, “The In Memoriam Manuscripts: Some Solutions to the Problems,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 21 (1973), 202–20.

⁷ Sartre has hard words for the sincere man (see particularly the chapter entitled “Bad Faith” in Being and Nothingness), but his critique rests on the grounds that sincerity itself, as it is understood and pursued, is necessarily a form of dishonesty.

⁸ Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1959), p. 12.

⁹ Frank Kermode makes this point with greater accuracy: “Between [Roquentin's] experience and his fiction lies Sartre's book.” For his excellent discussion of the problem of rendering contingency in literary vehicles, which are inevitably formal, see The Sense of an Ending (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 133–52. For a broader exploration of the relationship between Sartre's thought and the style and structure—including the diary structure—of Nausea, see Edith Kern, Existential Thought and Fictional Technique: Kierkegaard, Sartre, Beckett (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 84–134.

¹⁰ Sartre, What Is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frecht-man (New York: Harper, 1965), pp. 220, 223.

¹¹ Sartre, “François Mauriac and Freedom,” Literary Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), pp. 7–23.

¹² Sartre's description of Mauriac's End of the Night as “an experiment in a fictional system” would appear particularly appropriate to Bernanos' novel, which includes a kind of experimental “control” in the suicide of one of its supporting characters, Dr. Delbende, a sudden event that can only be explained (given the information we are allowed) by the doctor's incapacity to believe in the existence of God. Both novels appear to exploit a fictional situation for a preconceived idea; the authors' hands are very much in evidence, and the plots quite clearly stand for arguments.

Of course, the same criticism can be made (and has been) of Sartre's work. When he accuses Mauriac of merely pretending to grant his characters and his readers freedom, it is hard to keep from thinking of the quod erat demonstrandum quality of the scene in the Bouville Portrait Gallery or of his disposal of socialist humanism through the homosexuality of the autodidact. If Mauriac's Preface is blatant in its determination to control our response to his novel, Sartre's Editors' Note in Nausea is perhaps more insidious in its seeming innocence. (Who is this fellow Roquentin that he should deserve editing—and by more than one editor? A legend, no doubt.)

¹³ Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 13.

¹⁴ Gide, Les Cahiers et les poésies d'André Walter (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), pp. 18–19, 27. The translations are my own.

¹⁵ Gide, The Counterfeiters, trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York: Random, 1973). p. 418.

¹⁶ William Matthews, British Diaries (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1950), pp. vii-x; Kate O'Brien, English Diaries and Journals (London: William Collins, 1943); Arthur Ponsonby, British Diarists (London: Ernest Benn, 1930). See also Alain Girard, Le Journal intime (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963).

¹⁷ Fothergill, Private Chronicles (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 47–48. The whole book is an excellent reassessment of the diary as a literary form.

¹⁸ J. P. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, trans. Gisela C. O'Brien (New York: Ungar, 1964), p. 22.

¹⁹ The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, trans. John Oxenford (New York: Horizon, 1969), p. 217.

²⁰ Autobiography, pp. 205–06. Stuart Atkins has shown how Goethe in addition trained, as it were, for the writing of his novel in writing his own letters: “The Apprentice Novelist: Goethe's Letters, 1765–1767,” Modern Language Quarterly, 10 (1949), 290–306.

²¹ An excellent work to put beside The Sorrows of Young Werther, to highlight both its complexity of effect and its “representational” character, is Ugo Fos-colo's The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis. Published in 1802 and composed under the strong influence of Werther, Foscolo's novel closely parallels Goethe's in both form and content. Yet the work is written in essentially the spirit in which so many readers took Goethe's work—a spirit that Goethe would call “didactic.” It is composed almost entirely of Jacopo's letters to his intimate friend Lorenzo. The protagonist's love, Teresa, is betrothed to the orderly and passionless Odoardo. Jacopo, like Werther, leaves for a while, attempts to stay away, fails, returns, and eventually commits suicide. His suicide note, like Werther's, is written by stages, and the account of his burial (with no priest in attendance) is delivered in the same perfunctory way. But there is little to indicate that the novel does not fully endorse the passionate pessimism of its letter writer. Crucial to this difference in effect are differences in plot and supporting characters. Teresa, for example, not only loves Jacopo but fully shows that she does. She is forced by political and economic necessity to marry someone she loathes. Because she is not a free agent, unlike Lotte, and because her betrothed, unlike Albert, is not sympathetic, there is little counterbalancing to the ideal of passionate immediacy expressed so often in the letters.

²² Byron rarely, if ever, allowed his heroes to unmask themselves through their own words. When it came to unmasking the Byronic hero, the poet performed the operation by altering his own voice.

²³ Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time, trans. Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 64.

²⁴ This reading of Pechorin's character is supported by John Mersereau, Jr., in his analysis of “The Fatalist,” the novel's last chapter, in Mikhail Lermontov (Car-bondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 132–43.

²⁵ Charles E. Kany, The Beginnings of the Epistolary Novel in France, Italy, and Spain (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1937), p. 116. As for the broader genre of epistolary fiction, Guilleragues missed inventing it by at least seventeen hundred years. Its ancestry is classical, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it flourished in the Romance languages and English, particularly in the literature of l'amour-passion. Guilleragues' generic originality lay in the mutation he effected in the art of letters, most notably in psychological intensity. As several scholars have convincingly argued, Guilleragues achieved this by crossing the style and passionate movement of tragic tirade with the epistolary genre. Yet even here, Ovid's Heroides and its seventeenth-century imitations form a highly suggestive precedent (the Lettres themselves were transcribed into verse and compared favorably to the Heroides). It is not simply in the intensity of language that Guilleragues helped revolutionize the epistolary genre but also in the hermetic containment he achieved by the two strokes of making his heroine a nun, confined to her cell, and of suppressing the replies, cold as they are supposed to be, that her cavalier sent back to her. In this way Guilleragues compounded his own effacement as author with a further effacement of all characters other than Mariane. This particular feature of the Lettres looks forward more to the peculiarly claustrophobic quality of later diary fiction than to the broader genre of passionate epistolary fiction that it immediately spawned (most examples of the latter type were correspondence fiction; Mariane's letters were themselves published in several editions with the replies of her cavalier, and in at least one version her lover happily returns in the end). The effect of the Lettres is that of a subjectivity thrown back almost entirely on its own resources.

²⁶ When, in the early nineteenth century, a real Portuguese nun. Mariana Alcoforado, was discovered to have been in her convent during the probable time of composition, partisans of innate and untrained creativity—of which that century had its fair share—carried the field, and to this day most libraries keep the volume in the Portuguese literature section, cataloged under “Alcoforado, Mariana.” It was not until Deloffre and Rougeot published their edition of the Lettres in 1962 that the debate was conclusively decided in favor of art, primarily through a wealth of excellent internal observations.

²⁷ Lettres portugaises, ed. F. Deloffre and J. Rougeot (Paris: Gamier, 1962), p. 65. All translations supplied for quotations from this work are my own. I know of no adequate published translations into English.

²⁸ Leo Spitzer, “Les Lettres portugaises,” Romanische Forschungen, 65 (1954), 94–135.

²⁹ E. P. M. Dronke, “Héloïse and Mariane: Some Considerations,” Romanische Forschungen, 72 (1960), 223–56; David E. Highman, “Lettres portugaises: Passion in Search of Survival,” Modern Language Quarterly, 33 (1972), 370–81.

³⁰ Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 1–25. See also Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1969).

³¹ “But now the narrative past, like the divine Beginner for whom it was for a time the surrogate, has lost its authenticating power. Far from being an authenticating agent, indeed, it has become the very type of inauthenticity. Here and now may be unpleasant, but at least they are authentic in being really here and now, and not susceptible to explanation in some shadowy there and then” (Trilling, p. 139).