I am currently on the process of writing a novel that, despite many writers’ hesitencies to use the form, is told as a series of journal entries. Perhaps I’ve always loved the flow of Sartre’s “Nausea,” where you can see the psyhological build up of the character in time, but I also feel journals can better represent reality as it is lived and experienced: they contain the minutiae of everyday life, the uncertaintyod events building despite the routines of the day. This is especially the case when contrasting personal experiences to historical world events and cultural media. We hear about news events, pick up a book, mull over ideas and days later (or years) suddenly form a new perspective on life. The typical fiction form can not do this, and often reads as contrived in the face of reality.
Another benefit of the journal form is the narrative voice. Someone writing in a journal can make mistakes, change their mind, display an emotional intensity to ideas, and be realistically unreliable. This raw uncertainty of the telling makes it more possible to recount fantastic and otherworldly experienes as potentially real. By being unreliable, the narrator escapes from the authorial burden of hacingto act like they know everything or think they are telling the truth.
Lastly, I suspect the journal or diary as a literary form is due for a resurgence. Isn’t so much of the written media produced online precisely in this genre? From blogs to stasis updates, there is the current need to tell, not just so others can hear, but that we can reaffirm the multiplicity of individual perspectives. Similarly, the journal is both episodic and serial (the way life is), distinct events and themes defining each entry that build up to larger narrative arcs over time, making use of certain devices that have made TV programming so popular such as the small repeated descriptions gags or character behaviors (what Umberto Eco called iterative schemes).
Of course there are still specific techniques that need to be worked out. For instance, how does one represent the written word in contrast to typed words? As one of the threads of my novel is the move to futurity over the last ten years, I have the narrator switch from a handwritten to an online journal. My immediate and simple solution turned out to be just getting rid of paragraph indentations and adding line breaks, as that is how text is represented online. Sadly though the same kind of move doesn’t work when the character earlier decides to start writing in cursive (nor can we see the change of penmanship over time and as a reflection of charcter moods). But the journal form does leave room for charts maps lists and other sub-literary forms that we express ourselves through on a daily basis.
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