Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Ana�s Nin by Elizabeth Podnieks (review)

TES,34, 2004 323 Daily Modernism: TheLiterary Diariesof Virginia Woolf,AntoniaWhite,ElizabethSmart, and Anais JNin.By ELIZABETH PODNIEKS. Montreal & Kingston, London, and Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2000. xi + 407 pp. f 43. ISBN: o-7735-202I-X. By the time Virginia Woolf and other modernistwritersset out to write their own daily chronicles, the diary had acquired such a literary status as to justify metadiaristic preoccupations. As early as 1899, when the young Virginia could hardly think of herselfas an acclaimed author, and novel writingwas yet to come, she paused (withan eye to the published text and to a public audience)to contemplate herself in the pose of the exacting diarist, dealing with her writing as with an art in itself:'Oh dear- the styleof thisworkought to undergo a radicalchange. All these detailswill swamp me.' And again some ten years later:'There are many ways of writing such diaries as these. I begin to distrustdescription.'ByI919, she thought she had found her form, and much in the same terms she was elsewhere advocatingfor the futurenovel: 'Whatsortof diaryshouldI like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not so slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. [...] I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that the collection had sorteditself& refineditself & coalesced, as such depositsso mysteriouslydo, into a mould, transparentenough to reflectthe light of our life, & yet steady, tranquilcomposed with the aloofnessof a work of art' (pp. I15-I6). As Elizabeth Podnieksaptly underlinesin her book, this modernist, self-reflexive approachwill be (moreor less overtly)a markof the diarywritingof the other latertwentieth -centuryauthors she takes into account:Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anais Nin. In fact, as she takespains to point out in her four analyticalchapters , all these authorswere well-read in the genre tradition,all used it as a practice ground and a resourceto be tapped for more seriouswriting,and all used to reread and revise themselves, both with an awarenessof diary as an art form, and with a Woolfian longing to see the fragmentsof their daily life as women coalesce into a recognizable pattern, although within the marginal space of a lesser genre, and in the form of an unfinishedstory. With all thiswell in mind Podnieks'sconsiderationson diaryliteratureare such as to make us appreciateits fullrelevancewithin modernism.She makesus enter a sort of laboratory where one can see the modernist writer at work redefining genres through a crossingof barriersand blurringof confines, a strifewhich runs parallel to a revisionof the autobiographicalself, or else (viaFreud)to a new sense of the 'I' as both real and imaginativelywoven. In her introductorychapters Podnieks explores literary theory at great length (andwith perhapsan excess of quotations),in searchof a suitabledefinitionof diary literature,one which can takeinto account its being a construct,or else itsproximity to autobiography,biography,the essay,poetry, narration.Her main issue, however, is the link between genre and gender, the way in which this special fluidityof the genre becomes 'a subversiveliterary space for women', a 'polyvocal playground', where private and public, domesticity and literature,high and low culture can be rehandled, but also where women can express and mask themselves, and where ephemeral daily fragmentsmight eventually compose themselves into a portrait, a narrativeof the self. Understandably,Podnieks'sapproach to her subjectentails the weaving of many threads,a taskshe performsquite well. Diary writing,especiallybecause it is to date considered a lesser form, benefits considerablyfrom the widening of the frame of reference (modernistaesthetics, psychoanalysis,poststructuralistcriticism, feminist theory).Neverthelessthere are times, in her analysisof individualauthors,when all this intrudes quite abruptly, and unnecessarily(see for example the references to Chodorow in Chapter 4), as if to answer a need for authoritativeanchorage. Also, Podnieks'scontextual awareness,which is what makesher workvaluable,may have led her at times to deviate with too lengthy asidesfrom her main course. But on the whole her book, scholarly,knowledgeable, and agreeable to read as it is, makes a good case for the rescuing of an underratedform. UNIVERSITYOF ROME III MARIA DEL SAPIO GARBERO Iris Murdoch'sParadoxicalNovels:ThirtyYearsof CriticalReception.By BARBARA STEVENS HEUSEL. (Studiesin Englishand American Literature,Linguistics,and Culture: Literary Criticism in Perspective)Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Camden House. 200I. xi + I85...

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