On vanity

Louis Menand’s article about diaries from the December 10th New Yorker is bad like the movie Transformers was bad. Do not be fooled by the whimsy with which he playfully wonders, “what’s up with diaries!” He doesn't mean it.

He starts the thing off by saying, “Hi, there are a couple of ways to explain why people might feel compelled to keep diaries but never succeed in doing so: the first one’s the id theory, the second one’s the ego theory, and the third one’s the superego theory.” Then he explains what each one of those actually means. So for instance: if you accept the “id theory,” it means you think that people want an outlet for their secret desires and secret shames but quickly realize that they actually want to forget all those things, rather than record them for posterity.

OK, a fine theory, whatever -– it is reasonably inventive and elegant. But why does Menand call it the “id theory”? What’s motivating him to give it this label? Wouldn’t it make just as much sense/offer as much insight if he didn’t?

You could say, well, the label clarifies it –- we have all these thoughts and know all these things already about the id, and when something less familiar (more specific) expresses itself as a function of it, we stand a better chance of understanding. This might be true, but it’s not good for Menand’s idea.

Which is to say, Menand had these three pretty good thoughts about why we do this weird thing with diaries, but by presenting them as mere expressions of these other, much bigger narratives, he’s forfeiting what was useful about them. Like, it actually cheapens what were initially precise ideas, by placing them in the context of very general ones and thus robbing them of their specificity. As a result of Menand’s invocation of “id,” in other words, we have learned less about why people do this weird thing with diaries.

I think this is why some people, like Nabokov, find Freudianism so distasteful –- because as a “system of thought,” it’s like a heap of blocks, this set of very big, unwieldy slabs of thought. And it plays to our worst instincts, gratifying our inclination to notice the ways in which things are the same instead of the ways in which they are different.

There's another reason why providing the labels is bad, this one less to do with its reception and more to do with Menand's motivation behind doing it. Which is that, he had these thoughts but he wasn't sure people were going to take them seriously, so he invoked the authority of Freud, whose ideas are taken for granted by so many people. I realize that Freudian psychiatry -– like, the stuff Freud actually believed about how the brain works -- has been pretty roundly discredited, but the tradition does live on in literary criticism and philosophy, and actually, when it’s applied to that stuff the dull compartmentalization by which it functions is particularly damaging.

I don't think I’m just ascribing motives to him randomly -- you can tell this is what Menand is doing and why. How can you tell? Because after he’s done enumerating the three theories (“id,” “ego,” “supergo”) he writes, “These are powerful, possibly brilliant theories, and they account for much.” Two things: 1) he’s referring to the theories as though they’re not his own –- I really can't see him being that horribly self-congratulatory. 2) the word “accounts.” These theories ACCOUNT for something, rather than explain it. ‘Account’ because these theories are already out there, they’re implicitly true, they exist and they can just explain stuff, the same way the law of gravity explains why things falls. Hate to say it but it’s a defensive mechanism, a measure to ensure that his new ideas fly by making it look like these far more established ones that Freud made up are vouching for their credibility.

This is only one reason why Menand’s article about people who keep diaries is bad. The other is that he employs cosmetic, misleading methods to trick his readers into thinking that two essentially unrelated inquiries belong in the same piece.

Because, let’s pretend for a sec that the Freudian thing doesn’t matter one way or another: he has still made a pretty respectable point, which is that the vast majority of people are at some point possessed by the impulse to keep a diary and that the vast majority of these people fail to maintain the habit. And he’s also set up a very intriguing question, which is: what allows the tiny population of people who actually succeed in keeping a diary to do that? How are they different from the people who fail? Does it take a certain kind of personality?

Instead of actually thinking about those questions though, Menand just poses them and then, by way of a slick turn of phrase, transitions into something totally different. How does he do this? By saying that these three theories he’s just described are nice and all, but that they fail to explain why we want to READ diaries. That is true, they don’t explain that. That’s because they are theories about something else: sure, he’s right that none of them explain this one thing, but that’s because all of them were designed to explain a different one.

If you read the sentence quickly enough though it gets the job done, effectively informing us that we’re about to start reading some stuff about why people feel compelled to read diaries, and convincing us that this is a perfectly logical direction for the stuff he’s been talking about so far to lead. One is reminded of a spy walking into a room of baddies and throwing a smoke bomb, or a magician doing a trick involving some sleight of hand.

I guess it’s okay that Menand wants to talk about this question and not the other, but it also means he shouldn't be allowed to get as much mileage as he does out of pretending that this is an article about “the urge to keep” diaries. Like, it’s actually how the piece is billed on the cover, and it’s also the excuse Menand uses to open with a cute “thought experiment” where the human race dies out, leaves all these diaries behind, and then another species takes over the world and can’t for the life of them figure why so many of their predecessors did this bizarre thing. That thought experiment is about why we write diaries, not how we read them. It is diametrically off-topic and thus its inclusion (along with the three or so paragraphs that come after it, up until the part where he so deftly “switches gears”) is sort of cynical.

OK, so why would Menand do this? What is he trying to get away with? I think it has to do with that same defensiveness that led him to invoke the Freud stuff.

The reason is simple: he’s writing a book review of two diaries -- one by Arthur Schlesinger and the other by Leo Lerman -- not an essay about the nature of diaries in general. And because he’s just writing a book review, he has to write about why a person would want to read diaries, and whether these two in particular have whatever that is -– not why the two men who wrote them felt compelled to do so and what in their singular characters predisposed them to maintaining it.

Menand doesn’t want us to know he’s writing a book review. That whole thing about “why the human race wants to –- but cannot force itself to—write down its own history” (not a real quote) was just something Menand wanted to say. It was his little idea, included so as to rescue his article from being just a buyer’s guide, and turn it rather into an "intellectual contribution." And you know that’s what he’s going for –- that’s why they slug it like a real article on the cover flap (“This is your life! Louis Menand on diaries and the urge to keep them”) instead of just calling it more honestly, “Louis Menand on Leo Lerman and Arthur Schlesinger’s Recently Published Diary Collections” a.k.a. a review of a couple of books.

It’s too bad because ultimately, his analysis of the two books is pretty sound and quite convincing: first he says that the diaries we like the most are the ones where the author writes about other people, because we think it gives us insight into how those people really were; then he says Arthur Schlesinger’s are consequently boring because his descriptions of people perfectly cohere with their public image, such that we don't get that tingle of insider revelation we feel when we think we're getting a private, and thus uncensored, look at someone with a big reputation or personal mythology. In the end he says basically that Lerman’s diaries are good because he was very interested in other people and described them vividly, and that Schlesinger’s are bad because they don’t give us that thing that draws us to the form.

That would have all been just fine if it wasn’t for the deceitful way in which it was presented. Like, ugh: at the end he pretends to bring it all full circle (that is, back to the id/ego/superego theories) by reiterating basically that the stuff that’s in these diaries we read is often quite unremarkable and mundane: that that’s what gives them their power, that everyone, not just the singular people who become famous or important, is capable of making observations like these, but that not everyone –- very few people, in fact -– entertain the illusion that all these observations are worth writing down. Which, yes, “brings us back” to the “beginning of the discussion.” But it’s fake and lazy; the facade of coherence only, not the real thing.

It reminds me of section, honestly. Which kinda makes sense!

P.S. For old times sake: he says near the end that the annotations in the Lerman book are so good and helpful that they are like “keyoles onto [a] vanished life, almost like miniature movie treatments.” Wamp wamp!