It's a while since I've pondered the narcissism and near solipsism of blogging. Recently, I came across a couple of quotations that sobered my blogging psyche.
Firstly, a slightly indirect parry on first-person 'creative non-fiction' narratives from 'Special Frocks', Jenny Turner's review of Justine Picardie, My Mother's Wedding: the Fabric of Our Lives, in LRB, 5 Jan 2005.
Many people object to memoir and personal anecdote on principle, being suspicious of the necesssary narcissism, worried about the ensuing trivial-mindedness, ashamed by the compulsive force of their own voyeuristic response. These concerns are entirely reasonable.
On principle? What would they make of blogging then? (They would have never survived a Sunday afternoon at our family's place, where memoir and personal anecdote ran rampant in the presence of my assembled relatives). This somehow seems a very English rather than American response.
And Barry Hill on Strehlow (yes, back to Strehlow):
The authority here, for Strehlow as well as anyone travelling with him in this way, is not God but the diary, with its cunning ability to seduce the diarist into a strange double life. The doubleness for the diarist consists of the phenomenon of writing for oneself directly, sensately, cathartically (or any of the terms that indicate a minimum of self-consciousness) while at the same time cultivating second reader at one's elbow. The latter is the other private reader of one's diary: it is the means by which one writes so theatrically, so confessionally, thus making an echo chamber of the deceptively solitary inner citadel of the self. No diarist, starting with Rousseau, ever sat alone.
Certainly no blogger ever sat alone, either. The blogging process, if anything, totally seduces the diarist into this strange public/private double life.
I read an article in The Age on the weekend about Frank McCourt, the Irish-American writer. Apparently, he taught creative writing for about 20 years before writing his first novel. This assuaged my current dose of the imposter complex somewhat.
Speaking of narcissists, I see there has been some kerfuffle about Princess Wee Wee's proposed tour of Europe with the Royal Spawn...she might be a terrorist target after the recent Danish press faux-pas! Wouldn't that be wonderful, I thought at first, then relented. All we need is for Princess Wee Wee to die young and tragically.
(*it was Pavlov's Cat who taught me to write 'quotations' rather than 'quotes'.)
Comments