In his 1918 journal, Andre Gide wrote:
It is from the point of view of art that what I write should be judged, a point of view never taken, or almost never taken by the critics… Moreover, it is the only point of view which is not exclusive of any other.
The journal continuously revisits itself and its conclusions in light of new reading or knowledge. The production of self, in this form, is tentative: it is willing to be rearranged or remade.
Tentativity occupies time and space differently from rigidity. The marble statue is rigid — it asserts itself against tentativity. The notebook is fluid.
As Roland Barthes remarks in his first published essay, “Andre Gide and His Journal”: "The stream is more durable than marble…”
The ellipsis is Barthes’ own. The ellipsis, itself, is common to journals, a marker of where a thought trails off to be picked up later.
And there is something poetic about this notebook’s ellipses — some way in which the uncertainty of self’s relation to time crosses both forms.
I’m thinking of Frank Bidart’s “Self-Portrait, 1969",” which uses ellipses in order to move back and forth between the self in the world and the self in the mind’s eye.
“He’s still young,” still overdetermined by what the word young allows or evokes.
Bidart plays with the eye a bit: this poem is composed of two stanzas, but the extreme indentation of “Once, instead,” makes it seem like three stanzas exist. The use of the field, the long blank before the qualifying condition, drags its finger along the rim of a sink, and all that white porcelain.
When I begin this poem
to see myself
as a piece of history . . .
Frank Bidart wrote this somewhere, in a poem, according to my notebook, which lacks the poem’s title and imagines each line as the first line of a triptych.
There is a way in which the journal or notebook genre enables the placing of words behind each other rather than after each other — it is disorienting to be the speaker inside a chronology. No conclusions can be drawn about the subject who is the speaker.
”I was writing this poem about someone else,” Samuel Cheney says in “This Was Before The Wedding.”
I was someone else before the wedding. Who am I now?
“I lost my father before I was twelve years old,” Gide writes.
From Andre Gide’s Strait is the Gate, translated by Dorothy Bussy.
The day when Gide’s mother “changed the black ribbon in her morning cap for a mauve one” . . .
Should I watch With Andre Gide? Isn’t this question mark actually wanting to be an ellipsis . . .
On a different note, Roland Barthes published an essay titled “Deliberation” about journals and notebooks. In it, he explains why he didn't keep a journal; and why the notebook, as a text, to him seems to fail, or to be implicated in the aesthetics of failure. But some of his favorite writings were notebooks, particularly those of Andre Gide. Imagine the ellipsis.