"But are these entries really written by the same person? Did "I" write these entries? Do they have meaning outside what I assign them as an adult reader?"

Harry Potter, My Daughter, Elihu Smith, and Me Bryan Waterman

Part I | II | III

III

A few weeks ago my daughter offered a similar warning, unintentionally, when she brought home a diary of her entire first grade school year. Most entries recount what happened the previous day or what was planned for that day at school. For 26 February 2001 the assignment, apparently, was to chronicle what had happened over the previous week's school vacation. She writes: "On vacation I went too my friend's house and I went to the empres new grove. and I had hot coco when I got home. and I had another sleepofer with a difrint kid's house. and I went to disny on ice. and one time I stay'd up all night." Now, chances are good that she saw The Emperor's New Groove over vacation. I can't remember. But I'm pretty sure she didn't have a sleepover, and I know she has never been to Disney on Ice or--the ultimate fantasy of all--stayed up all night. Occasionally the diary includes other imagined events, such as swimming with the dolphins in Florida. Who's to say what prompted her to record these things? Are they her own fantasies? Were they prompted by the diary of the kid sitting next to her? Will some future reader be fooled into thinking these things happened? Am I fooled into thinking they say something fundamental about her psyche?

I have a diary of my own from around age six, another that covers to thirteen or so, and one more that runs from thirteen to nineteen. Since I don't actually remember the events I narrated when I was my daughter's age, who's to say they really happened the way I said they did, or what prompted me to record some things and not others? I'm struck by the way a bound diary suggests a continuity of selfhood, that life is like a story with beginning, middle, end; rising action; character development. Writing in the same volume, the thirteen-year-old who recorded daily life as part of an eighth grade English class is apparently the same person who, at age nineteen, recorded the agonies of a college freshman's love life. But are these entries really written by the same person? Did "I" write these entries? Do they have meaning outside what I assign them as an adult reader?

One of the most appealing aspects of Harry Potter's encounter with Riddle's text is that the diarist has been frozen in time. He remains sixteen years old and has no idea, until a reader informs him about his later life, what that future would hold. It's a difficult if not impossible task for readers of a diary not to exploit their knowledge of the diarist's final outcome. Reading Smith's last few diary entries and letters makes me want to shout out warnings: "It's the mosquitoes! The mosquitoes!" It's impossible to read his long letter to Theodore Dwight, to watch their friendship erode due to their religious differences, without thinking of Smith's impending death, less than two years away. But should Smith's twenty-seven-year-old self necessarily be related to the Smith who published poems in the Gazette of the United States as a young man? Riddle would seem to suggest that we can attempt to let entries be informed by the past, but not necessarily by the future. My daughter warns that even the past's information might be misleading.

Tom's other warning--against privileging diaries as somehow more transparent than other historical records--is the same sort of warning my college English teachers had given me. But if this is the final truth about diary reading, if we're unable to place any confidence in the "reality" of what a diary records, how can we explain what remains uniquely seductive about texts like Smith's? Perhaps Riddle can offer answers here as well. Tom only knows what his readers have told him about life after the diary was written. In this way, as I've noted, he seems a perfect emblem for the relationship between a text and the reader who gives it meaning. But Tom also works against reader response theories in certain ways. He is not only a figure of audience response, but of an author's audience awareness. This suggests his agency in shaping the ultimate meanings his text might take and the uses to which it will be put. Tom has anticipated his readers. He hopes to use them, to outsmart them, to remain immortal through them. The story of Harry's encounter with Tom Riddle's diary offers a modified notion of reader response. When Harry initially discovers how the diary works, he carries out conversations with it, writing in it and receiving its answers. When he meets Riddle outside the text, the interaction is more physical, but still suggests that meaning is made as a reader interacts with a text, grapples with it, fights with it. The power is on both sides. It's in the constant negotiation with a diary, our awareness of its various audiences, our imagined conversations with its author, our suspicion of his or her motives, that we can begin to learn what such a text has to teach us.

If Tom and Harry warn that diaries, like other forms of writing, are misleading or limited in their representation of the past, they also remind us, perhaps, of why we constantly want to test those limits. Whether or not we want to admit it, we read diaries differently than we do novels because we want to believe they are letting us at least approach something that was once real. For years literary critics belied the death of the author in their occasional biographical references (even if only appealing to an author's gender, race, or apparent partisan affiliation) as evidence for a text's take on the culture that produced it, what it could tell us about "history." Admitting that biography can matter, that we can learn from the stories people told to make sense of their own experiences, that these stories can even help us interpret more overt fictions from the past, shouldn't threaten us, as long as we remain relatively skeptical about autobiographical truth claims. I know, for example, that Brown's novels gain additional meanings when I bring to them my experience of reading Smith's diaries.

But Riddle may be most useful as a reminder that beyond the academic and historical uses we make of diaries, the texts have personal meanings and motivations, both in their production and reception, then and now. Those meanings and motivations warrant respect. Like Tom Riddle, Elihu Smith had his own reasons for writing: my task isn't simply to make meaning for his diary by reading and writing about it the way I do Brown's novels. It's to seek to recognize and understand his own acts of imagining, of meaning-making, the reasons why he wanted to preserve some version of himself, for whatever audience, and why he chose a diary as his vehicle. Addressing these issues can be dangerous for a literary critic. But only when we respect a diary's dangers can we, like Harry, thumb through its pages and "finish" the story. Scarlet ink and all.

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