Narrative technique

Narrative technique in the 'Diary'

The Diary of a Nobody, useful though it is as a document of social history, is first and foremost a comic fiction--indeed, by general consent, a comic masterpiece.

Analysing humour is a dispiriting activity. As Mark Twain said, it is like a frog: you can dissect it, but if you do, it dies. It is a fact that very little Victorian humour has worn well. It is a disquieting experience to leaf through an original volume of a comic paper like Punch. Many of the cartoons, jokes, and anecdotes in Punch are not simply not funny today: they are literally incomprehensible.

Nevertheless, the Diary did emerge from a well-established tradition of Victorian humour, and it has to be read against that. Where the Diary is most unusual is in its economy of effect. In an era when most written humour was marked by its piling-up of whimsical detail - the Dickensian tradition, in fact - the Diary is very different. It knocks away a central prop of Victorian humour with its mockery of Pooter’s own execrable puns. Its writing is scrupulously taut. It contains hardly an extraneous sentence. Every little detail carries its sly weight of comic significance. How difficult a feat that is can be seen by looking at extracts from fictions that tried to imitate the Diary’s success. (See extracts elsewhere in these pages.) These seem slack by comparison, and their humour close to mere facetiousness.

Indeed, though the Diary may seem artless, it is a good deal more sophisticated than it may look. For one thing, there is its sheer originality. Earlier novels had incorporated diary entries for the sake of immediacy, but the Diary is probably the first English novel using a diary format throughout.

It is useful, at this point, to distinguish between two types of fictive diary. The first is the pseudo-diary, where a fiction is offered as a real diary, ostensibly written by the protagonist. Examples are Stephen Dedalus’s diary that closes Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Roquentin’s diary that makes up Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938). The appeal of using this variety of first-person narrative is obvious: no other technique is so inherently realistic and immediate. Indeed, the realistic novel itself was, in part, born out of texts that were offered initially as “real” memoirs or diaries. For example, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) was offered as the memoir of one “H.F.,” a Whitechapel saddler, recording the events of the Great Plague of 1664-5, and was not discerned to be fiction until decades later.

The other type is the mock-diary, where both diarist and the diary form itself are handled ironically. The mock-diary emerged definitively in the late-Victorian years, probably because a new flood of real, pompous, self-regarding diaries, journals and memoirs finally drew the attention of satirists. Punch magazine exploited this trend with a “Dogberry’s Diary” about an inept policeman, a “Diary of a Pessimist,” and an “Extract from the Diary of a Dyspeptic.” Another long-running feature in Punch was a mock diary called “Essence of Parliament. Extracted from the Diary of Toby, MP.”[1] All these were contemporary with The Diary of a Nobody, which announces itself as being in the same mode with its defensive opening statement by Mr Pooter himself: “I fail to see--because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody’--why my diary should not be interesting.”

Mock-diaries are inherently comical, and their comedy depends on the maintenance of several narrative levels in the text which, in the convenient terminology of reader-response literary theory, are controlled by the implied author, the narrator, the narratee, and the implied reader.

The implied author is a voiceless textual constructor, the arranger of the materials, and the guide to the whole point of view of the Diary: It is not necessarily identical to the flesh and blood Grossmiths--a point considered further later on.

As for the narrator, this is ostensibly Pooter himself. In most realist fiction, certainly that of the Victorian era, the narrator may well address the implied reader directly, without ambiguity and with a tacit assumption of shared values.

However, in some fictions--and in all mock-diaries--standing between narrator and implied reader is another entity, the narratee, who is silent in the text yet exists as an ever-sympathetic “ear” into which the diarist speaks. Frequently the narratee is the physical diary itself: the entity sometimes cosily addressed by diarists (though not by Pooter) as “Dear Diary.”

The humour in all mock-diaries depends on the maintenance of a gap between the implied reader--that is, the one who is presumed to be capable of deciphering the narrator’s pomposities and self-deceptions--and what has been called the “specifically acquiescent” narratee.[2] What makes for unique comedy in this Diary is the particular way in which Pooter recollects and represents his painful experiences, for the ear of his unheard narratee.

Three episodes will serve to illustrate this point. Each of them, potentially, involves humiliation and fear, but in each case these strong emotions are anaesthetised during the process of transcription and transmission to the narratee. In the scene at the Islington theatre, when his free tickets are contemptuously rejected, Pooter is not, so to speak, humiliated in “real time.” What we have is Pooter’s reconstruction of the episode afterwards for his narratee, and the essence of the humour is not the situation itself but Pooter’s inability to give adequate verbal shape to his pain. The stilted phrasing (“some very unpleasant words … to my horror … doomed to still further humiliation … felt quite miserable … could scarcely sleep a wink”) defuses the whole toe-curling experience. It is the implied reader who turns it into comedy by detecting just how absurdly content Pooter is once he has transmitted his pain to his silently consoling narratee.

Again in the second case, Pooter’s confrontation with the irate cab driver over the lack of the fare, we do not see Pooter having his beard pulled by the cab-driver, which would be more shocking than amusing. What we have is Pooter telling his narratee that he has been subjected to a “disgraceful insult and outrage.” Further, we notice that the episode closes only when Pooter is able to lay a soothing plaster of words--in two layers this time--over the raw experience. Here as elsewhere, he writes in his diary about his need to communicate in writing with a second narratee. “Have copied this verbatim in the diary … wrote a very satirical letter … never wrote a more determined letter … wrote him sixteen pages … put down the conversation word for word … intend writing to the Telegraph.” That newspaper was and is a Conservative paper where the middle classes expect to elicit sympathy when they want to wax indignant about society’s shortcomings. In real life, no doubt, it still supplies the same kind of balm that a century ago healed Pooter’s damaged self-esteem. For a man of his stamp, its readership makes the perfect narratee.[3]

Thirdly, there is the episode where Pooter paints the bath-tub red. It is only two days afterwards that he takes a bath and scoops up what he thinks is a handful of blood. We might object that he could hardly have failed to notice the paint was melting and staining the water as he got in. But the Grossmiths worked in a trade of situation comedy where timing and effect are critical. They knew well how to build situations unobtrusively but progressively, for example by making Mrs. James devolve in graded steps from being a pleasant acquaintance to a meddling nuisance. In the bath-tub case, the intervening “business” has been so adroitly handled that it doesn’t seem unrealistic that the climax surprises Pooter, for the reader too has quite forgotten the paint-pot.

There is nothing remotely funny about showing a man terrified that he has had a fatal haemorrhage. The scene is irresistibly comic, nevertheless. Why? Because of the clichéd, clerkish officialese that is the only register Pooter can command when he secretively writes it up later (“experienced the greatest fright I ever received in the whole course of my life … imagine my horror”), not to mention the wonderfully economical bathos of “stepped out of the bath, perfectly red all over” [29 April. Ch. 3.].

One consequence of having a narratee interposed between the narrator and the implied reader was first noticed by Tom Lubbock: it makes it hard to do justice to the Diary’s comedy when it is dramatised or read aloud. An audible reader can hardly refrain from leaning heavily on phrases like “imagine my horror” or “felt quite miserable,” yet these phrases are intended for the ear of the narratee, not the (presumed) less-than-sympathetic implied hearer. Unless handled carefully they distort the effect of having the experience filtered through Pooter’s complacent sensibility. This is humour that works best, as Lubbock put it, in “the silence of the page” (26).

[1] These mock-diaries appeared in the issues of Punch of 7 April, 2 June and 6 December 1888 respectively. “Toby, MP” started on 16 June 1888. All were anonymous.

[2] By Cobley (2001), 140 in his brief but cogent discussion of the Diary’s narrative tactics.

[3] In a 1996 editorial, the Daily Telegraph preened itself about this century-old reference, apparently believing the Grossmiths were promoting Pooter as a middle-class hero. The writer failed to realise the distinction between narratee and implied reader. There are further details in Wheen (1996).