Agency Under Fire

This article focuses on three, Second World War, female diarists writing about self-control, self-definition, and self-assertion. The diarists are: Jane Hoyake (GDP 306), a 70 year old living in German-occupied Amsterdam; Ethel Johnson (GDP 7), an internment camp prisoner; and Evelyn (GDP XX), coming-to-age in England. The paper starts with an exploration of the women’s multifaceted and, often, contradictory experiences of war. Jane, for example, shows us that her sense of agency is under-fire, not from starvation, exile or German troops, but from her lack of self-control. She declares herself determined to fashion her own being: a religious form of self-abnegation. It is clear, she is far from thinking that she has triumphed in the adventure. Our diarists highlight the ways in which the form’s special character captures the fragmented and ambiguous nature of experience. Irrespective of how much we learn of our diarists, whether it be a lot or very little, we are as often confronted by what we realise we still don’t know. A gappy “intimate history” and a sort of heuristic heaven, the diaries invite us to explore what we can say about trauma, agency, and about the diary-form, on teasingly slight data (Hartman 2019). With the support of insights drawn from Wittgenstein’s and Einstein’s diary-writing, the second section of the article sketches a handful of ways in which the diary-form’s “poetics” and modus operandi can point to interpretative strategies that are well-suited to navigating such elusive territory. It does so precisely because the form will not be standardized. The penultimate section of the article introduces perspectives from the “gap hypothesis”. This supposes that even the fullest account of a person’s life (one’s own or others’) is full of unknowns, or gaps. Contrariwise, the least fragment can be rewarding if tantalizing. The “gap hypothesis” is a diary-derived interpretative mode that goes beyond the diary and amounts to a strategy for the discussion of veracity, not least in seeing that the “poetics” of the form are truth-seeking and aesthetically effective. The article ends by suggesting that the diary-form’s “poetic”, exemplified so powerfully by Jane, Ethel, and Evelyn, can help us discuss perennial issues that now matter in new and powerful ways.