the diary was edited by daniel aaron and published in 1985 by harvard university press.which prompted me to think, why would you ever edit a diary? that seems to me a heinous crime against the author of the diary. sure, they wouldn't want certain secrets being divulged to the public, but then if the diary is published posthumously there is no problem. so why would you ever edit a diary? if you edit a diary, then you are changing what the author is saying--and that is just outright lying. a diary is a good (truthful) window into a person's mind, and changing anything in the diary is almost the same (to me) as murdering that person's thoughts and replacing it with a surrogate which is totally not honest at all. so, why people edit diaries, i might never ever know.
12.04.2010
censoring the truth--fiction, or just plain lying?
so i was stalking browsing through some people's blogs and came across this post on vicki's blog. it was linked to this page on wikipedia regarding hypergraphia. at the end of the article, i came across the line:
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If you're publishing someone's diary postmortem, and they did not give you permission to do so, perhaps you want to allow them some privacy? Surely there's things you've written that you would not care for the whole world to have the opportunity to read?
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, maybe it's to actually better preserve the ideas. When you scribble in a diary, your ideas are usually a bit jumbled. Oftentimes, there's a bunch of redundancies and spelling errors and nonsensical mumbojumbo. If you're publishing it, a certain degree of flow and comprehensibility must be met.
well... i can understand the spelling errors. but everything else... i feel like everything else should be kept because it's that person. mark twain's autobiography (totally not a diary, i understand) was edited and a LOT was taken out. now, it's being republished with minimal editing with everything kept in, and it's reaching several volumes... so i really don't understand why someone would edit a diary. of course there are some secrets better left in the dark...
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