MY SECRET LIFE, A VOLUMINOUS SEXUAL MEMOIR written by an anonymous upper-middle-class gentleman who identifies himself by the name Walter, was published in a very limited and private manner in 1888. As genre, the diary of sexual experience fascinates in a number of different registers. One of its primary interests comes from the collector's impulse. Collectors seek to contain and archive an essentially disorderly world always seeping out of one's grasp and running away into irrevocable decay, forgotten days, a present becoming irremediable past. Collecting might stanch the unquiet flow, create a cleared space which arrests and makes sense of a random heterogeneity. A diary follows the collector's impulse; it is a collection of days and the experiences marked off within the day's space. A sexual diary seeks to hold on to experiences not only by recording-crystallizing them through obsessive inscription--and sharing them with others, but through the repetition of more or less the same experience again and again. Generally the pornographic project is to repeat a series of moments of supersaturated meaning--moments which also mean the same thing, again and again. As Steven Marcus explains in his discussion of Victorian pornography, the pornographer has no interest in generalizing, summary, or even, finally, in concluding. Each little narrative has its temporary and natural teleology in the orgasm. Once this climax comes, the narrative possibilities are limited to retelling the same story, with only slight variation. "Generalization is in fact anathema to pornography;" Marcus writes, Pornography in general and My Secret Life in particular are collections of instances rendered with scrupulous and concrete detail.
