Literary Diary 2020-2024

Literary Diary 2020-2024 is the working journal Tarnawsky kept while composing his final dilogy, Sebastian in a Dream and The Burial of the Count of Orgaz. It is not fiction. It is the record of the trials and the dead ends, the account of a writer reaching toward goals he had not yet defined.

Its real subject is method. The diary lays out the rules he devised for Sebastian in a Dream, a text-based equivalent of the music-based rules of Bach's Goldberg Variations, thirty variations framed front and back by a single aria, and watches him test whether the system would hold over the length of a book. The dilogy braided that formal scheme with autobiographical material. Tarnawsky described his writing to The Collidescope as "akin to proving a theorem, the goal is to do it, and do it as elegantly as possible." This is the lab notebook for that proof.

The dilogy is the late work; the diary is the record of how it was built.