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JOAN DIDION:

"TELLING STORIES TO LIVE."

By

Diana R. Pingatore

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to

Michigan State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1987

Copyright by

DIANA RAE PINGATORE

1987

ABSTRACT

JOAN DIDION:

"TELLING STORIES TO LIVE"

By

Diana R. Pingatore

A developmental approach to the works of Joan Didion

reveals a gradual change in her understanding of the

relation of literature to life.

As the status of

literature in contemporary life occupies a pivotal position

in modern literary theory, Didion's attention to this

issue places her in the mainstream of American literary

thought.

Her contribution to the critical debate can be

characterized in three basic ways.

First, an analysis of Didon's four novels discloses a

pattern of progression in her work which corresponds to a

paradigm best articulated by Edward Said in The World, The

 

Text, and The Critic.

Said claims that the definitive

experience of modernity has been a shift in the cultural

modes of relation from filiation to affiliation.

Didion's

novels reflect that shift as crucial to the American

experience.

Her first two novels chronicle the effects of

the loss of filiation in American life, whereas the last

two novels represent and critique the affiliative patterns

that have emerged to replace filiation in contemporary

experience.

Another salient feature of Didion's concern is the

relation of language to experience.

That concern is

registered through Didion's attention to narrative, in all

forms of cultural discourse.

For Joan Didion, narrative

provides the requisite link that holds a culture together

in the modern shift from filiation to affiliation.

It is

in Didion's narratives, fiction and non—fiction, that

traces of this crucial cultural transition can be detected

and given form.

Finally, Didion's understanding of the relation of

language to experience, and thus literature to life, is

filtered through her historical situation as a writer who

is female, contemporary and American.

These three factors

account for the form, content and distinctive style evident

in Didion's narratives.

These factors also justify the

application of critical approaches which seek to articulate

the juncture at which literature meets life.

For that

reason, feminist criticism that focuses on the development

of narrative as a force in social change will dominate the

following discussion of Didion's four novels and four essay

collections.

For my children, Leisa and Tony,

whose extraordinary love and courage make possible this

future;

For my family, the Martins,

whose spirit and struggle provide strength from the past;

And for Gary,

who connects me to all the loves of my life,

past, present, and future.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ..................................

1

II.

A MOTHER'S LEGACY:

FEMININE ARCHETYPAL PATTERNS IN

RUN RIVER .. ........... . ...... ........ ..... ....

43

 

III.

CULTURAL ORPHANS:

THE REPUDIATION OF NARRATIVE IN

PLAY IT AS IT LAYS ........ .............. ......

93

 

IV.

A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER:

STORIES OF THE FATHER

 

RETOLD ........................................ 149

DEMOCRACY A NOVEL:

A FAMILY OF FICTIONS FROM

 

HISTORY TO ROMANCE . ......... . ..... . ..... ...... 221

VI.

DIDION'S NON-FICTION:

MESSAGES FROM THE FRONTIERS

OF AMERICAN EXPERIENCE ........................ 310

VII.

CONCLUSION ...... ....... . ................ ...... 351

vi

:
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INTRODUCTION

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live".1

This

observation, which appears as the opening line of Joan

Didion's second essay collection, The White Album, is the

 

most incisive statement Didion makes about the function of

narrative in society.

For Didion, the narrative impulse

serves both a psychological and social function:

narrative

is both an act of knowing and a model for action.

Narrative (the sequencing of events that constitutes the

stories we tell) not only offers precepts to live by, "the

sermon in the stone"; narrative also serves to organize and

interpret the data of the senses.

"We live entirely,

especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a

narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with

which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria

which is our actual experience" (EA 11).

Thus for Didion,

the production of satisfying narratives is an essential

activity, both for the individuals that produce them and

for the society they construct.

Didion's statement recalls the literary predicament of

Scherazade in The Arabian Nights.

Scherazade is another

woman whose very life depends upon her powers as a

storyteller, as do the lives of her sisters in the realm.

)
H

Her stories provide distraction and amusement for a

patriarchal villain whose pride demands the sacrifice of a

new bride each morning as retribution for his first wife's

betrayal.

But the stories serve another function as well;

they offer the sultan alternative possibilities to

consider.

As such, they function as much of feminist

literature and criticism does - to resist the dominant

ideology of a patriarchal society.

Scheherazade clearly

conceives of narrative as an essential human activity with

recognizable political ramifications, a concept that

literature has deemed significant enough to eXplore and

record.

Yet Didion's understanding of the term 'narrative' in

the opening sentence can not be limited to the conventional

literary species; the term is understood in its wider

application as all cultural discourse, and as such includes

religion, science, history, etc. or any system of thought

devised in language by human beings to interpret the world

and their relation to it.

A pertinent analysis of the

types and functions of such cultural discourses can be

found in The Social Construction of Reality, a seminal work

 

by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.

These sociologists

examine the processes by which groups of individuals

construct a social reality by divising narratives to

explain or interpret experience.

They emphasize the

process by which human beings become detached from the

production of such narratives so as to no longer recognize

th'

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582

3

them as the work of their own making.

Their theory will

inform my discussion of the intersection of public and

private worlds in Didion's works.

It is the failure of narrative to fulfill its

traditional role of cultural transmission in contemporary

society that pre-occupies Didion in the late 1960's and

70's.

According to Didion, the atomization of American

life is directly related to the breakdown of the narrative

function.

Like other traditions, narrative structure seems

doomed to a "tragic obsolescence":

"In this light all

narrative was sentimental.

In this light all connections

were equally meaningful, and equally senseless... (WA 43).

Didion recognizes that social cohesiveness is achieved

through the generation and transmission of narratives which

sanction and thus perpetuate cultural values.

It is the

failure of mid—century American to pass on this cultural

legacy that Didion identifies as the cause of the "social

hemorrhaging" she observes in Haigh-Ashbury in the

Sixties.2

We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of

pathetically unequipped children to create a community

in a social vacuum.

Once we had seen these children,

we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer

pretend the society's atomization could be reversed.

This was not a traditional generational rebellion.

At

some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow

neglected to tell these children the rules of the game

we happened to be playing.

Maybe we had stopped

believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having

a failure of nerve about the game (STE 122).

For Didion, as a writer, the failure of narrative

constitutes a social crisis of epidemic proportions, with

moral and epistemological repercussions.

Parents fail to

establish generational connections with their children; the

accumulation and transmission of knowledge and traditions

of the centuries is radically threatened.

But the failure of narrative is not only a cultural

phenomenon with social ramifications.

The failure has

personal consequences as well, especially for writers--the

producers of such cultural discourse.

Didion details some

of the personal ramifications of the social turbulence

which characterizes the beginnings of her literary career

in The White Album:

I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I

saw:

flash pictures in variable sequences, images

with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangements,

not a movie but a cutting—room experience.

In what

would probably be the middle of my life I wanted to

still believe in the narrative and the narrative's

intelligibility, but to know that one could change the

sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the

experience as rather more electrical than ethical (WA

13).

The rumble of cultural disintegration sends tremors

into the personal sphere as well as into the professional

for Didion.

Berger and Luckmann find this situation

predictable, given the dialectical relationship of the

individual to society.

The erosion of traditional values

creates an abyss between generations that radically alters

communal, family, and personal experience.

On a personal

note, Didion reflects that she will not be able to give to

her child what she herself was given as a 'natural'

inheritance:

"I...wou1d like to give her home for her

 

birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her

nothing like that"

(STE 168).

Didion's personal

predicament is one several female protagonists confront in

her fictional works.

As mothers, they are unable to

provide a personal or cultural 'home' for their children.

Indeed, the traditional mother—child bond, and its function

as a transmitter of culture, seems an anachronistic in a

consumersociety as does the abacus in a computer age.

If the experience of narrative failure on the social

level is one of chaos, the experience on the personal level

is one of profound loss.

Didion's writing, as much as that

of any writer of our time, evokes a cognizance of what such

a loss means.

Guy Davenport notes, in a review, that "Miss

Didion's version is distinguished by her terrifying sense

of what has been lost and how irreparable the damage is"

(903).

For it is in Didion's narratives, both fictional

and non—fictional, (which she continues to write despite

her metaphysical doubts about the efficacy of narrative in

6

modern life)

that we encounter the personal ramifications

of cultural loss.

In this respect, Didion's novels reflect

a belief in a literary tradition that is everywhere

questioned as to its ontological status.

Didion's novels

serve to characterize and critique the actual world of

experience; there is a presumed connection between

literature and life, discourse and power, and creativity

and loss.

Many critics label her fiction as 'realistic'

and thus dismiss her literary efforts as irrelevant to

contemporary systems of thought.

Brian Morton, however, in

an illuminating essay on her work, comments favorably on

this aspect of her fiction.

He maintains that Didion's use

of the devices of realism is never naive; it is actually

subversive.

"Realism as a literary strategy has less to do

with the external relationships of a text--its supposed

ability to 'reflect' real life—-than with its internal

relationships.

Realism is heretical; it offers haersis or

choice, subversively stripping away the falsifying

conclusiveness of mythical and ideological structures"

(73).

Morton proposes that Didion's fiction appears

'realistic' precisely because she is alert to the

"irreducible and ambiguities" between language and

experience.

"Didion's realism operates precariously in the

interstices of words" (74).

The entanglement of language and experience as

discussed by Terry Eagleton in Introduction to Literary

 

Theory uses the example of Freud's interpretation of the

famous fort-da game as an instance of the psychological and

social function of literary discourse.

Watching his grandson playing in his pram one day,

Freud observed him throwing a toy out of the pram and

exclaiming fort! (gone away), then hauling it in again

on a string to the cry of 93! (here).

This...is the

infant's symbolic mastery of his mother's absence; but

it can also be read as the first glimmerings of

narrative.

Fort-da is perhaps the shortest story we

can imagine:

an object is lost, and then recovered.

But even the most complex narrative is that an original

settlement is disrupted and ultimately restored.

From

this viewpoint, narrative is a source of

consolation..." (185).

The idea of narrative as consolation is an idea that

fits Didion's works well.

In each of the novels, the

fictional world is a world suffused with loss, and every

gesture toward narrative is an act of retrieval.

This act

of retrieval is, in turn, an attempt to comprehend the

conditions and consequences of the loss.

For instance, Didion's first novel, Run River, opens

 

with a shot, fired at seventeen minutes to one on August

1959, but at the end of the novel only one hour has passed.

In the interim, however, the narrative has accounted for a

lapse of some twenty years.

Didion uses the classic

technique, in medias res, to retrieve the twenty year

 

period that has brought the protagonist, Lily Knight

8

McClellan, to this particular moment in August.

The

narrative suspension enables Lily to recall (in a third-

person narration) her twenty year marriage to the man who

has fired the shot at her lover.

When the narrative

present resumes at the end of the novel, Lily confronts her

husband on the dock but is persuaded by him to return to

the house to contact the authorities.

He then returns to

the dock to retrieve the gun; the novel closes as Lily

hears the second shot that signals his suicide.

In Play It As It Lays, Didion's second novel, Maria

 

Wyeth speaks from the mental hospital where she has been

committed for aiding and abetting the suicide of a

Hollywood director, a man who is also her husband's friend

and employer.

The novel then attempts to retrieve the

circumstances of Maria's life that have brought her to the

narrative moment that initiates the novel...the story of

Maria's life as a woman in contemporary American society.

Didion's third novel, A Book of Common Prayer, begins

 

after the death of the protagonist, Charlotte Douglas.

The

narrative emerges as a gesture of grief on the part of its

narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana.

As an effort to reclaim

the memory of a loved one (Charlotte), the powers of

narrative are weighed and found wanting by Grace.

Thus the

powers of narrative to serve as consolation for loss are

put into question.

When Democracy opens, Inez Victor has long ago made her

 

stand, choosing to run a refugee camp rather than to

9

continue as Harry Victor's wife.

The narrator reconstructs

the events of Inez Victor's life as wife of a failed

presidential candidate almost as a technical exercise in

narrative in this fourth and latest novel.

The attention

paid to narrative structure suggests that it is the form

and function of narrative itself that needs to be retrieved

and revived in contemporary life.

The principle of narrative as consolation, as an act of

retrieval, nonetheless serves as the over—arching concern

of the protagonist in each work and of the narrative

structure itself.

Each novel begins after the most

significant event of the narrative has occurred; the

retrospective construction of the sequence of events

attends as much to the process of narrative construction as

to the story being told.

But the focal point of both story

and structure is loss...loss as the experience the

protagonist undergoes, and loss as the privileging of one

version of events over another in the production of

narrative.

Some of the losses Didion's protagonists suffer include

the loss of historical continuity, the loss of community,

the loss of personal identity, the loss of metaphysical

certainty, and finally, the loss of narrative

intelligibility.

The specific configuration these losses

assume in Didion's fiction changes from story to story as

ambiguity replaces absolutes in the protagonists'

experience.

But a primary loss is certainly that of the

10

family in its sundry forms.

Didion's obsessive concern

with this central loss locates her as a direct descendant

of modernist thought.

Edward Said contemplates the significance of familial

loss in contemporary life in The World, the Text, and the

 

Critic, and points out that the preoccupation of the modern

world has been with

"the difficulties of filiation or the

'natural' connection of family" (16).

Said cites the

efforts of major modern figures such as Joyce, Eliot,

Freud, and Marx to come to terms with the "failure of the

generative impulse" and to effect a "transition from a

failed idea or possibility of filiation to a kind of

compensatory order" that Said designates as "affiliation"

(19).

He distinguishes between the two modes of connection

by pointing out that "the filiative scheme belongs to the

realms of nature and of 'life', whereas affiliation belongs

exclusively to culture and society" (19).

This idea is echoed in an essay by Alice Jardine,

titled "Opaque Texts and Transparent Context, which offers

a proposal for reading texts from a post-modernist

perspective.

"Modernity is...about the loss of narrative",

Jardine claims.

"Modernity seems to be about not knowing,

about not being sure, about having no story to tell.

It

also seems to be about loss:

loss of identity, loss of

truth, legitimacy, knowledge, power——loss of control"

(100).

As a feminist influenced by American and French

intellectual thought, Jardine posits the possibility that

11

the loss of certitude in every area of social existence can

be seen as an opportunity to formulate novel responses to

this unprecedented situation.

She suggests as an example

some French writers whose response to loss has been "to

affirm and valorize the loss itself" (100).

She argues

that it is, in fact, because the patriarchal system has

lost its legitimacy as a social and ideological structure

in contemporary life that feminist theory has acquired the

access required to design future social and ideological

systems.

As a woman with little faith in social planning, Didion

is not inclined to view the loss associated with modernity

as an occasion for social reform.

Indeed, she would find

Jardine's proposal fraught with the American delusion of

"indefinite perfectibility" (de Toqueville 158).

This,

ironically, is what Jardine would hope to avoid by holding

up the French approach to loss as exemplary.

However,

Didion must acknowledge Said's contention that a new mode

of relation must be invented or retrieved from the past to

compensate for the loss of filiation, the definitive

experience of modernity.

Therefore, in each of her novels,

Didion examines the failure of the family structure in

modern life.

She then holds up for scrutiny contemporary

versions of the compensatory orders Said maintains are

required for survival of civilization.

In Run River, for example, Didion records the

disintegration of the family as an institution of social

12

stability and coherence.

Lily Knight McClellan views that

passing with considerable anxiety, unable to imagine a

future to replace the past she has lost.

At the close of

the novel, she contemplates the whole history of the

familial institution that seems to self-destruct in the

novel:

"It had been above all a history of accidents:

of

moving on and of accidents" (246).

The only future Lily

can imagine as she wipes her husband's blood from her arm

is one in which she will construct a narrative of that

history for her children.

"She did not know what she could

tell anyone except that he had been a good man.

She was

not certain that he had been but it was what she would have

wished for him, if they gave her one wish" (248).

Thus the

filiative impulse still remains strong in Lily, even though

it is equally clear that her children will have no

appreciation of the narrative Lily would bequeath to them.

Maria, in Didion's second novel, negates even the

possibility of a narrative legacy.

"Nothing applies," she

insists throughout her own narrative (2).

So radical a

break with the past has she suffered that even narrative

possibilities are seriously threatened.

Maria can find no

conceptual machinery adequate to explain or compensate for

her loss.

She is bereft of a familial past, present and

future.

Instead she finds herself surrounded by

counterfeit, synthetic, mass-produced imitations of a

familial institution long deceased.

Her story registers a

feeble but courageous protest against such paltry

compensatory orders.

13

By A Book of Common Prayer, familial institutions are

 

as remote and unavailable as religion in modern life;

indeed one becomes equated with the other as the loss of

filiation in the novel takes on distinctly religious cast

and is expressed in a diction of the liturgy.

So

trivialized has filiation become by Didion's fourth novel,

however, that families are created via the media as a

public relation's invention; family life is confined to

occasions of photo opportunities while actual family

members feel no real connection or loyalty to each other.

Perhaps it is the paucity of value embodied in those

modern compensatory orders that accounts for the grieving

spirit which accompanies many of Didion's examinations of

filiative loss.

One such compensatory order is noted by

Ewen and Ewen in Channels of Desire:

Mass Images and the

 

Shaping of American Consciousness.

"The image, the

 

commercial [reach out and touch someone on] reaches out to

sell more than a service or product; it sells a way of

understanding the world.

The basic premise is that in a

corporate, industrial world, it is the agencies of

communications that provide the mechanisms for social

order.

The notion appeals to the businessman's desire for

effective management.

For the rest of us, as mobile often

isolated individuals in an industrial, consumer society, it

promises that which is increasingly elusive:

kinship and

community.

Mass imagery, such as that provided by AT&T

14

creates for us a memorable language, a system of belief, an

ongoing channel to inculcate and effect perceptions,

explaining to us what it means to be part of the modern

world" (42).

Because Didion recognizes Ewen's assessment of modern

life as a valid description of the insidious influence of

mass culture, she must formulate her own individual,

literary resistance to it.

Her individual, tentative

narrative—-fiction and non—fiction——becomes a rival version

of the mass—produced totalizing fictions of the media.

The

act of producing narrative under such conditions literally

is an act of artistic survival; fiction is one of the few

remaining preserves which registers the single, solitary

voice.

Only the individual can offer a critical response

to the claims made by the media, that nameless, 'blameless'

mechanism of cultural production.

Said describes the

interaction of the individual mind with the cultural

environment as the prerequisite condition of criticism.

"On one hand, the individual mind registers and is very

much aware of the collective whole, context, or situation

in which it finds itself.

On the other hand,it.iS precisely

because of this awareness-—a worldly self—situation, a

sensitive response to the dominant culture—-that the

individual consciousness is not naturally and easily a mere

child of the culture, but a historical and social actor in

it.

And because of that perspective, which introduces

circumstance and distinction where there had only been

15

conformity and belonging, there is distance, or what we

might call criticism" (15).

Said posits that the critical

perspective alone is capable of compassionately assessing

the loss entailed in the achievement of that distance; the

act of criticism then serves to ameliorate the loss so

assessed.

A number of historical and social factors contribute to

the particular perspective Didion registers as a critical

consciousness in contemporary American life.

To some

extent, she is, as Said says, "merely a child" of her

culture (15).

As any number of critics have observed,

criticism is characteristic of the contemporary era.

As a

citizen of late twentieth century America, the most modern

and so the oldest civilization on earth (to paraphrase

Gertrude Stein), Didion's works reflect the self-

consciousness and critical stance endemic to the age.

But Didion's own frontier history also sharply limns

the critical consciousness she brings to bear.

As a

descendant of one of the more fortunate members of the

Donner-Reed party who detoured to the north and thus

avoided the notorious fate of the others, Didion understood

early the consequences of personal and cultural history.

That she inherits the frontier legacy of pioneers who

literally attained the much sought after American Dream——

discovering Eden in the Sacramento Central Valley—-1ends an

additional weight to her critical stance.

The frontier

legacy itself implies a critical stance toward the

.
4
k

16

'fictions' of the society at large, just as it manufactures

'fictions' of its own that require a critical appraisal.

As a Westerner, Didion considers herself

constitutionally ill—equipped to contend with the

subtleties of progressive social programs.

"People who

keep moving on lack practice in the enlightened art of the

possible,

" Didion sardonically surmises in an early essay

for Esguire (14).

Her Western inheritance includes a

specific narrative about life:

"The story that the

wilderness was and is redemptive, and that a radical break

with civilization and its discontents is distinctly an

option" (14).

That is a narrative that undergoes

considerable revision in Didion's work as the complexities

of modern life metastasize to the point no wilderness,

redemptive or otherwise, remains to be colonized by force

or by the imagination.

But the desire to break free of the

fetters of the past lingers as a romantic possibility.

It

is always subjected to clear-headed scrutiny in Didion's

work however.

Escape from the past is an option Maria Wyeth and

Charlotte Douglas especially attempt to invoke.

However,

they find that the past provides the only possible route to

the future.

Even Lily McCllelan, who values the past most

of all Didion's protagonists, feels she is "afflicted with

memory" (230).

The protagonist who must successfully

achieve a condition of tabula rosa is Inez Victor; as a

 

public figure, her past is jettisoned and recreated at will

17

and with regularity.

In her world, memory is the cost of

public life.

Each of Didion's female characters work out

Didion's escape fantasy; each in turn suffers the loss

entailed.

In part their failure is a failure of the

American Dream; but it is also due in part to their

experience as females.

As females in a patriarchal

society, their identity is rooted in connection, not

separation.

Another factor essential to an understanding of

 

Didion's critical consciousness is her view of the female

experience in modern life.

That view is historically

determined by the 'stories' she inherited from her maternal

pioneering ancestors.

As feminist theory has demonstrated,

a woman occupies a position both inside and outside of the

patriarchal society (du Plessis 41).

Or as Elaine

Showalter claims, in "Feminist Criticism in the

Wilderness," women exists within two traditions

simultaneously, the dominant patriarchal one and the muted

female tradition (32).

For Didion, there are obvious similarities between her

maternal ancestors' experience as frontier women and her

own experience as a female artist.

As in the case of the

frontier explorer, a woman most exemplifies the values of

the dominant culture in her distance from it.

The

ambivalence inherent in the position as insider/outsider,

however, is compounded by the maternal values assigned the

female in a patriarchal society.

As the primary female

re

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18

task is to transmit cultural values, 'to take care of

someone' as Didion phrases it, a women intuitively

recognizes that the frontier credo of a radical break with

civilization is, in fact, suicidal.

Didion's ancestors

knew in a visceral way what happens when the primary social

codes are violated:

cannibalism results.

Although a woman

may well exhibit the unadorned virtues associated with

frontier life-~courage, ingenuity, perseverance-~she can

never be 'free' of social constraints to the degree a man

may delude himself that he is.

For the female, the

frontier experiences teaches the lesson of mutual

dependence, not radical autonomy.

The primary loyalty is

to those for whom and to whom one is responsible.

Didion

expresses this

"wagon—train morality" as "one of the

promises we make to one another is that we will try to

retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the

coyotes" (SIB 159).

This is a filial obligation she

bequeaths to each of her protagonists; how each one assumes

or neglects the obligation determines to a large extent

each one's fate.

That obligation to retrieve our

casualties becomes an affiliative response when it

functions as the basis of narrative, as it does for Didion

and for some of her protagonists as well.

This adherence to a relatively simple social code

places Didion at a distinct disadvantage within

contemporary academic and literary circles.

Brian Morton

makes a note of Didion's "relative unfashionability" in

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academic circles and states that Didion's supposed

'excesses' are the critical levy taxed on her ideological

heresis" (76).

Her insistence that past failures matter,

that those failures preclude the social redemption many

academics advocate as justification of their own endeavors,

made Didion an unpopular figure in American letters.

Morton presents a strong counter-argument for Didion's

fictional contributions in his contention that "Didion has

suffered from too ready a conflation of her fiction with

her political and philosophical concerns" (73).

Because

her conservative ethos radically resists the prevailing

liberal norms, in academia at least, Didion's fiction is

treated dismissively as an expression of a fashionable

angst

or cited as exemplary of the "politics of despair"

(Epstein 66).

Morton points out that Didion's narrative

concerns parallel those of her male counterparts, Pynchon

and Mailer, in particular; nonetheless, their literary

efforts are regarded as innovative, soPhisticated, and

seminal, whereas hers are dismissed as derivative, naive,

and peripheral.

Morton defends Didion's artistic abilities by pointing

to the philosophical and literary backgrounds common to

both Didion and Pynchon.

As children of their time and as

Westerners, both, he maintains, were influenced by the

literature of the Beats and the philOSOphy of the French

existentialists.

Didion also shares with Pynchon a

preoccupation with marginal characters; both "obsessively

20

employ images of 'waste'; both 'find junk and waste as a

correlative of the repressed content of civilization, that

which is excluded from rational progress" (75).

But most

interesting to Morton is the fact that it is Didion, rather

than Pynchon, who has "explicitly linked these concerns

with their latent populist content, to the notion of the

frontier experience which has been so central in American

literature" (75).

The tendency to connect the peripheral, the marginal to

the female experience is demonstrated in the remarks of a

different critic on the topic.

Didion's interest in the

peripheral reminds this critic of a line from a Dickinson

poem.

"One thinks again of a line in Dickinson-—'The

Missing All-~prevented me/From missing minor things'--the

minor thus becoming major things as they shift from the

periphery toward a center empty of transcendental meaning"

(Taylor 143).

The same critic finds Didion's self-effacing

posture as an author reminiscent of Dickinson's disclaimer,

"I...am small, like a Wren."

While Didion would not be

entirely pleased by the association with an 'invalid' and

'marginal female writer, she probably would acknowledge

that this perspective does offer a

view from which to

examine her own preoccupation with the marginal.

Indeed,

it is a view Didion herself suggests in an essay on Georgia

O'Keefe.

What both of these male critics seem to overlook (or

perhaps just ignore) is the way the social status Didion is

21

assigned as a woman might affect the literary status she

achieves as a writer.

Didion herself collaborates in this

benign neglect, preferring to direct her interests and

energies to the technical aspects of narrative production.

As her frontier history has led her to expect adversity,

she is not surprised when she encounters it in the process

of claiming a place for herself in the literary system.

Her pioneering spirit is also adverse to claiming any

special handicap based on her gender.

Her warm admiration

for Georgia O'Keefe reveals Didion's secret pleasure in

having to find her own space for her still small voice.

Like O'Keefe, Didion finds opportunity in resistance and

conflict.

Didion admires O'Keefe's ability to be proud of

her difference from the male painters of the time, who

insisted they alone knew how to paint a tree.

For in the

space that her 'difference' created, Georgia O'Keefe

discovered an evening star on a treeless horizon that

focalized her entire artistic vision.

"I had nothing but

to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the

star" she wrote, and Didion reports in The White Album

 

(130).

In Didion's view, O'Keefe made the peripheral

central simply by her passionate attention to it.

Didion performs a similar gesture in her narrative of

American experience.

Although her concern for the effects

of the loss of filiation focuses on the individual family,

she understands that the universal is validated only

through the particular.

In fact, Didion herself insists

22

that her access to the wider world of ideas or elaborate

systems of thought is relentlessly through the individual,

through the particular.

She says of her undergraduate

experience at Berkeley, "I would try to contemplate the

Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating

instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the

particular way the petals fell on my floor.

I would try to

read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering

instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill"

(Friedman 5).

Didion's privilege of the particular signals an

affinity with a perspective usually considered indicative

of the female experience in Western culture.

That focus

leads her to examine changes in relationships, filial and

otherwise; recent psychological theorists, such as Gilligan

and Chodorow, suggest that this interest in relationships

is related to the formation of the female identity.

3

For

Didion, the examination of relationships exceeds the merely

personal or domestic; it leads her to a cultural assessment

of the crucial shift from filiation to affiliation.

In the following pages I shall trace the development of

Didion's artistic vision as she registers the cultural

tremors associated with the shift from filiation to

affiliation in contemporary American experience.

Narrative

function and form operate as the critical elements in this

realignment of cultural values for Didion.

It is the

narrative as a human activity that provides the cultural

th

na

‘33

fu

Co

in

23

link between past and present, and it is the narrative that

enables human beings to project a future out of the

detritus of the past.

This unadorned, domestic particular

serves as the source of power which generates the works of

a writer who has been called by James Dickey as the best

prose stylist writing in English today (Kazin 113).

My approach to Didion's four novels and essay

collections centers on a concern that underlies all of

Didion's work:

Didion's position as a writer who is

contemporary, American, and female.

The traditional themes

of self as defined in relation to time and place serve as

the fundamental structure upon which Didion constructs her

narrative of American experience.

Didion uses the past as

material from which to construct a present or to imagine a

future.

In Chapters One through Four, I will examine each

of Didion's four novels and conclude with a brief look at

her essays in Chapter Five.

My choice reflects my sense

that Didion's novels imaginatively work our problems often

ignored or even contradicted in her non—fiction.

(I share

Marton's view that Didion's fiction is her best response to

her critics.)

This apparent discrepancy can best be

explained by Didion's own account of the differences in the

compositional process of fiction and non—fiction.

In an

interview, Didion observes that the work of an essay is

essentially concluded with the investigation of the

subject——an act which occurs in the empirical world of

experience rather than in the imagination.

Non—fiction

24

writing, for Didion, attempts to capture what has already

transpired.

In fiction, though, the dynamics of the

writing process open up in a new way.

Fiction operates at

the frontier of the Didion psyche.

Writing is literally an

act of discovery then.

"I write entirely to find out what

I'm thinking..." she states in a well—known essay, "Why I

Write" (Friedman 6).

The critical apparatus I use to discuss each novel also

reflects my sense of Didion's growth as a writer over the

past twenty-five years.

As the emphasis shifts in her

fiction, so my critical method alters to accommodate the

shifts I perceive in Didion's work.

But again, Said's

identification of the shift from filiation to affiliation

serves as a fundamental paradigm as I move from a feminist

archetypal approach in Run River, to an ideological

analysis of cultural discourse in Play It As It Lays, to an

 

account of Didion's literary legacy in A Book of Common

Prayer, and finally, to a de—construction of literary forms

in Democracy.

 

The feminist archetypal analysis is, in my view,

essentially a filiative gesture, attempting to retrieve the

cultural and literary legacy that has been lost; as such,

my critical method parallels Didion's structure in her

first novel.

In Play It As It Lays, a transitional novel

 

for Didion, the past is part of what has been aborted.

Its

imagery is as sterile as it is oppressive.

The validity of

all narrative discourse comes under scrutiny for its

25

menacing potential in this work Didion herself has called

'ugly'.

Again I take my cue from the structure of the

novel itself; I too employ an ideological scrutiny of the

cultural discourse produced in the novel, discourse that

presents itself as a compensation for the wrenching loss of

filiation that the protagonist experiences.

In A Book of Common Prayer I trace a specific literary

 

tradition Didion openly invokes as a way to begin writing

again after the narrative deadend she ultimately encounters

in her second novel.

I argue that Didion seeks a paternal

literary ancestor in order to establish an affiliative

relation with her literary past; that move enables her to

claim the literary legacy she inherits while placing her

contribution to that tradition along side as one of equal

moment.

This is only possible as she has forgone the

privilege of filiation implicit in a hierarchal patriarchal

structure.

In Democracy, Didion reconsiders her own personal

literary history and its relation to her affiliative

connections as an American of a certain time and place.

Thus Democracy acts as a gloss of her previous fiction at

 

the same time it examines her position as a reporter of

contemporary American life.

In the process of

deconstructing literary forms, Didion explodes the

filiative myth of innocence and privilege.

In Chapter Five, I explore the themes of Didion's non—

fiction that provide the scaffolding for the novels.

Her

26

position as an inheritor of a frontier legacy, as a native

of California, serves as a focal point of that discussion.

But, as I have indicated, my primary interest is in her

fiction as the novels best reflect Didion's development as

a writer.

In her fiction Didion tries to invoke imaginary

resolutions to actual social contradictions, as Frederic

Jameson suggests all novelists do (77).

One of the

dilemmas Didion poses for herself is what it means to be a

producer of narratives in a time of cultural crisis, a

question she shares with many of her artistic peers.

She

covertly poses that issue as a crucial problem for her

characters in the early novels, but increasingly it becomes

an issue she overtly discusses as author/narrator in the

later novels.

Run River employs a narrative structure indicative of a

 

very conventional approach to literature.

Didion herself

admits that at twenty-five she simply did not have the

technical ability to convey the sense of timelessness she

desired in the novel.

Some of that longing still lingers

in the work, however, as evidenced by the number of critics

who detect Faulknerian overtones in the novel.4

A sense of

tragic obsolescence pervades this first novel of Didion's

which is a working out of her relation to her own past as a

native daughter of California's Central Valley.

Sometime

between the writing of her first and second novel, Didion

comes to perceive that her inheritance as a writer also has

27

to be included in a past that is now obsolescent.

But in

Run River she writes with the joy of the newly—initiated,

 

seemingly unaware of how depleted is the literary

inheritance she so proudly claims.

Nonetheless, the novel

itself carries subversive elements within it that will make

it impossible for Didion to write another of its kind.

In Run River, the act of narration is already a

 

desperate act of retrieval.

As I have noted, the narrative

actually holds time in abeyance while a chronological

reconstruction of the history of the two Valley families is

initiated.

The history records the merging of two powerful

Valley families, the Knights and the McClellans, and then

traces their decline.

As the suspension lasts less than an

hour, the protagonist is not privileged with profound

insight or granted an ephiphanic moment.

Rather Didion's

point is the weight of the past on the present moment.

The

protagonist ponders this issue in relation to her inability

to understand her husband's shooting of her lover.

"Was

there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time,

devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum

of all the choices gone before?" (31).

In retrospect, Didion's writing of Run River is seen as

 

a gesture not unlike that of her protagonist's.

Like Lily,

she wants to arrest time.

Didion, too, appears afflicted

with memory; she seeks consolation for what is lost in the

narrative form.

Her first novel attempts to reclaim and

28

comprehend a past that is rapidly disappearing.

That is a

past that includes her own experience in the California of

her youth as well as a literary past with stable

assumptions about its own workings.

Her admitted nostalgia for the California of her youth

conveys a more subtle and covert longing for the

'narratives' of her childhood.

Those narratives contained

the possibility of happy resolutions--one really could

reach the promised land——just as they unquestionably

supported the cultural values of order and certitude.

The

author—work-reader relationship seemed a straight forward

affair;

authors able to assume absolute power as creators

of the discourse they produced and readers passive and

attentive, even reverential receptors of authorial

inspiration.

These narrative assumptions will be seriously

challenged in Didion's subsequent novels.

Even in Run River some of the narrative certitude

 

Didion apparently assumes is gradually eroded as the story

unfolds.

A primary assumption that is challenged is

Didion's attempt to create a sense of timelessness in the

novel by stopping the forward movement of history at a

moment of crisis.

Something other than a lack of skill may

be at work here.

An attempt to fusepast to present as

Didion claims she wanted to do, gag serve to accentuate the

effects of history on the present moment; but another

possibility also exists as a subtext of this intention.

The attempt may have the effect of rendering all events as

29

ahistorical, outside of time.

Didion appears only somewhat

 

aware of this quandary but evidences a considerable

ambivalence about the dilemma in the novel.

While the

surface text registers how Didion's characters are

"afflicted with memory", a subtext threatens to render

their experience as ahistorical.

This conflict between

historical and ahistorical interpretations of experience is

best delineated in the lives of Didion's female

protagonists.

Writing of the loss of filiation primarily from the

perspective of the female, Didion relies on narrative

patterns in Run River that feminist critics have identified

 

as the literary legacy maternal artists have transmitted to

their female successors.

In their study of nineteenth—

century female authors, The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert

 

and Gubar speculate that "anxiety of authorship" is one of

the legacies that female artists both inherit and pass on

(50).

They propose that these maternal predecessors

produced "works that are in some sense palmipsestic, works

whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less

accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of

meaning.

Thus these authors managed the difficult task of

achieving true female authority by simultaneously

conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary

standards" (73).

As Annis Pratt has suggested in

Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction, feminist archetypal

 

analysis is one critical method for revealing obscured or

3O

concealed aspects of work whose subtext carries traces of

its maternal inheritance (9).

Chapter One will provide an

extensive analysis of Run River employing this critical

 

method.

Tracing the patterns of female archetypal images

will illuminate a maternal literary connection Didion

doesn't always acknowledge or perhaps even recognize in her

fiction.

Run River lends itself to a female archetypal analysis

 

in a variety of ways.

Again, the strong sense of

timelessness acts as a dominant factor in this critical

choice.

The whole universe of the story seems suspended as

an Edenic memory; the novel recalls Didion's cultural

childhood as well as her personal one.

She discovers in

the novel, as her protagonist does, that the country of

childhood is one of the "places of the mind" she discusses

in an essay "Notes From a Native Daughter."

As an

archetypal analysis claims to retrieve lost narrative

patterns of experience by locating their progeny in new

situations, this critical approach emphasizes the

ahistorical elements in human experience, ahistorical

experiences being those that recur over time.

However, as an American writer, Didion knows only too

well the problematics of the ahistorical perspective.

Her

chronicle of American experience repeatedly points to the

subversive role history plays in American life.

Thus she

must simultaneously register the fulfillment and the

failure of the American Dream of starting over, tabula

past

sali.

novej

they

31

rosa.

The result is that the dream of ahistorical freedom

 

becomes a historical condition itself.

This, too, seems to

me the purpose of the feminist approach to archetypal

criticism.

As defined by feminist critics such as Annis

Pratt, Carol Pearson, and Katherine Pope, this critical

method functions as an act of retrieval, salvaging from the

past

literary traditions messages that are particularly

salient to the female experience.

"For centuries women

novelists have been gathering us around campfires where

they have warned us with tales of patriarchal horror and

encouraged us with stories of heroes undertaking quests

that we may emulate" (Pratt 178).

Yet feminist archetypal

criticism revises the patriarchal archetypal system of men

like Campbell or Jung by insisting on the historical nature

of the female experience.

Thus female archetypal criticism

historically situates an ahistorical method; in so doing,

it retrieves what has been 'lost' from the narrative of the

dominant patriarchal culture.

If Run River is the novel that establishes the loss of

 

filiation as a fact in American life, Didion's second

novel, Play It As It Lays records the consequences of that

 

loss.

In City of Words, Tony Tanner proposes that "the

 

plot—-the situation of the character among things-—is a

reflection or projection of the author's sense of his own

situation among words" (18).

Tanner's analogy works well

as a way of thinking about Play It As It Lays.

For in this

 

work, Didion has to imagine, as a writer, what it means to

32

be a literary orphan, deprived of the 'natural',

'filiative' ties to language that were severed in the

writing of Run River.

Didion has to forge a new connection

 

to words themselves—-the natural connection between

language and experience having been destroyed by a

modernist understanding of the two as discontinuous.

Whereas language was once viewed as having a filiative or

'natural' connection to experience, now the relationship is

viewed as arbitrary, as one of affiliation.

In this sense,

Play It As It Lays constitutes Didion's frontier experience

 

as a novelist; the novel serves as a radical break from her

literary past, just as it records her venture into the now-

alien territory of language.

Again, it is the structure of

the novel that carries the ideological weight of change in

Didion's fiction.

In this second novel, the principles of traditional

narrative have been replaced by those of film; meaning

accrues through the 'electrical' connection of sequence and

juxtaposition rather than through the conventional ethical

considerations of cause and effect.

The narrative

structure is stripped bare; 84 clips of staccato prose,

comprised of isolated if vivid vignettes, supplant the 26

long chapters of lyrical prose in Run River which weave

 

past to present.

While Lily's narrative stands poised

between the two shots that open and close the novel,

Maria's story begins and ends in the confinement of a

mental institution.

Grief and loss in Run River have

 

33

metastasized into madness and despair in Play It As It

Lgy_,

Whereas experience in Didion's first novel exists

somewhere in a timeless Eden of the mind, in her second, it

is relentlessly anchored to the barren desert of the

American West.

Play It As It Lays is an experience in "isolation and

adversity" for its protagonist, its readers, and its author

(WA 220).

The frontier quality of this experience is

captured in the central event of the novel, Maria's

abortion.

This event serves as a metaphor for the entire

work, just as it represents Didion's reaction to the

decades of the 60's-—the general time of the novel.

The

abortion motif conveys the lack of connection endemic to

the displacement of modern life.

Characters in the novel

are always 'aborting' their pasts and moving on—in true

frontier fashion.

Didion's use of this image of female

experience critiques the American Dream as it was embodied

in the frontier experience and as it is re—enacted in

modern life.

The narrative itself replicates the abortion motif by

short—circuiting any critical response to it.

Maria's

dictum "NOTHING APPLIES" severs her connections to any

system of interpretation the novel appears to elicit.

Her

repudiation of all systems of interpretation is rooted in a

radical individualism that is cultivated by her experience

in the American West.

The loss of connection-—ethical,

epistemological, generational—-renders each participant in

34

the novel (character, narrator, reader, writer) entirely

responsible for his or her own interpretation.

This is a

point Didion makes clear in her essay, "Why I Write."

She

says that Play It As It Lays is "a book in which anything

 

that happened would happen off the page, a 'white' book to

which the reader would have to bring his or her own bad

dreams" (Friedman 7).

Yet American individualism——the principle usually

invoked to justify a radical break with the past--carried

with it elements of the opposite tendency which

deToqueville foresaw nearly a century and a half ago.

The

underside of a racial individualism that is based on an

abortive break with the past, and that was practiced on the

American frontier, reveals a strong disposition toward a

sinister conformity.

This is a tendency everywhere evident

in corporate life in modern times.

Maria's story functions

to resist the corporate fictions manufactured by the agents

of social control in the novel-—primarily the film

industry, the gambling—entertainment industries, and the

institutions of psychiatry.

These corporate fictions

perpetuate conformity by totalizing all experience under a

common rubric.

My analysis of Play It As It Lays in Chapter Two

 

examines Maria's resistances to these agents of social

control.

It also addresses the resistance to totalization

schemes within literature as evidenced by the shifts in

power relations among the participants of the literary act

35

of production in the novel.

As noted, the reader shares

more responsibility for the production of meaning than in

Didion's first novel.

Thus literature itself, or to be

more precise, all narrative discourse, is implicitly

recognized as an agent of social control that vies with

other discourses to exert actual power in the empirical

world.

Confronted with the loss of a certitude traditionally

assigned to the production of narrative, Didion's

protagonist suffers an epistemological paralysis.

Later,

as the narrative progresses, Didion demonstrates that

certitude and totalization are attributes of the same world

view or symbolic universe.

Thus Didion, with Maria, comes

to find a value in the production of narratives that resist

the very totalization narratives conventionally ensured.

When asked by others "Why" live without the certainty of

meaning, Maria answers, "Why not?" (213).

Didion's own

response to her plight as a writer who must write without

the certainty of significance echoes that of her

beleaguered protagonist.

Although Play It As It Lays explores the limits of

 

radical individualism as characteristic of American

experience, Didion and her protagonist find little solace

in that lonely solitude of spirit.

A racial individualism

will not suffice to produce narratives, as survival is the

only achievement possible in such adverse circumstances.

It is as this juncture in her career that Didion shifts her

36

attention from the loss of filiation to the possibilities

for making new connections.

As is characteristic of her

artistic vision, she first looks to the past as a way to

begin to imagine a community of the future.

The title of Didion's third novel, A Book of Common

 

Prayer, alludes to a primary communal experience of the

past-religion.

As Said observes in The World, the Text and

 

the Critic, Eliot sought compensation for the loss of

 

filiation finally in the affiliative connection with the

Anglican church.

"For Eliot the church stands in for the

lost family mourned throughout his early poetry" (18).

Like Eliot, Didion mourns the filiative loss in her early

works; in fact, some critics compare the imagery of her

second novel to The Waste Land.5

Didion's choice of title

 

signals her affinity with Eliot's position even as the

novel denies that possibility.

In A Book of Common Prayer

 

neither institution—-church or family-—are available except

_§ an allusion to the past.

Indeed, she uses many of

Eliot's images and diction from Four Quartets to show how

 

empty those symbolic references are in the post—modern age.

So repeating the past is not possible in Didion's world;

however, new modes of connection are necessary.

The task

of the narrator is to discover those new possibilities

through the production of narrative.

Didion's return to her literary past as a way to begin

writing fiction again is most evident in the structure of

her third novel.

For the first time, she chooses a first—

37

person narrator who is not the protagonist of the story.

This narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, attempts to

construct a narrative of the life of yet another woman,

Charlotte Douglas.

In Chapter Three, I detail the

similarities in narrative situation between Didion's novel

and the work of her chosen forefather, Joseph Conrad.

I

argue that Didion chooses Conrad as he is an example of

affiliation with the literary tradition that she inherits.

Didion's retelling of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a story

 

of affiliation, from a female perspective validates her

connection to her literary past through the affiliative

relation she establishes with it.

That she addresses the issue of relationships between

women places Didion in a position of revision not only the

patriarchal tradition she rewrites, but also of revising

her own history as a novelist.

In this respect, Didion

performs

a feminist act, an act which ultimately valorizes

the relations of women to each other as relationships

between males have traditionally been valorized.

Indeed,

she finds that for women it is the loss involved in the

 

failure of filiation that provides the requisite link for

affiliation.

Some feminist critics have taken up the search for

affiliation recently as well as a motif to symbolize their

objectives of creating communities among women.

In

"Forward into the Past," Gilbert and Gubar suggest that the

twentieth—century female author may find an affiliative

relation the most suitable one to imagine forging with

38

one's literary predecessors.

"In the twentieth century...

our own 'anxiety of authorship' must inevitably give way

to a paradigm of ambivalent affiliation, a construct which

dramatizes women's intertwined attitudes of anxiety and

exuberance about [female] creativity" (243).

Other critics have focused on the way women forge new

connections by telling their own stories.

Rachel de

Plessis's work, Writing Beyond the Ending, articulates the

 

ways in which modern writers/narrators break through the

barriers of what she calls the 'feminity text' by altering

the conventional romance plot (4).

Joanne Frye, in Living

Stories, Telling Lives, argues for an affiliative relation

 

between text and lives, between language and experience.

She argues for an "inquiry into the understanding of the

female experience and its relationship to literature.

And

this inquiry can in turn illuminate the problems and

possibilities of literary form as being both part of a

complex system of conventions and simultaneously integral

to lived experience" (17).

The works of these critics

informs my reading of Didion's third novel, as she too

begins to probe the problem of how and why women become

involved in the production of narratives of their own

lives.

This is a problematic that continues as a subtext

of her fourth novel as well.

As noted earlier, all filiative relations have

completely deteriorated in Democracy.

The Victor/Christian

 

39

families exist only on television as images of political

rhetoric.

Only affiliative modes of connection remain.

But rather than valorize affiliation as Said tends to do,

Didion dissects the varieties of affiliation produced in

contemporary life and made significant distinctions among

them.

As an American she does so by challenging the modern

understanding of a democratic principle that equality is

freedom.

For Didion, freedom exists in the differences

involved in individual efforts, not in the bland sameness

of mass production.

Still, she understands the need for new connections.

This recognition is reflected in the resolution of the plot

in Democracy.

Inez Victor finds fulfillment in her work

with the refugees of the Vietnam War.

Her commitment to

the children of the war—torn world, to the casualties of

modern life, supercedes her connection to her 'natural'

family.

In Democracy, the "ethos of responsibility" has

 

been transferred from the individual, nuclear family to

those for whom one is responsible as a member of a global

community.

But the concept of affiliation—~connection

through cultural relations—-serves as more than a

replacement of a failed generational impulse.

Affiliation

characterizes the relation of works of literature to each

other and to the life they 'represent'.

In Democracy Didion establishes an affiliative relation

 

between her fourth novel and the three previous ones.

She

does so by using Democracy to gloss her previous works of

fiction.

Themes, characters, and narrative events

4O

introduced in Run River, Play It As It Lays, A Book of

  

Common Prayer are re—worked in Democracy.

In Chapter Four

 

 

I will discuss the similar personalities of Didion's female

protagonists in each novel; the light and dark male images

that repeat themselves in the novels; maternal loss and

sexual politics as recurring themes in Didion's fiction.

I

will examine the rival versions Didion presents of each of

her former novels in her fourth work of fiction.

The

examination will focus on Play It As It Lays, however, as

 

that is the least satisfying of all Didion's work in my

view.

I see Democracy re—thinking some of the issues that

 

were inadequately resolved in Didion's second novel, such

as the relation of public and private life.

Also the

production of public and private narratives is taken up

again in Democracy.

 

The rival versions of her previous novels act to

deconstruct Didion's own previous literary productions.

But Democracy also deconstructs the literary forms Didion

 

inherits by calling attention to the problematic status of

literature in the post—modern world.

This issue is

considered from a variety of perspectives, which include:

1) the fact the novel announces itself as a novel; 2) that

the title alludes to works of both fiction and non—fiction;

3) that the novel is narrated by Joan Didion, the reporter;

4) that many events and people in the work bear a striking

resemblance to actual people and events of contemporary

American life; and 5) that the novel is metafictional in

41

its design.

More than any of her other novels, Democracy

 

establishes Joan Didion as a post-modern American writer.

In this work, she examines the ideological basis for the

production of narrative in a contemporary, consumer

society.

She deftly records and deconstructs the corporate

'narratives' produced by the communications industries in

Democracy.

Didion also deconstructs the way such mass—

 

produced narratives act as agents of social control in

public and private life.

Furthermore, she examines the

role of the media in these productions, and by implication,

her own role as a journalist in a consumer society.

Finally, Chapter Five presents a brief look at Didion's

four essay collections.

Again

the focus is Didion's

position as a producer of narratives whose frontier history

shapes the perspective she brings to contemporary culture.

I delineate the factors that make her the kind of writer

that she is—-a writer concerned primarily with narrative

form and with history as the crucial narrative of the

American experience.

I share with Brian Morton the sense

that she is undervalued as an accurate and astute

articulator of the American scene.

But history itself will

render the final verdict in the matter; and when the

immediate distractions of fame and fortune no longer could

the judgment, perhaps her own particular contribution to

American letters can be defined.

For here we have a woman

42

writer who never denies the female quality of her

experience, but who never exempts herself from exacting

standards by self—serving claims of female ingenuity.

Her

frontier spirit makes Joan Didion a kind of writer whose

vision may not be fashionable, but it also makes her the

kind of writer whose voice will transcend the vagaries of

time.

A MOTHER'S LEGACY:

FEMININE ARCHETYPAL PATTERNS IN RUN RIVER

 

Didion's preoccupation as a writer with the loss of

filiation as the quintessential experience of modernity

displays itself in her first novel, Run River.

The novel

seeks to recapture a past that is both personal and

cultural.

Didion attributes much of the novel's attention

to landscape, for instance, to a nostalgic impulse.

She

remarks that the impulse is not uncommon in writers and

indicates she recognizes it in James Jones' From Here to

Eternity.

"I could see exactly that kind of nostalgia,

that yearning for a place, overriding all narrative

considerations" (Kuehl 151).

Didion goes on to suggest the

same pattern is evident in her first novel.

Yet, in "Notes From a Native Daughter,' in Slouching

 

Toward Bethlehem, Didion reflects that the loss of her

personal past in Califonia has corrolaries in the

collective American experience of the postwar years.

By

perceiving her personal situation in its historical

context, Didion comes to understand the inter-relations of

public and private life, that private life can often serve

as a 'code' for collective, public experience.

This

understanding is reflected in her subsequent novels, as

Brian Morton has observed.

"The breakdown of relationships

43

44

is now seen in the context of history itself, not as an

ideological abstraction but as a field on which orphans and

lost children wander and meet" (84).

I propose that Didion

arrives at this seminal understanding of the relation of

public and private experience through the writing of her

first novel.

She has repeatedly maintained that writing

for her is an act of discovery, an attempt to find out what

she has on her mind.

The loss of filiation is what

preoccupies Didion's mind as she sets out on her career as

a woman of letters.

Didion seeks consolation in narrative form for that

loss, a not uncommon response in the modern world.

Indeed,

as I have indicated, some critics such as Eagleton claim

narrative has its origins as an act of consolation.

That

Didion structures her first and subsequent novels so as to

present narrative as an act of retrieval suggests her

concurrence with Eagleton's idea.

Narrative serves yet another function, however, in

Didion's scheme of things.

Said proposes some inherent

connection to familial patterns resides in the history of

narrative development itself.

"From its earliest

beginnings, narrative fiction...has been built around the

totalizing figure of the family, in which its recurring

circumstantial perpetuity is tampered with by the upstart

'original' hero" (154).

Said's observation implies that

narrative emerges as a literary form in conjunction with

altered social and political circumstances that signal the

45

dissolution of totalization in all its guises, but

especially that of the filiative structure.

Thus Didion's

inclination to see a relation between narrative and family

structures appears to be rooted in a historical condition.

Given that Didion's first novel is both an act of

retrieval and a record of loss, situated in a historical

context, and executed by a female writer about a female

protagonist, the critical approach most suited to

retrieving the feminine perspective of historical forces is

the feminine archetypal approach.

For, as we shall see,

the aproach has as its objective the reclaiming of a

discarded or suppressed past and the establishment of a

literary community of women, a community connected by

narrative threads that weave in and out of their lives

across time.

By calling attention to the narrative connection in

women's lives, Didion implicitly signals the historical

circumstance that enables a recognition of the value of

such a communal tie:

the loss of filiation as articulated

within the patriarchal system.

An analysis of feminine

archetypal patterns or systems of order within the larger

patriarchal structure but often at odds with the

superstructure will reveal patterns of experience that may

become paradigmatic for the future.

But first, it is

necessary to study the aims and methods of this critical

approach and determine its application to Didion's first

novel.

46

Feminist critics who have examined works by women

writers on a large scale have been particularly drawn to

archetypal criticism.

They find in that critical approach

a methodology that permits them to accommodate a large

volume of very different texts and to detect in those texts

a similarity of concerns.

The archetypal approach also

provides a critical vocabulary for articulating the mutual

concerns that connect women across the centuries.

Thus the

approach facilitates a perception of continuity and

community among women, a perception that women have

expressed a need for in their lives and in their

literature.

The archetypal approach to literature appeals to those

concerned with women's issues for other reasons as well.

A

primary appeal, I think, is its claim to power.

Archetypal

criticism derives from Jung's theory of archetypes, defined

by Neumann as the "structural elements of the collective

unconscious" which determine and direct the development of

human consciousness. (XV

)

Since archetypal images are

presumed to determine the range of possibilities available

to human experience, they are seen as tremendous sources of

psychic power.

Given the concern with the sources of power available

to women in a patriarchal culture, it is not surprising

that feminist critics would be attracted to a critical

theory that presents itself as a repository of imaginative

power.

The emphasis on the imagination as the active agent

47

of personal and social change especially appeals to women

whose collective history has been one of suppressing or

denying their creative potential.

The imaginative emphasis also links feminist archetype

criticism to the romantic literary tradition, which values

the imagination as the most powerful human faculty.

Another link with the romantic tradition is the preference

in feminist archetypal criticism for the quest-romance

motif.

As the fictional mode which most explicitly

explores the idea of personal freedom and self-fulfillment,

the quest-romance is well suited to the needs of women who

see themselves as denied the modes of expression readily

available to men.

"The quest-romance is the search of the

libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver

it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain

reality"(Frye 193).

In women's fiction, the quest-motif

frequently involves a woman's imaginative search for a

personal reality that will allow her to transcend the

social limitations which discourage any sense of herself as

a heroic being.

Annis Pratt and Carol Pearson/Katherine Pope are

exemplary feminist critics who use an archetypal approach

to examine the fiction of women.

Each takes a

system of

literary interpretation originally devised by men and

revises that system to more accurately reflect contemporary

feminist readings of women's fiction.

Pratt, for instance,

subscribes to Jung's theory of archetypes as "recurrent

48

literary forms that derive from unconscious originals"

(Pratt 3).

She differs from Jung, however, in her

interpretation of the female archetypal experience.

Jung

assumes a continuity of archetypal experience from male to

female; Pratt argues for a radical discontinuity.

In Jung's system, the journey of the male hero involves

as one of its critical aspects the incorporation of the

anima or feminine principle into his construct of self as a

prerequisite for achieving an authentic self.

Jung further

postulates that a simple reversal of that process, in which

the female hero incorporates the animus or male principle

as part of her psychological make-up, accounts for the

female archetypal experience.

Pratt argues that such a

system overlooks important social restrictions placed on

the female in a patriarchal society.

"Women's fiction

reflects an experience radically different from men's

because our drive towards growth as a person is thwarted by

our society's prescriptions concerning gender" (Pratt 6).

Pratt states further that as the patriarchal culture has as

one of its structuring principles the devaluation of women,

the female hero's confrontation with the animus figure

entails a coming to terms with and rejection of the self—

loathing implicit in the masculine principle.

"Whereas the

encounter with the anima is supposed to be the crucial

experience leading the male back to society as a

superordinate or reborn person, women encounter the animus

as a block to full development" (Pratt 142).

49

A crucial distinction here seems to be the society or

social context from which the hero exits and to which the

hero must return.

The male hero's journey into the

unconscious serves to complete his potential as a fully

developed human being.

This fact is recognized by society

which grants him the status of hero.

The female hero,

however, rarely receives such acclaim.

Her heroic journey

is not perceived as a boon to society.

Instead that

journey more often poses a threat to the very fabric of

patriarchal society and to herself.

As Pratt points out,

the female hero's journey into the unconscious forces her

to recognize her devalued status in the patriarchal

structure.

Furthermore, she must come to recognize that

she herself has been complicitous with that appraisal of

her status.

The source of that complicity has been an

aspect of her own psyche——the male principle which

subscribes to the wider culture's values of rationality,

logic, order, etc.

Pratt maintains that the aspects of one's psychological

make—up are influenced by cultural factors to a much higher

degree than Jung suggests, and that the degree of influence

is more significant in the female's development than in the

male's as there is a wider discrepancy between her

experiences and societal expectations than there is for the

male.

So instead of embracing and reclaiming as her own

the principle of the opposite gender, as the male hero

does, the female hero must forego that gesture.

It is only

50

by rejecting those aspects of the male principle that are

culturally influenced that the female hero can discover

that the 'masculine' qualities that society values--

courage, strength, assertiveness——are truly her own.

Yet that rejection of the male principle entails a

profound loss for the female hero who has been socialized

to perceive her connection to males and to the values they

represent as Ehg_essentia1 connection.

Deprived of that

connection, the female has no legitimate access to the

patriarchal structure.

She is thus forced into a dilemma.

Either she must deny her newly—found knowledge in order to

gain acceptance by society or she must relinquish all sense

of community to gain an authentic self.

That is a cost

many female characters are not prepared to pay, and thus

their female authors often consign them to madness or

death.

Unlike the male hero, the female hero's death does

not redeem society; it is more often perceived as a just

punishment for violating the dictates of the patriarchal

society.

Pratt's reading of archetypal patterns in women's

fiction, then, not only revises Jung's theory of the nature

of the heroic journey; it also suggests that the very

concept of hero is culturally bound to such a degree that

it cannot be said to represent all human experience.

Pearson and Pope arrive at a similar conclusion in

their revision of Joseph Campbell's model of heroic action.

In The Female Hero, these critics argue that the male

 

models do not take into account the female's experience as

51

'other' in a patriarchal society and thus do not serve as

the universal models they claim to be (Pearson/Pope 5).

Pratt, Pearson and Pope restructure the archetypal models

to more accurately reflect the female experience as

codified in women's fiction.

In so doing, they recognize

what male archetypalists have failed to acknowledge:

that

feminine archetypes are "repositories of power useful to

women"

as well as to men (Pratt 8).

Pearson and Pope read the women's fiction they examine

almost exclusively in terms of the quest-romance.

Pratt,

too, designates the quest—romance as the literary motif

most important for women trying to articulate the process

of their development.

Another critic notes that the whole

concept "of a coherent self" has been challenged recently

by contemporary critics and writers, but maintains the

concept "remains cogent for women who for the first time

find themselves in a world increasingly responsive to their

needs" (Abel 13).

Achieving a full adulthood is still a

legitimate concern for women.

Thus female archetypal

critics, such as Pratt, Pearson, and Pope judge the female

protagonist by the success or failure of her attempt to

achieve an authentic self.

Pratt's system, however, allows

for an identification of the thwarted quest.

Using a

developmental approach, Pratt classifies women's fiction

according to the stage of psychological development

achieved by the female protagonist.

She then identifies

the archetypal patterns associated with each stage, as do

Pearson and Pope.

52

All three critics find the female author implicated in

the success or failure of the protagonist to achieve an

authentic self.

They speculate that the writer's vision is

determined by the extent to which she has internalized the

values of a patriarchal society; values, these critics

claim, are inherently contradictory to the aims of a woman

writer.

Therefore, whether a work is explicitly feminist

or not, by virtue of choosing a female protagonist, the

writer challenges the patriarchal assumption that all

heroes are male.

(Pearson and Pope 12)

Nonetheless, women

writers possess differing degrees of awareness about their

problematical relation to such patriarchal values.

A

frequent result is that "the disjunction between an

author's social conscience and her need for selfhood

renders characterizations ambivalent, tone and attitude

ambiguous, and plots problematic" (Pratt 11).

This

dissonance, Pratt argues, "stems from what Northrup Frye

calls the 'myth of freedom' or romance element, set against

the 'myth of concern', or of social conservatism" (35).

In some ways, Joan Didion provides an apt illustration

of the female writer these critics describe.

She does not

align herself with feminist causes, yet implicitly

sanctions many of their aims in her fiction.

Didion

repeatedly chooses female protagonists for her novels and

then examines the nature of the female experience in

contemporary culture.

Perhaps what distinguishes Didion

53

from the more radical feminist writers is her

disinclination to believe in social redemption.

In an

essay in The White Album, Didion characterizes herself as

 

"...a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever

slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the

meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human

endeavor" (WA 134).

It is Didion's skepticism about what she calls "the

romantic ethic" that provokes the feminists' attacks

against her, and her's against them.

In another essay in

The White Album, Didion writes a scathing invective against

 

the Women's Movement, pointing out how trivialized much of

the Movement's rhetoric had become in the early 70s.

Didion criticizes the popularized version of the Movement

for "its invention of a proletariat, its cult of

victimization, and its refusal to come to grips with the

ambiguities of adult sexual life"(flA 116), But one critic,

Judith Newton, views Didion's critique of the Movement as

an attack on women.

Newton speculates that Didion's attack

is a misguided gesture of self-protection, one that

sacrifices other women in order to salvage her own self-

respect.

Despite my contention that Newton misreads

Didion's essay, the tone of the essay is vitriolic and it

is that tone that I suspect accounts for Newton's reaction.

Newton feels betrayed by a woman writer she had admired for

confronting the nature of the female experience in the

novel Play It As It Lays.

"It is painfu1——and maddening—-

 

54

to watch Didion move into the same realm of misery, and

that realm of misery peculiar to women whose uneasiness

about their own vulnerability provokes distorted visions

and defensive judgments of other women who have chosen to

admit that, yes, they are vulnerable and who have set about

confronting that vulnerability, asking where it all began"

(110).

Didion does distance herself from the Women's Movement

in the essay, but it is from the social phenomena and not

from the women themselves that she distances herself.

In

the same essay, Didion observes that women's actual

experience is as subject to trivialization by the feminists

as it is by those the feminists designate as the

'oppressor'.

By attributing their victimization solely to

men, women deny any responsibility for their own lives.

"All one's actual apprehension of what it is like to be a

woman, the irreconcilable difference of it—-that sense of

living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement

with blood and birth and death—-could now be declared

invalid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all" (WA 117).

It is against such dismissal of woman's experience, against

an over—simplification of woman's role as Other in the

world, that Didion directs her strident rebuke.

For if we examine Didion's novels, we find an enduring

respect and admiration for women, a genuine concern for

their problems, and an implicit faith that women are

intelligent enough to recognize their own complicity in any

55

victimization and possess sufficient courage to refuse to

be a victim.

This belief in the strength and courage of

women demonstrates itself in Didion's first novel, 322

River, and continues throughout her subsequent works.

Play

It As It Lays, Didion's second novel, is often cited as an

example of a work in which the female protagonist chooses

to be viewed as 'the mad wife' rather than to function as

the object of the perverted fantasies of those around her.

As Pearson/Pope and Pratt note, the 'mad wife' is a common

archetypal pattern in women's fiction, reflecting the

position of a woman with critical intelligence in a

patriarchal society.

In A Book of Common Prayer, Didion

explores yet another archetypal pattern that recurs in

women's fiction:

the reunion of the mother and daughter or

a reworking of the Demeter/Kore myth.

Through a

reconstruction of Charlotte's 'narrative', Grace Strasser-

Medena comes to understand what Charlotte knew all along:

that both women are outsiders who can offer mutual support

and friendship to each other.

Textual evidence suggests

that Didion's latest novel, Democracy, began as Inez

 

Christian's story about her mother:

"Imagine my mother

dancing..." (21).

Although the surface structure of the

novel changes radically in the course of composition, and

those changes are then foregrounded by Didion, the theme of

the loss of mothers and daughters constitutes a significant

sub-text.

In addition to the archetypal patterns that surface in

56

Didion's fiction which connect her to other women writers,

she herself perceives a similarity of concerns.

In an

interview for Paris Review, Didion characterizes herself as

 

a writer of romance.

Referring to an observation made by a

reviewer of A Book of Common Prayer, Didion recalls that

 

"She [the reviewer] suggested that the women were strong to

the point of being figures in a romance, that they were

romantic heroines rather than actual women in actual

situations.

I think that's probably true.

I think I write

romances" (Kuehl 159).

The romance, as we have seen, is a

literary motif especially preferred by women who write and

critique women's fiction.

That preference seems based on

the recognition that the romance permits an imaginative

exploration of the conditions under which women discover

the source of their own strength.

Didion's comment that she writes romances appears to

come to her in the nature of a discovery.

It suggests she

had not previously thought of herself in that context, just

as it seems she does not consider herself as a woman

writer, but a writer who happens to be female.

Her

reluctance to attribute any significance to her gender as

an important aspect of her authorial vision disturbs

feminist critics.

Yet an analysis of her fiction will

demonstrate quite clearly that she shares many of the

insights and concerns of those who write under the

nomenclature of feminist.

Didion's first novel, Run River, makes an interesting

 

57

case study in this respect.

Written in 1963, it predates

the popularization of feminist concerns, yet displays

Didion's preoccupation with the female experience in a

patriarchal society.

The title itself recalls a feminine

archetype, the Great Mother, who functions as both creator

and destroyer.

That the title was assigned by an editor

indicates that Didion may not have been entirely aware of

its significance for her novel.

Also, Run River is

 

Didion's first novel, written out of a profound sense of

loss and nostalgia, which implies again that she may not

have had as much conscious control over her material as she

obviously does in her later novels (Kuehl 150).

The abundance of traditional archetypal images also

supports such a view.

Images of water, fire, and light

permeate the novel.

Everette McClellan, the protagonist's

husband, is haunted by dreams of fire in which he imagines

his hop fields burning and Lily, his wife, trapped in the

fire, the "ugly image of her fragile bones outlined in the

incandescent ruin."

Everette's apocalyptic vision

represents his fear of impending disaster and a foreboding

that all his efforts to maintain control over the green

valley of his youth will come to naught.

However, it is water, not fire, which is connected to

actual death in the novel.

Everette's sister, Martha, and

Lily's father and his mistress all drown in the novel.

And

when Everette shoots Ryder Channing (the lover of both his

wife and his sister), and then himself, the shootings take

58

place on the dock by the river that has already claimed so

many of the family's dead.

There is, however, a

conjunction of light and water images in each of the death

scenes in Run River.

A flashlight burns through three

 

inches of muddy water near the dock as both Everette and

Ryder lay dead in the closing scene, just as the headlights

of Walter Knight's (Lily's father) submerged car had shone

through twenty-five feet of water some seventeen years

earlier.

And it is in the "brilliant cold light of the

flared" that Lily watches the futile efforts to revive

Martha's lifeless body after she is pulled out of the flood

waters (RR 210).

The conjunction of light and water suggests that there

is some knowledge to be gained from the tragedy that besets

the McClellan-Knight family.

And it is Lily Knight—-wife,

daughter, sister, and lover of the victims—-who is privy to

those insights.

Her name connects her to figures of

traditional romance that embark on quests to bring about

rebirth, as does her privileged role as the protagonist of

the novel.

These factors strongly suggest that despite the

ambiguity of Lily's insights, Didion's first novel is as

much a novel of female development as it is a dramatization

of a society in transition, as one critic claims (Henderson

92).

Katherine Henderson comes closer to this recognition in

her assessment of the novel as "the integration of

traditional myths with the private history of the novel's

59

characters and the public history of their community and

nation" (92).

Yet Henderson, like Didion, fails to make

explicit how factors of gender shape Lily's perception of

this troubled time and even contribute to it, or how such

factors help to account for Didion's choice of the romance

as the genre in which to express her vision.

Insights provided by feminist critics such as Pratt,

and Pearson/Pope, however, will prove useful in detecting

the archetypal patterns of female development embedded in

the traditional framework of Didion's novel.

Such

patterns, as Pratt observes, often function as "subversive

elements" which implicitly challenge the more explicit

patriarchal values the novel upholds as traditional (177).

Run River presents such a challenge, but in a covert

 

manner.

An examination of the archetypal patterns that

recur in women's fiction will indicate that Didion's first

novel embodies a stronger awareness of gender factors than

the author willingly acknowledges or her critics admit to.

In Pratt's terms, Didion's first novel is about a

female hero whose quest for selfhood is thwarted.

Run

 

River incorporates two of Pratt's classifications—the novel

of development and the novel of marriage.

The first is a

female bildingsroman which explores the female hero's

experience of the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

The second, the novel of marriage, is an account of the

female hero's attempt to accommodate society's expectations

of her as a married woman.

For Lily Knight, the

6O

protagonist of Run River, both of those transitions are

 

fraught with troubling complications.

In Frye's terms, she

is caught in the archetypal struggle between the myth of

concern and the myth of freedom, a situation in which an

individual's needs conflict with societal expectations.

It

is at moments of confrontations, when Lily tries to

interpret society's demands of her as a female in light of

her own perceptions, that Pratt's system of archetypal

patterns in women's fiction seems most enlightening.

The archetypal patterns associated with the novel of

development in Pratt's system are the green—world

archetype, the rape-trauma archetype, and the growing—up—

grotesque archetype.

To a degree, each of the three

patterns is evident in Run River.

But as Pearson and Pope

 

observe, the archetypal stages often over-lap or repeat

themselves or occur in a non-linear fashion.

The green—world archetype manifests itself in images

associated with nature.

The young female finds "solace,

companionship, and independence" in nature (Pratt 21).

There she finds a source of nourishment for her fledgling

dreams of self.

But as Pratt points out, images of the

green world are most often presented in retrospect and thus

are associated with a strong sense of loss.

In the case of

the young female hero, those images are most prominent just

before she is to be initiated into the patriarchal

structure of the adult world.

Such is the case with Lily

Knight.

Images of the green-world appear in Run River when

 

Lily is about to marry.

61

Lily is eighteen when she renews her childhood

acquaintance with Everette McClellan.

She has just

completed a year at Berkeley, but has no plans to return in

the fall.

She prefers the security of her father's ranch

where her role is clearly defined as his 'princess'.

At

the ranch she feels in possession of herself and in contact

with the natural world around her.

On a visit to the

family cemetery, Lily confides to her father that

"Sometimes I think this whole valley belongs to me" (33

79).

But she loses that confidence at Berkeley where young

men expect her to be more knowledgeable about sexual

matters than she is or cares to be.

The world of

male/female relationships is a perplexing one for Lily.

Advice from her female friends strikes Lily as

contradictory:

"Be more fun--be yourself" (RR 48).

Lily

is able to be herself only when she is on her father's

ranch, driving his car on roads he has paid for.

She

clearly feels that her father's power extends to her and

that his power derives from the land he owns in the

Sacremento Valley.

It is the proprietary nature of Walter

Knight's claims to the land that has advanced his cause in

the State Legislature, just as it is his mastery of a

voluble rhetoric and his Rhett Butler handsomeness that has

claimed his only child's heart.

Until she meets Everette,

Lily is unable to imagine any connection with a man who is

not her father.

62

But in the summer of 1940, Lily's sexuality is

awakened; she is acutely aware of the sensual beauty of her

world--the coolness of clear water on her skin, the lush

green of the hops fields, the richness and ripeness of the

warm, heavy pears in the orchard.

She senses a connection

between the fruit in her father's orchard and her own body

and is led to contemplate "the waste of her perfectly good

but constantly depreciating body" (RR 51).

At some level,

Lily is aware that she is ready to enter the world of adult

sexuality.

But that desire for maturity is clouded by the

apprehension that her youth and beauty, like her father's

pears, are commodities whose value decreases with time.

So

when Everette McClellan re—enters her life, she welcomes

his return as part of some natural rhythm.

For Lily, Everette takes on some of the aspects of what

Pratt calls "the green-world lover", a figure who leads the

hero towards social development.

Like Walter Knight,

Everette is a grower in the valley.

Unlike her father,

however, Everette actually works the land himself and is

therefore more closely associated with nature.

All his

psychic energies are connected to the planting, growing,

and harvesting of the green hops, now a defunct crop.

His

courtship of Lily takes place almost exclusively within the

realm of the green-world; in fact, Lily's sexual initiation

takes place on the banks of the river that runs through the

McClellan property.

After that initiation, Everette offers

Lily the opportunity to remain in the green-world; he

63

promises to protect her from whatever snakes may or may not

lurk in the grass of the riverbank.

Enchanted by this

blond, tanned god—like figure whose "bones seem right to

her", Lily agrees to marry Everette.

"It seemed as

inescapable as the ripening of the pears, as fated as the

exile from Eden" (RR 59).

The "exile from Eden" in some women's novels

corresponds to what Pearson and Pope designate as the first

stage of the journey for the female hero.

"In the first

stage, the hero exists from the garden when she comes to

realize that people she had previously seen as guides for

her life...are her captors" (68).

Although Lily has come

to recognize that her parents are fallible, that her father

will never be governor, that he has a mistress, and that

her mother is somehow complicitous in that triangle, Lily

does not yet perceive her parents as captors.

She does

understand at a later time, unspecified by Didion, that her

father was "a good man but maybe not good enough, often

enough, to count for much in the long run.

When you know

that you know something about yourself, but you did not

know it then" (RR 45).

As Lily does not yet make the

connection between knowing something about her father and

knowing something about herself (for instance, that they

both possess a talent for self—deception), Lily perceives

the exit from the garden of parental dependency as an

eviction.

The exile from the garden comes in the form of marriage

64

for Lily.

Once she has engaged in sexual activity with

Everette, she finds that he expects her to marry him.

Later she understands that her agreement to do so was

"really no decision at all; only an acquiescence" (RR 59).

Having grown up with the understanding that her father will

protect her, Lily is shocked to discover that some action

of hers can be construed as an obligation to another

person.

She wants to question that assumption, but to do

so seems to invoke the potential destruction of the green

world Everette has promised.

"The word gay, once spoken

out loud, could bring the pears all tumbling down" (RR 59).

Unlike some female heroines, Lily cannot imagine any

access to the green world apart from a connection to a man.

Nature itself is a part of the patriarchal space that is

all-encompassing in her world and it does not occur to Lily

to question the validity of that male claim.

It does occur

to her to question the claim that Everette makes on her

body.

Although Lily does marry Everette, she does not do so

without serious reservations.

She begins to question the

assumptions of a society which sanctions sexuality only in

the context of marriage.

She senses in some vague way that

marriage will involve a loss of an essential freedom, that

it will be achieved only by some "intricate deception" she

cannot yet afford to recognize.

Lily tries to convey her

uneasiness to Everette, but he fails to understand her

point.

"Sometimes I don't want to marry anyone.

Some

65

afternoons I lie on my bed and the light comes through the

shutters on the floor and I think I never want to leave my

own room" (RR 61).

Lily perceives that marriage will

somehow violate her private space, but Everette

misunderstands her apprehension; instead he tries to

console her with a promise of a whole house to herself.

Everette fails to comprehend, and Lily does only dimly,

that he cannot give her what she needs and wants——not

material space, but psychological space, a room of her own.

So uncertain is Lily about marriage that she cannot

bring herself to inform her parents of her intention.

Accepting Lily's passivity as acquiescence, Everette drives

Lily to Reno to elope.

But Everette's assertiveness does

nothing to alleviate Lily's anxiety.

On their honeymoon

Lily imagines that the fact she lied about her age on the

marriage license will invalidate the marriage.

It is not

until she returns to her father's house that she

comprehends the irrevocability of her act; marriage is a

condition from which even her father cannot protect her.

Her exit from the garden of parental dependency is

complete.

A second archetypal pattern, the rape—trauma archetype

in Pratt's system and the stage of seduction in Pearson and

Pope's model, share certain attributes.

There is a

seducer, usually male, who is sometimes a villain, but can

also be one aspect of the green-world lover, once that

lover assumes the role of husband.

As in Lily's case, the

66

seducer—-Everette——may perpetuate the belief that she need

not complete the heroic journey; he will complete and

protect her.

Instead he becomes another captor, leading

the hero into the enclosure of marriage.

Pratt observes

that the rape-trauma archetype recurs as the most frequent

plot structure in women's fiction and is always associated

with pain and betrayal.

For Lily, images of pain and betrayal are most clearly

associated with sexuality.

Although her sexual initiation

can in no way be labeled 'rape', it is nonetheless

traumatic.

On the occasion of that initiation, Lily and

Everette go swimming.

Lily expresses her fear of the

impending experience through a reference to her fear of

water——traditionally associated with the birth/death cycle.

"I always think I'll be dragged under," she confesses to

Everette (RR 56).

While swimming she acquires a long

scratch which later becomes infected and leaves a scar.

That injury to her person becomes connected in her mind

with the loss of her virginity, a loss that is both

physical and psychological.

The linkage of sex and pain is

one that remains with Lily throughout the novel.

Later

when she seeks erotic freedom with subsequent

lovers/seducers she can only be aroused when she can

recreate the pain-as-pleasure of the original loss.

Feminist critics would read Lily's reaction as one that

results from an internalization of society's values which

are detrimental to women.

Sexual freedom is traditionally

67

forbidden to females in a patriarchal society and so must

be punished.

When the punishment is not forthcoming from

an external source, the female hero will often punish

herself for enjoying a sexual freedom not sanctioned by

society.

One way to impose such self punishment is to

experience sexual pleasure as pain, as Lily does.

That

Lily's reaction is one that Didion may share at this early

stage in her career is suggested by another incident in the

novel.

Lily's father, Walter Knight and his mistress, Rita

Blanchard, are in an accident in which they are drowned.

Again the linked images of sex and water appear.

Two

passersby discover Walter Knight's car submerged in twenty—

five feet of water, the headlights still shining.

Although

Walter Knight's face is "unmarked", "Rita had been cut,

across her left cheek and down that long Blanchard throat"

(RR 75).

While the male participant in this marital

transgression is equally as dead as the female, it is the

female who bears the totemic sign of guilt.

If Didion

herself is not punishing the mistress figure, she is at

least indicating that it is the female who will be

recognized as the guilty party.

The punishment of the female who seeks erotic freedom

can also be connected to the growing-up grotesque

archetype.

Many female heroes who try to achieve an

autonomy that permits them to make choices regarding sex,

work, love, etc. are punished as social freaks.

In

68

Didion's novel, it is Everette's sister who most closely

follows this pattern.

Martha McClellan "is a case" as

Lily's mother observes (RR 51).

Although Martha claims to

be studying agriculture at college because her father wants

her to marry a rich farmer, it is clear that what Martha

really wants is to run the family farm herself.

Martha's

passion for the land is one she shares with Everette;

however, as a female, she has to revise history a bit to

justify her claim to it.

In her childhood versions of the

winning of the West, it is the women, often the wives of

the frontier leaders who are responsible for the settling

of California.

Obviously Martha is trying to compensate

for the lack of female models by inventing some of her own.

Martha's fantasy life is seriously undermined however

when Everette, who had supported Martha's feminist version

of their childhood dreams, marries Lily and thus makes

certain his undisputed claim to the patriarchal

inheritance.

Martha views his marriage to Lily as a

betrayal of that primal loyalty to kin and so accuses him

of leaving her alone.

In her view, her brother's marriage

is a defection from the family unit in which she had seen

herself an equal partner.

She had understood that

Everette's promise to protect her included a promise to

support and nourish a vision of herself as a strong and

independent helpmate.

When Everette's action contradicts

that understanding, Martha loses that vision of herself.

It is as if at seventeen, Martha discovers for the first

69

time that the male virtues of freedom and independence are

not ones she is allowed to claim for herself.

Denied those possibilities, Martha comes to see herself

as grotesque, as some distortion of the valued male

identity.

She begins to act in ways that will justify her

self-hatred; she goes to too many parties, drinks too much,

makes a spectacle of herself.

She also becomes involved

with Ryder Channing, a man she knows will betray and

exploit her, out of some disparate need to revenge her

brother for failing her.

At a party with Ryder where she

meets his fiancee, Martha is overcome by depression and a

sense of foreboding.

She locks herself in the bathroom to

stare at herself in the mirror.

But she does not recognize

the woman who stares back.

"Your name is Martha McClellan,

she said again and again to the mirror, and then cried

because it did not seem to be the Martha McClellan she had

wanted to be" (RR 182).

She is not the courageous,

intelligent woman she envisioned the ideal frontier woman

to be.

Instead she has become the "gauche, bitchy little

girl" Ryder expects her to be.

(RR 185)

Martha has

discovered that to be accepted as female in this society

she must grow 'down', not up.

Pearson and Pope point out that the mirror is a

common symbol "to express the limiting and oppressive

effects of the traditional female role" (22).

Those

effects are clearly evident in this scene.

Since Martha's

mother died giving her birth, Martha has grown up in a

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predominantly male household.

Without the guidance of a

mother who traditionally prepares the young girl to take

her place in society, Martha has appropriated the values of

the males around her as her own.

She is bright,

aggressive, competitive, defiant, questioning.

As she

moves into womanhood, however, she finds these qualities

are liabilities, not appropriate attributes for attracting

a husband.

As she has not learned through example the fine

art of pleasing a man, she perceives herself as powerless

in the female domain.

"You're strong enough to make people

take care of you" she informs Lily and thereby discloses

her own deficiencies.

(RR 97)

So Martha sets out to make

someone take care of her.

If she cannot be the pleasing

female, she will be the recalcitrant one.

But the

discrepancy between the woman she had wanted to be and the

one she has become is so great that Martha verges on

schizophrenia.

Furthermore, most of Martha's actions,

especially towards men, are prompted by an overwhelming

rage, which, when turned inward becomes despair.

She illustrates also the type of female hero Pratt

describes as a young woman "who sets forth with wit and

intelligence, only to be punished by an internalized form

of self—torture with which she programs herself into

atrophy and disuse" (Pratt 31).

After graduating summa cum

 

laude from the university, Martha literally wastes the

remaining five years of her life.

She attends parties,

sleeps around, conducts a torrid affair with Ryder

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Channing, and generally upsets the McClellan household.

She makes one pathetic attempt to hold a job at a local

television station.

But by then she has lost all hold on

reality and cannot manage simple tasks such as writing

letters.

Martha's systematic alienation of herself from

her family and the world around her is recorded in a

journal that Lily finds after her death.

"I am so far away

from them all it is incredible when you consider" {RR 214).

The journal also includes lists of reasons why she should

not love Ryder, Everette, or her father--all the important

men in her life.

Martha's final revenge on a world that

has denied her any real accomplishment is to defy nature

itself and her own intelligence.

She takes a boat out in a

storm and is drowned.

The growing-up—grotesque archetype serves another

function in Didion's novel as well.

It is also associated

with the Shadow figure, which "contains all those elements

in the personality which the ego condemns as negative

values" (Neumann 351).

The Shadow is often presented as an

antagonist and frequently as a 'dark' sibling around who

aggressive tendencies accumulate.

In some ways, Martha

functions as the Shadow figure Lily must come to terms

with.

It is Martha who relentlessly questions the value of

Lily's wifely gestures-—her declared loyalty to Everette

while she engages in an affair with Joe Templeton or her

tendency to ward off disaster with "domestic gestures of

gaiety or grace" (107).

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But it is also Martha who lies for Lily when she has an

abortion and who recognizes what Lily refuses to

acknowledge-—that they are sisters.

Above and beyond the

familial relationship, they share the sisterhood of being

women in a man's world.

In that sense Martha functions as

the dark sister who accrues the negative qualities

associated with the bitch goddess, while Lily operates as

her counterpart, the virgin goddess.

Yet neither woman

fully recognizes that such roles are complementary

projections of a patriarchal society which seeks to define

women in accordance with its own needs.

Having internalized the devalued status of women in

their society, neither Martha nor Lily is able to

completely penetrate the myth of female inferiority that

Pearson and Pope identify as a necessary step to the

completion of the female hero's journey.

Still, there are

suggestions that both are moving in that direction by the

end of the novel.

Martha, for instance, tries to phone her

'prodigal sister in the East four days before she commits

suicide.

When no one answers, Martha concludes "it is too

late" (RR 205).

That Martha should try to contact her

sister whom she has always depicted as an enemy rather than

Everette whom she has considered her ally suggests that

Martha feels a need to revise her perceptions about her

sister's worth and possibly her own.

Lily undergoes a similar revision of her understanding

of Martha, but unfortunately the revision is prompted by

Si

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73

Martha's suicide.

Didion depicts this scene in strong

archetypal images.

Martha's body is found in the flood and

is retrieved by Everette, who gently places it in a sea

chest for burial on the McClellan property, over the

protests of family members and the local officials.

As

Lily watches the hired man help Everette dig the grave, she

realizes "that Martha's body could well be washed out by

evening, the unnailed lid of the sea chest ripped open and

Martha free again in the water in the white silk dress with

the butterflies" (RR 207).

Despite the grief of the

occasion and Lily's horror at her own thoughts, the image

of Martha floating free in the water is a soothing one.

There is, of course, the sense of a return to the Great

Mother, the rever.

Furthermore, the scene evokes another

archetypal pattern--the birth of the hero, which is often

associated with a treasure chest and the sea.

It is almost as if Martha's death is a symbolic rebirth

for Lily as it is Lily, not Everette, who gains the

treasure of wisdom from the tragedy.

It is Lily who is

able to detect the pattern of Martha's psychological

deterioration in a journal she finds after Martha's death;

and it Lily who chooses to protect Martha's secret even

though it means Everette will blame himself for his

sister's suicide.

Lily also defends Martha's memory

against accusations that her antisocial behavior somehow

explained or justified her death.

This subtle shift in

attitude toward Martha suggests that Lily understands

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something about their connection to each other she hadn't

understood before.

As Didion is noticeably reluctant to pursue the point,

a reader must speculate about the nature of the change in

Lily after Martha's death.

Such speculation is complicated

by the fact that Lily herself seems unaware of the precise

nature of the change that has occurred.

What is clear

though is that Lily is no longer willing to let men usurp

her power in a relationship; she demands that they be

willing to invest at least as much as she does.

"What

would you give if I would?"

(Divorce Everette) she demands

of her lover Joe Templeton.

Even her subsequent affair

with Ryder Channing is conducted on her own terms; he will

not exploit her need for affection as he had Martha.

Nor

will she allow Everette,whom she never stops loving, to

consign her to the role of child in a sexless marriage.

A chance encounter on a plane with a man who whispers

an obscene monologue in her ear is revealing of Lily's

change of attitudes.

"What held her in trance was his

total lack of interest in anything else about her, his

promise of being what she had looked for over and over:

the point beyond which she could not go, the unambiguous

undiluted article, the place where the battle would be on

her terms.

There would be no question of whether he liked

her or disliked her, no question of approval or

disapproval, no roles at all" (RR 229).

Although Lily does

not persue the encounter, she does understand the

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possibility exists that men and women might arrange their

encounters in such a way as to avoid the victor/victim

pattern that has characterized their history.

Or, to be

more precise, Lily recognizes that both men and women are

victims of patterns that no longer work; as she observes of

herself, Everette and Ryder, "they seemed afflicted with

memory" (RR 230).

By refusing to be a victim, Lily is beginning to

challenge the overriding patriarchal myth-—the myth of the

inferiority of the female.

Such a recognition comes

however only after Lily has been married for a number of

years.

At this point, Didion's novel is more strictly one

of marriage than one of development, in Pratt's terms.

As

Pratt indicates though, similar archetypal patterns govern

both types of novels, especially those representing trauma

and enclosure.

Didion depicts marriage as a troubled and troubling

situation in her first novel.

It may be pertinent to

recall that Run River is written before Didion herself

 

marries.

Her subsequent novels, written after her own

marriage, are even more critical of this social institution

than is the first one.

Whatever redeeming qualities Didion

finds in marriage in Run River, those are noticeably absent

 

from the second novel for instance.

Even in Run River the

 

negative attributes outweigh the positive despite Didion's

apparent efforts to find some equilibrium between them.

Pratt observes that novels of marriage are primarily

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"accommodationist", seeking to sanction the social

institution of marriage while allowing for the development

of the female protagonist.

This, it seems, is what Didion

attempts to accomplish in her first novel.

In a book length study of Didion's works, Katherine

Henderson observes that Didion uses the narrative strategy

of presenting both Lily and Everette's View to effect the

equilibrium she desires.

The effect however is to

accentuate the emotional isolation that is the essential

attribute of the McClellan marriage.

"Didion's alternation

of Lily's and Everette's points of view serves..to

dramatize their growing estrangement."

The shift in

point of view is used in one instance to portray the very

different reactions that Lily and Everette have to his

enlistment in the army.

Whereas Everette enjoys the

solitude of the orderly male environment at Fort Bliss,

Lily is left at home to contend with sick children,

Everette's quarrelsome father and a disturbed Martha.

In

fact Everette chooses to enlist because he wants to escape

the "peculiarly female disorder" Lily brings to his life.

(RR 121)

Lily senses an implicit rejection of her in his

decision and feels he has deserted her.

For her,the

desertion constitutes a violation of the promise he made to

take care of her when they married.

Although both

responses derive from the patriarchal myth of female

inferiority, Everette's choice permits him a certain degree

of comfort while Lily's predicament plunges her into abject

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An even more injurious estrangement develops when Lily

takes it upon herself to abort a child she is not certain

is Everette's.

Because both are so imprisoned in their

own sense of failure to fulfill their roles of husband and

wife, Everette allows Lily to get an abortion even though

he recognizes there is no need for it.

It is an act that

becomes the focal point for years of recriminations which

leave them both feeling alone and isolated.

But there are other reasons for Lily's isolation

besides Everette's physical and psychological desertion of

her.

One is her perception that she is not like other

women.

She is persuaded that other women possess a secret

that she does not, a secret that accounts for their

apparently unquestioned accommodation of the roles Lily

finds it impossible to play.

This isolation from other

women extends to, or perhaps begins with, her relationship

with her mother.

Initially Lily views her mother as a

frivolous woman.

Edith Knight appears a smiling if not

convinced supporter of her husband's political aspirations.

It is only after her father's death that Lily understands

that it was Rita Blanchard, her father's mistress, who

provided Edith Knight with her most important role—-that of

the long—suffering wife.

Lily is not content to repeat her

mother's performance, especially as she finds Rita the more

admirable of the two women.

Nor is Lily able to accept the

lessons mothers inevitably pass on to their daughters.

One

78

Christmas her own mother insisted that Lily give all her

presents but one to children evacuated by a flood.

It was

an act of self-sacrifice, Lily muses later, "in which only

Lily came out behind" (85).

Although Lily is able to perceive the injustice

inherent in societal expectations of women, she is unable

to recognize how such injustices affect her life directly,

at least this is the case before Martha's death.

In this

respect Lily is a victim of the feminine mystique.

As

Henderson notes, "In the portrait of Lily, Didion

dramatized the very mystique of which Friedan wrote, the

myth that a woman finds her real self in husband, home, and

children" (Henderson 58).

The other part of that mystique

is that if a woman fails to do so, the failure is a

personal one.

Lily is such a woman.

Lily believes other women do find fulfillment in their

roles as wives and mothers, and that she should too.

Waiting in a bus station after her abortion, Lily

contemplates the discrepancy between herself and the other

"well-behaved sun—tanned wives getting out of their

swimming suits and dressed for dinner" (RR 170).

And she

understands that Everette deserves just such a wife.

"You

never would catch one of them standing around the Greyhound

bus station in a tea-stained wrinkled suit not wanting to

see her husband....There was the kind of wife Everette

should have, and look what he had instead" (RR 170).

Lily's perception of her difference from other women

79

further serves to keep those women at a distance, thus

preventing her from discovering the lies such exteriors

conceal.

When Martha tries to initiate discussions with

Lily about the female experience, Lily refuses to

participate.

Any frank discussion of feelings between

women about men or themselves strikes Lily as threatening:

"harsh words between women seemed to her unthinkable, an

irreparable rent in the social fabric" (RR 111).

This

failure on Lily's part is different from and more crucial

than the kind of failure she experiences when she attempts

to imitate her mother's role as a river matron.

"Lily

turns away from Martha's confidences, unable to deal with

the emotions of another woman.

Had Lily and Martha been

able to communicate with and support each other, Lily's

loneliness might have been transcended, and Martha's

suicide averted" (Henderson 53).

But as Lily aptly

perceives, to break the unstated taboo of female silence is

to risk the very structure of the patriarchal society.

Lily's experience of isolation and enclosure within her

marriage is most precisely detailed in a scene in which she

is literally confined to bed after the birth of her second

child.

Although Lily had accepted the birth of her son

with equanimity, the birth of a daughter makes her acutely

aware of her responsibility as wife and mother.

That is a

responsibility for which Lily feels wholly inadequate.

Images of oppression and confinement dominate the

hospital scene and serve to embody many of the conflicts

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Lily experiences as a married woman.

The room is filled

with flowers Everette has brought, "sweet and heavy as

drugs" (RR 81).

It is raining outside and Lily feels "it

must be raining in every part of the world, flooding the

valleys" (RR 81).

She cannot persuade the nuns to open the

narrow windows of the room which intensifies her feelings

of suffocation and powerlessness.

At one juncture, Lily

literally covers her head with a pillow to block out the

overwhelming sensations which accost her.

The rain and its potential for disaster in the valley

remind Lily of the novel A Farewell to Arms.

In her panic,

 

she becomes convinced that she faces a fate similar to that

of the heroine of the novel:

"...she was certain that her

baby had died in the night, that the nuns were concealing

the death from her, and she knew as well that before long

she would begin to hemorrhage and die herself" (RR 81).

That scenario makes her cry for Everette as she had

undoubtedly cried for Frederick Henry when she read the

novel.

It is interesting to note that Lily's empathy is for

Frederick and not for Catherine in this instance.

Even

more, Lily sees herself as a heroine in a man's novel about

war, an unlikely circumstance for Lily to identify with.

Or perhaps not, if one recalls that Frederick Henry risked

dishonor to be with Catherine in her time of need, whereas

Lily suspects Everette would never do the same for her.

That the time of the incident is 1942 may contribute to

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Lily's pronounced anxieties, especially as she suspects

that Everette wants to enlist in the war.

However, if her

fear was only that Everette might die, her fantasy should

have taken quite a different shape.

Since it is the woman

and child and not the soldier who dies in Hemingway's

novel, and in Lily's premonition, Lily's death fantasy may

be as much a wish fulfillment as it is an irrational fear.

Death would provide an escape from the suffocation she

experiences as a wife and a mother; it would also allow her

to be reunited with her recently deceased father, another

desire she expresses in the hospital scene.

Part of such a wish fulfillment involves a desire to

return to the green-world of childhood.

Pratt indicates

such desires often erupt as the female hero is about to

enter the enclosure of societal expectations, most often

marriage.

Although Lily has already been married for two

years at this point, the birth of her daughter revives her

conflict about her role as a woman.

Lily recalls a cousin

who had entered the convent at eighteen and was

subsequently disowned by the family.

Lily muses that she

had wanted "to have Mary Knight with her always, a

talisman" (RR 87).

Lily admires and envies Mary's

abilities to make a decision, to choose her own life.

In

one respect, Lily's version of Mary's life is an attempt to

imagine the ways in which her own life might have been

different had she not acquiesced to Everette's demands for

marriage.

82

But Lily also values and envies Mary Knight's innocence

of sexual politics and her refusal to participate in them.

"I should have taken the Holy Ghost not Everette" (RR 88).

Lily's comment can be read in a number of ways as Didion is

particularly cryptic here, but one possibility is that Lily

suspects that a purposeful celibacy would have been more

suitable to her temperament than marriage has proved to be.

It would also have allowed Lily to avoid the pain/pleasure

dilemma associated with sex, another memory that

constitutes a part of this scene.

The vividness of her

memory of her sexual initiation continues to perplex Lily

more than two years after the event.

Even now, two years later, those few minutes were more

vivid than any since:

she had lost neither the sense

of wonder nor the sense of deprivation that the

experience had not been uniquely hers.

The summer

smell of that morning, river water and sweat and the

acrid sting of weeds breaking under them (and that

would always be summer's smell), was stronger still

than all the roses and jasmine gardenias in whole of

Mercy hospital.

(33 88)

The complex of forces that contributesto the recreation

of Lily's experience in this scene reflect the ambivalence

of her position, and perhaps, Didion's as well.

Pleasurable images of the green—world—-summer, water,

smell——are linked with images of pain-—acrid sting, sweat,

83

weeds breaking.

The vividness of this memory as well as

its ambivalence may be accounted for by the fact that it

functions as part of the rape-trauma archetype.

That

archetype is associated with images of invasion of a female

sanctuary by an uninvited male.

As I have stated earlier,

I do not mean to suggest that Lily was raped; she desired

the sexual experience as much as Everette did.

Nor does

the archetype imply forced intercourse is necessary as a

prerequisite.

It does, however, carry with it connotations

of violation and the sense of a sexual experience that

violates one's psychological integrity.

When a sexual

experience, particularly the first one, like Lily's is

painful both physically and psychologically, the result can

be traumatic.

Such an event may be blocked from memory or

later reconstructed to delete the painful aspects.

My

reading suggests that Lily does the latter.

First, though, I want to consider a related factor.

When a woman undergoes a psychological experience of

violation in the context of a physically painful sexual

initiation, it is often difficult for her to separate the

factors that contribute to her general impression of pain.

As the physical pain of sexual initiation is considered

normal, indeed a badge of honor, the woman is likely to

conclude that pain is the norm of the experience.

Thus a

woman's body and the society at large teach her that pain

is the norm whether its origins be physical or

psychological or both.

84

Lily seems to be operating on such assumptions when she

reconstructs her sexual initiation in this scene.

But in

so doino

0.

she glosses over important discriminations she

had made in her original account of the event,

discriminations that could lead her to question the origins

of her pain.

For instance, physical pain is the primary

perception in Lily's original account:

"...after a while

she began to think it could never happen because it hurt so

much" (RR 58).

Everette is not aware or at least not

sensitive to Lily's experience of pain.

Instead, he

perceives the experience in terms of a victory.

"When

Everette finally said, again and again in a kind of

triumph, you feel it, baby feel it, she assumed it had

happened (RR 58).

Yet Lily's subsequent recall of the

event conflates the discrepancies in their separate

responses so as to suggest that all aspects of the event

were shared equally.

Clearly such was not the case, and

even Lily has some difficulty with the revised version.

Lily cannot align the revised version of her sexual

initiation with the knowledge that everyone has such an

experience.

Partly that dissonance is the result of Lily's

refusal to accept an adult's perception of the world which

requires one to concede that one's own sensations are not

unique.

It is this version that Didion appears to support,

based on Didion's assessment of the Women's Movement in her

White Album essay.

What is not pointed out is that in our

 

society, 'adult' is equated with the predominantly male

85

view of experience; to dissent from that view is to be seen

as a child rather than as someone who has a very different

view of experience based on a different reality.

I would argue that Lily's inability to conceive of her

sexual initiation in terms of its universality is not

rooted in an inability to

'grow up', but rather in her

actual experience as a female in the male/female encounter.

As Lily is not in a position to compare her experience

with that of other women, she has no basis for assuming its

universality.

But what she can know is that her perception

differed radically from the one person with whom she shared

the experience:

Everette.

She experienced no triumph in

the loss of her virginity.

Everette did.

It is almost as

if he

usurped a victory that should have been her own.

In

that sense, her experience is unique.

Her pain isolates

her from Everette and his reaction serves to make both her

pain and her subsequent isolation from important factors in

Lily's perception of the event as a violation.

To use her

pain as an occasion of triumph, even inadvertently, is a

violation of Lily's psychological integrity. Didion's use

of the rape-trauma archetypal pattern in this instance

suggests an implicit recognition of this violation, even

though, she, like Lily, is reluctant to pursue the

political implications of the act.

The inability or refusal to articulate the larger

patterns that emerge from a sequence of behaviors is a

problem that both Didion and her protagonist share in this

86

novel.

Lily first encounters this issue when she discovers

Martha's journal after her untimely suicide.

"The notebook

changed nothing.

Everette would only have blamed himself

for not having seen before what she now saw with

ineluctable clarity:

the pattern there all along, worked

through it all as subtly and delicately as, in a drawing

she had loved as a child, the tiger's face had been worked

into the treetops.

Once you had seen the tiger's face, you

could never see the treetops" (RR 213).

In this instance,

Lily is forced to acknowledge that Martha's behavior did

allow for interpretation, that the pattern of psychological

deterioration was clearly visible, at least after the fact.

But at the end of the novel when Lily must try to

understand why her husband has killed her latest lover and

why he will kill himself, no such pattern emerges.

She is

only able to recall that their shared past was "a history

of accidents" (RR 246).

Lily is unable or unwilling to

explore what such an assessment can possibly mean, and

Didion does not elaborate.

Perhaps the writer shares her

character's apprehension that further examination might

efface the preferred 'treetops'.

At any rate, we are left

with a descriptive assessment of the McClellan history that

neutralizes all cause and effect and implies a very

deterministic view of life, a view which is antithetical to

the feminist perspective.

Yet Didion's working out of the plot suggests other

interpretations if viewed from a feminist perspective.

87

That perspective highlights the ambiguities Pratt observes

are often present in the work of a woman writer who has not

yet come to terms with the problematical nature of her

relationship to the larger society.

If Everette McClellan

and Ryder Channing are seen as representatives of the

patriarchal structure--as the light and dark images

respectively--then Didion's novel describes that structure

as one that is doomed to collapse of its own weight.

Everette's motives for killing Ryder Channing and then

himself have to do with his need to protect the female in

his care and thus defend his honor and property—-a basic

tenet of the patriarchal doctrine.

But Everette is able to

conceive of these responsibilities only in the rigid terms

of an Old Testament retribution.

Everette is so

preoccupied with honoring the rational principle of justice

that he overlooks the real human needs this principle

obscures.

Feminist critics, such as Carol Gilligan, have

identified this predisposition as one that is common to the

masculine view of moral development (164).

Everette can only perceive Ryder as 0ther-—as the

intruder who has trespassed on his domain which includes,

in Everette's view, his wife and his sister.

He cannot

recognize or alter the fact that his own aloofness, a male

privilege, is a significant factor in both women's turning

to Ryder Channing.

It is only after Lily and Martha find

that Everette will not respond to their needs that they

seek out Ryder's attention.

The fire images that haunt

88

Everette throughout the novel are symbolic of his fear that

his own inadequacies will destroy him and his family.

The

fire images represent everything Everette is not capable

of——uncontrolled fury, rampant sexuality, devouring

passion.

"He had been loading the gun to shoot the

nameless fury which had pursued him ten, twenty, a good

many years before.

All that had happened now was that the

wrath had taken a name, and the name was Ryder Channing"

(28).

Equally important is that Ryder represents the thing

Everette cannot tolerate—-change.

What Didion does avoid, to her credit, is a too-

sweeping denunciation of Everette McClellan and the

cultural values he represents.

Lily does accept the

collapse of her world as she has known it and comes to

understand that she cannot save her husband from the

inevitable consequences of his action and thought.

Didion

uses this recognition on Lily's part to puncture a common

female myth——that women can serve as the salvation of men

they love.

Lily learns otherwise:

"Maybe the most

difficult, most important thing anyone could do for anyone

else was to leave him alone; it was perhaps the only

gratuitous act, the act of love" (247).

But Lily's

recognition of the limits of her power also brings a

recognition of the loss she has suffered and she grieves

for that loss.

Whatever has been the nature of their

common history together, it has been her history as much as

it has been Everette's, and its loss leaves her bereft.

89

Furthermore, there is a forgiving tone at the close of

the novel as Lily cradles her dead husband in her arms and

contemplates how she will interpret this historical event

for her children.

"She did not know what she could tell

anyone except that he had been a good man.

She was not

certain that he had been but it was what she would have

wished, if they gave her one wish" (248).

The ambiguity of

this closing statement suggests that Lily understands that

according to his own code, Everette was a good man; what

she must question is the morality of the code itself.

She

must question a code whose adherence required an abortion

of a child that was not her husband's and demanded the

death of two of the men she loved to sanction its

principles.

The act of questioning places Lily in the position of

the traditional female hero who must examine the nature of

her actual experience in light of the patriarchal

interpretation of that experience, an interpretation often

radically different from her own.

It is Lily's son, Knight

McClellan, who provides the patriarchal interpretation of

Lily's actions in the novel.

His insight is the catalyst

that sets off the tragic chain of events which shape the

novel and spur his father to action.

"It's not what I

hear, it's what I know.

Nobody says it out loud, not

around here.

But you know what they call her?

You know

how they think of her still?

They call her Lily Knight,

not McClellan, Knight.

Like she was never married at all"

90

(236).

The son's accusation of his mother is that she has

remained a virgin in the sense that she has retained her

own identity and has control over her own life.

As such,

Lily is a threat to the patriarchal structure that demands

subjugation of its female members.

But that accusation clearly identifies Lily as a female

hero as well, although the precise nature of her heroism

remains somewhat obscure.

In terms of the patriarchal

structure, Lily functions as a scapegoat.

She is the

sacrificial victim around whom the crimes of society

accrue.

Her choice to remain self-determining especially

in terms of her sexual behavior is perceived by society as

a violation of its most sacrosanct principle...that female

sexuality is a force so threatening it must be contained

and controlled within the patriarchal culture.

In this

light, Lily can be seen as responsible for the deaths of

her husband and lover.

But that is not a perception that

Didion can permit to stand without challenge.

Clearly, as the protagonist, Lily is to be recognized

as the character who represents the moral choice sanctioned

by the author.

It is Lily who survives the tragic

circumstances of the Knight-McClellan family history and it

is she who is given the responsibility for shaping the

future of the next generation, because it is Lily who must

construct the narrative of the family's past, and thus its

future.

The structure of the novel also points to this

91

conclusion.

The novel begins with the shot that killed

Ryder Channing.

Then it follows Lily as she recalls the

history that leads up to the moment of the shot-—even

though the point of view does shift to include Everette's

perspective as well.

But Lily's view predominates and

shapes the act of writing itself.

And it is the act of

recall that characterizes the final phase of the

traditional heroic journey.

As Frye notes, this stage is

often signaled by settings of "the mountain top, the

island, the tower, the lighthouse, and the ladder or the

staircase" (203).

Lily is upstairs alone in her room when

she hears the shot and it is from this vantage point the

novel unfolds.

So despite the ambivalence of Didion's

explicit assessment of Lily's actions, the implicit

structure of the novel supports a feminist reading.

Although in Pratt's terms, Didion's protagonist does

not complete her heroic journey because she does not become

fully conscious of the gender factors which determine her

relation to the patriarchal structure, there is a sense

that Didion is more aware of such factors after writing her

first novel.

That claim is supported by the fact that

Didion goes on to write subsequent novels which are

immediately recognized as works that primarily concern the

female experience, even by her strongest feminist critics.

Yet Didion remains what I would call a cautionary

feminist.

Her works function as a critique of the feminist

position as much as they function as a critique of the

92

patriarchal structure from which the feminist position

evolves.

She takes care not to repeat the mistakes of the

past—-to replace one totalitarian system with another.

Confronting the condition of moral ambiguity is a central

concern for Didion.

And while some of the ambiguity of

Didion's position may well reflect her own problematical

relationship to the patriarchal structure of our society,

that is a condition shared by all women, including her

feminist critics.

For Didion, the myth of freedom and the myth of concern

must always remain in a precarious balance.

The woman

writer must function as both the archetypal daughter who

ventures forth to imagine new ways of being 33R as the

archetypal mother who must assess and grieve for the loss

of what is entailed by that venture.

The archetypal

patterns that characterize the female heroic journey serve

as the legacy each literary mother bequeaths to the

daughter of her own creation.

CULTURAL ORPHANS:

THE REPUDIATION OF NARRATIVE IN PLAY IT AS IT LAYS

 

The realities of power and authority——as well as

the resistances offered by men, women, and social

movements to institutions, authorities, and

orthodoxies-—are the realities that make texts

possible, that deliver them to their readers, that

solicit the attention of critics.

I propose that

these realities are what should be taken account

of by criticism and the critical consciousness.

(Said 5)

In this introductory statement to his work The World,

 

the Text and the Critic, Edward Said maps out certain

 

parameters that textual criticism should consider in its

analysis of cultural discourse.

These parameters--"the

realities of power and authority'

' and the "resistances

offered"--are particularly applicable to literary texts

which have traditionally claimed the authority to re-

present the reality of everyday life, a reality which

exists in the social sense as a function of the

distribution of such power and authority.

Said's statement

serves as a focus for examining these relations in the text

of Joan Didion's second novel, Play It As It Lays, a novel

 

93

94

whose very title lays claim to one kind of ideological

position that demands resistance.

In addition, the novel

invites an examination of the distributions of power and

authority in its fictional society by identifying certain

agents of social control and then reconstructing the

resistances that one individual, the protagonist, registers

against the institutions and systems that shape and control

social and psychic life in its fictional milieu.

In Chapter One, I indicated that certain archetypal

patterns function as sources of psychic power for women

writers and readers in women's fiction.

As Pratt, Pearson

and Pope observe, these patterns are often less than fully

conscious on the part of the female writer.

She, the

writer, is merely recording the female experience as she

observes or experiences it in a patriarchal society.

In

other words, the writer, as well as the protagonist, may

lack a coherent critical perspective of the events which

shape the fiction.

This is the position Didion finds

herself in at the end of her first novel.

In Run River, Didion records the loss of the family

 

unit as the primary social structure, and thus the

disintegration of the patriarchy.

But Didion records that

dissolution from the inside; she registers how the

dissolution is experienced by both Lily and Everette

McClellan, and to some extent, Everette's sister, Martha.

That the story is about the loss of filiation in modern

post—war society, and the female's particular experience of

95

that loss, does not seem entirely apparent to Didion until

she writes the second novel.

In Play It As It Lays, Didion addresses the loss of

 

filiation from a quite different perspective, one that

employs the critical consciousness referred to by Said.

Another critic, Ronald Foust, captures the essence of the

shift in relation between writer and work in the title of

his article on Didion's second novel:

"Family Romance and

the Image of Women's Fate."

Foust argues that the

P

rota onist's

8

P

osition in Pla

Y

It As It La 8 serves as an

Y

 

archetypal pattern of all women's fate as it is acted out

within the traditional family romance—-the paradigm of the

patriarchal structure.

"Maria's is an image of woman's

fate in a world dominated by...masculine aggression and

insecurity.

While Play It As It Lays is not a feminist

 

polemic per se, it is uniquely a woman's novel in the sense

that its coded meaning is undecipherable apart from a

sympathetic understanding of the specific nature of the

female experience" (48).

Foust's statement points to the critical difference

between Didion's first and second novels.

Whereas Rgg_

River attempted to offer both a male and female perspective

of the dissolution of the family structure through Lily's

and Everette's point of view, Play It As It Lays is focused

 

solely through the point of view of its brutalized female

protagonist, Maria Wyeth.

The scope of the second novel

extends beyond the family unit of Run River to include

 

several of the institutions and systems of the patriarchy

96

against which Maria, as female, must register a resistance.

For Maria discovers, as Lily does not, that the power and

authority of the patriarchy is not limited to a father,

brother, or husband who may fail or disappoint one.

Maria

comes to understand in an experiential way that the systems

of the patriarchy pervade all structures of society and

that the vehicle of dissemination is primarily cultural

discourse.

The task of the protagonist is one which Didion shares:

to decipher the textual codes by which one lives, and then

to register a resistance to those cultural discourses that

totalize experience as the patriarchal system does.

What

both Didion and Maria find is that all cultural discourse

is political in that it is intimately connected to systems

of power.

Said makes this point as well.

"Each discourse,

each language—-of psychiatry, penology, criticism, history—

—is to some degree a jargon, but it is also a language of

control and a set of institutions within the culture over

what it constitutes as its special domain" (219).

A primary issue in Play It As It Lays is the politics

 

of interpretation.

This is an issue that Didion will

continue to address in subsequent works, in Salvador,

Democragy, and Miami in particular.

But she expresses an

awareness of the political nature of interpretation early

in her career in a much anthologized essay "Why I Write."

97

"In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of

imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me,

 

see it my way, change your mind.

It's an aggressive, even

 

a hostile act" (Friedman 5).

To characterize the act of

writing as "a hostile act" is to acknowledge that discourse

has a direct relation to power; that literary discourse in

particular is only one of many voices to offer an

interpretation of human experience.

As evidence of that

power, Didion locates her own understanding of the world in

literary discourse.

She cites the works of James, Conrad,

Hemingway and others as influential in shaping her life.

"I tended to perceive the world in terms of things read

about it...I still do" (Friedman 35).

In other words,

experience is filtered through the structures of familiar

narratives.

The structure of Didion's second novel also foregrounds

the issue of interpretation by presenting separate

statements from each of its three main characters.

The

three statements act as a "prologue of sorts" to the novel

proper (Chabot 53).

The statements are produced by Maria

Wyeth, the protagonist; by her estranged husband, Carter

Lang, a film director; and by Helene, one of Carter's

lovers and the wife of B2, Carter's producer and the man

whose suicide Maria has witnessed.

The statements are made

some time (perhaps a few years) after Maria has been

98

committed to a mental hospital on criminal charges related

to BZ's suicide, a time which corresponds to the narrative

present.

In the fictional world of the novel, these statements

function as contested interpretations of the action and

motives of the protagonist.

Presumably the question of

Maria's sanity, and therefore degree of social

responsibility in BZ's death, is the point of contention.

But as Berger and Luckmann point out in their work, 2R3

Social Construction of Reality, a question of sanity is as

 

much an ideological issue as a medical one.

"To put it

more sharply, psychological status is relative to the

social definition of reality in general and is itself

socially defined" (176).

The positioning of the three statements at the

beginning of the text signals readers that they too must

participate in making a determination of Maria's sanity or

lack of it and assess the 'resolution' she proposes to the

problems posed by her predicament.

Given there are social

and psychological implications in making such a

determination, it is appropriate to examine the vested

interests of each of the positions represented in the

novel.

That this is not a task without its difficulties is

suggested by the varying critical responses to the novel.

The reviews of Didion's second novel at the time of

publication were mixed.

Some reviewers dismissed the novel

99

as philosophically naive (Segal 1970), while others viewed

Didion as perversely concerned with the marginal elements

in society (Samstag 1970).

Others praised Play It As It

 

Lays as a "triumph not of insight as such but of style"

 

(Schorer 174) or described it as "a fever chart of psychic

pain" (Duffy 67).

In 1977, one critic adroitly observed

that Play It As It Lays "enabled the reader to taste—-in

 

Poet Wallace Stevens' phrase--'the unreal of what is real'"

(Sheppard

87).

Critical commentary, which is conventionally regarded

as a more carefully reasoned contemplation of a work than

is the standard review, contains many of the same

contradictions.

Some critics (Geherin, Goodhart, Chabot)

insist that the novel is fatalistic and concerns itself

with alienation, madness and nihilation as definitive

qualities of the human condition.

Others focus their

attention on the heroic quest for identity that the

protagonist undergoes in the face of overwhelming odds and

judiciously document her meager success in this venture

(Anderson, Vincent, Wolff).

These critics, who employ a

feminist archetypal approach to their criticism as

advocated by people such as Pratt or Pearson and Pope, find

Didion's novel more optimistic than do critics who use a

more traditional approach.

While each of these approaches offers acute perceptions

that will inform my own analysis of the novel, none of the

commentaries directly addresses the dynamics of the

100

interpretative process itself, a process which Didion's

protagonist comes to apprehend is political in nature.

The

political nature of the interpretative process becomes

apparent when it is recalled that readers and writers, as

well as narrators and characters, all vie for an audience

in the context of a novel.

Didion's novel calls attention

to the problematical nature of interpretation at two

levels--in the world of the story or the diegetic world,

and in the non—diegetic universe or the world of the actual

experience of the readers.2

The problematical nature of

the interpretative process is signaled in Didion's novel by

the protagonist's statement at the beginning of the novel.

This statement poses a dilemma which transgresses the

limits of the diegetic universe created in Play It As It

 

LEI—yer

"What makes Iago evil? some people ask.

I never do."

(flax 1)

This is the opening statement of Didion's second novel

and the reader's first introduction to its protagonist,

Maria Wyeth.

We quickly discover that Maria (pronounced

Mar-eye-ah) is thirty—one, divorced, and the mother of a

four-year old retarded child, Kate, who like her mother, is

currently institutionalized.

The first few pages of the

fictional text are comprised of Maria's statement, which

she describes as a collection of "certain facts, certain

things that happened" (2).

Maria claims to have produced

this account only to be an "agreeable player of the game"

101

(2) and not as an explanation of her current situation.

According to Maria, explanations are futile as too many

questions have no "satisfactory" answers.

Her litany of

pointless questions includes why her daughter has "an

aberrant chemical in her brain" (3).

The pointlessness of

such questions has caused Maria to refuse to contemplate

these or any other enigmas.

"Nothing applies" she

maintains, both as a caution to her audience and as a

reminder to herself for those rare occasions when she is

tempted toward interpretative activity (2).

Maria begins her statement with examples of questions

she claims never to ask any more, although she does

acknowledge that she used to ask such questions in the

past.

"You might ask that.

I never would, not any

more...I am what I am.

To look for 'reasons' is beside the

point" (1).

Maria's refusal to participate in the

quintessential human activity of interpretation becomes

problematic for Didion's readers, as well as for the

narratee Maria seems to have in mind as she narrates her

account of the facts.3

This narratee isaddnxwedas 'you' in

Maria's statement and it seems clear that Maria expects

this narratee to be sympathetic to her renunciatory

position.

Maria even tries to enlist this unnamed 'you' in

a conspiratorial coup against the predictable

interpretations of the psychiatric staff Maria indicates is

her diegetic audience.

"They will misread the facts,

invent connections, will extrapolate reasons where none

102

exists, but I told you that is their business here" (2).

Maria's prediction of course also anticipates the

reaction of the readers of Didion's novel, an audience

literary convention decrees that Maria can have no

awareness of as a character.

Still, the reader of Play It

As It Lays must ignore Maria's stipulations regarding the

fallacy of narrative logic or cease to be a reader at all.

And unlike film--a recurring metaphor which can defer

interpretative activity indefinitely in the novel——the

reading process inevitably involves the kind of

interpretive activity Maria denounces.

This rhetorical

gesture on Didion's part thus sets up an uneasy dynamic

between reader/writer and narrator/character.

The act of

interpretation becomes the forbidden fruit the writer uses

to tantalize the reader with as writer and reader conspire

to assert their non—diegetic authority over mere literary

creations.

Obviously this narrative ploy can work to the

disadvantage of the protagonist.

While Maria's claim may

be sufficiently intriguing to incite curiosity on the

reader's part, the tacit contract between reader/writer

supercedes every other consideration possible between

reader and character.

And the fact that we as readers are

compelled to ignore Maria's implicit judgement of us—-as

readers who will do exactly what the psychiatric staff

does:

"misread the facts, invent connections,...

extrapolate reasons..."-—or forego our

103

authority as readers, only serves to further undermine the

credibility of Maria's renunciatory position.

Apprehension of the dynamics of this reader/writer

exchange functions to give weight to a central question of

the novel——how suspect is Maria's position?

This does seem

to be the issue that accounts for the range of response to

the novel by its reviewers.

Each reader/critic must decide

if Maria's withdrawal to a mental institution and away from

the world of human intercourse constitutes an act of

salvation, sanctuary or suicide.

Either the reader/critic

privileges Maria's account of events over all other

information the novel provides and so finds her refusal

credible, although perhaps pointless, or the reader/critic

consciously rejects Maria's renunciatory position as

untenable and points to some larger design attributable to

Didion the writer as a guide to the interpretative activity

needed which Maria so resolutely renounces.

Whatever the

final choice, the reader/critic has been maneuvered into

the very situation Maria tries to avoid:

he or she has

made a value judgment regarding Maria and her story.

But

the judgement remains an uneasy one, as Maria's dictum will

menace the reader/critic who has ventured where

narrators/characters fear to tread.

Despite Maria's disclaimers, her opening questions

invite more interest than they dispel.

When the questions

are considered in the light of the rest of the novel, they

begin to resonate with all sorts of narrative implications

that Maria would say "do not apply.’

'

They are

104

implications that readers cannot but make however, and thus

readers find themselves in an adversarial position in

relation to this first person narrator who obviously

desires and perhaps warrants our admiration and sympathy.

The enticement begins with the literary reference to

Iago, a character who is conventionally presumed to embody

uJ

the essence of evil.

"What makes Iago evil?"

While

Maria's reference to Iago explicitly poses a moral question

about the nature of evil, nonetheless, the reference

contains a certain ambiguity as well.

Either the question

emphasizes an individual's moral development—~i.e. how Iago

came to commit his machinations--or it emphasizes the

nature of evil itself and is thus a question about the

criteria for determining evil, so that the quality may be

assigned to the specific acts of Iago.

Maria apparently has the first version in mind, if the

nature of her second question is a reliable indicator of

the general direction of her thought.

The rest of the

novel, however, clearly calls into question the criteria

for making moral judgments at all in contemporary society.

"Didion repeatedly demonstrates the moral derangements of

modern society by patterns of images, sometimes even by

abstract verbal patterns or by patterns of association,

which capture the inherent distortion of value" (Wolff

485).

So Didion's emphasis is not so much a cause—and-

effect analysis of the behavior of a person designated as

 

 

105

evil, as Maria's is, but is rather an inquiry as to how

such a determination is to be made in the first place.

While Maria may be justified in her insistence that "to

look for 'reasons' is beside the point" (1), that

justification must be restricted to the limits of an

individual's biography; questions of morality arise from

the social realm of intercourse and thus supersede

individual needs and desires.

Although Didion remains a

strong individualist, even she insists that the preferences

of the individual must give way to the wider need to

maintain a cohesive social structure.

Maria's reference to Iago points in another direction

as well.

It calls our attention to the fact that it has

been traditionally within the purview of literature to

explore such moral ambiguities as the nature of evil.

In

an essay in The White Album, Didion includes herself as a

 

writer as one of those "who remain committed mainly to the

exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities" (113).

(And indeed, critics such as Eagleton concur with Didion's

perception that literature does explore such distinctions;

but Eagleton would be even more explicit and insist that

literature is itself a moral ideology [See Eagleton 22-

27].)

Thus again we see a distancing of Didion the writer

from Maria the narrator, an act which contributes to the

narrative tension of the novel.

For Maria not only refuses

to follow the literary convention she refers to——that of

exploring moral distinctions——her denial implies that the

106

efficacy of literature in resolving such ambiguities is

dubious at best.

In this respect Maria is aligned with

those critics who prefer to discuss literature in terms of

its linguistic possibilities and ignore its moral

implications.

However, Maria curtails further speculation about this

issue by asserting that the Iago question is not a serious

one in any case, but merely a rhetorical gesture she finds

useful in presenting yet another example of the kind of

question that has forced her into a renunciatory position.

To reinforce her point, Maria produces another question of

this sort:

"Why should a coral snake need two glands of

neurotoxic poison to survive while a king snake, g3

similarly marked, needs none.

Where is the Darwinian logic

there" (2).

So intent is Maria to establish the credibility of her

position that she either ignores or neglects to consider

the significance of the content of the two examples or to

note the electrical energy that passes between those two

nodes.

She appears to be oblivious to the fact that a

literary audience will automatically associate 'Iago' and

'evil' with 'snake', snakes and Iago being two symbols of

evil in literary works.

And for readers, if not for Maria,

there is a connection between this literary representation

of evil and a function of narrative, a connection that may

help to account for Maria's position.

The reference to snakes of course alludes to the

107

temptation of Eve in the garden by Satan, who appears in

the guise of a serpent.

A reconsideration of the Biblical

account will produce the observation that Satan seduces Eve

as much by his powers as a narrator as by his promise of

omnipotence.

In fact, the two qualities are related.

In

part, Satan's seduction is effective because he promises

Eve the only thing denied her:

complete knowledge--the

knowledge of good and evil.

And in one sense, a similar

principle operates in the Iago/Othello situation as well.

Iago incites Othello's suspicions with a narrative that

promises to complete Othello's insufficient knowledge of

Desdemona.

Surely the promise of complete knowledge has been an

important enticement of every conventional narrative,

especially those that purport to be mimetic.

The one thing

(among others) that fiction can supply which everyday

experience denies is complete access to the minds and

hearts of others, as well as the presence of a grand design

under which all information generated becomes

comprehensible.

(Such designs are labeled "symbolic

universes" by Berger and Luckmann and will be discussed in

detail later.)

But it is precisely this promise of

complete knowledge that Maria rejects, and by implication,

the promise of literature itself.

Maria also refuses the "consolation of narrative" that

Eagleton discusses in his work, Literary Theory:

An

 

Introduction:

108

Something must be lost or absent in any narrative

for it to unfold:

if everything stayed in place

there could be no story to tell.

This loss is

distressing, but exciting as well:

desire is

stimulated by what we cannot possess and this is

one source of narrative satisfaction.

If we could

never possess it, however, our excitation might

become intolerable and turn into unpleasure; so we

must know that the object will be finally restored

to us....We have been able to tolerate the

disappearance of the object because our unsettling

suspense was all the time shot through by the

secret knowledge that it would finally come home.

EQEE has meaning only in relation to RE,

(185).

Maria's refusal to be consoled by the power of narrative

may have its basis in her intuitive recognition of the

discontinuity between language and experience.

Objects

lost in life are not always returned and narratives

anticipating such returns console temporarily, only to

bring greater grief.

As we discover later, before her

breakdown Maria consoled herself with stories night after

night about how she would live with her lover and her

daughter in a house by the sea.

But every morning she knew

the stories represented a hollow consolation:

"In that

empty sunlight Kate could do no lessons, and the mussels on

any shore Maria knew were toxic" (114).

In addition, Maria has reason to be suspect of the idea

109

of consolation itself.

In her world, losses such as hers

are not even recognized as such.

Helene berates her for

feeling sad when she gets a divorce, Carter reprimands her

for her motherly concern for Kate, and there is a decided

lack of sympathy for Maria as she spirals into

psychological despair.

Most of her friends and

acquaintances are much more concerned about how her strange

actions will affect Carter's career than they are about

Maria's well-being.

Maria's refusal to be consoled by narratives of

cultural discourse may also entail the recognition that her

losses cannot be compensated for by those narratives.

Neither science nor religion, the dominant cultural

discourses, can restore her daughter to her care, nor

repair the rent in her psyche caused by her mother's death.

Only a litany of "certain facts" can prevent Maria from

remembering "how everything goes" in this throw-away

society and keep her mind focused in the oblivion of "the

now" (6).

It is Maria's resistance to all interpretation that a

reader must contend with as the rest of the novel unfolds.

To aid the reader, Didion presents almost all of the rest

of the novel (excepting Carter and Helene's statements)

through a close, third-person point of view, a perspective

which allows the reader to learn more about Maria than she

could tell us directly herself.

The perspective also

allows the information to come to the reader with more

110

sympathy than Maria could generate for herself.

Part of

Maria's problem as a character is that she cannot elicit

much sympathy for her plight——there are no other characters

in the novel to recognize the metaphysical terror that

paralyzes her.

B2 is a possible expectation, but then he

opts for suicide, an option Maria cannot accept.

As one

critic notes, BZ simply lives out the inexorable logic of

this dehumanized world (Wolff 13 ).

Maria prefers to

resist that logic, but her resistance comes at a high cost—

-she literally risks her sanity.

Feminist readings of the novel suggest that Didion's

use of this "mad wife" archetype depicts one option

available to women in a patriarchal society.

In such cases

the woman is usually deemed insane because she cannot or

will not comply with societal expectations of her as a

female.

As Annis Pratt notes, "Maria accepts the

accusation that her insanity has led to Helene's husband's

death, preferring to act out the role of madwoman than to

live in the world outside, which seems even more irrational

than the world within" (53).

Didion anticipates sexist criticism of Maria's actions

and short circuits that conventional response by presenting

that view in Carter's and Helene's statements.

As both

Carter and Helene are presented in an unfavorable light in

the novel, Didion directs her readers to discredit

interpretations of Maria's predicament which dismiss her

actions as crazy or perverse, whether such views originate

from readers or characters.

111

Nonetheless, the two contending interpretations impose

a severe judgement on Maria's actions and motives.

Both

Carter and Helene's judgments seem predicated on Maria's

failure to conform to certain expectations of females in

contemporary society, particularly in the social roles of

wife and mother.

Both see Maria's resistance to these

expectations as a deliberate sabotage to 'injure' them

personally and each holds Maria fully responsible for her

actions.

Helene attacks Maria as an inadequate woman, one who

lacks the virtues of altruism and concern.

She accuses

Maria of being "selfish" and "careless", of being jealous

of Carter's success (9).

Helene's account is especially

vicious, actually accusing Maria of having "killed" B2 and

speculating that Maria "would have killed Carter too" given

the opportunity (10).

For Helene, Maria is clearly the

villain in this scenario and yet there are some curious

oversights in Helene's account.

The most noticeable is the lack of grief or loss of her

husband.

Helene's vitriolic diatribe focuses exclusively

on her injured position now that she's been deprived of her

means of support.

It is implied in the novel that BZ, a

homosexual pimp, and Helene remain married primarily

because his mother, Carlotta, bribes Helene with gifts to

provide a respectable cover for BZ's questionable

proclivities.

Helene's statement reveals her as an

112

"aggrieved wife", one of those pathetic and repulsive

creatures Maria observes on television.

And yet there is

just a glimmer of envy in Helene's statement as well.

"I

could see her resting, I could see her down by the pool in

the same bikini she was wearing the summer she killed BZ,

lying by that swimming pool with a shade over her eyes as

if she hadn't a care or a responsibility in the world"

(10).

Helene appears to envy Maria's lack of concern about

her appearance or the judgement of the outside world upon

her actions.

Helene's is an envy born of weariness though,

not of admiration.

Carter's statement tends to concur with Helene's

judgement that Maria is careless and selfish.

He expresses

his frustration with Maria's incorrigibility as an

inability to compose "scenes" of their life together in a

suitable sequence as if for the camera.

He provides two

such scenes as examples of the intractable material he has

had to work with.

One is a scene in which Maria publicly

contradicts Carter's announcement that he likes to eat

breakfast out alone.

Maria's persistent honesty

about the

matter—~"In fact the last time he got breakfast out was on

April 17" (11)——is a source of embarrassment to Carter, a

social faux pas which challenges the image of himself he

wants to project to his public.

The second scene, which

involves Maria and Kate, implies Maria cannot be trusted to

care for her child properly.

Thus Carter sees Maria as a

selfish wife and careless mother...two sweeping

113

condemnations of a woman in today's society.

As such,

Maria is no longer amenable to Carter's projects; this

Maria would not be a suitable subject for that first film

he made of her.

Like Helene, Carter expresses no grief or

loss for his mate; his statement is merely an

acknowledgement of a project that has failed.

Yet if the fact that Carter is a film director is taken

into account, then it is possible to claim a causal

relation between the two scenes which Carter presents as

randomly juxtaposed.

In an examination of the influence of

film on the American novel, the French writer, Claude

Magny, notes that "the greatest lesson the American novel

learned from the movies...[is] that the less one says the

better, that the most striking artistic effects are those

born of the juxtaposition of two images, without

connection..." (48).

Didion's second novel displays a

knowledge of this lesson with a precision that stings.

As

in the case of film, certain images in the novel cohere

only after the 'random' sequence of images has been

registered on the mind for some time.

So it is with

Carter's 'clips' of his relation to Maria and to their

retarded child.

To posit a causal connection is to

immediately detect a subversive message about the

patriarchy:

that separation from her daughter is the price

Maria must pay for embarrassing or otherwise thwarting

Carter.

As Pratt points out, separation of mother and

daughter has constituted an archetypal pattern of

114

punishment imposed on the female by the patriarchy since

the Demeter/Kore myths of pre-historical times.

Thus Didion's novel discloses the ideological power of

film through a narrative enactment of its technical

devices, generally presumed to be neutral.

The subversive

message in this 'preview' of Maria's story points to a

number of important issues at one.

One is that the power

of film resides in its ability to capture images without

comment, to imply that a mechanical recording of experience

can avoid or ignore ethical content.

Thus film is often

granted an ethical neutrality narrative can never claim, as

language refers endlessly to itself.

At the same time

Didion's novel points out that film is not merely a

technical device, but constitutes an industry which exerts

considerable power over modern society.

It promotes a

cultural discourse that her protagonist must first

decipher, and then resist.

So pervasive is the influence of media in shaping the

modern consciousness that the novel reflects this

preoccupation in its form as well as in its content.

(Not

surprisingly, the novel was made into a movie with Didion

and her husband responsible for the screenplay.)

"The

story of Maria's decline from depression to breakdown is

told in 84 brief cinematic takes-—84 direct hits on a

fragile psyche" (Duffy 68).

This observation refers to the

terse 84 chapters which Didion uses to tell Maria's tale,

chapters that approximate the flash of images indicative of

115

film rather than print.

The unnamed, uninvolved narrator

of most of these chapters follows Maria as closely as

Carter did in New York, recording Maria's actions and

feelings from a perspective only slightly less detached

than that of a camera.

Didion's decision to mimic the

structure of film is surely a gesture that implicitly

recognizes the competition between print and film in the

bid for an audience in the modern consumer market, a

marketplace where literature must advertise its value as a

commodity to be consumed.

So Didion's novel must promise

to tell its readers something about film that film doesn't

tell us about itself.

One of the things Didion's novel

indicates is the extent to which the film industry acts as

an agent of social control in American life.

Sociologists have noted the importance of film in the

development of the American consciousness, especially at a

time when the country needed to assimilate the large wave

of immigrants which arrived around the turn of the century.

"The camera was a powerful mechanism for conveying fantasy

and transcendence, its imagery employed a powerful visual

vernacular, understandable even to immigrants unable to

speak English.

Yet at the same time in its ability to

docify and capture an objectivist "truth", it was also a

powerful mechanism of order and control" (Channels of

 

Desire 34).

As these authors go on to observe, the medium

of film proved highly instrumental in the process of

enticing the masses to relinquish the values and traditions

116

of their diverse pasts in exchange for a new, shared

identity as Americans.

So prized was that new identity

that few questioned whether or not something of

irreplaceable value had ben lost in the exchange.

This 'consumption ethic' permeates the fictional world

of Didion's novel as well and the film industry serves as

an important purveyor of that ideology.

It is the film

industry that sets the criteria for personal and social

success in the novel.

"The major community which is

described in Hollywood...where love is a commodity and

honesty a breach of taste and age the unpardonable sin"

(Vincent 59).

Successful people are those like Carter, B2,

and Helene—-people who can cut deals because they have

something to sell that someone else can be persuaded to

buy.

The commodity for sale may be a 'property', a

function actors serve for producers like B2 or Carter, or a

public relations service such as that Helene provides for

her husband.

In Play It As It Lays, 'image' as a marketing concept

 

becomes divorced from its origins in film and television

and comes to dominate the consciousness of the characters

in the novel.

The manufacturing and marketing of an image

becomes the ultimate concern in the world shaped by the

values of the film industry.

To a great extent, creating

an image of the self has come to replace the more

traditional activity of achieving a self—identity.

This

shift in focus and terminology represents a corresponding

117

shift in values.

The dialectical nature of the process by

which individuals arrive at a sense of their relation to

society is obfuscated in the first effort.

Conversely, the

interdependence of individuals and the society in which

they find themselves is made more explicit in the idea of

self-identity than it is in the idea of self—image.

Creating a self—image calls attention to the artificiality

of this process and thus hints of its precariousness, as

does the

tacit expectation that creating a self—image is

a self generating and self-sustaining activity; whereas

achieving an identity implies a struggle that is

cooperative in nature and is thus available for sanction or

censure by those involved in the endeavor.

Also important

is the recognition that the creation of a self—image is

necessarily an adult (i.e. conscious) activity, whereas

one's self—identity begins at birth and is shaped over

time, a condition that likely contributes to the sense of

its tenacity.

Berger and Luckmann designate another element as

essential to the acquisition of an identity:

a sense of

place.

10 be given an identity involves being assigned to

"m

a specific place in the world" (132).

In a mobile,

industrialized society the possibilities of achieving an

identity rooted in a sense of place are radically

diminished.

Unlike their predecessors in Run River, the

 

characters in Didion's second novel cannot form an

attachment to, and thus forge an identity with, a permanent

118

geographical location as do Lily and Everette Knight to the

Sacramento Valley.

As Maria observes when she recalls that

her birthplace (Silver Wells, Nevada) is now a missile

range:

"Everything goes" (16).

Instead Maria tries to find a sense of herself in the

activities her society claims will provide security and

success.

Work is one of the those tokens proffered by this

society whose corporate structure seeks to replace the

family unit-—a unit the corporation also disrupts in its

bid for power and profit.

Workers are encouraged to become

a part of the corporate 'family', to assume the 'image' of

the corporation which becomes a ready passport to success

in the mobile society.

Maria's agent sums up this attitude

when he informs her that "work is the best medicine for

things wrong in the private-life department" (90).

Even

the terminology used reflects the depreciation of

traditional values. The idea of work curing private ills is

not new-—what is new is that the two worlds are seen as

distinct, that private grief is perceived as an 'illness'

that needs a cure and that the corporate paradigm

'department' is chosen to describe private space.

Rather

than recognizing that the demands of the work world

contribute to the displacement and disintegration of family

units in modern society, the prevailing ideology Perverts

the cause of the dilemma into a cure.

Yet Maria's

experience and Didion's perceptions of this relationship

tells a different story.

 

119

Maria herself looks to her work to salvage her sanity

as work has replaced relationships in her life.

In fact,

Maria's inability to work, usually precipitated by an

emotional upheaval, is one of the first signs that all is

not well with her world.

The loss of her mother and the

loss of her daughter are two such times the novel indicates

Maria walks off a set, unable and unwilling to work because

"everything showed in the camera by then" (8).

Yet she

tries to work even while she is hemorrhaging from an

abortion because she is desperately trying to maintain her

tenuous grasp on reality.

Maria's growing alienation is initially conveyed by a

lack of identification with the image of herself in the

films Carter has made of her.

It is important to note that

Maria never questions the validity of that perception; nor

does Didion focus on the futility of trying to achieve a

sense of identity vis-a-vis an attachment to the image of

one's body that film can convey.

Instead, Maria's

inability to forge such an attachment is presented as

evidence of her psychic disintegration.

A major loss for Maria in the novel is the loss of her

identity, but to some degree, that is a loss that Maria

regains when she claims herself as "Harry and Francine

Wyeth's daughter" at the end of the novel (209).

By this

point, Maria has totally rejected the attempts of her

culture to force her to accept its requirements of her as a

woman of her time.

She refuses the consolation of what

120

Said terms affiliation, preferring instead to connect

herself to the original family structure that provided

values and morals to live by.

But such was not always the

case.

In her youth, Maria actively sought the approval of

the very people and institutions she later comes to resist.

As Maria becomes dissociated from the people and places

connected to her youth, she becomes increasingly identified

with the symbols of success in a consumer society.

At

eighteen, she works as a model in New York and finds she

can command a considerable amount of money for permitting

someone to use her physical attributes to display the goods

of society.

She discovers that her body has a high market

value, not so much for its inherent attractiveness as for

its utility in promoting the products and ideas of others.

Maria's role in this transaction is a passive one, but it

is a passivity for which she is well rewarded.

When Maria begins her work with the film industry some

time later, she discovers that as an actress, she has

literally become a commodity.

She finds that work is not

an avenue of self-definition so much as another opportunity

to be exploited.

She becomes the property that her husband

Carter "parlays...into a very nice thing" (29).

A chance

encounter with a minor actor demonstrates this aspect of

Maria's relationship to her husband-director:

"the look he

gave Maria was dutifully charged with sexual appreciation,

meant not for Maria herself, but for Carter Lang's wife"

(22).

And later when her breakdown is almost complete,

121

Maria steals a car from an actor she has just met when she

wants to leave a party.

She is arrested, and when the

actor is pressured to drop the charges against Maria, he

retaliates:

"Just hold on, cunt,...you never told me who

 

you were" (156).

Even her agent doesn't take Maria's

requests to work seriously; he makes a token gesture to

comply only because of her connection to Carter, a man to

be reckoned with in the film industry.

Carter is in the "enviable" position because of his

ability to "make a deal" (29).

In other words, Carter can

put together a package, actors, story, director, etc. which

a producer will finance.

And as Didion notes in her essay

"On Hollywood", "the action is everything...the picture is

but the by-product of the action" (160, 164).

Later when

Maria has fallen into despair and can no longer be relied

upon to function as a part of any package Carter might put

together, he discards her as worthless:

"Go to sleep.

Die.

Fucking vegetable" (184).

While the two films that Maria made with Carter brought

him professional success, the films and people's reactions

to them only bring Maria pain and further loss of identity.

The first film is an avant-garde attempt in which Carter

merely follows Maria around New York taking pictures of

her.

Maria never liked the film, especially the last frame

in which Carter threw her image into the negative so that

she looked dead.

Yet BZ, Carter's producer, insists on

watching his cut of the film over and over, even while

123

well.

In this scene, the female serves as a substitute for

the desired but forbidden object, other males.

Such is the

principle of much television/film advertisement.

To choose

Pepsi, for example, is to acknowledge one's desire for the

less accessible qualities of youth and wealth, as those are

the images by which Pepsi is made seductive.

But even more

insidious is the potential that by choosing Pepsi one comes

to believe one has acquired the social power associated

with the images of wealth and youth.

The Ewens examine

this phenomenon in their appraisal of the influence of film

on American life in the early 1900's:

"Beneficence and

opportunity were being codified not in an expansion of

social power and rights, but in the widely extended

availability of images associated with the prerogatives of

 

power" (176).

What Maria discovers is that such images are

as empty as they are deceptive.

It is the ability of film to evoke fantasy and suggest

transcendence that appeals to Maria even as the medium

alienates her from any sense of herself.

After the

dissolution of her marriage, Maria recalls isolated moments

of the marriage in a wave of remorse.

"The images would

flash at Maria like slides in a dark room.

On film they

might have seemed a family" (136).

Maria has unconsciously

appropriated the metaphor of film to structure her

memories; and indeed she tends to see the events of her

married life in terms of scenes like those that express

her longing for a traditional family complete with father,

 

124

mother, and child.

"Quite often with Carter she felt like

Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight..." (40).

When Maria informs

Carter that she is pregnant and probably not by him, her

perception is that "in the scenario of her life this would

be what was called an obligatory scene..." (50).

A number

of critics have commented that Carter 'sees' as if he

viewed the world through the eyes of a camera, but fewer

have observed that the protagonist is equally disposed to a

cinematic version of reality.

Didion's work suggests that

only radical surgery can enable anyone living in such a

dehumanized culture to avoid such a fate.

Perhaps Didion's

adaptation of cinematic techniques to the novel can serve

to make readers more conscious of the pervasive effects of

the media on the way we interpret our reality.

A radical feminist view would hold that the patriarchal

aspects of this micro-society-—the film industry--are

accountable for Maria's increasing alienation.

But

Didion's novel insists on calling attention to Maria's own

complicity in this matter, and thus to the dialectical

nature of the individual's relationship to society.

As a

woman, Maria has internalized the values of her society to

such an extent that she unwittingly contributes to her own

illness.

Maria's most conscious awareness of herself is §__a

body, the only aspect of her being that film can re—

present.

Even in the midst of her despair, she diets and

forgoes salt to avoid bloating..."no matter what happened

 

124

mother, and child.

"Quite often with Carter she felt like

Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight..." (40).

When Maria informs

Carter that she is pregnant and probably not by him, her

perception is that "in the scenario of her life this would

be what was called an obligatory scene..." (50).

A number

of critics have commented that Carter 'sees' as if he

viewed the world through the eyes of a camera, but fewer

have observed that the protagonist is equally disposed to a

cinematic version of reality.

Didion's work suggests that

only radical surgery can enable anyone living in such a

dehumanized culture to avoid such a fate.

Perhaps Didion's

adaptation of cinematic techniques to the novel can serve

to make readers more conscious of the pervasive effects of

the media on the way we interpret our reality.

A radical feminist view would hold that the patriarchal

aspects of this micro—society--the film industry-—are

accountable for Maria's increasing alienation.

But

Didion's novel insists on calling attention to Maria's own

complicity in this matter, and thus to the dialectical

nature of the individual's relationship to society.

As a

woman, Maria has internalized the values of her society to

such an extent that she unwittingly contributes to her own

illness.

Maria's most conscious awareness of herself is g__a

body, the only aspect of her being that film can re-

present.

Even in the midst of her despair, she diets and

forgoes salt to avoid bloating..."no matter what happened

125

she remembered her body" (16).

As a child of her culture,

Maria presumes this conscientiousness to be a virtue when

in fact it is a symptom of her illness.

In this respect,

she resembles her antagonist, Helene, although the

resemblance is not one Maria cares to consider at length.

She does align herself with Helene's fate as a woman,

however, when Maria observes that "Helene was not quite so

immune to time...that whatever arrangements were made, they

worked less well for women" (46).

The cult of the body is of supreme importance in a

society that is as mobile and fast—paced as is Didion's

portrayal of contemporary society.

People are defined by

their ability to project a desired image as vividly and

instantaneously as a commercial on television.

One's

material possessions and physical attributes are employed

to advertise one's sexual availability, political

preference, occupational status, etc....

The body becomes

the focal point around which all other aspects of self-

identification coalesce.

Such is the case with the young Maria who has

internalized the market mentality of her culture.

She

perceives her body as a commodity, as an item with an

exchange value.

Even the concept of ownership has

degenerated in this world from its former sense of

belonging to something as much as it belongs to oneself——

for instance, the land that Everette loves and inherits in

Run River has as much claim on him as he does on the land.

126

In this post-lapsarian universe, however, ownership simply

implies the right to dispose of a possession as one sees

fit, preferably for the highest margin of profit possible.

Maria has come to think of her body as a possession in

the same way that her father thought of the various

properties he acquired and lost in the gambling games that

he indulged in all his life and from which he extrapolated

an ideological position he bequeaths to Maria.

That

position is one that Maria at first accepts, but must

eventually learn to resist, just as she does the

ideological stance of the movie colony:

"I was raised to

believe that what came in on the next roll would always be

better than what went out on the last.

I no longer believe

that, but I am telling you how it was" (3).

In fact, it is from her parents that Maria first learns

to think of her ability to present a pleasing appearance as

a guarantee of success.

So it is ironic later that when

Maria makes a statement from the mental hospital she asks

about the Darwinian logic involved in the principle of

mimicry as it refers to the king and coral snake.

The

principle of mimicry, or survival by virtue of appearance,

is a tenet very familiar to Maria.

It came to her, as did

the guarantee of success, as part of her parental legacy.

"From my mother I inherited my looks and a tendency to

migraine.

From my father I inherited an optimism which did

not leave me until recently" (3).

Her father's optimism

consists of his certainty that, as a pretty girl, Maria

127

holds "all the aces" in the game of life, a crap game whose

probabilities he has taught Maria to assess rapidly (7).

One critic notes that Maria's father sees his daughter

as "his ticket to fortune, and like Carter, he had high

expectations for the profit to be made from her" (Wolff

488).

Maria is just another in the series of hunches he

hopes will pay off and justify his faith in his good

fortune.

That Maria's future is held in ransom so as to

satisfy the deluded dreams of an obsessive gambler who

i'

happens to be her father never seems to be questioned by

either Maria or her father.

In her parent's world, as in

the film industry, one sells whatever one can find a buyer

for; staying in the action is all that matters.

A family

discussion about an escape fantasy that Maria and her

mother share of opening a hash house reveals the rampant

commercialism that colors every aspect of public and

private life.

"Franchises, you rent out your name and your

receipt", a family friend advises the women if they want to

cash in on the wave of the future (86).

So Maria's insight

years later in the midst of her breakdown that "the still

center of the daylight world was never a house by the sea

but the corner of Sunset and La Brea" (a prime commercial

property in Hollywood) is not so much a discovery as a

confirmation of an ugly reality she first became acquainted

with at the family dinner table (114).

Maria's mother, too, contributes to Maria's subsequent

dilemma.

By her actions and attitudes, she encourages

128

Maria to seek her fortune as an actress in New York.

Francine Wyeth's ideas are shaped by the many movies and

magazines she dreams over to fill the time that hangs heavy

in the desert ghost towns her husband's fancies have

relegated her to.

She thinks Maria's career choice is "a

nice idea" and cuts her daughter's hair in the style of a

favorite movie star (6).

Any qualms Francine may have

about the kind of life her daughter leads in New York that

leaves the girl thin and pale are quickly dismissed by

Maria's father:

"She can't win if she's not at the table,

Francine...you wouldn't understand that" (86).

Implicit in

his reaction is the presumption that a 'womanly' concern

for the well-being of a loved one is a detriment when

mapping out strategies for professional success.

That the

advice comes from a 'professional' loser seems to make no

difference as Harry Wyeth's words echo the market mentality

so pervasive in post WWII America.

Indeed, Maria's parents expect their daughter to leave

home and accept as inevitable the infrequent contact with

their child that results from her success.

It could be

argued that the Wyeth's would have been more disappointed

if their daughter had not pursued the dreams they had for

her.

As the child, it is Maria's fate to live out the

American Dream that shapes this family's life, however

elusive that dream continues to be.

In effect, Maria's

parents sanction her rejection of them as part of her past,

an action that will ironically but systematically undermine

Maria's precarious success in that wider world Francine and

129

Harry Wyeth can only dream of.

Foust provides another reading of the familial

situation in the novel.

Referring to the scene that

presents Maria's last visit home before her mother's death,

Foust suggests that the scene depicts the Freudian dynamics

of family life in microcosm.

The scene entails an exchange

between Maria and her mother that expresses a longing on

their part to be together, somewhere else.

Maria's father

interrupts the exchange with a harsh reminder that Maria

needs to be in New York if she is going to become a

success.

"This scene is a guioco piano, a quiet strategy.

Its commonplaceness seems almost irrelevant to Maria's

crisis until one senses the connection between its

structure and the structure of family romance.

Maria is

fixated on childhood scenes which depict her other as a

nexus of futile despair; her father is the authority-figure

who separates mother and daughter; and the child as

helpless pawn in the struggle between male and female

wills.

The sense of hopeless disconnection is made

complete when the loved and feared parents wave their

farewells 'at the wrong window.

'

The narrative thrust of

the scene emphasizes the futile desire of mother and

daughter to unite in a world free of men" (51).

Foust's

reading of the family romance in Didion's novel illuminates

a grim social reality suppressed or ignored in the movie or

magazine versions of family on which Maria and her mother

 

 

130

have fed their fantasies.

Even more, the scene graphically

demonstrates the devastating effects of the patriarchal

structure on female relationship to each other, as it

depicts the desire of connection as infantile and foolish.

Again, the male moral preference for separation is

privileged in this patriarchal view of relations; the pain

inherent in that separation is dismissed as trivial, thus

demeaning the females who experience the pain most

intensely.

For it is the severing of ties to her past that

precipitates Maria's plunge into a metaphysical despair.

The death of her mother is especially traumatic for Maria

as it portends the rupture that separates Maria from her

past.

Not only is her mother's death completely

unexpected, but Maria finds her reaction to that loss

equally inexplicable.

In fact, her grief is almost

unrecognizable as such to Maria; instead she refers to her

time of intense sorrow as "the bad season in New York, the

season when she had done nothing but walk and cry and lose

so much weight that the agency refused to book her" (59).

Years later when Maria contemplates an abortion, the

questions surrounding the circumstances of her mother's

death return to haunt her.

Her mind is preoccupied with

the pitifully few facts she has about the incident, facts

from which she attempts to reconstruct a plausible sequence

of events.

All Maria does know is that her mother's car

ran off the road in the desert, but that her mother's body

 

131

was not discovered for two weeks because the coyotes had

torn it apart.

The only other fact she has is that she

could not be reached because she was with some man.

In one

of the most powerful images in the novel, Maria is

described as imagining her mother trying to place a call to

New York just before her death, a call Maria fantasizes

would have contained a coded farewell message for her.

{aria would reconstruct this scene "particularly around the

time the sun set in New York, think about the mother dying

in the desert light, the daughter unavailable in the

Eastern dark...and she would wonder what she was doing in

the dark" (60).

As a number of critics have pointed out, Maria's grief

is contaminated by a horrific guilt, and the darkness into

which she has fallen is the darkness of the damned.4

For

Maria, however unwittingly, has transgressed the basic

tenet of the "wagon-train morality" Didion subscribes to in

her essay "On Morality".

This "wagon—train morality" is a

code of ethics which insists that the only valid promise

people can make to each other is to "try to retrieve our

casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes"

(RER 158).

But like the members of the Donner—Reed party

whose story shadows Didion's personal history, Maria has

become one of those who "somewhere abdicated their

responsibilities, somehow breached their primary loyalties"

(STB 159).

While Maria was distracted by her pursuit of

 

success in New York City, her mother's body was literally

 

devoured by coyotes.

132

This brief scene evokes an archetypal pattern of

mother—daughter loss as well that finds a resonance in the

psyches of contemporary women who, like Maria, feel

responsible for the loss of traditional relationships.

As

the socially-recognized functions of motherhood in

particular—-emotional nuturance, physical sustenance, moral

education-—are co-opted by social institutions such as

schools, hospitals, and the service industries in general,

the individual mother and daughter relationship erodes and

become as gratuitous as is Maria's 'mothering' of her

institutionalized daughter, Kate.

As a result, daughters

such as Maria who still inherit vestigial moral concerns

regarding maternal responsibility are literally "in the

dark" about how to execute such duties in contemporary

life.

(This is an issue that Didion will explore again in

her third novel A Book of Common Prayer.)

And so when Maria has to make a decision about whether

or not to comply with her husband's demand that she abort

another man's child, she is at a loss to judge the morality

of her act or its consequences.

The abortion simply

becomes one in a series of ploys she and Carter perpetrate

in the power game that constitutes their marriage.

Maria

permits Carter to blackmail her into the abortion by his

threats to deprive her of custody of Kate, a threat which

one critic notes is hollow as Kate is already

institutionalized at Carter's insistence.

Nonetheless,

133

Maria acquiesces to the emotional extortion without

examining its rationale.

This indicates that the threat of

the loss of her daughter is sufficient to dismantle any

critical intelligence Maria may possess.

Maria does arrive

at one conclusion after this encounter with her husband

however.

"She would do what he wanted.

She would do this

one last thing and then they would never be able to touch

her again" (73).

Clearly, Carter is to be included in the

ominous 'they' Maria perceives as a threat to her sanity, a

threat that represents the demands of a culture that has

denied her needs as an individual woman.

Still, Maria recognizes that her resistance to the

standards of the movie culture exacts a high cost; her

whole sense of reality is threatened when those people in

her present social milieu withdraw their approval from her

at a time when the people from her past are also no longer

available for confirmation of an alternative way of life.

This withdrawal is critical, as Berger and Luckmann point

out, for it is those people with whom we have constant

contact that reaffirm and shape our individual sense of

reality.

"The significant others in the individual's life

are the principal agents for the maintenance of his

subjective reality" (150).

It is only when Maria's sense of reality has been

placed into question that she encounters the other agent of

social control in the novel:

the institutions of

psychiatry.

While a number of critics have observed that

 

134

the film industry and the gambling enterprises represent

ideological authorities whose rhetoric Maria must decipher

and resist, few critics have noted that the psychological

systems and institutions serve as equally effective agents

of social control.5

Maria, however, does register this

potential threat in her initial statement at the beginning

of the novel.

She understands very well that her version

of what has happened (the narrative of Maria Wyeth's life)

is a version contested not only by her family and friends,

but also by those empowered to assign her psychological

and, therefore, social status.

In some respects Maria

seems at least dimly aware of the functions of

psychological institutions and theories as defined by

Berger and Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality:

 

"...psychological theories re-enter everyday life by

providing the interpretive schemes for disposing of

problematic cases..." (176).

That she is a "problematic case" is something Maria is

aware of herself.

Indeed she concurs with almost

everyone's opinion that she is, in fact, ill.

"I am sick

of everybody's sick arrangements" she tells Carter when she

informs him of her unwanted pregnancy (48).

And later on

the desert with Carter, B2, and Helene, Maria confirms that

self—diagnoses.

"I don't like any of you," she said.

"You

are all making me sick" (189).

The distinction Maria makes

though is that she refuses to be held entirely responsible

for her condition.

 

 

Unlike the psychiatrist at the hospital or the

135

hypnotist Maria briefly visits, Maria does not believe the

cause of her illness is a personal derangement lurking

somewhere in her unconscious.

She does not believe her

illness is like that of her daughter's, an "aberrant

chemical" in the brain; nor is she receptive to the

hypnotist's theory that a return to the womb will solve her

problems.

Maria understands that her interaction with her

social world has contributed significantly to her

condition-—the lack of ethical and moral criteria has

disrupted her psychological and emotional growth.

In fact,

Maria may recognize that her social world is the source of

contamination, and thus her insistence on the need to

withdraw from it completely as she does when she enters the

mental hospital.

That Maria comes to understand at least

in a minimal fashion that definitions of reality are

socially produced and maintained is indicated by a

statement she makes toward the close of the novel.

"Carter

and Helene still believe in cause-effect.

Carter and

Helene still believe that people are either sane or insane"

(202).

Maria realizes that psychological status is relevant to

the societal body which makes that determination.

Therefore, in recognition of the power that resides within

the institutions of psychiatry, Maria tries to be "an

agreeable player of the game" and produces a narrative she

refuses to analyze.

She understands that in her world,

136

hers is a discourse without power, and as such it remains

as marginal as she does.

Didion, too, supports Maria's perceptions regarding the

influence of social institutions in determining

psychological status by her choice of imagery to represent

Maria's psychological disintegration.

The images which

torment Maria derive from the conditions of modern life and

are often imbued with a sinister meaning.

These images

range from surrealistic scenes of modern life as viewed

from the freeway to realistic nightmares that conflate

public and private history.

Most of these images center around the pivotal event of

the novel, Maria's abortion.

For instance, on her way to

have the abortion Maria's sensitivity to her surroundings

is heightened:

The stillness and clarity of the air seemed

to rob everything of its perspective, seemed

to alter all perception of depth, and Maria

drove as carefully as if she were

reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity.

Taco Bells jumped out at her.

Oil rockers

creaked ominously.

For miles before she

reached the Thriftimart she could see the big

red T, a forty-foot cutout letter which

seemed peculiarly illuminated against the

137

harsh unclouded light of the afternoon

sky. (75—76)

Other critics have remarked on the symbolic content of

the "big red T" and have noted that the figure alludes to

the Christian crucifixion scene.

They point out that such

traditional symbols of redemption have become so

depreciated in contemporary life that they signal the

absence of or the lack of moral qualities such as mercy or

forgiveness.

Indeed, in a world where Taco Bells have

replaced church spires, the only activity to replace

religious observance is a trip to the supermarket or

shopping mall.

Consumerism is the only viable form of

communion in this corrupt community.

But if society fails to meet the individual's need for

moral categories in Play It As It Lays, the need persists

 

nonetheless.

(In fact, Wolff argues that Didion would

maintain that morality is essential to identity:

"We need

moral categories to be" [492]).

Maria's dream life retains

such categories even if her conscious mind obliterates such

ethical narratives.

For instance, Maria's conscious mind

accepts the banal explanation of her behavior provided by

the young man who directs her to the house where the

abortion takes place.

Maria turned off the ignition and looked at

 

138

the man in white duck pants with an intense

and grateful interest.

In the past few

minutes he had significantly altered her

perception of reality:

she saw now that she

was not a woman on her way to have an

abortion.

She was a woman parking a Corvette

outside a tract house while a man in white

duck pants talked about buying a Camaro.

There was no more to it than that.

(78)

In other words, by shifting the perspective of this scene

from a narrative account to that of a film script, the

moral and ethical aspects of the situation are eliminated

and only observable activity remains.

That shift suggests the neutrality associated with the

scientific method, a view that Didion's novel challenges

even as it shows the way film achieves its spectacular

effects.

But the loss of ethical content-—which for Didion

is central in relationships, familial or otherwise,——is

registered as a disturbing and troubling afterthought in

Maria's psychic life.

However in the weeks that follow the abortion, Maria's

dreams refuse this expedient interpretation of events.

Her

dreams repeatedly force her to confront the idea that her

actions have moral consequences and not just cinematic

possibilities.

She dreams of connections to some vague

underworld, populated with menacing characters who require

 

 

 

139

that she supply them with information about the plumbing

conditions of a rented house.

She is haunted by images

that suggest the presence of discarded fetuses in clogged

drains.

The man in the white duck pants

materialized and then the doctor in his

rubber apron.

At that point she would

fight for consciousness but she was

never able to wake herself before the

dream revealed its inexorable intention,

before the plumbing stopped up, before

they all fled and left her there, gray

water bubbling up in every sink.

Of

course she could not call a plumber,

because she had known all along what

would be found in the pipes, what hacked

pieces of human flesh.

(96)

Later her dreams take on an even more sinister form.

Public and private history merge in this dream as Maria

imagines herself a participant in the Holocaust.

The novel

suggests that an individual action has social consequences.

"This way to the gas, ladies and

gentlemen," a loudspeaker kept repeating

in her dreams now, and

she would be

140

checking off names as the children

filed past her, the little children in

the green antechamber, she would be

collecting their lockets and baby rings

in a fine mesh basket.

Her

instructions were to whisper a few

comforting words to those children who

cried or held back, because this was a

humane operation.

(125)

The dreams which torment Maria after her abortion

clearly designate her as guilty of complicity with evil.

They also depict the grave ramifications of an individual's

abdication of moral responsibility when compounded on a

grand scale.

Complicity with evil is an accusation that

Maria makes of herself.

As Pearson and Pope, two feminist

critics, observe, Maria feels she is complicitious in the

death of her mother, in the loss of her unborn child, and

in the institutionalization of her retarded daughter,

Kate.

In each instance, Maria has permitted a man's

expectations of her to take precedence over her graver

responsibilities as mother and daughter.

And having

abrogated these primary loyalties, Maria is plunged into

despair.

Given the weight of Maria's guilt, it is not surprising

that she opts to comply with BZ's request that she attend

his suicide.

Perhaps Maria seeks to do penance, to find a

 

141

means of atonement.

(Her time in the desert seems like a

time of trial; also Didion has mentioned in one of her

essays something about going to the desert to be shriven.)

Or perhaps she reasons that she will only be punished for

contributing to the death of an important person in the

community.

Psychologically it may seem to Maria that it is

not her actions per se which draw the censure of the

institutions of justice, but rather the importance of the

person against whom the 'crime' is committed that

determines the seriousness of her offense.

Unborn fetuses,

retarded children, and dreamy housewives are not among the

protected citizens of this calloused society.

Famous movie

directors are.

Whatever Maria's motives, both Didion and her

protagonist make it clear that Maria chooses to hold BZ's

hand as he dies from a deliberate overdose of alcohol and

drugs.

Just once, the week after the desert,

when Helene came to see me in

Neuropsychiatric, I tried to explain how

wrong she had been when she screamed

that last night about my carelessness,

my selfishness, my insanity, as if it

had somehow slipped my attention what BZ

was doing.

I told her:

there was no

carelessness involved.

Helene, I said,

142

I knew precisely what B2 was doing.

But

Helene only screamed again.

(202)

On this point Didion would have her readers reject the

accusation of insanity made against Maria as a result of

her complicity in this matter.

From Didion's perspective,

Maria like her predecessors——Didion's first protagonist,

Lily Knight McClellan——is doing the only 'moral' thing

possible when she does not interfere with the decision of

another individual to end his life.

As Lily observes when

she realizes her wifely pleas will not dissuade her husband

from suicide:

"Maybe the most difficult, most important

thing anyone could do for anyone else was to leave him

alone; it was perhaps the only gratuitous act, the act of

love.

(RR 247)

Clearly Didion does not mean for Maria to

be censured for her part in BZ's suicide.

Yet, neither is

BZ's choice entirely sanctioned in the novel.

Maria's

final remarks to the reader clarify her position on the

issue.

"I know what 'nothing' means and keep on playing.

Why, BZ would way.

Why not, I say" (213).

There is something admirable in Maria's courageous if

feeble resistance to total despair.

Foust places a

feminist interpretation on what most readers consider an

existential statement, even declared feminists.

He says,

"She [Maria] has learned from her mother that women are

'nothing'-—wives, 'hoarders of secret sexual grievances,'

and that they Can only passively receive the blows rained

143

upon them by misogynic males" (51).

'Nothing' in this

context takes on political overtones in addition to the

metaphysical ones associated with existentialism.

The moral distinctions and ambiguities that Didion

maintains constitute the raison d'etre of fiction begin to

 

surface and trouble Didion's account of the resistances her

protagonist registers against the institutions,

authorities, and orthodoxies of her fictional time and

space.

For many readers the ambiguities coalesce around

the issue of individualism, a characteristic so inherently

American that it has come to characterize our culture as

no other ideological stance has.

It is a characteristic

that is mythologized in the creation of our heroes,

especially in those heroes whose quests are easily adapt

to the silver screen-—the cowboy and detective.

Both the cowboy and the hard-boiled

detective tell us something important about

American individualism.

The cowboy, like the

detective, can be valuable to society only

because he is a completely autonomous

individual who stands outside it.

To serve

society, one must be able to stand alone, not

needing others, not depending on their

judgments and not submitting to their wishes.

Yet this individualism is not selfishness.

Indeed, it is a kind of heroic selflessness.

 

144

Once accepts the necessity of remaining alone

in order to serve the values of the group.

And this obligation to aloneness is an

important key to the American moral

imagination.

Yet it is part of the profound

ambiguity of the mythology of American

individualism that its moral heroism is always

a step away from despair...there is no return

to society, no moral redemption.

The hero's

lonely quest for moral excellence ends in

absolute nihilism.

(Habits of the Heart 146)

 

Feminist critics have observed that for many female

heroes, no community exists to support their newly found

selves and the critics speculate that this is a problem

indigenous to patriarchal societies. (Pratt 38)

What the

former passage suggests is that the problem of the isolated

hero may well be a particularly American dilemma that

transcends gender-—a position Didion is more likely to

subscribe to than the feminist position.

In any case,

Didion's protagonist finds herself confronting the

ambiguity of individualism at the end of Play It As It

 

518.-

By the novel's conclusion, Maria has literally cut

herself off from all forms of human contact.

She refuses

to talk to anyone; she says she has nothing to say.

On one

hand, the self-imposed isolation appears to be an ascetic

145

gesture designed to purify Maria's conscience if not her

soul.

On the other hand, the isolation seems pointless.

Of what value can a secularization of the monastic life be

in the late twentieth century?

Didion's novel suggests that another sort of redemption

may be an option, an aesthetic one.

Maria spends her days

composing nostalgic scenes of domesticity with her retarded

daughter and focusing on the humming bird directly in her

line of vision.

This activity could be read as a conscious

plan to recreate some of the value lost in her past—-to

reclaim her daughter and recapture her openness to natural

beauty.

However when it is remembered that the humming

bird is also traditionally considered a good luck charm, a

harbinger of luck and love, Maria's absorption in its

features can be viewed as a refusal to confront the

complexities of modern life; in which case art is escapism.

Indeed, her plan to secure the custody of her daughter Kate

and support the both of them seems as fanciful as any

scheme her father conjured up in his time.

Another

possibility is that Maria's efforts to 'be an agreeable

player', efforts that include the production of a

narrative, can be seen as strategic moves in her recovery,

a recovery of not just her sanity, but of those connections

to family which are needed to preserve a sanity purchased

at such a high price.

But the futility of Maria's gesture

emphasizes how extensive is the loss of filiative

structures in modern society, just as the poignancy of her

 

146

effort reveals the intensity with which the loss is felt.

It is at this juncture that the problematical nature of

 

interpretation comes back to haunt the novel.

Didion has

carefully weighted the novel so the narrative remains as

'neutral' as Maria herself claims to be.

Readers are left

with 'nothing' to guide their understanding of Maria's

story, much as she warned would be the case.

The text

itself resists any totalization-~metaphysical,

sociological, psychological—~and every reader/critic does

so at his or her own peril.

Bereft of the certitude which

accompanies a totalizing order——in this case, the familial

institutions which represent the patriarchy—-around which

atomized fragments of experience can coalesce, and thus

create systematic and stable meaning, Maria, and the

readers of her story, are susceptible to a "melancholy of

disbelief" (Jameson 252).

Jameson identifies this

condition as the consequence of the loss of value, a

condition he equates with nihilism.

"The study of value is

at one with nihilism, or the experience of its absence"

(251).

The ending of Didion's second novel recalls Tony

Tanner's remark about the analogous relation of character

to event and writer to words.

The correspondence seems to

obtain in Play It As It Lays.

Maria Wyeth exists in a

 

state of metaphysical and ethical paralysis at the end of

the novel.

She cannot determine a reliable basis for

interpreting discourse, even though she participates in the

147

process in a minimal fashion.

Such seems the case with

Didion.

This novel represents a dead end of the sort Coale

suggests in his work, In Hawthorne's Shadow, a study of the

 

legacy of romance Didion inherits from the American

literary tradition.

"For Didion's vision, however, the

form of Play It As It Lays suggest a dead end.

The state

 

of soul [nihilism] is so complete, so much the product and

process of her California landscape and of Maria's own

fears and despairs as a woman and an actress, so much a

 

reflection and creation of the hard cinematic style itself

with which Didion conjures up her "hard white empty core of

the world," that the book achieves a kind of paralysis in

its own right" (190).

Thus, I suggest, Didion envisions an entirely

different approach to the task of producing narrative in

contemporary society when she writes A Book of Common

 

Prayer, by claiming affiliation with a particular literary

tradition she inherits.

A discussion of this change will

follow in Chapter Three.

Furthermore, as I shall

demonstrate in Chapter Four, Didion returns to some of the

unfinished themes and refrains in Play It As It Lays and

 

reworks ideas that were aborted or discarded in her first

examination of the complex relation of literature to life

as it evolves in the decades of the 703 and 80s, the

decades of post—modernism.

Yet, even so, she finds minimal

justification in the narrative act in Play It As It Lays,

 

as her response to the question "Why write" would surely

148

correspond to Maria's "Why not?". For an affirmative answer

is sufficient to propel Didion on to write yet another

novel, just as Maria's minimal affirmation of life allows

her to successfully avoid suicide.

 

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A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER:

STORIES OF THE FATHER RETOLD

In A Book of Common Prayer, Didion takes up the

literary challenge presented by Virginia Woolf in A Room of

 

One's Own:

that of female friendships which Woolf

 

describes as

"...that vast chamber where nobody has yet

been..." (88).

Accepting the challenge of this modernist

writer scarcely gives one pause in today's post—modernist

feminist climate that enthusiastically seeks to re-

interpret literary history with a view toward renewing or

restoring the literary status of this formerly-neglected

half of the human species.

What is unusual, though, is

Didion's particular approach to this "vast chamber," the

issue of relationships among women.

This issue surfaced

only obliquely in Run River and Play It As It Lays.

In her

 

 

third novel, Didion finally confronts it directly.

Didion's somewhat belated entry into this no longer empty

chamber merits attention because it is curious in a number

of respects.

Her exploration of female friendships is

curious in regard to both her development as a writer and

to her relationship to the literary tradition which she

inherits.

In the first instance, A Book of Common Prayer

represents yet another occasion in which Didion's

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ambivalence regarding her position as a female writer

surfaces to become yet another subtext of the novel being

written.

Didion's ambivalence becomes even more pronounced

in A Book of Common Prayer because the novel centers around

 

the difficulties a female narrator encounters in trying to

tell a story.

The fact that Grace Strasser-Mendana is a

 

female is not inconsequential to her narrative of yet

another woman's life.

Despite her disclaimers regarding

any affiliation with the feminist movement (discussed in

Chapter 1), Didion employs a classic feminist strategy in

the construction of this novel.

Didion creates a narrative

whose form and content examines the relationship of two

women to each other and to the literature produced by and

about them.

At the same time, Didion identifies her points

of difference from radical feminists while implicitly

acknowledging her affinity with women as a group.

Feminist critics such as Showalter, Gilbert/Gubar, and

Pratt have observed that female writers have often used

seemingly conventional narrative strategies to tell their

stories, but then have subverted those strategies for

feminist purposes.

As was demonstrated in Run River,

 

certain patterns of feminine archetypes provided a subtext

somewhat at variance with the surface claims of that novel.

Pratt has claimed that such subversive patterns--carried in

some cases in the archetypal patterns Pratt identifies-—

comprise the legacy that literary mothers have bequeathed

to their female progeny.

An example of this procedure is

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located by Pratt in Woolf's novel To The Lighthouse.

Of

 

Woolf, Pratt remarks, "She blends this sub—conscious,

personal material [her relationship as a daughter to her

parents] with the rebirth archetype in incorporating motifs

derived from one of the oldest mother/daughter narrative of

all, the Demeter/Kore archetype" (132).

However, Gilbert and Gubar's recent examination of the

relation of twentieth-century women writers to their

literary inheritance provokes a reconsideration of the

relation to maternal predecessors.

They propose that by

the twentieth-century, a woman writer has a choice of

either a matrilineal or patrilineal inheritance to claim.

These critics speculate in their article, "Forward into the

Past," that "in the twentieth-century...Freudian

concepts..as well as Freud—derived Bloomian paradigms like

the 'anxiety of influence' and our own 'anxiety of

authorship' must inevitably give way to a paradigm of

ambivalent affiliation" (243).

Gilbert and Gubar goes on

to contend that writers such as Wharton, Plath, Gather, and

Woolf "also perceive themselves as...free to adopt the

powers of paternal and/or maternal traditions" (244).

These exceptional feminist critics are discovering in the

mid 80's what Didion already knew ten years earlier when

she wrote A Book of Common Prayer.

Still, their analysis

is helpful in distinguishing the patterns of relationships

that Didion works out novelistically.

After demonstrating through an etymological analysis

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152

that the idea of adoption resides within the concept of

affiliation, Gilbert and Gubar explain the advantage of

this concept for the woman writer.

Affiliation, they

suggest, permits "an evasion of the inexorable lineage of

the biological family even while it also implies a power of

decision in two historical directions:

one may be adopted,

and thus legitimized, as a literary heiress; but one may

also adopt and thus sanction others to carry on the

tradition one has established.

Finally...the concept of

'affiliation' carries with it possibilities of both choice

and continuity.

Choice:

one may decide with whom to

affiliate--align or join——oneself.

Continuity:

one is

thereby linked into a constructed genealogical order which

has its own quasi—familial logic" (244).

Rather than

repeat the filiative patterns of family romance that Bloom

suggests sets up antagonisms between literary generations,

the twentieth-century female writer prefers to invoke a new

structure for relation to her literary past.

The concept

of adoption or affiliation avoids the problems associated

with patriarchal lineage while ensuring the continuity of

tradition still desired.

Instead of following Woolf's example of To The

Lighthouse in her third novel, Didion chooses to adopt a

 

narrative strategy often employed by her literary

forefathers.

As a twentieth—century woman writer, Didion

exercises her choice of either a patrilineal or matrilineal

heritage.

This seems an option she never doubted was

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available to her.

Her choice consists of a narrative

strategy that has been used to depict the quintessential

connections between two male characters, popularly known as

male bonding.

The connections delineated operate in the

social, psychological, spiritual, and literary realms of

experience for the male protagonists.

In addition, the

strategy often reflects an ideological stance——that men

have their significant relationships with each other in a

patriarchal culture-—on the part of the male writer

employing the narrative strategy.

Didion establishes her

claim as the legitimate daughter of her literary

forefathers by her adoption of a narrative technique those

forefathers have claimed as their own.

She then rewrites

the narrative of male bonding from a female perspective.

Her revision reveals a profundity of emotional and

ethical content in the relationships that women forge with

each other.

In so doing, Didion calls into question the

male Prerogative of locating significance exclusively in

the male experience.

By assigning a corresponding

significance to female relationships, Didion makes a

distinctly feminist gesture.

Pearson and Pope insist that

"any author who chooses a woman as the central character in

the story understands at some level that women are primary

beings...whether explicitly feminist or not, therefore,

works with female heroes challenge patriarchal assumptions"

(12).

Nor is Didion any less bold in her choice of paternal

 

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predecessors from whom she appropriates her technique:

namely, Conrad and Fitzgerald.

Conrad and Fitzgerald are

alluded to simultaneously through Didion's choice of a

first-person narrator who evolves in the process of

narration to become a co—protagonist of the person whose

story the narrator relates.

Echoes of The Great Gatsby and

 

Heart of Darkness reverberate throughout Didion's third

 

novel.

(Some critics, such as Strandberg, have noted this

phenomenon, but few have pursued the implications of this

insight.)

Furthermore, Didion's narrative tactic has a sense of

happy audacity about it.

Her choice of narrative device

implicitly challenges the cultural assumption that females

possessless potential for heroism that males do.

Didion's

story is about a non-descript, even neurotic, middle—aged,

middle-class woman (Charlotte Douglas), who, on the

surface, elicits very little sympathy or admiration, but

who, through the compelling agency of the narrator's voice

and vision (that of Grace Strasser-Mendana's) comes to

command both.

That Didion dares to imply that Charlotte's

story, and Grace's telling of it, is on a par with the

stories of Lord Jim, Kurtz, or Gatsby is, to say the least,

a bit outrageous...but also utterly delightful.

And that

sense of outrage mingled with delight is perfectly

apprehended by the cool, analytical Grace Strasser-Mendana,

whose performance as a first-person narrator with a

perplexing story to tell is equally as engaging as the

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stunning narrative performances of Marlow or Nick Carraway.

The following discussion will examine the similarities and

differences in each of these narrator's performances.

Equally important is the recognition that Didion's

gesture toward her literary past is not only a feminist

gesture; it is also an implementation of one of the basic

tenets of modernism, as formulated by one of the movement's

founding fathers, Eliot himself.

In "Tradition and the

Individual Talent," Eliot exhorts the practitioners of art

to know the past in a way that the past could not know

itself.

Tradition, Eliot maintains, "involves a

perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of

its presence....This historical sense...is what makes a

writer traditional.

And at the same time what makes a

writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his

contemporaneity....But the difference between the present

and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness

of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's

awareness of itself cannot show" (The Sacred Wood 51—52).

 

That knowledge is part of what every new artist can

contribute to the literary tradition.

In other words,

Didion's novel, by its conscious allusion to the past, can

be read as Didion's tribute to her patriarchal

predecessors.

It can also be read as a critique or re-

working of the legacy she has inherited as a literary

daughter, a legacy she needs to expand to accommodate the

needs of a post-modern world.

 

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And so, this discussion of Didion's novel, A Book of

 

Common Prayer, will use a two—layered approach.

One the

one hand, the discussion will delineate the similarities

between the stories of Joan Didion, a post-modern female

writer, and those of her literary fathers of the age of

modernism:

Conrad and Fitzgerald.

On the other hand, the

discussion will attempt to articulate the significant

distinctions among the stories, including the nonfictional

one of the literary tradition the writers share.

I will

then discuss the implications of the insights that emerge

from Didion's venture into Woolf's "vast chamber" of female

friendships via the paths worn smooth by the footprints of

her literary fathers.

"Sometimes I think that those of us who are now in our

thirties were born into the last generation to carry the

burden of 'home', to find in family life the source of all

tension and drama" (SIB 165).

Although Didion made this

comment in the 1960's in her first book of essays, the

truth of that observation can be detected in her literary

activities that span the subsequent two decades.

Not only

does the disruption of the traditional family unit

constitute a major thematic concern in each of Didion's

four novels, but Didion is of a generation of artists whose

conception of most social relationships, especially

literary ones, tends to coalesce around the paradigm of the

family structure.

Critics with views as divergent as Frederic Jameson and

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Harold Bloom acknowledge this metaphorical preference,

albeit for very different reasons.

Jameson reminds his

readers in The Political Unconscious that the family as a

structure carries with it ideological implications as a

social unit.

"Sartre's Search for a Method has taught us

 

to read the family situation as the mediation of class

relationships in society at large, and to grasp the

parental functions as socially coded or symbolic positions

as well" (180).

Bloom, of course, in Anxiety of Influence,

 

uses the familial paradigm to construct a whole theory of

literary relationships between poets and their

predecessors.

He states that his purpose in that book is

to "center upon intra-poetic relationships as parallels of

family romance" (8).

And, as I have mentioned earlier, in The World, the

 

Text, and the Critic, Said elaborates on his theory that a

 

major cultural shift in modern times has been the shift

from filiation to affiliation.

"Affiliation becomes a form

of representing the filiative

processes to be found in

nature, although affiliation takes validatednonbiological

social and cultural forms," Said explains (23).

In some

instances, Said postulates, affiliation can consist of a

replication of the familial structure, complete with the

attendant authority systems and ethnocentric assumptions of

filiation, or it can produce forms of its own.

As this

shift transpires, contemporary writers such as Didion

seemed compelled not only to record the cultural upheaval

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that results, but also to grieve for the losses incurred in

the process.

Didion records the cultural upheaval

primarily in her essays on American life.

But it is in the

fiction that she most poignantly expresses the loss

entailed in this transition.

This idea of transition from the filiative to the

affiliative mode of social relationships is particularly

relevant because it describes Didion's repeated concerns as

a writer.

Further, it serves to identify her relationship

as a writer to her work, and to the literary past she

inherits.

Each of her novels takes this cultural

transition as a central concern.

In Run River, Didion explores the emotional,

 

psychological, and social repercussions for an individual

family caught in a dissolution of family systems.

At the

end of the novel, however, the protagonist cannot imagine

what cultural unit will evolve to replace the familial

structure which in Run River has self—destructed.

Because

 

Lily Knight McClellan has no explanation for the

deterioration of the patriarchal system she finds herself a

victim of, she labels the dissolution a "history of

accidents" (246).

She only vaguely senses that the

dissolution may be more widespread.

In fact, it should be

noted that Didion's comprehension of the scope of the

"social hemorrhaging" which she observes in STB comes after

the publication of her first novel (85).

This suggests

that Didion is unaware of the cultural ramifications of the

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failure of filiation when she writes Run River.

As I have

 

claimed previously, Run River evolves primarily out of her

 

sense of a personal loss which only later is recognized as

cultural too.

In Play It As It Lays, the protagonist refuses all

 

forms of affiliation as expressed by cultural discourse.

She thinks such forms are not compensatory for the familial

connection from which she feels disenfranchised.

Ultimately Maria resorts to a simplistic aestheticism, one

which permits a total and probably permanent withdrawal

from the struggle to forge complicated connections with

others and the world about her.

Maria's action seems the

result of her discovery that human connections, like

discourse, are made, not given.

She also finds that

discourse is not neutral, but can possess sinister and

oppressive implications.

In fact, Maria's gesture of

repudiation can be seen as that of a radical feminist, one

who refuses to participate at all in the male-dominated

system that has first silenced her and then judged her act

of compassion to be mad and criminal.

Didion's understanding of the cultural crisis of the

60's and 70's is reflected as well in the situations she

proscribes for her protagonists.

Maria's refusal to

participate in the production of discourse is more a

gesture of despair than one of principle.

That despair is

suggested by the fact that she does attempt to be

an

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agreeable player" in the construction of her life story

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(Play 2).

In other words, she makes a feeble, if futile

attempt to participate in an effort toward affiliation by

producing a quasi-literary discourse which serves to frame

the novel.

By the end of the novel, Maria emerges with a knowledge

of "what 'nothing' means" (213).

She considers that

knowledge to be valuable and the exclusive property of

those like herself who have dared to resist social pressure

to accept the totalization of cultural discourses.

However, knowing what 'nothing' means only ensures Maria's

physical survival.

The knowledge saves her from suicide,

but not despair.

Maria's metaphysical despair corresponds

to Didion's own questioning of the validity of producing

narratives that are discontinuous with experience.

The

'natural' connection of language and experience has been

broken in Didion's second novel, a consequence (or the

cause?) of the failure of filiation in modern life.

Both

Didion and her protagonist face the challenge of finding a

reason to continue producing narratives that are

disconnected from any absolute sense of truth.

Nonetheless, by the time she writes A Book of Common

 

Prayer, Didion has rediscovered a value in the production

of narrative as an essential human activity.

By her third

novel, she has moved beyond the paralyzing effects of

filiative loss in contemporary society.

Indeed, from this

point forward, both in her fiction and non—fiction,

Didion's literary efforts are directed toward the process

161

of affiliation.

The change of direction in purpose is

signaled by a change of geographical locale.

This is not

surprising as geographical locations are "places of the

mind" for Didion (SIB).

She shifts the focus of her

attention away from her patria, the American West, to

Central America in both A Book of Common Prayer and

 

Salvador and then later to the Pacific in Democracy, and to

 

the Atlantic in her latest work about Miami.

The

geographical shift is indicative of a search for a new way

to forge connections in modern life.

A salient aspect of Didion's reconsideration involves a

reflection on and a reassessment of the literary tradition

which she inherits, and most particularly, the

predominantly patrilineal nature of that tradition.

(Bloom's book of poetic family romance, for instance,

employs exclusively male terminology and by implication,

concerns itself with the dynamics of patriarchal lines of

descent.)

In contrast, A Book of Common Prayer represents

 

Didion's attempt to locate her rightful place as a female

within a literary tradition whose privilege of patriarchal

values has frequently denied its literary daughters equal

status with their male siblings.

Didion's choice of the conventional canon as the

literary institution with which to associate herself, or to

challenge if need be, is no less audacious than her choice

of Joseph Conrad, the 'father' of modernism, as the

predecessor to whom she claims lineage.

This preference

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for a male rather than a female progenitor would likely be

viewed by some feminists as evidence of Didion's naive

internalization

of patriarchal values.

(Pratt, for

instance, makes this argument in her work on feminine

archetypes.)

Such a view implies a lack of critical

consciousness on the writer's part that is simply not

supported by any of Didion's fiction.

Another possibility

exists.

The choice of Conrad as a literary father, so to

speak, almost automatically legitimizes Didion's claim to

inclusion within the traditional literary institution.

In

any case, it certainly makes clear her claim to that

position.

An alliance of affiliation with a maternal

progenitor may not provide the same legitimacy.

I think

legitimacy is an issue with Didion at this point in her

career.

In Gilbert and Gubar's terms, she does suffer a

bit from an "anxiety of authorship", although that anguish

may not be exclusively the result of her gender.

But a

stronger case for Didion's choice of paternal predecessor

is that it was from her literary forefathers that Didion

consciously learned the craft of writing..."the way a

sentence works" (Davison 18).

Didion says that women

writers, such as the Brontés and George Eliot were

influential only "in the sense of being models for a life,

not for a style" (Art of Fiction 140).

 

It seems to me that what Didion seeks when she is

writing is the authority of her own voice as a writer.

Her

concern for authority leads her first to the traditional

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canon, where she chooses Conrad over other contenders as a

literary predecessor.

I expect that is because she

perceives an affiliation with him.

As an 'outsider' to the

English-speaking world, Conrad would have experienced many

of the problems of any writer attempting to move from

filiation to affiliation.

Part of that move entails the

discovery of a new source of authority other than the

conventional and usually exclusive patriarchal one

(national—~theland of the father) from which to speak.

To

put it in slightly different terms Didion chooses Conrad

who is himself a subversive element within the filiative

structure.

In this case the subversive element is an

outsider, who may

under certain circumstances come to be

included as Conrad was, but who more often is decisively

excluded.

In this fashion Didion alignsherself with a writer who

is in the institutional structure of literature but is not

entirely 2f the structure; someone whose relation to the

patrilineal literary system is one of affiliation rather

than filiation.

Frederic Jameson comments on Conrad's

position in this respect.

"His place is still unstable,

undecidable, and his work unclassifiable, spilling out of

high literature into light reading and romance, reclaiming

great areas of diversion and distraction by the most

demanding practice of style and écriture alike, floating

uncertainly somewhere between Proust and Robert Louis

Stevenson

(206).

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Didion's fiction, especially, creates a similar

quandary among academic critics.

The exploration of

women's experience in Didion's fiction tends to serve as

justification for relegating it to the scorned category of

popular romance, for instance.

On the other hand, critics

who value Didion's fiction (males especially) tend to

ignore its female content as inconsequential and

concentrate their praise on her technical expertise.

Yet, as I have suggested, it is through Didion's

imaginative realignment with her paternal predecessors that

she discovers the possibility of moving-~at least in the

imagination—-beyond a history of failed filiation to a

condition of affiliation.

Didion, in fact, comments on the

value of affiliation in an otherwise perfunctory interview.

"The ideal unit [in society] seems to me to be the extended

family, extended either naturally--through the recognition

of vast numbers of aunts and cousins and great-uncles--or

by force of will, through friendships so close that they

seem to the child as constant as family" (105).

In other

words, Didion's own observations of modern life lead her to

a condition of affiliation.

Early in her career she

perceives that filiative can and dafifail, and that some

substitute mode of connection with the past is required for

continuity.

The extended family-—an affiliative

connection——is the pattern she chooses to replicate in her

imaginary connections, literary or otherwise.

In an effort to imagine a condition of affiliation,

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Didion writes a novel that has the effect of being a

reassessment of her patriarchal heritage, an

acknowledgement of any generational indebtedness she deems

appropriate, but then directs toward that inherited past

the sort of scrutiny advocated by Eliot for one reason and

Virginia Woolf for another.

In so doing, Didion delineates

her differences from the literary tradition she inherits;

she also establishes the criteria by which she can be

included in that tradition via affiliation with her

paternal inheritance.

Another effect of Didion's choice, or perhaps a factor

in the decision, is the alliance of Didion with F. Scott

Fitzgerald, another American author who 'adopted' Conrad as

his paternal mentor.

Any number of critics have observed

that The Great Gatsby is an American adaptation of Conrad's

 

Heart of Darkness.

At least two contemporary critics,

 

Victor Strandberg and John Hollowell, have delineated the

relationships between Didion's third novel and this

American version of Conrad's work.

They emphasize the

narrative strategy of Didion's novel as it relates to both

of those of her male predecessors.

(Again, this is

evidence of Didion's contention that she learned the way to

tell a story from the male writers of previous

generations.)

It is the way in which each of the stories

are told that make Conrad and Fitzgerald's texts

correspond, as the stories themselves are more dissonant

than not.

That Didion's later version is to be seen as an

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alternative to Fitzgerald's American adaptation of Conrad's

work is suggested by the fact that while she, like

Fitzgerald, employs a first—person narrator who resembles

Conrad's original, unlike Fitzgerald, Didion adapts

important facets of Conrad's story as well.

In this way

Didion's work calls attention to the similarities and the

differences between not only her work and that of her male

predecessors, but also to the differences between the works

of male predecessors themselves.

What adapting Conrad's narrative strategy and story

allowsDidion to do is to work out the basis of her

affiliation with her patrilineal literary heritage.

Certain factors come into play through the re—working of

Conrad's tale that present Didion with the opportunity for

imagining alternative patterns of community, of

affiliation; for instance, the dynamics of how such

connections might be forged outside of the failed filiative

structure of contemporary society.

These factors are

adapted to Didion's narrative situation—-which includes

both the story told and the manner of its telling.

The most salient analogies between Didion's A Book of

Common Prayer and Conrad's Heart of Darkness center around

   

the relationship of the first-person narrator to the

narrative each has set in motion.

The parallels continue

to obtain in the relationships that each of these

narrators, Marlow and Grace Strasser-Mendana, establish

with their respective protagonist, Kurtz or Charlotte

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Douglas.

Further, Grace and Marlow evidence similar

qualities as self—described characters within their

narratives and those qualities operate in the personal

relationships each undertakes with the novel's protagonist.

Furthermore, the fictional situations which engender

the narratives are similar in that both Grace and Marlow

construct their narratives only after the death of the

narrative's central character.

In each circumstance the

central character or protagonist is depicted as something

of a maverick, a renegade, a marginal and unpredictable

element with relation to conventional society, with which

the first-person narrators are more closely aligned.

One

reason for the marginal status of the protagonist is an

ability to function almost exclusively in his or her own

symbolic universe (to use a Berger and Luckmann term) or

version of reality.

Indeed, it is the otherness of both

Kurtz and Charlotte that provokes the inference that each

is an unwitting accomplice in the ambiguous circumstances

surrounding his or her own death-—Kurtz through his

relentless pursuit of ivory and self-aggrandizement and

Charlotte through her apparently deliberate disregard of

political reality.

But it is the remarkable quality of the protagonists

that initially commands the attention of others, including

their respective narrators.

Rumors of the mysterious

behavior of each protagonist precede the narrator's

introduction to the prospective protagonist.

That

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introduction reveals that both Kurtz and Charlotte are

striking in their physical appearance, but more notable in

their manner of speaking.

The protagonists are both envied

and feared by the people around them which is a factor in

the narrator's interest in them as people and as

characters.

Both Kurtz and Charlotte present themselves as

heroes and heroines of romance-—a fact that intrigues their

first-person narrators, as much as it puzzles them.

Nonetheless, it is the ambivalent and ambiguous nature of

the relationship between narrator as character and the

protagonist that serves as a paradigm for the relationship

that will emerge in the narrative between each narrator and

the narrative he or she constructs.

Questions of

authority, audience perceptions, alternate interpretations

all emerge from this narrative situation.

Early in their narratives, Marlow and Grace diagnose or

label their respective protagonist in ways that reveal

their own character.

Kurtz is diagnosed as "lacking

restraint,’ restraint being a quality Marlow values highly.

'

"He was hollow at the core'

' Marlow says in his final

assessment of Kurtz.

Marlow finds this hollowness evidence

of a lack of "a deliberate belief," a quality without

which, Marlow concludes, one is powerless before the forces

of nature or man, and from which lack he imagines himself

to be exempt (31).

Grace operates similarly describing Charlotte at the

onset of her narrative in terms diametrically opposed to

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Grace's view of herself.

She informs her audience that

Charlotte would call herself a 'tourist', but Grace finds

'sojourner' a more suitable term (1).

Grace refers to

herself as "a prudent traveler" (2), and of course, claims

all the privileges to be gained from such a distinction.

Grace also prefers to call Charlotte's story of her own

life one of "delusion", although Grace acknowledges that

Charlotte would call it one of "passion" (2).

Grace posits

that Charlotte leads an unexamined life, that Charlotte

simply revises her grasp of events to coincide with her

preferred version of reality.

Events which Grace deduces

that Charlotte has erased from memory include the deaths of

her parents, marital adulteries, abuses, and abandonments.

"I used to think that the only event in Charlotte Douglas'

life to resist her revisions and erasures was Marin's

disappearance" (58).

Grace's sense of her own self-worth is to be found in

her differences from Charlotte at this point in her

narrative.

She prides herself on her more clinical and

lucid appraisals of such emotionally laden events as

parental deaths.

She attributes her more efficient and

therefore more reliable attitude to her own early

experience as an orphan.

"Unlike Charlotte I learned early

to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under

surveillance, keep it on clear ground and away from any

brush where it might coil unnoticed" (120).

Grace's

experience as a frontier woman, emotionally as well as

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geographically (having been raised in Denver early in the

century) are revealed by her metaphorical view of death as

a maverick snake against which one might defend oneself by

alertness or violence.

Another comparison of Conrad's narrator to Didion's is

the fact that each narrator critiques the 'narratives'

produced by their respective protagonist.

Both Charlotte

and Kurtz produce written documents during their sojourns

in the tropics which Grace and Marlow comment about.

Kurtz

writes a report for the International Society for the

Suppression of Savage Customs that Marlow declares provided

him with considerable insight into Kurtz's character.

The

report becomes part of the information that Marlow manages

to rid himself of before his visit to Kurtz's Intended.

Thus Marlow relieves himself of the obligation to explain

the rival versions of reality incorporated in that rather

remarkable report.

Nonetheless, at the time of its

discovery Marlow recalls that he was impressed by Kurtz's

literary style even if he was critical of the lack of

substance in the report.

"This was the unbounded power of

eloquence--of words-—of burning noble words.

There were no

practical hints to interrupt the magic current of

phrases..." (44).

The latter, the lack of "an exposition

of method" constitutes Marlow's severest criticism of

Kurtz's report.

Like Kurtz, Charlotte Douglas produces literary

documents which Grace critiques in her narrative.

The

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focus of Grace's criticism, like Marlow's, is that his

prose does not conform to certain conventions Grace

presumes obtain

among educated people.

Charlotte's

"Letters" from Boca Grande, in Grace's opinion, reflect

Charlotte's idle and romantic dreams about what Boca Grande

"could become" and totally ignore Boca Grande "as it was"

(7).

Grace quibbles with Charlotte's rival version of the

social and political significance of Boca Grande's position

l

in the world economy as well.

In each instance, Grace

claims to defend her position from the classical stance,

whereas Charlotte's position is described as an example of

the romantic viewpoint.

Like Marlow, Grace tends to

dismiss the literary efforts of her protagonist as

misguided and ineffectual, as the production of someone

whose basic organization of even empirical evidence is

suspect.

It may be their cognizance of the power of alternative

interpretations that disturbs the two first—person

narrators in both Didion's and Conrad's novels.

Indeed the

literary efforts of their respective protagonists create an

implicit rivalry with each narrator's efforts and within

the narrator's own special domain:

the production of

literary discourse.

The basis of both Grace and Marlow's

critiques of their protagonist's manuscript is that neither

are legitimate:

they do not belong to the tradition of

literary production; they, therefore, are not products of

filiation.

In some respects, Marlow and Grace perform as

 

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critics of Kurtz's and Charlotte's literary discourse, and

by pointing to the absences in the prior discourses, create

a legitimate space for their own productions.

This pattern

is one of the possibilities that Bloom presents in his

discussion of the patrilineal relations among producers of

literary discourse.

And it may be that some of the anxiety

that Grace and Marlow share as producers of discourse is a

reflection of the dichotomy between their functions as

critic and creator of such discourse.

For each narrator is self—conscious about his or her

authority to assume the role of narrator.

Both Marlow and

Grace feel compelled to explain their motives for

participating in the narrative act.

Said comments about

this anxiety of authorship in Conrad's work when he

observes that "there is an unusual attention paid to the

motivation of the stories being told-~evidence of a felt

need to justify in some way the telling of the story" (90).

"I am interested in Charlotte Douglas only insofar as she

passed through Boca Grande, only insofar as the meaning of

that sojourn continue to elude me,' Grace informs her

presumed, though unidentified, audience (14).

"Give me the

molecular structure of the protein which defined Charlotte

Douglas,

H

Grace requisitions, and in so doing, recalls

Marlow, who in Heart of Darkness, declares that his

 

narrative has the purpose of "trying to account to myself

for Kurtz--for the shade of Mr. Kurtz" (44).

In fact, so compelling is this issue that Grace returns

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173

to it a number of times under various guises.

She suggests

that her venture into narrative may be an attempt to answer

the question of whether or not Charlotte was "an outsider

to romantic sensibility,‘ (22) or to determine the

appropriate terminology for Charlotte's death--murder, or

passing.

Marlow, too, defends his narrative activity in

one of his many digressions from his story:

"I have a

voice too, and for good or evil, mine is the speech that

cannot be silenced" (33).

The self-consciousness of these narrators is also

indicated by the interruptions in the flow of the narrative

to address the audience directly.

Grace addresses an

audience even though she has no diegetic or fictional

audience as Marlow does.

These addresses seek to ascertain

the impact of the story--for example, Marlow questions his

audience if they "see" Kurtz, or he may taunt them about

their privileged positions as Europeans; the addresses are

sometimes used to anticipate objections, as when Grace

rather defensively cites her sources of information about

Charlotte's life; or they have the function of

acknowledging shared information, as when Grace uses the

second person pronoun in "you no doubt heard the tape"

(74).

The effect of these interruptions is to remind the

listeners/readers that a story, a cultural artifact, is

being constructed, actively and in the presence of

witnesses.

Also, as Said points out in his article,

"Conrad's Presentation of Narrative," "the reflective

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174

narrator is always a narrator preventing the wrong sort of

interpretation.

His narrative invariably assumes the

currency of a rival version" (95).

An important way in which both Marlow's and Grace's

narratives serve as rival versions of interpretations for

events recounted is their shared propensity to

demythologize public and private history.

Marlow spends

considerable time in his narrative revising the romance

that has come to constitute a primary cultural discourse in

the West--history.

His opening account of European

imperialism provides a significant contrast to the

conventional version of that historical moment offered by

the unnamed narrator.

That unidentified personage sees the

early conquerors as "the great knights—errant of the

sea...bearers of a spark from the sacred fire" (20).

Marlow provides a corrective version of the account which

deflates the mythological posture of those historical acts.

"It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a

grand scale, and men going at it blind...", Marlow insists

(4)-*

Grace too punctures the delusions of grandeur sometimes

accorded to personal history.

She especially attacks the

version of an aristocratic heritage that her son, Gerardo,

and her in-laws perpetuate.

"Gerardo is the grandson of

two American wildcatters who got rich, my father in

 

*I am indebted to William Johnsen for his dsicussion

of this novel; many of the ideas expressed here derive from

that discussion.

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175

Colorado minerals and Edgar's father in Boca Grande

politics, and of the Irish nursemaid and the metiza from

the interior they respectively married.

Still he persists

in tracing his line to the court of Castille" (14).

Both Grace and Marlow train their discerning eye on

their environments as well-—in each case, an unknown

territory...the tropics.

They balance their precise

empirical descriptions against the more generalized and

widely—held romantic impressions, which even they are not

entirely impervious to.

"Everything here changes and

nothing appears to.

There is no perceptible wheeling of

the stars in their courses, no seasonal wane in the length

of days or the temperature of air or earth or water, only

the amniotic stillness in which transformations are

constant.

As elsewhere, certain phases in these

transformations are called by certain names ("01dsmobile",

say, and "rust"), but the emotional field of such names

tends to weaken as one leaves the temperate zones.

At the

equator the names are noticeably arbitrary.

A banana palm

is no more or less 'alive' than its rot" (157).

For Grace,

the "equatorial view

" does not permit unequivocal

assertions.

Like Marlow, she finds herself unable to

arrive at clear and certain judgments.

This holds true

even when, or especially when, she juxtaposes empirical

evidence against romantic perception.

Marlow is confronted with a similar problem when he

encounters the natives as he travels up the Congo River.

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Rival interpretations of his visual experience vie for his

agreement.

"We could have fancied ourselves the first of

men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be

subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive

toil.

But suddenly, as we struggled around a bend, there

would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass—roofs, a

burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands

clapping, of feet stomping, of bodies swaying, of eyes

rolling, under the drop of heavy and motionless

foliage....The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to

us, welcoming us—-who could tell?

We were cut off from the

comprehension of our surroundings" (31).

The preponderance of rival versions is but one element

in the urgency and immediacy Grace and Marlow exhibit with

regards to the production of their separate narratives.

The impact of the actual encounter with their respective

protagonists has prompted both narrators to engage in the

telling of tales.

0f the two, Marlow has an established

record as a spinner of yarns, a notable attribute of his

profession as a man of the sea.

Of course, as a former

anthropologist, Grace would be no stranger to the process

of constructing narrative discourses either.

Regardless of

differences in their degree of experience as tale tellers,

both narrators acknowledge an overwhelming need to tell

this particular story.

The need in each case is born out of two circumstances:

one is that the meaning of the event recounted continues to

  

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elude the narrator of both Conrad's and Didion's novels.

Previous quotes allude to this circumstance and indicate

that the ensuing perplexity provides a strong motivation

for the narrative.

The other is that the experience that

prompts the narration has radically altered each narrator's

life.

Grace reports that Charlotte's stories have revised

her own memory of even the most empirical objects:

"I am

now incapable of thinking about the glass at Chartres

without seeing through every window the light of Tivoli

Gardens" (109).

(The Tivoli Gardens and the rose windows

at Chartres figure prominently in Charlotte's "demented"

version of her relationship to her fugitive daughter.)

Marlow, too, remarks on the scope of the effect meeting

Kurtz has had on his life, calling it "the culminating

point of my experience.

It seemed somehow to throw a kind

of light on everything about me—-and into my thoughts" (5).

Indeed both Grace and Marlow produce images of light

repeatedly throughout their narratives.

The light images

reflect the multi-dimensional aspects of knowledge and

understanding possible, or the lack of such on certain

occasions.

Often the image of light has a consoling, if

inexplicable, effect in the narrative and on the distressed

psyche of the narrator.

Marlow reports that he retreated

to the solace of a lighted mess—room after hearing the

announcement of Kurtz's death.

"There was a lamp in there-

—light, don't you know-~and outside it was so beastly,

beastly dark" (62).

Images of light are equated with

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solace for Grace too in Boca Grande.

"I continue to live

here because I like the light,'

' Grace informs her audience

of readers.

"And because my days are too numbered to spend

them in New York or Paris or Denver imagining the light in

Boca Grande, how flat it is, how harsh and still.

How dead

white at noon" (13).

But just as often the light images suggest the

inexplicable or the artificial light of illusion.

"Who can

say why I crave the light in Boca Grande, who can say why

my body grows cancer" (125), Grace intones as she tries to

find an adequate explanation for the enigmatic behavior of

her protagonist, Charlotte Douglas.

As additional details

of Charlotte's life are recalled by her narrator, each

detail alters the possible interpretation of any one of her

acts.

"In this light..." is a phrase repeated ad infinitum

 

in A Book of Common Prayer.

So too does Kurtz's narrator

 

evoke the image of light in his observations of the

Intended's faith——"that great and saving illusion that

shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness" (68).

It is

also by the light of a candle that Kurtz evidently cannot

see, but Marlow does, that Marlow observes and thus

recreates for his audience, Kurtz's "supreme moment of

complete knowledge" when Kurtz utters his resounding and

enigmatic pronouncement

"The horror!

The horror!" (62).

The preference for images of light in narratives

immersed in the incomprehensible and enigmatic functions as

well to delineate the character of each narrator.

Again,

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the similarities in personalities between Conrad's

storyteller and Didion's surface.

For Marlow, as for

Grace, the observance of form and appearances is not only

essential; it can become redemptive.

Such Observances

serve to create an effect like the effect created by a

light in the darkness:

order in the midst of chaos.

Marlow admires the Accountant's imposition of order on the

squalid out-station, even though he is initially aghast at

the fanaticism and myopia required of the Accountant to

maintain that order.

Especially appalling to Marlow is the

Accountant's annoyance at the feverish groans of an ill man

placed in his orderly office.

Only later does Marlow come

to understand what a nuisance simple human frailty

(especially another's) can be when all of one's energies

are required to keep one's version of reality intact.

In Boca Grande, Grace's home provides an oasis of order

and serenity in the center of a pointless but disruptive

revolution.

Flowers, ice cubes, clean uniforms, all become

signifiers of reason and sanity for troubled spirits such

as Charlotte's second husband, Leonard Douglas who visits

Grace after he fails to accomplish his mission to persuade

Charlotte to leave the troubled country where she is only a

'tourista'.

Emerging victorious over the messiness and

complications of even ordinary life as lived at the equator

represents a sort of moral victory for Grace Strasser-

Mendana, as it did for her literary predecessor, Charlie

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Marlow.

Each narrator had received instructions from a

self—appointed expert as to how to conduct oneself in the

tropics and what activities to avoid or to engage in so as

not to acquiesce to the general lassitude of the place and

the demoralization that inevitably accompanied it.

Despite

such well-intentioned advice, both find themselves subject

to such dire consequences nonetheless and even make note of

such slippages in the course of their narrations.

Marlow

reports that he was becoming "savage", and thus

"scientifically interesting", when he is pushed to the

point of exasperation at the folly of the various white men

he encounters (17—19).

But probably most incredulous to

Marlow is the complete lack of "efficiency", the idea that

is the European man's salvation (4)--or so Marlow announces

at the beginning of his narrative.

Grace admits to being bemused by, even while trying to

thwart, one or the other of her brothers—in-law's political

machinations.

She presumes her lack of emotional

involvement assures her of a moral superiority to people,

like her son, who "plays only for the action" (229).

In

fact, later in her narration she realizes, somewhat

abashedly, that she introduced Charlotte to her son,

Gerardo, mostly "to discomfit Victor", a brother—in—law who

had displayed a prior sexual interest in the norteamericana

 

(203).

As it is probable that Charlotte's association with

Gerardo was a contributing factor in Charlotte's being shot

in the back in front of the Estadio Nacional, Grace's tone

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181

at this disclosure becomes one of remorse and increasing

incredulity at her own folly.

But initially Grace and Marlow evidence an ethical

arrogance that gradually erodes as the narrative

progresses.

Both narrators consider themselves immune to

the delusion and senseless violence of those around them.

That perception persists whether the delusion disparaged

entails Charlotte's expectation that her daughter, a

fugitive from the FBI, will somehow appear at the Boca

Grande airport, as the naive and innocent co—ed Charlotte

remembers; or whether it involves the pilgrims' aimless and

unprovoked firing of guns into the empty bush that incites

Marlow's disgust at his fellow humans.

Indeed this moral

superiority may well serve as a motivating factor in the

inception of the narrative, as it becomes apparent in both

tales that it is the narrator who requires the moral

education deemed appropriate to the fictional situation.

But perhaps the most compelling reason that Marlow and

Grace become narrators of their respective stories is that

both have been entrusted with the memory of their

protagonist.

"I was to have care of his memory...But,

there, don't you see, I can't choose.

He won't be

forgotten' (44).

Marlow is designated to dispose of Kurtz'

pamphlets, to report back to his family and employers, and

finally, to visit Kurtz's Intended.

Likewise, Grace is

sent, or claims, Charlotte's personal belongings, travel

documents, letters and a piece of jewelry.

It also falls

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182

to her lot to contact Charlotte's estranged daughter,

Marin, after Charlotte's untimely death.

When Grace cannot

explain what Charlotte had "'done' to get killed in Boca

Grande" as Marin expresses it, Grace, as narrator, ponders

the reasons she continues to be intrigued by a situation

she cannot decipher the significance of.

"Maybe there is

no motive role in this narrative.

Maybe it is just

something that happened.

Then why is it in my mind when

nothing else is" (217).

This is not a responsibility that either Grace or

Marlow sought out-—like greatness, it was thrust upon them.

In fact, for both Grace and Marlow, the contact with

Charlotte or Kurtz began as a matter of coincidence:

a

replacement pilot was needed for the steamer that was sent

to bring Kurtz down river and Marlow happened to be

available and in need of work.

Charlotte happens to arrive

in Boca Grande, a Central American country where Grace

lives and is "in putative control of fifty—nine-point-eight

percent of the arable land and about the same percentage of

the decision—making process..." (12).

As the only other

norteamericana in the country, Grace extends a cautious

hospitality to Charlotte when she becomes ill at Christmas

time.

Nonetheless, gestures which were initiated out of

simple courtesy or even expediency evolve into a moral

responsibility for the memory of the protagonist.

Of

course, each narrator is a person, as we have seen, who

183

takes his or her moral responsibility seriously.

Yet this

grave sense of responsibility is not relieved when either

Grace or Marlow seek to fulfill its requirements, which

they do by their respective attempts to pass on information

or to convey a message to the loved ones of the deceased

protagonist.

Each attempt is foiled.

As with Kurtz'

Intended, Charlotte's daughter perversely misunderstands or

willfully misconstrues the admittedly ambiguous message

proffered by the keeper of the loved one's memory.

In Grace's situation, as in Marlow's, the message

intended is not the one received.

Nonetheless, the

ceremonial visit to the survivor becomes for each narrator

a momentous occasion.

The visit to pay last respects and

thus to discharge any remaining obligations to the

deceased's memory becomes the focal point in the

narratives.

It is a point around which each narrator

begins to justify a relationship to the protagonist.

As

the encounter is retold, both Marlow and Grace evidence

signs of finding themselves more culpable than they had

originally believed themselves to be.

This conversion

happens primarily because, in the process of telling their

respective stories, each narrator finds him or her self

considerably more implicated in the very situations for

which they prided themselves on their objectivity and

detachment.

Marlow discovers, or at least begins to intuit, that

his reasons for making the visit to the Intended may have

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184

involved more than a desire to observe the social forms he

so cherished.

His uncertainty in retrospect leads Marlow

to indicate more than he intends that his motives for

visiting the Intended may have been contaminated by his own

romantic expectations.

His description of that decision

suggests that Marlow was indeed seduced by his idealization

of the image of the Intended as deduced from Kurtz'

portrait of her that has been in Marlow's possession for

some time.

He imagines her as pure, faithful, altruistic,

trusting, sensitive-—all the stereotypical virtues of

womanhood as defined by the patriarchal culture—-and

proceeds to 332 upon those manufactured impressions.

80

strong is his visualization of the woman that when he

reports his actual sight of her, he continues to interpret

her physical features and psychological qualities

accordingly.

"All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz" (44),

Marlow remarks mid-way through his narrative, quite some

time before he actually describes his encounter with Kurtz.

Those words come to resonate in his description of his

encounter with the Intended, as does Marlow's previous

observation that at one point he had found himself "limped

along with Kurtz" as a "partisan" of unsound methods (55).

So troubled is Marlow, the narrator, by his recall of this

encounter that he even admits that he is still unsure of

his motives at the time of the narration.

In this

instance, as in so many in the novel, rival versions

185

compete for credibility; but this is one instance in which

Marlow almost deliberately defers exploring the possibility

of self—deception.

"Perhaps it was an impulse of

unconscious loyalty, or the fulfillment of one of those

ironic necessities that lurk in the facts of human

existence.

I don't know.

I can't tell.

I went" (65).

The fact that Marlow categorically refuses to attribute

any significance to his apparently incidental mention of

the girl earlier at one of the prolonged pauses in the

course of narration also makes the moment suspect.

The

unguarded musing that Marlow catches himself at reveals

that the girl is inextricably linked to his memory of

Kurtz.

"...The memory of that time itself lingers around

me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense

jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean,

without any kind of sense.

Voices, voices-~even the girl

herself--now—" (42).

This 'lapse' in a carefully contrived

narrative presentation, which is Marlow's practice, is in

direct contrast to the more detailed, more premeditated

account regarding the Intended which Marlow produces at the

end of his tale.

One explanation is that Marlow only begins to apprehend

that some quality of his encounter with Kurtz's Intended

bears a striking resemblance to the encounters of the

colonials with the natives.

His indulgence in a 'lie

I "for

the salvation of another soul" marks Marlow's act as one

worthy of the "emissary of light" he so cynically scorns at

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the onset of his journey (66/9).

186

The pre-ordained plot embodied in the 'narrative' the

Intended constructs of Kurtz has the function of finalizing

Kurtz's story, and Marlow's in the process.

Her account is

one for which Marlow could not articulate the rival version

that haunts him at the time, but which he is able to give

voice to only later aboard the ship on the Thames.

But at

the original meeting with her, Marlow falls into the

Intended's conventional plot and produces the expected

ending to a romance--a statement attesting to the primacy

of romantic love.

In so doing, Marlow defers an accounting

of the rival version of Kurtz's life, a version that would

inevitably be produced by the alternate ending-—"The

horror!

The horror

As Kermode observes in The Sense of

'l'

 

an Ending, in human perception it is the end

that

 

organizes and shapes the sequence of events that precedes

it.

It is the end that actually identifies the beginning

and lends significance to the middle (33).

Marlow's

subsequent narrative aboard the ship has the function of

creating a new ending and therefore a new interpretation of

the events he recounts.

And it is in his reconstruction of

the narrative that his audience and Conrad's readers may

begin to envision patterns of meaning not yet fully

apparent to the narrating Marlow.

One new possibility is that Marlow's act of narration

serves as an act of expiation for the lie that sets uneasy

on his conscience--a lie which involves a resistance to

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187

articulating an alternate interpretation of events rather

than the established pattern of producing history as

romance.

By his 'lie' Marlow misrepresents his

understanding of events.

He fails to resist the pattern in

part because he (and perhaps Conrad) is still committed to

a version of reality that does not permit the new version

to come into circulation; namely his patriarchal view of

all human experience in which "they--the women-—are out of

it--should be out of it" (42).

A post-modernist feminist reading would understand the

ironic contradiction implicit in Marlow's statement-—not

only that indeed women are 'out of it' as they are excluded

from sources of power and discourse, but also that their

exclusion forms the very basis of that patriarchal/imperial

power structure. In that light, what is 'too dark' is

Marlow's 'unconscious loyalty' not to an individual but to

a system, a system which is based on the natural rights of

filiation.

In A Book of Common Prayer, Grace Strasser-Mendana

 

comes to a corresponding reckoning of her culpability in

the power structures responsible for Charlotte's death.

She recalls in her reconstruction of the events that shaped

Charlotte's last weeks in Boca Grande that she, Grace, also

attended the political 'evenings' hosted by Charlotte for

what passed as the intellectual elite in that country.

Grace also reveals that only now in the process of

producing her narrative about Charlotte's sojourn does she

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188

begin to apprehend the basis for Charlotte's rival version

of experience.

"We were voices...

" Grace recalls and for

Charlotte, one voice was indistinguishable from another.

The phrasing of Grace's insight of course alludes to

Marlow's narrative and Marlow's perception of his

experience as a collage of voices.

Grace also reveals that she was informed by Charlotte's

second husband (a lawyer who arranges arms sales for third—

world countries) that her own husband, Edgar, had financed

a local revolution, and that Leonard Douglas had provided

the 'hardware' for it.

In exchange, Edgar had given

Leonard the square emerald which Charlotte wears as a

wedding ring, an object much commented about in the

narrative.

"I had no idea.

I prided myself on listening

and seeing and I had never even heard or seen that Edgar

played the same games Gerardo played" (247).

Grace further

discloses that Charlotte mailed this ring to her just

before Charlotte took her last walk to the Capilla del Mar

on the evening of her death.

That gesture palpably

suggests that Charlotte knew far more than Grace had

credited her with knowing.

That possibility seriously

undermines all of Grace's carefully constructed credibility

as a narrator.

"All I know now," she declares at the end

of her narrative, and Didion's novel, "is that when I think

of Charlotte Douglas walking in the hot night wind toward

the lights at the Capilla del Mar I am less and less

certain that this story has been one of delusion.

Unless

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the delusion was mine" (280).

189

In summary Grace uses the colonial pronoun 'we' to

signal her inclusion in the corrupted political structure

of Boca Grande.

"I see now that I have no business in this

place but I have been here too long to change,'

' Grace

explains.

In claiming her share of the responsibility for

Charlotte's death, Grace concurs with Marlow's observations

about life.

"Droll thing life is——that mysterious

arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.

The

most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--

that comes too late——a crop of unextinguishable regrets"

(62).

The numerous correspondences with Conrad's work display

an affinity with the father of modernism that relates

Didion to a wide range of male writers who have also

claimed the same narrative patrimony.

As one critic

observes of Didion's use of the elegiac romance, it is "a

fictional autobiography which must disguise itself as the

biography of a person now dead" (Merivale 46).

Merivale

also notes that the elegiac romance is a form chosen by

other American male writers, namely, Melville, Fitzgerald,

Bellow, Kesy and Robert Penn Warren.

Of that group, the

book Didion's novel is most readily associated with is

Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

This association is based

primarily on 'family' resemblances shared by Fitzgerald's

and Didion's characters, that of being not atypical

Americans.

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190

Although several critics of Didion's work make note of

these familial connections between the fictional creations

of The Great Gatsby and A Book of Common Prayer, only

   

Victor Strandberg and John Hollowell discuss these

similarities at any length.

While Hollowell emphasizes the

narrative strategies in Didion's novel that resist final

interpretation or totalization of events depicted, he does

not enumerate a number of qualities shared by Didion's and

Fitzgerald's novel, qualities which as I have pointed out

are shared by at least one of Conrad's novels as well.

Specifically, Hollowell mentions the relation of the

narrator to the subject or central character of the novel

as the primary factor that enables the two novels to cohere

as a recognizable family of fiction.

Elements Hollowell

mentions include 1) Nick Carraway's (and Grace's)

distancing from the central character, (Gatsby or

Charlotte); 2) the increasing ambivalence the narrators

exhibit toward their major subject as the novel unfolds; 3)

the rumors and speculations about the central character

prior to the narrator's meeting that subject; and 4) the

fact that the narratives are reconstructed after the death

of the protagonists (168).

Strandberg generally concurs with Hollowell's

assessment of the analogous features in the two novels, but

he places a higher priority on the cultural heritage the

two sets of fictional characters share.

In Strandberg's

view, the cultural connection is central for both narrators

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191

and subjects.

Gatsby and Charlotte are examples of

arrested emotional development, according to Strandberg, as

they are both victims of a delusion rooted in the American

ethos.

That delusion manifest itself as a dedication to

self—improvement, a belief in the essentially upward spiral

of history, and an unexamined expectation that the world is

peopled with others more or less like themselves.

Strandberg maintains, although I do not, that Didion is

allied with Fitzgerald in a defense of traditional American

middle-class values.

"Both Nick Carraway and Grace, by

rediscovering the values of their respective Midwestern and

norteamericana upbringing earn narrow escapes from the

corruption of a dangerously subversive alien society, Nick

fleeing back West...Grace filling her center by taking care

of Charlotte" (157).

My sense is that Didion, some fifty years later, is not

able to defend the American ethos quite to the extent that

Strandberg implies.

Nor is she as able to construct a

narrator, whose vision, like Nick Carraway's, in retrospect

arrives at the sort of certitude Nick expresses in both the

opening and closing passages of Fitzgerald's novel.

Grace

Strasser—Mendana's "I will be her witness" and "I have not

been the witness I wanted to be"——Didion's framing

sentences for her novel--reflect far greater

epistemological uncertainty with regard to all human

behavior, including that of constructing narrative.

Didion's novel itself provides a paradigm for

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192

elucidating these distinctions.

As Grace composes her

narrative and attempts to reconstruct the sequence of

events that comprise Charlotte's 'story', she often refers

to the legal documents she has been given or claimed after

Charlotte's death, the only tangible evidence of

Charlotte's passing through Boca Grande.

Her passport, in

particular, contains a description of Charlotte that

resonates throughout Grace's narrative:

"Nationality

NORTEAMERICANA.

Type of Visa TURISTA.

Occupation MADRE"

(15).

That document of identification provides Grace with

certain facts of Charlotte's 'sojourn,' the meaning of

which remains elusive.

Nonetheless, these documents-~the

passport, a visa, a list of personal belongings, a

vaccination record, letters,-—constitute the 'text' of

Charlotte Douglas that Grace attempts to decipher.

(Hollowell comments on the textuality of Grace's narrative

as well in his article, "Against Interpretation:

Narrative

Strategy in A Book of Common Prayer.")

The specific terms

 

from the document create three central images around which

meaning begins to coalesce for Grace.

The question of national identity is one around which

much of the dramatic tension of the novel turns.

As with

her American predecessor, Joan Didion's narrator and

central character are norteamericanas, the prefix being a

necessary distinction given the fictional locale of a

Central American country.

The geographical remove affords

Didion and her characters a peripheral position from which

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to assess the particular frontier mentality that

characterizes many of Didion's heroines.

Having resided

outside the continental U.S. for some forty years, Grace

Strasser—Mendana has earned a privileged perspective of

fellow Americans such as Charlotte Douglas.

As she tries to reconstruct Charlotte's history prior

to her arrival in Boca Grande two years previously, Grace

observes that Charlotte's national identity is one of the

"three or four things I know about Charlotte" (55).

Katherine Henderson, in her study of Didion's works, also

emphasizes the quintessential quality of this aspect of

Charlotte's life.

"Her nationality is, in fact, one of the

few stable elements in her identity.

Her character is

western American not only in its delusions, but also in its

odd mixture of physical daring and intellectual weakness"

(79).

Charlotte's national character not only reveals her

naive perceptions of the world, it also serves to link her

to the assorted men who people her life like extras on a

movie set.

As a norteamericana, Charlotte is described as

"immaculate of history, innocent of politics" (56).

This

description remains accurate despite the fact that

Charlotte first marries an untenured instructor at Berkeley

and then a left—wing lawyer who sells 'hardware' to

guerrilleros in third—world countries.

"You smell

American," are Gerardo's first words to Charlotte (202).

They also operate as his opening line in his brief and

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brash seduction of Charlotte, conducted at first sight and

in full view of his own mother.

Antonio, Grace's brother-

in-law who instigates the revolution in which Charlotte is

killed, refers to Charlotte by a part of her female

anatomy, assigning it a national identity in a repeated

insult he hurls at her whenever he has the opportunity-—

"Norteamericana cunt" (222).

But the primary link of nationality in the novel exists

between Grace and Charlotte.

An appraisal of the qualities

that characterize Charlotte's national heritage leads Grace

to the recognition of a strong bond with this protagonist

she has sought to remain distant from.

"A not atypical norteamericana.

Of her time and place.

It occurs to me tonight that give or take twenty years

and a thousand miles, Charlotte Douglas's time and place

and my time and place were not too different" (57).

That affiliative connection between the women is

demonstrated by the fact that Grace purchases a t-shirt

"which had the appearance of" an American flag on it to

drape over Charlotte's coffin, which Grace accompanies to

the plane.

As narrator, Grace attributes an ironic

significance to the fact that Charlotte's body was found

thrown on the American Embassy lawn after she was shot in

the back.

That would seem to implicate Antonio in

Charlotte's murder, but Grace can't be sure——empirically

sure, that is.

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195

to Charlotte's homeless status as an American in exile, but

even more, TURISTA aptly describes Grace's view of the

manner in which Charlotte proceeds through the world.

Grace formulates this impression of Charlotte when she

attempts to warn Charlotte that one of the recurring

'revolutions' frequently staged in Boca Grande is about to

take place.

Charlotte seems not to see or hear any of the

signs Grace find obvious, such as interruptions in mail

delivery, rerouted airplane and telephone service, or

carbine holes in the railing of the local hotel, etc.

"Charlotte would remain a tourist, a traveler with good

will and good credentials and no memory..." (201).

As a TURISTA, Charlotte comprehends her surroundings

only superficially.

While she makes extensive lists of

local flora and fauna, catalogs the insects, bacteria, and

parasites indigenous to the area, and makes plans for

botanical gardens, film festivals, and colorful boutiques,

she persists in believing that her lack of interest in the

political maneuverings of the Strasser—Mendana males will

suffice to exempt her from the ramifications of their power

struggles.

She apparently feels that if she can but

duplicate her own good sense and efficiency and old—

fashioned know-how, those Western values will transform

Boca Grande into a miniature America.

She views the entire

country as a "matchbox model" village and shows a marked

preference for summary profiles of any situation of the

 

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type Grace provides at the onset of the narrative.

While Charlotte relies on letters of introduction from

San Francisco banks, American Express credit cards, and an

International Certificate of Vaccination as the 'good

credentials' that ensure her a safe passage in her travels,

Grace relies on credentials of her own as an educated,

professional woman of some means.

In fact, as narrator,

Grace makes a point of establishing her professional

credibility early in the narrative only "to legitimize my

voice" (14).

And the credentials are impressive, as is the

skepticism that inevitably accompanies her exposition of

them.

"I studied under Kroeber at California and worked

with Levi—Strauss at Sao Paulo, classified several

societies, cataloged their rites and attitudes on occasions

of birth, copulation, initiation, and deathn did extensive

and well—regarded studies on the rearing of female children

in the Mato Grosso and along certain tributaries of the Rio

Xingu and I still did not know why any one of these female

children did or did not do anything at all" (2).

Grace,

too, has traveled essentially as a TURISTA, observing and

cataloging human behavior in various parts of the globe but

without much insight as to the reasons people behave as

they do.

Now, in her sixties and dying of pancreatic

cancer, Grace relies on a more reliable credential, she

informs us——one she acquired via her role as the TURISTA

who played anthropologist and later as a relative of the

Strasser—Mendanas.

Accounting for the sources of her

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197

information on which she bases her narrative of Charlotte's

life, Grace declares:

"...Most of what I know, the most

reliable part of what I know, derives from my training...in

being de afuera..." (53).

This credential too becomes a link that connects

Charlotte to Grace as the narrative progresses.

As

norteamericanas, they are outsiders.

As American women

they acquire some of the properties of a taboo among the

local families.

Charlotte's first marriage provides

another connection between the two women in this respect.

Her former husband, Warren Bogart, with whom she travels

for a time, is described by Grace, who meets him only once,

as "an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the

inside" (165).

Grace can identify with Warren's technique

as it aptly describes her modus operandi within the

Strasser-Mendana family.

As Warren is dying of cancer too

when Grace meets him, Grace speculates that such a

coincidence "perhaps made us even more de afuera than

 

usual" (165).

Of course, as a narrator, Grace is an 'outsider' as

well.

In that role she is the intelligent and discerning

observer whose activity becomes menaced by the fact of her

inclusion in the activities observed.

That is a problem

discussed by the non-fictional Levi-Strauss with regard to

anthropological observations that becomes Grace's yet again

as she ventures into the production of literary discourse

late in life.

As I have mentioned earlier, Grace resigned

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from her studies as an anthropologist because she "lost

faith in her own method" (4); she will come to that

position again at the end of her narrative about her

relation to Charlotte, another de afuera like herself.

The third and final term of identification on

Charlotte's passport is Occupation MADRE (15).

In Grace's

composition of the 'text' of Charlotte, it is not the loss

of her patria as Charlotte moves ever southward, nor the

implicit homelessness associated with her status as TURISTA

in an alien land, but the loss of her filiative role as

MADRE that propels Charlotte into the dream that becomes

her life.

It is the loss of her child, Marin, that

initiates the subliminal obsession with mothering

activities that Charlotte undertakes after the FBI informs

her that her 18-year—old daughter has hijacked a P.S.A. L—

1011 to Utah.

As a revolutionary terrorist, Marin

announces her allegiance to her peers and their cause of

"liberation" while disavowing any affiliation with her

natural parents, Charlotte and Warren Bogart, whom she

labels as "class enemies" (76).

This maternal loss is

quickly compounded by another—-the death of a hydrocephalic

infant daughter, her namesake, in Merida after Charlotte

has begun her course south.

The significance of these

facts in Charlotte's life causes Grace to remark on this

aspect of Charlotte's plight early in her narrative.

"She

lost one child to 'history' and another to 'complications'"

(1).

199

This failure of filiation proves to be the most

identifiable connection between Grace and Charlotte and is

the first promise of affiliation to be presented in Grace's

narrative.

"One thing at least I share with Charlotte:

I

lost my child" (13).

Although Grace's son, Gerardo, is

very much alive and active in Boca Grande politics, when he

is not using Europe as his playground, Grace has

surrendered any emotional claim on him; she has

relinquished him to the paternal world of Boca Grande

politics from which Grace maintains a detached, bemused

distance.

Thus the loss of a child is a source of empathy

and compassion for Charlotte in a woman such as Grace who

has little of either quality, and whose entire sense of

distinction rests in being different from the sort of

aimless and dreamy woman Charlotte appears to be.

So affected is Grace by Charlotte's inarticulate grief

that some of the most haunting and liturgical language in

her narrative accumulates around this pivotal event in

Charlotte's life.

"Charlotte adored her, [Marin] brushed

her pale hair and licked the tears from her cheeks, held

her hand crossing streets and wanted never to let go,

believed that when she walked through the valley of the

shadow she would be sustained by the taste of Marin's salt

tears, her body and blood.

The night Charlotte was

interrogated in the Estadio Nacional she cried not for God

but for Marin" (66).

As Grace recreates this crucial time in Charlotte's

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200

history, she fashions descriptions of Charlotte's actions

so as to accentuate the child-like quality of Charlotte's

behavior.

After Marin's disappearance, Charlotte is so

benumbed with grief that she regresses to Marin-like

behaviors——she lies on Marin's bed in Marin's childhood

room, clutches Marin's teddy bear and tries to recall the

trips she and Marin took to Europe or the trips she wished

she and Merin had taken to Tivoli Gardens, a point about

which neither Grace nor we are ever completely certain.

Grace's memory of Charlotte's 'stories' when she arrives in

Boca Grande is that Charlotte's verbalizations resemble a

child's who expects her listeners to know and care about

the details elided from the story told and that Charlotte

uses words as a seven-year old might, not at all certain of

their meaning.

Even when Grace leaves Boca Grande, unable

to persuade Charlotte that danger is imminent, Charlotte

sees Grace off at the airport and performs the rituals of a

child well-taught.

She pins a gardenia on Grace's dress

and dabs perfume on her wrists "like a child helping her

mother dress for a parts" Grace recalls two years later

(264).

While Grace appears disapproving or unsympathetic

toward Charlotte's immature mannerisms in her early

account, she is demonstrably moved by the appeal of

Charlotte's child—like innocence and idealism later in

their acquaintance.

It is scenes like this that Marin's

actions become more explicable as the idealistic but doomed

201

commitments of the very young or the incredible naivete of

the not so young.

One instance, in particular, evokes a

declaration of love for Charlotte when recalled by Grace at

the end of her narrative.

From that point onward in their

relationship, Grace is actively protective toward

Charlotte, reserving a seat on the evacuation plane for

her, and when she cannot persuade Charlotte to leave, Grace

implores even people she intensely dislikes, like Antonio,

to intervene and persuade Charlotte to leave Boca Grande.

The incident that radically alters Grace's perception of

Charlotte occurs when Charlotte is forced to watch Antonio

and his peasant girlfriend shoot up cases of cholera

vaccine with M-l6s.

These cases of vaccine were the very

ones that Antonio ordered confiscated from Charlotte who

had volunteered to give inoculations during a local

cholera epidemic.

"Cholera.

It ran on the street when

they shot up the crates" (243) Charlotte reports to Grace

after a tearful session at dinner at Grace's house.

"I

think I loved Charlotte in that moment as a parent loves a

child who has...come up in any way against the hardness of

the world.

I think I was also angry at her, again like a

parent, furious that she hadn't known better..." (243).

But perhaps the image that is most vivid in Grace's

recreation of the maternal grief Charlotte suffers, however

inarticulately, is the description of Charlotte, alone,

caring for her dying daughter in Merida.

After a two-week

vigil, the baby, dehydrated and convulsive, dies in

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Charlotte's arms in a parking lot of a Coca-Cola plant.

The local undertaker dresses the infant in a lavender nylon

shawl and puts red shoes on her feet--an image that remains

with Charlotte for months to come and one she refers to

often.

But when Charlotte tries to visit the baby's grave

just before leaving for the airport, she cannot locate it

among the numerous small unmarked graves at the cemetery.

She deposits the bougainvillaea she has stolen from the

hotel on one of them.

After the vaccine incident Grace can no longer claim

that her interest in Charlotte is merely professional.

For

in her narrative as in her life, Grace has hidden behind

several disguises in her relationship to Charlotte.

One is

her professional role as an anthropologist who studies the

rearing practices of female children in various cultures;

another is her own maternal role as the matriarch of the

Strasser—Mendana family.

An important distinction between

Charlotte's designation as MADRE and Grace's as matriarch

(not a term that Grace actually uses but one that is called

to mind by her actions) is that a matriarch is a woman with

power—-legitimate power while a MADRE has none.

In Grace's

case, that is a power she accrued from the local

patriarchal structure upon the deaths of her husband and

father-in—law.

It is within the socially sanctioned role

as matriarch that Grace initiates her contact with

Charlotte, visiting Charlotte when she becomes ill at

Christmastime, and somewhat at the promptings of her

203

brother-in—law than in power, Victor.

But as the

friendship between Grace and Charlotte develops, the

maternal instinct that is camouflaged by the matriarchal

posture emerges.

Charlotte gives evidence of understanding

Grace's unstated attachment to her by the trust implicit in

her act of sending Grace Marin's address and the emerald

ring that connects all their lives just before her own walk

to death.

(A number of critics have commented about the

significance of the emerald ring as a token of the bonds,

fatal or friendly, that connect the major characters in the

novel.)

Didion's use of these three aspects of identity to

characterize both the narrator and protagonist in A Book of

 

Common Prayer works well to elucidate the paths to

 

affiliation for these two women.

A communal spirit can be

fostered among those of common origins, status and

occupations, official and unofficial.

What is neglected,

ignored, or overlooked, however, is the obvious factor of

gender identity.

As gender is a designation that would

conventionally appear on a passport, gender presents itself

as an option novelistically; so its exclusion may be seen

as deliberate.

If that choice is deliberate, there may be

a number of reasons for it, some of which seem more

reasonable than others.

An obvious one is that Didion does

not wish to focus on the gender of her characters; she may

feel that in so doing she risks the danger of becoming

entrapped in the differences she creates to distinguish

204

herself from her predecessors.

Another possibility is that

to emphasize the gender of her narrator and protagonist is

to once again resort to filiative associations rather than

the affiliative possibilities it is my contention Didion

sets out to explore in this third novel.

For it is worth

noting that both in her private conversations, and in her

fictional discourse, Didion is notable for her isolation of

women from each other; she personally claims not to know

what to say to women, and often assigns that attribute to

her female characters, such as Lily McClellan and Maria

Wyeth.

The decision not to accentuate gender as a

connection factor in A Book of Common Prayer has the effect

 

of calling attention to the social and cultural factors

that make possible affiliation between women, as well as

those that serve to render that affiliation unlikely--i.e.

the political sphere of human activity.

The decision not

to focus on gender identity also permits Didion to explore

the many differences between her two female characters

which may in the long view be more detrimental to

affiliation than their shared difference from men.

Nonetheless, as in the works of her male predecessors,

especially in Heart of Darkness where the issue of gender

is also suppressed, it is everywhere present as a salient

feature in Didion's novel.

Indeed, a significant point of

difference from her paternal forefathers is Didion's choice

of two female characters with which to rework this

generational story of affiliation.

Almost any reading of

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Didion's third novel refers to this obvious point.

"Until

now, the central relationship [in these novels] has almost

always been a male—bonding between narrator and subject;

Didion seems to be the first to make that central

relationship a female bonding" (Merivale 45).

Strandberg

also acknowledges Didion's achievement "as a female

counterpart of The Great Gatsby" (148).

He goes on to

 

discuss the role of gender in the novel, particularly in

relation to Charlotte's sexuality.

Strandberg finds

Didion's portrayal of Charlotte remarkable as a portrayal

of modern sexuality.

His discussion is accompanied by a

fairly lengthy analysis of the mother/child religious

imagery in the novel.

He seems unaware that his emphasis

on sex and religion repeats the patriarchal views

conventionally employed by men who examine women's fiction.

Still, Strandberg remarks that it is "Didion's extended

treatment of female identity that comprises the book's most

original, profound, and brilliant achievement" (148).

Part of Didion's achievement consists of a depiction of

both the world women are excluded from and the world they

create within and around that excluded space.

In fact, a

considerable portion of Didion's novel is devoted to

showing how impossible in the late 1970s is Marlow's claim

that the women are completely out of it.

In Didion's work,

the women are very much in it.

Still, there are some readings of A Book of Common

 

Prayer that contend that Didion simply repeats Conrad's or

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at least Marlow's disclaimer.

Judith Kegan Gardiner's

article, "Evil, Apocalypse, and Feminist Fiction," includes

Didion's third novel among four contemporary women's novels

that "display comparable urgency about connecting personal

and political values in contemporary society" (74).

That

claim seems justified, but then Gardiner goes on to say,

"In the novels, the most satisfying and most dangerous

emotional bonds are between women and men and women inhabit

entirely different public and private spaces" (78).

While

that description may fit a feminist perspective of novels

or even of reality, it seems off target with respect to

Didion's third novel, although it could well apply to her

two previous works of fiction.

My contention is that the gender issue has entirely

infiltrated both public and private space in Didion's

novel, and not necessarily to the benefit of the females

involved.

For instance, both Grace and Charlotte lose

their only child (at the time), a male and a female

respectively, to the realm of politics/history.

These are

areas of social activity that Gardiner labels "inviolably

male preserves in the novel" (78).

Also in Boca Grande,

public life or political experience is integrated with

private life; politics are quite literally a family affair,

the notorious and frequent revolutions being conducted

entirely by "people we know" as Grace admonishes early in

her narrative.

Nor are the politics "ethically...neutral"

as Gardiner maintains, as evidenced by Grace's sense of

207

incredulity and then remorse when she finally realizes her

own culpability in the 'political' act of Charlotte's

death.

Indeed, it is only in this instance that Grace in

the process of her narration begins to understand the

implicit privilege accorded her designation as de afuera.

 

To be out of it, to be truly an outsider, comes to be seen

as one of the many comforting illusions of the novel.

As a matter of fact, politics prescribes the arena for

interaction between men and women in public life, in the

novel, just as sex does in private life.

Such public and

private alliances tend to be fraught with "personality,"

delusion, and violence in the fictional world of Boca

Grande; in short, all are struggles for power.

Grace and

Victor cautiously barter tidbits of information in their

see-saw struggle for dominance in their legitimately yoked

control of Boca Grande politics.

Warren Bogart,

Charlotte's first husband, uses the power of his personal

appeal and outrageous violations of social conduct to

dominate private social occasions.

Alone with Charlotte,

he exudes a sexual charm over her which he manages to

reinforce primarily by frequent and repeated incidents of

violence and humiliation.

If that machismo technique

displays signs of weakening, as when he is ill and dying of

cancer and is rendered impotent, Warren will resort to

inflicting guilt on Charlotte by implying that their

daughter, Marin, 'left home' because of Charlotte's

inadequacies as a mother and wife.

208

Despite her victimization by Warren, a condition in

which she does participate for some time because of her

guilt for leaving him and lying about it, there are

instances where Charlotte demonstrates a single—minded

courage as when she saves four people when a bomb goes off

in the birth control clinic she works in.

This is a fact

Charlotte fails to mention when she tells her second

husband, Leonard, of the bomb; she remembers only that she

bled all over the clinic as she was in the midst of

changing a tampon when the bomb went off.

But this is the

sort of a physical courage that is Charlotte's inheritance

as a Westerner; an ethical courage in the relationships she

has with men is more difficult to come by, but she finally

discovers it within herself.

She leaves the hospital with

the deformed baby that neither Leonard nor Warren or even

the doctor wanted her to see.

"She was not going to do

what they wanted her to do.

She was not even sure what

they wanted her to do but she was not going to do it....She

was going to leave here alone with her baby" (179).

Charlotte's decision not to do what the men in her life

wanted her to do regardless of what that was is a decision

that her predecessor in Didion's fiction, Maria Wyeth, also

arrives at; at some point, the issue seems almost but not

quite irrelevant——it does seem to usually be connected to

the women's maternal selves--these women rebel against the

patriarchal restrictions placed on them.

But first the

woman has to sever the insidious connection she has with

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the males in her life.

209

Part of the appeal that women like Charlotte have to

men like Warren seems to be a question shared by her of the

extent of his sexual power over her.

His interest, and

perhaps hers, is sustained until that limit is exceeded.

Women like Charlotte assume that the sexual interest a man

demonstrates is an interest in them personally—which rarely

proves to be true.

Usually the mutual sexual attraction

wanes once the limit of his sexual power is established.

For Charlotte, the limit of Warren's sexual power over her

was reached when Warren hit the young girl he insisted

travel with them through the South.

Warren exceeded his

limit again when he and Leonard argue that their respective

claims on Charlotte should take precedence over her

responsibility to her dying infant.

She leaves Leonard to

bury the dying Warren, as it turns out, and proceeds

southward toward Boca Grande and Grace Strasser-Mendana.

Another way the issue of gender differentiates Didion

from her literary forefathers is by her specific creation

of Grace—Strasser-Mendana as the female narrator of

Charlotte's story.

As a fictional construction herself,

Grace violates several taboos regarding conventional female

behavior.

She is educated, intelligent, wealthy and

powerful.

She is also old, and she is dying.

Although she

acquired her wealth and power through her marriage to Edgar

Strasser-Mendana, the eldest son, that acquisition is

nonetheless perceived by Victor and Antonio, the two extant

210

sons, and lawful male heirs, as a usurpation on Grace's

part.

(Thus Grace has cause to suspect that the rage and

violence and suspicion the two direct against Charlotte is

actually intended for herself.)

Grace's method of

acquisition of 59.8% of the control in the family empire

duplicates that of both of her sons grandfathers.

Both

were men who failed in their youthful professions as

'wildcatters' or adventurers and con—men, and so married

the local equivalent of wealth and power where they

happened to settle.

It is interesting that Grace

apparently "lost faith in her own method" somewhere about

the same time as she discovered that her mentor, Claude

McKay, had published her work under his own name.

Only

after that little—mentioned incident did Grace 'retire'

from her career and then revert to the traditional female

plot:

marriage.

Grace knows, however, that power corrupts

and by the end of the narrative, realizes that she, and by

implication, all women, are susceptible to that corruption,

no matter how detached from its source they claim to be.

By engaging the characters of Grace and Charlotte in a

dialectic within A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion has

an opportunity to examine rival versions of the female

experience.

One of her characters, Charlotte, is evidently

modeled after the maternal history Didion inherits from her

own Western past, and which she reconstructs through family

stories and heirlooms.

In a revealing Esquire essay,

Didion refers to this maternal inheritance after describing

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a number of the artifacts her female ancestors constructed

on their journey westward.

These artifacts are proudly

displayed in Didion's home.

"I came into adult life either equipped or afflicted

with a specific narrative about the nature of life as the

women in my family had understood it.

These women were

pragmatic and in their deepest instincts clinically

radical, given to breaking clean with everything and

everyone they knew....They tended to accommodate any means

in pursuit of an uncertain end.

They tended to avoid

dwelling on just what that end might imply....They could

shoot and they could handle stock and when their children

outgrew their shoes they could learn from the Indians how

to make moccasins..." (10). In this vignette, we easily

recognize the physical courage and domestic efficiency

demonstrated by Charlotte's killing a chicken with her bare

hands, or staying awake for 34 hours to inoculate the

local population against a cholera epidemic, in many cases

against the population's superstition.

There is also the

willful resistance to analytical thought and the tendency

to dreamy rationalizations so characteristic of Charlotte's

demeanor when confronted with ambivalence.

But the vignette also displays the potential for

ingenuity in resolving private and public problems.

These

women are not restricted to repeating the patterns of their

past, but are willing to learn new modes of doing and

feeling.

This is evident in their willingness to replace

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old shoes with new moccasins.

That act carries within it a

recognition that the maternal commitment must supersede all

other allegiances—-even political ones.

For at that time,

of course, Indians were generally perceived as the enemy to

the forward expansion these women risk life and limb to

achieve.

Yet their emphasis is directed to methods of

cooperation rather than competition with the natives for

the resources of the land.

In this way these women ignore,

as Charlotte does, the changing political alliances around

them and turn their energies and emotions to the

transhistorical and transpersonal tasks of caring for those

that are entrusted to their care.

Didion's dictum "take

care of somebody" has its origins in the 'narratives' of

her many mothers' lives.

In contrast to Charlotte's portrayal Didion's portrayal

of Grace Strasser—Mendana represents another version of

female experience.

This portrait appears to be more

closely aligned with Didion's adult and learned perception

of the world.

In Grace, we see a woman who has

appropriated and absorbed all the patriarchal values of

that system as her own.

It may be notable that the women

in Didon's novels who presume the autonomy usually deemed a

male attribute in Western society are women whose childhood

was spent either free of maternal influence, such as Martha

in Run River, or as an orphan like Grace.

Didion may be

 

suggesting that autonomy comes more 'naturally' to those

women who pay attention to what men do and not what they

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213

As in the case of Charlotte, gender is not a pressing

issue for Grace, but for very different reasons.

First, of

course, is that Grace possesses all the qualities women

presumably envy in men:

education, wealth, power,

intelligence, eloquence.

And then, Grace is—-because of

her age and illness--comfortably beyond the reaches of

sexual passion that by its nature facilitates contact

between the sexes, but as easily can trigger conflict.

Yet

it appears as if Grace was never subject to passion, given

her predisposition to the "mechanical view" of experience

Grace prefers in her narrative.

"Reverse the entire

neutron field on my lawn, exhausting and disturbing and

altering not only the mood but possibly the cell

structure...of everyone there" (206) is the way Grace

describes sexual attraction when it is her son who is

seducing a woman she is coming to care about.

Grace's

faith in the scientific method and its trappings, namely a

kind of scientific aestheticism, is still prevalent at this

stage of the narrative.

Otherwise she might recognize that

her detached objectivity is dependent upon her not

 

recognizing the potential for harm in Gerardo's seduction

of Charlotte.

Grace prefers empirical fact to feeling as demonstrated

by her explanation to Charlotte that "fear of the dark is

an arrangement of fifteen amino acids" and that it "exists

irrelative to patterns of child-rearing in the Mato Grosso

H

214

or in Denver, Colorado" (5).

Grace provides this exchange

early in her narrative as an example of the oppositions

between herself and Charlotte.

When Charlotte responds

that she doesn't "quite see why calling it a protein makes

it any different," Grace tries again to clarify her point.

However, in retrospect, as readers we understand that it is

Grace more than Charlotte who is being obtuse.

This point

becomes clear when Grace insists on challenging Charlotte's

denial of fear of the dark; but the oblique reference to

the existence of the phenomena in Denver, Colorado,

irrelative to child—rearing practices, indicates that Grace

herself is susceptible to that fear.

The fact that Grace

"craves the light in Boca Grande" also supports that

submerged fear she must have felt as a child left alone in

the Brown Hotel for six years after her parents' death.

When 'facts of this sort are extrapolated from the

empirical contexts in which Grace, as the narrator,

submerges them, it is easier to explain the affinity Grace

felt for Charlotte and the denial of it that Grace imposes

on their relationship, even after Charlotte's death.

It is

only in the construction of her narrative that Grace

becomes aware of her own faculty for sublimal perceptions.

These perceptions exist somewhat like Charlotte's do,

mixtures of fact, feeling, and fiction, but severed from

the particular history, personal and cultural, from which

they are derived.

And so, like Marlow, her paternal

predecessor, Grace's experience as narrator is not totally

.
3

h
e

r
.

215

transparent to her, nor to us.

Possibilities of meaning

accumulate beneath the "sleek surface" Didion aims for in

her art.

For Grace it is her own traumatic experience of

the profound loss of all her filiative connections that

enables her to appear——even to herself—-as the prescient

observer of human behavior she claims to be.

But Grace

does come to realize, ultimately, that knowing is not

enough, but then neither is unexamined feeling of the sort

that overwhelms and drives Charlotte to extreme

commitments.

Neither knowledge nor passion is natural and

therefore filiative modes of human experience; both are

cultural forms of affiliation, but it is only in the

construction of a dialectic between the two that such

connections can be made.

The pursuit of either one in

isolation necessarily precludes a measured consideration of

the other, or a recognition of the pivotal relationship

between them.

In trying to explain to herself why Charlotte was the

victim of Antonio's hatred, Grace contemplates:

"I suppose

she was a norteamericana, she was a woman, she was an

unpredictable element.

I suppose she was a version of me

at whom he could vent his rage" (219).

In this statement

Grace brings together a number of elements that can stand

in contradiction:

the reference to norteamericana can

signify one's resourcefulness and vitality, or it can

signify one's otherness and exclusion.

"Unpredictable" can

indicate a lack of stability, an untrustworthiness or it

216

can suggest the promise of possibilities unexplored.

The

statement also suggests that one can be victimized by

elements other than gender while indicating that power

protects, regardless of gender.

It also alludes to Grace's

discovery that self—deception is not limited to male

narrators, but is rather to be examined as a

rationalization for one's power.

In The Political Unconscious, Jameson postulates that

 

"ethics is the informing ideology of the binary opposition"

(114) when whatever is Other is evil and the self is good.

Didion has utilized this ethical ideology to explore the

dialectical relationship between the American versions of

the historical forces of empiricism and romanticism, as

represented by Grace and Charlotte respectively in the

novel.

In choosing to work out the difficulties of rival

versions of reality in this manner, Didion accomplishes

what is presented as a possibility later in Jameson's work.

There he proposes to read 'a given style as a projected

solution on the aesthetic or imaginary level, to a

genuinely contradictory situation in the concrete world of

everyday social life.

The purpose of this possibility is

to "restore, at least methodologically, the lost unity of

social life" (226).

Didion's technical choices then have

an effect similar to that of Conrad's, about whom Said

comments:

"Quite literally, therefore, Conrad was able to

see his narrative as the place in which the motivated, the

occasional, the methodical, and the rational are brought

217

together with the aleatory, the unpredictable, the

inexplicable" which are then described as "an interplay of

antithesis" (92).

Circumstances from the everyday social

world are brought into literature where in the realm of the

imagination such contradictions as knowing versus feeling

are tolerated to a higher degree than possible in every day

life.

Grace posits this possibility when she acknowledges

that she has no business in Boca Grande, that all her

assumptions about her self and its relation to history

require reconsideration, but in actuality, it is too late

to do anything very effectual about her dilemma.

Still,

the process of reconstructing her relationship with

Charlotte has provided the opportunity to find community

inside differences.

A prior reference has been made to Didion's comment in

an interview regarding the illusions she had struggled

against in her personal life.

Her response is

"...I was

one of those children who tended to perceive the world in

terms of things read about it.

I began with a literary

idea of experience, and I still don't know where all the

lies are" (Art of Fiction 162).

Like the way one accepts

 

without question the virtues of one's family, Didion

accepted literary discourse as a valid interpretation of

her world.

With the passing of years and experience,

however, she has come to reassess that literary heritage

and to examine the ideological implications of even the

most 'empirical' evidence regarding such aspects as

technique, style, voice, etc.

218

As I have demonstrated, Didion's adaptation or

'adoption' of Conrad's narrative strategy from the Heart of

Darkness is a gesture which effects a relation to other

literary progeny of Conrad's, for instance, Fitzgerald's

The Great Gatsby.

As a consequence Didion's third novel is

situated within a 'family' of fictions that share certain

features in common but also call attention to the valid

distinctions to be made between them.

Nor does Didion's

participation in this family of fictions seem to be one of

conflict with her paternal predecessors as Bloom's "family

romance" would indicate should be the case.

In fact, Didion's impetus toward affiliation seems more

radical than mere challenge or competition:

she insists on

inclusion within the extended literary family; she expects

to have her rival version accommodated within the existing

structure.

Indeed, she uses the ideas and concepts

expressed in that literary legacy to justify her position

as a true literary daughter of the traditional literary

institution.

Upon reflection, Didion finds pride in her literary

heritage and a high value for its rich and varied

traditions.

She incorporates the literary products of the

past into her own contemporary milieu as an artist and

public figure much as she integrates the historical

artifacts of her personal history with the contemporary

design of her family home.

In an effort to understand not

219

just the past, but her relationship to that past, Didion

allows history and experience to interrogate each other

within her works.

Referring to her literal maternal ancestry and its

relation to her present status as a contemporary woman

(some years ago), Didion admitted to "a certain native

ineptness at tolerating the complexities of post-industrial

life" (10).

Her essay collections of the 60s and 705, as

well as her fiction of the same period, generally attest to

that difficulty and to Didion's struggle to come to terms

with it.

Yet, as Frye notes in her book Living Stories,

Telling Lives, "our self—histories chan e as a function of

8

 

the questions we put to the past" (68).

When Didion begins

to question her relation to her paternal literary

inheritance, at a time when the fashion is to establish a

working model of one's connection to a maternal legacy, her

fiction becomes more complex, more compelling, and more

compassionate.

That is not to suggest that there is not a rich legacy

from their mothers that all women writers can lay claim to.

It is just to indicate that an examination of her paternal

heritage produced in Didion a recognition of the value

implicit in differences.

She discovered the contrast

between the principles of affiliation and those of

filiation.

For it is the principle of filiation to

duplicate,to repeat, to value sameness.

That is a

principle that frequently operates in feminist criticism.

220

But the principle of affiliation offers the opportunity to

value difference; to learn that out of difference what is

communal is relationship; that the relationship between the

differences is more important than the differences

themselves.

In A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion makes a quantum

 

leap toward tolerating the complexities of contemporary

life.

That movement is made possible by her willingness to

accept the necessity of finding in affiliation the source

of comfort and strength, unity and coherence once provided

in her work by the structures of filiation.

JOAN DIDION:

"TELLING STORIES TO LIVE."

Volume 2

By

Diana R. Pingatore

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to

Michigan State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1987

DEMOCRACY A NOVEL:

 

A FAMILY OF FICTIONS FROM HISTORY TO ROMANCE

In her fourth and latest work of fiction, Democracy, A

 

Novel, Didion's pre-occupations with the cultural shift

from filiation to affiliation are reconstructed as a

dialectical relationship between literature and life.

These modernist concerns coalesce around her non—diegetic

position as a writer who is female, contemporary, and

American.

Issues of gender, time, and place—predominant

and recurring themes in all of Didion's work, fiction and

non—fiction - provide the focus for the diegetic world of

Didion's novel as well.

Her concerns as a writer, and the

concerns of her characters as fictional constructs, blend

and blur in this intricately woven story of politics and

literature.

Reviewers nearly all indicate the intricacy of

Democracv's design.

An early review by Joyce Carol Oates

is representative:

"The construction of "Democracy'

' feels

like the working out of a jigsaw puzzle that is slowly

being put together with a continual shuffling and re-

examination of pieces still on the edges or heaped in the

middle of the design....Despite the fact that the pieces

are known to us, face down and face up, almost from the

start, there is an intense suspense, which seems to be

221

222

causeless...suspense arising from the assembly of the

pieces, that is, from the procedures of narrative

themselves" (18).

That Didion's fourth novel is likely to be somewhat

unconventional in its design is intimated by the title

itself.

First, the title points to the historical

conditions of the work's construction.

Democracy A Novel

 

situates Didion as a writer of a particular time and place:

an american of the post-modern period.

"Democracy", of

course, recalls the satiric novel by Henry Adams of the

same name, as well as Alexis de Toqueville's prescient

assessment of the model of American democracy he observed

in 1831-32.

To the extent that both of these works

function as critiques of the democratic process as it was

worked out in the New world, they serve as models of the

authorial stance Didion takes in her latest work toward

this once again timely topic.

Didion's affiliative relation to her paternal

predecessors in Democracy A Novel is not a repetition of

 

the filiative pattern of her relation to Conrad in A Book

of Common Prayer.

In this novel, however, the relation is

 

more removed and alluded to only indirectly rather than

openly declared.

The nature of Didion's relation to the

literary past in this work is more intrinsically

affiliative, as work to work, and as such operates rather

as Said describes the function of the critical

consciousness in The World, the Text, and the Critic:

"The

 

223

critical consciousness is part of its actual social world

and of the literal body that the consciousness inhabits,

not by any means an escape from either one or the

other...cooperation between filiation and affiliation...is

located at the heart of critical consciousness" (16).

Like Adams' novel, Didion's novel concerns itself with

the nature of political life in contemporary America.

And

as with the Adam's work, the focus of that concern is a

female protagonist in Didion's Democracy as well.

As a

 

female, the protagonist is someone whose position is

marginal or peripheral to, and yet intimately connected

with, the fate of the primary 'players' (the politicians)

who in the 1970's as in 1868, are male.

So the

relationship of gender to politics is an immediate and

overt issue in Didion's latest novel, just as it was in A

Book of Common Prayer.

Didion's protagonist, Inez

 

Christian Victor, disaffiliates herself from political life

just as Adam's Mrs. Lee does.

Yet Didion's heroine is

always more implicated in political life than Adams'

heroine is.

For it is Inez Victor herself who must finally

relinquish

"the American exemption" from the immorality of

political life, a gesture that Adam's Mrs. Lee is permitted

ultimately to avoid by a tour of the historical monuments

of Western Judaeo—Christian civilization.

As with the Adams' novel, Didion's work, at times,

appears a thinly—disguised version of actual people and

events from contemporary life; in other words, it is a

224

roman a clef, or literally a 'novel with a key'.

Indeed,

this is one of the haunting and somewhat perplexing

qualities of the novel.

Oates observes in her review that

the Victors appear to bear some resemblance to the Kennedys

(19), a connection that Martha Duffy makes as well in her

Time review.

Duffy speculates that Didion's actual

 

reporting on the Reagan term as governor may also influence

Didion's depiction of political life.

"Although the

Victors have Kennedyesque political notions and glamour,

the hilarious back room detail in Democracy_may come from

Sacramento" (114).

Part of the key, though, to understanding the novel's

design, I think, lies in the remaining words of the title:

A Novel....Didion's point of difference from her

predecessor.

Her deliberate attention to the specific

nature of the literary genre she is producing accomplishes

several objectives at once.

First, the gesture appears to

function as a query of the dialectical relation of

literature (A Novel) to life (Democracy).

But on further

consideration, democracy of course is not life as such,

that is unmediated reality, but already an idea, an

interpretation of reality, complete with the ideological

implications of such a symbolic universe.

Then, the title

clearly declares itself as a work of fiction; however, the

fact that such a declaration is deemed necessary just as

clearly situates the work in its contemporary historical

context.

It does so by announcing itself as a piece of

literary prose whose ontological status may be in

225

question , an ever—recurring problematic of the post-

modern era.

That the novel refers simultaneously to a work of

quasi—fiction, Adams' Democracy, and to a work of non—

fiction, de Toqueville's essay, "Democracy in America,"

also supports the deliberately ambivalent status of

Didion's work.

This particular ambivalence, that of the

work's uncertainty regarding its literary status, is

mirrored in Didion's choice of narrator for Democracy A

Novel:

a reporter called Joan Didion.

Thus, some of the

'facts' of the novel correspond to the 'facts' available

about Didion's actual experience as a reporter.

"What is a

live fact——Joan Didion-—doing in a work of fiction?"

Oates

inquires in her New York Times Book Review article.

"In

 

current theories of fiction, much attention is given to the

role of the narrator, considered as sheer verbal device,

without correspondence to any anterior reality.

Yet if I

understand Joan Didion right, here she is doing the exact

opposite, inserting an attestable fact—~herself--into the

moving sands of fiction" (19).

This ambivalence regarding the status of the literary

production points to other analogies explored in all of

Didion's works as well; namely, the relation of literature

to life, the relation of culture to nature, and the

relation of affiliation to filiation.

"The filiative

scheme belongs to the realms of nature and of 'life',

226

whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and

society" (Said 20).

In Didion's life, and now in her

fiction, the relation of fiction to non-fiction becomes an

issue for her both as a writer and as a female in

contemporary American culture.

This issue will be

considered from both perspectives in my discussion of

Didion's works.

In this chapter (4), I will discuss this

relation as an issue reflected upon within her latest

novel; in Chapter 5,

I will take the issue up again in the

context of the history of Didion's literary production of

both fiction and non-fiction over the past twenty-five

years.

The ontological status of all literary production

surfaces in Didion's fourth novel almost as an echo of the

emphasis given to the production of narrative itself in A

Book of Common Prayer and Play It As It Lavs.

Indeed, many

of the specifically narrative concerns of those two novels

(the literary precursors of Democracy so to speak) are

 

reintroduced in this later work and set into play with each

other.

The focus shifts from hgy_to tell a story or how to

produce a narrative to the conditions under which

narratives are produced at all.

The shift entails a

movement from the private and personal to the public and

political realms of experience.

Having satisfactorily

established in A Book of Common Prayer an answer for

Maria's implicit question in Play It As It Lays—-Why

 

produce narratives at all--(the answer being to forge

affiliative connections, especially with other women),

227

Didion is free to pose other questions regarding the nature

of this life—sustaining activity, the production of

narratives.

Focusing on the literary status of narrative

indicates a wider grasp on Didion's part of the 'political'

nature of literature itself.

As Terry Eagleton remarks in

Literary Theory An Introduction, "Literature, in the

 

meaning of the word we have inherited, is an ideology.

It

has the most intimate relations to questions of social

power" (22).

If the literary status of Democracy A Novel is

 

problematic, that situation is complicated by another facet

of the work.

The novel presents itself as a work of

metafiction.

The structure of the narrative provides

evidence of this.

It is a story within a story about the

production of 'stories'.

This concern with the convoluted

internal workings of producing narrative resonates a

concern about fictionality that is shared by many of

Didion's contemporaries, feminist and non—feminist alike.

The purpose of fiction in post modern society recurs as

a preoccupation of many literary critics.

In his

introduction to a collection of essays, Surfiction Fiction

 

Now and Then, Raymond Federman maintains that "the primary

 

purpose of fiction will be to unmask its own fictionality"

(8).

Richard Poirer in The Performing Self sees this

movement toward metafiction as one that carries political

overtones for the relation of the writer and the critic:

228

"A considerable body of literature seems determined...to

evade analysis by being exhaustively and often satirically

self-analytical" (viii).

Each critic cites the works of

male writers such as Barth, Barthleme, Mailer, Pynchon,

etc. as evidence of the prevailing interiority of post-

modern fiction.

This preoccupation with the internal

workings of fiction is not without its critics.

On the

other hand, critics such as Gerald Graff in Literature

 

Against Itself sound a note of alarm at the ease with which

 

some literary critics accept and even valorize the demise

of literature as we know it and embrace the "ultimate

refutation of philosophical and literary realism" (19).

Whereas the predominantly male version of this dispute

about the relation of literature to life, or the lack

thereof, generally progresses to a stance that focuses

exclusively on textuality as the basis of literature, the

American feminist version arrives at quite a different

conclusion.

Feminist critics insert themselves in this

debate about the purpose of literature in modern life.

They decline the abstractions preferred by males because

the feminist recognize that literary ideology functions

directly in their lives.

Feminist critics see metafiction

as an effort to delineate a woman's relation to bggh life

and literature.

Joanne Frye, in Living Stories, Telling

 

Lives, claims that "a feminist poetics of the novel can

examine the novel's capacity both to represent women's

 

experience and to redefine the premises of representation"

 

229

(16).

In Writing Beyond the Ending, Rachel du Plessis

argues that the female's dilemma in relation to life and to

literature is essentially the same dilemma.

Referring to

Virginia Wolf's sense of the duality of women's lives,

especially as evidenced in the works of nineteenth century

women writers, du Plessis states, "The debate between the

inheritor and critic is a movement between deep

identification with dominant values and deep alienation

from them" (39).

The woman writer then is in a position to

require a duplicitous structure for her narrative.

She

needs a structure that permits her to depict her attachment

to those cultural values, including literary ones, that she

has inherited.

She also needs, simultaneously, to register

a critique of that attachment, based on her marginality to

the dominant culture.

As Didion's position in regard to

her literary past (as I have constructed it in Chapter 3)

is precisely that of

"inheritor and critic", the feminist

position seems most promising as a method of assessing her

position as a post—modern writer.

Didion's focus is always

on the relation of literature to life, and not on

literature's distance from lived experience.

As I have indicated, Democracy A Novel consists of two

 

stories——one is a romance, the other a history.

The

romance explores the public and private lives of Inez

Christian Victor, daughter of a Hawaiian family "in which

the colonial impulse had marked every member" (26).

Private life is rooted in the twenty-year affair of the

230

heart that Inez Victor and Jack Lovett conduct with each

other, and which runs parallel to their respective

marriages to other partners.

The public life evolves

around Inez's role as wife of Congressman Harry Victor, a

failed presidential candidate; it also touches on Jack

Lovett's reputation as a quasi-CIA agent, someone who had

"various irons in the fire" (39).

This romance narrative

is framed by another:

a history of the romance narrative,

as constructed by Joan Didion, the reporter who follows the

enigmatic figures of the romance over a twenty year period,

roughly spanning the time in American history from the

advent of the atomic bomb to the Vietnam War.

The metafictional structure of the novel enables Didion

to posit a dialectic between her actual roles as a public

figure:

the 'factual' reporter and the writer of fiction.

As such, the structure examines the relation of fiction to

non-fiction and the relation of literature to life.

In so

doing, it engages Didion, a contemporary American writer,

in a post-modern/feminist dialogue.

Joyce Carol Oates describes the romantic aspects of the

novel best in her New York Times Book Review article:

"One

 

must applaud the author's nerve in making a C.I.A. agent in

his 60's the love interest and parfait gentile knight of

 

her book.

Actually, this is a romance, even a sentimental

novel, with the C.I.A. man and the Congressman's wife as a

pair of eternally faithful lovers, constantly separated and

constantly reunited till his death and burial under a

231

jacaranda tree—-after which Inez Christian Victor has only

one choice, in essence the choice of Guinevere:

to take

the veil.

Kuala Lumpur is her Almesbury" (19).

As any number of feminist critics have observed, the

romance is a genre of fiction preferred by women writers

and one traditionally implicated in the maintenance of the

patriarchal structure.

"Women have been bound by the

anticipated resolution of plot difficulties in marriage,

death, or painful isolation, by definition of character in

terms of the traits of "femininity", by the presentation of

reality as the relational and domestic social context that

the dominant sexual ideology presumes for women, and by the

coherence of the love story," claims Frye (36).

And as we

have seen, Didion's novelistic resolutions display some

characteristics of these conventional plot resolutions.

All of Didion's women end up alone, although not

necessarily in painful isolation.

Lily Knight McClellan is

widowed when her extramarital lover is shot by her jealous

husband who then commits suicide; Maria Wyeth prefers the

confinement of a mental institution to the supreme madness

of the entertainment industries, film and gambling;

Charlotte Douglas is shot, a victim of sexual politics as

much as of revolutionary politics, and Grace Strasser-

Mendana waits in the light of Boca Grande to die of

pancreatic cancer, "neither hopeful nor its opposite" (14).

Only in this latest novel does the heroineescape marriage,

death, or ostracism.

Inez literally abandons her grown

232

family without repercussions.

Rather than continue as

Harry Victor's wife, or Adlai and Jessie's mother, Inez

chooses to run a refugee camp in Malaysia.

But this

apparent anti-romantic reversal of the conventional

femininity plot is made problematic by the fact this

resolution is presented as romance.

Nonetheless, as I

shall show later, Didion's frame text serves to critique

this subtly seductive resolution so as to reveal the

political implications of the romance.

In so doing, I shall argue that Didion achieves what

Rachel du Plessis defines as "writing beyond the ending" in

her work of the same name (5).

For this feminist critic

this position is arrived at when a woman writer "produces a

narrative that denies or reconstructs seductive patterns of

feeling that are culturally mandated, internally policed,

hegemonically poised" (5).

But before turning attention to the frame narrative of

Didion's novel that critiques Didion's use of the romance,

I want to examine in greater detail the traditional

trappings of the realistic novel as contained within the

romance narrative.

Specifically I want to compare certain

elements of characterization, theme, plot, etc. with those

of Didion's previous novels.

As I indicated previously,

this fourth novel serves as a gloss of its literary

precursors, Didion's previous novels.

This relationship, a

primarily textual one, and therefore affiliative in nature,

seems more pronounced in this novel than does the

233

attachment to Didion's actual literary predecessors.

This perspective remains valid despite the fact that

more than one reviewer comments specifically about the

paternal legacies that are apparent within Didion's novel.

Of course Henry Adams work is cited as a precursor, but

echoes of Hemingway, Orwell, Mailer, Eliot, and James Jones

are cited as well.

I find Oates remarks about the strong

influence of Conrad's vision in the novel most pertinent to

my discussion.

"This powerful relation to film, stronger

than that of any other current author, must account for her

affinity with Joseph Conrad, whose tales and romances——

above all "Nostromo," "The Secret Agent," and "Heart of

DArkness"--seem to have anticipated film, like an uncanny

prophecy" (18).

Oates goes on to note that Conrad's

ability to create potent images is what

"one senses [of]

Conrad in Miss Didion's "Democracy"; he has passed through

this territory, making trail blazes" (18).

While Oates'

comment is valid in my view, it is also true that Didion

retraces novelistic paths that are as much her own as they

are Conrad's.

It is as if Didion is trying to imagine

rival versions for her own previously imagined narratives.

This retrieval of her own literary past is very much in

keeping with her narrative technique in each of her novels;

it is also in line with her clear understanding that we are

each a product of a very particular history.

In an early

essay which is included in Slouching Toward Bethlehem,

 

Didion says of the people of her native California "they

234

will have lost the real past and gained a manufactured one"

(186).

Twenty years later of course Didion realizes that

all pasts are manufactured to some extent and Didion uses

the creation of Democracy A Novel to assess her own part in

 

that manufacturing process.

Therefore I want to look at

elements in this novel which echo those of the earlier

works while also of course accentuating the differences in

those elements of representation.

An obvious feature to begin this analysis with is the

choice of a female protagonist.

For in many ways, Inez

Christian Victor is yet another Didion heroine.

Martha

Duffy, a frequent reviewer of Didion's work in 2123

magazine, described Didion's heroines in the 1970s in the

following way:

"the Didion girl-woman has taken shape.

She is as sensitive as a Geiger counter, articulate in

feeling but not in speech, an incurable romantic with vast

moral expectations of herself and others——especially men"

(67).

Physically these women, like Didion, are thin,

fragile, nervous yet pretty.

But perhaps the most telling

detail is that they are all some years past their youthful

attractiveness.

Everette McClellan notices Lily's fading

prettiness when she comes to meet him on the dock where

Ryder Channing's body lays between them.

"No one had ever

called her beautiful, but there had been about her a

compelling fragility, the illusion not only of her bones

but of her eyes" (14).

A couple eye up Maria, a model and

an actress who finds it difficult to get work, in a

235

restaurant as a possible sexual partner and pronounce her

as "thirty-six...but a good thirty-six" (168).

Charlotte's

presence is made conspicuous, according to Grace, by an

"extreme and volatile thinness" and a "strain of

exhibitionism" (l9).

Inez Victor, too, is described in

terms that render her physically vulnerable.

"She is a

woman at that age (a few months over forty in her case)

when it is possible to look very good at certain times of

day...and not so good at others....Her dark hair, clearly

brushed by habit to minimize the graying streak at her left

temple, is dry and lusterless..." (76).

And like

Charlotte, some disrepair of her expensive clothing

suggests "some equivalent disrepair of the morale, some

vulnerability, or abandon" (19).

Only one reviewer, Michael Wood, in the London Review

 

of Books, makes a point of the similarities of Didion's

 

heroines.

In the same gesture however, he questions

Didion's preference for this type of protagonist.

"I have

always found it curious that Didion, who in her essays is

such an alert and diligent observer of the busy world,

should construct her novels around such withdrawn, benumbed

women, but I take it that these pieces of her working life

do match, make a picture:

the journalism saves her from

what the characters in the novel are always in danger of

becoming.

Democracy doesn't offer a different type of

 

heroine, but it does address the question her heroines pose

for Didion, and it permits her to wonder how much of a

novelist she is" (16).

236

Wood's comments are validated in part by Didion's own

reflections on the purpose of her heroines and their plots

in her fiction.

"You know how doctors who work with

children get the children to tell stories?

And they figure

out from the stories what's frightening the child, what's

worrying the child, what the child thinks?

Well, a novel

is just a story.

You work out things in the stories you

tell" (160).

Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, posits

 

this idea as an argument for the ideological nature of

narrative itself.

"Narrative form is...an ideological act

in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary

of formal 'solutions' to unresolvable social

contradictions" (79).

Based on this perspective, Didion's view of such social

contradictions is clearly focused on certain identifiable

issues that occur repeatedly in her novels about women.

Maternal loss and sexual politics are two such issues that

capture the Didion imagination.

As Grace Strasser-Mendana

wryly observes in A Book of Common Prayer, Charlotte's

dreams dealt only with "sexual surrender and infant death,

commonplaces of the female obsessional life.

We all have

the same dreams" (53).

Maternal loss, the rupture of the primary filiative

connection, is a grief that is shared by Maria Wyeth,

Charlotte Douglas, and Grace-Strasser Mendana.

Only Lily

McClellan is exempt from this traumatic loss, except in the

237

form of submitting to an abortion she doesn't really

desire.

It appears as if Inez Victor, too, will be subject

to the same debilitating trauma when, at a critical point

in the novel, her daughter, Jessie, flees from a drug

rehabilitation center to look for a job in Saigon.

As this

is the Saigon of the spring of 1975, when American forces

and support personnel are evacuating the city, Jessie's

decision proves to be even more dangerous and incredulous

than it seemed when she nonchalantly mentioned the

possibility to her mother during a Christmas visit.

As it turns out, Inez Victor is not doomed to this

frequently imagined gate of Didion's heroines.

Due to the

capable if questionable intervention of her lover, Jack

Lovett, Inez's daughter is rescued.

Unlike Charlotte

Douglas, Jessie Victor is not required to live out the

inexorable narrative logic of her naive actions in a

volatile political climate.

Unlike Charlotte, Inez can and

does 'save' her daughter from the fateful consequences of

impetuous and youthful choices.

Like Persephone, Inez

Victor negotiates an arrangement with the gods whereby her

daughter is reclaimed.

So redemptive is this maternal act

of salvation that Jessie remains in felicitous contact

with her mother, and with the narrative Joan Didion, the

reporter, even at the close of the novel when we learn she

is in Mexico City writing a historical novel.

Whereas Maria Wyeth's impractical dream of rescuing her

daughter, Kate, and herself from their common fate as

238

institutionalized females constitutes only a minimal hope

at the end of Didion's second novel, both Inez Victor and

her daughter are pursuing their own vocations as autonomous

but responsible women at the close of Democragy.

In

 

contrast to Charlotte Douglas or her surrogate mother,

Grace Strasser—Mendana, women who too late recognize the

value of affiliation, Inez Victor not only reclaims her

natural female child, she also extends her maternal concern

to the refugee children of Kuala Lumpur.

Ironically, these children are refugees from the

Southern Asian countries in which America has been waging a

war——a war that is at the center of the dispute between

the males in Inez' public and private life.

This is the

same war Jack Lovett views as a business enterprise whereas

Harry Victor belatedly finds it a potent issue for his

failed presidential campaign.

It is also the same war that

reveals the hypocrisy that Inez's son, Adlai, shares with

his father.

Adlai is the sort of young man who calls his

sister a slut, who informs his mother when she inquires as

to his intentions to visit a girl hospitalized due to

Adlai's drunk driving that the girl

"is definitely on the

agenda" (62).

When, in the midst of the crisis of her

sister's death and her daughter's disappearance in Saigon,

Inez is confronted by Adlai's sardonic comment that perhaps

his sister "can score" in Saigon, Inez slaps him.

By the end of the novel, it is clear that her son

remains on the periphery of Inez Victor's life.

So this

239

modern day Persephone relinquishes any emotional claim to

her cherished daughter's male twin as part of the

inarticulate bargain she strikes with the gods.

In this

apparently expected loss of her male child, Inez Victor

resembles Grace Strasser—Mendana more than she does any of

the other Didion heroines.

It is almost as if such a loss

is so early anticipated that these women never even

register a clear protest against it as they most certainly

do on behalf of their daughter's.

In her work, Women

Writing About Men, Jane Miller notes that "of all the

 

descriptions of themselves with which women have had to

grapple, those which define them as mothers, and especially

as mothers of sons, have been the most contradictory and

the most silencing" (103).

Miller goes on to locate the

difficulty in this relationship in the "ambiguity of

women's collusion with male dominance" in the experience of

motherhood, especially of the male child (105).

Miller

also suggests that women have been most evasive about this

aspect of motherhood in part because "there is no story

which tells them why and how they love their sons" (114).

An important facet of this issue in regards to Didion may

be, but not necessarily, the fact she has no son; however,

she does have a brother, so she would have observed the

mother/son relationship first hand.

It seems more likely

to me that it is the impoverished state of literature in

this respect that may be the most significant factor in the

rather collective evasion of this issue.

240

Yet, if the mother/son relationship is peripheral in

the lives of Didion's female protagonists, their relations

to the males who are their sexual partners is a focal

point.

This is another matter in which Inez Victor reveals

her sisterly connection to Didion's previous heroines.

While there are significant differences in the working out

of these sexual relationships, certain patterns repeat

themselves regularly in Didion's work.

The most

predominant is the pattern of both a husband and a lover,

represented as light and dark images, which is in effect a

polarization of the attributes that attract and connect

each protagonist to these men.

Indeed, so persistent is

this pattern that these male pairs are metamorphized over

and over again in Didion's novels.

The use of the double

image whose facets are polarized is a recurring pattern of

course in the works of male writers who portray

women;

the virgin/witch motif is well documented in feminist

writings.

Not so well documented is its reversal in the

writing of women such as Didion.

What seems to be

different in Didion's portrayal of the double image is that

there is no rigid assignment of the dark or light features

based on the legitimacy of social status.

For instance,

either husbands or lovers can accrue positive or negative

qualities, and indeed, in some cases, a man's image may

change from light to dark or dark to light.

First, it should be noted though that contrary to the

assumptions of a patriarchal society, none of Didion's

241

heroines are exemplars of marital fidelity.

In fact each

of them explicitly transgresses this dictum, often more

than once.

Yet none of them appear to suffer untowardly

because of this failure of loyalty expected of the

conventional wife.

In fact, contrivances of plot indicate

that the heroine often resorts to sexual independence as a

way of provoking her indifferent or unresponsive husband to

some kind of emotional reaction.

Both Lily and Maria turn

to lovers when their respective husbands withhold sex and

affection from them as a stratagem in their embattled

marriages.

Charlotte's marriage to Leonard Douglas has

become celibate by the time she embarks on her odyssey of

sex and death through the American South with her ex-

husband, Warren Bogart.

While the taking of a lover often

does not elicit the desired response from the husband, it

often does establish a sense of control and freedom for

these wounded women.

What does not seem possible, even in

Didion's latest novel, is an avoidance of the polarization

of male attributes; as a consequence, a realistic but

affectionate and mutually supportive marriage is never

envisioned in Didion's works.

This duality of male images begins in Didion's first

novel, Run River.

Lily Knight McClellan is attracted to

 

both her husband, the blond, bland, conservative Everette,

and to his rival for her affections, the dark, menacing and

reckless Ryder Channing.

In fact, her attraction for both

of these males is a duplication of a previous one on the

242

part of Everette's sister, Martha, for both men.

Ultimately, however, both women lose both men.

In Maria

Wyeth's world, all men are representative of the power

structures that exploit women and each other.

The only

exception is a very minor character, a friend of her

parents, who offers a sincere but ineffectual comfort to

Maria.

Still, Maria finds some degree of relief in the

laughter and affection shared with her married lover, Les,

whereas a state of war aptly characterizes her relationship

to her manipulative husband, Carter Lang.

Only the

bisexual pimp, BZ, appears to understand Maria's despair,

but he too exploits the vulnerability in Maria that he

shares.

Charlotte's loyalties are torn between the

conventional appeal of her liberal, wealthy, and reliable

husband, Leonard, and the dark and febrile attraction that

her roguish exhusband, Warren, exerts over her.

Inez repeats this pattern of the double image, but with

a difference.

Aligned by marriage and accident (she was

two months pregnant when she married Harry Victor) to a

shallow man whose public persona requires that she suppress

her own identity, she preserves that small private self

that remains untouched by her public image via her largely

platonic relation to Jack Lovett.

For Inez, the twenty—

year romance becomes emblematic of her threatened selfhood.

As reflected in Jack Lovett's eyes, Inez can recall a

vestige of her former seventeen—year-old self, the self

that audaciously initiated the love affair with the married

243

and much older Jack Lovett; the self she was before she

abdicated her own identity to become the packaged commodity

that became known as "Harry Victor's wife".

An interesting reversal of the dark/light images occurs

in this latest triangle in Democracy A Novel.

It is the

husband who emerges as the dark and unsavory character,

whereas it is the lover who collects all the images of

integrity and light.

All of which seems rather remarkable

as Jack's genuine concern for Inez, his actions as her

'parfait gentile knight' is his most admirable quality.

 

The only other redeeming quality he possesses is perhaps

his clear-eyed realism, or what passes for that scarce

commodity in the company of the rhetorical morons who

inhabit the universe of the story.

In Jack Lovett's view,

information is power, "an end in itself" (30).

He is a man

capable of putting together isolated bits of information

from vastly different sources so as to deduce the need for

action, and then implementing such action almost

singlehandedly.

He recognizes economic interests as

indigenous to war and apparently is not squeamish about

doing whatever is necessary to accomplish the task he has

undertaken.

His only aversion seems to be to publicity,

which places him in direct contrast to Harry Victor who

thrives on his status as a celebrity.

True to his code,

Jack Lovett dies as anonymously as he lived; the news of

his death becoming public several weeks after the fact.

Jack Lovett appears to be based on a certain type of

244

man that Didion displays a fondness for, the prototype of

which is John Wayne.

His primary attractions are his

sexual authority, an ability to devise his own code and to

live by it, (no matter how simplistic that code may be) and

that implicit promise to protect the female of his choice,

to take her to "the bend in the river where the cottonwoods

grow" (SIB 30).

What Didion appears to admire in Jack

Lovett is an "emotional solitude, a detachment that

extended to questions of national or political loyalty"

(219).

But perhaps it is necessary to recall that it is a

fictive Joan Didion, in the guise of a reporter, that is

making these comments, although the nostalgic emotion

attached to the descriptions seems attributable to Didion

herself.

But it is a romantic nostalgia that Didion fights

all the way.

For of course what emerges in this construction of Jack

Lovett is the typical hero of romance.

The hero is a

literary construct against which actual men never quite

measure up, contaminated as they are by loyalties of all

sorts, and the first of which is not likely to be a loyalty

to the woman they love.

In her book, Becoming a Heroine, Rachel Brownstein

 

points out that "real women, like realistic novels, are

haunted by the shaping shadows of romance" (32).

In her

portrayal of Jack Lovett, Didion reveals as much as

anywhere in the novel the shape such shadows have taken in

her consciousness.

Still, there are elements in the novel

245

which strain against this powerful tendency toward romance.

One resisting element is Jack's age-—a 60-year-old man, in

custom-made seersucker suits, with a slightly military

bearing, is but a faded copy of a once virile notion.

As

Didion indicates in the frame text, what appears as realism

can veil a hopeless romanticism.

He exhibits a machismo

that is as vulnerable as it is wistful.

His touching

insistence of the simple and lucid view of reality can all

too easily slip into a simplistic avoidance of actual

complexity.

Jack Lovett's romanticism is revealed in his vision of

Inez as the seventeen—year—old girl he met twenty years

previously.

"The picture he had was of Inez listening to

something he was telling her, listening gravely, and then

giving him her hand.

In this picture she was wearing the

gardenia in her hair and the white dress she had worn to

the ballet, the only dress in which he had ever seen her,

and the two of them were alone.

In this picture the two of

them were in fact the only people on earth" (87).

"Pretty goddamn romantic,'

' even Jack Lovett admits some

twenty years later when he discloses his secret vision to

the reporter, Joan Didion (87).

Didion's inclusion of all

these details and the commentary on them draws attention to

the nature of romanticism——in many ways an emotional

solitude shared by two people, a detachment from all other

loyalties, personal and political, that people usually

engender by their multiple connections to each other.

246

Instead, romance sets one apart, makes heroes and heroines

of ordinary people in the narrative they each construct of

their fortuitous encounter.

So, in a sense, Jack Lovett's

recognition in the spring of 1975 just before Inez leaves

her husband to be with him, his recognition of Inez as

"Harry Victor's wife" (15). is an implicit violation of his

twenty-year fantasy of Inez as a solitary being whose only

meaningful intercourse has been exclusively with him.

To some degree this fantasy is reminiscent of one

shared by another Didion male with whom Lovett has an

affinity-—Everette McClellan of Run River.

Everette, too,

 

has a version of the woman he loves that seems impervious

to the onslaught of evidence to the contrary.

He refuses

to acknowledge Lily's flagrant affairs, even when she takes

Ryder Channing as a lover, a man whose maltreatment of his

sister, Martha, at least contributed if not precipitated

her decline into despair and finally suicide.

When

Everette's son reports the rumors of his mother's

indiscretions, the father can no longer ignore Ryder's

presence in the marital triangle.

Everette dimly perceives

Ryder as a threat to his own seventeen—year-old daughter as

well. Given Ryder's propensity for the McClellan females,

Everette's fears may man be justified, especially as Julie

is developing into a combination of Lily and Martha.

But

if Everette cannot ignore his rival, neither can he

accommodate a revision of his version of reality.

As we

have seen, he uses his father's gun to shoot Ryder and then

247

himself, and thus acts out to its logical conclusion the

heroic drama of the patriarchal myth.

If these 'positive' male characters are shown to be

disabled by their romanticism, their darker brothers that

populate Didion's works display no such vulnerability.

These men are insensitive, outrageous, manipulative and

denigrating of all women, but especially of their 'chosen'

female.

Both Carter Lang and Warren Bogart enjoy demeaning

their women in public and private.

Both men exPect their

wives to tolerate their blatant male infidelities while the

women's adulteries are severely punished.

Their particular

brand of cruelty keeps Maria and Charlotte enthralled with

these dark demons of the heart, as the women have been

taught to be in the stories they have read about love.

The

relationships also re—enact the spiritual dilemma of their

Protestant heritage.

On one hand, they feel chosen, set

apart, and special, even as recipients of exceptional

cruelty.

On the other, they are mired in the

unpredictability of these acts, never certain of the males'

response, a victim of the whims of the powerful man who is

as likely to badger or beat the selected female as he is to

caress or comfort her.

As victims of torture have so

succinctly and tragically pointed out, the alternation of

cruel and kind acts is the perfect recipe for

victimization.

The less volatile male, husbands such as Leonard and

Harry, are simply too involved in their own careers to be

248

much concerned with their wives' personal crises.

Each

marriage has entailed a 'rescue' of the wife from messy

circumstances—-Harry 'saved' Inez from an illegitimate and

unwanted pregnancy and Leonard was there to pick up the

pieces of Charlotte's life when she divorced Warren.

That

rescuing action seems to weigh on both couples as an

obligation whose worth is never quite determined and

therefore always due on demand.

The social status extended

by the male to the female of the couple ends up being a

kind of extortion.

Whatever degree of social security the

women derive from these marriages, these models of

husbandry never incite the imagination of the women as do

the darker, or even the lighter, brothers.

But none of the plots of Didion's male heroes are

exempt from a fatal resolution.

In each of Didion's

novels, the significant male character dies.

Some are

killed, (Ryder), some commit suicide (Everette and B2), and

some die natural deaths (Warren and Jack).

The other men

with whom the protagonists have connections are abandoned

by them and their author when the protagonists jettison

their pasts (Carter, Harry, Leonard).

In any case, the

connection to the male which so completely defined the

protagonist at one point, albeit for a variety of reasons,

is the connection that must be severed, voluntarily or

not, for the female protagonist to achieve an autonomous

state.

That autonomous status, one much valorized by feminist

249

writers and critics, is not unproblematic for Didion's

heroines.

The independence achieved can sometimes appear

as much a relief due to the cessation of conflict in these

war-torn marriages as it can a true victory over

debilitating dependence.

Autonomy, for females as well as

for males in Didion's world, always entails loss.

So, if Inez Victor escapes the entrapment of the

conventional femininity text, perhaps she does so because

the circumstances of her life have enabled her to avoid the

crippling fate that her literary sisters could not.

Inez,

through a combination of luck and loyalty, does not violate

Didion's frontier code of morality:

not to abandoned one's

dead to the coyotes.

While Inez, like Maria and Charlotte

before her, is not present at the death of either of her

parents, unlike the other two women, she does maintain

that painful but redemptive vigil on two occasions; once,

at the bedside of her only sister, and then again, at the

unexpected death of her lover.

In fact, a significant point of distinction between

Inez and her literary precursors is her possession of a

sister whom she cares about.

As their mother, Carol

Christian, had abandoned the family when the girls were

quite young, Inez assumed a maternal responsibility for her

younger outspoken sister.

The Christian sisters remain in

close contact with each other despite their mobile lives

and despite the fact that the contact consists almost

entirely of cross country phone calls devoted to a recall

250

of their shared past.

But this pattern is a significant

departure from past practices for Didion.

Lily McClellan

is unable to make significant connections with any woman,

even her mother or her sister-in—law who desperately seeks

that contact.

Maria's relationships to the females in her

world is not one of mere detachment; the other females are

as vicious in their judgments and as eager to exploit her

vulnerability as the men in the novel are.

And, as I have

shown, Charlotte and Grace are initially quite wary of

each other, and even later as their mutual love and respect

grows, are reticent about any overt expression of that

affection.

Inez, on the other hand, is adamant about her loyalties

to her dying sister, Janet.

She demands that a picture of

Janet be put back in its usual place and not in a position

that renders it a memorial gesture.

She refuses to

participate in the Christian family's bizarre version of a

wake while Janet is still unconscious at the hospital.

For

her, Janet is not as she is for the family, "available to

be dead" (157).

In fact, the events of this romance are set into motion

by the shooting of Janet Zeigler by her bonafide lunatic

father, Paul Christian.

The only ostensible reason

provided for Janet's murder is her dalliance with a native

Hawaiian Congressman, whose dead body is found on Janet's

liani with her own.

Her father appears to be outraged by

the racial implications of Janet's affair rather than by

251

any ethical considerations.

In any case, Janet is left

unconscious, a state she remains in for several days until

she can be pronounced medically dead.

Only Inez remains by

her bedside faithfully, and with Inez, Jack Lovett.

Waiting for her sister's death is the first act Inez

undertakes after she walks out of the Christian family home

and away from her family with Jack Lovett.

As with

Didion's other heroines' belated rebellion against the

status quo, some crisis of maternal responsibility

precipitates the action.

Maria leaves Carter after she

gets the abortion he demands she have or lose Kate, and

Charlotte leaves both her husbands when they try to

interfere with her decision to care for her dying infant

daughter.

For Lily, the change occurs after her sister-in-

law's suicide.

In each case, the heroine feels her

adherence to patriarchal values has compromised her graver

obligation to care for someone.

For the Didion heroine,

Carol Gilligan's "ethos of responsibility" (165) always

finally supercedes the standard of justice imposed by the

patriarchal society they are part of.

The moral choice,

however, depicted as an act of strength by and for women is

likely to be viewed by men as a betrayal, as a failure to

honor a tacit contract.

Because these women have

internalized both value systems, they are likely themselves

to feel highly ambivalent about their decision and to

experience considerable anxiety in its implementation.

Perhaps the unresolved inner conflict is what finally

252

causes these women not just to make a change, but like

Didion's maternal ancestors, to make a radical break with

their pasts.

Each becomes, to varying degrees, what Maria

claims as an identity at the end of her narrative, "a

radical surgeon of my own life" (202).

"It's too late for

the correct thing," Inez Victor tells Jack Lovett just

before she leaves with him for Hong Kong to search for her

lost daughter, Jessie (187).

Inez best represents the

position of these adult women who seek autonomy.

When the

reporter Joan Didion sees Inez in the refugee camp at Kuala

Lumpur, she observes Hut mx;mflymm Inez fulfilled a long—

standing desire to work with refugees, but she "had herself

been a kind of refugee.

She had the protective instincts

of a successful refugee.

She never looked back" (56).

Thus, whereas Grace faults Charlotte for her inclination to

live an unexamined life, in Didion's fourth novel, Inez is

praised for her ability to turn her back on a past that

demanded only her passive endurance.

Frye recognizes that the subversive acts of adult

females present different problems for their author than do

those of the younger heroine.

"The conventional

assumptions about womanhood are already in place as a part

of novelistic characterization...the representation of

adult women seems from the beginning to be confined within

the femininity text" (109).

Part of Didion's quarrel with

the feminists is their preference for versions of

experience that avoid or elide the complexities of adult

253

life, when adult is defined as intrinsically related to the

very social structures feminists would have one repudiate.

For Didion the difference between the quintessential crises

of the young versus the adult female protagonist is the

difference between foregoing what one never had experience

of and losing what one holds most dear.

To renounce the

future is a far different gesture than to relinquish the

past.

For this reason, these adult heroines seem to

require some event must intercept the ordinary quality of

their experience to make them aware of the ideological

dangers in the social structure within which they seek

security.

This emotional/psychological paradigm holds true even

when ordinary experience is far from ordinary, as is the

case of Maria Wyeth.

In this respect, Inez's story most

strongly resembles that of Didion's protagonist in her

second novel.

A crucial feature the two protagonists share

in common is their celebrity.

While Maria's public image

is derived from her work as an actress and a model, Inez's

status is derivative not of active work but of static

position, that of Harry Victor's wife.

Maria finds the

discrepancy between her image on film and her actual

experience an intolerable conflict.

Inez has virtually no

private life to conflict with or critique her public

persona.

The narrative Joan Didion reports that Inez found

it difficult to conceive of life beyond the camera range by

the time the story unfolds.

That is part of the appeal of

254

her tenuous but tenacious connection to Jack Lovett--it is

one of the few events of her life which is conducted out of

the public eye.

So valued is the quality of privacy in

Inez's life that she feels it imbues the romance with a

mysterious power and accounts for its inexplicable

longevity.

As public figures, Maria and Inez finally realize that

their lives are scripted entirely by others, mostly males.

Neither woman possesses the power to tell her own story.

At any number of occasions in the story, Didion makes a

point of reporting Inez's silence; most often, these are

occasions that she should be the speaker.

Part of Maria's

paranoia about the production of any narratives in the

novel has its roots in her experience of always being

scripted by others, and inadequately so.

Yet so addictive

is that usurpation of human experience that Maria comes to

rely on someone else's, anyone else's, version of events to

make sense of her own life.

The degree of her addiction is

demonstrated by the episode with the young man in the duck

pants and white Corvette who drives her to the place she

gets the abortion.

In and through his eyes, Maria's moral

dilemma is diminished to a casual encounter about the

relative values of different models of cars.

As the wife of a political figure, Inez's life is even

more circumscribed than Maria's is.

A public relations

man, (a function adapted from the movies and applied to

political life) Billy Dillon, one of the most memorable

characters in the novel, has the expressed purpose of

providing Inez and her family with sanitized scripts of

255

their lives, past, present and future.

This man insinuates

himself in even the most private of moments, advising Inez

about how to cope with her jealousy of Harry's female

groupies that accompany them on various political trips.

This modern—day travesty of John the Baptist prepares the

way for the newly-announced saviour of society in 1970,

Harry Victor, who must be accompanied by the golden nuclear

family.

When a crises occurs in the Victor family, the emphasis

is not on how to solve the problem or how to determine its

causes; their collective energy and time is spent deciding

how to "advance" it to the press.

An elaborate scenario is

worked out between the local district attorney and the

Christian family men about the disposition of their loony

relative when he is indicted for the murder of his daughter

and her lover.

These "mutually choreographed proceedings"

are conducted without consulting the man's closest living

relative, his daughter, Inez (179).

One of the best lines

in the book belongs to Inez who is almost always silent

during these absurd exchanges of inflated rhetoric.

Billy

Dillon informs Inez that he is at a loss about what to tell

Harry to do when Harry's plan to collect Jessie by private

plane to attend her aunt's funeral is derailed by Jessie's

refusal to attend funerals as a matter of principle.

"Tell

him he should have advanced it better,

Inez retorts (171).

H

A disinclination to be caught up in the "stories"

256

produced by others causes Maria and Inez to be reticent in

the production of even their own narratives.

The first-

person sections of Maria's story comprise only 15 of the

total 212 pages of the novel, and much of those fifteen

pages is left blank.

When pressed to explain her decision

to remain in Kuala Lumpur, Inez Victor produces only

thirteen words in her defense:

"Colors, moisture, heat,

enough blue in the air.

Four fucking reasons.

Love, Inez"

(232).

Like Maria, Inez resorts to the aesthetic aspects

of her environment as a focus for her newly-achieved

autonomy.

"Carter called today, but I saw no point in

talking to him.

On the whole I talk to no one.

I

concentrate on the way light would strike filled Mason jars

on a kitchen window sill.

I lie here in the sunlight and

watch the hummingbird" (213).

Thus Maria explains her

austere repudiation of the social structures that have

circumscribed her experience.

While Inez Victor's position at the end of her story is

clearly preferable to that of Maria's (unlike Maria, Inez

is content and engaged in productive work), nonetheless

both women share a sense that it is pointless to explain

their actions to those who will never understand.

A point

of difference though is that Maria assumes no one will

understand, whereas Inez at least gives Joan Didion the

opportunity to try.

Even more, Inez entrusts Didion the

reporter/narrator with her story.

This is a significant

257

gesture considering Inez's previous experience with the

press.

On one occasion when queried as to the "major cost"

of public life, Inez responds, "Memory, mainly" (51).

When

prompted to elucidate her remark, Inez indicates that

public life causes one to lose track of one's whole life,

that it is as if one had undergone shock treatment.

She

informs the press agent that "things that might or might

not be true get repeated in the clips until you can't tell

the difference" (53).

When the reporter protests that she

wants the 'true' version from Inez herself, Inez replies,

"You might as well write it from the clips.

Because I've

lost track.

Which is what I said in the first place" (53).

By the time the narrative Joan Didion visits Inez in

Kuala Lumpur, she is Didion's sole source of information

surrounding the events of Jack Lovett's death.

Inez's

memory has improved considerably by this time, precisely

because it has not been tampered with by press agents or

news releases for several months.

In fact the reporter,

Joan Didion, has to make three separate requests for an

interview before Inez inexplicably grants one six months

after the murder of her sister, the disappearance of her

daughter, and her decision to leave Honolulu with Jack

Lovett in the spring of 1975.

During the summer and fall

that follows, the narrative Joan Didion conjectures that

Inez "seemed to have renounced whatever stake in the story

she might have had, and erected the baffle of her achieved

serenity between herself and what had happened" (216).

258

During that time Inez directs Didion to the stories

produced by Harry Victor or Billy Dillon as sufficient

explanations of her actions.

Only when a number of stories begin to circulate about

Jack Lovett's activities during and after the Vietnam War

does Inez Victor reconsider her vow of silence.

The

reporter Joan Didion assumes Inez's decision to talk with

the press is, in effect, a ploy to allow Jack Lovett to

defend himself against the mounting allegations of wrong-

doing.

Didion discovers that assumption to be "too easy a

reading of Inez Victor"; as it turns out, Inez wants to

inform Didion of Jack's death two months previous to her

visit; therefore he will be unavailable to answer the

congressional subpoena issued for an investigation of his

wartime conduct.

In the romance story, Inez's gesture

seems worthy of Guinivere in Camelot, as an attempt to

salvage the damaged reputation of her much aligned hero——a

quintessential romantic gesture.

Hers is an effort to

offer a rival version of the many stories produced by the

press of Jack's activities and Didion's own in Democracy A

 

Novel.

But the double sense of critique of and attachment to

the romance story produced in the novel is to be discovered

in the relationship of the frame text to the story it

encloses.

It is in the dialectic between the "romance"

narrative, whose characters and events recall 'factual'

occurrences, and the history of the "romance", constructed

259

by an apparently 'factual' Joan Didion, that the complexity

of Didion's novel reveals itself.

The pivotal point of

intersection of the two tales functions to critique the

democratic ideal referred to by its title.

It is also

where this deceptively sleek and transparent fiction begins

to double and redouble back on itself.

"This is a hard

story to tell,‘

' the narrative Joan Didion claims on page 15

at the end of Chapter One.

The sense of the difficulty the

narrator struggles with becomes apparent only when one

tries, as I do, to articulate the patterns of significance

in this intricately-woven story of public and private life

in contemporary America.

A focal point for this novelistic intrigue resides in

the position of the narrator——as the reporter, Joan Didion.

The factuality of this narrative agent as well as the

particular approach she uses to present her narrative are

aspects of the novel much commented upon in reviews of

Democracy A Novel.

 

Many reviews complain about the anti-fictional devices

employed by this narrator just as others ignore them; still

other reviewers grudgingly admit the novel warrants its

complexity.

Two reviewers focus on the individual scenes

that remain with the reader after the book is read.

Both

Anne Tyler and Laura Berman find this Conradian influence

the primary appeal of the novel.

Martha Duffy of Time Magazine and Christopher Lehmann—

Haupt of The New York Times find the metafictional

 

260

techniques unnecessary and ultimately unjustified.

Duffy

calls this self-conscious attention to narrative "throat

clearing" (114) while Lehmann—Haupt accuses Didion of

"mostly fashionable gestures of despair" (23).

(The latter

accusation is an oft repeated one by critics who tend to

revolve around either end of the political extremes.)

The review of Christopher Hitchens in Times Literary

 

Supplement depicts Didion's allusions to her literary past

 

in the most unflattering light, referring to stylistic

choices that reflect "the undigested influences of Kurt

Vonnegut" or that display the credentials of "a student

with some, but not many, courses in Hemingway" (1018).

He

then proceeds to dismiss Didion as a writer who like her

character "must be introspective, even self—doubting.

The

cuticles, perhaps, a little gnawed" (1018).

In Yale Review, Howard

aptly notes that Didion's

 

narrator is not required as the teller of her tale in the

way that "Gatsby and Daisy need to have Nick around....I

can find no development in this character, no pressure,

emotional or artistic, that exerts itself within the text

to include her as more than an arty stage manager who

switches the scene in front of us" (xiv).

This reviewer

calls Didion's resolution to Inez' story more sentimental

than Henry Adams'.

"Didion elevates Inez to cinematic

sainthood, a romantic solution" (xvi).

While he touches

succinctly on questions that need to be raised regarding

Didion's novel, his answers are too simplistic. Howard

notes the disregard for literary convention or the

261

questionable employment with equal deprecation; but more

seriously, I think, without crediting the authorial Joan

Didion with the literary finesse to make these

discontinuities intentional.

Not that Didion's novel ever truly escapes being

"deeply enigmatic" as Oates observes in her review.

Oates,

too, wonders about the book's "knowingness", but speculates

that it may be connected to the novel's celebrity theme

(19).

Oates"

P

P

erce tion that "ever one in 'Democrac ' is

Y

.1

some kind of insider...the author herself has some

 

complicity in the insider—outsider game" (19) rings true in

my reading as well and is a point I will return to later.

But first, the two reviews that provide the most

comprehensive look at Didion's novel perceive a

relationship between its title, its style, its structure,

and its subject.

Michael Wood, in The London Review of

 

Books, detects these salient features of the work in his

comparison of Didion's novel to one by Angela Carter.

"But

what if the first freedom [the freedom to juggle with

language] is illusory, if all we have to juggle with is

cliche, the language of others, a shabby idiom we can't

refresh and can't abandon?

What if the 'shop—

soiled...romance'...seems...merely worn down, beaten thin,

at best only the shadow of an old puzzle?

This is the

dilemma that confronts the narrator and characters in Joan

Didion's Democracy, a novel whose title itself mimes a

 

262

slippery problem.

Democracy, in Didion's work, is not a

form of government, but an item of rhetoric" (16).

In the New York Times Book Review, Thomas R. Edwards

 

supports Wood's observations with his own account of the

importance of unrelated facts as a metaphor for the

democratic value of literal equality.

"The significant

relations [emphasis added] of events wash away in a flood

 

of facts those equally circumstantial details that news

reporting democratically represents as being about equal in

import" (23).

Thomas, too, focuses on the slipperiness of

language and meaning in contemporary society by his

statement that "...the larger subject must be the

evanescence of thought and moral judgement in a world of

ceaselessly unsortable information" (23).

At the end of

the review, Thomas acknowledges that Democracy "finally

 

earns its complexity of form...and the presence in it of

"Joan Didion" trying to tell it is an essential part of its

subject" (24).

The metafictional structure of Didion's novel allows

her to fictionalize her persona as a public figure in the

guise of the reporter—narrator.

Thus the structure is a

narrative devise which merges fictional and factual

information.

It is necessary to examine Didion's narrative

strategy from both perspectives-~that of reporter and that

of narrator-—in order to comprehend the larger issues in

this complex novel.

Examining Didion's actual status as a

reporter of contemporary culture will illuminate and inform

263

my reading of the narrative function this persona performs

in the novel.

For it is through the reportorial persona

that the metafictional devices reveal and critique

themselves in the work.

Perhaps the blurring of fact and fiction is most

readily ascertained in the factual knowledge of Joan

Didion's writing which is included in the novel.

She did,

in fact, work as a feature writer for Vogue for six years;

she did subsequently travel around the globe interviewing

famous people for various magazines, such as Saturday

Evening Pbst, Life and Esquire.

She has also taught novel

 

courses from time to time at her alma mater, Berkeley.

And

like her characters in Democracy, Joan Didion has achieved

 

a modicum of celebrity.

The celebrity status for a moderately successful writer

as for a moderately successful politician comes "with the

life", as Billy Dillon would and did say to Inez Victor

(48).

This contemporary phenomenon, which applies as much

to the fiction writer as to the journalist, constitutes an

object of study itself.

In his work, Fact and Fiction

John Hollowell addresses the celebrity status of writers.

"Like the novelist, the reporter has created a public

reputation for himself in the same way that movie stars and

politicians have for some time" (51).

This development of

a personality Hollowell attributes, in the case of the

journalist, to the shift in perspective in the new

journalism.

"Our usual vision of the journalist as a

 

264

dispassionate observer who gathers facts but stays out of

the action himself has yielded to that of participant—

observer" (52).

The works of Mailer, Wolfe, and Hersey are

cited as examples of the new approach.

Nor is the writer of fiction excluded from this altered

relationship with the reading public.

Hollowell refers to

John Raeburn's observation that

...the writer has become a

H

commodity to be consumed by the public'

' (54) as evidence of

the epidemic spread of the cult of personality.

Raeburn

goes on to posit that "the mass media and the celebrity

have a symbiotic relationship:

in return for the fame they

bestow on him the celebrity allows his private life——his

character, his tastes, and his attitudes--to become a

commodity to be consumed by the mass audience" (54).

As part of that breed of new journalist, Didion is

subject to or perhaps seeks (depending on which critic one

reads) the publicity attendant to making oneself the

protagonist of one's own work, as Hollowell claims these

writers do (14).

Interviews with Didion and her writer-

husband, John Gregory Dunne, regularly appear in the

nation's popular magazines.

Hollowell finds John Aldrige's

remark a suitable description of this cultural phenomenon.

"Literary production in our society can no longer be

separated from its promotion" (49).

Like other writers,

Didion and Dunne are active in the promotion of the work

they produce.

Each magazine article is an insurance policy

against the sales of past and future books.

 

So Didion's choice of her public persona, or

265

"personality", to include as narrator of her tale, troubles

this novel.

For as a public person, as a certain kind of

"celebrity" whose books are always reviewed in the most

prestigious magazines, or who periodically appears on Phil

Donahue to promote her latest book, surely she herself, and

not just her narrator-mime, is as implicated in the

scathing critique of this cultural phenomena the novel

provides as are its characters, Billy Dillon, Harry Victor

or Jack Lovett.

In Democracy, Didion, the "outsider" has

definitely become an "insider", as Joyce Carol Oates so

aptly points out (19).

Some of Didion's critics see her as not only implicated

by the nominal celebrity that accompanies the sale of her

books, or her work with her husband as screenwriters, but

some also see her as contaminated by the greed, avarice,

and envy associated with the very rich in America.

To

achieve commercial success as an American writer in the

1970s and 805 is to become suspect, to be dismissed as a

cohort of the television and movie personalities so

disdained by academic and literary circles.

Lahr

maintains that to seek fame or to become famous in this

climate is to foster an elaborate cultural self-deception.

"Fame dramatizes vindictiveness as drive, megalomania as

commitment, hysteria as action, greed as just reward"

(228).

This critic claims that it is the famous who

justify the perpetuation of an American Dream that is

 

everywhere else questioned or disproved.

266

As a denizen of the Hollywood milieu, Didion (with her

husband) is especially singled out for such censure.

Her

critique of that culture is dismissed as an act of

complicity.

"She needs the fiction to rationalize the fact

she is part of the problem she analyzes....She is obsessed

with the moral emptiness around her because she embraces

it.

The story she tells is that her suffering sets her

apart..." (206, 213).

Labeling Didion as a "technician of

trauma", and thereby displaying some of his own complicity

with the penchant for catchy phrases, this critic condemns

Didion to the "aristocracy of success" which seems to

preclude finding any redeeming quality in her work

whatsoever (213).

From one perspective these comments have a certain

validity, especially if one is repulsed by the cult of

"personality" as this critic appears to be.

Also the fact

that Didion does address this issue of celebrity, and

include a representative of her public self in that

address, in her fourth novel lends additional credence to

some of the observations put forward in this exceptionally

vituperative assault on her work.

Other observers of the dilemma of the writer in

contemporary culture offer a rather different and more

efficacious view of this situation however.

They attribute

the foregrounding of the self in a writer's work (a crucial

point of contention in the previous censure of Didion's

267

work) to very different conditions.

Hollowell insists that

the subject and style of the new journalists (among whom he

includes Didion) is determined by the extreme experiences

of the 60's, the decade this new genre blossomed on the

American literary scene (40).

Thus the new journalists

chose as their subjects the celebrities and personalities

making news, the youth subculture, the extraordinary crime

or violent protest movement.

He sees the writer's placing

of him or her self in history as an admirable gesture and

one that is radical in its political implications.

"Almost

by definition, new journalism is a revolt by the individual

against homogenized forms of experience, against monolithic

versions of the truth," John Hellmann declares in Fables of

 

Fact:

The New Journalism as New Fiction (8).

The emphasis on the personal perspective functions as a

resistance to the "corporate fictions" manufactured daily

by the media rather than as a gesture of self-

aggrandizement for the new journalist.

In describing the

condition of contemporary culture in the 60's, Hellmann

asserts that "the contemporary individual was in less need

of facts than of an understanding of the facts already

available" (3).

The new journalism took as its mission the

insertion of the personal perspective into an assessment of

collective phenomenon, and in so doing, declares a specific

origin for the relationships established among the

multitude of random and isolated facts proliferated by the

media.

The position of the new journalism however always leave

268

its practitioners vulnerable to the lure of fame and

fortune, to the seduction of the celebrity image.

John

Hollowell mentions this intrinsic difficulty in his

assessment of the development and success of the genre.

"Despite the actual literary accomplishments of the best

new journalism, then, the rhetoric of its promoters [i.e.

Tom Wolfe] has greatly amplified its impact.

It became a

dominant form of writing in the sixties, not only because

it describes the important changes that took place in that

decade, but also because it was itself the object of such

scrutiny.

The new journalism as a cultural phenomena,

then, must be seen both as an agent and as an object in a

society dedicated to making experience continually more

surprising and exciting" (62).

In this respect, all

literary efforts, fiction and non-fiction, and by

extension, the producers of such efforts, like Didion, are

implicated to some extent in the American quest for novelty

as an end in itself.

But surely writers, such as Didion,

who perceive and address the ambiguity of their positions

deserve recognition for that self—critical effort; for no

writer or critic is ever exempt from the cultural phenomena

critiqued in his or her work.

As part of a small female minority, Didion participated

in the journalistic revolt conducted by males such as

Mailer, Thompson, Capote, Hersey and Wolfe.

(The issue of

her gender in relation to this experience is a topic

269

explored in Chapter Five.)

Indeed, it was through her work

as a journalist rather than as a fiction writer that Didion

gained the recognition she has acquired in literary

circles.

So it is ironic but exceedingly appropriate that

she subject that aspect of her public self to narrative

scrutiny as the narrator of a novel about celebrity.

That version of her public self however does not easily

comply with conventional expectations of the first—person

narrator.

As

Lahr

mentions, the "narrative Joan

Didion" fails to become a recognizable character in the

novel; she remains a voice—piece, a director of rather than

a participant in the narrative action she sets in motion.

It is unclear what connection she has to the story she

relates; if she is fascinated by a truth (Inez Victor's

romance) stranger than fiction, or if that interest is only

a pretext for examining the limits of narrative itself, if

narrative structure fails to contain even the most

formulaic versions of reality, the romance.

To examine these questions, it is necessary to

delineate the clues of this relation between the narrator

and her narrative as they are embedded in the text.

Susan

Lanser has defined point of view in her work, The Narrative

 

Act:

Point of View in Fiction, as distinct from other

aspects of the novel because "unlike such textual elements

as character, plot, or imagery, point of view is

essentially a relationship rather than a concrete entity"

 

(13).

Lanser then sets out certain procedures whereby the

270

relationship between the narrator and narrative produced

(among others, the relation of narrator to audience, to

author, to society) can be retrieved from the text.

Because these multifaceted relationships are both

foregrounded (as metafictional techniques) and subverted

(as incidental clues) in the text of Democracy, Lanser's

 

model will help to illuminate aspects of the novel that

have perplexed or frustrated its readers.

Susan Lanser's model is derived from Speech Act Theory

and so views its subject from three angles:

status of

speaker (literary and social); mode of contact established

between narrator and narratee; and stance of narrator

toward characters and events narrated (130).

In addition,

Lanser addresses the issue of silence in a text; who does

not speak or see, what is not said, what is not shown.

"Indeed, it is this inquiry into absence that can reveal

most dramatically the relationship between ideology and

technique through the structuring of point of view; the

exploration of absence uncovers the system of values which

has made the textual perspective seem natural (or purely

technical) rather than ideological" (214).

The first indices Lanser designates as significant in

this exploration is the status of the literary speaker as a

literary and social construct.

That status is comprised of

the distance from the authorial voice, the narrative

privilege granted the narrator, and the narrator's social

and psychological identity.

271

In Democracy A Novel, the voice of the narrator is to

 

be considered as virtually equivalent to that of the

authorial Joan Didion.

"The equivalence of author and

narrator implies an authorial responsibility that is

similar to an author's responsibility for his or her

nonfictional work.

The responsibility is imaginative and

ideological whether or not it is referential" (153).

The

only distinction to be made between the narrative and

authorial Didion is the distinction between the public and

the private Joan Didion.

This is a distinction the novel

clearly indicates may be vast.

Thomas Edwards makes a note

of this distinction as an important clue in understanding

the enigma of Jack Lovett.

"If there is a point to

Lovett's combination of qualities, it may simply be that

public performances don't reliably fit the contours of the

private self inside" (24).

This is a point about which

Didion would be sensitive as she has a reputation as a

minor celebrity.

Also, as with other women writers,

Didion's private self is identified with not only her

public persona but also with the image of her fictional

characters.

As I have shown, many critics see Didion as

interchangeable with her female characters.

This is a

perception she both cultivates and resists in her portrayal

of her public self as the narrator of her fourth novel.

Another characteristic which reflects the literary

status of a narrator is the privilege accorded to the

narrator with regard to the range of perception he or she

exercises in the novel.

The Query to be posed is whether

272

the narrator is confined within the limits of human

perception or if he or she can claim omniscience.

The

position of Didion's narrator is near the end of this

continuum, claiming to be a reporter of people and events

in the public eye and therefore subject to human

limitations as to what she can know.

All information comes

to this narrator either through direct observation or via

the report of others.

And over it all is the consciousness

of a mind selecting, interpreting, and juxtaposing details.

This mind of the reporter recalls the consciousness that

emerges in the new journalism, which essentially adapts the

techniques of fiction to factual reporting.

Given that many of the "fictional" characters and

events in Democracy bear a striking resemblance to

 

"factual" ones from that actual time period, the

referential claim of the novel becomes somewhat

problematic.

Zav, in The Mythopoeic Reality, discusses the

 

differences between works that are mono—referential and

those that are bi—referential.

Monoreferential works refer

to one world, either factual or fictional, such as

conventional fiction or journalism.

Bi—referential works

refer to both actual and imagined worlds at the same time;

works such as Mailer's Armies of the Night and Capote's IE

Cold Blood are examples of the latter.

Didion's fourth

 

novel, in Zav's terms, is a work of fiction which

masquerades as a work of non-fiction; a monoreferential

273

text which mimics the characteristics of a bi—referential

text.

Zav's discussion of the differences in plot between

what he designates as the "fictive" novel (i.e.

conventional) and the nonfictional novel will help to

demonstrate the nature of Didion's literary gymnastics.

"Although the plot of the fictive novel may be taken in

greater or lesser degree from actual events, it is, in its

entirety, a narrative correlative for the author's reading

of the "human condition"...the "plot" of the non-fiction

novel is one with the author's donneé" (80).

The fictional

situation of Didion's reporter—narrator can be seen to

correspond with this author's donnee, even though it is

also fairly clear that the plot also constitutes Didion's

reading of the human condition.

As an actual reporter who

follows the careers of public figures and creates their

"stories", Didion is highly cognizant of the "textual"

nature of such reports and of public life in general.

But

that situation applies to Didion as a producer of texts as

well. That producer of texts is what is codified in this

novel as Joan-Didion, reporter—narrator.

This strategy

permits the novel to achieve a kind of bierefentiality

then, by announcing itself as a fictional construct that

directly refers to an aspect of Didion's factual existence.

Such a strategy reveals the fictionality of fact and the

factuality of fiction.

A third category of characteristics that depict the

status of a fictional narrator is the narrator's social and

274

psychological identity.

The overt social identity of

Didion's narrator is confined almost entirely to her

professional status.

The reader is informed that the

narrator is a professional journalist who sometimes teaches

a course at the university.

Even the reference to the

narrator's production of fiction is oblique.

That

situation is implied only by the attention given to the

narrative construction of the novel.

Other facts of social

identity are to be inferred; for instance, that the

narrator is female, that she is an American, of Caucasian

ancestry, and of the upper middle class.

Sexual preference

and marital status are factors neither addressed directly

or in any way alluded to.

This omission contributes

significantly to the impression of certain readers that the

narrator is not a fully developed character and thus does

not justify so obvious a presence in the novel.

The

omission of gender-specific could also serve to direct

attention to human problems that are what Didion has

claimed are more general than that of being female.

The narrator's psychological identity is established

through her credibility as a teller of tales.

She appears

honest and reliable in relation to the 'facts' of the story

she tells; her competence to assess the relation of those

'facts' to each other is a point she questions herself

however.

As narrator-reporter, she professes a lack of

skill that stands in ironic contrast to the skill with

which she displays her ostensible incompetence.

She finds

 

275

her material intractable and her conceptual machinery

inadequate to the task.

In this respect, the narrator's

situation is reminiscent of Maria's in Play It As It Lays;

 

it is as if Didion takes up Maria's problem and reworks it

in Democracy, A Novel.

 

"I have no unequivocal way of beginning" (16), the

narrator informs her audience, and then proceeds to detail

all the ways of beginning that have been rejected.

That

retrieval of the rejected beginnings serves as the

initiating point of the narrative.

So there is a certain

dissumlation on the part of the narrator which creates an

element of suspense in a story whose outcome is known in

advance.

The kinds and modes of contact between the narrator and

the narratee is another factor that determines point of

view for Lanser.

That contact can range anywhere on a

spectrum from direct to indirect contact.

For instance,

neither the narrative "I", no the narratee "you", exists in

Didion's first novel, Run River.

As Lanser observes, the

 

occurrence of the personal pronouns in the third-person

narrative structure of such a novel

"would constitute a

breach of the decorum of the text"; although used

sparingly, the occurrence of the personal pronouns is not

disruptive in Maria's narrative, most of which is related

through a close third-person perspective.

The direct "I"

and "you" appear in both A Book of Common Prayer and

 

Democracy, A Novel.

Lanser states further that only when

 

276

there is a possibility of "I-you" contact is it possible

for narrative self-consciousness to exist (176).

Thus

Didion's novel become, as does the age she lives in,

increasingly self-conscious.

The degree of narrative self—consciousness is another

measure of the contact established between a narrator and

narratee.

In Democracy, that consciousness threatens to

 

displace the story being narrated.

As a corollary to this,

the novel can insist that the narratee remain a passive

observer of the narrative's activities or become an active

participant in the re-construction of the narrative.

Didion's fourth novel demands the highest degree of

activity from its narratee.

Christopher Hitchens refers to

the effort required by this demand in Didion's novel.

"Effort must be expended in turning back pages for brief

and testing refresher courses.

But the effort is often

worthwhile" (1018).

What emerges in this highly active

interchange between narrator and narratee is a focus that

so strongly accentuates the production of narrative as a

collective event.

The story or the content of the

narrative then becomes a pretext for this indirect but

essential writer/reader contact.

Texts themselves, by

requiring that readers actively participate in the

production of meaning, come to function as affiliative

modes of contact in contemporary society.

The effort toward affiliation is supported by the

attitude toward the narratee/reader that is embedded in the

277

text.

Again, Lanser points out a range of possibilities

exist from confidence to uncertainty, deference to

contempt, and formality to informality (178—79).

Didion's

narrator displays a great deal of confidence in the

narratee, directly addressing that textual personage:

"as

a reader you are ahead of the narrative here" (160).

But

then Didion's narrator goes on to suggest that if the

reader has not already guessed the outcome of the story,

"you might have seen the film clip I mentioned" or

remembered the event from television and news stories

(160).

Here the reader as well as the writer conspire to

blur the edges of fact from fiction.

The intimacy of this

mode of contact permits the inference that Didion's

narrator presumes a position of relative equivalence

between herself and her audience.

(An audience, by the

way, the narrator obviously imagines to be like herself——

literary, educated, intellectual.)

The intimacy

established though is through the nature of the activity

shared—making meaning—~and not through other points of

affinity--i.e. social factors.

In this respect, the

narrator's lack of or oblique reference to certain facets

of social identity can aid in establishing the contact

desired.

This is especially true for writers such as

Didion whose personal identity may and does alienate those

who do not share her social privilege.

To suppress those

real differences of social context while emphasizing the

potential for intellectual exchange between the narrator

278

and narratee is analogous to the formal but beneficial

exchange that occurs between teachers and students...the

roles often assumed by strangers engaged in the most

intimate intellectual activity.

Indeed, Didion's narrator

not only refers to her role as teacher of the novel, she

actually assumes it in this narrative; she employs her

professional knowledge as a reporter as a teaching model.

"I was trained to distrust other people's versions, but we

go with what we have.

We triangulate the coverage.

Handicap for bias.

Figure in the leanings, predilictions,

the special circumstances which change the spectrum in

which any given observer will see a situation.

Consider

what filter is on the lens.

So to speak" (124).

That

model of course is also good advice for reading the

narrative.

The equivalence of power shared in the construction of

the narrative also points to a felicitous application of

the democratic ideal so cynically scrutinized in the

content of the novel.

Thus the narrative structure

operates to provide a rival version of the cynical if valid

perception of American democracy in the late twentieth

century.

This conscious attempt to establish an affinity

between narrator and narratee (writer/reader) also

distinguishes Didion from her literary predecessors, Henry

Adams.

The attempt also aims to avert the condition Said

describes as typical of written discourse especially:

"far

from being a type of conversation between equals, the

279

discursive situation is more usually like the unequal

relation between colonizer and colonized, oppressor and

oppressed" (179).

Like Inez Victor, Didion discovers she

needs to relinquish her "American exemption", that "her

passport did not excuse her from...history..." (211).

To

engage in this democratic technique of narrative

construction is a radical change from the Didion who

claimed almost total power over a reader in "Why I Write".

The third item of consideration in this relation

between technique and ideology that Lanser posits is that

of stance.

Stance is the term Lanser uses to describe the

conventional aspects of point of view as technique.

Lanser

opposes the tendency to focus almost exclusively on "how"

point of view is presented while neglecting the "what" that

technique conveys.

She employs Boris Upinsky's framework

of four planes (A Poetics of Composition) to describe the

 

levels at which stance is operative and can be retrieved

from the text:

phraseological, spatial and temporal,

psychological, and ideological.

Lanser privileges the

ideological and psychological, claiming that the first two

planes are merely structuring devices for the latter (184).

What seems most important though in her analysis is how the

plane overlap.

The phraseological plane distinguishes the discourse of

the narrator fig narrator from the discourse of characters,

called mimetic discourse.

The narrator's own discourse is

designated as diegetic and represents the extreme of this

280

continuum.

In one sense Didion's novel operates at this

extreme position because all language in the novel is the

narrator's direct report of events, including the discourse

of other characters.

Indeed the ability of the narrator to

critique directly or indirectly the speech of the

characters comprises an ideological function of the text:

to display the underside of the move toward affiliation in

a contemporary democratic society.

The increased

significance attributed to linguistic functions and the

discontinuity perceived between language and experience

occupies a privileged position in contemporary thought.

The preference for democracy, an affiliative mode of

government, rather than for a filiative mode such as

monarchy, points to the loss of hierarchal structure in the

political realm as in the epistemological sphere.

These

forces combine in particularly volatile fashion in the late

twentieth century America.

"In place of a communal

language of values, there have developed a myriad of

idiolects which have in effect created a new Tower of Babel

in the nascent cybernetic metropolis" (Zav 29).

This is a

cultural phenomena that Democracy A Novel records,

 

represents, and repudiates.

Examples of inane rhetoric abound in the novel and

supply many of its humorous or marcarbe moments.

Didion's

narrator captures the versatility of this linguistic

disease as it encroaches upon virtually every profession:

legal, medical, educational, entrepreneurial, the military

281

and the press.

Dick Zeigler informs the public relations

agent, Billy Dillon, that "there's considerable feeling

here that we can contain this to an accident" (119) when

referring to his wife's murder by her father.

"The problem

at hand, as you put it, is substance habituation," the

therapist chides Inez when she consults him about Jessie's

addiction to heroine (63).

The police report of Janet

Zeigler's death contains its own version of the linguistic

mutation:

"OFFICERS ENTERED RESIDENCE VIA OPEN DOOR, NOTED

NO EVIDENCE OR DISARRAY OR STRUGGLE, AND PROCEED TO LANAI,

THEREBY LOCATING FEMALE VICTIM LATER IDENTIFIED AS JANET

CHRISTIAN ZEIGLER LYING FACE DOWN ON THE CARPET" (113).

The entire document which goes on for a couple of pages is

in capital letters as if the use of the upper and lower

case might violate the objectivity aimed at in the report.

Paul Christian, a lunatic murderer, indulges in his own

version of rhetorical madness that is virtually

indistinguishable from the

'sane' versions offered by the

medical or legal professions who treat him.

The medical

profession is equally obtuse in matters of life and death,

claiming it is not an either or position.

"The patient was

not technically dead, no.

The patient's

electroencephalogram had not even flattened out yet.

Technical death would not occur until they had not one but

three flat electroencephalograms, consecutive, spaced eight

hours apart" (151).

Michael Wood aptly expresses the situation of the novel

282

when he says "the book is in one sense about the language

these characters inhabit, the awful homes of stereotype

they make or borrow to live in.

Didion creates a sort of

chamber music of their jargon..." (16).

The

reader/narratee will succumb to this incantation at his or

her own peril however, as crucial bits of information are

tucked in between the folds of this inflated prose.

For

instance, in a listing of things she does have to work

with, the narrator details several photographs of the

Christian family.

Included in her description of the

photograph of Paul Christian is the first mention in the

novel of the central event of the plot, but the mention

seems incidental as do the other details given the plethora

of information made available without a context in which to

construct meaning from it.

The spatial and temporal planes of narrative stance

correspond to the more conventional notion of point of

view.

In Democracy, the narrator is free to shift focus

 

from character to character but remains technically outside

of the character's consciousness attending to the surface

detail of speech or gesture in the true reportorial stance.

The narrative relies on the reconstruction of conversations

and scenes as reported by one of the main characters, often

reported in the diction of that character, or on reports or

documents connected to the events.

The temporal aspect of

point of view is securely posterior in that all events of

the novel have ben completed before the narrative begins.

283

However, the narratee/reader is provided with clues in

a piece meal fashion, many of which as I have indicated

appear trivial or irrelevant when first encountered.

The

process of accumulating detail through repetition and

development of content replicates the process by which

humans acquire, decipher and assess information, separating

the significant from the trivial after the fact.

Didion's

narrator comments on this epistemological method of the

narrative form within the metafictional structure of the

text.

Referring to a repetition of Inez Victor's four

reasons for staying in Kuala Lumpur, the narrator says, "I

told you the essence of that early on but not the context,

which has ben, you will note, the way I tried to stay on

the wire in this novel of fitful glimpses" (232).

There is

a certain temporal factor involved in this acquisition of

knowledge which will vary for each reader and for each

reading of the novel.

Psychological aspects of point of view are revealed

through the distribution of scene and summary in the

conventional novel; the idea being that whatever character

or event is given more attention, the greater the

importance of that element in the novel.

Implicit in this

rationale is the understanding that the narrator will

establish an affinity for a character or event so attended

to and supply a maximal amount of information about that

aspect of the novel.

These expectations are radically

challenged in Democracy A Novel as part of the book's plan

 

284

to deprive the narrative of such conventional scaffolding.

The most important psychological factor appears to be

repetition of certain phrases and scenes as a method of

acquiring significance and thus meaning.

What changes in

each instance is the context in which these items are

placed; as the context accumulates more detail, meaning is

accrued.

The opening chapter serves as a good example of this

strategy.

It is a record of the conversation between Inez

Victor and Jack Lovett the night she walks out of the

Christian family home in Honolulu.

Jack is speaking

rather elaborately of the bomb tests conducted in the

Pacific atolls in 1952, the year he meets Inez Victor.

When the reader first encounters this scene it is Jack's

aesthetic description of the sky during the tests that

grips one's attention.

It is not until several repetitions

of certain segments of this scene that the real

significance of those bomb tests for Jack is made clear;

the bomb tests are his way of remembering his first

encounter with the seventeen year old girl he embarks on a

twenty year affair with.

But in the original scene it is

"the light at dawn during those Pacific tests" that "are

something to see.

Something to behold" (11).

But Didion's narrator is careful to disperse the

elements of repetition almost randomly throughout the novel

so as to defer, delay, or diffuse significance.

Reading

the novel is literally an exercise in making one's way

285

through a plethora of 'facts', many of which are merely

digressions, to achieve a state of comprehension whereby

the relation of these disparate facts begins to coalesce

into meaning.

This process is complicated by the design of

the novel which provides several versions of events without

privileging one over the others.

In addition to the

narrator's story, the novel presents the 'stories' of Inez

Victor, Jack Lovett, Billy Dillon, Harry Victor, Dwight and

Paul Christian, Dick and Janet Zeigler, and Adlai and

Jessie Victor.

As Lanser indicates in her work, the psychological and

ideological planes combine especially in the attitude of

the narrator toward characters and events described.

The

narrator's attitude may range from complete disapproval to

unqualified approval, or register somewhere along that

spectrum, and may vary from character to character and from

event to event.

Inez Victor, as protagonist, is the

character's whose story is resolved most satisfactorily.

Thus she clearly emerges as the most approved character in

the novel.

The narrator protects Inez from the most

serious indictment in the novel-—the use and abuse of

language.

As noted, when most of these rhetorical abuses

are happening, Inez remains noticeably silent.

As Wood

observes, "Didion's given her an oblique, almost speechless

romance" (17).

Also, Inez changes, as does her daughter,

something no one else in the novel seems to be able to

accomplish.

Indeed most of the women in the Christian

286

family are treated with some kindness even though they are

not always immuned to the linguistic plight that devastates

this social milieu.

The family men fare less well, and indeed receive the

most severe censure by Didion's narrator.

Harry and Adlai

Victor, as well as Dwight and Paul Christian, are portrayed

as little more than linguistic buffoons.

As Billy Dillon

manufactures rhetoric as his profession, he is seen as a

more conscious and even humorous dispenser of such jargon.

The fact that despite this venial fault, he silently cares

for and about Inez apart from her role as Harry Victor's

wife also exonerates Dillon.

Jack Lovett, of course, is

the male outsider and the only one truly given the badge of

approval by Didion's narrator.

Even so, as I have

indicated, his portrayal is not unequivocal.

He, too,

parades his own brand of machismo/military cliche; "I told

you when I saw you in Jakarta in 1969, you and I had the

knack for interesting times," he tells Inez.

"Jesus

Christ, Jakarta.

Ass end of the universe, southern tier.

But I'll tell you one thing about Jakarta in 1969, Jakarta

in 1969 beat Bien Hoa in 1969" (14).

Then there is the questionable nature of Lovett's

activities which makes transparent the ease with which

business and the military merge their rhetorics in

contemporary society.

Although Didion's narrator comes to

Lovett's defense, declaring that what "Jack Lovett did was

never black or white, and in the long run may even have

287

been (since the principal gain to him was another

abstraction, the pyramiding of further information) devoid

of ethical content altogether..." (219), the fact that he

is portrayed as the hero of the romance narrative whose

truth value is questioned by the larger design of the novel

renders that defense less unqualified than it seems at

first.

Also of note is the fact that while Jack Lovett is

the gun-runner in this novel, and is connected to the

military—industrial complex that constitutes big business

in post-war America, the liberal lawyer, Leonard Douglas in

A Book of Common Prayer defended liberal causes and

arranged for the sale of hardware to Third World countries.

Clearly Didion the author, sees all political factions as

imbricated in the coalition of business and the military.

Lanser identifies "three focal issues concerning any

given narrator's or character's ideology:

the way it is

expressed, how its 'content' relates to the cultural text,

and the position of power and authority held by the

particular voice" which supports a given ideology (216).

Using this system of analysis, the narrator's position is

privileged over that of all the characters', as it is the

only consistently dominant voice in the novel.

Part of the

narrator's task is to determine the nature and the value of

the story she reports and thus the relation of literary

systems to everyday life.

The way the narrator's ideology

is expressed is through explicit and implicit commentary on

the 'content' of the narrative she constructs; the romance

288

of Inez and Jack as a literary genre, but also as a reading

of the cultural text of a failed colonialism in conflict

with or as a contrast to the linguistically diseased

democracy portrayed in Didion's work.

The other "stories"

in the novel are the various themes that combine to produce

the cacophony of sound that is Democracy A Novel.

From

that cacophony Inez emerges as "a troubling lyric in the

middle of a song, a fragment of a song caught up in a

narrative whose grace itself is suspect, and which the

persistent song keeps threatening to unravel into mere rags

of rational guesswork" (Wood 17).

The narrator's own discourse in the novel is a

discourse of critical commentary on the romance she

produces in an effort to tell Inez Christian Victor's

story.

As such, she engages in the "debate between the

inheritor and critic" DuPlessis characterizes as an

essentially post-modern feminist act.

The reporter Joan

Didion indicates her deep attachment to this cultural

value--the romance as a link between life and literature-—

while she simultaneously critiques the impoverishment of

that literary system in a post-industrial, democratic

society.

The focus of that critique is to be found in the

narrator's commentary on the narrative process in which

she is engaged.

The narrator's predicament begins when her narrative

begins:

"I have no unequivocal way of beginning..." the

narrative Joan Didion informs her readers after she has

289

presented and discarded a couple of possibilities.

Chapter

One, the literal beginning of Didion's novel reconstructs

the pivotal scene in the Happy Talk Bar between the lovers,

Inez Victor and Jack Lovett.

But the narrator finds that

opening inadequate, so looks to the literary past for

assistance.

"Call me the author.

Let the reader be

introduced to Joan Didion, upon whose character and doings

much will depend of whatever interests these pages may

have, as she sits at her writing table in her own room in

her own house on Welbeck Street.

So Trollope might begin

this novel" (16).

The literary allusion, which is implicitly discarded

even as it explicitly remains, acquires real significance

only in retrospect.

On a first reading, it appears as a

rupture in the structure of the novel.

But that rupture

signals two important features of the novel which follows.

First, the reference to Trollope suggests the production of

a certain kind of literary work-—a realistic romance.

Thus

the gesture of allusion to her literary past registers the

narrator's position as an inheritor of a literary form; her

rejection of the form establishes her as a critic of the

past she inherits.

The other important feature of this

initial posture the narrator assumes is that the passage is

a sample of literary rhetoric.

In a book that is composed

of the various idiolects that have replaced a common

language this passage implicates reader and writer in the

production of the very discourse——a literary one——these

individuals privilege.

290

The sample of past literary rhetoric is contrasted with

another which the narrator presents as contemporary:

the

standard composition assignment.

"Didion begins with a

rather ironic reference to her immediate reason to write

this piece.

Try using this ploy as the opening of an

essay; you may want to copy the ironic-but—earnest tone of

Didion, or you might try making your essay witty.

Consider

the broader question of the effect of setting:

how does

Didion use the scene as a rhetorical base?....Consider,

too, Didion's own involvement in the setting:

an

atmosphere results.

How" (17).

In addition to signaling

the nature of academic rhetoric, this passage provides a

glimpse of a writer noting the uses to which her words are

put once they have achieved the autonomy of the printed

page.

In its context, the passage functions to juxtapose

the narrator's uncertainty about the relevancy of

narrative itself.

(A problem the actual Didion discusses

in The White Album.)

The academic commentary implies a

 

certainty and intention on the part of the writer that

Didion's narrator finds dubious at best.

Another problem Didion's narrator encounters is the

lack of narrative machinery to aid her in the story—telling

process.

"So I have no leper who comes to the door every

morning at seven.

No Tropical Belt Coal Company, no

unequivocal lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill"

(18).

While these images remain enigmatic, they point to a

291

centrifical force around which narratives conventionally

evolved.

Later the narrator discovers in the process of

telling the story that she has a scene which will perform

the same function for her.

"T his scene is my leper at the

door..." (78).

However the revision is rendered ambiguous

as it is situated between two scenes:

one a glimpse of

Inez as she will look at the bedside of her unconscious

sister and the other Jack Lovett's view of Inez as she

embarks from the plane in Honolulu "at 5:47 A.M. on the

morning of March 26, 1975, crushing her lei in the rain on

the runway.

Jack Lovett watching her.

"Get her out of the goddamn rain,’ Jack Lovett said to

no one in particular" (78).

As both scenes focus on the few gesturesof concern

expressed by anyone in the novel, they represent the ethos

of responsibility Didion has stressed repeatedly in her

works.

The scenes are also linked by the fact that it is

the death of her only sister that prompts Inez to follow

the unfinished script of her life with Jack Lovett.

But at the beginning of the novel, the narrator

withholds this connection because she says later, she knows

"how not to tell you what you do not yet want to hear"

(162).

Instead, the narrator distracts the attention of

the narratee/reader by detailing the history of the story

she is producing, a history that consists of all the

versions of the narrative she has "abandoned" (18).

292

But even her "abandoned" stories about the local

history of the Islands centers on the lives of the

Christian women.

The narrator admits to a preference for

the story of Carol Christian, Inez's mother; a woman who

left her family without much explanation apparently.

As

this is more or less an act Inez will repeat later, the

discarded story foreshadows the one Didion's narrator will

reconstruct.

The narrator offers a sample of the beginning

of that story, complete with revisions and commentary.

"Imagine my mother dancing," that novel began....You will

notice that the daughters in romantic stories always

remember their mothers dancing..." (21), the narrator

points out.

Carol Christian is then limned out as an

ultra-romantic who invests even the most mundane occasions

with an aura of the exceptional.

That the story of Carol

Christian is one that bears a strong resemblance to

Didion's own literary history is suggested by the

dismissive comment:

"What I had there was a study in

provincial manners, in the tyrannies of class and privilege

by which such people assert themselves against the tropics"

(22).

The narrator cites her interest in Carol Christian's

position "as an outsider", an interest Didion has

demonstrated in a previous novel, A Book of Common Prayer.

 

As the discarded story of Carol Christian is primarily

about her propensity to view her life as an enactment of a

romantic dream, the narrator has suggested, although not

explored, a link between the "colonial impulse" and the

293

"romantic sensibility" Didion has used to describe Carol's

predecessor, Charlotte Douglas.

The potential linkage is

one that will surface again in Carol's daughter's story,

which proves to be a reworking of her mother's

predicament.

The other distraction offered by the narrator-reporter

Joan Didion is the bits and pieces with which she announces

she will construct a story.

There are "certain things" she

has "in mind":

lines from a Wallace Stevens poem, Inez

Victor's four reasons for remaining in Kuala Lumpur, Jack

Lovett's pink dawns, and her own recurrent dream "in which

my entire field of vision fills with rainbow, in which I

open a door onto a growth of tropical green...and watch the

spectrum separate into pure color" (17).

The only apparent

connection between these four fragments is the absence or

irrelevance of human endeavor.

Jack Lovett's "pink dawns",

which no painter can capture, being a possible exception,

although even they are noted because of their aesthetic

value.

"Colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the air,"

explains Inez are her reasons for preferring Kuala Lumpur

to Honolulu or New York.

Of course, as the novel unfolds,

it becomes clear that Inez Victor's stated reasons for her

decision and her action——"spent on the administration of

what are by now the dozen refugee camps around Kuala

Lumpur' (234)——do not exactly coincide, although they do

not collide either.

By the end of her narrative, the

narrator has come to view these factors as fused into one

294

image:

"a sudden sense of Inez and of the office in the

camp and of how it feels to fly into that part of the

world, of the dense greens and translucent blues and the

shallows where islands once were" (234).

This fusion of the historical processes of nature which

includes human activity represents a shift in the

narrator's position over the course of the novel.

In her

initial statement, it is the absence of the human or at

least its insignificance that appeals to her.

The poem by

Wallace Stevens is a case in point:

The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises

In the bronze distance,

A gold—feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song.

This preference for the post—historical is indicated in the

narrator's analysis of why she lacks the familiar reliable

machinery of narrative.

"In fact no immutable hill:

as

the granddaughter of a geologist I learned early to

anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls

and even islands....A hill is a transitional accommodation

to stress, and ego may be a similar accommodation.

A

waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to

structure, and so, for all I know, is technique" (18).

In

this statement the narrator reveals her post modernist

tendency to see personality and its representative

295

narrative as passing historical moments.

"Consider any of

these things long enough and you will see that they tend to

deny the relevance not only of personality but of

narrative" (17) she instructs her narratee/reader.

Thus

narrative activity is represented as literary rhetoric is--

as only one possibility among many available as human

endeavors.

The particular dilemma of the post modern

reader/writer (or narrator/narratee) is the loss of

reliable systems of privilege.

Not knowing what detail may

prove to be significant in life as in literature, both

writer and reader undertake the risky task of making

meaning together.

On her way to that end, the reporter-narrator Didion

begins to weave together the narrative fabric made of the

"fitful glimpses" called Democracy A Novel (232).

As part

of that process, she provides overt and covert critical

commentary about the material she finds available for this

questionable endeavor.

An important feature of this

critical commentary is the demythification of the standard

clichés of the romance narrative.

"First looks are widely believed instructive...I

wonder," the narrative Joan Didion contemplates as she

begins the novel proper.

Then she proceeds to reconstruct

her own first sight of Jack Lovett, who she remembers

thinking might be Inez's father.

"The instructiveness of

that moment remains moot" (34) she remarks later, and

thereby deconstructs the myth of love-at-first-sight which

296

encourages a deterministic view of the romance narrative.

As the narrative Didion reminds her narratee/reader, "these

are considered obligatory scenes, and are meant to be

remembered later, recalled to a conclusive point, recalled

not only by novelists but by survivors of accidents and by

witnesses to murders; recalled in fact by anyone at all

forced to resort to the narrative method" (32).

This demythification process also serves to provide the

reader/narrator with guidance for deciphering the tale

being constructed by this dissembling narrator.

The "first

looks" provided by this narrator are not immediately

"instructive" either.

As I have noted, the "first look" at

the novel—-Chapter One—-operates more as a decoy than a

foreshadowing of the novel to follow.

The important

elements of Didion's novel only accrue significance as they

are repeated in various contexts and expanded upon.

David

MacFarlane of MacLean's finds a quote from Democracy

 

 

applicable in this respect.

"'Let me give you a little

piece of advice,' says Inez's uncle in Democracy.

'Life

 

can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived

forwards.

Kierkegaard.'

What makes reading Democracy so

 

difficult, but finally so rewarding, is that precisely the

same can be said of Didion's writing" (67).

First

encounters, for readers and characters, are likely to be

trivial, random, and superficial rather than portentous,

destined, or profound.

This narrative principle is one

that informs all of Didion's fiction as all are narrated in

297

retrospect.

Thus the emphasis is always, overtly or not,

on the production of narrative rather than on the events

themselves.

The retrospective look though is not thereby

automatically granted immunity from the difficulty of

constructing meaning, as we have seen in the narrative of

Grace Strasser—Mendana.

The brilliance of hindsight is

itself questioned in Democracy by the narrator who observes

 

Inez Victor's tendency to rely on this narrative ploy.

Inez uses coincidence such as the fact she and Jack Lovett

were at the same place, but not at the same time, as a way

to close the wide gaps in the lengthy but limited

connection she had to this man who died shortly after she

ran away with him.

"During the five days I spent in Kuala

Lumpur Inez mentioned such 'correspondences', her word, a

number of times, as if they were messages intended

specifically for her, evidence of a narrative she had not

suspected.

She seemed to find these tenuous connections

extraordinary" (230).

The narrator dispels any

inclination to agree with Inez by reminding the

narratee/reader of Inez's particular history, a history

sufficient to account for Inez's perceptions.

"Given a

life in which the major cost was memory I suppose they

were'

9

the narrator observes of Inez's will to believe in

these "correspondences" (230).

Didion's narrator indicates

that a deliberate if not conscious amnesia is required to

shape any narrative, that a good deal of information has

298

been deleted or discarded along the way.

Her effort to

identify what she herself has "jettisoned" represents an

attempt to include and retrieve what is usually lost in the

production of narrative:

its history.

That gesture foregrounds not only the specific

narrative the reporter-narrator Didion is constructing, but

also the history of the literary genre she works with as

well——in this case the romance as it is situated in the

development of the novel.

And so the commentary about

romantic heroines in general.

Rachel Brownstein examines

the seductiveness of this literary concept in her work,

Becoming a Heroine.

She notes that "a heroine, like a

 

novelist, can convert the least promising of lives into

art, by the way she looks at it"

(91).

In the previous

passage cited, Didion's narrator has pointed to Inez's

performance as a heroine, and by that gesture, reflected

her own similar practice.

What is more, the authorial

Didion is included in this gesture as well given that all

female producers of stories are subject to this narrative

seduction.

Didion chooses to create art from the lives of

women——Lily Knight McClellan, Maria Wyeth, Charlotte

Douglas~—whose lives are not promising as heroines.

Only

in Democracy is the process of creating a heroine called to

 

the narratee/reader's attention as the construction

proceeds.

For there are resistances to that practice embedded in

the novel's structure.

When the Didion narrator reports

299

Inez's change of perspective, a decision which radically

changes her life from a public to a private figure, the

narrator makes of point of deflecting any heroic

significance from that change in status.

"This period in

Hong Kong during which Inez ceased to claim the American

exemption was defined by no special revelation, no instant

of epiphany, no dramatic event" (211).

The moment of

decision, a private one, is never revealed in the

narrative, nor even re—imagined.

Even its report is

carefully constructed to deflect any undue significance.

To deprive the event of a sense of moment is to attack

the literary convention of the romance at its center, if

not to entirely disable it.

Again, the comment serves as a

"narrative alert"——to warn the narratee/reader that

conventional expectations will be thwarted in this

narrative of politics and romance (164).

Another way in

which the dismantling of cliched plots and phrases is

revealed is in the depiction of the romance between Inez

Victor and Jack Lovett.

The relationship is characterized

primarily by its absences.

As the 'heroine', Inez is never

described in a physical manner, except once, very briefly

through Jack Lovett's eye when she lands at the airport in

Honolulu.

Their conduct as lovers is not portrayed in any

detail and any conversation between the two would never

comply with the expectations of romantic talk as encouraged

by novels or movies.

Describing bomb tests as "something

to behold" scarcely acts as a conventional seduction

300

strategy.

Nor is the Happy Talk Bar a idyllic place for

the cultivation of romance; one is more likely to hear the

rhetoric of war in this military establishment than the

rhetoric of love.

The romance, deprived of its conventions, reveals its

ideological implications.

Whereas Carol Christian could

persist in maintaining her romantic version of the male—

female relation despite evidence to the contrary—~"when a

man told a woman her dress was too revealing it meant he

adored her"——, her daughter is less susceptible to such

narrative self—deceptions.

Given her history as Harry

Victor's wife, Inez discovers early on how "heroines" are

created—-as self—serving manipulations of fact by men such

as Billy Dillon on behalf of failed presidential

candidates.

In Inez' world, the heroine is no longer a

private self—creation as in her mother's time, but a

collective enterprise to be resisted as much as possible.

Still, Inez Victor is not unaffected by her mother's

literary creations of her own life.

Carol Christian

explains that Paul Christian's extended absences from their

marriage and family life in her typically romantic fashion:

"'When a man stays away from a woman it means he wants to

keep their love alive', Carol Christian advised Inez and

Janet" (24).

This is one story that Inez apparently does

believe, as she puts that belief into practice in her

relationship to Jack Lovett.

"Often enough, during those

twenty years

,

c' Inez Victor and Jack Lovett refrained

301

from touching each other, refrained from exhibiting undue

pleasure in each other's presence or untoward interest in

each other's activities, refrained most specifically from

even being alone together, to keep the idea of it quick.

Quick, alive.

Something to think about late at night.

Something private" (92).

The seduction of becoming a heroine continues to tempt

Inez, like her mother before her, long after she has gained

awareness of the contrivance involved in that process as

manifested in her public life.

Instead, Inez claims

exemption for the private sphere of experience, as do most

heroines since their public roles rarely confirm their

private versions of their heroism.

In the private realm,

Inez does retain the capacity for memory.

"Thinking over

one's story and seeing its pattern, discerning in that the

meaning of one's integral self, is an exquisitely self—

defeating mode of claiming mixed literary and moral

distinctiveness—~of becoming a heroine--that continues to

be tempting" maintains Brownstein in her 1982 critical

examination of this phenomenon.

That "mixed literary and moral distinctiveness" is

something Inez Victor relinquishes during the silent time

in Hong Kong.

As reported by the narrator, Inez came to

understand that public and private narratives can trap as

well as free their heroines, even as they attribute an

inflated significance to the acts and thoughts of these

heroines.

"She had spent her childhood in the local

 

302

conviction that the comfortable entrepreneurial life of an

American colony in a tropic without rot represented a

record of individual triumphs over a hostile environment.

She had spent her adult life immersed in Harry Victor's

conviction that he could be president" (211).

Once Inez

relinquishes her "American exemption" from history, "the

convulsions of a world largely unaffected by the individual

efforts of anyone in it," Inez achieves an "eerie serenity"

(211).

She discovers a freedom in the release from

narrative, both personal and private versions.

An Inez

awaits the rescue of her daughter from the fall of Saigon

alone in an apartment in Hong Kong, her understanding of

her place in history alters.

"As she listened to the rain

and to the voices fading in and out from Nakhon Phanom Inez

thought about Harry in New York and Adlai at school and

Jessie at B.J.'s and it occurred to her that for the first

time in almost twenty years she was not particularly

interested in any of them.

Responsible for them in a

limited way, yes, but not interested in them.

They were

definitely connected to her but she could no longer grasp

her own or their uniqueness, her own or their difference,

genius, special claim" (208).

Of course that freedom from internal narratives is

ironically juxtaposed with the narrator's and the

narratee's awareness of Inez as the subject of yet another

narrative--that of the novel being written and read——but

the narrator's story of Inez's experience exerts less

303

control over its protagonist than does the narratives Inez

Victor inherited as a child.

Zav remarks on this

characteristic of the metafictional novel in The Mythopoeic

 

Reality.

"The main counter-technique of metafiction are

two-dimensional flat characterization, consciously

contrived plots, and paralogical, non—causal, and anti-

linear sequence of events..." (39).

The flat

characterization, contrived plots, and anti—linear sequence

of events are features some reviewers consider artistic

inadequacies in Didion's fourth novel.

But Said sees this

movement from the individual/personal forms to

"transpersonal" forms in literary as in non-literary

discourse as evidence of the "transformation of naturally

filiative into systematically affiliative relationships.

The loss of the subject...is in various ways the loss as

well of the procreative, generational urge authorizing

filiative relationships" (20).

This movement is replicated in Inez Victor's own

life as well.

She finds she loses "interest" in familial

relationships after the death of her sister.

The ethos of

care that she shares with all of Didion's heroines is

transferred to a global 'family', the refugees of war.

The

administration of those refugee camps is an affiliative

relationship in which Inez's "personality" is absent, and

the "transpersonal function" she performs is foregrounded.

But this 'positive' pattern of affiliation in the novel is

presented along with a less desirable one; one in which

304

each profession develops its own language as a way to

separate rather than bring together those who do not share

filiative claims.

In this emerging social pattern, all

groups claim access to the production of meaning and

significance, thus usurping the privilege conventionally

accorded literary artists in the past.

Thomas Edwards makes reference to this artistic dilemma

that Didion shares with her predecessor, Henry Adams in his

view.

"In both of them, irony and subtlety confront a

chaotic new reality that shatters the orderings of simpler,

older ways.

Both face such a world with an essentially

aristocratic weapon, the power to dispose language and

thought, at least, against those empowered to dispose just

about everything else'K24).

The equal access to

information through the media is far more rampant in

Didion's age of the post—industrial democracy; the leveling

of language in the late twentieth century represents the

darker side of affiliation in Didion's view.

In this

social milieu, bomb tests are occasions of aesthetic

experience, a war becomes an exchange of favors, a protest

is not so much a political act as it is an apprenticeship

in public relations, drug abuse is not a sin, nor an

expanded experience, but a "consumer decision", the events

of one's life are diminished or elevated to the status of

"photo opportunities", and personal and public narratives

are reduced or promoted to press releases.

But in the release from the filiative structures of

305

relationships and meanings, a freedom is discovered by the

artist nonetheless.

A journalist can write fiction and a

novelist can report news.

Indeed, as Grace Strasser—

Mendana discovers in A Book of Common Prayer, writing as an

affiliative act can attempt to reclaim what has been lost

in the repudiation or irrelevance of the filiative one.

Didion's narrator in Democracy also achieves an artistic

 

freedom in her production of the narrative she engages in.

She expresses that discovery in terms of the possibilities

that remain open because of the loss of certain narrative

conventions.

"Perhaps because nothing in this situation

encourages the basic narrative assumption, which is that

the past is prologue to the present, the options remain

open here.

Any thing could happen" (233), the narrator

speculates at the close of the novel.

The narrative Didion

can even imagine bequeathing a literary legacy to a younger

female writer and thus initiating a tradition the authorial

Didion generally ignores:

a maternal literary tradition.

"Imagine my mother dancing I had hoped that Jessie's novel

would begin, but according to a recent letter I had from

her this particular novel is an historical romance about

Maximilian and Carlota" (233).

In other words Jessie will

write the sort of novel a reporter-narrator could be

expected to write.

In Democracy A Novel, the narrator describes her

 

production of narrative in contemporary American society as

"a high wire act" (232).

And in many ways, that

306

description is an apt one.

To attempt to produce meaning

from a set of circumstances without at the same time

creating a totalization of experience proves to be a

difficult challenge.

To risk inclusion of many rival

versions of the American experience as this narrator does

is to risk misreading, misinterpretation; but only if the

narrator makes a filiative claim to all possible

productions of meaning that reside in the linguistic

environment of the novel, which this narrator does not.

Instead, the narrative Joan Didion chooses to set not only

her narratee/reader free from such obligations, but also

her own creation——her heroine.

"Since Kuala Lumpur is not

likely to dispatch its last refugee in Inez's or my

lifetime, I would guess she means to stay on, but I have

been surprised before", (234) the narrator speculates about

her heroine's future.

In so doing, the narrator

accomplishes an action similar to that of George Eliot's

narrator in Middlemarch.

Brownstein claims that at the

 

close of that novel, Eliot "lets Dorthea go...The

ending...releases her [the heroine] from self—

consciousness.

Doing that, it rephrases the question of

whether the romantic or literary or fantastic aspect of a

woman's self is so deeply implicated in her consciousness

that it must inevitably immure or entomb her" (153).

Brownstein would claim that Eliot thinks otherwise, the

same claim I would put forth for Didion's view of the

female's relation to narratives about and by her.

As has

been noted, Didion finds considerable autonomy in the

narratives of the women of her maternal history who shared

307

in the opening of the frontier.

Keeping Didion's own particular history in mind, the

resistance to totalization of experience demonstrated in

this fourth novel through its metaficitonal structure bears

a striking analogy to another pattern in women's art:

quilting.

Elaine Showalter examines the correspondences

between these two arts in her article "Piecing and

Writing".

"The history of quilting is closely associated

with the recording of American female experience as one

historian notes, women 'were stitching together the history

of the country, making the great American tapestry'" (255).

Showalter notes that a number of female writers and critics

have found the process of quilting an apt description of

the process of producing narratives.

She cites the work of

Rachel Blau DuPlessis as exemplary in its envisioning of

this possibility.

"According to...DuPlessis, a pure

women's writing would be 'non-hierarchical structures,

making an even display of elements over the surface with no

climatic place or moment, having the materials organized

into many centers.

In the "verbal quilt" of the feminine

text, there is no subordination, no ranking" (274).

This

description which sees the quilting process as a metaphor

for narrative production seems particularly suited to

Didion's novel as it incorporates the important elements of

that work:

the American, female and contemporary literary

308

experience.

Furthermore, Didion prizes, as I have noted,

actual quilts of her maternal ancestors which hang in her

California home.

One of Didion's remarks about the

construction of one of those prized heirlooms suggests that

she recognizes a correlation in these female activities.

Didion details the experience of a maternal great-great—

grandmother who crossed the country in a covered wagon.,

The woman twice suffered from fever, buried one child and

gave birth to another on this long and arduous journey.

"In that quilt of Elizabeth Reese's are more stitches than

I have ever seen in a quilt, a pointless and blinding

compaction of stitches, and it recently occurred to me that

she must have finished it one day in the middle of the

crossing, somewhere in the wilderness of her own grief and

just kept on stitching" (Esquire 10).

Didion has since

used the sewing analogy to describe her construction of A

Book of Common Prayer.

In an interview for Paris Review,

 

Didion told Linda Kuehl that she had "to work that

revolution in on the bias, had to ease out the wrinkles

with my fingers" (155).

In Democracy A Novel Dildion has constructed a "verbal

 

quilt" of American life which uses whatever material is at

hand to design her story; she understands, as does the

quilter, that "piecing is an art of scarcity, ingenuity,

conservation and order" (Showalter 228).

In so doing,

Didion represents what is best in American tradition, and

what is not.

The narrative resembles a quilt, each piece

309

democratically equal to the next, each contributing to the

entire design.

Democracy A Novel involves the painstaking

 

care of a female art that proudly displays Elizabeth

Reese's talent for making art out of grief and loss-—an art

of scarcity and survival.

DIDION'S NON—FICTION:

MESSAGES FROM THE FRONTIERS OF AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

There is no fiction or non-fiction as we commonly

understand the distinction:

there is only narrative...

E.L. Doctorow

This post—modern description of literary production

particularly applies to writers such as Joan Didion whose

prose is situated at the literary juncture Doctorow

deconstructs.

As a producer of both forms as they are

conventionally defined, Didion has acted as a narrative

pioneer on this literary frontier.

Her perspective has

allowed her to recognize that all narrative constructs are

'fictional', but that those 'improvised' constructs are

nonetheless required for survival in both literature and in

life.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live", Didion

announces and thereby establishes literary claim on the

disputed linguistic borders of the post—modern narrative

landscape.

The 'we' in her statement suggests Didion's

view of narrative as a communal activity, just as the

pluralization of 'stories'implies the multiplicity of

productions entailed.

This sense of venturing beyond the conventional borders

of fiction/non-fiction is characteristic of the

310

311

journalists of the 60s and 703.

As noted in Chapter 4,

Hellmann envisions the situation of the new journalist as a

conflict in which the demythologizing perceptions of the

individual mind are pitted against the mass produced

corporate fictions that pass as news.

"New journalists

directly confront the actualities behind these images and

interpret them for us, fulfilling the functions of

explorers who pass through the frontiers of ordinary

experience and then return to tell us what is on the other

side" (139).

The report from the other side exposes the fictionality

of all fact by examining the empirical evidence from which

that 'fact' was extrapolated.

The report takes the

conventional form of the journalistic essay, a form Said

has compared to an x-ray.

"If...the various forms of

literature are compared with sunlight refracted in a prism,

then the essay is ultraviolet light" (52).

In other words,

the narratives produced by writers that fuse fact and

fiction display their skeletal structure as interpretative

methods imposed on "the shifting phantasmagoria" of actual

experience.

Because of its focus on interpretative

methodology, new journalism is seen by critics such as

Hellmann as "a genre of the new fiction; it deals with

fasts through fable, discovering, constructing, and self-

consciously exploring meaning beyond our media—constructed

'reality', our 'news'" (xi).

Nowhere is the fusion of factual and fictional devices

more apparent in Didion's work than in her book—length

essay Salvador.

Published in 1983, after the 1977

312

publication of A Book of Common Prayer but before the 1984

 

publication of Democracy, the contents of Salvador reflect

 

its publication history as part of Didion's literary

production.

As noted by a number of critics, several

passages in Salvador bear an uncanny resemblance to some in

A Book of Common Prayer; issues that emerge again in

 

Democracy first surface in Didion's depiction of this

 

enigmatic country, notably the idea of democracy as a

linguistic commodity.

Published subsequent to A Book of Common Prayer, the

novel I claim is pivotal in Didion's development as a

writer, Salvador represents the narrative shift from

filiation to affiliation in Didion's non—fiction that I

have claimed for her fictional works.

Contemporary

America, but more precisely, her native California, served

as the internalized geographical locus for Didion's

observations of cultural phenomena in the first two

collections of essays.

In Salvador her range of vision

expands to include the political turmoil of our southern

neighbors in Central America.

Democracy incorporates an

 

even broader geographical sweep, one that arcs from New

York to Honolulu to Saigon to Kuala Lumpur.

In a truly

American fashion, Didion's gaze turns in a westerly

direction.

Didion's change of venue, however, is not merely a

313

matter of personal preference.

It also reflects

corresponding shifts in American foreign policy, as

documented by the 'corporate fictions' of the media.

In

Salvador, Didion enacts Hellmann's version of the new

journalistic stance toward the official media.

She pits

the resources of her individual, female, and contemporary

mind against the polyglot, masculine, and corporate

fictions manufactured by both Salvadoran and American

government officials.

Some critics find this stance inadequate to the task at

best, claiming "she mystifies her subject" and thus makes

her personal failure seem a universal quandary (Videz 33).

Still others are even more vociferous in their attacks,

calling Didion the "Meryl Streep of U.S. Letters, an

intelligent craftsman of high strung sensitivity" (Ross 40)

or accusing her of almost treasonous acts.

George Will

writes a la Colonel North:

"But books such as Didion's-—a

reaction of revulsion, visceral yet controlled, in response

to savagery of all sides-—can weaken the tenuous hold

Americans have on this truth:

There are national needs--

such as the need to prevent the multiplication of Cubas-—

that are important regardless of the nature of the company

we must keep when pursuing them.

Fastidiousness is a

virtue in literature and an impossibility in politics" (LSJ

14).

Interestingly, those of either political extreme are

dissatisfied with Didion's approach.

The far left

314

denounces her failure "to think clearly through the muddled

political debate" (Ross 40), while the far right accuses

her of making "the tiny republic of El Salvador into a

mirror reflecting her own basic contempt for liberal

democracy and the American way of life" (Falcoff 68).

Eder, in a National Review article, engages in a savage

 

attack on the book and on Didion herself.

His method is a

curiéh reconstruction of Didion's literary history.

He

accentuates her six years as a feature writer for Vogue (in

her early twenties) and then he points to her work as a

screenwriter in Hollywood.

He totally ignores her

considerable repute as an essayist and acknowledges only in

passing that she "produced four minor works of fiction.

Salvador must be regarded as her fifth effort in that field

 

although written in the guise of a documentary" (829).

Eder proceeds to defend the Salvadoran election process he

feels Didion's has attacked, he deliberately misreads

Didion's critique of a local arts and crafts festival, and

then Eder suggests that Jean Kirkpatrick would be a more

reliable and reasoned source of information on El Salvador.

The two British reviews are more incisive in their

comments, to my mind.

Both point to the noticeable lack in

the book of any discussion of the insurgents or guerrillas-

-a frequently cited and, I think, justified criticism of

the work.

But in the Times Literary Supplement, Whitehead

declares "her main achievement is to dissect the language

used by American officialdom "which he maintains is used to

315

disguise the reality of Salvadoran life and to distract

the public from "the disagreeable work" American officials

are performing there (663).

My discussion will center on

the linguistic analysis Didion employs as an ideological

strategy in the book.

In so doing, Salvador will be

 

considered, as Acherson of the London Review of Books

 

describes it, as "a study of the connections between fear

and unreality, atrocity and illusion" (111).

But first an observation about the highly critical

assessments of Salvador seems in order.

What is most

 

remarkable about even the most vicious attack on the book

is how accurately the derogatory comments describe Didion's

work, despite the intense disapproval voiced in those

descriptions.

For instance, Will's description of the work

as "a reaction of revulsion, visceral yet controlled, in

response to savagery on all sides" catches precisely the

mood so carefully and consistently evoked in Salvador.

It

 

is the potential effectiveness of the mood that worries

Will; readers, indeed, may be so repulsed by Didion's

reconstruction of the daily horrors in that tiny country

that they may well question American policy in the region.

Will's accusation of "fastidiousness" on Didion's part, in

this light, becomes a pejorative term, perhaps even a

sexist one, for what in other circumstances would be

recognized as moral rectitude.

And while it is true that

Didion finds that the American involvement in El Salvador

reflects the political ambiguities that originate from

316

Washington, her critique of those policies is contemptuous,

not of democracy as such, but the rhetorical manipulation

of such terms as "liberal democracy" as occurs in El

Salvador.

Those critics who decry Didion's lack of a solucidn to

the Salvadoran situation, and by implication, the U.S.

Central American policy, either have their own solutions to

offer (as Videz does), or they ignore Didion's point that

it is the "illusion of plausibility" and not a soluci6n

that is aimed for in the region (87).

As for the critics,

such as Forche, who want more detail about "what life is

like for a majority of Salvadorans" (241), Didion's

response permeates the entire book; the majority of

Salvadorans live——on a daily basis--the abject terror

Didion experienced only as an outsider for a brief two-week

period.

Forche's concern, that a tendency toward literary

interpretations can act to deny the reality of daily

atrocities, is an appropriate one; but it is a concern I

believe Didion shares and takes pains to resist.

The two comments that best represent, however

inversely, the salient features of Salvador are Ross's

criticism that the "tragedy" of El Salvador appears "as if

it is happening inside the writer's head" (40), and Eder's

conjecture that Salvador could be mistaken for a work of

fiction.

If Didion's position as a practitioner of the new

journalism is taken into account, then her approach to

Salvador seems less vulnerable to the more pejorative

317

readings these critics suggest.

In a perceptive analysis

of Didion's modus operandi as an essa ist, titled "The

Y

 

Implacable '1':

Joan Didion," Gordon Taylor posits that

Didion is able to draw "the world into the self" (141).

Commenting about The White Album, Taylor reports that

 

Didion "exerts throughout the book her power to

personalize the world, less relentlessly intent on remaking

\

it in her own image than on making her way into it by

seeing it in her mind" (147).

Didion's propensity to

envision empirical reality in language that always bears

the mark of her personal stance acts as her signature on

any piece of prose she produces.

It is the process by

which Didion signals how the "narratives" or stories we

tell in order to live come into being--"in the mind".

Samuel Coale finds Didion's tendency to construct

narratives around the pictures she sees in her mind a not

unusual narrative practice.

"Didion admits that the images

haunted her first, as in many ways they did Faulkner",

Coale observes in his essay of Didion in his work In

Hawthorne's Shadow (184).

Viewed from this angle, Ross's

 

comment reveals her own lack of insight about how

narratives are produced; when that process is taken into

consideration, then it is clear that the "tragedy" of El

Salvador had to be taken into Didion's mind in order for

her to write so evocatively about it; however, that

circumstance in no way need to suggest that the lucidity of

Didion's account of the tragedy pre—empts the stark reality

 

318

of it.

The exposition of Didion's method however does

support Eder's contention that Salvador possesses fictional

qualities, if 'ficitonal' is understood as those properties

which reveal that a piece of writing always gives evidence

of the mind of its maker.

The 'fictional' properties of Salvador resemble those

of what Zav, in The Mythopoeic Reality, calls the

testimonial non-fiction novel.

Zav characterizes this

borderline genre as a "narrative of encounters between the

author--the historical person whose name appears on the

title page, not a fictional 'second self'-—and the brute or

physical facts" (130).

Salvador provides just such an

account.

The brute facts overpower the very slim volume of

Didion's account of her encounter with that very small

troubled country.

The reader is introduced, as Didion was,

first to the body dumps and forensic photographs that pass

for local interests.

"The photograph...shows a body with

no eyes, because the vultures got to it before the

photographer did.

There is a special kind of practical

information that the visitor to El Salvador acquires

immediately, the way visitors to other places acquire

information about the currency rates, the hours for the

museums.

In El Salvador, one learns that vultures go first

for the soft tissue, for the eyes, the exposed genitalia,

the open mouth.

One learns that an open mouth can be used

to make a specific point, can be stuffed with something

emblematic; stuffed, say, with a penis, or, if the point

319

has to do with land title, stuffed with some of the dirt in

question.

One learns that hair deteriorates less rapidly

than flesh, and that a skull surrounded by a perfect corona

of hair is not an uncommon sight in the body dumps" (17).

Passages such as this pull the reader into the powerful

rhythms and stark images of Didion's prose.

The tourist-

like scenario, created in a flat, even diction, jangles

against the sites being detailed.

The abrasive

juxtaposition of language and experience in Salvador alerts

the somnolent reader to the "endemic apprehension of danger

in the apparently benign" (105).

Didion cautions the

reader early on that language in this prose country is a

mine-field and one needs to tread carefully through its

well-worn paths.

Didion recounts several occasions when she and her

husband were confronted by aimless threats of violence and

concludes that "terror is the given of the place" (14).

In

this respect, the country retains its frontier quality for

Didion.

The "local vocation for terror" seems inexplicable

to her except in terms of the fact that the "place remains

marked by the meanness and discontinuity of all frontier

history" (73).

Didion supports that impression with the

fact that El Salvador was never really settled by either

the Mesoamerican or South American cultures that invaded

the country.

A visit to a native crafts exhibit only

reveals that what passes for native culture in El Salvador

is "a learned idea of local culture, an official imposition

320

made particularly ugly by the cultural impotence of the

participants" (75).

This encounter with the reality of a war—torn country

demoralizes Didion in ways she as a norteamericana has been

privileged not to have known.

Small ironies loom large in

this alien territory of fear.

She notes that the forensic

photographs are kept in photograph albums with plastic

covers that have pictures of American dating scenes on

them.

In a country where "romance is dead" (Hanley 25),

countless women come each day to search the albums for a

clue as to the whereabouts of their husbands, sons, or

brothers who have been "disappeared".

Part of Didion's privilege though comes from another

fact of her experience; it is not one she comments about,

although a critic, Lynne Hanley, does:

the fact that she

is a woman

faced

tr with the barbarianism of a civil

war.

In her article, "To El Salvador," Hanley states that

Didion's account of this troubled situation constitutes a

departure for her as a female writer.

Hanley maintains

that Didion has in the past followed the lead of most women

novelisé and scrupulously avoided the actualities of war.

Didion, she says, has preferred to report from the

periphery about the seismographic tremors felt on the

homefront.

She cites Didion's focus on Haight-Ashbery

rather than on the cause for which it was a symptom:

the

Vietnam War.

But in Salvador Didion engages her

 

sensibilities in the painful process of confronting and

 

 

321

recording horrors she can neither assuage or avert.

That effort is one that demands of the journalist that

she refuse to employ her literary craftsmanship as an

evasive tactic.

As Hanley remarks, Didion's experience of

war has been "literary and imaginary" (23); her

expectations have been shaped by the accounts of James

Jones, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer.

Furthermore,

Didion had herself imagined a country like El Salvador in

»
?
I

Book of Common Prayer.

Still, her subsequent visit to El

 

Salvador to dispel the literary idea of the place reveals

how persistent literary ideas remain.

Henley speculates

that Didion had to confront not only the chaos and terror

of everyday life in a country smaller than San Diego

County, but also had to resist her own tendency to

fictionalize her experience.

"To get at the facts, lg

verdad, Didion had to penetrate both the fictions about El

Salvador and her own desire to disassociate, to

fictionalize" (24).

The literary influence is signaled immediately by

Didion's inclusion of a passage from Conrad's Heart of

Darkness as the preface of Salvador.

The passage contains

Marlow's description of Kurtz's report for the

International Society for the Suppression of Savage

Customs.

Echoes of the passage reverberate throughout

Didion's text.

"'By the simple exercise of our will we can

exert a power for good practically unbounded'" was an idea

that fired European imperialism a century ago, and it is

322

the idea that propels the American version of that gesture

today, in Didion's view.

Conradian images and phrases punctuate the text of

Salvador almost unavoidably; as a result, it is as if Heart

of Darkness itself comes to function as one of the many

rhetorical commodities that compete for its share of this

jumbled linguistic market.

When Didion is informed that a

Salvadoran official had to be divested of his belief that

Franciscan nuns and priests were French, her reaction

imitates Marlow's in the Congo.

"This was one of those

occasional windows that open onto the heart of El Salvador

and then close, a glimpse of the impenetrable interior",

(49) Didion remarks.

The prevalence of anti-Semitism and

the official discrimination of the native Indians,

especially among the oligarchy, prompts Didion to speculate

that "in many ways race remains the ineffable element at

the heart of this particular darkness" (74).

But, as

Hanley points out, Didion also departs from Conrad in an

essential way:

whereas Conrad's language becomes

increasingly abstract the closer he approaches the horrors

of white civilization, Didion's "grows more relentlessly

concrete in the face of the unspeakable" (24).

Didion is

ultra—sensitive to the potential of the abstract to mask

hypocrisy and even atrocity in El Salvador; and thus even

her lapses into abstract language refer to a concrete text,

call up a particular history against which to measure the

present incantations.

Part of the history recalled is her

own.

323

Oblique references to A Book of Common Prayer also

appear in Salvador; in some ways Salvador functions as a

'factual' version of its previous fictional self——A Book of

 

Common Prayer.

Hanley finds the rather unusual reversal of

Didion's works (the fictional precedes the factual)

inevitable for Didion.

"Her experience of war has been

literary and imaginary, her inclination has been to improve

upon these accounts" (23).

What Didion finds in El Salvador (or what she looks

for?) is what Grace knew in Boca Grande:

that civil wars

are often waged by "the already entitled", and that the

guerrillas are pawns in these cyclical realignments of

power (34).

One suspects that Didion's expectations were

shaped by her own reading about El Salvador prior to her

visit—~reading that may also have been concurrent with the

writing of A Book of Common Prayer.

She lists Mantaza:

El

 

 

Salvador's Communist Revolt of 1932, The War of the

 

Dispossessed:

Honduras and El Salvador, 1969 and El

 

Salvador:

Landscape and Society as works for which she is

 

indebted for general background.

Another source of

information, the Area Handbook for El Salvador, published

 

by the United States Government Printing Office, captures

Didion's imagination in more obvious ways though.

In this

booklet of basic facts are two sentences that arrest

Didion's attention; the sentences describe the social

programs of general Martinez, dictator of El Salvador

324

between 1931-44.

"He kept bottles of colored water that he

dispensed as cures for almost any disease, including cancer

and heart trouble, and relied on complex magical formulas

for the solution of national problems....During an epidemic

of small—pox in the capital, he attempted to halt its

spread by stringing the city with a web of colored lights"

(54).

Those colored lights appear in A Book of Common Prayer

 

and apparently in Didion's mind's eye while she is in El

Salvador as well.

"Not a night passed in San Salvador when

I had not imagined it strung with those colored lights...",

she reports (54).

In an uncanny way Didion at that moment

almost becomes the fictional protagonist of her previous

novel.

That interchange also holds true for her

descriptions of the airport, the empty tourists hotels, the

general sense of unease one experiences when landing in El

Salvador.

"To land at this airport built to service them

[the defunct resort hotels] is to plunge directly into a

state in which no ground is solid, no depth of field

reliable, no perception so definite that it might not

dissolve into its reverse," sounds as much like Grace

Strasser-Mendana's assessment of Boca Grande as it does

Didion's of El Salvador.

Like Boca Grande, El Salvador has

no history, either as a republic or as a colony.

"So

attenuated was El salvador's sense of itself in its moment

of independence that it petitioned the United States as

admission to the union as a state,' Didion notes

I

325

But if some fictional aspects of her third novel

foreshadow the 'facts' of El Salvador, others are

emphatically revised.

In A Book of Common Prayer war and

 

politics are men's games from which women are perfunctorily

excluded.

That fictional model no longer applies in

Salvador.

Didion's actual experience in the war—torn

country "strips away the fictions that insulate women from

war", explains Hanley (25).

In El Salvador, Didion has to

witness the effects of war on the women, children and the

elderly, the only civilian population left after years of

civil strife.

In El Salvador, as in Boca Grande though,

war is waged by men that the women share lives with-~by

brothers, fathers, sons.

"The dead and the pieces of the

dead turn up...everywhere, everyday" (19).

Whole families

"are disappeared" in El Salvador, the personal and

political are merged, no one is immuned to the terror or

safe from the atrocities that qualify for ordinary

experience in this country under siege.

While visiting

Puerta del Diablo, a well—known body dump situated high on

a steep ridge, Didion notices a woman backing up a Toyota

pickup to the edge; she executes this maneuver several

times, apparently taking instructions from a man who

signals to her with his hands.

Three children play nearby.

Didion assumes the woman is learning to drive.

Only later

does it occur to Didion to question the choice of a well—

known body dump as a place to learn to drive.

The

implications of course is that the woman was learning, not

326

to drive, but to dump bodies.

"This was one of a number of

occasions...on which I cam to understand, in a way I had

not understood before, the exact mechanism of terror,"

Didion declares (21).

One aspect of that mechanism is to make the actual

appear illusory and to infuse the apparently benign with

the threat of the malefic.

The preferred method for

achieving connections "between fear and unreality and

atrocity and illusions" in El Salvador is to sabotage the

conventional relations of language and experience.

Words

take on a life of their own in this country which has

historically employed language as a tool to invent rather

than to report reality.

Only in El Salvador does Didion

come to see Gabriel Garcia Marquez "as a social realist"

(59).

This tendency toward a linguistic inflation is

supported by the physical landscape of El Salvador as well,

as it suggests 'literary' interpretations, as Didion wryly

observes.

"The place presents itself as a pathetic

fallacy:

the sky 'broods', the stones 'weep', a constant

seepage of water weighing the ferns and moss" (20).

The tendency to dress fiction in the clothing of fact,

to perform a linguistic hocus—pocus, is never more evident

than in the official rhetoric of El Salvador.

"Among

officials of the country language is appreciated not for

its descriptive but for its fictional possibilities"

(Hanley 26).

As such, political rhetoric functions in a

sphere of reality totally separate from the activity of the

 

327

body politic.

Political rhetoric, like contemporary

fiction, is self—reflexive, referring endlessly to itself

as a textual code; in effect, a metalanguage.

Didion

admits to being seduced by this incantation while visiting

Deane Hinton at the ambassador's residence.

"It was not

until late in the lunch..that it occurred to me that we

were talking exclusively about the appearance of things,

about how the situation might be made to look better, about

trying to get the Salvadoran government to 'appear' to do

what the American government needed done in order to make

it 'appear' that the American aid was justified" (93).

The

circular aspect of the American effort in El Salvador,

according to Didion, can be deduced from the periodic

reports of 'improvements' in the human rights situation,

which are followed by a worsening of that situation, which

in turn 'improves' again when certification of such

improvements is required for the receipt of U.S. aid.

In Fables of Fact, Hellmann discusses the introduction

 

of Dispatches, Michael Herr's non-fictional novel about

Vietnam/in terms that are relevant to Didion's observations

of El Salvador.

"The relation of a map to a territory is

of course a common semantic analogy for that of language to

reality and Herr's opening use of the map suggests not only

the literal alteration of the landscape by American

technology but also the self-deceiving alteration of that

destructive reality by a deceptive language" (129).

Didion's appraisal of El Salvador finds an analogous

328

situation to Herr's depiction of the American position in

Vietnam. "That we had been drawn, both by a misapprehension

of the local rhetoric and by the manipulation of our own

rhetorical weaknesses, into a game we did not understand, a

play of power in a political tropic alien to us, seemed

apparent, and yet there we remained" (96).

Although Didion

doesn't produce a map of El Salvador, she does report the

alterations of reality in this miniature country as well as

the official fictions produced to justify the American

presence there.

But in Didion's report, all efforts to find a solution

to the civil strife are radically undermined by the

language used to propose them.

She maintains that the

language used in El Salvador is the language of advertising

and the product being marketed is a political solution

crafted in Washington, Panama, or Mexico, "which is part of

the place's pervasive obscenity.

This language is shared

by Salvadorans and Americans, as if a linguistic deal had

been cut," (65).

In this environment, 'democracy' becomes

a linguistic commodity that materializes by virtue of

having been named——as if invoked by magic, or by a

misplaced faith.

The historical understanding of

linguistic capabilities as merely 'situational' explains

the Salvadoran preference for this ephemeral manipulation

of words perhaps, but fails to account for the American

complicity in that practice in Didion's view.

Didion invokes medical terminology to describe the

329

official American perception of El Salvador as a smaller

version of the United States, but "'sick', a temporarily

fevered republic in which the antibodies of democracy

needed only to be encouraged..." (96).

The American

reliance on the empirical assumption that all problems can

be cured, quickly and easily,-—one that contradicts all

social history-~permeates American foreign policy in El

Salvador from Didion's perspective.

De Toqueville's

assessment of the American character in this respect

provides an apt description of this predilection.

"The

practice which obtains amongst the Americans, of fixing the

standard of their judgement in themselves alone, leads them

to other habits of mind.

As they perceive that they

succeed in resolving without assistance all the little

difficulties which their practical life presents, they

readily conclude that everything in the world may be

explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of

the understanding" (144).

He proceeds to speculate that

Americans deny what is beyond their comprehension, or as

Didion suggests, transform the situation by a manipulation

of language so as

to render it amenable to comprehension.

Thus a man like Robert D—Aubuissoon, noted for his

association with the right winge

death squads, can be

characterized as someone who has to be encouraged to "play

ball" (29).

In this context, Didion's admitted lack of

comprehension of the "vocation for terror" in El Salvador

330

departs from the stereo-typical American response.

As in

the case of her literary counterpart, Grace Strasser-

Mendana, Didion has to conclude that simple soluci6ns lie

 

beyond her grasp and that of most norteamericanas.

After a

visit to a shopping mall which produced for Didion the

usual ironic detail a reporter seeks out to illuminate the

story being written (the juxtaposition of a guard who

conducts a weapons check with the availability of American

products for the socially upwardly mobile), she concludes

the detail is irrelevant.

As she leaves she sees soldiers

herding a young civilian into a van, guns at his back, but

she walks straight ahead, "not wanting to see anything at

all" (36).

She then begins to suspect the 'story' will

never be illuminated, that it will remain a "true noche

obscura" (36).

Indeed, what emerges from Salvador, ultimately, is the

central theme in all of Didion's work, fiction and non-

fiction:

what it means to be an American of a certain time

and place.

It is the American national character that is

on trial in Salvador more than it is the oppressive regime

of the Salvadoran government.

Didion's examination of the

troubled situation is, in fact, predicated on the official

American intervention in that small country south of our

borders; a country that shares with us the nomenclature

American and presumably a desire for democratic government,

American—style.

"My interest wasn't in Salvador...as a

political idea...I was interested in what the United States

331

was doing in Salvador," Didion explained to Leslie Garis of

the New York Times Magazine in February of 1987 (52).

Didion's statement refines her intention in Salvador by

evoking a different 'political idea', but one that has

intrigues her for a quarter of a century:

the question of

the American identity.

In fact, this concern supercedes

that of all others in her work.

To be an American, then, for Didion is to operate

collectively according to a specifically Western narrative-

-the narrative variously encoded as the American Dream,

Manifest Destiny, etc.

The perpetuating of that national

narrative generates the tenuous connections that link

Americans in bonds of affiliation with each other.

These

affiliative bonds have been characterized as a "community

of memory" by the authors of Habits of the Heart:

Individualism and Commitment in American Life (153).

A

"community of memory" is one "that does not forget its

past...is involved in retelling its...constitutive

narrative" (153).

The severing of our filiative bonds with

Great Britain, an act of self-generation, serves as the

constitutive narrative of our democratic society.

For

Didion, the radical break with the past which engendered

our collective identity as Americans also gave birth to our

national sense of rootlessness, sometimes experienced as

supreme freedom, sometimes as grievous loss.

Didion, too,

finds the American national identity serves as one of the

few communities of memory extant in modern American life.

332

The authors of Habits of the Heart speculate that

 

"Americans identify with their national community partly

because there is little else that we share in common but

also partly because America's history exemplifies

aspirations widely shared throughout the world..." (153).

Didion's investigation of the American role in El Salvador

suggests that the American democratic model may not be

readily exported to a country with a history quite

different from that of the United States.

Also, her report

indicates that for some Third World countries, American

history exemplifies something other than ideal aspirations

for a free society.

As in El Salvador, some factions see

American military and economic assistance as a form of

imperialistic extortion.

The fact that this view which is

couched in rhetoric associated with the left traditionally

is voiced by a group linked to the right in El Salvador

"suggests how latent... good will remains" for Americans

there, Didion testily observes (96).

The allegation also constructs a version of American

history very much at odds with Americans' view of

themselves and their role in history.

The "colonial

impulse" is an issue Didion concerns herself with more

directly in her next work, Democracy; however, she does so

 

only after that impulse has become a historical fact.

The

fact that she does examine the 'colonial impulse' as it

exhibited itself in Hawaii, however belatedly, does

indicate that Didion has begun to perceive a connection

333

between the 'colonial impulse' and the 'frontier mentality'

she claims a personal affinity for as definitive of the

American spirit.

The definition of the American character occupies a

central position in Didion's first two collections of

essays that examine contemporary culture.

The definition

of the American character centers around aspects of the

self in relation to time, to place, and to society.

Of

these factors, the ahistorical quality of the American

experience surfaces as the pivotal concern in Didion's

works.

The national tendency to consider the past as

obsolescent permeates all levels of American life, high

and low.

The ahistorical perspective is of course derived

from a sense of having started over, tabula rosa,

 

subsequent to a radical disaffiliation from our colonial

past.

But Didion's most recent works chronicle how

persistently that disavowed past continues to haunt

contemporary life, just as her earlier works document the

repercussions of the disavowal itself on the American

spirit some two centuries later.

The essays in Slouching

 

Toward Bethlehem and The White Album record Didion's

 

 

perceptions of these national dilemmas over two tumultuous

decades in American life.

From Didion's perspective the ahistorical sense is

deeply embedded in another--that of a particular place.

The particular place that most embodies this conjunction of

time and space for Didion is her native California.

334

Critics have noted Didion's passionate interest in her

native land parallels that of literary ancestors she speaks

of in a piece about Hawaii.

"A place belongs to whoever

claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches

it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so

radically that he remakes it in his own image..." (WA 146).

California belongs to Didion in the same sense that she

claims Honolulu belongs to James Jones, or Oxford,

Mississippi to Faulkner, or Kilimanjaro to Hemingway.

Didion maintains that California is a particularly

fitting metaphor for America at large as it is in

California, "here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is

where we run out of continent" (STE 172).

Brian Morton,

too, in his brilliant essay on Didion, proposes that

"California inherits the full ambivalence of 'manifest

destiny'" (76).

In the 1960's and 70's Didion could detect

residual evidence of the 'frontier mentality' in

California, residues of the spirit that propelled her own

maternal ancestors westward some five generations earlier.

In the story of Lucille Miler, a woman convicted of

murdering her husband in order to obtain the legal and

economic freedom to marry another who denies any attachment

to her, Didion detects the predilection of Americans to

reinvent their life.

In the story of James Pike, a man who

views questions about his past divorce and remarriage as

attempts to 'thwart' his election as the Episcopalian

Bishop of California, Didion finds Pike 3 "Michelin to his

335

time and place" (57).

In the story of twenty-two year old

Dallas Beardsley, who took out an ad for $50 down and $35 a

month for eight months for the fifth page of Daily Variety

 

announcing her own uniqueness and intentions to become a

movie star, Didion finds a "representative from the

invisible city" (WA 105).

In these stories of Californians

and many like them, Didion intuits that "time past is not

believed to have any bearing upon time present or future,

out in the golden land where everyday the world is born

anew" (SIB 28).

These people, like so many of California's

dispossessed, came "from somewhere else" to pursue their

dreams of easy success in a land of sun and surf, "a long

way from the cold, a long way from the past" (STE 19).

What they discover, though, is something quite different.

Instead of perpetual warmth and sunshine, they find a

climate "characterized by infrequent but violent extremes"

of wind, rain, and fire (STE 219).

"The city burning is

Los Angeles's deepest image of itself,’

' Didion claims, and

attributes that apocalyptic predisposition to the weather,

especially "the violence and unpredictability of the Santa

Ana...which shows us how close to edge we are" (STE 221).

A predilection for extremes is reflected in the lives

of many Californians who live at the edge of a frontier

that collapsed in on itself over a century ago.

Didion has

stated that she finds Frederick Jackson Turner's

declaration that the closing of the frontier constituted

336

one of the most significant events in American history

especially prescient in relation to the development of her

native land.

Both Turner and de Toqueville before him

recognized what many Americans apparently fail to take into

account:

that the frontier spirit, so intertwined with our

conception of the American way of life, was always a

function of the immense geographical space the Americans

were fortunate to find (or powerful enough to appropriate)

in the New World.

Yet, as Didion's account of the 60's and

70's in California demonstrate, that spirit has detached

itself from its historically relevant geography and now

floats free; it hovers over the collective experience of

American life as an uneasy sense of primal betrayal in the

midst of chaos and change.

When the betrayal of the frontier spirit takes the

shape of the right to impose one's will on a resistant

environment, a senseless violence, a petty vengeance, or an

intolerance of small irritations is the result, and the

underside of frontier life is exposed.

Didion finds

evidence of this enduring hostility in the proliferation of

bike movies which she sees as "ideograms of the future" (WA

100).

She speculates that the movies will set the style

for an entire generation.

Twenty years later the

propensity for senseless violence takes the form of

perverse and unprovoked shootings of anyone who happens to

cross one's path on the LA freeway or in a local

MacDonald's.

337

Another facet of the Western experience that Didion

finds in the California of her past is a sense of loss, a

tragic obsolescence.

"All that is constant about the

California of my childhood is the rate at which it

disappears", she observes in Slouching Toward Bethlehem

 

(176).

Her family has lived in the lush Sacramento Valley

for five generations and as such she inherits an insular,

agrarian past which resembles that of the American South,

and is thus consigned to a similar fate--"the Valley fate

which is to be paralyzed by a past no longer relevant" (STE

184).

She comments that when the agrarian way of life

disappeared her family went into real estate as they

recognized "no reality other than land" (STB_184).

This

attachment to the land may account for the Faulknerian

overtones discerned by a number of critics in Run River.

 

Didion herself admits much of the landscape detail was

included because she was so nostalgic for her native land

while writing the novel and living in New York.

Just across the desert from Didion's beloved Central

Valley a mirage of modernity floats above the horizon.

As

the embodiment of the secular spirit, Las Vegas stands in

stark contrast to the traditional spirit fostered by the

California of Didion's personal past.

In Didion's eyes,

this most artificial of cities panders exclusively to the

baser underpinnings of the American Dream.

"Las Vegas is

the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements,

bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion

338

to immediate gratification" (SIB 80).

In Las Vegas, one

can completely escape the burden of a historical identity.

One is not restricted to a given time or place, and one's

past is rendered obsolete with each roll of the dice or

turn of the wheel which creates a whole new set of

possibilities.

"There is no 'time' in Las Vegas, no night

and no day, and no past and no future...neither is there

.
5
L

any logical sense of where one is..." (80), Didion states

in defense of its magical appeal to modern Americans.

Las

Vegas capitalizes on what is left of the frontier spirit,

on the propensity to risk all in one stupendous moment of

intense exhilaration.

The myth of progress, of the upward

spiral of history permeates the place, while the democratic

impulse assures each courageous gambler that every one has

an equal chance to win an unimaginable fortune.

That gambling spirit which brought pioneers westward

also made possible the adventure of literally creating a

paradise out of a desert.

Much of the precariousness of

California's existence is due to the lack of a natural

source of water in the state sufficient to support it human

life.

Didion notes that water is the only natural force

that is controlled in the golden land.

Because of its

scarcity, however, she views water "with a reverence others

might find excessive" (WA 59).

She experiences an

ephiphanic moment on a visit to Hoover Dam and possesses a

catechismic memory of the intricate networks of waterways

that transport the sacred liquid from the Colorado River to

339

her kitchen sink.

She reverts to a litany of facts about

these waterworks as an incantation to induce an elusive

sleep.

Hoover Dam represents a sort of original force in

Didion's mind, "the several million tons of concrete that

made the Southwest plausible, the fait accompli that was to

 

convey in the innocent time of its construction, the notion

that mankind's brightest promise lay in American

engineering" (WA 198).

For her, part of its appeal is that

the dam functions as a "monument to a faith since

misplaced", but its compelling beauty, efficiency, and

isolation exceed its relation to the human efforts implicit

in its making.

The dam is a kind of secular god for

Didion, whose supreme omnipotence reveals itself ultimately

only in an absolute freedom from its creators..."a dynamo

finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute

isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a

world where no one is" (WA 200).

The aridity of the climate and the imperative to import

a water supply make this land of paradise less than truly

habitable.

"The apparent ease of California's life is an

illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here

in only the most temporary way", Didion points out (WA 64).

Even in Malibu where Didion lived for seven years, major

roads collapsed regularly or were often impassable due to

torrential rains or to raging fires that leapt across the

Pacific Coast Highway.

Didion captures something essential

of the Californian spirit, and perhaps America's as well,

340

in her description of life at Malibu.

"I had come to see

the spirit of the place as one of shared isolation and

adversity" (WA 220).

The sense of a "shared isolation and adversity" also

characterizes the experience of two of California's

fetishes:

the shopping mall and the freeway.

Both a visit

to the shopping mall and a drive on the freeway entail a

1

release from the self that Californians find redemptive.

Both are democratizing experiences, available to all

regardless of color, creed, or credit card rating.

Both

are communal in their demand for conformity; Didion

describes the freeway experience as "the only secular

communion Los Angeles has" (WA 83).

The driving itself

constitutes a mystical experience for the initiated.

"Actual participants think only about where they are.

Actual participation requires a total surrender, a

concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a

rapture-of—the-freeway.

The mind goes clean.

The rhythm

takes over" (WA 83).

This mechanized rapture reaffirms the

American myth of individual mobility for those who navigate

the freeways of California.

In the shopping mall, too, one

moves for a while "in an aqueous suspension not only of

light but of judgment, not only of judgment but of

'personality'" (WA 85).

In both situations, the self is

suspended in the now, free of future and past.

In the

sameness of experience, both the freeway and shopping mall

provide a "sedation of anxiety" (WA 185).

One cannot be

341

contacted or constricted by human limitations in these

ephemeral zones of experience; one is alone with the gods

of consumerism and commerce.

Another example of the cult of individualism as

practiced by Californians is the establishment of what

Brian Morton calls "exclusive groups" (78).

Morton sees

this cultish phenomenon as one that unerringly attracts

Didion's attention.

"Everybody in California lives

according to a set of fictions generated by what ever

_1

clique or profession or sect one adheres to; it is an

'immigrant' world, burdened by the 'pre-Einsteinian

dimension of the immigrant's symbolism, his lack of a sense

of time' and by a tendency to break up into...' little

pathological groups'" (77).

Morton explains that Didion's

fascination with such groups focuses on the way each

constructs a narrative, a 'community of memory', so to

speak, involving a distinct if often incomprehensible

jargon, and a "shared ideology or practice" which often

generates a "microcosm of order outside of clock or social

time" (Morton 78).

She locates these characteristics in

groups as diverse as the Hollywood film industry, the

Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, the

California Department of Transportation or Caltrans, the

Santa Monica Junior Chamber of Commerce, Brother Theobold

and his Friendly Apostolic Bible Church, or the lifeguards

at Zuma beach in northern Mailbu.

As Morton recollects, de

Toqueville foresaw this tendency toward solipsistic

342

behavior and associations as potentially harmful to

American society, as it "induces a fatal abdication of the

responsibilities of social order" (Morton 77).

Didion shares de Toqueville's concern.

For her, the

hippies of the Haight—Ashbury district in the 1960's most

forcefully depicted the 'atomization' of society implied in

de Toqueville's premonition.

The title piece of her first

collection of essays portrays in graphic detail the "social

hemorrhage" that indicates the lack of social cohesion de

Toqueville predicted could result from the cult of

individualism.

Didion introduces, in that essay, Deadeye,

a young man who isn't sure where Chicago is but who wants

to start "a teen Evangelism"; Max, who has gotten rid of

his middle—class Freudian hangups but drops acid every

week; Sharon, Max's "old lady", who gets high on washing

dishes; and Susan, a five year old who takes acid regularly

and who can name the other children in her kindergarten

class who do as well.

Didion's small vignettes of these

individuals she meets in San Francisco are presented

without much commentary; they tell their own stories which

she records and arranges in a narrative pattern.

Only

towards the end of the essay does she assess the stories of

the lives she has drawn.

Her assessment attends in

particular to the loss of filiation evident in this

cultural upheaval.

"We were seeing the desperate attempt

of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create

a community in a social vacuum...These were children who

 

343

grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great—aunts

and family doctors who had traditionally suggested and

enforced society's values...These are children who had

moved around a lot" (§l§ 23).

Didion sees these orphaned children as the future that

America had at some point aborted and "butchered the job"

(85).

The specter of lost children continues to haunt

Didion's subsequent works as I have pointed out in previous

chapters.

So emblematic has the lost child become for the

condition of American society that nearly all of Didion's

protagonists are themselves orphaned, as well as being

parents who 'lost' their children "to history" or "to

complications".

In Didion's fiction and non—fiction, she

records the working out of de Toqueville's vision of

filiation in a democracy:

"the woof of time is every

instant broken, and the track of generations effaced...not

only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors,

but it hides his descendants and separates his

contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon

himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him

entirely within the solitude of his own heart" (194).

From the solitude of her own heart, as a child of her

times, the America of the 50's, Didion views the Sixties

phenomenon with compassion, empathy, and wistfulness.

But,

ultimately, she has to consider the movement in a

historical context, and when she does, she recognizes it as

repetition.

"It's a social movement, quintessentially

 

344

romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social

crisis.

The themes are always the same.

A return to

innocence.

The invocation of an earlier authority and

control.

The mysteries of the blood.

An itch for the

transcendental, for justification.

Right there you've got

the ways that romanticism historically ends up in trouble,

lends itself to authoritarianism.

When the direction

appears" (£32 123).

In her assessment, she detects the

longing for a lost filiation, both in the nostalgic return

to innocence and in the yearning for a restored authority.

The impetus for social action is a temptation she

recognizes but rejects as an avoidance of the personal,

which for her consists of the "dread of meaninglessness

which was a man's fate" (205).

As a member of the silent

generation, Didion maintains that social action is

essentially a romantic panacea; but as de Toqueville points

out, it is also the logical consequence of the democratic

condition.

In a democratic society without intrinsic

limits on one's capacity to succeed, a theory of infinite

perfectibility is likely to develop without contradiction,

de Toqueville speculates.

Implicit, too, in the very

American idea of infinite perfectibility is the practice of

planned obsolescence.

As technology appears to perpetually

'improve' our standard of living, it also fosters a

devaluation of the past, so that all hope and value resides

in the future; thus the situation also encourages a view of

the upward spiral of history that Didion consistently

 

questions.

345

As I have argued, Play It As It Lays is a working out

 

of Didion's position as an individualist who tries to live

outside history.

In the novel, the reader discovers, if

Maria does not, that a separate peace is as romantic a

quest as is the zeal for social protest that Didion kindly

disparages in the Sixties.

Maria's position at the extreme

edge of individualism is a historical position; the idea of

living outside history being quintessentially American and

romantic.

This is the discovery that Grace makes in A Book

of Common Prayer and is one that Inez Victor shares in

 

Democracy.

Nonetheless, in "On the Morning After the

 

Sixties," Didion reasserts the stance of the silent

generation; even so, by then her youthful certitude is

cracking.

"What I have made for myself is personal, but is

not exactly peace," she admits (WA 206).

In her later

works (Salvador and Democracy), even the 'personal'

 

signifier is put to question.

By the late 80's, it has

become apparent to even the staunch individualist, Joan

Didion, that the personal is political, and the political,

personal.

The generational loss of the Sixties is accompanied by

another loss, a linguistic one.

At first, Didion perceives

this cultural phenomenon to be endemic to the generation of

children begat in the social hemorrhage of that decade of

unrest.

"Because they do not believe in words...their only

proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes...they

346

are less rebellious against society than ignorant of it,

able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-

doubts, Vietnam, Saran—wrap, diet pills, the Bomb" (STB

  

  

123), she ascertains.

The lack of language and the systems

of meaning that Didion still believes at this point

inevitable accompanies language strikes her as a crucial

disability.

The lack of a constitutive narrative, the

failure of the community of memory to function, renders

these homeless children susceptible to anyone who

possesses what they lack:

words.

"They are sixteen,

fifteen,fourteen, younger all the time, an army of children

waiting to be given words" (E32 123).

Later Didion finds her personal and professional life

has been infected by the cultural malaise she had first

glimpsed symptoms of in Haight—Ashbury; it was there she

first encountered evidence that the controlling metaphor of

culture was shifting from one of order to entropy.

Whereas

Didion recognized the lost children and their synthetic

language as emblematic of cultural waste in the mid-

sixties, it is a few years later before she understands

that her own communities of memory have been rendered

obsolete.

As a writer, she is paralyzed by that

realization.

Referring to the disconnected sequence of

events that include Robert Kennedy's funeral, the first

reports from My Lai, and an account of a woman who put her

five year old daughter out to die on the median of

Interstate 5, Didion surmises that "certain of these

347

images did not fit into any narrative I knew" (WA 13).

She

presents a psychiatric report that describes her as "a

personality in the process of deterioration" (14) when she

is tested to determine the cause of attacks of vertigo and

nausea.

Later she is diagnosed as having a disease of the

nervous system, probably multiple sclerosis.

In retrospect

she argues that "an attack of vertigo and nausea does not

now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of

1968", a summer that ended for her with the Charles Manson

killings (WA 15).

Didion's questioning of the efficacy of narrative

itself as an agent of social cohesion occurs when evidence

of the failure of the constitutive narrative of American

life can no longer be denied.

In this crisis of spirit,

which is both personal and cultural, psychological and

physical, Didion found "it necessary to revise the

circuitry of my mind" (WA 13).

She finds the functions of

the nervous system (which in her case has broken down) to

be paradigmatic of the impulse to narrative as well.

Taylor remarks on this discovery, noting that Didion finds

a way to overcome the loss of narrative and neural

functions, and that "the neurological report is a model" of

her discovery (145).

"Neural paths of prose work their way

out from the points of blockage represented by the reports,

revising mental circuits toward what Didion calls a

"revisionist theory of my own history", though she also

calls such a theory an 'illusion'" (142).

The nervous

348

system apparently heals itself by gradually changing it:

circuitry, so that it locates healthy nerves to carry the

message that a blocked, inflamed nerve is unable to

transmit.

Thus Didion finds the failure of the filiative

system of narrative she essentially inherits as a child of

her time can be the focal point for initiating rather than

terminating narrative possibilities.

‘

"The writer tells a 'story', performs the literary act,

in order to survive," Taylor informs us in "The Implacable

'I'".

That act of survival functions as an act of

affiliation as well.

Affiliation is the relationship that

presents itself as an alternative to the failure of

filiation.

As such, it serves as the compensatory neural

circuit, the one engendered to allow transmission of the

constitutive narrative which in modern times is the

narrative of the failure of filiation.

The construction of

narrative itself becomes an affiliative act which must

declare its origins and limitations, as Grace Strasser-

Mendana discovers in her narrative of Charlotte's life and

death.

The relationship between the writer and characters

can also duplicate the lost filiative connection.

Didion

says of her characters that they become "your family,

closer to you than anybody you know"(Davison 35).

In her

observation resides the clue to the alarm she sounded when

she discovered the children of the Sixties were a

culturally orphaned generation without the solace of words.

For it is only through language and its infinite

349

possibilities that the necessary connections must be

regenerated if we are to continue to tell the stories we

need in order to live.

Taylor finds Didion's description

of her Malibu home an appropriate analogy for this

accomplishment.

"The spirit of the place she has come to

see as one of 'shared isolation and adversity', the phrase

first suggesting a Native Daughter's sense of the Western

past, then crystallizing as an expression of her adverse

narrative spirit, paradoxically communal in its isolation"

(150).

The sharing of isolation and adversity is an action

common to Didion's beloved maternal ancestors whose courage

and sheer determination were instrumental in the opening of

the Western frontier.

The daughters of these strong women

recorded in their journals patches of history the mothers

embroidered into quilts, appliqued to calico and muslin, or

embedded in recipes of corn bread and India relish.

From

one such daughter we learn that a grieving aunt carried a

dead baby in her arms "a long time" for fear the child

would be buried in the wilderness; from another child that

her mother threatened extermination to Indians that were

rumored to be intent on killing her family.

"They tended

to accommodate any means in pursuit of an uncertain end"

Didion recalls, and in so doing describes her own will to

narrative.

(Esquire 10)

"There is something like

exhilaration for the reader in the demonstration of her

will to narrative act" (Taylor 143).

That is a will to

350

narrative that Didion inherited as a daughter of the

frontier.

She has learned, with other women writers, that

writing is an art of scarcity, but even so, the affiliative

bonds must be forged, the filiative promise must be kept.

Thus Didion knits together the pieces of her past, maternal

and paternal literary legacies, fact and fiction, personal

and cultural, in a reconstruction of the constitutive

narrative of American history to bequeath to the children

lost to the future.

CONCLUSION

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of

memory against forgetting" (Kundera 3).

This astute observation is made by the narrator of

Milan Kundera's work, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,

 

a work which examines contemporary life in Czechoslovakia

under a repressive regime.

Joan Didion's just recently

published work of non—fiction, Miami, echoes many of

Kundera's concerns about the relation of power to memory.

Miami is Didion's attempt to engage the American

consciousness in a struggle against the forgetting of its

own past.

As in the case of Kundera's narrator, Didion

detects the threat of totalitarianism in the routine and

deliberate revisions of national history perpetrated by any

system of government, democratic or otherwise.

In Didion's

case, she finds this deliberate dissociation of language

(narrative) from experience (history) evident in the

peculiar relations that have evolved over the last quarter

century between the City of Miami, Florida and Washington

D.C.

"Of American cities Miami has since 1959 connected

only to Washington, which is the peculiarity of both

places, and increasingly the warp" (14).

Always on the alert for signs of significant cultural

351

 

352

upheaval, Didion's unerring eye is drawn to this American

city whose "feel" in the early 80's seems "that of a Latin

capital a year or two away from a new government" (27).

The cultural upheaval that directs Didion's attention to

the city of Miami in the past few years results from the

rampant increase of Cuban exiles in that southernmost

American city.

The huge influx of Cuban exiles into Miami

has radically altered the complexion of one of America's

fun-in-the—sun cities and Didion's latest work seeks to

chronicle the whys and wherefores of that change.

Miami also crystalizes the increasingly political

nature of Didion's cultural observations which have been

most overtly displayed in Salvador.

The new book

represents an extension of the shift in emphasis away from

private experience and toward public life, a shift which

began in Didion's non—fiction with the publication of

Salvador in 1983.

Like Salvador, Miami addresses overtly

political issues that dominate our national public life —

the relations of the Washington government to our southern

neighbors in Cuba and Central America.

As I have indicated

in Chapter Five, the concern with public affairs represents

an alteration of focus from the essentially domestic

concerns Didion addresses in her two early collection

of

essays, The White Album and Slouching Toward Bethlehem.

The political shift also corresponds to a shift from what

is conventionally considered the female's sphere of

influence — the realm of private experience — to what has

353

conventionally been held to be an exclusively male

privilege - the public domain.

Thus Miami reaffirms

Didion's implicit claim as an important observer of

American culture whose scope of observation transcends the

domestic, the peripheral, or the female perspective.

For in Miami, Didion comes into her own as an astute

analyst of the contemporary political scene.

Her gender

functions, as does her Western heritage, merely as an angle

of vision from which to speak, nothing more, nothing less.

 

Still, there is something less tenuous about the authorial

voice in Miami than say in Salvador.

The confident and

incisive, but curious, mind of the reporter is at work in

Miami; that mind carefully and systematically processes the

information offered for its inspection just as it

persistently persues the elusive fact that evades easy

interpretation.

Didion's journalistic stance in Miami provides a sharp

contrast to the more literary posture she assumes in

Salvador.

This is a Didion who has obviously read and

taken into consideration the valid criticisms raised about

Salvador; a Didion who has sought to avoid the pitfalls

encountered in her previous document of our times.

The

change in perspective accentuates the differences in the

two works.

In retrospect, one sees that Didion constructs,

in effect, a poetics of terror in Salvador, her own Letter

from Central America.

The stylistic effects created by

Didion's reconstruction of her experiences in El Salvador

354

are of an aesthetic as much as an ideological nature.

The

'literary' quality of the place permeates Didion's response

to this Central America country in conflict.

Our emotion

rather than our intellect, is most directly engaged in

reacting to the horror Didion so vividly evokes in

Salvador.

In stylistic terms, reading Miami after having read

Salvador is analogous to venturing into the underworld of a

Raymond Chandler hard-boiled detective story fresh from the

fictional parlours of a Jane Austin novel.

The effect is

abrasive.

Reading Salvador engages the literary

sensibilities in the impenetrable mysteries of an unknown

world; it constitutes a journey into the inexplicable heart

of a modern darnkess.

Conversely, reading Miami forces one

to confront the starkness of the contemporary sensibility

as developed via the media.

In contrast to its nineteenth—

century counterpart — the literary sensibility which evokes

haunting but remote images — the modern media sensibility

produces images whose immediacy stings like a slap in the

face.

To visit Miami is to confront this media — induced

sensibility directly.

Its syncopated pace jangles, its

neon images glare, its synthetic diction mesmerizes.

Salvador is a journey into the past, while Miami is a

glimpse of the future.

In Salvador Didion observes the

effects of an American presence in a Third World country.

In Miami the Third World has claimed a portion of American

soil as its own — Florida's Dade County.

In both

355

instances, place becomes a metaphor for a certain Spanish

cast of mind Didion finds intriguing but also revealing of

an American weakness for romance.

Miami is divided into four sections, and each section

presents the story of that place from a slightly different

angle.

The first section sets the stage for Didion's

narrative in two characteristic ways.

First, the city of

Miami is depicted as a tropical capital, a metaphor central

to Didion's vision in other works as well.

The focus of

life in Miami is a 19th century Havana for the thousands of

exiled Cubans who comprise 56% of Miami's population in the

80's.

Secondly, Didion's tropical metaphor is extended

through the use of a diction related to theater, opera, or

romance.

Didion uses this literary language to describe

how the exiled Cubans express their Spanish heritage and

its influence on thought and experience in a modern Miami.

An anniversary celebration of the Bay of Pigs incident

some twenty-four years after the event symbolizes the cause

that unites all Cubans in exile in the U.S.

"They shared

not just Cuba as a birthplace but Cuba as a construct, the

idea of birthright lost.

They shared a definition of

patria as indivisible from personal honor, and therefore of

personal honor as that which had been betrayed and must be

revenged.

They shared, not only with one another but with

virtually every other Cuban in Miami, a political matrix in

which the very shape of history, its dialectic, its

tendency, had traditionally presented itself as la lucha,

356

the struggle" (17).

Thus Didion labels the Bay of Pigs

incident "an ideal narrative, one in which the men of the

2506 were forever valiant and betrayed and the United

States was forever the seducer and betrayer and the blood

of 105 martires remained forever fresh" (19).

Didion

 

indicates at the close of this section that la lucha over

the past twenty-five years has become a matter of American

interest as well, involving American citizens, institutions

and even three American presidents.

That is a connection

she explores more fully in Section Three.

Section Two analyzes the Third World character of the

city.

Didion notes the ostentatious display of wealth in

the midst of abject poverty.

"...Miami was a city, like so

many to the south of it, in which it was possible to pass

from walled enclaves to utter desolation while changing

stations on the car radio" (19).

She details the political

violence engaged in by warring factions of Cuban exiles

over issues more pertinent in Havana than in the U.S. that

nonetheless create an image of a city overrun by gangsters

and lawlessness.

As in Salvador, Didion observes that

 

racial tension fuels the fires of discontent in Miami.

Didion remarks on the disenfranchisement of the native

black minorities as the exiled Cubans rise easily to power

in this Southern city.

"Not often does a social dynamic

seem to present itself in a single tableau, but at the Omni

in Miami one did, and during the time I spent there I came

to see the hotel and its mall as the most theatrical

357

possible illustrations of how a native proletariat can be

left behind in a city open to the convulsions of the Third

World..." (47).

Didion implies that Miami's welcoming of exiled Cubans

into positions of power at the expense of the native blacks

may prove a serious error in judgment.

The threat comes,

in Didion's view, not so much from the dispossessed blacks

as from the potentially powerful exiles.

Didion stresses

the concept of exilio as central to the Cuban coalition

that runs the city of Miami; for, as she sees it, these are

not immigrants, be they American citizens or no, but rather

true exiles who fully intend to return to their homeland as

victors over the communist regime that displaced them.

That the Anglo community of Miami persists in seeing the

Cuban exiles as potential candidates for assimilation seems

to Didion to miss the point of the political unrest in

Miami.

In this context, it is the Anglo community that is

naive at best and wrong—headed at worst.

Their insistence,

for instance, on the use of English as an official language

in a predominantly Hispanic community constitutes, in

Didion's view, "a cry from the heart of a beleaguered raj"

(67).

Nor are the Cuban exiles especially amenable to the

intracies of democratic government.

Miami Cubans are tuned

instead to an autocratic political mode, as "heirs...to the

Spanish Inquisition" rather than trained in good

citizenship under the systems of checks and balances

358

provided by the American Constitution (75).

Didion

perceives a connection between the preference for a facist

government - as expressed by the pro-Batista elements of

the exiled Cubans — and the romantic view of history and

politics, as conceptualized by la lucha.

In the romance of

history, Spanish style, any political resolution of

problems is tantamount to betrayal, and thus any form of

democratic government is suspect, based as it is on

compromise.

Didion believes it is this romantic tendency

in Spanish culture that accounts for the Cubans view of

Washington as the betrayer, given that compromise always

seems preferable to martyrdom among such Anglo-Americans.

In Section Three Didion explores the machinations of

Washington policy over the last 25 years in regard to its

neighbors to the south, especially in Central America.

Miami has become a focal point for any operations in this

southerly direction.

The Miami—Washington connection

emerges in this section as a clandestine operation

befitting any "romance of the tropics" (33).

"A disposal

problem" is the term used by the Kennedy administration to

describe "the possible consequences of aborting the

projected Cuban invasion" (83).

Didion remarks that only

after she had spent time in Miami did she come to see the

attitude of the Kennedy administration toward the 2506

Brigade which it had trained and then abandoned as "the

cannon which the protagonist brings onstage in the first

act so that it may be fired against him in the third" (83).

359

Duplicity characterized the language as well as the

action of Washington during the Cuban crisis, according to

Didion's investigation.

Special vocabularies were

constructed by special groups connected to the CIA to

comprise "a language in which deniability was built into

the grammar" (94).

Didion makes it clear in her report

that the more recent actions of Colonel North, et al.,

.
L
L

merely repeated the policy and practice of the

privitization of government functions begun some three

decades earlier.

What concerns her, as it should concern

Washington in her view, are the long-term consequences of

such actions.

"That each move left a certain residue on

the board was what some people in Washington had called

their disposal problem, and some people in Miami their

betrayal" (179).

Didion reports that some of the residue

left on the board in this political game includes Cuban

'terrorists' trained by the U.S. and now operating on the

other side in the conflict in Nicaragua.

The final section of Miami looks at the Reagan White

House and its policy on Central America.

Didion notes that

Reagan's 'stories' about how the world operates in the

Southern Hemisphere bear all the trademarks of propaganda.

"The Reagan reworking was interesting on its own, a way of

speaking, later to become familiar, in which events could

be revised as they happened into illustrations of ideology"

(157).

Speaking of the advertising language employed by,

the entire Regan White House, Didion notes that those who

360

employ that diction are not "arguing a case, but counting

instead on the willingness of the listener to enter what

Hannah Arendt called, in a discussion of propaganda, 'the

gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world'" (159).

The

focus on language echoes the concerns Didion raises in

Salvador, where linguistic deals are cut that create the

 

desired impressions without ever altering the reality of

the lives lived under a repressive regime.

This attention to appearance is presented as a major

concern in the Reagan White House in Section Four.

Didion

lists the activities of the president on a day in 1984; the

result is a listing of photo opportunities in which nothing

of a substance occurs, but rather the President is

presented in interesting settings, as contrived and

implemented by the President's men.

"It was...taken for

granted that the presidency had been redefined as an

essentially passive role, that of 'communicator' or

'leader' which had been redefined in turn to mean that

person whose simple presence before a camera was believed

to command support for the policy proposed" (177).

By the end of Miami it is clear that Didion feels

Washington is as complicitious in the move toward the

privitization of government as is any Central American

country.

She cites the now well—known activities of people

like Colonel North and General Singlaub to use workings of

the government to achieve their own desires.

The Miami-

Washington narrative is one in which "the actions of

361

individuals had been seen to affect events directly, in

which revolutions and counter—revolutions had been framed

in the private sector; that narrative in which the state

security apparatus existed to be enlisted by one or another

private player" (206).

And for the private players,

actions and words do not necessarily carry long—range

consequences for which one can be held accountable.

The

extent to which that attitude pervades Washington is

signaled by the final passage in Miami - a quote by

President Reagan claiming the idea to support the 'freedom

fighters' in Nicaragua was his "idea to begin with" (208).

In the struggle of memory against forgetting,

twentieth-century America seems to be losing the battle,

according to Didion.

Miami, like her other works of

fiction and non-fiction, seeks to put together the puzzle

of the past.

Implicit in that effort is the consequence of

forgetting the history of a nation:

totalitarianism.

For

Didion sees the struggle of memory against forgetting as an

act of serious consequences, for individuals and for the

society they create.

For without memory, there is no

narrative; and without narrative, there is not community;

and without community, there is only madness.

For Didion, narrative as an act of retrieval serves to

remind humans of their connections to and differences from

each other.

But the form can be misused and abused, as

works such as Salvador and Miami clearly indicate.

But

with narrative comes the possibility of the critical

362

consciousness which, in turn, makes freedom possible.

As an American of a certain time and place, Joan Didion

endeavors to ensure the continuation of freedom through the

production of narratives that connect the past to the

future.

As a woman, she is not content to settle for an

exclusively male view of experience.

As an American, she

is not content to settle for a purely feminist

understanding of contemporary life which tends to negate

the definitive experience of national consciousness.

As a

contemporary writer, she is highly conscious of the

influence of history in determining all human experience.

These distinctions make possible Joan Didion's

particular contribution to American Letters.

Hers is a

vision that places gender in relation to history, and time

in relation to place.

Hers is a voice that speaks for and

through women of the importance of connection to a past and

with a future.

Hers is a narrative whose message will only

be fully interpreted in a future that remains to be

created.

If history should prove the shift from filiation

to affiliation a successful transition, Joan Didion's

record of that cultural upheaval will serve as a

significant link in the chain of memory that connects us

with that future generation.

INTRODUCTION

NOTES

1Didion, The White Album (11).

Subsequent references

 

to this work will be designated as WA and will appear

parenthetically within the text.

2Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (122).

Subsequent

 

references to this work will be designated as S32 and will

appear parenthetically within the text.

3These theorists propose that females achieve a sense

of identity through a connection to and duplication of the

mother's relation to her daughter.

Thus identity 13

connection, 32 relationship.

Males, on the other hand,

achieve identity through separation from the mother; hence,

all subsequent connections to females threatenes the male

sense of identity.

Identity for males ii separation,

especially from females.

Female moral development, then,

organizes itself around an 'ethos of responsibility,'

whereas male moral development centers in the 'ethos of

justice.'

4Both Brian Morton and Samuel Coale comment at length

about the Faluknerian quality of Didion's first novel.

Morton notes how Faulknerian is Didion's image of

Westerners, as are the cadences of her language in Run

 

River.

"They had been a particular kind of people, their

363

364

particular virtues called up by a particular situation,

their particular flaws waiting there through all those

years, unperceived, unsuspected, glimpsed only cloudily by

one or two in each generation, by a wife whose bewildered

eyes wanted to look not upon Eldorado but upon her mother's

dogwood, by a blue—eyed boy who was at sixteen the best

shot in the country and who when there was nothing left to

shoot rode out one day and shot his brother, an accident"

(WA 221).

Samule Coale identifies qualities shared by Didion and

Faulkner in his work, In Hawthorne's Shadow.

"As

 

Faulkner's fiction, doom, decay, and corruption stalk

favored agricultural lands.

Old agrarian cultures shatter

before the fiery assaults of a postwar boom" (182).

Coale

goes on to observe that "Didion admits that images haunted

her first, as in many ways did Faulkner" (184).

Didion

herself collaborates with the impression by her admission

that she tried to create a sense of timelessness, a fusion

of all times, in Run River—-a technique often associated

with Faulkner's works.

5Again, Morton mentions the images of waste and

sterility in Play It As It Lays and likens them to Eliot's

 

images in The Waste Land.

He also notes that "echoes of

 

Eliot" appear in such lines as "the dead still center of

the world" (53).

I would also claim that echoes of Eliot reverberate

through A Book of Common Prayer.

Eliot's voice and vision,

 

365

especially from Four Quartets, are recalled and

 

reinterpreted in numerous rhetorical gestures that

characterize the fictional voice in Didion's third novel.

For instance, Grace Strasser—Mendana adopts the position of

a scientific aestheticism Eliot advocates in "Tradition and

the Individual Talent," when he exhorts the artist to

become a medium through which art is created.

She also

claims the objectivity of the scientific method as a

narrative function.

In addition, the title of the novel, A

Book of Common Prayer, alludes to the affiliation with the

Anglican/Episcopalian discourse that Eliot and Didion

share; the two writers also share a strong preference for

diction associated with the Anglo—Saxon linguistic heritage

of legal and religious discourse.

"At the still point of

the turning world" is a phrase from Eliot that reappears in

several variations in Didion's work, as do images of light

that "glow morbidly."

Like the poet Eliot, Didion employs

refrain, repetition, and litany as rhetorical devices to

evoke mystery, nostalgia, and solace from a linguistic

performance.

RUN RIVER

NOTES

1Didion, Run River.

Subsequent references to this work

 

will be designated as 53 and will appear parenthetically

within the text.

366

PLAY IT AS IT LAYS

NOTES

1Didion, Play It As It Lays.

Subsequent references to

 

this work will be designated as PLAY and will appear

parenthetically within the text.

2The terms, diegetic and non—diegetic, are Gerard

 

 

Genette's and refer to the fictional and non-fictional

worlds of experience, respectively.

3Narratee is Genette's term for the fictional audience

 

indicated in a text through the use of the second person

pronoun.

The narratee is a fictional construct that

corresponds to the narrator.

4Foust summarizes the critical response on this point

quite well, pointing out that while David J. Geherin

declares Maria's despair to be 'ontological', that view

cannot account for the horrific guilt she experiences after

the abortion.

It also diminishes the female quality of the

experience, a point that Foust, like myself, finds

significant to the novel's theme.

"Women's dependence on

men, and the inevitable brutalization and coarsening that

comes with that dependence, is the ultimate 'misery

peculiar to women,' and it is the novel's true, if buried

theme" (53).

5In fact, even Foust, whose reading of the novel I have

367

368

found insightful, ultimately neglects this crucial point.

But then, his intellectual association with the

institutions of psychiatry predispose him to that neglect.

Still I find his perspective helpful as he situates the

family romance paradigm within the patriarchal structure

and thus avoids the totalization that Didion's novel

clearly resists.

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