Abhorred the kind of thought that forecloses thought. Would not be bullied by what “everyone” was saying or what “everyone” believed. She was just another subject among many, prone to the petty delusions of all humans but-crucially-genuinely interested in drilling down into that hardpan, no matter what she might find down there. Whether writing about the invention of “women as a ‘class,’ ” Haight-Ashbury, John Wayne, the death of her family, or her own mental breakdown, Didion’s target was the “psychic hardpan.” This she located just beneath the seemingly rational or ideological topsoil, which she found to be “dense with superstitions and little sophistries, wish fulfillment, self-loathing and bitter fancies.” That she is considered a personal essayist is another one of those literary ironies: even when the subject was Didion, she was still reporting, and no more likely to be sympathetic to her own feelings than to those of Joan Baez, Nancy Reagan, or a kid on acid. “It is the right of the oppressed to organize around their oppression as they see and define it.” But, of course, this statement, which the young Didion found ironic-a circular attempt to create a politics out of sheer emotion, falling well short of a practical feminism’s Marxist ideals-would now be read not only sincerely but legally.
DEFINE MAGICAL THINKING CRACKED
The above is from her very funny and very inconvenient 1972 essay, “The Women’s Movement.” How bracing to watch her skewer a set of ideological and aesthetical commonplaces that have only hardened in the intervening fifty years! Yet now that these modes of reading are no longer absurd to anyone-indeed, now that they are embedded not only in universities and publishing houses but in our own minds-it becomes very difficult to hear the acid tone of Didion’s original formulations: “To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.” What happens to Didion when a narrow and cracked determinism swallows not just the women’s movement but the whole world? We delude ourselves: we remake her in our own image. Victim of a sexist society, a woman who had “internalized theĬonventional definition of wife.” The narrator of Mary McCarthy’s TheĬompany She Keeps could be seen as “enslaved because she persists in Longer be the victim of her own idealism.
Salvage other books: Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady need no Session with your child.” Other literary analysts devised ways to “Portions of anyįairy tale or children’s story can be salvaged during a critique “As a parent you should become an interpreter of myths,” advised LettyĬottin Pogrebin in the preview issue of Ms. To put it another way, while everyone else drank the Kool-Aid, she stuck to Coca-Cola and cigarettes: But the reading is a dissection: of our fondest aims and beliefs, of all our watchwords. Maybe this is why it remains easier to look at pictures of Didion than to read her. Rereading her, you find her astringency relentless, undimmed by age. She did that with her own sentences, too. Radically upgrading Hemingway’s “bullshit detector,” she probed the public discourse, the better to determine how much truth was in it and how much delusion. She was exceptionally alert to the words or phrases we use to express our core aims or beliefs. It sees causality where there is none, confuses private emotion with general reality, imposes-as Didion has it, perfectly, in “ The White Album”-“a narrative line upon disparate images.” But the extremity of mourning aside, it was not a condition from which she generally suffered. The same goes for “magical thinking.” Magical thinking is a disorder of thought. A sentence meant as an indictment has transformed into personal credo. How else to explain the odd ways we invert her meanings? We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Perhaps when your subject is human delusion you end up drawing that quality out of others, even as you seek to define and illuminate it.
It is a peculiarity of Joan Didion’s work that her most ironic formulations are now read as sincere, and her sincerest provocations taken with a large pinch of salt.
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