“A fifth generation Californian, Joan Didion explained that her theatrical temperament was shaped by stories of the pioneers who settled in California–stories that featured ‘extreme actions’: Leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways–those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California.”
Zadie Smith’s unsentimental, non-hagiographic, tribute to Joan Didion, is worth a read. Didion was the writer, who lived and breathed in her “sentence,” not in a self-propagating myth created by today’s writers in the Twitterverse.
Didion’s target was the “psychic hardpan” located “just beneath the seemingly rational and ideological topsoil which [Didion] found to be dense with superstitions and little sophistries, wish fulfillments, self-loathing and bitter fancies.”
In other words, the writer dealt with people’s delusions, though readers misunderstood these intentions. But the extremity of mourning aside, it was not a condition from which she generally suffered. Didion’s watchword was watchword. She was exceptionally alert to the words or phrases we use to express our core aims and beliefs. Alert in the sense of suspicious. Radically upgrading Heminway’s “bullshit detector,” she probed the public discourse, the better to detect how much truth was in it, how much delusion
According to Smith,
“When your main subject is human delusion, you end up drawing that quality out of others, even as you seek to define and illuminate it [delusion]. How else to explain the odd ways in which we invert her meanings? We tell ourselves stories in order to live. A sentence meant as indictment has transformed into personal credo. The same goes for “magical thinking.” Magical thinking is a disorder of thought. It sees causality where there is none, confuses private emotions with general reality, imposes “a narrative line upon disparate images” (White Album) . But the extremity of mourning aside, it was not a condition from which she generally suffered. Didion’s watchword was watchword. She was exceptionally alert to the words we use to express our core beliefs and aims. Alert in the sense of suspicious. Radically upgrading Heminway’s “bullshit detector,” she probed the public discourse, the better to determine how much truth was in it and how much delusion.”
In many ways Louis Menand’s study of Joan Didion’s writing in the August 24, 2015 Issue of the New Yorker magazine is more than a meditation on Didion.
The essay, subtitled “The Radicalization of Joan Didion,” personally resonates with me at a slightly different level; I get a different view of the word “radicalization” from reading it.
Present Continuity 