The Appealing Nihilism of Joan Didion
by Rachel J. Russell
Few if any contemporary writers have achieved the peculiar and untouchable stature of Joan Didion. Her written work spans novels, essays, memoir, and scripts for stage and screen. She is unquestionably prolific. Effusive New Yorkercritics describe her memoirs as tours de force; grief-stricken mourners are offered copies of The Year of Magical Thinking as a healing tonic; and anyone who wants to try his hand at nonfiction is virtually required to read her essays.
The unquestioned adulation and de facto canonization of Joan Didion confused me once I began to read her work in earnest, and it has continued to puzzle me for nearly a year. My initial quibble with Didion was not that she is politically conservative – which she unquestionably is – but that she seemed not to believe in anything. I wanted to explain the cognitive dissonance I felt about her work, which stayed with me even as I read her most celebrated works.
My suspicion was that Joan Didion is a hard-nosed nihilist masquerading as an aloof Cool Girl with a fragile artistic temperament and a pair of big sunglasses. And that her widespread popularity as a literary figure might reveal something about a larger crisis of faith in this country.
I have now read most of her published work, and my opinion has not changed much.
Didion began her career at Vogue, but rose to prominence when she wrote about the hippie movement in Northern California in her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” which was first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1967. Positioning herself as an outsider who was skeptical about the promises of free love and endless drugs, she wrote about the scene in San Francisco, focusing on the underlying sadness and loss that characterized this assembly of dropouts.
For Didion, the hippies of Haight-Ashbury were not rebellious freethinkers, but rather were desperate characters – “missing children” who were victims of bad parenting, and who had not been taught “the rules” of the establishment of the fifties and sixties.
Even in that early essay, Didion aligns herself with the established order and gives an unabashedly conservative viewpoint. She writes:
“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. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.”
The question of whether there might be some truth to the complaints made by these young people, that they might actually have some qualms, anger, or despair about being drafted and sent to Vietnam and possibly killed in the name of ideology; that there might be a genuine desire to ameliorate what at the time were very obvious racial inequalities; that the behavioral restrictions and repressions of the fifties might have caused a reaction – is never once raised by Didion in this essay.
The very idea of social progress is one that she easily waves away with a lissome flourish. For Didion, the main thing is that one must always follow the rules or else be seen as a fool. And those rules are just because those in power made them. It is an appeal from authority, or argumentum ad verecundiam. This is not, it must be said, a progressive or even lower-case democratic belief system. But it is one that underlies nearly all of Didion’s work: might makes right.
In her essay “On Morality,” Didion is similarly skeptical of idealism, thoroughly convinced that any act of charity is merely self-delusion and therefore the only sensible reason for not leaving a dead body on the side of the road is that coyotes might eat it.
Knowing these things about Joan Didion, her extreme moral conservatism and lack of interest in what is often referred to as “social justice,” I was quite surprised to learn that Didion is considered a gay icon. I could not immediately discern the reasons for this since she has not, to my knowledge, ever written about gay rights or the Castro or AIDS or marriage equality or anything that affected LGBTQ people in the last half a century.
Her novel Play It As it Lays does feature a homosexual character, but that’s not much consolation to me because the book is a cautionary tale about the extremes of vice and depravity in Hollywood. In Play It as It Lays, the protagonist Maria has moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting but has quickly become exploited by her manager and, after a series of setbacks, her personal life and her career appear to be in freefall.
Maria during this time is “thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.” This is a bit confusing, but Didion continues: “She had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for even one microsecond she would have what she had come to get. As if she had fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity. She could feel smoke against her skin. She could feel voice waves. She was beginning to feel colors, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs of the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which.”
This reads more like a bad LSD trip rather than any kind of poignant emotional response to the admittedly gruesome fate which has befallen Maria. It is unclear that any of these characters feel anything other than the side effects of the various drugs they take. It does not make for satisfying reading.
The dialogue in Play It as It Lays ranges from banal to obscene. There is no discernible plot, the characters are two-dimensional, and the only reason I was aware that there might be something gay going on is because of Didion’s gratuitous use of the word “faggot.” Which, of course, is gay men’s preferred method of referring to one another.
Didion is trying to convey emotional distress in this novel, and the thick Los Angeles smog of desperation that shrouds her characters who drive aimlessly around Los Angeles looking for parties and sex and drugs – but she doesn’t quite achieve it.
We are supposed to sense that Maria, the morose, hemorrhaging heroine, is having an emotional breakdown that has landed her in an institution. But because Maria, like most of Didion’s fictional characters, has no discernible personality trait other than a desire to get high, it is difficult for the reader to become emotionally invested in what happens to her.
Didion does give us something close to a narrative conclusion towards the end of the novel. She writes: “My father advised me that life itself was a crap game; it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.”
This is a signature Didion move – hiding the ball, offering closure but then refusing to engage with any interpretation of events, even if Didion herself has created the events in question. There is always an aloof disregard for the reader who may wish, from time to time, to know what the hell is going on – or why he has bothered to read this book in the first place.
The novel ends with an even heavier dose of nihilism and banality:
“I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is ‘nothing.’”
The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion’s most currently celebrated book, and it is also her emptiest. She wrote the memoir in 2004 in the wake of significant personal tragedy: the unexpected deaths, within the span of a few weeks, of her husband and then her only child.
Confronted with this major personal loss, and understandably half-mad from it, Didion writes about this fraught time in her own life in what is ostensibly a meditation on grief.
Her observations of her inner world, the irrational thoughts she has in wishing for her husband to return, are catalogued with a librarian’s careful precision. We see that she is sad but there is no real insight or personal development. The world we see in Magical Thinking remains firmly within the familiar bounds of Didionland, which is to say, largely attitudinal and material.
When she makes an attempt at spiritual wisdom towards the end of the book, Didion reveals the limits of such modes of thinking. She goes to church, where she reads the well-known Doxology. Literally translated from the Greek, “doxology” means “words of praise.” But Didion hasn’t much interest in matters of the spirit. She quotes the end of the prayer (“as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end”) but then wildly misinterprets it.
Didion sees this uncomplicated religious text in homage to the changelessness of God as “a literal description of the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and mountains, the inexorable shifting of the geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away.”
The whole point of Christian belief, of course, is to shift one’s focus away from the material world and focus on devotion to God. It requires, at its most elementary, a belief in something beyond the geologic world. Didion’s language in a passage like this is seductive; it has the look and sound of emotional poignancy, but is essentially meaningless.
Yet, despite all of its hollow emotional displays and fetishiziaton of rocks and linens and towels, there are amusing and witty moments in The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion has her sudden flashes of wryness, which arrive unexpectedly and depart just as quickly. Of the early years of her marriage to John Dunne, Didion writes:
“My memory of those years is that both John and I were improvising, flying blind. When I was cleaning out a file drawer recently, I came across a thick file labeled ‘Planning.’ The very fact that we made files labeled ‘Planning’ suggests how little of it we did. We also had ‘planning meetings,’ which consisted of sitting down with legal pads, stating today’s problem out loud, and then, with no further attempt to solve it, going out to lunch. Such lunches were festive, as if to celebrate a job well done.”
Didion’s personal essays comprise some of her strongest writing, but they are almost always about her own sense of dread and emptiness. They are occasionally witty. Her essay on migraines, in which she pushes back on the idea that migraine is just a figment of a hysterical imagination, was ahead of its time. She has unquestionably inspired a generation of essayists who feel free to write deeply personal essays about their own inner lives. Whether or not this is a net good is a debate I will leave to other writers.
What is most notable in these more directly personal essays in The White Album is Didion’s anhedonia, this lack of sensual pleasure, the inability to be moved by anything. Despite the drug use and the parties and the luxurious settings, Didion is not really convincing as a hedonist because she never seems to enjoy herself. She is equally unconvincing as a poet because she refuses to be moved in any way by the events that she witnesses. Her most common response to an event, whether it is the gruesome murder of Sharon Tate or the whimsical folklore of Bogotá, is that she is not surprised.
Didion's insights in these essays are sometimes spot-on. She seems to recognize her own limits in connecting with other people – “I think we are all well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4AM of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
Even in Didion’s indisputably great essays, the ones for which she is rightly celebrated, such as “Goodbye to All That,” there is a noticeable absence of human description on the page. Didion can paint a landscape exceptionally well, but there are rarely any figures dotting that landscape other than Didion herself.
On her misspent twenties in New York, she writes that the lights of the city skyline pleased her; “and so did walking uptown in the mauve eight o’clocks of early summer evenings and looking at things, Lowestoft tureens in Fifty-seventh Street windows, people in evening clothes trying to get taxis, the trees just coming into full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet promises of money and summer.”
She is precisely right in her assessment of New York as a city of polarities and one that is more legend than real place for people who move here from California. But what strikes the reader is the absence – even when she is writing of other people like her friend or her future husband – of any character other than Joan Didion.
This is not an accident. All of Joan Didion’s writing is fundamentally solipsistic in a way that is slightly disturbing if one looks beyond the glossy veneer. She writes often of her own disillusionment, and of her inability to believe that other people’s lives matter.
“During the years when I found it necessary to raise the circuitry of my mind, I discovered that I was no longer interested in whether the woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor jumped or did not jump, or in why. I was interested in the picture of her in my mind: her hair incandescent in the floodlights, her bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge. In this light, all narrative was sentimental. In this light all connections were equally meaningful.”
This sounds like a winning and even beautiful line, but it’s actually terrifying as a concept if we look at it closely. Nothing matters except the image. Whether someone commits suicide is less important than how her hair looks in the floodlights.
Virginia Woolf wrote that critics are created either through a natural sense of poetic sensibility, or through what she called “the profusion of the age.” Woolf lived through World War II and yet was able to view the literary and artistic richness of her time as profuse. Didion has lived in times of plenty, has had access to the most significant and fascinating cultural moments of the last half century – yet she seems often unwilling to engage with them fully.
Woolf’s gift was that she could show an quotidian occurrence – a trip to buy a pencil in London, for example – and imbue that fragment in time with various longings and emotional depth, that creating meaning through detail and by virtue of the fact that Woolf had paid attention to the moment and remembered it. Didion, by contrast, has borne witness to some of the most politically and culturally significant events of the last century, moments that were in themselves extraordinary and memorable, but she’d rather forget most of it.
Didion’s 1972 essay “The Women’s Movement” gives the most insight into Didion’s worldview. Published as part of The White Album, the essay is a fascinating polemic, and it is sharp and angry. Didion in this essay is viciously contemptuous of lesbians, and her screed against feminism blends Freudian misogyny and California evangelism into an intoxicating and confessional tirade. It is amusing and disturbing in almost equal measure.
“Increasingly, it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself,” she writes. “One is constantly struck, in the accounts of lesbian relationships which appear from time to time in movement literature, by the emphasis on the superior ‘tenderness’ of the relationship, the ‘gentleness’ of the sexual connection, as if the participants were wounded birds.”
Are tenderness and gentleness really a bridge too far for Didion? Apparently so. Sex, like everything else in life, is rarely more than an opportunity to demonstrate one’s superiority. For Didion, any other incentive is dubious at best.
The reason Didion makes for such dispiriting reading is that the concept of sensual pleasure never seems to occur to her. She can’t quite comprehend that idea that anyone, male or female, might pursue something – a relationship, a family, a career, a hobby – because the pursuit is enjoyable in itself. There must be some other sinister, Machiavellian force that motivates them, since it is what motivates her. Physical intimacy is yet another aspect of life which one must grimly accept.
Despite all of the hedonistic parties and the obsessively catalogued prescription drugs, Didion rarely if ever writes about her own pleasure. I suspect that, for Didion, the very concept of enjoyment is another futile exercise in self-delusion, a lie that we tell ourselves in order to live. Happiness, like spiritual fulfillment or morality or folk songs, is just another dream for the hippies.
Underlying much of Didion’s writing is an unnamed sense of regret and sadness about her own childhood, and it is one that extends beyond the typical intergenerational complaint that the social graces that she learned growing up are no longer applicable. It is a distinctly familial loss that she is writing about.
Most of her nonfiction deals indirectly with that original loss of family connection, but the poignancy is somewhat diluted when she decides that there is no social contract at all, and that any attempt at idealism – whether political, religious, artistic – is just an elaborate game.
In “On Going Home,” Didion’s 1967 essay about her family in California, she writes about the melancholia of returning home to a family where one is not wanted. In the town near Sacramento where she grew up, Didion paints a maudlin picture of her daughter’s first birthday, and one that for emotional depth and insight surpasses anything she wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking.
Talking with her aunts, she describes the isolation and dread, but it’s easier to comprehend the emotional weight of it in this context, which is uncharacteristically earnest and free of contempt.
“Questions trail off, answers are abandoned, the baby plays with the dust motes in a shaft of afternoon sun.”
Looking down at her sleeping daughter on the eve of her first birthday, she reflects:
“I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups. I would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now, and I can promise her nothing like that.”
Didion’s most candid moments in The White Album, her celebrated collection of essays, reveal a woman who is capable of writing positively about other women and about other artists and writers. Her essay about Georgia O’Keeffe is remarkably tender, even if she can’t resist calling O’Keeffe and her paintings “aggressive.” But she writes about O’Keeffe with something approaching reverence:
“Like so many successful guerrillas in the war between the sexes, Georgia O’Keeffe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it.”
For Didion, O’Keeffe is deserving of respect because she embodies that flinty (and again, traditionally very conservative) quality that Didion wrote about in “On Self Respect.” The willingness to take responsibility for one’s own life is the key to inner peace. O’Keeffe’s pioneer toughness and her willingness to move to the Southwest to pursue her art in the spirit of protestant individualism is what earns Didion’s praise.
The O’Keeffe essay is probably the sincerest tribute to a living artist as Didion has ever written. She also succeeds admirably in the overwhelmingly positive introduction to Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction and Betrayal, in which she writes with surprising warmth and charm about a fellow critic and essayist. For Didion, Hardwick is “the only writer I have ever read whose perception of what it means to be a woman and a writer seems in every way authentic, revelatory, entirely original and yet acutely recognizable.” This is the Didion equivalent of a standing ovation, and it is as unattainable as the dews of Hymettus.
Didion’s appeal to contemporary readers is that she offers a conservative moral critique of American culture but she offers it without the pious old demands of atonement or religious commitment. Some of her views, in addition to being conservative, are surprisingly Christian, as when she writes about her generation’s sense of alienation in her 1970 essay “On the Morning After the Sixties”:
“I suppose I am talking about just that: the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood.”
This is a Christian idea, of course, and not a particularly esoteric one. Repackaged with a secular flourish, it is the notion of original sin – the idea that man is born evil and is saved through belief in Jesus. But what she never seems to offer is the second and crucial promise of Christian dogma: redemption and forgiveness.
Despite all of this, Didion does have the ability to delight. “After Henry” is momentarily a joy to read – even with the characteristic name-dropping – because Didion is able, for a blessed paragraph or two, to transcend herself. She recognizes the critical relationship between writer and editor, between writer and reader. She is laughing into the night, listening to the “funny, brilliant, enchanting voices” of her friends. She seems almost real.
Rachel J. Russell lives in New York. You can read more of her work at racheljayrussell.com