Joan Didion and the Ethics of Memory

Matthew R. McLennan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350149601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Looking at the breadth of Joan Didion's writing, from journalism, essays, fiction, memoir and screen plays, it may appear that there is no unifying thread, but Matthew R. McLennan argues that 'the ethics of memory' – the question of which norms should guide public and private remembrance – offers a promising vision of what is most characteristic and salient in Didion's works. By framing her universe as indifferent and essentially precarious, McLennan demonstrates how this outlook guides Didion's reflections on key themes linked to memory: namely witnessing and grieving, nostalgia, and the paradoxically amnesiac qualities of our increasingly archived public life that she explored in famous texts like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Year of Magical Thinking and Salvador. McLennan moves beyond the interpretive value of such an approach and frames Didion as a serious, iconoclastic philosopher of time and memory. Through her encounters with the past, the writer is shown to offer lessons for the future in an increasingly perilous and unsettled world.

1

‘Earthquake weather’

Didion’s universe

To gauge Didion’s contributions in terms of the ethics of memory, I believe it would be helpful first to grasp her view of the universe, or reality or the world. Using these terms synonymously, I intend to refer both to Didion’s take on the social universe and to the broader ‘natural’ universe in which human society is embedded. Perhaps more accurately, and in keeping with the methodological caveats of the Introduction, I should put it as follows: I claim in this chapter that it would be helpful to grasp the overall universe, or reality or world that Didion appears to present in her writings, or that can be gleaned from them – whether or not she can be said to consistently believe in it – in order to later draw lessons on the ethics of memory from her body of works.

I claim that starting here is pertinent because Didion’s thoughts on how ethics intersects with memory, which I will start to unpack in the next chapter, appear to be absolutely coloured by the picture of reality that can be gleaned from her writing – that is to say, by the ‘ontology’ or ‘metaphysics’ her writing suggests, though I hesitate to rely on these terms for two reasons.

First, as I argued in Philosophy and Vulnerability, Didion is a ‘philosopher’ but in a ‘pre-disciplinary’ or ‘existential’ sense (2019). There I defined such baseline philosophical activity as Didion engages in as ‘the self-conscious activity of the mastery of one’s being mastered’, and I showed how she often grapples with finitude (her own, and that of her loved ones and communities) using finite tools (thinking through the medium of writing, her attention directed at particularity). In sum, Didion through her writing engages in activity that could be considered philosophical on my definition, though she cannot be considered a disciplinary philosopher (in fact, she ‘resists belonging to any class narrower than “writer”’, and though she studied English as an undergraduate at Berkeley, returning there for a fellowship in the late 1970s, she had a tenuous foothold in the academy (Parker 2018: ix)). For these reasons – the continuity of my interpretation, and Didion’s own self-interpretation – I will go easy on terms suggestive of disciplinary philosophy, except where these are especially helpful in illuminating some aspect of her works. Whenever I do use technical philosophical terms, I will try to be clear that it is me and not Didion who is construing things in that manner.

Second, and related, the use of the terms ‘ontology’ and ‘metaphysics’ might tempt us into pursuing technical philosophical questions about the very nature or ‘depth’ of nature itself in Didion. In theory these are interesting questions, but what she provides is more thematic than systematic. It is more useful for my purposes to speak straightforwardly of ‘reality’ in what could be construed as a naïve way – especially considering Didion’s sensibility of ‘induction’ from particularity, wherein as Nelson puts it, ‘the thing speaks for itself’ (Nelson 2017: 154).

On such a straightforward view there is simply ‘reality’ and ‘illusion’, and the two are mutually exclusive. But immediately a problem arises: if Didion gives evidence of adhering to such a view, she also appears to derive no epistemic comfort from it. What I have called the ‘aristocratic universalism’ of her sensibility notwithstanding, she punctuates her writing with doubt. She does this even as she insists that it is the ‘shimmering’ picture in her mind, and not her, that ‘dictates the arrangement’ of her sentences (Didion 2021: 51). Referring to such pictures and arguably interpellating her reader, she claims that if ‘you’ look hard enough at them, ‘you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there’ (Didion 2021: 49–50, emphasis added). But this, of course, leaves open the question of whether and to what extent pictures ‘in the mind’, even those that are apparently clear and self-evident to her, really do map onto reality. Interestingly, the earlier Didion seems at once to affirm a straightforward view of reality and to suggest that it is practically untenable: ‘I have as much trouble as the next person with illusion and reality,’ she tells us (Didion 2006: 32), if not more so – as intimated by her claim elsewhere that though the images feeding her writing really do ‘shimmer’, they also shimmer for people on hallucinogens, and for schizophrenics (Didion 2021: 50). The partisanship of the particular she describes in ‘Why I Write’ is, after all, about ‘the imposition of the writer’s sensibility, (Didion 2021: 46) and a sensibility is not the same thing as a coherent philosophical programme. It is important, though, to stress that Didion’s scepticism is still far from radical; she qualifies her adult life as ‘a succession of expectations, misperceptions, that . . . dealt only with an idea that I had of the world, not with the world as it was. Reality does intervene,’ and in doing so it nourishes a particular outlook or affective colouring, as I will describe (Parker 2018: 34, emphasis in original). In this way, Didion delivers not merely a perspective on the particular, but also a perspective on the world and on its power to impinge upon our lives.

To be sure, the same Didion who ironically elevates the particular to the universal and in doing so disavows her perspective as perspective, also at times gives the unavoidably perspectival nature of her outlook its due. She is self-conscious, despite invoking ‘reality’, about her limitations as a knower and a thinker and a writer, and of the limitations of writing in general, as a means of encapsulating and expressing it:

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 leanings, predilections, the special circumstances which change the spectrum in which any given observer will see a situation.

Consider what filter is on the lens. (Didion 1995: 124)

In this vein, Didion claims for writing both a kind of straightforward realism and a self-reflexive function related to deriving ‘meaning’ from the encounter with the particular: her only ‘“subject”’ or ‘“area”’ (scare-quotes in the original) is actually ‘the act of writing’ itself (Didion 2021: 46), and she adds that ‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear’ (Didion 2021: 49). But notably she ends the essay ‘The White Album’, reflecting on aspects of the end of the 1960s, with the claim that ‘writing has not yet helped me to see what it means’ (Didion 2006: 212, emphasis added). I think that this fault line is emblematic of her approach to writing in general; even if nothing should seem to be exactly given or clearly rendered, the ‘not yet’ of meaning contains at least a suggestion of a possible match between the world as it really is and the subject who writes. After all, reality does intervene in a person’s life, even if belatedly – as Didion describes of her own case (Parker 2018: 34). This stance puts her squarely in line with the definition of philosophy as a precarious but by no means pointless activity that I have previously defended.

To return, finally, to the claim that questions of reality are a good place to start in approaching Didion, I will argue in this chapter that she gives something approaching a perspective on the universe, whatever we wish to make of her doubts and the reflexivity of her writing. Her universe – or at any rate, the universe that is there to be gleaned from her writings, the one that apparently ‘intervenes’ to shape her thinking – is, overall, indifferent, entropic and precarious. The universe is indifferent in Didion to the extent that it neither centres nor ‘holds’ the human being and what she cherishes. The universe is entropic in Didion to the extent that order and life and community are eked out, hard won and likely only ever temporary, being finally at the mercy of natural forces. Finally, the universe is precarious in Didion to the extent that imminent disaster is the norm rather than the exception, lurking even in the everyday.

In this chapter I will give my reasons for drawing this picture from Didion. Chapter 2 will then explain how precisely it bears on memory and the ethics of memory; Chapters 3 and 4 and the book’s Conclusion will thereafter take this bearing for granted. In brief, the set-up in this chapter allows me to claim in the remainder of the book that ‘Didion’s picture of reality’, which reflects a radical or even abject modernism, makes her good to think with when it comes to the increasingly palpable decomposition of the ethical, in Margalit’s sense, and what that has to do with practices of memory today.

The sense in which I describe Didion as a ‘modernist’ is philosophical rather than literary and will be further unpacked in Chapter 2.¹ For now, note that her ‘modernism’ is a self-critical version of the post-metaphysical and forward-facing time-consciousness largely shaping and driving our age. Focused on the present and future and largely jettisoning the past, such a consciousness is vulnerable to ethical decomposition, and, indeed, may contribute to hastening it or to inviting reactionary communitarianisms, at least if it fails to articulate something like Margalit’s moral viewpoint. It is in this sense that Didion appears to imbibe, reflect and spread the much-discussed disenchantment and anomie of the postwar period, especially evident in the 1960s and thereafter. Reading Didion, we appear to enter a universe that does not hold us in general. We fear with good reason, perhaps, that there is no cosmic meaning or personal survival after death. This would make other humans our only means of survival after death, and fragile ones at that (Chapter 2). Such a scenario endows communities of care and concern with grave ethical importance, as we earlier saw Margalit has suggested. But reading Didion, we also note that contemporary American society (and by extension, other late capitalist societies) increasingly lacks any fixed, unifying meaning or narrative beyond the neoliberal one of economic maximization. This is an issue because narrative, as a practice of communal memory, grounds the ethical community. We therefore see that existing societies, like the universe that fails to hold them, are, rather, in a perpetual process of ethical decomposition and, perhaps, increasingly dubious ethical recomposition (Chapter 3) – though as I will discuss in Chapter 4, the later Didion, from about the 1980s on, appears to reconsider the extent to which there is, indeed, an underlying narrative or political logic to the comparatively chaotic social surface.

All of this matters, I have argued, because Didion demonstrates how in a period of ethical decomposition undergirded by a precarious vision of reality, it is still possible to stay clear-headed and resist the urge to move towards a bad-faith, reactionary recomposition of the ethical community. She provides a model wherein coping with anomie, with sociological ‘postmodernity’, is not simply to beat a fetishistic retreat into fantasies about the community and its past. As we will see, taking this option suggests the character flaw of self-delusion; it betrays veracity, which is a cardinal point in Didion’s ethical orientation, as well as the memory-ethical value of relative comprehensiveness, which pushes her to want ‘life expanded to a novel’ rather than ‘life reduced to a short story’ (Didion 2021: 69). And this might add up to more than just an ethical concern: though avowing that the situatedness of her telling and its focus on particularity always problematizes it, Didion’s commitment to the truth and to ‘giving it to us straight’ – her posture of universalism, however ironic or ‘aristocratic’ – points to an enlarged ethical community and perhaps even the moral in Margalit’s sense, in other words that which she believes she owes us qua human beings, irrespective of our particular ties to her. But there is also room here, as we will explore further in Chapter 2, for discuss ion of character traits or virtues required to sustain such an ethical and perhaps moral point of view. Ultimately, the universe gleaned from Didion allows her to suggest how an ethics of memory is necessary, while not being cosmically sufficient, to preserve something of people and places past. Her ethics of memory is therefore in some sense ‘courageous’, ‘heroic’ perhaps, but at a minimum it is obstinate. And it is self-consciously so, because it posits its own necessity even after taking the full measure of its ultimate, cosmic futility.

This chapter, in sum, forms the backdrop against which Didion’s ethics of memory will emerge with clarity. An important further aspect of the chapter however will be to look at how space, place and, eventually, politics inform Didion’s view of the universe, and how they link up with her notion of time and memory. Specifically, I will look at her framings of ‘South’ and ‘West’ – the former including not just the southern United States, but also real and imagined Latin American locales and political fault lines that she problematically invokes to underscore her entropic vision. Since Didion’s universe is embedded and expressed in tropes that can be challenged, it is also worthwhile to take this discussion as a more general commentary upon her limitations; it is not always advisable, for example, to take a literary depiction as an argument and therefore the overall gesture of this book is hypothetical. If we adopt an entropic and meaningless cosmic perspective, then Didion has much to teach us – though as she herself seems to realize as her thought develops, this perspective is open to challenge and nuancing.

Didion’s atmosphere of dread: indifference, entropy, precarity

The three elements of Didion’s universe identified here, indifference, entropy and precarity, form something of a thema...