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IN OCTOBER 2007 WE WERE HEARING ABOUT THOSE SANTA ANA WINDS AGAIN
Heat and drought had left Southern California vulnerable; when the wildfires started up it was the Santa Anas that drove them to such a pitch that 19 days forward over 1,500 homes and half a million acres of land were burnt. Nine dead, almost a hundred wounded. Known first causes: downed powerlines, an overturned-semi, arson. One suspected arsonist was shot by the police at what either was or wasn’t the scene of a crime; if not, it became one when he fled and backed his truck into a prowler or prowlers and an officer shot and killed him.
The Santa Anas were ubiquitous in news reports; the words became talismanic. And of course we’d heard it before. In blog after blog they were posting the same quote:
Joan Didion’s Santa Anas: the new meme. But then Kevin Drum, The Washington Monthly’s prominent and generally wonderful blogger, wrote:
At the Los Angeles Times blog, Matt Welch was quick to second him:
I don’t think that either of these posts is merely scoring easy points – Didion provokes in her readers a genuine discomfort: is this really it? And to read that Santa Ana quote not in Slouching Towards Bethlehem but online, shoehorned between news reports, further highlights the subjectivity of Didion’s sensibility – her dramatic, conspiratorial, aesthetically-perfect weirdness.
It’s not just the non-fiction, though. I’ve heard the same criticism of her novels – that they’re at once overblown and somehow reductionist. That “near-secretive knowledge” – how unfair it is! Didion knows something we don’t, something we could have never learned on our own, because we haven’t gone that far – but follow the money, follow the votes, follow the guns or winds or highways or back-end points and you’ll find the answer, or almost find it (it’s always just out of reach, you see). Anyhow, that’s only a part of it. Let’s be clear: if there’s a “Didion Problem,” it’s a complex of intersecting problems.
So: are Drum and Welch wrong, or beside the point, or what? I’m not proposing a defense of Didion against some big mean bloggers. I suspect she’s doing just fine without my help. But their posts made me wonder: How do you build a “Didion Problem”? What’s the recipe and how does it work and why are Didion’s novels great? Is it redundant to even speak of this? After all, if there is a “Didion Problem,” it’s hardly one that Didion herself ignores. What other writer so ruthlessly interrogates her own work, both the fiction and non-fiction, delving into her own motivations for telling a given story together with all the reasons that said story is incomplete or provisional, certain details highlighted, others pushed off-stage, etc.? Which is of course one more part of the “Didion Problem.”
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1. A WOMAN
In both the fiction and non-fiction, there’s a woman at the center of things who is at once tough and fragile – though often in unequal quantities. In the non-fiction, this woman – call her Joan Didion – is prone to migraines, struggles with relationships and unexpected deaths, and is assailed by the malignant landscape in which she’s living – including, of course, those Santa Ana winds. And yet, this same woman is fueled by a stunning reserve of moxy, not flinching from investigating California speed freaks, El Salvador, the Reagan Administration, and so forth.
This woman – fragile yet strong-willed, caught up in the tides of history yet alienated from the narratives that might have worked, have sewn it all up, for previous generations – appears in all five of her novels.
The character was already full-realized in Didion’s second work of fiction, Play It as It Lays. In this novel, and the three that follow, the female protagonists have varying degrees of agency and intelligence, but all represent a blank at the center of the books. The actions of this protagonist – her sudden flights to the highway, or to another continent – are never fully accounted for. The motto of Maria, from Play It As It Lays: “NOTHING APPLIES.” As Maria says in one of the passages she narrates (the voice switches between two first persons and a third, adding to the dislocation): “Carter and Helene still believe in cause-effect. Carter and Helene also believe that people are either sane or insane…..Fuck it, I said to them all, a radical surgeon of my own life. Never discuss. Cut.”
2. SO CAUSE AND EFFECT, RADICALLY SEVERED
This is true not only for the protagonist (prone to decide, for instance – in The Last Thing He Wanted– to leave a plum Washington Post gig covering the ’84 presidential primaries to involve herself in the arms trade of her fatally ill father) but for the woman’s family, as well. In Play It As It Lays, Maria’s 4-year-old daughter is sick with a severe illness of the nervous system. In Democracy, the protagonist’s daughter leaves for Vietnam on a whim, just before the US pulls out. In A Book of Common Prayer we get a double whammy: “She lost one daughter to ‘history’ and another to ‘complications.’” The daughter lost to complications was born vomiting, and died shortly thereafter; the daughter lost to history joined a group of Marxist terrorists as a teenager. All of these occurrences are presented as arbitrary, unmotivated – we lived in a poisoned time, mentally and physically. As Maria famously says at the start of Play It As It Lays, “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.” In Didion’s world, we’re beyond such questions. (It is this attitude – and the undermining of it – which made The Year of Magical Thinking such a revelation; Didion was, as a hospital worker noted, “"a pretty cool customer" in the face of her husband’s death – a designation that would aptly describe any number of Didion’s characters – and yet she is beset by the worst ravages of grief. The classic Didion protagonist has been turned inside out, humanized. It’s a heartbreaking achievement.)
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3. MALIGNANT LANDSCAPES
Bacteria proliferate.
Termites eat the presidential palace, rust eats my Oldsmobile.
Twice a year the sun is exactly vertical, and nothing casts a shadow.
The bite of one fly deposits an egg which in its pupal stages causes human flesh to suppurate.
This description continues – Didion is one of those writers that it’s hard not to quote for pages at a time, there’s so much pleasure in her sentences – but the key point is her use of verbs that suggest decay, sickness, an all out assault on the human – though these descriptions are themselves, she admits, not quite right. Words in this country lose their meaning: “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.”
4. WHICH ILLUSTRATES
another paradox of the “Didion problem”: the writing is clinically precise, yet it teeters on the edge of meaningless, or anyhow, is incapable of fully comprehending worlds in which meanings are always wrapped up in conspiracy, in some truth that eludes the narrator. Though she is widely praised as an expert sentence-maker, Didion hasn’t met with universal approval. James Bowman, reviewing The Last Thing He Wanted in The National Review, offers us a faintly disapproving parody of her style:
Short sentences.
Short paragraphs.
Repeated lines from telephone messages or casual remarks or overheard conversations.
This mantra-like repetition of the tag ends of dialogue -- repetition that is meant to seem significant but whose significance remains obscure -- is part of the general atmosphere of paranoia.
Well, fair enough – like all writers with an extreme style, she’s easy to parody. (She once responded thusly to the question of influences on her prose style: “Hemingway – only Hemingway.” Whether or not she’s being a bit glib, she’s not shy in aligning herself with someone who has left in his wake countless thousands of parodies.) I can understand why people might dislike her, but I find her prose thrilling. The coldness and intelligence of the style, the pathological repetitions and circling back, seem to me, across the body of her work, to represent one of the finest instances of what is often termed “existential” literature – prose that you might trace back to Hamlet, or The Underground Man, or in any case Hamsun, Kafka, Beckett – in short, works of an obsessive nature that question that circle around fundamental epistemological and ontological problems.
5. THE BOTTOM KEPT DROPPING OUT
And so on, for several more pages. This is by no means an exceptional paragraph; the narrator in Didion’s fiction is forever trying to get her mind around where the pieces are “on the board” – revelations which come, if the do, too late to do anyone any good. Such ruminations are necessarily endless. The paradox is that while Didion’s comprehension of power at the highest level can seem maddeningly reductive – throw together a few rumpled men and shadow corporations, stir – there is a narrative vertigo which prevents us from getting anything but a final fix on things; in the end, the novels are only ever glancing and fragmentary look at the big picture. Again from Democracy:“Jack Lovett had reportedly made some elusive deals with the failed third force (or fourth force, or fifth force, this was a story on which the bottom kept dropping out).”
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6. FEARSOME SYMMETRY
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p.s. Hey. We begin the spate of mostly reruns with this thoughtful jewel brought to us the amazing writer and former d.l. Mark Doten. Enjoy, hopefully, and the blog sans me "in person" will see you tomorrow.
IN OCTOBER 2007 WE WERE HEARING ABOUT THOSE SANTA ANA WINDS AGAIN
Heat and drought had left Southern California vulnerable; when the wildfires started up it was the Santa Anas that drove them to such a pitch that 19 days forward over 1,500 homes and half a million acres of land were burnt. Nine dead, almost a hundred wounded. Known first causes: downed powerlines, an overturned-semi, arson. One suspected arsonist was shot by the police at what either was or wasn’t the scene of a crime; if not, it became one when he fled and backed his truck into a prowler or prowlers and an officer shot and killed him.
The Santa Anas were ubiquitous in news reports; the words became talismanic. And of course we’d heard it before. In blog after blog they were posting the same quote:
There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. ….The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air.
Joan Didion’s Santa Anas: the new meme. But then Kevin Drum, The Washington Monthly’s prominent and generally wonderful blogger, wrote:
I've lived in Southern California my entire life, and this just doesn't bear any resemblance to anything I know about the place. Santa Ana winds are just....Santa Ana winds. They do whip up brush fires, as Didion says, but otherwise her description seems way, way over the top. Sure, the weather feels a little weird when Santa Anas kick up, but teachers don't cancel classes, pets don't go nuts, people don't stay inside their houses, and Los Angeles doesn't get gripped in crime waves.
At the Los Angeles Times blog, Matt Welch was quick to second him:
This, I believe, gets close to the heart of the Joan Didion Problem…..It's delightful to read, and leaves lasting impressions on your brain, but many of the impressions are, regrettably, not true. Not only that, but they advertise some near-secretive knowledge -- hey wait, all this time I've been living here and I didn't realize that the Santa Anas were the primordial force unleashing the dark side of human desire?
I don’t think that either of these posts is merely scoring easy points – Didion provokes in her readers a genuine discomfort: is this really it? And to read that Santa Ana quote not in Slouching Towards Bethlehem but online, shoehorned between news reports, further highlights the subjectivity of Didion’s sensibility – her dramatic, conspiratorial, aesthetically-perfect weirdness.
It’s not just the non-fiction, though. I’ve heard the same criticism of her novels – that they’re at once overblown and somehow reductionist. That “near-secretive knowledge” – how unfair it is! Didion knows something we don’t, something we could have never learned on our own, because we haven’t gone that far – but follow the money, follow the votes, follow the guns or winds or highways or back-end points and you’ll find the answer, or almost find it (it’s always just out of reach, you see). Anyhow, that’s only a part of it. Let’s be clear: if there’s a “Didion Problem,” it’s a complex of intersecting problems.
So: are Drum and Welch wrong, or beside the point, or what? I’m not proposing a defense of Didion against some big mean bloggers. I suspect she’s doing just fine without my help. But their posts made me wonder: How do you build a “Didion Problem”? What’s the recipe and how does it work and why are Didion’s novels great? Is it redundant to even speak of this? After all, if there is a “Didion Problem,” it’s hardly one that Didion herself ignores. What other writer so ruthlessly interrogates her own work, both the fiction and non-fiction, delving into her own motivations for telling a given story together with all the reasons that said story is incomplete or provisional, certain details highlighted, others pushed off-stage, etc.? Which is of course one more part of the “Didion Problem.”
1. A WOMAN
In both the fiction and non-fiction, there’s a woman at the center of things who is at once tough and fragile – though often in unequal quantities. In the non-fiction, this woman – call her Joan Didion – is prone to migraines, struggles with relationships and unexpected deaths, and is assailed by the malignant landscape in which she’s living – including, of course, those Santa Ana winds. And yet, this same woman is fueled by a stunning reserve of moxy, not flinching from investigating California speed freaks, El Salvador, the Reagan Administration, and so forth.
This woman – fragile yet strong-willed, caught up in the tides of history yet alienated from the narratives that might have worked, have sewn it all up, for previous generations – appears in all five of her novels.
The character was already full-realized in Didion’s second work of fiction, Play It as It Lays. In this novel, and the three that follow, the female protagonists have varying degrees of agency and intelligence, but all represent a blank at the center of the books. The actions of this protagonist – her sudden flights to the highway, or to another continent – are never fully accounted for. The motto of Maria, from Play It As It Lays: “NOTHING APPLIES.” As Maria says in one of the passages she narrates (the voice switches between two first persons and a third, adding to the dislocation): “Carter and Helene still believe in cause-effect. Carter and Helene also believe that people are either sane or insane…..Fuck it, I said to them all, a radical surgeon of my own life. Never discuss. Cut.”
2. SO CAUSE AND EFFECT, RADICALLY SEVERED
This is true not only for the protagonist (prone to decide, for instance – in The Last Thing He Wanted– to leave a plum Washington Post gig covering the ’84 presidential primaries to involve herself in the arms trade of her fatally ill father) but for the woman’s family, as well. In Play It As It Lays, Maria’s 4-year-old daughter is sick with a severe illness of the nervous system. In Democracy, the protagonist’s daughter leaves for Vietnam on a whim, just before the US pulls out. In A Book of Common Prayer we get a double whammy: “She lost one daughter to ‘history’ and another to ‘complications.’” The daughter lost to complications was born vomiting, and died shortly thereafter; the daughter lost to history joined a group of Marxist terrorists as a teenager. All of these occurrences are presented as arbitrary, unmotivated – we lived in a poisoned time, mentally and physically. As Maria famously says at the start of Play It As It Lays, “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.” In Didion’s world, we’re beyond such questions. (It is this attitude – and the undermining of it – which made The Year of Magical Thinking such a revelation; Didion was, as a hospital worker noted, “"a pretty cool customer" in the face of her husband’s death – a designation that would aptly describe any number of Didion’s characters – and yet she is beset by the worst ravages of grief. The classic Didion protagonist has been turned inside out, humanized. It’s a heartbreaking achievement.)
3. MALIGNANT LANDSCAPES
There is the obsession with Donner Pass in her first memoir, Where I Was From, there are of course the winds, also the deadly snakes which coil beneath every rock in her native California. Here’s a striking and typical description at the start of the second half of A Book of Common Prayer, of the fictional country of Boca Grande:
Fevers relapse here.
Bacteria proliferate.
Termites eat the presidential palace, rust eats my Oldsmobile.
Twice a year the sun is exactly vertical, and nothing casts a shadow.
The bite of one fly deposits an egg which in its pupal stages causes human flesh to suppurate.
This description continues – Didion is one of those writers that it’s hard not to quote for pages at a time, there’s so much pleasure in her sentences – but the key point is her use of verbs that suggest decay, sickness, an all out assault on the human – though these descriptions are themselves, she admits, not quite right. Words in this country lose their meaning: “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.”
4. WHICH ILLUSTRATES
another paradox of the “Didion problem”: the writing is clinically precise, yet it teeters on the edge of meaningless, or anyhow, is incapable of fully comprehending worlds in which meanings are always wrapped up in conspiracy, in some truth that eludes the narrator. Though she is widely praised as an expert sentence-maker, Didion hasn’t met with universal approval. James Bowman, reviewing The Last Thing He Wanted in The National Review, offers us a faintly disapproving parody of her style:
Short sentences.
Short paragraphs.
Repeated lines from telephone messages or casual remarks or overheard conversations.
This mantra-like repetition of the tag ends of dialogue -- repetition that is meant to seem significant but whose significance remains obscure -- is part of the general atmosphere of paranoia.
Well, fair enough – like all writers with an extreme style, she’s easy to parody. (She once responded thusly to the question of influences on her prose style: “Hemingway – only Hemingway.” Whether or not she’s being a bit glib, she’s not shy in aligning herself with someone who has left in his wake countless thousands of parodies.) I can understand why people might dislike her, but I find her prose thrilling. The coldness and intelligence of the style, the pathological repetitions and circling back, seem to me, across the body of her work, to represent one of the finest instances of what is often termed “existential” literature – prose that you might trace back to Hamlet, or The Underground Man, or in any case Hamsun, Kafka, Beckett – in short, works of an obsessive nature that question that circle around fundamental epistemological and ontological problems.
5. THE BOTTOM KEPT DROPPING OUT
The political world which creates or is created by the “Didion problem” stands to bizarre and unique. The paranoia about the shadowy networks that control the world order is certainly as extreme as anything this side of LeCarre, but in her case it’s less completely mapped – we’re more paranoid because we meet fewer of the players. In her fiction there are always a few men who can hold something close to the entire world-political game in their heads (or in the case of Play It as It Lays, the Hollywood studio system, which is – hilariously – no different in its machinations than, say, Central American military juntas). This attitude is captured in a paragraph about just such a man in Democracy:
There had been the affiliations with interlocking transport and air courier companies devoid of real assets. There had been the directorship of the bank in Vila that put the peculiarities of condominium government to such creative use There had been all the special assignments and the special consultancies and the special relationships in a fluid world where the collection of information was indistinguishable from the use of information and where national and private interests (the interest of state and non-state actors, Jack Lovett would have said) did not collide but merged into a pool of exchanged favors.
And so on, for several more pages. This is by no means an exceptional paragraph; the narrator in Didion’s fiction is forever trying to get her mind around where the pieces are “on the board” – revelations which come, if the do, too late to do anyone any good. Such ruminations are necessarily endless. The paradox is that while Didion’s comprehension of power at the highest level can seem maddeningly reductive – throw together a few rumpled men and shadow corporations, stir – there is a narrative vertigo which prevents us from getting anything but a final fix on things; in the end, the novels are only ever glancing and fragmentary look at the big picture. Again from Democracy:“Jack Lovett had reportedly made some elusive deals with the failed third force (or fourth force, or fifth force, this was a story on which the bottom kept dropping out).”
6. FEARSOME SYMMETRY
To stare into the workings of power is in the end to confront the void, which explains in part the blankness of these women, their ability to hop a plane for South America and leave it all behind. What holds these worlds together is Didion’s commitment to some certain kinds of narrative symmetry in the face of so many disjunctions. In A Book of Common Prayer, the fat man you see jabbering on the phone in the airport lounge at the beginning of your trip will be the same man who kills you at its end. It’s that art – the skeleton of classical tragedy, even when all hopes of classical narrative purity are lost – that in the end contributes to the enduring power of the “Didion Problem.” As Kevin Drum observed, “this just doesn't bear any resemblance to anything I know about the place.” It’s true. The place you thought you knew was gone. We’re somewhere else now.
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p.s. Hey. We begin the spate of mostly reruns with this thoughtful jewel brought to us the amazing writer and former d.l. Mark Doten. Enjoy, hopefully, and the blog sans me "in person" will see you tomorrow.