Joan Didion: Life and/with/through Words
Summary
The collection also features photographs of Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, with an accompanying essay by artist and photographer Nancy Ellison, plus a contribution by literary biographer Tracy Daugherty.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Illustrations
- Let Us Tell You What We Mean
- Finding Joan Didion
- A Note on Joan Didion’s Notebooks
- The Madwoman Narrative in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays
- The Paradoxical West of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays
- “The White Album:” Didion’s Grammar of Anti-sentimentality
- “An Atmosphere Results:” Intimate Unknowing in Joan Didion’s Democracy
- Failing California: Notes on Didion’s Cemeteries and Spaces of Abjection
- Some Daughters of the Golden State
- Joan Didion and NYC – from “Goodbye to All That” to Her Final Goodbye
- Going, Going … Gone?: Of Auctions and Abandonments
- Research Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
We thank the Università degli Studi di Milano (Dept. of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Mediations) and the Otto-Friedrich Universität Bamberg (SPOT Program) for the publication grants that allowed us to bring the proceedings of the international conference “Joan Didion: Life and/with/through words” (April 2022) to press.
With deep gratitude to Nancy Ellison and Tracy Daugherty for being part of this project.
List of Illustrations
Photograph 2a: “Joan Didion b,” reproduced with permission © Nancy Ellison/Polaris.
Photograph 3: “Joan Didion shared workspace,” reproduced with permission © Nancy Ellison/Polaris.
Photograph 4a: “JGD at the partners desk,” reproduced with permission © Nancy Ellison/Polaris.
Photograph 4b: “Joan John 3”, reproduced with permission © Nancy Ellison/Polaris.
Photograph 4c: “Joan and John in their studio,” reproduced with permission © Nancy Ellison/Polaris.
Photograph 5: “5 Joan (Whistler’s mother),” reproduced with permission © Nancy Ellison/Polaris.
Photograph 6: “Joan Didion The Confession,” reproduced with permission © Nancy Ellison/Polaris.
Photograph 7: “Partial contact,” reproduced with permission © Nancy Ellison/Polaris.
Eva-Sabine Zehelein and Cinzia Scarpino
Let Us Tell You What We Mean
Some real things have happened lately.
–Joan Didion
The Last Thing He Wanted
Joan Didion passed away shortly before Christmas, 2021. Even if not entirely unexpected, the news nevertheless came as a shock to those who knew her and/or her work, the effects rippling through numerous conversations with friends and colleagues for many weeks to come.
The critical reception of Didion had been growing nearly exponentially ever since the success of her two memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011), and also after the theater version of the former, starring Vanessa Redgrave, had made quite a splash on Broadway (2007). However, the number of monographs on Didion’s work is limited, and the broader evaluation of her entire oeuvre seems to be sorely lacking. Nearly two decades after the significant contributions of the 1990s – Janis Stout (1990), Alan Nadel (1992), Sharon Felton (1993), John McClure (1994) – critics returned to Didion with essays appearing in journals and magazines (most notably in The New Yorker, with Louis Menand 2015, Hilton Als 2019, Nathan Heller 2021),1 a few chapters in books here and there (Michael Szalay 2012; Deborah Nelson 2017), one collection of interviews edited by Scott F. Parker (2018), and a seminal literary biography (Tracy Daugherty 2015) (see the research bibliography at the end of this volume).
We decided that we wanted to talk, again, in detail, about Didion and her work through various lenses, with fresh approaches. So there we were, in April 2022, hosting an international two-day conference, with speakers from Germany, France, Italy and Spain, from Iceland, Canada and from the United States, including as keynote speaker Tracy Daugherty, Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oregon State University, Emeritus (since 2013) and author of the literary biography on Didion, The Last Love Song (2015).
We invited contributions that cover the entire range of Didion’s work, from Run River (1963), her first novel, to Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021), a final collection of previously uncollected materials. We wished to provide a very broad theme, one which offers just a three-pronged grid to engage and play with, to hang on to, to swing from: Life and/with/through words.
We are thrilled to have Nancy Ellison’s photograph “The Confession” on the cover of our book, and we are grateful that she offered to (con)textualize it (see Ellison in this volume), since this photograph, for us, encapsulates “life and/with/through words.” Didion is sitting in front of the typewriter, surrounded by books on bookshelves, by words and texts and scripts. She has turned her head to the camera, eyes wide open, hand before her mouth in a soft fist, with a facial expression maybe somewhere between surprise and slight worry. Positioned between the viewer/the camera lens and the typewriter, she is, indeed, the pair of eyes between what she observes, straight on, and the typewriter, or future written text. She does not speak; she covers her mouth with a gesture that may or may not be protective or withholding. The light clearly focuses on her head and left hand, as well as on the typewriter and a piece of paper with printed text on the right side, the rest of her body is lost in shades or darkness. Here, Didion felt safe: “I got control. I calmed down. I’m only myself in front of a typewriter” (Braudy 1977, in Parker 2018, 16). Nancy Ellison captured what Didion said about herself in 1976: “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” (“Why I Write” in Let Me, 49).
Life and/with/through words.
Life and Words
“Life and words” also suggests general, fundamental questions and well-rutted paths: what is the relationship between life and words? What do words do? How and in how far do words create, co-create and re-create the lives we live, the memories we carry, and the selves we are, at any given moment, over time? How useful are labels such as fact and fiction, non-fiction, and creative nonfiction, or even journalism, reportage, New Journalism, embedded journalism, deep reporting, “advocacy journalism,” not to speak of documentary aesthetic, autobiography, and memoir?2
All these sticky tags, it seems, are without ontological power, once one takes the close look at Didion’s texts. Their surfaces and essence seem to demand effortless transitions, they seem genre fluid. The sticker glue peels off, the layers come lose, the labels cannot hold.
Didion always pointed out that every text is a personal text. Every news item is the product of a human being. Bias is always there – Deborah Nelson calls this “epistemological caution” (Nelson 2017, 149). In “Alicia and the Underground Press” (1968) Didion wrote: “I admire objectivity very much indeed, but I fail to see how it can be achieved if the reader does not understand the writer’s peculiar bias” (“Alicia” in Let Me, 4).
So what is this thing called objectivity, or, worse even, truth? What can words do? And what is the relation between the writing subject and the written subject and the textual object? And doesn’t Didion’s crisp, reduced, exact style just make us think that she is striving for accurate representations of events, as she experienced them? Doesn’t she produce what she admired about Hemingway: a style that offers “the illusion but not the fact of specificity” (“Last Words”, 1998, in Let Me, 100–01)?
Enter the idea of New Journalism or literary journalism – the idea that fact-centered reportage of outside events gets enmeshed with ruminations about personal, internal, emotional experiences, that texts can transcend ‘bare’ reporting and become so much richer in the process.3 This concept serves Didion well. Yes, she was a reporter, an observer, a critical eye on events of her time – but that may not be the center of her work (although many have argued along these lines).
We wish to suggest that she immersed herself in style to find out about, and then to “confront only obliquely” (Where, 18), how she felt. It seems to us that she wrapped herself in blanket after blanket of reportage, storytelling, comment and analysis, to explore, concealed by those narrative tapestries, how she felt.
“Remember what it is to be me. That is always the point” (Dunne 2017).
This essential quote is to us a Rosetta stone for Didion’s work. These sentences operate on at least two levels – either as a call to the reader to remember what it is to be Joan Didion, and that that is always the point. Or, somewhat self-referentially: to remember what it is to be me is always the point, meaning that for Didion her writing serves her to remember what it is to be her. So in these two short, declarative sentences, one could argue, Didion manages to encapsulate her entire writerly program, self-understanding and self-positioning. She calls out to the readers, she calls out to herself at the same time, that the (only) point to remember is “what it is to be me.”
Details
- Pages
- 194
- Year
- 2024
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631895719
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631895726
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631894408
- DOI
- 10.3726/b21411
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2023 (December)
- Keywords
- Autobiography memoir crossing-story the West NYC abandonment narrative opacity storytelling neoliberalism reparative reading New Journalism Fiction Non-Fiction
- Published
- Peter Lang – Berlin · Bruxelles · Chennai · Lausanne · New York · Oxford, 2024. 194 pp., 7 fig. b/w
Biographical notes
Cinzia Scarpino (Volume editor)
Eva-Sabine Zehelein (Volume editor)
Cinzia Scarpino is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Milan. Her research interests and publications range from American literature of the 1930s and 1940s and of the second half of the 20th century to environmental studies, screen studies, and Law & Literature. Eva-Sabine Zehelein is Adjunct Professor of American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. She has published broadly in North American Studies, e.g. on John Updike, contemporary science plays, Alice Munro, Joan Didion, 55+ communities and family trees.
