#14: not as aimless revelation
Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom one glory, and one horror. This is the fourteenth one.
Boredom. In Meghan Daum’s delightful new book critiquing mainstream liberalism, The Problem With Everything, there’s a chapter titled “On the Right Side of Things (Until I Wasn’t).” It’s about how, as a way of coping with her divorce, Daum submerged herself in YouTube videos by people who later came to be known as members of the Intellectual Dark Web. The most interesting thing about the chapter is that Daum introduces her Dark Web discussion by talking about Joan Didion. Daum recalls an essay she wrote early in her career that earned praise for its Didion-ish-ness, despite the obviousness of its central thesis: “Beauty magazines, bad! Girl power, good!” But as Daum points out, voicing the liberal orthodoxy in this way really isn’t very Didion-like at all. Daum gives as an example an essay from Didion’s The White Album (1979) that I think about often, “The Women’s Movement.” In it, Didion rails against second-wave feminism, particularly its foundational notion that women can be classified as an oppressed group:
The creation of this revolutionary “class” was from the virtual beginning the “idea” of the women’s movement, and the tendency for popular discussion of the movement to center for so long around day-care centers is yet another instance of that studied resistance to political ideas which characterizes our national life.
People are always saying how beautiful and special Didion’s sentences are (John Leonard: “I have been trying forever to figure out why her sentences are better than mine or yours”). But what is she talking about here?
The creation of this revolutionary “class” was from the virtual beginning the “idea” of the women’s movement
Why are “class” and “idea” in quotation marks? Quotation marks are one of Didion’s many moves; I suppose they suggest ironic distance. I assume she’s saying that the central idea of the women’s movement is that women are a revolutionary class. But why is the clause inverted like that? The awkwardness of her phrasing undermines that attempt at a cooly ironic tone.
And what does this second part of the sentence--
and the tendency for popular discussion of the movement to center for so long around day-care centers is yet another instance of that studied resistance to political ideas which characterizes our national life.
--have to do with the first part? Look at this:
the tendency for popular discussion of the movement to center for so long around day-care centers
“tendency”; “so long”…what kind of timeframe are we dealing with here? The phrasing is so awkward! “to center for so long around day-care centers.” This is not the crystal-clear, deliberate prose styling Didion is lauded for. I can’t find that clarity in anything she writes, and I’ve been looking for it in her writing for twenty years.
Didion suggests that the need for childcare (so that women can have children and work) is indicative of the women’s movement’s “studied resistance” to serious political discussion. A cursory acquaintance with national political discussion over the last 50 years (or even the last week) shows how misguided this is. She uses tone as a stand-in for information. And what a trick! If she wrote with more clarity--more information!--and less tone, her ideas would be held up to scrutiny.
Horror. I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve been reading and re-reading Didion for two decades. I’m perversely drawn to her and her vision of herself and the world. I like her writing, but I don’t love it—actually, I kind of hate it. No, maybe I love it but I don’t like it. Something contradictory like that keeps bringing me back. The White Album is Didion Degree Zero; in it, she does everything she always does, but more. So although I have a million opinions about her other books, I’ll stick to The White Album here. I’m even going to stay with “The Women’s Movement” essay for a bit. The most appalling part of this essay is Didion’s critique of feminists’ presentation of “an imagined Everywoman,” a perpetual victim:
She was persecuted even by her gynecologist, who made her beg in vain for contraceptives. She particularly needed contraceptives because she was raped on every date, raped by her husband, and raped finally on the abortionist’s table.
The archly ironic tone Didion uses to discuss rape, even in this imagined scenario, strikes the 2020 ear as shockingly insensitive. She wouldn’t write this now. But Didion’s beef here, which is that this everywoman-victim-person isn’t cool, is at the heart of everything she writes: Joan Didion is the cool, tough woman; she’s not part of some gross crowd of women. The imagined Everywoman ethos, writes Didion, “seemed very New England, this febrile and cerebral passion.” (Another Didion move is to describe the present or the near-past in past tense--further establishing distance between herself and the yuckiness of other people). There’s nothing nerdier to Didion than New England; it’s just much better—morally better—to train one’s mind to Malibu. Didion calls the literature of the women’s movement “Emersonian,” as a dis; in this literature (which she doesn’t identify by author or title), “[t]he clumsy torrent of words became a principle, a renunciation of style as unserious.” These nerdy New Englanders don’t even care about style!
But feminist writing would have to be Emersonian, to imagine the whole, entire person a woman is; to imagine a better world, even within the horror of this one; and it would have to be—stylistically—messy. Didion’s own writing could hardly less Emersonian. Her essays are not a journey. They are neat, confined, repetitive, I-centric, proper noun-laden memoranda. Tonally, she is more like Poe, casting a hazy irony that pre-accuses the reader: if you think I’m wrong, or if you think this is stupid, you just don’t get it.
Glory. There is an essay in The White Album titled “In the Islands” that speaks directly to another central issue I find in Didion: audience. Who is she writing this for?
We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.
I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract.
I put those you-are-getting-a-woman-who’s in bold, because I find them so telling. Would she present herself as a woman to other women? No. This is for men. The combination here of fragility and strength seems like something men (as another imagined mass) would be super into.
I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am what is on my mind.
I want to be honest with you, not like those other women who pretend to be persecuted by their gynecologists. But where is that promised honesty? All I can find is a parade of nouns, Hollywood, Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles Times Woman on the Year, Spahn Movie Ranch, Honolulu… The ever-presence of these markers don’t evince loss of faith in the social contract.
Didion’s self-presentation, as a woman “radically separated” from other people (like those terribly uncool women’s movement women who try to get rights and stuff), holds huge appeal for contemporary women essayists. It’s the promise that you can write “women’s” stuff, like a personal essay, in a way that makes you attractive to men.
I'll always read Didion. Her influence is unavoidable, but I need to keep making sure, making positive, that I'm not writing to men like that.
Sincerely,
Lucy
NOTE: My newsletter will be on hiatus for the next two months while I have a baby. See you in spring!