Thinking About Joan Didion
On criticism, sentimentality, and standing at the edge of the room.
“…now is it possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level…”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
I’ve was reading a lot of Joan Didion last fall, including Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. Looking back on her writings, one thing that surprised me is how often she talks about atomization, social breakdown, people drifting away from institutions, families, communities, all of it. Which was weird because I tend to think of those as modern concerns. Social media concerns. Things people started talking about in the last ten or fifteen years. Then you realize she’s writing about them in the 1960s.
At the same time, I found myself increasingly annoyed with her.
It started with some of her essays about feminism. My initial reaction was that I was seeing a combination of internalized misogyny and conservatism. She seemed weirdly unsympathetic to women, particularly women acting collectively. She often appeared more interested in critiquing feminists than engaging with what they were actually saying. The meetings, the slogans, the emotional atmosphere, the way they talked to one another—those seemed to draw more of her attention than the substance of their arguments.
The more I read, though, the less convinced I became that conservatism was actually the root of it. What I kept running into wasn’t really a political worldview so much as a temperamental one.
Didion seems deeply suspicious of sentimentality in all its forms. Not just feminist sentimentality. Almost any collective emotional experience. Political movements. Counterculture. Shared outrage. Shared hope. The moment a group begins telling itself a story about who it is and what it means, she starts circling around the edges looking for the cracks.
One thing I recognized in her writing was a habit I used to have more strongly myself. If you want to criticize something badly enough, you can always find another level on which to do it. You disagree with the argument. Then you question the motivations behind the argument. Then the social incentives. Then the unconscious assumptions. Then the assumptions underneath those assumptions. Eventually you’re no longer responding to what someone said. You’re responding to a structure you’ve built around them.
Take a line like:
“How is it possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level?”
It’s a perceptive question. Sometimes it’s even the right question. But it’s also a way of looking at people that can become all-consuming. Once you’re always looking for the hidden motive, the unacknowledged value, the contradiction beneath the stated belief, sincerity starts to disappear. Everyone becomes a case study.
Another line that stuck with me came from one of her essays on the student movement:
“We wonder what kind of people would go to a school like this,” she asked quite early in the controversy. “Why they aren’t out working and making money.”
What fascinated me wasn’t the quote itself. It was Didion’s attraction to that way of seeing. Her tendency to look past what people believe and instead focus on the social structures, assumptions, and identities operating underneath. Sometimes that instinct cuts through illusion. Sometimes it feels like it strips away every reason people have for acting except the least charitable one.
The strange thing is that I don’t think she was doing this because she lacked empathy. Reading more interviews and biographical material, I started to think she was doing it because she was afraid of being swept away by the very emotions she was examining. She distrusted sentimentality because she distrusted what it might do to her own judgment. That’s a different thing than conservatism, even if it can occasionally arrive at similar conclusions.
There’s a kind of comfort in standing at the edge of the room observing. You don’t have to commit. You don’t have to belong. You don’t have to risk being wrong along with everyone else. The older I get, though, the more I think there are costs to that posture. You can become so good at noticing the flaws in every movement, every community, every ideology, and every relationship that you never quite join anything. Criticism starts out as a tool and slowly becomes an identity.
Maybe that’s part of why the atomization passages stuck with me. Lately I’ve been wondering whether the opposite of atomization isn’t agreement or ideology or even community in the abstract. Maybe it’s participation. Showing up somewhere repeatedly. Having dinner with friends. Helping somebody move. Reading books with people. Joining things despite their imperfections.
Maybe that’s unfair to Didion. Maybe I’m reading my own concerns into her work. But the more I read her, the less interested I became in whether she was right about the feminists, the hippies, or the student radicals. What interested me was the perspective itself, and how easily a strength can become a limitation when it becomes the only way you know how to look at the world.
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