1st Edition

California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels Exiled from Eden

By Katarzyna Nowak McNeice Copyright 2019
    212 Pages
    by Routledge

    212 Pages
    by Routledge

    California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden focuses on the concept of Californian identity in the fiction of Joan Didion. This identity is understood as melancholic, in the sense that the critics following the tradition of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin use the word. The book traces the progress of the way Californian identity is portrayed in Joan Didion’s novels, starting with the first two in which California plays the central role, Run River and Play It As It Lays, through A Book of Common Prayer to Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, where California functions only as a distant point of reference, receding to the background of Didion’s interests. Curiously enough, Didion presents Californian history as a history of white settlement, disregarding whole chapters of the history of the region in which the Californios and Native Americans, among other groups, played a crucial role: it is this reticence that the monograph sees as the main problem of Didion’s fiction and presents it as the silent center of gravity in Didion’s oeuvre. The monograph proposes to see the melancholy expressed by Didion’s fiction organized into four losses: of Nature, History, Ethics, and Language; around which the main analytical chapters are constructed. What remains unrepresented and silenced comes back to haunt Didion’s fiction, and it results in a melancholic portrayal of California and its identity – which is the central theme this monograph addresses.

    Introduction



    Part 1: Joan Didion, the Native Daughter



    Didion the Sacramentan, Californian, Westerner



    Critical Reception



    Joan Didion’s Melancholy California



    Part 2: Californian Losses and Melancholia



    The Myth of an Empty Frontier



    How Joan Didion Expelled Herself from Paradise



    Racial Melancholia and the Emergence of Conscience



    The Social Dimension of Melancholia



    Chapter 1: The Loss of Nature



    Problems with American Nature



    Problems with The Garden of Eden



    The Paradoxes of Nature



    Writing to Remember and to Redeem



    Pioneers and Ancestors



    Purification through Fire



    The Howling Wilderness: The California Desert



    Turner’s and Didion’s Frontierless West



    Chapter 2: The Loss of History



    Manifest Destiny and Its Fulfillment in California



    Freedom from History



    History, Nature, and Hysteria



    "A History of Accidents"



    "You Can’t Call This a Bad Place"



    The Freeway Experience



    Escaping the Meaninglessness of History



    Chapter 3: The Loss of Ethics



    The Emergence of Conscience



    The Melancholic Donner Party



    Desire and the Wagon-Train Morality



    Betrayals of Familial Loyalty



    Life as Gambling



    Parental Influence



    Parental Transgressions



    Chapter 4: The Loss of Language



    Looking Awry at Conscience and Loss



    The Language of Melancholia



    The Limits of Language



    Estrangement from the Body



    Translation and Betrayal



    The Modern Pioneers and the Loss of Memory



    The Language of Democracy



    Conclusion

    Biography

    Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice is a Conex-Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. She obtained her doctoral degree from the University of Wroclaw, Poland, in 2005. She is the author of Melancholic Travelers: Autonomy, Hybridity and the Maternal (Peter Lang, 2007) and co-editor of Interiors: Interiority/ Exteriority in Literary and Cultural Discourse (Cambridge Scholars, 2010) and A Dark California: Essays on Dystopian Depictions in Popular Culture (McFarland, 2017), as well as essays, reviews and translations.