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    Lingua e letterature angloamericane, I Modulo“Coming from the shadows”

    Il modulo sarà dedicato alla lettura e al commento di tre testi di scrittrici degli Stati Uniti, pubblicati negli anniSettanta, che affrontano il tema del trauma e del suo superamento da una prospettiva femminile. Le autrici inquestione sono Joan Didion, Toni Morrison e Leslie Marmon Silko. Nello specifico, i temi della guerra, della

    violenza, e della diversità etnica e sessuale saranno analizzati in rapporto alla società degli Stati Uniti diquegli anni.

    BIBLIOGRAFIA

    È richiesta la lettura analitica dei tre testi primari. Dei testi indicati nella bibliografia storico-critica èrichiesto lo studio dei testi numero 1, 2, 6, 10 e 14 e di un testo a scelta per ciascun romanzo (uno trai nn. 3, 4, 5; uno tra i nn. 7, 8, 9; uno tra i nn. 11, 12, 13). Il testo n. 14, insieme agli schemi riportati infondo (riadattamento di testi esistenti sul romanzo) è una guida alla lettura di Ceremony .

    Testi primari (qualsiasi edizione integrale e in lingua inglese; i tre testi sono disponibili nelle biblioteched’Ateneo): Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays (1970)

    Toni Morrison, Sula (1973)Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977)

    Bibliografia storico-critica:1. Maria Cristina Iuli, “Gli anni Settanta? Un universo parallelo”, Enthymema, VII, 2012, pp. 275-284.2. Jennifer Brady, “Joan Didion”, in Marshall Boswell and Carl Rollyson, eds, Encyclopedia of American

    Literature. 1607 to the Present , Facts on File, New York, 2008, pp. 320-323.3. David J. Geherin, “Nothingness and Beyond: Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays”, Critique, 16: 1, 1974, pp.

    64-78.4. Cynthia Griffin Wolff, "Play It as It Lays: Didion and the Diver Heroine”, Contemporary Literature, 24: 4,

    1983, pp. 480-4955. Cinzia Scarpino, “‘I, the Implacable I’: l’opera di Joan Didion negli anni Settanta”, Enthymema, VII, 2012,

    pp. 453-472.

    6. Marshall Boswell, “Toni Morrison”, in Marshall Boswell and Carl Rollyson, eds, Encyclopedia of AmericanLiterature. 1607 to the Present , Facts on File, New York, 2008, pp. 773-776.

    7. Cedric Gael Bryant, “The Orderliness of Disorder: Madness and Evil in Toni Morrison's Sula”, Black American Literature Forum, 24: 4, 1990, pp. 731-745.

    8. Rita A. Bergenholtz, “Toni Morrison's Sula: A Satire on Binary Thinking”, African American Review , 30: 1,1996, pp. 89-98.

    9. Marie Nigro, “In Search of Self: Frustration and Denial in Toni Morrison's Sula”, Journal of Black Studies,28: 6, 1998, pp. 724-737.

    10. Marshall Boswell, “Leslie Marmon Silko”, in Marshall Boswell and Carl Rollyson, eds, Encyclopedia of American Literature. 1607 to the Present , Facts on File, New York, 2008, pp. 1060-1061.

    11. Nancy Gilderhus, “The Art of Storytelling in Leslie Silko's Ceremony ”, The English Journal , 83: 2, 1994,pp. 70-72.

    12. Dennis Cutchins, “So That the Nations May Become Genuine Indian”: Nativism and Leslie Marmon

    Silko’s Ceremony ”, Journal of American Culture, 2: 4, 1999, pp. 77-89,13. Aaron Derosa, “Cultural Trauma, Evolution, and America’s Atomic Legacy in Silko’s Ceremony ”, Journal

    of Literary Theory , 6:1, 2012, pp. 41-64.14. Laura Coltelli, “Leslie Marmon Silko”, in Allan Chavkin, ed., Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. A

    Casebook , Oxford UP, Oxford 2002, pp. 241-255.

    Sulle tre autrici può essere inoltre utile la consultazione del volume Guida alla letteratura degli Stati Uniti.Percorsi e protagonisti 1945-2014 (di Cinzia Scarpino, Cinzia Schiavini, Sostene M. Zangari, Odoya,Bologna 2014), disponibile nella Biblioteca di Scienze del linguaggio (collocazione: 1DIDATTICALETTERATURA 056).

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    320 entry 

    for his son and was neither a critical nor commercial suc-cess. His last novel, To the White Sea (1993), the story of alone American soldier escaping Japan in the midst of thewar, enjoyed modest success. Early in his career, Dickeywas a frequent essayist (The Suspect in Poetry  [1964]) andreviewer (Babel to Byzantium [1968]).

    SourcesBaughman, Judith, ed. James Dickey: An Illustrated Chronicle.Dic-

    tionary of Literary Biography, Documentary Series, volume

    19. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman/Gale Research, 1999.

    Baughman, Ronald. Understanding James Dickey.Columbia: Uni-

     versity of South Carolina Press, 1985.

    Hart, Henry. James Dickey: The World as a Lie. New York: Picador,

    2000.

    Kirschten, Robert, ed. “Struggling for Wings”: The Art of James

    Dickey.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,

    1997.

    —Ward Briggs

    Didion, Joan (1934– )  journalist, essayist, novelist, screenwriter

     In many ways writing is the act of saying I, ofimposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen tome, see it my way, change your mind.  —“Why I Write” (1975)

    Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California, and at-tended C. K. McClatchy Senior High School. In 1956 shegraduated from the University of California at Berkeley with

    a B.A. in English. She won the Priz de Paris in a competitionsponsored by Vogue magazine for college seniors and movedto New York where she worked at Vogue in several capacities,including senior features editor, and wrote movie reviews forVogue,  Mademoiselle, and other magazines.

    Didion’s traditional novel Run River  (1963) was a regional-ist interpretation of California and the American West. Didionmarried the writer John Gregory D in 1964; the couplelived in Los Angeles for over two decades before returningto New York in 1988. Working in concert on many projects,Didion and Dunne alternated on the writing of a monthlycolumn called “Points West” that was published by Esquire inthe 1970s. They also collaborated on several screenplays, most

    notably The Panic in Needle Park, a gritty 1971 movie focus-ing on drug addiction in New York’s Sherman Park. Didionand Dunne adopted a daughter, Quintana Roo, named after astate in Mexico, in 1966; she is featured in both of her parents’

     journalism of the period, especially in the personal essays inDidion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968).

    Play It as It Lays  (1970) became a minor classic, cel-ebrated for its portrayal of anomie in the self-destructivelives of a Hollywood starlet and her associates. A deliber-

    ately fast read due to its prominent display of white spaceon the page, Play It as It Lays offered its readers a stylishmorality tale narrated by an existentialist heroine. It wasfollowed by  A Book of Common Prayer  (1977), a complexnovel inspired by the radical political movements of the

    1970s and connected to Didion’s interest in the abductionof the heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974 by the SymbioneseLiberation Army. Didion later wrote a sympathetic reviewof Hearst’s laconic memoir. In an essay called “Girl of theGolden West,” Didion writes of Hearst: “She was never anidealist, and this pleased no one. She was tainted by sur-

     vival.” In Didion’s reading, Hearst becomes a pragmaticsurvivor in the frontier mold of pioneers who avoided thebackward glance in their will to surmount hardships en-countered in settling the American West.

    Didion was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis after expe-riencing episodes of temporary blindness, a trauma she dis-cusses in the essay “The White Album,” published in 1979.

     After Henry (1992) is dedicated to her longtime literary agent,Henry Robbins, who died of a heart attack at fifty-one. Did-ion has written about her own ancestors, some of whom trav-eled partway with the Donner-Reed party on their ill-fatedoverland crossing to California in the 1840s. Her 2003 book,Where I Was From, draws extensively on family diaries, as dothe personal essays of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 

    Didion’s recent work is framed by a succession of personallosses. Where I Was From (2003) is dedicated to her parents

    320 Didion, Joan

     Joan Didion

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    entry 321Didion, Joan 321

    and closes with her poignant memories of her mother’sand father’s deaths. John Gregory Dunne died in December2003 and Didion’s daughter died in August 2005 at the ageof thirty-nine. Didion won the N B A forNonfiction in 2005 for The Year of Magical Thinking , a memoirexamining her grief at her husband’s death and her daughter’s

    critical illness. Reviews of The Year of Magical Thinking  havecentered on the attending social worker’s description of Did-ion as a “pretty cool customer” in the immediate momentsafter her husband’s death—a survival mechanism that alsodescribes the reactions of her heroines Maria Wyeth of PlayIt As It Lays, Grace Strasser-Mendana of  A Book of CommonPrayer, Inez Victor of Democracy  (1984), and Elena McMahonof The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)—suggesting a coherenceand consistency to Joan Didion’s work and preoccupationsover the past forty years.

    Didion is often classed with the New Journalists (see NJ) of the 1960s, a nonaffiliated group of writerswho emphasized the necessary subjectivity of their reporting.

    Her first collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, included incisive portraits of the Haight-Ashbury hippies inSan Francisco, an account of a murder trial in San BernardinoCounty that seemed to be drawn from the plots of James M.Cain noir  novels, and several personal essays on Didion’srelation to her family, her family’s frontier history, and herambivalent fascination with New York and Sacramento. Herwork is influenced by several writers she admires, amongthem Henry James and George Orwell; her stylistic debts toErnest Hemingway’s spare sentence are well known, but herrecent nonfiction owes much to James’s opaque style in hislater novels. Didion’s reputation is primarily as the writer oftwo important and influential collections of essays, each the

    register of a particular decade of American culture: SlouchingTowards Bethelehem reports on the 1960s, The White Album onthe 1970s. She is also a novelist of some repute. Her novelsrange from realist to Postmodernist in their technique, andhave become progressively more skeptical in their relationto narrative. “You see the shards of the novel I am no lon-ger writing, the island, the family, the situation. I lost pa-tience with it. I lost nerve,” the narrator, Joan Didion, admitsabout the book she is struggling to write in Democracy: “Iam resisting narrative here.” The stance is consistent withher focus on image rather than on narrative in the collage-style title essay of The White Album. Her most recent workhas focused on an exploration of the ideological underpin-nings of narrative. Where I Was From (2003) is a revisioniststudy of the persistent mythologizing of California’s historyby such writers as Jack London, Frank Norris, and Didionherself, culminating in a skeptical reading of the romanticnarrative of her elegiac first novel, Run River. The author offive novels and eight nonfiction books, Didion is a frequentcontributor to The New York Review of Books and The NewYorker.

    —Jennifer Brady 

    Principal Books by DidionRun River. New York: Obolensky, 1963.

    Slouching Towards Bethlehem. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,

    1968.

    Play It As It Lays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970.

     A Boo k of Common Prayer.  New York: Simon & Schuster,

    1977.

    Telling Stories. Berkeley, Calif.: Bancroft Library, 1978.

    The White Album. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.

    Salvador. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982.

    Democracy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.

     Miami. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.

     After Henry. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

    The Last Thing He Wanted. New York: Knopf, 1996.

    Political Fictions. New York: Knopf, 2001.

    Where I Was From. New York: Knopf, 2003.

    Dust jacket for Didion’s second novel, 1970, which earned aNational Book Award nomination

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    322 entry 322 Didion, Joan

    Working typescript for A Book of Common Prayer (1977)

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    entry 323

    Fixed Ideas: America since 9.11. New York: New York Review of

    Books, 2003.

    Vintage Didion. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.

    The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Knopf, 2005.

    We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction. New

    York: Knopf, 2006.

    Studying Joan DidionThe Everyman’s Library collection of her nonfiction, We TellOurselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), includes Joan Didion’simportant early works. Her award-winning The Year of MagicalThinking  (2006), a meditation on the deaths of her husbandand daughter, is not included in the Everyman collection andis a necessary element in her canon. Her novels are available inseparate editions. No book-length biography of Didion exists; however, Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations, edited by EllenG. Freidman (Princeton, N. J.: Ontario Review Press, 1984),collects three interviews and an essay by Didion as well ascritical responses from academic scholars. Though it focuses

    mainly on Didion’s fiction, this book provides insight intoDidion’s creative process and her personal life.

    The Critical Response to Joan Didion, edited by Sharon Fel-ton (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1994), provides reviewsof her books and offers scholarly examinations of Didion’sfoundational works including her nonfiction, novels, and

     journalism. Katherine Usher Henderson’s Joan Didion (NewYork: Ungar, 1981) and Mark Roydon Winchell’s  Joan Didion(Boston: Twayne, 1989) both connect biography to analysisin order to examine Didion’s fiction and nonfiction throughcritical surveys of her life and career.

    Two books that examine Didion’s work within largerframeworks—the first, placing her in the tradition of New

    Journalism, and the second, examining her place amongBritish and American women writers—include Marc Wein-garten’s The Gang that Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thomp-son, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution  (New York:Crown, 2006) and Janis Stout’s Strategies of Reticence: Silenceand Meaning in the Works of Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Kath-erine Ann Porter, and Joan Didion (Charlottesville: UniversityPress of Virginia, 1990). Sandra Braman’s chapter in A Source-book of American Literary Journalism: Representative Writers inan Emerging Genre, edited by Thomas Connery  (New York:Greenwood, 1992), names Didion as a founder of the NewJournalism movement.

    —Student Guide by Britt Terry 

    Dillard, Annie (1945– )  essayist, novelist, poet

     A child wakes up over and over again, and notices thatshe’s living . . . bingo, she feels herself alive. . . . And shenotices she is set down here, mysteriously, in a goingworld.

    —“To Fashion a Text” (1987)

    Born Ann Doak in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Annie Dillardwas educated at Hollins College, where she received a B.A. in1967 and an M.A. in 1968. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Pil- grim at Tinker Creek (1974), a nonfiction work that evokes thewonder of nature and has been compared to Henry DavidThoreau’s Walden. Like Thoreau, Dillard is a keen observer

    of the seasons and natural cycles. Other titles that extend her view of nature and the act of writing about it are Teaching aStone to Talk (1982), Living by Fiction (1982), and Writing Life (1989). In An American Childhood  (1987) she describes herconventional childhood in middle-class urban America. Hernovel The Living  (1992), is characterized by a philosophicalregionalism. She reveals a feeling for the way people interactwith the land—in this case, loggers in the Pacific Northwestat the turn of the nineteenth century. She has also writtentwo poetry collections, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel  (1974) and Mornings Like This (1995). Her novel The Maytrees was pub-lished in 2007.

    SourceJohnson, Sandra Humble. The Space Between: Literary Epiphanyin the Work of Annie Dillard. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University

    Press, 1992.

    The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg (New York:Random House, 1950)  novel

    Budd Schulberg’s third novel introduces the novelist Man-ley Halliday, teamed with junior writer Shep Stearns toscript “Love on Ice,” a formulaic romantic comedy that isto be filmed on location at the Dartmouth winter carnival.The novel is freely based on Schulberg’s collaboration with

    F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which the two authors shared misad- ventures at Dartmouth while working on the motion pictureWinter Carnival (1939). The details are accurately drawn fromSchulberg’s firsthand knowledge of Hollywood where his fa-ther, B. P. Schulberg, was head of Paramount Studios from1925 to 1932. With celebratory champagne as fuel, Halliday’scomeback from his literary nadir and Stearns’s shot at a brightwriting future are derailed. Halliday dies, joining the ghostsof his past, while young Stearns learns of life’s disenchant-ment. The novel was adapted into a Broadway play by the au-thor and Harvey Breit in 1958 and ran for 189 performances.Schulberg’s best-seller helped trigger a Fitzgerald revival.

      —Michael Edelson

    “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich (1973)  poem

    Taken from her 1973 book of the same title, “Diving into theWreck” is perhaps Adrienne R’s most famous poem. Hav-ing abandoned the taut formal work of her first collections,Rich utilizes a short-lined free-verse structure in this poemthat creates a quick and graceful movement. The poem ar-

    “Diving into the Wreck” 323

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    Nothingness and Beyond: Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays Geherin, David J Critique; Jan 1, 1974; 16, 1; ProQuest pg. 64

    Nothingness

    and

    Beyond:

    Joan Didion s

    Play t

    s t ays

    DAVID

    J.

    GEHERIN

    What we

    probably

    do

    not

    need in American fiction

    s

    yet

    another Hollywood novel. Hollywood as metaphor for

    everything that

    s

    tawdry, artificial, and superficial about

    America has become a cliche in contemporary fiction. Those

    novels

    about

    Hollywood which are still read-West's

    The Day

    o the Locust Mailer's

    The Deer Park

    Fitzgerald's The

    Last

    Tycoon Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?

    -succeed

    by

    transcending

    the

    limitations

    of

    their

    subject matter. Countless

    other ones have faded as quickly as the sunset in the West they

    describe because their voyeuristic concern was with

    Hollywood as Hollywood, their fascination with tinsel as

    tinsel.

    Joan

    Didion's Play It

    As

    It Lays

    (1970) belongs

    to

    that

    former

    group

    of novels which enlarges

    upon the

    limited nature

    of

    its material. Although its sett ing

    s

    Hollywood, its heroine s

    an

    ac;tress, and movie making figures

    prominently

    in its action,

    the

    novel

    s

    as much

    about

    Hollywood as

    Heart

    of

    Darkness

    s

    about Africa

    or

    The Stranger

    s about

    Algeria. Like

    those novels,

    Play It As It Lays

    depends

    upon

    an intimate

    connection between setting

    and

    theme;

    but

    also like them, its

    overriding thematic concern

    s

    man's relationship with himself

    and

    with in general.

    Didion's

    novel s neither

    primarily a sociological commentary on the values

    of

    contemporary American society nor a psychological case

    study of its heroine. It is, rather, a picture of personal dread

    64

    Copyright

    (c) 2002

    ProQuest Information and Learning Company

    Copyright (c) Heldref Publications

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    and

    anxiety,

    of alienation and absurdity lurking

    within

    and

    without. For

    although

    Hollywood

    s

    her setting, nothingness

    s

    Didion's theme.

    The

    novel presents a

    harrowing picture

    of

    Maria

    Wyeth, a

    thirty-one-year-old actress and former model,

    and

    her

    encounter

    with

    an

    existential nothingness which envelops her

    like a coastal fog. Her

    marriage to Carter

    Lang,

    an

    egocentric,

    ambitious

    young

    film director,

    s breaking

    up; her four-year-

    old daughter, Kate, is institutionalized with some

    sort of

    brain

    damage; her casual affairs

    are many but

    mechanical

    and

    lifeless. When Maria discovers she s pregnant, probably not

    by her husband, she has

    an

    abortion. Her closest friend, BZ, a

    homosexual who produces

    her husband's

    movies, commits

    suicide by

    taking an overdose

    of

    pills while

    cradled

    in her arms.

    Finally, Maria herself· s hospitalized for what s usually

    loosely described as a nervous

    breakdown.

    The facts of Maria's life are the basic material

    of

    thousands

    of

    soap opera situations. What saves Play t

    s

    t

    Lays from degenerating into banality s Didion's control over

    her material , her skill in focusing

    attention

    not

    on

    the events in

    Maria's life so

    much

    as

    on her cumulative

    response

    to

    them.

    The real action of the novel

    takes

    place in the mind and

    heart

    of

    Maria

    as she

    s

    forced to deal with her experiences. Viewed

    from

    a medical

    point

    of

    view,

    she

    might well be classified as a

    near schizoid personality whose experiences

    have

    precipitated

    a severe

    emotional

    crisis result ing in the loss

    of an

    integrated

    personality. In a

    more profound

    sense, however, her sickness

    s

    neither

    emotional nor

    psychological; it

    s

    ontological.

    She s

    suffering not from a nervous breakdown, but from the

    breakdown

    of a world

    around

    her which threatens

    to

    engulf

    her whole being with nothingness.

    Although

    narrated

    iq third person for the most part, the

    novel begins with Maria's first person

    account of

    her situation,

    written, she tells us, at

    the

    urging of

    the doctor

    who

    s

    treating

    her. Her statement s lucid, perceptive, and sensitive. t reyeals

    Maria's response

    to

    her personal encounter with nothingness,

    which the rest of the novel details.

    Maria

    says she answers

    Nothing

    applies

    to the battery of

    psychological tests

    put

    before her,

    indicating

    neither

    evasion

    nor unwillingness to

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    cooperate and nothing less than the naked truth.

    What

    does

    apply, they ask later, as if the word 'nothing' were ambiguous,

    open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an

    Icelandic rune.

    1

    With

    an

    arrogance characteristic

    of

    the

    initiated, Maria displays impatience at the obtuseness of

    others because she has been

    out

    there where nothing is (212),

    as Z puts it. Unlike him, Maria lives on; her encounter with

    nothingness does not completely defeat her but forces her into

    a new awareness. Her confinement in the sanitarium

    is

    not to

    be viewed as a solipsistic retreat but as a temporary withdrawal

    from the world in preparation for a

    future

    re-emergence,

    wounded but wiser, with a wisdom born of pain.

    In this way, Play It s It Lays

    is

    closer in spirit and theme

    to the works

    of

    Camus

    and Sartre than

    to

    those

    of

    Nathanael

    West. In The Myth o Sisyphus for example, Camus writes:

    In certain situations, replying nothing when asked what one is thinking

    about may be pretense in a man.

    Those

    who

    are

    loved

    are

    well a ware of this.

    But if

    that

    reply is sincere, if it symbolizes

    that odd state of

    soul in which the

    void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures

    is

    broken,

    in

    which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then

    it is

    as

    it

    were the first sign of absurdity.

    2

    Play It

    s

    It Lays testifies on every page to this eloquence

    of

    the void as Didion relentlessly explores the

    emotional

    shock

    of

    the encounter

    with

    absurdity. The refrain Maria said

    nothing

    is

    repeated with increasing persistence throughout

    the novel until it takes

    on

    the characteristics

    of

    a ritual chant.

    In its silence, the statement itself becomes eloquent,

    illuminating the almost palpable nature of Maria's dread. That

    Maria cannot articulate her experience

    to

    others, can say

    nothing, only makes more poignant and intense her

    experience.

    o

    her husband, her friends, her doctor,

    she

    appears vague, evasive, withdrawn; for herself, she sees no

    ambiguity whatever. She has heard the silence of the void, has

    encountered that absurdity Camus describes, and has learned

    the truth

    of

    Beckett's observation that there is nothing more

    real than nothing.

    For

    the title to her collection

    of

    essays, Slouching

    Towards Bethlehem

    Joan

    Didion chose the final line of Yeats'

    The Second Coming. Her overriding concern

    in

    those essays

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    and in her two published novels-the first was Run River

    (1963)-is with the broken center, with things falling apart,

    with anarchy loosed upon the world. However,

    .Yhere

    the

    emphasis in the essays is primarily

    on

    the sociological impact

    of

    such fragmentation (the title essay, for example, deals with

    hippie life styles in

    San

    Francisco), Play t s t Lays focuses

    on a highly personal

    and

    private version of the broken center.

    Things

    are

    falling apart in Maria's world,

    the

    chain of daily

    gestures has been irrevocably broken. What results is the main

    concern

    of

    the novel, Maria's encounter with absurdity and

    nothingness.

    Maria's painful

    journey

    towards perception begins with a

    nagging awareness of dread hovering over her. At the

    beginning

    of

    the novel, her perception has no real focus, no

    sharp

    delineation

    of

    its exact nature. Her ultimate fate is

    suggested early by a description of a documentary movie

    of

    her

    life as a model in New York, filmed by her husband. In the final

    scene of the movie, Maria's face is shown in negative image,

    foreshadowing the nothingness

    that

    will soon be her life.

    To

    ward off the increasing anxiety, Maria develops a compulsion

    to drive the freeways, to seek order and meaning to

    counteract

    her growing sense of disorder.

    I n

    the hypnotic flow of the

    freeways, she

    is

    able, temporarily

    at

    least, to ignore the outside

    world.

    At

    night the sense

    of

    dread

    inevitably returns, but each

    morning brings the escape

    of

    the

    automobile

    once again. Only

    on the freeways is she able to feel the orderly rhythm

    of

    life that

    she finds nowhere else. The automobile becomes an

    appropriate symbol

    of

    her escape: self-contained and womb-

    like. Driving is both .free and tightly ordered; she can flow

    along aimlessly but only in the direction the road dictates.

    Ironically,

    the

    only source of the rhythm of life is mechanical;

    nature, the normal source

    of

    natural rhythms, is depicted as

    polluted, sterile, and lifeless. Maria's compulsion causes her to

    drive over seven

    thousan9

    miles in

    one month.

    The freeway

    runs

    out

    in a scrap metal yard in

    San

    Pedro, and Maria soon

    discovers that driving is ineffective protection agairrst the

    unspeakable peril she senses

    about

    her.

    We discover the particular causes of Maria's anxiety only

    gradually: her marriage is breaking up; her daughter is

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    institutionalized while

    doctors

    try

    to

    figure out what went

    wrong ; she

    is

    haunted more and more by the

    sudden

    violence

    of her mother's death in an

    automobile

    accident

    in

    the Nevada

    desert

    some

    years earlier.

    Not

    only the facts distress her:

    uneasiness has arisen because she has asked why (her name

    should probably be taken symbolically; Wyeth: Why is).

    Asking questions sometimes

    prompts

    answers that the

    questioner

    is

    not prepared to handle. As Camus writes, one

    day

    the arises

    and

    everything begins in

    that

    weariness

    tinged with

    amazeness.

    3

    That weariness, which Camus says

    comes at the end of a mechanical life,

    is

    the beginning of the

    impulse of consciousness. In seeking answers to fundamental

    questions about her life, for

    an

    explanation for the

    unaccountable suffering

    of

    her child, for a logical reason for

    her mother's sudden death, Maria gains a new awareness. She

    discovers no answer,

    that nothing is the

    answer to all these

    questions. She

    is

    forced

    to

    confront irrationality and silence.

    The reader

    soon

    recognizes

    that

    her opening words in the

    novel,

    What

    makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask

    (3),

    are not

    an

    evasion; instead, they clearly indicate her

    profound awareness

    that

    there

    is

    no answer.

    To

    explain lago's

    evil

    is

    impossible

    and

    futile, since mere explanation

    cannot

    remove it.

    To

    look for Maria confesses, is beside

    the

    point

    (3).

    Maria's knowledge of evil

    is

    symbolized by

    the

    frequent

    appearance

    in her dreams of the rattlesnake. As a girl, her

    father had warned her against

    turning

    over rocks for fear she

    might reveal a snake.

    She

    was unable

    to

    follow

    the

    advice, for

    the

    rattlesnake

    is

    revealed all too clearly in the harsh light of

    her reason. Once released, it never crawls back under the rock.

    A

    man

    is

    always prey to his

    truths,

    said Camus. Once he has

    admitted

    them, he

    cannot

    free himself from them. One has to

    pay something. A

    man

    who has become conscious of the

    absurd

    is

    forever bound to

    it

    4

    Maria

    can have no turning

    back, no retreat to

    the comforts

    of innocence or ignorance; the

    rattlesnake pursues her everywhere, in her dreams,

    on

    the

    highways, even in the coiled shape

    of

    her food.

    What distinguishes Maria's experience

    from that

    of most

    heroes of existential novels

    is that

    hers

    is

    uniquely feminine,

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    not

    that Didion

    has written a blatantly feminist tract, nor

    that

    Maria's

    encounter

    with nothingness

    is

    ultimately qualitatively

    different from a man's. However,

    one

    must understand her

    experiences as a

    woman

    to appreciate fully

    the nature

    of

    her

    crisis. When

    Carter

    calls Maria to ascertain

    that

    she has made

    definite

    arrangements

    for the abortion, he is totally insensitive

    to what she feels emotionally as a

    woman about to

    abort her

    child:

    Sometime

    in the night she had moved into a realm

    of

    miseries peculiar to women,

    and

    she had

    nothing

    to say to

    Carter (62). Just

    as Ellison's hero is shaped by the particular

    nature of

    his experiences as a black

    man

    in America, Maria is

    shaped by experiences uniquely feminine.

    Just

    as

    the

    Invisible

    Man could say, Who knows but that, on the lower

    frequencies, I speak

    for

    you, s

    Maria

    can

    speak for many who

    are

    neither women,

    nor

    actresses,

    nor

    residents of Hollywood.

    y having a

    woman

    protagonist, Didion adds a

    heightened sensitivity

    and emotional

    impact

    to the encounter

    with nothingness.

    Maria's

    role as mother, for example, causes

    her

    to

    feel so deeply

    not

    only about Kate, but also

    about

    all the

    suffering innocents in the world.

    Such

    inescapable realities as

    the

    four-year-olds in the

    abandoned

    refrigerator, the tea

    party

    with Purex,

    the

    infant in the driveway, rattlesnake in the

    playpen (99) convince her intuitively of

    the unspeakable

    peril in

    the

    everyday.

    That

    maternal

    sensitivity

    is

    further

    emphasized when Maria breaks down into uncontrolled sobs

    on the

    day

    the

    aborted

    baby would have been born; although

    she

    had

    deliberately avoided keeping track of the days, she

    must have been

    counting

    them unawares, must have been

    keeping a relentless

    count

    somewhere ( 41).

    Maria

    is not

    afforded the

    luxury

    of deciding whether

    or

    not to

    confront

    absurdity; it

    is thrust upon

    her as a result of

    the nature of

    her

    situation. Once begun, the confrontation moves inexorably

    toward a crisis. In no way does

    an

    intellectual awareness of

    absurdity, general disorder,

    and

    cruelty debilitate her; her

    feminine

    (and

    maternal) sensitivity

    to

    things such as the

    unreasonable suffering of children

    and the

    inexplicable

    ailment afflicting her

    daughter

    leads her to see

    the

    dead still

    center of

    the

    world,

    the

    quintessential intersection

    of

    nothing

    (66).

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    Maria's visceral awareness is complicated and intensified

    by her abortion. Although repelled by the idea, she agrees to

    have the operation

    to

    satisfy Carter, who threatens to take

    Kate away if she refuses.

    Her

    guilt, her sense of complicity in

    that suffering of the innocents which she detests, only serves

    to strengthen her growing awareness of the absurdity. Her

    guilt, both moral and psychological in origin,

    is

    expressed in a

    dream

    in whi< :h she acts as

    an

    attendant at a gas

    chamber

    where children file by on their way to execution. Her job

    is to

    whisper words of comfort to the reluctant children because

    this was a

    humane

    operation ( 126). Her

    abortion

    was to be a

    humane operation too, but she could not escape persistent

    thoughts

    of the

    fetus in the garbage.

    Her

    inability to deal with

    guilt associated with

    the

    abortion

    is

    perhaps

    the strongest

    single factor in her

    emotional

    collapse, the culmination

    of

    her

    deepening awareness of the irrationality and. absurdity

    of

    life .

    . Maria

    may well be compared with Esther Greenwood, the

    heroine of Sylvia Plath's

    The ell Jar (1963)-published

    here

    in

    1971

    . Both characters undergo a severe emotional

    crisis as a result of specifically feminine problems

    (for

    Maria an abortion, for Esther an attempted rape) and both are

    hospitalized as a result. Plath is much

    more

    concerned with the

    specific details

    of

    Esther's crisis

    and,

    in fact,

    wrote

    the

    book

    as

    therapy relating to her own psychological problems. Didion,

    however, is purposely vague about the exact details of Maria's

    breakdown

    because

    she is more

    interested in

    the

    metaphysical

    rather than

    the psychological implications of her illness.

    Both Maria and Esther suffer from what existential

    psychologist R. D. Laing calls ontological insecurity, a

    condition

    in which

    the

    individual lacks a firm sense of his own

    identity in a world which seems to be threatening him at all

    times.6 Laing suggests

    that

    such insecurity can lead to insanity

    which,

    from the point

    of

    view

    of

    the individual involved, can

    be seen as a perfectly rational adjustment

    to

    an insane world.

    Esther exemplifies

    an

    extreme form of ontological insecurity

    and madness; her emotional problems drive her to several

    suicide

    attempts and

    eventually to a complete breakdown.

    While: Maria exhibits some of the recognizable symptoms of

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    schizophrenic behavior, Didion apparently does not want the

    reader to dismiss her simply as mentally or emotionally

    disturbed. Her sickness

    s

    metaphysical, a manifestation

    of

    her

    difficulty in adjusting to her newly discovered consciousness

    of

    absurdity.

    As Maria's awareness of absurdity deepens, she finds

    herself in a desperate search for meaning, for escape, or for

    values of some kind. She soon discovers she can find no

    relationship between cause and effect, no meaningful

    explanation for the way things are, for such things as suffering,

    random violence, and death. Although she throws the Ching

    in the sanitarium, she does it only to pass the she never

    bothers to read the coins because she now knows

    that

    nothing

    can be predjcted, everything

    is

    random. Her various attempts

    to escape her perceptions also fail. Driving the freeways did

    not work. Love as a solution

    is

    futile, whether sought for in her

    husband, who loves himself, in BZ, who

    is

    homosexual, in

    casual lovers, who invariably treat her as

    an

    object, or in her

    daughter, who is emotionally incapable

    of

    returning her love.

    She gets no pleasure from

    any of

    her affairs and is unable to

    achieve satisfaction even at the purely physical level.

    Religion, a

    traditional

    source

    of

    consolation in time of

    stress, is represented in the landscape of the novel by the giant

    red T

    of

    the

    Thriftimart, under

    which

    the attendant

    meets

    Maria to take her to the place for her abortion:

    For

    miles

    before she reached the Thriftimart she could see the big red T,

    a forty-foot

    cutout

    letter which seemed peculiarly illuminated

    against the harsh unclouded light of the afternoon sky (76).

    The attendant, who unfeelingly tells Maria how nice the

    neighborhood they are driving through is for raising children,

    ironically describes himself as

    a

    regular missionary (84).

    When she is lonely, Maria turns to Dial-a-Prayer, only to fill

    the silence with an available voice.

    She

    becomes fascinated

    with

    the

    story

    of

    the

    man

    who went

    out

    walking in the desert to

    find God but finds a rattlesnake that kills him. Religion for

    Maria leads to the same dead ends the freeway did.

    Most desperate

    of

    all

    is

    her search for the past. When

    memories

    of

    the immediate past become unbeLtrable, Maria

    turns to thoughts

    of

    her childhood

    and

    seeks to discover the

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    roots which can give her support. Her parents are dead,

    and

    Silver Wells, her

    homr.

    town, no longer exists, replaced by a

    missile range. She even goes so far as to attempt to return to

    her mother's womb through hypnosis, but to no avail. The

    only living link with her

    past

    is

    Benny Austin,

    an

    empty

    failure

    pumped full

    of

    unrealized dreams,

    but

    his memories usually

    differ from Maria's. Significantly, Maria's search takes her to

    the barren deserts of Nevada, a state whose name suggests

    nada itself. In the end, she is forced to admit

    that

    the past no

    longer exists; she rejects as it was and learns instead to play

    it

    as it lays.

    The only consistent value Maria retains

    throughout

    the

    novel

    is

    Kate, who represents a kind of talisman against peril;

    whenever things get bad, she

    dreams

    of Kate. On

    one

    occasion,

    she goes to Kate's bed, clutches her pillow to her and fights off

    a wave

    of

    the dread (23). When she has been stripped

    of

    everything-her optimism, her

    humor,

    her past, her husband,

    her illusions, even her emotional stability-she still has Kate:

    Why bother, you might ask. I bother for Kate (4). More than

    simply a mother's stubborn instinct, her concern for Kate is a

    positive gesture, a reaching

    out of

    love, a celebration of value

    in a meaningless world.

    Play t s t Lays is not a nihilistic novel. Although Maria

    encounters nothingness, she survives:

    Now that

    I have the

    answer, my plans for the future

    are

    these: (I) get Kate, (2) live

    with Kate alone, (3) do some canning.

    Damson

    plums, apricot

    preserves. Sweet India relish

    and

    pickled peaches. Apple

    chutney.

    Summer

    squash succotash (210). Not much of a

    future, since Kate may not ever be able

    to

    live with

    Maria

    outside the institution. But this future

    and

    its resolution,

    however precarious, are meant to be taken seriously. In

    another context, Didion has written: I

    know

    something

    about

    dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which

    some

    people

    manage

    to

    fill

    the

    void,

    appreciate

    all

    the

    opiates

    of

    the people,

    whether

    they

    are

    as accessible as alcohol and

    heroin and promiscuity

    or

    as

    hard

    to come by as faith in God

    or History.

    7

    Maria's system for salvation lies somewhere

    between the extremes of heroin and history. Nevertheless, she

    has found an answer to nothingness

    and

    a reason for

    continuing to play

    the

    game. The novel ends with Maria

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    playing solitaire

    and

    looking at

    the

    hummingbird, whose

    frenetic wing activity allows it to appear motionless, at rest in

    the center. After

    the

    swirling experiences of the previous

    months, Maria

    has achieved a

    similar

    stasis,

    an inner

    peace

    which enables her to

    confront

    existence

    and prepare

    for the

    future

    once more.

    Maria's encounter

    with nothingness

    is contrasted

    with

    BZ s, whose confrontation with the void

    destroys

    him. In

    the

    most

    intensely moving scene in

    the

    novel, BZ, having reached

    the end

    of his

    endurance,

    commits suicide by taking an

    overdose of

    pills while

    Maria

    holds his

    hand.

    Unable

    and

    perhaps unwilling to

    stop

    him,

    Maria

    nonetheless comforts

    him

    maternally as

    she

    comforted the

    doomed

    children in her

    dream.

    BZ s suicide

    is shocking but not

    unexpected, for he has

    lost his resilience

    and

    desire

    to

    continue.

    Stripped of

    a name,

    reduced almost to a

    cipher,

    BZ is never even physically

    described in the novel; he exists

    only

    as a voice, a presence, a

    shadow. He has gone all

    the

    way to Z, to the end where

    there

    is

    nothing

    more, and he can find no

    reason

    to live

    one moment

    longer. BZ and Maria

    provide

    alternate answers to the

    question raised by Camus in

    the

    opening words

    of

    he Myth

    qf

    Sisyphus: There is

    but

    one truly

    serious philosophical

    problem, and that is

    suicide.

    Judging

    whether

    life

    is or is

    not

    worth

    living amounts to

    answering the fundamental question

    of

    BZ tries

    to

    convince

    Maria that nothing

    matters, that

    playing

    the

    game has

    no point any

    more. His

    name also suggests a parallel with Beelzebub, a Satanic

    tempter

    who seeks to

    corrupt

    Eve from her innocence.

    Maria

    loses her innocence but

    ultimately

    refuses BZ s offered apple,

    the Seconal

    pills which kill him. Through Maria,

    Didion

    endorses

    Camus' conclusion that

    living

    is

    better

    than

    dying,

    even if one

    must

    live with nothingness. Why? VVhy

    not,

    Maria

    says, in

    the

    final words

    of the

    novel (214).

    Humanity is

    won by continuing to play in the face

    of

    defeat, even if

    the

    odds

    against the

    player

    are

    overwhelming.

    Maria understands

    that

    although

    life

    may have no meaning,

    it

    is

    still

    worth

    living .

    If

    Maria's

    last

    name

    suggests

    her

    questioning of

    existence,

    her first-

    (pronounced,

    she tells us, Mar-EYE-ah) suggests an

    · , .

    enduring

    self-identity.

    Despite

    the

    numerous

    threats to her

    > _fundamental existence,

    her

    sense

    of I

    endures. At

    one

    point

    7

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    in the novel, she confronts non-being and finds herself

    threatened with personal annihilation: By the end of a week

    she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and

    the air began,

    about

    the exact

    point

    in space and time

    that

    was

    the difference between Maria

    and

    other (I 70). She senses the

    same fundamental

    threat

    to her existence that Roquentin does

    in Sartre's ausea when he discovers his contingency and his

    nothingness in the world of things. (Maria's own personal

    version

    of

    nausea

    is

    graphically illustrated by her constant

    vomiting; her physfcal revulsion

    at

    the way things

    are

    should

    be seen as more than a simple case of nerves or a chronically

    weak stomach). Although Maria loses selves- Maria as

    actress, Maria as Carter Lang's wife, Maria s Francine and

    Harry

    Wyeth's

    daughter-she

    never loses her real self,

    that

    enduring sense of I, the source of all the false selves, whose

    continued existence ultimately prevents a. feeling of total

    annihilation

    . . Maria's encounter with nothingness is set in a world

    which Didion pictures in vivid images as bleak, sterile, and

    hostile-where houses fall into canyons, where men seeking

    God are

    killed by rattlesnakes, where towns

    are

    replaced by

    missile ranges.

    It is

    a

    random

    world

    of

    chance, suggested

    in

    the

    novel by recurring references to gambling (including the title).

    It

    is

    a nightmarish burning world, where fire and destruction

    always threaten:

    In

    the aftermath

    of

    the wind the air was dry,

    burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows of

    firebreaks on distant mountains.

    Not

    even the highest palms

    moved.

    The and

    clarity

    of

    the air seemed to

    rob

    everything

    of

    its pe:rspective, seemed to alter all perception

    of

    depth,

    and

    Maria drove as carefully as if she were

    reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity (76). It

    is

    a

    world devoid of

    natural

    beauty and comfort: She drove to the

    beach, but there was oil scum on the sand and a red tide in the

    flaccid

    surf and mounds

    of

    kelp

    at

    the waterline.

    The

    kelp

    hummed with flies.

    The

    water lapped warm, forceless (65). It

    is

    a world inhabited by the dead

    and

    the

    dying:

    A woman in a

    nurse's uniform wheeled a bundled neuter figure silently past

    ahe hedges of dead camellias ( 130).

    As Maria's awareness

    of

    nothingness deepens, the action

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    of

    the novel moves from Hollywood to the desert, to a town

    on

    a

    dry

    river bed between Death Valley and the Nevada line

    ( 187)

    where Carter is filming. Here in the desert

    BZ

    discovers

    absolute zero

    and

    kills himself; here Maria has her

    breakdown. Didion describes the town: ''By late day the

    thermometer outside the motel office would register between

    120° and 130°. The old people put aluminum foil in their

    trailer windows to reflect the heat. There were two trees in the

    town, two cottonwoods in the

    dry

    river bed, but one

    of

    them

    was dead (

    188).

    But all is neither desolate

    nor

    hopeless. One tree is dead

    (BZ), but one is still alive, even in the inhospitable desert. The

    ability to survive is personified by the waitress

    at

    the local

    diner who invites

    Maria to

    her trailer, set

    on

    a concrete

    foundation, surrounded by a split-rail fence and a hundred

    miles of drifting sand. She comforts Maria, who is crying, by

    telling her that since she made her decision in '61 at a meeting

    in Barstow (199), she has not shed a tear. She has found a

    reason to go on.

    Throughout

    her conversation with Maria, she

    continues to sweep the sand:

    The

    woman picked up a broom

    and began sweeping the sand into small piles, then edging the

    piles back

    to

    the fence. New sand blew in as she swept ( 199).

    An endless, frustrating,

    almost

    ridiculous gesture, sweeping

    back the constantly blowing sand; no more hopeless and

    endless than Sisyphus's eternal task of pushing the rock to the

    top of the hill. Both activities embody a stubborn refusal to

    submit to the way things are, to admit defeat by surrendering

    to meaninglessness. Even ifshe cannot keep the sand away, the

    woman refuses to

    stop

    trying; even if Maria cannot have Kate,

    at

    least not now, she refuses to stop planning.

    The

    ending

    of

    the novel is not optimistic-nor is it nihilistic. For, as Camus

    wrote

    about

    Sisyphus,

    The

    struggle itself

    toward

    the heights

    is enough to

    ill

    a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus

    happy.

    9

    Similarly,

    one

    must imagine

    Maria

    happy.

    Didion's narrative technique recalls Eliot's line from

    The

    Waste Land

    A heap of broken images, images

    of

    alienation

    and desolation, fragments

    of

    banal conversations, the

    minutiae

    of

    everyday life joined in a mosaic

    of

    nothingness.

    Instead

    of

    a flowing narrative, a broken and disordered

    pattern is brought

    about

    by frequentjuxtaposition

    of

    past and

    7

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