I feel like Didion, as a writer, is constantly searching for a story. But Didion, as a human being, is trying to tell us in “The White Album” that these stories don’t always exist. She writes about the 60s, about the colorful characters like Jim Morrison and the radical events like the student strike at San Francisco State. She writes herself into these scenes, so that what we see is what she sees. She writes without “the imposition of a narrative line,” but rather presents everything as flashes, separated by numbers. In doing all these things, Didion is making a statement about what essentially makes us human: we perceive, we feel, but we don’t necessarily need to interpret everything that happens in our lives.
Yet, I am sitting here typing my “interpretation” of Didion’s piece, so I guess it seems a little counterproductive. It’s probably okay, though. I’m not interpreting life; I’m interpreting literature. And literature is not life. Didion says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” A story helps us to live, but it doesn’t make us living human beings. It is merely what we do to make sense of things. Didion sees a “naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor,” and she wants to be interested in her. She searches for the story—and the life—within the woman. But by the end of the essay, Didion loses that interest. She “was interested only in the picture… her hair incandescent in the floodlights, her bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge.” In the end, Didion wrote an experience, not a story.
“… we perceive, we feel, but we don’t necessarily need to interpret everything that happens in our lives.” I’m not sure I can get totally on board, here, Simon — but this was a rich and provocative post that I totally enjoyed. I think her skepticism had more to do with narrative, in particular, SIxties Narrative, the myth of that Peace and Love era which was in fact hyper-violent.