If I had to place it, I’d say Joan Dideon’s purpose is something of a modernist one. I was tipped off to this by her quotes of Pound and (indirectly) Eliot, and they might be 0ver-influencing my reading but I think it fits. She presents her life as this series of obsessions, events, spectacles and experiences. She repeatedly insists that the people involved in them do not know the meaning of what they are doing.
For her this mass of experience and movement is all a play of some sort. There are things constantly occurring in the periphery of her vision, and sending ripples across to other people and histories. She mentions that she is always improvising. I’m not entirely sure that this essay is an attempt to make sense of the disparate events and string them into one narrative but instead to try and encompass them and give the genuine impression of them. Because she so consistently avoids of any sort of deeper meaning or symbolism to the events she witnesses, I think it’s more about their inherent meaning… not the one ascribed to them by a careless observer but one who can penetrate the quick conclusions to arrive at some truth about humanity or society arising from the period she is sketching out.
