White Album

Joan Didion seems to think that life is not shaped so much by what happens nor by how we perceive it. Rather, there is no shape, and life will go on running along its aimless path, without some underlying consistency or reason, no matter what we think about it. Looking for some sense of order, purpose, or an inherent truth in life will lead nowhere because none of these things exist. How could they? The Sixties she describes is filled with incongruency and absurdity of events. Musicians like Jim Morrison and his bandmates talk in incoherency and lack of direction, making Didion “unsure in whose favor the dialogue had been resolved, or if it had been resolved at all” (25). And yet none of The Doors see this as unusual or unacceptable. After noticing that everything Huey Newton said “had the ring of being a ‘quotation’” (31), Didion considers the fact that people are “expendable” in revolutionary politics and wonders if “Huey Newton’s political sophistication extended to seeing himself that way” (31). This suggests that someone can successfully be at the center of a movement, like Newton, without really even knowing precisely why, or in what way, they’re playing their role. So life goes on, and things happen, regardless of whether people think about or plan or reason out what they’re doing. Didion tries to make the Sixties into a narrative so that she can pretend there is some order to things, but she knows that this is only to help her deal with her experiences, to make them seem manageable or understandable in some way.