Is Joan Didion a "moral" writer?
A fundraising campaign and trailer of sorts for a new documentary about Joan Didion has hit the internet, engineered by her nephew Griffin Dunne. For someone with such a distinct place in American letters — her seminal subjects, her cool tone, those sunglasses — it’s surprising that no such documentary already exists.
What was surprising, however, was Dunne’s confident, repeated description of Didion as a “moral voice.” I say this as a great fan (I came this-close to getting a tattoo of her prose a few years back): it never occurred to me to read her as someone with a particular moral vision of the world. Despite the fact that for young, writerly women of a certain disposition Didion is practically a saint, that was never part of her appeal. She has a clear vision, surely. Even an incisive and necessary one. But in what sense is Didion’s work concerned with morality?
Early in her career, she actually wrote a piece called “On Morality,” in which she lays out her concern with the way we use the term. Writing from Death Valley — a name she milks for its metaphor — she sees morality as the practical value we place on helping each other survive, on not leaving the wounded to the wild. “I am talking, you want to say, about a ‘morality’ so primitive that it scarcely deserves the name, a code that has as its point only survival, not the attainment of the ideal good. Exactly.”
Didion has no time for transcendent virtues; it’s socially negotiated promises all the way down. Morality is fundamentally a community’s habit, and “the good” does not exist independently of how we apply it. Her essay elegantly conveys the desperate chaos of the surrounding culture (she compares it to a Hieronymus Bosch painting, and the whole piece is filled with subtle and layered images that make you believe her). She hopes this view will steer society away from the absolutist banners of “right” and “wrong” that politicians and fanatics use to do foolish or unjust things:
’I followed my own conscience.’ ‘I did what I thought was right.’ How many madmen have said it and meant it? Klaus Fuchs said it, and the men who committed the Mountain Meadows Massacre said it, and Alfred Rosenberg said it. And, as we are rotely and rather presumptuously reminded by those who would say it now, Jesus said it. Maybe we have all said it, and maybe we have been wrong. Except on the most primitive level –our loyalties to those we love–what could be more arrogant than to claim the primacy of personal conscience?
Of course, it’s news to no one that people claim moral imperatives for acts that are plainly wrong. It also probably doesn’t need to be pointed out that even the great villains of history could show loyalty to people they already liked. Yet for all of Didion’s concern about survival, I suspect she does have some notion of what is “wrong” outside her own description, even something beyond loyalty to those she already loves. It begs the question: where did this idea of loyalty or justice come from in the first place?
