The moral of Didion's story

In the penultimate chapter (written in 1970, nine years before the publication of the book we find it in) Didion tells us what she thinks the moral of her story (really a collection of stories) is. It's very much her story and her moral even though it is also the story of an era; not for nothing did they call the 1970s "the me decade".

What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace. Only one person I knew at Berkeley later discoverd an ideology, dealt himself into history, cut himself loose from both his own dread and his own time. A few of the people I knew at Berkeley killed themselves not long after. Another attempted suicide in Mexico and then, in a recovery which seemed in many ways a more advanced derangement, came home and joined the Bank of America's three-year executive training program. Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time. If I could believe that going to the barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to the barricade, and quite often I wish I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.

This is a familiar story type. We find it, as I say, in Tyler Cowen and we find it in Flaubert's l'Éduation sentimentale. In Flaubert's version, the expression "to the barricades" is literal, the participants in the 1848 revolution went to real and not metaphorical barricades. We might wonder if this type of story is the one people tend to tell themselves after their revolution fails them.

Cowen: "I used to think I was in the camp of economists. I was one of the good guys and I was allied with other good guys and we were fighting the ideas of the bad guys." There is his failed revolution. And he tells a story with strong family resemblances to other failed revolution stories. He also says, "the [story] filter always leaves in the same thing," and he goes on to add, "if you think in terms of stories, you are always telling yourself the same thing over and over again." Well, apparently sometimes we do.






PS: The most frequent, and, I have to say, accurate, criticism of Didion is that she is narcissistic. Think of how utterly wrapped up in yourself you have to be to conclude that becoming a bank manager is more deranged than committing suicide. You may, especially these days, have it in for bank managers, but our world couldn't exist without them. If some malicious extraterrestrial came by with a magic beam that vaporized all the economists and all the intellectuals, the world was we know it would keep going. Do the same with bank managers and it would collapse.