Matthew R. McLennan - Joan Didion and the Ethics of Memory

Joan Didion and the Ethics of Memory

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This book is dedicated to Leos and Mosess grandparents and great-grandparents.

Anna and I especially want to acknowledge the loving care and support given to our sons during the pandemic by Louise Legault, Pierre Legault, Christopher Seifried, Louise Guay and Susan McLennan. The care youve selflessly given to your grandchildren in turbulent times grounds them firmly in a warm and loving past, and it helps to safeguard their futures.

Joan Didion and the Ethics of Memory

Matthew R. McLennan

Contents

Completing a book in a pandemic, no less is something I could not have accomplished without the strong support and encouragement Ive always been so lucky to receive.

Above all I thank my family, in particular Anna Seifried, Leo McLennan, Moses McLennan, Susan McLennan, Doreen Richmond, Audrey Lundy, Louise Legault, Pierre Legault, Louise Guay and Christopher Seifried.

I am also lucky to be surrounded by supportive friends and colleagues. In the period of researching and writing this book, I received special encouragement as well as moral and critical support from Deniz Guvenc, T. Mars McDougall, Devin Zane Shaw, Julie Paquette, Lauren Levesque, Denis Dumas, Morgan McMillan, Jason Peters, J. Moufawad-Paul, Rajesh Shukla, Tyler Shipley, Lorraine Ste-Marie, Lesley Jamieson, Stephen Stuart, Manal Guirguis-Younger, Monique Lanoix, Sophie Cloutier, Louis Perron, Richard Feist, Natalie Dupuis, Nathalie Poirier, Chris Casimiro, Ephraim Barrera, Sebastian Valderrama-Moores, Darrah Teitel and Susanna Wiens.

I greatly appreciated Lucy Russell, Liza Thompson and the team at Bloomsbury even in the best of times, but they showed exceptional patience, kindness and understanding when the pandemic upended my best laid plans. The book also benefitted greatly from the critical comments of the anonymous manuscript reviewer and anonymous prospectus reviewers.

Finally, Chris Casimiro and Ephraim Barrera provided invaluable formatting and editing assistance. Any errors or omissions in the text are, of course, wholly my own.

This book has two aims. First, I want to make a good case that the voluminous works of Joan Didion masterful American essayist, novelist, memoirist, screenplay writer, political journalist and cultural commentator may be profitably organized and understood through the theme of the ethics of memory. Second, for those of us who are concerned with the drift of modern societies at present and the possibility of better political futures, I want to show how Didions writings have much to teach us about the overall salience, as well as some specific aspects, of the ethics of memory.

To my mind, the second aim is the more important of the two. As I will explain in this Introduction, Didion demonstrates both the normative importance and limits of memory in a modern historical conjuncture where what public memory there is, is at best contested, and at worst is decaying or coming apart.

I do not want to be misunderstood here: vigorous contestation over public memory can be necessary and a very good thing, for example, by allowing a community to commit or re-commit itself to core values through an agonistic if not robustly collective process of revising how the past is remembered.targeted. Since people typically do not learn their history from statues, it is, rather, a struggle over how certain elements of the past are either glorified or demonized. Indeed, the very contestation of monuments itself indicates a vigorous engagement with aspects of the countrys past, and repudiating a particular historical figure as racist precisely, by publicly remembering his or her racism and its legacy is not tantamount to erasing or forgetting.

Contestation, then, is not in and of itself the problem. The degradation or, at the limit, the destruction or disintegration of public memory, on the other hand, would amount to no less than the crumbling of community and hence (I will explain), of ethics itself.

For its part, public contestation of the type just described is inherently risky. Though morally required, it may veer into disintegration . A communitys ethically fraught revision of its relation to the past may sometimes cross from agonism into antagonism, and this raises the possibility of its splitting into two or more communities, meaning that there are now two or more public memories to be reckoned with.

Public memory may also degrade or decay through the modernizing process in general, and the imperatives of capitalism and neoliberal governance. After all, if surviving in this world means chasing innovation and recasting myself in my very subjectivity as a kind of walking portfolio (), then it makes little sense to linger on those aspects of the past that are not obviously useful to my forward trajectory. Community history, even family and intimate ties based upon a shared past, may be jettisoned as I move around and always forward searching for new opportunities for self-maximization.

What is more, a community can also have its ties to the past actively targeted for destruction , as was the case with First Nations, Mtis and Inuit in Canada via the residential school system (). In this system, children were taken from their communities by the Canadian state, forbidden to speak their mother tongues, and educated in harsh and squalid conditions of frequently deadly abuse and neglect all with the aim of facilitating settler colonialism by breaking down their cultures, the lifeblood of which was language, tradition and memory.

In all such cases, what is at stake is the crumbling of community through the loss of robust links to a past that individuals could hold in common. Granting her position of privilege and an arguably troubling tendency to partiality, which are issues I will return to throughout the book, Didion offers particularly acute observations and object lessons here. With great clarity, she tracks public memorys contestation in the United States, as well as its degradation and signs of its threatened disintegration or destruction. But she is also remarkable in her refusal to give in to the temptation to reassert and reassume public memory in any crude, reactionary or nostalgic way. On the contrary, she fully assumes the contestation, degradation and threatened disintegration of public memory to say nothing of putatively private memory, which will also figure prominently in the book as realities that cannot be magically wished away. She gives us a devastatingly clear if partial prognosis of modern collapse and precarity, but in a pessimistic rather than a nihilistic mode meaning that she gives full-throated voice to an ambient anxiety and dread, but ultimately abandons neither ethics nor meaning.

Despite certain limitations that I will flag as the book progresses, Didion can therefore be read as a modern moralist, or ethical teacher or exemplar, in the sense that through both her words and her omissions, she indicates what fully facing up to a pessimistic outlook regarding public memory may require of us ethically. This might speak to my own moods and dispositions, but it seems that if we want to transform the world for the better, then we need to read thinkers who at least try to give it to us straight. If pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will are, indeed, the order of the day as Gramsci and Rolland prescribed (), then Didion stands out as a crucial and timely resource.