This article was downloaded by: [Universitat Politècnica de València] On: 25 October 2014, At: 23:35 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Review of Communication Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rroc20 The Writerly Reader in Memoir: Inter/ subjectivity and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking Devika Chawla Published online: 15 Sep 2008. To cite this article: Devika Chawla (2008) The Writerly Reader in Memoir: Inter/subjectivity and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking , Review of Communication, 8:4, 377-394, DOI: 10.1080/15358590802074704 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15358590802074704 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions The Review of Communication Vol. 8, No. 4, October 2008, pp. 377394 Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 The Writerly Reader in Memoir: Inter/ subjectivity and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking Devika Chawla In recent years, much attention has been given to the construction, writing, and reading of the memoir as a literary genre. Debates surrounding life-writing have been invariably concerned with narrative truth because autobiographical narratives center on subjectivity, identity, reflexivity, and representation (of self and other). Moreover, matters of self and subjectivity are inherent to the writing, reading, audiencing, and experiencing of autobiographical writing. This paper is a reflective engagement with Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir which won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 2005. The book is the story of the year after the sudden death of Joan Didion’s writer husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, and how circumstances compelled the author to create a magical psychic space in which she could believe that her husband was still alive. My goal in this essay is three-fold. I engage with what overtly seems like a trauma narrative of personal grief to show the reader/myself how life-writing swings the tensions between the public and the private as well as the personal and cultural, thereby giving us a picture of the ‘‘becoming’’ self in the writing of memoir. I then turn my attention to an examination of how this tension enables the creation of what Philippe Lejeune refers to as the ‘‘autobiographical pact’’ between the memoirist who writes her self into being and the reader who reads her ‘‘selves’’ in association with the writer. In discussing this, I show how these two elements are crucial to understanding the intersubjective nature of autobiography and life-writing. Keywords: Autobiography; Intersubjectivity; Narrative Theory; Life Writing; Memoir Devika Chawla (Ph.D., Purdue University, 2004) is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University. Correspondence to: School of Communication, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701, USA. Email: chawla@ohio.edu. The author would like to thank Professors Raymie McKerrow, Lenore Langsdorf, Amardo Rodriguez, Jeffrey St. John, and Caryn Medved for their thoughtful guidance in the completion of this paper. ISSN 1535-8593 (online) # 2008 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/15358590802074704 378 D. Chawla Introduction In the opening stanzas of her memoir1 The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), Joan Didion provides us with an introduction to the story that she unravels in the pages that follow. It therefore seems appropriate to begin my essay with her words as she tells us where this will take her and us. Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004. Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o’clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death. Our only child, Quintana, had been for the previous five nights unconscious in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center’s Singer Division, at that time a hospital on the East End Avenue (it closed in August 2004) more commonly known as ‘‘Beth Israel North,’’ or ‘‘the old Doctor’s Hospital,’’ where what had seemed a case of December flu sufficiently severe to take her to the emergency room on Christmas morning had exploded into pneumonia and septic shock. (p. 6) Having given us the literal facts, Didion begins to situate her identity as a writer clearly as she writes her memoir. She answers the readers’ call when she directly tells us why she felt compelled to write and who she is, thereby showing the reader why her writing is necessary and crucial. This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea that I ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to get published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself. (pp. 68) These powerful words drew me into Didion’s memoir: words that I first read in reviews as the book was released, and then as one of its first public readers. I selected a book which focuses upon death, a terrain of human experience with which I am as yet unfamiliar. I have*fortunately or unfortunately*escaped experiencing death in close proximity. I am nevertheless aware that death is ever-looming and ever-present, because as humans we live ever-conscious of our mortality and for ‘‘the individual life, death is the ultimate and irrevocable closure’’ (Carr, 1986, p. 81). Death is, in other words, very much a continuing rhythm of life. Therefore, it is with a level of Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 The Writerly Reader 379 deliberateness that I choose to focus on what is for now an unfamiliar domain of experience and on what roles readers bring to such experiences. My interest in The Year of Magical Thinking did not sustain only because it is an unknown sphere. I am partial to writings that are autobiographical in nature, and also to writer-autobiographies. As a person interested in exploring writing as an epistemology, I find readings such as these necessary for reflecting on my own writing practices. I read these books not because I believe that they will teach me how to write, but I am convinced that they allow me to travel into the cultural, personal, social, and historic worlds of others involved in a writing life. I also adhere to the notion that autobiographies have the capability to reveal as much about an author’s audience as they do about him or her. For this reason, autobiographies should be read as cultural documents, and not merely personal ones (see Sayre, 1994, American Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Writing). I am most interested in how the personal and the cultural are intricately interwoven, and how memoirs often articulate a symbiosis. In short, I find moments of truth, confusion, convergence, and divergence in reading what writers have to say about their lives, their writing lives, and therefore the cultural presents they inhabit. In this essay, I loop around these matters as I work through the tensions between the personal and the cultural as they are resurrected in this book. In particular, I argue that Didion’s reliance on a static and fragmentary mode of temporal narration opens up to dialogue and collaboration what is a very personal quest. Alongside, I examine the book in light of contemporary discussions about autobiography, of the goals it serves, and of how this book encourages the reader to become a writerly-reader*a collaborator in the autobiographical pact. In fact, the style and the form I un/consciously adopt in this paper mirrors Didion’s topical, impressionistic, non-linear reading and writing of her own life, ‘‘showing’’ how this essay (as a reading) might illustrate the autobiographical pact between writer and reader. Finally, I show how the aforementioned elements are crucial to understanding the intersubjective nature of autobiography/life-writing. The Year of Magical Thinking is certainly a writer’s memoir. It is the story of a writer, a woman, a wife, and a mother who experienced the death of a spouse and a child within the span of two years. To me, the memoir juxtaposes multiple parallel narratives; I find three most significant and thus worth mentioning as I proceed into this analysis. The first narrative, easiest to discern, is Didion’s reflective and retrospective attempt to understand the sudden death of her spouse of 40 years, the writer John Gregory Dunne. In the backdrop, what functions as the second key narrative is an intimate portrait of their 40-year-long marriage. A third narrative, parallel to these, is the story of their daughter Quintana’s illness, which began before John died and progressed into Quintana’s ultimate demise 18 months after her father. Even though Quintana’s death remains peripheral and more or less unacknowledged in this memoir, the story of her illness functions as a story which allowed Didion to postpone her grief and mourning over her husband’s death while undertaking the care of her child. Didion crafts together a memoir which I can only acknowledge as multi-genre in craft. It intermingles reportage, retrospection, ethnographic detail, and other cultural texts and textures. It is written in the present with a sense of urgency 380 D. Chawla and immediacy about the recent past*so much so that the writer and reader both feel as if they are both there in the then, and here in the now. The reader becomes a co-creator in both the writing experience and in the recollected experience*herself becoming a conduit between the public and private experience of death. Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 Rescuing the Self in Memoir: A Cultural/Public Act There is no doubt that The Year of Magical Thinking confirms the deeply personal nature of life-writing. At the same time, this book is intensely public in being a public requiem to a marriage and a husband in ‘‘writing.’’ It performs tensions between the cultural and personal and between the public and private, while showing us a person’s urgent narrative quest to rescue herself from a sudden tragic circumstance. It answers many wide-ranging but also a few specific questions: How does someone who is a writer and was married to a writer identify, experience, understand, outlive, and articulate the loss of a spouse? In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion presents us with one narrative portrait of such loss, grief, and un/coping. This is not to say that a writer experiences loss in any different, peculiar, or similar way to another person. I would argue that this book is crucial because it shows us how one person, a writer, accesses the medium that she is enmeshed in, and indeed embodies, in order to explore her grief. In my reading, the story is not textually narrated with the intent of exoticizing the events of human trauma and death; rather, I believe its intent is epideictic. The story calls for an epideictic understanding because it asks the reader to think about what they have just witnessed (read), thereby memorializing the event*in this case the death of a spouse. Rhetorically, I consider the story epideictic, but is the writer’s goal here to attain narrative order*a goal, process, and product of a lot of therapeutic writing? This question is open for debate among those involved in exploring narrative therapy and therapeutic writing, about which there exists a plethora of contemporary research (Ezzy, 1998; Frank, 1995; Hyden, 1997; Rimmon-Kenan, 2002). In her memoir Didion enters some of these conversations by perusing literature on grief, melancholy, and mourning, yet her own narrative veers away from being a grief narrative alone, because the person in need of healing in this case is a person who is deeply familiar with, indeed, submerged in a world of stories and writing. I would argue that, in a curious way, this memoir shows a ‘‘narrative betrayal,’’ whereby words, plots, and stories become simply inadequate to describe experience. In this way, this book captures the essence of crises because all crises ‘‘in some way involve a struggle with language’’ (Chandler, 1989, p. 4). Specifically, Didion is unable to comprehend and transfer the materiality and corporeality of her grief into ordered language and words, and yet, ironically, words are her only recourse. As a reader, this memoir brings the limits of language, words, stories, and narrative to the forefront. Alternatively, it also reinforces language’s power by showing, in a Burkean sense, how literacy acts can function as ‘‘strategies for living’’ for individuals (Burke, 1973, p. 293). The very act of writing serves not only as a healing ritual, but as an affirmation of life because it recovers the writer, and recalls and reinvents the writer into being. On a The Writerly Reader 381 Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 simple level this is the story of recovery, grief, and loss, but on a more complex level this is a story about ‘‘life.’’ In writing, Didion seeks to resurrect and lay to rest her husband. In writing, she resurrects her self*a salute to her own aliveness. What readers receive is a personal and public anatomy of grief, which is undoubtedly one of the most universal of human experiences. The story begins in the present. It begins with the words Didion wrote four days after the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, due to a coronary. These are words that she only resumed writing nine months after his death: Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity. (p. 3) These lines signal finality and finiteness and are a tragic refrain in the book. I continue to be touched by them because they embody the push and pull between the continuity of memory (even when it is continuously reinterpreted in the present) and the finality of death (with its continuity of interpretation). The narrative takes us into the details of the death, the paralysis, the shock, and both the singularity and yet the everydayness of death. Simultaneously, it returns us again and again to the living and the lived. In this simultaneous dance lies the connection between the outside and the inside*the personal and the cultural*which is where I believe resides the value of this book, and more generally the worth of memoir. I am by no means suggesting that the personal and the cultural are separate domains; rather, my concern is with how they are entwined in life-writing. As we read along, Didion delineates how death and life co-exist at all times, and how easily a life may end*as in, ‘‘In the midst of life we are in death’’ (Didion, p. 5; the author attributes this to an Episcopalian saying). For instance, Didion relives, resurrects, writes, and rewrites her memories of the moments of her husband’s death, which took place in their living room as they were getting ready to eat dinner*seeking refuge in narrative repetition. The repetition is necessary in order for the reader to become sophisticated in reading the tension between life and mortality. She relives in minute, almost excruciating, detail her daughter’s illness, showing us how she was forced to postpone her grief for her husband because she needed to take care of her daughter*a physical refuge that presented itself to her, and one which she seemingly almost welcomed. This other narrative*the story of her daughter’s illness*allows her to take us into a profound understanding of how she carved out the ‘‘magical,’’ which was the creation of a psychic space inside which she could continue to believe that her husband would return. She shows how her daughter’s illness colluded to keep this magical illusion intact. She began writing the memoir while her daughter was still unwell because the second crisis enabled her to pretend that her husband was ‘‘away,’’ and not ‘‘gone.’’ Admittedly, all this is certainly the personal. Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 382 D. Chawla However, as readers we are escorted into the public/the cultural because Didion shows us how she felt compelled to find public literature on grief, mourning, melancholia, and health to apprehend her own process. I am wary of simplifying this ‘‘outward’’ movement made by her, because Didion does not bring in public materials to illustrate the connections between her personal experience and literature on grief simply by inserting information from psychology, poetry, prose, medicine, and even Emily Post’s etiquette rules for funerals. She creates a collage of scraps, quotes, passages, and references to Shakespeare, Styron, Freud, Auden, Cummings, C.S. Lewis, and others*maneuvers that are deeply complex and multi-layered. For instance, she turns to characters she created in previous novels*particularly characters who mourn or grieve or live on the threshold of death*to re-explore their grief, and thereby her own grief. She is even able to merge with the tragedies of the novelistic characters (and deaths of these characters) in her husband’s novels and those she herself created; she is now living her own tragedy. A good example is her discussion of John’s novel Dutch Shea, Jr. in which the main character Dutch Shea obsessively and compulsively relives the loss of his daughter, Cat. Didion returns to the novel, re-reads it in moment and memory, and tells us: I see now what I had failed to see in 1982, the year Dutch Shea, Jr. was published: this was a novel about grief. The literature would have said that Dutch Shea was undergoing pathological bereavement. The diagnostic signs would have been these: He is obsessed with the moment Cat died. He plays and replays the scene, as if rerunning it would reveal a different ending: the restaurant on Charlotte Street, the endive salad, Cat’s lavender espadrilles, the bomb, Cat’s head in the dessert trolley. (p. 51) Just when Didion, surrounded by death and illness, is achingly seeking life, the novelistic characters of her and John’s past become organic and real, conspiring in keeping the magic of John’s return intact. All of these narrative maneuvers ultimately, in my reading, become unconscious ways in which she survives with the semblance of a self intact. In these movements, Didion is able to show clearly that life-writing is no longer exclusively a matter of representing a life from birth unto death. Instead, we are shown, as narrative theorist Mark Freeman (2002) eloquently explains in his recent essay, ‘‘Charting the Narrative Unconscious: Cultural Memory and the Challenge of Autobiography,’’ how autobiography is a matter of discerning, as best as one can, the multiple sources, both near and far, that give rise to the self. This does not eliminate the place of the ‘‘I’’ in the telling of the self ’s story. The project at hand whether it takes place intentionally, as in the writing of an autobiography, or unintentionally, as in the course of living is one of poesis, of fashioning an identity in and through these multiple sources. (p. 209) The fashioning of identity, indeed the creation of a living identity, is clearly in place in this memoir, and we are privy to how cultural texts, people, places, and textures become interwoven into the fabric of memory (Freeman, 1998). As these texts and life worlds mingle, we see the emergence of an interdependent self that illustrates most clearly: ‘‘[N]o one is rightful possessor of his life or his death; lives are so thoroughly Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 The Writerly Reader 383 entangled that each of them has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere’’ (Gusdorf, 1956/1980, pp. 2930). In The Year of Magical Thinking, I believe we witness the emergence of the ‘‘narrative unconscious,’’ which, while referring to those regions of our history that we have lived, nevertheless remains unthought and untold*that is, the culturally rooted aspects of one’s history that have not become a part of one’s story, and something incites them into being (Freeman, 2002). The sources Didion accesses are pieces of information on grief in medicine, in popular culture, in poetry, in literature, and even in sceneries/geographies which she then merges with her experiences of death. Her inclusion of all these ‘‘outside’’ materials*even sidestepping these materials to tread into others*allows the reader to enter the story because she moves us beyond her personal life into the shared life of culture. In other words, we attempt, alongside Didion, to understand her grief and grief itself, and her self-pity and self-pity itself. Consider the following words toward the end of the book when she writes about self-pity: You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity. People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it . . .. We understand the aversion most of us have to ‘‘dwelling on it.’’ Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. ‘‘A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,’’ Philippe Aries wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death . . .. Self-pity remains both the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given . . .. I never saw a wild thing/sorry for itself, D. H. Lawrence wrote, in a much-quoted four-line homily that turns out on examination to be free of any but tendentious meaning. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough/without ever having felt sorry for itself. This may be what Lawrence (or we) would prefer to believe about wild things, but consider the dolphins who refuse to eat after the death of a mate. Consider the geese who search for the lost mate until they themselves become disoriented and die. In fact, the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need to feel sorry for themselves. Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life*both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections*have all vanished. (pp. 192193) In these stanzas, we are shown a portrait of grief that begins externally*in the culture out there*and moves into the personal, showing us the personal and cultural nature of the memoir. Didion’s grief is a shared grief, perhaps temporally distanced from many, but it is shared by human beings from the past and readers of the moment. This sharing accomplishes a key objective of autobiography as being the story of a distinct culture (in this case grief) written in individual characters and from within (Olney, 1980). As she does this, Didion illustrates the interdependent, dynamic, and fluid notion of identity which is the central force of autobiography* because in writing out her own grief the writer is authoring a new identity, one that is bereft of a spouse, but one that is still living. It is here that I find it appropriate to discuss the genre of autobiography and its intricate relationship with subjectivity, Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 384 D. Chawla which I believe is one of the key theoretical values of this book*for readers and critics of autobiography. Autobiographies are nothing if not acts of self-creation, because they present the writer and the reader with a new mode of being in time (Eakin, 1985; Gusdorf, 1956/1980). In the past three decades or so, work in autobiography has stressed appreciating the genre in light of the auto*the self*rather than in light of biography (Olney, 1980; Smith & Watson, 2001). The autobiography is now commonly considered ‘‘an act of creation rather than a mere transcription of the past’’ (Luca, 2006, p. 126). Or, as Paul Eakin (1985) eloquently tells us, autobiography is ‘‘both an art of memory and an art of the imagination’’ (p. 5). In such an understanding, the central force driving this type of life-writing is identity. Luca (2006) points out that the ‘‘quest for identity, offering one’s life as a model, self-understanding, and ordering and reordering one’s life may be . . . reasons for writing an autobiography’’ (p. 129). It is clear that Didion seeks clarity about her tragic experience, a clarity she cannot find because there is the finality of death. However, she needs to access memory in order to make sense of the experience, and so gain back a sense of self/selves*be these coherent or incoherent, ordered or disordered. Didion’s autobiographical process follows the conventions of autobiographical theory with its emphasis on the self or auto by overlapping ‘‘with the process of identity construction; both are processes of understanding one’s self in time’’ (Brockmeier, 2000, p. 54). In my view, this autobiographical process unfolds in reliance on two modes of narrative telling and creating. I am drawn to the notion of autobiographical time proposed by Jens Brockmeier, who points out that different narrative models ‘‘encapsulate culturally normative views, patterns of experience and evaluation . . . [and] organize the account of a life course; which is to say, their specific function is to order complex temporal scenarios’’ (p. 61). Most models2 evoke a certain vision of the life course and of the direction it has taken in time. In many, life is seen as a movement and a process, and we encounter the autobiographical process as a place of development. However, two models of autobiographical time*the static and the fragmentary*can be deemed ‘‘timeless’’ because they ignore and even deny that life has a direction or a goal. These models lack the developmental trajectory of the conventional models and seem diminished of both form and content. A static model can be found in stories that revolve around one catastrophic event. As we read or listen to these stories, we find an immovable picture of the self, determined by an all-dominating experience or by irresolvable conflicts and contradictions. In such stories we can discern stagnant metaphors such as ‘‘as if my watch stopped,’’ petrified,’’ or ‘‘frozen in time’’ (Brockmeier, 2000). Most contemporarily, stories of survivors of genocides such as the holocaust or Rwanda illustrate such a mode of autobiographical narration. On a resonating yet different note, the other ‘‘timeless’’ model*fragmentary*is rooted in a postmodern and postcolonial ethos whereby autobiographical accounts are ‘‘decentered,’’ ‘‘open,’’ and ‘‘ludic’’ and there is an emphasis on the unpredictable nature of life (Francese, 1997). Such life narratives rely upon metaphors such as play, Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 The Writerly Reader 385 scenes, patchwork, fragments, and so on. More importantly, fragmentary models ‘‘undermine the foundation upon which identity is posited by shifting the ground of reference and explode the relationship of individual memory to any certain chronology of experience’’ (Smith & Watson, 2001, p. 108). Visions of time in stories that follow this model show a fragmentary layout. We find ‘‘alternative versions’’ of life told simultaneously, mingling the real, possible, imaginative, and anticipated life courses like equal story lines. Didion’s memoir, I believe, encompasses these two models in showing alternating versions of selves: a self in paralysis because of death, a self trying to construct ‘‘magic’’ pretending that a loved one had not died, and a self trying to stay alive in writing. The mere creation of a magical year to prolong the pretence of un/death shows an emergent static model of narration and experience. However, at the same time, we see a self narrating and narrativizing a collage with oft-repeated scenes, resurrected in different backgrounds and contexts, to understand them for herself and the reader in a fragmented mode. In fact, the writing*linguistically, semantically, and syntactically* embodies the static and the fragmented. As I read it, I found the fragmentation everywhere; I picked up the pieces alongside the writer by traveling into the sentences that are on the verge of completion, thoughts that may go in one direction but end up elsewhere, and emotions that are on the threshold of toppling into hysteria, yet remain on the page. For instance, in describing the moments that preceded her husband’s death and a phone call from the hospital seeking his organs, Didion’s narrative shows both models of autobiographical telling: He was calling, he said then, to ask if I would donate my husband’s organs. Many things went through my mind at this instant. The first thing that went through my mind was ‘‘no.’’ Simultaneously I remembered Quintana mentioning at dinner one night that she had identified herself as an organ donor when she renewed her driver’s license. She had asked John if he had. He had said no. They had discussed it. I had changed the subject. I had been unable to think of either of them dead . . . . . . This man from the hospital was talking about taking only the cornea, the eyes. Then why not say so? Why misrepresent this to me? Why make this call and not just say ‘‘his eyes?’’ I took the silver clip the social worker had given me the night before from the box in the bedroom and looked at the driver’s license. Eyes: BL, the license read. Restrictions: Corrective Lenses. Why make this call and not just say what you wanted? His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes. And what I want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death 386 D. Chawla I could not that morning remember who wrote those lines. I thought it was e.e. Cummings but I could not be sure. I did not have a volume of Cummings but found an anthology on a poetry shelf in the bedroom, an old textbook of John’s, published in 1949, when he would have been at Portsmouth Priory, the Benedictine boarding school to which he was sent after his father died. Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 (His father’s death: sudden, cardiac, in his early fifties, I should have taken that warning.) (pp. 3941) In the above collection of paragraphs, lines of verse, and sentences, we see exemplified a postmodern ethos. The language, imagery, and tonality*indeed even the pictorial structure of these stanzas*illustrate the static and fragmentary configuration of autobiographical time in which every plot is situated around the death event, yet the narrative moves back, forth, sideways, and beyond different time modes. We are offered an altered/alternative course of coherence, that proceeds in a non-linear and non-developmental fashion. Didion begins in the present as she recalls the telephone call asking her permission to donate organs; from here she moves to a dinner conversation from the past, to her husband’s eyes, to e. e. Cummings, and then to her husband’s father’s death at an early age due to cardiac arrest. Even though she skips disparate contexts and times, each memory is re/ collected around the death, and each memory harnesses a different sense of her own identity. Finally, every recollection is necessary, even crucial, to Didion’s emergent identity because she needs to remember the past and create some un/connecting dots so she can forget the present*her own self-healing ritual. In these memories, we witness the collapse of various identity/ies and very little resurrection of previous identities. As Didion herself indicates in the paragraph I quoted at the beginning of this essay, although resurrection is not a goal, she resurrects because she writes. Ultimately, near the end of the memoir, Didion unveils that she fears completion of the writing process because the writing has allowed her to stay ‘‘alive.’’ It is a narrative refuge of self which she is loath to end. To finish ends also her husband’s psychic aliveness. This tentativeness helps bring further understanding to the static mode of autobiographical time which compels a writer to contain her self into one time zone. Of course, Didion overtly tells us that the act of writing this meĢlange has been therapeutic and healing; more importantly, she clarifies how her story is an act of both remembering (the past) and forgetting (the present). She reflects on this in the last few pages of the memoir when she writes: I realize as I write this that I do not want to finish this account. Nor did I want to finish the year. The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place. I look for resolution and find none . . . . . . I know why we keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point when we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. (pp. 224225) The Writerly Reader 387 Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 As we reach the conclusion, there is no end, but a symbolic death in the relinquishing of the ‘‘magical.’’ We view the unmasking of the pretence that her husband was alive so she could stay in the ‘‘here and now.’’ We realize that we too have been in death in the memoir, yet we’ve pretended along with the author to reside in the magical psychic space. This echoes the classic novelistic idea of ‘‘suspension of disbelief ’’ and risk taken both by the writer of the autobiography and by the reader who colludes in the risk by constructing alongside the author. This shared, even inter/subjective, risktaking brings forth the complementary identity relationships shared among readers and writers of memoir as a genre. The Autobiographical Pact In this book the risk is intertwined with the two temporal modes of narrative telling. By accessing two timeless narrative models which are neither developmental nor linear, Didion’s text successfully establishes what has been described by Philippe Lejeune (1989) as ‘‘the autobiographical pact,’’ a subject that is much discussed in postmodern and postcolonial autobiographies (see also Eco, 1979; Gunn, 1982; Miller, 1991, 1994; Smith, 2001). This pact ‘‘integrates a concept of both implied and actual (flesh-and-blood) readers in the meaning-making of autobiographical writing’’ (Smith & Watson, 2001, p. 140; see also Lejeune, 1989). The pact embraces two questions of identity that entwine the writer and the reader and tells us that the ‘‘Who is speaking?’’ cannot be engaged without ‘‘Who is addressed?’’ This pact is first and foremost a pact between the author, the narrator, and the character in the story*all of whom also share a proper name. Second, it is a pact between the autobiographer and the reader because the reader can adopt modes of reading or follow a story different from those suggested. Specifically, reliance on a fragmentary model allows the reader recourse into multiple reading options because the non-linear narration allows her to enter the text on her own conditions. The reader then can follow the story by retaining certain fragments*previously experienced words or events*and anticipate the coming words or events. Following a story requires her to integrate each ‘‘catastrophic event’’ into a fluid process of constructing, and deconstructing, ‘‘a character or a culture’’(Langsdorf, 2006, p. 3). Theoretically, in such a scenario, there arise two moments of autobiographical reading. There is the reading by the memoirist who, in writing, is reading her own life. This reading is made more complex because the autobiographer can be selfreflexive about the writing even as s/he writes/performs the autobiographical act. And then there is the reading by the reader of the text, who in encountering the lifewriting is re-reading her own life by association. The reader, according to Roland Barthes (1985), rewrites the text of the work within the text of his/her life. Thus, the reader, like the narrator, becomes a collaborator in the autobiographical act. These different layers of reading bring forth ambiguity, a characteristic that enables a collaboration in which in this memoir readers grieve alongside Didion.3 The reading self is the self who reads, who comes to and engages with the text, and so joins Didion’s work of repetitive reconstruction by repeating and reconstructing events in Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 388 D. Chawla the life of the self who reads. Also, as Langsdorf (2006) points out, the reading self is the self that’s read in the resulting doubled text, a self that’s created in and through the ‘‘meaning [that] itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs’’ (Didion, p. 7)*a meaning that’s both cultural and personal and public and private, and so can be shared by innumerable reading selves’’ (p. 2). This very ambiguity enables us to notice that ‘‘the self who reads gains, from the self that’s read, a multiplicity of possibilities for being self, for building identities through appropriating variations proposed by another’’ (p. 3). This is an ontological turn that asks not what the self is, but how it becomes*indeed is always becoming*self (Langsdorf, 2006). In exploring different ways that life-writing might be interpreted, Smith and Watson (2001) outline some stances a reader might embrace when encountering a memoir. I focus on their discussion of the audience and addressee as it relates to the autobiographical pact. The private/public nature of this memoir alongside its fragmentary and static layout indeed enables the reader to enter the reading on her own terms, yet at the same time some questions remain. Who is the implied reader of this text? Who is this book written for, and what is the audience? However, I prefer to complicate this somewhat by asking instead*what kind of a reading self does the text implore, indeed, necessitate one to become? On an overt and indeed basic level, a reader undergoing a similar catastrophic event would benefit from reading this memoir. This memoir can be easily categorized as a trauma and scriptotherapeutic narrative, as it certainly offers one way that a reading self might associate with grief (Watson & Smith, 2001). For other readers, not personally involved in trauma and death, what can such a book offer? What selves does it uncover, create, or demolish, and why? What kind of a reader might I become as I read this memoir? Moreover, what modes of reading am I called to utilize? Several critics have engaged such questions and often discussed them in terms of binaries* the resistant versus the compliant reader or the reliable versus the unreliable narrator (Booth, 1961/1983; Schechet, 2005). The resistant reader is cued by the text to resist the text’s narrator. The compliant reader, on the other hand, is a reader cued to follow the text’s narrator without questioning their reliability. Instead of engaging these binaries, I take the middle ground as I enter the discussion of who is being addressed by reflexively turning to my own entry into the autobiographical pact. I encountered The Year of Magical Thinking in all the public ways that I was allowed to via the ‘‘narrative unconscious’’*the culturally rooted aspects of my history that had not revealed themselves as a part of my own story (Freeman, 2002). I was a public reader. The fragmentary model propelled me into embracing a configurational reading stance described by Mink (1970) in his essay ‘‘History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension’’ as a mode of comprehension that allows a reader to read stories as elements in a single and concrete set of relationships. For instance, when Didion tells us about the hospital call for donating organs, which leads her to other memories unraveled by that one phone call, we see the writer’s thought process skip multiple temporal zones that are eventually all connected to the death event. To comprehend this process, I relied on configured reading (as much as Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 The Writerly Reader 389 Didion relies on configured comprehension) because we both needed to makes sense of what seemed to be incoherent and fragmented, yet held together through various events, plots, literary details, and anecdotes. Since such temporal swings occur throughout the book, as a reader I had to become adept in the configured mode, otherwise the story/ies would have escaped comprehension. Thus, my first entry into the pact was to align with the writer in a configurational mode, and my first self-transformation was to become curious about how I might cope with such a loss. I asked myself, naively, how a human being was able to reconcile let alone write about such a loss. As I reflected upon this, indeed rummaged through my reading experience, I realized that what I had felt most dominantly was a feeling of incompleteness which, I believe, is the ethos Didion wants to accomplish. This is a memoir replete with strong literary allusions*both medieval and contemporary*and so, in a literal sense, there is an awareness that a reader might be deciphering a puzzle because s/he is not so familiar with all the literary works under discussion. However, not knowing some of them ceases to matter because their deliberate inclusion seems to contribute to the fragmentary layout of the narration. It centers the writer*Didion*into her medium, and if the reader feels outside some of the literary allusions, their briefness keeps her engrossed (as an example see the discussion of D.H. Lawrence and e.e. Cummings mentioned previously). Emotionally, I was not replenished by the memoir; I was disturbed because I was impelled to think about death in ways that I had not previously imagined. For instance, Didion’s repetitive reconstruction of the moments of her husband’s death made me conscious of the ‘‘whys’’ of specific details because knowing how everything may have occurred in John’s last moments were necessary facts that she needed to recreate, so she could forget. As I watched Didion retrieving literary sources to understand her grief, I wondered, for instance, what I would read in moments such as these, or if I would even be able to read. Would I read about Emily Post? Would I read D.H. Lawrence? Would I be able to eat? Would I be able to write? When Didion refers to her body feeling delicate, her own feeling of physical vulnerability in the months following the death, I am reminded of how one feels for days after one is recovering from a simple virus*fear of its return. And then, I begin to wonder*how would my body feel in these moments when a return is only imaginable? More importantly, my reading of this work took me into my own recollections about how I had previously grieved for people, places, and relationships that I left behind. A period of mourning that I can recall with sensory, intellectual, and emotional detail is the grief I felt in the weeks before I left my erstwhile home in Delhi, India, and arrived here in the United States 10 years ago as a 23-year-old student. As the day to leave drew closer, I found myself unable to eat, think, or even pack my belongings into the two suitcases permitted for the trip. I experienced a sense of paralysis, muteness, and extreme anxiety, as if I was in mourning even before I had left home, even before I had said goodbye*a kind of death, a void, but not death itself. How did I cope? I didn’t. I do remember entering into a literary heaven, accessing Indian writers writing in English, accessing immigrant/exile writing by authors such Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 390 D. Chawla as Rushdie, Naipaul, Kundera, Neruda, and so on. Unconsciously, in reading them, I hoped to learn how to become a refugee. In those times, I began writing memories which had perhaps been in my unconscious, but the event of leaving home had brought them to the surface. I wrote about my mother and focused more on how I remembered her and wanted to remember her than on what I felt about the loss. In my summers here in the United States, I remember recreating in essays and poems memories of the summers of my childhood in which my mother is ever-present. I needed to remember the scenes and the sceneries and I needed to maintain and re-imagine my past in order to exist in this new present. Alternatively, I wanted to reimagine old sceneries to map them on the new topography that I was making mine. As I recollect this grief, I am called to another one, to a time when I was seven years old and was bidding farewell to my 10-year-old brother whom I was losing to the strangeness of a boarding school in the north Indian hills. I have never told him that I missed him then, and nor has he told me that he missed me, but I grieved as only a sibling can and then I wrote. Instead of writing about how much I missed him, I wrote to imagine him in new locations, collapsing time, space, and identities into varied and multiple amalgamations. In a small essay, ‘‘In the Shadows of Baba,’’ I imagined him in his boarding school as he went through his daily routines. In text, I became his psychic shadow to understand his life away from me. Retrospectively, I too was creating a magical space*a different one, but a grieving space. My goal here is not to compare grief; instead, I am suggesting that as I read Didion and unraveled the mazes of memory in her memoir, I became a collaborator/reader in her grief. I was able to fall into rhythm with the import of the sideway stories, the exploration of unrelated events, and the relative non-structure of the entwined stories. I was able to understand the story of her marriage as a necessary co-narrative to the story of death. In fact, it was important for Didion to tell the story of her 40-year-old marriage because she needed to create a backdrop for the story that she formulated in writing. This backdrop is crucial for the reader; without the backdrop, her grief remains cursory. With it, we are provided with much more than a portrait of grief; we are provided with the anatomy of grief. The creation of this backdrop brings to my mind a very recent essay in Text and Performance Quarterly by GingrichPhilbrook (2005), in which he explores two different ways whereby one might write about the experience of a sudden death in a family (in his case that of a grandmother). If a writer chooses to write about the experience, s/he could describe the entire process of receiving the death-call, sliding down the kitchen floor, the emotions one felt, and so on. Such writing, according to Gingrich-Philbrook (2005), would not give us courage to face the years ahead without a loved one. In other words, such a narrative mode could potentially exoticize, trivialize, and even make clinical (owing to the linear detail) the immediate experience of death and its ensuing grief. If one is compelled to write about these matters, then a better alternative could be to reflect on one afternoon, one summer, in her dining room, years before. One day I remembered listening to her talk, that lost hour, about her grandmother. I watched The Writerly Reader 391 Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 her eyes shimmer, taking in the mirage of her decades-old memory of the woman who raised her; I watched her rock, ever so slightly, in front of a painting she bought at K-Mart because the kerchiefed woman reminded her of her grandmother saying grace over a bowl of soup. (p. 305) The point is that writing of ‘‘that other memory, of her memory, might provide a source of courage’’ (Gingrich-Philbrook, 2005, p. 305) for the writer who grieves and moreover for the reader who audiences this grief. I believe that Didion creates many such backdrops for herself and unconsciously for the reader, and in so doing creates her addressee by inviting a non-grieving audience into the autobiographical pact. Toward the end of the book, Didion in fact communes with her audience when her writing directly/semantically ensconces the reader within it. It seems as if the fragmentary model, which encloses the public and the private, and the resultant narration, which is both personal and immensely cultural, together prepare the reader/us for this moment when the writer-reader officially become collaborators. This communion is most evident in the following lines: Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be ‘‘healing.’’ A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest. We imagine the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral after which the hypothetical healing will take place . . .. We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others . . .. Nor can we know of the fact of the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself. (pp. 188189) As it nears completion with such stanzas, The Year of Magical Thinking achieves hermeneutic intimacy because it weaves together the narrator, the narrated, the individual life, the culture outside, and the reader who is graciously ushered inside the narrative. Whether it provides therapy to readers or an exotic journey into a yetunknown world of grief, or creates an empathetic audience, it certainly provides the reader with the option of becoming a collaborator. This option for the reader to become a collaborator is also an invitation to them intersubjectively to enter the ‘‘experience’’ of the writer and thus fashion a readeridentity that may be similar to or disparate from the author’s identity. The lesson to be learned from such a reading of any memoir is to understand that in all life-writing even though the experience we are required to enter is simply personal, it is anything but merely personal (Smith & Watson, 2001). Entering the experience of the writer in life-writing is necessarily an intersubjective process, because experience itself is ‘‘a process by which subjectivity is constructed’’ (see Scott, 1992, p. 27). Experience is 392 D. Chawla mediated through memory, the body, and language. It is already an interpretation of the past and our place in the ‘‘culturally and historically specific present’’ (Smith & Watson, 2001, p. 24). Both the reader and the writer enter it subjectively. Explaining this matter, Teresa de Lauretis notes that this entry is the intersubjective process through which Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 one places oneself or one is placed in a social reality and so perceives and comprehends as subjective (referring to, originating in oneself) those relations* material, economic, and interpersonal*which are in fact social, and, in a larger perspective, historical. (1984, p. 159) Life-writing, most importantly, shows this process at work and illustrates quite clearly that it is not individuals who have experiences, but ‘‘subjects who are constructed through experience’’ (Scott, 1992, p. 27). Ultimately, and broadly, as a reader what can this memoir teach us? About life? Or about grief? Or what does it prepare us for? I am reminded here of a few lines of a review of this memoir in the New York Review of Books, where John Leonard (2005) notes that he cannot imagine dying without having read this book. Having read and re-read the memoir, I wholeheartedly agree. Does this book teach us how we may grieve some day? It might. However, I don’t see that as its intent. Even so, it certainly is a story about the grieving. Rather, it makes me wonder: how I will encounter grief in the future? What will be my own anatomy? Will I be stronger or weaker in my dealings with grief? These are questions that will arrange themselves and that I will unravel when grief finds me. For, as Louise Erdrich (2001) tells us, there is no place as unknown as grief; in making us encounter her own anatomy of grief, Didion makes grief more familiar and ironically even more unknown*an inherently subjective cultural process. And that, I believe, might be most powerful lesson we can take from The Year of Magical Thinking. Notes [1] [2] [3] Even though there are theoretical and conceptual differences among all these terms, in this essay, for practical reasons I use the words autobiography, memoir, life narrative, and lifewriting interchangeably. The other models of autobiographical time proposed by Brockmeier (2000) are the linear, the circular, the cyclical, and the spiral. In her work, Narrative Fissures: Reading and Rhetoric, Nita Schechet (2005) refers to strategies of narration that allow readers into texts as a narrative fissure, which are sites for textual entry for readers of fiction or ethnography. Narrative fissures might be writerinitiated or reader-sought. Iser (1989) discusses these as ‘‘blanks’’*switches that activate readers to initiate their own ideas into completing the intention of the text. While some of these ideas resonate with my argument, I am limiting my analysis to autobiography, a matter that these critics do not directly address. References Barthes, R. (1985). Day by day with Roland Barthes. In M. Blonsky (Ed.), On signs: A semiotics reader (pp. 98117). London: Sage. Downloaded by [Universitat Politècnica de València] at 23:35 25 October 2014 The Writerly Reader 393 Booth, W. (1983). The rhetoric of fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published in 1961) Brockemeier, J. (2000). Autobiographical time. 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