According to the New York Times, on the 23rd local time, Joan Didion, a famous American writer, novelist and screenwriter, died at the age of 87 due to Parkinson's complications at his home in Manhattan, New York. Joan Didion's masterpieces include Trek to Bethlehem, White Album, El Salvador, and the mourning writings Blue Nights and Year of Whimsy, which are more familiar to Chinese readers, and she co-authored the screenplays of "A Star Is Born" (1976) and "The Unlocked Lock", "Because You Loved Me", and "The Poisonous Sea Mandarin Duck" with her late husband John Gregory Dunne.
Joan Didion, who entered the world of Chinese, has two images, a "cool grandmother" with silver hair and large sunglasses to endorse Celine, and a surviving person who mourns her husband and daughter in "Year of Fantasy" and "Blue Nights". She experienced mourning in her old age, fragile and sensitive, and tough and sharp. In the eyes of many people, the mourning of old age just confirms that the female writer was a good harvest in the family when she was young, happiness and unhappiness are one, and there is a satisfaction for chewing in the lack.
Before that, Didion had already become famous. Without the blessings of fashion, age, and the loss of a loved one, Didion became a star of American literature with his nonfiction writing, and his light shone for half a century and continues to this day. She abandons traditional journalistic rules and documents socio-political events from a personal perspective. In 1967, Didion published a report on hippies in the Saturday Evening Post, "Trek to Bethlehem." The following year, a collection of essays of the same name was published, containing twenty-one articles by Didion, most of which were related to California in the 1960s. Despite Didion's dedication to writing, the book is still her most famous collection of essays.
Joan Didion, an American writer and cultural icon, born in 1934 in Sacramento, California, whose books "Trek to Bethlehem", "The Year of Whimsy", "Blue Nights" have been translated into Chinese published Source: The documentary "Joan Didion: The Center Is Difficult to Maintain"
When the Chinese edition of Trek to Bethlehem came out this year, Interface Culture (ID: booksandfun) wrote "Trek to Joan Didion," an attempt to get a closer look at Didion's "new journalism" and how the way she observes and portrays the world affects us today. In commemoration, it is hereby republished.
Trek to Joan Didion: How Does the Female Writer Face a World that Is Disintegrating? 》
Written by | Zhao Yunxian
Edit | Yellow Moon
"Everything disintegrates, the center cannot be maintained", "A stare as hollow and merciless as the sun", "What kind of beast, finally waiting for the ripe time, trekking to Bethlehem, regaining a new life"... Since 1966, the verses in Yeats's "Second Coming" have long gripped Didion, and "Trek to Bethlehem" is the most direct echo. Before heading to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district (hereinafter referred to as the hippie district), she had been unable to write for months because she felt that the world she knew "no longer existed", that she could not pick up her pen, and that if she wanted to resume work, she would have to compromise with the disorder in front of her.
Didion in "Trek to Bethlehem" is not a cool grandmother, nor is she an undead person, she is like a ghost of her own time, watching everything coldly, occasionally sneering, exuding anger and fear. The dissipation of all things is the theme of Didion's writing, but she slips away from its front again and again, arranging scenes and pictures around it. What the writer wants to express is not easy to capture, and reading Didion in the 60s is itself a trek.
Trek to Bethlehem
[Beauty] Joan Didion by He Yujia translated
DAFANG CITIC PUBLISHING GROUP 2021-6
The Chinese edition of Trek to Bethlehem was recently published. Re-reading the book half a century later, it may be difficult for us to get answers from them, such as answers about hippies, answers about California, answers about the Vietnam War, answers about Pearl Harbor. In the preface, Didion confessed that although she was direct and frank enough at the time, she could not write what she expected to be "grander". What we can learn is Didion's direct frankness in the face of self and the outside world, and the courage to speak again when he is aphasia.
How to recall a drugged child? A journalist's sense of empathy and alienation
Since the release of Joan Didion's solo documentary, The Center Is Hard to Maintain, almost all critical articles about her have mentioned a dialogue in the film to highlight her alienation as an observer and the coldness of the writer. When the director asked her how she felt about seeing a 5-year-old drugged child in San Francisco's hippie district in 1967, Didion was silent for a moment and said, "It was gold." ”
The child, wearing white lipstick and sitting on the floor taking psychedelics, was written by Didion at the end of The Trek to Bethlehem. Obviously, after a montage of the chaotic, indulgent and hollow everyday life of the hippie area, there is no scene that captures the essence of the matter more than this scene, leaving the reader to flee in a hurry due to self-shame. Rebecca Mead, the author of The New Yorker, had tried to imagine that if it was herself who had witnessed her child taking drugs, if it had been herself who had been asked decades later, she would have said she wanted to call an ambulance, call the police, reach out to the children on the ground, and cry over the absurd tragedy in front of her, all of which can only be described as "shocked". But Didion didn't, and she was well aware of her responsibility—"If you're here to report, you're there for a moment like that." For better or worse. ”
Didion in Contemplation Source: Documentary Joan Didion: The Center Is Hard to Maintain
Perhaps in those few seconds of silence, Didion suppressed the urge to evaluate and lyrically. Even after 50 years of leaving the scene, she still found exactly where she had stood. In the face of suffering and tragedy, it is easy to develop compassion and salvation, but what is really difficult is another morality that seems to be contrary to common sense, that is, the morality of being a writer, the morality of being a witness rather than a redeemer. Mead argues that a journalist always has to strike a balance between empathy and alienation — without empathy, he can't get close to marginalized people; without alienation, it's impossible to report calmly and fulfill his professional mission. It would be useful to move on to the issue of alienation here. If you feel that Didion's "once-in-a-lifetime" lacks humanity, then when a reporter looks back on the past and in what language does he comment on the past, he is responsible for the objects of writing that have intersected, and is responsible for his own words? Shocked, sad, overwhelmed, these answers are useless except to prove that "I am a good man", almost the clichés of Didion's hippie teenagers; if the idea of immediate action has long overshadowed the enthusiasm for writing, perhaps one should change to a social activist; if the report is full of his own sadness, it is even more useless.
Didion's cold eyes capture another side of reality. When the rebels enshrined Joan Baez as the Virgin Mary, she punctured the charming wounds and fresh shallowness and falsehood of Baez's body; john Wayne's representation of the manhood of the Hollywood West was already apocalyptic and ridiculed, and she had no scruples to recall wayne's cotton-poplar-like fantasies left in the hearts of a generation; California, the land of gold, with inexhaustible wealth and sunshine, the daughter of California pierced through the fall of santa ana wind that did not last night and no tomorrow; in the hippies or was worshipped as an anti-combatant, When either considered a corrupt person, Didion saw only a group of children on the streets of Hayth Ashbury who were "ignorant of society" due to the collapse of order.
Depiction and Abstraction: How to Tell the Story of a World That Is Disintegrating?
"Trek to Bethlehem" made Didion famous, her peers praised her, and readers pursued her, but the author himself was not satisfied. In the preface to the collection of the same name, Didion dejectedly states that this was the one that made her feel the most urgent to write, and the only one that had left her "plunged into depression and despair" after publication:
"That was the first time I had written a direct and frank account of the basis for the dissipation of all things, the proof that everything was disintegrating... After publishing it, I found that no matter how direct and frank I imagined my description, I still failed to make it clear to many readers who had read or even liked this article, and I failed to show that I was describing something more macro, not just a few children wearing mandala flowers on their foreheads. ”
What was Didion trying to say? What does the child wearing the mandala flower refract or symbolize something grander? If everything begins to dissipate and disintegrate at that time, is there a stable, harmonious center before that? When was that center born? What is the order?
The Hippie District of Los Angeles in the '69s Source: Documentary Joan Didion: The Center Is Hard to Maintain
Re-reading Trek to Bethlehem half a century later may be more confused than readers of the year. First, if one taps into the text with an interest in understanding the ins and outs of hippies, one will find that, apart from the sketches of the collapse of the entire country at the beginning and the minimal discussion in the middle, it is difficult for the reader to touch the clear veins, and there are fragments of hippies cut by Didion floating around, which is difficult to salvage (perhaps this is also partly attributed to the fact that readers in the Internet age are accustomed to accepting straightforward answers). But for the news industry and the general public at that time, Didion's one-handed observation of the hippie area filled in the gaps of previous reports, revealing the true state of hippie life - poor vocabulary, no direction, the spirit of mutual assistance achieved through drug scalping, the undetected movement leaders of the outside world, and commentators believed that Didion replaced narrative clues with the collage of scenes, so that the article echoed its theme - the dissipation of the center. But to what extent does such collage explain the relationship between the child wearing the mandala flower and the disorder of the world as hippies become history?
Thus, Didion's dissatisfaction is not only the writer's high demands on himself, it becomes understandable. Trek to Bethlehem describes the chaotic lives of children in the hippie district, but fails to tell where they came from or how they came from. Didion repeatedly stressed that no one has explained to the children the rules of social play, but what these "rules" are, Didion has not been able to summarize and explain.
For Didion of that period, it seems that as soon as abstract questions were involved, her words slipped away. In reporting on communist party member M. In I. Lasky's article, she describes the person in front of her as "engaged in a career that may not be successful because of a very sharp fear", and claims that she has also experienced "real fear", but the meaning of fear is lost. In 1976, In "Why I Write," Didion said she was a little overwhelmed with abstract thinking, and that while studying at Berkeley, she had tried philosophical speculation and theoretical learning, but her attention inevitably returned to "concrete, tangible, universally considered marginal" things.
The picture occupies the center of Didion's early writing, and depiction is the most common technique she uses. In his 1978 essay "Telling Stories," Didion articulated his ambitions for the scene: "I don't want a window into the world. I want everything in the picture. The sensitivity to the picture is also reflected in her work methods as a journalist. Didion has repeatedly admitted that he is not good at interviewing, "can't ask any questions", and does not trust what the interviewee says. Her strength lies in her small, low-key, and when everything is happening right in front of her, almost no one notices the writer in the corner and her tomographic gaze.
Children on the streets of hippie districts Source: Documentary "Joan Didion: The Center Is Hard to Maintain"
A few years after the publication of Trek to Bethlehem, Didion said in an interview with radio station KPFR: "Usually when you write a story, one day you know that you don't need to do interviews anymore, you can go home and you've got it." But in that [hippie] report, that day never came. "It doesn't make sense to suppose that Didion's interview technique is more clever, because the appearance of the article is not regulated by a few techniques, not that if you lower this parameter a little, and that one raises it, you can get a more perfect work, first of all, why you write, and secondly, what technique you use. Didion's dissatisfaction with himself is actually the dilemma that all creators will face sooner or later: when the facts change and the old methods of cognition and narration fail, should people leave only a few words in time, even if the voice is broken, or remain silent before the unattainable reality?
In the 1990s, Didion gradually abandoned his previous writing style. She revealed to the Paris Review that she had lost interest in "lengthy depictions" and "depictions used as a substitute for thinking" in both fiction and nonfiction, and she began to turn to public, more opinion-based political writing. Before finding a new voice, there is a long and endless trek.
Trek to Bethlehem: What does Reading Didion Teach Us?
Before the rise of neo-journalism in the 1960s, mainstream reporting promoted objectivity and required writers to hide their tracks, but both the study of narrative and the biases and realistic biases in existing "objective" reporting declared the bankruptcy of traditional practices. In her nonfiction news work, Didion is always reluctant to reveal details about herself—whether she sat alone in the car and saw everything outside the window, or watched a couple of hippies in a cluttered room, how the bureaucratic police rejected her, she was on the margins of celebrity cocktail parties or a socialist, and in that "once-in-a-lifetime" moment, she tried to ask if there were still children taking drugs but ultimately failed to say anything. It is very important for Didion to show his place in the article, and only then does the reader know what kind of vision sees everything written in the text and what kind of voice speaks. In 2011, she said in an interview: "In the days when I started reporting, people didn't feel like it was a good thing for writers to put themselves at the front end and the center, but I had a strong feeling that I had to put myself there and let the reader see who was on the other end of the voice." ”
Didion reading Source: Documentary "Joan Didion: The Center Is Hard to Maintain"
Didion is like a key to his nonfiction journalism. That's why putting the individual Trek to Bethlehem in the entire collection of articles would eliminate some of the confusion mentioned above. For example, the murder of Lucille Miller in "The Man in the Golden Dream" embodies the random killing, the abandonment of homes, and the disappearance of parents and children at the beginning of "Trek to Bethlehem"; the hippies drunkenly dream of death, claiming that young people under the age of twenty-five have two billion dollars to squander, and Miller's lover coldly leaves all relations after the murder and walks into a newlywed marriage decorated with roses, both of which are new students of the Golden Nation who "experience it once a day". Opening the Los Angeles Notes, the reader can perceive that didion's fear comes not only from civilization, but also from the barbarism and fury of the land. In "Goodbye to Everything," Didion says goodbye to New York and her youth, she says how young she was, and at one point, "the golden rhythm suddenly stops"—what a universal and secretive fear.
Los Angeles Notes consists of several unrelated fragments that Didion cuts out from different articles and collages them together, which is the editorial idea of the entire collection. In this book, at least, Didion rarely outlines the problem, she only describes, constantly describes the details that are implicitly related to the grand themes of society, politics, and life. Everything disintegrates, the world is disorderly, some kind of enlightened light has not yet come, and stopping in place is not the way, only trekking, only striding forward in the dust of the desert. Reading Didion is a trek between texts, and we are still panicking about the panic of the writer. Instead of seeking answers from Didion, we need to ask ourselves, do we have the ambition and strength to devote ourselves to "not necessarily successful undertakings" and trek to Bethlehem to regain a new life?