Journalistic reporting kept Didion in the role of observer rather than direct partaker in the Sixties riotous culture. Though Didion was the one experiencing visual problems and the subsequent onset of a "vague' disease, she chose not to write her distress, emotionally or physically, at this "surprise', but kept the same detached voice in the climax of "The White Album':
Once I had a rib broken, and during the few months that it was painful to turn in bed or raise my arms in a swimming pool I had, for the first time, a sharp apprehension of what it would be like to be old. Later I forgot. At some point during the years I am talking about here, after a series of periodic visual disturbances, three electroencephalograms, two complete sets of skull and neck X-rays, one five hour glucose tolerance test, two electromyelograms, a battery of chemical tests and consultations with two ophthalmologists, one internist and three neurologists, I was told that the disorder was not really in my eyes, but in my central nervous system. I might or might not experience symptoms of neural damage all my life. These symptoms, which might or might not appear, might or might not involve my eyes. They might or might not involve my arms or legs, they might or might not be disabling. Their effects might be lessened by cortisone injections, or they might not. It could not be predicted. The condition had a name, the kind of name usually associated with telethons, but the name meant nothing and the neurologist did not like to use it. The name was multiple sclerosis, but the name had no meaning. This was, the neurologist said, an exclusionary diagnosis, and meant nothing.
I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife. In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist's office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone. The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind. "Lead a simple life," the neurologist advised. "Not that it makes any difference we know about." In other words it was another story without a narrative.
Questsions
1. Didion writes, "It was hard to surprise me in those years." What is the difference in context between "surprise" there and "sharp apprehension" here? Does this apprehension encompass the entire piece?
2. Didion doesn't specify when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Do you think it was in the later period of her detached mental state, or earlier, and why?
3. In the story, "On the Morning After the SixtiesÕ, Didion writes of "the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in manÕs own blood." This explains much of DidionÕs detachment. Why did she write of her generation so blatantly there, and shy away from generational generalizations in "White AlbumÕ? How would that technique not serve "White AlbumÕ? How much do you think her generation played a part in her detachment?
4. Do you consider this to be the climax? Why or why not? Would your answer change if you were reading this in the '70s, rather than today?
11 September 2007