Didion begins her snapshot-history of the 1960s by emphasizing that in order to live we try to impose a fictional order upon the welter of fact and experience amid which we find ourselves: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," she insists, and then she heaps up instances of things about which she has tried to tell herself stories in order to live:

The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy; will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. (White Album, 11)

Like Carlyle and Ruskin before her, Didion thrusts forward a grotesque assemblage of encountered fact, and, also like them, she reveals that she has come upon one of the Signs of the Times to which we must pay close attention. Like her predecessors, she also has chosen to force apparently trivial matters upon our attention, for however bizarre they may seem to us, none of the images she proffers at first seem to bear any major significance. Would-be suicides, protesters, or what-have-we are all alas so common that we hardly pause over them any more. Of course, Didion's proffered album contains pictures, snapshots, which turn out to be secondhand. The disguised fireman, for example, has been captured from that enigmatic event not by Didion's memory but by a newspaper photograph of it;and that secondhandness, like the fact that her memory (our memory) has been stored with images made by others preserved with the aid of modern technology, is itself a Sign of the Times -- indeed, perhaps one of the most significant.

These events and the photographic images that record them have intruded themselves upon Didion's consciousness, and now, in her role as sage, she makes them intrude upon ours. For having tried them upon her own pulse and in the chambers of her own mind, she knows that they are significant, that they are Signs of the Times, and that to survive these times we must read them. We must interpret, and we must interpret correctly. According to her, writers exist to present connections between things and events, and she therefore has a double advantage over us -- her career as writer has forced upon her the crucial recognition that the writer of fiction engages not in just one among many human activities but in the primal one that defines the human and also enables us to survive.

In the manner of the modern sage, she also admits doubt about both her own enterprise and her own ability to carry it out successfully. According to her, "We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five." We must make them mean something. Therefore, "we interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience" (White Album, 11). Thus far we have encountered a good old-fashioned generalization, a sententia such as Samuel Johnson might have advanced for our improvement, after which we have found ourselves amid a welter of puzzling images and have been told that we must understand them in order to live. At this point, Didion introduces the element of doubt, and in so doing she answers our curiosity about "why these images?" For after instructing us that we -- and writers, in particular -- live by imposing stories, order, upon that "shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience, "she reveals that her album captures the crucial fact about the 1960s in America: belief, the paradigmatic narrative that held society together, had disappeared.

Last modified 2000