Adderley Dannley-Bearden
Schrager
“Eye of the Story”
1 February 2016

In Order to Live

Examining the social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s, Joan Didion, in a collection of essays from her book The White Album, seeks to identify her own personal turmoil during that era and how the combined incidents of people, politics, architecture, music, and status quo influenced her psychological affair.

On the first page, in an essay which the book is titled after, Didion explains to the audience from the very first sentence how “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (11). These are the types of stories, not found in books persay, but the ones we formulate on a daily basis. They are the assumptions we make about someone’s shirt or their lunch, maybe their family. Constantly trying to find reason and solution for the knowledge we do not have. Didion goes on to say:

“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. 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” (11).

She addresses the audience with the frequent usage of “we” as if to include them in her dilemma. Didion wants to acknowledge, or perhaps prove to herself, that she is not alone in her experience, therefore she makes it a universal experience. By saying “we live entirely” on a narrative, is another way of saying we are dependent upon it.

Didion states that the 60s were a time period where she began to question, or doubt, “the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself” (11). Feeling like life was a production and that every encounter or conversation followed a specific script, Didion admits to improvising. If she was given a script, she must have lost it, and could not adhere to the cues, nor the plot. Didion admits to only knowing what she saw: “flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting room experience” (13). Seeing her own life in the 60s through a series of discombobulated imagery which had no evident meaning, Didion found herself still craving a narrative, still wanting to believe in the narrative’s accuracy, something to help her make sense of the events around her.

The 1960s leading into the early 70s was a period of inexplicable transition. From Didion’s other descriptions about being in a studio with The Doors to talking about the logistics of book publishing with Elderidge Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panthers, Didion allows the scope of her existence at that time to envelope the audience. Simply based off those two examples alone, it might be safe to infer the era was not one for scripts, nor did its citizens deign to follow them as strictly as Didion may have presumed.

While reading “The White Album”, I found myself relating with Didion’s need to formulate a narrative, especially after viewing The Nine Muses directed by John Akomfrah. The combination of found footage and original material had my brain in overdrive, trying to piece together a narrative when we were told not to make an attempt. The film had a lot of intent but whether or not we were supposed to–or even allowed to–understand what was being projected is unknown. I think the same idea could be lended to Didion’s idea about narrative. I am unsure whether or not you are meant to understand what is occurring in your life until it has come and gone.

I live most of my life by assuming narratives, but the problem with narratives, specifically your own, is that they cannot be trusted as you are experiencing them. Didion had to come to terms with that when she looked back on her life in order to write her books. She needed to be able to reflect upon the narrative from a later viewpoint and how the observations and assumptions she was making about the time period and about herself in the midst of the mansions, the Reagans, and the feminist movement, were mostly premature.