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Writing the Self and the Sixties
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
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I Lived Through the sixties and in certain ways could be considered typical of the times, or at least of women of my class and calling. I might even seem to some an emblematic person worthy, perhaps, of notice. But I belong among the millions elided from the historical records of their time, their lives unnoted and unremembered. I wonder now why I could not have done what Joan Didion did to make herself memorable. Like her, I might have picked out people who seemed, so she said, “emblematic” – Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Linda Kasabian at the Manson trial – and by writing about them I could conceivably have written my self into history. For clearly, Didion intended to inscribe her self into the record of the sixties by describing people she went to see. “I went to see …,” she would write, and again: “I went to see.” She wanted to see symptoms of cultural decline, especially those connected to violence, and wherever she looked, with her selective and impounding gaze, she found what she sought – the disarray that confirmed her vision of a world “devoid of any logic” in which, as she (and Yeats) said, things fall apart. She wrote of social disorder in a stark elliptical style, her insistent parataxis representing the lack of connection that was her theme. The reportorial mode she adopted suited her intent, for personal journalism, which melded the topical with the autobiographical, allowed her to impress her self, as well as her nihilistic vision, upon the reader's consciousness. ‘I want you to know, as you read me,’ she wrote, “precisely who I am and where I am, and what is on my mind” (“In the Islands,” White Album, 133).
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