In conjunction with the publication of Political Fictions, Joan Didion did a series of interviews with college newspapers around the country - discussing with young people the material in her book, the uncertain future of the American political process, and her own experiences with the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Two of the newspapers, the Daily Californian of UC Berkeley, where Didion attended school as an undergraduate, and the Harvard Crimson, have given us permission to share here substantial excerpts from their interviews. Please take a look, and follow the links to read the complete interviews and the student reviews of Political Fictions.
From UC Berkeley's DAILY CALIFORNIAN:
Berkeley Alumna Discusses Politics After 'Fictions'
By REBECCA MEYER
Friday, October 19, 2001
An excerpt from the interview:
DAILY CALIFORNIAN: What do you remember about being a student at Cal?
JOAN DIDION: I loved Berkeley. It was like waking up. The whole way I deal with politics came out of the English department. They taught a form of literary criticism which was based on analyzing texts in a very close way. If you start analyzing the text of a newspaper or a political commentator on CNN using this same approach of close textual analysis, you come to understand it in a different way. It's not any different from reading Henry James.
DC: In "The West Wing of Oz," you talk about elected officials using international affairs as a set for the theater of domestic politics. Do you see that going on right now?
JD: In one way it's a hugely different thing because we didn't initiate this--we were attacked. But I do notice that a lot of the response to it has had elements of--when Bush gave his first address to the nation, it was reviewed before and after as to how it would play in terms of his domestic ratings. The speech, which was a response to the actual attack, was being construed as part of an ongoing political campaign.
DC: You portray American democracy as fairly bankrupt. If you see through all this theater in the name of politics, what keeps you tuned in? Where do you find the strength to indict the fable-makers rather than just tuning out?
JD: I keep thinking that when everybody notices the inconsistencies, the way things don't add up, there will be a change. It's a romantic idea, I suppose, but I keep thinking it. Just in the weeks since the book was published, in fact, I've gotten a heartening response. A lot of people are starting to think along the same lines.
Read the entire interview with Joan Didion and Rebecca Mayer's review of Political Fictions.
From THE HARVARD CRIMSON...
Joan Didion Takes on the Political Establishment
An Interview With Joan Didion
By J. HALE RUSSELL
Crimson Staff Writer
An excerpt from the interview:
THC: You live in New York City. Have you seen Ground Zero since Sept. 11? Could you describe it from the eyes of a writer?
JD: I don't have a police pass, so I haven't been inside the site. I've been down, several times, to the nearest barricade, which is about a block away. It's such a big site. I can hardly stay away from it. It's in my mind all the time. It draws you toward it. It has almost the impact of a great cathedral. I don't know anyone who has seen it who hasn't been filled with a terrible awe. My brother and his wife were here from California over the weekend, and they went down to look at it, and then they went down to look at it again, without having intended to. It just kind of presented itself as something that they had to do.
THC: What do you make of that kind of magnetism?
JD: Well, I think a lot of us are still in shock, attempting to come to terms with it. I don't know what we're in shock at. It's not exactly at the amount of the destruction. Other things have been destroyed through our lifetime; a higher number of people have died in a lot of combat situations. This, you can't quite come to terms with it, you can't quite grapple with it. It's a really direct challenge to our idea of--as many people have said--to our idea of modernity, to our idea of progress, to our idea of secular democracy. Someone said, "You can't have that, we can take that away." That is what everyone is trying to come to terms with.
THC: What about the political aftermath of the event? The media has presented the idea of the "reinvention" of George Bush in his "finest hour." Does this relate to Political FictionsÔ idea that politics has become a "show"?
JD: There was this reinvention of Bush as a leader, which was entirely required by the narrative of the moment. He's a very mysterious figure to me--he operates a lot of the time behind the screen of everyone around him. The extent to which he's operating at all we have no idea. I have the sense that he's operating less than meets the eye. [Laughs.] But we don't know. It will be an interesting period to deconstruct.
THC: What do you think about the way the media has been portraying the air strikes of the last few days? When Bush gave his speech before Congress a few weeks ago he actually specified in the speech that we might have "dramatic strikes, visible on television." There was this idea of a war "made for TV" in his speech.
JD: There were these kind of delphic utterances, about "some of it you will see, some of it you won't see." [Laughs.] This is the part we were meant to see. There was even the talk of sending in the Delta Force; the Delta Force has not been fantastic but we keep seeing these videos of it. We haven't actually heard about too many successes in a lot of years. There is that video aspect to what we're seeing. On the other hand, some response had to be made. Clearly, time was running out in terms of domestic politics to make a response, and so we made it. Where it will take us is hard to know.
THC: What would you say about the American people's ability to forget? Right after the election people were talking about the lack of legitimacy Bush had; right now he has a 90 percent approval rating.
JD: I was talking a couple years ago about this ahistorical quality to Christopher Dickey, the Newsweek bureau chief in Paris, and he said that the absence of memory--the refusal to recognize history--has been America's genius. And it has. There is a sense in which the whole idea of America is that it doesn't have anything to do with the past.
THC: What about the recent upsurge in a kind of patriotism?
JD: In the immediate aftermath of the attack, most people--I'm not talking about people on television--most people couldn't find words for it. There was a surge of actual patriotism, by which I mean a sort of a visceral love of the place, the home, the family. But then that got overtaken by jingoism. I had to go to the West Coast a week after the attacks so I was gone for a week, and when I came back to my astonishment New York was full of flags. It happened during the second week. I mean, I couldn't believe it, they were all over, every place you looked there was a flag. It was kind of troubling because it seemed to be something that people felt they had to do.
THC: Stepping back into more abstract terms, your book feels very descriptive but not terribly prescriptive. So what do you think has caused this transformation in our political process? Who are the behind-the-scenes players?
JD: Everyone inside the process has benefited. And that's a larger and larger group of people. It's not just politicians. It's all the people for whom politics is their business. It's people you see all day long now on the talk shows. Because of cable, there is no hour of the day when you can't watch somebody within the political class arguing with somebody else within the political class. These are people who don't have a very deep commitment to the rest of the country; in fact, they have none. You saw that most markedly during the year that led up to the impeachment; essentially the political class turned against the people and excoriated them at every opportunity for not going along with the notion that Clinton had to go. The American people were said to be interested in nothing but the Dow Jones, which was saying they were selfish, they were stupid, they were irresponsible. You saw the idea of secular democracy itself put up for grabs that year, which was pretty startling.
Read the full interview and J. HALE RUSSELL's interview with Joan Didion.
