On Joan Didion and the Art of Looking Back

In Thomas Wolfe’s posthumously published novel You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), protagonist George Webber finds himself in Germany amid the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and “face to face with something old and genuinely evil in the spirit of man.” Upon his return to America, Webber acknowledges that the darkness he has witnessed is not confined to Germany but is everywhere around him, a realization that “shook his inner world to its foundations.” Disillusioned, Webber reflects on the inability to return to a previous worldview, a previous self, or a previous innocence, though his realization remains tinged with longing:

You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing’s sake, back home to aestheticism, to one’s youthful idea of “the artist” and the all-sufficiency of “art” and “beauty” and “love” . . . away from all the strife and conflict of the world . . . back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time, back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

Webber’s unsettling revelations do not end in defeatism, however; rather, he is inspired toward “a definite sense of new direction.” While he possesses a keen awareness of the corruption that surrounds him, he also exhibits a distinct optimism for the future, particularly the future of America, which he believes still has the capacity to conquer evil, and in the end he insists that “this glorious assurance is not only our living hope, but our dream to be accomplished.” Webber’s conception of the future is thus one that simultaneously encompasses and rejects a nostalgic view of the past, as his forward-looking vision is shaped by a longing for the return of a past moment that collides with the realization of its impossibility.

Of course, Wolfe is not the only American writer to contend with a nostalgic impulse that is deeply connected to experiences of chaos and change. As social, industrial, and technological shifts continued to inform art, politics, and commerce over the course of the twentieth century, writers ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Toni Morrison also examined the allure of looking back, of yearning for a purportedly more stable past. Yet I would argue that there are few contemporary American writers who examine the complexity of nostalgia with more depth, breadth, curiosity, and prescience than Joan Didion. Like Wolfe before her, Didion acknowledges the multitude of ways we might define “home,” and recognizes the inevitable pull of nostalgia for a particular time, place, aesthetic, hope, ideology, or feeling even as she, too, harbors an increasing mistrust of past narratives that “once seemed everlasting.”

Across her body of work, Didion’s approach to the impossibility of returning “home”, in a geographical, temporal, and emotional sense, is varied, uncertain, and melancholic.

Yet Didion takes these ideas much further than Wolfe, and further than most writers, for that matter. Her engagement with nostalgia is not confined to a single character, publication, or era, but defines her fiction and nonfiction across decades, informing her discussions of politics, gender, rhetoric, media, and much more. Her nostalgia also becomes increasingly future-oriented, in a way that is more cautious than that of a character like George Webber, but which nevertheless undermines assessments of her worldview as nihilistic or fatalistic, and complicates common understandings of nostalgia as a purely conservative impulse.

Nostalgia was a starting point for Didion’s first novel, Run River (1963), by her own admission, and the theme became a driving force of both her fiction and nonfiction in ensuing years. However, Didion’s work does not paint an illusory picture of either personal or national history awash in the golden light of falsely idealistic imagery. Instead, she and her characters express nostalgic longings even as they question their own tendencies to do so, a dueling perspective that reflects the anxiety of the time periods Didion covers.

Across her body of work, Didion’s approach to the impossibility of returning “home”, in a geographical, temporal, and emotional sense, is varied, uncertain, and melancholic. She and her heroines alternately struggle against it and resign themselves to it, arriving at conclusions far more ambivalent than those expressed in Wolfe’s novel. Her work contends with the dangerous allure of allowing a particular vision of home to mire one in a stagnant existence. “The way you got sideswiped was by going back,” she wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking. Published over forty years after Run River, this work of nonfiction exemplifies her lifelong fascination with how the passage of time shapes, colors, and alters our memories, tempting us to look backward with a longing that does not tell us the whole truth about the past.

As she consistently questions her own process of looking back, Didion neither rejects nor succumbs to nostalgia, but wrestles with it; she harnesses it as a critical and literary tool, examining its potential alongside its perils, critiquing its manifestations, questioning its usefulness and timeliness, looking back to look forward. Indeed, nostalgia is at the center of nearly everything she wrote, and I argue that by investigating the various ways she engages with and defines the concept in both fiction and nonfiction, we can better understand the contradictory terms that have come to define Didion’s writing and literary persona: fatalistic and hopeful, fragile and strong, detached and connected, feminist icon and antifeminist, humble and haughty, conservative and liberal. Reading Didion’s work through the lens of nostalgia theory allows us to better understand the source of these tensions, and to reevaluate her views on American history, regional identity, hubris and imperialism, gender, political theater, the counterculture, national rhetoric, grief and loss, and more.

Ironically, on more than one occasion, Didion framed the very concept of nostalgia as being lost to history, a perception she discussed with a mixture of anxiety and pragmatism. “Sometimes I think that those of us who are now in our thirties were born into the last generation to carry the burden of ‘home,’” she wrote in 1967 (Slouching). Though she felt “the question of whether or not you could go home again was a very real part of the sentimental and largely literary baggage” of her generation, she also believed it to be “irrelevant to the children born of the fragmentation after World War II.” She situates her experience as a demarcating line that divides generations, suggesting that nostalgia might be part of a bygone era; it is “baggage” and “a burden,” something no longer applicable, despite remaining personally meaningful to her. And yet today, in our increasingly globalized, nomadic, and digital age, the anxiety over the concept of a fixed “home” is far from an irrelevant concept.

In fact, one might say that amid the turbulence of recent years, environmental catastrophes, economic disruption, pandemic, intensified culture wars and political divides, the desire for home is more pressing than ever. As cultural theorist Svetlana Boym writes, over the course of the twentieth century, contemporary society has seen a “global epidemic of nostalgia, an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.” The fascination with and wariness of nostalgia has persisted into the twentieth century, and a number of recent critical works have sought to clarify nostalgia’s opacity and examine its tentacles in many sectors of society, from politics to psychology to art.

Didion’s career-long examination of the nature of “home,” in all of its mutability, along with her interrogations of memory and nostalgia and their roles in shaping individual and collective identity, thus resonates in our current moment as we seek some stable ground in an ever-shifting and tumultuous era. More specifically, I would argue that Didion’s work, which makes distinctions between various kinds of nostalgia, helps us understand why and how nostalgia can simultaneously exist as a cultural malaise and a personal necessity.

While Didion’s cultural observations are often filtered through a personal experience of nostalgia, more often the latter functions as a critical lens that she discerningly turns onto twentieth-century American culture.

Many critics have previously acknowledged the nostalgia in Joan Didion’s writing, yet none have deeply investigated its complex nature across her complete body of work or considered its potential as a theoretical map of her ideas. To date, many of the those who have addressed nostalgia in Didion’s writing have framed it as a largely negative phenomenon, a “retrograde nostalgia for a firm center and . . . derision of the new” which Didion sometimes struggles to reject or “repudiate.”

Still others see it as evidence of Didion’s navel-gazing, a glance not just backward but solely inward. In one of the most excoriating of these assessments, Bruce Bawer criticizes the “self-romanticization” in Didion’s retrospective musings, viewing her process of “wistfully recalling her youth” as an example of the “egocentrism” and “solipsistic” perspective that he feels runs through her work. While not all assessments of Didion’s incorporation of nostalgia are so biting, many are limited by their failure to recognize the diversity of nostalgias in Didion’s writing. Often, it is taken for granted as a presence in her work or mentioned in passing amid other analyses.

For example, Ellen G. Friedman refers briefly to an “obsessive” nostalgia in an early examination of Didion’s melancholic and existentialist sensibility; Kathleen Vandenberg takes note of Didion’s “complicated nostalgia” in her larger study of rhetorical technique in Didion’s later nonfiction; William Handley also briefly acknowledges that the nostalgia in Didion’s work is “complicated”; and Alissa Wilkinson, in her specific examination of Didion’s fraught relationship with Hollywood, steps back to observe that Didion “had been trafficking in some kind of nostalgia all her life.”

Taken together, assertions like these serve as entreaties to go back through Didion’s catalogue to ask more pointedly: What exactly does this look like? What shapes does nostalgia take? Why is it in fact so complicated? Why does it obsess her? What form, if any, is Didion peddling? How do her own direct comments about nostalgia square with the ways she presents it in her prose, the way it is baked into her carefully constructed sentences? How does it intersect with her writing on class, gender, and the undercurrents of American life?

My goal is to untangle and elucidate the concept’s more varied meanings in her fiction and nonfiction with the goal of answering such questions. Through a close reading of her prose that appreciates the “arrangement of words” that Didion valued, I draw attention to the ways she frames certain nostalgias as essential to intellectual and emotional growth, distinguishable from nostalgia used solely to promote traditionalism, self-delusion, self-absorption, or control. While Didion’s cultural observations are often filtered through a personal experience of nostalgia, more often the latter functions as a critical lens that she discerningly turns onto twentieth-century American culture. At the same time, nostalgia theory becomes a tool we might turn back onto Didion’s work, useful in probing not only her own enigmatic ideas but also the ways modern American history has been narrativized, and how that impacts our cultural and political discussions in the present moment.

An interrogation of nostalgia is also, I would argue, part of her own truth-seeking project as a New Journalist, and her exploration of the allure and menace of nostalgia takes on new dimensions as she directs her gaze outward. Indeed, the nature of New Journalism as a genre allows Didion to demonstrate an acute awareness of her own narrative construction; she draws attention to the fact that her cultural criticism might be tinged with nostalgia and then proceeds to critique this tendency in herself.

She hovers over the lines where memory and invention cross and wonders how this has shaped not only her identity but that of her country.

This is evident in her attempts to write against a narrative, and her repeated insistence that she no longer believes in the stories that previously provided her with a solid moral foundation. And yet her most oft-cited observation, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” suggests that it is human nature to craft an idea of a time or place that never existed in precisely the way we would prefer to believe, a mechanism we employ to explain things to ourselves and inspire a forward momentum.

In this way, she remains sympathetic to nostalgia even as she recognizes its consequences. Her writing reveals that a self-aware deployment of nostalgia might help to reveal some truths of the present, and that nostalgia should be held and cross-examined rather than dismissed outright. Often, it becomes a road rather than the roadblock, and the way she works to understand the relationship between herself, her culture, and her history, her longing being integral to her experience. The result of Didion’s exercise in returning to her past again and again is a moving commentary less about what we remember than how we remember, and what that mode of remembering reveals about us as individuals and as a community.

In this way, her nostalgia plays an essential role in assessing not just her own individual life, as critics like Bawer suggest, but the cultural and political landscapes of her time. Didion explores the way the concept shaped American culture in the twentieth century, stepping back to survey its varied consequences and search for its sources. She examines specific pockets of society whose central darkness, as she sees it, is the utter lack of any engagement with history, let alone nostalgia. She arrives at poignant realizations after recollecting the past in her personal essays while, in the same breath, questioning the reliability of her memory. She is skeptical of the very idea of an “authentic” past that could be completely free of nostalgic revision and acknowledges the subjectivity of historicization even as she practices it. She hovers over the lines where memory and invention cross and wonders how this has shaped not only her identity but that of her country.

In both fiction and nonfiction, she documents the ways that America has used nostalgia to “pernicious” effect on a political and imperial level, a factor that continues to shape our national mythos (Where I Was From). As a nearly ubiquitous presence, nostalgia becomes a recurring theme, a character trait, a narrative perspective, a subject of her criticism, and a critical device in her work. Didion’s work emphasizes that while nostalgia can be paralyzing and foster stagnation when wielded at the institutional level and as an unquestioned worldview, political tactic, or marketing technique, it is also a natural inclination, one that allows us to make sense of our place in the world at any given moment, and can be a tool for uncovering personal truths and identifying cultural and national myths.

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From The Art of Looking Back: Joan Didion and American Nostalgia; courtesy of LSU Press and the author.