On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War

Afterword: Critical Conventions / Postmodern Canons

Afterword: Critical Conventions / Postmodern Canons In the third chapter of Democracy (1984), Joan Didion tells us that the novel she is “no longer writing” was to have been “a study in provincial manners, in the acute tyrannies of class and privilege by which people assert themselves against the tropics,” focusing on a “family in which the colonial impulse had marked every member.”1 This is classic Didion in its narrative self-consciousness, but Democracy is also resolutely Didionesque in another way, since the novel she goes on to write is, like much of her fiction, interested in peeling away the veneer of civility to reveal what sustains it.2 Democracy puts its anticipated reader in an uncomfortable place, as we are encouraged to sympathize not with the left-liberal Kennedyesque political figure of Harry Victor, but with Jack Lovett, Inez Victor’s lover, and the one character who can, politically speaking, get things done. Things get sticky when we realize that Lovett works in the quasi-governmental realm. A man who “had access to airplanes” and saw “information as an end in itself” (31), Lovett is a shadow operator , with “the assignment to Vientiane, the missions to Haiti, Quebec, Rawalpindi” comprising “the traces of what intelligence people call ‘interest ’” (40). So a projected novel about class in Hawaii is replaced with one about the largely invisible underpinnings of hegemonic power, and done so in a way that asks us to love it (Lovett). Democracy offers a suitable conclusion to this study in the ways in which it raises questions about novels both written and unwritten, and about the forces that impinge on the ability or desire to write. But most intriguingly for my purposes, Didion’s attention to the differences 150 / ON ENDINGS between the novel she set out to write (about the machinery and rivalries of colonial history) and the novel she did actually write (about the realities of American involvement in world affairs) masks the third novel she could have written. For Democracy begins neither with colonial Hawaiian history nor with Jack Lovett’s involvement in Vietnam. Rather, it begins with 1952 and 1953 thermonuclear tests (“Christ they were sweet,” Lovett says (13)) in the Pacific, even though the rest of the novel will subsequently bracket this spectrally emergent nuclear theme: The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see. Something to behold. Something that could almost make you think you saw God, he said. (11) The dawn that makes one think of God, however, is not at this stage obviously natural or artificial; this could be either the naturally spectacular dawn of the tropics, or the artificial dawn of nuclear illumination (the “during” is ambiguous). If we assume that this dawn is a natural one, are we to take it that the dawn was something to see only because of the nuclear testing it preceded? Are all dawns seen from this atoll something to see, or do they need to be seen in relation to nuclear weapons? As Didion elsewhere notes, “dawned” was one of the “verbs favored for use with ‘the atomic age.’”3 When Lovett finally elaborates a few pages later by describing what he and his companions would do—“Watch for pink sky. And then the shot, naturally”—we get no real help, since it is unclear how we are to understand his use of “naturally” in this context (13). And, as Nadel has noted, the novel’s first sentence raises the problems of narrative truth the novel will go on to explore, since the lack of context means we aren’t sure how to take this: “Is it a claim about the light, given to us on the authority of Jack Lovett, or a claim about Jack’s response to the light, given to us on the authority of Inez Victor, or a claim about Inez’s conversation, given to us on the authority of Joan Didion, a character who narrates the story of Democracy?”4 While Nadel’s identification of the formal ambiguity of this opening statement is instructive, I would add that the problem of narrative truth is further extended by the content of the novel’s opening chapter. The passage goes on to record a problem for representation, though again the question of authority is raised: “He said: the sky was this pink no painter could approximate, one of the detonation theorists used to try, a pretty fair Sunday painter, he never got it. Just never captured...