Joan Didion Cover Image

Joan Didion

Start Free Trial

The Bond between Narrator and Heroine in Democracy

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

In the following essay, Henderson calls Democracy “an uneasy affirmation of the possibility of personal meaning” because of its portrayal of the relationship between its central female characters.
SOURCE: “The Bond between Narrator and Heroine in Democracy,” in American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 1989, pp. 69-85.

When Susan Stamberg told Joan Didion in a 1977 radio interview that she would never win the Nobel Prize for literature because her novels were too pessimistic, Didion readily agreed.

I think that's probably true. … One of the books that made the strongest impression on me when I was in college was The Portrait of a Lady. Henry James's heroine, Isabel Archer, was the prototypic romantic idealist. It trapped her, and she ended up a prisoner of her own ideal. I think a lot of us do. My adult life has been a succession of expectations, misperceptions. I dealt only with an ideal I had of the world, not with the world as it was. The reality does intervene eventually. I think my early novels were ways of dealing with the revelation that experience is largely meaningless. \Emphasis mine.]

At the time of this interview, Didion had published three novels—Run River (1963), Play It As It Lays (1970), and A Book of Common Prayer (1977). To Stamberg's earlier challenge that she found Play It As It Lays and Common Prayer frightening, even distasteful, Didion had answered obliquely, “A Book of Common Prayer is … not a good deal more cheerful, but I think it's not as ugly.”

By the end of Common Prayer, two of the four major characters are dead and a third, the narrator, is dying. Yet its atmosphere is not unreservedly ugly because it embodies a powerful existential moral: In a world ruled by a capricious and elusive deity (or perhaps no deity at all), people must care for one another. Our conduct must evidence a “common prayer” of grace and love, for we are bound by common morality. Decent characters in the novel are defined by their attempts to care for those who are weak or endangered. Charlotte Douglas cares for her dying baby and for the children of Boca Grande. Leonard Douglas cares for Charlotte and even—an extraordinary act of generosity—for her dying first husband. Grace Strasser-Mendana tries desperately to save Charlotte's life. Despite the courage and concern of these characters, however, the novel affirms nothing beyond the existential fact of death as the measure of friendship and love.

In a perceptive essay on “The Didion Sensibility” written shortly before the publication of Democracy, Ellen G. Friedman stated that Didion “has no faith in the authority of individual choice and action. The individual in her view is not endowed with the power to recreate the world, imbue it with meaning, restore coherence and purpose.” As Friedman acknowledged, however, Didion's characters are often redeemed by an immense capacity for commitment and love, even when—as is usually the case—that commitment is doomed to fall far short of its purpose. In Run River Lily's commitment to Everett cannot save him from suicide; in Play It As It Lays Maria's commitment to her daughter cannot restore the child to health. While intense, the heroine's devotion is in both cases flawed; Lily contributes to Everett's destruction by her repeated infidelities, and Maria cannot accept the limitations of her daughter's illness. Although both women, like Charlotte and Grace in Common Prayer, are ennobled by love, the love is ultimately powerless to create coherence even within the family, far less within the community or the world.

At the end of her interview with Stamberg, Didion said, “My next novel is going to take place in Hawaii. I can't describe the picture, except that it is very pink and it smells like flowers, and I'm afraid to describe it out loud because if I describe it out loud I won't write it down.” For this novel, which she worked on over seven years, Didion created a new prototype of character and a new universe of personal relationships; for the first time in her fictional world, she created characters capable of successful loyalties and of purposeful lives. Democracy is not a fanciful novel—it includes a fair share of fools and villains—but it also portrays two strong and autonomous women whose lives mesh in a pattern of order and purpose. The novel is an uneasy affirmation of the possibility of personal meaning in a world where society and politics are defined by artifice and self-seeking.

The sensibility from which Democracy evolved was deeply affected by Didion's travels in Latin America and in Asia, where she stayed in both Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur. She has given us a full report of one of these visits, the trip to El Salvador that she took with her husband, the writer John Dunne, in June 1982. The long essay Salvador (1983) is an account of the events and impressions of their two-week stay. The techniques of Salvador are those that define her earlier journalism: a precise rendering of what she saw, heard, and felt, a complete absence of sentimentality, a bluntness of tone that serves to make the terror more palpable. In Salvador in the summer of 1982, no place and no one was safe; ordinary parking lots sported cars with bullet-shattered windshields and congealed blood on the upholstery; ordinary people disappeared to turn up (if ever) as viciously mutilated bodies.

Both in the book and in interviews about it, Didion stated that the trip was the most terrifying experience of her life. Reporter Leslie Garis asked them why they went.

Dunne answers instantly, “Oh, we were desperate to go.”


“Desperate to go,” Didion echoes. …


“I was interested in what the United States was doing in El Salvador,” she says.

In her career as a reporter, Didion has always felt the pull of public and private catastrophes, often seeing them as emblems of our time. In the sixties she felt a personal need to witness the pain that seared the United States—the children on drugs in Haight-Ashbury, the Manson murder trial, the burial of young Americans killed in Vietnam. Since the late seventies, she has been drawn to the pain in other countries as well, especially those with which the United States has been involved.

Democracy reflects the inner changes in Didion that both led to and resulted from her trip to Salvador. It was no longer a novel set in Hawaii, but a novel spanning two continents, a novel in which personal and political lives are inextricably intertwined. The first Didion novel to contain portraits of fulfilling adult relationships, it is set—paradoxically—against a background of political violence and social chaos. From its opening sentence—“The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see”—the novel projects a world contracted through technology into a single community existing under the threat of nuclear holocaust. Every major character is affected by the central political event of the novel, the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975. Corruption and instability in government are mirrored throughout by disloyalty and disorder in the extended and nuclear family.

The very real chaos in the realms of politics and society today creates a challenge for the novelist, for the novel is that form of literature that traditionally defines the individual in relation to institutions such as family, community, and nation. When these relationships lose meaning, the characters must either be shown to find meaning from another source or life's insignificance will be tacitly affirmed. The voice and “self” of the narrator often assume a crucial importance in this question of the locus of life's larger meaning.

In Part I of Democracy, the narrative “self” that Didion projects is problematic. “I began thinking about Inez Victor and Jack Lovett at a point in my life when I lacked certainty, lacked even that minimum level of ego essential to the writing of novels, lacked conviction, lacked patience with the past and interest in memory; lacked faith even in my own technique.” “Call me the author,” she proclaims at the opening of chapter 2 but acknowledges that she has lost her author(ity) as novelist; she knows neither where nor how to begin. She lacks the easy confidence of the Victorian narrator (she mentions Trollope). She identifies with the “gold-feathered bird” in Wallace Stevens's poem “Of Mere Being,” the bird who “sings in the palm, without human meaning, without human feeling, a foreign song.” She has no plot, only dreams, images, and fragments of poems. “I have those pink dawns of which Jack Lovett spoke. I have the dreams, recurrent, in which my whole field of vision fills with rainbow, in which I open a door into a growth of tropical green. … Consider any of these things long enough and you will see that they tend to deny the relevance not only of personality but of narrative, which makes them less than ideal images with which to begin a novel, but we go with what we have.”

For the rest of this chapter and the first portion of the next, she tells us about the novel she is not writing, the historical novel of Hawaii that would trace the childhood and ancestry of Inez Christian, that was to have been written from Inez's point of view. Democracy is a later version of the novel originally entitled Angel Visits, begun shortly after the completion of A Book of Common Prayer. Angel Visits opened with Inez Victor's recollection of her mother; its first line was, “I have never seen Madame Bovary in the flesh but imagine my mother dancing.” In Democracy, Angel Visits has become “the shards of the novel I am no longer writing. … I lost patience with it. I lost nerve.”

The skeleton of a romantic novel is constructed and then deconstructed. The reader is mystified. The critics were, too, although some applauded and others panned. “What is Didion doing as character in her own novel?” was the question most insistently raised by reviewers. If she is writing autobiography, is her story of Inez Christian and Jack Lovett and Harry Victor biography? (Mary McCarthy actually tried to find these people in Who's Who.) Didion employed unconventional narrative structures in earlier novels, but in none of them did she actually appear as a character.

The answer to the question raised by the reviews lies in Didion's self-definition as a writer. Writing is for her an act of self-discovery. “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Relentlessly scrupulous in this pursuit, Didion abandons projects that do not lead to essential self-knowledge. Sometime before or after her trip to El Salvador in 1982, Angel Visits, narrated by Inez Victor, no longer felt right. It was too provincial, too limited in scope; it was not addressing Didion's private thoughts and fears. Her awareness of America's interventionist strategies in foreign countries intruded; the trips to Asia and El Salvador intensified her quest to understand herself as a North American and as a citizen of the larger world.

At the same time, her fictional characters Inez Victor and Jack Lovett had already seized her imagination, moved into her study. (“I think you identify with all your characters,” she told Sara Davidson in an interview. “They become your family, closer to you than anyone you know. They kind of move into the house and take over the furniture.”) She had already developed a relationship with the characters and with certain images (“Those pink dawns of which Jack Lovett spoke”) surrounding them. For all of these reasons, Didion entered a version of herself into her novel—not her private self, herself as mother/wife/friend—but herself as writer and reporter. In the final chapter of Democracy, she acknowledges, “It has not been the novel I set out to write, nor am I exactly the person who set out to write it.” A process of change is implicit in that of self-discovery.

Didion the narrator discovers herself most fully by entering the life of Inez Victor, her double, her alter ego. There are several kinds of twins in the novel: Jessie and Adlai, the twin children of Inez and Harry Victor; Harry Victor and Billy Dillon, the inseparable political team of candidate and manager; and most significant, Didion and Inez, two women born three weeks apart whose paths keep crossing, who share the perils of celebrity, who are both given to reticence and emotional control in their personal relationships. The story of Inez led the narrator Didion to restored confidence and self-knowledge; in turn, Didion became Inez's closest friend and confidante. Neither character can be understood without appreciating the bond that subtly develops between them.

Democracy is a novel of correspondences: in addition to the correspondences between Inez and the narrator, there are numerous correspondences between the public and the private spheres, as well as a long series of literary correspondences (e.g., between Didion's Democracy and Henry Adams's Democracy; between the rhetoric assignment that Didion cites in chapter 2 of Part 1 and the structure of the novel itself). The most thematically central of these, however, is the parallel quest for life's meaning undertaken by Inez and the narrator, a quest pursued consciously and intellectually by the narrator and, until the end of the novel, fitfully and unconsciously by Inez. During the narrator's visit to Inez in Kuala Lumpur, Inez recurrently mentions coincidences of place that form a pattern in her relationship with Jack Lovett. “During the five days I spent in Kuala Lumpur Inez mentioned such ‘correspondences,’ her word, a number of times, as if they were messages intended specifically for her, evidence of a narrative she had not suspected.” Inez articulates the narrative primarily in terms of places and events; it is the narrator's rendering of the story, the novel itself, that will locate its real significance in the emotional and moral categories of love and loyalty.

For writer Didion the quest for meaning and the obsession with narrative are components of a single struggle. In the opening essay of The White Album, she wrote; “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. … 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.” Didion repeatedly describes herself as a writer who begins with a concrete image born of experience and then traces its path through her imagination. The narrator of Democracy can recover meaning and certainty only when she finds a form and structure in which to cast the disparate images of the gold-feathered bird, the pink dawns, and the tropical greens that dance through her imagination.

By following the images, painfully, faithfully, she ultimately succeeds in her appointed task. The images take on contexts, the contexts yield patterns, and the patterns yield meaning. One of the clearest patterns is of parallels and intersections between her life and that of Inez, together with a felt affinity between them. In 1960 she and Inez were both working for Vogue, and Didion first met Jack Lovett when he dropped in to see her there. (“I had known Inez Victor for perhaps a year but I had never seen her smile that way.”) In 1972 Didion is present when a reporter from the Associated Press asks Inez what she regards as the greatest cost of public life. Her answer is “memory.” When the reporter is puzzled, she elaborates, “You drop fuel. You jettison cargo. Eject the crew. You lose track.

Three times in the course of the interview, Inez repeated the single word memory in answer to the reporter's question, but when the story appeared through the Associated Press wire, it read, “Inez Victor claims she is often misquoted.” Inez was trying to tell the reporter that her experience of life was jagged and discontinuous, that its pressures often led her to lose a former “self” as one might drop cargo from a plane. Clearly, this reporter did not understand. Didion did, however, and from this time she takes up the burden of Inez's story, piecing it together from various sources, trying to give it coherence. She needs to do this not primarily because Inez's memory is deficient—in fact, many of her memories are sharp and clear—but because they are scattered visual memories, usually dissociated from emotion. Didion also needs to do it to recover her sense of herself as a writer; if she can find the true narrative thread that defines Inez's experience, she can recover her own conviction of life's existential meaning.

Part 1 of Democracy might be called Didion's book; although we learn something of Jack's life and character and much of the history of Inez's marriage, Didion's presence dominates. The reader is drawn by her elegiac feelings of transience and dislocation, her sense of drowning in disconnected dreams, her need to show us the “shards of the novel” she is not writing. (That would have been an easy novel, a “provincial novel of manners.”) As the book progresses, she gradually recovers a sense of purposeful writing—and the catalyst for recovery is her felt connection with Inez. A key moment in the forging of that connection is the interview in which Didion sits quietly in the background as Inez repeats the word memory. Didion had cited as one symptom of her malaise a lack of “patience with the past and interest in memory.” By the end of Part 1, her interest is mobilized, her mood raised, her narrative under way.

By the opening of Part 2 (Inez's book), she has charted a course (while still uncertain of precisely how to navigate it) that will traverse the love story of Inez and Jack from its inception through the crisis in Inez's family that brought it full circle. The markers in this course are events and feelings that she learned from observation, from Jack, whom she encountered from time to time in her travels, from Billy Dillon and Harry Victor, and from Inez. The chief obstacles are enigmatic qualities within the lovers: “I have no memory of any one moment in which either Inez Victor or Jack Lovett seemed to spring out, defined. They were equally evanescent, in some way emotionally invisible; unattached, wary to the point of opacity, and finally elusive. They seemed not to belong anywhere at all except, oddly, together.”

By the sheer persistence of her quest, which gathers such momentum that it takes her finally to Kuala Lumpur, Didion penetrates most of the mystery of Inez Victor. The woman who emerges shares certain traits with earlier Didion heroines, although in fundamental ways she is radically different. Like both Lily Knight of Run River and Charlotte Douglas of A Book of Common Prayer, she is tough and outwardly composed under stress: she remains calm when her mother abandons her in Honolulu, when Janet lies dying in the hospital, when her daughter runs away to Saigon in the closing days of the war.

In other ways, however, she represents a fundamental departure from her predecessors. Unlike Maria Wyeth of Play It As It Lays, who imagines that she can one day live a normal life with her brain-damaged daughter, or Lily Knight, who believes that she can have serial affairs without damaging her marriage, or Charlotte Douglas, who lives in sentimental reveries of her “inseparable” relationship with her fugitive daughter, Inez nurtures no obsessive illusions about herself or other people. She recognizes the essential character of the separate members of her family; she has a realistic grasp of what is possible and what is not. Although she believed for many years that Harry would become president, the belief was in the realm of the possible, to be discarded the moment he lost the nomination. Her realism, together with the courage that sustains it, enables her to survive devastating losses and still reclaim and ultimately direct her life.

She also has firmer self-esteem than her counterparts in earlier Didion novels, all of whom look to men to validate their essential self-worth. Unlike Lily, Maria, or Charlotte, she does not fall into bed with any man who wants her, for her self-respect renders her incapable of casual affairs. Although her love for Jack is profoundly sexual, her sense of decorum prevents her from acting on these feelings while she is living with her husband.

They did run into each other.


Here or there.


Often enough, during those twenty-some years during which Inez Victor and Jack Lovett refrained from touching each other, refrained from exhibiting undue pleasure or untoward interest in each other's activities, refrained most specifically from even being alone together, to keep the idea of it quick.

The affair between Inez and Jack is one of the most heroic and moving sexual and emotional relationships of contemporary American fiction. It is also quintessentially romantic, for it ultimately demands of Jack the risk of life itself and of Inez the courage to begin life over.

When Jack first meets Inez on her seventeenth birthday, the image of her—in a white dress with a gardenia in her hair—becomes engraved in his imagination. Their affair begins a month later, when he rescues her from a drunken date, but they both know they cannot look forward to a conventional future together. When Jack predicts, “you'll go off to college and marry some squash player and forget we ever did any of it,” Inez simply responds, “I suppose we'll run into each other. … Here or there.” Yet she forgets nothing that passed between them. When she marries Harry Victor in the spring of her sophomore year at Sarah Lawrence, two months pregnant with his child, she sends Jack an announcement with the words “Not a squash player” written across it.

From the moment of her marriage, her story becomes that of a woman defined by her role, the supporting role of wife to an ambitious public man. Plunged almost immediately into an active political life, she appears not to develop any core of identity, any private self. For the twenty years of her marriage to Harry, she had only two genuine interests—her twin children and a strong wish to work with refugees—a wish denied when Harry's political advisers decided that “refugees were an often controversial and therefore inappropriate special interest.”

For twenty years she played the role that Harry and Billy Dillon assigned to her. She was beside Harry as he rose on the tide of liberal politics—through his two years with the Justice Department, through the marches in Mississippi, through his three successful campaigns for Congress, through his brief period as senator and his failed bid for the 1972 presidential nomination. She did not protest volubly when Harry had affairs (“‘Inez, I'm asking you nice, behave, girls like that come with the life,’ Billy Dillon said to Inez after Connie Willis and Frances Landau.”). She went on speaking tours and fact-finding missions and to fund-raisers. She behaved precisely as the wife of a politician should—in his interests.

Several critics suggested that the Inez-Harry relationship was modeled on that of either Jackie and Jack or Joan and Ted Kennedy. These suggestions may have elements of truth, but the portrait of Inez could represent equally the wife of any American politician aspiring to national prominence, women who sacrifice not merely their time and careers but their sense of continuity and even of identity. The sacrifice is enormous, not only because they must suppress cherished wishes (Inez's wish to help refugees), but because they must shape a self that is public property, that is constantly on display. The middle-class liberal constituency of Harry Victor felt that they knew Inez, when in fact they knew only media images: “These people had all seen Inez, via telephoto lens, drying Jessie's blond hair by the swimming pool at the house in Amagansett. These people had all seen Inez, in the Daily News, leaving Lenox Hill Hospital with Adlai on the occasion of his first automobile accident. These people had all seen photo after photo of the studied clutter in the library of the apartment on Central Park West. … These people had taken their toll.”

Although faithful at times, the media image is just as likely to be false. When CBS Reports did brief biographies of the candidates' wives during Harry's 1972 campaign, its representation of Inez as a woman with a “very special feeling for the arts” and a “very special interest in education” was largely a fictional construct. As part of the same program, her sister Janet in a live interview presented a certainly glamorized and probably incorrect version of incidents from their childhood. While watching the televised interview, Inez drew up a list of the names of the Star Ferry boats that crossed between Hong Kong and Kowloon. At the time, Didion says, she thought of this cool detachment as “the frivolous habit of an essentially idle mind”; she later recognized it as a protective mechanism “for living a life in which the major cost was memory.”

Yet to reconstruct an exhaustive list of the names of boats one has never taken requires the capacity of a retentive memory. Didion is using “memory” in a special sense that can be illuminated by a passage from her 1966 essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” which appears in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. … We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” Inez has unconsciously divided her life into discrete segments, and with each transition she tries to jettison painful experiences from memory. She can recall from an earlier period material that is not emotionally charged—such as the names of boats—but she refuses to remember painful events such as her abandonment by her mother. This defense saves the anguish of emotional work and may help her to survive and to function, but it at times gives a hard edge to her character, and it consistently disrupts the emotional continuity of her life. The only character in the novel who penetrates this defense is her tenacious friend Didion.

Inez does not often take her emotional pulse, nor does she often look at her past. On the few occasions when she does, there is a striking difference between the happy memories and the sad ones. The positive experiences are recalled with strong emotional overtones. “She recalled being extremely happy eating lunch by herself in a hotel room in Chicago, once when snow was drifting on the window ledges. There was a lunch in Paris that she remembered in detail: a late lunch with Harry and the twins at Pre Catelan in the rain. … She remembered Jessie crowing with delight and pointing imperiously at a poodle seated on a gilt chair across the room. She remembered Harry unbuttoning Adlai's wet sweater, kissing Jessie's wet hair, pouring them each a half glass of white wine.”

Her memories of tense, unhappy moments, on the other hand, are primarily visual, only faintly suggestive of emotion. After her discovery of Jessie's addiction to heroin, she and Harry run through three therapists before discovering the program in which Jessie is helped. “Inez remembered that the therapist was wearing a silver ankh. She remembered that she could see Jessie through a glass partition, chewing on a strand of her long blond hair, bent over the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.”

It is Didion who portrays for us the losses and trials of Inez's life, sometimes telling us the source of her information, sometimes slipping into the role of omniscient narrator. When Inez finds Jessie on the floor of her bedroom begging to die, she remains calm and dry-eyed, despite the fact that Jessie is by this time (June 1973) the only member of her family to whom Inez feels bound. Harry has alienated her through infidelity and hypocrisy, and Adlai at seventeen is a crude carbon copy of his father, without feeling for the girl he almost killed through reckless driving, without feeling for his sister, whom he calls “the junkie.” The bond between mother and daughter—in most Didion novels the strongest of emotional ties—is deftly implied in Democracy when Jessie calls Inez from the adolescent treatment facility in Seattle and reports that her job is “pretty cinchy”—“The bright effort in Jessie's voice had constricted Inez's throat.” As Inez's marriage moves slowly but steadily toward dissolution, she neither mourns nor rages; she simply prepares in the depths of her being to once again “jettison cargo” and “eject crew.”

In March 1975, as the war in Vietnam is moving toward the fall of Saigon, Didion and Inez share a parallel experience of “homecoming,” of returning after twenty years to the place each grew into adulthood. Didion is lecturing at Berkeley, feeling the personal nostalgia of teaching in the same rooms in which she had attended classes as an undergraduate and, with her preternatural response to public catastrophe, obsessively following the newspaper accounts of events in Southeast Asia. “In 1955 on this campus I had first noticed the quickening of time. In 1975 time was no longer just quickening but collapsing, falling in on itself, the way a disintegrating star contracts into a black hole.” Although she has asked her students to “consider the political implications of both the reliance on and the distrust of abstract words,” their politics are radicalized, and they interpret the fall of Saigon not as disaster but as its liberation from imperialism. Thus, she is lonely, cut off from them, for her mind is focused on the specific, concrete events of the evacuation.

At the same time, Inez returns to personal catastrophe in Honolulu, for her father has been imprisoned for shooting her sister and the Nisei politician who was probably her lover, Wendell Omura. Omura is dead, and Janet lies dying in the hospital. Like Didion, Inez is surrounded by people who not only refuse to focus on the specific events of the tragedy but deny that a tragedy has taken place. Her uncle invites her to have a martini, and her aunt suggests that she and Billy tour the ranch. Dwight and Ruth Christian have no affective response at all, not wanting the surface of life ruffled. At one level they are satirical characters; when Inez insists on trying to learn how and why the tragedy occurred, her aunt challenges, “Why air family linen?” and her uncle agrees, “Why accentuate the goddamn negative?”

More significantly, Inez's aunt and uncle are used by Didion to point to the absence of traditional Judeo-Christian values in the contemporary world. They are a family named “Christian” who display neither compassion, faith, nor charity. Janet's death, taking place the day before Good Friday, is in part a retelling of Christ's crucifixion. Although the insane Paul Christian casts himself as a martyr, it is Janet and Wendell Omura who are the Christ-figures. As Christ is abandoned by his apostles, so is Janet Christian abandoned by her family. During the twenty-four hours that pass before she is declared legally dead, only Inez cares enough to keep the vigil at the hospital. Her uncle plans a simple funeral (“the ashes to ashes business”) from which the Twenty-third Psalm is to be specifically excluded. “Passive crap, the Lord is my shepherd. … No sheep in this family.”

Didion invokes the Christian myth to dramatize the spiritual impoverishment of Inez's family. Only she truly mourns; when choosing the dress for Janet's burial, she cries for the only time in the novel, sharing her grief not with her husband but with Jack Lovett. Her grief breaks through her usual suppression of memory; she remembers Janet's wedding and Janet's childhood identification with their absent mother. In the flood of genuine emotion caused by Janet's death—and by seeing Jack again—her feelings for Harry are like debris on the tide. When he criticizes her for going to the hospital with Jack while her sister was dying, she tells him that their marriage is over. In recounting the scene to Didion later, she admits to a failure of memory on one point. “She had either said ‘Don't dramatize’ to Harry that Saturday evening or she had said ‘I love him’ to Harry that Saturday evening. It seemed more likely that she had said ‘Don't dramatize’ but she had wanted to say ‘I love him’ and she did not remember which.”

Because Inez typically expresses her strongest emotions obliquely—not once in the novel does she tell Jack directly that she loves him—the reader can be confident that she said, “Don't dramatize.” Yet she told Didion what had been in her mind, what she felt at the core of her being. This fact is a measure of the trust between the two women, of the powerful, mutually felt bond between them.

So strong is this bond that at times Didion's memory is indistinguishable from that of Inez, and the reader does not know how Didion “knows” the details of crucial scenes in Inez's story. One such scene takes place after Inez has said goodbye to Harry, when she goes with Jack to the bars where he hopes to learn of Jessie's whereabouts in Saigon.

Where Inez stood with her back against the jukebox and her arms around Jack Lovett.


Where the Mamas and the Papas sang “Dream A Little Dream of Me.”

The novel keeps returning to a single line of dialogue from this scene, Jack's lament that Inez is married to a politician of national prominence, “Oh shit, Inez … Harry Victor's wife.” Jack understands the likely personal consequences of his elopement with Inez. He knows that it will probably spell the end of his career as an undercover agent for the United States; he may also suspect that it will place his life in jeopardy. His willingness to suffer these consequences is the ultimate test and ultimate proof of love.

Of the cast of characters in Democracy, only Jack and Inez approach realization of the ideals their names suggest. Ruth Christian is perhaps the most ruthless character in the novel, concerned only with preserving appearances and avoiding all feeling and sentiment; Dwight Christian (unlike Dwight Eisenhower, who created unity among those around him) generates division by betraying Janet's husband in their business dealings. The bigoted and self-pitying Paul Christian is the opposite of the saint who welcomed all races into the Church. Harry Victor sustains only losses—the nomination, his wife, and almost his daughter. Only Inez embodies authentic Christian values, leaving her family on Easter night for a journey that will end with the sacrifice of comforts to a permanent, lonely commitment to serving the human community. Her description of her departure with Jack suggests resurrection and new life. “Inez said the 3:45 a.m. flight from Honolulu to Hong Kong was exactly the way she hoped dying would be. Dawn all the way.”

Love for Jack is service and loyalty; he spends much of his life waiting for Inez, protecting her from rain and from danger, respecting her marriage until she herself denies it. It is her decision to flee the charade of “the correct thing” with which her aunt and uncle are obsessed, to acknowledge the hollowness of her marriage by resigning the role of supportive wife and public figure. The break is final and permanent; once again she has jettisoned cargo and ejected the crew of her past. This time, however, she will find her own place, be her own person. She is not an Isabel Archer, Didion's “prototypic romantic idealist,” willing to remain imprisoned within a loveless marriage.

Part 3, covering the month of April 1975, is a transitional segment of the novel. Inez is in Hong Kong—for the most part alone, as Jack makes repeated trips to Saigon, both to gain strategic information and to find Jessie before the American evacuation is completed. The sexual component of their reunion is muted almost to complete silence, in keeping with the urgency of the occasion. Yet their relationship is tender and generous on both sides; for one entire night, Inez listens to Jack describe the madness that has taken over the leadership of the falling city, and when Inez expresses fears that Jessie may be lost, Jack promises to find her.

During the long days of solitude and waiting, Inez establishes a routine; she walks in the rain, reads American newspapers at the embassy, and spends much time watching Chinese children playing outside a nursery school. When Jessie's safety is assured, she realizes that her attitude and perspective toward herself and her family has radically changed. She feels separated from Harry and the children—and from her former “self”—by a vast emotional distance.

It occurred to her that for almost the first time in twenty years she was not particularly interested in any of them.


Responsible for them, yes, in a limited way, but not interested in them.


They were definitely connected to her but she could no longer grasp her own or their uniqueness, her own or their difference, genius, special claim. … The world that night was full of people flying from place to place and fading in and out and there was no reason why she or Harry or Jessie or Adlai or for that matter Jack Lovett … should be exempted from the general movement. …


Just because they were Americans.

Like Didion, who anguished over events in Saigon, she now feels a member, not of a family or nation, but of the world community. Not fully understanding why, she is ready to forgo the privileged status of the American citizen. Since Inez is unable to define her own “uniqueness,” Didion will attempt the definition by constructing the narrative of her life, probing its mystery.

In the summer of 1975, Didion travels thousands of miles to build her narrative—to learn events and their dates, to learn why Inez is in Kuala Lumpur and what happened to Jack. She travels to New York and to Martha's Vineyard to talk with Harry Victor and Billy Dillon and to Honolulu to speak with Dick Ziegler. She even talks briefly with Jessie and Adlai. But Inez remains inaccessible, politely but firmly rejecting Didion's repeated requests to see her—until the first week in December when she suddenly changes her mind and invites her to come to Kuala Lumpur.

Only to Didion does Inez communicate her memories of her sister and the details of Jack's death, as well as her view of their love affair. Didion is frustrated because Inez cannot remember those facts—places and dates—that are important to a reporter, but her memory is otherwise clear and full. For five days she recounts memories to Didion. She remembers her mother, slightly drunk, singing at her sister's wedding; she remembers that Janet as a child “had studied snapshots of Carol Christian and cut her hair the same way.” Her account of Jack's sudden death in Jakarta and her long trip with his body to Honolulu, where she negotiates an honorable burial space for him in the military cemetery at Schofield, is deeply moving, for this loss followed that of her sister by only four months. After burying Jack under the jacaranda tree, Inez flies directly to Kuala Lumpur, without seeing or calling any member of her family.

Part 4 of the novel gives us a later perspective on the narrator's meeting with Inez in December 1975. (Since Adlai, who was eighteen in 1975, apparently has his law degree in the final chapter—he is clerking for a federal judge in San Francisco—the span of time since Didion's visit to Kuala Lumpur must be at least seven years.) Inez has seen neither Harry nor her children since the spring of 1975, although she writes to them—most often to Jessie. She also stays in touch with Didion and Billy Dillon, whom Didion occasionally meets for dinner. (“In some ways I have replaced Inez as the woman Billy Dillon imagines he wishes he had married.”) In a piece in the London Guardian about Southeast Asia's refugees, Inez is quoted as saying that “she would be in Kuala Lumpur until the last refugee was dispatched”—in other words, her lifetime.

The relationship between Didion and Inez might appear to be that of priest and confessor, or psychiatrist and patient, for the confidences flow only one way. However, Didion needs Inez as much as Inez needs Didion; through telling her story, Didion confirms her essential “self,” the writer-reporter discovering meaning by understanding and ordering experience. The narrator senses rather than articulates the parallels of character and experience between herself and Inez. They are both realists with an irrepressible romantic streak. Inez has no illusions about Jack's marginally legal activities, yet her final vision of her relationship with him is a romantic affirmation. “We were together all our lives. If you count thinking about it.” Didion is a ruthless seeker of truth, yet she is captive to romantic images of dancing—Inez leaning against the jukebox with Jack's arms around her, Inez dancing on the roof of the St. Regis. When she hears that Jessie is writing a novel, she fantasizes that it begins, “Imagine my mother dancing.”

Inez is throughout the novel associated with images of height. At least five times Didion refers to the film clip of her dancing on the St. Regis roof, and Inez spends much of the novel on planes—during Harry's campaign, during the trip to Honolulu after her sister is shot, and, finally, her long flight in a small plane with Jack's body. These images enhance her heroic stature; by the novel's end, we can understand Jack's assessment of her as “‘one of the most noble’ women we had ever met.”

The narrator is metaphorically linked with images of height. She twice refers to herself as a tightrope walker.

Aerialists know that to look down is to fall.


Writers know it too.


Look down and that prolonged spell of suspended judgment in which a novel is written snaps, and recovery requires that we practice magic. We keep our attention fixed on the wire.

In the book's final chapter, she explains her scattered narrative method (introducing crucial events early, providing their context later) as “the way I tried to stay on the wire in this novel of fitful glimpses.” Like a dancer, a tightrope walker must practice art; however, the aerialist traces a linear pattern—the narrative—while the dancer moves with less tension in graceful curves.

Another metaphor Didion invokes, a traditional image for a poet, is close to that of Inez flying about the world in planes. In the beginning of the novel, she was the bird in Wallace Stevens's poem who sang “without human meaning, without human feeling, a foreign song.” But the story she has told—Jack's heroic love and Inez's discovery of her own place in the world—has affirmed the possibility of existential meaning in individual lives even amid the holocaust of contemporary madness and violence. For the character who is called Didion, the meaning of the story resided in her bonds with the woman who shared her capacity for solitude, her sensitivity to color and heat and moisture, and her stubborn resilience. In the novel's concluding sentence, the gold-feathered bird has recovered poignancy of feeling and memory. “I had a sudden sense of Inez and of the office in the camp and of how it feels to fly into that part of the world, of the dense greens and translucent blues and the shallows where islands once were, but so far I have not been back.”

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

The Poetics of Joan Didion's Journalism

Next

‘A Hard Story to Tell’: The Vietnam War in Joan Didion's Democracy

Loading...