The White Album

Stories and meaning give a person an identity. The stories and meanings attached to Huey Newton give him his identity as a revolutionary Black Panther leader, yet Didion subverts his identity. She sees Newton as an “alchemy of issues” (23). Identity turns into symbolism, but Newton isn’t a symbol: He’s a person, so identities, like stories and meaning, are something of a fabrication—they’re made up.

Throughout the essays, Didion deflates the identities people create for themselves. Hollywood figures think of themselves as good people, but Didion presents them as self-important and simplistic for “perceiving social life as a problem to be solved by the good will of individuals” (80). Feminists create identities for themselves that center on constant oppression, but Didion deconstructs those identities and argues that they’re not oppressed but immature and unrealistic. In the essay “Notes Toward a Dreampolitik,” Didion presents four types of identities: the preacher, the biker gangs, the aspiring movie star, and people addicted to gambling. Each is a construct—a mishmash of ideals and conflicts.

The identities that appeal to Didion are less coherent and identifiable. James Pike fascinates her as “a man who moved through life believing that he was entitled to forget it and start over” (50). Identity didn’t confine Pike. He could always make a new identity when he felt like it. Similarly, O’Keeffe represents a laudable identity. She defies conventional identities for artists and women. She’s neither a conformist nor a fabrication: “She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees” (113).

The identity Didion creates for O’Keeffe has much in common with the identity Didion forms for herself as a woman separate from norms and knowledge. She doesn’t read The New York Times but listens to call-in shows. She’s an individual and doesn’t feel the pressure to perpetuate common talking points or beliefs. Didion feels “radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people” (118). The isolation, though it sounds negative, is beneficial: It gives Didion her unique character. Didion’s world gives her several identities: “I was named godmother to children. I was named lecturer and panelist, colloquist and conferee. I was even named, in 1968, a Los Angeles Times ‘Woman of the Year’” (9). However, Didion doesn’t identify with any of these labels. Like O’Keeffe and Pike, Didion maintains an elusive identity. She doesn’t restrict herself to a social movement or group.

In most cases, Didion is like a vessel. Similar to O’Keeffe, she’s open to what she sees. Both O’Keeffe and Didion are women, and “woman” is an identity that Didion accepts. Didion states, “I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves” (119-20). However, Didion subverts her identity as a woman by defining womanhood as “that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death” (103). The identity Didion picks for herself is mysterious and mostly unintelligible.