Despair And Defense:Narcissism In Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays

Loss is a lasting theme in the writings of Joan Didion(1934—).Personal losses are presented in her writings through changes of history and society,while the loss of the character of the nation,the character of California in particular,looms over the everyday life.Play It As It Lays,a representative of Didion’s fiction,is a story about the loss of self,and such loss is accompanied with the loss of innocence of the American Dream,or loss of "home" where each individual has their genuine play in the very early years of their life and retains the nostalgia for it.In exploring the cause and effect of the loss of self of the heroine Maria Wyeth and the relation of the self to its surroundings and others,there are discussions on the female self,the existential self,the literary regionalism embodied in the novel,Didion’s reflection on the history of the American West,Didion’s moral intention,the spiritual emptiness of the characters,and nihilism presented in a postmodern consumer society.Narcissism is not an unusual perspective from which the process of the self-formation and self-recognition of an individual is examined and the relationship between the "true self" and the "false self" and that between the self and its surroundings are exploredStructuring around the culture of narcissism proposed by Christopher Lasch,by which the narcissistic personality,the prevailing sense of nothingness,and the survival mentality in a consumer society,represented by Los Angeles,are explored,this thesis focuses on the defenses that are built upon narcissism and then dismantled when the narcissist of a postmodern consumer society chooses to live a life of survivalism after encountering nothingness and despair,while narcissism is intensified by deploying these defense mechanisms,that is,the false self,the inauthenticity of everyday life,and the ironic detachment of the performing self.The narcissist suffers from the encounter with the false self,while he preserves the false self as defense against the disillusion of his omnipotence;the narcissist finds himself more helpless and purposeless in the inauthenticity of everyday life,while he himself creates fantasies to evade the nothingness that he is well aware of.Besides,the narcissist has the traits of the"performing self" which,according to Lasch,keeps ironic detachment from others and withdraws to become an observer of the "play" and lives a life of survivalism.Maria’s profession as an actress is her fate decided by the culture,and an irony as well.The defense mechanisms employed by the narcissist tend to minimize the self-respect of the narcissist.In this sense,it is not unfair to say that Christopher Lasch’s thinking on the culture of narcissism serves as an accurate footnote to the novel.Besides Didion’s moral concern and her reflection on the present of California that are embodied in the exploration of narcissism and the culture of narcissism,her style of minimalism is an efficient means for presenting a discussion on this subject.Some minimalistic devices she uses reinforce the potential for discussing narcissism in her characters.Such omission facilitates the presentation of a narcissistic heroin,as well as the narcissistic group represented by the Hollywood people,to the audience and the white spaces on the pages of the novel seem to be the metaphor for the narcissist’s evasions.