![]() In their introduction to the catalog of Joan Didion: What She Means-a recent exhibition at the Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles-the show’s curators, Hilton Als and Connie Butler, speak of Didion’s “acutely visual language.” What does that mean?Ĭover of Joan Didion, The White Album (Simon and Schuster, 1979)Īls, a friend and literary peer of Didion’s, has previously put together exhibitions about James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, authors whose power and presence we may imagine we glimpse in photographs of them. But such is her mix of vision, exactitude, and atmospheric effect that her work seems more suited than that of others to sit alongside paintings, drawings, and photographs, with an eye toward making connections. Sontag and Malcolm wrote extensively about photography. Then there is Didion, out along her own axis, where the essay is almost all detail. In the middle, Janet Malcolm’s fine attention to peculiarities of person or place. ![]() At one end, Susan Sontag’s epigrammatic judgments, with their relative lack of empirical texture. “My mind veers inflexibly toward the particular,” Joan Didion writes in her 1965 essay “On Morality.” When it comes to the concrete and specific, you might say there’s a continuum among her cohort (now mostly gone) of great American essayists. ![]()
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