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Death and the maiden...
I avoided Joan Didion’s bestselling The Year of Magical Thinking, for two reasons. One, I practice magical thinking, which crops up among primitive tribes and schizophrenics as the belief that your thoughts can change reality. I don’t mind being in the company of schizophrenics because the greatest spiritual teachers share the same belief. How else could faith move mountains? Didion views magical thinking as akin to delusion, a desperate tactic that the mind resorts to when reason fails. If my first excuse seems eccentric, it’s backed up by an uneasy sense that Didion had done something creepy and narcissistic with grief. Now that The Year of Magical Thinking has been transformed into a one-woman show for the iconic Vanessa Redgrave, I had a chance at the National Theatre last night to prove or dispel my trepidations.
Redgrave was mesmerizing, even though she barely raised her voice above a conversational lilt (she invented a flat, whiny twang that resembles the author’s peculiar speaking voice). Redgrave’s persona on stage is at odds with Didion’s, which helps. She is open, emotionally frank, and sympathetic. The prose she was reciting, seated on a wooden chair before minimalist projections of the sea, is terse but also show-offy. It needed warming up, because Didion’s method, and her gift, is to observe herself coolly in extremis. (“I noticed that it was hard applying lipstick properly during the tsunami.”) Her mind dissects itself without sympathy, making it hard for me to feel any. I doubt that Didion would care.
The year in question was 2005. First Didion’s husband of forty years died suddenly, keeling over at the dinner table and collapsing on the floor in a pool of blood. Adapting to this catastrophe, Didion then had to cope with her grown daughter going into septic shock and eventually dying as suddenly as her husband. These are harrowing events, but Didion isn’t concerned with the grieving process – quite the opposite. Her subject is how her mind defended itself from grief, resorting to “magical” thoughts to deny the reality of death. Such thoughts are common. Wishful thinking attends the surviving process, to coin a phrase, and Didion did strange but understandable things like avoiding Sunset Boulevard because her mind would “vortex” into memories of her dead husband driving there; she kept his shoes because he would need them when he came home, which her mind told her was imminent. In its way her microscopic self-absorption is brilliant. Didion captures thoughts in capsule form without losing their psychological weight, as when she gazes at her husband’s corpse for the first time and says, “He didn’t need to be dead.” The sentence is eerie and apt at the same time.
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