“Core Dislocation in the Personality”: Reassessing Cold War Romance in Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted
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In her earlier novels about Cold War frontiers, Joan Didion has developed her signature style of minimalist writing attentive to a bare narrative surface. This essay will try to show that in The Last Thing He Wanted, her latest novel about an obscure incident related to Iran-Contra, Didion deploys her minimalist narrative style, not to reduce political realities to romantic personalities as she has often been criticized to do so in her previous novels, but this time to reveal the cost of romantic self-delusion, certain fundamental dislocation in the personalities of Cold War romancers who have lived too completely immersed in the perennial myth of the New Frontier. In The Last Thing He Wanted, Didion no longer idolizes romancers’ personalities immune from history and political milieu. Instead, Didion reveals that their dislocated personalities are nothing other than casualties of history.
Abstract
In her earlier novels about Cold War frontiers, Joan Didion has developed her signature style of minimalist writing attentive to a bare narrative surface. This essay will try to show that in The Last Thing He Wanted, her latest novel about an obscure incident related to Iran-Contra, Didion deploys her minimalist narrative style, not to reduce political realities to romantic personalities as she has often been criticized to do so in her previous novels, but this time to reveal the cost of romantic self-delusion, certain fundamental dislocation in the personalities of Cold War romancers who have lived too completely immersed in the perennial myth of the New Frontier. In The Last Thing He Wanted, Didion no longer idolizes romancers’ personalities immune from history and political milieu. Instead, Didion reveals that their dislocated personalities are nothing other than casualties of history.
참고문헌 (17)
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