January 29, 2024
To the editor of LIBER,
One trend I observed while researching my book The World According to Joan Didion was people’s tendency to project themselves onto Didion. The writer had a strong moral center but also an intellectual empathy that made her adaptable to different ways of thinking, and that led her to frequently question her own received values. When S.C. Cornell declares the writer a conservative in her disappointingly inaccurate—could she at least spell my name correctly?!—review of my book*, she too is “remaking Didion in her own image,” as she accuses me of doing. Cornell defines conservatism as fatalism about the human condition. Her refusal to accept that Didion “had to struggle all my life against my own apprehensions, my own false ideas, my own distorted perceptions,” as Joan said and I quote in WATJD, is evidence of Cornell’s fatalism, not Didion’s. Just because the author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem acknowledged her existential dread doesn’t mean she gave into it. In Where I Was From the California writer explicitly wrestled with and ultimately renounced the frontier myths she was fed as a child. And while she never was someone who took part in social movements, her writing on criminal justice, the interior life of women, and the environment was and is inspirational to many of us who do.
One of the tactics of conservatives is to put and keep people in their places. By cherry-picking Didion’s essays to fit her own point of view, Cornell denies the writer her agency. While I admit to sometimes trying to see myself in Joan’s image, I also take issue in my book with many things she wrote, particularly that egregious article “The Women’s Movement”—there is one critique the reviewer and I agree on. Cornell describes me as a “feminist rock critic”; true, as far as that goes. But I can just see her looking down her New Yorker nose at me as she sniffs that my book is not “in any way an effort at serious literary criticism.” In fact, I intended The World According to Joan Didion to be, as Susan Sontag famously called for in “Against Interpretation,” an “erotics of art,” not a “hermeneutics”: “to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” (Italics are Sontag’s, not mine.)
I’m not surprised to encounter this kind of conservative, elitist response to my writing and to Joan’s; in fact, I’m used to it. But I am disappointed to find it in a publication that declares itself feminist.
—Evelyn McDonnell
(not McDowell)
S.C. Cornell responds:
Literary criticism—the practice of upholding standards through sniffiness—understandably invites the charge of elitism. In my work, I try to minimize the truth of this charge by getting things right and by not needlessly punching down. My recent piece on Joan Didion’s legacy gets something wrong: it twice misspells Evelyn McDonnell’s last name. I am embarrassed and very sorry. Besides this error, however, I am unaware of inaccuracies in the piece. Nor do I consider myself to be punching down when I criticize McDonnell’s latest book, which is for sale by the luminaries at the partner shop of the London Review of Books, and which advances delusions about Didion’s politics held by many people who should know better. As for whether I could ever punch down at Joan Didion—please.
