Inez Victor embodies everything, and yet nothing, about the flaws in our current political system.
Her story, told through fragmented moments that jump anytime between the 1950s and March of 1975, becomes a very obvious stand-in for the fragility of memory in both the political climate and one’s personal experiences. Joan Didion is herself a character in Democracy (1984), wherein she reconstructs Victor’s life as if picking up scattered puzzle pieces. The reader, let alone Didion, cannot clearly define the significance of each particular moment, nor the reason for why it is ordered in the way it is. Rather than looking for some deep explanation in the sequencing of this work, the piece as a whole fulfills its allegorical purpose of how we recount our own memories – sometimes hazy, other times vivid – but most of all, the portraying of one’s feelings at a specific point in time.
While reading Democracy, I couldn’t help but transplant Didion’s messaging to our modern political circumstances. Memory has become selective, something we choose to opt in to, while continuing to haunt the past, present, and future states of our being. We witness how history has begun to repeat itself as a result of our willful ignorance; politics are often formed by people cleverly erasing the wrongdoings of their politicians in the collective memory. Didion plays with the concept of temporality, mocking human nature’s propensity to fixate and putting into question the sheer randomness of what we decide to fixate on. These elements together contribute to Victor’s disconnectedness from the events of her past, allowing her to move freely through space, tied down to nothing and no one.
And yet, I couldn’t find myself relating to her character in the slightest. Born affluent, beautiful, and able to cultivate the attention of those around her, Victor’s essence exists solely for the eyes of the public, but not for the hearts of her readers. I’m unsure whether Didion crafted Victor for the purpose of the story’s moral or to channel the idea that no matter what position you are in the social structure, the way we navigate the world around us remains the same. It is increasingly difficult to parse through the humanity of Didion’s characters, and Democracy remains mostly plot-driven, resembling a Kurt Vonnegut-esque level of chaos.
I cannot lie and have to admit that this is my first time reading any of Didion’s works. Her essays sit on my shelf, waiting to be opened, but I picked this novel up instead. Democracy is significant in the way it portrays the human condition from the perspective of the political, rather than of realistic fiction. Didion’s witty intermissions and self-deprecation made me fall in love with her writing style, and for those who struggle to stay engaged with dense texts, it was a fairly pleasant read. Although it has been over forty years since its publication, this work remains very modern and is one of the best representations of how our misperceptions are shaped. Didion describes how the extreme documentation of our lives enables us to overlook moments that truly matter, and that we forget who we are when blinded by the opinions of the masses.