“Academic Raskolnikov” - “On Self-Respect”
Didion writes, “I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald's failure to become president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it.” Didion regards herself as a high ranking academic mind who would straightforwardly triumph in the Phi Beta Kappa organization. Had she been an unqualified ‘Raskolnikov’, she would have naturally prevailed in the race. Her ironic failure is an indicator of the self-deception which misleads her to trusting that she would not be stalled by cause-effect limitations.
The Irony of the ‘Golden Land’ - ‘Some dreamers of the Golden Dream’
Didion’s depiction of the ‘golden land’ is undeniably ironic: “This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased haier and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white dressing dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school. ‘ We were just crazy kids’ they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where divorce rate is double the national average and where one person is very thirty- eight lives in a trailer.”
The literal elucidation of Genesis incarnates the superficiality of the ‘ golden dreamers’: their understandings do not meet the golden specification which is connoted in the title. Furthermore, the focus on double indemnity accentuates the prevalent moral exposures which are incongruent with a golden raking. The girls’ focus on marriage which is epitomized by the ‘wedding dress’ is a pointer of false optimism on the leeway of exultant matrimonies because divorce is proliferating in the land. If the country were unequivocally golden, the divorce proportions would have been marginal to designate the solidness of marriage. Besides, the pervasive neglect of the past indicates the superficiality of the golden land; the ‘golden dreams’ are tantamount to hollow illusions which do not yield substantial utility to the dreamers.
