ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses critical terms defining melancholia in order to use them in the literary examples. It explains how identity comes into being in melancholic terms, which entails a crucial paradox: one must long for the place from a spatial and temporal distance in order to claim it; expulsion from the Californian paradise is the only way to see oneself as Californian. The chapter analyzes the position that the frontier occupies in Didion’s prose: the loss of this idea turns into the central lack, around which the writer’s authority is constructed. Joan Didion recognizes the need for consolation as the main impulse behind the composition of her first novel, Run River, and claims that she was “experiencing a yearning for California so raw that night after night” she composed herself “a Californian novel”. The refusal to represent the Californian past fully and to give voice to the nonwhite actors in history is intricately related to the melancholia Didion’s characters experience.
