ABSTRACT
The relationship between representation through language and melancholia is marked by reticence: “the melancholic would have said something, if he or she could, but did not, and believes in the sustaining power of the voice”. This chapter looks at Joan Didion’s last three novels in order to analyze the melancholic language which Didion self-consciously uses to construct her vision of American identity. The melancholic language is the language of identity, which is to say, the language of projected attachments, both on a personal and national level. In Didion’s first two novels, California is in the focus of her narrative, whose whole effort is directed at explaining the Californian character, yet even in these novels, the limitations of language are exposed, and the role of language questioned. Language serves to break the exchange of ideas, not to promote it; thus, it loses its central function and testifies to the melancholy permeating the characters’ existence.
