Navigating Nihilism: Surrealism and Self-Realization in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays

Abstract:Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It As It Lays begins with a question. Maria Wyeth, Didion’s troubled protagonist, asks, “What makes Iago evil?” However, Maria quickly adds that the answer does not matter. The novel follows Maria, a model and actress in an unhappy marriage, as she searches for meaning through a series of choices that only make her life harder, including an illegal abortion, an ill-fated affair, and the suicide of her close friend, BZ. By the end of the novel, Maria has accepted the pointlessness of looking for truth value in any decision. Using ideas pioneered by the European surrealist movement, this article argues that Maria’s conclusion is not an embrace of philosophical nihilism or intellectual vacuity, but rather an alignment with the Surrealist belief that opposite states can exist in contradiction and do not need to be resolved through rational questioning of the empirical world. Furthermore, the landscape of Southern California empowers Maria to arrive at this surreal “sublime point” by allowing her to integrate states and concepts like indecipherability, uncanniness, the merging of self and other, and the centrality of the perceptual field into her understanding of her own mind and of the world itself.