10.25364/27.2:2022.1.2
McKenna, Maxime D.
Maxime D.
McKenna
Freie Universität Berlin
The Freeway Fix: Infrastructure, Affect, and the Politics and Aesthetics of Distance in Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays
Universität Graz
2022
Article
en
2789-889X
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
This essay reconsiders the many scenes of freeway driving in Joan Didion's
Play It as It Lays (1970) through the critical lens of infrastructure to argue that
the novel finds in the built environment a model for its own distanced narrative
style. The novel's engagements with everyday infrastructure like the freeway
encourage us to imagine a personal "affective fix" operating alongside David
Harvey's theory of the "spatial fix," which describes how large-scale midcentury
infrastructure projects both manage and replicate capitalism's crisis
tendencies. The fix that Maria gets while driving on the freeway is a dynamic
process of performing radical self-reliance amidst society's connective and
constraining structures. The text itself strives for a similar fix in its form, which
can be said to be infrastructural in the way that it maintains its various levels
of textual distance to enact a profound impersonality.
Keywords: Affect, Automobility, Distance, Self-Reliance, Infrastructure.