Didion’s debt to Hemingway and American modernism extends beyond the theory of language that can be found in Play It As It Lays. Maria’s passive response to her world is very much in line with Hemingway’s taciturn protagonists like Jake Barnes and Frederic Henry. Like Jake and Frederic, Maria’s passivity is a form of resistance as much as it is a sign of her psychic scars. Her sparing use of words is meant to show how empty and “unmotivated” the words employed by others are. While the resistance of Jake and Frederic fits comfortably within the oedipal uni- verse of modernism, however, Maria’s resistance has nothing to fall back on—no tradition of a coherent subjectivity in whose
