Miller 1

Dara MillerDr. SirlesENG 4085 June 2013

In Joan Didions collection The White Album, she develops a style of radical particularity that shapes, as Chris Anderson claims, her arguments about what it means to be a writer and to experience life throughout the sixties and seventies (133). Didion writes, as she notes in the title essay, what [she] saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, and her style cannot be confined to a simple narrative, for she sees the world as not a movie but a cutting-room experience (13). Despite her claim that the images she presents have no meaning beyond their temporary arrangement (Didion 13), it is these very images the discrete scenes of her own encounters and experiences that do shape the many meanings within her work. As Anderson claims, her habitual gesture as a stylist is to isolate the ironic or symbolic or evocative image and then reflect on its possible significance, (134) and it is this intense focus on the particular that allows her reflections to enter into and become the readers own reflections. By describing her experiences through her own stark and unapologetic perspective, Didion invites her audience to partake in her own authorial questioning of the meaningfulness of what she ironically refers to throughout the collection as the issues of American society. Her intimate voice, however, never forces conclusions; rather, her style of radical particularity creates a joint exploration between the personas of author and reader.In The White Album, Didions rhetorical peculiarities begin with her opening lines. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, she claims, invoking the desperation that will haunt her entire collection, and expounds on the startling image of a naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor (11) with a series of anaphoric sentences that draw the readers into a world shaped entirely by perceptions. We tell ourselves and We look for and We interpret and We live entirely within the events that shape our lives, and this simple repetition of what we all do establishes an immediate intimacy between the author and the reader. This bond in itself becomes a part of her rhetoric of process as she uses it to establish why she feels the need, as a writer, to avoid imposing a narrative line that would work to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience (Didion 11). Her flash cut to her psychiatric report interpolates a medical document into her personal reveries, and this report is absorbed into her style as a statement of personal vulnerability and juxtaposed against the worldly success of being named a Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year (15). She does not explain why she includes this, but rather a part of her rhetoric of gap she simply presents it in order to allow readers to draw their own meaning from this information. This section also brings out the characteristic understated irony in Didions rhetoric: she claims that in retrospect, an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem an inappropriate reaction to the summer of 1968 (15). Throughout the subsequent sections of The White Album, Didion hones in on the particulars of her experience that shaped her throughout this period. The fifteen discrete sections act almost like puzzle pieces: seemingly incongruous, but joining together to form a portrait of life in California at that point in time. The microcosm of her experience becomes symbolic of the era; the sinistral inertia seems to fall not only on her, but on the generation, and one cannot help but conclude that the sense of anticipation of imminent but not immediate destruction (16) applies to the character of America as easily as to her Franklin Avenue neighborhood. This conclusion, of course, is left to the reader. As part of her rhetoric of gaps, Didion merely implies; though we can infer potential insights into her opinion on the haphazard collection of people in that neighborhood as representatives of broader issue within American society, Didion never ventures all the way into this territory, and readers are left to shape the functional tenor of her writing for themselves. Instead, she cuts away again. The flashes reel by in excerpts from a trial, reflections on her interest in the trial, morbid reminiscences about the possibility of violence, and then a return to her diagnosis, now taken out of context of the report and claimed for her own as my intellectualization, my obsessive-compulsive devices, my projection, my reaction-formation, my somatization (20). This return to themes and phrases throughout the essay helps create continuity across disparate sections of the text; although the pieces are fragments, glimpses into various aspects of her experience, they come to reflect the wider understanding of what the sixties were to Didion.Her depiction of her interaction with the music business exemplifies Didions unusual authorial presence in her writing. She is physically present during a recording session with the Doors, for example, sitting on the cold vinyl floor on Sunset Boulevard, but she is still detached, only watching (21). As Anderson claims, Didions rhetorical approaches are the result of [her] failure to word an experience which she repeatedly defines as apocalyptic, paralyzing, and finally inexplicable (145). Thus, the Doors, as missionaries of apocalyptic sex are the only band that truly interests her, but even with this interest she is not fully engaged in interaction with them. She is with them, but decidedly apart from them; it is the band who gathers in the uneasy symbiosis, (22) while she is silent, paralyzed by the unspecific tensions that seemed to be rendering everyone in the room catatonic (23). She does not engage in the conversation, but she captures the state of the room. Her extended naming of objects and people and the anaphoric repetition of the structure there wereandand highlights the static nature of the band as they waited on Morrison to arrive. This section hinges on the image of Morrison, and the grammatical structure that had perfectly captured the previous image of indolence shifts and takes on new meaning when used in combination with the series of appositives that whip up the pace of her description: he was the fourth Door, the lead singer, Jim Morrison, a 24-year-old graduate of U.C.L.A who wore black vinyl pants and no underwear and tended to suggest some range of the possible just beyond a suicide pact (22). This image of the singer builds, creating his presence in the text with the anaphora of It was Morrison, until his anticlimactic arrival. Didion describes his actual interaction (or lack thereof) in shorter, simple sentences that sharpen the sense of surreal disconnection in the room; although they are all there now, and have been patiently awaiting his arrival, no one acknowledged it (24). Didions reinsertion of herself into the end of this section only adds to the surreal and disturbing sense that no one was going to leave the room, ever, (25) and though this leads the reader to wonder if the recording studio has now become a symbol of the doldrums of the sixties, she just as suddenly abandons the topic with I did not see it through (25). Didion juxtaposes her sections about the music scenes directly against the case of case of Huey Newton. Instead of beginning with her personal connection to the case, she opens this section in a journalistic style, building her exposition by reporting on the bare facts of the case. She is interested, though, not so much in the facts but in the alchemy of issues (27), and like in her essay on the womens movement, Didion focuses on the power of language to create issues out of people. Like Anderson points out, she highlights the irony she sees in the catchphrases of the movement by putting them in quotation marks, grouping Newtons statements and messages into his wall of rhetoric (31) that she despaired of breaking through. Throughout the remaining sections of The White Album, Didion returns and returns to the same ideas, structures, and even phrases established in these first five sections as part of her rhetoric of process. As she grapples with understanding an era in which disorder often seemed to be its own point (37), she consistently returns to the idea of writing and its role in unraveling the ironies she sees in each situation, only to state, as her only solid conclusion in the piece, that writing has not yet helped [her] to see what it means (47).In In the Islands, Didion develops an intimate relationship with the reader, beginning with a direct address: I had better tell you where I am, and why (133). This intimacy becomes an important part of her rhetoric of process as she invites the reader to know her through the images and experiences that shape her. When she insists that she wants us to understand exactly what [we] are getting (133) in her, she does not tell us that she struggles with depression; instead, she describes how often[she] felt [herself] a sleepwalkeralert only to the stuff of bad dreams, (134) and catalogues a stark list of horrors that she says, in a characteristic understatement, present difficulties for her. Her struggle is captured her own lonely image of herself as a thirty-four-year-old-woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come (135). The power of this sentence lies in the carefully simplistic diction, in the rhetorical gap, and in the repetition of an image that seems in its repetition to take on a symbolic meaning. Her choice of simple adjectives her age, old and bad perfectly suggest an exhaustion so complete that she cannot even muster the strength for more specific choices, and the successive coordinating conjunctions imply that this state of mind comes specifically from the combination of those descriptions. Significantly, there is also a distinct absence of any others on the island with her, and though the tidal wave reference takes readers back to the description of waiting out a potential storm with her husband and child, it now invites us to consider the pain of feeling alone even when with loved ones. The tidal wave becomes an image of apocalyptic destruction, but she despairs of its coming even though she cannot seem to stop waiting for it. Coming directly after this image, the claim that she and her husband and the baby spent a restorative week in paradise drips with irony, and her list of what they do and refrain from doing invites readers again to look at the gaps, this time in her relationship. Meanwhile, her allusion to Tolstoys famous line about happy families coupled with the caveat on the terrace of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu (135) reminds readers that they are only glimpsing an artificial snapshot, the appearance of happiness rather than its reality. This idea of Honolulu, in both its artificiality and its beautiful realness, serves as the unifying element throughout this essay. Although it is divided into sections across the years, and even further divided into separate experiences within those unmarked divisions, the theme of place and its relationship to her experience as a person and a writer runs through each. She states a great deal of Honoluluhas always belonged to James Jones (147), and in her discussion of him as a writer who claimed [Honolulu] hardest (146) and as a soldier who taught her that the Army was nothing more or less than life itself (152), she draws together the themes of writing and war that permeate this essay, but leaves the reader to wonder how it all connects back to the family struggles with which she opened the essay.Didions In Hollywood again tackles a sense of place as she works through her experience as a part of a community as intricate, rigid, and deceptive in its mores as any devised on this continent (153). Her description of the Hollywood elite often borders on cutting as she describes the elusive dottiness (154) of the women who focus on endless superficialities and the men who deal ruthlessly in the chase for fame and fortune, yet she seems to also admire how this communitys notable excesses include virtually none of the flesh or the spirit (154). Her rhetoric, however, characteristically reveals no concrete conclusion; as soon as the reader senses her sympathy, she turns that apparent sympathy into a pun: In the houses of the inheritors the preservation of the community is paramount, and it is also Universal, Columbia, Fox, Metro, and Warners (155). Although she seems to value the sense of community and family she often sees as slipping away in American society, she also sees through the appearance of Hollywood as the last extant stable society, recognizing it also as a calculating tropism toward survival (155). Throughout the essay, she returns to the rhetorical particularity of couching her ironic commentary through quotations, and she uses this to attack the rhetoric that disguises corruption in Hollywood economics, noting that More perfect survival book-keeping has been devised, but mainly in Chicago and Las Vegas, (156) two cities long known for their political corruption. In this section, her rhetorical gaps lead to much more conclusive critiques than in most other essays in the collection; when she rebuts the claim that in the new Hollywood the studio has no power with the simple response The studio has (157), one can hardly avoid the critique of this false rhetoric. The remaining unnumbered sections of the essay are divided according to time and interspersed with flash cuts of her experiences with the people of Hollywood. Each major move from month to month is accompanied by the phrase in the last extant stable society, which continues to build in irony until it at last seems almost an acceptance. Days pass (157) and The winter progresses (162) and Didion reflects again, now at almost the end of the collection, on the importance of stories. She reenters the text to speak to her readers again to remind us that she is only suggesting that much of what is written about pictures and about picture people and perhaps, about the sixties and the sixties people approaches reality only occasionally and accidentally (162).

Works CitedAnderson, Chris. Style as Argument: Contemporary American Non-Fiction. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinous UP, 1987. Print. Didion, Joan. The White Album. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1979. Print.