I first picked up Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem in the summer of ...
opt out of a move to New York City (“Goodbye to All That”) or agreeing with my ...
What Rough Beast: Narratives of Apocalypse and Survival in Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album Bethany Leach Mentor: Brandon Schrand Background: I first picked up Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem in the summer of 2008. At the time I was mentally invested in utopian ideals and imminent revolution and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Didion’s colder interpretation of the youth in the sixties. After all, she was young, too—only 29 by the time Bethlehem was released: How had the collective conscious sighed past her? Didn’t she believe in change? Was Didion, in fact, a square? Despite this, in subsequent years many moments in her essays have floated to mind and influenced my life in personal ways, be it supporting my justification to opt out of a move to New York City (“Goodbye to All That”) or agreeing with my fear that if I fail to dutifully record the phenomena of my life then I will forget what it meant to be me (“On Keeping a Notebook”). Many of these underlined passages have been cautionary tales of a kind, words that have named fears or at least been companions to the suspicion that things in the world are well out of sorts. As my writing has shifted from hopes and dreams lived out on paper to more serious explorations—be it via essays or by way of fictional themes—of how things are, Didion’s writing style has been exemplary in terms of maintaining control over emotional subject matter and favoring subtlety and precision over sentiment and flowery language. However, writers are the creators of their narratives. Even when writing nonfiction, one is editing together the pieces to tell a story. There seems to be a drive in Didion to spin the story into one seized with dread and cynicism. This is generally described as her “razor-sharp insight,” but since perspective is subjective (and since I have the luxury of hindsight) I have wondered whether Didion’s tone is less “telling it like it is” and more a need to construct a darker narrative so she has an idea of how to live through darker times. Current project: My current project will focus on Didion’s nonfiction works of the sixties and seventies, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. It will not delve into the cultural context of this era beyond the political and social events Didion brings up and the weight of Los Angeles as a reflection of the corruption of contemporary society. In many cases, Didion renders Los Angeles an apocalyptic city, one brimming with madness and ill will from the Santa Ana winds to the Charles Manson murders. Springboarding from here, I will conduct an abbreviated cultural study of Los Angeles’ narratives, specifically the literary tone with which the city of angels is described. Being somewhat familiar with other authors who have risen out of (and on the back of) this milieu, I expect to find parallels with Didion’s paranoia, relating it to the collective imagination of Los Angeles/California. I also wish to succinctly seat Didion within the modernist movement so there is literary context. Next I will consider how Didion takes a stance that is understandable and reasonable for someone living through apocalyptic times, from her view of ethics as
a primitive means of survival (“On Morality”) to her resistance to creative change of the social order (“Slouching Towards Bethlehem”). I would also like to incorporate her writing style into this analysis, perhaps correlating her terse prose with strained control over the uncontrollable. Finally, I wish to shift my literary analysis from what has hitherto been primarily a cultural study to cognitive psychology, as applied to Didion’s essays. Specifically, I will be focusing on the use of storytelling, as related to Didion’s proclamation, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (“The White Album”). I am less interested in the escapism that may be at the root for many created narratives, but the equally strong human need to live through the imaginary traumatic as preparation for what might come, or at least to soothe persistent fears. I believe this project will be of interest to anthropological scholars of storytelling, Los Angelites, pop culture critics, and New Critics. Plan for the next two months: I have recently finished rereading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and I plan on finishing The White Album by September 12. After this, I think it would be useful to read the books and articles in my bibliography in order of subject. Works related to the symbolism of Los Angeles must be read by September 19. Works related to storytelling and cognitive psychology must be read by September 26. Other, nonclassified works must be read by October 2. Each reading will naturally be accompanied by personal annotations where I see the work speaking to Didion’s. I will have a separate document storing properly cited quotes as to eliminate this clumsy process from the time I spend on my draft. Next I will return to Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, choosing around five essays from the two collections to focus on. I will reread this and make appropriate notes by October 10, turning these notes and the notes from the external works into an extensive outline by October 17. This will give me one week to flesh out this outline into a draft. Ideas about how to present this work: I imagine it would be useful open with a selection from Didion for those unfamiliar with her style and as an introduction to my topic. The beginning of “The White Album” seems most suitable, as it is what coined “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” perhaps the most important one-liner from Didion as far as my project is concerned. I hope that something more creative will come to me by then, but as of now I see my presentation in terms of a slideshow including my major points as well as pictures related to Didion, Los Angeles, the hippie movement, and perhaps folklore. Tentative bibliography: Austin, Michael. Useful Fictions: Evolution, Anxiety, and the Origins of Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. Blom, Bolkéus Mattias. Stories of Old: The Imagined West and the Crisis of Historical Symbology in the 1970s. Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1999. Brennan, F. “The Year of Magical Thinking: Joan Didion and the Dialectic of Grief.” Medical Humanities 2008: 35-39.
Coale, Samuel Chase. Paradigms of Paranoia: The Culture of Conspiracy in Contemporary American Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Didion, Joan. We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Fine, David M. Imagining Los Angeles. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. Herman, David. “Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind: Cognitive Narratology, Discursive Psychology, and Narratives in Face-to-Face Interaction.” Narrative Oct 2007, Vol. 15 Issue 3: 307-334. Hoffman, Michael J and Patrick D Murphy. Critical Essays on American Modernism. New York: G.K. Hall; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992. Lass, Leslie. “The Refusal to Shed Light.” The Threepenny Review Winter-Spring, 1980: 12-13. Warner, Marina. No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999.
