Rosette Simityan
Didion’s essays “Holy Water,” “Bureaucrats,” and “Los Angeles Notebook” critique the assumption of ease that undergirds the myth of Los Angeles, and California in general, as paradise by addressing urban and environmental issues contemporaneous to the social unrest of the 1960’s and 1970’s. She questions what social ecologist Murray Bookchin calls the abstractions of megalopolises (abstractions like the bureaucracy, “the system,” etc.) in order to highlight the anonymity and powerlessness of individual citizens who are alienated from each other and their environment in a sprawling, isolating metropolis (Bookchin 81). The implication that the promise of Eden and the fear of apocalypse in Los Angeles function as paradoxical delusions that keep city residents complicit in the structural inequities that oppress them and their natural resources pervades Didion’s subjective journalism on the city. The three essays I have selected explore the critique she outlines by focusing on the statewide manipulation of water, residents’ civic impotence in the face of freeway implementation, and anxiety around wildfires stoked by the annual return of the Santa Ana winds. All three essays employ Didion’s characteristically subjective voice, which I will argue is integral in challenging what she calls the dreamwork: the political, social, and economic powers that control the population by robbing people and the land of individuality (i.e. subjectivity). By adopting this iteration of subjectivity in order to present civic and environmental issues, Didion grapples with the social ecology of Los Angeles during the postwar boom.
Didion begins each essay by accentuating the mystical veil which shrouds Los Angeles, thereby embedding her subjective journalism within the popular, perhaps even shared, myth that Los Angeles is a magical place. What unfolds throughout the course of each essay is a demystification, an unveiling that allows, and even demands, that the reader peer into the machinery that powers the original dream-vision. In his analysis of Didion’s socio-political critique, Joel Alden Schlosser identifies Didion’s coinage of the term “dreamwork” as the socially-accepted delusions “endemic to American democracy” that allow ordinary citizens to refuse to confront histories of violence and inequity (28). Schlosser argues that in the face of this interplay between power and selective ignorance, Didion interrogates all sides of American social and political life in order to respond to “American democracy’s susceptibility to the dreamwork” while unearthing “the deep roots of these tendencies and the inextricability of the desires animating them,” thus demonstrating the “dismaying trouble, namely, the impossibility of escaping such delusory stories, an impossibility that Didion herself endeavors to confront” (29). And although Didion rarely “touched the ‘race beat’” as Schlosser concedes, her investigations into the underbelly of the American Dream implicate the “dreamers” that “believe the lie of the American dream, deifying democracy to avoid the human costs it has entailed” as outlined by Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me (28). Schlosser applies Coates’ indictment against the American Dream to demonstrate the implications of Didion’s writing against structural racism despite the fact that she rarely wrote on the topic of race. Although it is arguably an extrapolation to assume that there is an implicit critique of racism in Didion’s general writing, I believe this application can be useful when approaching Didion’s explicit treatment of the natural environment in these essays and how her narratives of anxiety about Los Angeles’ wildfires, freeways, and water supply represent larger social, political, and economic injustices that reinforce racism.
Power and control serve a central function in these essays and inform Mazel’s argument that the myth of the environment wields the power to alienate individuals and their environs by imposing capitalist and imperialist distinctions of difference. The capitalist and imperialist institutions that control the population in public and personal spheres act as dreamweavers, crafting the fabric of the dreamwork that deceives and manipulates the public through its myths around human control over the environment. In fact, social ecology and social ecocriticism demonstrate how “the social, political, and economic decisions made by humans affect our interaction with the environment” and how the integration of both biocentric and anthropocentric studies “has been particularly fruitful for analyzing urban areas,” areas that prove the porousness of the distinction between the human and natural in the first place (Bennett 33). In my analysis of Didion’s representation of this amorphous borderland, I will trace how these three essays employ the subjective voice to regurgitate the mystical language of the Los Angeles myth before questioning the dreamweavers in power and ultimately disenchanting urban dwellers who refuse to address their own complicity in social and ecological injustices.
Mythical Beginnings
In these essays on Los Angeles’s defining features (fire, freeway, and water), Didion begins with an awareness of the city’s unreality as a paradoxical space. In “Los Angeles Notebook,” she opens with a meditation on the portents of wildfire in Southern California: the Santa Ana winds. “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension,” she explains by way of introduction, “I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it…To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior” (217). Before the fire, and before the winds, there is an uneasy feeling that confirms the coming catastrophe. As the uneasy calm between two storms of wind then fire, this preemptive warning stage mystifies the natural event; this stillness before the wind is not as “unnatural” as Didion claims—after all, wind is a natural occurrence and its accompanying heat and aridity are natural ingredients for wildfire. But the heightened anxiety she creates by defining the time period before the winds serves to characterize this natural feature of Southern California as something ominously supernatural.
Her eerie opening remarks present a particular definition of the word “natural,” because if the uneasy calm before the Santa Anas are unnatural, then by default that which is natural is easy, thereby bolstering the myth of the easy life in California, a land of perennial sunshine and comfort. But Didion questions this myth that life in California is inherently pleasant throughout her writing, explicitly arguing, “The extent to which the postwar boom years confirmed this warp in the California imagination, and in the expectations of its citizens would be hard to overestimate. Good times today and better times tomorrow were supposed to come with the territory” (Where I Was From 129). According to Mike Davis, private developers perpetuated this mentality of territorial exceptionalism in order to sell more land in hazardous earthquake and fire corridors throughout the city, endangering lives and altering environmentally sensitive spaces for the sake of profit. He explains that “the social construction of ‘natural’ disaster is largely hidden from view by a way of thinking that simultaneously imposes false expectations on the environment and then explains the inevitable disappointments as proof of a malign and hostile nature” (Fear 9). In the face of these unrealistically positive expectations established by developers, unpleasant but natural occurrences like the Santa Anas certainly seem unnatural insofar as they challenge a shared delusion.
In addition to highlighting the myth of the Santa Anas by characterizing them as unnatural portents, Didion also presents them as omnipresent in these opening lines. Although there may not be any official confirmation from news sources, all city residents can sense their onset. Interestingly, the epistemological identification of the winds relies not on facts or empirical evidence, but on metaphysics: “We know it because we feel it,” Didion insists (emphasis added, 217). This causal relationship between a feeling leading to knowledge heightens the uncanniness of Los Angeles’s communal anticipation of the winds and their accompanying fires. This creates the appearance of unity among residents, at least to the extent that they universally fear this reminder that they may have bought into a lie about their environment. Didion will go on to interrogate even this compromised sense of unity, as I’ll outline in the following section. But insofar as these opening lines reinforce the eeriness of the winds characterized by an unnatural and omnipresent effect, the illusion of an easeful life remains.
Just as Didion uses the myth of comfort in California to introduce the Santa Anas and their subsequent fires in “Los Angeles Notebook,” she also begins “Bureaucrats” with the myth of the freedom of the open road to introduce CalTrans’s implementation of the Diamond Lane pilot project in the 1970’s. She characterizes the Caltrans Operations Center in downtown Los Angeles with tongue-in-cheek omnipotence as she explains, “The closed door upstairs at 120 South Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles is marked OPERATIONS CENTER. In the windowless room beyond the closed door a reverential hush prevails. From six A.M. until seven P.M. in this windowless room men sit at consoles watching a huge board flash colored lights” (79). This introduction presents the operations center with an air of esoteric mysticism, its mysterious operations conducted behind a closed door, atop an elevated perch, and with reverent silence. Twice in two successive sentences Didion mentions that the room lacks windows. Although the juxtaposition between their monastic perch and these flashing lights may seem ridiculous, the operations center has authority over a contested holy relic: the freeway. Didion is reporting on the operations center because people are protesting the project on the very streets that the bureaucrats cannot see because they do not have windows. Whatever CalTrans’s intentions are with their pilot project, they do not want to be seen and they do not want to see the world they are altering as it is, but rather as their monitoring system represents it. The operations room reinforces the dichotomy between inside and outside, and Didion represents the outsider frustrated in her attempts to understand these opaque bureaucratic insiders.
The controversy of the Diamond Lane project hinges on the illusion of the open road, a promise of freedom and independence in the sprawling city of Los Angeles. According to Didion, in order to understand the uproar around this new freeway implementation, one must first participate in “the freeway experience, which is the only secular communion Los Angeles has” (83). Didion implies here that Los Angeles exhibits a dearth of human connection, and this scarcity amplifies the sanctity of the shared driving experience in the city. Ironically, in order to feel this communion, one must drive, and there cannot be more than one motorist to a vehicle. So even this communion is felt essentially alone. To characterize this paradoxically shared religious experience between “lone souls” in a state of “mechanized rapture,” she uses words and phrases like “total surrender,” “narcosis,” “rapture-of-the-freeway,” “rhythm,” “distortion of time,” and “exhilaration” (83). Murray Bookchin corroborates this symbolic significance of the road when he explains,“In Los Angeles, the automobile is not only a means of transportation, but a state of mind that shapes the citizen’s sensibility toward his environment, lifestyle, and concept of space and time” (Bookchin 69) The selections pulled from Didion’s meditation reveal the all-encompassing effect of driving that creates the somatic symptoms of disorientation, aural hallucination, intoxication, etc. that rely on the freedom, independence, and danger implicit in the freeway. So when CalTrans attempts to change this sacred space, and to change it by intentionally targeting lone motorists who cannot enter the diamond lanes, they are attacking one of the fundamental delusions that characterize life in Los Angeles. Just as the illusion that California should be perpetually safe and comfortable fueled residents’ fear of wildfire in “Los Angeles Notebook,” so, too, does the illusion that roads promise freedom and independence fuel this protest against CalTrans’s attempt to restrict the motorist.
Not unlike the sacred flow of traffic in Los Angeles is the sacred flow of water, which stands as one of the state’s most staggering technological feat. In “Holy Water,” Didion tracks Los Angeles’s water supply up to the Operations Control Center for the California State Water Project in Sacramento. By framing her visit to the control center on “one summer morning,” she colors her narrative with the timelessness of an endless summer in California before going on to scrutinize the cost of that seeming endlessness (60). Moving beyond the illusion of the easy life, this trope of the endless summer reinforces the illusion that humans can control their environment to create a life of ease. Didion relates the importance of water for Californians to the symbol of the swimming pool as she explains, “Actually a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye” (63-64). She goes on to assert, “It is easy to forget that the only natural force over which we have any control out here is water, and that only recently” (64). Although I will discuss how she goes on to dismantle this apparent certainty in the next section, Didion’s initial presentation of the American West as an arena of combat between humans and aridity succinctly demonstrates the myth that bolstered citywide and statewide attempts to dominate the environment since the nineteenth century. William Mullholland’s “There it is, take it!” declaration at the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913 (wall text, Becoming Los Angeles) belied the anxieties over water scarcity that Didion addresses, anxieties that stem from what Mazel called “an imperial teleology that always took for granted the eventual domination of the region in question,” that is, the American West during its nineteenth-century conquest (144). Didion’s meditation on the symbolic power of reliable water in California demonstrates the illusion of control that dictated the infrastructural development of Los Angeles.
The Fraying Dreamwork
Having established each of her essays with the different environmental illusions that played into the shared myths of Los Angeles, Didion proceeds to expose these delusions in order to reveal their human and environmental costs. Despite her earlier characterization of the Santa Anas as supernatural forces that unite Los Angeles residents in an esoteric “knowing,” Didion spends the rest of the essay portraying the divisive, fragmentary effect of this fear based on the illusion that life in California is safe and comfortable. She explains that reading Los Angeles Times headlines during the Santa Anas approaches “very close to what it is about the place” (220) which is that the wind “shows us how close to the edge we are” (221). Her repetition of “close” not only heightens the anxiety of approaching wind and fire, it recalls spatial invasions and challenges to definitions of identity. When she mentions a symbolic “edge,” that edge can represent a vast number of dichotomies relevant to the development of the city (human/nature, civilization/wilderness, inside/outside, white/black) that essentially amount to this fundamental difference between the self and other. This omnipresent, metaphysical anxiety is not just residents’ shared fear of an inhospitable environment but their shared fear of one another.
Didion’s presentation of the Santa Anas moves on to become a meditation of the symbol of wildfires in the Los Angeles psyche, a potent symbol that betrays the relationship between environmental and racial inequities. She insists that the Santas Anas are a potent symbol in the Los Angeles imagination because the “city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself” and that the media images of the Watts Riots of 1965 “that struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires” (220). Her use of “radical,” combined with the superlative characterization of destruction via fire as the city’s “deepest” image of its own self, combined with a fleeting reference to arson-obsessed media coverage on the Watts Riots create a startlingly complex presentation of self-annihilation. According to Davis, Los Angeles has a predisposition with its own destruction that “the taxonomy of disaster fiction reveals the deepest animating fears of our culture” concerning ethnic and racial others (Fear 281-282). Davis echoes Didion’s description of superlative depth: the deepest image of self-immolation reflects the deepest fear of the other. He even concludes Ecology of Fear with an image of fire that strikingly echoes Didion’s fixation with the burning city: on April 20, 1992, a space satellite picked up thermal data that registered what seemed to be “a unitary geophysical phenomenon” like a volcanic eruption. However, this data did not actually come from a natural disaster, but rather from the arson fires scattered across Los Angeles during the riots after the murder of Rodney King. This apparently unitary image of natural fire was actually a massive agglomeration of disparate manmade fires, what Davis called “individual acts of anger and desperation” from an oppressed and alienated community (Fear 422). Placed in this perspective, there does not seem to be much of a difference between natural and human pyrological activity, reinforcing social ecologists’ argument that natural and human ecosystems are so interrelated that they must be studied together (Bennett 33). In this way, Davis helps illuminate how Didion analyzes the communal fear of wildfire to expose the city’s illicit fixation with self-destruction derived from its ethnic and racial divisions.
Didion’s mention of the Watts Riots also reveals how violence against property during social revolts further destabilizes the myth upon which Los Angeles was arguably built: the unchecked private development of California came at the expense of all forms of life, human and otherwise. Although most outside observers focused on criminal behaviors like looting and arson during the 1992 riots, they failed to recognize this behavior, when placed in perspective as “the product of long-standing grievances and as a manifestation of street governance,” signified “a redefinition of social and political value” in which “personal needs were granted a higher authority than the preservation of private property” (Hahn 81). Didion’s evocation of Watts to reinforce her argument on the symbolic significance of fire in the Los Angeles psyche reveals that media coverage had also focused on “criminal behaviors” in 1965, just as they would go to do in 1992. These outside fixations reflect anxieties around the symbolic significance of arson as a threat to the illusion maintained by a capitalist economy that private property is more important than human life and dignity.
However, the fear of fire in Los Angeles not only reveals the racial division of the community, it also portrays the isolation of each individual in the sprawling metropolis. Didion ends “Los Angeles Notebook” with a fragmented series of scenes that represent the complex relationship between the alienated community and their communal discontent that mirrors the rebellion of the oppressed environment. Without offering any explanation or reflection, Didion presents four disparate scenes: during the Santa Ana’s, a radio station hears from angry callers about the loosening morals of the country; a woman at the grocery store antagonizes Didion for wearing a bathing suit in public; a tipsy wife publicly announces her husband’s homosexuality at a film industry party in Beverly Hills; finally, an Encino piano bar serves as the backdrop for drunken arguments concerning class differences (221-224). In these jarring episodes presented in quick succession without any explanation, Didion offers a cacophonous portrait of an alienated, isolated, and antagonistic community. As Bookchin argues, modern urban dwellers are “[h]erded together, they exude an active force of mutual unconcern, indeed, of latent hostility, and reinforce rather than allay the ubiquitous lack of human solidarity” (82). Bookchin’s analysis of capitalist metropolises elucidates the self-perpetuating isolation of city life that Didion depicts in these scenes of frustrated individuals voicing their private grievances through radio waves, women oppressing other women by imposing patriarchal expectations on their bodies, a wife using her husband’s sexuality as a malicious tool, and individuals in a capitalist society unable to commune peaceably over music and a drink. The abrupt scene-cuts that punctuate these episodes mimic the sprawling scenes taking place simultaneously in Los Angeles’s far-flung peripheries. In the wake of her initial presentation of city residents united in a metaphysical fear over the illusion that life in Los Angeles is easy, Didion concludes the essay with the impression that the only way in which these people are united is in their utter aloneness.
These paradoxical moments of disordered unity, whether as physical assaults on private property during riots or emotional assaults on individuals, are also why the Santa Anas are such a powerful symbol in “Los Angeles Notebook”— they get the entire city on the same chaotic wavelength. Similarly, another rare instance of unity is what moves her to investigate the Diamond Lane project in “Bureaucrats,” where she describes the unrest of the population in terms that resemble the disquiet in “Los Angeles Notebook.” She explains that “the only effect so far” of the Diamond Lane project “had been to disrupt traffic throughout the Los Angeles basin, triple the number of daily accidents on the Santa Monica, prompt the initiation of two lawsuits against Caltrans, and cause large numbers of Los Angeles County residents to behave, most uncharacteristically, as an ignited and conscious proletariat” (82). Her use of “proletariat” places residents in a position of powerlessness within the capitalist system. By describing them as “ignited and conscious,” Didion returns to the correlation of fire as symbol of defiance against social inequity and attributes the protesters with responsiveness to their environment. Her sardonic aside that these qualities of alertness and rebellion are “uncharacteristic” explain why this display of civic unity is so unusual in the first place. This portrait of the protesters ridicules the delusions of independence and freedom to which they aspire, delusions that the myth of the freeway promises.
Didion maintains a dubious voice throughout the essay to assert that the operations center, although a part of the state entity CalTrans, does not act in the interest of the public. She unequivocally calls the Diamond Lane pilot project “a foray into bureaucratic terrorism” and highlights the insincere language of bureaucracy, perhaps designed to keep citizens in the dark, by encompassing certain words in quotation marks: “verified,” “pilot project,” “incident,” etc (80). This recuring jargon spoken among the staff at the operations center sounds like insincere prayer as the quotations marks indicate that there is something disingenuous about them as they are placed in the mouths of their speakers; Didion remains skeptical of these bureaucratic mystics and their “certain Caltrans opacity” (81). She also explains that when Caltrans responded to the protest, their “statements in the press had been cryptic and contradictory, reminiscent only of old communiqués out of Vietnam” (82). Her reference to the devastating war only a year after it was over in relation to a municipal concern may seem unusual if not patronizing, but it connects this relatively small-scale city-level act of corruption to national and global political maneuverings.
By attacking the circuitous and out-of-touch response of CalTrans to the protests of the general population, Didion attempts to interrogate bureaucratic institutions at large. According to Bookchin, precapitalist cities were constructed around hierarchical structures of authority like pharaohs, emperors, monarchs that individuals could identify and comprehend as people who wielded power over them. However, he argues that modern metropolises experience a different relationship with authority:
Power is utterly abstracted by transferring it from persons to institutions, from
definable individuals to faceless bureaucracies. Although power—and
powerlessness —are felt like a twitching nerve in every sphere of life, the locus
of these feelings and forces becomes diffuse…The personified powers that once
administered society evaporate from the social terrain. They are replaced by
“the system,” the vague anonymous apparatus that lacks definite boundaries
and forms. (Bookchin 80-81)
The indirect, vague language of the operations center that Didion so thoroughly critiqued represents the operations center’s indirect, vague power over the population of Los Angeles. And because their power exists in a windowless room on the upstairs floor of an inconspicuous building in downtown Los Angeles (79), CalTrans can control the population without fear of being challenged in any meaningful way. Thus, Didion scrutinizes the bureaucratic institution in charge of managing transportation, with all its latent promises of spatial and personal freedom that fuelled westward expansion and Los Angeles’s infamous freeway system, in order to expose the powerlessness of individuals in a sprawling metropolis.
In “Holy Water,” Didion applies this struggle for control to the vital resource of water as a powerful symbol in the Western imagination. Returning to the myth that California ingenuity has completed humanity’s domination over nature to guarantee the easy life, she gives contradictory examples of how the precise flow of water may be disrupted by increasing salinity levels, a sudden rain, or fish getting stuck in the pumps (61). Didion dismantles the assertion of the might of human innovation over nature when she remarks, “In the part of California where I now live [Los Angeles] aridity is the single most prominent feature of the climate, and I am not pleased to see, this year, cactus spreading wild to the sea. There will be days this winter when the humidity will drop to ten, seven, four. Tumbleweed will blow against my house and the sound of the rattlesnake will be duplicated a hundred times a day by dried bougainvillea drifting in my driveway” (64). This sequence of ominous images (cactus, tumbleweed, rattlesnake) reminds her audience of Los Angeles’s water scarcity in the face of a booming population growth and naturally limited resources. By counting down the humidity levels, she heightens the sense of anxiety over increasing aridity. The juxtaposition of the cactus, a symbol of the desert, uncontrollably encroaching upon the watery expanse of the Pacific speaks to a fear of desertification and environmental catastrophe. When Didion mentions that tumbleweeds, which are iconic of ghost towns, will knock on her door and dried flowers will sound like dangerous rattlesnakes against the walls of her home, she is expressing her dread that the arid Los Angeles wilderness will one day invade her domestic refuge and bring it to ruin alongside the city.
The unsettling portrait of human life pitted against the environment dismantles the myth of paradise that brought laborers and consumers to California in the first place, the myth that because Mulholland had pulled water from the Sierra Nevadas all the way down to Los Angeles, water was now there for the taking. Didion starkly reminds her audience, “Even now the place is not all that hospitable to extensive settlement. As I write a fire has been burning out of control for two weeks in the ranges behind the Big Sur coast. Flash floods last night wiped out all major roads into Imperial County. I noticed this morning a hairline crack in a living-room tile from last week’s earthquake, a 4.4 I never felt…The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way” (64). Didion’s temporal references to the present—“even now” and “as I write”—insist on the immediacy of danger in the natural processes of California’s environment. Moreover, they assert that geological and environmental events will occur despite centuries of human intervention and innovation. Her claim that those who fail to understand the dangers of life in California “live here in only the most temporary way” carries an ominous implication as it can mean a metaphorical loss of belonging as well a loss of property or a loss of life to natural hazards. In this way, Didion questions the certainty with which the control center appears to govern a precious, unwieldy resource.
As in her previous essays, this control over water signifies a greater desire for control. Didion explains, “Water is important to people who do not have it. And the same is true of control” (65). By equating water to control, by comparing control over California’s environment to the individual’s desire for power in a state of powerlessness, Didion echoes the ideology of conquest concerned with “knowing, restructuring, and finally controlling the land and life of the continent” (Mazel 144). When she concludes the essay with her reluctance to leave the control center, she admits, “I had no further business in this room and yet I wanted to stay the day. I wanted to be the one, that day, who was shining the olives, filling the gardens, and flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile. I want it still” (66). Although she spent most of the essay describing how this intricate and complicated technological feat can fail to anticipate everyday natural occurrences, she still leaves the reader with the impression of her unconsummated desire for control, with the edenic and picturesque images of the fruition of that desire. By describing the pull of the control room, Didion maintains the perils of the siren song of the California myth, that even someone who has scrutinized the cost of controlling all that water across the state can still want to be complicit in this exertion of power.
Conclusion: Disenchantment
In this way, each essay demystifies a mythic narrative around Los Angeles’s distinctive environmental features that serves capitalist and imperialist institutions. In “Los Angeles Notebook,” Didion dismantles the myth that the Santa Anas and their resulting wildfires are unnatural, demonic forces that disrupt the promised calm of California life— as Mike Davis highlighted in The Ecology of Fear, these natural occurrences are characteristic features of the environment and urban planners and developers have conveniently shaped and sold the city in ways that ignore this natural reality, harming the environment and placing the lives of citizens in danger. In “Bureaucrats,” Didion dismantles the myth that the freeways are miraculous zones of spatial liberation, exposing the bureaucratic elite who spatially track and manipulate motorists and turn a blind eye to civic protest. In “Holy Water,” Didion dismantles the myth that technological innovations have guaranteed immunity to natural hazards by outlining California’s complex, unprecedented, and imperfect attempt to control its water supply. After lifting the fog of enchantment from wildfires, freeways, and water, Didion leaves her reader to reckon with the reality left in the wake of the dream-vision.
Her search for the truth behind symbols makes her a fitting critic of the faceless institutions that control life in modern metropolises like Los Angeles. Mark Z. Muggli argues that “Didion is under the spell of images…but she is even more fixed on discovering these images’ resonance. Both her fiction and her journalism have explored how precision, rhythm, and structure can unbind this resonance” (419). Each essay functioned as an exercise in unravelling the myths of California that resulted in the subjugation of its people and environment. Muggli explains, “Didion has explored her relationship to such images most fully in ‘Why I Write,’ where she asserts that she does not think ‘in abstracts’ but is, rather, drawn ‘inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible’ (Didion qtd. in Muggli 403). This writerly tendency to turn general ideas into discernible specifics effectively reverses what Bookchin said was the transference of power from concrete persons to diffuse institutions in the metropolis, a type of municipal enchantment that allows those in power to evade attempts from the powerless population to regain control (81). In effect, Didion reverses this transformation that occurred as cities modernized; she turns the abstract into the concrete and the unnameable into the nameable in order to gain an understanding of the sources of control and oppression. Her subjective voice unravels the dreamwork that governs the natural and urban infrastructure of Los Angeles during the postwar boom, but this reliance on individual subjectivity concludes each essay with an impression of hopeless disappointment. For Didion, the disillusioned individual has limited power to influence the institutions that shape their life.
Works Cited
Bennett, Michael. “From Wide Open Spaces to Metropolitan Places: The Urban Challenge to Ecocriticism.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 8, no. 1, 2001, pp. 31-52.
Bookchin, Murray. The Limits of the City. Harper & Row, 1974.
Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, Metropolitan Books, 1998.
Didion, Joan. “Los Angeles Notebook.” Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008, pp. 217-224.
Didion, Joan. “Bureaucrats” The White Album: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, pp. 79-85.
Didion, Joan. “Holy Water.” The White Album: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, pp. 59-66.
Didion, Joan. Where I Was From. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
Hahn, Harlan. “Los Angeles and the Future: Uprisings, Identity, and New Institutions.” Rethinking Los Angeles, edited by M.J. Dear, et al., Sage Publications, 1996, pp. 77-95.
Mazel, David. “American Literary Environmentalism as Domestic Orientalism.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, University of Georgia Press, 1996, pp. 137-146.
Muggli, Mark Z. “The Poetics of Joan Didion’s Journalism.” American Literature, Vol. 59, No. 3, 1987, pp. 402-421.
Schlosser, Joel. “Joan Didion and the American Dream.” Raritan, vol. 37, no. 4, 2018, pp. 28-51.
Interpretations: Journal of the Graduate Literature Association 