Originally written for Advanced Language Composition at Santa Monica College, taught by Professor Susan Caggiano
The two themes — consistency and change — are found all throughout literature, Joan Didion tackles them in “South and West” and “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” respectively. Though different in types of work: one a notebook meant to lead to a story and one a collection of previously published essays, Didion uses rhetorical devices perfectly to achieve the feeling of a never or always changing America. While the rhetorical devices of “South and West” tend to be less crafted, more observant of her natural, un-retouched style, and the devices in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” are planned to the period, they both function for the piece of work they belong to. “South and West” uses parallel structure, anaphora, dialogue, and diction to draw out every scene she encounters, bringing you into the unmoving state of the South. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” uses various rhetorical and literary devices to make her readers understand what it’s like to belong to somewhere as unstable as California.
In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” Didion talks about notebooks in a variety of ways, and thinks through a variety of purposes. The final purpose she gives is that notebooks, and writing things down, is to remind you of who you once were and remember that version of yourself: “I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about” (Slouching, 140). In the essay “On Keeping a Notebook”, it seems Didion uses her written memories to bring her back to precise moments in time, to remember specific details and emotions. At the end of the essay, though, she realizes that things don’t stay the same — don’t make you feel how you once did, but you should remember and learn from them anyways: “I made the sauerkraut again last night and it did not make me feel any safer, but that is, as they say, another story” (Slouching, 141). With this in mind, the purpose (outside of gathering notes for a possible story) that emerges from “South and West” is to remind herself that she likes change and is okay with it. In each city she visits, it seems as though she feels stuck. Despite only being in the South for a month, and travelling through at least a dozen different locations, the similarity from one town to another seems to wear on her and by the end she is desperate to get home: “nothing ‘happened’ anywhere I was, no celebrated murders, trials, integration orders, confrontations, not even any celebrated acts of God,” (South, 13) “glad to be, I suppose, so very close to the place where the National and Delta flights left for California” (South, 102).
The published notebook “South and West” is the jottings of Joan Didion’s month long drive through America’s south, originally expected to be turned into a final piece. Throughout the notebook, Didion does a handful of rhetorical and literary devices that slow the reader down and makes them feel just how constant life in the south as shown itself to her. Two of which are the use of parallel structure and anaphora, often with each other. Both of these have the effect of making the reader feel like they’re seeing the same thing over and over again (because they are). By using them throughout her notebook, and while talking about such an unchanging place, the readers understand her feelings of being stuck in time. With anaphora, she often describes a list of details that are all happening at the same time: “We ate trout with shallots and mushrooms. We drank some white wine, we drank some more bourbon. We passed the evening” (South, 18). When she uses parallel structure, it’s often to highlight how similar things really are and how everything happens in the same way’: “Everything seems to go to seed along the Gulf: walls stain, windows rust. Curtains mildew, wood warps” (South, 20).
Didion also is keen to use long passages of dialogue and diction that creates a sense of stillness throughout her notebook. Often, she has a section of dialogue (largely said by one person) that goes on for multiple pages at a time. This technique makes the reader feel how long the conversation got dragged on. In one section of the notebook, there’s almost 3 pages of dialogue between a couple women at a laundromat, talking about the AC and heat (South, 73-76). This depiction of never ending, pointless conversation makes the reader notice just how little is going on in the places she visits. Another technique that has this same effect is word choice that amplifies the constants in the towns. She uses words like “everything, always, still, never, and again” all throughout the notes to highlight how long things go on and how similar they are from one town to another.
In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” we see a more developed version of Didion’s style. In her final product essays, she has expanded her device use to more thought out rhetoric, as well as literary style. Didion seems to be a fan of rhetorical devices such as additive sentence style mixed with amplification, rhetorical questions and hypophora, and methodical use of punctuation. Each of these devices work towards creating an unstable environment for the reader, where they question what is happening and why. Using an additive sentence style, along with amplification, gives the reader the sense of tumbling through passages without knowledge of where they’re going or how things will fall. The amplification serves to build more and more upon each idea she puts across, and gives a sort of clarity in the muddiness of an additive sentence: “They have not been [to true California], and they probably never will be, for it is a longer and in many ways a more difficult trip than they might want to undertake, one of those trips on which the destination flickers chimerically on the horizon, ever receding, ever diminishing” (Slouching, 171). Didion’s use of punctuation is interesting. She keeps things together that could be separate and separates what could be kept. Many times, she separated three different images with semicolons (this example taking up 108 words), but then talked about one thing throughout an entire page:
“First, I remember running a boxer dog of my brother’s over the same flat fields that our great-great-grandfather had found virgin and had planted; I remember swimming (albeit nervously, for I was a nervous child, afraid of sinkholes and afraid of snakes, and perhaps that was the beginning of my error) the same rivers we had swum for a century: the Sacramento, so rich with silt that we could barely see our hands a few inches beneath the surface; the American, running clean and fast with melted Sierra snow until July, when it would slow down, and rattlesnakes would sun themselves on its newly exposed rocks” (Slouching, 173).
This out of the ordinary use of punctuation continues to add to the feeling of unsureness the reader has. They’ve been told that the theme is things falling apart, yet they’re met with sentences 185 words long with every type of punctuation available. But, within that sentence she changes topics many times and makes it difficult to connect the pieces. When Didion uses rhetorical questions and hypophora, she pushes the reader to question her ethos: “Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all?” (Slouching, 132), she specifically wants them to be unsure of what she’s talking about. In some passages, she completely destroys the idea most people would have about her credibility: “not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters” (Slouching, 134) by doing this, she knocks the audience off their feet and further demonstrates her theme of things falling apart. Everything falls apart, even your belief in the truth in an awarded writer.
Didion also uses quite a bit of literary devices throughout “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, including additive sentences to showcase images, metaphor, and anecdotes/references. Using additive sentences for both literary and rhetorical purposes is a great showcase of Didion’s style, and she often uses them right next to each other. Right before the example for rhetorical additive sentences she uses the same sentence style to create vivid images in the reader’s’ mind: “They have been to Los Angeles or to San Francisco, have driven through a giant redwood and have seen the Pacific glazed by the afternoon sun off Big Sur, and they naturally tend to believe that they have in fact been to California” (Slouching, 171). By keeping the sentence going, detail after detail, she gives the impression that these things people have seen means they have been to California, only to destroy that idea in antithesis with her next additive sentence: “They have not been…” (Slouching, 171). Throughout “Slouching Through Bethlehem”, Didion uses some pretty extended metaphors. One of which, that is thematically telling, is the story of an old house and the man who lives in a trailer in front of it (Slouching, 185). This story is a metaphor for the deterioration of her childhood and how even things that feel permanent don’t last or change with time: “That is a story my generation knows; I doubt that the next will know it” (Slouching, 185). The choice to use a metaphor, instead of flat out telling people that things don’t last, allows people to get broader meaning from the passage and take what they will from her story. It takes some of the pressure to convince people off of her. Didion also uses a variety of comparisons in her work. These comparisons give a deeper understanding of what she’s talking about, since she’s comparing places that not everyone has been to(California and New York) to places everyone has read about (Eden and Xanadu): “because in at least one respect California… resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished,” (Slouching, 176), “To think of ‘living’ there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not ‘live’ at Xanadu” (Slouching, 231).
Despite the obvious differences between “South and West” and “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, they both depict one of the most showing of writing techniques: imagery. The imagery throughout both books is intense, perfectly crafted, and draws the reader into the emotions going on. The imagery in “South and West” brings the reader into the situation Didion is facing, and makes it so you can almost hear the ticking of the clock in the stillness: “No flicker of expression crossed her classic mountain face, and her movements were so slow as to be hypnotic. She made a kind of ballet scooping ice into a glass. Behind her a soft-ice-cream machine oozed and plopped, and every now and then ice cubes would fall in the ice machine” (South, 42). Didion has created the ultimate environment to suck a reader in and make them feel exactly what she is feeling. She knows how to make a boring stillness feel interesting. Didion also uses the repetition of images in “South and West” to bring out similarities from one place to another or to amplify a specific detail. First, she repeats the image of a beach towel that she recognizes from her own life and the ones she sees in the south: “I bought a cheap beach towel printed with a Confederate flag… and my child prefers it to the good ones” (South, 26), “[the boy] stalked after her wrapped in a Confederate-flag beach towel” (South, 45). The choice to repeat the image of something so specific in its southerness is done to make the reader (and herself) wonder if Didion and the other families she’s watching are really so different. She also uses the repetition of comparing the feeling of the heat to water, giving the reader the same feeling she has: “I think I never saw water that appeared to be running in any part of the south. A sense of water moccasins. In Demopolis around lunchtime the temperature was 96 degrees and all movement seemed liquid” (South 63), “I was underwater in some real sense, the whole month” (South, 90). This image brings the feeling of floating through time to the forefront of people’s imaginations, everyone knows what it feels like to be in such heat that the world seems liquid, or be so dazed that you feel underwater. These images connect with the reader and gives them details that they can hold onto.
In “Slouching Through Bethlehem” the images tend to be stronger and have the ability to move you from one to another much faster. Didion focuses on images that still bring you to the scene of her story, but also give you the sense that things aren’t always going to be like how she is describing them. She describes things in terms readers understand and can see, even if they have never experienced the Santa Ana winds, or have never been homesick in New York City: “For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire… Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse… The wind shows us how close to the edge we are” (Slouching, 220-221), “All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better” (Slouching, 232). Both these images are concrete and give the reader just as much to hold onto as the images in “South and West”, but here, they also bring out an emotional response that people might not have expected. You feel her longing for the winds to be over and the fear they bring, and you understand her trying to make her apartment feel more like home. In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” Didion uses her imagery to provoke the readers to feel more than just an idea of an image might have. The imagery in both of her books, and how it makes them feel, how it transports them to where she is, is one of the most telltale signs of her writing, and one of the most interesting parts of it.
Any differences between “South and West” and “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” are largely due to the different purposes of the works. Had “South and West” been turned into a full piece, we would see the more planned out writing style come forward; had we seen the notebooks that lead to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” we would probably find the simpler versions of the ones she ended up using. Her writing is interesting as it is complex, in either situation, and she has a power to entrance readers that not all writers possess.
Works Cited
Didion, Joan. Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays. New York: FSG Classics, 2008. Print.
Didion, Joan. South and West: From A Notebook. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. Print.