A Question of Rhetorical Method
“To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.”
No. Didion is one of the few female writers that has crossover gender appeal. I know a number of males who adore her. Something that probably can’t be said of Caitlin Flanagan.
Reading Flanagan’s piece—twice—I had the unnerving sensation of being kept late at the end of a party by someone determined to get in the last word long after the drinks have run out and the person she was arguing with, or wanted us to see her arguing with, has left for home. Mixing textual analysis with anecdote, the piece blurs the distinction between Didion’s reception in different eras, her social presence (mainly in the ’60s and ’70s), and her writing itself. A feat, to encompass the object of your gaze in such qualified admiration as to narrow the circle of her appreciation and claim her for we few, we mournful few, who know what to make of her.
But the interpretations of Didion’s words—not of Didion the social figure, which I can’t affirm or dispute—seem to me as off as the characterization of those words’ appeal (at least their later appeal). Discussing “Goodbye to All That,” Flanagan writes:
It’s about the exquisite sadness of the end of a love affair, the growing disenchantment with living in New York, and most of all what it’s like for a woman to lose her youth:
There was a song on all the jukeboxes on the upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl that used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that … One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
Didion begins with a woman’s details—hers—but the generalizations are all general. Her prose, never more influenced by Hemingway than here, is not interested in narrowing down. Its motion is all outward. It tells and asserts, but its connections between shown details and told observations are rarely causal and never inherent and when she does land back in particulars they are so oblique as to be strangely, atonally inarguable, as at the end of “Goodbye…”:
on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles “the Coast,” but they seem a long time ago.
There’s so much power in the logical and temporal gap between those last two sentences (“there were years?” Which years? When?) and the illogical juxtaposition of scent and what “we both knew.” She is doing strange things to our thinking, leaving the meaning, the “about”-ness, in the gaps that the rhythms carry us over.
When I taught “Goodbye To All That” this fall, I began by having students read it aloud. One student raised his hand, entranced, wondering if it was poetry. Didion’s is a poetry of the experience of significance erasing significance. As a writer she is above all a formal innovator and if, as Flanagan writes, this has become familiar it is because it is a rhetorical method, severe and replicable and unmistakable, applicable to any topic, if especially those with time to lend the sepia of loss, and it is always more concerned with the experiencing of itself than with its subject—whatever that may be.
