Didion’s “On Going Home”: The Rhetoric of Fragmentation

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 6 (1997): 35-42. Didion’s “On Going Home”: The Rhetoric of Fragmentation Dilek Direnç One of the recent developments in American letters has been the recent awakening of interest in the essay form, considered for long a subgenre of literary nonfiction. “A greater number of essayists,” Scott Russell Sanders indicates, are “at work in America today, and more gifted ones, than at any time in recent decades” (qtd. in Atkins 13). One of these gifted writers is Joan Didion. Chris Anderson contends that her essay writing “represent[s] the fulfillment and attenuation of the essay as a form” (141). In the history of the essay, he sees Didion following “the tradition of Montaigne” (143). Similarly, Katherine Usher Henderson, reminding that “in saying that his essays were about himself, Montaigne referred to the universal rather than the idiosyncratic aspect of the ‘self,’” finds Didion often using “her ‘self’ in this manner, as both illustration of and authority for her ideas” (91, 92). In fact, for Anderson, Didion’s characteristic strategy is “to reflect on contemporary life from the standpoint of her own experience or to engage in autobiographical narrative which ultimately leads to commentary on the social problems of the time” (142). In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her collection of essays published in 1968, Didion depicts events, places, and persons of the 1960s with a social as well as a philosophical concern. Michelle Carbone Loris sees her essays as “social histories with a literary structure—Acts of America.” In these essays, Loris explains, Didion “foregrounds an historical event, a geographical place, or a well-known personality, but her intent is to get beneath the manners to the moral character of her community” (99). Henderson echoes the same opinion when she asserts that “Didion seeks to render the moral complexity of contemporary American experience, especially the dilemmas and ambiguities resulting from the erosion of traditional values by a new social and political reality” (146). Didion’s essays provide the reader with stories about herself and about the culture she carefully observes and analyzes; these stories work “as parables of contemporary America” (Loris 96). In “On Going Home,” one of the essays in the collection, Didion relates the story of her visit to her family home in California and elaborates on the dream of a close-knit extended family. This dream, she concludes, can not be realized in contemporary America. Thus, the personal story “brings a moral perspective to the cultural chaos that she records” and her writing becomes a “moral documentary of the way we live now” (4-5). Written in 1967, this essay comprises Didion’s reflections on the loss of home, on “whether or not you could go home again,” while revealing her genuine concern with “the fragmentation [of America] after World War II” (165). While reflecting on and writing about this newly emerged fragmented world, Didion utilizes a nontraditional, alternate grammar of style, and the techniques of New Journalism become her means of conveying the sense of contemporary reality. In “On Going Home” she skillfully employs these techniques, while her style both interprets and mirrors the fragmented reality she is concerned with. In the post-World War II period, not only Didion but many writers were aware of the fragmentation, separation, and discontinuity in culture and society, and searched for a new way of writing which would enable them to convey the sense of contemporary reality. The traditional grammar of style had “the characteristics of continuity, order, reasonable progression and sequence, consistency, unity, etc.,” characteristics that did not correspond to new realities (Weathers 20), and therefore were not of much use to them. In “Grammars of Style,” Winston Weathers defends the use of an alternate grammar: Many writers believe that there are “things to say”... that simply cannot be effectively communicated via a traditional grammar; that there are “things to say” in a highly technological, electronic, socially complex, politically and spiritually confused era that simply cannot be reflected in language if language is limited to the traditional grammar. (4) An alternate grammar, suggests Weathers, is “a variegated, discontinuous, fragmented grammar of style [which] corresponds to an amorphous and inexplicable universe and mentality” (4). Although attempted earlier by experimental poets and innovative fiction writers, the alternate grammar of style, or “Grammar B,” as Weathers terms it, has been established as a way of writing and interpreting reality by the “new journalism” in the mid-1960s. As one of the leading New Journalists, Didion both contributed to the development, and employed the techniques, of New Journalism, or Grammar B. The major techniques that she uses in “On Going Home” are, as I demonstrate below, the collage/montage, the list, the labyrinthine sentence, synchronicity, the “crot”-like paragraph, repetitions, and refrains. Didion nostalgically entitles her essay “On Going Home” while regretfully recognizing its impossibility. Her topic is personal; a visit to her family home for her daughter’s first birthday. However, her use of Grammar B, with, as Weathers aptly puts it, “characteristics of variegation, synchronicity, discontinuity [and] ambiguity,” enables her to move from the personal to the social, and to express much more than individual words on the page denote (2). Her basic theme in this short essay is the fragmentation of contemporary life, and the disconnectedness of generations. In her attempt to connect the past with the present, and vice versa, she searches for threads of continuity in her own past and present. To reinforce her message, she employs throughout the essay the various techniques mentioned above which are all techniques of fragmentation. The stylistic fragmentation serves as a means of representing the fragmentation of American experience in the postwar era. As a consequence of its stylistic fragmentation, the essay as a whole becomes a collage: a visual as well as a verbal collage. (Note 1) Fragmentary and unrelated scenes follow one another: the dusty houses “filled with mementos,” she and her family chatting around the fire, “a pretty young girl on crystal tak[ing] off her clothes and danc[ing] in an ‘amateur-topless’ contest,” the writer in her family home going “aimlessly from room to room,” the contents of an old drawer where she meets her past, “the broken monuments in the graveyard,” “the baby play[ing] with the dust motes in a shaft of afternoon sun,” she “kneel[ing] beside the crib” of the baby. (Note 2) “Many of the stylistic devices that finally became a part of Grammar B,” Weathers argues, “are based upon cinematic techniques” (3). Yet, as a result of her attempt to reveal the fragmentation of contemporary experience, Didion’s prose is more photographic than cinematic. Thus, the reader (...truncated)