However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

—Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The few literary critics who have examined Joan Didion's early nonfiction seem unable to see the forest for the trees. They focus so intently on particular stylistic or thematic aspects of her essays that they become blind to how these specific elements work in concert toward a more general end. A wider and more synthetic view allows us to see that Didion's style embodies and enacts her central theme in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Indeed, the style of these early essays forces the reader to engage in the same struggle for articulation that Didion herself experiences—and with similar results.

I

But what are the stylistic and thematic “trees” in Didion's nonfictional “forest,” Slouching Towards Bethlehem? Perhaps the most obvious quality of Didion's style is what Chris Anderson calls her “grammar of radical particularity.” Didion herself says that her “mind veers inflexibly toward the particular.” Her style reflects this habit of mind, Anderson notes, with essays such as “Going Home” consisting of little more than “a list of details, a juxtaposing of scenes” wherein the concreteness of the scenes carries “the burden of meaning.” Didion's method throughout her work, he says, is to be “a framer of pictures, an arranger of images.” According to Anderson, Didion's “habitual gesture as a stylist is to isolate the ironic or symbolic or evocative image and then reflect on its possible significance.”

Mark Z. Muggli also describes Didion's emphasis on the evocative particular, calling it the “poetics of her journalism.” Muggli says her dependence on the emblem, an extreme form of metaphor beyond the symbol, can be seen in her many memorable “timeless, static pictures.” These pictures, he writes, “reverberate with an intensity that suggests a world of meaning beyond the confines of a particular story.” Thus, he argues, “The emblem does not illustrate, or even represent—it evokes.” Muggli notes that Didion often places her evocative emblems at the end of structural units in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, giving the emblems “a white space in which to echo.” For example, the essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” which completes the first section of the book, ends with an emblem that reverberates in the following white space, suggesting meanings beyond that particular essay: The residents of a hippie apartment Don't notice a mother screaming at a three-year-old who sets a fire “because they were in the kitchen trying to retrieve some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard damaged in the fire.”

Closely related to the grammar of radical particularity in Didion's prose, “in fact, ultimately a function of it,” Anderson says, is the second characteristic of her style, which he calls her “rhetoric of gaps, ＼her］ withholding of interpretation and commentary at every level of language.” Anderson contends that powerful writing frequently relies on the deliberate omission of signposts and that “meaning sometimes carries across the gaps or silences in a discourse with greater power than words themselves can bear.” He concludes that “the rhetorical effect of gaps … is to draw us as readers into the text” as we “actively ‘assemble’＼its］ various parts.” In Didion's nonfiction, he notes, there are gaps between sentences and paragraphs, resulting from her deliberate omission of transitional words and phrases, and likewise gaps follow her short interpretive statements. In the essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” for instance, she uses “obvious sections of blank space to separate deliberately fragmentary and unrelated scenes, portraits, dialogues, and stories, creating a verbal collage.”

A third strategy of Didion's prose in Slouching Towards Bethlehem is what Anderson has termed her “rhetoric of process.” He notes that what little commentary Didion does offer is “highly tentative, grounded in the moment of writing, a function of her effort at that place and time to think through a problem in language.” Thus, he argues, her thinking and writing seem coinstantaneous, as if she were exploring problems as she writes, “allowing the various versions of her thought to stand side by side rather than canceling the abandoned interpretations or resolving ambiguities in fixed, balanced sentences.” Her prevalent parentheses, repeated predicates, multiple conjunctions, and cumulative modifications embody this sense of spontaneity, according to Anderson, with the appositive serving as “her characteristic modifier.”

Other critics also have noted Didion's reliance on apposition, which she uses not only at the sentence level but also at the essay and book levels. Whereas Anderson discusses its use at the sentence level, W. Ross Winterowd argues that, at the essay level, Didion's texts gain their coherence from “what Burke calls qualitative progression, in which ‘the presence of one quality prepares us for the introduction of another,’ not from the syllogistic progression that structures formal essays.” Thus, in essays such as “L.A. Notebook,” Winterowd argues, Didion creates “an attitudinally coherent essay” by presenting “a series of … images in apposition.” And at the book level, Katherine Henderson believes, “passages from different essays echo and balance each other,” the organization of the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem thus giving us “point and counterpoint in a thematic richness that would be easily missed were they not collected in a single volume.” She notes that “certain fleeting images ＼in one essay］ reappear in subsequent essays, where they are developed in more detail; these links serve to add shades of meaning ＼to the first essay］ and to enrich the texture of the entire collection.” One need think no further than the reappearances of the hot Santa Ana wind to see how each appearance offers a redefinition and unpacking of its previous appearance as well as a balanced and echoing qualitative progression to the book as a whole.

Not only do critics tend to blind themselves by too narrowly focusing on these stylistic traits of the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem but they also tend to obsess upon a particular thematic “tree” of Didion's: the fragmentation of experience. As Ellen G. Friedman has remarked, the most obvious element of Didion's sensibility is her “perception that the world is atomized, and it begins every book she has written.” Slouching Towards Bethlehem is clearly no exception to this, for its title and epigraph echo Yeats's contention that “the center cannot hold.” Several critics have argued that Didion's style grows out of this conviction. Anderson, for instance, says that since, for Didion, there is no final solution to the fragmentation of her life or of postmodern experience, her stylistic “obliqueness reflects her inability to word the wordless, to order what resists order.” Likewise, Mark Royden Winchell, writing of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” says that most of the essay is “devoted to an accumulation—a veritable montage—of short, fragmented scenes,” Didion shaping “the printed page in such a way that its very appearance tells us something about her story. … Thus the reading experience itself conveys a sense of fragmentation.” Indeed, Anderson says, all of Didion's stylistic strategies result from her “failure to word an experience which she repeatedly defines as apocalyptic, paralyzing, and finally inexplicable”:

In a world where the conventional connections no longer obtain, the form of discourse is reduced to particularity … and gaps. … Discourse becomes a collage of images, not a “narrative,” not, that is, an orderly presentation of judgments. … The recourse of a mind in the face of meaninglessness is to the concrete and singular detail. In the face of apocalypse the meaning of images becomes suspect and finally irrelevant; only the image itself, in all its irreducible physicality, has reliable shape.

II

In the overemphasis on Didion's perception of the atomization of the world, most critics blind themselves to other thematic “trees” in her forest. Friedman identifies the first of these neglected themes in Slouching Towards Bethlehem by pointing out a second part of Didion's sensibility, “her belief in what she calls ‘extreme and doomed commitments.’” According to Friedman:

Didion redeems the nihilism that a vision of an atomized world invites, allows meaning to penetrate her severe universe, with individual commitments that give purpose to the life of the person making them. The commitments are by definition “doomed and extreme” because there is no coherent order into which they may be absorbed. These commitments do not necessarily make sense in terms of the larger world: one is only compelled to make them.

Similarly, Katherine Usher Henderson notes that another dominant theme in Slouching Towards Bethlehem is “the attempt to integrate the past and the present.” In this respect, we must remember what Didion says in the preface to the book—that she is not “a camera eye,” not simply a recorder of irreducible images. Rather, she is an interpreter, a creator and imposer of patterns upon the fragments of experience. As Anderson notes, writing for Didion “is a means of discovery and problem-solving, a way of reflecting on what the pictures in her mind might mean.” As readers, he says, we witness “the struggle enacted on the page to understand the meaning of the pictures in her mind,” to integrate the past and the present, to come to an “extreme and doomed commitment.”

It is this struggle for articulation of meaning that is central to a wider and more synthetic view of Didion's method/message in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Henderson, discussing the hippies in Haight-Ashbury as described in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” notes that

most people become articulate because they need words to integrate their past into their present, and to struggle with both present feelings and future plans. These young people have turned their backs on the struggle through which one becomes an adult; thus they have no need for words to shape understanding, to define themselves as individuals.

This struggle for articulation, the struggle that Didion enacts on the page and that the hippies refuse, is the means by which one becomes an adult, shapes understanding, and defines oneself as an individual. Didion forces us as readers to engage in exactly the same struggle to articulate meaning. Her evocative particulars, emblems, gaps, appositions, collages, and rhetoric of process require us to integrate experience through words and thus to grow up, assume personal responsibility for our lives, and achieve character. Through the struggle, we gain committed self-respect, a quality that Didion clearly and dearly values and that allows us to sleep in the “notoriously uncomfortable” beds we must inevitably make for ourselves.

III

Didion begins Slouching Towards Bethlehem by describing herself as “neurotically inarticulate” and discussing her personal struggle for articulation. In “A Preface,” she writes that “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was the first essay in which she “had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart,” and that she “had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act.” “If I was to work again at all,” she realized, “it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.” For Didion, the struggle for articulation in the face of this atomization, irrelevancy, and disorder is a monumental task:

＼T］here is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.

Perhaps as a result of what she sees as her own inadequacies in the struggle for articulation, Didion clearly admires and praises those individuals in Slouching Towards Bethlehem who have imposed a meaning on the atomized world. Consider, for instance, her portrait of John Wayne, “The Duke”:

＼I］n a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it.

Just as several film directors “were to sense that into this perfect mold might be poured the inarticulate longings of a nation wondering at just what pass the trail had been lost,” Didion, too, pours into Wayne her longing for the very thing she so desperately desires: the ability to articulate her own code and live by it. In much the same way that both she and America are enamored of John Wayne, and for the same reason, Didion clearly admires Howard Hughes:

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves＼,］ … tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is … absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific＼,］ … to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.

Again, we see the importance to Didion of imposing one's own meaning on the world, establishing one's own code or set of rules. However, in discussing Comrade Michael Laski, her third hero in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion is able to acknowledge a more kindred spirit in him than in Wayne or Hughes. She says she is comfortable with

the Michael Laskis of this world＼,］ … with those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void.

Her praise continues:

The world Michael Laski had constructed for himself was one of labyrinthine intricacy and immaculate clarity, a world made meaningful not only by high purpose but by external and internal threats, intrigues and apparatus, an immutably ordered world in which things mattered.

Although some might argue that her praise approaches irony, any such irony is a manifestation of Didion's envy that springs from her inability to completely articulate such “extreme and doomed commitments” herself. She does, after all, conclude the essay with an admonition: “You see what the world of Michael Laski is: a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness.”

For those like Didion who keep private notebooks, for those “lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss,” such a triumph as Laski's, however perilous, is clearly admirable. Like Laski, Didion, in her struggle for articulation, is struggling to construct a world, to “fill the void,” to make commitments and so to escape her dread. But in “On Keeping a Notebook,” Didion realizes that this struggle must necessarily and always be waged in the midst of several paradoxes. On the one hand, she says, “We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing.” On the other hand, she realizes that “however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’” Moreover, the “implacable ‘I’” requires us to be egocentric and myopic, to skew reality in our favor. Earlier in the book, Didion notes that she has “as much trouble as the next person with illusion and reality”; here, she notes that “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.” In writing in our notebooks, constructing our worlds, making our commitments, Didion implies, fact and fiction—reality and illusion—are equally assets and debits. A third paradox she uncovers is that while a notebook or constructed world is “an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker”—“your notebook will never help me, nor mine you”—“sometimes even the maker has difficulty with the meaning.”

We must engage with all these paradoxes, must struggle with all these forces that would entrap us in inarticulateness, Didion suggests, because this is the only way we can define ourselves as adult individuals, the only way we can come to the essential quality we all need: self-respect. Self-respect, she writes, “has nothing to do with the approval of others,” “nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.” The ability to make “extreme and doomed commitments,” to make one's “own code and live by it,” “to be a free agent, ＼and］ live by one's own rules,” to “exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral verve” is what Didion calls character, and “character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” The purpose of all this struggling for articulation, of this effort toward the creation of self-respect, is “to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”

IV

The tragedy of an American people who refuse to take on the struggle for articulation is epitomized in Didion's description of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” Here, clearly, are Americans who ran away to find themselves and found no one at home. Their inarticulateness and lack of struggle for articulation border on the grotesque. And this tragedy, I would argue, is why “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was “the most imperative of all these pieces to write and the only one that made ＼Didion］ despondent after it was printed.”

In the America of Didion's essay, vandals misspell “even the four-letter words they scrawled,” and the hippies' vocabulary consists of little more than sadly empty phrases such as “bummer,” “groovy,” “O.K. baby, it's your trip,” “hippie chick,” and “too much.” When Didion asks a pair of young women what they do, their responses are pathetic: “‘I just kind of come here a lot,’ one of them says. ‘I just sort of know the Dead,’ the other says.” In trying to describe his apparently fascinating ride in an outside elevator at the Fairmont Hotel, “three times up and three times down,” sixteen-year-old Jeff is utterly at a loss: “Wow,’ Jeff says, and that is all he can think to say, about that.” He is equally stumped when asked about his mother. “‘My mother was just a genuine all-American bitch,’ Jeff says. ‘She was really troublesome about hair. Also she didn't like boots. It was really weird. … It was weird. Wow.’”

Perhaps more disturbing than the general semantic shallowness and emptiness of this language is the stunning meaninglessness of a conversation in which Haight-Ashbury hippies apparently do somehow articulate themselves to one another:

“Max,” he says, “I want to say one thing.”

“It's your trip.” Max is edgy.

“I found love on acid. But I lost it. And now I'm finding it again. With nothing but grass.”

Max mutters that heaven and hell are both in one's karma.

“That's what bugs me about psychedelic art,” Steve says.

“What about psychedelic art,” Max says. “I haven't seen much psychedelic art.”

Max is lying on a bed with Sharon, and Steve leans down to him. “Groove, baby,” he says. “You're a groove.”

One of the principal perils of such monumental inarticulateness is the danger of being used by a language that one is incapable of using. For instance, Didion encounters a woman named Barbara whose characteristic rejoinder is “Groovy” and who tells Didion “how she learned to find happiness in ‘the woman's thing.’” Didion notes that “Barbara is on what is called the woman's trip to the exclusion of almost everything else.” In a striking contrast between the articulate and inarticulate persons' relative abilities to use （and thus not be used by） language, Didion writes:

Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.

The implications of inarticulateness, however, go beyond Barbara's blindness to the hippies' hypocritical sexism. Their inarticulateness also infects and undercuts their attempts at spirituality. The lyrics to a Krishna song that Didion includes, for instance, rather than inspiring awe for a deity are laughable and ludicrous:

Do you know who is the first eternal
spaceman of this universe?
The first to send his wild wild vibrations
To all those cosmic superstations?
For the song he always shouts
Sends the planets flipping out. …

Inarticulateness also prevents the hippies from achieving any of the political power to which they aspire. Lacking extensive vocabulary, they lack awareness and perspective; and lacking awareness and perspective, they lack any possible mechanism for change. At one point, Didion observes the Mime Troupers, in blackface and carrying plastic nightsticks, confronting a young black man after distributing “communication company fliers” that read:

& this summer thousands of un-white un-suburban boppers are going to want to know why you've given up what they can't get & how you get away with it & how come you not a faggot with hair so long & they want haight street one way or the other. IF YOU Don't KNOW, BY AUGUST HAIGHT STREET WILL BE A CEMETERY. （125）

And when Didion asks a young woman what she thinks of the Mime Troupers' actions,

“It's a groovy thing they call street theater,” she said. I said I had wondered if it might not have political overtones. She was seventeen years old and she worked it around in her mind awhile and finally remembered a couple of words from somewhere. “Maybe it's some John Birch thing,” she said.

In sum, it is the remembering and the repeating back of “a couple of words from somewhere” that most indict these people as “pathetically unequipped children.” Their refusal to engage in the struggle for articulation prevents them from becoming responsible adults. As Didion says,

They feed back exactly what is given to them. Because they do not believe in words—words are for “typeheads,” Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips—their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

V

In the end, however, Didion knows that she cannot give them the words. Indeed, she would argue that no one could or should give them the words. As she says in “On Morality,”

Of course you will say that I do not have the right, even if I had the power, to inflict that unreasonable conscience upon you; nor do I want you to inflict your conscience, however reasonable, however enlightened, upon me. （“We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes,” Lionel Trilling once wrote. “Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.”）

Although we cannot give someone the words, although each of us must construct our own worlds, make our own “extreme and doomed commitments,” write and use our own notebooks, we can nonetheless prompt others toward the development of character. Didion says that “self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.”

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion's style—with its radical particularity, emblems, gaps, appositives, collages, and rhetoric of process—develops, trains, and coaxes forth the reader's self-respect. It requires each of us to integrate our own experience, to construct literary continuities with her words, and thus to achieve our own individual and “minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness.” In the end, while Didion's prose forces us to recognize the inevitability of our eventually lying down in beds of our own making, it also forces us to develop the self-respect that will allow us to sleep in those beds.