Sonja S. Mongar
Joseph Boyden, Thesis Chair
MFA Comprehensive Exam, Part 1
15 April 2004
Didion Troping Orwell; A Comparison of “Why I Write”
As an essayist, Joan Didion, along with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, has been
praised as a great social critic of the Vietnam War era. She also wrote novels, Play It As
It Lays, Common Book of Prayer and most recently The Last Thing He Wanted. Her
latest book, a “political thriller,” takes place during the Iran-Contra era and is closely
based on the hearings. Some critics have termed her fiction more true than the truth
(par. 3.)
Of course, I only know this through recent research as I have read very little of
her work. When I did my MA in Creative Non-fiction at the University of Central
Florida, she did not appear on any of the reading lists, nor was she mentioned except in a
critique of my writing by one of my peers. My story had been focused around a pregnant
teen girl’s experience of women’s lib, and the huge gap between theory and practice—i.e.
getting an abortion wasn’t like pulling a tooth as some feminist literature of that era had
suggested. My peer wrote, “Have you read White Album, Joan Didion?” When I looked
for Didion in the school library, none of her work was listed.
Like Didion, George Orwell was also a social critic, one who described the
motives behind his writing as a desire to “de-class himself (par.13.)” It’s interesting that
a writer who so desired to shed his middle class identity and values would write from
behind a pseudonymic “I.” Regardless, Animal Farm and 1984 were satires that made
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huge social and political impacts. He was in the UCF library and on the Creative Writing
reading list, “Shooting An Elephant,” which we spent one entire class period analyzing.
Orwell’s Animal Farm was even required reading as far back as ninth grade
(1968) for all students in the protestant school system in St. John’s Newfoundland, (the
protestant church being the most politically liberal camp.) It made such an impression on
our young minds that when a local journalist formed the first free school in the province,
some of us quit school and joined up, naming our new school “Animal Farm.” The value
of Orwell’s work was unmistakable, an inspirational force in our own youthful social and
political consciousness. His placement in the literary canon was of course undisputable.
In those years, Didion’s name never came up, her writing never passed through my
hands.
I actually found Didion’s White Album on the shelf marked “Non-fiction” at
Barnes & Noble when I was compiling my own book list for my MA thesis defense, after
the new millennium had turned over its first year. Surprisingly, the book had been
around since 1979. I found her writing journalistic yet intimate as well as disturbingly
cynical, and irreverent towards everything my generation might find sacred—such as her
revelation on the failure of the Civil Rights movement and the Women’s movement. I
had to read “The Women’s Movement” over and over in order to not only deconstruct my
own beliefs about the women’s movement of the 60s-70s but also to absorb the meanings
of its failures, that it had become “no longer a cause but a symptom” of women who
equate freedom from oppression to romanticized lives, “some kind of inchoate yearning
for fulfillment or self–expression, a yearning absolutely devoid of ideas (110.)” In my
own experience, she had affirmed for me what I had not yet fully realized and was only
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beginning to articulate. It was something I had called “the gap between theory and
practice,” which I was beginning to understand as the gap between the privileged and
coded world of ideology and the practice of real human experience.
If that wasn’t disturbing enough, she said that the Civil Rights movement had
failed to bring up other equally oppressed groups for the same reason the Women’s
Movement failed to represent all women, self-interest.
Looking deeper into her writing, a subtext emerged, a criticism not of ideologies
but how they have been interpreted by and for “self.” More specifically the expression of
the “I” in our self-enlightened, self-indulgent, self-centered modern Western culture—
that “I” which imposes “oneself upon other people…saying listen to me, see it my way,
change your mind…an aggressive, even a hostile act (5.)” I wonder would we even be
having this comparative discussion had she not troped against an icon of the literary
canon?
Orwell wrote “Why I Write,” in his mid-forties and though he was chronically ill
from tuberculosis, it is not clear if he was aware that he was so near the end of his life. So
whether or not he intended this essay to be his final reflection on the subject is unknown.
He’d already had substantial success as a writer and so presenting himself as the expert
on not only why he writes but also why anyone writes; “sheer egoism, aesthetic
enthusiasm, historical impulse, political purpose (par.8.)” seems perfectly acceptable due
to his accumulated experience, knowledge, skill, and success founded upon his individual
predispostions, “I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the
feeling of being isolated and undervalued (par. 2.)” Thus his rhetorical approach to the
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argument, why anyone writes, is testimonial, he as the expert uses his personal
experience to draw valid conclusions about the subject of writing.
The New Yorker critic, Louis Menand notes that one of Orwell’s biggest charms
was that his writing was intensely personal. “He put himself at the center of all his
nonfiction books and many of his essays, and he often used personal anecdotes in his
political journalism to make, or reinforce, his points (par. 6.)” Though he says that Orwell
never made himself the heroic subject of his stories because of his inclination towards
merciless “self-abnegation,” it was that very element of self-denial that carried the power
of his arguments (par. 6.) It’s interesting that, given the political themes of Animal Farm
and 1984, that this rhetorical strategy, “plain folks,” is an effective tool used in
propaganda.
Structurally, the first section of his essay is written in the first person establishing
his authority on the subject. In it he refers specifically to childhood influences and
predispositions towards writing. “I” appears approximately fifty-four times. The writing
is somewhat dry and approaches something of a list of events, or even a sort of linear
equation: childhood experience + predispostion + opportunity (or lack of) = writer.
In the fourth paragraph he shifts into a more objective mode, signaling the larger focus of
his argument, “I do not think I can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something
of his early development (par. 4.)
In the succeeding pages of the text, he breaks up the linearity with a poem, given
as a proof of the burden he faced as a writer, an ordinary man, who has been chosen by
history to write its stories, “A happy vicar I might have been/Two hundred years ago/To
preach upon eternal doom/And watch my walnuts grow;/But born, alas, in an evil time/I
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missed that pleasant haven.” He also illustrates his next point, the importance of “making
political writing into art, (par. 8)” with personal experiences, shifting back into the first
person. As gentle as he is in presenting his ideas, he concludes his argument with a hard
edge, that not only are writers “vain, selfish and lazy,” any writer who lacks political
purpose writes “lifeless” books, in other words books without value. In that sense,
regardless of Menand’s analysis of his writing, Orwell has now made himself heroic, the
one writer who “struggles to efface one’s own personality,” in order to write (par. 10.)
Making himself a martyred hero in this subject certainly poses a problem for his
argument, detracting from its credibility, making his purpose not noble but self-serving.
Orwell writes in the form of the personal essay, a tradition dating back to the time
of Montaigne, “essays of myself.” In Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia
Watson define personal essay as a form of autobiography that “marks the writer’s
refraction of self-reference through speculation about history, politics, religion, science,
and culture (2.)” More specifically, the form demands a “self-trying out…a testing of
one’s own intellectual, emotional and physiological responses to a given topic ( 200.)”
Certainly Orwell embodied the eighteenth century notion of the “Enlightened Individual”
reflected in autobiographical tradition through his personal narrative.
The problem with “enlightenment,” according to Smith/Watson, is that it has
“become canonical,” and a subject of intense dispute in the “wake of postmodern and
postcolonial critiques of the Enlightenment subject (3.)” The canonizing of this “mode of
life narrative,” autobiography (which includes the personal essay), which “celebrates the
autonomous individual and the universalizing of life story,” has marginalized and
“assigned a lesser value” to other modes of life narratives (4-5.)
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The problem of the universalizing story, is a problem constantly confronted by
readers, writers and critics of minority and feminist literature, which have until more
recently been largely excluded from the literary canon. One example of this conflict is
illustrated by writer Barry Holstun Lopez. In “Winter Count 1973: Geese, They Flew
Over in a Storm.” In the story, the protagonist is an academic giving a paper “Winter
Counts from the Dakota, the Crow and the Blackfeet; Personal Histories” at a conference.
As he tries to listen to another paper, “The Okipa Ceremony and Mandan Sexual Habits,”
he thinks to himself, “the Mandan are all dead. Who would defend them (494?)”
His audience’s alienation grows as he recounts the personal narratives of the Winter
Count, a Native American calendar, “1904 Moving Gently, his sister hung herself
(494.)”What strikes him at that moment are the inconsistencies between the human
narrative and experience and the formalizing, universalizing and thus dehumanizing act
of transforming the personal story into academic code and discourse. He concludes that
“it is too dangerous for everyone to have the same story. The same things do not happen
to everyone (496.)”
Based on the idea that the universal story is marginalizing and devalues and thus
excludes stories outside the canon, it can be deduced that Orwell’s canonized argument of
what makes and motivates a writer and what constitutes a valuable text, is exactly what
Didion is troping against.
When I first read her essay, “Why I Write,” I was reminded of Mary
Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790),” a scathing response to Sir
Edmund Burke’s “Reflections of the Revolution in France (1790)” a defense of the class
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system and the monarchy. Wollstonecraft’s strategy was to signify against Burkes’ essay
by restating key phrases in the essay to counter his argument. Didion uses a similar
strategy, only hinging her whole argument on one phrase that she turns upon itself as if it
were truly an Orwellian invention, “Why I Write.” “There you have three short,
unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound is this: I, I, I (6.)”
However, unlike Wollstonecraft, who addresses Burke personally, calling him a
“vain man” for his presumptuousness to know human nature and thus speak for all people
(20-24,) Didion does not address Orwell personally (though she might have easily called
him vain) nor his point of view specifically, but uses what he represents in order to open
the much larger issue of the canon and its inability to embody her story and her world
view.
One of the characteristics of this essay that reveals the motives behind her
argument is that it was originally a speech delivered at a Regents’ Lecture at the
University of California, Berkely. Since her original audience was strictly academic, it
can be assumed that the message was directed at them specifically. It is obvious from the
very beginning that her dismissal of Milton and indirectly, the literary canon, was
specifically placed to stir up her audience. This rhetorical approaches is “anger,” a
rhetorical technique used to “to increase impact,” which in her case the motive seems to
be the need set a tone of “wrongedness, (par. 1.)”
“I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of
his universe in "Paradise Lost," the central question of at least one century…but I
can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s
dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil
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refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In
short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and
touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus (5.)”
She seems to be saying not only, “See, I got here without him,” but that there was
something awry in the system that she survived.
In order to soften the blow, she uses the same approach Orwell does, a “plain
folks” explanation as if the problem were within her rather than within the system.
“During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport,
forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I
knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew was
what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was (5.)”
And then she delivers the punchline which cleverly reverses the self-effacement,
“Which was a writer (5.)” This simple statement of fact immediately reestablishes her
credibility and seems to be saying, “ I have something to say that you haven’t yet heard
and I know what I am talking about.” This is the primary characteristic of “testimonial.”
Thus, Didion reverts to the same techniques Orwell used to convince, “By describing the
successes or failures of ones own experience lends credability to the pitch.” But in her
case, “I tried doing that exactly the way you did, but it didnt work because... (par. 1.)"
Unlike Orwell’s essay where the reader is very clear on his argument and purpose,
Didion’s purpose is not immediately clear. As the text evolves, she seems to move in a
circular, fragmented fashion rather than linear, her point made through the accretion of
anecdotes. This is explained in Rachel Aviv’s "’I’ Versus ‘They’: The Textual and
Communal Self in Joan Didion's Writings:”
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“Jerzy Kozinski once described Didion as ‘our quintessential essayist . . . always
at the center’ (Carton, 308) -- an odd claim about a woman whose writings
perpetually articulate the absence of any center, the moral and social dilemmas of
living in a world where "the center cannot hold" (Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
xi). In Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, Didion's essays
explore the disintegration and fragmentation surrounding her and yet, within these
essays, Didion recomposes her own self (par.2.)”
In Didion’s essay, “Why I Write,” she deconstructs that self that Orwell had so
carefully constructed, “the..autonomous, decontextualized self (par. 1.)” Aviv further
explains Didion’s process as “fluid, interdependent and not clearly distinguishable from
[her]surrounding communities (par.1.)” Thus creating a “…distinctly feminine
formulation of selfhood.” This feminine selfhood is the foundation from which Didion
makes the “metaphorical leap between the personal and universal, but it also, necessarily,
complicates any attempt at categorizing their writing as personal (par.1)”
And she does this well, over and over again with her “pictures in her mind”
juxtaposed to the narrative line as she travels from Milton to grammar to words, “exact
rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted
windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed
and obscurely sinister light,” or, “Grammar is a piano I play by ear (7.)”
Aviv explains this process in Didion’s writing:
"[by the] imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images (The White Album,
11), Didion writes herself to the center: Didion, the ‘common denominator of ‘ all
[she] sees’ (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 136), becomes the medium by which
she reads the external world. She embodies the ‘disparate images’ that lie outside
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her -- she ‘affects absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other people's
trout’ (par.1.)”
Aviv concludes that Didion has invented a new discourse, a “communal, collective I” in
which to embody her experience.
In comparison, Orwell certainly makes a clear, easily digestible argument. He
uses solid rhetorical strategies and speaks from his authority as a successful writer. Even
though Orwell published his essay in an era that accepted his form of discourse as the
canon and his experience as the universal, he is still on the reading lists and in the
libraries fifty years later, attesting to his success. The point is, that even in 2004, a
student is more likely to run across Orwell than Didion.
Thirty years after Orwell, Didion began a new discourse that wasn’t widely
recognized for at least a couple of decades. I can imagine that night in the late ‘70s, when
she delivered this speech to a room full of round tables covered in white linen tablecloths.
Around each table, serious, important-looking, well-dressed, mostly male academics,
sipping water from wine glasses. I can imagine them hearing this speech and straining to
make the connections as she seems to move around her points in a sort of dance. Is she
drunk, or stoned? (You know how women think, in circles.) I can imagine the clearing of
throats as she stomps on Milton and the polite smiles, her prose, her human experience
dismissed in a world that values structures and codes and ideologies and lines and most
of all universality-as if the whole world can be translated into one language. I can
imagine this because I have spent the last six years, two advanced degrees in creative
non-fiction, looking for the discourse to talk about my writing and my experiences as a
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writer—and over and over again encountering George Orwell. I have spent six years
looking for my own narrative space in canonized forms, structures, conventions, syntaxes
and dictions—encountering in workshop critiques, “this isn’t therapy,” or, “why don’t
you write it as fiction?”
As a writer of my own experience, in a world of imagery versus text, of ideology
versus human experience, of lines versus fragments—as a struggler to make my own
pictures into words, I find Didion’s essay offers salvation. I feel hopeful that I am on the
right path, that my experience and my writing cannot be reduced to any common
denominator nor dismissed as too personal or self-centered. Now, instead of being
ashamed that I have made myself the subject of my narratives, I see that my “I” is
“vaporous,” “communal” and “less about…self and more about the culture in which it
resides (par.5.)”
“…And identity is funny being yourself to yourself is funny as you are never
yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe
yourself.” Everybody’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein
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Work Cited
Aviv, Rachel. “"I" Versus "They": The Textual and Communal Self in Joan Didion's
Writings.” The Victorian Web.
http://www.victorianweb.org/courses/nonfiction/didion/index.html. 04 09 04
Didion, Joan. The White Album. The Noonday Press. New York. 1979.
Didion, Joan. “Why I Write.” Regents Lecture, University of California at Berkely. 1976.
Disinfopedia. “Propaganda Techniques,” “Rhetorical Techniques.”
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Propaganda_techniques#Rhetorical
_techniques. 04 09 04.
Menand, Louis. “The Critics.” The New Yorker. January 27, 2003.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?030127crat_atlarge. 04 09 04.
Lopez, Barry Holstun. “Winter Count 1973: Geese, They Flew Over in a Storm.”
Literature, Reading & Writing the Human Experience. ed. Abcarian Richard,
Klotz. Marvin. Bedford/St. Martin’s. Boston. 2000.
Orwell, George. “Why I Write.” George Orwell 1903-1950.
http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/write.html. 04 07 04.
Smith, Sidonie, Watson, Julia. Reading Autobiography, A Guide for Interpreting Life
Narratives. University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis. 2001.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. “Vindication of the Rights of Men.” British Literature 1780 –
1830. ed. Mellor, Anne K., Matlak, Richard E. Harcourt Brace College
Publishers. Forth Worth. 1996.
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