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Society and its disintegration in Joan Didions Los Angeles Notebook

Society is a highly structured system of human organization for large-scale


community, living that normally furnishes protection, continuity, security, and a national
identity for its members, as the Random House Websters Dictionary defines it. The
theme of Joan Didions short story is exactly the opposite of this affirmation. It delineates
the experience of a disintegrating modern society, in which the existence is not any
longer a securing one; it is rather a type of living in a world where nothing and nobody is
protected any more.
The strange beginning of the story: There is something uneasy in the Los
Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. (480) somehow
forecasts that some events will happen, that maybe some beliefs and ideas will be
destroyed by an undeniable power. The unnatural stillness that mysteriously reigns the
place is in a way unusual. Who could imagine that Los Angeles, the great city, can have
moments when everything is still and peaceful? This image of the lull before the great
storm is frightful. We, as readers, might be bothered in a way by this terrifying silence,
yet the narrator seems to be wont with this aspect of her own world. She immediately
finds an answer to our question; this stillness is the first sign of the foehn that still has to
come. The sentence We know it because we feel it(480) suggests the consciousness of
all those who inhabit this world. They are aware of the fact that something happens in
their world, and yet they passively expect the foehn instead of doing something in order
to prevent its devastating effects. From this moment in the text, we as readers might feel
somehow ostracized, because the inhabitants of this world know something more than we

do about the greatness of this natural disaster, the foehn, that dries the hills and the
nerves to the flashpoint(480).
Furthermore, the name of the foehn, the Santa Ana might be significant too,
because it is not adventitious. It appears 14 times in the text, and after a while it seems to
be obsessive to the narrator, but meanwhile imminent. Neither we, nor the narrator can
deny the importance of the Santa Ana. It has an overwhelming effect over the whole
environment and in the mean time on life itself. As the narrator says it herself: To live
with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view
of human behavior.(481) This acceptance of the Santa Ana seems somehow weird. Why
doesnt anybody try to do something, why is everybody so indulgent with this aspect of
their lives? I believe this is the key to the understanding of the whole text. People accept
the life they are given without protesting in any way and this is the fact that disintegrates
their world. They only seem like some robots moving around, their personalities are
wiped out by the greatness of the Santa Ana. The mechanistic point of view tends to gain
more field day by day. Humans have a tendency to lose their own selves when being
surrounded by a greater force then they are. They nevertheless give up fighting, they in a
way or other indulge to their situation whether they like it or not. This explains the 14
appearances of the name Santa Ana, the magnitude of this name and this appearance.
Contrasting to the fact that we all seem to understand and know many things
about the Santa Ana, at a point the narrator says: It is hard for people who have not lived
in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local
imagination.(482). This is one more strange situation: for two pages we have been
informed about the Santa Ana, we have read its geographical description, and concrete

data was given to us about the foehn and its victims, and yet somehow when we feel that
finally we begin to understand more about this foehn, our wings are cut off, and we are
told in a more polite way that we should not even try it, because we will never understand
the Santa Ana the way they, the inhabitants of Los Angeles understand it. In this context,
the word radical means thoroughgoing or extreme, which signifies that although those
living in Los Angeles accept the facts, they still feel it, care about it, but yet something
stops them from acting against the fact they dislike.
The impossibility of acting against the authority, in this case the Santa Ana
enslaves the inhabitants of Los Angeles to subsume their selves. This is the main cause of
the disintegration of the world they live in. This is the reality: they make their own world
a disintegrated one by their acts, better said by their passivity to the events. The sentence
The wind shows us how close to the edge we are(482) backs up this idea of passivity.
How come the wind shows us? Why shouldnt we show something to the wind, is it true
that we cannot show anything in our condition of human beings in a disintegrated world?
The sad response to this question that comes up from Didions piece of work is that
indeed, the inhabitants of Los Angeles, as we all, are not capable of doing something. Our
minuteness in front of nature is striking. We are nothing considering the forces of nature
and we are nothing considering the whole universe. We are not able to change anything
because our humanity was forgotten from the moment when we subsumed ourselves to
the greatness of nature.
Further examples of the disintegrated world are the second and third passages of
the text, passages that do not have much to do with the text we have discussed until this
moment. After two pages of dry description, we are harbored in a human world, where

communication seems to exist. We are witnesses of a world where communication is


welcomed, as the many dialogue quotes suggest it. Contrasting to the well-received idea
of communication, this act seems to be no longer an act of communication between
human beings. Everything seems to be chaotic. The sentences are no longer coherent or
adequate to the situation they are said in. The episode at Ralphs market sustains the idea
that nothing is cohesive any more. The city under the thick smog seems to be somehow
clustered and the people tend to lose their common sense. A cohesive world is totally
annihilated by these images and the suggestion of order no longer exists, no matter us
being conscious or unconscious of this fact.
According to all these, I believe that the image of total disintegration comes both
from the highly symbolical message of the text and meanwhile from its construction. The
composition of this text, going back to the title, Los Angeles Notebook indeed suggests
the incoherence and disorganization of a notebook, if not of a diary. Mainly this text is
the modern expression of the fact that a coherent, organized world does not exist any
more, and we, humans; tend to accept this instead of trying to do anything against it. This
is our great mistake; we are somewhere hovering above our own lives instead of trying to
do something. This is where the imminency of our perishability stands: The wind shows
us how close to the edge we are. Indeed, we are very close to the edge due to our
irresponsible behavior towards our selves and our environment.
Considering the above stated aspects, I believe that Joan Didions text is a very
strange, but meanwhile very expressive text. It suggests in a very vivid manner the reality
of our world. We must admit, at least after reading this story, that the world we live in is
not a perfect world, it is rather a converted description of the world that should exist. The

world we live in is disintegrating day-by-day, moment-by-moment and we are nobody to


do anything against it. We could act, but still something stops us from being brave and
fighting against the laws that took possession on our lives. Nothing seems to have its own
meaning, nothing seems to be coherent any more, the world is in a total disintegration,
and we, humans, are not capable of doing anything contrary to the natural course of
things.

Works Cited:
Didion, Joan. Los Angeles Notebook. The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of
Literary Journalism. Eds. Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1997. 480-84.

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