1. RETURN TO INNOCENCE?
Joan Didion’s ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’

2. Outline
Background
Author, title, setting
Analysis
Discussion

3. Joan Didion (1934-)
Exploring cultural values and
experiences of American life in
the 1960s
Adopted daughter 1 year before
Slouching research
Awarded for 2005 “The year of
Magical Thinking” - memoir
Blue Nights memoir published
2011 (experiences of grief)

4. Slouching - 1968
1968 Essay Collection
Didion’s experiences
in California, 1960’s

5. Title - William Butler Yeats
Irish poet, composed in 1919
Uses imagery of the Apocalypse
- allegory for post-war Europe
Themes and symbology sets tone
Referenced in other artforms

6. The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
W.B. Yeats - 1865 - 1939 Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

7. Setting - Summer of Love
Set in Haight-Ashbury district
in months prior to Summer of
Love (100,000 people
converged in neighbourhood)
Was countercultural centre -
mix of music, drugs, sex,
creative expression and
politics.
Popularised through music
and media

8. Structure
Intro Polyphonic Snapshots Analysis Final Image
Didion portrays a very difference scene
Pushes the boundaries of the observer
Explores the gap between who we are and who we think we are
Balancing act between objective and subjective approaches

9. Intro Polyphonic Snapshots Analysis Final Image
Attention grabbing - contrast of atrocities “casual killings,
misplaced children, abandoned homes” - to reveal that she
writes of the United States
Tone is set with striking language, use of poem “the centre was
not holding” - “We had aborted ourselves and butchered the
job.” - “Social haemorrhaging”
She establishes the relationship with the reader - Her voice sets
stage in first person, - it is to be an account from ground zero

10. Intro Polyphonic Snapshots Analysis Final Image
The structure loosens (as in the poem?) Didion shifts to a series
of ‘snapshots’ using multiple voices - interwoven
On her writing, “To shift the structure of a sentence alters the
meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the
position of a camera alters the meaning of the object
photographed.”
So she carefully presented these snapshots to lack careful
presentation

11. Intro Polyphonic Snapshots Analysis Final Image
Characters - voices
Kid 16/17 who has been shooting speed for 3 days
Max who drops 250-350 micrograms of acid every 6 days, teenage girlfriend Sharon
Arther Lisch - leader of the Diggers, who worries the influx of runaways will lead to
full-blown humanitarian crisis
Disorienting - she darts back and forth as erratically as the homeless youth she writes of -
as a reader you get a sense of what it was like to be amongst those she was writing about
She uses their vernacular, adapts her own language to further paint these snapshots -
“on a bad trip” “I figure the sign is Sharon’s trip”
Relentless and grim - in some ways reminded me of Jack Kerouac and his beat generation

12. Intro Polyphonic Snapshots Analysis Final Image
On her negotiation of access - she has gained their trust:
“I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and
so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my
presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always
does.”
Notoriously inarticulate - “Had I been blessed with even limited
access to my own mind there would have been no reason to
write.”

13. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qesozdFK8U

14. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/155799-1 43:00 -ish - 55:00

15. Intro Polyphonic Snapshots Analysis Final Image
In this section we are led through the quote of a psychiatrist to
Didion writing directly of her findings
She discovered a league of lost children - not amid a social
revolution but rather in a drug-addled stupor, consumed by a
self-destructive nihilism and lacking the language to articulate
their particular malaise.
“Army of children waiting to be given the words.”

16. Intro Polyphonic Snapshots Analysis Final Image
The analysis seems to tie these snapshots together, we are then
called to reflect on these thoughts with two more examples
Final and shocking image of 5 year old girl on Acid. Didion uses
her neutral and objective tone until one key moment, “I start to
ask if any of the other children in High Kindergarten get stoned,
but I falter at the key words.”
Very subtle, but immensely telling

17. Style and Conclusion
Uncluttered writing style (Hemingway was an influence for
Didion)
Structure used to immerse the reader in her world
Extremely accurate use of quotes, right down to vernacular
(however graphic)
Very involved research, close and honest relationships with
sources
Snapshots used to back up her opinion, then more examples
used in newly presented frame

18. References
Didion, J 1990, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “ Slouching
towards Bethlehem, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Harkins-Cross, R 2012, “Writing the self: On Joan Didion.
Meanjin, Vol.71, No. 2: 80-88.
Ulin, D 2010, “What Happened Here?”, Columbia Journalism
Review Vol.48 Issue 6, 50-54.

19. Discussion
How can structure influence the reader? Can you think of any
examples? When is it ok to break the rules and when isn’t it?
(Order of scenes, Points of analysis/digression etc)
On the topic of representation - what are your thoughts on how
Didion represented her subjects?
(sub-point - Didion was very transparent about herself, but her
attitudes towards and relationships with her subjects are less
defined - discuss) or use eg. of 5yo girl - would you report it?