The White Album

The story of James Pike continues Didion’s thematic focus on elusive narratives. Pike disrupts her story about the church: “I was advised by my grandmother that Grace was ‘unfinished,’ and always would be, which was its point” (45). As Pike finishes the church, the point is lost; the meaning changes. Didion can’t figure out what it means but feels it’s an “odd and unsettling development” (45). Much about Pike is disruptive. It’s difficult for Didion to link him to a narrative: “Here was a man who moved through life believing that he was entitled to forget it and start over, to shed women when they became difficult and allegiances when they became tedious and simply move on” (50).

Like Didion’s essays, Pike deviates from a coherent order. As with the people in the last essay, Didion sees him as a symbol. He represents the upheaval of the 1960s and the careless extravagance of the characters in The Great Gatsby. He’s a product of an impulsive American culture, and Didion learns about him through a book—more specifically, a biography about his life. Whatever the reality, Pike’s messy story fascinates Didion. She juxtaposes his life with hers. While her essays can be fanciful and dizzying, her personal life is stable. She has a husband and a child—and unlike Pike, she doesn’t feel like she can leave them and start a new story.

Didion’s memory of the life raft reinforces her attraction to ebullience, and her visit to the Water Project reveals her fascination with systems. Unlike a story, the water system has an impersonal objective, and Didion has a different one:

[…] an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and after bays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale (52).

She uses the diction or vocabulary of the water system to advance her point. The water system is beyond personal opinions and subjective viewpoints. It doesn’t speak in quotes or require a dress. It exists separate from the world of media and identity construction. Then again, the worlds collide when a movie needs water that doesn’t come because of a sudden storm. It’s as if Didion can’t avoid the presence of movies and media. In this case, the water has the upper hand.

The water system is a symbol; it represents control. Control intrigues Didion, and she expresses her rush of excitement through repetition. She repeats, “I wanted” (58) and lists the things she wants to control. She then connects swimming pools to control, noting the relationship between pools and privilege but arguing that pools are “a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable” (56). One response to this assertion might be that control is itself a privilege or sign of “affluence.”

The essay on the Reagan mansion furthers the idea of affluence and privilege. Jerry Brown, the Democratic governor, calls the mansion built by the Republican Reagan a “monument to the colossal ego of our former governor,” and Didion notes its “luxury features” (62). Nobody seems to want to associate with the structure, but Didion claims that the house “is the style not only of Jerry Brown’s predecessor but of millions of Jerry Brown’s constituents” (65). The row over the mansion links to the theme of Storytelling. People create a narrative that conceals their reality—they’re the kind of people who’d live in a supposedly tasteless mansion. Didion reveals her privilege in the essay too. She was friends with the daughter of a former governor, so she visited that governor’s home and loved it. She connects herself to tradition and taste and distances herself from contemporary culture.

Getty’s museum complicates the motif of affluence. He builds an expensive museum that’s popular among ordinary people: “[H]ere was a museum built not for those elitist critics but for ‘the public’” (70). Wealthy people can connect with people of different classes. In addition, Getty disrupts the narrative about the economics of museums and how they must look. Getty made the museum in his vision. He didn’t ask the state to help pay for it and doesn’t charge visitors.

With “Bureaucrats,” Didion juxtaposes systems with narratives. The freeway system works fine on its own. While driving on the highway, Didion notes, “The rhythm takes over” (74). The bureaucrats at Caltrans impose their narrative on the system and interfere with it. They create a story that tells Californians that they need to use buses and carpools, and this story upends the system, upsets people, and leads to more accidents. The dangerous reality of the Diamond Lane doesn’t faze the Caltrans authorities, and they persist with their narrative.

“Good Citizens” reflects Didion’s ironic tone since it’s unclear how the people in the essay qualify as honorable. Didion describes the people that populate Hollywood as self-important and inconsequential. The canonized Black writer James Baldwin characterizes the Styron book debate in Beverly Hills as “a very important event,” but Didion quips, “Of course, there was nothing crucial about that night at Eugene’s in 1968” (79). She notes that people in Hollywood believe in creating stories and identities: “There is always a resolution, always a strong cause-effect dramatic line, and to perceive the world in those terms is to assume an ending for every social scenario” (79). These people appear isolated from reality, as does Nancy Reagan, who picks flowers for the media, and the Jaycees, who are “personally betrayed by recent history” (85).

“Notes Toward a Dreampolitik” continues the ironic tone. These aren’t notes but profiles of people creating their own stories. Theobold forms a narrative that involves direct communication with God, the bikers make a story that puts them in violent conflict against the world, Beardsley adheres to the narrative that places a premium on stardom, and the people addicted to gambling try to frame their behavior through stories and identities. The people in this essay dream of an unrealized reality, a different world, or an “invisible city” (93).