Feb. 2006, Volume 3, No.2 (Serial No.

26) Sino-US English Teaching, ISSN1539-8072,US A

A Masterpiece of Literary Journalism:

Joan Didion’s Slouching towards Bethlehem

Xiaocong He* Zhejiang University of Science and Technology

Abstract: Slouching towards Bethlehem is one of Joan Didion’s major works that established her reputation.
The work is a collection of essays, which tells stories of unusual people and places, also displays personal writings
on her notebooks and her going home after having been away. Many of the stories tell factual tales of her native
California. Based on the truthful stories, Joan Didion presented readers what she felt about life and society, along
with her literary techniques. Under the tenets of literary journalism, the article checks the non-fiction elements as
well as literary ones set forth in the writings and sees that the writing style of the essays is reflected in accordance
with that of literary journalism.
Key words: Joan Didion literary journalism literary technique

1. Literary Journalism and Slouching towards Bethlehem

Literary journalism always seeks to communicate facts through narrative storytelling and literary techniques.
It is in contrast to standard journalistic reportage, characterized neither by objectivity, direct language, nor by the
inverted pyramid style. The concept itself has been described with different terms, like new journalism, creative
nonfiction, intimate journalism or literary nonfiction. Tom Wolfe popularized the term “new journalism” in the
book The New Journalism in 1974. Wolfe’s description of this style is that “it is possible to write journalism that
would…read like a novel.”Later people gave this writing style a much better understanding:
A) It is a hybrid of literature and non-fiction:
factual elements: Literary elements:
essay form literary voice/feel
explanation/exposition story/narration
standard rhetorical patterns characterization
focuses on ideas, facts (not language), place/scene/setting author personally engaged
researched facts artistic, instinctual polished language
B) It expects to reach the audience via:
narration
characterization
setting/place
personal involvement
(Barbara Lounsberry, The Literature of Reality, 1996:30)
What the literary journalists try to do is to convey a deeper truth than the mere presentation of facts can
*
Xiaocong He (1963-), male, M .A., lecturer of School of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang University of Science and Technology ;
Research fields: literary criticism, applied linguistics; Address: School of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang University of Science and
Technology , Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, P.R.China; Postcode: 310023.

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 A Masterpiece of Literary Journalism: Joan Didion’s Slouching towards Bethlehem

accomplish. Fiction writers can enjoy the license to create, to make things fit, to apply just the appropriate symbol
to convey meaning. Literary journalists must work within the boundaries of dialogues and scenarios that they have
witnessed, or that have been conveyed to them by witnesses or documentation of such events. Just as things ride on
the right track, all these writing principles are incarnated in Slouching towards Bethlehem: the first-person authority,
the personal feelings involvements, the author’ s memories, places that the author used to know so well and the
narration in her unique style. Slouching towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays and articles that sums up the
chaos of the 1960s in the United States. The author then went to the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco to see
and explore the hippie movement. There, out of that experience came the title essay and the great work as well.

2. An Analytic Survey of Factual Elements

The text is composed of three parts as a whole. Part One, Life Styles in the Golden Land, represents life in
California in 1967 and provides a nostalgic and geographical root for the entire book. However, under the author’s
pen, California is neither Eden, nor the Golden Land of the American Dream, but in favor of the failed remnants
of the two. Because Didion’s family can be traced back to the Donner-Reed tragedy in which resulted the
well-known cannibalism, California is depicted like a dark act, historically and symbolically combined, showing
no sign of “the land of Golden opportunity.”The major key of unsatisfactory and counter -culture is explored.
The essays in Part One display a big variety of haunting scenes of the social life in America then. The first
piece Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream is about a woman who kills her husband and how the murder itself
becomes the symbolic loss of a whole generation in 1960s’America. Other typical images of the counter -culture
of that time, such as teenyboppers, are also represented:
“Pretty little 16-year-old chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about & gets picked up by a
17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then feeds her 3,000 mikes
& raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Hight Street gangbang since the night before last.
The politics and ethics of ecstasy….”(Didion, 1979: 101)
Being a participant as well as an observer in that turmoil, Didion succumbed to the appealing of psychedelic
drugs in pursuit of exploration of consciousness and submerged herself into the counter-culture tide. Inundated as
she was, she seemed to be suffocated from the bewilderment. Retrospectively, she tried to dig up a reasonable clue
to the unrestraint of that late 1960s:
“At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the
game we happened to be playing…. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and
great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s
values”(ibid: 123).
By concluding the movements into confusion and disorder, the first section ends with the title essay
Slouching towards Bethlehem, which is written in the style of clarity and cadence carrying a strong sense of
self-salvation, though still in a state of perplexity.
Part Two, Personals, is the central part of the book. Just as the title of the book suggests, it is aimlessly
wandering outward, begging for personal communication and meaning. The center that “was not holding”and the
conventional values by which Didion was brought up overwhelmed the essays. Hence the obvious emphasis on
traditional values in essays like On Self-Respect and On Morality are smeared in this part, while the savage and
aimless ruins of California haunted the author, and she couldn’t get that “monster”out of her mind. Finally, Part

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 A Masterpiece of Literary Journalism: Joan Didion’s Slouching towards Bethlehem

Two concludes with On Going Home, an essay that focuses on “the place where my family is”(ibid: 164) and the
sense of “dark journey,”for which Didion’s generation consumed painstaking efforts. Holding a doubtful attitude
of “the past tense, and the implicit sense of failure”(ibid: 166), Joan Didion failed to supply a supportive center or
a satisfactory explanation to her daughter just as the conventional generations could not to the hippies gathering in
the communities in Haight-Ashbury.
Part Three, Seven Places of the Mind, the final part of the book, which moves on from the lack of home at the
end of Part Two, emphasizes that the only center that is possibly tangible is what people have for themselves in
their own minds. Didion left New York behind to come to California in 1964. She once had her dreams of youth in
New York City rather than those of the hippies in San Francisco. However, because of her lack of center just like
the hippies, she couldn’t escape from becoming the victim of her own generation who was to be alienated from
the social connections. The author wrote at the end of the book, “Farewell to the Enchanted City”, she took leave
from not only New York City which appeared to be mournful and bittersweet in her description, but also
Haight-Ashbury and the conventional values of her own generation. Disillusioned by all the shattered realities, she
gave up the pursuit of American Dreams of youth. Thus the author became the “rough beast”that “Slouches
toward Bethlehem to be born”(ibid: 11). The author recalled a tumultuous time in her life here, and although she
appeared to be a shy and fragile female, her words proved her courage and power. Disoriented for the moment, but
she was not totally lost of self at all. Finally, this part ends with the essay Goodbye to All That.

3. Literary Elements of the Essays

Slouching towards Bethlehem is a book that searches for meaning and comprehension of change. The general
movement of the book procures the theme “the lack of a center”that author expresses throughout the title essay
Slouching towards Bethlehem that focuses on the deviated life in Haight-Ashbury, where the street scenes
illustrate the breakdown of human connection that the author originally believed. The following writing reflects
the author’ s inner life:
“The widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear the falconer, the gaze blank and pitiless as the sun; those
have been my points of reference, the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and
thinking seemed to make any pattern”(ibid: 13).
While repeatedly indicated by “the lack of home”, “the lack of a center” also implies “the lack of social
community”and the “atomization”. The “atomization”Didion describes is the way in which things have fallen
apart and left millions adrift from the cultural and ethical moorings where the American heritage anchored, and
thereby a big vacancy of spiritual support is produced. And “the lack of center”is symbolized to that rupture with
tradition. All these essays, keynoted by the extraordinary reports on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, reflect that,
in one way or another, things are falling apart, “the center cannot hold”. Thus, the book punctually captures the
essence of 1960s’American society, especially California the hot spot of its counterculture.
The writings of essays, on the other hand, give a feeling of intellect, honesty and power. Though reading of
Slouching towards Bethlehem would go in a slow and meticulous manner, like a bond with the words that are so
carefully chosen and wonderfully articulated. To the readers the immediate perception in reading is a mysterious
presence called voice. In reading, people are seemingly to “hear”the author’ s speech in their heads as if by magic.
That’s the author’ s unique employment of language. It can also be well argued that all essays are an expression of
Didion’s voice addressing an imagined audience, seeking to appeal to another person in her common humanity.

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 A Masterpiece of Literary Journalism: Joan Didion’s Slouching towards Bethlehem

Almost all her artfully composed essays suggest a naturalness of discourse. In the essay Rock of Ages about
Alcatraz Island on page 208 Didion wrote:
“I saw the shower room (in Alcatraz) with the soap still in the dishes. I picked up a yellowed program from an
Easter service... and I struck a few notes on an upright piano with the ivory all rotted from the keys and I tried to
imagine the prison as it had been, with the big lights playing over the windows all night long and the guards patrolling
the gun galleries and the silverware clattering into a bag as it was checked in after meals, tried dutifully to summon up
some distaste, some night terror of the doors locking and the boat pulling away. But the fact of it was that I liked it out
there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusion, and empty place reclaimed by the weather where a
woman plays an organ to stop the wind’ s whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke....”
Some of the essays go “informally”; but this isn’t to suggest that they are innocent, unmediated utterances
lacking the stratagems of art. The thematic movement of her writings has been a search for the expression of
personal experience within the historical and the individual talented structure. Her airings in the form of essays,
springing from intense personal experiences, are nonetheless significantly linked to larger si sues, which are
viewed playfully.

4. Conclusion

Slouching towards Bethlehem firstly tells stories of unusual people and places, it shows readers a wide range
of figures, from actors to millionaires, from doomed brides to acid trippers, who seem to be neither villainous nor
glamorous, but bungled and alive; it also depicts places like San Bernadino, John Wayne, Joan Baez’s School, etc.
Secondly, the collection has more personal writings on the author’ s notebooks and her going home after having
been away. Many of the stories tell tales of her native California. Through Joan Didion’s own feelings and
experiences and the feelings and experiences of those she encountered, these essays explore the emotions of the
hippy generation and bewilderment of the elder generations, both of which appeared to be a complex and social
oddity in conventional American hierarchy of cultural values. The essays not only successfully represent a wide
cross-section of the American society, but also their fact-immediacy, literary techniques and first-person authority
give evidence that they are the ideal form to convey such a vision. Thus, with its memorable artistic achievements
in voicing articulate witness to the most intractable truths in a chaos age, Slouching towards Bethlehem
established itself as a masterpiece of literary journalism. When the book was first published in 1968, it got
immediate success and has become a modern classic. It exerted a great influence on the readers’views on literary
style, voice, and the artistic pos sibilities of nonfiction or literary journalism.

References:
1. Didion, Joan. Slouching towards Bethlehem. New York: Touchstone. 1979.
2. Felton, Sharon (ed). The Critical Response to Joan Didion. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press. 1994.
3. Hartsock, John C. A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press. 2000.
4. Henderson, Katherine Usher. A Bibliography of Writings about Joan Didion. American Women Writing Fiction: Memory,
Identity, Family, Space. Pearlman, Mickey (ed.). Lexington: UP of Kentucky. 1989.
5. Jacobs, Fred Rue. Joan Didion: Bibliography. Keene, CA: Loop. 1977.
6. Lounsberry, Barbara. Writing Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality. New York: Longman. 1996.
7. Schilb, John. Deconstructing Didion: Poststructuralist Rhetorical Theory in the Composition Class. Literary Nonfiction:
Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy. Anderson, Chris (ed.). Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. 1989.
8. Wolfe, Tom (ed). The New Journalism. New York: Harper and Row. 1973.

(Edited by Nina Liu, Jun Wu, Xiao Li and Iris)

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