A Song of Innocence and Experience

            

            In “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion professes a reality in which the façade that is New York, is not what it seems like, nor what it eventually comes to mean to those who try and hold on to the glamour and richness associated with the city. She arrives like so many have before her to a place that seems out of this world and that continues moving and changing, leaving some people behind. Didion challenges that notion by exemplifying the loss of innocence and naiveté that comes with an arrival in New York and, in that regard, a new environment. Isolated and wary of what’s to come, she is able to gain control of her life and to see the reality that New York represents. Through the loss of innocence comes maturity and a development in experience that allows her to escape the redundancy that envelops her everyday life. In the essay, Didion presents the perspective of a nostalgic, idealized New York through her current lens to understand the meaning behind it all and the disillusionment that eventually comes to be her New York life. She is able to portray the façade by the use of metaphors and polysyndeton to describe the city in such a way to recreate her fairytale dream of New York, however the interruptions with the use of parenthesis and her choices of diction are able to show the underlying tone of desperation and hope that reveals the cracks that her uses of metaphors and polysyndeton try to cover. The writing rely on these two dynamics to make a distinction of what has become her New York dream and of herself.

            Didion arrives in New York at the tender age of twenty, for all the reasons that so many have constructed various epithets to paint this picture of New York, of being an enigma where dreams flourish and homogeneity ceases to exist. That is to say, New York is the city of dreams and outcasts, or so it seems. The metaphor that is New York is the main catalyst that allows Didion to question why she decided to come to New York and why others are continuing to do so. The comparison of two unlike things hints at the rationale and mindset of the person making the comparison. Didion writes, “it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair” (687). By using the metaphor to compare New York to that of a fair, it establishes that the style is being used to portray a view of New York that is being seen by a child. The choice of word of “fair” is not something that an adult would associate a grand city with, but it simply resonates with the image that this sentence conveys, that hope still lingers. Even though she is explicitly saying that her time in New York has run out, the metaphor through the choice of diction says otherwise. The personification of New York; the attributed humanistic qualities to an inanimate object is how she is able to build upon a sense of hope in this “fair”. The metaphor and choice in diction is simply a way for her to close herself from the disillusionment and bring herself into the state of mind she has come to associate with the beginnings of her New York nostalgia and her optimism that things are going to go back as they were. The innocence in the choice of diction fuels her continuing impression that New York meant something to her, when in reality it does not.    

            The metaphor and the diction are being used to sustain the dream that was her New York perspective. A fair is a place filled with enticing lights, smells, games and music, which no child can resist. It is perplexing why she would say that she would want to leave such a comforting place. However, this sentence balances not only herself but her previous sentence which dismisses the idea of hope and things ever turning around. She says, “And even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples who lived in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpunished or failed writers” (687) and on and on, to which the choice of “parties” becomes the central idea of this sentence. In this sentence, she is relying on the use of epistrophe, repetition of the same word at the end of each clause. The repetition of the word creates the feeling of redundancy and dullness in her life by generalizing that the parties were no different from each other, even though they might have been in a new environment with other people. The epistrophe hints that her life is bleak and filled with a “Monday morning” feeling every single time. The diction is also important, because usually “party” is a positive connotation, but she is repeating it so much and with no distinction, that she completely drags that feeling out of the word and makes her life in New York tedious. The metaphor of New York to that of a fair, employed in the sentence following her recalling of parties, helps cover up this revelation, that somewhere there is still a trace of hope and innocence which she could still use to heal her unforgiving experiences.

Metaphor is not the only stylistic device that she uses to try and fix the broken dream. Her use of polysyndeton, the repetition of many conjunctions, also works in trying to mask the façade. The first paragraph is filled with the conjunction, “and,” to portray the linguistics of a child who has yet to comprehend how to organize thoughts and ideas in a sentence. She writes,

When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York (681).

The effect of the polysyndeton (bolded) here is to showcase Didion as a naïve girl who is about to embark on a journey that she sees only as an easy, breezy adventure, which turns out to be quite the opposite. When a child is excited, they tend to express their feelings by prolonging their story with the conjunction “and”. This in effect slows down the idea of the sentence and that is exactly what Didion is trying to do. What she is aiming for, through the use of polysyndeton, is to convince the reader that she doesn’t know better and that she is expecting great returns from New York. This is the foundation of her façade and through this she will continue using it as a way to keep the cracks from showing and through the emphasis of each part of the clause, generate even more lies to herself. In the above quote she has shifted herself to tell of her arrival to New York by extending the event through the use of the conjunction “and,”  in which she relates the environment of New York at the time with the essence of youthfulness and innocence. As long as she uses polysyndeton, she will continue revitalizing and recreating a non-existent reality. Polysyndeton is the device that takes her into her nostalgia and as she continues to use it, it will inevitably cause her to believe that there has been an alteration of what has become of her New York.

At the end of the essay, the polysyndeton continues doing this even though she is trying to make the case that she has let go of the disappointment of New York, but the style distorts this. She writes, “All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired” (688). The structure of the sentence is not of someone admitting that he or she is wrong, but of someone using the conjunctions to emphasize a last attempt to fabricate that sensation once more; “I was young,” “the rhythm was broken,” and “I’m not that young anymore” do nothing to close the chapter in her life, but to instigate it all over again. As I said before, polysyndeton as a device works not for her, but against her, and thus it’s ironic that even though she moves to a new city in the end, the device will bring her back to the state of mind and innocence that she conceives was New York. The dependence on using polysyndeton to make a contrast of what she used to be in New York and her desire of what she will be in California, is no more than a call for disillusionment.

The transformation or evolution from naiveté to disillusionment is not explicitly laid out, but it is interjected through parenthesis and once again her diction, to address the elephant in the room. The parenthetical scheme relies on an interruption in the flow of words which is perfectly exemplified when Didion is talking about one of her walks in New York. She writes,

I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there (683).

The interruptions through the choice of diction (italicized) and her parenthesis (bolded) are able to provide some context on her life. The use of “garbage” is not something appealing that a reader would be interested in knowing about New York, but she makes note to highlight this once more when she includes her parenthesis. There is an immediate effect that Didion is trying to convey of her life in New York. This is the Achilles’ heel of the essay, because parenthesis is able to show that she is finally relenting that non-existent reality and just admitting in a subtle way, “I hate this place”. This may seem like a big jump, but the style through the interruption and the diction emphasizes a complete loss of innocence and naiveté. The innocence and naiveté is lost when she says to herself prior to the interruption, “I knew that it would cost something sooner or later.” The parenthesis that follows is no more than just an apology. Both the diction and the parenthesis are combined by the use of anaphora, or the repetition of the phrase “I could” at the beginning of each clause which is underlined. The anaphora helps by emphasizing the emotions that she experiences when she walks through the city, and it helps bring out the climax of the essay through the parenthesis at the end.  The choice of word of “could” also demonstrates the façade that is her New York dream, because it hints at the possibility that she has the ability to do certain actions by the use of her senses in experiencing New York; but she stops that possibility because she realizes it’s not possible or real. The parenthesis is the only real view of New York.  

            Didion’s writing shows that for the longest time, time and experience have not caught up to her when she is relying on polysyndeton, but the immediacy that goes with parenthesis and diction shows that it has. The use of both of these will not lead Didion to cover such a big revelation. For that reason, she avoids parenthesis, because it is the device that will be her own undoing. However, with the subtle choices of diction throughout the essay, she has been unmasking the façade to reveal her true self and her imaginative New York. It does not rely on connecting or building up words, but it relies on the author to say, “this is what I’m thinking and this is what I feel”. The styles she incorporates in her writing for the most part, try to hold on the metaphor, but when she uses certain devices (epistrophe, anaphora, diction, parenthesis), the disillusionment in her dream seeps in and the façade is depleted.