Los Angeles Notebook

Joan Didion
According to Random House Websters Dictionary, the term notebook means a book
of or for notes, especially a book or binder of blank, often ruled pages for recording
notes. The Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners also sustains this
formulation, presenting us the fact that a notebook is a book with empty pages used for
writing notes. Adequately to these above mentioned formulations, as its title suggests,
Joan Didions work is a collection of notes. This literary form is not a usual one, it
somehow suggests the interior world of the narrator herself, but meanwhile it also reflects
the reality of our living, of our world.
The title Los Angeles Notebook gives us the expectation of reading about Los Angeles,
the city originally named Grande Seora Protectora de los Angeles, meaning The
Great Lady who protects the Angels. The notebook about this city, or at least what I first
expected from its title, should be something very special and revolving somewhere in a
higher world. After reading the piece, I have realized that it is indeed a very special kind
of writing, of literature, but its style is also extremely shocking. The innovative kind of
writing seems to disintegrate all our beliefs about what is true literature. The modernity of
this text consists of the fact that it shifts between different styles and it is rather a
compilation of small articles or stories than a coherent piece of work.
A further example of strangeness, but in the mean time of excellency is the beginning of
the story: There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some
unnatural stillness, some tension. (480) The in medias res beginning, bumping right into
the middle of things introduces us to a world where something seems to be wrong,
unusual, meanwhile forecasting that something might happen there or that a chaotic force
might take control over the place. The tranquility usually signifies the stillness before the
gale, foreshadowing the lull before the storm. The image of Santa Ana, the name of the
foehn that appears 14 times in the text, becomes somehow obsessive to the narrator. Los
Angeles seems to consist only of the presentation of a dry geographic representation of
the storm and its history.
In addition to the above-mentioned ideas about Santa Ana we cannot deny observing a
very interesting sentence: To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or
unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.(481) In my opinion, Santa
Ana might be viewed as a symbol for the disintegration of the world we live in. As we
can find out from the so very scientific presentation of the storm, the Santa Ana is a foehn
that begins as a cold wind, being inverted into a hot dry wind. The hotness of the wind
might also signify perdition. Hotness does not always signify fertility, it might also mean
decomposition, the dissolution of the society afore. This conversion of the wind
characteristics might signify the conversion of the human world into a totally upsidedown world. Further examples of incoherency both at the level of significance and the
level of composition also sustain this image of the world that turns out to be something

different from the natural one. A cohesive world is totally annihilated by this text and the
suggestion of order no longer exists, no matter us being conscious or unconscious.
Considering all these 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. 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.