The White Album

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1979

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Pain, Violence, and Death

Ideas of death, violence, and pain—danger, in general—fascinate Didion. She names the collection The White Album—after the Beatles’ album that inspired the Charles Manson cult to murder people. She has a relationship with Linda Kasabian, the woman who during the Manson murders drove the car to the home of Sharon Tate. The Ferguson murder trial also captivates Didion: “I followed this trial quite closely, clipping reports from the newspapers and later borrowing a transcript from one of the defense attorneys” (13). She relates the music of The Doors to violence and danger when she describes the band as “missionaries of apocalyptic sex” (18). She starts her story of James Pike with his mysterious death, and the lives of lifeguards and soldiers earn her esteem, as the occupations involve danger, pain, and potential death.

It’s as if death, violence, danger, and pain represent some kind of irrefutable reality. This symbolizes a type of truth: The world is a dangerous, deadly place, and those who don’t recognize it as such don’t have a firm grip on reality. In Hawaii, the privileged people at the hotel are unaware of the violent reality of Robert Kennedy. They’re not in reality—they’re “in paradise” (120). Didion tries to “refrain from dwelling at length on a newspaper story about a couple who apparently threw their infant and then themselves into the boiling crater of a live volcano on Maui” (12). She isn’t in Hawaii to face reality but to try to avoid her troubled reality. The tidal wave threatens the Hawaii paradise, but because it never arrives, reality and its dangers remain neutralized.

In the essay “In Bed,” reality arrives in the form of migraines. The pain symbolizes truth: “For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties” (154). In the essays, pain, violence, and death often appear as an antidote to the superficialities that animate Didion’s world. They break through the contrived stories and identities.

Systems

Because Didion has deep doubts about storytelling and meaning, humans take on a problematic presence. Humans tell stories to bring meaning to their lives. At times, Didion conveys an urge to escape from humans and their narratives, and systems offer her a reprieve. The systems she illustrates, however, feature humans. Humans work at the California State Water Project, and the lifeguards and soldiers are humans. Nevertheless, the efficiency of the systems and their objective aims remove the subjective element. The people become parts of the machine. At Schofield, Didion writes, “I had fallen into the narcoleptic movements of the Army day” (134). The soldiers can move through their days as if they’re asleep because the army systematically organizes their time.

For Didion, systems transcend subjective human concerns. They put the human in contact with something larger than themselves. At the Hoover Dam, Didion spots “something beyond energy, beyond history, something I could not fix in my mind” (180). About the Zuma Beach lifeguards, she writes, “It seemed to me a curious, almost beatified career choice, electing to save those in peril upon the sea forty hours a week” (189). Systems symbolize something nonhuman or superhuman. They’re a break from subjectivity. In a system, a person doesn’t have to express opinions or construct a narrative. If they adhere to the system, they’ll be fine.

When humans interfere with systems, trouble arises. The people at Caltrans disrupt the highway system because they impose a narrative about buses and carpooling. Their subjectivity undercuts the system’s objectivity.

Privilege and Control

The idea of privilege, which recurs often in the essays, symbolizes control. With privilege comes the power to manipulate situations and information. Didion can control whether she gets her news from radio, TV, newspapers, or books. In hotel rooms with room service, she and her daughter can control the flow of food and drinks—and they require a constant flow. In the Hawaii hotel, Didion and the other guests have privileges. The tidal wave threatens their control but never arrives, so danger stays away. When news of violence arrives—Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination—it’s late. This is a privilege in that the guests don’t need to know what’s happening beyond the hotel and the insular world that they control. The hotel’s private beach furthers the symbolism of privilege because the guests can control this part of the beach:

Anyone behind the rope will watch over our children as we will watch over theirs, will not palm room keys or smoke dope or listen to Creedence Clearwater on a transistor when we are awaiting word from the Mainland on the prime rate (121).

Didion calls swimming pools “a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable” (56). However, as the essay on Hawaii indicates, affluence—a product of privilege—itself equals control. In the first essay, Didion conveys an abandonment of control and privilege when she rents a huge home in a “senseless-killing neighborhood” (12). Odious strangers enter her home and talk to her on the phone. Sometimes, unknown people sleep in one of the 28 rooms. However, Didion chooses to rent the house—and opts to engage strangers and throw parties. The chaos is a result of her control.