Analysis of Style: Didion
Peer Review Feedback:
Hi Matthew, It was a pleasure reading your work. I left some comments in the attached file but here are some overarching thoughts as well. Your work shows a really strong understanding of Didion's work and stylistic devices. I am really impressed with the natural way you wove in each of the your detailed examples without interrupting the flow of the piece. Additionally, your piece shows a clear structure, following the outline effectively. An area I might look to for improvement, and I highlighted examples of this in the piece is sentence clarity. Some sentences are bit more complex and could be simplified for clarity. This will enhance the readability of the piece ensuring your audience doesn't get confused. Overall, I thought your essay was really thoughtful and detailed. You have a very clear grasp of literary devices and how they function in Didion's work. With some minor adjustments for clarity and consistency, your essay will be even more impactful. Keep up the great work! Best, Britteni
Prewriting Outline:
Proposition/Thesis: Joan Didion uses the stylistic devices of repetition, alliteration and triplets to close the gap between her readers and her memories
Reason 1: She uses triplets to emphasize the ambiguity of memories to make her recollections more tonal than specific
Example A: I was still trying to run the game, make the rules, have it my way.
Example B: When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old.
Example C: But here is how I most often preferred to visualize myself: not on a moor, not in Shubert Alley, but standing on the steps of a public building somewhere in South America.
Example D: And then, the most important step of all, the key to the eventual effect, the very point of giving a tea.
Example E: She could forget the princess dress. She could forget the Juliet cap. She could forget the seed pearls, the clouds of white tulle.
Reason 1: She uses sentence-level repetition to answer questions and describe the context in which objects are being used
Example A: I once asked her what made 24 so memorable. It seemed that she had been married when she was 24. It seemed that I had been born when she was 24. It seemed that 24 was (I can hardly believe our discussions of age deteriorated to this, but possibly the lettuce cocktails had edged us both into a casino mode) her “lucky number.”
Example B: In these dramas of my own devise I was sometimes wearing a sable coat, although I had never seen one. I was wearing this sable coat in an urban setting that looks in retrospect not unlike Shubert Alley. I was at other times walking on a moor, although I had not yet read those English novels in which moors figured heavily.
Reason 2: She uses alliteration to articulate specific detail
Example A: There was the white silk shirt strewn with star-shaped silver sequins that she wore when my father was stationed at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs and she took me ice-skating at the Broadmoor Hotel.
Example B: I remember a sailor on the train, a survivor of the USS Wasp, who once at a siding somewhere in the Southwest got off the train.
Example C: My mother is wearing the plaid seersucker suit, spectator pumps, and, pinned at her temples, white silk gardenias.
Prose Draft:
Analysis of Style: Joan Didion’s In Sable and Dark Glasses
Didion’s recollection of youth is a nostalgic journey back to a time she wished was further along than it really was. Using the stylistic devices of triplets, repetition, and alliteration to emphasize aspects of tonal ambiguity, context, and specific detail, she employs several approaches to go both broad and narrow in closing the gap between her readers and her memories. Her devices reflect functional aspects of memory itself as it reaches back into the past in efforts to help us taste, touch and feel our own prior experience through the lens of her own.
The use of triplets to emphasize the ambiguity of memories makes her recollections more tonal than specific. They broaden the scope of what’s being recalled when she remembers ‘When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old.’ Or when they even expand her definition of remembering and forgetting with ‘She could forget the princess dress. She could forget the Juliet cap. She could forget the seed pearls, the clouds of white tulle.’ These triplets give us both more information while concurrently making the memory less focused. The result is that Didion articulates the tone and flavor of her memory, rather than describing it. ‘It’ is a distant, foggy collection of different experiences, and more reflective of memories themselves.
These triplets are often adjacent to an approach of sentence-level repetition which seeks to answer questions and describe the context in which specific objects are being used. Didion uses this stylistic approach when she’s talking with her mother about the importance of the year 24. ‘I once asked her what made 24 so memorable. It seemed that she had been married when she was 24. It seemed that I had been born when she was 24. It seemed that 24 was (I can hardly believe our discussions of age deteriorated to this, but possibly the lettuce cocktails had edged us both into a casino mode) her “lucky number.”’ It’s not just repetition of 24, it’s also the repetition of ‘it seemed’. We get a lot of description which moves from specific to more ambiguous, but none of this clarifies. The repetition only helps us understand what something felt like, not what it really was. It’s smell, not touch. Context is described and articulated through this device, but again the stylistic outcome is tonal rather than specific. Similarly, Didion recalls ‘In these dramas of my own devise I was sometimes wearing a sable coat, although I had never seen one. I was wearing this sable coat in an urban setting that looks in retrospect not unlike Shubert Alley. I was at other times walking on a moor, although I had not yet read those English novels in which moors figured heavily.’ It’s the sentence-level repetition of ‘it was’ which connects the memories together, but as readers we still don’t get a cohesive whole. There’s a stylistic tension between drawing upon the promise of the specific while still holding to the ambiguous, just as memories themselves behave.
Didion uses alliteration to articulate more specific detail, notably in ‘There was the white silk shirt strewn with star-shaped silver sequins that she wore when my father was stationed at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs, and she took me ice-skating at the Broadmoor Hotel.’ The alliterative repetition of the letter s creates tone and rhythm for the reader as Didion goes deeper into her own memories. Alliteration here is used to fill in the gaps between memories left by the holes of repetition and triplet. If the stylistic device of repetition answers questions and provides context, then alliteration paints layers on top of that context. If the device of triplet emphasizes tonal ambiguity, then alliteration draws that ambiguity more into a place we can touch and taste. She repeats the approach again as she recalls ‘a sailor on the train, a survivor of the USS Wasp, who once at a siding somewhere in the Southwest got off the train’ in providing more descriptive detail about people and place while situating the reader into something which feels specific, but still isn’t.
Memories are both vague and specific. They are deeply sensory in the way in which they help us taste, smell and touch the past. Didion’s stylistic devices help us not only experience her own memories as if they were our own, but they draw upon the functional aspects of memory itself. Her triplets act as broad ambiguous memory, more feel than touch. Her repetitions are the isolated context inside of memory which is still surrounded by the fog of recollection. And her alliterations are the details we recall of the texture, color, and place of memory. Combined, Didion brings her readers not just into her own world, but also shows them something new about their own.
