La inmutabilidad del territorio en las transformaciones del Estado

A great part of PAL takes place outside the city boundaries, in the freeways of Northern California and in the roads of Nevada, leading to Las Vegas. Stepping out of the urban perimeter offers a chance to take a different perspective on the city, to look at it from another angle, to analyze its significance in the western landscape, in its symbolism and mythology. As Kevin McNamara stated in the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles:

Los Angeles is defined by sprawl. Much of iconic Los Angeles…lies beyond the city limits…As a literary subject…Los Angeles is less a city, county, or “metropolitan statistical area” than a state of being (of grace, fear, emergency, or exception, depending on whom one reads) anchored in the area south of the Tehachapi Mountains, north of San Diego, west of the desert, and squarely in the collective imagination of utopia, dystopia, and, more recently, the urban future. (1)

The “state of being” referenced by McNamara tackles one of the crucial considerations pertaining to Maria Wyeth, as the anxieties regarding the environment she inhabits follow her into the desert and the hotel rooms of Las Vegas. The concept of dystopia is elaborated by Didion in Maria’s nightmares, in her premonitions, in her constant fear of catastrophes. These images—flooding, people killed by rattlesnakes—are as much urban as they are rural; and in both cases they are predominantly western. There are distinctive echoes of the Gold Rush in reference to greed and land acquisition, such as in the case of Maria’s father and the possession of the town of Silver Wells, whose name encloses promises of prosperity, which are in fact

shattered by the crude realization of failure. The cost of these trades is not only monetary, it has other implications related to both the hardship faced by the pioneer in the new land and the punishment for the greed, the illegitimate occupation, and corruption. The narrative places two iconic cities in contrast: Los Angeles and Las Vegas. One is the capital of the movie industry, the other of gambling; both summarize the promise of success and the failure of dreams in a context that is profoundly American, in relation to the individualism of the self-made-person. Through the character of Maria, said individualism acquires a communal connotation, especially

considering the use of symbols that transform the scenes of the novel into icons.

It is in this symbolism that the relationship between environment and the body emerges forcefully. Looking into the character’s involvement with the spaces that extend beyond the city limits, reflections on the meaning of water emerge. Didion defined what is like to be a woman as “that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death” (We Tell 262). This statement parallels distinctive parts of the narrative: Maria’s abortion experience and her posttraumatic nightmares in its more intimate contextualization, her obsession with water or the lack of it; in particular the realization that “There would be plumbing anywhere she went”(104) and the fact that the movie set in which she starts working is situated

“ON A DRY RIVER bed between Death Valley and the Nevada line”(187).52 _{Maria drives out}

of the city toward the beach and what she see is “oil scum on the sand and the red tide in the flaccid surf and mounds of kelp at the waterline” (65) while at her house the pool water is always at the same temperature (24). The image of the pool recurs numerous times in the narration, such in the instance in which BZ and his masseur are by the water. Their bodies are described as “gleaming, unlined,” recalling “an arrangement with mortality” as water is associated with

52_{Such as in her nightmares where the fetus of her unborn baby floats in the East River and}

disaster (46). In Colomina’s introduction to Sexuality and Space, she reflects about the division between outside and inside—which is an implicit nod to Grosz’s considerations on the same subject—through the observation of the house Loos designed for Josephine Baker she notices that the split between home exterior and interior is nullified by the addition of the pool. The pool is deigned as an extra room bringing the inside out. Furthermore, the swimming pool, “paradigm of sensual spaces” (88) with its voyeuristic implication (watching people while they swim) makes it the prime reference point of the entire house’s architecture. The different scenes revolving around the pool in PAL reference a similar direction. The inhabitant, Maria Wyeth, is what Colomina defines as “the primary object” (88) while guests are the looking subjects.

In the town where Maria goes to shoot the movie there is a bathhouse, that according to the narrator attracts “old people, believers in cures and the restorative power of desolation” (187). In the passage reported below, the description focuses on the reasons Maria gives herself for sleeping besides the swimming pool at night, and again the connection with catastrophes emerges:

She told herself that she was sleeping outside just until it was too cold to sleep beneath beach towels, just until the heat broke, just until the fires stopped burning in the

mountains, sleeping outside only because the bedrooms in the house were hot, airless, only because the palms scraped against the screens and there was no one to wake her in the mornings. (16-17)

Even though the outside described here is not intended as “outside the city limits,” the opposition between indoor and outdoor serves as an indicator of the continuous crossing between lines in what Scarpino defines as the “Neither/nor places” of the narration in which the

protagonist is “neither able to abandon herself to the genius loci nor to maintain a form of insularity”(460).53

The idea of border crossing is particularly relevant in the interpretation of the novel. California, the ultimate US frontier, is presented in the narrative as a collection of very distinctive landscapes, connected to each other only by the presence of the protagonist. Maria drives aimlessly between them and once she arrives in a new place she invariably looks for a phone. Through the use of the telephone she manifests the connection between her ecologies, uniting the places that are meaningful to her. In her wondering in and out of places other symbols emerge. Coca Cola for example, the American drink par excellence, is repeatedly presented in the narration. The significance of the beverage resides in its ideology, in the images of the road, and of post-war prosperity.54 According to Lee Clark Mitchell, “[t]he West in the Western matters less as verifiable topography than as space removed from cultural coercion, lying beyond ideology (and therefore, of course, the most ideological of terrains)” (qtd. in Shoop 588). All the symbols that Didion uses are related to the territory and serve as a liaison between past and present, seeding questions on the ideological frame that made the environment into what it is, where the echoes of Manifest Destiny reverberate, as the nightmares of the future respond to old affairs.

The choice of passing in between borders in a geographical sense, moving from city to city, to and from different states, in a temporal sense, connecting memory and the facts of the narration, is a strategy that is mirrored stylistically, as the novel does not present a solid temporal structure. According to Shoop, “Didion’s ‘Western’ style arrogates to itself a certain clear-eyed realism by its willingness to leave an idea in the lurch” (587). The meaning is conveyed by

53_{My translation.}

omission, which, just like the symbolism of the desert and of the ghost towns in the narrative, presents images charged with significance. The spatial implications of such rhetorical devices are noteworthy. On the topic, Shoop affirmes that, “The secret of the Western—like the secret of Didion’s style—has been to dress an impossible nostalgia in the outfit of its heroic refusal” (590). A sense of untamable tension permeates the narration, a feeling connected to the land, something that seems lo linger unresolved, that crosses the boundaries between spatiality (the landscape) and temporality (through the said nostalgia and fear of the past), arriving to the character of Maria herself.

Maria is not only faced with geographical limits, the frontiers she crosses are corporeal as well. As Kristeva would argue, the obsession with body fluids in the narration--vomiting, expulsion of the placenta, and menstruation--is a form of abjection, specifically the horror associated with these elements and the desire to reject them as they symbolize Maria’s fears.55 The implications between Maria’s body and the treatment of her “abjections” have a spatial reference in the narration, space that is connected to the water symbolism and that I identify in the image of the hospital.