Tracks by Robyn Davidson and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion - Essay Example

? The Narrator’s Voice: Davidson’s Tracks, Didion’s The Year Of Magical Thinking In her book Tracks, Robyn Davidson narrates her journey across the Australian outback. Joan Didion, in The Year of Magical Thinking, describes her journey through grief. Each author must draw on reserves of strength and endurance to survive their respective journeys. Didion, a writer by trade, does so with a high degree of sophistication, whereas Davidson’s story makes up for what it lacks in polish through the sheer passion in her narrative. It is the purpose of this paper to examine each narrator’s voice in its journey of survival. Davison has much to overcome. Her journey begins with preparation in the outback town of Alice Springs. “One does no have to delve too deeply to discover why some of the world’s angriest feminists breathed crisp blue Australian air during their formative years…Anyone who has worked in a men-only bar in Alice Springs will know what I mean” (33). “The modern-day manifestation [of the Australian man] is almost totally devoid of charm. He is biased, bigoted, boring, and above all, brutal.” (34). The alliteration of brutal B’s works to bring home her point. Davidson works at a bar, and for a man named Kurt, who terrorizes her, so that she can learn about camel handling. “The murderous light never left his eyes during those weeks. We were involved in a tacit war, both playing games, both desperate to win. He was forcing me to train the young white bull, Bubby, without benefit of nose-line or saddle…This meant I was thrown at least three times a day, and my nerves were shot to bits.” (74). Here the author uses the imagery of “murderous light” effectively. Davidson endures threats and danger from the station culture of outback Australian men, so much so that when she finally begins her actual journey, it seems easy by comparison. Davidson’s voice is that of a straightforward narrator. Her experiences in the desert have a transformative power: “The self in the desert becomes more and more like the desert. It has to, to survive. It becomes limitless, with its roots more in the subconscious than the conscious--it gets stripped of non-meaningful habits and becomes more concerned with realities related to survival” (197). Here , the author uses simile, and psychological constructs to describe the changes that are working upon her. Davidson’s use of metaphor: “That evening the camels played in the white dust, raising balloons of cloud that the fat, red setting sun caught, burst and turned to gold…I lay on a foot-thick mattress of fallen leaves…golden jangles of firelight…Night calls and leaf sighs floated down…around me was a cathedral of black and silver giant ghost-gums, the thin sliver of platinum moon cradled in their branches. The heart of the world had been found” (221). Metaphor and anthropomorphizing of the leaves conveys her synthesis with her surroundings. Davidson’s journey involves surviving not only the desert, but grief: “I knew she must be hallucinating, knew she was dying. Her two mirror eyes burnt an image into my mind that will not fade. She came over to me and put her head between my legs…I tried to pretend it was a game…She was on her side convulsing…I blew her brains out…I walked back to Diggity’s body, stared at it, and tried to make all of myself face what was there. I didn’t bury her. But I said goodbye to a creature I had loved unconditionally…I wept for the first time and covered the body with a handful of fallen leaves. I walked out into the morning and felt nothing. I was numb, empty. All I knew was I mustn’t stop walking” (224-5). The author uses metaphor “mirror eyes” and relates in a straightforward manner the events of her grief. Robyn Davidson was victorious over many odds, and her journeys were through the desert, through the Australian male culture, and through grief.: “The two important things that I did learn were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of the endeavor is taking the first step..” Davidson’s style is direct, forceful and inner-looking. Her sentence structure is that of straightforward prose. In contrast, Didion’s prose is short, clipped, to the point: “Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night. I lit the candles…John was talking, then he wasn’t.” (10). This last sentence is set apart, constituting its own paragraph. It sits, stark and alone, like death. “I remember saying Don’t do that” (10). This sentence is alone. It conveys the suspension of time occurring, the shock. Didion continues in this vein: “I had taped the numbers by the telephone in case someone in the building needed an ambulance. Someone else.” Her placement of the lines conveys the stop-motion of shock. “There was a silence . ‘He’s dead, isn’t he,’ I heard myself say to the doctor. The doctor looked at the social worker. ‘It’s okay’, the social worker said. ‘She’s a pretty cool customer.’… “(15). The disembodied “heard myself say” the curt exchange in the hospital, all bring home the trauma. It is here that Didion begins her use of litany to describe both the events and her grief and shock: “They gave me the silver clip…They gave me the cash…They gave me his watch…They gave me his cell phone…” A medieval dirge is beginning, with the modern ingredients of credit cards and cell phones. Didion’s use of litany conveys the enormity of her emotions: “Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life” (27). “What was the meaning and what the experience? To what thought or reflection did the experience lead us? How could he come back if they took his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes?” (41). In the use of litany, Didion’s voice is very different from Davidson’s. But the grief is the same. The author uses the metaphor of a river of death: “I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers…I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee.”(75). She deconstructs the ritual of India, and comes to her own conclusion: “Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which …their grief…had taken them.” (75). And then the dirge: “I wanted more than a night of memories and sighs I wanted to scream I wanted him back.” (75). In addition to the death of her husband, Didion was also facing the probable death of her daughter, which is lamented in another litany on page 101. It is the author’s way of being terse and wailing at the same time. Her disassociation is conveyed in a complex, beautiful sentence: “So profound was the isolation in which I was then operating that it did not immediately occur to me that for the mother of a patient to show up at the hospital wearing blue cotton scrubs could only be viewed as a suspicious violation of boundaries” (106). The phrase “ isolation in which I was then operating” conjures images of the ICU, as do the “blue cotton scrubs”. There is something tragic and symbolic of thwarted motherhood in the blue cotton scrubs. The author uses the metaphor of memory as a vortex to describe the mind’s journeys through the past that occur with grief: “I had been writing that book when Quintana was three. When Quintana was three. There it was, the vortex.” (110). Didion goes into the past for the next three pages, and ends with this “The way you got sideswiped was by going back.” (112). In this way, she brings the reader along on her journey through the grief process. Litany occurs again on page 117-18: “You’re safe. I’m here… I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears. The Santa Ana was back. The Jacaranda was back… She was three days old. We had placed her bassinet next to the wisteria in the box garden. You’re safe. I’m here…” A song of grief by a mother to her daughter. Didion eventually comes to terms with her magical thinking towards the end of the book, and does it through metaphor: “The difference was that all through those eight months I had been trying to substitute an alternate reel. Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead star.” (184). Her husband’s dying is the collision, and the collapse of the dead star. In her scholarly fashion, Didion defines grief for the reader as “a place none of us know until we reach it.” (188). In a final; litany, Didion describes the process of moving on: “I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water…”(225-6). The imagery of water as an agent of change continues to her last words about her husband”…the swell of clear water…the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks…Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell…timing it wrong. John never was…You had to go with the change. He told me that…” (227). Joan Didion and Robyn Davidson went on journeys through grief, and arrived at the end with a new strength and a new knowledge of themselves. Davidson wrote a detailed, sometimes heart-wrenching travel diary, and Didion wrote a complicated dirge. Both used metaphor, and poetic imagery to describe the process of their self-realization. Works Cited: Davidson, Robyn. Tracks. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Print. Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Knopf, 2005. Print. Read More