Failing California: Notes on Didion's Cemeteries and Spaces of Abjection

In Where I Was From (2003), Didion locates a central narrative about California in the “crossing story,” about the migration from the Midwest to California. Within that narrative of origin, we are told, the hopefulness and fierce optimism of the enterprise were coupled with the unacknowledged event of loss, defeat, and abandonment. The sick and the weak were to be left behind, their flaws symbolically yet in a brutally concrete way, prevented them from entering the El Dorado. This article focuses on a specific aspect of Didion’s representation of California, namely the place of those who do not, or cannot, join the Golden Dream, those who are left out, who can’t keep up. Through a reading of selected passages from Didion, which explore the continuum between cemeteries, asylums, and prisons, I try to understand the modes and spaces of exclusion in and from California.