Time and Image in the Eyes of Joan Didion and E. B. White
by Rachael Peckham
Photo by Tuan Nguyen
To read Joan Didion’s “Arrival in San Salvador, 1982”¹ and E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake” and “The Ring of Time” is to witness the way time and image are married in memory. Both writers want us to see their subjects—the beautiful and the grotesque; in the past and in the present; with nostalgia and brilliant immediacy—so that the length of each essay feels much longer than it is, by way of the image. But it’s also true that the image can exist outside of time—that it resists a history “and therefore lives in a timeless present,” as Mark Muggli writes of Didion’s presentation of San Salvador in “The Poetics of Joan Didion’s Journalism” (Muggli 418). My reading of these essays, then, takes into consideration the treatment of time as it relates to the image (and the Image, as I’ll discuss).
I. Circling Back
Essays of E. B. White by E. B. White
Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999.
E. B. White, author of two beloved children’s books and famed New Yorker contributor, is described as having a “clear, clean, spare” prose style that some critics consider Montaignian for its humorous play and irony (Lopate 532). But, as one biography reveals, White “resisted becoming known as a humorist,” preferring his editorials and the status they gave him as an American essayist (Boylan). At any rate, this discussion does not take up White’s politics (though it is very interesting how social commentary creeps into his narrative—a tendency that deserves its own critical response) but the sliding spectrum of time that gives these essays, “Once More to the Lake” and “The Ring of Time,” a structure worth studying.
First of all, both titles evoke circular images in that of the lake and the ring, respectively, and this seems deeply tied to White’s conception of time, as he notes in his observation of the circus showgirl: “The rider’s gaze, as she peered straight ahead, seemed to be circular, as though bent by force of circumstance; then time itself began running in circles, and so the beginning was where the end was, and the two were the same” (White, “The Ring of Time” 181). And so the essay ends in much the same place where it begins—with the “girl on the horse,” but it is not the girl’s timeless quality White yearns for, but his own immortal youth, “that [he] could ride clear around the ring of day, guarded by wind and sun and sea and sand, and be not a moment older” (186).
The convolution of time does not seem a very profound or original idea, but the commentary that follows—“She will never be as beautiful as this again”—disrupts the centripetal force for a moment to consider a future point on the circle, the image of “the older woman, holding the long rein, caught in the treadmill of an afternoon long in the future.” Interpretation aside, the “equilibrium” of the prose can’t be maintained forever; the writer must get off the ride eventually lest the reader get dizzy, or bored, and White seems to acknowledge this in his admission, “It has been ambitious and plucky of me to attempt to describe what is indescribable, and I have failed, as I knew I would. But…a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him” (181-182). (It is worth quickly noting that Didion seems to have a similar project concerning the “indescribable,” which the second half of this response will dare attempt in a “plucky” stunt of its own.)
White seems to be using the girl on the horse, and maybe the circus in general, as a vehicle for getting at some deeper-seated problem, an image the narrator plucks from history to place in the penultimate paragraph: the slave ship. And before that, the “separate (but equal) bases” at the ballpark, and before that, the “colored people” missing at the public bath “because they would not be made welcome there.” Indeed, it’s not the image we’re presented with sometimes but “the very absence of signs” that’s impossible to miss, he writes. And I wonder, is White’s project really an ambitious stunt—presenting this metaphor for time—or is it one of “common sense,” as he concludes, a realization that to think of time as a circle entraps us in cycles that don’t recognize a need for change? “The only sense that is common, in the long run,” he decides, “is the sense of change—and we all instinctively avoid it, and object to the passage of time, and would rather have none of it” (185).
I see this objection much more firmly staked in “Once More to the Lake,” an essay written fifteen years prior to “The Ring of Time.” Again, White’s delivery of thought on memory doesn’t feel that profound, initially: “It is strange how much you can remember about places like that once you allow your mind to return into the grooves that lead back” (White, “Once More to the Lake” 247). What’s stranger, in my opinion, is not the “return” but the projection of his past self onto “his boy,” who’s not given any shape or form in the essay except one that reflects that of the narrator —or, at least, is complicated by it. I couldn’t help but cringe a little at the phallic implications in this line: “I looked at the boy, who was silently watching his fly, and it was my hands that held his rod, my eyes watching. I felt dizzy and didn’t know which rod I was at the end of” (248). Now, I could look beyond this Freudian slip (his fly?) once, but that gets harder to do when we get to the essay’s end, and read, “I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death” (253). The humor, the “jollity” in these lines does not escape me, either—humor being the great neutralizer of anxiety. The essayist seems anxious, alright, about the passage of time; about getting old; about losing a sexual virility that seems “linked” to the idyllic landscape, which no return to—in memory and in the present—can assuage. The essay is an “illusion” (to borrow his word), prompting the reader to ask not where but when are we, as White moves fluidly from past to present and back again, sometimes all in the course of one sentence: “I have since become a salt-water man, but sometimes in the summer there are days when the restlessness of the tides and the fearful cold of the sea water and the incessant wind that blows across the afternoon and into the evening make me wish for the placidity of a lake in the woods” (246). Even the title, “Once More…” suggests a syntactic tension between the past (“once”) and the future (“more”) that gets played out in the image of this lake, which White seems to divorce from time, as though “there had been no years” (249).
II. The “I” in image
Salvador by Joan Didion.
Vintage International, 1983
Joan Didion has been heralded for her work as an essayist, literary journalist, and novelist. No matter what the form, her prose style has been called lean and controlled, episodic and—what I’m interested in here—image-driven. In his article, Muggli references the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, in which “she writes about words that function like a physical image” (Muggli 403). This particular use of language, words for images, speaks to an admission Didion makes in “Why I Write”: “I do not think in abstracts.” Instead, she sees “the specific,” the “physical fact,” which is seemingly objective, if it weren’t for that “imposing” I. “In many ways,” Didion asserts, “writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind” (Didion, “Why I Write” 270). Didion’s appeal (see it my way) does more than acknowledge the writer’s unrelenting subjectivity; this act of seeing points to an inherent tension between the I and the eye, as evinced by the image. But just how are the two inextricable in “the act of saying I,” and how might they be pulled apart? With White, we’re clearly meant to see what he sees, even as he blurs his subjectivity with that of his son. In contrast, what “one sees” in Didion’s recounted visit to San Salvador is a subjective I framed as the objective eye of the tourist: “One sees mainly underfed cattle and mongrel dogs and armored vehicles” (Didion, “Arrival . . .” 18). Of course, the list quickly reveals what we’d rather not see—decomposing and broken bodies. And this is the trick of Didion’s craft, a formula she’s been criticized for by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in “Joan Didion: The Courage of Her Afflictions”: “That juxtaposition of nihilism with all the ripeness and plenitude of the physical world” (Harrison 278). What Grizzuti Harrison recognizes is the classic way Didion, in such a detached fashion, shocks us by pairing the familiar with the grotesque, oftentimes in the middle of a lovely-sounding sentence, such as this one: “One learns that an open mouth can be used to make a specific point, can be stuffed with something emblematic; stuffed, say, with a penis, or, if the point has to do with land title, stuffed with some of the dirt in question” (Didion, “Arrival . . .” 21). The timing of these images, Grizzuti Harrison says, produces a “perversely sentimental” effect, “dismissing the truth in order to achieve effect” (Harrison 278). To this critic, the “truth” is in the why and not the what (the what being the information provided by the images); Didion is only concerned with that information that can be measured in the present by the eye—and for that matter, the I. Didion answers this charge, explaining that
during the years when I found it necessary to revise the circuitry of my mind I discovered that I was no longer interested in whether the woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor jumped or did not jump, or in why. I was interested only in the picture of her in my mind: her hair incandescent in the floodlights, her bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge. (Muggli 412)
It’s funny to me that even in her defense, Didion can’t help but rely on the image and the specifics of the woman on the ledge—which is exactly what she’s criticized for (New Journalism in general was attacked for the way journalists wrote with imagined details and people’s thoughts). And all this for a very important purpose that Muggli identifies in Didion’s use of the word emblematic: “One learns that an open mouth can be used to make a specific point, can be stuffed with something emblematic; stuffed, say, with a penis…” (Didion, “Arrival . . .” 21). He asserts further, “What sets Didion apart from most other journalists is her dependence on an extreme form of metaphor that moves along a spectrum beyond symbol to what we might call ‘emblem’” (Muggli 407). (This is different than, say, the way the Imagists are working with language; they want words to be concentrated and compressed so that only the Image is presented, without having to make sense of it via commentary. In this way, the objective world is presented in language.) The way Didion treats the image as emblem, particularly those she sees in San Salvador, is to regard the ways it resists temporality (Didion observes firsthand that the visitor “learns immediately to concentrate, to the exclusion of past or future concerns, as in a prolonged amnesiac fugue”) and interpretation. She can only bear witness to them. And in this way, tourism and sightseeing (like the view site of Puerto del Diablo) is indeed fraught with “subjects for photography,” a terror that is best represented in the compressed image, and not in abstract discourse. This is not to say that the emblem defies meaning but that its meaning is pervasive and exists in a “timeless present” (Muggli 418). “Her images are not Image, the non-meaningful particular,” explains Muggli, “but are emblems that capsulize meaning at a number of levels of generality beyond themselves” (419). Ultimately, I see White and Didion’s essays raising questions about the erasure of time; about death and a sense of dread; and about what it means to think and write in the “physical fact,” as Didion claims to do in “Why I Write.” I would ask us to think about whether or not the written image is fact at all—or, if I may borrow from White, it’s a stunt we know we’re bound to fail.
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1. “Arrival in San Salvador, 1982” is the title of an excerpt from Didion’s 1983 essay collection Salvador, as it appears in the 2004 collection Vintage Didion, published as part of the Vintage Readers series. I am focusing on this excerpt for its concise framing and magnification of the treatment of image and time that is characteristic of the essays in Salvador and, indeed, in much of Didion’s work.
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Boylan, James. “White, E. B. (1899 1985).” American National Biography, Feb. 2000, https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1603012, Oxford University Press, 15 Jan. 2026.
Didion, Joan. “Arrival in San Salvador, 1982.” Vintage Didion. New York, Knopf, 2004, 17-25.
---. “Why I Write.” The New York Times Book Review, 5 December 1976, p. 270, 294.
Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti. “Joan Didion: The Courage of Her Afflictions.” The Nation, 29 Sept. 1979, pp. 277-86.
Lopate, Phillip, ed. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. New York, Anchor, 1995, p. 532.
Muggli, Mark Z. “The Poetics of Joan Didion’s Journalism.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography. vol. 59, no. 3, 1987, pp. 402-21.
White, E. B. “Once More to the Lake.” Essays of E. B. White. New York, Harper Perennial, 1999, pp. 246-53.
---. “Ring of Time.” Essays of E. B. White. New York, Harper Perennial, 1999, pp. 178-87.
Rachael Peckham is professor of English and a John Deaver Drinko Academy Distinguished Fellow at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, where she teaches courses in creative nonfiction for both the undergraduate and graduate programs in English. Rachael specialized in classical and contemporary forms of the personal essay for her PhD in creative writing from Ohio University, and she holds an MFA in creative writing (creative nonfiction) from Georgia College & State University. In addition to publishing literary nonfiction, Rachael’s critical essays have appeared in Composition Studies, Grist, Phi Kappa Phi Forum, New Ohio Review, and Xavier Review. She is the author of Alight: Flights of Prose (UnCollected Press) and the co-authored book Flight 932: The 1970 Marshall Plane Crash and the Story of an American Town, forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky.
