ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the main paradox underlying the traditional representation of nature in California, linking it to the particular brand that Joan Didion’s prose represents.Nature, obviously a complicated and contested concept, will be understood here to encompass the elements of animate and inanimate landscape, together with the complex, dynamic dependencies that exist between these elements. Didion’s vision of California’s history is anachronistic and conservative, and it approximates the claim put forward by arguably the most influential historian of the West, Frederick Jackson Turner. The winter rains provide respite from the summer heat, and they are the revitalizing force in Didion’s California novels, both in the plainly physical as well as in the moral sense. To perceive California as a Garden of Eden before putting it on the map means to attribute it with distinctive traits which mark it as different from the ordinary human sphere before it is allowed to function as the same.
