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Askew in El Salvador
"Salvador"
By loan Didion
Simon and Schuster
1983, 108 pages
To those who defer to the so
called experts, whether of the
geopolitical right or the revolu
tionary left, luminary Joan Didion
looms a touch askew on the
horizon of war-ravaged El
Salvador.
Certainly to the naked eye she
seems, physically and emotional
ly, a somewhat precarious, (and
therefore, to one critic, all the
more compelling) intruder.
Physically dimunitive, of a sen
sibility vulnerable, even fragile,
she is the southern Californian
frozen by fear in "the White
Album" — as many of her
neighbors were — following the
mania of the Charles Manson
murders.
Riding Didion's undeserved
reputation for knee-jerk depres
sion, one critic from the right dis
counts the sustained aura of ter
ror emanating throughout
"Salvador,” claiming Didion
"would find something melancho
ly in the Ressurection."
From the other side, a leftist
critic dubs her an issue-clouding
eclectic, and lumps her with "the
editorial hacks."
Despite being a highly suc
cessful and acclaimed gringa
essayist, novelist, reporter and
critic who has written with uncan
ny incisiveness on a vast array of
subjects, Didion apparently fails
to measure up to what many have
come to demand of our
commentator-experts — that they
be specialists.
That is, she is not a political ex
ile, a foreign service globetrotter,
a Third World advocate veteran,
or a grunt war correspondent in
the Ernest Hemingway or even
Michael Herr mold.
But Central America is not un
familiar territory to Oidion. Her
novel "A Book of Common
Prayer," published in 1978, was
set in the fictional country of Boca
Grande. Boca Grande resembled
Nicaragua, and the events there
prophesized the fall of the
Somoza regime.
And rather than drawbacks, Di
dion's emotional, intellectual and
experiential luggage — her sen
sitivity (combined with her
toughness of mind), her alien
perspective, her unerring eye for
the ironic and the illuminating
detail — make her a particularly
sharp viewer and reviewer of what
El Salvadorans refer rather obtuse
ly and interchangeably to as "la
situacion," "el problema," and "la
verdad (the truth)."
Armed with these tools Didion
unearths the subterranean
realities.
In so doing, Didion unmasks
Salvadoran culture and
psychology, and on a level that
traditional history and political
science is impotent to match.
"Salvador" is not a history book.
As if in defense Didion maintains
and demonstrates, somewhat con
vincingly, that history of the tra>
tional sort is almost impossible
discern — and is therefore
consequential — in El Salvador.
Salvadorans shun facts and
figures, those elements European
culture often equate to the truth
itself. Reality functions more on a
mythic level there, and as Garcia
Marquez has also tried to show to
North Americans, if they can
understand this and other
elements of the psychology of El
Salvador and other Latin American
countries, they might better
manage their relationships down
there.
Like much of what Didion
writes, "Salvador" is sometimes
more unabashedly about herself
in the place than the place itself.
And this new-journalistic or fic
tional technique works searinglyA
well here. As a protagonist she is™
herself illuminating, functioning
as a vehicle of identification that
pulls the reader very quickly into
the maelstrom of El Salvador.
From the outset, we see Didion
as the tourist arriving at the El
Salvador International Airport,
and quickly learning "a special
kind of practical information...
the way visitors to other places ac
quire information about the cur
rency rates, the hours for
museums. In El Salvador one
learns that vultures go first for the
soft tissue, for the eyes, the expos
ed genitalia, the open mouth... "
From this start, Didion takes us
on a backyard tour of El Salvador,
leaving the big-picture
geopoliticizing to the experts.
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