SOURCE: “Beyond Reportage in Salvador,” in Connecticut Review, Vol. XIII, No. 2, Fall, 1991, pp. 15-21.

[In the following essay, Goffman reviews critical commentary on Salvador and concludes that Didion's unorthodox journalistic style allows the reader to identify more fully with her and with the situation in El Salvador.]

In the eight years since its publication, Joan Didion's Salvador has aroused a full spectrum of response, from criticism for sloppy reporting （Pilger） to praise for ascending “beyond journalism” （Kiley）. Readers looking for solutions to the problems in El Salvador complained that they searched in vain, and chastised Didion for not fingering precisely the flaws or assets of U.S. policy and not asserting firmly her conclusions about the future of the country. Other readers, however, have found in this book indications of truths more significant than ones which would dictate foreign policy. During her visit to El Salvador, Didion encountered darkness and terror so profound that she questioned her own attempts to convey the situation in words. In Salvador, Didion discovers and explores the inadequacy of language in official government reports, in conversations, in labels and names, and, ultimately, in her own desire to convey what she has seen. Salvador is Didion's attempt to express the inexpressible, to plumb the void of Salvadoran experience, and to voice, in her word, the “ineffable,” by putting into words horrors and fears that seem to defy language.

Didion approaches her subject as a journalist, with a journalist's questions on her lips and with her notebook always in hand. She believes, like a straight news reporter, that it is crucial to present objects and events as documents that recreate reality. Her extensive use of descriptive details reveals, but does not dictate, larger meaning, and allows the reader space to infer the ideas which she does not spell out. She uses imagistic detail the way a precise news journalist might use statistics, to convey concrete information to the reader. As a result, the answers she receives, or fails to receive, and the images she transfers to her notebook result in something that is both less quantitative and more profound than a standard news report.

Her details are sometimes called “vivid,” sometimes “symbolic.” In “Why I Write” （1976） Didion says she is drawn “inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible.” She claims that she is unable by temperament to think in “abstracts.” Salvador exemplifies this need to see tangible specifics, “physical facts.”

Mark Falcoff, in his Commentary review of Salvador, describes Didion's writer's eye as a “zoom lens” which gives an exhaustive and picturesque catalogue of all the vices of Salvadoran society. Didion herself, however, has said she is not a “camera eye” （Slouching）. Rather, she looks for images that resonate with significance. Chris Anderson calls her method, in which she relies heavily on physical details to carry her meaning, “radical particularity.” W. Ross Winterowd, focusing on Didion's use of juxtaposition and irony, labels her writing “appositional,” and praises her technique of placing physical and anecdotal phenomena in the foreground.

Didion clings to concrete details as the only possible means of approaching the truth. Her experiences in El Salvador make her wary of other people's words. During her visit, she begins to doubt received information and people's narratives, and to trust only in the particular facts which she herself can observe. In El Salvador, language becomes not a means of communicating, but a means of deception and a way of obscuring the truth. Common expressions become code words for something else. De afeura, “the truth,” refers not to verifiable facts, but to reality as seen from a particular viewpoint. Early in her stay, when asked what she hoped to discover in El Salvador, she replies that “ideally I hoped to find out la verdad.” Her statement was received with approval: “… no one told la verdad. If I wrote la verdad it would be good for El Salvador. I realized that I had stumbled into a code … and ＼that］ they meant the truth according to Roberto D'Aubuisson.”

Didion assiduously compares official reports and documents, both Salvadoran and American, with what she is able to observe herself. She finds the language of politics to be obstructional and obscuring. Proper names have only a situational meaning. Problems are solved by a name change. Didion notes that ORDEN, a paramilitary organization founded in 1968 as an information organ for the government, no longer exists, having been outlawed as part of the government's stand against human rights abuses. The State Department notes, however, that “some of its former members may still be active” under a new acronym, FDN.

Certain words are used regularly to scramble meaning. National reform movements are never discarded or ignored; rather, they are “perfected” or “improved.” Didion observes that “language has always been used a little differently in this part of the world,” and that an “apparent statement of fact often expresses something only wished for” rather than something verifiably accurate.

Later, Didion notes a government commandante who thought a group of American nuns and priests were French because the word used to describe them was “Franciscan.” For Didion, this is “one of those occasional windows that open into the heart of El Salvador and then close, a glimpse of the impenetrable interior.” If one could only comprehend people's misuse of language, then perhaps one could grasp why people are thinking and acting as they are; this understanding, however, remains just out of reach. Only what is seen, never what is heard, can be taken as fact.

Didion presents these linguistic muddles skillfully to reveal the mendacious, undermining effect of language itself. Didion points out again and again that in El Salvador language is used not to illuminate truth, but to re-invent it, to improve upon it, to circumvent it, and finally, to conceal it. It becomes impossible to distinguish factual from wishful statements. The official language is the language of advertising, with its obsessive insistence on making things look right. Hoodlums are turned into good guys as “part of the place's pervasive obscenity.” In the rhetoric of the obscene, accurate information is almost impossible to get. Numbers are used to express the inexpressible. Statistics add a patina of plausibility to the absurd. Things and situations are named and re-named a thousand times.

Didion nonetheless pursues information, asking questions that a conventional journalist might ask: What happened to the Hughes 5000 helicopter? Who is responsible for the latest killings? What are the identities of the people who have “been disappeared” and of the recent corpses? What changes in Salvadoran national policy have been made in response to U.S. intervention? What is the approach of the United States Ambassador, Dean Hinton? What are his perceptions of the situation in El Salvador?

Didion gets few consistent, satisfactory responses to such questions. She encounters instead “overheard rumors, indefinite observations, fragments of information that might or might not fit into a pattern we did not perceive.”

She nevertheless persists in asking a journalist's questions. In trying to pin down the facts of the helicopter crash, she asks President Magana, who had talked to the pilot, what had happened:

Was Colonel Castillo a prisoner? … Was Colonel Beltran Luna dead? … Was the bodyguard dead? … Where exactly had the helicopter crashed? … I looked at President Magana, and he shrugged. “This is very delicate,” he said. “I have a problem there … if I ask him ＼the pilot］, he should tell me. But he might say he's not going to tell me, then I would have to arrest him. So I Don't ask.”

This, Didion informs us, is the standard development of a story in El Salvador. Not only do those in authority not share information with the press, but they themselves do not possess, or wish to possess, the information.

At last, a single body which she has seen lying by the roadside becomes the least equivocal fact of the day of the helicopter crash. And even that event, that particular murdered and mutilated body, remains without meaning: “It was agreed that someone was trying to make a point. The point was unclear.”

In Salvador, Didion attempts to organize her horrific snapshots into a pattern of meaningful pictures. The crystallizing images are a mixture of her own observations and experiences with anecdotes and stories from the war. The image of the Metropolitan Cathedral becomes the most meaningful “fact” that she can take away. The cathedral is the site of the assassination of an archbishop and of more than thirty people attending his funeral. The assassinated archbishop had refused to complete the cathedral “on the premise that the work of the church took precedence over its display.” Rusting structural beams, exposed wiring, raw concrete, and fluorescent tubes create a “vast brutalist space … that seemed to offer a single ineluctable message: at this time and in this place the light of the world could be construed as out, off, extinguished.” The cathedral, Didion says, is “perhaps the only unambiguous political statement in E1 Salvador.”

After presenting a detailed image or anecdote, such as the description of the Metropolitan Cathedral, Didion simply stops, leaving a gap or, as Anderson calls it, a “white space,” in which the reader may contemplate the image. These “white spaces” bear a large burden of significance. Some details are metonymic—they trigger associations for the reader. Other images are symbolic of a larger meaning. Didion does not spell out the symbolism, but, by stepping out of the way at the crucial moment, allows the reader to construct its meaning on his own.

Didion sets up, but does not dictate, the inference to be drawn by the reader. Is her presentation of “snapshots” objective reporting or a subjective illustration of values? Certainly, Didion's “I” goes beyond the intentionally neutral voice of the daily newspaper reporter. Her personal presence and her choice of metaphors （the Cathedral, for example, is a “bomb in the ultimate power station”） provide a “moral hardness” and a strong flavor of subjectivity to her work. She frequently anatomizes her own responses to the memorable images and scenes that she sees. In fact, at least one critic （McGill） suggests that in spite of the magnitude of Didion's “grocery list” of topics, the real subject of Didion's prose is herself and her own involvement with the subject and with the writing process.

Anderson calls this kind of involvement the “rhetoric of process”: Didion's commentary is “grounded in the moment of writing and in her efforts to think through a problem in language.” In using this rhetoric, she engages in “metadiscursiveness,” a process in which she layers discussion of the writing process onto her discussion of the subject.

Didion's strategy is to reflect on contemporary life from the standpoint of her own experience. She sees her subject in terms of herself, and does not attempt to abandon the framework of her own consciousness and be “objective,” the traditional newswriter's technique of self-effacement. She observes, records, and uses her presentation of the facts as she sees them as a point of departure for reflection.

Didion maintains her presence as human observer by describing where she herself fits into the scene and how she feels at the time. Perhaps more importantly, however, she draws attention to the writing process itself by referring to where she is as she writes and what her writing environment is like. Her comments highlight her role as writer. She remarks, for example, “As I write this I realize …” or “When I think now of that day in Gotera I remember. …”

Didion's presence on the scene and her commentary on the writing process do less to illustrate abstract “truths” than to tell the story of the search for truth. In this sense, her writings become true “essays,” attempts to arrive at the truth, rather than strict journalism, an attempt to express the truth through presentation of fact.

“Objective” journalists differentiate between what “happened” and what generally “happens,” and they seek to portray events concretely and precisely placed in time. Didion, however, finds “what happened” in El Salvador too slippery to be captured in words, so she turns to details, images, and conversations to convey a sense of what, in general, “happens” in El Salvador.

El Salvador is a place where “no ground is solid, no depth of field reliable. … terror is the given of the place.” Didion painstakingly describes the details of that terror: the body counts, the cases of torture and disfigurement, the incidents of detention and disappearances, the death squads, and the frenzied attempts to seek political resolution.

In her talent for detail, Didion does somber justice to the paraphernalia of terror: the vehicles, uniforms, weapons, methods of execution, and body-dumping sites. Incidents and objects multiply, their volume providing an unwritten commentary on the situation. Didion places quotations from authorities side by side with brutal facts of life and death. Wrenching descriptions of corpses and mutilations are juxtaposed with descriptions of the relentlessly optimistic posturing of U.S. officials.

Some readers have seen these juxtapositions as confusing, and have criticized Didion for being indecisive, for not being clear about her political position, and for presenting her material from a viewpoint that is too personal rather than from a traditionally “objective” journalistic stance. Mark Royden Winchell praises Didion's earlier non-fiction because she “wisely avoids … the conventional reporting one finds on the front page of a daily newspaper and the sort of punditry that appears on the op-ed page.” He argues, however, that Salvador contains too much of both of these. Didion is most successful, Winchell says, when she acts as an “anthropologist of strange political types,” rather than when she attempts investigative reporting or public policy analysis.

A few critics credit Didion with promoting a strong political stance in Salvador. Bernard F. Engel states that Didion concludes pessimistically that there is nothing the United States can do that would be useful at all: stepping up intervention or pulling out are both equally pointless. Frederick Kiley says that Didion claims that the absence of the United States would worsen conditions, but our conscience “prevents us from abandoning a murderous state of affairs that our presence only encourages.”

John Pilger sees a less nihilistic stance in Salvador. He says that Didion seems to be saying that more Americans would oppose U.S. intervention if only they were aware of the “criminal stupidity” of U.S. policy. Unfortunately, Pilger adds, Didion's “stylish prose” renders her basic message obscure. Pilger objects to Didion's failure to define political terminology, such as “Marxist,” “moderate,” and “left-of-center,” within the context of El Salvador. He accuses her of engaging in emotional “hand-wringing” rather than striving for a more intellectual and partisan analysis.

Juan E. Corradi suggests that Didion portrays the United States as a hostage to its own mythology, tied to the “last gasp of a shabby local power” which gets weapons and a fabricated political identity from the north. Corradi says that Didion implies that the United States, by failing to insist on a plausible political approach, acquiesces to the brutal tactics of those in power in El Salvador.

If Didion, however, is attempting to advise on or to dictate Salvadoran policy, her views are anything but overt, and are matters for interpretation rather than statement. She herself has asserted that she is temperamentally disinclined to thrust her views on others:

I am a moralist … ＼but］ I tend not to impose my own sense of what is wrong and what is right on other people. If I do impose it, I feel very guilty about it, because it is entirely against the ethic in which I was brought up, which was strictly laissez faire.

As the 1980s drew to a close, more critics began to praise Didion for her literary accomplishment in Salvador, rather than regretting her seeming lack of firm political commitment. In particular, her idiosyncratic approach to the subject of war has received favorable notice. Lynne T. Hanley argues that Didion's point of view on the war is most effective because she takes a specifically female stance.

A woman's view of war, Hanley argues, is colored by the social situation of women. Women writers have not written as much about war as have men, but not, Hanley says, out of ignorance and humility （as might be said of men not writing about childbirth）, but out of fear and loathing. Women writers of the First World War delineated not the war itself, but “its ripples, its side-effects.” With the Second World War, women were still not in the combat zone, but now the war zone was everywhere; women were not protected. With the advent of the Cold War, women moved to the forefront of danger as part of the mass of human beings under threat of nuclear annihilation.

As a journalist, Didion avoided, until Salvador, any “wars she ＼could］ walk around.” Her reflections on Vietnam in Slouching Towards Bethlehem were centered in Haight-Ashbury, and her essays record not the war itself, but the culture the war spawned at home. In Salvador, Didion finally brought herself to stand where war was going on.

The war Didion experiences in El Salvador is not the type which threatens unclear annihilation or global conflict. Because it is a small war in an unimportant country, it is, in time, overlooked. Because it seems chronic, it engages the attention of the superpowers only sporadically. For Didion, however, a war—any war—is less a political event than an event conducted by identifiable people, men who are part of families or relationships, husbands, fathers, brothers, or lovers.

Before going to El Salvador, Didion imaginatively approached the alien terrain through the characters in the novel A Book of Common Prayer, in which she depicts a deadly encounter between a Central American war and Charlotte Douglas, a historically protected, determinedly optimistic norteamericana. Charlotte feels connected not with the war, but with the men who make war. Charlotte tries to remain de afeura, an outsider, involved not with fighting or violence, but with “the faces of men and women in light of its shell-fire.” Charlotte's detachment from events is impossible to maintain, as is vividly indicated at her death, when her body is tossed onto the lawn of the deserted American Embassy.

In A Book of Common Prayer, Didion asserts that war is waged by “people we know.” She cannot disentangle men at war from men at home, or when she gets to El Salvador, from the men sitting at a table next to hers at the Escalon Sheraton.

Hanley points out that it is not common for a novelist to follow a fictitious account of a place with a factual report, but Didion's achievement seems natural. Her experience of war had been only literary and imaginary; her inclination was to improve on these fictions. To get the facts （la verdad） about El Salvador, she had to penetrate both the myths about the country and her own desire to dissociate herself from war, to fictionalize events that seemed ineffable. El Salvador affects her not as a descent into an imaginary world of fiction, but as a harsh awakening. Hanley points out that Didion “clings to detail as though it alone convinces her she is in the presence of the actual.”

Didion's use of details in Salvador, Hanley argues, strips away the fictions which protect women from the actualities of war by demonstrating the death of romance. The photo albums with “plastic covers bearing soft-focus color photographs of young Americans in dating situations” contain not pictures of happy family events, but forensic photographs. The women of El Salvador wait for hours to pore over these photographs, looking for the bodies of their lost loved ones, and passing the albums from hand to hand without comment or expression.

Even the physical landscape harbors horrors beneath “soft-focus covers.” Didion finds that an airplane magazine still describes Puerta del Diabla, a much-used execution site and body dump, as “offering excellent subjects for color photography.” The terror of encountering death in the brilliant scenery is paralleled by the terror of encountering one's own death in every landscape, however bucolic, and every situation, however benign. Didion finds herself more than once “demoralized by fear.” The sight of the ubiquitous Cherokee Chiefs, filled with “reinforced steel and bulletproof Plexiglas an inch thick” is an ominous one. These vehicles, a “fixed feature of local life,” are popularly associated with disappearance and death. One evening, at an outdoor restaurant with her husband, Didion becomes aware of shadowy figures sitting behind the smoked glass window of a Cherokee Chief parked at the curb, and another figure crouched between the pumps at an Esso station. On another occasion, she pauses in the street to open her handbag and hears the “clicking of metal” as weapons are readied.

Not only does Didion's experience in El Salvador shake her faith in language and jar her sense of personal safety, but her confidence in her professional role also suffers a blow. She not only questions her approach and her ability to communicate what she sees, but she begins to lose her desire even to write about her perceptions.

At a dinner she meets Victor Barriere, the grandson of General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, Salvador's dictator between 1931 and 1944. Barriere expresses approval of his grandfather's terrorist tactics, even as he shelters a young village boy “to keep him from getting killed.” Didion weighs this fact against her knowledge that one of the most active death squads now operating in El Salvador calls itself the Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez Brigade, and realizes “that this was the first time in my life that I had been in the presence of obvious ‘material’ and felt no professional exhilaration at all, only personal dread.”

Didion experiences “personal dread” on other occasions as well. She visits “Central America's Largest Shopping Mall,” where she “became absorbed in making notes about the mall itself,” the muzak, the luxury grocery items, and the fashionable women:

… I wrote it down dutifully, this being the kind of “color” I knew how to interpret, the kind of inductive irony, the detail that was supposed to illuminate the story.

But as she writes, she realizes she is “no longer much interested in this kind of irony, that this was a story that would not be illuminated by such details.” As she left the mall, she noticed soldiers herding a young man into a van, “their guns at the boy's back, and I walked straight ahead, not wanting to see anything at all.” In the horror and darkness of what she sees around her, journalistic watchfulness and note-taking suddenly seem inappropriate, if not impossible.

During her experiences Didion's role as journalist/reporter frequently fails to sustain her. While her response to the absurdity of events may be at times an authorial silence—Anderson's “white space”—she also announces the impossibility of doing justice to the story of El Salvador, and instead tells the story of her decision to remain silent. Her rhetoric is a direct response to a central darkness in which language, however inadequate, is the only response to the apocalypse of El Salvador. A tension exists in the ironic relationship between her style and her perception of the apocalypse, between readability and epistemological doubt. The paradox of Didion's prose, Anderson points out, is its ability to project a sense of the apocalypse in rhetorically effective and engaging ways. In this form, readers respond not to dogma, but to the efforts of an individual like themselves struggling to come to terms with experience. Thus, a process of identification occurs between the reader and the writer. Didion creates identification by revealing her doubts and fears and her inability to synthesize what she sees—limitations which we share.

Didion's version of the inexplicable is somber, despairing, and fearful. In Salvador, she does not attempt to piece together the fragments of “cultural breakdown,” but relies only on the immediacy of her experiences. She presents us with vividly depicted fragments. Didion's “radical particularity” creates a sense of her presence, which in turn magnifies the reader's awareness of the events. Rather than present us with remote or abstract ideas, she plunges us into a concrete time and place, rendering issues and events immediate and vivid.