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Harred teaches English at Macalester College, St. Paul, MN. Previously she taught at the University of Minnesota and the University of WisconsinRiver Falls.
In an essay titled "On Morality," Joan Didion writes that meaningful morality for her has little to do with a concept of the "ideal good," that the "cautionary tales" told her in childhood about the behavior of people in particular, often extreme, situations embody for her the only sort of morality that avoids appearing false and empty (1968b, 159). Thus, Didion connects morality and narrative, suggesting that the moral and ethical dimensions of events can be understood most legitimately, perhaps exclusively, in terms of a story. This suggestion calls to mind Carol Gilligan's discussion of moral judgments dependent upon "a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract" (1982, 19). But what implications does such a suggestion have for Didion's nonfiction? How does the use of narrative discourse interact with and influence her attempts in that nonfiction to represent actual events, to understand and draw moral as well as political conclusions about those events and the world in which they happen? Her book of political reportage entitled Salvador (1983) offers complex, even contradictory, answers to these questions.
Salvador incorporates a variety of discourses but consists primarily of a narrative constructed loosely from the events of Didion's two-week stay in El Salvador in the summer of 1982, an experience that she has called the most terrifying one of her life (Henderson 1989, 71). She went there to report on the political situation in a country whose government the United States was supporting with economic and military aid, including training the soldiers in its army, which was engaged in a civil war against opponents whom then-President Ronald Reagan identified as Cuban-backed guerrillas. Didion visited El Salvador approximately a year and a half after four American church women were murdered there; approximately six months after all the residents of the village of El Mozote were massacred by the Salvadoran army's Atlacatl Battalion (trained by the United States); and shortly after the ARENA party's Roberto D'Aubuisson, who had been implicated in the assassination of Archbishop Romero, was elected president of El Salvador's constituent assembly. Didion's text and her use of...