Un dinamismo natural en progresivo deterioro

dismisses the Colombians' vision of their past as a naive, child-like version of history in a place which has no history; "When Colombians spoke about the past I often had the sense of being in a place where history tended to sink, even as it happened, into the traceless solitude of autosuggestion"(189). Didion suggests that from what she witnesses Colombia is handicapped not only by its inability to shed its colonial past, but by its adherence to the myths of the conquest. Didion, however, fails to make a connection between her obsession with the myth of the founding of Califomia and the pursuit of Eden and the Colombians' belief that they are all descendants of Spanish nobility.

Didion includes, in its entirety, Lowell's poem "Caracas" which begins "Through another of our cities without a center, as hideous/ as Los Angeles...". Didion thinks the negative images of the poem are equally relevant to Bogotâ. The inclusion of a poem about Caracas is problematical since it suggests both that Venezuela and Colombia are interchangeable and each country's identity is unimportant to Didion. Further, the very fact that the poem is quoted in full, with its references to Latin American gun- democracy, prostitution, corruption and poverty, re-emphasises Didion's view of Colombia and, by extension, the rest of Latin America.

Didion recognises Bogotâ as a composite of three cultures: the ancient indigenous Indians, the Spanish conquistadors and, latterly, a North American influence. She sees all three present but unconnected in modern Bogotâ. At a party she attends, Didion expects people to be talking about the latest news story: the possibility of the ex­ dictator, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, launching a new bid for power. Instead, the talk is of non-Colombian matters: "Why had the American film industry not made films of the Vietnam War, was what the Colombian stringer for the Caribbean newspaper wanted to talk about"(192). Americans are everywhere in Bogotâ. They view their embassy as "the emotional center" of the city but are careful not to offend the local people. This is not because of any concern for the Colombians. It is the weight Of responsibility of being American which disallows ill-manners: a sense of duty to "the eagles on our passports" means that: "We would prefer the sweet local Roman-Cola to the Coca-Cola the Colombians liked. We would think of Standard Oil as Esso Colombiano. We would not speak of fever except to one another"(l 91-2).

American culture fills the city's movie halls and bookstands. The local newspapers are full of stories about Jackie Onassis, the American "princess". Americans are different: a man at the airport tells Didion he knew she was American because her bags smelled American. The newspaper, El Espectador, mentions Didion's arrival, "Parece una turista norteamericana", which Didion seemingly mistranslates as "She resembles

an American tourist"(191), thereby introducing an element of doubt as to her identity.35 The Colombians make veiled references to the CIA’s presence in Bogotâ and a fellow American re-casts the CIA to Didion as the "information" department. In her collection of images, Didion suggests that what is important to the Americans is how they are seen to behave and that their manners are one means of creating a certain impression. It is a theme Didion returns to in her latest novel, The Last Thing He Wanted.

The second dominant cultural influence in Bogotâ is that of the Spanish. The tangible evidence of Spanish culture, from the time of the conquistadors, helps to reinforce the idea that those of Spanish descent still live in the past. The out-dated decadence of colonial Spain is captured in Didion's closing anecdote about a child waiter. Didion lunches in the restaurant, Hosteria del Libertador, where all the symbols of ancient Spain are preserved; the heavy drapes, formal place settings and waiters in tailcoats and white gloves who look as if they belong to a European court. The image of grandeur is undermined as Didion tells the reader that the drapes smell musty and the linen is darned. Didion then describes a child waiter returning an empty wine bottle in its holder to the kitchen. To put the empty bottle back into the wine holder symbolisés perfectly the meaningless rituals which have been adopted, without thought, in Colombia:

One of the little boys in white gloves picked up an empty wine bottle from a table, fitted it precisely into a wine holder, and marched toward the kitchen holding it stiffly before him, glancing covertly at the maitre d’hotel for approval. It seemed to me later that I had never before seen and would perhaps never again see the residuum of European custom so movingly and pointlessly observed (197).

The third culture in Bogotâ is that of the ancient world which existed before the Spanish arrival. The Gold Museum of the Banco de la Republica Didion visits is witness to the greed of the Spanish and the destruction of that ancient civilisation. By focusing on the three separate cultures, which at different points in history have all dominated Colombia, Didion asserts that Bogotâ has no history or sense of continuation because the domination by a series of disconnected cultures has not allowed a connection to be made from one generation to the next. Didion's misunderstanding of the salt cathedral at Zipaquirâ can be explained by her confusion at the degree of separation between the three dominant cultures in Bogotâ. The massive cathedral is carved into the salt mountain, 450 feet below the surface, and gives the appearance of being centuries old. Didion assumes the structure to be ancient and to have been built by the Chibcha Indians. In fact, much to Didion's surprise, she learns that the cathedral was not the site where the conquistador 35 "Parecer" has many more meanings than simply "to look like". Its first meanings are "to seem" or "to look". It can also mean "to appear". There is no evidence in Didion's writinas that she has more than a rudimentary fluency in Soanish.

priests indoctrinated the Indians because it was only constructed in 1954 during La Violencia. It is a symbol of yet another brutal ideology stamped into Colombian history. Didion cannot understand the timing of the construction. She views it from a North American perspective, failing to understand the reasoning behind the building of the cathedral:

In 1954 people were fleeing the terrorized countryside to squat in shacks in the comparative safety of Bogotâ. In 195 4 Colombia still had few public works projects, no transportation to speak of: Bogotâ would not be connected by rail with the Caribbean until 1961. As I stood in the dim mountain reading the Banco de la Republica's dedicatory plaque, 1954 seemed to me an extraordinary year to have hit on the notion of building a cathedral of salt, but the Colombians to whom I mentioned it only shrugged (196).

Didion's failure to understand the timing epitomises the gap between the Colombia she sees and the one she imagines. Didion fails to register that, as a Catholic couiitry, the building of a cathedral in Colombia carries potential political propaganda. She also overlooks the fact that things do not happen in Colombia with the same logic that might be applied in North America. She cannot, in any coherent way, connect the images she has absorbed of the place and work out what they might mean. The disconnected images, a result of centuries of cultural domination, are captured from the (American) hotel: "On the fourth floor of the glossy new Bogotâ Hilton one could lunch in an orchid-filled gallery that overlooked a shantytown of packing-crate and tin-can shacks where a small boy, his body hideously scarred and his face obscured by a knitted mask, played listlessly with a yo-yo"(190).

In both "Guaymas, Sonora" and " In Bogotâ", Didion visits real places and, in the reporting of them, imbues them with her own perception. She creates a place which is neither wholly imagined nor wholly real but more a literary construct. "In Bogotâ" shows North Americans in a Latin American city where the fragmentary nature of Colombia's violent history has allowed recent North American culture to dominate. In "Guaymas, Sonora" Latin America is seen as both a potential redeemer and destroyer. Didion takes all of these themes into her next novel and develops them more roundly.

In A Book o f Common Prayer (1 S 7 7) Didion invents a Central American republic which she calls Boca Grande and which, on first reading, is the physical manifestation of the moral abyss into which Charlotte Douglas, the story's protagonist, has fallen. The novel continues the theme of disintegration begun in Didion's previous novel about the Hollywood film industry. Play It As It Lays (1 9 7 0 ). The apocalyptic vision of Californian decadence, where none of the characters has any sense of a shared history,

and where Maria Wyeth’s alienation almost destroys her, is picked up again in ABookof Common Prayer. Charlotte Douglas has fled her life in California and travelled south to Boca Grande, leaving behind Marin, her terrorist daughter, her current husband, Leonard, and her dying ex-husband Warren Bogart. As Leonard Wilcox says: "Like Maria, Charlotte Douglas reenacts the frontier pattern of cutting clean and moving on, again with consequent crimes of betrayed family loyalties."36

Boca Grande is presented by Didion as a final frontier which, Wilcox suggests, is an extension of the West which "assumes the essential traits of California with its postapocalyptic ambience and its collapsed sense of history"(ibid). In Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album Didion documents the advent of the decline of California; now, by moving the action south, she shows what happens when the final frontier is crossed. Didion never explains why she moved the abyss south. She does, however, go into great detail about how she arrived at the idea of Boca Grande. Boca Grande was born out of three remembered images which Didion brought together: a hijacked Boeing 707 burning on a runway in the Middle East, the night view from her Cartagena hotel room, as already noted, and Panama airport at 6 a.m. It was this final image which gave Didion the sense of place she was looking for:

The picture that did, the picture that shimmered and made these other images coalesce, was the Panama airport at 6 A.M. I was in the airport only once, on a plane to Bogotâ that stopped for an hour to refuel, but the way it looked that morning remained superimposed on everything I saw until the day I finished A Book o f Common Prayer. I lived in that airport for several years. I can still feel the hot air when I step off the plane, can see the heat already rising off the tarmac at 6 A.M. I can feel my skirt damp and wrinkled on my legs. I can feel the asphalt stick to my sandals. 37

The weather, more specifically the destructive tropical heat, is central to the impression Didion wants to convey in her portrait of Boca Grande. In her interview with Davidson, Didion explained the significance of the weather:

I worked at the faculty club in Berkeley for a month, and it was very hard to work there because I didn’t have the map of Central America. Not that Boca Grande is on the map, but the map took on a real life in my mind. I mean that very narrow isthmus. One of the things that worried me about this book was that there were several kinds of weather. It took place in San Francisco, the American South, and Central America. This sounds silly, but I was afraid that the narrative wouldn’t carry if the weather changed. You wouldn't walk away from the book remembering one thing. The thing I wanted you to walk away remembering was the Central American weather. 38

36 "Narrative Technique and the Theme of Historical Continuity in the Novels of Joan Didion" in Friedman: 75.

37 "Why I Write": 8. In The Last Thing He Wanted airports are also featured heavily. 38 Davidson interview in Friedman: 17.

Following Hemingway, Didion's insistence that the reader remember the different weather is significant because it reminds us that we are concerned with how things are on the surface. 39 Further, Didion uses the weather to draw attention to the book's various locations. Much of the novel’s action takes place outside Boca Grande, back in the United States, as Charlotte's story is told in a series of flashbacks. Charlotte's descent into degradation happens outside Boca Grande, yet critics have incorrectly concentrated their attention on Boca Grande as the only site of Charlotte's humiliation. Boca Grande is read by them as a metaphor of Charlotte's despair. This is a consequence of the narrator's relentlessly negative portrait of the place, Boca Grande. McClure is perhaps the only critic to question why Boca Grande is so negatively portrayed. He points out that Didion is not the only North American writer to have used Central America as a metaphor for North America’s decline: he cites Robert Stone, Margaret Atwood and Denis Johnson as all having written novels in which women go to Central America and are, at the very least, humiliated.40

Grace Strasser-Mendana, the North American narrator of Charlotte's story who has married into the ruling family, has a controlling interest in Boca Grande, but this does not prevent her from seeing the country's failings. Indeed, it is Grace who describes Boca Grande negatively throughout the book:

Boca Grande is not a land of contrasts. On the contrary Boca Grande is relentlessly "the same": the cathedral is not Spanish Colonial but corrugated aluminium. There is a local currency but the American dollar is legal tender. The politics of the country at first appear to offer contrast, involving as they do the "colorful" Latin juxtaposition of guerrilleros and colonels, but when the tanks are put away and the airport reopens nothing has actually changed in Boca Grande. There are no waterfalls of note, no ruins of interest, no chic boutiques ... to provide dramatic cultural foil to the voodoo in the hills.

In fact there is no voodoo in the hills.

In fact there are no hills, only the flat bush and the lifeless se a .4 l

Grace, a North American, bases her description of Boca Grande's lack on the stereotyped images of Latin American countries en masse. Mary Louise Pratt criticises Didion's later Salvador for building a narrative of place on absence: "Didion seems to reject the estheticizing project of travel writing altogether. She erects nothing, paints nothing, masters nothing."42 This criticism might be applied to Grace's opening description of Boca Grande. Boca Grande is a non-place with no distinguishing

39 Weather was a major concern of Hemingway as well, and he was probably the first