The Old Realism
The New Journalism.
by Tom Wolfe.
With an Anthology edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson. Harper & Row. 394 pp. $10.95.
During the early 1960's, working more or less independently, journalists like Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, and Tom Wolfe, and novelists-turned-journalists like Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and James Baldwin, were beginning to employ certain novelistic techniques in the writing of nonfiction. By 1966, the work these “New Journalists” were doing had not only been recognized as a movement and given a name, but had also, according to Tom Wolfe, their principal spokesman, begun to “wreak havoc in the literary world,” unleashing there a flood of “bitterness, envy, and resentment” over the journalistic usurpation of both literary techniques and literary insights. Without quite realizing it, the New Journalists had discovered a form for nonfiction that within the course of the next several years was—as Wolfe sees it—to “wipe out the novel as literature's main event,” and was to become “the most important literature being written in America today.”
In his long introductory essay to The New Journalism, an anthology of representative selections, Wolfe compares the distaste of the “literary establishment” for the New Journalism to the distaste engendered among the literati of the 18th century by the appearance of the realistic novel. Just as, for example, “Dr. Johnson dismissed Fielding's novels by saying his characters were so ‘low life’ you would think Fielding himself were an ‘ostler,’” so too, Wolfe believes, do the various dismissers and disparagers of the New Journalism object to it not because it is technically inferior or inconsequential, but rather because it concerns itself with people and things its detractors consider inferior or inconsequential. Also, and more importantly perhaps, it profoundly antagonizes literary academics who feel that the absorption of the New Journalism in the details of everyday experience endangers certain notions in which they have a vested interest, like “a higher reality, the cosmic dimension, eternal values, and the moral consciousness.”
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Wolfe's sense of the importance of the New Journalists stems first of all from his conviction that they are the only contemporary writers who haven't deserted “the rich terrain of the novel: namely, society, the social tableau, manners and morals, the ‘whole business of the way we live now.’” Instead of sustaining the great traditions of the realistic novel, the writers of modern fiction have regressed to a time before the techniques of realism were developed. Rather than attending to what is actually taking place in the culture, modern fiction relies on what Wolfe calls the “conventions of No Background, No Place Name, No Dialogue, and the Inexplicables.” Modern fiction, preoccupied as it is with “myth” and “mystery,” sets its characters adrift in a sea of mystification and paradox, thereby depriving its audience of all sense of recognition and hence of any emotional involvement in the scene.
In short, modern fiction has, as Wolfe puts it, “left behind for the New Journalists quite a nice little body of material: the whole of American society, in effect”:
“[T]he generation gap,” “the counter-culture,” “black consciousness,” “sexual permissiveness,” “the death of God,” . . . the abandonment of proprieties, pieties, decorums, connoted by “go-go-funds,” “fast money,” swinger groovey hippie drop-out pop Beatles Andy Baby Jane Bernie Huey Eldridge LSD marathon encounter stone underground rip-off. . . . This whole side of American life that gushed forth when postwar American affluence finally blew the lid off—all this the novelists simply turned away from, gave up by default.
It was in the attempt to capture and record the dynamics of these various manifestations of contemporary life that the New Journalists rediscovered, “by trial and error . . . the devices that gave the realistic novel its unique power, variously known as its ‘immediacy,’ its ‘concrete reality,’ its ‘emotional involvement,’ its ‘gripping’ or ‘absorbing’ quality.” The essential devices of the New Journalism are defined as faithful reconstruction, “scene by scene,” of external settings, as opposed to summary and superficial historical narrative; recording of dialogue as a means of “establishing and defining character”; use of “point-of-view” narration, thus evoking any given character's sense of his own situation; and the extensive cataloguing of the external props of a character's life—his clothes, mannerisms, furniture, friends, relatives, attitudes, and gestures, and all the other details “symbolic” of people's “status life . . . of the entire pattern of behavior and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be.”
No one, Wolfe asserts, was ever “moved to tears” by the characters of, to use his examples, “Homer, Sophocles, Molière, Racine, Sidney, or Shakespeare.” But “even the impeccable Lord Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, had cried . . . over the death of Dickens's Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop.” The introduction, then, of realism into literature was like “the introduction of electricity into machine technology. . . . It raised the state of the art to a new magnitude.” Yet, says Wolfe, the New Journalism surpasses even the achievement of the realistic novel: “it enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost forgets what a power it has: The simple fact that the reader knows all this actually happened.” This is where the ingredients of exhaustive reporting of “facts” come into the picture. According to Wolfe, it is the element of the factual in the New Journalism that removes all “screens” between literature and its audience and puts “the writer one step closer to the absolute involvement of the reader that Henry James and James Joyce dreamed of and never achieved.”
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In dismissing just about every major critical theory on the nature and purpose of literature, Wolfe seems to assume as self-evident a role for literature that is in effect one of handmaiden to the social sciences. In his impatience with sophisticated aesthetic questions, he also seems to assume that people now read Dickens or Balzac for their detailed reproductions of the social milieus of 19th-century London or Paris. Moreover, one gets the impression that he doesn't realize that people are still reading Shakespeare or Sophocles for any reason whatever.
The truth is, however, that there is more to the nature of literature than the extent to which it does or does not provide an approximation of the reader's own emotional experience in the culture of his time; more to the distinction among Shakespeare, Dickens, and Hunter Thompson than the presence or absence of detailed reportage and the consequent degree to which each author does or does not “absorb” his audience; more to the history of literature than the differences between those who preceded the 18th-century novelists and those who have followed them; and more to the dynamics of the contemporary literary scene than the ways in which Tom Wolfe has or has not surpassed Balzac, who in turn had or had not surpassed Shakespeare.
One of the main thrusts of Wolfe's essay is the assertion that the techniques of the New Journalism are the only truly effective means of capturing the “reality” of particular cultural phenomena. In the course of this argument, Wolfe winds up in the position of equating the desire to extract from literature certain “truths” that might be said to illuminate the course of “everyday” experience with an indifference to the “way people really live.” He also makes connections between the operations of the critical intelligence in an effort to understand the dynamics of contemporary society and a tacit contempt for “real people.” He says, in effect, that only through the offices of the New Journalism, with its various representations of “immediacy,” can anything worth knowing about anything be brought to light, and anyone who feels that there might be more efficacious ways of looking at the world is just a “gentleman in the grandstand,” or a “man of letters,” who for whatever reasons of temperament can't bring himself to engage fully in the cultural life of his times. Literature, in other words, is supposed to show “what's happening.” It can be left to the pedants to try to make sense of it.
All Wolfe's scorn notwithstanding, however, it is literature, and—however one may blush to say it—even “life” itself, and not merely posturing intellectuals, that raise questions about the ethical or theological dimensions of art or about the nature of aesthetic response. “Reality” is a complex and problematic business, and the “mind” and the “emotions” are not luminous, self-defining arenas about which there is no good reason to speculate. It was, indeed, largely in an attempt to explore such problems through art that much of the writing Wolfe himself extols was written, including that of Flaubert, James, and Joyce.
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In turning from Wolfe's essay to the selections in his anthology, the great temptation is to judge them merely in terms of the extent to which they are or aren't embarrassed by his claims for them. Taking his essay at face value, one might reasonably assume that what would unfold in the anthology would be a representation of the social milieu not just equal to but better than that given in Remembrance of Things Past or War and Peace, and a depiction of subtle and complex psychological relationship of a sort striven for but never quite captured in Ulysses or The Portrait of a Lady.
Although there is nothing even vaguely approaching these heights in the pages of The New Journalism, there are selections (most notably Wolfe's own) of remarkable technical accomplishment, and several dramatically perceptive studies of some of the issues by which contemporary America is, in fact, profoundly troubled. Once these pieces are absolved of the burden of either succeeding or failing in terms of Wolfe's extravagant and, finally, somewhat silly standards, it becomes possible to judge them for what they are: sometimes thoughtful and comprehensive and sometimes drastically biased and narrow accounts of diverse aspects of the times.
The works in this collection range over a wide variety of subjects: movie stars, directors, and producers; the Vietnam war and the anti-war movement; macrobiotic diets; Martin Luther King and the “old” civil-rights movement; a baton-twirling institute at Ole Miss; murder; ethnic political pressure groups; football; Presidential campaigning; the New York police; the commodity futures market; and the Hell's Angels.
Taken as a whole, these pieces embody just about all the ways of looking at American society that have become common currency during the course of the last ten or fifteen years. They are couched in the language of polarization and crisis; preoccupied with the presentation of anxiety, confusion, and dissatisfaction; permeated by a sense of unbridgeable distances among regionally determined sensibilities; suspicious of traditional values and the possibilites of meloration: based, in short, on the implicit proposition that to be that “secretary of American society” which Wolfe claims as the highest office for a writer, necessarily implies the recording of increasingly mindless violence, frustration, and a pervasive climate of decadence and amorality.
Far from placing primary weight on the individual “reality” of the lives they investigate, then, the New Journalists typically place their characters in a context of passivity and beleaguerment every bit as diffuse and “inexplicable” as the settings of that “modern fiction” Wolfe has gone to such great lengths to debunk. For the most part, the characters in this New Journalism seem victimized by their own illusions and insecurities, and by the breakdown of moral and rational order in the culture itself. The tendency to metaphysical incoherence, displayed in Beckett, Camus, or Kafka is replaced in this context by a species of sociological nihilism, and all that can be known about anything are various manifestations of instability it is now customary to regard as being intrinsic to American society.
Once it has been acknowledged that there is nothing inherent in the New Journalism that would reasonably inspire the kind of virulent hostility toward it that Wolfe dwells on in his essay, it must also be said that if these works represent the most energized attempt being made in contemporary America to get to the bottom of things, we have indeed come a long and dismal way from the clays of Dickens and Balzac. For what these and other truly great writers do, in the final analysis, is to provide the basis for all those careful generalizations from particular cases, all those drawings of meaningful distinctions, and all those attempts to make soundly based judgments of value which so much of the New Journalism dismisses as either stuffy or obsolete.
