Writing reality

Review of The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe, published in 1973.

Tom Wolfe introduces this anthology of writing with a discussion of the [ostensibly] universal ambition among writers to gain the respect of their colleagues and readers. He argues that, in his day, novelists still had the top position in the hierarchy of writers, journalists the lowest rung on the social ladder, and he sets out to challenge this [unsatisfactory] situation radically. "A writer needs at least enough ego to believe that what he is doing as a writer is as important as what anyone he is writing about is doing and that therefore he shouldn't compromise his own work. If he doesn't believe that his own writing is one of the most important activities going on in contemporary civilisation, then he ought to move on to something he thinks is..." This is a level of belief that Tom Wolfe displays here in abundance. 

Truman Capote, when he published In Cold Blood, protested that it was not mere journalism, but a new style of novel that he had invented - "the non-fiction novel." Wolfe observes this is because novels had far greater social status than mere journalism. This was not always the case. When Henry Fielding published Joseph Andrews in 1742, he denied that it was an example of the novel, which was had very low status then, but was indeed a "comic epic poem in prose" comparable to a lost comic epic of ancient Greece called The Margites. In fact, especially with Tom Jones, Fielding and other writers of realistic novels transformed the status of the novel for the next two centuries. Tom Wolfe suggests that the New Journalism was about to have the same effect on modern journalism. 

Wolfe argues that epic poetry belonged to an age before mass literacy. It inevitably gave way to the novel, because the novel is a far more effective vehicle by which to engage its audience - to draw the reader in. This he attributes to its greater capacity for realism. 

"The psychological, moral, philosophical, emotional, poetic, visionary (one may supply the adjective as needed) power of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Mann, Faulkner, is made possible only by the fact that they first wired their work into the main circuit, which is realism."

But the writers of novels still retained a distance from their material which was only now being eliminated by the techniques of the New Journalism. The novel would give way to such journalism because of the demand among readers to be engaged as directly and fully as possible in the experience described - to feel as though they were there in person. 

Wolfe defines New Journalism as having four techniques or qualities that combine to achieve a transformation in the level of realism. First - tell the story scene by scene [so that readers experience events as they happened]. Second - record dialogue in full. ["It establishes and defines character more quickly and effectively than any other single device."] Third - present every scene through the eyes of a participant, ["giving the reader the feeling of being inside the character's mind and experiencing the emotional reality of the scene..."]. Fourth, a very detailed recording of what he calls the "status life" of people - their gestures,..habits, ..furniture.., clothing.., styles of eating, travelling, keeping house... "the entire pattern of behaviour and possessions through which people express their position in the world..." In brief, all of the techniques of reporting - all the weary slog of investigation and recording - are employed to supply the material required for a story and all of the techniques of the writer's art are applied to this material in order to construct an extraordinarily realistic account of people and events, so that the reader can in turn feel totally involved in the resulting account. 

Wolfe's hymn to realistic writing is infectious. The anthology is by all means a tribute to its achievements. It is excessively masculine it must be said, with two women writers included among 23 pieces of writing. It is excessively driven too - just packed with energy and aggression and competitive testing of the limits. All that might be forgiven in "the most important activities going on in contemporary civilisation." 

But all this was published in 1973. Reading again my terribly discoloured and worn copy of this exciting book, a treasured heirloom from my distant youth, I have to wonder what has become of this exciting movement towards greater realism and greater involvement of the reader. 

Wolfe may have underestimated the capacity of our media to take hold of a powerful movement such as this and to tame it, to wring all life from it, reducing it to the limp reflection of the past which is the reality of much contemporary journalism. He may have correctly estimated the public demand for realism, but helped to open the gates to the modern levels of intrusion into the private lives of anyone standing between the media and a story they can sell. Realism may today have become a form of hyper-realism, with the publication through Wikileaks of impossibly huge quantities of deeply secret and private email communications between officials in the recesses of government agencies, and through Snowden proving the theft by government agencies of impossibly huge quantities of deeply private communications between citizens of every western democracy. In their turn, the public may have accepted the impossibility of privacy and taken to making their own lives public through Facebook and other social media. 

Worst of all, I wonder how far the explosion of realism in our media conceals also an explosion of pure dishonesty and manipulation of the public by powerful agencies skilled in the presentation of a false reality. After every revolution there often comes a counter-revolution.

What is wrong then in this project? I wonder if it is a failure to recognise that reality (especially social reality) is as much a construct as a phenomenon. However close the New Journalist may approach to a detailed and exhaustive record of social reality, there will always be a huge element of selective perception, of selective blindness too, and it will remain to be further selected, interpreted and presented in accordance with the beliefs and values of the journalist, which may indeed have been formed prior to starting the work because that is how the New Journalist is likely to select a subject for research. The problem with "Realism" is that is in itself an illusion produced by great writing. And the problem with writing that deeply engages the reader is that it also disarms and manipulates, so that the reader accepts as reality what is, after all, story telling. 

When anyone claims to have discovered the Truth, it is always a good idea to be deeply suspicious. Wolfe attacks writers who prefer myth and fable and other forms of writing that are less realistic and less engaging of the reader. Possibly, however, many writers do not accept the false god of realism because they suspect it has a very dark aspect. Perhaps it is no bad thing to hold some distance between writer and subject, between reader and story, that acknowledges the need for a more thoughtful, critical, complicated transaction between the reader and the material. 

Finally, Wolfe has some entertainment at the expense of the "man of letters", a designation which Balzac has said is the worst insult one can offer to any author, and of whom T.S.Eliot said that they are "minds of the second order," useful to do the bookkeeping and to help circulate the ideas of others. Such a sharp blow to the wounded ego of any reviewer - for instance this one - is helpful to revive the critical faculties and overcome the temptation to hero worship of such a colourful and potent literary giant as Tom Wolfe. Yes he is a big guy, I am a little guy, but his excited appeal to the exalted status of the New Journalism, of realism in general and himself in particular, is nevertheless politically innocent, naive about the sociology of communication and mass media and blind to the potential abuse of these techniques in an age of continuing ideological conflict. And whatever T.S Eliot's status in the world of poetry, do we really want his elitist guidance in a matter as political as journalism? Wolf needs to read his Orwell again.