Senior Seminar
Rough Draft
"...the center of reality is wherever one
happens to be,
and its circumference is whatever one's imagination can make sense of."
and its circumference is whatever one's imagination can make sense of."
Northrop Frye
Reality by Majority: Arguments
about New Journalism
New Journalism is a
style of writing that sparked a lot of controversy among journalists in the
1960s and 70s. It’s commonly marked by a keen, insightful voice, which acts as
a filter for the piece and is a stand-in, an alter-ego or hyper-ego of sorts,
for the writer. Two major New Journalists were Thomas Wolfe (The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson.
Yes!), who coined the term, and Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing). Thomas Wolfe is quoted in True Stories by Norman Sims as having four devices that characterized
New Journalism:
1)”Scene-by-scene construction, telling the story by
moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer
historical narrative”
2)
“Witnessing as many of these scenes as possible through extraordinary
‘saturation reporting’, and ‘recording the dialogue in full’. Dialogue
powerfully establishes character, Wolfe said.”
3)”Use
of third-person point of view, “the technique of presenting every scene to the
reader through the eyes of a particular character, giving the reader the
feeling of being inside the character’s mind and experiencing the emotional
reality of the scene as he experiences it.”
4)”Recording
details that might be symbolic ‘of people’s status life’ meaning ‘the entire
pattern of behavior and possessions through which people express their position
in the world or what they things it is or what they hope to be’. Wolfe said
these details – including gestures, habits, manners, customs, and styles – were
‘as close to the center of the power of realism as any other device in
literature.” (Sims 236).
So
in The Last American Hero is Junior
Johnson. Yes! by Thomas Wolfe, the reader is amused by the
narrator/writer’s repeated exclamation of “Mother dog!” and various other odd
words and phrases followed by the usually
excluded exclamation point. In Fear and
Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72, Hunter S. Thompson introduces a
political article with “People still fish in Lake Michigan, but you don’t want
to eat what you catch. Fish that feed on garbage, human shit, and raw
industrial poisons tend to taste a little strange” (Thompson 136). The writers
aren’t seeking to only relay the reality of the facts, they believe in a larger
reality – the context of our perception. The constant “!”s by Wolfe make the
energetic atmosphere of the car race palpable, and the digressions of Thompson
convey not only the conditions of Milwaukee but the political climate as well.
The stuff where you “just had to be there” is now communicable.
These devices may
categorize the style, but they also are what make it so controversial as well.
The heart of the issue is subjectivity. In Journalism, too much bias discredits
the writer as well as the publisher. Without policing for bias, articles that
would have been read as “news” become untrustworthy – they’re just the personal
insight of the writer, or the editor, or the lobbyist who is best friends with
the CEO of the company publishing the work. One wouldn’t be able to know whom
to trust for information. Those against New Journalism argue that it is too
literary minded and dependant on the filter device, the writer’s insight and
ability, rather than focusing on the information and facts of the story.
A hypothetical: a piece
of writing is published. The author is an unknown, and the work has captured
the attention of readers. Fiction or not, people tend to ask the same
questions: how much of this is real or based on real life? Where did you get
your information? Who or what are your sources (anecdotes, experience,
imagination, interviews, Wikipedia)? Why did you write this? What is your
point/intent/anticipated result or influence? In essence, readers hold the
writer accountable. Just as with politics and love affairs – we want you to
make sense, we want to know your intentions, we want you to follow through, and
we want to be told the truth. Even if
you’re bad news (ehem…Thompson), we might still take the bait. Trust can be
very powerful. Why? Because we are beings of perception, and no matter how you
slice it, our personal “reality” is the only Reality or Truth we can possibly
Know. Readers hold writers accountable to maintain the current understanding of
Reality.
It’s through this
personal philosophy that I have come to understand the New Journalism Argument,
and in a kind of looped fashion, it is this perspective which further leads me
to the conclusion that New Journalism is indeed truly Journalism in that it
conveys real people, real events, and so on as they are experienced to the
fullest honesty of the writer (and in his way, Thompson’s dishonesty is his own
form of honesty). The perception of the individual cannot be separated from the
work. Even in the more subtle ways, there are inevitable marks of “bias”. One
writer is going to pick a word or structure a sentence differently than another.
In an interview, one journalist will ask different questions than her collogue,
and the even the subject being interviewed will answer differently based on who
is asking – even down to whether they’re attracted to the interviewer or not.
It’s possibly shallow, and silly, and unprofessional, but it is human
regardless.
Perception, however,
gives way to intention. Comparable to Impressionism in art, is Starry Night any less a painting than The Mona Lisa? Did they both not seek to
capture their subjects as they were seen? On the other hand, the intent to be
honest can’t guarantee an outcome of “honesty” - but again – whether or not one
felt a work is “honest” depends an awful lot on their perception. And their
perception is going to be influenced, not only by what they empirically
witness, but also by the perceptions of others.
There is a deep
alienation in the idea that we are our own little planets of senses just
spinning past or colliding with one another, but that’s where trust is most
effective. We trust that what is True to most others is Reality – the larger
Reality or collective Reality. We obsess over norms and forms and styles, means
and measurements and averages. It is why Ronald Weber calls New Journalism a
“menace” in Some Sort of Artistic Excitement.
The very existence of work like Wolfe and Thompson’s threatens the larger
accepted Reality because it is providing us with an alternative and calling it
just as True.
Weber is determined to
separate Journalism from New Journalism – to cast one as fact and the other as
art. Then, to degrade from art to worse, he points to egotism calling New
Journalism “‘I’ writing for an ‘I’ time, personal writing for an age of
personalism” (21). In the end, if New
Journalism must cohabitate the definitions of both fiction and non-fiction,
then Weber can redeem New Journalism for one reason, an ability to “function in
something of the same way for an educated middle class as the early novel did
for an emerging economic middle class – it’s bringing the news in engaging
fashion.” For me, Weber’s arguments combined with his focus on not only
discrediting New Journalism but also slighting Wolfe points to – may I say – a
personal problem.
Strangely Weber does
not argue that the biggest danger of Wolfe and Thompson is not the reliability
of their work, but the connotations within it. When Thompson puts the image of
nasty, inedible fish and pollution in your brain, then talks about a political
race, you make an association. Even if Thompson was screaming on the page that
Nixon was an evil lunatic, it’s nothing compared to “sending Muskie against
Nixon would have been like sending a three-toed sloth out to seize turf from a
wolverine” (Thompson 159) or calling him a “bloodthirsty thug”. It’s not a
matter of truth in the events, but in perpetuating a valid perception of an
event on impressionable minds. Easily overcome, of course, so long as we’re
exposed to a variety of perfectly valid perceptions, I think.
Another hypothetical:
if a work influences thought, which influences one’s Reality or a group of
people’s Realities, then it is assumed that a writer would want to spread more
knowledge and awareness – seeking to define the majority Reality further. They
should be deliberate then in whatever they write because –if published- they
will be held accountable for influencing people one way or another. More people
read Wolfe, enjoy his writing, agree with his perspective, trust his craft,
understand or even relate to his Reality – well that would change the majority
or collective Reality as well – even for those who disagree, the possibility of
seeing the world as Wolfe does cannot be erased from their minds but instead
must be incorporated into that perception. That’s the potential power of these
works, both the creative and the critiques.
Therefore, Weber is
utterly entombed by his own reality – which as an academic would be represented
by his education and status – and wants to shoot down and discredit this style
just because he doesn’t want to do the work to incorporate it. Just as he is
not a presence in my Reality (mainly because he doesn’t have accessible
biographical information online), I am not part of his because his focus
(perhaps demographic) is not me. Weber quotes Seymour Krim, calling New
Journalism “literature for the majority”. Again, Weber clearly subscribes to
majority determined Reality – fixated on tradition and definition. Weber is
trying to explain something and so he must pull what he knows - just like Wolfe
- just like all the other writers we’ve talked about in class. The difference
is that Wolfe uses his Reality to open up the world and Weber’s Reality closes
the world down.
Citations
Sims, Norman. True Stories. Chicago, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2007. 235-236. Print.
Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72.
Weber, Ronald. Some Sort of Artistic Excitement. Print.
Wolfe, Thomas. The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson.
Yes! .
