A History of American Literature

700 The American Century: Literature since 1945

Gallimard – also known as Madame Butterfly.” It is a strange kind of honor that

compels him to become his own fantasy. It measures just how far men see themselves

and their needs in women, how far the West projects its will to power and domination

on to the East. But it, and the suicide it leads to, measures those things in turn that

combine analysis with awe, pity for the predicament of Gallimard with fear over the

deeper sources, the larger consequences of his error. This is a genuine tragedy and,

on one level, a genuinely American one.

New Journalists and dirty realists

Realism is a notoriously slippery term, but it is true to say that the realistic approach,

allied to the domestic setting, has been the staple of the American theater. In prose

writing, fictional and nonfictional, it also became the weapon, in particular, of those

who came to be known as the New Journalists. In fact, according to the man who has

seen himself as the chief publicist and cheerleader for the New Journalism, Tom

Wolfe (1931–), realism is now, or should be, the emotional and moral core of all

serious writing. “The introduction of realism into literature by people like

Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett,” Wolfe has insisted, “was like the introduction of

electricity into machine technology.” “The genius of any writer – ... in fiction or

nonfiction –” Wolfe has argued, “will be severely handicapped if he cannot master,

or if he abandons, the techniques of realism.” Wolfe’s specific argument here has

been with those American writers who, as he sees it, have ignored their primary

obligation to catch the manners and comment on the morals of their times, and who

have instead gone after the strange gods of fantasy and absurdism, myth, fable, and

magic. Too many writers, in his view, have abandoned “the whole business of ‘the

way we live now’ ” and sought to produce “novels of ideas, Freudian novels, surrealistic

novels ... Kafkaesque novels ... the catatonic novel or the novel of immobility.”

Other, earlier writers, Wolfe has pointed out, were proud to see themselves as the

chroniclers of their society, but now many give the appearance of having only “fable,

myth, and the sacred office to think about” – to be a chronicler, to give a brief abstract

of their times, is evidently “a menial role.” For Wolfe, the counterrevolutionary

movement, a return to the imperatives of social realism, began in the early 1960s

with the appearance of articles and books that explored nonfictional subjects, events,

and characters symptomatic of their times, using some of the classic strategies of

realist fiction. The main exponents of this new way of writing, registering the rich

social fabric of contemporary America, were, he suggested, him, of course, Norman

Mailer and Joan Didion, and Truman Capote (1924–1984).

According to Wolfe, the good New Journalist should stick to the facts as far as he

can, the ones he has gathered as a reporter. But in retelling those facts, he avails

himself of certain novelistic devices, techniques that have helped give the realistic

novel its unique power – what, Wolfe says, is “variously known as its immediacy,” its

“concrete quality,” its “emotional involvement,” its “gripping” or “absorbing” quality.

These techniques, as Wolfe describes them, are essentially four. First, what is required

is an extensive use of dialogue: so the New Journalist needs to be a skillful

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