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lying around dormant when I carne along.... [my ellipses] I found that
things like exclamation points, italics, abrupt shifts (dashes) and synco–
pations (dots) helped give the illusion not only of a person talking but of
a person thinking." But the main discovery came when he "started play–
ing around with the device of point-of-view." This led him on, and soon
he realized that all "this extraordinary power" of social realism comes
from "just four devices." No.1 is "scene-by-scene construction"; No.2
is
dialogue--the best thing going for involving the reader; No. 3 is
"third-person point of view," getting inside your character, showing each
scene through someone's eyes. The whole game could come a cropper on
this device ,' for how can a journalist claim to be inside characters he
didn't invent but only just met? "The answer proved to be marvelously
simple: interview about his thoughts and emotions, along with every–
thing else." And No.4, the device gleaned from Balzac of recording
minute details of gesture, habit, furniture, clothing, food, decor,
all
the
symbols of "status life": "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."
As for the rest, "from character to moral consciousness (whatever
that may be)," that depends on what you have in the way of "genius."
The argument is only that "the genius of any writer--again, in fiction
or nonfiction- -will be severely handicapped if he cannot master, or if
he abandons the techniques of realism." All the power of "Dickens,
Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Mann, Faulkner, is made possible by the fact that
they first wired their work into the main circuit, which is realism."
So much for technical explanations. There is a social explanation as
well, an explanation from history. Wolfe is describing a revolution in
aesthetics, in culture: a take-over by the sansculottes of the world of
letters. ew Journalists are the
lumpenproles,
the Low Rent crowd,
"ignoring class lines," and they have had "the whole crazed obscene
uproarious Mammon-faced drug-soaked mau-mau lust-oozing Sixties in
America all to themselves."
The New York Times Book R eview
and the
New York Review of Boohs
disapprove. They are trying to protect the
old class structure which has the novelist at the top and the Grub
Streeters below.
Waxing prophetic Wolfe foresees "a tremendous future for a sort of
novel that will be calIed the journalistic novel or perhaps documentary
novel." And it wilI not be an isolated event. In Wolfe's world revolution
from below has been the main event in American society since World
War II, and New Journalism is part of the uproarious scene. Wolfe wants
to align the new kind of writing with all the mad energies bursting the
old social styles at the seams.
