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ALAN TRACHTENBERG
associated with a zest for enlarging the social experience of readers, often
with reform as a plain motive. See Jacob Riis,
How the Other Half Lives.
Or Jack London,
People of the Abyss.
Or the muckrakers. Or the report·
age of the 1930s (Wolfe might start with William Stott's recent book,
Documentary Expression and Thirties America,
where he will learn just
where Agee went and lived). Many of the selections in
The New Jour·
nalism
fit a familiar, well-tried mold.
If
not a "new thing," there is still something special, something that
needs pointing out, in the composition of the collection. It lies in the
relation of the ensemble to its presumptive subject, America in the
1960s. Although there are exceptions, the dominant social voice in
The
New Journalism
is degrees cooler than was true in past reportage, less
outrage, more understatement, juxtaposition, irony. There is less undis–
guised social purpose, less passion for exposure, for change. And less
concern simply for "the facts." Wolfe writes: "When one moves from
newspaper reporting to this new form of journalism, as I and many
others did, one discovers that the basic reporting unit is no longer the
datum, the piece of information, but the scene,
since most of the sophis–
ticated strategies of prose depends upon scenes"
[my italics]. The
motive revealed here might clear up a puzzling point that appeared
earlier. Why should Wolfe worry about whether literary intellectuals and
other class-biased souls take notice of the wave of new styles that occupy
so many millions of people? Because the cutting edge of his kind of
writing is the claim that he is seeing what others, the rulers of taste, the
intellectual elite, refuse to see. The assumption behind this kind of writ–
ing is that until somebody notices an event, it is not real. But the some–
body has to be somebody other than the people in the event, somebody
who by noticing thereby gives the event what it needs to become real:
status, prestige. The same thing is true about the writing itself; it asks to
be noticed, to have conferred upon it the status of "style," and now of
"art."
In Wolfe's works, including his present claims to a new kind of
writing, the mechanisms of a middlebrow mass culture are transparent.
In
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
his book about Ken Kesey, the Merry
Pranksters, and the California LSD scene, Wolfe writes: "I have tried not
only to teII what the Pranksters did but to recreate the mental atmos–
phere or subjective reality of it. I don't think their adventure can be
understood without that." Unquestionably a clever mimic, a shrewd ob·
server, and sometimes pretty funny, Wolfe performs neat jobs of ventril–
oquism with his "downstage" voices. The gimmick is that all the words
are authentic, taken from observation, correspondence, interviews, publi–
cations. They are ingeniously reassembled and appear as if they are the
