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spontaneous generation of the narrated action itself. This way Wolfe
seems to merge with his subjects, to be speaking their thoughts, feelings,
words. Wolfe is at pains to authenticate his sources, but the claim mat–
ters little except as a device to keep the reader from noticing that the
true facts of the genesis of the work--the interviews, research, listen–
ing to tapes, even being on the scene--are kept hidden. Unlike Terry
Southern and Hunter Thompson, Wolfe does not dramatize his own
participation. He is almost not there. This means that along with the
actual apparatus of journalism, anything like a substantive perspective is
impossible to locate. The corrugated verbal surface, the hyped-up prose,
its tachycardiac speed, its fevered illusion of thinking and feeling, all
disguise the
reporter.
That is why the direct quotations from a letter by a
woman recounting her first experience with LSD comes with such
relief: at last, a real voice. The rest is illusion of a group subjectivity,
only and sheerly verbal, never complete, never completing itself in the
reader's imagination, except as display, as spectacle.
What Wolfe gains by his pyrotechnics is an easy experience for the
reader: just lean back and let it happen to you. But it is a deceit: by
disguising itself and its procedures, by mystifying the presence of the
author as a merely neutral recorder when he is in fact the only active
producer of the product, Wolfe's work is a revealing instance of mass
culture. The appearance of spontaneity is the product of the most arch
manipulation and manufacture. By pretending to render the world al–
ways as someone's experience, from the inside, Wolfe may seem to be
revitalizing the craft of journalism and preventing the loss of experience
that comes with hardened journalistic formulae. But just the opposite
results. He converts experience into spectacle, fixes it, reifies it as a
reader's vicarious experience. He cheats us with illusions of deeper pene–
trations into segregated realities but the illusion is a calculated product
that disguises what it is we are actually reading.
Wolfe's genre is a cool flaneur's version of the comic journalism
practiced by Mark Twain and his brethren. He dons the guise of the Low
Rent rebel, speaking on behalf of those who have been deprived of their
status by the literary, intellectual, and political elite. His devices include
a bogus erudition and intellectuality, an OED vocabulary of technical
terms, outrageous but "learned" neologisms, and catalogue after cata–
logue of the names and things that fill the days and hours of American
popular life, all presented without punctuation, as a kind of synchro–
nistic pop mandala. He panders to both a hatred and an envy of intellec–
tuals. His
lumpenprole
revolution is no more than a botched theft of
what he thinks is the prize jewel of the intellectuals, the label of "art."
Far from revolutionary it is a conformist writing, whose message at a low
