CUSHING STROUT
429
temporal processes by taking account of the possible, the proba–
ble, and the actual. Aristotle has been influential in regarding
the truth of art as closer to philosophy than to history, but he
conceded that sometimes (as in Greek drama) the artistic sphere
of the possible is devoted to actual persons and events.
George Eliot's "veracious imagination," as a warning
against anachronism, also has pertinence to contemporary
dramatists of historical issues about Oppenheimer, Salem witch–
craft, Burr, Buchanan, or the Rosenbergs. Her concept opposes,
however, what I would call the "voracious imagination," which
dominates much fashionable contemporary literature and critical
theory. The voracious imagination exhibits the tendency to see
everything as a text produced by projection of the mind on an
environment subject to limitless transformation into whatever
fables we can construct. This voracity betrays itself in the "new
journalism" of the 1960s, which advertised itself as a new genre–
the " nonfiction novel." Truman Capote's
In Cold Blood
was the
forerunner. This pseudo-invention of a genre merely signaled
that Capote wished to exercise a poetic license denied to reporters,
while at the same time avoiding any moral evaluation or expla–
nation of the murderers who massacred an innocent American
family. Mark Twain in
Life on the Mississippi,
Henry Adams in
The Education of Henry Adams,
and James Agee in
Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men ,
for example, show that Capote did not in–
vent a new genre, though his predecessors have the merit of
combining their dramatizing talents with a personal responsibil–
ity for moral interpretation.
In
this respect, Norman Mailer in
The Armies of the Night
is closer to them than to Capote, and he
is especially close to Henry Adams, whose personal background
could hardly be more different. Mailer wonders whether his ac–
count of the 1967 march on the Pentagon is really a "novel" or a
" history." At first he thinks the more personal part of it is novel–
istic, the more public part, historical; but he later concludes that
since he was a witness of his personal participation in the first
book, it is history; while the second book, since he was dependent
on secondhand testimony for the concluding phase of " the battle
for the Pentagon," is not history, but the "condensation of a col–
lecti ve novel." Yet nei ther "nove
I"
nor "h is tory," nor hybrid of
both, is really an appropriate term for this genre-the confessional
memoir, as old as St. Augustine or Rousseau. Closer to home, it
