When Literary Journalism
Narrows the Vastness into Violence
by
John Hartsock
Assistant Professor of Journalism
Division of Communication and the Arts
Marist College
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601
Convention of the
Association for Education in Journalism
and Mass Communication
Atlanta, GA
August 12, 1994
ABSTRACT:
When Literary Journalism
Narrows the Vastness into Violence
This paper proposes that one source of literary journalism's
narrative ambition lies in the inevitable failure of linguistic
interpretation heightened by the journalist's commitment to
transcribing temporal and spatial actuality. Examining a passage
from Richard Rhodes' The Inland Ground, the paper identifies
"announced" and "discrete" interpretations whose sum result,
captured in the metaphor "narrowing the vastness into violence,"
reflects an irreducible gulf between presence and figure that has
been intensified by journalistic realism. The thesis is then
applied to passages from In Cold Blood.
When Literary Journalism
Narrows the Vastness into Violence
In one passage of The Inland Ground, Richard Rhodes'
penetrating account of life in the American Midwest in the 1960s,
the author describes a night scene outside a diner window and what
it summons to the imagination:
Through the window at my elbow the wooden scrollwork on
the diner's marquee glows red and yellow, garish lights
from a neon sign across the parking lot, and around and
above the sign swells the vast Kansas sky, black as
space. Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, diabolic engines
with oddly ordered gearings and photocell eyes, also
made this trip on a windy night. It is no wonder, under
such a sky, that Perry killed, rived his gentleman's
throat, narrowing the vastness into violence. (127)
The passage is resonant with meanings, perhaps the most
compelling the reference to the killers in Truman Capote's In Cold
Blood. Indeed, in the homicidal shadow cast by Smith and Hickock it
would be easy to overlook the enigmatic trope "narrowing the
vastness into violence."
Thus Rhodes characterizes Perry Smith's disposition for
"riving" Herb Clutter's throat with a fishing knife. But in so
doing Rhodes has provided, I would suggest, a useful metaphor not
only for homicide but for what also seems to be a persistent and
"sharpened" linguistic violence inherent to the genre in which he
and Capote have engaged, that of literary journalism. This
violence, I propose, is the result of a heightened but irreducible
referential yearning in the linguistic text that in turn helps to
provide for the genre's distinctive narrative energy and ultimately
ambition. Put another way, literary journalism contains a violent
linguistic yearning that derives from no less than the unresolved
and estranged nature of language.
#
Defenders of literary journalism, and more specifically its
subsidiary the New Journalism, have long sought to defend it as a
distinctive narrative form, one that synthesizes or fuses disparate
elements into a new genre. But as John J. Pauly has observed,
discussion of the genre has frequently dichotomized it.
"Specifically, New Journalism offered a double dare to the
establishments of Journalism and Literature. It challenged the
authority of Journalism's empire of facts, and the sanctity of
Literature's garden of imagination" (110). Thus critics unfriendly
to the genre have frequently charged that literary journalism
remains fundamentally either a journalism or a fiction. For
example, Thomas Powells dismissed the New Journalism in a 1975
Commonweal article. "So, the novel is alive and well
... which is okay with me, and journalism ... trapped for so long
in leaden books--well, journalism, alas...is still journalism"
(qtd. in Weber 3). John Hellmann, however, has argued that literary
journalism is simply another form of fabulist fiction because of
its "most essential methods and concerns" (xi).
I would suggest that this bifurcation should be viewed not
as a critical problem whose contradictions must be bridged or
synthesized or fused in order to account for the genre, but rather
that the bifurcation is a necessary problem, a kind of modus
operandi, that helps to account for the integrity of literary
journalism as a genre: A violence of yearning is created by the
irreconcilable vastness between inherent oppositions, which
conventionally may be called literature and journalism,
metaphorically may be characterized as "garden of imagination" and
the "empire of facts," but which ultimately reflect the irreducible
gulf between signifier and signified.
On its face, one of the distinguishing features of literary
journalism is its attempt to render temporal and spatial actuality.
Unlike fiction, which announces itself as a fiction, literary
journalism claims a base of factuality in our temporal and spatial
world. The compellingness of literary journalism has long been
attributed in part to this quality of factuality or "realism." In
The New Journalism, one of the first attempts to critically account
for that subgenre which blossomed in the 1960s, Tom Wolfe
discredits contemporary fiction for having abandoned realism in
favor of a fabulation "that never stood a chance" (41) when
confronted by his brand of "new journalism."
And still elsewhere he slights fiction's historic attempts "to
illumine a higher reality ... the cosmic dimension ... eternal
values ..." (40). At that point, in Wolfe's view, fiction started
losing what about it made it compelling: realism. Wolfe claims that
in the 1960s writers and journalists were drawn to the new
journalism by what fiction had abandoned, that "rather elementary
and joyous ambition to show the reader real life--'Come here! Look!
This is the way people live these days! These are the things they
do!'" (33)
The gospel of the compelling power of realism has been echoed
elsewhere:
The "true fact" has indeed an indubitable advantage
over the invented tale. To begin with, that of being
true. This is the source of its strength of conviction
and forcefulness, of its noble indifference to ridicule
and bad taste, also of a certain quiet daring, a
certain off-handedness, that allows it to break through
the confining limitations in which a regard for
likelihood imprisons the boldest novelists ....
(Sarraute 63)
And yet despite the gospel of the compelling power of realism,
critics have not been hesitant to detect in it that all is not as
it seems: That the "real" can be suspect. The compellingness of
realism has been attributed to what Hugh Kenner calls a deceptive
"plain style" that appears to be inherently suited to the
communication of "facts" or "reality" by virtue of the deceptive
belief that the world can be presented in a
forthright and unambiguous fashion:
Plain prose, the plain style, is the most disorienting
form of discourse yet invented by man .... A man who
doesn't make his language ornate cannot be deceiving
us; so runs the hidden premise. Bishop Thomas Sprat
extolled "a close, naked, natural way of speaking" in
1667; it was the speech, he went on to say, of
merchants and artisans, not of wits and scholars.
Merchants and artisans are men who handle things and
who presumably handle words with a similar probity ....
(183)
Kenner goes on to note that "Journalism seemed guaranteed by
the plain style. Handbooks and copy editors now teach journalists
how to write plainly, that is, in such a manner that they will be
trusted. You get yourself trusted by artifice" (187).
The journalism he discusses in this instance is of the daily
deadline variety. But the statement is nonetheless telling in
regard to literary journalism. Kenner cites George Orwell's Homage
to Catalonia, literary journalism of an earlier vintage. In his
account of his participation in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell
records the seemingly irrelevant:
"Sometimes I was merely bored with the whole affair,
paid no attention to the hellish noise, and spent hours
reading a succession of Penguin Library books which,
luckily, I had bought a few days earlier; sometimes I
was very conscious of the armed men watching me fifty
yards away." (132)
Such a "plain style" is deceptive because its purpose is to
solicit the trust of the reader by disarming his or her
apprehensions with a directness in expression and tone. In effect,
Orwell was establishing his personal "credentials" in order to make
a larger political point.
"The plain style, by which you gain that advantage, seems to
be announcing at every phrase its subjection to the check of
experienced and namable things," says Kenner (189). The deceptive
"integrity" in the plain style derived from and seemingly obedient
to the "facts" of realism works then to create a powerful and
persuasive form of discourse.
#
But given that one of the distinguishing features of literary
journalism is its attempt to render temporal and spatial actuality,
what inherently in the totalizations of "realism" and of "facts,"
expressed by means of the "factual" plain style, results in
compelling reading? Kenner suggests that it is journalism's
"subjection to the check of experienced and namable things." But if
that were the case we would have, in the "subjection," compelling
reason to be persuaded by what Kenner says is a deception. We are
left with a contradiction.
It is at this point that the Rhodes passage provides a
possible explanation, one founded in linguistic contradiction.
I will begin with a simple and perhaps obvious observation:
Through the memory of our senses concrete images are placed
spatially and temporally as Rhodes describes an experience he had
at a diner in Kansas. At his elbow is a window out which he sees
"the wooden scrollwork on the diner's marquee [that] glows red and
yellow, garish lights from a neon sign across the parking lot
.... " This would appear to be merely plain description. But his
characterization of the lights as "garish" reveal the
interpretive mind of the writer at work as he attempts to invest a
greater meaning in what he sees. Another interpretive act is the
description of the vast Kansas sky as it "swells" around and above
the neon sign. If only obliquely, the sky is suggestively
personified by the "swelling." Then there is the sky that is "black
as space." "Space" as an abstraction can only have meaning within
an openly interpretive context. Whatever tangible reference it may
have to the temporal or spatial (for example, the sky as "outer
space"), it is ultimately an abstraction for a multitude of
concepts: void, place, nothingness, and so on: It is open in its
invitation to interpretation. It is this openness of
interpretation, what I will call "announced" interpretation, that
will provide a trail guiding us back to what could be called
"discrete" interpretation. It will be the sum of those interpretive
acts that most intensely reflect literary journalism's "narrowing
the vastness into violence."
But for the moment, as we walk forward through the passage it
is important to recognize the accumulating suggestiveness in the
open and announced interpretation if we are to understand where
literary journalism seems to inevitably arrive as text. The
suggestiveness intensifies in the juxtaposition of the swelling
sky around and above "the wooden scrollwork on the diner's marquee
[that] glows red and yellow, garish lights from a neon sign across
the parking lot .... " In the accumulation of figures of
spatiality--concrete images--made suggestive, still larger meanings
emerge. For Rhodes the writer what is suggested are the murderers
Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, and Perry's "riving" of Herb
Clutter's throat.
It is not necessary to look for a writer's intentions in order
to understand the attempt at larger, overtly interpretive meanings.
However, Rhodes has acknowledged to scholar Norman Sims the
interpretive element to his writing: "'Symbolic realities ....
That's been terribly important to me. The transcendentalist
business of the universe showing forth, the sense that there are
deep structures behind information, has been central to everything
I've done in writing'" (qtd. in Sims 22).
The journey from concrete image to clear and indisputable
interpretation is complete, and completed most thoroughly in the
author's interpreting Perry Smith as "narrowing the vastness into
violence." And yet the interpretation is problematic: Does it mean
that Perry narrowed the vastness of the swelling Kansas sky into
the violence of riving Herb Clutter's throat? In Cold Blood does
not say this. Does the swelling Kansas sky represent the abuses of
life that made Perry a homicidal maniac? Neither Rhodes, Capote nor
Perry Smith have said this. Clearly, these are interpretations,
perhaps no better and no worse than any others, a circumstance due
as much to the abstract nature of "vastness" and "violence." We can
make of them what we wish.
But that we can make of them what we wish helps to reveal by
way of a clue what about the passage in The Inland Ground, and by
extension literary journalism, works as narrative form. Thus far my
examination applies only to what is open or "announced"
interpretation and it would be easy to conclude here with having
observed the obvious.
#
To understand the significance of the clue that we can make of
vastness and violence as we wish, we must revisit the initial
concrete images of the diner marquee, the neon lights, and the vast
Kansas sky. In selecting these images, Rhodes struggled, as we have
seen, to give them openly interpretive meaning or meanings, the
"transcendentalist business of the universe showing forth." As
concrete images, what at face value do a diner marquee, its neon
lights, and a broad Kansas sky mean? In the temporal and spatial
world of actuality, nothing more it would seem than a diner
marquee, neon lights, and a broad Kansas sky. And thus it would
seem we are left with only the world of "real life," as Wolfe
called it, subject "to the check of experienced and namable
things," as Kenner characterized it. Such a conclusion of course
overlooks the nature of language. That nature is important here for
two reasons: first, to acknowledge the linguistic nature of the
figures "marquee," "red and yellow," "neon sign," "Kansas sky";
and, second, to determine how their use distinguishes literary
journalism from literary fiction.
A neon sign is a neon sign. A marquee is a marquee. A broad
night sky is a broad night sky. These are the most discrete or
subversive interpretations of all because of their seeming
simplicity and directness of meaning. It is these which have
somehow prompted or begged for announced interpretation.
Deconstructing direct and simple language is a different task from
perceiving the openness of "announced" or flagrant interpretation.
And yet this is a task peculiarly suited to examining literary
journalism as text given its unique mission to convey spatial and
temporal actuality by discrete interpretation. Simply, such
discrete interpretations by their nature as specular figures are
ultimately denied from expressing that which they wish to express:
totalized meanings, existences created whole and in their full
temporal and spatial actuality: The signifier can never be the
signified. What is important in the present case is that "neon
sign" as language is only the mirror and not the actuality
incarnate of the object it wishes to portray. In that sense,
language ultimately can only be a form of wishful thinking. This
wishfulness, the more it longs to refine and confine meaning, can
only become an accumulation of wishfulnesses, and thus an
accumulation of longings, in the case of literary journalism for
actuality. These longings, forever frustrated by the nature of
language as merely specular, thus can only become more desperate in
their attempts to realize actualities. Thus we have a creative act,
in the initial discrete and then increasingly desperate announced
interpretations. Ultimately what began with discrete interpretation
summons an
even greater act of creative "desperation," the memory of Hickock
and Smith, and their metamorphosis, one that is nonetheless
hyperbolic, into "diabolic engines with oddly ordered gearings and
photocell eyes."
The conclusion of this impossible yearning that began with
discrete interpretation, is the final and most intensive act of a
desperate interpretation: "narrowing the vastness into violence."
Except that this is an ironic statement on its face. Vastness
offers no promise that it can be "narrowed" by violence, that the
distance can be closed and consummated. Instead, it can only be
filled with the din of a violence as a result of powerful but
unfulfilled and increasingly desperate yearnings attempting to
bridge what is ultimately unbridgeable. Thus the trope parodies the
irreducible vastness or gulf between figure and presence, signifier
and signified. This is the fundamental condition of language
confronted by the literary journalist. To some degree, it could be
said that it is a condition confronted by journalists at-large who
are committed to the pursuit of the "real."
The attempt to summon concrete actuality then is a spurious
and ultimately spurning summons, not resulting in realized
totalities: "Red" and "yellow" are only "re-presentations." As are
"sky," "neon" and "marquee." They can only yearn deceptively with
and towards interpretation.
Paul de Man detects this yearning in Blindness and Insight
when he observes that the "so-called idealism of literature is then
shown to be an idolatry" (12) of the signifier attempting to be an
imperfect replication of the signified. But in the present
case this could be safely reworded in the following italicized
insertion: "The so-called idealism of fact as literature is then
shown to be an idolatry," ultimately of the figure yearning for
Wolfe's "real life."
This unfulfilled linguistic yearning for actuality then would
appear to be one possible source for what about a literary
journalism text gives it its narrative energy and makes for
compelling reading: Like a tease, it draws the reader on in search
of what he or she will never find. It is in this that the genre's
"elementary" if not "joyous" ambition--at least linguistic
ambition--lies. This, according to both meanings of the verb "to
lie."
#
The belief in false idols is part and parcel of course to
literary fiction as well, which would suggest that literary
journalism as a genre is virtually indistinguishable from fiction
as a genre, a position I have already noted that Hellmann for one
has taken. Afterall, until the appearance of fabulist fiction in
the second half of this century partly in response to the
increasing perception of language in crisis, the tradition of
realist fiction made ample attempts at imitations of spatial and
temporal actuality. Therefore, what can be said of the nature of
language for one genre can be said for the other: The signifier can
never be the signified. Such an argument would appear to support
those hostile critics of literary journalism who view
literary journalism as nothing more than another literary fiction.
On those grounds there can be little argument.
But on other grounds there is room for consideration. Once
again if we return to where we started, the deceptively simple and
direct concrete images at the beginning of the Rhodes passage offer
possibilities for determining the difference between the two
genres. Granted, everything in writing is a fiction, given the
nature of language. But not all fictions are equal. This is why it
is perhaps more accurate to suggest that we have texts, and leave
the appellation "fiction" for the kind of literary fiction that
qualifies as those texts of imaginative prose long associated with
the traditional canon. They "announce" themselves as created
fictions.
Literary journalism does not. Unlike fiction, literary
journalism is a deception by virtue of openly announcing itself as
a transcriber of actuality. As Mas'ud Zavarzadeh has observed, the
events and actions in literary journalism
are actual phenomena in the world accessible to
ordinary human senses and, unlike the contents of
fictive novels, exist outside the cover of books. The
subjectivity involved in all acts of human perception
of the external world does not deny the phenomenalistic
status of the experiences transcribed .... (226)
The key then is what is perceived to "exist outside the
cover of books." This is not to suggest, as Zavarzadeh
acknowledges, that literary journalism is any more "real" than
traditional fiction. Instead, the commitment to replicating
actuality is the announced and acknowledged commitment to the
writing of literary journalism. And herein once again lies the
source of the genre's crisis because the commitment is one that
ultimately can only prove an illusion or wishful thinking. In a
sense, literary journalism has been set up for a fall from the
outset given the nature of its "realistic" commitment.
The rewording in the de Man quote with the insertion bears
reexamination in this context and I will present it in its
entirety:
"The so-called idealism of fact as literature is then
shown to be an idolatry, a fascination with a false
image that mimics the presumed attributes of
authenticity when it is in fact just the hollow mask
with which a frustrated, defeated consciousness tries
to cover up its own negativity."
The result is an inevitable estrangement of temporal and spatial
fact from imagination, of presence from figure, signified from
signifier.
De Man provides additional insight into what distinguishes
literary journalism from fiction when he considers the problem of
autobiography. This is perhaps no surprise given that the line
between autobiography and literary journalism is a fine if not
transparent one in that both aspire to represent actuality.
According to de Man in "Autobiography as Defacement":
The specular that is part of all understanding reveals
the tropological structure that underlies all
cognitions, including knowledge of self. The interest
of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable
self-knowledge--it does not--but that it demonstrates
in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of
totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into
being) of all textual systems made up of tropological
substitutions. (922)
"Knowledge of temporal and spatial actuality" could be substituted
for "Knowledge of self" and "self-knowledge," and "literary
journalism" could be substituted for "autobiography" to demonstrate
just how similar are the two genres and I invite the reader to do
so. But the key trope here is the "striking way." In the case of
literary journalism, the more intensified the commitment to
rendering actuality, the greater the escalation of its linguistic
failure. This "escalated" failure, I would suggest, is the
"striking" or distinguishing way in which texts of literary
journalism differ from the referential failure of texts of literary
fiction.
What we see then is the peculiar nature of literary
journalism's violence as it attempts to occupy the irreducible
vastness between what the genre sets out to do, replication of
actuality, and what it must inevitably conclude with, an
intensified counterfeit created by the imagination and made all the
more compelling by virtue of the heightened failure of its
intensified yearning: The result is the violence of an escalated
linguistic frustration. This is true not only in the Rhodes
passage. It can be detected, for example, in In Cold Blood as Perry
Smith drives across the Kansas plains in the lowering dusk
with Dick Hickock in what ultimately will be a violent but futile
attempt to "narrow the vastness." The scene, along with that of the
murder of Herb Clutter, provides a perhaps uncanny pantomime of the
nature of the linguistic problem in literary journalism in the
attempt to realize temporal and spatial actuality:
"Christ!" said Perry, glaring at the landscape,
flat and limitless under the sky's cold, lingering
green--empty and lonesome except for the far-between
flickerings of farmhouse lights. He hated it, as he
hated the Texas plains, the Nevada desert; spaces
horizontal and sparsely inhabited had always induced in
him a depression accompanied by agoraphobic sensations
....
A full moon was forming at the edge of the sky.
(Capote 62-63)
Perry then is fearful of the open spaces that deny him
closure. It is a fear illuminated by the concrete image of the moon
that works to persuade us of the facts of what we read, along with
"the sky's cold, lingering green--empty and lonesome except for the
far-between flickerings of farmhouse lights." Thus like Perry we
are in a similar position, forever attempting to close the gap, to
realize our goal, readily suspending our linguistic disbelief when
confronted by the deceptively sincere tropes of the plain style
such as the images of the moon and the farmhouse lights. Only,
given language, closure must be denied, just as Perry finds his
goal denied when he confronts with rage not Herb Clutter, the man
to whose throat he holds a knife, but
Dick, in what becomes a challenge between the two:
"'Well, Dick. Any qualms?' He didn't answer me. I said,
'Leave them alive, and this won't be any small rap. Ten
years the very least.' He still didn't say anything. He
was holding the knife. I asked him for it, and he gave
it to me, and I said, 'All right, Dick. Here goes.' But
I didn't mean it. I meant to call his bluff, make him
argue me out of it, make him admit he was a phony and a
coward. See, it was something between me and Dick. I
knelt down beside Mr. Clutter ...." (276)
We attempt to watch then, yearning for the impossibility of
witness that language denies us. It is not only a question for us
of whether Perry will kill Clutter. It is a question of will we be
able to witness Perry do it if he does it. We are in a sense
attempting to bluff language just as Perry attempts to bluff Dick.
To pick up on the passage again:
"... I knelt down beside Mr. Clutter and the pain of
kneeling ... [recalls Perry's sense of humiliation at
the botched robbery] .... But I didn't realize what
I'd done till I heard the sound. Like somebody
drowning. Screaming under water."
A moment later Perry picks up a shotgun and fires point blank at
Clutter.
The irreconcilable vastness has been narrowed to its
conclusion, violence. But has there been a true narrowing? Has
Perry witnessed closure? No. Because Clutter was merely a
counterfeit, a surrogate for Dick Hickock. Dick likely would have
been a counterfeit too for Perry's existential rage. As Kansas
Bureau of Investigation detective Alvin Dewey would observe in the
book, "The crime was virtually a psychological accident, virtually
an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by
lightning. Except for one thing: they had experienced prolonged
terror, they had suffered" (277).
And have we the readers witnessed closure, witnessed
linguistic passion for closure consummated? Perhaps only if we are
sick, and take pleasure in such things. Otherwise the scene was a
counterfeit for what cannot be fulfilled. As if to emphasize the
point, the reader only learns about the throat slashing after the
fact: "But I didn't realize what I'd done till I heard the sound,"
Perry through Capote's orchestration tells us, denying us the
witness of a knife blade slicing flesh. But even if such "faithful"
concrete description were provided, it along with others in the
passages from In Cold Blood would remain only as announced and
discrete interpretations. They are tropological substitutions.
Nonetheless, such counterfeits pose intriguing questions. Does
language in its irreconcilables imitate life in this instance? Or
must life here imitate language--the inability to realize
wishfulness, the inability to come to genuine closure?
#
In a sense then, those who would defend texts of literary
journalism as part of a genre that synthesizes disparate
elements, most notably imagination and fact, do the enterprise an
injustice. At the same time, those who would belittle such texts as
incapable of overcoming the bifurcation argue perhaps unwittingly
for one of the genre's strengths. With that in mind, I would like
now to recharacterize one statement I made at the beginning of my
examination. I had said that the Rhodes passage is resonant with
meanings. In other words, the accumulation of meanings in the
passage foreshadows the coyote hunt and cock fight the author is on
his way to witness, events of murderous "banality," to use his
characterization in what ultimately is a story about the terror
lurking in the American psychic landscape. Only, "resonant"
suggests a Miltonic harmony working to a higher order of the
universe. It would be just as appropriate to characterize the
passage as containing the dissonances of foreshadowing. It is those
dissonances, sounded by the fundamental estrangement of language,
that are at the heart of what I have attempted to explore here.
In the earlier quote from Sarraute, she intuited something of
this nature when after acknowledging "the strength of conviction
and forcefulness" inherent to "facts," she nonetheless adds that
they have the ability to "extend far afield the frontiers of
reality. It allows us to attain to unknown regions into which no
writer would have dared venture, and brings us, with one leap, to
the edge of the 'abyss.'" (63) The "abyss," I would suggest in
this instance, is linguistic.
And although Kenner is not inclined to post-structuralism, his
discussion about the plain style takes on a curiously
post-structural ring:
What the masters of the plain style demonstrate is how
futile is anyone's hope of subduing humanity to an
austere ideal. Straightness will prove crooked, gain
will be short-term, vision will be fabrication and
simplicity an intricate contrivance. Likewise, no
probity, no sincerity, can ever subdue the inner
contradictions of speaking plainly. These inhere in the
warp of reality .... (190)
If we avoid the tendency to reinscribe the contradictions in
a totalized "warp of reality", then it would appear that Kenner has
reached the edge of the abyss, one in which texts of literary
journalism can aspire for actuality with a sharp or poignant
futility precisely because of irreconcilable linguistic
contradictions.
But the question arises, does the "escalation" of the inner
contradictions that results only in an intensified failure mean
that literary journalism as a genre is a failure? Linguistically
speaking perhaps yes, as is the case with all texts. But as a
narrative genre in our temporal and spatial world, not necessarily.
This is because the violence between what literary journalism
aspires to, rendering actuality, and what it can only do, fail as
part of an inevitable rending, is a source of the genre's energy
and what about it makes it compelling. This aspiration, as it
escalates into desire on the order of frustrated passion like
Perry's, accounts at least in part for the genre's ambition: The
longer its linguistic passion remains
frustrated, the more intense its violent linguistic desire can only
become.
Again, I would suggest that it is in linguistic violence,
sharpened like Perry Smith's knife by a desire to render something
across the vastness of impossibility, that the genre's rending
ambition lies.
Works Cited
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple
Murder and its Consequences. New York: Signet, 1965.
DeMan, Paul. "Autobiography as Defacement." MLN 94 (1979):
919-930.
---. Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Hellmann, John. Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as Fables of
Fact. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981.
Kenner, Hugh. "The Politics of the Plain Style." Literary
Journalism in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Norman Sims. New
York: Oxford UP, 1990.
Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. 1938. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1980.
Pauly, John J. "The Politics of the New Journalism." Literary
Journalism in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Norman Sims. New
York: Oxford UP, 1990.
Rhodes, Richard. The Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American
Middle West. New York: Atheneum, 1970.
Sarraute, Nathalie. The Age of Suspicion. Trans. Maria Jolas. New
York: George Braziller, 1963.
Sims, Norman, ed. The Literary Journalists. New York: Ballantine,
1984.
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