Content-Type: text/html Literary Journalism's Insurgency Against Totalized History by John Hartsock Assistant Professor of Journalism Division of Communication and the Arts Poughkeepsie, NY 12601-1387 Marist College Work phone: 914-575-3000, x2651 Home address: 25 Bruceville Road High Falls, NY 12440 Home phone: 914-687-4057 15 March 1995 ABSTRACT: Literary Journalism's Insurgency Against Totalized History This paper proposes that many texts of the genre called literary journalism and also commonly called literary nonfiction have a tendency to create an insurgency against totalized histories as a consequence of linguistic ambiguity coupled with the journalist's commitment to rendering temporal and spatial actuality. When the journalist insists on his or her commitment to transcribing actuality, he or she must ultimately be reduced to transcribing metaphors of particularity, eschewing then what Nietzsche calls "volatilised" linguistic constructions. Literary Journalism's Insurgency Against Totalized History In the opening chapter to Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, an account of the origins of America's space program, there is a scene in which a pilot bails out of his malfunctioning jet, his parachute fails to open, and as onlookers watch from the ground the world rises up to "smash him. When they lift his body up off the concrete, it was like a sack of fertilizer" (14). So life is vulgarly reduced, as is in a sense the history of America's space program. There would be little argument that the accomplishments of the space program taken cumulatively represent an important historical achievement in the post-World War II era. This, if history is understood as the ground against which human activity is enacted. And yet as the Wolfe quote demonstrates, that interpretation is problematic: History in this instance is metaphorically reduced to fertilizer. I would suggest that Wolfe is engaging in more than just deflating a cultural icon, a charge often levied against his variety of literary journalism. Rather, I would suggest that even as he set out to record the accomplishments of the space program in a conventional and traditional historiography, his craft as a literary journalist created an inescapable undercurrent, or a kind of insurgency, against traditional historiographies. It is an insurgency that provides a portrait of history as fundamentally random, indecipherable, and ultimately Nietzschean. And it is an insurgency that surfaces not only in Wolfe's oeuvre, but also, I would tentatively suggest, in the works of many of the leading practitioners of the genre of literary journalism, also commonly called literary nonfiction, which gained notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s as the "new journalism." Ultimately, if the texts of the two authors I will examine, Wolfe and Sara Davidson, are any indication, it is a perspective indulged by literary journalists that assaults the view of history as an essentialized totality. Rather, a result of this distinctive form of narrative is a kind of anti-history or a history that seeks to escape the totalizing inclination. In this can be detected one of the distinctive contributions of the genre, one, incidentally, that problematizes any line of critical inquiry that places the genre within the context of an essentialized totality that elides the problem of language. In my examination I will explore: the Nietzschean assault on the essentializing consciousness; the evidence of Wolfe's emphasis on the concrete particular that will inevitably lead to the insurgency against conventional historiography; the nature of the journalistic commitment to the particular; how by comparison daily newspaper journalism is more inclined to reification and ultimately what Nietzsche would call a "volatilised" historiography; and the distinct critical problems posed by Davidson's overtly subjective form of literary journalism. # In his essay "Truth and Lying in the Ultramoral Sense," Nietzsche hypothesizes an argument upon which abstract thinking is derived and in so doing offers an argument that has been one the most powerful weapons for the poststructural assault on critical structuralisms. In making his case that the intellect essentializes the particular into a self-delusory general, he notes that: When we talk about trees, colours, snow and flowers, we believe we know something about the things themselves, and yet we only possess metaphors of the things, and these metaphors do not in the least correspond to the original essentials. (178) Thus he provides one of the bases for the poststructural position that the figure (metaphor) can never express a full and complete presence. In further explication, he observes that every idea originates through equating the unequal. As certainly as no one leaf is exactly similar to any other, so certain is it that the idea "leaf" has been formed through an arbitrary omission of these individual differences, through a forgetting of the differentiating qualities .... (179) This elimination of what distinguishes particulars results in what he calls a qualitas occulta that the intellect essentializes into universal laws. As a consequence, one begins to submit his actions to the sway of abstractions; he no longer suffers himself to be carried away by sudden impressions, by sensations; he first generalises all these impressions into paler cooler ideas, in order to attach to them the ship of his life and actions. Everything which makes man stand out in bold relief against the animal depends on this faculty of volatilising the concrete metaphors into a schema, and therefore resolving a perception into an idea. (181) Such "volatilisation", he adds, assumes the appearance of being the more fixed, general, known, human of the two [as opposed to an individual and unequal concrete metaphor] and therefore the regulating and imperative one. Whereas every metaphor of perception is individual and without its equal and therefore knows how to escape all attempts to classify it, the great edifice of ideas shows the rigid regularity of a Roman Columbarium and in logic breathes forth the sterness [sic] and coolness which we find in mathematics. (182) In short, such regulating and imperative universals take on the qualities, through "occult" leaps of faith, of closed critical systems. Hegel's view of history is one example, as is that of Marx. It is here that Wolfe, my first example, takes exception. This is because he runs into professional obstacles if he engages in occult leaps of faith into the abstract. # When the pilot in The Right Stuff falls back to earth, his wings like those of Icarus having failed him, he is only one of several pilots who come to similar ends in the first chapter of The Right Stuff. In the rendering of their deaths can be detected a key to Wolfe's anti-historical insurgency. Admittedly, it could be argued that literary journalism is one form of traditional totalized history. Perhaps it is only apocryphal, but journalism at-large has been called the first draft of history. Elsewhere, journalism has been called "tomorrow's history" (Fedler 114). While the deaths in Wolfe's work could be interpreted as traditional chronological benchmarks of a totalized history, to cite just one historiographical trope, they can also be viewed as a denial of a totalized history because Wolfe the journalist declines to reify his characterizations of death. Here he embraces Nietzsche. Throughout the opening chapter the experience of death is repeatedly likened to the motif of food. For example, "burned beyond recognition" was an "artful euphemism to describe a human body that now looked like an enormous fowl that has burned up in a stove, burned a blackish brown all over, greasy and blistered, fried, in a word" (3). Wolfe the literary journalist understands at some level then the true nature of euphemism: It is in itself a "volatilised" form of essentializing designed as a trope to avoid what his characters do not wish to confront. Or, as Nobel poet laureate Joseph Brodsky has observed in a similar context, "Euphemism, generally, is inertia of terror" (317). But not only is the deception of euphemism unmasked. Wolfe pointedly avoids inflating death into an abstract idealization. He could, for example, have characterized death in a perhaps more nineteenth century idiom generally accessible to a broad reading public of the twentieth century. Thus, death could have been described as "heroic," "tragic," or "sacrificial." In a more contemporary idiom, the deaths could have been described as "the consequence of societal pressures that in a collective hubris aspired to cultural stardom." "Societal pressures," "collective hubris" and "cultural stardom" are the operative occult leaps of faith, the essentialized totalities, the grounds against which it is determined that human activity must be enacted. Among other examples, Wolfe describes the wives of aviators "sizzling" as they await the news of their husbands' deaths (3) and of receiving the news "like a fish" "on ice" from a clergyman or officer. Elsewhere, a dead pilot's brains are likened to "yellowish curds" (6), and the pilot's head as having been "knocked" "to pieces like a melon" (6). Thus the abstractions of life and death are vulgarly reduced--in these instances to what we find in the produce and dairy sections of our neighborhood supermarkets. The motif of food acting as simile may be in "bad taste" but it is nonetheless effective because it makes a visceral appeal to what readers can perceive in a world of temporal and spatial actuality. Wolfe has turned then to viscerally appealing similes--or "concrete" similes--in order to avoid the creation of abstract or "volatilised" metaphors of concrete metaphors--"heroism", "tragedy", "sacrifice", as I have suggested. Instead, his is a more prosaic and intellectually lowbrow enterprise to create concrete or viscerally appealing similes of the original concrete metaphors. This is significant because simile makes no attempt to overcome distinctive difference. Instead, even as simile bears resemblance by means of likeness, an ineluctable part of its energy derives by virtue of difference and no effort is made to bridge the gulf between such contraries. The attempt at equating two unequals must fail and the resulting inequality acknowledged for what it is. Viewed from another perspective, when Wolfe avoids the practice of essentializing or "volatilising" the particular metaphor into the abstract metaphor, he avoids the journalistic sin of gratuitous editorializing. This stance as journalist is one he addresses in his The New Journalism, one of the first efforts to critically account for the "new journalism" that burgeoned in the 1960s and 1970s. Sounding remarkably like Nietzsche, he denigrates fiction's attempt "to illumine a higher reality ... the cosmic dimension ... eternal values ..." (40). # In Wolfe's reluctance to engage in gratuitous editorializing (given that all semiology is a kind of editorializing, the admonitions of journalism textbooks not to the contrary) can be detected a modus operandi, one that applies in principle to journalism at large. It is a truism, and perhaps a hackneyed one, that one of the functions of the journalist is to accurately transcribe the events of temporal and spatial reality. Most textbooks for the beginning journalist subscribe to this position as an article of faith. "Journalists are expected to gather information and then to report that information as factually as possible. They cannot comment, interpret or evaluate," reads one widely used text (Fedler 181). Indeed, such a prescription eerily recalls, as Linda Orr has pointed out, the historian committed to an objectified history: "Thiers, one of its foremost exemplars, promoted the following ideal: 'to be what things themselves are, nothing more, to be nothing except through them, like them, as much as they are.' History therefore was supposed to speak itself. But the implicit paradox resulted in a kind of conceptual monster behind the ideal" (11). Such a history becomes a kind of Jekyll and Hyde. It attempts to present the one face of the ideal but on closer inspection of the linguistic problem it reveals the true face of a monster that can never realize the ideal it longs for. The inherently problematic nature of reporting information factually, and avoiding comment, interpretation and evaluation, aside for the moment, the journalist's prescription places an onerous burden on the practitioner. This is no less so in the more impressionistic journalism indulged by Wolfe. No matter how much the genre may aspire to be impressionistic, the impressionism must nonetheless and inevitably be tempered by what it sets out to do: represent spatial and temporal actuality. Not to do so, not to have the minimum of spatial and temporal reference points from the world of phenomenon, would be to move wholely into the realm of overt and creative fictions, instead of the kind of covert fiction that journalism represents. Whatever the impossible ambitions of literary journalism, it cannot afford to lose sight of terra firma, the kind that Johnson kicked in his attempt to refute Berkeley and prove the world real. This brings us to the linguistic crux of (the) matter. If there is forever a random slippage or displacement in the referent between figure and presence, the kind that Orr suggests is the true place of history (12-13), then the journalist, whatever his or her best intentions, ultimately can have only best intentions, or "referential aspirations" as Orr characterizes the problem (12). This then is the journalist's unenviable and onerous position: Despite the prospect of inevitable failure, the journalist, whether literary or not, has a commitment to transcribe the world. This can only conclude in a kind of parody, given that the journalist is engaged in a grand and sanctioned illusion. As Gayatri Spivak notes, "It is correctly suggested that the sophisticated vocabulary of much contemporary historiography successfully shields this cognitive failure ... " (199) which she characterizes as "success-in-failure" and "sanctioned ignorance." Such a condition is not unlike the legend of the king's new clothes: He chooses what he wishes to see even though he goes out in public undressed and his subjects understand the reality of his being compromised. This is parody, or worse, farce. Thus Marx may have been right in spite of himself in what amounts to an eery historical echo rooted not in history, as he would have us believe, but beyond history and into language. He remarks that Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. (15) What Marx fails to acknowledge in his remarks, while he indulged his own form of "sanctioned ignorance" with his implicit faith in a totalized "history," is that the farce is linguistic, not historical. Such is the nature, if Marx had investigated his statement with closer scrutiny, of "re-marking" (on) history, of engaging in the specular act. Marx was playing with mirrors. Anticipating the critical response of historians who may still posit an objectified and essentialized history, when they remark on what I have remarked on what Marx has remarked on what Hegel has remarked on, the result can only be a linguistic maze of specularity critically reflected. They will have joined me in the farce which will be not unlike one of those halls of mirrors in amusement parks that in the specular act can only provide a distortion of the human form. Add smoke and it could be mistaken for metaphysics. As in all specular acts then, the literary journalist's condition is one of distortion. But it is a distortion made all the more paradoxical by virtue of the literary journalist's commitment via "irreducible compromise" to rendering the Johnsonian "real". Inevitably, this leads not to a totalized historiography, but, as the Wolfe example demonstrates, to a contingent and indecipherable history, to anti-history if the journalist, or at least Wolfe as a journalist, is true to what could be characterized as an impossible calling: He declines to abstractly "volatilise," to use Nietzsche's term, the particulars. The exception is the creation of similes that only reinforce the inequalities posed by differences. The resulting narrative then is an anti-history in that a country's heroes are reduced to metaphors of food. The parody thus is heightened and in a certain sense this is the only true kind of reification that can occur, as the abstract, "life," is converted into the material. As if to reinforce by way of irony that this is anti-history, Wolfe's narrative in the last death in the chapter, of the pilot whose parachute fails to open as the earth rises up to meet him, evolves as parody of history in the motif of death as food into what food inevitably must be reduced to: fertilizer. Wolfe has the literary good taste to leave out the evolutionary stage between food and fertilizer, but the scatological metaphor is clear. # The question will perhaps inevitably arise, one that poses a challenge to the assumptions of journalism at large, as to the difference between what Wolfe undertakes and what the police reporter writing breaking news for a daily newspaper undertakes. Perhaps the difference is ultimately only one of degree. But it is nonetheless significant. In order to maintain a manageable scope it is not my purpose to expand this examination at length into the area of conventional daily newspaper journalism. However, suffice it to say that the ambition to be factual in conventional daily journalism confronts similar problems. Given the inherent slippage in representation, there can only be, once again, the irreducible compromise of cognitive failure. The difference in degree is this: For all its attempt at a more neutral or objectified transcription attended by the self-conscious avoidance of personal judgment, daily print journalism can only conclude with a greater degree of suspect volatilization. The following newspaper lead demonstrates this point: "An Annapolis woman allegedly attacked a supermarket employee with a spoiled chicken on Sunday, city police said" ("Victim of fowl play"). Abstracting volatilization occurs in the tropes "Annapolis woman," "allegedly attacked" (the speculative nature of the attack volatilizes it, reducing it to a possibility, not a probability), "supermarket employee," and "city police." About the most concrete metaphor in the story is the spoiled chicken. Thus it can be argued that the ambition of conventional daily newspaper journalism differs from that of literary journalism because its disposition is to indulge in abstract metaphors of concrete metaphors while literary journalism privileges concrete metaphors, particularized similes of concrete metaphors, and, as I will show later, particularized metaphors of concrete metaphors. And it is perhaps no small matter that in its linguistic volatilization daily newspaper journalism can only be more inclined to a confirmation of essentialized historiographies. # My accounting of Wolfe may work well with the kind of literary journalism he engages in. Afterall, Wolfe is a self-acknowledged "realist." As he observed in The New Journalism, he and his contemporaries were drawn to the genre by 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 consequence is that the greater the commitment to the representation of a temporal and spatial actuality, the more it must conclude with Nietzsche's concrete metaphors, or, out of professional self-imposed restraint, with particularlized similes and metaphors of Nietzsche's concrete metaphors. A slightly different problem is posed, however, by those texts of literary journalism which openly acknowledge their subjectivity, whose "editorializing," while perhaps not gratuitous, is flagrant. Examples would include the writing of Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Hunter Thompson and Sara Davidson. Here there is an initially different and more subtle dynamic at work for which the critic David Eason provides a model that will prove useful in understanding the difference between the kind of text Wolfe writes and the kind that Davidson engages in. Eason distinguishes between two kinds of texts in the genre. First there are "realist" texts that "organize the topic of the report as an object of display, and the reporter and reader, whose values are assumed and not explored, are joined in an act of observing that assures conventional ways of understanding still apply" (192). "Conventional ways" are inscribed then in a social constructivist critical system. Practitioners of this approach would include Wolfe, Truman Capote and Gay Talese. One consequence, of course, is that the subjectivity of the narrator is submerged to a greater degree as he or she attempts an objectified transcription while suffering from an extreme case of "sanctioned ignorance". Then there are "modernist" texts, Eason suggests, that "describe what it feels like to live in a world where there is no consensus about a frame of reference to explain 'what it all means.' The reports focus instead on the contradictions that emerge at the intersection of various maps of experience" (192). Such writers are hesitant "to foreclose the question, 'Is this real?'.... " (192) At face value then it would appear that "modernist" texts are in overt opposition to a totalized history whose reified enclosure prescribes what is real. But a problem emerges that must be addressed before "modernist" texts can be placed in the camp of the insurgents. Once again, the commitment of the journalist to "fact"--to tropes of temporal and spatial actuality--creates traditional tropes of history, perhaps the most obvious among them chronology. Thus such works still can be placed within an inscribed historiography, or, for that matter, in social constructivist critical systems that claim theoretical closure. I would suggest that such "modernist" texts are engaged in an insurgency against totalized history not because they overtly challenge history by openly acknowledging the lack of consensus about a frame of reference. Instead, they do so covertly in much the same way that realist texts do, the seemingly fundamental differences between the two notwithstanding. This can be detected in passages from Davidson's "Real Property," one of a collection of journalistic narratives in the volume of the same name. "Real Property" is Davidson's highly subjective account--it began as a personal journal--of living in Venice, California in the 1970s. As such, it is cast as a quest that moves in a traditional historical progression from one quest trial to another. As a consequence, while the narrator may lack a frame of reference for explaining "what it all means" she can still be interpreted as existing within a larger frame of history. What ultimately emerges however is not an explanation that can be accounted for within a closed critical system, but rather a commitment once again to the random and ultimately meaningless particular. The first trial the narrator undergoes is a search for "an unscarred man" following a failed marriage. The narrator dates Bruce until one day he tells her there is "no more cheese in the relationship" (18). "So much for that dream," she concludes, as if realizing for a moment the fraudulence of her belief in a Nietzschean qualitas occulta, interpreted more conventionally in the "volatilisation" we call love. The next trial in the quest is to buy real estate. That too leaves her unfulfilled so that she is left to observe that the mania for buying real estate in California in the 1970s was part of a "feeding frenzy" (35). "The only problem ... is that you can never have enough", so that "real estate" becomes an ironic metaphor for what is no more real--as possessing substance and permanence--than any other metaphor of reality. We begin then to detect here another literary journalist's commitment to the particular--on both ontological and linguistic levels. We can see it in the failed relationship with Bruce as no more than a failed relationship, one reduced to "cheese." Or, we can see it in the purchase of a house that is little more ultimately than the mundane purchase of boards held together by nails. In addition to their making their claim on our consciousness as temporal and spatial actualities, these two examples are particularized linguistic constructions representing failed "volatilisation" of abstract linguistic constructions: love in a relationship and a sense of belonging or rootedness in a house. Davidson is seeing through the illusion of the qualitas occulta of each experience by remaining faithful to the journalist's commitment to investigating the particular of phenomenalist experience that can only prove fundamentally inconclusive. And if you can not conclude, you can not achieve a volatilized fulfillment. In the same spirit the narrator takes up listening to reggae and making trips to Israel. Eventually, still unfulfilled in her (volatilized) quest, she takes up rollerskating on the Venice boardwalk, following the example of one of her friends who says to her, "'Now I can float along with the rest of the flakes'" (36). A "light" humor characterizing the narrative's inhabitants as "flakes" perhaps belies the particularized metaphor's use as a much more profound trope for what drifts, albeit whimsically, in the aporia, or gulf, or abyss or irreducible compromise not only in the phenomenalist realm but in the linguistic as well, between figure and presence. We have, in a sense, returned to parody, one heightened by the journalist's insistent commitment to rendering the particulars of actuality by means of the specular nature of language. When the narrator is incapacitated because of a bad fall, she notices others who have had similar experiences including a surfer with a dislocated shoulder. When she asks him why he continues to skate, he responds, "'What else is there to do?'" Thus we see the uncertainty and indirection that accompanies particularized "flakes", ontological and linguistic, drifting in the abyss on the metaphor of roller skates, again ontological and linguistic. And if it is not already evident, we can detect a variation in Davidson as she makes less use of simile in her reportage than Wolfe in favor of more use of particularized metaphors for Nietzsche's concrete metaphors of the phenomenal world. Thus "unscarred man" and "real property" are abstract metaphors for what remains unfulfilled, while "roller skates" and "flakes" suggest particularized metaphors for what the journalist in search of the confirmation of facts must settle for, or what we critics in our own volatilization would try to call drifting inconclusion. Admittedly her metaphors, unlike Wolfe's lowbrow similes, begin to push at the boundaries of metaphysics: In their suggestive symbolism they attempt to transcend the differences that a simile respects. That said however, they remain particularized metaphors that Davidson has declined to metamorphose into the abstract because of the continuing journalistic commitment. "Real Property" then reflects an insurgency against totalized history precisely because Davidson remains true to that journalist's faith, the attempt to acknowledge spatial and temporal actuality--no matter how much the "cognitive failure" based on the linguistic "irreducible compromise." As with Wolfe, Davidson turns away from gratuitous volatilizing. The result of course is not the history that Thiers predicted. Nietzsche's concrete metaphor can be no more than a figure for the originating concrete presence, unless one turns to a particularized metaphor that can be no more than a figure for Nietzsche's concrete metaphor that can be no more than a figure for the originating concrete presence. The smoke and mirrors has begun. In either case, these are realms ultimately indeterminate in meaning. The narrator intuits this indeterminacy at the conclusion of the narrative. Returning home, she accidentally runs over a homeless drunk lying in her driveway. Inexplicably--Davidson is at a loss to account for this--he is unhurt. Like the idiot in Boris Goudonov who can only weep as he divines that Russia's future is dark and clouded, the drunk in his intoxication takes on the qualities of a seer, except in this case he becomes a kind of anti-seer. When the narrator questions the drunk on why he was lying in her driveway, he says, "I wanted to sit down here ... think about shit" (39). He adds a moment later, in what in its repetition becomes a scatological incantation, "I got shit on my mind" (40). The narrator takes up the incantatory refrain obliquely with an unspoken but nonetheless telling ellipsis to be filled in by the reader: "I'm just glad you weren't hurt. It scared the ... life out of me." The drunk limps away, and the incantation now fades to a faint echo resonating at the end of her thought. "As I stood there, I realized that I was thirty-five and I was still waiting, expecting to wake up from all of this ... " (ellipsis added for emphasis). Ultimately, what is "this"? Davidson does not say. But the drunk's scatological invocation can only echo in our minds. The scatological motif as metaphor proves prophetic in more than one sense, however. In the introductory section to the piece, the narrator meditates, "It means, I think, that we are in far deeper than we know." At the end of the narrative we discover what, metaphorically speaking, fills the depth: a particularized and vulgar metaphor. Only the perverse could find an illumined higher reality in what fills the depth and scatological metaphors provide a useful antidote to such essentializing. There is a history of sorts in "Real Property", one that evolves, one whose chronology is detectable. But ultimately an anti-history is constructed because of the commitment to concrete metaphors of love, real estate, reggae and travel that lead to the concrete metaphor of roller skates on which people "will fly out of control and there is nothing to hold onto" (15), literally, and, perhaps more important, figuratively in the different and indeterminate meanings that the figurative can reflect. Having lost control, with nothing to hold onto while floating in the abyss called irreducible compromise because of the commitment to concrete metaphor, the conclusion as Eason observed of modernist texts is that "there is no consensus about a frame of reference." One source of the lack of consensus is to be found in the nature of language at the intersection of the refusal to reify the particular. The metaphor for that lack of consensus is scatological. The result once again is a heightened parody of history, one whose irony is implied by the title: There can be no "real" property, the "realists" notwithstanding. # The two texts of literary journalism I have examined here then pose their own distinctive problems. On the one hand, "realist" texts would appear to lend themselves most completely to conventional historiography by virtue of a narrator's assumptions about what can be observed in a temporal and spatial world. Fundamentally, such a position reenacts the old mimetic conceit, and with it overt tropes of historiography. On the other hand, "modernist" texts would seem in their overt subjectivity to be the least objectively "historical." In a sense this is true but not because of the overt subjectivity. Such a subjectivity can still be reduced to a conventional historiography. That said, both kinds of texts engage in an insurgency against totalized history for the same reasons. That is because both reflect a distinctive commitment, no matter how impossible that commitment eventually proves, to rendering Nietzsche's "concrete metaphors." The results are parodies of history or anti-history. It is at this point that modernist and realist texts converge. And this would help to explain at least in part why Wolfe has been so often charged with deflating cultural icons. Given his journalistic mission, he had little choice because ultimately his was a linguistic deflation of what all so often had been "volatilised." Moreover, it is perhaps not entirely an accident that both pieces conclude with scatological metaphors. We see in both Wolfe and Davidson the only end to which a history rooted in a journalist's commitment to the "factual" can honestly arrive at, random, indecipherable, despite the sublime longings of Thiers. There is no sublimity in the scatological. Even Johnson, who tried to prove the world real, could not escape this circumstance when he implicitly and explicitly acknowledged the random and indecipherable nature of the world even as he attempted to "kick" it into existence. On embarking on his walking tour of Scotland with Boswell, he informs Boswell's wife, who opposed the trip, "Madam, we do not go there as to a paradise. We go to see something different from what we are accustomed to see" (19). The differences, Nietzsche observed, make all the difference. This becomes more explicit near the conclusion to the journey when Johnson acknowledged that even concrete particulars could not be trusted as part of a larger scheme: He who has not made the experiment, or who is not accustomed to require rigorous accuracy from himself, will scarcely believe how much a few hours take from certainty of knowledge, and distinctness of imagery; how the succession of objects will be broken, how separate parts will be confused, and how many particular features and discriminations will be compressed and conglobated into one gross and general idea. (139) The "truth" then of the "compressed" and "conglobated" idea is suspect, and Johnson, in acknowledging the indeterminacy inherent in what we now know must conclude with an attempt at linguistic representation, is talking Nietzsche. Ultimately then, literary journalism, because it is a journalism and because journalism has long been viewed as a vassal-scribe in the service of an essentialized historiography, contains in its distinctive Nietzschean commitment to the concrete metaphor an inherent insurgency that must invariably assault an inscribed historiography's smug dominion. Works Cited Brodsky, Joseph. "On 'September 1, 1939' by W.H. Auden." Less Than One: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1986. Davidson, Sara. "Real Property." Real Property. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1980. 11-40. Eason, David. "The New Journalism and the Image-World." Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Norman Sims. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Fedler, Fred. Reporting for the Print Media. 5th ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993. "Victim of fowl play." The Capitol [Annapolis, MD] 30 Nov. 1984: n. pag. available. Johnson, Samuel, and James Boswell. Introduction. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Ed. Peter Levi. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1869. New York: International Publishers, 1963. Nietzsche, Friedrich. "On Truth and Falsity in their Ultramoral Sense." Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays. 1911. Trans. Maximillian Mugge. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964. Vol. 2 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. 18 vols. Orr, Linda. "The Revenge of Literature: A History of History." New Literary History. 18.1 (1986): 1-22. Spivak, Gayatri. "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography." In Other Words. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1988. 197-221. Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Bantam, 1980 ---. "The New Journalism." The New Journalism: With an Anthology. Eds. Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.