The ripped-seam relativism of Post modernism is evident in the work of
so-called New Journalists, whose cultural reporting used fictional techniques
to tell fact-based stories, writers such as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Joan
Didion, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Peter Matthiessen. The school, if there
ever was one, has faded as something one claims as current, but the flashy
prose style and application of novel-like strategies remains influential. The
method has left a trace that seeps upward through the soil and is absorbed, as
an influence, by a generation of journalists nee bloggers, historians and
social loud mouths who may well be unaware that loud mouthed application of
fictional narrative structure to actual events isn’t something that was always
with us.
The New Journalist were post modern in their coverage of events--
whether the writers themselves were modernists in sensibility is irrelevant to
work they did. The style defined, in the usual quarters, as the eclectic
jumbling of categories and styles, the blurring of distinctions of generic
distinctions, and transgressive of boundaries that were formerly considered
sacrosanct, immutable, unyielding. Some
years ago that sounded revolutionary and seemed a lethal theoretical blow to
the constructs of the vaguely described ruling class controlling the
conversation and the terms. There are
masterpieces in the genre, yes, but a good amount of it reads agitated and
shrill, written by writers drunk on adjectives and cheesy effects who tried
mightily to goose a number of ordinary stories.
The work evident in Armies of the Night, The White
Album, In Cold Blood, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Fear
and Loathing in Los Vegas, and other sublime and less-sublime examples of
the approach fulfill what's come to be the givens, and even clichés of
post-modern writing. It's not unreasonable to think that writers normally
considered Modernists would take what's thought to be a post modern strategy in
order to achieve perspective that normally form would make more difficult.
Carrying about the matters involved in a story hardly disqualifies a work, or a
writer, from being a post modernists. The cool, ironic stance that is supposed
to problematize the conditions of narrative formation seems more as a pose
critics who have a curious aversion for writing that is meant to illicit a
galvanizing reader response: it sounds more like a good rap than good
reasoning. The conflation of the irrational of fictional dynamics and the
reasonable presentation of vetted facts is exactly the kind of writing
literature ought to be engaged in, whatever slippery pronoun you desire to
append it with. Being neither philosophy, nor science of any stripe, fiction is
perfectly suited for writers to mix and match their tones, their attitudes,
their angles of attack on a narrative schema in order to pursue as broad, or as
narrow, as maximal or minimal a story they think needs to be accomplished. New Journalism seemed, for many, not just
history in a hurry but Philosophy on the fly. The attack on modernisms' arrogance that it was the light to
the "real" beneath the fabrications that compose our cosmology, is
grossly over stated, it seems, vastly over regarded: Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and
Stein, arguably literary modernism's Gang-Of-Four, did not, I think, tell us in
any specified terms exactly what that true reality was, or what it was
supposed to be, but only that the by dicing up, challenging, making it strange
and making it new could we challenge ourselves, as artists, and as readers that
new perceptions, and new ideas about the nature of the world could be had.
Individually , each writer had a different idea of heaven
that they wanted the world to become--Pound was ultimately a befuddled, albeit
fascist sympathizer, and Eliot became a conservative Royalist (and their
anti-Semitism is problematic for anyone looking for real-time heroes)-- but so
far as the principle thrust of their work, which was away from the
straight jacket of accumulated literary history and toward something new
and different that renewed the possibility of art to engage the times in an
aesthetically relevant manner, is scarcely diminished in power merely because
it came before.
In any event, New Journalists never as a group never
referred to themselves as "post modernists", and the style, now faded
some what, has been absorbed by the culture as an accepted style for very
mainstream consumption. The news story-literary-narrative scarcely raises an
eyebrow today. But the judgment of history has these writers, nominal
modernists perhaps, performing the limpest of avant gard gestures, interrogating the
margins of genre definitions, and making impossible to regard news reporting
quite the same again.