1. Introduction
In 1960s, literary journalism emerged as a new hybrid genre that combines the best practices of both fact and fiction, journalism and literature. The emerging genre is marked by the publication of two non-fictional books written by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer; namely In Cold Blood (1965) and The Armies of the Night (1968) respectively. At the same year of its publication, Mailer’s book has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Since then, it has been the focus of a cornucopia of critical investigation as a major work of American nonfiction. Literary journalism has various labels that are used interchangeably. Leonira Flis points out that the “terminological inconsistencies” inherent in this hybrid genre have led critics to employ various concepts to label this genre such as “nonfiction novel”, “faction”, “historiographic metafiction”, or “historical narrative” (1-2). Other labels of the genre include “literary non¬fiction”, “new journalism,” “literary journalism”, “literary reportage”, “factual narrative”, “literature of fact”, and “the true life story”. The plenty of the concepts for this genre makes “finding a uniform and a fixed definition […] a virtually impossible task” (Flis 6).
The emergence of literary journalism witnessed a large debate concerning its historical beginnings. Some critics found the early seeds of the genre appeared in the works of Daniel Defoe and William Hazlitt who were considered the precursors of literary non-fiction. In the same vein, other writers such as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and John Hersey lend themselves to the genre of literary journalism. As non-fictional works, these works depend more on facts rather than on fiction. However, there is a consensus among the critics that “literary journalism” has become a genre-concept characterizing the distinctive form of American literature of the 1960s. According to Flis, “it is in the United States that this particular literary genre or style of writing has developed in a truly versatile and abundant way” (2). The emerging genre has added a new color and taste to the journalistic discourse in which journalistic material is presented in a literary narrative form. Such a new genre of literary writing has focused on the formalistic narrative strategies of foregrounding and backgrounding according to which the writer’s subjectivity, ideas, and perceptions are foregrounded while factual and historical journalistic news are backgrounded. These strategies create a sense of amalgamation between the fictional narrative of literature and the factual methods of traditional journalism. The hybrid quality of the works of journalists-writers locates them in the halfway between journalistic discourse and literary discourse.
This paper is an attempt to limn the various tropes of literary journalism in order to show how it creatively shapes factual material into literary form. To show the manifestation of the theory of literary journalism in practice, Mailer’s text, The Armies of the Night, is analyzed. The purpose of analyzing Mailer’s text is to show how the emerging genre effectively creates a third space in-between the well- established genres of fiction and non-fiction. This paper proposes three tropes of literary journalism: the intertextual, the self-reflexive, and the autobiographical. On proposing these tropes of literary journalism, this paper mainly attempts to connect the critical discussion to Mailer’s Armies with its explicit and implicit reflection on the genre.
2. Discussion
Literary journalism is a complex genre that “conveys the hybrid nature of the texts and thus their paradoxical, threshold, problematic nature” (Anderson, Literary Nonfiction ix). It is characterized by its foregrounding of the poetic and referential aspects. According to Barbara Lounsberry, this genre remains “the great unexplored territory of contemporary criticism” (xi). There is a cornucopia of theoretical and critical vectors on literary journalism. These vectors investigate the reasons behind the emergence of this genre. The rupture that occurred in the 1960s within literary realism and traditional journalism as a result of the dominance of television and other social and political forces constitutes the main reason of the appearance of this genre. In the American context, television has established itself by the end of the 1950s.
The emergence of television as a powerful resource media has concurred with the absurd reality in the literary scene. Thus, the classical sense of reality has been eroded as a result of the radical shifts in all cultural, social, political, economic, and informational spheres. Such an erosion of reality has altered people’s perception of the world around them. In this respect, the novelist, Philip Roth, stated that “credible” reality was absent in the fiction of the 1960s as absurdity replaced the common, ordinary perception of life. The absence of what can be considered modern reality in realistic fiction is largely due to its resistance to the realistic treatment in such a type of fiction. According to Roth, “much of the American reality” is difficult to “understand, describe, and then make credible” as “[i]t stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents” (224).
The impossibility of understanding, the indescribability, and the incredibility of American reality suited the “altered nature of reality” in the mid-twentieth-century. This explained the turn towards “the mythicizing objectification of the world by the media through which we get much of our ‘news.’ The ‘reality’ the mass media cover —objects of their attention—has become indistinguishable from the way they cover it” (Frus 164). Phyllis Frus pointed out that mass media had utterly transformed the way that American society saw itself. The new paradigm threatened both traditional journalists and men of letters as it blurred the boundaries between what is factual and what is fictional. In this regard, Edward Epstein assumed that “news reports are more likely to hold viewer’s attention if they are cast in the form of the fictive story, with narrative closure” (263). Therefore, television emerged as a “menace” to print journalism in such a context of shifting paradigms. In an attempt to resolve this devastating situation, the journalists managed to find a new role in the news world through which they used tropes of fiction to tell news stories. This marked the emergence of the literary journalism of the 1960s.
Literary journalists attempt to overcome the crisis of reality through the depiction of a complex and multi-faceted world, in which the central events of the story become even more obscure. They use the act of journalism as a trope to explore the modern reality that is “so extraordinary, horrific, and absurd that the methods of conventional realistic imitation are no longer adequate. There is no point in carefully creating fiction that gives an illusion of life when life itself seems illusory” (Lodge 33). Literary journalists do not adopt the escapist formula with its tendency for retreat from the world of reality. Rather, they attempt to delve into reality and to explore the world as if it was art. They not only construct but also attempt to understand reality out of the fragmented ambiguity of journalistic facts. In brief, literary journalism, through the use of literary techniques, attempts to break with the singularity of historical narrative in favor of a far more complicated reality. Literary journalists strive to uncover the more universal and artistic truths about the world in which we live.
The technique of mixing fictional narratives with journalistic discourse was anew as it appeared in the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in works such as Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Hazlitt’s The Flight. However, despite the early use of this technique, the modern version differs from the old one as the historic circumstances and intentions of these literary journalists were rather unique to this era, as was the proliferation of writers, new and old, who quickly adopted the style for their own reasons. In the “Introduction” to The New Journalism (1975), Tom Wolfe states that the emerging genre was a response to the crisis of realism in the literary context. Wolfe found out that the intersection of novel and journalism was largely due to the abandonment of realism by authors and the need to bridge the gap between fact and fiction. For Wolfe, the novel had been “an American dream” in the forties, fifties, and the early sixties of the twentieth century. It “was no mere literary form. It was a psychological phenomenon. It was a cortical fever” (19).
The crisis of the novel of the mid-sixties of the twentieth century was due to the fact that “talented novelists had abandoned the richest terrain of the novel; namely, society, the social tableau, manners and morals, the whole business of the ‘the way we live now’” (Wolfe 43). Therefore, it was an opportunity for both journalists and novelists to come closer and to play a shared role in establishing the hybrid genre of literary journalism. In this regard, David Lodge stated that the recourse of the journalists to this hybrid genre “implies no disillusionment on the author’s part with the novel as a literary form: on the contrary, it reaffirms the primacy of that form as a mode of exploring and interpreting experience” (12). Rather than seeing the novel as a fading genre of literature, literary journalists saw the novel as having a role in coming to interpret the world around them. They found in the novel the generic functions that could allow for the breadth and scope to deal with such a complex subject as the modern world.
Norman Mailer is considered as the co-founder of the hybrid genre of literary journalism with Truman Capot in the Sixties of the twentieth century. He has developed a form of journalism that combines actual events, autobiography, and political commentary with the richness of the novel. Moreover, he recognizes the value and power of the literary journalism in both its literary dimensions and political relevance. The genre allows him to acknowledge the tension occurring within contemporary literature and journalism without having to abandon either form. Further, Mailer utilizes literary journalism to simultaneously exploit the strengths of these differing genres while avoiding their flaws. He adopts the journalistic information to keep his work rooted in the real world. Meanwhile, he employs literature to dismantle and to subvert the simplistic objective/subjective binary of news reporting. In short, Mailer finds in the emerging genre an outlet to keep himself connected to the rapid changes of the sixties. Norman Mailer launched his literary career in the end of the 1948 with fictive and non-fictive texts which depicted agony, ideological void and the illusions of the decade. His texts were characterized by its intensity, laden with modern topics, and experimenting with form. All these features reinvigorated American literature which was at the brink of mediocrity and the exhaustion of the existent literary form.
Mailer has a prolific and controversial career as a writer who defies categorization. Not only is he a novelist, a journalist, a critic, and essayist, but he is also a director, a screenwriter, an actor, a poet and a politician. He attempted every sort of narrative form, including some he invented himself. Many critics saw Mailer as one of the greatest voices of his generation. Mailer delved deeply into political issues and meanwhile he pursued his new interest between the area of fact and fiction. His search for truth led him to combine journalism and literature in order to create a new genre which could pave the way for a more artistic meaning. Furthermore, the articulation of the relationship between the writer and the reader was most important for Mailer. He insisted that it is necessary for the writer to keep in touch all the time with his readers. In this respect, Robert Lucid points out, “Mailer enunciates, more clearly and consciously than had any of the public writers in the tradition before him what the real relationship is between the public writer and his audience” (Lucid 6).
Mailer`s The Armies is written in an overtly self- conscious manner as he assumes the roles of both the author and the central character. It models itself on the tradition of the more experimental fiction of the time. In this novel, Mailer does not abandon reality like fabulists but rather he extends the literary range to make reality relevant and meaningful in this multi-faceted and complex world. In this novel, Mailer attacks traditional reporting that rarely gets at the truth of a situation such as the march on the Pentagon. As critic Kathy Smith points out, “Mailer’s strategy [.. .] is to question the authority of the newspaper text and to discover the limits of the reporter’s narrative practices” (Smith 179). For Mailer, these limits exist because reporters do not simply list facts, but retell stories and thereby insert, consciously or not, their own bias and subjective view into their reports. As Mailer explains, “Journalistic information available from both sides is so incoherent, inaccurate, contradictory, malicious, even based on error that no accurate history is conceivable” (The Armies 284). Journalistic objectivity, then, is simply a myth that Mailer earnestly seeks to undermine.
The Armies has often come under critical scrutiny as a literary journalistic text that amalgamates fictional narratives with factual information of the October 1967 Peace March on the Pentagon to protest against Vietnam War. The Armies shows the literary talents of Mailer, the journalist, who have an inner desire, not to tell the news objectively, but to narrate, interpret, and reflect upon such news subjectively. The text is divided into two books as indicated in the subtitle. The first book, entitled “The History as a Novel: The Steps of the Pentagon”, tells the story of the March and Mailer’s active participation in it (historical fact) from the highly subjective perspective of the author (narrative technique). Moreover, in an attempt to endow this book with a dramatic touch, Mailer inaugurates the first book in medias res as he indicates that his participation in the activities of the March comes after a phone call invitation. Another dramatic touch is added to the dénouement of the first Book. Mailer, the author, prefers the open ending of his narrative by closing the first book with his protagonist, Mailer the character, being released after his arrest during the March. This helps the readers to contemplate on the unanswered questions of the text concerning what happened during the arrest and the release of the protagonist. It also paves the way for the text to have a sequel, the second Book, entitled “The Novel as History: The Battle of the Pentagon”. In the second book, as its title indicates, the author adopts a highly objective and omniscient point of view in an attempt to give a realistic account of “the Battle of the Pentagon” that occurred after the arrest of the protagonist between the demonstrators and the police. Therefore, the framework of the text indicates that it has two-fold perspectives in dealing with the political issue of the war in Vietnam. The first book presents a subjective view from within the march. As a fiction, it unravels the protagonist’s personal experience and his involvement in the March. In the second book, Mailer, the author, puts on the cloak of the journalist or the historian who objectively and omnisciently accounts for the March as an outsider. Uniquely, then, The Armies interweaves the separate discourses of fiction, journalism and history into a distinctive genre that launches “an explicit attack on the objectivity and impersonality of the conventional media” (Hollowell 92). The discursive narrative of The Armies subverts the hierarchies of the traditional genres. It creates a hybrid matrix of discourses in dialogue with each other with no one discourse claiming the ultimate truth or superiority over another.
3. The Tropes of Literary Journalism: Three Tropes
Literary journalists has a sense of literary aspirations that enable them to overcome and to challenge the hurdles of objectivity. According to John Hollowell, the emerging genre of literary journalism foregrounds the subjective over the objective in an attempt to report “stories hidden beneath the surface facts” (23). Moreover, literary journalists not only write the news stories from their own point of view, but also become the story by involving themselves into it. By so doing, they manage to depict a vivid picture of life that could never have been achieved through standard objective reporting. Ironically, this subjective journalism “strives for a higher kind of ‘objectivity’” (22). This higher type of objectivity is achieved through the treatment of the subject of the stories. The use of the subjective style in treating ‘objective’ subjects results in a far deeper and more meaningful story than could ever be told through the conventions of traditional journalism that fails to “offer the individual a meaningful relation to” the story (Hellmann, Fables of Fact 5).
Another feature of literary journalism is its ability to demystify the shifted reality of the age. Literary journalists allow themselves to be involved in the story being told. By being involved in the story, literary journalists manage to get their ordinary reader suddenly familiarized with the alien and shocking tone of their stories. Through all the craziness and absurdity, literary journalism allows for the humanity to come through. Literary journalism, furthermore, utilizes novelistic techniques such as the portrayal of dramatic scenes, dialogue, recording narrative/descriptive details, and point of view in writing news stories. This adds a visual dimension to literary journalism and enables it not only to recount events to the readers or the audience, but to bring them there. The literary journalist, thus, “attempts to reconstruct the experience as it might have unfolded” through the use of “literary techniques to convey information and to provide background not usually possible in most magazine and newspaper reporting” (Hellmann, Fables of Fact 25).
Motivated in part by their inner desire to be novelists as well as journalists, literary journalists attempts to achieve the Horatian pragmatic formula of literary writing, that is, to dulce et utile – “amuse and inform” – to justify their literary journalistic writings. In other words, literary journalism should aim to provide the readers with pleasure, which they usually entertain as a matter of style, and with utility, which they usually get as a matter of information and facts. Moreover, pleasure is almost seen either as independent of, but consistent with, journalistic instruction, or as subordinate to it. This may shatter the illusions and the fears of the puritan journalistic community who fears that the information might become secondary to the entertaining elements of the story. Bored with traditional news reporting, readers find the appropriate alternative in literary journalistic texts that simultaneously move, delight, and inform them. Therefore, literary journalism blurs the boundaries between literary narrative and journalistic discourse or between the literary form of the novel and journalistic report. It establishes itself as a powerful force in forming cultures and societies.
Both men of letters and journalists of the time found that the new social reality could not be represented through old flawed conventions. There was a need for a new mode and medium of representation of reality in order to mediate the gap between reality and art. Literary Journalism, thus, can be seen as a hybrid discourse that aims at transforming news or historical stories into literature. It explores the very nature of how reality is constructed in an attempt to simultaneously document and interpret a historical situation. Therefore, in a literary journalistic text, the objective truth of traditional journalism and history intersects with the subjective truth of art and literature. In this respect, Don DeLillo, in an interview, distinguishes between journalism and fiction. He says that,
It’s curious to think of what a fiction writer can do, as opposed to a journalist or a historian. They say that journalism is the first draft of history, and maybe, in a curious way, fiction is the final draft: not because it’s more truthful or more permanent than the work of historians but because it can enter unknown territory. That is, a writer can work his way into the impact of history on interior lives. He can examine what his character sees, feels, thinks, hears, even what a character dreams. These are elements ordinarily beyond the grasp of historians or social theorists or journalists. (DeLillo)
Therefore, it can be elicited that the great significance of literary journalism lies in its ability to orchestrate unobtrusively the objective historical discourse with the subjective and speculative narrative of literature. Hence, it is through this critical lens that the present paper can map out the three tropes of literary journalism and their manifestation in Mailer’s The Armies.
3.1. The First Trope: The Intertextual
Literary journalists share an intensified awareness of and strategic focus on and significance of intertextuality. There is a common consensus among them that a meaningful world can always be projected not through a process of mythos-making but rather through the operation of various versions of the same story in a certain text or the interaction of the text itself with other texts within it. Intertextuality has particularly permeated the theoretical framework of literary journalism. Julia Kristeva, Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes are among the major critics who seek to give a thorough definition of the term, “intertextuality.” According to Kristeva, “Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of inter-subjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double” (Original italics 66). It is obvious that this definition aptly recapitulates the main characteristics of intertextuality. First, any text relates in a way or another to other texts constituting a mosaic. Second, any text enthralls other texts within itself in a process that results in a metamorphosis of the text itself to a new form. Third, this metamorphosis of the text creates a sense of doubling and infinitude that denies originality. Every text is an intertext in another text. Therefore, intertextuality can be regarded as “the most important tool” to deconstruct the relationship between the text and its author. Through intertextuality, “creativity and productivity are transferred to the text… and the individual subjectivity of the author disappears and his authority over the text vanishes” (Pfister 212). Thus, intertextuality has accentuated its usefulness and significance in challenging the “author-text relationship” and replacing it with “one between reader and text” (Hutcheon, Poetics 126). In brief, intertextuality assumes that any text derives its meaning and significance from the prior texts and discourses of which it constitutes only a part in the flux of their play.
Intertextuality creates a condition in which every text is replete with a mutiny of simulacra of stories or inter-texts in the absence of the origin or the essence. This intensifies the idea of infinitude in intertextuality where there is an “impossibility of living outside the infinite text” (Barthes 36). In the same vein, McHale draws an analogy between intertextuality and “Chinese-box worlds” to show that mutiny of self-conscious inter-texts. Through this analogy, the boundaries between the worlds of fact and fiction can be dismantled. The intertext, like the Chinese-box or layering structure of narrative, consists of several stories-within-a-story, thereby instantly creating “recursive structures” with a number of different fictional levels or mutiny of possible worlds within the text. This slippage between narrative worlds creates a mise-en-abyme or a labyrinthine discourse within the text itself. Such self-conscious labyrinths or abysses of the text “have the effect of interrupting and complicating the ontological ‘horizon’ of the fiction, multiplying its worlds, and laying bare the process of world-construction” (McHale 112). This means that the “recursive structures” are designed in a meta-narrative manner to force readers to be lost in the labyrinths of the text’s narrative worlds and construction. Therefore, intertextuality presupposes “recursive structures” through which issues of representation and narrativity are questioned producing infinite gaps between texts and their construction and the worlds they represent it.
The intertextual trope in literary journalism intersects with Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism according to which novel is considered the most dialogic genre with its rejection of the monolithic discourses of other genres that are “encased in a firm and stable monologic framework” which does not “rip apart the presented world” (Problems 68). In literary journalistic theory, such a dialogic discourse is privileged over the monologic discourse of traditional journalism. This dialogic discourse manifests itself in inter-texts or competing stories within a certain text that subvert any idea of originality, hierarchy, or a prior discourse. In a traditional journalistic context, the language of the reporter or the journalist functions in an authoritative zone where it “is not a question of choosing it from among other possible discourses that are its equal” (Bakhtin, The Dialogic 342). So, the rejection of the monolithic text of the journalist in favor of the dialogic text of the novelist can be read as a literary journalistic rejection of the view of the text as simply a means of communication as it is the case with traditional journalism. Rather, the text of literary journalism is a product and reflection of history as it will always carry the “survivals of the past” (Bakhtin, The Dialogic 66). Moreover, literary journalistic texts are consciously intertextual as they exist “in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions” (Bakhtin, The Dialogic 294). As a novel, a literary journalistic text reveals its dialogic and intertextual nature. It is an intersection of many other stories and texts that creates a dialogue among the story and itself, the story and the other stories, and the story and the socio-political context. In brief, intertextuality moves beyond textual constructs or storytelling as fixed and as being a property of individuals to include the view of texts as inter-texts. Therefore, intertextuality is a defining feature of literary journalism that distinguishes it from historical and journalistic discourses. The latter are monologic discourses that “report everything from an impersonal viewpoint and do not enter into a dialogue with other texts”. On the contrary, the former are intertextual and dialogic discourses that create “a typology of discourses” in which competing texts and stories are in a constant dialogue with each other (Carrard 109).
Literary journalistic discourse is “perhaps the most intertextual of all texts, referring to other texts” in terms of transforming prior historical stories and restructuring conventional literary and journalistic genres and discourses in an attempt to generate a new one, that is, literary journalism (Mills, Discourse 65-66). Thus, the journalistic discourse cannot be but dialogic and intertextual because its raw material is a news story that can be manipulated, adapted, and adopted by the literary journalist in order to compete other versions of the story. It “assimilates a variety of discourses” that “always to some extent question and relativize each other’s authority” (Waugh 6). Literary journalists, thus, are actively engaged in interpreting and scrutinizing the discursive practices of intertextuality in order to generate their distinctive but hybrid discourse. This hybrid discourse can be conceptualized using Edward Said’s notion of the “contrapuntal”. As the adjective “contrapuntal” implies, the literary journalist discourse exhibits a counterpoint among diverse stories that “play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one” (Said 51). The competing stories enter into an interplay that results in a new alternative narrative colored with the individual’s perception of reality. The contrapuntal discourse of literary journalism is intertextual in two senses. First, any one story adopted by the narrator or the author might work independently and seem aptly complete to itself without any type of support from other competing stories. Second, the story adopted by the narrator has the ability to be combined with other independent stories. In this way, intertextual or contrapuntal discourse of literary journalism deploys various stories that are entangled with one another with none of these stories “can exist without the others; they illuminate and explain one another as they explore a single theme” (Kundera 76).
Mailer’s The Armies is an intertextual literary journalistic text par excellence. It narrates the story of October 1967 March to the Pentagon from the point of view of Mailer as a participant and as an eyewitness. In The Armies, Mailer attempts to put all the intertexts and their worlds in an interplay subverting any priori narrative based on political agendas. Therefore, the story of the March has many divergent intertexts each of which, “in [its] own separate way” represents a voice or a counterpoint to the main story. According to Mailer, “The Old Left,” has its own intertext of the story of the March that reads it as a “brickwork-logic-of-the-next-step”. The Old Left has to adapt this version of story to get political benefits. The Old Left “would always find a new step – the Left never left itself unemployed” (The Armies 102). Another inter-text of the same story can be provided by “The New Left” that draws “its political esthetic from Cuba”. This version of story is characterized by its revolutionary spirit that “existed in the nerves and cells of the people who created it and lived with it, rather than in the sanctity of the original idea” (The Armies 104). A third intertext is adopted by The Negroes or “The Black Militants,” who read the event as “a White War” of the “White Left” and announce “their reluctance to use their bodies in a White War” (The Armies 120). The White House officials interweave the thread of their own intertext for the main story of the march. They read their involvement in the story of the March as a story of standing “in sharp contrast to the irresponsible acts of violence and lawlessness by many of the demonstrators” (The Armies 316).
All intertexts are misreadings or misinterpretations of the story of the March which is “so odd and unprecedented” with “its monumental disproportions” (The Armies 68). In accordance with the intertextual trope of literary journalism, no intertext can claim dominance, authority, or privilege over other intertexts in this discursive play on a real event. This discursive play urges Mailer, the narrator, to provide his own intertext of the story from the point of view of “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan… ambiguous in his own proportions”— “a comic hero” (The Armies 67). Mailer, the author-narrator, chooses for his own intertext, a character named Norman Mailer as the protagonist and “the narrative vehicle for the March on the Pentagon” (The Armies 68). Mailer’s intertext differs from other interrelated intertexts because of its being ideologically and politically free of interest. All the intertexts of the event are historically dependent since the raw material of the story is the historical fact of the October 1967 March of the Pentagon. While the other intertexts are politically induced, the author-narrator’s intertext alone are esthetically induced. The focus, in Mailer’s intertext, is not on the political ends, but on the construction of the narrative of the intertext itself.
In The Armies, the contrapuntal dimension of intertextuality that characterizes literary journalism is achieved in a manner that proves the idea that the literary journalist has the potentiality of refutation of competing stories. By looking at a literary journalistic text contrapuntally, intertwined histories and perspectives will be taken into account. Such a contrapuntal analysis, developed by Edward Said, can be used in interpreting and exploring literary journalistic texts, considering the perspectives of both the journalist or historian and the fabulist or the man of letters. This approach is not only helpful but also necessary in making important connections in a non-fiction novel. The contrapuntal discourse, according to Said, shows an “awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts” (Said 51). It takes in various accounts of socio-political issues by tackling simultaneously the factual historical perspective of journalism and the literary fabulations of it.
From the very beginning, The Armies introduces explicitly the point and the counterpoint to a Time magazine story about the March. The story of the Time gives a picture of Mailer as an “unscheduled scatological solo” protagonist (The Armies 13, 240). This story of the Time initiates the story with a thorough depiction of Mailer and of the incidents and scenes of the Pentagon March. According to this version of the argument, Mailer was depicted as a poser and phony protagonist of the Pentagon March; his major pre-occupation in life is “[s]lurping liquor from a coffee mug” and “[m]umbling and spewing obscenities” (The Armies 13). The argument of the Time is supported by the evidence that “By the time the action shifted to the Pentagon, Mailer was perky enough to get himself arrested by two Marshals” (The Armies 14). Apparently, Mailer rushed to be copped before the “civil disobedience” action actually erupted, which Mailer does not deny in his version of the event: he chose to be arrested the easy way because “the thought of Mace in his hard-used eyes inspired a small horror” (The Armies 70) and because he wanted “to get back to New York in time for their dinners, parties” (The Armies 137).
After perusing the story, Mailer gets out of the contrapuntal story world (“Now we may leave Time in order to find out what happened”) and offers his own version, which functions as an expanded critical counterpoint to Time’s story. He re-contextualizes the central scenes—say, the drunken scene, the obscenities scene, and the arrest scene, among others—and re-describes them point by point and act by act. The selected scenes of the Time story are re-enacted as central episodes respectively in the chapters,
“Toward a Theater of Ideas” (The Armies 40-43), “A Transfer of Power” (The Armies 55-66), and “A Confrontation by the River” and “Bust 80 Beyond the Law” (The Armies 149-158).
Mailer’s persona becomes an overruling lens that perceives and organizes the event. The Pentagon March from the beginning to the aftermath was an ambiguous event that harbored heterogeneous sentiments, agendas, and people: “hippies,” “lawyers,” “accountants,” “Reform Democrats,” “Women Strike for Peace,” “Inter-University Christian Movement,” “Jewish Peace Fellowship,” “Students for a Democratic Society,” “The Resistance,” to name but a few (The Armies 111). From this perspective, the event never had a shared value or goal in the first place; rather it was a formative and transforming event, the meaning of which the sterile and unimaginative language of Time could not ever fathom. Mailer, now a comic protagonist with a “monumental disproportion,” offers a contrapuntal reading of a series of incidents—the drunken scene, the obscenities scene, and the arrest scene—and, further, the absurd and schizophrenic event of the march itself. Through Mailer’s contrapuntal reading of these incidents, the readers can view and better understand the explicit and implicit aspects of the events.
One of Mailer’s most contrapuntal strategies against the Time story is to stage the very counterpoint character, the Time reporter, in his redefined story world. Upon the first encounter of his foe, Mailer introduces him to the readers as a “young man from Time magazine” and assumes him to be “a stringer” because the young man “lacked that I-am-damned look in the eye and rep tie of those whose work for Time has become a life addiction” (The Armies 43). “The young man,” Mailer argues, “had a somewhat ill- dressed look, a map showed on his skin of an old adolescent acne,” and then in a quicker and louder tempo he rounds off his characterization: “he gave off the unhappy furtive presence of a fraternity member on probation for the wrong thing, some grievous mis-deposit of vomit, some hanky panky with frat-house tickets” (The Armies 43). The reporter is brought to the stage again where he introduced Mailer as “an unscheduled scatological solo” in the Time story. Now, in Mailer’s version, Mailer on the stage asks all the reporters to stand for the audience in the theater and, further, for the nation, and no one responds to the call
except “One lone figure” from the “Washington Free Press”—“some student or hippie paper” (The Armies 64).
To alter the perception of the march by other journalists and to reinforce his own, Mailer repeatedly engages other stories for comparison, contrast, modification, and synthesis in the representation of the march. By so doing, he promotes the contrapuntal and intertextual quality of his historical knowledge and understanding of the event, and establishes the ethos of a reliable researcher, analyst, and storyteller.
Summing up, literary journalism is an intertextual act that binds fictional and factional activities into a deliberate reality statement towards, and about, the world we live in. By formulating a specific kind of narrative to capture his/her understanding of the world, the literary journalist implicates a specific epistemological and ethical world—the world we would feel happy or sad about, the world with which we may sympathize or condemn, and the world we may find justified or absurd. It is a contrapuntal narrative act, through which the literary journalist argues for a specific kind of story world.