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.