TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112789/11278900.075

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.7 KB | 112 lines

                                                                                IDEAS, Page 78

Wolfe Among the Pigeons


A new "literary manifesto" ruffles some feathers

By David Aikman


    At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of
American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas
to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping
Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.

    The man who would lead this crusade has the proper mettle
-- or at least the proper brass -- for the job. He is none other
than Tom Wolfe, apostle of the New Journalism, archaeologist of
radical chic and, most recently, best-selling author of Bonfire
of the Vanities (1987), which gleefully pilloried the greed and
corruption of New York City life. Wolfe's summons to revolution,
published in the November Harper's, pinpoints a new and
surprising target: his fellow American novelists. This latest
bonfire is already throwing off a lot of heat.

    In a long, sharp-witted article subtitled "A literary
manifesto for the new social novel," Wolfe lambastes the current
crop of U.S. novelists, as well as academic critics, for leading
American fiction since about 1960 further and further from
traditional realism. Young writers, he complains, are being
cajoled into an avant-garde wilderness populated by exponents
of bizarre genres: absurdists, magical realists, even K mart
realists. They have been persuaded by the likes of Philip Roth
that American life has become too absurd to write about in a
realistic way.

    Much of Wolfe's manifesto is crammed with an account of his
rationale for writing Bonfire. He says he wanted to create a
novel about New York City in the manner of Zola's and Balzac's
novels about Paris or Thackeray's Vanity Fair. He kept waiting
for some novelist to encompass the great phenomena of the age
-- the hippie movement, say, or racial clashes or the Wall
Street boom. But no one came forward. "It had been only
yesterday, in the 1930s, that the big realistic novel, with its
broad social sweep, had put American literature on the world
stage for the first time," Wolfe writes, apparently forgetting
such pre-1930s writers as Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane
and Theodore Dreiser. He adds that while five of the first six
American Nobel laureates in literature were what he describes
as realistic novelists (Pearl Buck, Sinclair Lewis, William
Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck), by the '60s
young writers and intellectuals regarded their kind of realism
as "an embarrassment."

    In Wolfe's jeremiad, the "puppet-masters" of the American
literary scene imported a new pantheon of foreign literary gods
-- Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The "headlong rush" to get rid of realism, Wolfe complains,
resulted in statements like that of experimental novelist John
Hawkes, "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the
true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and
theme."

    Faced with these developments, Wolfe decided to write
Bonfire in order to prove a point, "namely, that the future of
the fictional novel would be in a highly detailed realism based
on reporting, a realism . . . that would portray the individual
in intimate and inextricable relation to the society around
him." This realism, argues Wolfe, was what characterized the
success of writers as varied as Zola, Dostoyevsky, Dickens and
Lewis, whose Elmer Gantry prefigured the Jim Bakker affair by
more than half a century. Nor is Wolfe too modest to add that
such realism is what "created the `absorbing' or `gripping'
quality" peculiar to his own novel.

    Since the mid-1960s, university campuses have become
battlegrounds of rival literary doctrines, all of them united
only in a suspicion of the traditionally "obvious" or "natural"
explanations of literature. Impatience with such abstruse and
often dogmatic theories has led to an outcry among educational
traditionalists for a return to established and proven literary
curriculums. Thus it is no surprise that the first wave of
letters in reaction to the Harper's article, according to editor
Lewis Lapham, has been strongly supportive of Wolfe's call for
a return to fictional realism.

    But there are also some strong dissenters. Novelist John
Updike, for example, despite receiving favorable mention from
Wolfe, is not amused by the manifesto. "It's the sort of thing
(Wolfe) says," he complains. "It seems sort of self-serving and
superficially felt. It seems to me that isms, including Magical
Realism and Minimalism, are all honorable alternatives to being
realistic." Updike is echoed by fellow novelist John Barth,
whom Wolfe calls "the peerless leader" of the retreat from
realism for his "neo-fabulist" style. Barth says Wolfe's
manifesto "is much too narrow a view. I see the feast of
literature as truly a smorgasbord. I wouldn't want a world in
which there were only Balzac and Zola and not Lewis Carroll and
Franz Kafka. The idea that because we live in a large and varied
country we therefore ought to write the sweeping, panoramic
novel is like arguing that our poets all ought to be like Walt
Whitman rather than Emily Dickinson."

    Ever the provocateur, Wolfe is enjoying the controversy.
Agreeing cheerfully that his piece is indeed self-serving, he
now adds to his list of targets Italian best-selling writer
Umberto Eco, whose latest novel, Foucault's Pendulum, is a
phantasmagorical venture into the occult. "Eco," Wolfe says, "is
a very good example of a writer who leads dozens of young
writers into a literary cul-de-sac." Harper's plans to throw
more fuel on the bonfire. Editor Lapham will devote a large part
of his January issue to responses and rebuttals to Wolfe.