TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/112789/11278900.075

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 6KB | 102 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.