The New Journalism v. Minimalism

Plus, Seducing Your Reader... And Yourself

Always Keep the Camera Pointed Over There

The best reason to “submerge the I” is that doing so forces you to always keep the camera pointed at something other than your own navel. Even if you’re depicting the dreaded CHARACTER ALONE, if you point the camera elsewhere you’ll be a lot more interesting.

Even if the story is told from the first-person, you’ll allow the reader to forget that everything is being filtered through a character. Somebody — Heidegger? Duchamp? — reminds us that the observer shapes what’s observed. The trick is to allow the reader to forget that every detail is being selected, framed and distorted by you. You’re manipulating them. You charmer.

To hide your own agenda — you want to make money, you want to change the world — you must present your reader with a fake narrator’s agenda.

It’s no coincidence that Gordon Lish’s Minimalism came of age alongside the New Journalism. In the latter, writers like Tom Wolfe and Nora Ephron and Hunter S. Thompson and Gloria Steinem abandoned the idea that a reporter should remain objective. The reporter would always color the reporting, so their generation of journalists wrote themselves into the story. In classic articles like A Bunny’s Tale and George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, the authors placed themselves in the action… to varying degrees. Joan Didion seems the exact opposite of Wolfe, where his reportage hides him, hers centers Didion in every event from the advent of The Doors to the decrepit Gilded Age mansions of Newport, Rhode Island — but not always, as we will see.

Like the New Journalists, Lish knew modern readers would suspect how the teller’s agenda shaped the story. To deepen the illusion of reality, Lish suggested writers create a context¹ for the telling of the story. So like Wolf and Ephron and Co., why not build in:

• Who’s telling this story?

• Who are they telling it to?

• Why are they telling it?

• Why are they telling it right now?

Like the New Journalists, Lish knew that including at least a paper tiger of context would give fiction a greater authority (i.e. sense of reality to the reader).

As for the master of making himself invisible, that would be Tom Wolfe. His every word is jaundiced with his outlook, but Wolfe never steps into the frame. His “recording angel” is so exact that we forget he’s sifting every detail to manipulate us. For an example of his sleight of hand, here’s this section² from his article Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.

Lenny seems like a changed man. He looks up at Cox and says, “When you walk into this house, into this building”—and he gestures vaguely as if to take it all in, the moldings, the sconces, the Roquefort morsels rolled in crushed nuts, the servants, the elevator attendant and the doorman downstairs in their white dickeys, the marble lobby, the brass struts on the marquee out front —“when you walk into this house, you must feel infuriated!”

Cox looks embarrassed. “No, man . . . I manage to overcome that . . . That‟s a personal thing. . . I used to get very uptight about things like that, but—”

“Don‟t you get bitter? Doesn‟t that make you mad?”

“Noooo, man . . . That‟s a personal thing . . . see . . . and I don‟t get mad about that personally. I‟m over that.”

“Well,” says Lenny,” it makes me mad!”

And Cox stares at him, and the Plexiglas lowers over his eyes once more . . . These cats—if I wasn’t here to see it—

For the full article, click here. Wolfe ultimately allows everyone to look foolish and manipulated, and while he does so we forget that he’s making himself the only smart person in the room. Wolfe is nowhere to be found in the scene, but he’s the organizing factor. He’s the filter that places this detail next to this detail and in doing so he makes everyone else look idiotic. Maybe they’re well intentioned, but ultimately they look ludicrous. Only Wolfe wins.

Joan Didion does this, but less often. She shapes the story by what she excludes. And while she does as Wolfe does — leaves herself out of the story — we forget she’s still leading us by the nose. Please consider this from her article Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream:

Imagine Banyan Street first, because Banyan is where it happened. The way to Banyan is to drive west from San Bernardino out Foothill Boulevard, Route 66: past the Santa Fe switching yards, the Forty Winks Motel. Past the motel that is nineteen stucco tepees: "SLEEP IN A WIGWAM-GET MORE FOR YOUR WAMPUM." Past Fontana Drag City and the Fontana Church of the Nazarene and the Pit Stop A Go-Go; past Kaiser Steel, through Cucamonga, out to the Kapu Kai Restaurant-Bar and Coffee Shop, at the corner of Route 66 and Carnelian Avenue. Up Carnelian Avenue from the Kapu Kai, which means "Forbidden Seas," the subdivision flags whip in the harsh wind. "HALF-ACRE RANCHES! SNACK BARS! TRAVERTINE ENTRIES! $95 DOWN." It is the trail of an intention gone haywire, the flotsam of the New California. But after awhile the signs thin out on Carnelian Avenue, and the houses are no longer the bright pastels of the Springtime Home owners but the faded bungalows of the people who grow a few grapes and keep a few chickens out here, and then the hill gets steeper and the road climbs and even the bungalows are few, and here desolate, roughly surfaced, lined with eucalyptus and lemon groves---is Banyan Street.

Didion swamps us with specific details. She leads us along a journey from landmark to landmark. A trip that both begins and ends at Banyan Street. Her cool tone is there, Didion trivializes by only including trivial details, but she never places herself in the world she witnesses.

Gordon Lish preached that good Minimalist fiction depended on “ruthless exclusion.” In both the Wolfe and the Didion examples we know that the authors are there, that they each lived the story, they were players, but both are so good at pointing the camera Elsewhere that we forget we’re being told a story. The story becomes our only reality.

When the “I” is so well submerged, the story occurs like “voice-y” third-person. In effect, there’s no clear narrator, but the language itself — cold or snarky or confusing — suggests a narrator. I’d argue that New Journalism and Minimalism are almost, kind of, maybe the same deal. When you look at Amy Hempel’s The Harvest where she’s clearly telling a personal story, but where Hempel ultimately tells us how she exaggerated and excluded details to make the story work better as fiction… well, it’s as if Wolfe pulled back a curtain and told us, “I was actually standing near the second piano with a tape recorder, jotting down the visuals as I cherry-picked exactly what quotes would best skewer everyone famous.”

From Wikipedia:

Wolfe identified the four main devices New Journalists borrowed from literary fiction:

• Telling the story using scenes rather than historical narrative as much as possible

• Dialogue in full (conversational speech rather than quotations and statements)

• Point-of-view (present every scene through the eyes of a particular character)

• Recording everyday details such as behavior, possessions, friends and family (which indicate the "status life" of the character)

It would seem that nonfiction adopted the storytelling traits of fiction, even as fiction was aping those of traditional reporting. Journalism was veering toward “fake news” — what Wolfe called “parajournalism” — while fiction was telling a larger truth no one wanted to hear.³

From The Wall Street Journal, circa 1971:

It's all part of the New Journalism, or the Now Journalism, and it's practiced widely these days. Some editors and reporters vigorously defend it. Others just as vigorously attack it. No one has polled the reader, but whether he approves or disapproves, it's getting harder and harder for him to know what he can believe.

In summation, let’s take another look at the New Journalism. You might be amazed how the storytelling aspects of New Journalism — embracing voice, context, agenda — are exactly what Lish’s Minimalism sought to highlight. This week, with buzz building around the film The Brutalist, I’m looking for a copy of Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House. Please don’t send me one. Half the fun is the search through used book stores. And yeah, I know there’s a PDF here, but I want a book book I can hold while I read on the floor next to the dog.

Another Way to “Submerge the I”…

Address your story to someone your narrator loves. Some secret object of his/her affection. For an example, click here. And click here. And click here.

The second-person “imperative mood” does so much. As a torch song like I cite, it shows the narrator as a loving person. The imperative also hooks the reader as the “you” or the suggested object of affection. People are sucked in by the “you” and automatically center themselves. And the second-person also creates the hidden character — who is this implied person the narrator is so attached to?

Best of all, in examples like this and this and this… you create instant emotional or “heart” authority. Also, you bury the first-person “I” as you lavish attention on an unseen character. Where you take that attention is your choice. Is the unseen character dead? Is the narrator a stalker? If nothing else, you’ve begun your story with a context. You’ve already given it a depth and realism that third-person “once upon a time” Modernism wouldn’t have.

What’s even MORE important, you seduce yourself. Even while writing fiction, the act of articulating your love — breaking it down to specifics and communicating that love — fills you with good feelings. When you write about characters who love, you focus on the pleasure of attachment. You steep in it. My editor at Simon and Schuster tells me that the Romance genre has eaten up some eighty percent of fiction — namely novellas — and what better skill could you have than articulating love? Learn to unpack and express the love you feel for others.

Then, learn how to use those details to create a sense of romance and love in your reader. And the good feelings you generate while writing will bring you back to the task of writing.

Gordon Lish told his students, “Seduce the whole world.” First, seduce yourself. And what better way than to write your story/book than as a love letter?

1. And no, this context does not refer to the “porch” that Victorian/Edwardian writers put on their fiction. For example, in ‘Thurnley Abbey’ the author, Perceval Landon, devotes pages to creating a character who tells the story to the narrator… but who is the narrator telling this story-about-a-story to? We never get a real world context for the telling of the story.

2. A dialog between the composer Leonard Bernstein and Donald Cox, a leader of the Black Panthers.

3. For example, Ira Levin exploring the horror of Thalidomide in ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and Shirley Jackson exploring the injustice of military conscription in ‘The Lottery.’ Among the first books to look at American expansion and nationalism was Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Martian Chronicles’ which used the doomed Martians as a stand-in for doomed native Americans. Fiction that lasts is fiction that says something we can’t yet talk openly about.

Which brings us to the film ‘Nosferatu’… I’m glad I saw it on a big screen, but really, did it say anything new? Talk to me about ‘Nosferatu’ in the Comments. Are new ideas so scarce that we need to see another Dracula remake? Did it express any unexpressable angst of our time? What really good ideas died in preproduction so that we could watch another Nosferatu? Didn’t Willem Dafoe already make this movie?