The Exam

I spent this week’s class carefully previewing the course exam. Here’s my summary of what will happen:

First: a CLOSED BOOK recognition section. In this section you’ll be shown ten passages from the readings this semester and asked to correctly identify the author of each excerpt and answer a brief question about that excerpt. Those brief questions will not be analytical questions about themes, symbols, context, etc. Rather, they will be designed simply to check that understand not only who wrote what, but where in the piece the excerpt appears and what’s happening at that moment. I will not choose excerpts I feel to be obscure. After you finish the section, you’ll hand in your answers in exchange for the second section of the exam.

Second: an OPEN BOOK short answer and essay section. This section will have three parts:

a) four questions that will ask you to use a paragraph to place an individual book or article within a given historical or literary context, or, as I often phrased it in class, to place that book or article along a given “contextual continuum.” We spent most of our exam review session in class going through our readings one by one and discussing these contexts; they are also included in every case in the recaps posted on this blog. I will name four books or articles and you will provide an answer for each.

b) two questions that will ask you use a half page (two paragraphs or so) to compare and contrast the work of a pair of authors from the course. I will provide four pairs of authors for this question; you will choose two pairs to write about.

c) one page-long (three paragraphs or so) essay that will ask you to make the case for an individual work’s inclusion in a survey course such as this one. Why, in other words, should this work be remembered and studied? I will list four works from the course and you will choose one of those four to write about. You should base your answers for the most part on class discussions and, if you wish, presentations. (Please note that this is only instance where presentations, yours or others, might come into play in taking the test. You will not be tested directly on the presentations at all.)

Recap: Maxine Hong Kingston

Hi, everyone. This post on Maxine Hong Kingston and The Woman Warrior wraps up my recaps. Four presenters spoke about Kingston: Alyse on the accusations made by Frank Chin and others that Kingston fueled racist stereotypes; Kate on the theme/motif of ghosts and the critical reception of the book; Katie on mother/daughter relationships and the theme of silence; and Claire on the conflict between individualism and community and the way that conflict also plays into the theme of silence.

Maxine Hong Kingston and Rise of Memoir (as Opposed to Autobiography)

Kingston wasn’t the first person ever to write a memoir, but her book stands at or very the beginning of the recent three-decade long boom in memoir as a commercially successful and critically acclaimed genre. Think, just for a few examples, of Kathyrn Harrison’s The Kiss; Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life; Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors; Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club; or Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I spoke the previous week (so file this under “New Journalism” as well, and also review “The Ladder of Literary Prestige,” in the E.B. White post) about the steady movement of nonfiction since the mid twentieth century in three directions: 1) from the objective implied narrator to the explicit and subjective “I” narrator; 2) from an emphasis on “independent fact” to greater acceptance of extrapolation and re-imagination; and 3) from a rigid hierarchy of literary prestige topped by the novelist and descending through essayists, reporters, and screenwriters to the current situation, in which this hierarchy has for the most part collapsed. Kingston’s popularity and critical reception is an example of all three movements. I talked about the difference between autobiography and memoir; the way the former attempts first to chronicle a life through events while the latter attempts first to evoke a life through memory, and how an autobiography (or, for that matter, a biography) generally demands that the writer be in some way publicly notable while memoir has no such requirement.

Recap: New Journalism

As I said at the start of class, “covering” New Journalism in one week is like “covering” the Romantic movement in one week. Not really possible. But I tried anyway, and will try to clarify the discussion here. As always, I reserve the right to heavily edit my own posts once I discover all of my typos, rambles, and slip-ups.

Four presenters provided additional context. George led us on a tour of Normal Mailer’s tumultuous life of celebrity, and then Kelly outlined Joan Didion’s career and emphasized her focus on creating “distinctive portraits of America.” Jon and Phillip both presented on Hunter Thompson’s pioneering “gonzo journalism,” which emphasized active participation by the author, style over objectivity, and a refusal to compromise control over approach, form, style, and subject matter.

New Journalism: NOT a Movement

One reason I felt okay with taking us through New Journalism in a week is that unlike, say, Romanticism, New Journalism really isn’t/wasn’t any kind of movement. Our examples (Wolfe, Didion, Mailer, Thompson, Talese) are as unlike one another as they are alike. The point I made in class, the thing I’d like you to remember, is that “New Journalism” is really one side of an argument between ways of looking at–and doing!–nonfiction writing. That argument began with–and was made most loudly by–Tom Wolfe, who in April 1965 in the brand-new New York magazine published a two-part parody-slash-mockery of the New Yorker with the titles “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” and “Lost in the Which-y Thickets.” Wolfe’s point: The New Yorker is pretentious, dull, fussy, irrelevant, and what’s worse, was in the habit of straightjacketing its writers with endless editing and outdated notions of journalistic propriety.  Never mind that the New Yorker was in the habit of publishing pieces like Hersey’s “Hiroshima” and Capote’s “In Cold Blood”; the argument stuck, got louder, and soon enough the publishing world was swarming with old and new magazines pushing the boundaries: New York, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Commentary, Scanlon’s, The Nation, even the Saturday Evening Post of Norman Rockwell fame. The boundaries these magazines and writers pushed were boundaries of length, of subject matter, of fact, of subjectivity, of language, etc. etc.  Breaking those boundaries is about the only thing the “New Journalists” have in common, because they didn’t all break them in the same way for the same reason.

Recap: Truman Capote

Here’s me, catching up with my posts. I told you some of these would be shorter than others; then I discovered what a terrific way this is to keep my own set of notes about the class. Meaning: What you see now is the result of placing far too many words into the post and then trimming, trimming, trimming. as always, I reserve the right to heavily edit my own posts once I discover all of my typos, rambles, and slip-ups.

Three presenters helped to provide us with addition context for this discussion. Beth talked about Capote’s explicit mission to create a new form called the “nonfiction novel”: a true-life narrative with “the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of fiction, and the precision of poetry.” I’m partly paraphrasing there [Beth, who said that?], but in any case that little inventory is as good a description of what many of the authors under study this semester were working to achieve. Janey put In Cold Blood into the context of the “true-crime novel,” talking especially about Capote’s decision to “solve” the murders for his readers fairly on in the book, so that the suspense has more to do with how the murders took place than with who done ‘em. Finally, Mike offered a series of questions about Capote’s reportorial connection to the killers, and especially to Perry, the most important question in my mind being one of empathy; did or didn’t Capote come to empathize, if not sympathize, with Perry? We’ll wait for those three sets of presentation notes for more detail on these matters, but all three address issues that have contributed to making In Cold Blood one of the most, if not the most, famous work of creative nonfiction in America during the post-WWII era.

Truman Capote and the “Nonfiction Novel”

Capote receives a lot of attention for a lot of reasons. The more I read of and by Capote, though, the more I’m convinced that he hasn’t received enough attention as an important writer. Many readers and students of Capote’s work are aware that in writing In Cold Blood he set out to create a new form called “the nonfiction novel.” Whether this form was truly brand-new I don’t know, but certainly it was more than just a statement of intent; it was a challenge to the world of nonfiction writing to step up and claim the right to frame things as point-of-view driven narratives, with all of the facets that Beth outlined in her presentation (see above). What’s most interesting to me about the nonfiction novel, and In Cold Blood in particular, is not the “novel” part of the genre, but rather the word  “nonfiction.” Because it’s clear to me, at least, that while In Cold Blood is a terrific example of the art of narrative, it’s also one of the most astonishing jobs of reporting, maybe the very best, that I’ve ever seen. As I put it in class, Capote “reported the hell out of the story,” and I mean that: For all of the discussion of what he might have “made up,” the real discussion could and should be about the ways he gathered his facts and what facts he gathered. The intensity and thoroughness of his reporting are what allow him to engage in the deduction, extrapolation, re-imagination, etc., that make the book feel so much like a novel. Rather than use the fiction-like character of the book as an excuse to do less reporting, Capote did the opposite: He understood that the fiction-like character of the book required him to do the best possible job of good old-fashioned reporting.

In Cold Blood and the Criminal Mind

The other great achievement of In Cold Blood is the way it changed (again, not all by itself and not all at once) the way crime stories were told. Before In Cold Blood, our fascination more often lay in solving the crime: clues, chases, dead ends, red herrings, bursts of intuition, and then, a solution! Perpetrators (or alleged perpetrators) were less interesting as rounded characters than as riddles to be solved. In Cold Blood helped to usher in an era in which our fascination lay not in catching the criminal, but in getting beneath or past the crime itself and uunderstanding or exposing the person in full. I used several movies, television shows, and books (for example: Silence of the Lambs, or the recently released Columbine by Dave Cullen) as illustrations of the change.

Recap: Jane Jacobs

This was a woolly week, as I came into class with some materials I’d just uncovered and didn’t have time to get to them all before the ending bell rang. I finished up the following week, cutting into some of our time with Truman Capote under the pretext that Capote would become part of the New Journalists discussion and sort of get two weeks to himself, if you follow. Anyway, and as always, I reserve the right to heavily edit my own posts once I discover all of my typos, rambles, and slip-ups.

We heard a solid pair of presentations about Jacobs: Whitney took us through some of Jacobs’ work up until (and just past) the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, while Lois picked up the story with Jacobs’ move to Toronto in response to her disillusionment with the war in Vietnam. The two presentations together gave us a useful portrait of a woman who, as she created Death and Life, found herself at the end of two titanic struggles: one to stop Robert Moses and the city of New York from turning her neighborhood into a Title I public housing project, and the second to stop Robert Moses and the city of New York from building an 8-lane, elevated, “Lower Manhattan Expressway” through her neighborhood. Whitney and Lois pretty well established that Jacobs successful struggles were still just that, struggles, and left her hoping to move on to to a quieter, less public life in Toronto.

Le Corbusier and the Radiant City of the Future

Chronology is once again very important. Jacobs was a writer (and editor? Whitney?) for architectural magazines for many years before finishing Death and Life, which was essentially finished before her two battles against Robert Moses. The book is a warning about the excesses of city planners like Moses, yes, but it’s important to understand that Death and Life is also a response to an entire philosophy of design led by the Swiss architect, a philosophy that held that design intellectuals could make people’s lives better through very ordered, very severe architectural forms. To look at some of those architectural forms, I took us to www.implosionworld.com to see dozens and dozens of public housing complexes destroyed because, in the end, Le Corbusier’s ideas did not work; large tower blocks with green space (and no streets, sidewalks, corner stores, etc.) did not solve the problems of so-called “slums.” In fact, Le Corbusier’s ideas made things worse. And that is what Jacobs was saying in the early 1960’s, many years before the most of the rest of realized she was right.

Jane Jacobs and Community Activism

Famous writers have written socially and politically influential books: Jacobs, Carson, Upton Sinclair, Dickens, Wollstonecraft, etc.  And a long list of famous activists have spurred the public to awareness and/or change: MLK Jr., Ralph Nader, John Brown, and Ghandi, just to name a few members of a really eclectic club.  But Jacobs is unique in that her activism and her writing are symbiotic, shared expressions of the same desire to prevent the destruction of New York City by powerful, far-away dictators: Le Corbusier with his theories of how a city and its people should be arranged, and Robert Moses, with his plans to make the automobile the first and last determiner of, well,  just about everything. Her book elevated her activism; her activism elevated her book.

Recap: Rachel Carson

Our group presentations this week were the work of Rebecca, who discussed the writing of Silent Spring and the forces arrayed against Carson as word got out that she was taking on the makers of pesticides, and Tara, who discussed the development, uses, and problems with the pesticide DDT. Thanks to both for providing very useful context.

Silent Spring and the tradition of American nature writing

One aim in the subsequent discussion was to focus our attention on Silent Spring as one part of the long continuum of American writing about nature and the environment, a continuum that Silent Spring is both part of and separate from. I tried to refresh our memories, with a good deal of help from you, about that tradition. We discussed Emerson and Thoreau and tried to get a quick handle on transcendentalism (remember, no transcendentalism, no Corona commercials set on the beach), before moving on to mention other important names, including John Muir, John McPhee, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, and others. Carson stands with these writers for what I hope are fairly obvious reasons; she stands apart from them in her explicit activism, her focus on science and argument rather than (here I’m generalizing) the other writers’ favored methods of observation and persuasion.

Silent Spring and the Timeline of Environmental Awareness

It’s easy to give Silent Spring a little too much credit for sparking a movement toward greater environmental awareness; after all, plenty of scientists, citizens, writers, and even politicians were coming to an understanding of the dangers of unchecked environmental manipulation at the same time that Carson was doing her research and writing her book. But as we discussed in class, Silent Spring really does stand in history as a signpost marking a dramatic change in our attitude towards the potentially toxic materials put in our soil, our homes, our mouths. That the book was also one important driver of that change makes it doubly worth our study, as does the fact that Carson wrote it as literature, full of broad metaphors and careful, readable, scientific explanations (absent distancing footnotes) at the same time. We spent a good deal of discussion thinking about a pre-Carson and post-Carson world: the pre-Carson world being the one in which my brother and I celebrated the helicopters spraying DDT (or parathion, or whatever it was they would have been using in 1971) directly over our heads; the post-Carson world, just a few years later, being the one in which my parents would make sure we stayed inside as the spray helicopters came over. Into this discussion we brought asbestos, cigarettes, lead, and a number of other substances that we now understand to be rife with potential harm, but which, in prior eras, we trusted to be safe, healthful, and signs not of the dangers of modern science but of its wonders. That shift in perception was so dramatic and so pervasive that it’s hard to recover, in our cultural consciousness, a world in which most everyone believed that as long as corporations told us what they were making us was useful and safe, we would be okay.

Recap: E.B. White

Our discussion of E.B. White began with Adrian, who did some digging into the history of The New Yorker and White’s important role in that history. Brittany then discussed E.B. White’s connection to place, his connections to New York City and to rural Maine, a dichotomy that provided White with material for a great many of his essays and other writings.

White in His Literary Context: The Essay

To discuss E.B. White is to discuss the essay, and to discuss the essay is to go back briefly to Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century French Resaissance author who’s best known, in the words of scholar M.A. Screech, for his “attempts at sounding himself and the nature and duties of Man so as to discover a sane and humane matter of living.” I quoted a little from Montaigne’s essay, “On educating children”: “I have never known a father fail to acknowledge his son as his own, no matter how scurvy or crook-backed he may be. It is not that he fails to see his infirmities (unless he is quite besotted by his affection): but the thing is his, for all that! The same applies to me: I can see–better than anyone else–that these writings of mine are no more than the ravings of a man who has never done more than taste the outer crust of knowledge . . . and who has retained only an ill-formed generic notion of it.” Published in 1580, the words still echo of White, and Mark Twain, and any number of other essayists who have made their literary reputations by offering their own “attempts” at making sense of the world.

White and Baldwin

I’m not the first person to compare White’s career and work with James Baldwin’s; after all, they both worked and were well-known in multiple genres, were for the most part contemporaries, and both are considered essayists of first importance. I don’t want to offer any conclusions about that comparison, but it’s worth thinking about their options, or lack thereof: Did White have a freedom of subject matter and tone that Baldwin didn’t? Was Baldwin’s career path as an essayist determined as much by his race as by his (prodigious) writing ability? The relationship between politics and their writing makes an interesting study: both are best known for their works that take on politics only tangentially, yet both came to associate, in the end, with political movements: Baldwin entered the civil rights struggle more directly, and E.B. White became a proponent of world government and nuclear disarmament. How their earlier essays steered clear of overt political engagement, but in very different ways, is worth noting and thinking about.

E.B. White and the stuffy old New Yorker scene

We spent a little bit of time talking about White’s accessibility to a modern audience. For a man whose name came to be synonymous with the New Yorker’s “voice” — which many find to be haughty or self-congratulatory (it’s not just you, Adrian) — his writing is very straightforward, even folksy at times, and often very aware of its own pretensions. In “The Years of Wonder,” White’s recollection of his youthful working boat ride to Alaska, he makes much fun of his own early writing style, his affinity for words like loitered and sauntered; this self-mockery suggests that not only was White not a fuddy-duddy, but that his own sensibilities are a good deal more populist than his association with the early years of the New Yorker might lead one to believe.

“Here is New York” and the Writing of Place

I spent some time reading from “Here is New York” and talking about my opinion (supported nicely by Brittany’s presentation) that White’s real subject, running across most of his essays in one form or another, is place. Written in 1949 (the year Russia tested its first atomic bomb), “Here is New York,” as some of you were aware, re-entered the national consciousness after 9/11, thanks to its eerily prescient ending: “The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway .  .  .  .”

The Ladder of Literary Prestige, Once Upon a Time

White wrote essays, and talk pieces, and children’s novels, and, of course, Strunk and White. What he is not known for is adult novels. For much of the past sixty years, this meant that White was denied a place among the very most important writers, who were considered by most in the scholarly community to be novelists, poets, and dramatists. White was a man of letters, but not a man of letters like James Baldwin, who wrote very adult, controversial novels in addition to his very earnest, often anguished essays. White was lumped in with writers of “light prose,” which still put him on the ladder a step above “reporters” such as Joseph Mitchell, and many steps above such heretics as radio writers or, goodness, film directors. I introduce this distinction to point out, again, that no one in an English department today (well, almost no one) is going to raise much of stink about putting writers such as E.B. White and Joseph Mitchell into a literature survey course.  Old distinctions can harden and become more difficult to break apart; other distinctions, like the ones keeping entire genres out of literature studies, can fade until they’re much less visible.

Recap: James Baldwin

James Baldwin, like many of the writers assigned for the course, had such a full and variegated career that to examine one of his books independent of his others feels like a cheat. But this is a survey; and cheat we must. As always, I reserve the right to heavily edit my own posts once I discover all of my typos, rambles, and slip-ups.

James Baldwin: Presentations

By Wednesday, April 15, all of you will have put your presentation notes into a common 3-page format that I’ll provide closer to that date. In the meantime, I’ll try to briefly summarize the topics of your presentations each week. This week, Arthur spoke about the “feud” between Baldwin and Richard Wright, author of Native Son, the book that lent its title to Baldwins essay and collection. Brooke presented on the topics of Baldwin’s homosexuality, the changes in Baldwin’s writing during the civil rights era, and reviews of Baldwin’s work.

Baldwin and Obama

Though George wasn’t able to be in class to deliver his presentation (and will move to a later week), he was able to provide an excellent article from the New York Review of Books entitled “Baldwin and Obama” by the fiction writer Colm Toibin. (You’ll find the article here.) The article focuses much less on politics or putting Obama’s possible election (the article was written in October 2008) in the context of African-American history than on treating the two men as fellow writers, quoting extensively from the various essays in Notes of a Native Son, especially the title essay, and from Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father. I read a few excerpts aloud in class, but take the time to read the entire piece — ideology or political affiliation aside, we are studying narrative nonfiction, and it’s a rare thing to have a president who at one point in his life took that kind of work as seriously as we do. Most important, of course, is the way that comparison illuminates our discussion of Baldwin.

The Tyranny (and Seductiveness) of Timelines

I spent a good deal of class time asking us not to take the assigned works out of their historical contexts, and praising the virtues of the good old-fashioned and much maligned timeline. Less important than memorizing dates (although that’s important) is understanding where each work fits into the shape of things. It’s important to place Hiroshima in 1946, one year after the use of an atomic weapon on Japan and three years before the start of the nuclear portion of the Cold War in 1949, when the U.S.S.R. tested its first atomic bomb. And it’s important to place Notes of a Native Son in the 1950s, a decade or so before the March on Washington (1963), the Civil Rights Act (1964), and the Voting Rights Act (1965), but nearly a century after the Emancipation Proclamation (1863). This puts Baldwin at a particular point in a very long struggle, without the ability to see the future — we need to do our best to read him as a person trying to make sense of his country, himself, and his race without the foreknowledge of the progress, shifts, and dislocations of the 1960s, all of which reads as past history to us and provides a convenient (and too easy) context for Baldwin’s work.

Baldwin’s Individualism and Insistence on the Human View

I’m going to combine two major threads of our conversation under this one heading. Several of you spoke about the interesting ways Baldwin worked to confound or upset his readers’ notions of who he was and who he was supposed to be. Baldwin’s identity politics–a phrase no one would have used in the 1950s but which seems very useful as shorthand now–were probably as complicated as those of any writer of his time or any: a black man in a white world; a gay man in a straight world; often an American in Europe. And this: Baldwin was a very prolific and talented writer known for writing about race who insisted that we look at him and his characters–and other writers’ characters–through the lens of their humanness. (This was the essence of Baldwin’s criticism of Wright, as Arthur pointed out.) Baldwin ends his preface to the 1984 edition of Notes of a Native Son with a quote from Doris Lessing: “Colour prejudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the sun.”

Recap: Joseph Mitchell

There’s no piece of literary nonfiction I enjoy more than “Joe Gould’s Secret,” by Joseph Mitchell. But I’ve included the piece in our course for reasons that go beyond my adoration, and I spent a good deal of time last Wednesday discussing the unique nature of the piece and the outlines of Mitchell’s career. As always, I reserve the right to heavily edit my own posts once I discover all of my typos, rambles, and slip-ups.

Nonfiction as Literature

Joseph Mitchell was hardly the first nonfiction writer to pay attention to scenes of everyday life, to spend time in supposedly out-of-the-way places among the supposedly low and profane. Such “sketches” of common life have been with us in one form or another for quite a while; I used the example of Charles Dickens, who wrote dozens of sketches under the name “Boz” before hitting the big time with The Pickwick Papers and, for the most part, never looking back. (Here, thanks to the public domain, are a couple of those sketches: The Streets–Morning and The Streets–Night.)

It’s the absence of “never looking back” that distinguishes Mitchell. While a great many writers used their “sketch-work” as a prelude to (or interlude between) the writing of stories or novels or essays or memoirs, Mitchell painstakingly and purposefully made his sketches his literature, continuing to lavish his prodigious attention on the street-level royalty and eccentrics of New York City for two decades between (roughly) 1940 and 1960, producing pieces collected in the books McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, and The Bottom of the Harbor, all later gathered in the omnibus Up in the Old Hotel, assigned for this course.

Joseph Mitchell, Joe Gould, and An Oral History of Our Time

I’m not going to rehash the “plots” of either “Professor Sea Gull” or “Joe Gould’s Secret” here; rather, I’ll just remind you that we had a lively discussion of the ways Joe Mitchell’s real project (captured for posterity in Up in the Old Hotel) is a partially realized form of the imaginary (or perhaps I should use the word conjectural) project that Gould so lovingly and excitedly carried around in his brain. No part of this course will ask you to play psychologist, but that didn’t stop us from a little armchair psychology as we considered why Mitchell’s discovery of the Oral History’s nonexistence caused Mitchell to stop writing his own sketches. Several possibilities were floated; I suggested that Gould’s project offered such a seductive sense of possibility — that such a project could be created, even completed, if you were just manic enough to do it–that to find out the Oral History was only a dream closed off Mitchell’s need or desire to complete anything of his own. Probably wrong, but that’s what makes Mitchell so captivating.

Joseph Mitchell and the Facts

Brittany offered the observation that Mitchell’s first Gould piece, “Professor Sea Gull” is full of a palpable naivete, almost a willful naivete, to which I added that I could feel Mitchell’s delight in every sentence of the piece. To encounter Gould (and all of the “characters” in all of Mitchell’s work) is a gigantic lark for Mitchell, who sustains that enthusiasm all the way up until 1964, when he finally publishes “Joe Gould’s Secret.” Brittany and Mike then pointed out the later piece’s dramatic change in tone–Mitchell is no longer celebrating Gould, but presenting a story of two people, writer and subject, bound together by knots they can’t untie: “You’re the one who started all this,” says Gould (p. 681). “I didn’t seek you out. You sought me out. You wanted to write a story about me, and you’ll have to take the consequences.”

What’s interesting to me about the changes between Mitchell’s first Gould piece and the second is the way those pieces bridge two very different times and moods: the open sentimentality (or, in Mitchell’s case, romanticism) of the 1940’s and the topsy-turvy dislocations of the 1960’s. In the first piece, various pieces of Gould’s life and person–the Oral History, his family background, his famous connections–are presented outside of quotation marks and without source material, as facts to be taken at face value. The second piece startles the reader by lifting the lid off of those facts and showing us Mitchell receiving the information in a series of diner-booth interviews with Gould. It’s rare that a writer–any writer, much less one so proficient and important as Mitchell–goes back and provides this kind of “director’s commentary” for a piece of writing; what’s even more rare is that “director’s commentary” ends up being such a fantastic, fertile story of its own.

The Myth of Joe Mitchell

“And Mitchell never wrote another word”

Mark Singer’s New Yorker article does a good job of debunking this statement, but like so many myths, enough of the statement is true to provide some lasting intrigue and, at least for a writer like me, a few goosebumps. Mitchell’s relationship with Gould is itself an epic that could only be told through two different pieces, written in two very different modes at two very different times. In my mind, it’s the great myth of recent nonfiction literature, which is why, in addition to all of the other factors discussed above, I give Mitchell a prominent place in our survey.

Recap: John Hersey

Hi, everyone. I hope to make posts like this one a regular part of the class, recapping the previous discussion a bit and adding what I might want to add. Once your presentations begin, I can also use this space to post links to web sites, pdf files, etc. that you’ve used or mentioned. I reserve the right to heavily edit my own posts once I discover all of my typos, rambles, and slip-ups.

Feel free to use the comment feature to add your own thoughts, respond belatedly to something mentioned in class, pose a question, etc.

Making Literature

I began the class period with a little history behind the writing of Hiroshima–some of the conditions and particularities of its production. These conditions and particularities seem somehow to matter more to me when studying literary nonfiction than when reading fiction or poetry. Looking at that sentence, it wonder if I’m talking nonsense, but that’s how I think I feel. Two points seem worth repeating: first, that Hersey was, in fact, a veteran war correspondent who straddled the “deadline journalism” world of Time magazine and the “literary reportage” world of the New Yorker; and second, that Hersey modeled Hiroshima after Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. One quick spin through that novel makes the connection clear. This, in part, is what I and others mean by “literary”: a self-consciousness about style and form doesn’t happen in the same way in standard journalism.

The Radicalism of Hiroshima

Hiroshima was radical in at least two  important ways. First, Hersey’s careful attention to the experience of six specific victims of the bomb, based on weeks of intense reporting, was eye-opening and surprising; cast yourself back to August 1946 and imagine opening the New Yorker or any of the other publications in which the article was reprinted, and discovering that you were suddenly on that ground at that moment, with a reporter who seemed to have no other mission than to narrate you through the events, minute by minute. At a time when the most famous image of the bomb was its mushroom cloud, seen from a distance of several miles, this was an abrupt change of scale and perspective.

Hiroshima was radical in style, as well. I talked about Hersey’s “invisible reporting,” meaning that the “newsiness” of the story was de-emphasized in deference to more literary tools such as point of view, dialogue, scene-setting, and everyday details. One might imagine an unimpressed reader saying: “Why is he telling me what kind of vases this doctor had on the shelves?” But that, of course, was part of Hersey’s mission, to make real an event that was one of history’s most surreal and mysterious events. More can be said about this point, and will be during the semester.

Hiroshima and the Cold War

Hiroshima can also be read in the context of U.S.-Russia tensions, the Red Scare, Sputnik, and the accumulation of weapons with the power to destroy the world many times over. As one of your classmates pointed out, the Cold War really began well before World War II, but the nuclear portion (the most familiar and (in)famous aspect of the Cold War) began at Hiroshima; for the next seven decades, continuing to the present day, the fear of nuclear weapons was our greatest planetary anxiety. Hersey’s book played an instrumental role in creating this anxiety, standing as the most vivid example in literature of the concrete causes of that fear. As I said in class, what was a narrative of what “we” did to “them” became, with the successful test of atomic weapons in Russia in 1949, a story of what “they” could conceivably do to “us.”

The Narrative Appeal of Awfulness

Hiroshima is a not a war story, of course; it’s a story of catastrophe , and stories of catastrophe have a strong pull on our imaginations; consider the recent success of the film Titanic, books such as Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air or Sebastian Junger’s A Perfect Storm. (All of which are obsessed, as is Hiroshima in its own way, with the question of what exactly happened.) On a recent flight to San Francisco, I began Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World, his account of the 1909 earthquake and fire that destroyed the city, and that bit of reading fundamentally changed the way I experienced the city (which I was visiting for the first time as an adult). I also suggested that we think a little bit about the relationship between Hersey’s book and the proliferation of post-apocolyptic literature in the second half of the twentieth century, and the fact that most disaster scenarios don’t suggest the end of the world; that is, not until we encounter powerful nations equipped with the atomic bomb, and then all bets are off. The idea here, simply, is that Hiroshima stands at an interesting place in the continuum of literature dealing with the worst that can happen, a subject that, far from repelling, has always exerted a strong pull on our collective psyche.

I may or may not follow up at this length for our other readings, but I was pleased with our work during the first discussion of the semester; what’s begun well has a better chance of ending well, right?