Pensamiento - Literatura

III. Narratologic Matters: Voice & Viewpoint, Realistic Dialogue & Status Detail, Tenses & Characterization

§13. Narratogically, TRS is heterodiegetic overt and dynamic: it is an authorial narrative making use of internal focalization. The narrative voice is heterodiegetic because it is not the writer speaking of a personal experience. The narrator's voice is authorial overt because the writer is present and has a distinct voice. This trait of omnipresence and authority combines with the existence of various internal focalizers so as to create the effect that the author is only one of the sources. At the same time, the author tries to gain a special status as a source of information and insight. The multiple viewpoint technique is a caleidoscopic way to present events that works more noticeably to engage readers. Let us examine how readers are involved by these resources and how the author builds credibility with these resources.

§14. Wolfe's narrative uses internal focalisation as a means to draw the reader to immersion in the events through the most engaging catch of the eyes of the characters. Internal focalizers elicit feelings of directness and immediacy because the reader is aligned with the characters' coordinates of perception, mostly by the composite characters of the Pilots', the Wives' and the Public, thus experiencing what it is like to be a participant in the unfolding events. Wolfe, as a New Journalist, seeks saturation reporting: being immerse in events himself-even if it is after they happened-and having readers be immerse in events, too.

§15. An interesting issue is that the multiplicity of points of view in the story does not work against focus but is used to enhance focus. Different characters keep redirecting us to the focus thematically, i.e. buzzing around the issue of having the right stuff . But this diversity is apparent only, not actual, in the sense that there is only diversity in perception but not in interpretation . Wolfe and the characters coincide in their ideology, they all respect the issue of manly courage and admire it, uncritically, which means: as if there could be no other notion of courage, as if courage could only be related to the military, at least in its ultimate (most heroic) expression. Courage is only linked to death and therefore, ultimately, to the military, men willing to die and kill "to protect" the Fatherland, in other words, the interests of those in power and the existing social order. Viewpoints are only apparently diverse. They all carefully lead to some final clarity, shared by all-admiration toward a shared model of hero. The multiplicity is literally from the perspective of what is seen.

§16. Formal comments on point of view and voice. "Sometimes I used point of view in the Jamesian sense in which fiction writers understand it, entering directly into the mind of a character, experiencing the world through his central nervous system throughout a given scene" (Wolfe, The New Journalism 33). Wolfe uses the stream-of-consciousness technique in combination with other points of views. "Often I would shift the point of view in the middle of a paragraph or even a sentence" (op. cit. 32). Let us consider some examples from TRS of third person narration (Wolfe narrates what Shepard and Glenn saw) combined with stream-of-consciousness narrative (Shepard's and Glenn's mind narrates). For Shepards words see 204. For Glenn's, see 262-5 or the extract below. The use of italics and suspended points is the author's. Square brackets mark the sentences which are a shift to the stream-of-consciousness point of view-or my own ellipsis in quotations. Wolfe's use of italics in these examples seems to give clues to the shifts in perspective-it is perceived as if the writer was just hearing the astronauts speak.

Twenty minutes later he was sailing backward over Africa again and the sun was going down again, for the third time, and the rheostat was dimming and he . saw [ blood . It as all over one of the windows]. He knew it couldn't be blood, and yet it was blood. He had never noticed it before. At this particular angle of the setting rheostat sun he could see it. [Blood and dirt, a real mess. The dirt must have come from the firing of the escape tower. And the blood . bugs , perhaps . The capsule must have smashed into bugs as it rose from the launch pad . or birds ] ... But he would have heard the thump. [It must have been bugs, but bugs didn't have blood.] Or the blood red of the sun going down in front of him diffusing . And then he refused to think about it any more (264-5).

§17. Let us consider the case of composite characters. Wolfe uses what he called the "downstage voice" when wishing to condense information, what actually contributes to the building of collective (composite) characters: "[When] I had to take over the explanation myself, in order to compress into a few paragraphs information that had come from several interviews . I decided . [to feign] the tones . create the illusion of seeing the action through the eyes of someone who was actually on the scene" (Wolfe, The New Journalism 32). The Wives' mock press interview in TRS could illustrate this. In the same way that Wolfe must have collected numerous quotes showing that for pilots the flight was "riding a rocket" and "not fucking up," "the wives" must have told him extensively about "their flight," the role of the media in their lives, particularly the Press conferences. Read from "One of the wives . would take the role of Nancy Whoever, TV correspondent, and hold her fist up to her mouth, as if she were holding a microphone and say" (322) to " and they'd all crack up at the thought of what a dim lummox the Genteel Beast really was" (323).

§18. The use of realistic detail and dialogue. Perspective is combined with the use of realistic dialogue-which, in my opinion, is weak (though certainly "colorful") in this book in the sense that it does not help much in characterization as it was actually used in realism, to give depth, life to specific characters (see §§20-22)-and, particularly, with the use of realistic status detail-which, in contrast, is prolific-in order to achieve readers' involvement and show how thoroughly the journalist has worked in gathering material. Wolfe's concern for detail is inescapable: see chapters III, VII, XV for information on the pilots' Low Rent lifestyle and their ritual daily after-work activities (49, 50). There is a huge amount of detail from the candidates' points of view when they are subject to tests of all types in chapter IV. In the chapters devoted to the space flights there are all type of minute details coming from astronauts information on their surrounding, probably coming from interviews where astronauts have been asked about their most superficial and deep feelings and thoughts in specific moments-which is undoubtedly an asset in literary journalism. In chapter XIII, we find the unfavorable description of the Texan "sui generis parade" (282) or the black humor description of the barbecue to honor the astronauts (283-4). When dealing with Yeager, status detail is an element which forges the traditional myth of violent courage, showing the consistency of personalities bound to glory, whereby all the qualities involved in the professional activity remain after work, constitute a lifestyle. Consider the episode when Yeager breaks his ribs while partying on a horse during the after-work hours of Flying and Drinking and Drinking and Driving (or Riding, here), just before a supersonic flight, and still performs successfully (41-5; ch. III).

§19. Changing tenses. Although the book is written from the third person singular and plural and using the past, there is recurrent dramatic use of the present tense at key moments for the sake of immediacy, as we can see in many instances, like in the Yeager episode above (where there are also shifts to stream-of-conciousness), in Grisson's landing on 224, in the example in §52 or in this extract from chapter X:

Louise knew the entire world of the test pilot's wife . the calls from other wives saying that "something" has happened out there . the wait, in a little house with small children, to see if the Friend of Widows and Orphans is coming to make his duty call . Day after day she tries to be stoic, she tries not to think about the subject, not to pay attention to the clock when he doesn't return from the flight line on time- (201).

§20. Characterization. Realist writers used detail and dialogue to build characters. Wolfe acknowledges this asset. However, his use of realistic dialogues and status detail while offering information on the protagonists, fails to contribute to effective character-building. Readers do not get a clear image of who is who in the story, in terms of individuals. Characters have no depth in themselves-they resemble cartoons. Readers give characters their human dimension because they know these are actual people. In the book, their actuality is only visual-you can see them, like when Yeager awaits help after his life-threatening feat (see §59). But the fact we can visualize them is not meaningful in terms of characterization. It is more like a frozen image in two dimensions. In spite of the enslaving "An image is worth a thousand words," we cannot say those images can account by themselves for characterization, at least in literary terms.

§21. Poor characterization seems to be connected to Wolfe's concern for being considered a journalist. Perhaps this explains why he does not work in characters as such: he does not wish to make up anything, he will just use the real material he gathered in interviews. However, is this a satisfactory explanation for his realistic cartoon depictions of people? Possibly, this weakness is related to the issue of a lack of ideological variety, taking "ideology" in a wide sense, a matter of sensitivity and interpretation-Wolfe's ideology prevails in spite of simulating various voices and viewpoints. It is hard to understand why the author should actually use the downstage voice to create composites but avoid instilling life, personality into his real life characters. He does not even give depth to Yeager, who remains like a prototype, sharing with heroes everything the audiovisual corporate industry has offered audiences for many decades-and story-telling and myths before that. Wolfe's characterization reminds of hyper realism in painting: you can see somebody's pores, every single hair in her or his eyebrows and eyelashes, the tiger-striped eyeballs, but that does not tell you much about that person's gaze, her or his passion, her personality, her way of being in the world at that moment. Are pores and eyelashes more real than what the person communicates-and the artist could try to grasp otherwise-with her or his presence? Creating character, capturing something of somebody's presence requires more than reproducing chunks of actual language used by that person, or it requires something else. In this sense, the book fails literarily or in its exploitation of a literary resource.

§22. Characters are poor possibly because Wolfe's main concern is propaganda, not information and not literature. He works to keep readers focused admiring society's prevailing model of courage: I don't want you to learn about people and events. I want you to admire these people whose lives gravitate around having the right stuff. I want you to admire those who actually have it-like I do!

 

Next: Part IV. Wolfe the Narrator

Please, quote the author and the site: michelle renyé, at mujerpalabra.net.
Another quotation style: michelle. "Wolfe's The Right Stuff. Some Comments on Formal Issues & the Timely Chanting of Military Heroism. An Essay on a Best-Seller". Mujer Palabra. 2005. Path: Pensamiento. Date of Access <https://www.mujerpalabra.net>.