Pensamiento - Literatura

IV. Wolfe the Narrator, Objectivity and Credibility

§23. In principle, Wolfe works on a distinct voice as opposed to the model of a "calm, cultivated and, in fact, genteel voice": "Readers were bored to tears without understanding why. . This had nothing to do with objectivity and subjectivity . it was a matter of . style" (Wolfe, The New Journalism 31). But he is also concerned with building credibility as a journalist, and having a personal voice may pose significant conflict. Let us see how Wolfe solves this problem, how his voice relates to three interacting issues: his proximity to readers, his being a valid source of information and his credibility as a commentator.

§24. Apparent non-intrusiveness on part of the author is important for gaining credibility. But how can this be attained while having a strong personal voice in what in being narrated? Wolfe will combine proximity to readers-using a language full of resources emulating oral speech-with showing he has valuable information and knowledge to elicit sound insight, a priviledged position readers are not in. Let us deal with this in more detail.

§25. In TRS, the informal tone prevails: our rockets always blow up, our boys always botch it, gotcha!, the Smocks, no john, goodies, whuh!, up yours!, somewhat panicky, a monkey's gonna., we fly the damn thing, f'r chrissake!, Yeager was like the big daddy of the skies (51) ... This is fundamental to open the path to complicity with readers, because it emulates oral speech. There is a great deal of slang, especially that used by the military pilots (some of which was actually incorporated into every day English after the book publicized it): to push the outside of the envelope, spam in a can, the chimp mode, to screw the pooch. Wolfe also makes use of punctuation and typography in a manner which emulates daily conversations and speech in personal letters. There are also bits of oral exaggeration , sometimes like the type of exaggeration found in oral narration ( they applauded, cheered, snuffled, wheezed . A couple of them said, "Amen!," 275), sometimes more literary (see hyperbole in §28). He also reproduces accents, drawls .

Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot . coming over the intercom . with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless!-it's reassuring) . the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes botling up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because "it might get a little choppy" . the voice that tells you [.]: "Now, folks, uh . this is the captain . ummmm . We've got a little ol' red light up here on the control panel that's tryin' to tell us that the lan din' gears're not . uh . lock in' into position when we lower 'em (34; see also 112).

§26. This combines with technical and political language, because the author is concerned with showing he has practised saturation reporting. "Friendship 7 . We do not read you, do not read you. Over." "Friendship 7, this is Kano. At G.M.T. 16:33:00. We do not . This is Kano. Out" (read on up to 261). Wolfe will bore readers "to tears" with information and facts he gathered. A brief example: "he was considered one of the Navy's best test pilots, drawing important assignments in testing the F3H, the F8U, the F4D Skyray, the F11F Tigercat, the F2H3 Banhshee, and the F5D Skylancer, including ." (135). In any case, some of this information will be welcome both because of Wolfe's technical skill and because it elicits curiosity; presented by internal focalizers, we find information on the thoughts and feelings of the interviewed in "historical" situations. TRS is felt as a reliable source of information for the reader to learn about how certain events were experienced by its protagonists. It is interesting to learn about what an astronaut was thinking of when he was about to be launched to space, what he thought while looking out the window, that he needed to go to the toilet or that he fell asleep. This draws them closer to readers-it does not give them depth, an identity, but it makes them human. Also, it is appealing because while entertaining yourself you are actually learning about the testimonial side of a historical event-this, the genre shares with autobiography and historical novels.

§27. Registering multiple viewpoints is also useful for building credibility, it functions as a pass which allows Wolfe to speak his mind freely: he reminds us he has been loyal to what other people expressed and has reflected it accurately. But even though Wolfe shares his narrative space with other voices, he holds a position of absolute authority-he knows everything, and he is entitled to comment overtly.

§28. Finally, his personal input is built by learned resources: comments and explanations with ample use of figures of speech such historical analogies like the ones on the ziggurat or on ancient warfare, metaphors like the literary figure of angels opening the book, hyperbole like "Only the extreme cold kept you from throwing up" (283), and French and Latin borrowings: esprit, tout le monde, carte blanche, joie de combat; in extremis, sui generis . His use of irony is constant-it decreases towards the end-and falls into the tradition of the common degradated use of irony among intellectuals, where the value of the argument is not in the argument itself but on establishing the intellectual superiority of an "I" versus "the Other".

§29. Recapitulating, Wolfe's way of writing aims at reaching the thoughts and feelings of the ordinary citizen, although at the same time marks its differentiated social status from ordinary citizens. This means he works to involve the public in listening to him and at the same time to show he is a reliable source for the public to learn about the narrated events. This is the reason why he will constantly show he is a well-informed journalist-overuse of facts-, a learned man-foreign borrowings, tracing historical references connected to contemporary issues-and an intelligent person-for this, he resorts to irony, a classical tool for style which facilitates that people who use it are considered intelligent regardless its quality!

§30. The bliss of populism. An intelligent learned narrator feigning the tones of oral speech is listened to for his authority and for his proximity, his complicity with "ordinary people" (who mainly speak and not write). But. is the author seeking proximity only by feigning the tones of oral speech? Or is proximity possible because he also feigns the voice of the Public, this is, society's prevailing mentality, the mentality of the majority. "Ordinary people," this is, people whose mentality is shared by the majority, do care to listen to "the learned" when they emulate their speech. If "the learned" is defending traditional values-values shared by the majority-while apparently attacking something that seems far away from the ordinary person's life (for instance, the show put up by the corporate media-but not the value system that supports it!) the ordinary reader thrives on what he or she is reading. The Public in TRS wonders and exclaims in the midst of events, it takes part. The fact that the narrator is a man who is convinced of his intellectual capacity, validates the ordinary citizen's feelings and ideology for he or she shares something with an intelligent learned man. This is an important ingredient in the recipe for bestsellers. Combining internal focalizers with the author's own voice works for the author's objectivity and credibility because he seems to be close, fair, democratic in giving voice to various other individuals while actually having his own views. However, he does not actually voice diverse viewpoints, but a value system shared by many, values which seem to him and the Public inescapable for humans. Is the fact that so many people share these values an indication of what makes us human and what therefore should move every human being (even New Yorkers cry at the sight of Glenn, Wolfe writes; even Wolfe does, in spite of his-is it really ironic?-description of people's feelings)? Or is the fact that so many people share these values an indication of the power an unacknowledged prevailing by default ideology has in our interpretative mechanisms? People would actually have cried too at the sight of Yeager if the media had been there to show the world his feat. And this is what Wolfe does as a reporter: show us that Yeager and the other pilots, the traditional representants of the war machinery, were also heroes. (To think about the effective workings of this by default ideology, we can meditate on the contrast that people do not usually cry at the sight of other courageous human beings when their "feats" have not been conceptualized as such by this prevailing ideology.)

§31. The narration has the alleged ambition of offering readers the truth about the events, but from this perspective this could be questioned, and this is why I anticipated the idea that the book became a bestseller mainly because of its power as a propaganda tool and not so much due to the literary or journalistic contribution it made. More on this in §§61-64, "Contextualizing a Concern for Credibility".

 

Next: Part V. Wolfe the Reporter vs Reporters & Myth-Building

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>.