Wolfe on The New New Journalism

Tom Wolfe Speaks in Tongues

Remember Doctor Rammer Doc Doc? No? Then you must not've read Tom Wolfe's A Man In Full, which featured the improbably named rapper's threat to "peel yo cap."

Well, Wolfe is back, speaking tongues yet again, holding forth on "gibber-gibber" and other things. After the jump, a letter Wolfe wrote to The Chronicle of Higher Education about Robert S. Boynton's new book, The New New Journalism.

To the Editor:
Is it really true that due to the sheer enormity of the task, college department heads today no longer read books--and instead rely on "book briefings" by graduate students? When that rumor began circulating four years ago, I dismissed it as absurd. But recent events have caused me to pause, and ponder.

For example, in The Chronicle Review's March 4 issue, writing about what he calls "the New New Journalism," Robert S. Boynton, director of New York University's magazine-journalism program, states that the book Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, "chronicles big business" ("Drilling Into the Bedrock of Ordinary Experience"). Inexplicably, the director's statement is not merely inaccurate. It is wildly gibber-gibber ape-shrieking off the wall.

Moneyball is about playing a game on the field, baseball. Specifically, it is about how one Billy Beane, office-bound general manager of a woebegone team, the Oakland Athletics, used the findings of a string of baseball-happy amateur statisticians to make a completely objective analysis of which player skills and field strategies work best in that game. The figures showed, for example, that the stolen base, the sacrifice bunt, and the hit and run actually reduce a team's chances of winning at that game. They showed that the hitter who has the knack of forcing the pitcher to a long count, say, 3-1 or 3-2, and then drawing a walk is a team's great invisible batting power, and that a hitter's on-base percentage was more important than his batting average in that game.

By using the blind stats and ignoring conventional baseball savvy, over a four year stretch (1999-2002) the Athletics won more regular season games than any other team in the Major Leagues aside from the Atlanta Braves, made the play offs three times, and in 2002 won the toughest of the Major League divisions, the American League West, with 103 wins, including a record-breaking 20 straight in September--despite being so strapped for money, they could afford only two types of players: has -beens and not-yets of that game. In other words, Moneyball is a book about a radical mathematical science for playing a particular game. It is a book about a game.

How could Director Boynton get the very subject of a book he cites as evidence supporting his thesis so completely wrong? Could it have possibly been a bungled briefing by some underpaid, overworked graduate student who himself couldn't find time to read the book? It is very hard to believe such a thing. But I challenge anyone to come up with a more logical explanation.

Or how could Director Boynton be not merely incorrect but, again, astonishingly, brain-numbingly wrong about an essay he chooses to make central to his argument, "The New Journalism" (1973) by Tom Wolfe? According to Director Boynton--or some grad student who hasn't slept for three days??--"Wolfe's New Journalism" involved such "avant-garde" devices as "placing the author at the center of the story" and "exploding traditional narrative." In fact, ego-centered narration is as old as journalism itself, and Wolfe warns against its pitfalls. And far from "exploding traditional narrative," Wolfe recommends the opposite: bringing into nonfiction the traditional structure and narrative of the novel or short story.

Director Boynton--or the voice at ear?--says Wolfe uses the sociological term "status" to refer to cosmetic matters, "how one dresses, where one lives," and overlooks the more profound matters of "class and race." In fact, Wolfe uses the term "status" in precisely the way Max Weber, who introduced it to sociology, did; i.e., to refer to the entire range of ways in which human beings rank one another, class and race being two of them--and he underlines that point in his essay.

Not incidentally, the essay served as the introduction to an anthology that included excerpts from two of the most vivid and best-known nonfiction stories ever written about class and race: "Martin Luther King Is Still on the Case," by Garry Wills, and "Radical Chic & Maumauing the Flak Catchers," the only chronicle of the thousands of racial "confrontations" minority organizations were compelled to use in order to get money out of the Poverty Program's white administrators.

Director Boynton--or the grad-grind elf on his shoulder?--says that when Wolfe's essay uses the term "point of vies," it is referring to "varying points of view," the narrator's being one. In fact, it refers to something else entirely: point of view in Henry James's technical use of the term, i.e., making the reader feel he is always inside the skin, the eye sockets, the central nervous system of some character as the story unfolds.

Director Boynton says that Wolfe thinks of "ethnic and ideological subcultures" as "terra incognita," phenomena that so baffle him, he regards them as different not just in "degree" but "in kind" from "the rest of American culture." Really? Whose hookah has the elf been smoking? The fact is, Wolfe doesn't refer in any way to" ethnic and ideological subcultures" and uses the term "terra incognita" only in reference to the physiology of the brain.

Today, just as in 1973 when Wolfe wrote his "New Journalism" essay, neuroscientists are still unable to provide a physiological explanation of consciousness, memory, language, sleep, or the effect of general anesthesia. But they do know what such brain functions are not. They are not "ethnic and ideological subcultures," whatever these 12 poor old tumble-down shabby-genteel abstract syllables may summon up in the mind of the director.

If this is the extent of Director Boynton's--or the homunculus's?--grasp of the obvious, I'm not sure I want to see how he has--they have?--handled the excellent journalists included in his--their?--upcoming book, The New New Journalism. Speaking of which, the evidence, as we have seen, indicates that he--or the little fellow?--has never read Michael Lewis's Moneyball.

It should come as no surprise, then, that he appears oblivious of something else: the "New New" locution of The New New Journalism is a haircut off Michael Lewis's brilliant Silicon Valley story, "The New New Thing."

Despite all the foregoing, I still don't believe Director Boynton or any other college department head in America would have graduate students read books for him. But should such a practice exist, it is the strongest argument yet for paying graduate-student T.A.'s professional-level salaries and lowering their workloads. They must be given greater incentive and more time for the important chores they now do for faculty members.

Source: www.gawker.com