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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 WRITING OUTSIDE/IN: NONFICTION NARRATIVE AS IMPLICATED TEXT DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Daniel Wayne Lehman, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1993 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Walter Davis John Hellmann Adviser Debra Moddelmog Department of English Copyright by Daniel Wayne Lehman 1993 To Barbara and Hadley 11 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I express sincere appreciation to the members of my advisory committee, Drs. Walter Davis, John Hellmann, and Debra Moddelmog, for their patient support, guidance, and insights during the research and presentation of this study. All three have taught me that the study of literature might be a study for life and that scholarship need not be remote from the problems and triumphs of the world. I would also like to thank Drs. James Phelan and Angela Jaffe, who read and offered suggestions on the early versions of some of the material in this study. Robert McGovern, chair of the Department of English at Ashland University, is gratefully acknowledged for his encouragement and professional example. Among the many writing colleagues who have taught me that journalism can be a force for positive change, I cite three by name: Jack Newfield, Bob Gibson, and Libby Wilson. To Hadley Lehman, I offer thanks for the excitement of your young life and for your ready smile. And to Barbara A. Lehman, I thank you for your example as a scholar and for your support as my companion and my best friend. Ill VITA August 29, 1950 ............. Born - Harrisonburg, Virginia 1972 ........................ B.A., Eastern Mennonite College, Harrisonburg, Virginia 1972-1986 ................... Reporter for The Columbian. The (Gramercy) Herald. The Brooklyn Paper. The (Charlottesville) Daily Progress 1988 ........................ M.A., Department of English, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. 1987-Present ............... Instructor and Assistant Professor, Departments of English and Communication Arts, Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio PUBLICATIONS Lehman, Daniel W. "Raymond Carver's Management of Symbol." Journal of the Short Story in English 17. (Fall, 1991): 43-58. Lehman, Barbara A., Lynn Johnson and Daniel W. Lehman. "Whole Language for Adult Literacy." Adult Learning 3 (Feb. 1992): 15-16, 26. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field; English Studies in Nonfiction Narrative, Critical Theory, and Twentieth Century Literature IV TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION............................................. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................ill VITA .................................................... iv INTRODUCTION ........................................... 1 The Stakes of Nonfiction Narrative ................ 1 The Problem of Truth in Nonfiction Narrative . 12 Methodology and Outline .......................... 31 F o o t n o t e s ......................................... 37 CHAPTER PAGE I. THE IMPLICATED WRITER OF NONFICTION ......... 39 F o o t n o t e s ........................... 81 II. THE IMPLICATED READER OF NONFICTION ......... 82 F o o t n o t e s .............................. 132 III. JOHN REED AND THE WRITING OF REVOLUTION . 134 F o o t n o t e s .............................. 209 IV. TOM WOLFE AND THE WRITING OF RECAPTURE .... 211 F o o t n o t e s .............................. 285 V. JOAN DIDION AND THE WRITING OF RADIATION . 28 6 F o o t n o t e s .............................. 363 VI. WRITING OUTSIDE/IN: FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS . 365 WORKS C I T E D .............................................. 379 INTRODUCTION The Stakes of Nonfiction Narrative The call came late at night, as I remember it, long after my wife and daughter had gone to bed, and I was alone with the crickets and mosquitoes in the humid Virginia night. On the other end of the line was a distraught woman, a woman whose father had committed suicide the night before. He had scrambled out the window of a treatment center for chronic alcoholics, walked slowly and deliberately onto a nearby interstate highway, and died— head up and arms outstretched— on the grill of a 20-ton semi truck. I had written the story of his death for the afternoon newspaper, and the daughter was calling to dress me down. Her father had been a bank president and church deacon in life. His alcohol problems, she said, had been kept quite private, and his admission to the sanatorium had been a secret to all but his closest family members. My story that day, sketchy though it was, had aired some of these secrets, even to his own grandchildren, and the daughter could not understand why. Was the idea, she asked, to destroy her family? To parade her father's pain for 2 profit? What gave me the right, she demanded to know, to have the final say on her father's life? I tried to explain that I had stuck to official sources, to easily verifiable facts. I told her that the fatality had snarled highway traffic for more than an hour, that people had the right to know why they were inconvenienced, that the police had the obligation to state publicly that the truck driver was not at fault, that we had to try to explain to our readers why a man might scramble over a fence and walk onto the highway to die. But her voice got louder as the conversation grew longer, and I began to wish that I had taken my editor's advice and ordered an unlisted home telephone number. How much safer it would be, I reflected, to write fiction, to hide characters (or myself for that matter) behind assumed names. If I could only guard my anonymity, my privacy, my vulnerability. What I yearned for, in short, was the very same protection that I had denied the caller's father in death. It was in that recognition— reached in the early hours sometime past the midpoint of a professional reporting career— that I first really understood the stakes of writing nonfiction. I as a writer, the woman as a reader, her father as the subject of the narrative— each one of us was implicated materially and historically by the words on the page. Whether the narrative I had written of the 3 father's life could be defined as true or not was not the only point. Certainly it had many elements of fact; in no way had it been exposed as lies. It was marketed as truth by the author and by the newspaper which profited from its publication. And yet it had the indeterminacy of text as well; a text produced from other texts like police reports, medical records, morgue files, memories, observation, eyewitness accounts, telling details, quotes. I could no more guarantee it was true than say it was false. But these conventional generic markers— of truth and falsity, of fact and text— were, finally, almost beside the point. They had triggered the discussion, but what counted was how the story— this story— implicated its writer and its reader. That anguished call in the night was proof that what I had written that day— while its truth may have been presented in textual form— had a social and material effect that far transcends that of fiction. On one hand, the circumstances of its research, writing, publication, and consumption were, and are, deeply intertwined with what literary critics traditionally have called the "text." But its full power and problems cannot be understood until the discourse relations that undergird nonfiction are read as closely as the words and images that make up the text itself. 4 The topic of this dissertation therefore grows from my interest and training both in literature and in journalism, wherein I worked as a professional reporter and editor for fifteen years. Because I was engaged for so long in the research and writing of narratives that claim to be "history," I have some working understanding of the way that writing and reading nonfiction differs from writing and reading fiction. The writer of nonfiction produces a document for an audience that is engaged both inside and outside the text: both by the lure of the narrative and by the direct or indirect knowledge of the events and people on which the text is based. Even the reader who has never heard of the bank president before his suicide will, no doubt, have some understanding that an actual person has died and not merely a character of the imagination.