Deconstructing the Ziggurat: Reading Dissidence in the Right Stuff, Friday Night Lights, and the New New Thing

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2011 Deconstructing the Ziggurat: Reading Dissidence in The Right Stuff, Friday Night Lights, and The New New Thing

Haavardsrud, Paul

Haavardsrud, P. (2011). Deconstructing the Ziggurat: Reading Dissidence in The Right Stuff, Friday Night Lights, and The New New Thing (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/20205 http://hdl.handle.net/1880/48524 master thesis

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Deconstructing the Ziggurat: Reading Dissidence in The Right Stuff, Friday Night Lights,

and The New New Thing

Paul Haavardsrud

A THESIS

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APRIL, 2011

 Paul Haavardsrud 2011

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Abstract

The script of the “American dream” promises that success is a function of an

individual’s inherent will to achieve a goal. A widespread acceptance of this ethos of

self-determination helps to underpin the conservative value system prevalent in America.

This thesis offers a cultural materialist consideration of how the dominant social order is

perpetuated in recent works of literary nonfiction. Specifically, “Deconstructing the

Ziggurat: Reading Dissidence in The Right Stuff, Friday Night Lights, and The New New

Thing” is concerned with denaturalizing the construct of individualism, with the hope of illuminating a small fissure in the authority of capitalism, the logic of which is often accepted as unassailable by those on the political, economic and social right.

Acknowledgements

Joan Didion once wrote “there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.” That Didion, fully aware of the dark nights to come, still finds a way to write is encouraging. (To get through “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” she did lean on a less-than-ideal cocktail of gin-and-hot-water, sleep deprivation, and Dexedrine, but, as old sailors say, any port in a storm). My gratitude goes out to those that made my own trip through this thesis possible.

As ever, my family is the straw that stirs the drink. My parents, Don and Carol

Haavardsrud, and my brother, Craig, have offered a lifetime of unconditional support.

Everyone should be so lucky. This project also provided the rare privilege to work with a supervisor, Dr. Susan Bennett, whose guidance, thoughtfulness, and patience deserves a special thank you. Her talent for offering the perfect word exactly when it is most needed is nothing short of breathtaking (or should I say astonishing? The mot juste? Drat! You know who would know...).

On some level, David Jenkins, Bryan Auge, and Chris Koentges would enjoy being grouped together and being acknowledged. I would be remiss if I passed on this opportunity to do both. Finally, I would like to thank Allison Mader, whom I adore (clear eyes, full hearts).

iii

For my parents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract …………………………………………………………………………... ii Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………. iii Dedication ………………………………………………………………………... iv Table of Contents ………………………………………………………………… v Epigraph ………………………………………………………………………….. vii

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………. 1

CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW ……………………………………. 17 “The Article as Art” ……………………………………………………….. 17 The New Journalism: The Underground Press ……………………………. 19 The New Journalism: With an Anthology ………………………………… 20

The Mythopoeic Reality …………………………………………………… 23 Fact & Fiction ……………………………………………………………... 26

The Literature of Fact ……………………………………………………... 28 Fables of Fact ……………………………………………………………… 31

CHAPTER THREE: THE RIGHT STUFF ……………………………………… 35 “The Right Stuff” ………………………………………………………….. 39

Chuck Yeager ……………………………………………………………… 43 Lab Rats …………………………………………………………………… 49

CHAPTER FOUR: FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS …………………………………. 54

Boobie Miles ………………………………………………………………. 65

CHAPTER FIVE: THE NEW NEW THING ……………………………………. 75

Jim Clark …………………………………………………………………... 78 Subverting the Metaphors …………………………………………………. 86

CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION ………………………………………………... 98

ENDNOTES ……………………………………………………………………… 107

WORKS CITED …………………………………………………………………. 108

Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind.

Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary”

vii

Introduction

In 1908 a Princeton University English professor, Henry Van Dyke, spent a year at the University of Paris as the Hyde lecturer, a chair established to strengthen relations between the United States and France. In a series of lectures titled The Spirit of America,

Van Dyke attempted to capture the essence of his country for a French audience.

Grappling with the question of what made America great, Van Dyke settled on a single powerful force that resided in the soul of his nation, “the spirit of self-reliance” (40).

From the earliest colonists onwards, Americans, he believed, could be defined by this shared characteristic:

This was the dominant and formative factor of their early history. It was the inward

power which animated and sustained them in their first struggles and efforts. It was

deepened by religious conviction and intensified by practical experience. It took

shape in political institutions, declarations, constitutions. It rejected foreign

guidance and control, and fought against all external domination. It assumed the

right of self-determination, and took for granted the power of self-development. …

It has persisted through all the changes and growth of two centuries, and it remains

to-day the most vital and irreducible quality in the soul of America, — the spirit of

self-reliance. (40)

More than a century later, Van Dyke’s description of American self-determination remains familiar, a narrative that continues to underwrite “the American dream.”

According to the national promise, personal prosperity is a function of an individual’s inherent resolve to achieve a goal, irrespective of external conditions. Indeed, Van Dyke explains to his French listeners, “It is not true that every native-born newsboy in America

2 thinks that he can become President. But he knows that he may if he can; and perhaps it is this knowledge, or perhaps it is something in his blood, that often encourages him to try how far he can go on the way” (65). A knowledge of the ambitions of American newsboys is among a number of sweeping, if unsubstantiated, claims lodged by Van

Dyke. In establishing his credibility to speak definitively about America’s national character, Van Dyke disregards his academic credentials, opting instead for a more personal disclosure.

In his testimonial, Van Dyke paints himself as a figure deeply ensconced in the conservative power structure of early twentieth-century America. At the time of his lectures in the winter of 1908, he notes that his family had maintained a residence in the

U.S. for more than 250 years, his ancestors arriving from Holland in 1652. As a professor at Princeton, his work offered him occasion to travel to nearly every state in the Union, bringing him into contact with all manners of citizens including “a personal acquaintance with all of the Presidents except one since Lincoln” (xiii). While Van Dyke is a minor historical figure at best, his turn-of-the-century articulation of the American spirit is representative of a conservative ethos that still persists today.

A hundred years on, how does this narrative continue to endure virtually unchanged? This thesis will investigate how these same ivy-covered notions of American self-determination are perpetuated in contemporary culture. More specifically, the following chapters will inquire into how nonfiction texts participate in reproducing the existing conservative social order. As Linda Hutcheon has argued, the concern of postmodern criticism is to “de-naturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that those entities that we unthinkingly experience as ‘natural’ (they might even

3 include capitalism, patriarchy, liberal humanism) are in fact ‘cultural’; made by us not given to us” (2). In this spirit, this thesis explores how the value system encoded in nonfiction texts can work to legitimate the dominant cultural order. Underpinned by a claim to truth inherent to the genre, I argue that nonfiction texts occupy a privileged position within the process of cultural formation and the construction of individual subjectivity. As a reflection of the world in which we live, nonfiction offers an experience that works to shape a reader’s understanding of cultural values, mores, and behavior. As such, nonfiction texts can participate in a process that ratifies the existing social order, making it seem natural and immutable, as opposed to constructed. At the same time, nonfiction texts can also offer moments of resistance that may work to destabilize the status quo.

The cultural materialist approach of Raymond Williams offers a useful theoretical framework to understand how nonfiction texts legitimize — and can potentially resist — the dominant social order. Still, transferring theories of cultural formation developed by

Williams and other British cultural materialists to American texts does contain certain concerns. A cross-cultural application of theoretical method, for instance, includes a risk that cultural differences will be suppressed as analysis based in specific conditions is universalized (Turner 640-41). Accounting for a potential loss of cultural specificity, this thesis believes Williams’s heightened attention to economic conditions offer his theories a particular value in an analysis of contemporary American cultural formation. In a seminal offering, Marxism and Literature, Williams engages the notion of the hegemonic process as it relates to artistic works. Published in 1977, the text, as the title indicates, is

Williams’s attempt to synthesize his position on Marxism with his views on literary

4 theory, a pair of subjects which preoccupied most of his professional life (1). In developing the work, Williams notes that he is especially indebted to contemporary

Marxist theorists such as Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and Lucien

Goldmann, as well as older work conducted by the Frankfurt School in the 1920s and

1930s (4).

In engaging the concept of hegemony, Williams singles out the contributions of

Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, whose theoretical writings carried out from inside a fascist prison marked a watershed moment in the evolution of Marxist thought (108).

Prior to Gramsci, a Marxist view of hegemony involved an understanding that the power structure between ruling and subordinate classes was kept intact through overt methods of political control, domination and coercion. For Gramsci, such a heavy-handed understanding of hegemony misses the much more subtle ways in which the status quo is maintained and social inequalities are perpetuated. In Marxism and Literature, Williams explains that Gramsci’s notion of hegemony describes a condition so totalizing and insidious that it is considered by most in a society as a natural state, as opposed to one that is constructed. He describes an organic hegemony as:

A whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses

and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is

a lived system of meanings and values—constitutive and constituting—which as

they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus

constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute

because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of

the society to move, in most areas of their lives. (110)

Gramsci’s articulation of the hegemonic process is far more subtle and pervasive than earlier Marxist notions of social control. The dominant cultural order of advanced societies, such as the contemporary Western world, is perpetuated not through a value system that is externally imposed by a ruling interest, but rather through a process of internalization.

Under such conditions, Williams’s totalizing conception of hegemony is a particularly useful lens through which to understand nonfiction literature’s current function in cultural formation. In his theoretical work, Williams is deeply invested in understanding the interplay between cultural products such as novels, films and television, and culture as it relates to the entirety of a person’s lived experience (Williams

“Culture” 93). In an early essay (1958), “Culture is Ordinary,” Williams begins by reflecting on his working-class upbringing in the Welsh countryside and his subsequent education at Cambridge. The contrasting experiences impressed upon him a belief that the idea of culture, as it was popularly understood, must be reconceived. Culture is not the sole purview of the learned; rather, he sees it is an ongoing process of creating shared meanings that everyone in society participates in at all times. He submits, “A culture is common meanings, the product of a whole people, and offered individual meanings, the product of a man’s whole committed personal and social experience. It is stupid and arrogant to suppose that any of these meanings can in any way be prescribed” (96).

During his Cambridge years it became clear to Williams that a culture’s shared meanings did not reside only in the canonical works being dissected inside the University walls, but also in the conversations being had in the local teashop. From this vantage point, a much more inclusive approach than was typical of traditional literary studies, Williams went on

6 to become one of the early forces in British cultural studies, eventually coining the term

“cultural materialism” to describe his critical approach.

In Political Shakespeare (1985), a seminal collection of cultural materialist essays, Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield situate a materialist approach to literary criticism as being an alternative to traditional formalist criticism. In the foreword,

Dollimore and Sinfield offer an oft-cited articulation of the principles of cultural materialism:

Our belief is that a combination of historical context, theoretical method, political

commitment and textual analysis offers the strongest challenge and has already

contributed substantial work. Historical context undermines the transcendent

significance traditionally accorded to the literary text and allows us to recover its

histories; theoretical method detaches the text from immanent criticism which seeks

only to reproduce it in its own terms; socialist and feminist commitment confronts

the conservative categories in which most criticism has hitherto been conducted;

textual analysis locates the critique of traditional approaches where it cannot be

ignored. We call this ‘ cultural materialism.’ (vii)

For Dollimore and Sinfield, literature’s role in cultural formation is explicitly political. A text is not just a reflection of a given moment, but is woven into the political and economic conditions at both the time of writing and, crucially, at the time of reading. If culture, as Williams argues, is constantly being created and recreated, then the potential exists for the shared meanings that shape a society to be reconceived in a way that challenges the existing social order. The political urgency of cultural materialist criticism stems in part from a belief in the possibilities that exist in the dialectical relationship

7 between literature and society. Cultural materialism, as Scott Wilson explains, “places texts in a material, that is socio-political or historical context in order to show that canonical texts, Shakespeare supremely, are bound up with a repressive, dominant ideology, yet also provide scope for dissidence” (35). Most commonly associated with

Renaissance literature, cultural materialism’s overt political commitment offers this thesis the necessary theoretical emphasis to inquire into the possibilities for ideological dissent in contemporary nonfiction literature.

* * * * * * *

In the 1960s fact-based writing gained a renewed prominence with American readers. Since then, the form has been described by a number of terms, including: the

New Journalism, literary nonfiction, and the nonfiction novel (Hartsock 4). In this thesis the term literary nonfiction will be used to characterize journalistic writing that is carried out with a literary intent. The rise of literary nonfiction’s importance within the hierarchy of American letters was summarized by Tom Wolfe, who claims in the introduction to his influential 1973 anthology, The New Journalism, that nonfiction writing had displaced the fictional novel as the most culturally significant writing of the time (9). The declaration, he later admits, is largely polemical, an attempt to carve out a more respected place for nonfiction at the literary table. Setting aside Wolfe’s jab at his fiction-writing counterparts, directionally his assertion does testify to nonfiction’s popularity with readers. A mass-market appeal puts literary nonfiction in a potentially privileged position within the circulation of shared cultural meanings. The populist nature of the genre is furthered by its reportorial foundation. Literary nonfiction is the “literature of the everyday” (Boynton xv). Indeed, one aphoristic saying summarizes the genre as

8 concerned with documenting either the extraordinary lives of ordinary people or the ordinary lives of extraordinary people (Boynton 361). Offering a reflection of mainstream culture back upon itself, literary nonfiction is part of a process through which a large number of Americans come to know themselves.1

The first principle in understanding cultural formation, Williams asserts, is the recognition that “culture is ordinary” (“Culture” 3). As the literature of the ordinary, literary nonfiction offers an opportunity to apprehend the dominant and oppositional forces that shape culture not in retrospect, but in real time. Indeed, in Marxism and

Literature, Williams contends, “The most interesting and difficult part of any cultural analysis, in complex societies, is that which seeks to grasp the hegemonic in its active and formative but also its transformational processes” (113). This thesis takes up the challenge of attempting to understand how the dominant social order is currently being maintained by deconstructing the ideological workings of three nonfiction texts published since 1979. A critical analysis of The Right Stuff (1979), Friday Night Lights (1989), and

The New New Thing (2000) will examine how conservative values have been circulated in the recent cultural moment. By tracing how such notions are embedded in nonfiction texts over the last three decades this thesis offers a platform from which dominant and resistant forces might be better grasped in contemporary literary nonfiction.

The Right Stuff

Published in 1979, The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe chronicles the history of the

Cold War space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The account is reconstructed primarily from the perspectives of the military pilots who formed the pool of candidates that would become the first U.S. astronauts. Beginning in the 1940s, the

9 story traces the development of the U.S. space program, with particular attention given to the social codes and mores adhered to within the hyper-competitive culture of test pilots.

The narrative goes on to describe the relationships, ambitions, and family lives of the seven pilots chosen to become part of Project Mercury, the first manned American space flights.

Pervasive throughout the text is a spirit of achievement, a reflection, arguably, of

America’s rise to global economic prominence.2 The optimistic tenor of postwar America is embodied most fully by Chuck Yeager, an Air Force test pilot who offers the archetype by which all other pilots are measured. By idealizing Yeager, the text forges him into a figure of aspiration for readers. In Yeager, the text personifies the spirit of self- determination described by Van Dyke. Indeed, a straight line can be drawn between the values put forward in the Spirit of America and Yeager’s depiction in The Right Stuff. A synopsis of his wartime heroics, offered upon his introduction, typifies the nature of

Yeager’s ideological position in the text:

In his first eight missions, at the age of twenty, Yeager shot down two German

fighters. On his ninth he was shot down over German-occupied French territory,

suffering flak wounds; he bailed out, was picked up by the French underground,

which smuggled him across the Pyrenees into Spain disguised as a peasant. In

Spain he was jailed briefly, then released, whereupon he made it back to England

and returned to combat during the Allied invasion of France. … It was a true Frank

Luke-style display of warrior fury and personal prowess. By the end of the war he

had thirteen and a half kills. He was twenty-two years old. (32)

Regardless of the obstacle — whether the maelstrom of war, wounds from anti-aircraft fire, the inexperience of youth, or even a mountain range — Yeager cannot be kept from the fight. As the idealized embodiment of the American individual, Yeager will not be stopped from seeing a job through to its successful completion.

By privileging Yeager’s unrelenting individualism, I argue the text participates in perpetuating a conservative value system that is fundamental to maintaining the capitalist ethos that underpins the dominant social order.

Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

Friday Night Lights, published in 1989 and written by Philadelphia sports writer

H.G. Bissinger, follows one high school’s quest to win the 1988 Texas state football championship. To report the story Bissinger and his family spent a year in the west Texas town of Odessa, a region hit hard by the recessionary oil price environment of the 1980s

(Yergin 750-51). The narrative interweaves stories of players from Odessa’s local high school football team, the Permian Panthers, as well as those of competing teams, residents of Odessa, and the town itself. In contrast to the postwar optimism of The Right

Stuff, a recessionary unease, as well as a nostalgic yearning for the supposed golden age of the American 1950s distinguish Bissinger’s text. In Friday Night Lights, the current of self-determination that runs through The Right Stuff is replaced by doubts about

America’s economic future in the face of foreign competition. The triumphant model of individualism offered by Yeager is found wanting when confronted by the revenue demands of foreign oil sheiks and the efficiency of Japanese just-in-time manufacturing systems. A shaken belief in the national myth of America as a land where anyone can

11 become president is articulated by Panther offensive tackle Jerrod McDougal, who has watched his father’s business fall victim to the vicissitudes of the global oil market:

How could he feel otherwise when he had seen what had happened to his father,

how helpless his dad had been as all that work, all that sweat, all that go-for-it, take-

a-chance, fearlessness, had fallen victim to a crash in oil prices engineered by a

bunch of people halfway across the earth? How could he feel otherwise when all he

heard, all he read about, was how smart the Japanese were and how dumb

Americans were? He could never do what his father had done, go out on his own

after high school, start his own business, will himself into becoming an enormous

success. It was like a fairy tale, something that just didn’t happen anymore. (246)

If McDougal, a dyed-in-the-wool son of Texas, can be taken as a proxy for conservative

America, then his worries can be understood to give voice to a more wide-spread tension about the very promise of the American dream itself. Such anxiety is writ large in the story of Panther running back James “Boobie” Miles. Once a star, a knee injury derails his life on and off the football field. When considered in concert with the hopelessness of the rest of the text, I argue that Boobie’s experience contains the potential to challenge the legitimacy of an ideologically conservative status quo.

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

Published in 2000, The New New Thing by financial writer Michael Lewis offers a version of the history of the technology stock bubble in the 1990s. Lewis tells the story of the Internet revolution through the lens of Jim Clark, a founder of former stock market darlings Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Clark, according to Lewis, has a rare ability to position himself to profit from future developments in culture and technology. His early

12 recognition, for instance, of the industrial uses of three-dimensional computer images led to Silicon Graphics becoming one of the leading technology firms of the 1980s.

Similarly, his understanding of the Internet’s vast commercial potential resulted in

Netscape gaining a first-mover advantage in the browser business that added hundreds of millions to Clark’s personal net worth and translated into a multi-billion dollar market capitalization for the company.

In contrast to Bissinger’s recessionary tale set in the dustbowl of west Texas, The

New New Thing is devoid of any similar traces of unease about the potential for success in America, which saw its economy roar back to life during the go-go economic climate of the 1990s (Geisst 366-68). Like Yeager, Clark is a master of the universe, able to control not just the chaos of the present, but also able to set the wheels of the future into motion. In a telling passage, Clark — who is spurred to build the world’s largest sloop,

Hyperion, after spying a massive yacht called Juliet — is credited with toppling the domino that inspired the market madness of the technology bubble in the 1990s:

Clark had decided he wanted one like it, only bigger and smarter. Juliet had led to

Hyperion and Hyperion had led to Netscape’s IPO and Netscape’s IPO had

triggered the internet boom. Of course, the boom probably would have happened

without Juliet, or for that matter without Netscape. But I doubt it would have

happened quite the same way. Clark’s first sighting of the Juliet was one of those

small perturbations that radically altered the world we inhabit. (266)

Disclaimers aside, the straight-line cause and effect from Clark’s mind to the desktops of the world suggests a control over the chaos of events that is reminiscent of Yeager’s mastery of the skies in The Right Stuff.

The tenor of each text, as suggested, is in part a function of the economic climate in the decade in which it was written. Significant to note, then, that The Right Stuff and

The New New Thing, each written when America’s economic star was on the rise, position Yeager and Clark as sources of aspiration. In contrast, Friday Night Lights, reported in petroleum-reliant Texas in the years following a collapse in oil prices, offers a much bleaker representation of the tenet of self-determination. Certainly, other nonfiction texts published in the same years do not conform to this framework. Nevertheless, the cultural resonance of the texts makes each a useful choice to explore contemporary possibilities for dissent.

In its current form, literary nonfiction is relatively new, only emerging in earnest in the 1960s. Early days for the genre though it may be, as a canon of literary nonfiction takes shape, The Right Stuff, Friday Night Lights and The New New Thing can each make a strong claim for inclusion. Along with exemplifying the rigorous reporting methods and narrative style that characterizes the form, each text has also earned considerable commercial success, as evidenced by a shared status as New York Times best sellers. The cultural currency of the texts is further enhanced by the celebrity stature of each author, and the influence of film and television adaptations.

If the merits of his writing alone were insufficient in keeping Wolfe’s catalogue of novels relevant, his decision to pen the introduction to The New Journalism has proven to be a savvy professional maneuver. In his 1973 manifesto, which became the bible of the new genre, Wolfe not only outlines the guiding principles of the craft, but also positions himself as one of the literary movement’s key early practitioners (Boynton xvi). His self- promotional efforts have helped to ensure his oeuvre is amply represented in anthologies

14 and in the syllabi of university courses. In 1983, the film adaptation of The Right Stuff was released to critical acclaim, winning four Academy Awards and nominated for four others, including Best Picture. The ensemble cast features a number of actors that went on to become bankable Hollywood stars, including Dennis Quaid, Scott Glenn, Ed Harris and Barbara Hershey.

The cultural reach of Friday Night Lights is arguably even more extensive. In

2004, Hollywood adapted the work into a film starring Billy Bob Thornton. In 2006, an eponymous television series based on Bissinger’s book debuted on NBC. The series went on to critical acclaim including 36 Emmy nominations, before finishing a five-season run on network television in 2011. Along with The New New Thing, Michael Lewis’s list of best-selling books includes Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, and The Blind Side.

A movie version of The New New Thing has yet to be produced, although Lewis has written a screenplay and the rights have been sold to Hollywood (Boynton 250). In 2009, a film version of The Blind Side achieved tremendous commercial and critical success, including an Academy Award for lead actress Sandra Bullock. A film adaptation of

Moneyball, starring A-list Hollywood celebrities Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Philip

Seymour Hoffman, is slated for release in the fall of 2011.

The commercial success of The Right Stuff, Friday Night Lights, and The New

New Thing has ramifications for literary nonfiction as a whole. For writers and publishers, each text’s popularity positions it as a potential template for what can be sold to the public. At its core, literary nonfiction’s journalistic foundation makes it an inherently populist genre. In mainstream journalism a story is based on a hook, a device that will grab the attention of the average reader (Podhoretz 137). Once a hook is

15 determined, writers must then sell these story ideas to editors and publishers, who are invested in understanding what their readership will buy. On the other side of the equation, popular texts that are forming literary nonfiction’s nascent canon also function to shape the parameters of the genre and readers’ expectations for the form. Within the context of a loose feedback loop that exists between author, publisher and reader, the work of commercially successful writers such as Wolfe, Bissinger and Lewis contains the potential to significantly influence the style, content, and form of future offerings in the genre.

Although the texts under consideration are based on different subjects and were published over three decades, they share an ideological fabric that is remarkably consistent. Each text is embedded with the same spirit of self-determination championed by Van Dyke, an ethos which functions as a tent pole for capitalism, a key pillar that supports the dominant social order of the Western world. The following chapters are concerned with denaturalizing the notion of individualism, with a hope the dissident readings will work towards offering the most modest of challenges to the authority of capitalism, the logic of which is often accepted as unassailable by those on the political, economic, and social right.

To date, much of the critical work on literary nonfiction is concerned with exploring the turbulent cultural conditions of the 1960s that facilitated the emergence of nonfiction writing into the literary mainstream. Theoretical explorations of nonfiction are also typified by a preoccupation with understanding the complex interplay between fact and fiction inherent to the genre. How, for instance, do readers negotiate the knowledge that narratives which are ostensibly based in fact are also unavoidably shaped by the

16 choices of the writer. The next chapter, which reviews much of the major theoretical work conducted in the field of literary nonfiction, offers a theoretical grounding for the cultural materialist analysis that follows.

Literature Review

“The Article as Art”

In a 1958 essay, “The Article as Art”, Norman Podhoretz argues the most relevant literature of the time is not to be found in novels, but in the literary backwater of the magazine world. While acknowledging the temerity of the suggestion, he submits that novelists have largely abdicated writing about the topics most pressing to everyday life in postwar America (137), choosing instead to explore more ethereal and imaginative realms. Concerned with the exact terrain vacated by the novelist, magazine writers emerged to fill a void in contemporary literature — the examination and exploration of the manners and morals of everyday experience. In a world ever more preoccupied with the pragmatic, Podhoretz presumes it natural that practical subject matter would offer the basis for the most pertinent and energetic writing.

Drawing a comparison between writing and architecture, Podhoretz notes, “our sense of beauty today is intimately connected with the sense of usefulness: we consider a building beautiful when it seems to exist not for anyone to enjoy the sight of or to be impressed by, but solely and simply to be used” (141). Tempering the negative implications such a utilitarian view might trigger, Podhoretz explains that satisfying an underlying condition of functionality allows both architecture and writing a freedom to include elements that could be considered impractical. In architecture such aesthetic considerations might include decorative columns or arches. In magazine writing the extra license can surface in a quality of prose that Podhoretz believes can elevate a story from the prosaic to the artistic:

I would suggest that we have all, writers and readers alike, come to feel temporarily

uncomfortable with the traditional literary forms because they don’t seem practical,

designed for “use,” whereas a magazine article by its nature satisfies that initial

conditions and so is free to assimilate as many “useless,” “non-functional” elements

as it pleases. It is free, in other words, to become a work of art. (142)

In arguing that functionality is fundamental to the relevance of contemporary literature,

Podhoretz observes that, curiously, many of the novelists considered to be among the pillars of American fiction could be found slumming in the pages of magazines (126).

Moreover, their nonfiction work was “more interesting, more lively, more penetrating, more intelligent, more forceful, more original — in short, better — than their fiction, which they and everyone else automatically treat with greater respect” (126-27). Taken in isolation, an opinion on the literary quality of magazine writing could be limited to a discussion of taste. However, Podhoretz believes the instinct behind the widespread shift to nonfiction merits further interrogation.

A compulsion among gifted nonfiction storytellers to turn out “second-rate fiction” is, according to Podhoretz, analogous to the novelist’s place vis-à-vis poets in the nineteenth century (130). Then, poetry was the “sanctified genre” (134), exploring life’s deeper truths, while the novel was an emerging form tainted with the muck of the everyday. Eventually, though, the novel “flourished because it remained in touch with the world around it, while the poets were busy transcending the mundane and the prosaic”

(134). Just as the novel usurped poetry, Podhoretz argues the most vital writing of the late

1950s could not be found in novels, but in magazines (137).

Unlike novelists, who Podhoretz believes are embracing the same imaginative terrain that marginalized nineteenth century poets, magazine articles possess a here-and- now practicality that appeals to contemporary readers. Confronted by a proliferation of media options, readers require more justification than ever to commit energy to a given text. Magazine articles, which begin with a news hook and continually work to maintain the attention of potentially fickle readers, are well suited to flourish in such conditions. A magazine article, as Podhoretz explains, “still has to sell itself to a reader who wants to be told why he should bother pushing his way through it when there are so many other claims on his attention” (137). Where readers once relied on novels to help illuminate and interpret society’s inner-workings, Podhoretz argues that by 1958 the same role is being filled by magazine articles. Rather than engage in a debate about the relative merits of various literary genres, he concludes by calling for a breakdown in genre distinctions.

The most useful outcome for readers and writers alike, he suggests, “is a return to the old idea of literature as a category that includes the best writing on any subject in any form”

(142). Recasting distinctions between fact and fiction, he believes, would grant nonfiction more liberty to explore a wider range of literary possibilities, while also helping fiction avoid the risk of being marginalized as culture continues a turn towards the pragmatic.

The New Journalism: The Underground Press, the Artists of Nonfiction, and Changes in the Established Media

As if on cue, the emergence of the so-called New Journalism in the following decade seemed to fulfill Podhoretz’s appeal. In the 1960s, a full-scale blurring of the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction occurred, spearheaded by widely read writers such as Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion,

Gay Talese and others. In the social upheaval of the time, an urge to convey reality by

20 any means possible opened the door to using literary devices that were traditionally the purview of fiction writers. In the process many journalistic conventions, such as the appearance of objectivity, were reinterpreted as unnecessarily constraining. An evolution in the practice of nonfiction storytelling is traced in a 1971 study, The New Journalism:

The Underground Press, the Artists of Nonfiction, and Changes in the Established Media.

In one of the earliest book-length treatments of an ongoing shift in journalism practices, author Michael Johnson argues the development of the New Journalism is an extension of revolutionary social changes in the 1960s. Politically minded, the work focuses on situating the role of an emerging liberal underground press against the conservatism of the mainstream media. A broad exploration of the various innovations in journalism in the 1960s, the work’s specific analysis of the New Journalism is limited to a single chapter. In exploring the role of the writer in nonfiction texts, Johnson does remark that in terms of understanding the New Journalism it is “the writing itself — its style and technique its expression of the writer as a person and its record of human event — that is central” (xii). A shift towards accepting the writer’s presence in nonfiction works is,

Johnson argues, a natural evolution that parallels other literary and cultural developments that arose during the 1960s.

The New Journalism: With an Anthology

In a seminal 1973 collection The New Journalism Tom Wolfe claims the New

Journalism, a hybrid literary form nestled between fact and fiction, has supplanted the novel as the most significant literature of the time. Admittedly polemical, Wolfe supports his proclamation by invoking similarities between the novel’s emergence in the mid- nineteenth century and the New Journalism’s rise in the 1960s. Just as Podhoretz

21 describes poetry ceding the realm of the everyday to the novel, Wolfe sees the same abdication of the here and now happening among contemporary novelists, who largely abandoned realistic subject matter in favor of “novels of ideas” (29). As such, he believes journalists in the 1960s were presented with an opportunity to engage “the richest terrain of the novel: namely, society, the social tableau, manners and morals, the whole business of ‘the way we live now’ ” (29). Concurrent with assuming the reins of social realism,

Wolfe also contends that journalists seized on the literary techniques that give the realistic novel its “unique power” (29).

The literary force of the realistic novel, Wolfe contends, is predicated on four main devices:

1) Scene-by-scene construction, or the telling of a story by moving from one scene

to another with little historical narrative. Through this technique readers are

offered insight into events as they unfold. As an extension of this device, Wolfe

details the “sometimes extraordinary feats of reporting” undertaken by new

journalists in an attempt to be present for key events (31).

2) Dialogue. To effectively capture a given scene Wolfe details the considerable

efforts undertaken by journalists to accomplish so-called saturation reporting. As

a product of sheer time spent, new journalists are often in a position to reconstruct

authentic conversations. Wolfe submits that recording “realistic dialogue involves

the reader more completely … and defines character more quickly and effectively

than any other single device” (31).

3) Third-person point of view, or presenting a scene from the perspective of a

character that is outside the writer’s own consciousness. The most controversial of

the storytelling techniques used by new journalists, a third-person perspective

breaks from a traditional journalistic approach, which is limited to a reporter’s

single frame of reference. In works of New Journalism scenes are presented

through the eyes of different characters. Though contested by critics, proponents

of the device maintain that in-depth interviewing of a subject about their thoughts

and emotions during a given event expands a journalist’s literary license. Using a

third-person perspective, Wolfe insists, enriches journalistic narrative by “giving

the reader the feeling of being inside the character’s mind and experiencing the

emotional reality of the scene” (32).

4) Status details, or the recording of specific aspects of the everyday. Chronicling

details, such as dress, gestures, and behavior that are symbolic of social standing,

Wolfe believes, “lies as close to the center of the power of realism as any other

device in literature” (32).

In Wolfe’s estimation the use of realistic techniques in the early days of the novel was as profound a development as “the introduction of electricity into machine technology” (34).

By adopting the devices of realism, he believes new journalists seized upon the wellspring of literature’s ability to involve readers in a story. Although such a bold claim is left unsubstantiated, Wolfe is undeterred in declaring, “the effect of realism on the emotions was something that had never been conceived of before” (34). In conjunction with the benefits of appropriating realistic techniques, Wolfe also submits the innate power of fact gives nonfiction an inherent edge over fiction. In terms of reader involvement, nonfiction’s claim to truth heightens a text’s significance. Compared to the fictional novel, Wolfe contends that nonfiction “enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-

23 in, one almost forgets what a power it has: the simple fact that he reader knows all this actually happened” (34).

The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel

In The Mythopoeic Reality (1976) Mas’ud Zavarzadeh takes a more theoretical approach than Wolfe in examining the relationship between fact and fiction in the nonfiction novel. Like Podhoretz and Wolfe, though, Zavarzadeh too believes that fundamental changes in postwar American society are responsible for the emergence of a new hybrid literary form. To ground his argument, Zavarzadeh begins by considering historical shifts in the cultural function of storytelling. He proposes that in agrarian times narrative offers order and meaning, usefully structuring an otherwise chaotic world.

Theological as well as teleological, narratives can explain the mysteries of existence, functioning to “justify the ways of God to men” (6). In a shift to industrialized society the purpose of narrative transitions from explaining the relationship of humans to the divine to more secular concerns centered on the individual. Remaining constant, however, is the totalizing nature of the narratives. In both agrarian and industrialized societies,

Zavarzadeh submits, narrative seeks to offer a comprehensive explanation of the world, an approach still informed by a classical belief that life is comprehensible by the rational mind. In the traditional novel, for instance, he posits that causes have effects and that even seemingly random events are instilled with purpose and meaning. Experience, he explains, is “organized causally in a linear plot, with careful exposition, logical development, and the strong closural effects of completeness, resolution, and stability”

(6). For a reader in an industrial age, Zavarzadeh proposes the practical effect of such ordering is to provide a comforting certainty.

In postindustrial culture, however, Zavarzadeh argues that reality becomes stranger than fiction, a shift that robs the traditional novel’s totalizing worldview of its force and function. Based largely on the effects of technological and scientific advances since World War II, Zavarzadeh sees a transformation in the lived experience of western cultures. Whereas previous cultural shifts were evolutionary, changes in postwar America resulting from technology’s new pervasiveness are a marked break from the past, a sea change in the way people engage the world. A proliferation of media availability and accessibility makes a multitude of realities newly possible. Under conditions of such media saturation the authority of any single narrative to forward a comprehensive worldview is undermined by the omnipresent challenge of rival narratives. Meanwhile, a postmodern awareness about the indeterminacy of truth — grounded in part in scientific advances such as Einstein’s theory of relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle — further erodes any claims to certainty (Zavarzadeh 14-15). He goes on to explain:

The scientific discoveries of the recent past have overthrown the traditional view of

facts as the understandable, tame, verifiable, and familiar sunny core of reality,

which provide a touchstone for man’s experience of the external world, and instead

have revealed them to be as wild, indeterminate, arbitrary, dark, and elusive as the

most outrageous fantasies of speculative fiction. (21)

In a newly destabilized world attempts to offer a unified vision of reality, such as those made in the traditional novel, are rendered meaningless. Under such conditions distinctions between fact and fiction are also blurred, creating a need for narratives that can negotiate a fragmented cultural reality.

With the totalizing novel an “anemic genre” that is no longer able to order and interpret experience (32), Zavarzadeh proposes the narrative approach most relevant to postwar America is that taken by the nonfiction novel. Rather than impose an order onto the chaos of events, the nonfiction novel, as conceived by Zavarzadeh, is non-interpretive

(42). While the writer selects material that is included and excluded in the nonfiction novel, the chosen facts are “not a means for fleshing out his epiphanic vision of the ultimate structure of reality but an end in themselves” (43). In contrast to the traditional novel, the nonfiction novel is “written not about but in facts” (46). In a post-industrial moment in which experience is fragmented and an outlandish reality of moon landings, nuclear bombs and political assassinations is stranger than fiction, the imaginary world of the totalizing novel fails to resonate with contemporary readers:

Epistemologically, the nonfiction novel is rooted in the idea that the experiencing

mind, confronted with the impossibility of reaching a total view of contemporary

life and the unavailability of any communal values which could endow experience

with a shared significance is left with a stripped reality: the facts of the phenomenal

world of events, its surfaces and appearances. (225)

Under such conditions, Zavarzadeh proposes the neutral approach to facts taken in the nonfiction novel is more meaningful in the contemporary moment. Readers, therefore, are drawn to narratives written with “zero degree of interpretation” (3), an approach that works to allay a suspicion of literature, which attempts to offer a comprehensive worldview.

The nonfiction novel’s position as the literary form most befitting the postwar period is grounded in an ability to blend the factual and the fictional in a narrative mode

Zavarzadeh dubs “fictual” (56). In his terms, most traditional narratives are

“monoreferential” (55-56). For a fictional text monoreferentiality indicates that meaning is found internally in a self-contained world constructed by the novelist. In nonfiction work such as biography and history the direction of the monoreferential mode is outward, relying on verifiable facts that exist beyond the text. In the nonfiction novel the “self- referential” and “out-referential” modes are merged to form a “bireferential” narrative

(56). Free from the restraints of an allegiance to either fact or fiction, bireferential narratives are able to closely resemble the lived experience of postwar America. As

Zavarzadeh explains, a bireferential work has the “shapeliness of fiction and the authority of reality usually reserved for factual narrative but transcends both, becoming the concrete narrative correlative for the fictuality of the present times” (57). In erasing distinctions between objective and subjective, Zavarzadeh argues the nonfiction novel emerges as the literary form best able to engage the ambiguity of contemporary experience.

Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and The Nonfiction Novel

In broad terms, John Hollowell’s 1977 study Fact & Fiction agrees with

Zavarzadeh’s hypothesis that a changing social reality in postwar America is responsible for a shift towards fact-based narratives in the 1960s. While the Mythopoeic Reality is largely theoretical, Hollowell offers a more pragmatic consideration of how the social turbulence of the decade fostered conditions appropriate for nonfiction work to flourish.

Examining the forces influencing writers in the 1960s, Hollowell argues that a new strangeness to life and events created a need among readers and writers to better

27 understand the suddenly unfamiliar morals, manners, codes and norms of a rapidly changing world (10).

The nonfiction novel — a literary form blending the techniques of fiction writers with a journalistic interest in real life — emerged, according to Hollowell, to fill a void in contemporary literature. The hybrid nature of the literary offering, he submits, allows for a practical mediation of “two dilemmas faced by novelists: (1) how to find a form more closely attuned to the altered nature of reality in America than the conventional realistic novel; and (2) how to secure and maintain an audience” (14). Similar to Zavarzadeh,

Hollowell sees a clear break between life in postwar America and earlier eras.

Specifically, he argues the lived experience in the 1960s assumed a new strangeness that functioned to blur previously well-demarcated distinctions between fact and fiction. As such, writers hesitated to adopt the omniscient voice of the traditional novel, opting instead for a first-person account of events. While more limited in perspective, the move granted narratives a new authority grounded in the writer’s direct engagement in proceedings (15). Steeped in a tradition in which the function of literature is, at least in part, to explain a society to itself, many writers turned to nonfiction as the most useful literary response to the current social conditions. For novelists, the need to invent fictitious plots and characters became less necessary as real-world stories provided an abundance of source material that resonated with readers struggling to understand the ramifications and significance of the events of daily life (10).

In attempting to define the genre of the nonfiction novel, Hollowell identifies the shaping presence of the writer as a feature common to the form. In opposition to

Zavarzadeh’s contention that nonfiction’s authority is rooted in its non-interpretive

28 approach, Hollowell submits that authorial subjectivity is vital to the genre’s literary force. The finest examples of literary nonfiction, he argues, “reveal a moral vision that may serve as a guide to the persistent human dilemmas common to … all eras” (16).

Although personal vision is a trait more often associated with the traditional novel,

Hollowell believes the layering of individual perspective onto the facts of contemporary experience is a powerful mixture that proved especially useful in the 1960s. Indeed, a popular embrace of the New Journalism by both readers and writers combined to cause fundamental and persistent changes in the production and reception of nonfiction (45-46).

Explains Hollowell: “by the end of the sixties there was little doubt that the varieties of reporting called ‘new journalism,’ ‘the nonfiction novel,’ and ‘the literature of fact’ had stimulated a widespread reevaluation of traditional journalistic practice” (45). Mirroring the decade’s social upheaval, the New Journalism is cast as part of a broad revolution in reading practices (46). Demarcations in the minds of readers and writers that had long separated objective nonfiction work from subjective fictional texts were blurred. As such,

Hollowell argues the emergence of the New Journalism participated in an evolution in the reading public’s ability to negotiate the grey area between fact and fiction in journalistic works. While conventional journalism still has a place in covering daily or breaking news, a heightened sophistication among readers also allowed for more literary journalistic offerings to become an acceptable form of nonfiction writing.

The Literature of Fact

In The Literature of Fact (1980), Ronald Weber reviews much of the earlier critical work done on the New Journalism. Similar to critics such as Zavarzadeh and

Wolfe, Weber too sees literary nonfiction in the postwar decades not as a new genre, but

29 as writing that follows in a tradition of reportorial journalism stretching back to the nineteenth century (5). Where other critics, though, are inclined to characterize the popular movement towards fact-based offerings as having profound consequences for the present and future of literature, Weber is more cautious about the significance and possibilities of nonfiction work.

As with much of the criticism surrounding nonfiction writing in the decades following the genre’s emergence in the 1960s, Weber’s views can best be understood in the context of a widespread uncertainty about the future of the traditional realistic novel.

As he notes, “the dominant feeling … was that realism was no longer a vigorous literary mode and that the pressing question was where fiction should go, if it was to continue at all, in a decidedly post-realistic period” (11). Indeed, in the postwar decades critical inquiry into the renewed interest in nonfiction is engaged against a backdrop of broader questions about the health of the traditional realistic novel. To varying degrees many critics, similar to Zavarzadeh, see emerging forces such as technology fostering a social condition in which real-world events seem stranger than fiction, a circumstance that saps the realistic novel of its literary force (11). Searching for forms that might more usefully engage the social issues of the time, literature branches into directions such as metafiction, fabulation, and nonfiction (12-13). Unlike fabulation, for example, which attempts to engage real-world issues by abandoning reality, fact-based storytelling takes an opposite tact. By aggressively pursuing facts, nonfiction attempts to depict reality while circumventing a diminishing faith in literary realism that troubles the traditional fictional novel.

Whether literary nonfiction employs realistic techniques more effectively than can realistic novels is, for Weber, a moot point. Despite polemical claims such as Wolfe’s assertion that nonfiction had replaced fiction as “literature’s main event” (Wolfe 9), fictional realism, from Weber’s vantage point, has firmly reasserted itself as a vibrant literary form (44). By 1980, he sees nonfiction as again subordinate to fiction in the literary hierarchy. Still, the genre’s emergence in the postwar decades is not without consequence. For writers, nonfiction’s popularity reestablished the form as a viable literary outlet. Regardless of nonfiction’s place relative to fiction, the legacy of the shift towards fact-based writing fostered a fresh awareness of the literary possibilities available in nonfiction. A newfound acceptance among readers of creative reporting techniques makes nonfiction a newly practical storytelling alternative, an outlet that is especially useful when concerns such as factual authority or immediacy are germane to a narrative.

As useful as nonfiction can be for a writer, Weber nevertheless believes the form has some inherent limitations. In contrast to Zavarzadeh’s argument that non-interpretive narratives, which strive toward an unfiltered transcription of facts, are a more authentic literary reaction to a newly outlandish reality, Weber believes nonfiction narratives still seek to reveal meaning (47-49). Indeed, in the years following the Mythopoeic Reality, critical work on the nonfiction novel devotes significant energy to addressing the ideas and implications of Zavarzadeh’s critical theory (Hellmann ix-x). Weber, for one, rejects

Zavarzadeh’s claims about the non-interpretive nature of nonfiction narratives, submitting that “recent nonfiction writers have sought to reveal meaning every bit as much as the most old-fashioned fiction writers” (48). Unlike Zavarzadeh, who believes the naked recording of facts is fundamental to offering an honest depiction of reality that

31 resonates in the contemporary moment, Weber argues that nonfiction narratives still strive to offer a totalizing worldview. Rather than facts being non-interpretive, he maintains that in nonfiction fact provides the domain in which meaning is sought. In fiction, comparatively, higher literary meaning can be pursued in the entire realm of the imaginative:

Nonfiction can touch the reader in ways fiction never can because of nonfiction’s

commitment to the truth of what can be known about the world. But fiction can

touch us in ways nonfiction never can precisely because of fiction’s commitment to

the truth of what cannot be known about the world but only imagined. (46)

For Weber, then, the literary possibilities of nonfiction are constrained by the genre’s fidelity to fact. Nonfiction writers, he claims, are unable to “go as far in the direction of meaning as fiction writers can precisely because of their commitment to the authority of fact. This commitment is at once their strength, in an historical sense, and their limitation, in a literary sense” (Weber 49). After decades of social turbulence that fostered a widespread appeal of nonfiction stories, Weber recognizes a new cultural stability emerging by the end of the 1970s. Consequently, he sees the literary pendulum swinging back towards fiction, returning fact-based stories to a role that, while more prominent, is once again secondary to fiction (44).

Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction

In Fables of Fact (1981), John Hellmann also attributes the emergence of nonfiction writing in the postwar years to the cultural instability of the time. Confronted by a newly chaotic reality, Hellmann, like Weber, believes literary realism is unable to meaningfully engage, interpret, or bring order to a cultural experience that is ever more

32 fragmented and surreal (8-9). As a response, writers began experimenting with literary forms that could better relate to experience such as fabulation and the New Journalism.

Based on a belief that realistic fiction no longer resonated in the cultural moment, so- called fabulators attempted to avoid the inadequacies of conventional fiction by constructing narratives that were wholly decoupled from contemporary experience. As

Hellmann explains: “Unable to capture American reality through realism, and convinced that America’s problems were now too profound for the social and psychological levels that realism most effectively probed, they sought to create autonomous worlds which would indirectly probe and illuminate the actual one” (10). Paradoxical though it may seem, works of fabulation attempt to gain the freedom to engage reality by abdicating a claim to the real world. Planted firmly in the realm of the imaginative, fabulists use tactics such as allegory and black humor to engage contemporary societal issues (10).

Confronted with the same desire to circumvent a perceived hollowness in realistic fiction, the new journalism embarks in a different direction to reach the same ends. By embracing fact and claiming the real world as subject matter, nonfiction narratives seek to establish a credibility with readers that realistic fiction of the time seems to lack (12).

While fabulation and the New Journalism share a similar response to realism’s diminished literary force, Hellmann argues the major difference between the two is located in the promise made to readers. Unlike realistic fiction, neither needs to convince readers to embrace a simulated reality:

In both forms the writer contracts an agreement with the reader which frees the

former from the need to establish the illusion of reality. In (a) desire to break

through the crisis of credibility in an incredible world, the fiction writer has escaped

the problems of plausibility and fragmentation by the radically simple device of

assuring the reader that he is dealing in pure fantasy. With just as bold a solution,

the new journalist has escaped the same problems by the opposite method,

promising the reader that he is dealing in pure fact. (11)

Where readers may dismiss a fictional attempt to address a surreal or unlikely tale,

Hellmann argues the inherent power of fact shields nonfiction works from the same distrust and disbelief. Knowledge among readers that events actually happened grants nonfiction a license that is inaccessible to fiction.

In Hellmann’s view a shared approach to authorial presence also distinguishes the

New Journalism and fabulation from realistic fiction. In contrast to a traditional novel, which tends to suppress an awareness of the writer in an attempt to maintain an illusion of verisimilitude, the new journalist and the fabulator are unavoidable presences in the text (Hellmann 16). By acknowledging and embracing the author as an active force openly shaping a work, literary nonfiction is effectively free to combine the considerable literary powers of both fact and imagination. The latitude offered by nonfiction’s author- reader contract spurs Hellmann to cast the form as a genre with unique literary powers. In literary nonfiction, he explains, the writer “ties himself inexorably to the actual world but turns his imagination outward to create a meaningful design from his experience of it”

(12). At once, works of literary nonfiction can stake a valid claim to truth, while also constructing a fictive narrative in which a writer can employ a personal vision in an attempt to bring order and meaning to experience (Hellmann x-xi).

The arrival of literary nonfiction into the mainstream of American writing in the

1960s caused a flowering of critical interest in the genre in the late 1970s and early

1980s. An overview of the theoretical concerns of first-generation critics such as

Hollowell, Weber, and Zavarzadeh (Hartsock 253), reveals a preoccupation with the effect, in the mind of the reader, of the genre’s complex relationship between fact and fiction. More recently, studies such as American Carnival show a concern with understanding how emergent influences, such as the proliferation of electronic media, alters the production and reception of fact-based writing. In the following chapters, early scholarship on the effect of nonfiction’s inherent claim to truth on reader response, by critics such Hellmann and Wolfe, provides a critical framework to consider the ideological capacity of recent literary nonfiction.

The Right Stuff

In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager. Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

In The Right Stuff the idea of a ziggurat, an ancient terraced pyramid, is used to illustrate the unforgiving selection process a pilot must survive to qualify for membership in the true brotherhood of fighter jocks. At each level, the number of candidates is whittled down until only a few remain with righteous enough stuff to join the fraternity of fliers at the top of the pyramid. For the purposes of the story, the motif of the ziggurat is used to establish the rarified nature of the pilot protagonists. From a critical perspective, the concept of the ziggurat offers a useful starting point for exploring the ideological workings of the text.

The exalted spot at the top of the pyramid belongs to Chuck Yeager, the first test pilot to break the sound barrier. His place in the pantheon, however, is not a result of his historic trip past the speed of sound, but rather on Yeager’s possession of the “right stuff,” an ineffable mixture of bravery, moxie, skill, cool, and panache that combine to create “the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes” (20). Indeed, so undeniable is Yeager’s righteous stuff that other test pilots, themselves among the chosen brethren, begin to emulate his folksy mannerisms. The description in the epigraph of Yeager’s voice filtering down from the top of the ziggurat offers a fitting analogy for the way in which the text extends an influence outside its own pages. Beyond his clout among pilots,

Yeager, I argue, also embodies the text’s ideology, a value system that legitimates a conservative social order. The concern of this chapter is exploring how Yeager’s valorization works to reinforce the existing cultural power structure by perpetuating a belief in an ethos of self-determination that is fundamental to maintaining capitalism’s de facto place as the economic status quo.3

As a point of departure, cultural critic Doug Kellner’s analysis of retired professional basketball player Michael Jordan offers a useful lens through which to better understand Yeager’s ideological function in The Right Stuff. In “The Sports Spectacle,

Michael Jordan, and Nike” Kellner unpacks Jordan’s place in contemporary western culture. Arguably the world’s greatest athlete, Jordan, when compared to his athletic contemporaries, possesses an unrivalled cultural influence (63). As Kellner contends,

“Jordan had become part of the US mythology, combining the values of individualism, hard work, competition, success, and unparalleled athletic achievement with morality, family values, honesty, and rectitude” (84). At the nexus of sports, commerce, and entertainment, Jordan’s cultural reach is expansive, a breadth that bolsters his potential ideological capacity. Personifying an ethos of individualism, Jordan’s role is virtually pedagogical, offering an imitable champion for the values of the dominant cultural order.

Kellner goes on to assert that Jordan “is the prototypical overachiever, pushing to win at all costs with his eyes on all the possible prizes of the rewards of competition and winning” (88). As a role model, Jordan, Kellner believes, is situated in a privileged position to transfer a behavioral ideal that reproduces and reinforces consumer culture at the level of individual subjectivity:

Jordan embodies national values of hard work, competitiveness, ambition, and

success. As a black superstar, he presents the fantasy that anyone can make it in

the society of competition and status, that one can climb the class ladder and

overcome the limitations of race and class. (74)

The same myth of the American dream Kellner reads into the cultural phenomenon of

Michael Jordan is useful in understanding Yeager’s ideological position in The Right

Stuff. Like Jordan, Yeager’s roots are humble, an up-hollow mining town in the hills of

West Virginia. In establishing his working-class background, Yeager is described as “the boondocker, the boy from the back country, with only a high-school education, no credentials, no cachet or polish of any sort, who took off the feed-store overalls and put on a uniform and climbed into an airplane and lit up the skies over Europe” (32). Unlike

Jordan, Yeager, critically, is not African American. The next chapter on Friday Night

Lights will pick up a consideration of how Jordan, as a black male, is still able to function as an acceptable role model for conservative white readers. The pair, however, does share a working-class background. A poor boy from the sticks of West Virginia, Yeager is a triumphant model that echoes Van Dyke’s claim that with enough dedication and hard work any native-born newsboy can become President. According to Kellner, the

“reproduction of the capitalist ethic” relies on a belief in the pull-yourself-up-by-the- bootstraps mentality represented by Yeager (65).

By idealizing Yeager the text forges him into a source of aspiration, a position of significance within the hegemonic process. In Marxism and Literature, Williams describes an organic hegemony as one that goes beyond the direct socialization of an ideological state apparatus, such as church or school, and into the very fabric of living

(118). He describes the insidious, totalizing nature of the hegemonic process by explaining:

An effective incorporation is usually in practice achieved; indeed to establish and

maintain a class society it must be achieved. But no mere training or pressure is

truly hegemonic. The true condition of hegemony is effective self-identification

with the hegemonic forms: a specific and internalized ‘socialization’ which is

expected to be positive but which, if that is not possible will rest on a (resigned)

recognition of the inevitable and the necessary. (118)

In casting Yeager as a utopian figure, The Right Stuff stokes a yearning for the ideals he embodies. In so doing the text manufactures a potential self-identification with Yeager and the values he represents. While resistant readings are possible, the overriding promise to the reader is that abiding by an unrelenting individualism will lead to success.

In The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon submits that “Ideology — how a culture represents itself to itself — ‘doxifies’ or naturalizes narrative representation, making it appear as natural or common-sensical … it presents what is really constructed meaning as something inherent in that which is being represented (49). How the ideology encoded in The Right Stuff naturalizes dominant cultural values can be understood by blending Hutcheon’s description of the doxifying process with Williams’ discussion of the “true condition” of hegemony. Considering The Right Stuff in these terms, Yeager becomes a source of desire that can align readers with the value system privileged by the text. A principle such as self-interest, for instance, is encoded in the text in a manner that makes it seem not only natural, but also virtuous. Only a single offering among the myriad products of the culture industries, The Right Stuff nevertheless participates in a

39 process that shapes self-identification and an individual’s relationship to the world; ultimately it is this understanding which constitutes a “sense of reality” for most people in society (Williams 110). As such, the belief system underpinning a dominant cultural order is not consciously accepted or rejected, for such scrutiny is not apprehended as necessary or even possible. Such deeply ingrained assumptions, according to Hutcheon, need to be shaken. Recalling her contention that postmodernism must be concerned with denaturalizing “dominant features of our way of life … that we unthinkingly experience as ‘natural’” (2), a critical analysis of The Right Stuff will investigate the tenet of self- determination, in an attempt to destabilize a mainstay that supports capitalism’s economic dominance.

“The Right Stuff”

In broad strokes, The Right Stuff tells the story of the early days of the space race, a cold war battle between the United States and the Soviet Union for dominion of the stars. The account is reconstructed primarily through the perspective of the military pilots who formed the pool of candidates that would become the first U.S. astronauts. As the foreword explains, the story’s impetus stemmed from an “ordinary curiosity” about what would possess someone to accept the risks inherent in strapping oneself to the top of a rocket and blasting into space (8). Given the enormity of the danger involved, the answer clearly involves the notion of “courage” (8). However, the text claims the brand of courage being examined is more than merely run-of-the-mill valor; rather, it is a blend of fearlessness and ability exalted as the “right stuff.” Existing at a remove from work-a-day mortals, the possessors of the “right stuff” are separated from the masses in terms that are often mythical:

No, the idea here (in the all-enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should

have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the

line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it

back in the last yawning moment — and then to go up again the next day, and the

next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite — and,

ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to

thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God.” (19-20)

Within the value system of the text, possessing the rarified elixir of the “right stuff” is tantamount to being at the right hand of God. This equation — that the “right stuff” essentially equals virtue — is, I argue, at the ideological core of the work. The implications of this assertion can be better understood by contrasting the characteristics and behavior of those purported to have the right stuff versus those found lacking.

Ostensibly, the exalted form of bravery tagged as the “right stuff” involves the sort of death-defying courage it takes to become an aviator in the face of statistics that say nearly one in four career Navy pilots will die in an aircraft accident (18). However, a further unpacking of the “right stuff” reveals more ideological significance than is suggested by the mere idea of courage. Foremost is a pervasive androcentrism that accompanies most descriptions of the “right stuff”. In one explicit discussion of those

“left behind” versus those who continue to climb the ziggurat the defining quality is distinguished as “nothing less than manhood itself” (22). In this patriarchal scheme, women are entirely excluded from the equation. What’s at stake in possessing the “right stuff” is further characterized as “manliness, manhood, manly courage… there was something ancient, primordial, irresistible about the challenge of this stuff, no matter

41 what a sophisticated and rational age one might think he lived in” (22). At once, the

“right stuff” is marked as a quality that is both inherent in the bearer and fundamentally masculine in nature. In the math of the text, the “right stuff” is not only equivalent to virtue, but virtue is shown to be an exclusively male quality.

The value system of The Right Stuff also perpetuates the Enlightenment notion that “man” is the centre of the universe. As noted in the foreword, the story articulates certain matters that “the very code of the pilots rules off limits in conversation” (9). But what is this mysterious “code”? A cursory reading suggests it is confined to the subculture of courageous naval aviators who “shoot dice with death” (25). A more critical examination, however, shows it is founded on a strident individualism that not only places “man” at the center of the universe, but also offers a specific vision of the type of man worthy of the position. Indeed, the ideological lesson embedded in the text asserts that the only worthwhile man is one who is ever in control — of technology, of nature, and of oneself. To be permanently in control and active in determining one’s fate is to be strong. Any indication of passivity, meanwhile, is to be weak, feminine, and avoided.

From the outset, the text works to establish the virtues of individualism and control. Underlying an extended discussion of death in the opening chapter is a suggestion that mortality is not capricious, but a function of merit. Consider, for instance, the “bad string” that befalls Pete Conrad’s training squadron at the Pax River base (16).

The death toll for trainees, we learn, is staggering. In one example, sixty-two pilots are said to die in a 36-week period. In a different 11-week span, training accidents claim another twenty-two pilots (18). Indeed, the opening vignette describes Jane Conrad waiting for a “death messenger” to come bearing news that her husband is dead. Pete, she

42 learns, is safe, but another young pilot, Bud Jennings, has been decapitated in a fiery crash into a swamp (12-13). A few pages later a detailed description is offered of the death of Ted Whelan, a pilot who dies after his parachute malfunctions (17). In all, the first chapter details the deaths of five trainees, while referencing five other pilots who were also killed.

In the following chapter the pilots’ measured reaction to the deaths of friends and colleagues underscores the tenet of self-reliance that runs throughout the work. Death does not elicit compassion; rather it is another occasion that solidifies the importance of control and the pre-eminence of the individual. Consider, for example, the rationalizations for the deaths of Whelan and Jennings.

“There are no accidents and no fatal flaws in the machines; there are only pilots

with the wrong stuff. (I.e., blind Fate can’t kill me.) When Bud Jennings crashed

and burned in the swamps at Jacksonville, the other pilots in Pete Conrad’s

squadron said: How could he have been so stupid?” (24)

In Whelan’s case, although many pilots are first-hand witnesses to his death, the reaction is equally bloodless. Instead of spawning sympathy, his death is regarded as evidence that he lacked righteous enough stuff to escape a tight corner. As he fell, Whelan, the pilots figure, had up to twenty seconds to disengage from the seat and open his parachute manually. “Why just stare at the scenery coming up to smack you in the face! And everyone nodded. (he failed—but I wouldn’t have!)” (25). In these and other moments, the active ingredient in the “right stuff” is control. If Jennings had followed the manual, he would have prevented carbon dioxide from entering the cockpit, thereby preventing the crash. If Whelan had checked his parachute rig or had the wherewithal to disengage

43 from his seat, he would have survived. In the value system of The Right Stuff, fallibility is unacceptable and accidents are for the weak. Those with righteous stuff are always in control, always exercising a mastery over nature, technology, even mortality, regardless of the situation.

Chuck Yeager

Among the truly righteous, Yeager is the ideal by which all others are measured.

Literally and figuratively, Yeager is positioned at the apex of the brotherhood. He resides

“on the dome of the world”, at Edwards Air Force Base, a testing site in the high desert of

California originally known as Muroc Field (34). Explicitly, the text elevates Yeager to the summit of the ziggurat with passages such as: “everyone knew the name of the individual who ranked foremost in the Olympus, the ace of all aces, as it were, among the true brothers of the right stuff” (27). Implicitly, Yeager’s role as an ideological archetype is reinforced by depictions that show him to be permanently active, in control, and self- reliant. While others are dependent on external validation, require assistance, and bow to outside authority, an entirely self-contained Yeager determines his own fate.

The mythologizing of Yeager begins on his introduction, which invokes the authority of airline pilots (30-31). Commonplace as it is, flying is nevertheless an unnatural act for a human being. As such, airline passengers grant an implicit trust to the pilot, who assumes a gravity-defying omnipotence during flight. Filtering down from above, the pilot’s disembodied voice on the intercom contains wisdom and powerful understanding, the source being in complete control of the craft, the skies, and the lives of those on board. As for this voice, this omniscient voice, the text makes the remarkable claim that “it may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically

Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country,” and it is the voice of Chuck Yeager (32). Such is the undeniable righteousness of Yeager’s stuff, the text submits, that pilots all over the country adopted his speech patterns, folksy phrasing, and West Virginia drawl. Supposedly possessors of awesome power and control, pilots are shown to be merely derivative. In effect, the text works to transfer the virtues of the omnipotent pilot onto Yeager. He is presented as a Platonic ideal, while others are just a copy of copy.

And that voice … started drifting down from on high. At first the tower at

Edwards began to notice that all of a sudden there were an awful lot of test pilots

up there with West Virginia drawls. And pretty soon there were an awful lot of

fighter pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. The air space over Edwards was

getting so caint-hardly super-cool day by day, it was terrible. And then that

lollygaggin’ poker-hollow air space began to spread, because the test pilots and

fighter pilots from Edwards were considered the pick of the litter and had a cachet

all their own, wherever they went, and other towers and other controllers began to

notice that it was getting awfully drawly and down-home up there, although they

didn’t know exactly why. And then, because the military is the training ground for

practically all airline pilots, it spread further, until airline passengers all over

America began to hear that awshuckin’ driftin’ gone-fishin’ Mud River voice

coming from the cockpit ... (47)

The particular magic of Yeager’s up-hollow West Virginia drawl that inspires such imitation is, I argue, the underlying control, or at least the illusion of control, implied by his unflappable calm. In the world of The Right Stuff, the exemplary model of conduct is

45 the self-possessed individual. To need outside assistance, according to the text, is irreconcilable with this belief: “… to declare an emergency, one first had to reach that conclusion in his own mind, which to the young pilot was the same as saying: ‘A minute ago I still had it—now I need your help!” (23-24). On the spectrum of right stuff to wrong stuff, exhibiting panic is an even graver sin than needing assistance. Indeed, in the value system of the text death is preferable to panic. When a pilot, for example, is asked by a controller if help is needed, the text asserts: “This would rouse him!—to say:

‘Negative, negative, Whiskey Kilo Two Eight is not declaring an emergency.’ Kaboom.

Believers in the right stuff would rather crash and burn” (24). Such extreme stoicism becomes even more valued as the stakes rise. During combat, “chattering” or “jabbering” on the radio is depicted as, “one of the greatest sins” (27). In one stark example, “A Navy pilot (in legend, at any rate) began shouting, ‘I’ve got a MiG at zero! A MiG at zero!’ — meaning that it had maneuvered in behind him and was locked in on his tail. An irritated voice cut in and said, ‘Shut up and die like an aviator” (27).

As the archetype of the ideal individual, Yeager naturally does not jabber. He is exclusively depicted as in control, a distinction that becomes more apparent in contrast to the behavior of the Mercury astronauts. Far from panicking or needing help, for Yeager control is always possible regardless of how extreme the situation. A pair of examples offered from his time flying “chase” for other test pilots underscores the extent of

Yeager’s dominion over his world. In the first instance, Yeager is at 20,000 feet when he notices the test plane flying erratically. Upon reaching the other pilot on the radio, Yeager instantly and correctly ascertains the problem. The pilot is suffering from a lack of oxygen, a dangerous condition known as hypoxia. Using a tactic that “only he could have

46 pulled off” Yeager snaps the other pilot to attention, gaining his cooperation by yelling into the microphone (44). The incongruity of the legendary Yeager both jabbering and asking for help pierces the pilot’s hypoxic state and he follows Yeager down to a safe altitude, saving his own life in the process. In a second scenario, Yeager is again flying chase, this time for a fellow test pilot, Bill Bridgeman, who is effectively blind, his windows iced over, in a plane that is out of fuel. Like a guardian angel, Yeager stays on his wing talking him down, “as if he knew that ol’ Skyrocket like the back of his hand… and this was a jes a little ol’ fishin’ trip on the Mud River… and there was jes the two of

‘em havin’ a little poker-hollow fun in the sun…” (47). Such examples illustrate Yeager’s unremitting control regardless of how dire a situation.

The portrayals of Yeager’s exploits reinforce his singular nature. Consider the first instance, in which the ruse Yeager uses is described as a tactic that “only” he could have accomplished. Yeager’s role in saving the other pilot is undeniable, yet the claim that he alone could have used the gambit warrants further consideration. Parsing the incident shows Yeager is unfailingly active rather than passive, successfully dictating how each moment will unfold. His choices, meanwhile, lead directly to safe resolutions of potentially fatal circumstances. First, Yeager recognizes “the man veering off”, rather than being told or otherwise externally alerted (44). Next, he instantly and expertly grasps the problem “as soon as he reached him on the radio” (44). Following his correct diagnosis, he strikes upon the ultimately successful ruse of yelling into the microphone for help. For another pilot, yelling and asking for help would violate the unwritten aviator code twice over. In Yeager’s case, however, disregarding convention reinforces his singularity. Rules that limit others are of no consequence to Yeager, whose only

47 governance comes from within. Positioned at the center of the universe, the world conforms to Yeager he does not conform to the world. For readers, such primacy offers an ideological template for successful conduct. Yeager is triumphant in situations that would end in disaster without his involvement. An aspirational position in the text is punctuated by his signature move a “slow roll sixty feet off the deck” (47). Encased in an otherwise non-descript plane, Yeager’s victory roll allows him to be identified, reaffirming his preeminent standing among pilots.

The second scenario involving Bridgeman is similarly distinguished by Yeager’s ceaseless initiative. In every instance, he is again central and active, a predominance supported even in the grammar of the passage. Yeager, in grammatical terms, is positioned as the subject of sentences; his involvement consistently described using active voice. Rather than Bridgeman’s plane being approached by Yeager, it is Yeager who “drew alongside” Bridgeman. Likewise, the text ensures it is Yeager who “told

Bridgeman” what moves to make, instead of Bridgeman being told by Yeager (47).

Following the event’s successful outcome, it seems “perfectly natural” for Yeager to call

Bridgeman “son”, despite being seven years his junior. In the hierarchy of The Right Stuff

Yeager is ever preeminent, the righteousness of his stuff unwilling to be contained by even established conventions such as seniority.

The virtues of control are again extolled after Yeager breaks his ribs two days before his trip past the sound barrier (37). Despite the historic significance of the test flight, he embarks on a drunken horseback ride through the desert. When it goes wrong, however, he does not allow the injury to jeopardize his place on the flight. Unable to close the hatch of the test rocket with broken ribs, he manages the situation by jury-

48 rigging a broomstick handle to provide the leverage necessary to snap the door shut and completes the flight without a hitch (38-39). Once again, Yeager’s success illustrates the merits of being in control. He does what he wants, when he wants and relies on his own merits and ingenuity to create the best possible outcome. While the text valorizes his exploits, any negative consequences stemming from such naked self-interest are left unexplored. For instance, given the importance of the transonic tests and the millions spent developing the X-1, Yeager’s broken ribs could well have compromised the flight.

The possibility that his actions could be construed as selfish is not considered. Instead,

Yeager is portrayed heroically, his actions having lead to another unequivocal triumph.

The ideological lesson of the moment is ratified by his God-like depiction in the stratosphere. He is a “master of the sky” reveling in “a king’s solitude, unique and inviolate, above the dome of the world” (40).

The text’s closing vignette, a harrowing 104,000-foot fall through the air, encapsulates the ideals embodied by Yeager. After a disorienting tumble, Yeager ejects out of his rocket ship only to be smashed in the face by the seat after it catches in the parachute lines. Compounding the calamity of hurtling towards the ground, bloodied and knocked silly, Yeager’s head is also on fire, engulfed in flames fed by a combination of rocket fuel and pure oxygen from his flight suit (260). Despite the dire circumstances,

Yeager remains poised. Head ablaze and seconds from certain death, he has the wherewithal to jam “his hand in through the hole in the visor” trying to “create an air scoop with it to bring air to his mouth” (260). Upon landing intact, Yeager cuts off his flight suit and the burned flesh on his hand with a knife borrowed from a passing motorist who witnessed the fall. As Yeager peels the melted suit from his body, the passerby

49 retches from the sight of the injuries: “It’s too much for him, the poor bastard. He looks up at Yeager. His eyes open and his mouth opens. All the glue has come undone. He can’t hold it together any longer” (261). The scene reinforces the separation between

Yeager and an average citizen. The motorist is unable to even watch what a stoic Yeager bears without complaint. His righteous stuff sets him apart from mere mortals, faceless masses described as the “poor souls who will soon be waking up and trudging out of their minute rectangles and inching along their little noodle highways toward whatever slots and grooves make up their every day lives—” (26). The final image of Yeager in the desert confirms his superhuman status: “standing erect with his parachute rolled up and his helmet in the crook of his arm, right out of the manual, and staring at them quite levelly out of what was left of his face, as if they had had an appointment and he was on time” (261). After flying to the edge of space, punching out of his plane, and plummeting to earth while fighting an unholy fire, Yeager still epitomizes control. Standing tall and proud, he is at all moments without weakness, a vision out of a Navy recruiting poster.

Taken together, the depictions of Yeager create an invincible figure. Alluring certainly, yet unattainable in reality.

Lab Rats

A shift in focus from Yeager to the Mercury Astronauts further delineates the values privileged by the text. Ostensibly heroes, the astronauts are often depicted as passive and, unlike Yeager, they are not always in control of their own world. Simply put, they are not always active, but things are done to them, a stark contrast to the self- determination that distinguishes Yeager. The chapter titles flag the differences. The heading of chapter three, “Yeager,” is immediately suggestive of the iconic nature of a

50 singular character (30). Juxtaposed against the next chapter, “The Lab Rat,” leaves little doubt about the text’s ideological pecking order. As the focus of the story transitions to

Project Mercury, unflattering portrayals of the astronauts push the reader to identify with

Yeager. Depictions of the astronauts are made warts-and-all, a markedly different choice than is made with Yeager. Where terms such as “master of the sky” (40) exalt Yeager’s god-like status vis-à-vis ordinary people, the astronauts are described with language such as “Spam in a can” (51) that cements them firmly in the ignoble world of the ordinary.

Where Yeager is noble and unique, the astronauts are represented as commodities. In selecting potential astronauts it is noted, “just about any young male college graduate with experience in a physically dangerous pursuit would do” (51). In contrast to the victory-rolling Yeager whose success stems from the control gained by being active, “the astronaut would not be expected to do anything; he only had to be able to take it” (51).

A shift in setting to the astronaut selection process at the Lovelace Clinic further underscores the ideological differences between the astronauts and Yeager. In

Albuquerque, the astronauts’ lack of control is pervasive, extending beyond the outcome of the selection process to dominion over their own bodies. In one example, Pete Conrad is the subject of a test that requires an electric current to be shot through a needle lodged into the muscle at the base of his thumb. When Conrad looks down “his own goddamned hand!” was contracting and releasing at “an absolutely furious rate, faster than he could have ever made it do so on its own, and there seemed to be nothing that he, with his own mind and his own central nervous system, could do to stop his own hand or even slow it down” (60). Added to which indignity, despite being the test subject, Conrad notes the doctor’s “weren’t even looking at him. They were looking—at the meter” (60). Far from

51 being at the centre of the universe, the astronauts are deprived of even sovereignty over their person. Furthermore, even when Conrad is the centre of attention an inanimate meter trumps his importance. The ignominy is extended further through a degrading series of tests that include rectal examinations, masturbation, stool samples, and enemas.

In sharp contrast to Yeager’s spot “at the dome of the world”, the astronauts’ worth is determined by “various things being shoved up your tail” (61).

Further punctuating Yeager’s singularity are representations of the astronauts as chattel. At a press conference introducing the astronauts to the nation their individual merits are barely an afterthought. As the astronauts are unveiled, “there was such frantic excitement—and their names had not even been mentioned! Yet it didn’t matter in the slightest! They didn’t care whether he was Gus Grissom or Joe Blow!” (69). A disregard for the individual continues throughout the selection process. Stripped of identity each astronaut is assigned “a number. Conrad was ‘Number 7” (62). The indignity of the numbering resonates with the introduction of HAM, one of the chimpanzees also being trained for space flights: “All this time the animals had been known by numbers. He was test subject Number 61” (131). The parallels in the descriptions of the training methods used for each group are unmistakable. For an astronaut:

A considerable part of his training would be what was known as de-conditioning,

de-sensitizing, or adapting out fears. There was a principle in psychology that

maintained that “bad habits, including overstrong emotionality, can be eliminated

by a graded series of exposures to the anxiety-arousing stimulus.” That was what

much of the astronaut training was to be. (107)

The chimps, meanwhile, are subjected to an “operant conditioning” based on the work of behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner:

It took two main forms: the desensitizing or adapting out of the fears that a rocket

flight would ordinarily hold for the animal (just confining an untrained

chimpanzee in a Mercury capsule would have driven him berserk with fear); and

placing the animal in a procedures trainer, a replica of the capsule he would be

inside in flight, and teaching him to respond to lights and buzzers and throw the

proper switches on cue and having him do this day after day until it became a

thoroughly familiar environment, as familiar, routine, and workaday as an office.

(120)

Prodded and programmed, the astronauts serve as useful ideological foils that illuminate

Yeager’s virtues. Contrary to lauding the astronauts, the text aligns them with animals, a comparison that undermines their ideological place in the text. Clearly, they are not the exalted rulers over all they survey, but common, a downgrade that underscores Yeager’s appeal and special status. Where Yeager is mythologized as “the big daddy of the skies”

(47), the astronauts are continuously demystified, their potential heroism debunked.

In discussing Jordan’s cultural significance, Kellner highlights a Gatorade campaign that guided audiences in the 1980s to “Be like Mike”, a slogan that helped establish Jordan “as a role model, as the very icon of excellence and aspiration” (73). In

The Right Stuff, Yeager is cast in the Jordan role, a portrayal that encourages readers to identify with his values. The ideological question is clear: would you rather be an invincible, victory-rolling pilot, cheating death from 104,000-feet or would you rather be passive, strapped in a capsule, laced with wires from head to rectum? In answering

Yeager, the reader becomes aligned with a value system based on self-interest, individualism, and control, ideals that underpin structures such as capitalism and the

“American dream.” While such principles may seem natural, they are, as Hutcheon notes, constructed. In a discussion of how role models influence individual subjectivity, Kellner writes that “superstar celebrities such as Michael Jordan mobilize desire into specific role models, ideals of behavior and values” (89). Viewing Yeager through a similar lens yields a utopian figure that offers a source of potential self-identification for a reader.

The values embodied by Jordan are similarly discernible in H.G. Bissinger’s

Friday Night Lights. Unlike Yeager, however, an alignment with Jordan’s value system does not elevate high school football star Boobie Miles to an ideologically privileged position. To the contrary, Boobie’s story is characterized by the same pervasive despair that distinguishes each of the text’s narratives. Rather than function as a source of aspiration, Boobie offers a marginalized cautionary tale for a conservative readership.

The following chapter investigates the subversive possibilities located in the hopelessness of Friday Night Lights, as well as the process through which the text’s oppositional potential is ultimately contained.

Friday Night Lights

In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams introduces his discussion of hegemony by comparing it with the concept of ideology. For Williams, ideology is a more straightforward proposition, which he describes as “a relatively formal and articulated system of meanings, values, and beliefs, of a kind that can be abstracted as a

‘world-view’ or a ‘class outlook’ ” (109). In contrast, fixing the parameters of the hegemonic process is more difficult. The totalizing nature of hegemony is such that most people in a society are unable to recognize its workings or see to its edges. Indeed,

Williams describes the hegemonic process as constituting “a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives”

(110). Such omnipresence can effectively make the dominant cultural order seem natural, as opposed to a condition that might be resisted or could be changed.

While the all-encompassing nature of the hegemonic process may seem to preclude the possibility for opposition, Williams notes that opposition does indeed exist.

Hegemonic dominance, however, is not easily shaken. Unlike the more fixed character of ideology, hegemony is not static, but an ongoing process that is continually being

“renewed, recreated, defended, and modified” (112). At any time, an interplay occurs between hegemonic and oppositional forces in which threats to the dominant order are deferred, contained and even incorporated. Such fluidity challenges attempts to critically engage the hegemonic process in a manner that does not reduce the discussion to the fixed level of ideology. Indeed, Williams notes “the most interesting and difficult part of any cultural analysis, in complex societies, is that which seeks to grasp the hegemonic in

55 its active and formative but also its transformational processes” (113). In this spirit, this chapter will investigate the potential subversion contained in H.G. Bissinger’s Friday

Night Lights, as well as how the text functions within a process of ideological consolidation.

In the preface to Friday Night Lights, Bissinger explains that the impetus for writing the book was a nagging desire to better understand the communal role of high school sports in certain parts of America (xi). To satisfy his curiosity, Bissinger relocates to Odessa, a West Texas oil patch town hit hard by recessionary conditions in the energy industry in the 1980s. In Odessa, Bissinger finds a place where as many as 20,000 people turn up on a Friday night to watch local teenagers play football. Friday Night Lights is told through a series of interwoven narratives loosely structured around the events of the

1988 Texas high school football season. More specifically, the text focuses on the members of Odessa’s local team, the Permian Panthers, a traditional football powerhouse and one of the favorites to win the 1988 Texas State football championship. In Odessa, football serves as a proxy for the American dream. The blueprint is the same for each.

Hard work will result in success on the field or in the workplace. Such success will lead to glory or wealth, which will ultimately translate into happiness in life. Indeed, the values instilled on the football field can be explicitly seen as a training ground for achieving success in America. Straightforward as the equation may seem, however, the text shows the math is deeply flawed. Results on the football field do not translate into any meaningful fulfillment for those who follow the script. Moreover, regardless of success or failure on the field the defining quality of life in Odessa is shown to be a condition of hopelessness. Indeed, the tension between the essential promise of football

56 to Odessans and the relentless despair of life in Odessa is at the ideological core of the text.

On initial consideration, Friday Night Lights fosters an expectation that a formulaic story is in the offing. From the subject matter to the clichéd tone of the subtitle,

“A Town, A Team, and a Dream,” the text does little to defuse an assumption that the pending story will tell the tale of a scrappy team of overachievers from the dustbowl of

West Texas who overcome a series of adversities to rise up and beat a big city Goliath to win a state championship. In the first chapter, the opening vignette continues to support such an assumption. The setting is early on a mid-August morning in Odessa, where the local high school football team has gathered for the season’s inaugural meeting. The smell of fresh furniture polish lingers symbolically in the air; the pristine condition of the locker room suggests to players that a clean slate exists onto which they can write their own futures. As members of the Panthers listen to their coach’s season opening speech, the text notes that the same scene is simultaneously being played out in hundreds of schools across Texas (24). The text positions Odessa as a stand-in for any town in

Reagan’s America that still yearns for the “sweet nostalgia of the fifties” (33). The message to thousands of players that morning is the same as the one that Coach Gaines delivers to the Panthers: “you guys are special” (24). From that moment on, however, each of the text’s narratives works to reveal the hypocrisy of Gaines’ words.

Far from being special, Permian players, past and present, are treated as chattel.

Such commodification, as will be shown, is put into stark relief when juxtaposed against the rhetoric of football. From an early age, players are sold on the idea that control over events, and by extension life, is possible. The formula is simple. The single-minded

57 pursuit of one’s agenda will allow the self-determined individual to earn success on the field and in life. If victory is not achieved in either arena, the shortcomings of the individual are to blame not the model. As the text progresses, the disheartening realities of life in Odessa show that players have been sold a false bill of goods. Regardless of the subject being explored, the defining quality of each of the narratives in the text is hopelessness. In story after story, the outcome is not triumph, but despair. Taken cumulatively, the persistent futility depicted in the text imparts a sense of unease that is difficult for a reader to avoid.

In Friday Night Lights, a resistant potential surfaces as a reader grapples, consciously or unconsciously, with the latent discomfort created by the hopelessness of each of the narratives. Such despair positions Friday Night Lights to participate in what

Williams designates “structures of feeling” (132), a term used to mark the nascent moments of resistance to a dominant cultural order. While a complete articulation of resistance is not yet possible, structures of feeling contain the seeds of what may eventually become resistance. Williams explains that such structures are “a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange” (131). Given the totalizing nature of the hegemonic process, such moments of resistance are often defused or incorporated before any meaningful opposition is consciously recognized. Still, moving towards an understanding of how the hegemonic process might be resisted is, according to Williams, a work-in-progress to which works of literature can be a messy, real-time participant (133). In such works, the possibility of opposition is more felt than understood. Williams places an emergent resistant awareness in the category of

“practical” as opposed to “official” consciousness (130). The difference between the two, he explains, is the difference between the actual lived experience of a culture and the perceptions of what is thought is being lived (130-31). This gap is usefully illustrated in

Friday Night Lights, which shows the wide distance that exists between the expectations engendered by football and the bleak reality of life in Odessa. The process of reconciling this interval, according to Williams, is part of the formation of a new structure:

There is a frequent tension between the received interpretation and practical

experience. Where this tension can be made direct and explicit, or where

some alternative interpretation is available, we are still within a dimension

of relatively fixed forms. But the tension is often an unease, a stress, a

displacement, a latency: the moment of conscious comparison not yet come,

often not even coming. (130)

The gap between expectation and experience, as Williams points out, does not need to be consciously registered to be ideologically significant. In the context of Friday Night

Lights, such an idea suggests that even if the overarching futility of the text goes unrecognized by the reader, it can still play a part in cultural formation. Even the presence of an unarticulated unease is enough to participate in a moment of potential resistance.

In Marxism and Literature, Williams describes the social features that comprise a cultural system as belonging to one of three main groups: the dominant, residual, and emergent (121-27). To effectively perpetuate itself, a dominant system must be continuously engaged in a process of incorporation and containment of the oppositional potential of the other groups. In an emergent or pre-emergent moment, according to

Williams, any shifts from the dominant order do not have to “await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action” (132). In Friday Night Lights, any pressures that may contribute to limiting hegemonic forces do not take the shape of an explicit message or corrective. Rather, the text’s resistant potential stems from the mere awareness that if this is the world we live in, then something must be wrong.

As a nonfiction work, Friday Night Lights, I argue, is in a privileged position to participate in an emergent moment of resistance to the dominant cultural order. In comparison to fictional works, nonfiction’s enhanced capacity to potentially function as a shaping presence within the hegemonic process stems from several qualities that, in part, differentiate the two literary genres. As Zavarzadeh, Hollowell, and Hellmann each observe, nonfiction’s emergence as a literary force in postwar America is based partially on an ability to help readers negotiate an increasingly complex world. Nonfiction literature, then, may be understood to serve a pedagogical function that helps readers better understand the world in which they live. In “The Article as Art,” Podhoretz touches on the pragmatic impulse that he believes draws readers to nonfiction. In concluding his argument, Podhoretz submits that “we have all, writers and readers alike, come to feel temporarily uncomfortable with the traditional literary forms because they don’t seem practical, designed for ‘use’” (142). If his assertion is directionally accurate and pragmatism does indeed play a part in drawing readers to nonfiction, then such an expectation would seem to foster a receptiveness to nonfiction texts that would not otherwise be present. In the mind of the reader, such fertile ground could offer conditions under which a resistant message might take root.

The subject matter of Friday Night Lights provides the text with a resistant potential that is worth especial consideration. As a book about football, Friday Night

Lights has a populist quality that may attract readers that are seldom exposed to ideologically resistant messages. Football has deep connections with institutions and traditions that support the dominant cultural order in America. Evidence of these associations is abundant. One of the quintessentially American occasions, Thanksgiving, includes watching football as an integral part of a traditional holiday experience. Each year, corporate America lines up to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for each second of advertising during the Superbowl. The championship game of the immensely popular

National Football League offers advertisers a singular annual opportunity to reach a massive audience simultaneously. Similarly, the mythology of the preeminent American family, the Kennedy clan, includes iconic images of the family playing touch football together. In terms of both popularity and cultural relevance, football is widely believed to have replaced baseball as America’s national pastime.

Football’s populist appeal is among the reasons for including Friday Night Lights as a case study in this thesis. The sport’s preferred status in mainstream America may offer the text an appeal to readers that do not typically seek out works that might challenge the dominant cultural order. Rather than affirming a conservative value system, as might be expected and even desired by those drawn to a story about football, Friday

Night Lights could offer these readers a rare instance of exposure to a narrative that resists the hegemonic order. In this way, Friday Night Lights could function as something of an ideological Trojan horse that is able to pass the guard of an unsuspecting conservative readership. Accepting such conditions, whether a reader’s reception of a text

61 is positive or negative is much less meaningful than the fact that the text was read at all.

As Williams discusses, a reader does not need to accept or even recognize the unease created by Friday Night Lights for the text to participate in a structure of feeling. Once read, the experience of a text, and its resistant potential, is like a bell that can’t be unrung.

The possibility for Friday Night Lights to pressure the hegemonic process is enhanced, I argue, by its status as a work of nonfiction. In discussing the merits of the

New Journalism vis-à-vis contemporary fictional novels, Wolfe submits nonfiction’s literary force is heightened by a knowledge the text is based on real events. He proposes that nonfiction “enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost forgets what a power it has: the simple fact that the reader knows all this actually happened” (34).

While Wolfe leaves his assertion about the power of fact-based writing largely unsubstantiated, other critics, such as Zavarzadeh and Hellmann, do explore how a claim to truth made by nonfiction texts might influence reader reception.

Hellmann, for instance, believes an awareness of literary genre participates in shaping the contract that exists between author and reader (11). When engaging literary nonfiction, readers accept the writer as a necessary and unavoidable presence that shapes the narrative. Such acceptance, however, does not relieve the writer from a responsibility to achieve a certain journalistic standard that must be met if a text is to benefit from the authority of fact available to nonfiction works. According to Hellmann, establishing the credibility of a nonfiction narrative is based in part on the author’s “integrity, efforts, and talents as a journalist, as well as his ability to convey these traits” (28). Along with the journalistic skills of the writer, Hellmann also describes other methods a text can use to help legitimize its claim to truth:

An author can make a convincing journalistic contract in a number of ways.

The first, simplest, and very effective method is simply to say so: to have

the book labeled as nonfiction … The author can strengthen this claim by

explaining in framing devices (forewords, afterwords, epilogues, etc.) that

the book adheres completely to his own or others’ observations. He can

develop this into a detailed description of materials available to him, or he

can place various documents and externally verifiable data within the text.

Finally, he can in various ways, such as through unusual self-revelations,

convince the reader of his honesty and trustworthiness. (28-29)

In a given nonfiction text, the legitimacy of the author-reader contract is clearly subjective. While Hellmann does not offer an exhaustive list of techniques that are used to build a narrative’s real-world credibility, the methods he outlines are indicative of strategies that, when taken in totality, help to establish the veracity of a text. The potential for verifiability, as Hellmann notes, is a critical part of establishing an effective journalistic contract. While it is unlikely that most readers will attempt to independently confirm the details of a nonfiction narrative, the authority of a text is still dependent on offering a reader the potential to do so. Similarly, the plausibility of a nonfiction narrative is also based on a reader’s awareness of the robustness of the effort that went into reporting the events of the text. The preface and acknowledgements that frame Friday

Night Lights, for example, attempt to establish the text as a meticulously reported journalistic work that is based on easily verifiable facts. In introducing the work,

Bissinger notes:

I left my job as a newspaper editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer in July 1988

and moved to Odessa two weeks later. The following month I met the

members of the 1988 Permian Panther football team, and for the next four

months I was with them through every practice, every meeting, every game,

to chronicle the highs and lows of being a high school football player in a

town such as this. I went to school with them, and home with them, and

rattlesnake hunting with them, and to church with them, because I was

interested in portraying them as more than just football players, and also

because I liked them. (xiii)

In highlighting his depth of involvement with the Panthers and the town of Odessa,

Bissinger displays a transparency towards facts that functions to build his authorial credibility. He does not merely note that he moved to Odessa for a year, but offers details, such as leaving his editorial job at the Philadelphia Inquirer, that might be easily confirmed or denied. Again, regardless of whether a reader attempts to verify the truth of his claims, by laying the text bare to such potential scrutiny, Bissinger is able to further establish the trustworthiness of his narrative. Indeed, such confidence in reportorial authority is especially effective within the context of the Internet, which facilitates fact- checking to a degree not possible when Friday Night Lights was published in 1989.

Similarly, by including that his time in Odessa involved rattlesnake hunting and church services, Bissinger is able to inform the reader that the text is grounded in a level of intimacy into the life of the team and the town that surpasses what could be achieved by merely attending practices and conducting formal interviews. Indeed, in the acknowledgements, Bissinger notes, “It is hard or me to express the feelings that I have

64 for them (the players), and as I sit here back in the suburbs … I remember how I thought of them at the end, as kids that I adored” (357). By claiming such affection for the

Panther players, Bissinger builds on his bona fides as a credible narrator. The act of caring, in itself, being indicative of a familiarity that could only be achieved through a genuine immersion into the lives of Odessans.

Distinct from the primary text, framing devices such as the preface and the acknowledgements offer an opportunity to strengthen the journalistic contract in a manner unavailable to the main narrative. The use of first-person voice, for example, allows Bissinger a chance to explicitly inform the reader about the depth of his reporting.

By chronicling his commitment to the story, Bissinger effectively pulls back the curtain on the editorial process, an approach that may help to allay potential doubts about his narrative authority. In the preface, Bissinger includes evidence that his understanding of life in Odessa goes beyond that of a mere tourist, noting:

I talked with hundreds of people to try to capture the other aspects of the

town that I had come to explore, the values about race and education and

politics and the economy. Much of what I learned about the town came from

these interviews, but some of it naturally came from the personal experience

of living there, with a wife and five-year-old twin boys. Odessa very much

became home for a year, a place where our kids went to school and we

worked and voted and forged lasting friendships. (xiii)

While doubts about the credibility of the narrative may remain, Bissinger’s description of his immersion into the culture of the town makes it difficult to challenge his version of events. Once the legitimacy of a narrative is ratified, the simple power of facts, as

65 proclaimed by Wolfe, is able to attain a currency in the mind of the reader that is not easily dismissed. In Hellmann’s conception, fact-based writing benefits from the

“impervious force of actual events” (141). In this context, the unavoidable nature of facts can grant nonfiction an elevated capacity to pressure the hegemonic process.

In Friday Night Lights, the inexorable nature of facts contributes to the text’s potential to destabilize a conservative readership’s acceptance of the dominant social order. In the preface, Odessa is positioned as representative of America’s heartland. In explaining his decision to move to Odessa, Bissinger notes, “My heart told me that I would find the answers to all these questions in Odessa, not because it was a Texas town, but an American one” (xiii). If a reader accepts the premise that Friday Night Lights is a faithful depiction of a quintessentially American experience, then the text would seem to contain a heightened capacity to affirm or disrupt ingrained notions about the culturally dominant value system.

Boobie Miles

The resistant potential of the text becomes evident in the story of James “Boobie”

Miles. Standing six feet tall and weighing 200 pounds with an impressive 40-yard dash time of 4.6 seconds, Boobie, as a junior in high school, possessed all of the physical attributes needed to make him one of the top running back prospects in the state of Texas.

As such, college football powerhouses such as Notre Dame, Nebraska and Texas A&M were lining up to recruit him to play for their program. But that was last year. The prologue opens to find Boobie, now a senior, lying in bed on a Friday morning contemplating the importance of that night’s game against Permian’s archrival, the

Midland Lee Rebels. Until recently the focal point of the Panther team and the town of

Odessa, Boobie has been relegated to the ignominy of bench-warming afterthought after suffering a knee injury in the first game of the pre-season.

The treatment of Boobie post-injury is the first of many instances in which the text highlights the commodification of Panther players. Prior to his injury, Boobie is treated as virtual royalty by the townspeople of Odessa. At an annual event, known as the

Watermelon Feed, put on by the Permian booster club to introduce the football team to the Panther faithful, Boobie accepts a boisterous reception from the 800 hundred people on hand “like a prom queen or an Academy Award winner having the first of what would undoubtedly be a lifetime of moments such as these” (51). Receiving star treatment was par for the course for Boobie, who after running for 1,385 yards as a junior was named one of the 10 best running back prospects in the state by Texas Football magazine, a prestigious recruiting publication (64). In Odessa, however, the text shows that the difference between town savior and disposable asset is separated by the thinnest of lines.

For Boobie, the adoration offered at the Watermelon Feed proves to be only as strong as the ligaments in his knee.

The opening line of the prologue underscores the unmerciful nature of the dominant value system that persists throughout the text. In his room on the morning of game day, Boobie, healing from his injury and participating on a limited basis on the field, believes the team’s salvation and his own could be found that night against Midland

Lee, “before thousands of fans who had once anointed him the chosen son, but now mostly thought of him as just another nigger” (1). When healthy, Boobie is assessed in

Christ-like terms, a football messiah sent to deliver Permian to the Promised Land. Once injured, however, his privileged status is not only revoked, but he is denigrated by the

67 harshest of racial epithets. For the reader the stark contrast between the town’s treatment of Boobie before and after his injury is a jarring introduction to the text. The commodification that distinguishes Boobie’s experience in Odessa is made even more explicit in several other moments that follow. For example, as Boobie lay on the field after suffering his knee injury, the scene is described from the perspective of his uncle,

L.V. Miles, who became his guardian when he was seven. Watching in horror from the stands, L.V. wants to believe his nephew will be fine, but he knows “there were too many people around Boobie, looking at his knee as if it were a priceless vase with a suddenly discovered crack that had just made it worthless” (57). Here, Boobie is characterized not as a person, but as a flawed piece of pottery. In a later discussion about what he might do without football, the consideration afforded to Boobie is even more dehumanizing, as some Odessans suggest the best outcome for his life would be to “just do to him what a trainer did to a horse that had pulled up lame at the track, just take out a gun and shoot him to put him out of the misery of a life that no longer had any value” (67). While casting Boobie on par with an animal is irrefutably ignorant, such naked commodification is not, in itself, enough to resist the dominant cultural order. A reader might easily dismiss such moments as unfortunate, but not unexpected examples of racism that are relatively commonplace in backwater towns across the southern States.

To understand how Boobie might function to destabilize the hegemonic order requires a further deconstruction of the signifiers offered by the text. Viewed through the lens of sports, Boobie appears to share many of the same tenets of individualism that distinguish Chuck Yeager. Indeed, on the morning of the game against Midland Lee,

Boobie is described as feeling “good when he woke up in the little room that was his, with the poster of Michael Jordan taped to the wall” (1).

As the only detail offered of Boobie’s inner sanctum, the invocation of Jordan’s image contains a heightened ideological significance that bears unpacking. As Kellner argues,

Jordan personifies the American ideal that success is a function of self-determination

(84). For a white audience, this version of Jordan is, in Kellner’s terms, considered a

“good” black figure (75). However, Kellner also goes on to explore Jordan’s cultural position as a “polysemic signifier who encodes conflicting meanings and values” (74).

Jordan, who has a well-documented history of marital infidelity, gambling, and alleged connections to organized crime can also be read as a threatening figure. On balance, though, Kellner believes that Jordan most often serves as an “icon of positive representations of African Americans” (75). Given the sporting context of Friday Night

Lights, the privileged image of Jordan in the text is, I argue, that of over-achieving role model. Scrubbed of transgressive qualities this aspect of Jordan’s iconography is well known and generally embraced by a conservative audience (Kellner 64). Jordan, as the ultimate competitor, functions to evoke the myth that race and class are merely limitations that the strong-willed overcome on the way to achieving success in America.

A connection that Boobie shares with the indomitable figure of Jordan is extended during the Watermelon Feed when Boobie asserts his self-confident belief that he can do with a football “what Michael Jordan did with a basketball, make heads turn with a certain cut so pure, so instinctive, only God could have given it to him. ‘He can fly and dunk all special ways. I can run and fake all special ways’” (51). Indoctrinated by the rhetoric of football since he was a child, Boobie believes his resounding success on the

69 field to date is a function of his own singularity. Only two months removed from arthroscopic surgery on his knee that has rendered him a shadow of his former athletic self, Boobie maintains an unquestioning belief in the same ethos of self-determination embodied by Jordan and Yeager. His creed is illustrated in an imagined interview he gives to a reporter after a triumphant return to the playing field against Midland Lee. In his daydream, Boobie tells local television viewers, “A person like me can’t be stopped.

If I put it in my mind, they can’t stop me … ain’t gonna stop me” (4). Boobie goes on to envision himself in that night’s game against the Rebels “running down that field in the glow of those Friday night lights with your legs pumping so high they seemed to touch the sky and thousands on their feet cheering wildly as the gap between you and everyone else just got wider and wider and wider” (4). In his idealized scenario, Boobie is set apart, his teammates unmentioned and unnecessary, the distance between him and the rest of the world increasing until he stands alone, a solitary figure victorious in the end zone.

The image is reminiscent of Yeager, at the top of the ziggurat, standing defiant and triumphant in the middle of the desert, his flight suit still smoldering after a 104,000-foot fall from the edge of space.

Unlike Yeager, however, Boobie does not function as a source of aspiration for a conservative readership. While descriptions of Boobie’s athletic determination share similarities with Yeager’s narrative, his position as a poor, under-educated, black man precludes the possibility that his voice could ever be the one filtering down from the top of the ziggurat to become the standard by which all others are measured. The dangerous aspects of Boobie’s blackness are encoded in familiar tropes that are read as threatening by mainstream America. For example, a description of Boobie in his game day uniform,

70 notes that “his helmet was off and he wore a black stocking cap over his head. The arm pads he liked still dangled from his jersey. The towel bearing the legend ‘Terminator X’ from the name of one of the members of the rap group Public Enemy, hung from his waist, spotless and unsullied” (16). For a conservative audience, a black stocking cap, a common item of headwear among young black men, is a signifier that positions the wearer in a lower socio-economic class. Taken in concert with the invocation of the seminal gangster rap group Public Enemy, the depiction of Boobie evokes a negative aura of crime-ridden inner-city housing projects and gang affiliations. Such an image of

Boobie not only serves to perpetuate the dominant cultural order, but his undeniable blackness also limits his capacity to function as a figure of hegemonic resistance.

The type of struggle that Boobie endures, while sad, is a common tale for the underprivileged in America. Within the hegemonic structure, the derailed life of a poor black man is not a particularly meaningful story for a conservative readership. Borrowing a postcolonial term, Boobie is very much the “Other.” In his essay, “The Other Question:

Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism”, Homi K. Bhabha uses the term “ambivalence” to describe the process through which the dominant cultural narrative incorporates the suffering of marginalized groups:

For it is the force of ambivalence that gives the colonial stereotype its currency:

ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures; informs

its strategies of individuation and marginalization; produces that effect of

probabilistic truth and predictability which, for the stereotype, must always be in

excess of what can be empirically proved or logically construed. (95)

Bhabha uses the notion of ambivalence in part to describe how stereotypes are perpetuated across historical and cultural moments. Over time, stereotypes can accrue a depth of usage that makes them seem natural, as opposed to culturally constructed. As such, the force of ambivalence works to co-opt the impulse to trouble stereotypes, as well as the awareness that such a process is necessary or even possible. Ambivalence, therefore, allows for the easy dismissal of marginalized groups.

In Friday Night Lights, Bhabha’s notion of ambivalence can be applied to understand how Boobie’s story, taken on its own, falls short of working towards hegemonic resistance. When Boobie is considered together with past Panther standouts, however, the possibility that Friday Night Lights could participate in a structure of feeling begins to emerge. A profound sadness is attached to each of the past Permian players introduced by the text. Like Boobie, each of them is a star on the football field.

Like his, their lives are also not unfolding as they had hoped. Unlike Boobie, however, the other players are white, a circumstance that troubles the process of ambivalence that allows Boobie to be dismissed. At the booster-sponsored Watermelon Feed, the text introduces Shawn Crow, the starting Panther running back from 1987. Only a year removed from Panther football his toughness on the field is already legendary (49). Crow is slated to be at Texas Christian University on a football scholarship, but a herniated disc sustained in high school means he cannot practice with the team and has stayed in

Odessa. The T.C.U. coaches, the text notes, told him “not to come to school until

January, after he had a chance to rehabilitate. There was no point coming to school just to go to class” (48-49). Such treatment is standard for players like Crow, who skated through high school due to his star status on the football team. For Crow, who needed

72 four attempts to meet the minimum college entry requirement on the Scholastic Aptitude

Test, the implications of his lax relationship to schooling are ominous for his future. After reading a children’s book to a group of elementary school kids to whom he spoke after his senior season, Crow received several letters of thanks. Among the notes, was one from Shauna who tells Crow, “ ‘Even though you have trouble reading, I think you read good. I hope that some day you will become a professional football player’” (50). Added to a scant probability that Crow, already struggling through a litany of injuries, will play professional football, borderline illiteracy will further limit his options later in life.

The blueprint for Crow’s future would seem to be already mapped out by Joe Bob

Bizzell, the “Golden boy of golden boys, the [player] against whom all others were measured” (279). Fifteen years earlier, Bizzell accepted a scholarship to play football for the University of Texas Longhorns. After his freshman year, a combination of injuries and poor off-field choices scuttled his athletic career. Now working in the oilpatch,

Bizzell’s life appears to be profoundly sad. Physically, he is described as looking “weary and exhausted” (281). As a pumpjack operator, his work is “hot and dry and as monotonous as the maddening, slowpoke motion of the pumpjacks themselves” (281).

That Bizzell, Crow, and Boobie have not fulfilled their early promise is not especially remarkable when considered in isolation. As the story continues, however, the text continues to depict a world that is filled with little but sorrow. Regardless of the results on the field, the text shows that eventually everyone loses.

The same pervasive hopelessness that distinguishes the characters’ lives is echoed in the text’s discussion of the town itself. Prospects for life in Odessa were rooted in inauspicious beginnings. Founded by unscrupulous land speculators in the 1880s, Odessa

73 was sold to optimistic homesteaders as a land full of bounty, possibility, and riches.

Rather than the promised utopia, however, the first eastern settlers arrived to find brutality, lawlessness, and thousands of desolate acres, a “gaping land that filled the heart with far more sorrow than it ever did encouragement” (25). When oil was discovered in

West Texas in the early 1920s, the original promises that the land around Odessa would yield a natural bounty proved prophetic. Oil wealth, however, did not improve conditions in the town. In one ranking of the most stressful places to live in America, Odessa ranked seventh out of 286 cities based on rates of “alcoholism, crime, suicide, and divorce” (31).

In a further description from a Dallas newspaper columnist, Odessa was equated to an

“armpit” which, as the local paper noted, “was actually quite a few rungs up from its usual anatomical comparisons with the rectum” (31-32). Indeed, another commentator summed up Odessa’s dismal conditions by describing the community as “the worst town on Earth” (32). Accounts of the inherent despair that distinguishes Odessa are juxtaposed against its standing as part of a so-called real America (xi). As Bissinger notes in the preface, “Odessa is the setting for this book, but it could be anyplace in this vast land”

(xiv). If Odessa is accepted as a proxy for America and life in Odessa is hopeless, then the ideological math of the text suggests a fissure may exist through which subversion of the dominant order is possible.

In The New New Thing, the version of reality represented is one in which the potential for resistance glimpsed in Friday Night Lights is effectively contained. A decade after towns such as oil-price dependent Odessa suffered through economic hardship, America is enthralled by a new gold rush emanating from northern California’s

Silicon Valley. At the epicenter of the boom sits Jim Clark, a software engineer, turned

74 entrepreneur, turned billionaire. In Clark the text offers an ideological return to a

Yeagerian value system, which confirms principles that function to ratify the existing conservative social order.

The New New Thing

In An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith frames the pursuit of individual self-interest as a natural consequence of the human condition. Expounding on the economic and social merits of the division of labor, Smith observes that people, unlike animals, continually require the help of others to efficiently provide for their own needs. Rather than relying on, for instance, the kindness of strangers, Smith believes this assistance is best gained through a process of mutually beneficial exchange. Appealing to the self-interest of a counterparty, Smith offers, is the most effective route to fulfilling your own needs. As he famously explains: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages”

(17). In an economic system predicated on a division of labor, self-interest is the operative force that allows the wheels of commerce to turn smoothly. A butcher may ostensibly supply meat for your dinner, but you effectively put the meal on your own table by trading the fruits of your efforts for the products of another’s labor. A belief in the organizing powers of self-interest, articulated by Smith in 1776, is a fundamental tenet of a capitalist system.

More than 130 years later, Smith’s Enlightenment philosophy is clearly echoed in

Van Dyke’s description of America’s “spirit of self-reliance” (40). Nearly a century after a French audience heard his lectures and more than 200 years after the Wealth of Nations, the same values are still being circulated in Western culture. In Michael Lewis’s The New

New Thing, for example, the text’s billionaire protagonist, Jim Clark, is positioned as the

76 apotheosis of Smith’s ethos of self-interest. The text represents Clark as a master of his own universe, a person who has carved out a life that allows him to do exactly what he wants according to his whims:

He had an animal desire to have what he wanted and not to have what he did not

want. He wanted Silicon Valley to be even more suited than it already was to his

talent for anarchy. He wanted to harness the forces of creation and destruction. He

did not want to manage a large company. He did not even want to be a venture

capitalist who vetted thousands of business plans, backed dozens of companies, and

then sat back with Olympian detachment and hoped that a few became big. He

wanted to create the company that invented the future. Once he’d done that, he

wanted to do it again and again and again and again. For his services he wanted to

be treated better, and paid more, than anyone else. (68)

By conventional standards the degree of autonomy Clark demands over his world would seem unattainable or perhaps even founded on a naïve, unrealistic egoism. Controlling, for instance, the primal forces of creation and destruction is a weighty task for a deity, let alone a software engineer educated at the University of Utah. Nevertheless, the text shows Clark conforming the world to his wishes. His days are spent sailing to the world’s ports, rather than strapped to a keyboard in an office (57). Silicon Valley dealmakers bend to his demands for more lucrative financial terms than those given to any other technology entrepreneur (71). His role, meanwhile, as the creative force behind start-up companies allows him to reap the financial rewards of his ideas without participating in the heavy lifting needed to make his concepts a reality (181).

Prodigious success in the corporate world results in Clark amassing a staggering amount of wealth, which facilitates a freedom that allows him to dictate the terms of his existence. Depicted as possessing a nearly limitless amount of money and authority,

Clark, like Yeager in The Right Stuff, is positioned as a figure of aspiration for a conservative readership. Significantly, the source of his success is shown to be the naked pursuit of his own self-interest. The pressures of social conventions that hold back lesser souls are revealed to be no match for the strength of his self-determination. In contrast to rule abiding, company men, Clark is represented as a non-conformist, “the engineer with a taste for anarchy, who lifted one big middle finger in the direction of the enormous gray corporation” (37). By positioning Clark as a maverick, the text participates in framing the parameters of possibility for the reader.

Omitted from this worldview, however, is the recognition that Clark is only an outsider within the scheme of the dominant social order. Clark is cast as the rebellious foil to conservative archetypes such as the “Organization Man” (36), and the “Serious

American Executive” (43). However, a penchant for eschewing neck ties, wearing grubby sneakers, and thinking innovatively about marketable applications for computer technology do not equate to actions that resist the dominant order. Although the text positions him as a maverick on the edge of cultural boundaries, Clark is neatly contained within the realm of what is already understood as possible. Nevertheless, the version of reality represented in literary nonfiction still participates within the hegemonic process to shape how readers apprehend the world. Indeed, as Williams explains, “the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political and cultural system seem to most of us to be the pressures and limits of simple experience and common

78 sense” (Marxism 110). Works of literary nonfiction, then, can be understood to exert a pressure that precludes a reader’s ability to grasp the potential for alternative cultural possibilities. By situating Clark at the edge of the cultural sphere, the text works towards bounding what is perceived as natural.

The version of reality offered in The New New Thing confirms values, such as

Clark’s particular brand of individualism, which function to ratify the existing conservative social order. An approach to cultural formation developed by cultural materialist critic Jonathan Dollimore conceptualizes how dominant values gain cultural legitimacy. In the introduction to Political Shakespeare, Dollimore outlines a process of consolidation, subversion and containment through which a cultural order retains its dominance. Consolidation refers to “the ideological means whereby a dominant order seeks to perpetuate itself;” subversion to the process by which that order may be undermined, and containment to the restraint of “ostensibly subversive pressures” (10).

Within the process of cultural formation, Dollimore explains that consolidation is a way in which a given “world picture reinforces particular class and gender interests by presenting the existing social order as natural and God-given (and therefore immutable)”

(10). Embedded with a conservative value system, The New New Thing participates in ideological consolidation by continuing to naturalize the same tenet of individualism that can be traced from Smith’s self-interested butcher to Van Dyke’s self-reliant Americans to Yeager’s singularly righteous stuff.

Jim Clark

Published in 2000, The New New Thing was reported and written in the late 1990s from Silicon Valley, the epicenter of a global boom in technology stocks. In retrospect,

79 the mania that sent the value of technology stocks soaring is now clearly recognizable as a market bubble. In the midst of the furor, however, the spirit of the time was defined by possibility. Seduced by historic market gains, investors flocked to tech stocks based on the lure of what might be. In the process, traditional measures for evaluating corporate worth, such as profits and losses, were abandoned in favor of new market metrics that justified investing in the sector. Where a publicly traded company once needed to build a sound business to be successful, the threshold for a technology play was remarkably less onerous. Under the new investing paradigm, companies that lacked substance were still able to become remarkably successful by offering little more than a story and a promise.

The potential value of finding a story that would excite investors is described at the outset of The New New Thing:

The financial success of the people at the heart of this matter was unprecedented. It

made 1980s Wall Street seem like the low-stakes poker table. As yet, there is no

financial reckoning of the wealth the Valley has created. Hundreds of billions of

dollars, certainly; perhaps even trillions. In any case, “the greatest legal creation of

wealth in the history of the planet,” as one local capitalist puts it. (xv)

Of the players that reaped the largest financial gains from the tech boom, the text positions Jim Clark as the person most representative of the zeitgeist of the late 1990s.

Abandoned by an abusive father and raised poor by a single mother in Plainview,

Texas, Clark joined the Navy at 17 after being expelled from high school. Displaying a gift for math, Clark was encouraged by a Navy instructor to enroll in night classes at

Tulane University. Within eight years, he earned a college degree, a master’s in physics and a doctoral degree in computer science (30). While teaching at Stanford University,

Clark developed a chip, the Geometry Engine, which allowed computers to process three- dimensional images in real time. Eventually, the chip became the foundation for Clark’s first company, Silicon Graphics. The success of Clark’s next two companies, Netscape and Healtheon, give Clark the singular distinction of being the only person in history to create three companies with market capitalizations of more than a billion dollars (241).

His poor boy-made-good story is reminiscent of Yeager’s working class upbringing in an up-hollow mining town in the hills of West Virginia. Like Yeager, Clark’s success is shown to be similarly self-determined.

Clark is consistently cast as possessing a Yeagerian-like control over the world. A vignette about his circumvention of a suburban by-law typifies his ideological positioning in the text. With new neighbors encroaching on a once-unencumbered view of the fields surrounding his home, Clark commits to rectifying a situation he finds unacceptable:

One morning he looked up from his kitchen table and saw the neighbors looking

back. He requested, and was denied, a permit to build a fence tall enough to screen

them from his view. The city of Atherton, California, had strict rules about fences,

and the fence Clark wanted to build was declared too high. So Clark built a hill, and

put the fence on top of the hill. It did not occur to him that there was anything

unusual about this. (31)

In erecting a fence, Clark’s self-interest trumps any other considerations. His obliviousness to the consequences of his actions for his neighbors underscores how self- interest — a value the text both reflects and ratifies — is innately accepted as a justification for behavior. Potential ethical questions such as, for instance, whether the self-serving nature of his conduct may be detrimental to the common good, are not so

81 much disregarded as left unrecognized. Steeped in a cultural order that leaves him wholly unencumbered by such concerns, Clark is free to pursue his self-interest, the tangible result of which amounts to a considerable measure of influence over the world and his place therein. In the ideological math of the text, then, self-interest is shown to lead to control, which is tantamount to power. The hill in Clark’s backyard offers a stark illustration of this equation, providing a physical representation of his will to reshape the landscape of the world to fit his needs.

The link between self-interest and power is further established by the figurative images used to depict Clark’s outsized role as author of the Internet revolution.

Metaphorically Clark is consistently positioned as a force akin to the prime mover of the country’s economic fate. In one instance, speculation is offered about Clark’s thoughts,

“as he wandered along the top of the cliff overlooking the U.S. economy, deciding which rock, if kicked, would wipe out the largest section of the slope below” (247). Clark’s figurative spot on the cliff edge shares ideological similarities with Yeager’s place atop the ziggurat. His position overlooking the whole of creation is a superior vantage point that provides a vast perspective unavailable to lesser mortals.

Similar characterizations of Clark looking down from above occur consistently throughout the text, such as a description of Clark’s place at “the top of the capitalist food chain” (95). A more material example of his all-seeing consciousness is offered in the writer’s first-hand account of the view from a helicopter. Looking down at Silicon

Valley, Lewis notes, “I finally had a good look at the place from the perspective that

Clark sought to maintain — the perspective of a man gazing down from a great height”

(21). Taking in the whole of Silicon Valley, the centre of the tech universe and the

82 driving force behind the country’s economy, gives Clark an omniscient view similar to

Yeager’s at the “dome of the world” (Wolfe Right Stuff 34).

Returning to the image of Clark contemplating his next move on the cliff edge, the allegory casts him as the decisive force that precipitates events. He chooses which rock to nudge, whether the stone will be kicked, and which part of the world he would like to change with his decisions. As the landslide touched off by Clark takes out swaths of the economy below, the argument that events are due as much to luck as they are to

Clark’s agency is both recognized and defused by the text. Invoking the academic authority of a peer-reviewed paper, the text quotes an economist’s musing on the indeterminate nature of economic growth:

“Once we admit that there is room for newness — that there are vastly more

conceivable possibilities than realized outcomes — we must confront the fact that

there is no special logic behind the world we inhabit, no particular justification for

why things are the way they are. Any number of arbitrarily small perturbations

along the way could have made the world as we know it turn out very differently.

… We are forced to admit that the world as we know it is the result of a long string

of chance outcomes.” (249)

In a deft rhetorical move the text acknowledges the existence of random chance before shifting in the next sentence to invalidate the notion as it applies to Clark, who is designated, “the inventor of chance outcomes” (249). While the happenstance of a chaotic world affects others, Clark resides in an initial position outside the system, the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in China, creating a tornado in the Midwest.

Further evidence of Clark’s preternatural power of self-determination is offered when the cliff top image is invoked in relation to a court case between Netscape and

Microsoft. Described as the “greatest antitrust trial of the era” (Lewis 189), Clark is credited with initiating the proceedings: “By then pretty much everyone, including Clark, had forgotten the phone call to Gary Reback that set the trial in motion. Certainly no one saw the Microsoft trial for what it was: yet another rock Clark had pushed off the side of a cliff, and watched with godlike detachment, as it became an avalanche” (189). By the text’s account of events, Reback, a lawyer, would clearly seem to be the key player that made the Microsoft trial a reality. After phoning Reback and asking him to take

Netscape’s concerns to the U.S. Department of Justice, Clark abdicated his role in the lawsuit (187). For the next several years, Reback continued to pester regulators, going as far as submitting a white paper detailing the specifics of the browser industry. His persistence eventually paid off when the Justice department brought Microsoft to trial in

1998 (187). While his efforts are chronicled, the narrative chooses to privilege Clark’s phone call as the impetus for the antitrust suit, rather than highlighting Reback’s years of ingenuity, hustle, and tenacity. Within the text’s commitment to establishing Clark’s control over events, “arbitrarily small perturbations” such as Gary Reback are marginalized (249). Clark is the one making the phone calls and kicking the rocks that matter most. In yet more metaphors employed by the text, he is the “orchestra’s conductor” (150), who sets momentous events into motion with a “flick of his left wrist”

(191).

The aura of control the text weaves around Clark is further apparent in his relationship to machines. More than a hobbyist, Clark is shown to possess an intimate

84 understanding of an array of machines including his helicopter, stunt plane, motorbike, exotic sports cars, sailboat, and computer (11). Indeed, Clark’s passion for the mechanical world is a consistent presence throughout the text: “Machines! He loved to know about them, to operate them, to master them, to fix them when they were broken.

More than anything he liked to upgrade and improve them” (12). Clark’s handling of his computerized sailboat, Hyperion, emphasizes the value the text confers on the capacity for control.

At the time of its construction, the 155-foot sloop boasted the largest mast ever carried by a sailboat (82). Beyond its physical size, Hyperion is fitted with sixty miles of electrical wires, which connect every part of the boat to computers, a system designed to give Clark an unprecedented control over the act of sailing:

A recent article in one of the yachting magazines pointed out that Jim Clark’s new

sailboat would “learn” to sail itself, in all conditions. Hyperion was, in fact, a

learning machine. It contained thousands of electronic sensors capable of

measuring everything from the pressure on the sails to the temperature in the

fridges. They would feed a continuous stream of data into twenty-five industrial

strength computers. Over time the computers would acquire the information they

needed to cope with every possible sailing condition. If he wished, Clark could

connect to Hyperion over the Internet from his living room back in California, seize

the computer from the captain, and sail it from a keyboard. (80)

Hyperion’s central place in the narrative is immediately evident in the title of the first chapter, “The Boat that Built Netscape.” Indeed, the book opens with talk of plans for

Hyperion’s maiden crossing of the Atlantic and the epilogue closes in Antigua at the

85 trip’s conclusion. In between, the narrative employs Hyperion as a plot device, using its construction, programming, and seaborne adventures to anchor the action of the text. Like

Clark’s backyard hill, Hyperion also offers another embodiment of his will to achieve dominion over the world.

A Herculean effort to computerize Hyperion allows Clark to wrest control of the boat not just from the Captain, but also from the tradition of sailing and even nature itself.

The twenty five super computers onboard Hyperion allow him to usurp the knowledge of wind, currents, and rigging that were once essential to surviving on the water. At the helm of a bank of computers programmed to conquer the forces of the sea, Clark seeks to master nature the same way he attempts to control every other aspect of his world.

Indeed, the programmers onboard Hyperion refer to the highest level of computer access that lets Clark to control the boat from any screen onboard as “God Mode” (137).

Ultimately, Clark’s attempt to computerize Hyperion is unsuccessful. Bugs in the programming codes that run the ship cause issues ranging from serious problems in the engine room to minor hiccups in the kitchen. The experiment in automated seafaring is finally cut short when the first mate detects a tear in the sail missed by Hyperion’s sensors (230). By the end of the text, however, the apparent lapse in Clark’s control is contained. The epilogue shows Clark outlining plans to build a new boat, “the perfect boat” (266). By showing Clark’s willingness to cast aside Hyperion — a $37-million sloop that took years of craftsmanship and programming to make a reality and is credited with inspiring the Internet boom — the narrative works to reestablish his agency. Clark is once again in control of events. He is, the text claims in another metaphor, “the racing

86 dog who had the wit to grab hold of the remote device that controls the mechanical rabbit” (258).

Subverting the metaphors

The ideological force of The New New Thing relies, at least in part, on a reader’s acceptance of the narrative constructed for Clark. In an uncritical reading Clark is a maverick, a searcher, a metaphysical marionette player pulling strings that makes the

U.S. economy dance. Given the grandness of the claims, Clark’s representation could be dismissed as hyperbole. The text, however, insists on building a case to convince readers otherwise. From the outset, the stage is set — Silicon Valley during the new economic paradigm of the Internet revolution — for an environment that offers the precise set of circumstances to make Clark’s preeminence plausible. In prepping the reader for its portrayal of Clark, the text submits: “a certain type of person who has recently made it big in Silicon Valley could have made it big at no other time in history. He made it big because he was uniquely suited to this historical moment. He was built to work on the frontier of economic life when the frontier was once again up for grabs” (xvi). The invocation of the Old West suggests that in the wilds of a new world anything is possible, even Jim Clark.

A review of The New New Thing in the New York Times offers evidence that a reader may indeed accept the narrative’s assertion that Jim Clark could invent the future

(73). After generating initial skepticism, the case that Clark essentially forged the Internet boom in the smithy of his soul (253), is apparently solid enough to convince the reviewer,

Kurt Andersen, of its authenticity:

It is a splendid, entirely satisfying book, intelligent and fun and revealing and

troubling in the correct proportions, resolutely skeptical but not at all cynical,

brimming with fabulous scenes as well as sharp analysis. Lines that seem slightly

portentous at the outset — “The business of creating and foisting new technology

upon others that goes on in Silicon Valley is near the core of the American

experience” — by the end seem unquestionably true, fully borne out by the tale he

has told.

Based on the evidence offered by the text, Andersen is willing to accept Silicon Valley’s primacy to the economic moment. The halo of legitimacy the narrative thereby seizes is further extended to include Clark’s role as author of the Internet revolution. Downplaying the importance of corporate titans such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs,

Andersen posits, “Lewis does not say, but nonetheless proves, that the 55-year-old Clark, not Gates or Jobs or anyone else, is the grandest figure of that realm — at least as accomplished and more interesting, inspiring and likable than his younger peers.”

Andersen’s acceptance of Clark’s portrayal uncovers part of the process of consolidation through which the dominant social order is ratified. Returning to the ideological math of the text, the narrative positions Clark as synonymous with the prospect of control, a possibility that may be realized through the pursuit of self-interest, which, as shown by

Smith, is a fundamental aspect of capitalism.

Although Andersen’s endorsement suggests otherwise, I argue the ideological force of the text is diminished by inadequacies in its aesthetic experience. A reader of nonfiction literature will accept, according to Hellmann, the shaping consciousness of the writer in constructing a narrative, provided the text is considered a faithful representation

88 of actual observation. Furthermore, Hellmann argues a text’s ability to demonstrate such a fidelity to real-world events is central to the theoretical contract agreed to by authors and readers. The process of establishing trust between the two parties, he explains, is a function of the journalistic abilities of the writer:

A journalist’s integrity, efforts, and talents as a journalist, as well as his ability to

convey these traits, are therefore an important and legitimate aspect of a critic’s

evaluation of a work in this genre. Since the validity and credibility of the

journalistic author-reader contract are intrinsic to the aesthetic effect of such a

work, these aspects of the text are equally proper subjects of study as style and

manipulation of point of view. (28)

In The New New Thing, Lewis’s storytelling prowess obscures gaps in the reporting of events. As such, the text falls short of creating the trust necessary to uphold the author- reader contract, a violation that diminishes not only the text’s aesthetic effectiveness, but also its potential ideological influence.

A distinguishing characteristic of literary nonfiction is its capacity to recount key events that reveal the essence of the narrative being constructed (Boynton xii-xv). The unpredictability of when such moments may occur requires an uncommon level of commitment by all involved parties to ensure the writer is present to witness critical scenes. The degree of access into people’s lives needed for a narrative to achieve an authority that will convince a reader it is a faithful rendering of reality is not easily obtained. Such rare access, however, is exactly what Wolfe argues is at the core of literary nonfiction’s “unique power” to involve a reader (New Journalism 31). In The

New Journalism, recall, Wolfe puts four devices at the heart of literary realism: scene-by-

89 scene construction, dialogue in full, third-person point of view, and status details (31-32).

Fundamental to delivering on the promise of each of these devices is the volume of time spent with a subject. The more unfettered a writer’s access, the more potential a narrative may contain to absorb a reader in the work.

In The New New Thing, Lewis is clearly granted a measure of entrée into Clark’s life. As a journalistic deconstruction of the text will show, however, the writer’s efforts fall short of achieving the standard of “saturation reporting” necessary to fully uphold the author-reader contract (Wolfe New Journalism 50-52). As a result, the aesthetic effect and by extension the ideological strength of the work are lessened. A closer examination of Lewis’s interactions with Clark, suggests the pair spent less time together than Clark’s pervasive presence in the text would suggest.

A best-guess accounting of the events in Clark’s life for which Lewis was present begins with the 16-day trip across the Atlantic. His time aboard Hyperion is the basis for partial or entire chapters scattered throughout the text. Lewis also joins Clark on at least two trips to Wolter Huisman’s boatyard in Holland (77), once to see Hyperion being constructed and the other to sail on its initial launch on the North Sea (2-10). The pair is together for a helicopter lesson that furnishes the action for the second chapter. Lewis is also present for Clark’s visit to Bank Julius Baer in San Francisco (154), a vignette that is also recounted in the preface (xvi-xvii). He follows Clark to several meetings with investment bankers, first when Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley visit Healtheon

(159), and next at the “MyCFO” pitch to Kleiner Perkins (253). Add to this list an indeterminate number visits to Clark’s office (86), as well as to Clark’s home to look in boxes in the guest room (28), chat near his backyard hill (31), and speak in the kitchen

(257). Undoubtedly, the pair also shared other interactions that were not explicitly represented in the text, yet still informed the narrative. While perhaps non-exhaustive, this account is indicative of the amount of time Lewis was permitted to spend with Clark, as well as the type of occasions.

In reporting the story, Lewis travels a considerable distance into Clark’s world.

Formidable as his efforts are, they nonetheless lack the depth of immersion needed for the text to satisfy the claim to authenticity promised to the reader. The shortfall becomes more apparent when contrasted to the exhaustive reporting undertaken by, for example,

Ted Conover, who worked as a prison guard to write Newjack and lived as a hobo to collect material for Rolling Nowhere (Boynton xiii), or Bissinger, who moved his family to Odessa for a year to follow the Panthers. Though rarely achieved, such immense efforts are required to amass the raw material nonfiction texts need to wholly seize the power of the devices that give literary realism its emotional immediacy (New Journalism

31). As Wolfe explains, the first technique, scene-by-scene construction resorts “as little as possible to sheer historical narrative. Hence the sometimes extraordinary feats of reporting that the new journalists undertook: so that they could actually witness the scenes in other people’s lives as they took place—” (New Journalism 31). In The New

New Thing, descriptions of authentic moments that explicate the narrative are rare. Much of the time Lewis spends with Clark occurs in formal settings, in which guarded behavior is the norm. Indeed, instances in which journalists are conventionally present, such as meetings in boardrooms or with investment bankers, rarely yield material that offers true insight into a subject’s character.

Lacking the series of moments that would allow scene-by-scene construction to drive the narrative, Lewis is instead forced to rely on background research and extensive secondary interviews to build his story. Interviews with staff of Silicon Graphics,

Netscape, and Healtheon, as well as investment bankers, and Hyperion’s crew are combined with a historical recounting of the technology bubble to form the bulk of the text. Beyond a seemingly perfunctory visit to Plainview to interview Clark’s mom, sister and brother-in-law (260-64), other people from his personal life are conspicuously absent.

The nature of Clark’s dialogue offers another indication that Lewis’s reporting lacks the depth necessary to uphold the author-reader contract. According to Wolfe,

“realistic dialogue involves the reader more completely than any other single device. It also establishes and defines character more quickly and effectively than any other single device” (31). With few exceptions, Clark’s dialogue is notably concise, offering the reader little insight into his thoughts. When he is not offering clipped reactions to minor events, such as programming glitches on the boat, he is shown addressing matters predominantly confined to the technology market. A discussion of an early Internet foray is typical of his dialogue: “‘The telecomputer was a direct result of the frustration I felt watching Silicon Graphics continually fall behind the PC in market share,’ Clark says. ‘I was trying to do an underbelly thing with Microsoft—come in under their monopoly and take it away’” (60). Useful for the purposes of documenting the Internet revolution, the expository quality of such dialogue does not generate an emotional investment in the text by the reader. Aside from one notable instance of extended conversation Clark offers about a dark period in his life (31-32), the personal disclosure contained in his dialogue is limited.

The restrictions Clark puts on access to both his time and the inner-workings of his mind presses Lewis into attempting to fill the gaps himself. Opening up the reporting process to the reader, Lewis articulates Clark’s reticence:

Anyway, it took some months before I realized that I was never going to hear about

his past from him, at least not in the usual way that information changes hands. The

few times I asked him directly how he had got from there to here—which, it was

becoming clearer, was the same asking how the modern world had got from there to

here—he would offer some perfunctory reply and wave me away. “That’s boring,”

he’d say. When I pressed he might say, “That’s the past. I really don’t give a shit

about the past.” (28)

Confronted by a subject that closely guards access to his time and thoughts, Lewis struggles to develop the third-person point of view that is vital to infusing a work of literary nonfiction with intimacy. As Wolfe explains, the technique presents “every scene to the reader through the eyes of a particular character, giving the reader the feeling of being inside the character’s mind and experiencing the emotional reality of the scene as he experiences it” (New Journalism 32). Unable to climb into his subject’s head, lacking compelling dialogue from Clark himself, and restrained in access, Lewis relies on his own considerable literary imagination to construct his narrative.

A lack of access compels Lewis to employ an abundance of metaphors to shape his narrative, rather than letting his story arise organically from events he witnessed. For writers in general and journalists specifically, the maxim “show don’t tell” is fundamental to crafting meaningful prose (McKercher 106-07). To be convinced of the narrative’s fidelity to the actual world, a reader would need proof of, for instance, Clark’s dominion

93 over events. Instead, his preeminence is merely insisted upon through a string of metaphors that are not borne out by textual evidence. Without further support, the image of Clark as a godlike figure kicking rocks that change the world rings hollow. The representation becomes even emptier given an awareness of the real-world fate of

Healtheon. Far from sitting at the centre of the “$1.5 trillion health care industry” (95),

Healtheon merged with WebMD in 1999 and is now a website chasing advertising revenue by offering on-line medical information. The text claims that Clark made his own luck in seeking “control of health care, the world’s biggest market, just when it was read to yield itself up” (247). Knowledge of Healtheon’s humble fate however, causes a breach in the author-reader contract, which lessens the text’s potential ideological influence.

The process of consolidation that occurs in an uncritical reading of The New New

Thing may be further subverted by considering the representation of groups in the text other than rich white males. Women, for one, are practically non-existent. Referenced in passing a handful of times, Clark’s wife is given no dialogue, nor does the text offer much indication that she has any meaningful influence on events. In a fleeting introduction she is cast in the stereotypical mold of a shrill housewife out of a mid- century situation comedy. After stepping back from Silicon Graphics, Clark develops an interest in model helicopters that comes about since “He’d just married for the third time, and his new wife, the journalist Nancy Rutter, had started to complain about his behavior” (53). In one of the few instances in the text in which a woman speaks,

Hyperion’s chef Tina Braddock is explicitly marginalized after a computer glitch causes a wall in the kitchen to rise unexpectedly: “‘What’s going on with the partition?’ Tina

94 asked. … The three young men remained lost in their computer thoughts. They were all nice young men. They did not wish Tina harm. But the only way they knew to help was through their machines. They failed to respond to the cry from below” (132). In the partition anecdote, Tina is portrayed as either screaming futilely (131), or ignored entirely. In contrast, the male programmers are active participants in events, both causing and potentially solving the problem in the galley.

In introducing Hyperion’s crew, Kristi, an assistant to the steward is mentioned, as is Celcilia, a deckhand. Later, when her male colleague, Jaime, ascertains a tear in the sail, the “comely Celcilia” belays him up the mast (231). While Jaime is credited with saving the world’s largest sail, the text reduces Celcilia to her physical appearance. At the same time, Celcilia’s role in preserving the ship is marginalized with the observation that she spends, “a large part of each day with her nose buried in books with titles like Sailing across the Atlantic Made Easy” (231). Barely present, in the few instances women do appear in the text they are used as ideological foils to underscore Clark’s sovereignty.

A visit to Clark’s mother in Plainview confirms the role of women in the text as, at best, spectators in a world dominated by the activities of men. In Plainview, Clark’s mother, Hazel, reveals the origin story of a tuba that sits in the guest room containing the boxes that hold the remnants of Clark’s past (259). Poor and unable to join the school band, Clark took up the tuba, the only instrument the school supplied to students for free.

As Hazel recounts, “Not long after he’d come home in tears, from what turned out to be his final meeting with his father, Clark quit playing his tuba. Soon after that he was expelled from school, and left town. Once he’d left, he became a stranger to his family”

(264). The text takes pains to situate the tuba, looming in the guest room, as a symbolic

95 token of Clark’s past. In illustrating the self-determined nature of his life — “Clark had invented Jim Clark” (90) — the tuba further demonstrates the text’s marginalization of women. By highlighting Clark’s act of quitting the instrument and leaving Plainview the text again attempts to confirm Clark’s self-reliance. The credit for his later business success is his alone. He is a stranger to his mother, who, like the un-played tuba, is relegated to the role of bystander.

The instances of women’s involvement recounted here are among the few moments women are represented in the text. To uphold the author-reader contract, a nonfiction text, according to Hellmann must convince the reader of the trustworthiness of the narrative’s account of events. Regardless of a potentially limited role women may have played in the male-dominated action of The New New Thing, a near total absence of an entire gender can create a dissonance for the reader when considered alongside real- world experience. Other groups, such as the Indian programmers that work for Clark, are similarly glossed over by the text.

An uncritical reading of software engineers Pavan Nigam and Kittu Kolluri would suggest that, unlike women who are either portrayed as ineffectual or entirely absent, they are closer to Clark on the spectrum of self-determination. Nigam and Kolluri are elite mathematicians. As teenagers, each counted among the rare few chosen to attend an

Indian Institute of Technology, besting hundreds of thousands of other applicants on an entrance exam (105). In standardized tests given to seventh grade students, Kolluri placed first in a region with a population of 80 million (109). Recognizing the exceptional training given to Indian engineers, Clark places a high value on IIT graduates:

Clark was onto something when he went looking for Indians. It wasn’t just that half

his work had been done for him by the Indian government. It wasn’t just that, next

to the sifting mechanism through which Pavan and Kittu had passed, the Harvard

admissions office was a kind, forgiving, place. It was that any person with the

brains to get into IIT’s and the gumption to get himself to the United States was

capable of all manner of miracles. The Indian engineers had the lust for the kill that

Clark loved. They were ferociously, recklessly competitive. Pavan and Kittu had

finished in the top one-hundredth of one percent on the test taken by bright young

Indians who probably were already in the top one-hundredth of one percent on the

national brainpower scale. (111)

The representation of Nigam and Kolluri supports the vision of American self-reliance laid out by Van Dyke and embodied by Clark. Through the naked pursuit of self-interest, each has made good in America. Troubling this narrative, however, are the hundreds of thousands of IIT candidates whose admission was rejected. The staggering level of

Nigam and Kolluri’s elitism creates a gap through which the narrative may be resisted. In describing Nigam and Kolluri’s position as perhaps better than the top one-thousandth of one-per cent of Indian students, the text raises the specter of the silent masses that are not

Nigam and Kolluri. Rather than working to consolidate the dominant social order, the representation of the elitism of the Indian software engineers may work towards undermining the ideological acceptance of a system that supports such extreme class polarization.

At the risk of immediately deflating a glimmer of possibility this analysis may stir, the odds are against the subversive potential of the Indian engineers coming to a

97 meaningful fruition. Among cultural materialist critics a continual anxiety exists about the possibilities for literary analysis to lead to effective subversion (Brannigan 10).

Indeed, the entire process of consolidation, subversion, and containment may simply be participating in a larger scheme through which the dominant order maintains its cultural authority. Recognizing such a dismal prospect, the conclusion that follows assumes a more optimistic tact in its consideration of the potential practical value of investigating possible spaces for resistance.

Conclusion

If culture is indeed constantly being created and recreated, as Williams submits in

“Culture is Ordinary” (96), then an opening exists to reshape the common meanings that bind together a society. Within an organic process of cultural formation, resistant impulses find the shifting conditions necessary to take root and eventually emerge to trouble an unconditional acceptance of conservative cultural structures, such as capitalism or patriarchy. The current inquiry began by questioning how such cultural dominants are perpetuated over not just decades, but centuries. This thesis holds that nonfiction’s current popularity combined with a claim to truth inherent in the genre collaborate to offer literary nonfiction an especial currency in investigating the process of contemporary cultural formation. An incentive to apprehend the active process of ideological consolidation and the potential for subversion within the pages of nonfiction texts is heightened by the genre’s commercial appeal, which furnishes best-selling nonfiction titles in particular with an expansive cultural reach.

A critical analysis of the protagonists — Chuck Yeager, Boobie Miles and Jim

Clark — in the texts under consideration affords a view into how the value system that supports the dominant social order is ratified, as well as offering a glimpse into possibilities for resistance. In The Right Stuff, a process of ideological consolidation can be apprehended in the valorization of Yeager. Positioned as a figure of aspiration in the text, Yeager embodies an ethos of self-determination that, as shown in the chapter on The

New New Thing, is vital to enabling capitalist practice. For conservative readers, aligning with Yeager fosters a fundamental endorsement of the ideology he represents, thereby

99 reinforcing that the values embedded in his character are natural qualities inherent to the human condition, rather than cultural constructs.

The ideological paragon offered by Yeager is troubled by the figure of Boobie

Miles in Friday Night Lights. In the poster of Michael Jordan in his bedroom, Nike shoes on his feet, and dreams of NFL stardom in his head, Boobie is portrayed as fully incorporated in the cultural promise advanced by Yeager. For Boobie, however, the sovereignty over events achieved by Yeager is unattainable. A debilitating knee injury punctures an illusion that self-reliance is the operative ingredient necessary to trump any adversity. The capricious nature of reality shown in Friday Night Lights opens a fissure in the conservative value system championed by Yeager. A pervasive hopelessness that distinguishes each of the narratives creates a critical mass of despair that, by the end of the text, unlocks a possibility for ideological resistance.

Situating Friday Night Lights in its historical moment suggests the text’s subversive qualities continue to be effectively contained within the dominant order. In

Friday Night Lights, a postwar enthusiasm evident in The Right Stuff has been replaced by a pessimism about America’s economic prospects in the face of rising overseas competition, particularly from Japan. In Odessa, specifically, the unease is deepened by low crude prices, which have caused an economic collapse in oil-dependent towns across west Texas (Bissinger 226-27). The despair reflected in Friday Night Lights suggests the subversive potential of cultural products is at least partially grounded in the economic conditions of the moment. As of spring 2011, the U.S. economy is experiencing an astoundingly swift recovery from the deepest recession since the 1930s. Systemic problems, however, in the housing market and the practices of the financial services

100 industry, coupled with a staggering national debt means the U.S. remains at risk of backsliding into a serious economic decline. The relationship suggested in this thesis between economic wellbeing and the emergence of oppositional currents in literary nonfiction suggests a prevailing economic uncertainty offers fertile ground for resistant thinking to emerge in the products of the culture industries.

A tendency for literary nonfiction’s ideological thrust to reflect existing economic conditions is affirmed by the hopeful mood of The New New Thing. Published a decade after Friday Night Lights, The New New Thing shows the resistant inklings of late 1980s

Odessa as being effectively contained. Replacing the anxiety generated by Boobie, Jim

Clark embodies a resurgent hope born of the seemingly boundless economic possibilities created by a rush of capital into the technology sector. Amid the fin de siècle optimism of the late 1990s, the text’s portrayal of Clark marks a shift back to a Yeagerian belief in self-determination. Positioned, like Yeager, as a figure of aspiration in the text, Clark’s representation serves to ratify an existing conservative social order.

Practically, an ideological affirmation of Clark’s self-interest as an inherent trait carries far-reaching consequences. Writing from Calgary, to pick an example close at hand, the same steadfast belief in self-determination represented by Clark is ascertainable in the spirit of the city’s energy sector. In the last ten years a historic increase in oil prices has created a commodity-led boom analogous to the technology bubble in the 1990s. The mood of Calgary’s oilpatch, meanwhile, reflects a belief in its own agency that echoes

Clark’s sense of self-determined entitlement to the fruits of his technological fiefdom.

Akin to Clark being the “inventor of chance outcomes” (Lewis 249), success in the oilpatch is more often attributed to the ingenuity, hard work, and risk appetite of

101 executives, engineers and geologists than it is to average oil prices quadrupling over the last decade. In an anecdote about Texas oilman Aaron Giebel, Bissinger describes a similar spirit prevailing in the oilfields of west Texas and in Houston office towers during the last oil price boom:

From 1973 to 1981, when the price of oil went up more than 800 per cent, he and

thousands of others made the fatal error of forgetting that every ounce of their

success was due to the geopolitics of the Arab oil embargo and the Carter energy

policy and the Iranian Revolution. They had actually thought that they themselves

had something to do with what was happening and were somehow in control of

their own destinies. Over at the country club … they confused luck with business

acumen. Instead of understanding that they were the beneficiaries of history, they

began to believe they were the creators of it. (219)

At the source of Giebel’s hubris is a notion that success is a function of his own self- determination. Within the consolidating process of the dominant social order, such an ingrained assumption fosters an insidious obfuscation of the recognition of the inequalities resulting from capitalist practice.

To be clear, the intention here is not to cast capitalism as a wholly negative force.

Much to the contrary, capitalism offers more benefits globally than any alternative economic mode. Of concern, however, are the negative consequences bred from an unexamined acceptance of the pursuit of self-interest. A dominant economic system may provide for the center, but what of those at the margin? Accepting that inequalities exist due to gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and class, necessitates an interrogation of how a value, such as self-determination, fosters social imbalances.

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In a conservative social order, how does an ethos of self-reliance shape a cultural understanding of individual value? In The New New Thing, Clark offers an ideological model that casts wealth as a function of self-determination. If a Clark-like control over events is indeed fundamental to success, then would the ideological corollary suggest an inability to control events results in failure that is similarly deserved? A potential answer is offered in Friday Night Lights, where the town’s treatment of Boobie provides a stark illustration of how value may be judged within a conservative social order: “‘What would

Boobie be without football?” echoed a Permian coach when asked the question one day.

The answer was obvious, as clear as night and day, black and white in Odessa, Texas, and he responded without the slightest hesitation. “A big ol’ dumb nigger’” (67). With football, Boobie is “the chosen son” (Bissinger 1), a town messiah. Without football

Boobie’s worth evaporates allowing once-fawning Odessans to turn on him with a venomous disregard. Such a striking disparity is enabled by a dominant value system held up by notions such as self-determination. Odessans would need no further justification to callously dismiss Boobie, than the inherent belief that his shortcomings are of his own doing.

Evidence of practical consequences of an innate acceptance of the tenet of self- interest is abundant in the corporate world. The explicit goal, for example, of publicly traded companies is to “maximize shareholder value.” The corporate axiom, taught in business schools and etched in company mission statements, mirrors the notion of self- interest described by Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Embedded with an assumption that corporate self-interest is its own justification, the pursuit of shareholder value provides an innate rationale that can preclude other, often ethical, considerations.

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In the energy industry, for example, the location of oil reserves in geopolitically tenuous areas, forces companies to weigh a variety of corporate and ethical risks before choosing to operate in a region. In the 1990s Calgary-based Talisman Energy chose to enter the Sudan, despite an ongoing civil war. The company’s operating expertise revitalized the country’s energy industry, translating into oil wealth for Sudan and profits for Talisman, which used the pursuit of shareholder value as a justification for operating in a troubled country. Other considerations, such as a possibility the ruling faction was using petrodollars to fund a civil war, were trumped by corporate self-interest. In 2011, violent conflict in Libya is raising similar questions about the oil industry’s corporate and ethical responsibility in funding the Gadhafi regime for decades.

At the risk of overstating the ideological weight of the argument, consider the potential role of self-interest in the decision-making fabric of other recent events. Among the reasons for the 2008 U.S. mortgage crisis include the profit motive of lenders, which relaxed standards in order to write more mortgages. Financial institutions, such as

Lehman Brothers, were spurred by a similar instinct, bundling together ultimately toxic mortgages and selling them in the form of credit-default swaps, synthetic financial instruments invented to satisfy corporate self-interest. In 2010, an undersea explosion at a

BP well sent oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico for months. The specific concern of this argument is not the environmental consequences of offshore drilling, but rather to underscore the ideological assumptions that enable a Clark-like confidence that boring into the ocean floor several kilometers underwater is a process that can be controlled. An ingrained belief in self-determination can also be apprehended in the muted public response to the U.S. government’s woeful post-Katrina efforts in 2005. A question can

104 be asked about the public reaction had Katrina hit Jim Clark in San Francisco, rather than

Boobie Miles in New Orleans. An answer would necessarily be bound up in race and class before, perhaps, moving to consider how dominant values work to marginalize groups based on ethnicity and class.

In highlighting potential ethical shortcomings among corporations the intention is not to imply that an inherent amorality exists in the corporate world. Indeed, many companies insist that profits and ethics are not mutually exclusive, Google’s informal slogan “Don’t be evil” offering one famous example. Still, even cursory attention to the business pages of the Wall Street Journal offers ample evidence of how much questionable conduct is justified in the name of shareholder value. At the core of corporate implosions such as Enron or Lehman are individual decision makers. As ethical beings, choices made in the pursuit of shareholder value must be rationalized. On an innate level a belief in Adam Smith’s doctrine of self-interest, recast as Van Dyke’s spirit of self-reliance and embodied by Clark would legitimize maximizing shareholder value as an inherently justified pursuit.

Once confined to a newspaper section, business is now featured in cultural products across the spectrum of media. A blending of cultural materialist analysis with nonfiction literary theory in this thesis offers a critical platform from which to question how a proliferation of business content works to consolidate the dominant social order.

Future research will consider the ideological consequences of a widespread consumption of books such as Freakonomics, an offering that not long ago would have been deemed too esoteric for mainstream tastes. On television, similarly, channels, such as Bloomberg

Television, CNBC and The Globe and Mail’s BNN, are dedicated to non-stop coverage

105 of the stock market. In theatres, The Social Network, an Academy Award-nominated film based on Facebook is a further indication of an appetite for business topics among

Hollywood studios and movie goers. The cultural reach of Michael Lewis, meanwhile, promises to become even more extensive, given the success of The Blind Side, and the best-selling status of his most recent book The Big Short, an investigation into the U.S. mortgage crisis.

A popular turn towards business among mainstream readers is offering financial writers, such as Lewis, an expanding cultural influence, as evidenced by The Big Short’s

28-week stay on the New York Times Best Seller list. More generally, literary nonfiction’s popularity suggests additional critical attention is required. In a study of the history of the genre, John Hartsock notes, “because there are only a few book-length examinations of literary journalism and the scholarship is generally meager, the form’s study lacks a critical or scholarly mass” (259). Despite more than forty years as a widely read presence in American literature, nonfiction remains on the critical margins compared to its fictional counterparts. Indeed, in the opening to study of the genre, The Art of Fact,

Barbara Lounsberry calls literary nonfiction “the great unexplored territory of contemporary criticism” (xi). A lack of critical attention can be traced, in part, to disciplinary boundaries. Literary nonfiction’s hybrid nature causes it to fall between the cracks of academic concerns (Hartsock 251). The form’s literariness allows for a comfortable fit in English departments. Journalism studies, meanwhile, can lay an equal claim based on the genre’s subject matter, history, and reportorial foundation. Literary nonfiction’s ties to the real world also bring it into the terrain of cultural studies, as shown by early critics such as Johnson and Zavarzadeh, who consider the form’s

106 emergence within the context of understanding the broader cultural confusion of the

1960s (Hartsock 254).

The weight of experience reveals that, at least in critical terms, nonfiction has failed to topple fiction from atop the literary hierarchy. In the decades since Podhoretz staked a claim for nonfiction’s literary preeminence a majority of critics have resisted his pronouncement. In opening a case for nonfiction, Podhoretz creates a straw man, an apt tool of the journalism trade, to begin his argument:

Indeed, some novelists ... tend to express their contempt or disdain for discursive

prose in the very act of writing it. You can hear a note of condescension toward the

medium they happen to be working in at the moment; they seem to be announcing

in the very construction of their sentences that they have no great use for the prosy

requirements of the essay or the review, that they are only dropping in from

Olympus for a brief, impatient visit. (126)

A prosaic taint of the ordinary that lingers around nonfiction may still be limiting research into the genre. According to Williams, though, the ordinary is exactly where more critics should look. Literary nonfiction is not only being written, but it is also being read and watched. That, as Williams advised more than forty years ago, is the place to start.

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Endnotes

1. Standard publishing industry categories do not separate sales figures by fiction and nonfiction. As such, fixing the size of the market for literary nonfiction specifically is problematic. In a 1998 article in Publisher’s Research Quarterly exploring nonfiction readership trends Beth Luey offers “fiction has had to surrender a great deal of shelf space to nonfiction in the last few decades. Visit any superstore: nonfiction occupies two to three times the area allotted to fiction. Open the New York Times Book Review: the table of contents usually lists three or four reviews of nonfiction for every review of a novel” (21).

2. According to one historian of America’s economic past: “By the early 1950s, half the population sampled in a Gallup poll claimed they were able to get a good night’s sleep, the highest figure in years. In the 1950s, everything seemed possible” (Geisst 275). For a further discussion of America’s postwar economic optimism, see Geisst, Wall Street: A History from Its Beginnings to the Fall of Enron, 273-98.

3. This thesis assumes a link between individualism and capitalism. A causal relationship between the two, however, is a contested area of sociological inquiry. For a full discussion, see B. Turner.

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