The Primary Colors of American Politics

So much about Primary Colors (1996) has so little to do with the novel. At the time of its release, the book apparently mattered less to many than the real name of its "Anonymous" author (journalist Joe Klein), the "true" identities of its characters, or the subsequent cast of the always inevitable film. Even now, few resist the urge to defer the text by making it "real"; for instance, its current Wikipedia entry offers a table of "Fictional characters and believed real-life inspirations." Critics describe it as a political novel, a faux memoir, and a roman è clef, genres with a marked proclivity for shiftiness. However we try to pin it down, it reaches beyond itself, drawing the real world into its fictional enterprise and projecting a certain truthiness, as Stephen Colbert might have it, onto our political life. Primary Colors run.

My essay focuses on that quality. Rather than trying to make the text real, I explore the realities constituted by the text. Primary Colors novelizes American politics, to borrow a term from Mikhail Bakhtin (Dialogic 6). The book's power flows from its knack for amplification and juxtaposition. It orchestrates languages, sees characters through words alien to them, and reflects, selects, and deflects generic influences. It imagines a novelized political community, one whose words are "polemical and double-voiced," one where "revered values find themselves in the daily marketplace" and "ideas and heroes from the 'absolute past' are reborn in the 'familiar zone' of the 'open-ended present'" (Morson and Emerson 304). In short, Primary Colors is a promiscuous novel. To grasp its constitutive charge, one should take its adultery seriously. That, in turn, is an important task, if only because the text constructively betrays its generic roots.

Primary Colors forges a political memoir. Michelle Ballif usefully directs our attention to the possibilities proffered by the verb "to forge" (189). It means to bring into being, to form by heating and hammering, to craft, to counterfeit, to imitate, fabricate, or use artifice. Klein's forgery admits such possibilities, much like a "real" political memoir. George Egerton's study explains the genre. Its attraction derives from "its capacity to personalize and dramatize political and historical phenomena . . . . [It] is by nature personal; it records personal political engagement and experience, or what has been witnessed" (235). Yet a purely personal record offers little to a reading public. Inevitably, synecdoche comes into play. The writer takes form as part for the whole of the nation; the "potency of the political memoir" lies in its capacity to shape popular memory, to represent a time and culture through a leader's experiences (238). As such, these are acts of persuasion and, like all rhetoric, they cannot say everything or tell the whole story in the limited time and space available. They choose elements, interpretations, and ideas that contribute to their purpose, vivifying and justifying the larger claim they seek to support. As memoirs "explain the causes of . . . events, and . . . interpret their meaning," an "elastic and expedient conception of truth" appears, suggesting "the appropriateness of fictional categories for appraisal" of such efforts (237).

Historians rightly disdain that move. For them, "'truthfulness,' however old-fashioned, ultimately stands as a fundamental critical concern in the evaluation of memoirs" (237). Klein wields a freedom of invention not available to George W. Bush, for example. In pursuit of its purpose, Primary Colors amplifies and exaggerates, imitates and fabricates its history in ways Decision Points (2010) must forego. Yet Bush's memoir offers a useful counterpart because, like Klein, Bush offers a vision of political leadership. He believes that politics require decisive action. He structures his memoir to advance the claim that great leaders respond appropriately to the titular decision points and poor leaders end up "lawyering" choices "to death" (qtd. in Woodward 96). Fiction it may be, but Primary Colors, too, wishes its readers to interpret our politics as it does. It seeks to teach. To paraphrase James Boyd White, Klein "wants his readers to see things in the world as he presents them in the text, to think and feel about them as he does...