Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction by John Hellmann (review)

Studies in American Fiction117 Williams makes important and helpful additions of his own. Numerous details and asides are shown to be integral parts of Cantwell's preparation for death. The "two ill-mannered youths who menace" Cantwell, for example, are "scavengers of death come too early" (p. 166). Cantwell refuses to invite Renata on his hunting trip because it is not time for her to die, and she "must not make it so" (p. 168). Ironically, Williams seems at his best with Hemingway's less successful fiction. The chapters on To Have and Have Not and Across the River, at least, strike me as better than the chapters on For Whom the BeU ToUs and The Old Man and the Sea. A seven-page analysis of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" contains nothing new, consisting of general comments about "vertical development" (p. 132) and "tonalities and thematic chords" (p. 133) . I am not certain what this judgment, if valid, tells us. My belief is that Williams has written an important pioneering study of a major topic but depended too much on traditional notions of tragedy, with a nod to the contemporaneous world in the form of an unassimilated generalization about existentialism. What we need now is further study which profits from The Tragic Art of Ernest Hemingway and concentrates on definitions—plural, I would assume—of tragedy in the twentieth century. Ernest Hemingway was consistently aware of universal values, including concepts of tragedy, and he was devoted to specific place and time and yet aware of the ephemeral nature of human enterprise. The invitation is there, and Wirt Williams has made a much appreciated contribution. The University of TexasMax Westbrook Hellmann, John. Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1981. 164 pp. Cloth: $12.95. According to John Hellmann the nonaction novel (as practiced by Mailer) and the new journalism (as also practiced by Mailer as well as by Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Michael Herr) reflect a single aesthetic and represent a new genre of fiction. Its special configuration—which Hellmann postulates on the basis of Frye's distinction between literary and assertive writing (Anatomy of Criticism) and on Zavarzadeh's notion of tile bi-referentiality of writing (The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel) is a "dynamic balance between die fictive nature of its created form and the factual nature of its content" (p. 110). By adhering to fact in a "journalistic contract" with the reader, the new journalist is absolved from the fictionist's necessity of making plausible an event often more incredible than is acceptable in realistic fiction. At the same time, by exercising the self-reflexive and absurdist strategies of the metafictionist and fabulist, the new journalist shapes an experience into a felt and meaningful form that is an interpretive advance over the "short-circuiting information" (p. 5) and distorted "truths" of conventional journalism. To determine the outer limits of this varying ontological relationship of mimetic and expressive treatment of events ("the rich, individual approaches to fact of separate texts," p. 33), Hellmann analyzes Mailer's Armies of the Night, Of a Fire on the Moon, and Executioner's Song; Thompson's two books on Fear and Loathing; Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; and Herr's Dispatches. And therein lies the rub. Fables of Fact hazards a comprehensive tiieory of a literature dynamically combining "the forming power of a consciousness and the imper- 118Reviews vious force of actual events" (p. 141), but its neat exegeses keep tipping die balance, determinedly nudging these actuality-based works into purely fictional stances. However much Hellmann tries to maintain a balance between factuality and fabulation as implied in both halves of his title, his argument succumbs repeatedly to a transformational bias for fiction without ever clarifying the nature and relationship of fact to fiction. Thus, he characterizes Of a Fire on the Moon as "an imaginative counterpart to its subject, rather than as a simple representation of it" (p. 50). The extreme instance of "the fiction-making process" in its "apprehension of 'reality' " (p. 58) occurs in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thompson "inventus] his story," drumming "it up...