Radical Naturalism: First-Person Documentary Literature

Abstract

IN THE MID-1960s fiction as an art form was under attack from prose writers such as Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, from dramatists such as Rolf Hochhuth and Peter Weiss, and from historians such as Jan Myrdal and Studs Terkel. A number of catchwords were attached to the new realism propagated by these writers: faction, literature of fact, factography, documentary documentarism. The preoccupation with authentic source material, common to all documentarists, has tended to obscure the ways in which they differ from one another, sometimes decisively. In the absence of a usable typology, and in order to forestall undue generalization, I shall concentrate in this essay on a documentary category which can be demarcated with some confidence. Variously known as the report, reportorial literature, or oral history, it attained prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unlike so much documentary drama, it does not consist of ready-mades; it is made. But the person on the cover is not so much the author as those who talked to him or into his tape recorder. More often than not it is partisan toward these people and has a professed emancipatory intent. Its loyalties are extraliterary, but viewed from within the field of literature it conflicts with fiction.