Emergence of the American Documentary Novel and Its Postmodern Extension

Abstract

The emergence of the nonfiction novel in the U.S. in the 1960s is closely linked with the birth of New Journalism, as formed by the writers who gathered around Tom Wolfe. Both narrative phenomena share a principle of combining references to empirical reality with the approaches and techniques of writing fiction. This article seeks parallels between the poetics of the postmodern and postmodernism, and the nonfiction novel. The postmodern state is predominantly seen as the state of pluralism of truths and interpretations; the “grand narrative” has been renounced, and one single, irrefutable truth no longer exists. This is a time of epistemological crisis and metaphysical void, and this state is reflected in the writings of both New Journalists as well as nonfiction novelists. Among the latter, Truman Capote and his work In Cold Blood (1965) stand out because he claimed that he had created a totally truthful account of the Kansas murder, yet his writing is substantially subjective. Norman Mailer, with his novels The Executioner’s Song (1979) and The Armies of the Night (1968), comes closer to what has been termed the “nonfiction novel” after trying to find a proper – yet, as discovered, inevitably unfixed – definition, as is the notion of postmodernism itself. John Berendt, a more contemporary “documentarist,” presents his work Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) as an example of postmodern narrative in the form of bricolage, combining journalism with features of travel narratives, crime novels, and gothic tales. The nonfiction novel displays a break with the traditional assortment of genres and stylistic and linguistic conventions, embodies the contemporary crisis of values in a specific way, and denotes a new and original distribution of narrative energies in the U.S. after the 1960s. Consequently, new terminology and critical approaches need to be created for this type of documentary narration.