Tom Wolfe’s Narratives as Stories of Growth

Lisa Stokes

“What a feast was spread out before every writer in America! How could any writer resist plunging into it? I couldn’t.”

So admits Tom Wolfe in his recent manifesto “for the new social novel” which appeared in Harper’s.’ Wolfe didn’t simply plunge-he cannonballed into the literary scene with the publication in 1965 of his collected essays, T h e Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and the resounding waves have continued to be felt with his non-fiction novels T h e Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and T h e R igh t Stuff and his social novel T h e Bonfire of the Vanities. His splashes get attention-whether the reader loves or hates Wolfe, all respond to the energy and liveliness of his language and the strong persona created by his wri ting.2

Curiously enough, however, little notice has been given to Wolfe’s narratives, including the special relationship which exists between narrator and subject and narrative and reader.3 Much Wolfe criticism addresses the satirical elements of Wolfe’s writing; however, my approach investigates how Wolfe works wi th his subject rather than against it. According to this perspective, the Wolfe-man interacts with his subject, is transformed by it, and moves ahead as he imagines and lives a new story creatively (i.e., writes the narrat i~e) .~ His seeingeyes, which respond to the concrete visual world, the world of the journalist, become narrative eyes (and the narrator’s “I”).

By focusing on four representative Wolfe narratives, I intend to emphasize Wolfe’s contribu- tion to American writing and the literary scene. My examination includes two areas: 1. the special way in which the narrator connects with his subject and how this affects language; and, 2. the implications of the characteristics of the subjects Wolfe writes about. I will discuss Wolfe’s first published collection of stories, T h e Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and extended essay, T h e Painted Word, and two non-fiction novels, T h e Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and T h e

R igh t Stuff, in each case looking at the initial encounter between the narrator and his subject, built around some kind of “happening.” The variations on these “happenings” indicate the narrative direction taken and the reader’s integral part in shaping the narrative.

Narrator Wolfe respects his subjects’ integrity as autonomous narrative forces. Their special relationship can be described as the reciprocal social relationship which exists between a speaker and a listener.5 Wolfe treats them as subjects, not objects- i.e., the subjects fulfill the relationship of subject to verb. They exist as active forces in the narrative with voices that speak, not merely as passive objects to be acted upon by a narrator who enacts the subject/verb/object relationship. The narrator’s voice is simply one alongside others-his subject, his reader, and language as other-and he remains responsive to the undiminished power of their voices.6

The narrator, distinct from his living subjects, is linked to them finally only through words, words which place him imaginatively in a functioning relationship with others, and through words the Wolfe narrator moves or comes alive. His excitement in response to his subject is expressed in language itself, through the panoply of voices, exotic punctuation, strange vocabulary in an unusual context, and neologisms. His humor and excitement often make the words bounce off the page, endowing him with narrative life. He allows all voices to speak, silencing none, providing the terrain on which they can compete for dominance.

Many voices speak in a Wolfe narrative.7 The voices of the subject converse with the narrator, as the narrator responds, both beside the subject and combining with its voice, extending the narrative and stimulating new encounters between narrator and subject. Wolfe is sensitive to the conversations his subjects speak and he literally quotes them as well as picks up their vocabulary himself. Of the many voices which converse, two repeatedly appear and characterize the narrator. These include the

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20 voice of an interpreter/translator, who defines and clarifies, who recognizes the pitfalls of generalization and abstraction and works to modify them, and the voice of articulation, whose constant refrain is “how can one put i t into words?” Wolfe’s preoccupation with not just saying it, but getting it right, dominates his voice and runs through all the Wolfe narratives as the narrator responds to his subject.

Wolfe’s compendium of subjects reads like a Cook’s Tour of strange and unusual phenomena. Car customizers, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, modern artists and critics, and test pilots and astronauts identify only a few which superficially seem to have little in common. Yet a closer look reveals Wolfe’s subjects share distinctly American values and attitudes. Wolfe is attracted to and celebrates rebel heroes, individuals specifically set against a larger social contest, hell bent on “pushing the envelope” or breaking the confines of the dictates of their society or sphere and reflecting anti-Establishment ideologies. They are independents with clearly defined identities, interested in exploration and discovery. Their subversion of the status quo can be traced back to impulses characteristically American. They serve as a link in the chain from America breaking with Britain and 19th-century American writers discovering an authentic voice and distinguishing American from European literature, to the movement westward and the whole concept of

moving on,” as evidenced in the novels of Kerouac, Kesey, and McMurtry. Their insistence on self- definition is inherent in the individual freedoms set down in the Bill of Rights, and their opening up new territory reflects Hemingway’s code, which emphasizes “pursuit as happiness,” not “pursuit of happiness.”

Wolfe’s attraction to these subjects is acted upon by the “good thinking” of his narratives, in which a reader discovers a narrative unfolds through Wolfe’s recognition of the immense power of language to convey the energies of Wolfe and his subject. Voices confront, answer, question, and listen in a Wolfe narrative, and at any moment a reader can enter the conversation. While a detailed discussion of any Wolfe narrative using my approach would require an analysis lengthier than the Wolfe narrative in question, I believe the easiest point of entry is to begin with Wolfe’s beginnings, because narrative inceptions can tell us much about narrative futures.

The initial interaction between Wolfe and his subjects begins, naturally, with the beginning. In the “Introduction” to the first published collection,

,I

Journal of American Culture The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Wolfe describes the process of writing its title story: “I could tell that something was beginning to happen. . .What had happened was that I started writing down everything I had seen the first place I went in California, this incredible event, a ‘Teen Fair.’ The details themselves, when I wrote them down, suddenly made me see what was happening” (xiii-xiv). The “something” Wolfe alludes to is the possible integration of narrator and subject, working and moving together to create the narrative. Narrator Wolfe responds to the concrete, visual details of the teen fair and the language of the teenagers, both of which grow out of their energies. He uses their voices, as they influence his voice and as they speak for themselves.

“The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Stream- line Baby” is the seminal story of Kandy-Kolored; the title of both story and book refers to the car that George Barris customizes for Ronny Camp. Immediately striking is its “kurious (sic)” spelling and grammatically correct but eye-catching punctuation. The words themselves are taken from a special color of paint Barris mixes to color customized cars. The title, taken from the words of the car customizers themselves, directs the reader’s attention to the power of the emerging narrative. “Kandy-kolored tangerine-flake” is a warm color, both visually appealing and life enhancing, suggesting an elemental force (sun, heat, fire). The “k’s” of “kandy-kolored” reflect George Barris’s individual style (expressed through language) of functioning in his world as a custom car artist; “streamline” suggests that the car is built for movement and will utilize its energy to the utmost, and emphasizes Wolfe’s interest in new forms; and, “baby” pertains to birth and life (as does color) and the integration of man and machine (the car is the baby, as is Ronny). Driving the car, Ronny, aided by its streamlining, will direct its power, just as Wolfe, utilizing his skills, will articulate “the real story” of the hot rod and custom car show through language, “the real story” being the narrator’s integration with subject.

In Kandy-Kolored Wolfe brings together twenty-two stories and six illustrations in search of a new narrative form whose underlying drive is to cross the barriers between stories and sections through its voices. The subjects have in common energies that attract Wolfe and incite narratively. Narrative direction depends upon the energies of both subjects and narrator. High-energy subjects dominate the stories through their appearance and language, and these subjects, like the car customizers, are the ones which the narrator relates

Tom Wolfe’s Narratives to most effectively as he works in synch with their energies. What they are doing in their respective worlds parallels what Wolfe is doing narratively. When Wolfe encounters subjects whose energies are misdirected, he still remains alive to their potential energies expressed through their language.

The narrative experimentation which “was beginning to happen” in Kandy-Kolored leads to new narrative venture in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The Acid Test narrative begins in medias res, with the narrator responding to Cool Breeze: “That’s good thinking there, Cool Breeze. Cool Breeze is a kid with three or four days’ beard sitting next to me on the stamped metal bottom of the open back part of a pickup truck. Bouncing along” (1). The reader is invited into the midst of a “happening” as the narrator relates to Cool Breeze’s dress and conversation. The narrator’s opening comment reflects the perspective of the reporter Tom Wolfe, responding ironically to Cool Breeze’s outrageous dress despite his wish to maintain a low profile. Secondly, the comment emphasizes “good,” the kind of thinking being done by narrator Wolfe who incorporates a Prankster phrase into his own conversation. As character Wolfe is bounced along in the Prankster-driven pickup truck, in the early chapters the narrator as well is less directing the narrative as being directed by it, these chapters growing out of his openness to whatever his subject offers him and his readiness to move with As the narrative develops, however, the narrator directs the possibilities the Pranksters’ energies present, through acid, the bus trip, the movie, and “beyond acid,” while Kesey himself becomes obsessed with control. Wolfe’s direction is drawn from the Pranksters’ world, alongside Kesey’s, and is not Wolfe’s imposition on the narrative; i t grows as an expression of the “happening,” the encounter of narrator and subject, and depends upon their voices and his own.

With the words, “An extraordinary thing happened: Z noticed something!,” Wolfe begins The Painted Word and a force is born as the narrator anecdotally relates having read a New York Times article about contemporary art. Wolfe emphasizes the encounter as “extraordinary,” set apart from the germinal “something was beginning to happen” of Kandy-Kolored and the “happenings” of Acid Test. Compared to other Wolfe narratives, here he is stimulated not by concrete details of the physical world, but by the word-literally Hilton Kramer’s words, an unintentional paraphrase of the position put forth by the art theorists themselves. Wolfe describes the encounter in the past tense, in contrast to the earlier happenings. This, coupled

21 with the avoidance of the immediate present, here and throughout the narrative, suggests not only the distance between narrator and event, but the distance that will be maintained between Wolfe and his subject, as an imaginative writer approaches a theoretical subject. Wolfe notices the following in Kramer’s article: “To lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial” and he is “jerked alert” (4). Stimulated to narrate, Wolfe begins by making Kramer’s words his own, putting them into his own words. Reading, initially a visual activity, becomes an imaginative one as Wolfe creates the book’s premise and the narrative’s conception which he will work through: “Modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text” (6) . Narrativity illustrates the thesis “believing is seeing” but it does so through an imaginative journey which develops around the energies and articulativeness of the theorists, whom Wolfe extensively quotes and paraphrases. They are perceived similarly to Wolfe’s non-intellectual subjects, as subjects who have energies to be used and use them.

The Painted Word provides Wolfe with the opportunity to explore how he can use the theoretical to stimulate narrative growth and prepares the way for the enormous amount of theoretical information he must deal with in The Right Stuff. The test pilots and astronauts of this narrative depend upon the theoretical and technical for their enterprise and movement, but they, more than any other subjects Wolfe has written about, exist as voices who articulate their identities, without a first-person narrator’s presence. The narrator is a distanced presence who exists only through language.

In Right Stuff, the initial encounter between Wolfe and the subjects’ energies has already transpired. The use of past and present perfect tense in the opening reflects this.

Within five minutes, or ten minutes, no more than that, three of the others had called her on the telephone to ask her if she had heard that something had happened out there.

‘Jane, this is Alice. Listen, I just got a call from Betty, and she said she heard something’s happened out there. Have you heard anything?’ (3)

The narrative opening begins, like Acid Test’s, in media res, but the historical present in which Acid Test’s “happenings” are set, along with the presence of the Tom Wolfe character and narrator, which clearly identifies the roles of narrator and subject, are missing in Right Stuff. The new narrative distances the encounter temporally and

22 through voice. “Something has happened out there” and “something’s happened out there” both refer to an action that begins in the past and is finished when one speaks. The encounter has already taken place, and Wolfe’s narrative desire to articulate “the right stuff” set in motion. Wolfe is and will remain “out there,” not as a first-person narrator, but as a narrative identity developed through language. His position exists through his voice and its relation to the other voices-of astronauts, test pilots, NASA brass, even a president. As he brings the subject’s words and belief systems into his language, he establishes his position through the interplay of their voices, playing out competing languages to creatively understand “the right stuff.” Incorporating the voices by which his subjects exist and the technical language on which their endeavor depends, introducing a voice which translates and interprets it, and creating his own terminology, Wolfe forges a new narrative identity determined solely by what is said and how it is said.

If Wolfe narratives depend upon the special relationship between a narrator and his subject, and this relationship nurtures interaction, growth, and possibility, what affect, then, do Wolfe narratives have on their readers? The celebration of autonomy and individualism through the subjects could be in danger of reinforcing a conservative politics (perhaps nurtured by the posturing of the white- suited dandy, Tom Wolfe.) In this light Wolfe could be seen as co-opting individuality, thus validating the subversive element these subjects represent and reinforcing the inequalities of contemporary American society. The narrative message read in this case would be that individualism and rebellion are alive and well in America, so that subversion is not only tolerated but legitimized. This message in turn defuses the potentially subversive reader, and society and culture continue to function without significant change. This message would rob the narrative of its potential effectiveness to the reader, sapping hidher energies before they can be activated.

To the contrary, Wolfe narratives tell readers to enlarge their “scripts” and make their “movies a little bigger” as expressed in Acid Test. The very life of Wolfe’s multi-voiced language and the energies exchanged between narrators and subjects undermines any conservative politics. Wolfe was once asked,

Journal of American Culture them? Wolfe responded ‘No1 You can’t approach a subject with a moral commitment and come up with anything new. As soon as any approach has reached the stage that it takes on a moral tone it is already out of date-it’s f ro~en.’~

With Wolfe for the Defense you don’t need a Prosecutor, is the way someone described your ‘ambivalent’ attitude towards your subjects. Isn’t it necessary to have a moral attitude toward

Wolfe co-exists alongside his subjects, and the presence of the subjects and their many voices influence narrator and narrative to such a degree, that, when the reader’s voice is also added to the narrative, a voice heard even as the narrative is being written, the struggle for domination remains unresolved and the potential for power and change is on-going. Consider this passage from The Painted Word:

‘Pollock’s strength,’ he [Greenberg] would say, ‘lies in the emphatic surfaces of his pictures, which it is his concern to maintain and intensify in all that thick, fuliginous flatness which began-but only began-to be the strong point of late Cubism.’ And all through bohemia the melody played. . . That thick, fuliginous flatness got me in its spell. . . ‘It is the tension of the inherent in the constructed, re-created flatness of the surface,’ Greenberg would say, ‘that produces the strength of his art’. . .That constructed, re-created flatness that you weave so we l l . . .‘his concentration on surface and tactile qualities.. .’ Those farnouspaint-flzngson that pictureplane.. .Ah, the music was playing1 And Clement Greenberg was the composer1 (56-

7)

Playing off the specific language of Greenberg’s art theory and “That Old Black Magic,” the narrative incorporates both into itself, and also the reader’s associations brought to this narrative moment. The narrative rhythm becomes seductive, like the original song, and according to Wolfe, like the purpose behind the theory of modern art, which seduces us into “believing is seeing.” Likewise, Wolfe’s narrative is a siren song which uses the theoretical as a springboard into the imaginative, and the narrative voices become an incentive for the reader’s imagination and exploration of his own powers. As Michael Holquist remarks, “Literature is important because it gives the most vigorous on- the-job training for a work we must all as men do, the work of answering and authoring the text of our social and physical universe.”lO Wolfe’s narratives empower readers by awakening their energies to the unresolved struggle between ideology and narrative.

‘Tom Wolfe, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” Har$er’s Nov. 1989: 50.

Tom Wolfe’s Narratives 2For example, among the writers whose letters were

printed in Harper’s in response to Wolfe’s manifesto, Scott Spencer described Wolfe’s “boyish glee,” and “a self that finds its writerly expression in style,” T. Coraghessan Boyle his ”marvelous frenetic, hyperbolic comedy,” Alison Lurie his “energy and lively interest,” and Walker Percy remarked, “Tom Wolfe has his nerve. I’m glad somebody does.” See “Letters,” Harper’s Feb. 1990: 4-12.

Wudies of Wolfe’s narrative include: A. Carl Bredahl, “An Exploration of Power: Tom Wolfe’s ‘Acid Test,’ ”

Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 23 (1981): 67-84; Ronald Weber, The Literature of Fact: Literary Nonfiction in American Writing (Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1980); and, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1976).

4The American tradition of rebellion, transformation and process is described by standard critics like Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, and R. W. B. Lewis. See Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1957); Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day, 1968); and, R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955).

5See Mikhail Bakhtin’s principle of dialogism which describes how language develops and how meanings are generated and heard as social voices which anticipate and answer each other. Bakhtin recognizes that voices represent distinct socio-ideological positions and narrative becomes a shared territory on which various voices are influencing and influenced by the voice of the other. Says Bakhtin: “Discourse lives on the boundary between its own context and another, alien context.” Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981) 284. See also “Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another.” In Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays Trans. Vern W. McCee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1984) 91.

6The narrator is a participant, not a dictator. Instead of a godlike author who oversees and manipulates the elements of his work, like Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky, Wolfe is a Christlike author: Christ as “a loving deity, who is silent so that others may speak and, in speaking, enact their freedom. . . Dostoevsky gives up the privilege of a distinct and higher being to descend into his text;to be among his creatures.” Katarina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984) 249.

7Wolfe himself listed the stylistic voices he uses. They include

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1. The voice from the possible perspective of a character 2. The “downstage voice,” as if it were coming from someone

who was a part of the scene 3. The “hectoring narrator” through which the reader

envisions what is taking place and can confront characters and poke fun at them

4. The third-person voice which writes objectively about “Tom Wolfe”

5. Stream-of-consciousness or interior monologue which selects those thoughts which most effectively convey the personality of the character

6. Quoted dialogue

For a detailed description of this list of voices, see Wolfe, introduction, The New Journalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1973) 3-52. To this list I would add several other voices:

7. The first-person speaker “Tom Wolfe,” who often starts the narrative (see the introduction to Kandy-Kolored or the opening of Painted Word)

8. The voice of the translator or interpreter who defines, elaborates, and clarifies, who recognizes the voice of abstraction and tries to modify it, and whose typical response begins, “Which is to say,. . . ”

9. The voice specifically interested in articulation, whose constant refrain is, “How can one put it into words?”

81 am indebted to A. Carl Bredahl for his understanding of Acid Test and have been influenced by his article “An Exploration of Power: Tom Wolfe’s ‘Acid Test’ ” cited in note 3 above.

9Tom Wolfe, interview, “Tom Wolfe.. .But Exactly, Yes!” by Elaine Dundy, Vogue 15 Apr. 1966: 153.

loMichael Holquist, “Answering as Authoring: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Trans-Linguistics” Critical Inquiry 10 (1983) 318.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

- Problems of Dostomsky’s Poetics. Trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson. Vol. 8 of Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: Minnesota P, 1984.

- Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McCee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.

Bredahl, A. Carl. “An Exploration of Power: Tom Wolfe’s ‘Acid Test.’ ” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 23

Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1957.

Clark, Katarina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.

Fiedler, Leslie. The Return of the Vanishing American. New York: Stein and Day, 1968.

Holquist, Michael. “Answering as Authoring: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Trans-Linguistics.” Critical Inquiry 10

(1981): 67-84.

(1983): 307-19. “Letters.” Harper’s Feb. 1990: 4-12. Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy,

and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. 1955. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971.

Weber, Ronald. The Literature of Fact: Literary Nonfiction in American Writing. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1980.

Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 1968. New York: Bantam Books, 1969.

24 Journal of American Culture - The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline - “Stalking the Billon-Footed Beast.” Harper’s Nov.

- Interview. “Tom Wolfe.. .But Exactly, Yes!” By Baby. 1965. New York: Pocket Books, 1972. 1989: 45-56.

___ The Painted Word. 1975. New York: Bantam Books,

- The Right Stujj. New York: Farrar, Suaus, & Giroux, 1976.

1979.

Elaine Dundy. Vogue April 1966: 124+.

Lisa Stokes has recently finished her doctoral dissertation on Tom Wolfe. She teaches at Seminole Community College in Sanford, Florida.