Reality Effect #1: Choosing a Style of Attribution
If you’re a reporter filing a daily news story, you lean quickly that all facts–and especially quotations–have to be subject to what the profession calls attribution . This is the technique by which facts or statements are rendered as “according to” a particular person, institution, or source of authority. (As in “According to the Pentagon…” or “as the Department of Defense stated,”…and so on.) One of the most revered forms of verification in all of American journalism, attribution generally has to be “adjacent” to such facts or statements–in the same sentence or paragraph. If it’s not directly identifying a person or source, protocols for other kinds of statements–background, “deep background,” on condition…all come into play.
And yet, if you turn to works of narrative journalism–especially in book form–you’ve probably notice that these rules have been, to put it mildly, relaxed. That’s because one of the first effects of “reading like a novel” is a “smoothing out” of the narrative so that it’s not clogged up by endless “according to’s” and so forth. We start to grant the long-form journalist much more scope and authority as a result: we assume such things are “as told to” or directly seen by the reporter, usually. And by doing that, often the “immersive” effect is enhanced: we “suspend disbelief” and go with the reporter’s novel-like account. Sounds like a plan.
But really, there’s much more to it than that. To illustrate some of the many effects involved in removing attribution, in what follows I’ve copied down two passages from Hersey’s Hiroshima, which is famous for this erasure of attributions. Hersey uses, as you’ll see below, a dispassionate, third person style that can make us feel we’re watching actual events. But what I’ve decided to do is show you what the same passage might look like with a series of hypothetical attributions put back in, in bold print below. I’ll try to suggest, through my inventions—including converting Hersey’s third person to direct quotation–how Hersey might have chosen to give us more explicit sources for his facts, his telling occasions, and so on—but in fact chose not to. What follows are two descriptions of one of Hiroshima’s main characters right before the blast hits him:
Mr. Tanimoto was a small man, quick to talk, laugh, and cry. He wore his black hair parted in the middle and rather long: the prominence of the frontal bones just above his eyebrows and the smallness of his moustache, mouth, and chin gave him a strange, old-young look, boyish and yet wise. He moved nervously and fast, but with a restraint which suggested that he was a cautious, thoughtful man. (3)
Before six o’clock that morning, Mr. Tanimoto started for Mr. Matsuo’s house. There he found that their burden was to carry a tansu, a large Japanese cabinet, full of clothing and household goods. The two men set out. The morning was perfectly clear and so warm that the day promised to be uncomfortable. A few minutes after they started, the air-raid siren went off—a minute-long blast that warned of approaching planes but indicated to the people of Hiroshima only a slight degree of danger, since it sounded every morning at this time, when an American weather plane came over. (4)
Here’s the same sequence, but now I’m putting some possible attributions back in. (I should emphasize again that I’m just making these up—I don’t mean to suggest I’m inferring them from the original, or from Hersey’s remarks, or anything like that):
Mr. Tanimoto was a small man, quick to talk, laugh, and cry, his friends all said. As photographs from the time showed, he typically wore his black hair parted in the middle and rather long: the prominence of the frontal bones just above his eyebrows and the smallness of his moustache, mouth, and chin gave him a strange, old-young look, boyish and yet wise. Even when I met him two years later, he moved nervously and fast, but with a restraint which, as he later said to me, was intended to suggest that he was a “cautious” thoughtful person. (3)
Before six o’clock that morning, Mr. Tanimoto recalled, “I started walking to Mr. Matsuo’s house.” There, as both he and Matsuo later recounted, he found that their burden was to carry a tansu, what he described to me as a large Japanese cabinet, full of clothing and household goods. The two men set out. Newspapers from the day tell us that the morning was perfectly clear and so warm that both men felt that the day promised to be uncomfortable. A few minutes after they started, the air-raid siren went off, at what the Japanese government later said was 8:44 AM —a minute-long blast that, many residents later testified, warned of approaching planes but usually indicated to the people of Hiroshima only a slight degree of danger, since it sound every morning at this time, commonly when an American weather plane came over. U.S. military commanders later confirmed that these were, in fact, spying runs.(4)
You may, yourself, notice many differences here. To my eye and ear, Hersey’s own prose, in the original first version I’ve given you here, seems less cluttered, more compact—a simple word count tells us that. Many of Hersey’s stylistic choices often tend toward this restrained, compressed, seemingly straight factual effect. And even though his original is in the past tense, his prose seems intent on creating that feeling of immediacy I myself responded to on my first reading when I was a teenager. That is, we might feel, as I first did, that the effect of removing such attributions is to make readers believe that they are listening directly, as if it’s a reality effect we all recognize, that famous “fly on the wall” effect (or fourth wall effect if this were drama) that enhances the feeling of immediacy. (Some will label this the illusion of unmediated experience, to tell us that the media representative, the recording journalist, has been made to disappear. Or, again, to make it seem Archimedean.)
So one way to think of those passages is that Hersey consciously omitted those attributions–in order to make the moment seem “real.”
But if you really think about it, you can see that the effect of Hersey’s choice to remove attribution, above, is actually more complicated than all that. For instance, though we may feel we’ve been listening to directly quoted dialogue, maybe we’re not: rather, maybe Hersey has translated such interviews into actions and indirect descriptions, again to make us feel as if we’re reading a transcription of what happened. Moreover, my added attributions might have actually served to clear up things that Hersey doesn’t bother to clarify: about who said what and where.
And so, you see, there might be an argument worth taking on about which is really more “realistic.” Paradoxically, for instance—and many mainstream reporters would agree with me on this—adding the attributions actually makes the passage more authoritative even if it also might seem less realistic in the way we commonly use the word. (You might want to read that sentence again). In fact, you can imagine (and, as I’ve said, you should imagine) journalistic subjects objecting to having the context of their words removed. Many, in fact, do. In fact, if you want to really get down into the grammatical weeds, one thing a rhetorician or grammarian might say is that my added attributions also have what is called restrictive effects—that is, they may limit the authority and even the power of a given fact by showing us a source for it that we might actually find insufficient or unpersuasive. So, for instance, if we learn that Hersey is using a photograph to describe a character rather than standing there looking at him, that might actually be less authoritative that Hersey made it seem, since photographs can be staged, or add weight to the person being photographed, and so on. And as such, we might realize that things Hersey does not attribute look like pure or incontestable facts rather than something said or claimed by a third party or source.
Now, it’s important to say again that I’ve made those missing attributions up. And there’s little evidence that Hersey did anything immoral or unethical here–and no evidence, here, that he was inventing facts. Nevertheless, we can say that if he enhances the reality effect of what we read, perhaps he did so by covering his tracks or “footprints.” And with such disagreements, one starts to see what could be the basis of your own critique.