The Healthy Predicament of Narrative Journalism
First of all, thanks for consulting Reading Narrative Journalism. If you’d like to send me some feedback, please use either the contact and comment form we’ve provided, or send me an email at wilsonc@bc.edu.
In the materials you’ve found here, I’ve tried to give you as many different examples of narrative journalism from the U.S. tradition that I could–those that conform to mainstream norms, and those that try to extend beyond them. But of course Reading Narrative Journalism can hardly account for all the different kinds of narrative journalism still out there—and the scope of the term itself is growing every day. I would certainly suggest consulting the Resources on this site; listening to the many online discussions, interviews, and public lectures you can find from narrative journalists themselves; and, if you like, open up a few of the entries in the Glossary section as well, for further thought. (Many of them are designed to provoked questions and conversations.) Many of the scholars I list in this site’s Bibliography are cracking open these very same tensions more adroitly than I have, and indeed going well beyond what I’ve been able to achieve in this relatively short narrative of my own.
I am thinking especially about the international range of reportage beyond the U.S., which has necessarily been neglected by my focus here. As scholars have shown, narrative journalism has a much older history than I’ve discussed, and it is rapidly being recognized as an international and transnational phenomenon. For starters, I would always say go to the website of the International Association of Literary Journalism Studies, at IALJS.org. From there, you can discover the very fine work being done in Canada, across Europe and Latin America, in Australia and many other places. I’ve benefited enormously from conversations with scholars and practitioners from those locations at IALJS conferences, and elsewhere.
Naturally, as well, my own views have evolved over the years. In a different kind of project, I myself might have brought to bear some of the questions I’ve asked in my final two chapters to bear upon writers discussed in the earlier ones. And, in turn, to apply a healthy skepticism to what I try to “explain” in those final chapters, too. And I would want readers of this site to do that, as well—to ask, for instance, whether a phenomenological approach sufficiently grasps the political or ideological issues of a given context; whether testimonial journalism needs to be more candid about the so-called telling occasion, and whether the so-called “recovery” of lost voices serves the interests of the recorder as much as or more than the speaker; whether a hospital in Merced, or a morgue in El Salvador, do have shaping influences on reportorial perspectives, especially since such locations are already-structured by intricate cultural rules about whether patients or victims even feel empowered to speak. And so on.
By saying that, I also mean to close by re-emphasizing the key word “active” in the “active, critical reading” I have tried, over the years, to encourage in my own students. An introductory site like this one necessarily builds up examples from my own personal point of view and my experience in the classroom. You can agree with me if you like, or not; your experience in classrooms is liable to be different from mine; and certainly I hope you can think of other writers and passages I should have considered, or other contexts outside of the texts I have. But I welcome those emendations and disagreements. Indeed, in creating this project, I think one of the most important and exciting discoveries, for me, was the realization that, when it comes to narrative journalism, sometimes working inside a text of narrative journalism–the approach I have emphasized here–can actually prove insufficient. Indeed, I often close my own classes by telling students that you become a better reader when you read more than one work of narrative journalism on the same subject; when you consult a writer’s interview or Notes on Sources; when you do your own research on subjects’ experience. This is an insight, as the saying goes, I didn’t know I knew—or had forgotten, perhaps, as I carried out the business here of thinking about the rationales behind different methods of reportage, and about different topics and different story-forms. But active reading is what matters most to me. In other words, what matters is not what this site offers, but what you do with it on your own.
And I can think of other caveats. Of course it is always the case that, whatever the prevailing conditions, stories will vary tremendously from reporter to reporter. We know from wonderful ethnographies of journalism like Marc Pedelty’s War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents (1995), in fact, that a reporting venue is often like a beehive of different hierarchies in the news profession, and many different access points to sources and information. In Pedelty’s account of Americans reporting on the civil war in El Salvador, you could find reporters reporting from the U.S. Embassy, battlefield reporters, stringers talking to people in the streets, members of alternative or even opposition presses. If Didion felt immobilized by what she saw, the New York Times‘s Raymond Bonner did interview members of the opposition political parties and even the guerrilla insurgency, while also talking to the President of the country; Bonner indeed sorted out the statistics on land ownership he was given by El Salvador’s “Institute for Agrarian Transformation.”1 There is no one-to-one correspondence, no causal effect, between conditions on the ground and the selections that individual journalists make. That’s why, in fact, the major variable I’ve emphasized—changing assumptions in postmodern experimentation about language, consciousness, and perception—are important.
But what about the first question: how can, say, a phenomenological or postmodern account be read to testify, in the journalistic way, to facts? Well, in some of my more contentious moods, I’ll admit, I tend to reply: well, how can it not be? The acts of faith we make with experimental reportage are not, I’ve tried to show, so different from those we make in reading more mainstream texts. And I would always say, of course, those acts of faith should all be examined critically. Moreover, it’s important to see that an account like Dispatches, if read carefully, is indeed trying to provide its reader with an explanation for why it takes the forms, and the risks, that it does. Some advocates of phenomenological writing would therefore say that this approach is actually more honest than those that, via a “realist” style, effectively write those problems out of their stories. And thus, if I took this line of argument, you can see that my pluralist answer to the second question would bear directly on my answer to this first one: reporters, again, simply work out decisions about reporting, style, story forms and subject relations in different ways.
In the end, the degree of focus that I offer about more experimental forms tries to point to is because they make us more aware of both the potential contradictions of the “telling occasion,” or what James Clifford has called the “predicament” of any such attempt to describe the experience of others.2 By using this term, I mean to say that such journalists’ honesty actually comes in acknowledging the perplexing, I would say even existential dilemma that their choices do indeed entail: not only for the balancing acts I have emphasized all throughout Reading Narrative Journalism, but even for some of the most rudimentary matters of journalistic verification and sourcing, especially under extreme conditions like war, reporting on authoritarian governments, or “recovering” (Margaret Randall’s term) stories on the fringes of news zones. To put this more simply, we might do well to see that a good reporter is often the one who points these predicaments out to us, and who doesn’t pretend somehow to have transcended them. And, as Wlliam Finnegan does, who reminds us that the privilege typically embedded in the very presence of the reporter can’t really answer all questions we have about what we call “news.” To the degree that such experimentation foregrounds such partiality, the gaps or aporia in a journalist’s own framework and interpretation—well, to me, the more it works. In fact, the more it actually legitimates its claim to being journalism in the first place.
Thanks again. Good luck, and good reading.
Notes