Nora BERNING - Interférences littéraires

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Nora Berning
Toward a Critical Ethical Narratology for Literary Reportages:
Analyzing the Story Ethics of Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how narrative techniques impact on the construction and negotiation of values in art-journalism. Located on the borderland between journalism
and literature, literary journalism’s epistemology is such that the construction of values is subject
to a dialectical-relational approach to social reality. In my paper, I argue that since narratological
categories like narrative situation, narrative time, narrative mood, and character-space that shape
the poetics of literary reportages are of some ethical import, it is important to foster dialogue
between classical, structuralist narratology and ethical criticism proper so as to be able to critically
examine the story ethics of literary reportages. The model that I propose for the analysis of literary reportages, Critical Ethical Narratology (CEN), is an integrative, context-sensitive and generically-specific framework, based on a holistic understanding of narrative as a vehicle of both
ethics and aesthetics. By applying this methodological armature to Alexandra Fuller’s reportage
Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier, I will show that CEN can serve as a prolific
model if one wants to account for the intimate link between value construction and narrativity.
Résumé
L’objectif de cette étude est de montrer comment des techniques narratives influencent la
construction et la négociation des valeurs dans l’art-journalisme. Située à l’intersection entre journalisme et littérature, l’épistémologie du journalisme littéraire soumet la construction des valeurs
à une approche dite dialectique-relationnelle de la réalité sociale. Dans la mesure où des catégories
narratologiques comme la situation narrative, le temps narratif, le mode narratif et l’espace-caractère, qui poétisent les reportages littéraires, ont des conséquences sur le plan éthique du récit, il
est important de nouer un dialogue entre la narratologie classique, voire structuraliste, et l’éthique
afin de pouvoir examiner, de façon critique, l’ethos textuel des reportages littéraires. Le modèle
que je propose pour l’analyse éthico-narratologique des reportages littéraires, Éthico-Critiquo
Narratologie (ECN) a vocation intégrative et vise à prendre en considération le contexte et le
genre. Il se base sur une conception holistique du texte comme dispositif éthique et esthétique.
En appliquant cette armature méthodologique au reportage d’Alexandra Fuller Scribbling the Cat:
Travels with an African Soldier, il s’agit de montrer qu’ECN peut servir comme modèle opératoire
pour une approche de la construction solidaire des valeurs et de la narrativité.
To refer to this article :
Nora Berning, “Toward a Critical Ethical Narratology for Literary Reportages :
Analysing the Story Ethics of Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat”, in: Interférences
littéraires/Literaire interferenties, November 2011, 7, Myriam Boucharenc, David
Martens & Laurence van Nuijs (eds.), “Croisées de la fiction. Journalisme et littérature”, 189-221.
Comité de direction – Directiecomité
David Martens (KULeuven & UCL) – Rédacteur en chef - Hoofdredacteur
Matthieu Sergier (FNRS – UCL & Factultés Universitaires Saint-Louis) – Secrétaire de rédaction
Laurence van Nuijs (FWO – KULeuven) – Redactiesecretaris
Elke D’hoker (KULeuven)
Lieven D’hulst (KULeuven – Kortrijk)
Hubert Roland (FNRS – UCL)
Myriam Watthee-Delmotte (FNRS – UCL)
Conseil de rédaction – Redactieraad
Geneviève Fabry (UCL)
Anke Gilleir (KULeuven)
Gian Paolo Giudiccetti (UCL)
Agnès Guiderdoni (FNRS – UCL)
Ortwin de Graef (KULeuven)
Jan Herman (KULeuven)
Marie Holdsworth (UCL)
Guido Latré (UCL)
Nadia Lie (KULeuven)
Michel Lisse (FNRS – UCL)
Anneleen Masschelein (FWO – KULeuven)
Christophe Meurée (FNRS – UCL)
Reine Meylaerts (KULeuven)
Olivier Odaert (UCL)
Stéphanie Vanasten (FNRS – UCL)
Bart Van den Bosche (KULeuven)
Marc van Vaeck (KULeuven)
Pieter Verstraeten (KULeuven)
Comité scientifique – Wetenschappelijk comité
Olivier Ammour-Mayeur (Monash University – Merbourne)
Ingo Berensmeyer (Universität Giessen)
Lars Bernaerts (Universiteit Gent & Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Faith Binckes (Worcester College – Oxford)
Philiep Bossier (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
Franca Bruera (Università di Torino)
Àlvaro Ceballos Viro (Université de Liège)
Christian Chelebourg (Université de Lorraine – Nancy II)
Edoardo Costadura (Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena)
Nicola Creighton (Queen’s University Belfast)
William M. Decker (Oklahoma State University)
Dirk Delabastita (Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la
Paix – Namur)
Michel Delville (Université de Liège)
César Dominguez (Universidad de Santiago de Compostella
& King’s College)
Gillis Dorleijn (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
Ute Heidmann (Université de Lausanne)
Klaus H. Kiefer (Ludwig Maxilimians Universität München)
Michael Kolhauer (Université de Savoie)
Isabelle Krzywkowski (Université Stendhal-Grenoble III)
Sofiane Laghouati (Musée Royal de Mariemont)
François Lecercle (Université de Paris IV - Sorbonne)
Ilse Logie (Universiteit Gent)
Marc Maufort (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Isabelle Meuret (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Christina Morin (Queen’s University Belfast)
Miguel Norbartubarri (Universiteit Antwerpen)
Andréa Oberhuber (Université de Montréal)
Jan Oosterholt (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg)
Maïté Snauwaert (University of Alberta – Edmonton)
Interférences littéraires / Literaire interferenties
KULeuven – Faculteit Letteren
Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 – Bus 3331
B 3000 Leuven (Belgium)
Contact : matthieu.sergier@uclouvain.be & laurence.vannuijs@arts.kuleuven.be
Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, n° 7, novembre 2011
Toward a Critical Ethical Narratology
for Literary Reportages:
Analyzing the Story Ethics of Alexandra Fuller’s
Scribbling the Cat
Alexandra Fuller’s non-fiction novel Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African
Soldier – part of which first appeared in The New Yorker in 2004 under the title
The Soldier – was reviewed as some of the most compelling contemporary longform reportage literature.1 In 2005, Fuller was awarded the Lettre Ulysses Award
for the Art of Reportage2 for her book which was labeled alternatively as memoir
or travelogue by reviewers.3 On a trip to her native Africa, Fuller revisits the places
of her childhood and travels with a white Rhodesian war veteran named ‘K’ from
Zambia, through Zimbabwe, into Mozambique to discover “the things that make
us war-wounded the fragile, haunted, powerful men-women that we are”.4 The
story which revolves around the inner and outer journey of K and the narrator
functions as a narrative of displacement – both in the literal and in the symbolic
sense of the term. The literary reportage defies easy classification not least because
white Africans are depicted as simultaneously oppressor and oppressed, colonizer
and colonized.5
Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat is a narrative “based upon personal experience, perception, and anecdotal evidence, representing a combination of the best of journalism and of creative non-fiction”.6 According to Fuller, it serves as a counternarrative to the mass media’s stereotypical images and formulaic narrative frames7.
Fuller seeks to dispel the “Out of Africa” myth as well as romanticized accounts
of the Black Continent by relying heavily on the creative use of language so as to
excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally, as Tom Wolfe would say.8 Her
1. Harry Mount, “White Man’s Burden”, in: The Telegraph, September 5, 2004; Malcom Jones,
“War Wounds”, in: Newsweek, May 17, 2004.
2. Between 2003 and 2006, the prize was awarded to “reporters whose courage, curiosity, and
integrity drive them to create in-depth, well-researched texts, bringing unknown, forgotten, and hidden realities to light”. See the official website of the Lettre Ulysses Award.
3. On the similarities between travel narratives and literary reportages see inter alia: Isabel
soares, “South: Where Travel Meets Literary Journalism”, in: Literary Journalism Studies, 2009, 1, 1,
17-30; John Hartsock, A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative
Form, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.
4. Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier, New York, Penguin, 2004,
251.
5. Antje Rauwerda, “Exile Encampments: Whiteness in Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat:
Travels With an African Soldier”, in: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2009, 44, 2, 51-64.
6. See the official website of the Lettre Ulysses Award.
7. Dave Weich, Author Interviews: Back to Africa with Alexandra Fuller, 2004, s.p., [online],
<http://www.powells.com/authors/fuller.html> (last accessed: May 15, 2011).
8. Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism, New York, Harper & Row, 1973.
189
The Story Ethics of Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat
reportage work resonates with Bell’s call for a “journalism of attachment”9 and
gives new impetus to the debate on care as a virtue for journalists10. In his keynote
speech at the Lettre Ulysses Awards inaugural ceremony in 2003, the Polish writer
Ryszard Kapuściński made a case for the reportage as a form of writing based on a
virtue ethics. For Kapuściński, solidarity and humanitas are at the heart of reportage
literature. The essence of literary reportages lies in the struggle for justice and in
the quest for social equality.
The adoption of a caring ethic by journalists which could possibly serve as
a remedy for what Moeller calls “compassion fatigue”11 does not come without
controversy, though. While its proponents argue that the kind of autonomy that a
virtue ethics could grant reporters acting simultaneously as ethical decision-makers
and moral agents12 is indispensable in an increasingly globalizing world – especially
when it comes to reporting war, disaster, and human misery – such a professional
self-understanding is anathema to reporters who hold dear notions like objectivity,
impartiality, and balance that loom large in conventional codes of ethics for journalists. With the debate on reporters qua “custodians of conscience”13 come to
the fore important questions regarding literary journalism’s ontology, epistemology,
and axiology. I will address these questions in this essay through the lens of what I
call a Critical Ethical Narratology (CEN), i.e. a generically-specific narratology with
which I seek to address the difficult issue of the construction of values and norms
in literary reportages.
CEN, as I will define it, is critical in two senses: First of all, it is critical because
it is based on an orientation to difference. CEN is grounded in a Relational Dialectics, i.e. an interpretative theory of meaning-making that harkens back to Bakhtin’s
dialogical theory of language.14 Literary reportages are, by definition, dialogical
insofar as “any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances” with which it “enters into one kind of relation or another”.15 Apart from it
being intra-discursive, CEN is a critical and reflexive narratology in the sense that
it seeks to advance critical-rational debate in the literary public sphere.16 Furthermore, CEN is ethical because it is fundamentally concerned with the construction of
values and norms in discourse and narration. The underlying assumption of CEN
is that literary reportages, like literary fiction, are primary vehicles of values and
9. Martin Bell, “The Journalism of Attachment”, in: Matthew Kieran (ed.), Media Ethics,
New York: Routledge, 1998, 15-22. The former BBC correspondent defines journalism of attachment as “a journalism that cares as well as knows; that is aware of its responsibilities; that will not
stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor.” (16)
10. ��
Linda Steiner and Chad M. Okrusch, “Care As a Virtue for Journalists”, in: Journal of
Mass Media Ethics, 2006, 21, 2&3, 102-122.
11. ��
Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death,
New York, Routledge, 1999.
12. ��
Edmund B. Lambeth, Committed Journalism: An Ethic for the Profession, Bloomington, Indiana
University Press, 1986.
13. ��
James S. Ettema and Theodore L. Glasser, Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism
and Public Virtue, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998.
14. ��
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, Austin,
University of Texas Press, 1981; Id., Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Austin, University of
Texas Press, 1986.
15. �Ibid., 69.
16. ��
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1962.
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Nora Berning
norms17. For the purpose of this essay, values will be defined as “critère qui fonde une
préférence, qui fait que quelque chose est désirable, souhaitable, bon etc.”18, whereas
norms, following Korthals-Altes, refer to “la forme prescriptive de la valeur”.19 To study
the values and norms of a narrative, whether it be fiction or non-fiction, means to
use the text as a “propédeutique à l’éthique”20, that is, as a kind of laboratory for
moral and ethical judgment. Since “individual narratives explicitly or more often implicitly establish their own ethical standards in order to guide their audiences to particular ethical
judgments”21, the role of the narratologist does not consist in applying a set of values
and norms to the text, but rather to ask the question “par quels procédés le texte
rend-il sensible les valeurs dont il se réclame?”22. Hence, “[é]tudier un texte dans
la perspective des valeurs qu’il véhicule, conduit également à examiner son organisation stratégique, qui détermine la valeur des valeurs”.23 What is central to CEN
then is the close linkage between textuality and values. It is a kind of narratology
that stands in the tradition of both Jouve’s and Phelan’s body of work insofar as it
combines narrative form and aesthetics with narrative ethics. It is based on the idea
that aesthetics and ethics are fundamentally complementary and that “interpretive,
ethical, and aesthetic judgments overlap and reinforce each other”.24
Since it is grounded in the basic assumption of the narrative nature of all discourse, CEN is a narratology that wants to be understood as both theory (narrative
theory) and methodology. As such, CEN is a form of critical inquiry that Phelan
refers to as “theorypractice”25 which is a particularly congenial way of combining
the theoretical dimension of narrative theory with the practical dimension of interpretation. Precisely because literary reportages go against our common sense
perception that journalism and literature are separate spheres which are clearly
distinguishable from each other, scholars need to be equipped with a conceptual
framework for dealing with these hybrid forms of narrative. It is my belief that
CEN is able to address not only many of the pressing questions that a stand-alone
ethical analysis or critical theory could not resolve, but that it can also “raise the
question of the nature of narrative,” thereby inviting “reflection on the very nature
of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself ”.26
Alexandra Fuller could be seen as belonging to the second generation of
literary journalists, the so-called “New New Journalists”.27 With her reportage
17. ��
Vincent Jouve, “L’autorité textuelle”, in: Karl Canvat and Georges Legros (eds.), Les
Valeurs dans/de la littérature, Namur, Presses Universitaires de Namur, 2004, 89-100.
18. ��
Liesbeth Korthals-Altes, Le salut par la fiction?: sens, valeurs et narrativité dans Le roi des
Aulnes de Michel Tournier, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1992, 10 (italics in the original).
19. �Ibid., 11 (italics in the original).
20. ��
Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre, Paris, Seuil, 1990, 139.
21. ��
James Phelan, “Narrative Judgments and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative: Ian
McEwan’s Atonement”, in: James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.), A Companion to Narrative
Theory, Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 325 (italics in the original).
22. ��
Vincent Jouve, Poétique des valeurs, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2001, 7.
23. ��
Liesbeth Korthals-Altes, Le salut par la fiction?, 12 et seq.
24. ��
James Phelan, Narrative Judgments, 327.
25. �Id., Living to Tell About It, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005, x.
26. ��
Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”, in: Critical
Inquiry, 1980, 7, 1, 5.
27. ��
“Rigorously reported, psychologically astute, sociologically sophisticated, and politically
aware”, these writers share “a devotion to close-to-the-skin reporting as the best way to bridge the
gap between their subjective perspective and the reality they are observing.” Robert S. Boynton, The
New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers, New York, Vintage, 2005, 10.
191
work she makes a significant contribution to the “rise of true fiction”28 at the turn
of the twenty-first century. Like the New Journalists in the 1960s and 70s, the
writing of this emerging second generation of literary journalists is said to have
as its touchstone critical constructivism.29 Accordingly, literary journalists like
Fuller tend to take the constructed nature of reality as their axioms for writing.30
Hence, it could be argued that literary reportages are as much cultural constructions as literary fiction. Precisely because literary reportages blur the boundaries
between journalism and literature in this way, I argue that this form of writing
has the potential to reinvigorate the view of communication as culture.31
Throughout the essay, I will shed light on the genre’s ontological specificity. The primary goal of this exploratory study, however, is to demonstrate how
narrative techniques impact on value construction in literary reportages. I will
use Fuller’s book-length reportage as an example to illustrate how my conceptual
framework for CEN can be applied to the narrative. I will show how such narratological categories as narrative situation, narrative time, narrative mood, and
character-space function as vehicles for value construction in literary reportages.
Through my close reading of Scribbling the Cat I wish to tackle the following research questions: How does the construction and negotiation of values function
in literary reportages? What is the ethical import of such narratological categories as narrative situation, narrative time, narrative mood, and character-space in
Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat? What values are thematized, problematized, and / or
foregrounded in the reportage?
Examining the story ethics of Scribbling the Cat in this way, i.e., through its
ethical and narrative fulcra, requires one to carefully scrutinize dominant narratological categories in terms of both relevance and applicability and to critically
interrogate the value of ethical codes in literary journalism. Hence, the aim of the
following chapter will be to first of all theorize literary reportages and to elucidate
the genre’s features from a decidedly interdisciplinary vantage point (chapter 1). In
a chapter on methodology, I will discuss the combined ethico-narratological model
that I propose for a critical examination of the story ethics of literary reportages
(chapter 2). In chapter 3, I will apply the theoretical and methodological armature
to Fuller’s reportage Scribbling the Cat. The findings of the textual analysis will be
discussed in terms of the contribution of CEN to the understanding of literary reportages as a form of writing that – as the committee of the Lettre Ulysses Award
maintains – presents us with an “enlightened interpretation of world affairs”. I will
conclude with a reflection on literary journalism’s role in a rapidly globalizing world
and make suggestions for guiding principles in terms of an ethical code for literary
journalists.
28. ��
Alissa Quart, “The Rise of True Fiction”, in: Columbia Journalism Review, November 2009,
47, 20.
29. ��
Caterina Konstenzer, Die literarische Reportage: Über eine hybride Form zwischen Journalismus
und Literatur (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2009).
30. ��
Literary reportages present us with “a story about reality, not reality itself ”. Elizabeth
bird and Robert W. Dardenne, “Myth, Chronicle, and Story: Exploring the Narrative Qualities of
News”, in: James W. Carey (ed.), Media, Myths, and Narratives: Television and the Press, London: Sage,
1988, 82.
31. ��
James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essay on Media and Society, Winchester, Unwin
Hyman, 1989.
192
Nora Berning
1. The Mythopoeic Reality of Literary Reportages
In the Anglophone academy, literary reportages are variously subsumed under such umbrella terms as literary journalism, literary non-fiction, creative nonfiction, art-journalism, and literature of fact or non-imaginative literature.32 The
abundance of terms (used more or less synonymously by scholars) testifies to the
genre’s epistemological fluidity.33 The view of literary reportages as an open, fluid,
indeterminate system of signs is, according to Hartsock34, inextricably linked to the
“form’s attempt to mirror a shifting reality rooted in the interplay of consciousness
and phenomenal experience”. For the purpose of this essay, I will follow Hartsock’s
conceptualization of literary reportages as an “epistemological moving object”35,
i.e. “a kind of narrative chameleon that shifts according to the critical perspective
brought to bear on it”.36
Such an understanding of the genre allows scholars to accommodate a diverse range of narratologies (e.g. cultural, ethical, feminist, etc.) when dealing with
literary reportages.37 Moreover, this view accounts for what Zavarzadeh means by
“the epistemological crisis of our age of suspicion”38, namely the ongoing erosion
of the distinction between fact and fiction. Conceiving of literary reportages as an
epistemological moving object means, on the one hand, acknowledging the fact that
the fact/fiction dilemma is nothing but a myth and, on the other, embracing the
subjective nature of all cognitions. By grounding the analysis of literary reportages
in the “fictuality”39 of our life-world, it becomes possible to conceive of literary
reportages as bi-referential narratives.40 This means that literary reportages are regarded as narratives that are directed, to an equal degree, toward the self-contained
world of the narrative (i.e. inward) and toward the external world of material reality
(i.e. outward). Following Zavarzadeh, I understand the literary reportage as
a unique mode of apprehending and transcribing reality, requiring its own particular set of critical assumptions which can deal with such central problems
in the phenomenology of reading it as the tension created by the centrifugal
energy of the external reality and the centripetal force of the internal shape
of the narrative.41
32. ��
Ronald Weber, The Reporter As Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy, New York,
Hastings House, 1974, 1; W. Ross Winterowd, The Rhetoric of the ‘Other’ Literature, Carbondale,
Southern Illinois Press, 1990, ix; Jan Whitt, Settling the Borderland: Other Voices in Literary Journalism,
Lanham, University Press of America, 2008, 2.
33. ��
John Hartsock, “Literary Journalism as an Epistemological Moving Object within a
Larger ‘Quantum’ Narrative’”, in: Journal of Communication Inquiry, 1999, 23, 4, 432-447.
34. �Ibid., 435.
35. �Ibid., 432.
36. �Ibid., 433.
37. ��
Ansgar Nünning, “Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent Developments, Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Usages of the Term”, in: Tom Kindt and HansHarald Müller (eds.), What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, Berlin,
de Gruyter, 2003, 239-275.
38. ��
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel, Chicago,
University of Illinois Press, 1976, 41.
39. �Ibid., 145.
40. ��
“Through its bi-referential narrative mode, the nonfiction novel registers the ontological
ambiguity of events and in doing so moves beyond the polar perspectives which view experience as
either factual or fictional.” (Ibid., 226)
41. Ibid., 57.
193
Central to this dialectical-relational approach to literary reportages is the
argument that the perceiver and the perceived, the focalizer (i.e. subject) and the
focalized (i.e. object), do not exist independently.42 Furthermore, experientiality and
referentiality are to be seen as the genre’s main distinctive features.43 The literary
journalist arranges facts not according to an a priori order but in such a way that they
“enact, in their totality and entirety, the ambiguity, unpredictability, and disorder –
in short, the entropy – of the actual”.44 What follows from this is that verifiability,
authenticity, and accuracy are the most contested notions in literary reportages.45
“Literary journalism is dangerous precisely because it challenges us to rethink what
we believe about the lines between fact and fiction and between truth and falsehood
and because it redefines and expands the idea of truth beyond the definitions of
‘objectivity’, ‘veracity’, or ‘accuracy’.”46
The prime strategy of legitimation in literary reportages is “mythopoesis”47
which means that the narrative writer’s ordering of facts is “not endorsive (authenticating) but mythopoeic”.48 Facts, following Zavarzadeh, are not to be seen
as carriers of journalistic “objectivity” but bring “ambiguity, unpredictability, and
disorder”49 into sharper focus. Since story-telling in Zavarzadeh’s view is also always
part mythmaking, the mythopoeic reality that is characteristic of the genre of literary reportages is such that it subverts the correspondence theory of truth that underlines factual journalism’s binding axiom of objectivity. Consequently, the genre
also undermines the logical positivist view of communication as implied in the
conventional transmission model of communication. The categorization of literary reportages is further complicated by the issue of artistic selectivity. Narrative
writers take liberties in recounting events and experiences, and there are differently
drawn boundaries in terms of what is permissible in literary journalism.
According to Zavarzadeh, the overall configuration of a literary reportage
depends on the narrative situation which refers to the narrator’s position relative to
the events of the story. Zavarzadeh distinguishes between testimonial (the narrator
is a witness to the events), exegetical (the narrator is not a witness to the events),
and notational (the narrator’s voice resembles a polyphonic choir) narrative nonfiction. However, based on the textual analysis of Scribbling the Cat, I will argue that
this threefold typology is not sufficient to describe such complex narratives as Fuller’s. Since the narrative journalist invites the reader to make a decision about the
text’s factual adequacy according to his or her own rules, it is important to analyze
the narrative situation in tandem with the narrative’s broader “web of facticity”.50
42.��
Mieke Bal, On Story-Telling. Essays in Narratology, Sonoma, Polebridge Press, 1991.
43. Monika Fludernik, “Fiction vs. Non-Fiction. Narratological Differentiations”, in: Jörg
Helbig (ed.), Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger, Heidelberg, C.
Winter, 2001, 85-103; Michael Geisler, Die literarische Reportage in Deutschland. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen eines operativen Genres, Königstein, Scriptor, 1982.
44. ��
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality, 66.
45. ��
Beate Josephi and Christine Müller, “Differently Drawn Boundaries of the Permissible
in German and Australian Literary Journalism”, in: Literary Journalism Studies, 2009, 1, 1, 67-78.
46. ��
Jan Whitt, Settling the Borderland, 17.
47. ��
Norman Fairclough, Analysing Discourse, London, Routledge, 2003, 99.
48. ��
49. �Ibidem.
50. ��
Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality, New York, The Free
Press, 1978, 82.
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In other words, the aim should be to assess the relation between the truth-claims
being made and the writer’s overall intention. In order to establish narratorial
authority and credibility, Alexandra Fuller prefaces her story as follows:
This is a true story about a man and about the journey that I took with that
man. It is a story about the continuing relationship that grew between the
man and me and it is a story about the land over which we journeyed. But
it is only my story; a sliver of a sliver of a much greater story. It is not supposed to be an historic document of fact. […] You will not be able to trace
our steps.51
Literary journalists work out ethical contracts not only with their sources but
also with their readers.52 “The charm of literary non-fiction is that it is a personal
ordering of a universe which, though it already exists, is nonetheless given shape by
the author’s own experience.”53 But the narrator whose character, actions, and outlook
are of some “ethical import”54 is only one central narratological category that shapes
the poetics and story ethics of literary reportages. In order to uncover the ethico-narratological dimension of literary reportages in its totality, it becomes necessary to go
beyond the concept of the narrator and to read reportages over a dialectical edge, that
is, to “read the complexities of narrative presence against authorial strategy”.55 If we
want to understand literary reportages as social narratives that are directly involved in
the construction of reality56, it is deemed imperative to unravel the narrative’s moralizing impulse since narrative writers generally tend to endow “events with a significance
they do not possess as a sequence or set of sequences in the order of existence”.57
Even though the ethical implications of narrative techniques are, as Craig58
points out, significant, no attempt has thus far been made to approach these
issues from an integrative perspective.59 Korthals-Altes60 explains that one of the
51. ��
Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat, Author’s Note.
52. ��
Mark Kramer, Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists. Nieman Storyboard, January
1, 1995, [online], <http://niemanstoryboard.us/1995/01/01/breakable-rules-for-literary-journalists> (last accessed: February 15, 2011). “[L]iterary journalists count on readers to understand their vantage point and to trust their narrative precisely because they confess their preconceptions and their points of view” (Jan whitt, Settling the Borderland, 8, italics in the original).
Following Fisher, humans have an innate capacity to determine narrative “fidelity,” i.e. to assess
whether a story rings true or not (Walter R. Fisher, “The Narrative Paradigm: In the Beginning”, in: Journal of Communication, 1985, 35, 4, 87). Fisher’s view is compatible with Bruner’s
argument that the question of narrative ‘truth’ is essentially about textual coherence (Jerome
Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality”, in: Critical Inquiry, 1991, 18, 1, 1-21). For
Bruner, truth “is judged by its verisimilitude rather than its verifiability”. (13)
53. ��
Henk Hoeks, “The Vulnerability of Literary Non-Fiction”, in: Publishing Research Quarterly,
2000, 16, 1, 39.
54. ��
Tilmann Köppe, “On Ethical Narratology”, in: Amsterdam International Electronic Journal
for Cultural Narratology, Autumn 2009, 5, [online], <http://cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology/a09_Koeppe.htm> (last accessed: May 15, 2011).
55. ��
Daniel Lehman, Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge, Columbus, Ohio State
University Press, 1997, 37.
56. ��
James W. Carey and Marilyn Fritzler, “News as Social Narrative”, in: Communication,
1987, 10, 1, 1-3.
57. ��
Mary S. Mander, “Narrative Dimensions of the News: Omniscience, Prophecy, and Morality”, in: Communication, 1987, 10, 1, 64.
58. ��
David Craig, The Ethics of the Story: Using Narrative Techniques Responsibly in Journalism,
Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006.
59. ��
“Narrative theory […] has yet to account, adequately or fully, for the ethical in the narrative process as either a formal property […] or a constitutive force” (Adam Zachary newton,
Narrative Ethics, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1995, 29).
60. ��
Liesbeth Korthals-Altes, “Présentation”, in: Études littéraires, 1999, 3, 31, 7-13.
195
reasons why the development of an ethical narratology proper has been hampered
is because the continuing influence of structuralism in the field of narratology made
it difficult for ethical criticism to enter the study of narrative. The fact that structuralist or classical narratology is formalist in its orientation – or to put it in the words
of Korthals-Altes, “l’orientation épistémologique et esthétique du structuralisme”61 –
has if anything reinforced the artificial opposition between aesthetics and ethics. But
especially in art-journalism, aesthetics and ethics build a productive relationship with
each other. “[L]es deux sont souvent intimement liés, puisque les positions esthétiques
les plus extrêmes se laissent décrire comme une éthique qui tient à se démarquer de
la morale ou des mœurs courantes, au nom d’une idée plus élevée de la responsibilité
de l’art.”62 Hence, it is all the more important to establish a dialogue between classical
narratology and ethical criticism. To investigate literary reportages with the help of
narratological categories that originated in structuralist narratology “is not to bring
them into some academic discipline which happens to ask ethical questions. It is to
bring them into connection with our deepest practical searching”.63
Despite the “ethical turn” that narrative theory has undergone since the
1980s, the body of literature on ethical narratology is surprisingly small.64 Especially
in France where the long-standing tradition of structuralism makes itself even more
felt than in the United States for instance65, the move towards integration and synthesis is virtually inexistent. My aim is to bridge this gap in extant research by proposing
CEN as a prolific framework for a critically oriented, ethico-narratological analysis
of literary reportages. “[I]l ne s’agit de demander à la littérature des solutions, mais
de montrer comment elle enrichit notre compréhension de l’homme par sa représentation complexe et profonde des problèmes moraux.”66 Following Korthals-Altes, I
argue that a combined methodological framework that is context-sensitive and generically specific is needed to account for the intimate link between value construction and narrativity.67 What CEN ultimately wants to get at is the “textual ethos”68,
because “[t]he telling itself – the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences,
vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader’s sense of life – all of this
expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and what does not, of
what learning and communicating are, of life’s relations and connections”.69
Before discussing the narratological categories central to my framework,
some remarks on what I mean by ethics and the negotiation of values in literary re61. Ibid., 8.
62. ��Id., “Le tournant éthique dans la théorie littéraire”, in: ibid., 39-56.
63. ��
Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1990, 24.
64. ��
Liesbeth Korthals-Altes, “Ethical Turn”, in: David Herman, Manfred Jahn and MarieLaure Ryan (eds.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London, Routledge, 2005, 142-146.
On the serious neglect as regards the study of the relationship between fact and value, see also
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, Cambridge,
Harvard University Press, 1988, 17 et seq.
65. ��
Liesbeth Korthals-Altes, “Présentation”.
66. �Id., “Le tournant éthique dans la théorie littéraire”, 46.
67. ��
Gerald Prince, “Narrativehood, Narrativeness, Narrativity, Narratibility”, in: John Pier
and José Ángel García Landa (eds.), Theorizing Narrativity, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2008, 19-28.
68. ��
“Cette phase initiale peut déboucher sur la confrontation de l’ethos textuel dégagé avec
d’autres conceptions éthiques, y compris celles du critique. À ce moment-là, celui-ci sort de son rôle
descriptif pour participer au débat éthique.” (Liesbeth Korthals-Altes, “Le tournant éthique dans
la théorie littéraire”, 54, italics in the original).
69. ��
Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature, 5.
196
Nora Berning
portages are necessary. I follow Weidle70, via Korthals-Altes, in the sense that CEN
is rooted in a rather loose concept of ethics as a practice embedded in medial and
cultural contexts. Understood in this way, CEN may be seen as a subfield of a much
broader cultural narratology since narrative is somehow always concerned ontologically with the cultural world and its arrangements.71 Yet I regard CEN not so much
as a specific strand of narratology, but rather as “a narratology in the service of
particular ends, and in the company of ethics. In particular, it is convenient to think
of narratology and ethics as providing a heuristics for the pursuits of these ends”.72
To examine literary reportages in this way, that is, by having recourse to classical
narratology that extends into ethical criticism and vice versa, has the advantage that
“l’œuvre n’est pas réduite à quelque vérité morale”.73 Rather, the narratologist is
confronted with the complex task of discovering the “vision du monde”74 hidden
beneath the aesthetic totality of the literary reportage.
2. CEN: A Model for Analyzing Story Ethics in Art-Journalism
In order to arrive at a holistic understanding of the negotiation of values in
literary narratives, Weidle proposes a typology that distinguishes between different
narrative techniques available to different types of media. Literary reportages that
contain images and photographs (like Scribbling the Cat) are classified as polysemiotic
media since they engage multiple sign systems (linguistic, symbolic, iconic) in the
process of meaning-making. Furthermore, literary reportages are spatio-temporal
media, because they extend both in the spatial and temporal dimension. In terms
of their sensory appeal, literary reportages fall under the category of one-channel
media since they engage the visual sense only. According to Weidle, seven narrative
techniques that are immediately relevant for an ethico-narratological analysis are
characteristic of polysemiotic, spatio-temporal, one-channel artifacts: sub-ordinary
relations, temporal relations, participation, perceptibility, reliability, focalization,
and speech representation.
Since Weidle’s model neither accounts for the ontological status of specific
genres nor for the diegetic / mimetic qualities of a medium, it will be modified in
such a way that it is better suited to tackle the complexity of literary reportages. The
kind of methodological approach that I take requires researchers to move back and
forth between the general and the particular in order to be able to grasp the dialectical
tension between a literary reportage and its “larger “quantum” narrative”.75 Such an
approach will allow researchers to focus simultaneously on the uniqueness of the text
under investigation and on the larger structuring principles available to literary jour70. ��
Roland Weidle, “Value Constructions in Narratives Across Media: Towards a General Typology”, in: Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, Autumn 2009, 5, [online],
<http://cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology/a09_Weidle.htm#_ednref21> (last accessed: May 15, 2011).
71. ��
Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Toronto, Toronto University
Press, 1985; Astrid erll, “Naive, Repetitive, or Cultural: Options of an Ethical Narratology”,
in: Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, Autumn 2009, 5, [online],
<http://cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology/a09_Erll.htm> (last accessed: May 15, 2011).
72. ��
Tilmann Köppe, “On Ethical Narratology”, s.p. See also Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald
Müller, “Narrative Theory and/or/as Theory of Interpretation”, in: What is Narratology? Questions
and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2003, 205-215.
73. ��
Liesbeth Korthals-Altes, “Le tournant éthique dans la théorie littéraire”, 46.
74. �Ibidem.
75. ��
John Hartsock, “Literary Journalism as an Epistemological Moving Object”, 432.
197
nalists.76 It is a method that helps determine the ways in which the parts of a narrative
serve as “functions” of the broader structure of the narrative77. Hence, “the best hope
of hermeneutic analysis is to provide an intuitively convincing account of the meaning
of the text as a whole in the light of the constituent parts that make it up”.78 Close
reading methods are particularly useful for discerning the latent meanings of texts.
Mander refers to this approach as “exegetical”79, because it is directed toward tracing
and explicating characteristic dimensions of a text that belongs to a specific genre.
My ethico-narratological exegesis of Fuller’s reportage Scribbling the Cat will
be based on a number of categories whose operational definitions I will sketch
out in the remainder of this chapter. The categories can be grouped under the following four headings: narrative situation, narrative time, narrative mood, and character-space. The narrative situation in general – and voice in particular – is one of
the most elemental categories of the story ethics of a literary reportage. Narrative
writers “listen to stories of most extraordinary life experience; and they retell these
stories, thus giving a voice to a particular other and generating a narrative laboratory
of (a)moral action”.80 For the purpose of this paper, I will distinguish between three
subcategories that together define the narrative situation: voice, perspective, and level.
Regarding the first category, voice (i.e. participation in Weidle’s classification),
I will make use of both Genette’s81 and Chatman’s82 typologies. Genette differentiates between homodiegetic narration and heterodiegetic narration, that is, the narrator is either present (homodiegetic) or absent from the story (heterodiegetic).
Autodiegetic narration (the narrator is the protagonist of the story) is a specific
form of homodiegetic narration. Apart from this threefold model, I will draw upon
Chatman’s distinction between overt and covert narrators. What he means by this is
that a narrator is either more or less overt depending on the degree of perceptibility
of his voice in the text. The second narratological category, perspective, refers to
focalization. Focalization is defined by Genette as the ratio of knowledge between
the narrator and the characters. In Genettean terminology, there are three different
types of focalization: zero focalization (the narrator’s knowledge exceeds that of
the characters), internal focalization (the narrator’s knowledge equals that of the
characters), and external focalization (the characters know more than the narrator).
The third category, level, refers to Genette’s distinction between extradiegetic and
intradiegetic narration and concerns a narrative’s sub-ordinary relations (first vs.
second-level order of the event-story).83
The category of narrative time is also made up of three analytical components:
order, speed, and frequency. As regards order, the equivalent of Weidle’s category
of “temporal relations”, I distinguish between chronological and achronological
76. ��
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1975.
77. ��
Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1968.
78. ��
Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality”, 7.
79. ��
Mary s. Mander, “Narrative Dimensions of the News”, 53.
80. ��
Astrid Erll, “Naive, Repetitive, or Cultural”, s.p. See also Susan Rubin Suleiman, Le Roman
à thèse, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1983, 2.
81. ��
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, New York, Cornell University
Press, 1980.
82. ��
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca, Cornell
University Press, 1978.
83. ��
See also Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London, Routledge,
1983.
198
Nora Berning
narration. Following Genette, the latter is divided into analeptic narration (anachronies that reach into the past) and proleptic narration (future-oriented anachronies).
The second element, speed, addresses the question of whether a narrator passes
quickly over an event (summary), lingers over it (pause) or omits it entirely (ellipsis).
Absolute correspondence between narrative time and story time (scene) is typical
of dialogic sequences only. The three kinds of frequencies that are possible in a narrative refer to the fact that a literary reportage “may tell once what happened once
(singulative), n times what happened n times (repetitive), n times what happened
once (basically irrelevant to literature), once what happened n times (iterative)”.84
Narrative mood, according to Genette, expresses the distance between the narrator and the text. The category is primarily concerned with the issue of the representation of speech in a narrative. This, in turn, refers to the question of whether
a character’s words are integrated into the narration (narratized speech), reported
by the narrator and presented with his / her interpretation (transposed speech,
indirect style), reported by the narrator but without his interpretation (transposed
speech, free indirect style) or cited verbatim in the text (reported speech). The distance between the narrator and the text increases progressively in these four types
of speech representation. The category sheds light on the ways in which narratives
“accommodate conflicting voices, thoughts and aspects of interiority that can assist
in shaping the construction, affirmation and questioning of value positions”.85 Reliability is closely connected to the category of narrative distance. For the purpose
of this essay, I appropriate Phelan’s conceptualization of reliability in the sense that
I examine reliability along three axes: the axis of facts, the axis of values and ethics,
and the axis of knowledge.86
In addition to the aforementioned three main categories, character-space will be
added as a fourth narratological concept to my framework for the analysis of literary
reportages. I adapt the notion of character-space which implies the close connection between characters and their surrounding environments (narrative space) from
Woloch.87 Following Woloch, much of the dramatic tension in literary narratives as
well as their social significance emerges out of the characters’ movements through
narrative space. In other words, characters and their spaces are important vehicles
for the negotiation of meaning and, by implication, for value constructions in literary reportages. I conceive of characters and their bodies as textual sites of ideological struggle and power.88 Through the depiction of characters and their bodies
writers can strategically advance norms and values. Hence, the body is “far from
being an irrepressibly individual “other” to narrative representation”.89
Having outlined the operational definitions underlying my CEN (for a summary see table 1 in the appendix), I will now briefly explain my rationale for choosing
Alexandra Fuller’s literary reportage Scribbling the Cat as my object of study. First, it
was chosen because it is an award-winning book that brings together such sensitive
84. ��
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, 114 (italics in the original).
85. ��
Roland Weidle, “Value Constructions in Narratives Across Media”, s.p.
86. ��
James Phelan, Living to Tell About It.
87. ��
Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the
Novel, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003.
88. ��
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I: An Introduction, New York, Vintage, 1990.
89. ��
Daniel Punday, Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology, New York, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003, viii.
199
topics as race and war which are discussed against the backdrop of the Zimbabwean
liberation struggle. Hence, it seems intuitively just to examine Fuller’s reportage from
an ethico-narratological perspective. Apart from the fact that the book raises fascinating questions about guilt, complicity, and responsibility, Scribbling the Cat is intriguing
because it is written by an African-American woman who is at home in two cultures.
As one of the few examples of outstanding post-independence Zimbabwean war
literature, the book serves as an important counterweight to the bulk of literary journalism that emerges out of an exclusively American context. Since from an ethiconarratological standpoint only relatively little scholarly work has been done on what
I call postcolonial literary non-fiction, I wish to offer a corrective to this structural
imbalance with my close reading of Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier.
3. An Analysis of the Story Ethics in Fullers’s Scribbling the Cat
3.1. Narrative Situation
The voice of a narrator is largely responsible for the narrative’s architectonics
(i.e. the way in which the event-story is narrated) as well as for the way in which the
story is perceived by the reader. Thus, the narrator’s voice demands a critical ethical
narratologist’s attention because it is an ethical issue in the sense that it may stir
compassion among readers. If used in a careful and meaningful way, the voice of a
narrator may encourage readers to press for social change and civic transformation.
Alexandra Fuller resorts to first-person narration to convey to the reader the complicated nature of her friendship with the war veteran K with whom she embarks
on a journey into the past, that is, to the roots of their childhoods. The use of the
homodiegetic narrator enables Fuller to project a high degree of subjectivity and
to touch such dimensions of actuality as imaginative reality and introspection that
objective reporting usually avoids. But a narrative situation in which the reporter is
both the teller of the story and a character in the story complicates the construction
of values in the narrative. Because the reporter follows her subjects around for a
long time, norms and values are endlessly negotiated and renegotiated. Fuller90 describes her interaction with K as follows:
I had shaken loose the ghosts of K’s past and he had allowed me into the deepest corners of his closet, not because I am a writer and I wanted to tell his
story, but because he had believed himself in love with me and because he
had believed in some very specific way I belonged to him. And in return, I
had listened to every word that K had spoken and watched the nuance of his
every move, not because I was in love with him, but because I had believed
that I wanted to write him into dry pages. It had been an idea based on a
lie and on a hope neither of us could fulfill. It had been a broken contract
from the start.
In this self-reflexive passage, Fuller not only concedes that despite the long
period of time that she had spent with her subjects and the strenuous efforts she
made in order to fully immerse herself in K’s world, she was not able to fully
‘own’ her subjects and their stories. Moreover, at various points in the literary
reportage, Fuller admits that her presence had an effect both on the course of
90. ��
Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat, 238.
200
Nora Berning
events (a.k.a. Heisenberg effect) and on the behavior of her subjects. The fact
that Fuller ‘goes native’ does not necessarily compromise her credibility as a narrator, though, because she never feigns omniscience. On the contrary, precisely
because she confesses to the reader her own biases and the kinds of limitations
that come along with internal focalization, Fuller is able to strengthen her authority as narrator.
I realized that even after all this time with him, I didn’t really know K or what
he was capable of. […] A long time ago, I had supposed that if I walked a mile
in K’s shoes, I’d understand what he had been through. I had thought that if I
walked where he had walked, if I drank from the same septic sludge of water,
if I ate nothing all day and smoked a pack of bitter cigarettes, then I’d understand the man better and understand the war better and there would be words
that I could write to show that I now understood why that particular African
war had created a man like K.91
Approaching the issue of epistemic responsibility in this way, that is, by
conceding that her thirst for knowledge and quest for truth left Fuller with more
questions than answers, is a clever hermeneutical move that has serious consequences for the construction of values. Since the first-person narrator functions as the
main fulcrum of the event-story and the reader sees refracted, much like in a prism,
the events (mediated by written discourse) through the lens of the narrator’s eyes,
values and norms are also subjected to a double mediation.
Consequently, “[t]he witness-participant-narrator is more a medium, an instrument, an articulating voice through which the interiority of events experienced
by people is registered”.92 In Scribbling the Cat, the narrator’s role is not confined to
an either-or paradigm. The narrator is at the same time witness and participant,
registrar and generator of events. Put differently, the character-narrator combines
the functions of an “experiencing I” and those of a “narrating I”.93 The characternarrator’s degree of participation in the story varies between total immersion and
detached observation. For the most part of the narrative, though, the narrator’s
voice is easily discernible and audible. Even where the “I” is not typographically
foregrounded, the voice of the overt narrator dominates the story.
I slumped back into my seat and closed my eyes. […] Is it possible – from the
perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to
coffin – to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil?94
This rhetorical question with which Fuller confronts the reader midway
through her journey is interesting insofar as it casts light on the narrator as a doubting subject. The narrator questions the very faculty of human judgment. Rather
than consolidating specific moral values and / or norms, the ethical value of this
passage lies in the questioning of morality itself. On the one hand, the overt voice
of the narrator allows Fuller to familiarize the reader with her own moral philosophy. Hence, the narrator’s voice functions as a mediating hinge between the diegetic
universe, Fuller, and the reader. But because voice is transposed here to a kind of
91. Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat, 219.
92. ��
93. ��
Franz K. Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984.
94. ��
Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat, 141-142.
201
meta-level, it can also have a distancing effect. In fact, this kind of meta-commentary is a narrative device that figures prominently in Fuller’s reportage. It could be
argued that the author uses it to express the growing desperation that plagues her as
she tries to impose meaning on the events unfolding before her eyes.
I looked away and lit a cigarette to distance myself from a sudden sharp ache
of longing I had to see my children. I itched for the routine of laundry; the
apple-air-conditioned scent of the grocery store; the happy predictability of
the days that started with tea and porridge, and children crumpled with sleep,
and that ended with baths, books, bed.95
Throughout the reportage, Fuller ridicules her own meaning-seeking self.
With the help of an almost ironic undertone, the character-narrator brings into
question not only the value of her journey with K but of life itself. The more Fuller
realizes that there is no all-inclusive reading of reality, the more disoriented and
dislocated she feels. “My vegetarianism suddenly seemed strident and self-indulgent
in a country where the opportunity to eat a whole rat is, for a great percentage of
the population, a rare treat. Out here the threshold for insanity and murder is high,
but the tolerance for anyone who could be perceived as sanctimonious is zero.”96
By looking at herself from the outside, that is, from the vantage point of someone
who has lived a “routine-fat life”97 in a “fat, sweet country”98 for the last seven years,
Fuller criticizes her self-indulgent lifestyle. Several times in the text, she attacks, in a
more or less explicit manner, dominant values of capitalism and the sway of neoliberal ideology, and positions herself as a green leaning thinker.
The narrative axis in Scribbling the Cat revolves around Fuller who is the primary focalizer, the perceived center of consciousness, of the story. She is the personification of a committed feminist and environmentalist. “The windows of the
pickup were rolled down because we, in common with everyone else in this part of
the world, were jealous of every drop of fuel we spent. And under these circumstances, air-conditioning (like the exorcism of war memories and the act of writing
about it) was an unpardonable self-indulgence.”99 While internal focalization and
homodiegetic narration allow her to convey pain, desperation, guilt, and complicity
in the most intense way possible, the use of the first-person means walking a fine
ethical line insofar as it holds the danger of becoming an “exercise in egotism”.100
Although it may seem prima facie as if “there’s not enough world and too much
self ”101 in Scribbling the Cat, it is important to assess Fuller’s attempt of being faithful to the intellectual and emotional context of the story in relation to the story’s
different diegetic levels. Fuller’s double role as both extradiegetic narrator who is
superior to the story she narrates and intradiegetic narrator who like Marlow in
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is “also a diegetic character in the first narrative
95. �Ibid., 197.
96. �Ibid., 206.
97. �Ibid., Author’s Note.
98. �Ibid., 72.
99. �Ibid., 144.
100. ��
Jack Fuller, News Values: Ideas for an Information Age, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1996, 144.
101. ��
Herbert Gold, “On Epidemic First Personism”, in: Ronald Weber (ed.), The Reporter as
Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy, New York, Hastings House, 1974, 286.
202
Nora Berning
told by the extradiegetic narrator”102 enables her to craft a distinct female voice and
some kind of écriture féminine103 without straying too far from K’s experiences and
that of the soldiers.
Warhol’s104 distinction between the “gaze” and the “look” provides further
insight into the configuration of the narrative situation. The gaze, according to
Warhol, “occurs in the realm of the ‘extradiegetic’, outside the world of the story,”
whereas the look “can be located inside, as something exchanged among characters
‘intradiegetically’”105. In Scribbling the Cat, the gaze and the look stand in a dialectical
tension with each other. The female gaze and the predominantly male look are inextricably linked. While Fuller’s visibility within the reportage as the main focalizer
of the event-story radiates incredible female power, there are instances in the book
in which the extradiegetic gaze and K’s intradiegetic look fold into each other – so
much so that they become almost indistinguishable. “[T]here were pieces of me and
pieces of him and pieces of our history that were barbed together in a tangle in my
head and I couldn’t shake the feeling that in some inevitable way, I was responsible
for K. And he for me.”106
As the story unfolds, the reader witnesses the character-narrator’s imaginative
projection into K’s feelings. Fuller’s feelings of responsibility toward K translate into
a much larger network of emotions that revolves around complicity, guilt, empathy,
and remorse. When K confides his ‘secret’ to Fuller, that is, the act of raping a young
woman during the war, Fuller assumes responsibility for K’s deed. “I was every bit
that woman’s murderer.”107 “She was a martyr and K and I were free. More or less
free. Never free. Not if we thought about what we had done.”108 The subtle transition
from an egotistic-‘I’ to the communitarian-‘we’ enables Fuller to create a narrative
situation in which K’s look is not automatically relegated to the background whenever
her gaze is foregrounded. On the contrary, it could be argued that the focalizer needs
its own established ‘other’ (the focalized) to make intelligible African reality.
I don’t think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we
are or why we are. I don’t think we have the range of emotion to fully feel what
someone else is feeling. I don’t think any of us can sit in judgment of another
human being. We’re incomplete creatures, barely scraping by.109
What lurks behind the author’s statement is a certain kind of cultural and
moral relativism that pervades the whole book. “It was a land of almost breathtaking beauty or of savage poverty; a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung
possibilities; a land of inviting warmth or of desperate drought. How you see a
country depends on whether you are driving through it, or living in it.”110 The
102. ��
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 94.
103. ��
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, in: Signs, 1976, 1, 4, 875-93.
104. ��
Robyn Warhol, “The Look, the Body, and the Heroine of Persuasion: A FeministNarratological View of Jane Austen”, in: Kathy Mazei (ed.), Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology
and British Women Writers, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1996, 21-39.
105. �Ibid., 25.
106. ��
107. �Ibid., 152.
108. �Ibid., 154.
109. Ibid., 142.
110. �Ibid., 143.
203
diegetic world that Fuller creates is one where the person who does the focalizing
and those who are being focalized are drawn into a spiral of mutual ‘dis-covery’;
it is a universe in which traces are discovered only to be covered up again at a
later stage. Fuller puts it like this: “I have covered our tracks as a good soldier
always does. But, as a fallen soldier might, I have broken the old covenant, ‘What
goes on tour, stays on tour’.”111 In this process of dis-covery that amounts to an
ongoing re-construction of social reality, the narrator and the characters in the
story are involved, to an equal degree, in the continuous negotiation of values
and norms.
Because what is important isn’t K himself, or me myself, or Mapenga and St.
Medard and the whole chaotic, poetic mess of people that turned this journey
of curiosity into an exploration of life and death and the fear of living and
dying and the difficulty of separating love and judgment from passion and
duty. What is important is the story.112
In Fuller’s reportage value construction is a communal enterprise. In fact,
such an emphasis on the communal aspect of the negotiation of values and
norms is very much in line with the genre’s pluralistic finish and literary journalism’s pro-democratic outlook, on the one hand, and Fuller’s humanistic approach, on the other. As I have shown in my textual analysis, in order to fully
grasp the ethical import of the narrative situation, an examination of level and
focalization, the latter being the “most subtle means of manipulation”113, is necessary. Last but not least, it is important for literary journalists to become aware
of the ethical import of these categories so as to be able to use them responsibly
in their writing.
3.2. Narrative Time
Arguing that “the actemes in a nonfiction novel are registered chronologically” and that “their geometry is a function of the rhythm of external events”114,
is tantamount to obscuring important aspects of discursive representation and
/ or manipulation. Such a view mystifies the scope of such categories as speed
and frequency. Besides order, these categories not only play a significant role in
the construction of narrative time but also in the negotiation of values in literary
reportages. The “emplotment”115 of a text, to put it in Hayden White’s terms, is
first and foremost a result of the sequencing of events, i.e. of having recourse
to narrative strategies used, in this case, for endowing the text with a specific
temporal framework. Thus, the ordering of events can be considered one of the
narrative writer’s primary means to structure and signify reality.116 Furthermore,
the analysis of temporal relations can give crucial insights regarding the way in
111. �Ibid., Author’s Note.
112. �Ibidem.
113. ��
Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 116.
114. ��
115. ��
Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth”, in: Keith Jenkins
(ed.), The Postmodern History Reader, London, Routledge, 1997, 393.
116. ��
Patrick O’neill, Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory, Toronto, University of
Toronto Press, 1994.
204
Nora Berning
which specific values are thematized, foregrounded, and / or problematized by
the author.
Although Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat is not heavily interspersed with indications
of time, the events in the reportage can nevertheless be grouped and ordered by
closely examining the structuring activity of the extradiegetic narrator. Fuller divides her reportage into twenty-four chapters (prologue and epilogue not included)
with each chapter forming its own mini-story. The episodic structure and the logical
coherence of the story are a result of the predominantly scenic mode of narration and the rigid chronological order. Consequently, individual chapters cannot be
shifted around without distorting the meaning of the text. The system of actemes,
that is, the dramatic arc of the literary reportage, can be visualized with the help of
Freytag’s Pyramid (see figure 1 in the appendix). Similar to a five-act play, Fuller’s
reportage consists of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement. Some qualifying remarks regarding the closure of the reportage are necessary,
though. The book’s final chapter which is entitled The Journey is Now indicates
that Fuller’s literary reportage is a text that resists closure. Speaking of the temporal relations, the chapter is – like the rest of the book – written in the contemporaneous present rather than in the epic preterite.117 This implies that the goal of
Fuller’s pilgrimage is not the arrival but the transformation that comes from being
open to the road. Since the narrative is structured “in the zone of direct contact
with inconclusive present-day reality”118 an attempt at closure would be antithetic
because “the closing of such unimagined narratives […] works against the openendedness which informs the body of the narrative and life itself ”.119
Rather, in Scribbling the Cat Fuller attempts to ‘(re-)humanize’ narrative time.
Since she uses the natural passing of time as the main marker of the temporal axis,
it seems intuitively just to conceive of narrative time in Fuller’s literary reportage as
“human time” rather than “clock time”.120 It is “time whose significance is given by
the meaning assigned to events within its compass”.121 In Fuller’s literary reportage,
story time and discourse time stand in a dialectical relationship with each other. It
seems as if the irreducibly durative nature of human time is constantly subjected to
a process of taming in the narrative. Fuller, by mentally travelling backward in time,
aims for a domestication of time in present-day reality. It seems as if she wants to
put ‘life on hold’ so as to escape our increasingly globalizing world. Such a representation of time carries a moral value which shows itself in Fuller’s phrase “that
life is cheap and that the secret to an inner peace is so dear and so elusive as to be
almost unattainable”.122
In her reportage, travelling across space is bound up with travelling through
time, and in it we see reflected Fuller’s desire for “superimposing the past onto the
present”.123 Contrary to K who regards the maelstrom of events as something that is
117. ��
Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1973.
118. ��
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 39.
119. ��
120. ��
Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984.
121. ��
Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality”, 6.
122. ��
123. ��
Zoe Norridge, “The Need to Go Further? Dedication & Distance in the War Narratives of Alexandra Fuller & Alexander Kanengoni”, in: Ernest N. Emenyonu (ed.), War in African
Literature Today: A Review, Oxford, James Currey, 2008, 106.
205
beyond his own control, the narrator is incessantly occupied with trying to bring to
a halt the subversion of the self-contained ego. Hence, it could be argued that the
temporal framework of the reportage reflects the narrator’s yearning for some kind
of pre-colonial stasis and for a serial conception of selfhood and identity. In Scribbling the Cat, narrative time “operate[s] by means of concepts, it also tries to form a
conception of something, to understand something”124, yet it remains locked in a
historicist mould insofar as the past becomes the key to understanding the present.
I felt somehow that if I knew this one secret about K – this one, great, untold
story – then everything else about him would become clear and I could label
him and write him into coherence. And then I would know what I was doing
here and how I had arrived here and I’d know more about who I was.125
Seen from an analytical perspective, two distinct space-times are juxtaposed in
the reportage. The first revolves around K’s and Fuller’s memories of the past and
the second centers on the hic et nunc of the narration. Yet this distinction is an artificial one, because these two spheres are deeply intertwined as the following quote
indicates: “I own this now. This is my war too.”126 It becomes clear that Fuller seeks
to “assert her “authenticity” in the present by laying claim to events in the past”.127
But Fuller’s metaphysical quest that lies in her endeavor to transcend the chaos of
the life-world by resorting to a linear temporal framework is doomed to failure.
Although she succeeds in establishing a kind of logic of decay, the formation of
an overarching, all-inclusive space-time remains beyond her reach since it is based
on the logical fallacy that it is somehow possible to “eternize the transitory”.128
The symmetrically composed plot that lends coherence to the narrative can evoke
a sense of organic space-time only as long as the caprice and the disorder of the
phenomenal world remain hidden beneath the surface.
Once the logic of decay is destroyed by the specter of war which dominates
not only the past but also the present, Fuller’s moral philosophy begins to crumble,
as well. Whereas Fuller the Actant had embarked on the journey with the belief
that “when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin – when we’re dancing with our own skeletons – our words might be all that’s left of us”129, Fuller
the Scribe realizes that war has closed in on the present insofar as it ruins human’s
capacity to narrate stories. Although K’s act of destroying Fuller’s tapes towards the
end of their journey does not prevent her from writing the story, his commentary is
self-revelatory: “I wasn’t born yesterday”. “And you can’t write my story”130. Hence
her sentimental stance at the end of the journey:
Those of us who grow in war know no boundaries. […] Far from being a story
of re-conciliation and understanding, this ended up being a story about what
happens when you stand on tiptoe and look too hard into your own past. (p.
250)
124. ��
Henk Hoeks, “The Vulnerability of Literary Non-Fiction”, 39.
125. ��
Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat, 147 (italics in the original).
126. �Ibid., 152 (italics in the original).
127. ��
Zoe Norridge, “The Need to Go Further?”, 109.
128. ��
Henk Hoeks, “The Vulnerability of Literary Non-Fiction”, 39.
129. ��
130. �Ibid., 236.
206
Nora Berning
The character-narrator cannot (re-)cover lost time, but is overpowered by the
“enormity of contemporary reality”131. It is precisely “the untamability of contemporary “reality””132 that turns Scribbling the Cat into an unfinished project, an open
book; in short, into a floating signifier. Ultimately, the reader is bound to accept the
contingent, ephemeral, and contradictory nature of present-day reality as the story
to live by.
3.3. Narrative Mood
Even more so than narrative time perhaps do the aspects of distance and
reliability impact on the construction of values and norms in literary reportages.
Both the questions of how speech is represented (distance) and how Fuller seeks to
acquire credibility (reliability) as character-narrator are pivotal in terms of the story
ethics of Scribbling the Cat. Together these aspects influence to a considerable degree
what Phelan calls the reader’s ethical positioning133. Distance helps the reader determine the degree of precision in a narrative and the accuracy of the information
conveyed134. In literary reportages, accuracy must be evaluated in relation to the
genre’s ontology, because the way in which the story is authenticated in narrative
writing is fundamentally different from other forms of reporting.
Heyne135 argues that in literary journalism “inaccuracy is not necessarily fatal” to the credibility of the narrator. Greenberg136 contends, however, that “the
extreme privileging of “authentic” feeling, without the possibility of an external
reality check, can lead to great violence being done to oneself and others, or at the
very least, to a lack of critical engagement with those who are different in some
way”. Then again, according to Aucoin137, “verification as a standard for literary
journalism draws the boundaries too narrowly”. In fact, if verification were the
main criterion by which to judge the accuracy of the truth-claims made in the story,
Fuller’s reportage could not hold together, because right at the beginning of the
narrative the reader is told that
if you were to do as I did – leave your family and your real, routine-fat life and
follow a feeling in your gut that tells you to head south and east with a man
who has a reputation for Godliness and violence – you will not find the man
whom I call K. You will not find where he lives. You will not be able to trace
our steps.138
But verisimilitude rather than verification and narrative cohesion are substitute
means for narrative writers to establish “narrative fidelity”.139 In Scribbling the Cat
131. ��
132. �Ibidem.
133. ��
James Phelan, Living to Tell About It.
134. ��
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse.
135. ��
Eric Heyne, “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction”, in: Modern Fiction Studies, 1987,
33, 3, 486.
136. ��
Susan Greenberg, “Poetics of Fact”, in: Times Higher Education, August 12, 2010, [online],
<http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=412982> (Last accessed: May 15,
2011).
137. ��
James L. Aucoin, “Epistemic Responsibility and Narrative Theory. The Literary Journalism of Ryszard Kapuscinski”, in: Journalism, 2001, 2, 1, 8.
138. ��
139. ��
Walter R. Fisher, “The Narrative Paradigm”, 87.
207
deception is transparent. Thus, concerns of skeptical readers regarding bias, distortion, and inaccurateness are declared moot. In Fuller’s reportage, truth-claims
derive their performative power first and foremost through the narrative techniques
and, more specifically, through a kind of representation of speech that Genette140
calls a “narrative of words”. This kind of narration which is based primarily on
reported speech allows Fuller to focus on what her subjects are saying and thinking
more so than on what they are doing. Long passages of reported speech in which
the characters’ words are cited verbatim by the narrator, as well as extended dialogue,
are characteristic features of Fuller’s style and the story ethics.
K was speaking with a preaching voice, a voice that was supposed to reach into
the dark, cool corners of a church. “We were all lost after the war,” he told
me. […] “How come we aren’t dead? Where are we? Why are we here? What
are we doing? We went from this incredible structure, this incredible focus
and sense of purpose…You were either in, or out. Alive or dead. And then it
was over and… All of a sardine141, we had to figure out by ourselves and what
we found is that nothing seemed to matter about the outside world. It was all
pointless.”142
From an ethico-narratological standpoint, reported speech in which the distance taken by the narrator with respect to the text is greater than in other forms of
speech representation serves a double purpose. As a direct window on the voices
and lives of people, this kind of narration is ethically less dangerous than, for instance, transposed speech. Furthermore, reported speech can serve a legitimizing
function. It helps create an illusion of realism; illusion because of the inherent
fictiveness of all memory.143 Also, since a narrative of words functions as a way of
turning characters into autonomous speaking subjects, the narrator can transfer her
ethical responsibility, at least in parts, onto the subjects. “The method of informing
the reader” is, according to Zavarzadeh144, “similar to the way the reader as a real
person in his or her own life gathers information about other people: external observations and statements made by the people themselves or their friends, relatives,
and acquaintances”.
But in Scribbling the Cat, reported speech not only mimics the natural process
of information gathering. Since it is part and parcel of longer dialogic sequences,
it becomes reminiscent of a quintessentially African way of information gathering
by means of oral communication. In Fuller’s reportage, dialogicality is a narrative
technique that helps foreground difference and enables the author to foster reader participation. The mediation of truth-claims through dialogue facilitates the
negotiation of values insofar as it creates a discourse that is democratic, pluralistic,
and pro-individual. Moreover, extended dialogue effectuates some kind of “second
orality”.145 In an interview, Fuller reveals that what she “was trying to capture was
the staccato of the sound when you’re there, this constant rat-a-tat-tat of the birds
140. ��
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, 71.
141. ��
The use of Afrikaans slang is another stylistic device that Fuller employs to authenticate
her story. “All of a sardine” means “all of a sudden”.
142. ��
143. ��
Roy Peter Clark, “The Line Between Fact and Fiction”, in: G. Stuart Adam and Roy Peter
Clark (eds.), Journalism: The Democratic Craft, New York, Oxford University Press, 2006, 217-224.
144. ��
145. ��
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word, London, Routledge, 2002.
208
Nora Berning
and the voices of Africans”.146 Like Ong, Fuller seems to have a longing for an
‘oral-aural-world’ in which a sensual, connected, and involved mode of being is
reestablished and where showing takes precedence over a seemingly ‘objective’ telling. Her reportage is a prime example of the kind of auditory world that Ong147
depicts, that is, a world in which tribal man “remained closed to the living human
lifeworld”. The organic harmony that this auditory world radiates is very much in
line with the pace of the story and with Africa’s modus operandi.
Reported speech is used by the narrative writer to recount either more or
less spatially and temporally remote events from multiple perspectives. Hence, no
one version of the events can be authoritatively declared as the main one. When it
comes to reliability148 literary reportages rely on a system of internal self-validation,
i.e. “a built-in checking system through which the reader can determine whether the
registered events are indeed actual or are dreamed up by the author for climactic
and dramatic effects”.149 This self-verifying system which comprises, for instance,
references to names, markers of temporal and spatial deixis, newspaper articles, and
photographs is characteristic of “manifest intertextuality”.150 Intertextuality is an
integral part of Scribbling the Cat. Fuller uses it as a narrative device to corroborate
facts, to convey values and norms, and to elucidate the ways in which we, as human
beings, come to know.
Fuller’s illustrated reportage is a polysemiotic artifact in which pictures serve
as “signposts”151 of factuality, and thus as central elements of the broader system of reliability that spans the narrative. Besides photographs, Fuller includes UN
reports and excerpts from Alexander Kanengoni’s novel Echoing Silences and Blaine
Harden’s Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent in her book, thereby endowing
the reportage with a plurality of voices. Regarding the quotes from Kanengoni’s
book, Norridge152 notes that they “may signal Fuller’s desire to use contemporary
writing as the means to re-open communication, reconciling the past through
the sharing of stories in a non-aggressive context”. I would add to this that
the incorporation of this kind of war literature written by a Black Zimbabwean
writer into Fuller’s own narrative is not only an important political message in
post-Apartheid South Africa, but also a stylistic device that allows Fuller to make
her narrative an integral element in the cultural construction of memory at the
heart of which figure Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique as the primary lieux
de mémoire.153
In a sense, then, intertextuality could be seen as signaling “a revolt by the individual against homogenized forms of experience, against monolithic versions of
146. ��
Dave Weich, “Author Interviews”, s.p.
147. ��
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, 49.
148. ��
Although I take over from Phelan the three axes (facts, values/ethics, and knowledge)
along which to ‘measure’ reliability, I use the term in a somewhat more loose sense insofar as it does
not refer exclusively to the narrator in my analysis. (James Phelan, Living to Tell About It.)
149. ��
150. ��
Norman Fairclough, Analysing Discourse, 47.
151. ��
Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1999.
152. ��
Zoe Norridge, “The Need to Go Further?”, 105.
153. ��
Pierre Nora and Étienne François, Erinnerungsorte Frankreichs, München, C. H. Beck,
2005; Jan assmann, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität”, in: Jan Assmann and Tonio
209
truth”.154 The narrative mood in Scribbling the Cat reflects a mixture of what Code155
calls “knowledge by description” (knowledge acquired through written or spoken
testimony) and “knowledge by acquaintance” based on immediate experience. The
combination of these two forms of knowledge acquisition is characteristic of the
epistemology of Fuller’s journalism. It allows her to “weave together the political
and historical accounts with the personal and psychological reflections of these
protagonists”.156 The axis of knowledge poses problems for many narrative writers
though, because it is directly linked to the issue of artistic selectivity. In this context,
Fuller remarks:
Perhaps the greatest liberty I took is how I chose to develop the “character”
of K and the “character” of the writer (me) – in other words, in deciding what
episodes or conversations I chose to write in, or leave out, in order to get to
themes that I felt were important in this book.157
In interviews like these Fuller reminds the reader that her version of the story
is necessarily flawed and incomplete. But what counts in literary journalism is “[b]
eing true to life” which “differs from truth of fact; it is both a looser and a more
demanding relation”.158 The best evidence for the fact that Fuller is committed to
getting the story right is her willingness to risk her life.
I wondered where the nearest water was. I considered sitting down and waiting
to see if anyone would come back and find me. The palms of my hands were
covered in a chilled film of sweat. PUSHED THE ENVELOPE TOO FAR
– that would be my epitaph. Or, CURIOSITY SCRIBBLED THE CAT.159
Since Fuller knows that neither the ontological proof of the photograph160
nor narrative coherence are in themselves sufficient for establishing authenticity,
she intersperses her narration with passages in which she thematizes the reporter-source relationship and the difficulty of establishing rapport with her informants. “It’s not hard to find an old soldier in Africa. What is harder to find are
old soldiers who will talk about their war with strangers.”161 This strategy enables
the narrative writer to situate himself as “an independent moral agent, responsible
for what he writes, and readers, as independent moral agents, must independently
decide whether to believe him”.162 In terms of reliability, one of the most problematic issues in Fuller’s reportage has to do with the fact that none of the soldiers
are referred to by their given names. What can be inferred from this is that Fuller
Hölscher (eds.), Kultur und Gedächtnis, Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, 1988, 9-19.
154. ��
John Hellmann, Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction, Urbana, University of
Illinois Press, 1981, 8.
155. ��
Lorraine Code, Epistemic Responsibility, Hanover, University Press of New England, 1987,
206.
156. ��
See the official website of the Lettre Ulysses Award.
157. ��
Penguin, Reading Guides, 2004, [online], <http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/
us/scribbling_the_cat.html> (last accessed: May 15, 2011.
158. ��
Lorraine Code, “Epistemic Responsibility”, 211 (italics in the original).
159. ��
160. ��
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York, Hill and Wang,
1982.
161. ��
162. ��
James L. Aucoin, “Epistemic Responsibility and Narrative Theory”, 15.
210
Nora Berning
has ethical concerns about naming her subjects who have little or no experience
of working with reporters. Most of the war veterans are suspicious about “nosy
journalist types”163 and disapprove of having their voice recorded on tape. “When I
turned on my tape recorder he shook his head.”164 Zavarzadeh165 argues that anonymity in literary nonfiction does not necessarily compromise reliability. Furthermore,
he contends that “[w]hat makes a narrative fictional or nonfictional depends not on
the quantity of facts used or on such relatively minor modifications as the change
of personal or place names but on the manner in which facts are approached and
the ways they are put to use.”166 Judging from the interviews with the author, it can
be said with relative certainty that the change of names was not a strategy to manipulate facts.
[T]he book was born out of an article for the New Yorker […] and anyone who
has gone through the New Yorker’s fact checking regime will know that there is
not even the slightest room for interpretation, let alone lies. They emailed the
characters in question and asked if this is what they had said and done, and
they made sure I had all my facts correct.167
Apart from the fact-checking system in place, the “core of documentation”168
in Scribbling the Cat testifies to the author’s efforts to cross-check her subjects’ accounts against each other. Put differently, there are certain mechanisms at work in
the reportage that convey to the reader that Fuller is committed to stay true to her
own moral compass.
It would have been so easy to caricature him as a war-wounded racist and to
caricature myself as wide-eyed but essentially innocent narrator – but that
lacked the emotional honesty that I thought was centrally important to a book
of this nature.169
3.4. Character-Space
The notion of character-space is central to the construction of values and to
the dynamics of literary reportages. The relationship between characters, bodies,
and narrative space is what drives the plot of Scribbling the Cat forward. Speaking
of the story ethics of Fuller’s text, characters and their bodies and narrative space
appear as inseparable entities. The body is of paramount importance here, because
it seems that Fuller wants to show how events register themselves on the bodies of
the soldiers and their senses. In her reportage, the body functions as a narrative device, i.e. “as part of a strategy of textual representation”.170 It is an integral element
in the process of meaning-making and inextricably bound up with the concepts
of character, space, and plot. In Scribbling the Cat, we encounter specific patterns
and recurrent narrative tropes regarding the representation of characters and their
163. ��
164. �Ibid., 147.
165. ��
166. �Ibidem.
167. ��
168. ��
169. ��
Penguin, Reading Guides, s.p.
170. ��
Daniel Punday, Narrative Bodies, ix.
211
bodies. By having a closer look at the portrayal of K (character traits, description
of his body) and the character constellations (interaction between K and the other
characters), it becomes possible to make inferences about the ways in which values
are constructed in the narrative. In addition to this, the analysis of character-spaces
gives insight into the ways in which the narrative bears the imprint of Fuller’s own
particular way of thinking about the relation between corporeality and culture.
I tried to picture K elsewhere and failed. Like the African earth itself, he seemed organic and supernatural all at the same time, romantic and brutish, a
man who was both savior and murderously dangerous. And he was much,
much more complicated than the stereotypes it was so tempting to use to describe him. Seeing him on this farm, I couldn’t decide if the man had shaped
the land or the other way round.171
This passage indicates that space becomes meaningful only through character and vice versa. In other words, characters serve as hermeneutic tools in Fuller’s
reportage that have a spatializing function. “Even when we retrieve characters as
relatively autonomous entities, we perceive them as part of an organizing structure
made up of elements that are interfused with each other and that illuminate each
other.”172 It must be borne in mind, though, that the reading experience is shaped significantly by the fact that characters are in a very real sense human beings.
“Nonfiction depends on a materiality of its characters’ bodies”.173 Hence, in literary
reportages all of the characters are “round” characters.174
Such people are not composite figures invented and projected by the author
to substantiate an interpretative pattern of human experience. They are individuals, and their individuality is not an achievement of aesthetic control but the
result of their existential uniqueness.175
However, I argue that to underestimate the importance of aesthetic control in
literary reportages is no less detrimental than to disregard the existential uniqueness
of characters. The questions of the “what” and the “how” should always be studied
in tandem when it comes to the aspect of character-space. This is especially complicated in cases in which reporters take on narrative license and the body acquires
metaphorical or metonymic value. Although Fuller does not infringe any of the
cornerstone principles that Sims and Kramer176 list as a series of “thou shalt nots”
for literary journalists, she admits that she “underplayed the character of K because
I needed to make him accessible for a US reader. And there were certainly times
when I probably played up the tension that came about because of Mapenga and K
and I being alone on this little island with a lion”.177 Yet by softening K’s character
traits, Fuller makes herself vulnerable to the critique that she perpetuates the myth
of the wild savage, exotic African. She conjures up, albeit unintentionally, age-old
171. ��
172. ��
Baruch Hochman, Character in Literature, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1985, 64.
173. ��
Daniel Lehman, Matters of Fact, 3.
174. ��
Edward M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970.
175. ��
176. ��
Norm sims and Mark Kramer, Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American
Nonfiction, New York, Ballantine, 1995, 25.
177. ��
212
Nora Berning
clichés and stereotypes. Rauwerda178 remarks that Fuller depicts K as “quintessentially African”. Regarding her first encounter with K, Fuller179 writes:
Even at first glance, K was more than ordinarily beautiful, but in a careless,
superior way, like a dominant lion or an ancient fortress. He had a wide, spadeshaped face and wary, exotic eyes, large and khaki colored. His lips were full
and sensual, suggesting a man of quick, intense emotion. His nose was unequivocal – hard and ridged, like something with which you’d want to plow a field.
His thick hair was battleship gray, trimmed and freshly washed. He had large,
even, white teeth. He looked bulletproof and he looked as if he was here on
purpose, which is a difficult trick to pull off in this woolly climate. He looked
like he was his own self-sufficient, debt-free, little nation – a living, walking,
African Vatican City. As if he owned the ground beneath his feet, and as if the
sky balanced with ease on his shoulders. He looked cathedral.
What stands out in Fuller’s description of K is that she puts particular emphasis on corporeal and sensual features. This, in turn, highlights the role of the
body as an aesthetic element in the reportage. The series of similes that Fuller uses
to convey an image of K’s body is an important narrative device in terms of the
construction of values insofar as it enables Fuller to bring together the key themes
of the reportage: war and religion. K radiates at the same time rigor and purity –
rigor because he looks like a “gladiator”180 and purity because “he was barefoot, but
barefoot with a confidence born of familiarity rather than necessity, as if defying
Africa to rear back and bite him”.181 As the personification of an African Vatican
City, K represents a sympathetic, caring and loving man. Then again, Fuller182 describes K as someone who wants others “to feel the sensation of being thirsty, alone,
hunted”. The author’s ambivalent feelings toward K shine through almost at all
times in the narrative. In an interview, Fuller explains:
I deliberately tried to be as tough on myself as I could be, and I deliberately
tried to show K in the most sympathetic light possible. I didn’t want the reader
to have a restful read or a “safe” character to identify with – after all what part
of war, or the repercussions of war, are restful or safe or unequivocal?183
The Vatican metaphor is a particularly strong image, because it implies that,
like the Vatican, K has “a history of being both virtuous and a terrible colonial
oppressor”.184 In Scribbling the Cat, the body is, on the one hand, a sounding board
for emotions and, on the other, a historical battlefield site on which Rhodesia’s war
of independence is reenacted. The reader witnesses the “transferring of authentic
living memory from the body of a survivor to an individual who has no “authentic”
link”185 to this particular event. For Fuller, K’s body is the mediating hinge between
the past and the present.
178. ��
Antje Rauwerda, “Exile Encampments”, 59.
179. ��
180. �Ibid., 188.
181. �Ibid., 20.
182. �Ibid., 218.
183. ��
Penguin, Reading Guides, s.p.
184. ��
Antje Rauwerda, “Exile Encampments”, 56.
185. ��
Alison Landsberg, America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a Radical
Politics of Empathy, 2001, 63, [online], <http://elenarazlogova.org/hist306/landsberg.pdf> (last ac-
213
On his right forearm was a winged-sword symbol, like something that has
been copied off a coat of arms. Above that, the words “A POS” had been
written. The only men I know who have found it practical or necessary to have
their blood group indelibly scratched into their limbs in blue ink have been
soldiers in African wars.186
In the narrative, the character K functions both as ‘embodiment’ of the
African way of life and as an antidote to the author’s “push-button life”187 in
America. Fuller stylizes K as a foil character and herself as his confidante. K is
everything that Fuller’s American-born husband, Christian, is not. To fully grasp
K’s character, he must be read and understood as a focal point in the narrative
and as a foil, because “[s]o much of what we are can only be defined in terms of
our relations with other people; indeed, if we wish to be rigorous, we can say with
the philosophers that other people must exist if only to show us what we ourselves are not.”188 The character constellations in Fuller’s reportage are carefully
constructed. The relation between characters and narrative space is a symbiotic
one; together these two categories markedly influence value constructions in the
reportage.
To conceive of character and narrative space as inseparable entities amounts
to a counter-narrative to dominant narrative theory insofar as it subverts the polar
distinction between character and its immaterial “other”, i.e. setting. Moreover,
it undermines the view of character as mere “existent”189 in the story. Characters
and their bodies, as my analysis has shown, play a decisive role in defining agency
and in positioning the narrator within narrative totality. Moreover, character-space
is an important element of CEN, because it can gesture toward “other places into
which character bodies can travel – physically, imaginatively, and perceptually”.190
It is also of some ethical import, because with the question of how to render
intelligible characters and their surrounding environments come along ethical
choices on the part of the narrative writer. Moreover, the reader’s encounter with
the text is shaped, to a great extent, by the stories that the bodies of the characters tell. In other words, the reader’s ethical positioning depends on the values
implicated in the representation of character-space. Following this rationale, literary journalism can be seen as an innately corporeal artifact or medium, “because
it needs to use character bodies as a natural part of the stories it tells, but also
because the very ways in which we think about narrative reflect the paradoxes of
the body – its ability to give rise to and resist pattern, its position in the world and
outside of it”.191
*
*
*
cessed: May 15, 2011).
186. ��
187. �Ibid., 73.
188. ��
William J. Harvey, Character and the Novel, London, Chatto and Windus, 1965, 52.
189. ��
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse, 32.
190. ��
Daniel Punday, Narrative Bodies, 13.
191. �Ibid., 15.
214
Nora Berning
Literary journalism, as I have pointed out at the beginning of this essay, is in
no way a new genre, yet scholars from all kinds of disciplines have only just begun
to realize that it provides an especially rich arena for the exploration of ethical
issues from a narratological vantage point. I have demonstrated in my analysis of
Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier that writers of literary reportages draw upon narrative techniques to foreground certain values and
that they are principally concerned with conveying to the reader an idea of their
own moral philosophy. The aim of the narrative writer is to craft a view of the
world that probes beyond the mirrors of the mass media. Kapuściński, in his 2003
keynote address, underlined the significance of reportage work and acknowledged
the heavy burden of social responsibility that comes along with any kind of reporting and especially saturation reporting.
Plying our trade, we are not just men of writing pursuits but also missionaries,
translators and messengers. We do not translate from one text into another,
but from one culture into another, to make them mutually better understood
and thereby closer, even friendlier to each other.192
Alexandra Fuller with her 2004 literary reportage seeks to foster intercultural understanding by presenting an enlightened interpretation of world affairs
that differs from that of the news teams who come to Africa to “take pictures of
starving Africans” and “ask the locals […] to stop dancing and ululating in front
of the camera”.193 She begins her book with “an either-or invitation to the reader
(either this is true for you or else you are wrong; either this is your history or your
history is inauthentic) that is then negotiated as the reader engages the text”.194 Fuller is dedicated to mediate a kind of mythopoeic reality in which facts and values
are endlessly negotiated and renegotiated. Hence, she becomes what Zavarzadeh195
calls a “mythographer of contemporary consciousness”.
Fuller “approaches facts not to invoke their facade of reality but to enact
[…] their inner turbulence”.196 The anthromorphic bias of the narrator, that is,
the onomastic identity of author and narrator, is pivotal for value constructions in
literary reportages.197 In Scribbling the Cat, the narrative situation is extremely complex, because Fuller combines elements of exegetical, testimonial, and notational
nonfiction. Since the content of her reportage “consists of the tested experiences
of its narrators, and the narrative axis of the book revolves around their testifying
voices”198, the book could be classified as notational and / or testimonial nonfiction. But there are instances in the reportage where the character-narrator is not a
witness to the events and has to imagine the situation. For instance, when K tells
Fuller about the rape, the only thing she can do is cross-check K’s account against
that of other soldiers and carefully scrutinize whatever evidence she can find so
org>
192. ��
See the official website of the Lettre Ulysses Award, <http://www.lettre-ulysses-award.
193. ��
194. ��
195. ��
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality, p. 67.
196. �Ibidem.
197. ��
Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Fictional vs. Factual Narration”, in: Peter Hühn, John Pier,
Wolf Schmid and Jörg Schönert (eds.), Handbook of Narratology, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2009, 98-114.
198. ��
215
as to “overcome the temporal distance and repossess the density of the haunting
facts”.199
The epistemology of Fuller’s journalism is such that what underlies the
construction of ethical values and norms in her reportage work is a dialecticalrelational approach to social reality. She draws readers in and encourages them to
actively take part in the negotiation of meaning. Hartsock200 notes that “[n]arrative
literary journalism offers more of an opportunity for reader engagement precisely
because its purpose is to narrow the distance between subjectivity and object, not
divorce them”. By continuously shuttling back and forth between the past and the
present, Fuller with her literary reportage “creates readers who examine history
over the boundary between reader and writer, history and discourse”201. She breaks
through the conventional boundaries of the fictional and the factual, and thus subverts the “bipolar approach to prose narrative”.202
What follows from this is that when talking about such a distinctly postmodern genre as the literary reportage, the dichotomy between objective and subjective
narration seems strangely dated. Therefore, a CEN able to adequately address the
construction of values in literary reportages must account for the fact that the internal
world of the narrative always stands in an “active tension with the experiential world
outside the book”.203 As regards value constructions, the generic ontology of literary
reportages carries a considerable weight, because in this dual mode of narration –
where mythopoesis functions as the main strategy of legitimation – facts, values, and
meaning are inextricably linked204. Precisely because of the bi-referential narrative
mode of Scribbling the Cat, Fuller is able to foreground the “ontological ambiguity of
events”205 as well as “the inherently ambiguous nature of human knowledge”.206
This exploratory study started from the assumption that in order to render
intelligible such a multi-faceted genre as the literary reportage, it is necessary to
bring together narrative theory, literary criticism, and ethical analysis by combining
these various disciplines in an integrative framework. Rather than placing ethics in
the realm of abstract rules and reducing the analysis of the construction of values
in literary reportages to an exercise in ideology critique, the aim was to offer an
alternative paradigm with which to tackle these issues. The kind of paradigm that
I have proposed for literary reportages in general, and for the analysis of the story
ethics in Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier in particular, was conceived in the spirit of what Phelan calls “theorypractice”, i.e. a method
of critical inquiry that emphasizes the fact that “[n]arrative theory and interpretation are both collective enterprises”.207
By taking this approach as the guiding principle of the textual analysis, I was
able to conceive of narratology as both theory and methodology. Moreover, by
199. �Ibid., 88.
200. ��
John Hartsock, A History of American Literary Journalism, 132.
201. ��
202. ��
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality, vii.
203. �Ibid., 58.
204. ��
James Phelan, “Narrative Judgments and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative”.
205. ��
206. �Ibid., 225.
207. ��
James Phelan, Living to Tell About It, xi.
216
Nora Berning
bringing ethical analysis to bear on this collective, interdisciplinary enterprise, my
CEN acquired a consequentialist dimension that calls for further analysis in terms
of the reader’s ethical engagement with the text.208 While reader-response criticism
would be particularly useful for tackling the issue of ethical and literary response209,
this study was informed by hermeneutic analysis. The application of close reading
techniques to Scribbling the Cat made it possible to tease out the latent content of
Fuller’s reportage and to account for the ways in which the links between form and
content impact on the construction of values in the text. My reading was based on
a modified version of Weidle’s210 conceptual framework. Weidle’s scheme for the
analysis of value constructions in narratives was developed further and systemized.
This re-conceptualization entails that narratological categories were regrouped (narrative situation), expanded (narrative time) and / or overhauled (narrative mood).
Character-space was added as a supplementary category, because “our encounter
with texts is always mediated by the corporeality of bodies”.211
On the basis of the revised framework for the analysis of literary reportages
I was able to shed light on the epistemology of Fuller’s literary journalism and
to show how the truth-claims made in the reportage fit into the writer’s overall
intentions. Similar to contemporary German, British, and Australian award-winning
narrative writers who make extensive use of narrative techniques and devices to
make their stories believable212, truth-claims in Fuller’s reportage also derive their
performative power through the narrative devices used to represent social reality
rather than their relation to the facts. Hence, literary reportages should be studied
as both aesthetic and social discourses.213 Such an understanding of the genre will
hopefully enable us to recognize that “being a reporter who deals in facts and
being a storyteller who produces tales are not antithetical activities”.214 Storytelling
devices are the basic means of production for the mythographer, and subjectivity is
literary journalism’s main productive force.
The representational intentions and the truth-claims that are being made in
these narratives are no more and no less than “an effort to fix our identity within
the world around us”.215 According to Goudsblom216, the primary function of literary reportages is “to offer an intellectual counterweight to the prevailing tendencies toward egocentrism and ethno-centrism”. Underlying the theory of literary
journalism is the idea of a form of journalism that declares intercultural understanding and human social progress its highest goals. The telos of literary journalism is
208. ��
“Interroger notre rapport aux attitudes et aux valeurs mises en scène dans les œuvres
d’art peut être une manière d’explorer ce qui, pour chaque lecteur, fait figure de valeur” (Liesbeth
Korthals-Altes, “Présentation”, 12).
209. ��
Cf. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983.
210. ��
Roland Weidle, “Value Constructions in Narratives Across Media”, s.p.
211. ��
Daniel Punday, Narrative Bodies, 12.
212. ��
Marcel Broersma and Verica Rupar, “The Power of Narrative Journalism: A Comparative Approach to Award-winning Reporting”. Paper presented at the Fifth International Association for Literary Journalism Studies Conference at Roehampton University, London, United
Kingdom, May 20, 2010.
213. ��
John J. Pauly, “The Politics of the New Journalism”, in: Norm Sims (ed.), Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990, 110-132.
214. ��
Gaye Tuchman, Making News, 96.
215. ��
216. ��
Johan Goudsblom, “Non-Fiction as a Literary Genre”, in: Publishing Research Quarterly,
2000, 16, 1, 5-12.
217
civic transformation through interpretive insight. Narrative writing “identifies the
contours of the moral landscape by representing the edge of values along which
human community is formed”.217 Fuller’s reportage work is evocative of the axiomatic foundation of social responsibility theory as advanced by Siebert et al.218 in
their seminal work Four Theories of the Press. It is also in line with the guiding
principles of A Free and Responsible Press as articulated by the Hutchins Commission in 1947. As one of the key tenets of literary journalism, communitarian
ethics “moves readers, and writers, toward realization, compassion, and in the best
of cases, wisdom”.219 This means that narrative writers are deeply involved in the
production of cultural capital220 insofar as their stories contribute to the building of
community and culture in liquid modernity.221
However, scandals about accuracy surrounding high-profile narrative writers
like the 2002 American finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Jack Kelley, or the German
reporter Tom Kummer who apparently fabricated stories reinvigorate the diatribe
of the skeptics. The argument that literary journalism is a “bastard form, having
it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric
license of fiction”222 – initially directed at Tom Wolfe and his ilk – gains new impetus in circles where the polar distinction between fact and fiction, journalism and
literature, is held in high esteem. Back in the 1970s, critics like Macdonald referred
to New Journalism as a form of “parajournalism” that is vulnerable on both sides.
Due to the fact that not so long ago narrative writers have occasionally made use
of such controversial practices as composite scenes and characters, misstated chronology, fabrication of quotes and / or entire scenes, standards for accuracy have
been advanced both by the juries of journalism awards and by practicing journalists
themselves in more recent years.223
Clark224 argues that “authors cannot have it both ways, using bits of fiction
to liven up the story while desiring a spot on the New York Times nonfiction list”.
The two cornerstone principles that he proposes are “do not add” and “do not
deceive”. While Clark’s deontological story ethics might be of some use for narrative writers, my analysis of Fuller’s reportage has shown that a list of “thou shalt
nots” as formulated by Sims and Kramer is not sufficient for dealing with contemporary literary realities. Having said that, narrative writers – by grappling with one
of the most fundamental epistemological questions, i.e. how to best account for the
phenomenal world225 – “must walk a delicate line to be certain that we are ethically
217. ��
Clifford G. Christians, John P. Ferré and P. Mark Fackler, Good News: Social Ethics and
the Press, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, 14.
218. ��
Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press,
Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1956.
219. ��
Mark Kramer, “Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists”, s.p.
220. ��
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, New York,
Columbia University Press, 1993.
221. ��
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000.
222. ��
Dwight Macdonald, “Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe and His Magic Writing Machine”,
in: Ronald Weber (ed.), The Reporter As Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy, New York,
Hastings House, 1974, 223.
223. ��
Roy Peter Clark, “The Ethics of Attribution”, in: Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (eds.),
Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, New
York, Plume, 2007, 189-192.
224. �Id., “The Line Between Fact and Fiction”, 222.
225. ��
John Hartsock, A History of American Literary Journalism.
218
Nora Berning
honest with both subject and reader”.226 With this in mind, Kramer227 proposes
some kind of writer-source contract and writer-reader contract to provide a remedy to the “ethical dilemma”228 that writers of literary reportages see themselves
confronted with day-to-day. “Narrative writers must strike a careful balance: caring
about our subjects without sacrificing our narratives, caring about our narratives
without sacrificing our subjects.”229 For narrative writers to be able to handle this
complex ethical situation, Harrington advances the idea that reporters should operate according to principles similar to that of anthropology’s ethical code.
The issue has been debated ever since Robert Ezra Park noted the parallels
between methods used in sociology and journalism.230 Christians et al.231 argue that
“[t]hrough disciplined abstractions (John Lofland), ethnomethodology, contextualization, thick description (Clifford Geertz), coherent frames of reference (Alfred
Schutz), case studies, naturalistic observation, and other research practices, reporters can stake out a claim to interpretive sufficiency and assume responsibility for
their efforts”. While I agree with the authors that sophisticated qualitative strategies
should inform the research of narrative writers, Fuller’s approach demonstrates that
widely recognized ethical standards like, for instance, those of the code of ethics
of the American Anthropology Association – which states that the informant and
not the public should come first – would be hard to accept, I believe, for some
literary journalists. Although Fuller grants her informants anonymity, it seems as if
she gives precedence to the writer-reader contract over the writer-source contract.
Even after K had destroyed Fuller’s material, Fuller – who had transcribed the tapes
onto her computer – did not refrain from publishing the story, thereby breaking her
covenant with K.
Rather than implementing deontological rules or best practices for literary
journalism, I think that we should take a didactic approach instead and make an
effort to train the emerging third generation of literary journalists in ethnographic
methods so as to expand their repertoire of techniques of information gathering.
The acquisition of skills regarding participant observation methodology for instance is but one side of the coin, though. The public nature of literary journalism
and its appeal to social responsibility theory demands that research methods be
made transparent. Put differently, narrative writers will also need to find ways to
educate the public and to better inform readers about their methods. This could
be achieved by making use of a notes section and / or method blocks, i.e. small
boxes that contain brief meta-narratives describing how the material for the story
was gathered and how the reporting was done. Another possibility that Fuller opted
226. ��
Walt Harrington, “Toward an Ethical Code for Narrative Journalists”, in: Mark
Kramer and Wendy Call (eds.), Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman
Foundation at Harvard University, New York, Plume, 2007, 172 (italics in the original).
227. ��
Mark Kramer, “Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists”, s.p.
228. ��
Elizabeth Bird, “The Journalist as Ethnographer? How Anthropology Can Enrich Journalistic Practice”, in: Eric W. Rothenbuhler and Mihai Coman (eds.), Media Anthropology, London,
Sage, 2005, 307.
229. ��
Isabel Wilkerson, “Playing Fair with Subjects”, in: Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (eds.)
Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, 172.
230. ��
David Weaver and Maxwell Mccombs, “Journalism and Social Science: A New Relationship?”, in: Public Opinion Quarterly, 1980, 4, 44, 477-497; Hannes Haas, “Die hohe Kunst der
Reportage. Wechsel-beziehungen zwischen Literatur, Journalismus und Sozialwissenschaften”, in:
Publizistik, 1987, 32, 3, 277-294.
231. ��
Clifford G. Christians, John P. Ferré and P. Mark Fackler, Good News, 121.
219
for in Scribbling the Cat is to make the afterword in which the reporter’s “organizing
consciousness”232 is thematized an integral part of the story.
While the rigorous upholding of ethics and honesty and the process of annotating the narrative are necessary first steps towards a more egalitarian, communal,
and orienting literary journalism233 that can contribute to a conceptually coherent
understanding of what literary journalism is and what it can do in today’s “postfactual age”234, more needs to be done in terms of redressing the structural inequalities of the profession. In Scribbling the Cat, we see the world refracted through the
lens of a writer who belongs to the privileged elite of travelling intellectual-émigrés.
Moreover, what has to be borne in mind is that only a small fraction of the African
population has access to this kind of literature. Hence, I conclude that a critical
investigation of the broader power and ethics of stories should never lose sight
of the political economy of the publishing industry and the forces that shape the
production and dissemination of literary reportages.
Nora Berning
University of Western Ontario
232. ��
John Hellmann, Fables of Fact, 14.
233. ��
Robert Ezra Park, “News as a Form of Knowledge”, in: American Journal of Sociology,
1944, 4, 45, 669-686; John Dewey, The Public and its Problems, Chicago, Swallow Press, 1927.
234. ��
James S. Ettema, “Journalism in the Post-Factual Age”, in: Critical Studies in Mass
Communication, 1987, 4, 1, 82.
220
Nora Berning
Appendices
Table 1: A conceptual framework for the ethico-narratological analysis of
literary reportages
Figure 1: The dramatic arc of Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat: Travels with
an African Soldier, 2004, adapted from: Gustav Freytag, Die Technik des Dramas (Berlin:
Autorenhaus Verlag, 2003).
© Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties 2011

Nora BERNING - Interférences littéraires

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