The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Mailer and Thompson on the Campaign Trail, 1972
 | This page, “Mailer and Thompson on the Campaign Trail, 1972,” is currently Under Construction. It was last revised by the editor Grlucas on 2021-02-18. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to have the page completed soon. If you have a question or comment, please post a discussion thread. (Find out how to remove this banner.) |
| « | The Mailer Review • Volume 13 Number 1 • 2019 | » |
Jason Mosser
Abstract: In his 1973 manifesto on New Journalism, Tom Wolfe wrote that for the literary journalists of his era, “the basic reporting unit was no longer the datum, the piece of information, but the scene,” the zeitgeist of an event. As early as 1960 when Mailer covered the Democratic convention, he invited readers to think about a presidential convention without getting bogged down in “housing projects of fact and issue.” Mailer was nevertheless scrupulous in the reporting of facts, inviting comparisons between his reporting of political campaigns with the reporting of Hunter Thompson.
URL: . . .
Both Norman Mailer’s St. George and the Godfather (1972) and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, ’72 (1973) deal with the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential race. As a way of situating St. George and Campaign Trail in their aesthetic, cultural, and historical contexts, I want to appropriate Kenneth Burke’s history-as-drama metaphor. To Burke, the terms dramatic and dialectic are closely related, for history, as he explains in The Philosophy of Literary Form, “is a ‘dramatic’ process, involving dialectical oppositions.”[1] In 1972, rival political interests, Democrats and Republicans, as well as their presidential nominees, Richard Nixon and George McGovern, assumed that the roles of antagonists and protagonists engaged in an ideological conflict between the dominant, pro-war establishment culture and an emergent, anti-war counterculture. Burke argues that, “human affairs being dramatic, the discussion of human affairs [as in campaign journalism] becomes dramatic criticism,” a rhetorical act.[2] Sometimes, however, what promises at first to be a dramatically charged event, like a political campaign, can fail to live up to the participants’ expectations, and such was the case with the major parties’ conventions in 1972. As literary journalists, then, each the central character and shaping consciousness of his own narrative, Mailer and Thompson adopted their own characteristic strategies to meet the challenge of creating compelling narratives in the relative absence of real-life drama.
. . .
Citations
- ↑ Burke 1969, p. 109.
- ↑ Burke 1969, p. 116.
Works Cited
- Burke, Kenneth (1969). A Rhetoric of Motives. University of California Press.
