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University of Oregon
Radical Naturalism: First-Person Documentary Literature

Author(s): Clas Zilliacus
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Spring, 1979), pp. 97-112
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
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SPRING1979
Volume31,Number2
CLAS ZILLIACUS
Radical Naturalism:
First-Person
Literature
Documentary
IN THE MID-1960s fiction as an art form was under attack from
prose writers such as Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, from
dramatists such as Rolf Hochhuth and Peter Weiss, and from oral his-
torians such as Jan Myrdal and Studs Terkel. A number of catchwords
were attached to the new realism propagated by these writers: faction,
literature of fact, factography, documentary literature, documentarism.
The preoccupation with authentic source material, common to all docu-
mentarists, has tended to obscure the ways in which they differ from
one another, sometimes decisively. In the absence of a usable typology,
and in order to forestall undue generalization, I shall concentrate in
this essay on a documentary category which can be demarcated with
some confidence. Variously known as the "report," "reportorial litera-
ture," or "oral history," it attained prominence in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Unlike so much documentary drama, it does not consist of
ready-mades; it is made. But the person on the cover is not so much the
author as those who talked to him or into his tape recorder. More often
than not it is partisan toward these people and has a professed eman-
cipatory intent. Its loyalties are extraliterary, but viewed from within
the field of literature it conflicts with fiction.
The report is accompanied by a distinct performative signal. That is,
what it offers is not a presentation of its author's imaginings but a rep-
resentation of reality, of unadulterated slices of life. Two antithetical
characteristics follow: an overriding realistic intent and the risk of a
vacuously authentic apparatus grinding out perspectiveless minutiae.
This conflict is much less recent than the resurgence of documentary
writing might lead us to expect: it is the crucial problem of naturalism.
97
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
The report is an extreme phenomenon, and as such it clearly demon-

strates the difficulties which beset avowedly realistic literature. This is
one reason for not leaving report literature to sociology or to anthropol-
ogy narrowly defined. Another reason is that writers have not done so.
Scandinavia and Germany have witnessed substantial contributions to
soft-data social anthropology from former belletrists, while in the United
States report producers as a rule have been recruited from journalism.
My emphasis in the present essay on North European examples should
make apparent the tension between literature and document.
A third reason for treating reports as literature is simply that all so-
cially oriented literature must be evaluated in terms of social criteria.
Thus Heinrich Vormweg writes of Giinter Wallraff "als Literaturpro-
duzent": "Es kommt an auf die immer neue Formulierung eines an
Verinderung und Zukunft orientierten Begriffs von Literatur. Von ihm
her ergibt sich kein Widerspruch zu Wallraffs erklartem Ziel, 'soziale
Wahrheit' freizulegen. Was die Literatur einer Zeit ist, bestimmt sich
danach, welche in dieser Zeit entstandenen Texte das Schwierigste zu-
standebringen: an ihre Wahrheiten, an das Konkrete tatsdichlichheran-
zukommen."lI Hegel asserted that truth is concrete. The question re-
mains whether the concrete is also truth, or merely an agglomerate of
petty truths that may even be used as a blocking device. Documentarism,
by definition, represents reality without fictional mediation. Report lit-
erature is documentary with little authorial mediation. These charac-
teristics, however, do not necessarily produce realism; taken at face
value, they seem rather to have obviated a serious discussion of report
and, by extension, of documentary realism.
"The present volume," claims a Preface from the early sixties, "is cu-
rious for many reasons," including the following:
It surely may be consideredcurious as being the first attempt to publish the his-
tory of a people, from the lips of the people themselves-giving a literal descrip-
tion of their labour, their earnings, their trials, and their sufferings, in their own
"unvarnished"language; and to pourtray [sic] the condition of their homes and
their families by personal observationof the places, and direct communionwith
the individuals . ..
It is curious, moreover, as supplying informationconcerning a large body of
persons, of whom the public had less knowledge than of the most distant tribes of
the earth . . . and as adducingfacts so extraordinary,that the traveller in the un-
discoveredcountry of the poor must, like Bruce, until his stories are corroborated
by after investigators,be content to lie under the imputationof telling such tales,
as travellers are generally supposedto delight in.2
These statements have a familiar ring. Oscar Lewis, in his introductory
1 "Wallraff als Literaturproduzent," Merkur, 326 (1975), 675.
2 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (1861-1862;
repr. Londonand New York, 1967), I, iii; hereaftercited in the text.
98
FIRST-PERSON DOCUMENTARY
chapter to Five Families, finds it "ironic that many Americans, thanks

to anthropologists, know more about the culture of some isolated tribe
of New Guinea, with a total population of 500 souls, than about the way
of life of millions" living in developing nations which are destined to
play a crucial role on the international scene.3 Siegfried Kracauer begins
his Die Angestellten: Aus dem neuesten Deutschland (1929) similarly:
"Hunderttausende von Angesteilten bev6lkern tiiglich die StrafBenBer-
lins, und doch ist ihr Leben unbekannterals das der primitiven V6lker-
stiimme, deren Sitten die Angestellten in den Filmen bewundern."4
Much the same chord was struck toward the end of the 1960s by Erika
Runge in a volume featuring German coal miners, by Sara Lidman re-
porting from iron mines in Northern Sweden, and by Folke Isaksson re-
porting from foundries in Central Sweden.5 The revelation that exoti-
cism begins at home, or close by, is a characteristic element of report
preambles.
My quotation,as I saidearlier,was fromthe earlysixties: from 1861,
to be precise.It was takenfromHenry Mayhew'sPrefaceto his monu-
mental four-volume work, London Labour and the London Poor, which
startedas a seriesof articlesin the LondonMorningChroniclein 1849.
With its four thousand densely packed columns on London's culture of
poverty in the early Victorian period this study remains unrivaled in its
field. It is a pioneering work, and the size of this one-man achievement
is perhaps best explained by the inability of the age to consider any task
unfeasible. Yet it remained unsung by those contemporaries of May-
hew's who demonstrablyknew him or knew about him. The description
of the seamy side of the era is still attributed to others. Mayhew, as
Jonathan Raban has put it, was abducted.6He was not acceptable as a
litterateur, and the social sciences were not yet ready for him.
The abductionof Mayhew might be explained as the restlt of his hav-
ing ventured beyond the agreed-upon confines of the literary system:
what he produced was journalism rather than creative writing. From
this point of view it is almost immaterial that the language of his inter-
views is highly organized, polished for maximum effect, and conveyed
in dramatic monologue. The relative silence that surrounded Mayhew
might also be explained, however, by the fact that he infringed on a larg-
er code. Consistent with his life-style, he was a Bohemian and a socialite;
but his disregard for the neat social stratification of Victorian London
3 Five Families (New York, 1959), p. 1.
4 Die Angestellten: Aus dem neuesten Deutschland, Schriften, 1 (Frankfurt,
1971), p. 212.
5 Runge, Bottroper Protokolle (Frankfurt, 1968) ; Lidman,Gruva (Stockholm,
1968) ; Isaksson and Jean Hermanson,Dom svarta (Stockholm, 1970).
6 "The Invisible Mayhew," Encounter, 41 (August 1973), 64.
99
tended to make his fellow clubmen uneasy. His interests in social strata
were vertical to the point of subversiveness. As Raban observes, "People
didn't quite believe in Mayhew. They sensed in him a basic lack of con-
tinuity, as if he had carried bad faith to the point of moral principle"
(p. 69).
Viewed in its historical context Mayhew's undertaking was undoubt-
edly radical. Much of it is oddly consonant with the more recent report
activity to be considered here, but to it are prefixed a number of prem-
ises which distinguish him from recent reporters. For instance, his in-
vestigation is subheaded "A Cyclopaediaof the Condition and Earnings
of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not
work." He regarded the human subjects of his cyclopaediaas a caste
rather than a class, as nomadic tribes rather than a stratum created by
a given socioeconomicsystem. Recent reportliteraturecannot repeat
Mayhew's feat because it does not share his views. One of his basic as-
sumptions, implicit or explicit, is that people will work but sometimes
cannot; tertium non datur. It is a literature of solidarity.
It is necessary at this point to sketch an outline, however sweeping
(and however local its validity), of the causes of the reemergence not
only of reports but of documentarismas an ism. One way of viewing the
new wave is as the more or less organic continuance of earlier work
which was forcibly interrupted.Thus, for instance, Germans and Soviets
in the 1920s and French and Scandinavians in the 1930s made signifi-
cant attempts to create a documentary literature.7 These were shelved
either through politico-administrativemeasures or by redirecting prior-
ities in the face of a clearly prewar situation. The war imposed a caesura;
it also shocked writers well into the 1960s into asking ultimate questions
such as those posed by existentialism and absurdism. After that, work
was started again, its aims somewhat modified by insights gained in the
meantime. One of these insights was that modernism, regardless of cur-
rent trends, tends to treat ontologically phenomena which are historic-
ally specific; more historicity rather than less, it was thought, might be
one way of depriving these phenomena of their apparent absoluteness.
Another postwar factor was the aggravated credibility gap of art-"no
poetry after Auschwitz," in Theodor W. Adorno's phrase-which
seemed bridgeable either by renouncing art or, less suicidally, by direct-
ing efforts from connotative toward denotative art.8 Political and social
processes, global and national, appeared in art, questioning the legiti-
7 For French efforts,not treatedhere, see esp. Jean-Pierre A. Bernard,Le Parti
communistefranCaiset la questionlittiraire (Grenoble, 1972).
8 Adorno's argument, which actually is a vote against commitment, is best
studied today in the context of the early 1960s: see his Noten zur Literatur, III
(Frankfurt, 1965), 109-35; the quotationis from p. 125.
100
macy both of the established canon of topics and of the attacks hitherto
made on it. These attacks, according to many, were formulated within
categories set up by the ideology to be countered and were thus, in the
last analysis, dubiously "affirmative."The dialectic of world and art
was underlined by a marked sociologization of the humanities, that is,
of the immediateacademicenvironment of an increasingly well-educated
writing profession. The new mass media posed challenges not merely by
bringing unseen vistas into the drawing room but by their very nature:
the inherent realism of the television image became a subject of emula-
tion. Interaction between "the Gutenberg boys" and the media found
various modes of expression.
Influences of a more strictly literary nature should also be mentioned.
Documentarism, it was argued, might have functional virtues; it might
be a way of bypassing an ossified literary system by bringing new subject
matter to a habitually nonreading public. Doing away with the narrator
offered a radical solution to the key problem of narrating. By breaking
with the completed structure and substituting for it an atectonic method,
the documentaristtakes sides with impermanence.This stand obviously
has extraliterary foundations. It seems too restrictive, however, to as-
sert that documentarism arose from political belief; rather, it arose
from a skepticism which might or might not be channeled politically. Its
chief claim to our interest, perhaps, was phrased by the editor of a special
issue on documentary literature of the Danish journal Vindrosen in
1974: "It is one of the soundest and least compromised tools available
today."'
Propelled by, among others, the interrelated causes outlined above, a
hectic production and consumption of documentary literature began in
which additional aspects of the position of writing and writers in society
were pointed out. The traditional role of the writer was unmasked as
that of the jester; his freedom parallels the freedom to harm enjoyed by
the harmless entertainer. But there are two sides to this freedom, as il-
lustrated by two quotations from the Stockholmer Katalog of the Dort-
mrunderGruppe 61; this "Arbeitskreis fiir kiinstlerische Auseinander-
setzung mit der industriellen Arbeitswelt" visited Sweden in 1970. First
Sara Lidman's enthusiastic opening statement (as translated into Ger-
man for the bilingual catalogue) : "Die Idee ist glinzend ! Es ist wirk-
lich an der Zeit, daB wir Schriftsteller mit unserem Land-und dessen
Rolle in der Welt-bekannt werden, da13wir uns dem Risiko aussetzen,
o N[iels] B [arfoed] in Vindrosen, 3 (1974), 5. All translations into English

are mine unless otherwise noted. Reasons for documentarytendenciesin Western
prose in the 1960s and 1970s are cogently outlined in Hans Hertel's "Romanens
krise (?) og det episke behov,"in Merete Gerlach-Nielsenet al. (eds.), Roman-
teori og romananalyse(Odense, 1977), pp. 319-421.
101
als Mitbiirger, Arbeiter, Zeitgenossen angesehen zu werden, daB andere

Berufsgruppen uns zur Verantwortung ziehen, ausfragen und uns Auf-
triige geben k6nnen." Giinter Wallraff offers another view: "Eine wich-
tige Chance dieser sogenannten Dokumentarliteratur ist es, sich die
'Narrenfreiheit,' die die Literatur weitgehend noch geniel3t, zunutze zu
machen und alldas, was im Journalismus nicht gesagt werden kann und
darf, fiber diesen Umweg doch noch ins 6ffentliche Bewul3tsein zu
transportieren."'0 Tenets of documentary literature acceptable to both
Wallraff and Lidman are that fact is stranger than fiction, that facts are
never the neutral data of positivistic inquiry but are subservient to a
cause, and that psychologism and individual portraiture are concerns of
badly focused literature. For Wallraff, as for Lidman in Gruva (a re-
port from a Swedish iron mine), the relations of production are both
subject and theme. The individual hero is dethroned in favor of a collec-
tive protagonist.
In a 1967 lecture Reinhard Baumgart speculates about the signifi-
cance of a possible breakthroughfor documentary writing: "Eine neue
Phase des Romans, falls damit eine neue beginnt, wiirde einsetzen mit
einer Entzauberung, der vergleichbar, die im 'Don Quijote' den neueren
Roman er6ffnet hat. Damals wurde dem feudalen Helden der reprasen-
tative Anspruch entzogen, jetzt dem bfirgerlichen Individuum, einer
anderen lange stichhaltigen, aber ebenso historischen, also durchaus
nicht unverginglichen Interpretation des Menschenwesens."11Baum-
gart does not explicitly declare that collective experience will be the sub-
ject of the new novel. But he does hint at a future in which a vast empty
space would emerge if the bourgeois individual were relegated from the
field of nature into that of culture. This vacuum could be filled with
texts "from the lips of the people themselves" (Mayhew, p. xv). The
idea of "making them heard," common to most report books, is a dis-
tinctive trait of the genre. It is the motto of an entire series of little
books, called Samtal (Conversations), issued by a Swedish publisher.
"The object of these books is to make heard some of the many who pos-
sess experience and insights," the back covers explain.12 The books are
based on transcripts of taped conversations which have been submitted
to the interviewees for approval. The first two volumes present a metal-
worker and a miner, respectively.
Concrete evidence of the risks that beset the reportorial mode may
10Stockholmer katalog der dortmundergruppe 61 (Stockholm, 1970), pp. iii,
119. Though the situationas describedby Wallraff is most readily recognizablein
Germany,it is hardly a Germanphenomenon.
11"Theorie einer dokumentarischenLiteratur,"Aussichten des Romans oder
Hat LiteraturZukunft? (Neuwied and Berlin, 1968), p. 60.
12The series was started in 1973 as a joint effort of FiB/Kulturfront, a left-
wing biweekly,and GidlundsFSrlag.
102
most profitably, almost paradigmatically,be taken from Erika Runge's

Bottroper Protokolle, which has also been called "ein nahezu klassisches
Werk der neuen deutschen Dokumentarliteratur."13Runge's volume
of interviews from a town in West Germany's coal-mining Ruhr region
was first published in 1968; more than one hundred thousand copies had
been printed by 1976. The book has been the subject of much praise but
also of serious critical examination.14 In the foreword, "Berichte aus
dem Klassengesellschaft," Martin Walser makes the following apodictic
statements:
Alle Literatur ist biirgerlich.Bei uns. Auch wenn sie sich noch so antibjirgerlich
gebirdet. Ich bin nicht so sicher, daBsie nichts als "affirmativ"sei, aber biirgerlich
ist sie sicher. Das heil3t: sie driickt biirgerlicheExistenz aus, Leben unter biirger-
Gewissen,GenuB,HoffnungundKaterin biirgerlicher
lichenUmstdinden, Gesell-
schaft. Arbeiter kommen in ihr vor wie Giinsebliimchen,Agypter, Sonnenstaub,
Arbeiterkommenin ihr vor. Mehrnicht.
KreuzritterundKondensstreifen.
Hier, in diesem Buch, kommensie zu Wort.15
The text on the cover is illuminating: "Bottroper Protokolle: Aufge-
zeichnet von Erika Runge. Vorwort von Martin Walser." It is not a
book by the workers, by those "made heard." It is a new work by tele-
vision personality Runge and prefacer Walser. Runge's next tape-re-
corder work, Frauen, was launched even more directly, as a book by
Erika Runge. This is largely explained by the nature of a literary mar-
ket which traffics in brand names. Anonymity sells no books, even if it
is the commanding fact of their content. Ironically, the part of the liter-
ary system in which anonymous authorship does appear is precisely that
popular, mass-produced literature which finds its readership among re-
port interviewees rather than among interviewers. The reports as pub-
lished tend to remain aloof. For report books to have the emancipatory
effect which is their frequently declared aim, the conditions under which
they are published would have to be altered considerably.
It is not difficult, however, to argue in favor of the way in which the
publisher, Suhrkamp,markets Bottroper Protokolle. The book is offered
to the public as a tape transcript. But while Runge recorded interviews,
that is, dialogues, what the book exhibits in print is straight narrative
in the shape of monologues. The element which guided the process of
is Marcel Reich-Ranicki, "Erika Runges Schwierigkeiten,"Frankfurter All-
gemeine Zeitung (Feuilleton), July 17, 1976.
14 Some of the best essays on documentarismfocus on Runge: see G. Katrin
Pallowski, "Die dokumentarischeMode,"in H. A. Glaser et al., Literaturwissen-
schaft und Sozialwissenschaften (Stuttgart, 1971), pp. 235-314; and Raoul Hiib-
ner, "Trivialdokumentationen von der Scheinemanzipation?" in H. L. Arnold and
S. Reinhardt (eds.), Dokumentarliteratur(Munich, 1973), pp. 120-73.
15Runge, p. 9. Cf. Heinrich B511,who once said that in Germanliteraturework-
ers are found only as soldiers.
103
telling, determining, or codefining the content has been suppressed by

means of a number of furtive ellipses. In the selection process entire con-
versations were discarded. Runge has laid out her eight interviews in
a sequence which by itself constitutes an authorial comment. She has,
in her own words, "das, was da spontan, assoziativ . . . gesprochen
wurde, dramaturgisch gerafft und geordnet." As Hiibner comments,
"Eigentlich bin ich vorgegangen wie bei der Montage eines Dokumen-
tarfilms, bei der die Rohaufnahmen erst nach Komplexen zerlegt und
dann in einer Auswahl neu zusammengesetzt werden" (p. 133, n. 39).
It would perhaps be an exaggeration to claim that Runge has performed
a creative act, for instance an act of Gestaltung in the Lukicsian sense
of a three-stage process: concretization-abstraction-reconcretization.
But neither has she been content to provide slices of life in the form
of littdrature trouvie. Whatever her attitude toward art, and however
antiliterary the climate in which her work was so keenly appreciated,
she has carried out a number of operations very much like those that go
into the creation of art.
In 1976 Runge bade farewell to her transcriptive past in an article
called "Abschied von den Protokollen."16She begins by announcing her
intention to write fiction, a novel; she goes on to justify this decision by
comparing the West German situation in the latter half of the 1960s with
that of a decade later. The former period presented bleak prospects. The
vaunted German economy, hit by a recession, exposed structural short-
comings. Those most severely afflictedby the recession had scant means
of dealing with it. There was no working-class consciousness; the Com-
munist party was illegal; and there was no left-wing (5ffentlichkeitwith-
in which a reestablishment of the links, broken in 1933, between prole-
tarian literature and a workers' movement might have been attempted.
"S~tze vom 'Ende,' vom 'Tod der Literatur' einerseits und von der
aufklarerischen, wenn nicht revolutionaren (das Proletariat ffir den
Klassenkampf organisierenden) Wirkung der Dokumentation anderer-
seits bestinmmtenin der zweiten Hiilfte der sechziger Jahre die Dis-
kussion. Wirklichkeit sollte an die Stelle von Kunst treten, die Doku-
mentation wurde dem experimentellen Text, der Fiktion und selbst
einer politisch engagierten Literatur mit ihren MSglichkeiten gegen-
fibergestellt." This was the situation as diagnosed by a bourgeois intel-
lectual with socialist convictions. She analyzes the mid-1970s differ-
ently: "Nach fast zehnjilhriger Debatte fiber die Arbeiterliteratur kann
festgestellt werden, dal3 Arbeiter und Angestellte angefangen haben
zu schreiben . . . die bisher siebzehn Titel des 'Werkkreises Literatur
16"Abschiedvon den Protokollen,"FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung (Feuille-
ton), July 17, 1976.
104
der Arbeitswelt' erreichten fiber eine halbe Million Auflage. Ein der
Arbeiterbewegung verpflichtetes Presse- und Verlagswesen entwickelt
sich. Die Lust, sich auszudrficken, nimmt zu. Die Auffassung, daB
Literatur unmittelbar dazu dienen k6nne, politische Prozesse in Gang
zu setzen, hat sich fiberlebt." Runge's new stand is unambiguous. She
is determined to remain a committed writer, but this, for her, today,
means becoming more of a writer. The desire was there from the start.
This brings us to another aspect of her article, which was greeted sar-
donically by critics skeptical of report literature.17 There were, she
states, extrapolitical reasons for her choice of genre: "Was motiviert
einen Autor, Stoffe zu wifhlen (etwa die Probleme von Lohnabhingig-
en), in die er seine Erfahrungen nicht einbringen kann; eine Sprache
zu benutzen (im Fall der Verwendung von Tonbandaufzeichnungen),
die nicht seine eigene ist; kurz; alles in allem als 'Nicht-Autor' eine
Bestatigung zu finden? Die politisch begriindete tibernahme einer die-
nenden Funktion-um die 'Kraft der Arbeiterklasse' bewuft zu ma-
chen-reicht zur Klirung nicht aus." She was unsure: interested in
sociology but untrained, politically committed but afraid of the conse-
quences of commitment, eager to express herself but unwilling to expose
herself. Unable to become a writer, she became a listener plagued with
the itch to write: "Eher wollte ich unfair sein, als aus diesem Buch
nicht doch noch in gewisser Weise mein Buch zu machen." These may
sound like the very private problems of a porte manqud.They need not
be, nor does Runge regard them as such. To her they are problems more
or less endemic to a whole social stratum, albeit a thin one: that of in-
tellectuals branded by a good upbringing but determinedly reaching out
for new loyalties.s8
Jan Myrdal's China report, Rapport fran kinesisk by, was first pub-
lished in Swedish in 1963. This book gave rise to something which might
be called a multinational report industry, underwritten by about a dozen
prestigious publishing houses in many countries. The story of Liu Ling
village in China was followed by reports from towns and cities in the
United States, Sweden, Cuba, Tunisia, England, East and West Ger-
many, and elsewhere.
Myrdal sees his book as built on a durable Swedish tradition which
includes Strindberg's description of life among French peasants and
Ivar Lo-Johansson's works about the Swedish rural proletariat. Gener-
ically he regards it as a novel of social realism in the tradition of Gorky
and Dos Passos. But it could not have been written as a conventional
17Thus, e.g., Ranicki (see above, n. 13; cf. also Ranicki's "Rote Bl~tter,"
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Feuilleton), September 11, 1976.
18A similar analysis appliedto Swedish writing is found in Birgitta Holm and
Ola Holmgren, "En kris pa vaigin i realismen,"OB, 6 (1972), 355-60.
105
novel. "I was unable to write it as a novel because I am not Chinese and
thus lack that entire frame of reference within which the cards could be
shuffled and dealt. All I can do is listen."19 Myrdal's book is distin-
guished by its very genesis from most other reports: its material has
passed two language borders, from Chinese via English into Swedish.
Microlanguage authenticity is precluded. The double filter lends the
book a clinical character aimed at by Myrdal.20
The filters also make it easier to introduce a shaping element ex post
facto: the interviews in the book, says Myrdal, "can be read as indepen-
dent stories; contes; human documents from a crucial period" (p. 13).
Li Hsiu-tang, a counterrevolutionary, and Mau Ke-yeh, a cavebuilder
and peasant revolutionary, "become types. I have worked on the style.
That goes without saying."21
Myrdal's leeway for creative imposition, for this reason, was excep-
tionally wide. But what of those who make and write out their reports
within the framework of their native language ? Sara Lidman's Gruva
is a case in point, rendered interesting by the fact that it was written by
a novelist of stature, and by the political influence it exerted during a
strike in the iron mines in which it originated. Lidman says that her book
is a selection based on much more extensive material, and that her main
criterion in sifting it was typicality; she also observes that the utterances
of her interviewees are genuine, retaining their vigor precisely by not
being taken out of context for comment.22 In a broadcast interview,
Myrdal objected to this pronouncementon a crucial point:
Sara Lidman's Gruva is an excellent book. But unless my memory fails me she
made certain statementswhich I find extremely dubiousif not dangerous.She said
that she wasn't the writer of the book: the miners were. I find this extremely du-
bious because reading Gruva one sees that it is quite evidently a Sara Lidman
novel with Sara Lidman characters. Thus the book wasn't written by those who
spoke into a little box. Sara Lidman, however, being a good and genuine writer,
has written in such a manner that those whom she describes, those whom she
speaks for, whose voice she is, the miners, recognized themselves and said when
reading the book that these are our words.23
This is undoubtedly a fair description of an ambition frequent among
report writers: the ambition to make articulate while making heard.
This desire, we have seen, has a potential for social, even subversive,
19 Interview by MarianneThygesen in her mimeographedpaper "J. Myrdal og

S. Lidman: Rapportgenreni svensk 60-tals litteratur" (Arhus, 1971), p. 93.
2o Jan Myrdal, Report from a Chinese Village, trans. Maurice Michael (Har-
mondsworth,1967), pp. 33 ff.
21Thygesen, p. 94.
22Thygesen, p. 100.
23 In Matts Rying, Diktare idag (Stockholm, 1971), p. 24. Cf. GiinterWallraff,
"Wirkungenin der Praxis," 4 (1970), 316 ff.
Akzenrte,
106
criticism which can be tapped in a more or less overt manner. There is

an obvious difference here between East and West. In a socialist cultural
strategy designed for a socialist country, reporting, like any other ac-
tivity, must not be antagonistic. This does not rule out affinities between
the two kinds of reportorial activity, that which basically denies the sys-
tem within which it takes place and that which basically affirms it. This
difference is "merely" fundamental and does not preclude similarities
in method and practice.
Experience which illustrates the concerns of the West during the
1960s was, in fact, gathered in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. This
was a period in which traditional priorities of text production were
questioned; no single code was adopted until 1934, when Socialist Real-
ism was decreed. In this state of normlessness a conflict arose between
proletarian writers and revolutionary writers of bourgeois extraction.
Some of the latter, with Sergey Tretyakov as prominent spokesman,
advocated a "productionist" literature: just as journalism was in the
process of being deprofessionalized by means of a movement of worker
correspondents,the tasks of the writing profession as a whole were to be
reformulated. The new Soviet reality was to be documented as it
emerged. On the one hand were those who did the work that made it
emerge; these, the "data bearers," had the insight and the experience
but lacked the means to articulate them. On the other was a cadre of
writers professedly willing to dedicate themselves to articulating them.
The task of the writer was to join the workers as interviewer, literary
secretary (a term with Balzacian connotations), or "constructor" of
the raw material with which he was confronted. Tretyakov's desire was
to create a literature of fact (literatura fakta). But he eagerly pointed
out that the description of facts must never deteriorate into fact fetish-
ism, and he was mordant in his attack on writers turned reporters who
roved the country for snapshots of the new life. Facts, he emphasized,
must be rendered in their temporal extension. Only thus can the process
in which they evolve be revealed. Merely recorded, cumulative depiction
cannot grasp the dialectic of change.24
This conception of the mission of literature, a polemically one-sided
one no doubt, was not formulated by Tretyakov alone but by various
writers associated with the Left Front of the Arts (LEF). It was put
into practice for a brief period-one example is the anthology of theo-
retical writings, Literatura fakta (Moscow, 1929), edited by N. F.
Chuzhak-but it was subjected to heavy criticism from the start and
24 This paragraphleans heavily on Fritz Mierau, "Tatsacheund Tendenz: Der
"operierende"Schriftsteller Sergej Tretjakow" in Sergej Tretjakow, Lyrik Dra-
matik Prosa (Leipzig, 1972), esp. pp. 483-94. See also V. D. Barooshian,"Russian
Futurism in the Late 1920's: Literatureof Fact," SEEJ, 15 (1971), 38-47.
107
its total liquidationwas not long in coming. It has, however, been helped
to posthumous fame through the mediation of others. It was wielded
as a weapon in the debate on realism that raged in Weimar Germany
during the last years of the Republic. In this debate one side referred to
Tretyakov as an exemplary productionist, while the other accused him
of leftist deviationism attributable to his bourgeois background. Georg
Lukics and Ernst Ottwalt were the chief opponents in this altercation.
To their names should be added those of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt
Brecht. The latter's contributionsto the discussion were, presumably for
tactical reasons, not published at the time. In his 1934 essay, "Der Autor
als Produzent," Benjamin refers to Tretyakov as "der operierende
Schriftsteller" incarnate: one who does not merely observe and inform
but also takes part.25 This essay and the entire 1930s controversy were
brought up for reconsideration in the late 1960s. In Germany and Scan-
dinavia arguments taken from this debate have figured as required en-
tries in most deliberations not only on realism but on the very role of
the would-be realistic writer.
Among endeavors to update and implement productionist theory,
those of Hans Magnus Enzensberger merit particularattention. Enzens-
berger has experimented extensively with documentary techniques in
prose, drama, poetry, and the new media. In addition he has written a
number of theoretical pieces, many of them for his own aperiodical mag-
azine Kursbuch. At least in an interview, however, he has synthesized
his views on literature in a deceptively simple manner: "I write less and
less of my own books myself. I have a feeling that the things I can relate
on the basis of my own experience are not enough to keep up production.
I do not want to end up in that subjectivism which is the fate of so many
novelists."26Obviously this is a feeling that would seize certain writers
and leave others alone: one must be rationally disposed toward it. One
must be persuaded that it is imperative to fight the literary monopoly
of the writing profession, and to do so from within this profession. In a
letter to me dated March 10, 1974, Enzensberger emphasizes this con-
viction, pointing out at the same time a corollary which it need not
imply:
EineZeitlanghabeich die dokumentarische Methodesehrstrengbeniitzt(z.B. in
dem Verhhr von Habana, das ein literarischesobjet trouve ist). Es war fiir mich
niitzlich, die Methode in ihrer ganzen Stringenz auszuprobieren.Seither bin ich
vom "Fetischismus"des Dokumentsund vom Kult der Authentizitditabgekommen.
(Vgl. z.B. mein Buch fiber den spanischen Anarchisten Durruti . .. ) Heute
25 The chief contributionsto this debate are conveniently available in Fritz
Raddatz (ed.), Marxismus und Literatur, Vol. II (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1969).
26 Quoted in Ib Bondebjerg, "Den kollektive fiktion," Hug! (Denmark), 1
(1974), 39.
108
halte ich fiir das wichtigste an diesem Konzept, da8 es erlaubt, andere zum
Sprechen zu bringen,d.h. das literarischeMonopol der Schriftsteller zu relativie-
ren. Aber ich m6chte das nicht mehr wie ein Buchhaltermachen.Sowenig wie die
andern Erzdhler . . . soll der Verfasser seine Phantasie unterdriicken.Unsere
Triume sind nicht weniger authentischals das was wir fiir Tatsachenhalten.
Enzensberger's observations demand that the concept of authenticity

be made problematic. They presuppose, moreover, a reconsideration of
the traditional givens of realist aesthetics. Briefly, the aesthetics of nine-
teenth-century realism rested upon a theory of knowledge which identi-
fies the real as an observable field accessible and discoverable by empir-
ical means. The real was also to be the domain of literature. If the real,
however, is bad, it is not a fit subject for a literature which primarily
wishes to insist on the radical changeability of the world. This is the gist
of the Frankfurt school's critique of realist aesthetics: realism conceives
of empirical existence as the only possible existence and, in doing so,
links art to the dominant ideology; by denying that art and the observ-
able are things apart, it deprives art of its utopian potential. This line of
reasoning has found its most consistent advocate in Adorno, who has
used it against writers as disparate as Lukacs, Brecht, and Sartre (see
note 8). Adorno's position is no doubt extreme, and it presupposes a
total rejection of any variety of documentary literature. I refer to it for
two related reasons. First, it holds up as problematic that realism which
many documentarists take as an article of faith. Second, Adorno, as a
philosophical materialist, fundamentally endorses the aims of those he
criticizes. He does not accept their procedure because he cannot accept
their logic: "Der Schlul3von philosophischem Materialismus auf aisthe-
tischen Realismus ist falsch."27
What, then, are the characteristics of the realism that report writers
end up in, or may end up in, in quest of more realism than fiction seemed
able to offer? I shall take as my point of departure a quotation from the
late 1920s in Germanywhich is directly applicableto more recent discus-
sions. It is part of Kracauer's preface to Die Angestellten (see note 4).
He asks himself how the reality of the employees of Berlin, "ein gut Teil
von der Wirklichkeit Berlins," is to be made comprehensible:
Ergibt sich diese Wirklichkeit der fiblichen Reportage? Seit mehreren Jahren
genieBtin Deutschlanddie Reportagedie Meistbegfinstigungunter allen Darstel-
lungsarten, da nur sie, so meint man, sich des ungestellten Lebens bemiichtigen
kinne. Die Dichter kennenkaum einen h6herenEhrgeiz, als zu berichten; die Re-
produktiondes Beobachtetenist Trumpf. Ein Hunger nach Unmittelbarkeit,der
ohne Zweifel die Folge der Unternahrungdurch den deutschenIdealismusist. Der
Abstraktheitdes idealistischenDenkens,das sich durchkeine Vermittlungder
Realitft zu niihernweil3,wird die Reportageals die Selbstanzeigekonkreten
27 Theodor W. Adorno, GesammelteSchriften, Vol. VII: A'sthetischeTheorie
(Frankfurt, 1970), p. 383.
109
Daseins entgegengesetzt.Aber das Dasein ist nicht dadurchgebannt, daf3man es

in einer Reportage bestenfalls noch einmal hat. Sie ist ein legitimer Gegenschlag
gegen den Idealismus gewesen; mehr nicht. Denn sie verliert sich nur in dem
Leben, das dieser nicht findenkann, das ihm und ihr gleich unnahbarist. Hundert
Berichte aus einer Fabrik lassen sich nicht zur Wirklichkeit der Fabrik addieren,
sondern bleiben bis in alle Ewigkeit hundert Fabrikansichten.Die Wirklichkeit
ist eine Konstruktion.28
It is against arguments like these that apologies for a purely reproduc-

tive report literature must be viewed. The main thesis, as seen above,
is that it is a way of voicing experiences which have not previously found
their way into books. This thesis may also be formulated as in Carin
Mannheimer's review of Hans Axel Holm's Rapport frdn Neustadt,
DDR: "Perhaps after all this is in many ways the foremost task of a re-
port book: to take all given evidence seriously because it is serious for
those who voice it; to agree and disclose but never judge or assess. A
report must strive to relate what people themselves say, their own de-
scription of their situation. To speculate about it, to draw conclusions
from it and analyze it, is another and different task."" What happens
when reports confine themselves to putting on the market unedited ex-
amples of being? A few instances will show how easily that which is
local, with a strong smell of concrete humanness, lends itself to being
projected onto a much larger canvas.
In his anthology of interviews Jiirgen Neven-du Mont makes the city
of Heidelberg, anonymous in the book, represent Federal Germany, and
hints at a still wider representativeness.30 Officer and streetwalker,
florist and priest, librarian and waitress-the mere diversity of the edi-
tor's gallery of humans bundled together by little more than geograph-
ical circumstance makes it resist analysis. It turns into a painting of
Adamites. Another recent example, Ronald Blythe's Akenfield grows
into a portrait of man tilling the soil not only in East Anglia but in Bur-
gundy or Vietnam as well; this is an extrapolation willed by the au-
thor.31 Well before the resurgence of the latest report wave Roland
Barthes and Walter Benjamin pointed out how reports of this kind tend
to render the primitive picturesque and things temporal timeless. Sig-
28 Kracauer, p. 216. Cf. Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke, XVIII (Frank-
furt, 1967), 161 ff. Kracauer'sstudy was the subject of two highly interesting re-
views by Benjamin: see his GesammelteSchriften, III (Frankfurt, 1972), 219-28.
29 BLM, 3 (1970), 217. Holm's book was publishedin English as The Other
Germans (1970). Mannheimer'sown Rapport om kvinnor (Stockholm, 1969), in-
cludes an introductionstating that no strategy has determinedher selection of in-
formants, and that their tapes have not been tamperedwith.
30Zum Beispiel 42 Deutsche (Munich, 1968), p. 12. The preface to the English
edition,After Hitler, does name Heidelberg; it also plays down the universalityof
the Germanexperience.
31Akenfield: Report from an English Village (Harmondsworth,1969), p. x.
110
nificantly, the objects of both critiques were taken from camera art.
Barthes observes how the photographic exhibition, "The Family of
Man," renders the human "condition" mythical, atemporal, and ahis-
torical; the means of effecting this resided in the very concreteness pe-
culiar to photography."3Benjamin cites a volume of handsome photo-
graphs, Die Welt ist schan, which he accuses of having made misery,
by means of sophisticated camera work, an article of consumption, even
of enjoyment. This, he says, is what die neue Sachlichkeit comes to in
the field of photography; in literature even less is achieved: "Ich sprach
von dem Verfahren einer gewissen modischen Photographie, das Elend
zum Gegenstand des Konsums zu machen. Indem ich mir der neuen
Sachlichkeit zuwende, muf3 ich einen Schritt weitergehen und sagen,
daB sie den Kampf gegen das Elend zum Gegenstand des Konsums ge-
macht hat . . . Die Verwandlung des politischen Kampfs aus einem
Zwang zur Entscheidung in einen Gegenstand kontemplativen Beha-
gens, aus einem Produktionsmittel in einen Konsumartikel ist ffir diese
Literatur das Kennzeichnende."33The culinary way out is a very tempt-
ing one; it is, perhaps, a particularly seductive approach to historical
documents. This is illustrated in John D. Rosenberg's preface to the
1967 edition of Mayhew's London study: "Despite the monstrous suf-
fering it depicts, London Labour and the London Poor also possesses
the minute and circumstantial gaiety of a Dutch painting . . . The
massive intricacy of [this book] mirrors unerringly the labyrinthine
vitality of London itself" (p. viii).
The work of Studs Terkel, the foremost compiler of oral documents
in the United States, supports my assertion that reports, through their
inability to transcend the empirical reality from which their material is
derived, must remain within the conceptual confines of the system they
set out to scrutinize. This seems to apply even if the reports focus on the
very base of that system, as Terkel's reportorial activity increasingly
does. After writing books on Chicago and on the Great Depression,
Terkel gathered more than 130 interviews about what people do all
day and how they feel about it. Working deals with the sphere of pro-
duction. It is a passionate book in which the ills of dehumanization are
kept constantly in view. In the last analysis the book is a paean of
praise, a quality ably summed up by Anthony Sampson: "The picture
is disturbing, confusing and often depressing: but it derives a basic
grandeur, like any good epic, from the spectacle of individuals assert-
ing themselves and achieving their self-respect against great odds .
even the most deadly and repetitious jobs are made tolerable by those
32Mythologies (London, 1973), pp. 100-02.
33 "Der Autor als Produzent,"in Raddatz, II, 270 ff.
111
with a sense of both service and humour: it is the word 'laughs' in paren-
thesis, which appears in the midst of the bleakest descriptions, which
furnishes the most hopeful sign of the resilience of the individual."34
Dehumanization, then, acquires one of many possible hues. Rather than
being a function of certain alterable and historically determined rela-
tions of production, it is a symptom which is valiantly, sometimes hero-
ically, fought by a number of individuals, each in his own way. The book
deals not with making things better but with making the best of things
as they are. Both are doubtless commendable themes for a writer, and
nothing in Terkel's book indicates that he had set his mind on treating
the former. Given the restrictions of his method he had no choice.
Many report writers try the former alternative and fail. Report litera-
ture might be approachedby referring to some basic donnies of the soci-
ology of reporting. Most reports are marketed by prestigious publishers.
An imprint is a selective instrument which attracts some readers and
keeps others away. Brecht defined realism as a method of discovery:
"Kein Realist begnfigt sich damit, immerfort zu wiederholen, was man
schon weiBl; das zeigt keine lebendige Beziehung zur Wirklichkeit."35
The problem resides in "was man schon wei8." What one man knows
may come as a revelation to others. For the audience most easily reached
by the reports discussed here, these may well serve as instruments of
cognition. The reader's mind may turn the milieus, the work processes,
the daily life described in them into something rich and strange. Exoti-
cism begins at home. For its presumptive readers the report may be a
kind of travel book: it opens up vistas which, for reasons of social strati-
fication, are more accessible through literature than through personal
observation.
In addition to the gap between subject matter and reader, there is a
gap between subject matter and writer. I suggest that report writing has
served many of its practitioners as a means of probing the validity of
their previous convictions and information. Work on a report has been
taken up in order to cover unfamiliar ground. In this sense a report
project is an ad hoc Gorkian university, a declaration of solidarity as
well as a farewell to fiction. Taking sides with reality against fiction, re-
port writers have often insisted on a rigid dichotomy. Reality, however,
is fraught with fictions of its own, which must be heeded by realistic
writing. "Die Wirklichkeit," as we know, "ist eine Konstruktion."'6
AAboAkademi
84"What about the Workers?" Observer (London), August 31, 1975,p. 21.
35 GesammelteWerke, XIX, 295.
36This paper was read at the XIVth Congress of the InternationalFederation
for ModernLanguagesand Literatures,Aug. 28-Sept. 2, 1978 (Aix-en-Provence).
An abstracthas been printed in its Proceedings.
112

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Radical Naturalism: First-Person Documentary Literature

The report is an extreme phenomenon, and as such it clearly demon-

chapter to Five Families, finds it "ironic that many Americans, thanks

o N[iels] B [arfoed] in Vindrosen, 3 (1974), 5. All translations into English

als Mitbiirger, Arbeiter, Zeitgenossen angesehen zu werden, daB andere

most profitably, almost paradigmatically,be taken from Erika Runge's

telling, determining, or codefining the content has been suppressed by

19 Interview by MarianneThygesen in her mimeographedpaper "J. Myrdal og

criticism which can be tapped in a more or less overt manner. There is

Enzensberger's observations demand that the concept of authenticity

Daseins entgegengesetzt.Aber das Dasein ist nicht dadurchgebannt, daf3man es

It is against arguments like these that apologies for a purely reproduc-

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