Between Fiction and the ‘Greater Truth’
Representation and Reality in Tom Wolfe’s
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

von: Marc Regler

Table of contents

1 Introduction 4

2 Tom Wolfe and his theories of writing  5

2.1 Journalism and New Journalism  6
2.2 The novel and the social realist novel 8
2.3 Material and Form in Wolfe’s writing  9

3 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test 14

3.1 Author’s note: material and approach to TEKAAT as a means of representation 14
3.2 The narrative as interpretative key to the body of material 16
3.3 Subjective reality and its technical manifestation in representation 20

4 Conclusion 24

5 Bibliography 27

5.1 Primary Literature 27
5.2 Primary Secondary Literature  27
5.3 Secondary Literature 27
5.4 Other Fictional Sources 27
5.5 Electronic Sources  27

1 Introduction

“Thus set up, pen in hand, for the sake of the greater truth, I would turn Portugal into a fiction. That is what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?”1 This essay is not about Portugal – or Life of Pi, for that matter – but about the relation between fiction, greater truth and the selective transforming of reality, the twisting of it to bring out its essence. The book of interest is Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test2. Unlike the literary novel Life of Pi, TEKAAT was published and written in the context of non- fiction – the New Journalism. TEKAAT claims to be no fiction and it strives to represent a greater truth around the events and facts it reports on – something, which Yann Martel claims to be the very soul of fiction.

The key for it is subjectivity, in Wolfe’s concept of writing, the subjectivity of experience and the subjectivity in representation. In this essay I discuss, under the central notions of ‘truth’ and subjectivity, fiction and non- fiction, the interplay between representation and reality and the related issue of realism and journalism as the forms – or genres – of representation Tom Wolfe draws on for his theory of representation. The first part of the essay deals with the general, theoretical background of TEKAAT, with Wolfe’s discussion on the novel and the New Journalism in his essays ‘The New Journalism’3 and ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’4. In the second part of the essay I look at TEKAAT in detail, focussing on the relation of the book – the representation – to the substance of the book, the kind of reality it is supposed to represent, and at the role of basical elements of representation, the narrative, language and point-of- view.

2 Tom Wolfe and his theories of writing

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1 Yann Martel: ‘Author’s Note’, Life of Pi (Orlando/Austin/New York/San Diego/Toronto/London: Harvest 2003).
2 Tom Wolfe: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (London: Black Swan, 1989). In the following referred to as TEKAAT.
3 Tom Wolfe: ‘The New Journalism’, The New Journalism with an Anthology edited by Tom Wolfe and E W Johnson, Tom Wolfe/E W Johnson (London: Picador, 1975 (reprinted 1990)), pp. 15 – 68. In the following referred to as ‘TNJ’.
4 Tom Wolfe: ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’, The Bonfire of Vanities, Tom Wolfe (N.A.: Picador, 1990), pp. vii – xxx. In the following referred to as ‘Billion-Footed Beast’.