Tom Wolfe Interview (page: 3 / 5) America's Master Novelist	Print Interview

The "fiction absolute," as you call it, is that a sort of mythology of contemporary life?

Tom Wolfe: No, I think it's probably been here forever. I've swallowed it all very easily: "Well, writing is really important!" But you can get split by a career. On the one hand, I'm thinking that, "Jeez, there's probably not much else in the world that you can do that's more important than writing." At the same time, I am protective of my Southern upbringing. And this leads to something I call "championism," which is a kind of irrational attachment to certain figures, or certain cultural directions, because somehow that group, that person, in your mind is a champion of what you believe in to maintain your fiction absolute.

So many people's votes are irrationally determined by championism. I remember, a Samuel Lubbell wrote a book called The Future of American Politics. He was a sociologist. He was trying to figure out why Truman had upset Dewey in 1948 -- a huge upset. So he went around the country and did a sort of sociological survey. And he entered a town, I think it was in Wisconsin. It was a German town. It had been founded by German Catholics, and it still maintained its German majority. And they, in that election, were voting Republican by an enormous margin. It turned out the reason was Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, had declared war on Germany in 1917, which in turn brought a lot of opprobrium on Germans who were in the United States. And they had never forgotten that that's what the Democrats had done. It really had nothing to do with the 1948 election. It had to do with something that had happened in 1917. And I think everybody does that. I'll give you an example in my own case.

Right after 9/11, both Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, independently -- I don't think they got together -- and came out almost the day after it and said the depravity and sinfulness of the American people, and their lack of contact with God, is what brought this on, that's why it happened. And of course, it was around the bend. But this tirade of disparagement was directed against these two men: Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. And I found myself saying, "Hey, wait a minute! I know those people!" Pat Robertson, incidentally, went to Washington and Lee, the same place I went. His father had been a U.S. Senator. And, you know, he's far from being stupid. I couldn't agree for a second with what he was saying, but I found myself defending him. Jerry Falwell was just maybe 75 miles down the road from Washington and Lee, in Lynchburg, Virginia. And he was one of my people. "You don't go around saying that these people are idiots, or morons!" It was totally irrational. I couldn't agree with a thing they said, but it's championism. And it's all part of the fiction absolute that I'm talking about. And I can sit here and call it a fiction absolute, and yet my life operates by it. I think everybody's does. That's what has gotten me interested in neuroscience.
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Another example, when I was working at the Springfield Union, in Massachusetts, I came across the names of Italian American women, all from the Third Ward in Springfield, who were getting naturalized at age 61, 62, maybe 63. I couldn't understand this. And so I went to the Third Ward, and it turned out that part of the Third Ward was like a preserved, authentic Italian village. And the people in that small part of the ward didn't want to change a thing. I mean, they were quite happy to live in the old ways, and were not at all corrupted by the world around them. They didn't want to be American citizens, or it wasn't important to them, unless you wanted Social Security. At that point, you get naturalized. But I thought it was such a good example of status, in the sense of wanting to maintain exactly what you've got.

I should throw this in, another great example of championism. There's a documentary movie you may have seen, called When We Were Kings. It's deservedly become very popular, as documentaries go. It concerned the fight that Muhammad Ali had against George Foreman in Zaire, the so-called "Rumble in the Jungle." Nobody in print picked up the fact that to Africans -- at least certainly in Zaire -- Ali was their champion. Not just a boxing champion, he was their champion. And they presumed that his fight against George Foreman was Armageddon. It was black against white. And when Foreman stepped off the plane and he was black, they couldn't believe it. That all comes out in the movie. It's just a marvelous touch. Ali goes touring around Zaire, and they'll go, "Ali Boom-ba-bay!" Apparently this meant, "Long live Ali!" He loved all that. And they wanted to love him.

How did this lead you to neuroscience?

Tom Wolfe: When I hit upon the whole concept of status and status absolute and all that, I was convinced that there is a part of the brain that controls this. For example, you can tell when you're humiliated before you could put it into words. Something goes off. And you haven't reasoned it all out. It's just happened. And this has to be neurological in some way. Well, I must confess, I've never found this area, although I'm an avid neuroscience buff now. I subscribe to two newsletters, they give you week-by-week developments in neuroscience in language that I can understand. I go to neuroscience conferences. And the field has just become enormous. The annual meetings of the American Society for Neuroscience are among the biggest in the country now.

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