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Faced with these developments, Wolfe decided to write Bonfire in order to prove a point, "namely, that the future of the fictional novel would be in a highly detailed realism based on reporting, a realism . . . that would portray the individual in intimate and inextricable relation to the society around him." This realism, argues Wolfe, was what characterized the success of writers as varied as Zola, Dostoyevsky, Dickens and Lewis, whose Elmer Gantry prefigured the Jim Bakker affair by more than half a century. Nor is Wolfe too modest to add that such realism is what "created the 'absorbing' or 'gripping' quality" peculiar to his own novel.
Since the mid-1960s, university campuses have become battlegrounds of rival literary doctrines, all of them united only in a suspicion of the traditionally "obvious" or "natural" explanations of literature. + Impatience with such abstruse and often dogmatic theories has led to an outcry among educational traditionalists for a return to established and proven literary curriculums. Thus it is no surprise that the first wave of letters in reaction to the Harper's article, according to editor Lewis Lapham, has been strongly supportive of Wolfe's call for a return to fictional realism.
But there are also some strong dissenters. Novelist John Updike, for example, despite receiving favorable mention from Wolfe, is not amused by the manifesto. "It's the sort of thing ((Wolfe)) says," he complains. "It seems sort of self-serving and superficially felt. It seems to me that isms, including Magical Realism and Minimalism, are all honorable alternatives to being realistic." Updike is echoed by fellow novelist John Barth, whom Wolfe calls "the peerless leader" of the retreat from realism for his "neo- fabulist" style. Barth says Wolfe's manifesto "is much too narrow a view. I see the feast of literature as truly a smorgasbord. I wouldn't want a world in which there were only Balzac and Zola and not Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka. The idea that because we live in a large and varied country we therefore ought to write the sweeping, panoramic novel is like arguing that our poets all ought to be like Walt Whitman rather than Emily Dickinson."
Ever the provocateur, Wolfe is enjoying the controversy. Agreeing cheerfully that his piece is indeed self-serving, he now adds to his list of targets Italian best-selling writer Umberto Eco, whose latest novel, Foucault's Pendulum, is a phantasmagorical venture into the occult. "Eco," Wolfe says, "is a very good example of a writer who leads dozens of young writers into a literary cul-de-sac." Harper's plans to throw more fuel on the bonfire. Editor Lapham will devote a large part of his January issue to responses and rebuttals to Wolfe.