Thirty years ago or so, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and some other "journalists" set about deliberately melding journalistic "fact" with fiction; the suggestion was that this is what mainstream journalism was doing without acknowledgement, so they (Wolfe and Thompson) would foreground the melding.
As I and many others (Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard, for example) see it, the usurpation of "fact" has moved very rapidly, even exponentially, along with the almost total reliance on technology. Information becomes disinformation without apology; one datum contradicts a previous datum posted a few hours before; medical technology makes no distinction between the "artificial" and the "natural." For example, when Janet Jackson's wardrobe "malfunctioned" a few years ago during the Super Bowl halftime show and a "breast" was exposed, the institutionalized media went wacky, but nobody pointed out that it wasn't her 45-year-old breast at all but rather the expensive surgically implanted "artificial" nubile breast that was briefly exposed.
Before the techno-cult became omnipotent there was at least a nominal distinction made between the "real" and the image or mask. Now, the cynicism is such that virtually everything depends on the efficacy of the mask. The notion of sincerity and authenticity (in Lionel Trilling's words) simply has no purchase.
Hence, my use of docufiction attempts to ape the mainstream culture while deconstructing it; the deconstruction is what puzzles less discerning readers, who don't see the pastiche element, don't see the deliberate exaggeration and "hyper-reality."
How does this make the reader feel? Disconcerted, I hope. With Brecht (contra Aristotle), I'd like my reader to come away from having read my work pent rather than purged; with troubled questions on his or her mind, rather than feeling virtuous after his vicarious catharsis.
This page features Harold Jaffe's docufictions, including sample chapters and stories. To read more about his fictions and nonfictions, follow the links on this page.
Purchase any book by Harold Jaffe thru the Amazon.com link. (Purchasing from this website defrays the site's expenses.) To purchase an autographed copy from the author, email Harold Jaffe.
Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories (Raw Dog Screaming Press, February 2010)
Forthcoming from Raw Dog Screaming Press in November 2009: Anti-Twitter. Harold Jaffe's 150 50-word stories are based on "found" texts from mainstream news sources and other public sites which Jaffe reconstitutes so that their subtexts are outed and the stories are turned against themselves into a critical commentary on our degraded epoch.
Anti-Twitter's extreme brevity demonstrates by example that brief need not = dumbed-down. The stories describe a wide arc: high and pop culture, intimate and public, sordid and exalted; with Jaffe's perfect pitch and broad erudition acutely at play.
Faruk Ulay of Locus Novus posted six of the stories from my collection on his site. They are beautifully-rendered. Here are a few other sample stories:
Flog
Pakistan's supreme judge demanded a hearing into the flogging of an adolescent girl, videotaped and displayed on YouTube. The video shows an alleged Taliban flogging the girl with chains while she shrieks in pain.
US analysts insist this marks an advance.
Previously, Taliban beheaded females accused of un-Islamic behavior.
Dead Wired
Online social networks are crucial to our lives and increasingly crucial when we die.
An industry has emerged to deal with online contacts after death.
Through a site called Deathswitch, humans post posthumous emails, announcements on online social networks, and send text messages.
Current cost: $16 per month.
Dope
About opium, Jean Cocteau, himself addicted, suggested chemists modify its toxicity while salvaging the euphoria.
Were cannabis legalized, it would become, like Marlboros, overpriced, with carcinogenic additives for extended shelf life.
Meanwhile the real shit, strong and safe, that amateurs grow would remain, like bootleg liquor, subject to prosecution.
A German
and his Italian girlfriend abandoned her three children at a cafe in the northern town of Aosta, after ordering them a pizza.
They left the cafe, supposedly for a cigarette, but never returned.
Later the German tried, unsuccessfully, to hang himself with his belt in the railroad toilet.
In Anti-Twitter, Harold Jaffe Works at the eruption point, where life in its raw fissiparity spews and proliferates story. Anger, astonishment, and outrage explode in bursts of savage irony. Jaffe excorcises the psychotic banal with a hot courage that is profoundly moral.
-- Patricia Eakins
The ephemeral world-wide chatter of Twitter is here bathed in Harold Jaffe's insidious acid, as another current language is accosted, insulted through example, and rendered absurd. Comic, at times frightening, pathetic, often ridiculous, these 150 Anti-Twitters stand against common currency of the form, become a cultural document of their own, no less than the hum of the word's turnings. Once again Jaffe proves himself a master of subversion.
-- Toby Olson
Jesus Coyote (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2008)
From Raw Dog Screaming Press: Jesus Coyote, a novel based on the Manson "family."
Building on the mayhem generated by his controversial but critically acclaimed 15 Serial Killers, Jesus Coyote goes still further. Jaffe's "docufictional" novel based on the Manson murders proves that, like Manson's coyote totem, the myths around him continue to vibrate. In one sweeping panoramic arc, with the brutal murders at its center, Jaffe captures the perspective of Manson, his devotees, the prosecutors, the victims and their mourners -- while exploding the sanctimony of institutionalized morality."
Harold Jaffe, celebrated enemy of convenient mythologies, has re-invented Charles Manson and his "family" through a brilliantly calculated decomposition of cultural images and historical narratives. What finally emerges is an elegantly carnivalesque narrative headlining Jesus Coyote and his tribe of acolytes. Not surprising to those familiar with his previous books, Jaffe's virtuosic novel manages to be both a richly entertaining read and a penetrating interrogation of official versions of cultural history.
-- Stephen-Paul Martin
Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Post-Millennial Culture (Starcherone Books, 2007)
Now sold by Starcherone Books, Harold Jaffe's collection of fourteen essays and docufictions range from searing indictments of the hypocrisies of American power to reflections on art and technology in America, travel in Asia, and madness as a revolutionary act.
Many of Jaffe's texts read like formally innovative narratives; others function like conceptual art, releasing meanings in the mind long after. Everywhere evident is Jaffe's broad erudition, social commitment, and energized, elegant writing.
At a time when most American fiction writers steer clear of direct political statement, Beyond the Techno-Cave declares, "Art is not an unmoved mover; it is, one way or another, a reflection of and response to contemporary culture and it employs the techniques and references at hand."
Read these sample essays from Beyond the Techno-Cave:
"We see then that Harold Jaffe's latest collection embraces both the practice and theory of engaged writing with great formal range and élan, and a critical rigor and directness that reinforce previous observations of the depth of feeling of Jaffe's own commitment."
"Harold Jaffe, in his latest book Beyond the Techno-Cave, expands his critical commentary to include artist's role in an anesthetized society and does so in style that has a rich, evocative clarity. The writing, purposefully lacking of fashionable literary pyrotechnics, makes up by employing a very particular rhythm, language and provocative narrative. Fourteen brutally honest texts, full of acute observations and calculated speculations, transmit Mr. Jaffe's own brand of social anthropology."
"At times Beyond the Techno-Cave reads like a weblog, but not just any blog -- the one golden blog among heaps of blog dross, that keeps the reader paging through entries all night long."
-- Reader's Bookwatch
"Beyond the Techno-Cave is a work of non-fiction. Yet it is a work of such range and erudition that it defies simple categories. Much like a good visual artist -- Rauschenberg's Combines come to mind -- Jaffe makes juxtapositions jump to life. The resistance of the very public Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the life of the very private Alberto Giacometti are not obvious connections; Jaffe makes them seamless."
As in his two previous 'docufiction' collections, False Positive and 15 Serial Killers, Harold Jaffe selects then 'treats' his texts such that the reader is incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction. That ambiguity permits Jaffe to cunningly tease out the contradictions and subtexts of official 'news' or 'information' and torque it into what it so often is fundamentally: jingoism, xenophobia and propaganda.
Jaffe's subject in Terror-Dot-Gov is not the everywhere-represented 'illicit' terrorism so much as 'licit,' institutionalized terrorism, and he assaults his subject from multiple angles: razor-sharp satire, precisely cadenced rhetoric, faux-reportage, and 'unsituated' dialogues (Jaffe's term, referring to his trademark talking heads with perfect pitch). The result is virtuosic and paradoxical: a prodigious display of firepower -- in the cause of peace.
The newest collection of fiction from author Harold Jaffe includes:
"As Terror-Dot-Gov vividly demonstrates, we are spiritually imperiled by illusions masked as 'news.' Omissions, slants, pallid editorials all testifying to servitude to a slavish, enslaving text. Harold Jaffe knows this by heart and has it right. He isolates the self-justifying words that demonize the enemy while cleansing the ongoing crime, the 'preventive strike.' He encourages organized terror (our very own) to emerge white as new-fallen snow. White as leprosy. Everywhere in Terror-Dot-Gov is exemplary skill, faultless tonality. And courage, don't forget courage. In order to be healed, our illness must worsen. Thank you, Harold Jaffe."
-- Daniel Berrigan, SJ
"Language is necessary, but frequently, Jaffe seems to be saying, it is used to obfuscate rather than illuminate. The media culture evoked by Jaffe in his remarkable series of "docufictions" is shown to be using linguistic confusion in order to dominate and subjugate through intimidation. The best defense we have as the objects of confusion is to familiarize ourselves with equivocations and other tricks that are used to make us comply with the dominant culture's methodologies. Remember the 1970s slogan meant to trick 18-year-olds into voting: 'You have the right to vote, so do what is right and vote.' This sort of use of equivocation fools the marginally literate, which most of the nation has become through the elimination of the teaching of logic and nonlinear thought. Simple linear thinkers fall for equivocation and enthymemes. Anyone trained in logic immediately recognizes the equivocation of the term 'right' and the fact that just because we have a legal privilege to do something ('right' in the first sense) does not mean we have an ethical obligation to do it ('right' in the second sense). We have, for example, the right to have our bothersome elders committed to institutions when those elders become problematic, but is that always the ethical thing to do? Of course not. It is the heavy-handed use of language by the dominant society that Jaffe is challenging. And he is examining it as text, as writing. It's good to see that someone is there sitting at the right hand of writing."
-- Recto and Sub-Verso
"Harold Jaffe's Terror-Dot-Gov is innovative and timely; his commentary on topics seen often in daily news reports will resonate with readers whose senses have glazed over, reading and hearing the same spin from the same talking heads, over and over again."
-- The Absinthe Literary Review
15 Serial Killers (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2003)
15 Serial Killers, by Harold Jaffe, was released October, 2003, by Raw Dog Screaming Press. This collection of 15 stories, illustrated by Joel Lipman, exposes society's obsession with the deviant mind.
Taking as his text Georges Bataille's insight that "only at the extremes is there freedom," critically acclaimed "guerrilla writer" Harold Jaffe documents Bataille's aperçu with 15 bone-chilling illustrations. Manson, Starkweather, Speck, Son of Sam, the Night Stalker, Aileen Wuornos, the Unabomber, Dahmer, Bundy, Gacy, Kemper, Kevorkian and Kissinger are not merely present and accounted for, they are rendered into a "reality TV" that you've never seen before.
Widely praised as a virtuoso stylist, Jaffe employs a number of narrative stratagems, such as letters, monologues, interviews and "unsituated dialogues" to torque the flattened, cartoon-like serial killers into a potently unnerving third dimension.
"With his usual brilliant blend of deadpan humor and uncanny psychological insight, Jaffe takes the likes of Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, Son of Sam, and the Unabomber and transforms them from tabloid icons into complex fictional characters. What do Jeffrey Dahmer and Henry Kissinger have in common? Read this book and find out."
-- Stephen-Paul Martin
"With 15 Serial Killers Harold Jaffe continues his relentless exploration of 'dangerous' territory. He's a rare literary pioneer -- brave, brilliant, original. Watch your step, but follow him."
-- Derek Pell
"15 Serial Killers grabs you by the head and forces you to look hard at some of the most disturbing, graphic, violent, senseless acts of our time. It offers up these gruesomes in a deadpan, darkly comic way that, damn it, makes you laugh, which is perhaps the most terrifying thing of all."
-- Claire Tristram
False Positive (FC2 Books, 2002)
Critically acclaimed "guerrilla writer" Harold Jaffe dazzles us yet again with his imaginative agility. Each of the fifteen fictions in False Positive was originally a newspaper article which Jaffe has "treated." The articles are mostly typical American fare: a high school mass murder; accusations of sexual molestation; the suicide of a rock star; policing pornography on the Internet; another serial killer on the loose . . . Jaffe enters the article, and by various stratagems exposes the host text's predictable but obscured ideology, in the process teasing out its most fertile (that is to say, terrorist) subtexts. Thus re-armed, Jaffe's prosthetic text is released into Culture to do its dirty work.
"Startling . . . eerie . . . ingenious. Jaffe has reconfirmed his reputation as 'the master word processor of his generation.'"
-- Publisher's Weekly
"These uncannily skewed para-documentary fictions burrow into a reader's consciousness like viral worms of great subtlety and cunning to explode the dangerous illusion of safety. Jaffe's is a neccessary and bold strategy which marks out new territory for fiction itself."
-- Patricia Eakins
"Jaffe's hard-nosed truth variations read like prose cantos as they refresh the twisted camp of news media for a deeper searing scrutiny. Jaffe evokes tears, laughter and tears of laughter as he artfully fashions absurdity after absurdity into a cold and gleaming template of contemporary American life. Marvelous stuff."
-- Wanda Coleman
"Mass murder! Assisted suicide! Germ warfare! Sex-reassignment surgery! Islamic extremism! Pedophilia! You've read it all before, now read it again here, the same but different. Juxtaposed, intercut, rewritten and detourned. Put it all together, it spells Y2K, where we all live now, after the end of the world. I enjoyed Jaffe's False Positive hugely."
-- Brian McHale
Madonna and Other Spectacles (PAJ/FSG, 1988)
Harold Jaffe takes as the subject of fiction anything that is really happening now. Madonna, Ronald Reagan, terrorism, AIDS, South African racism, Dynasty, The Three Stooges, Max Headroom. They share the same global landscape investigating any number of cultural and political illusions.
In his fifth book of fiction, Jaffe recharges the images and language of rock, television, politics, film, and sports in an idiosyncratic prose style that has the syncopated elegance of the hippest kind of jazz. Word music that transcends all musical styles, all historical periods. A rap style that roams up and down the scales of "high" and "low" cultural assumptions. His writing is a collective text of sorts made up of the many different dreams of many cultures. Madonna and Other Spectacles moves in and out of fictional frames where spectacle, characters, and plots overlap, collide, and merge with historical events.
Jaffe's postmodern fictions -- or are they non-fictions? -- outline the savagely ironic spectacles of contemporary society whose actual and make-believe characters interface in stagings of global impact. Sex, entertainment, politics, and technology create a frighteningly ambiguous iconography that shapes consciousness. In a world playacting at the edge of insanity, Madonna and Other Spectacles looks at the masks of power and pleasure created in this age of many forms of terrorism.
"Crackling with rage and black laughter, these 13 short fictions by the author of Beasts wrench themselves out of grimmest fact: genocide, nuclear devastation, black poverty, corporate murder. [This is a] collection that confronts terror in street language and redoubles its impact."
-- Publisher's Weekly
". . . Bursting with stylistic virtuosity."
-- Choice
"Jaffe's Madonna fictions are like a man trying to clear his throat, his brain, his gut, his language of debris--and managing to sing at the same time."
-- John Edgar Wideman
"One of Jaffe's gifts is his extraordinary ability to disassemble contemporary experience and then to reassemble it into something new and inventive. This is a serious book, full of shocks and innovations, which is also fun to read."
-- San Diego Union-Tribune
"The lucid rampage of Jaffe's images and judgments is extraordinarily exciting. It reminds me nostalgically of the Real World we suppose ourselves to see out there."
-- Robert Kelly
"Nobody writing in America today can do what Jaffe does."
-- Larry McCaffery
TO-BE-PUBLISHED DOCUFICTIONS
I have two docufiction collections in production:
Paris 60. The 60 brief entries that constitute Paris 60 were recorded daily during a recent Paris visit. They are based loosely on Baudelaire's Paris Spleen, 1869, and as in Baudelaire, are both factual and fictionalized. Here's a published excerpt from my forthcoming novel Paris 60.
Orfeo. The 15 fictions and docufictions from Orfeo have to do both with the visionary and revolutionary, sometimes in a single text. Several -- "Kosinski & Kaczynski," "Hijab," "Bela Lugosi," and "Orfeo" -- have been published elsewhere.
"Death in Texas" has been published elsewhere but is not yet part of a collection.
"Date of Execution: September 27, 2004
Offender: Dwayne-Earl Clapp #999150
County: Scurry
Last Statement:
Sharla, Lamar, Sonny, Michelle, yawl know I love you.
Tell ever'body I said hey, I love 'em and I will see 'em on the other side. K?
Now I just pray that if there is anything 'gainst me--that God will take it on home.
I don't want nobody talkin' bad at nobody.
I don't want nobody bein' bitter.
Keep clean hearts and I will see yawl on the other side. K?
I love yawl, stay sweet.
Kick the tires and light the fire, I am goin' home to see my infant baby girl and my mom."
