William Gibson, Bruce Springsteen and the Dearth of Style in Applied Ethnographic Writing

In “How Fiction Works,” (2008) literary critic James Wood encapsulates the central tradition of the novel like so: “Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are [ . . . ] cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or life sameness, but what I must call lifeness, life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry.” (p. 247 emphasis original). Replace “realism” with ”ethnography” and it is hard to conceive of a better description of what most of us would most like to achieve in our work. “Truthfulness to the way things are” gets nicely to all of the important moments of what we do — observation, description, inscription, interpretation. But in that last, crucially active phrase, “brought to different life by the highest artistry,” there is perhaps more room between author and page than we are comfortable with as scientists, as researchers. Most of “How Fiction Works” is focused on that gap, for although the creation of a slight mismatch between what character or narrator understands and what the reader should understand is the very definition of irony (according to Wood, at least), it is also where style is embodied, where the work of fiction “triples” to encompass ‘reality,’ it’s perception, and reflective commentary on both. In this paper, I lay out how we can move “style’ up the ladder of importance in how we think, write, and talk about the work we do.