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The Primary Colors of American Politics

So much about Primary Colors (1996) has so little to do with the novel. At the time of its release, the book apparently mattered less to many than the real name of its “Anonymous” author ( journalist Joe Klein), the “true” identities of its characters, or the subsequent cast of the always inevitable film. Even now, few resist the urge to defer the text by making it “real”; for instance, its current Wikipedia entry offers a table of “Fictional characters and believed real-life inspirations.” Critics describe it as a political novel, a faux memoir, and a roman à clef, genres with a marked proclivity for shiftiness. However we try to pin it down, it reaches beyond itself, drawing the real world into its fictional enterprise and projecting a certain truthiness, as Stephen Colbert might have it, onto our political life. Primary Colors run. My essay focuses on that quality. Rather than trying to make the text real, I explore the realities constituted by the text. Primary Colors novelizes American politics, to borrow a term from Mikhail Bakhtin (Dialogic 6). The book’s power flows from its knack for amplification and juxtaposition. It orchestrates languages, sees characters through words alien to them, and reflects, selects, and deflects generic influences. It imagines a novelized political community, one whose words are “polemical and doublevoiced,” one where “revered values find themselves in the daily marketplace” and “ideas and heroes from the ‘absolute past’ are reborn in the ‘familiar zone’ of the ‘open-ended present’” (Morson and Emerson 304). In short, Primary Colors is a promiscuous novel. To grasp its constitutive charge, one should take its adultery seriously. That, in turn, is an important task, if only because the text constructively betrays its generic roots.