Intimacy and Gonzo Conservatism

In the Agenda radio show on Saturday Suzanne Brøgger too was mentioned as a possible example of a Danish female gonzo journalist -- I quote the remark from memory that 'She wrote about being raped and that seems pretty gonzo to me'.

Suzanne Brøgger is a novelist and essayist and not a reporter, but she has been nominated in the gonzo category before (to me per e-mail, that is), as I've been encouraged to take a look at her autobiographical novel Creme Fraiche from 1978 which is very personal and very explicitly sexual. And very gonzo - ?

It seems to me that gonzo quality in this sense becomes a matter of the writer/reporter not only putting him- or herself 'on the line'. It seems to become implied that putting yourself on the line as a writer involves making intimate confessions, ultimately of a sexual sort. Hunter S. Thompson didn't do that though (or did he? I still have quite a few pages left to go). Besides from passages from his Rum Diary which to my mind is quite an atypical piece of juvenalia, I don't associate Thompson's writings with sexual (or romantic) confessions or stories of any kind.

Thompson is definitely putting himself on the line in terms of transcending social norms and standards as he confronts himself with the material and people he is supposed to be covering. And of course there's a lot of irony in his hallucinatory remark from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas about being a professional and thus determined to "cover the story, for good or ill", but still -

he really is professional in his ways of adapting his written persona to the circumstances from one text to the next. It is done in a weird literary and experimental fashion, but it somehow remains journalism. And I definitely read him as being playfully semi-fictionally professional rather than intimately sincere or confessional.

My point is not that Gonzo Journalism should remain what it was in Thompson's day (even if I've been writing a lot about 'my category' and 'my sense of the words'). I'm curious about the ways that imitation/interpretation becomes creative and is adapted to peculiar local circumstances, and contemporary reporters definitely identify with the gonzo paradigm for different reasons. Now it seems to me that the abovementioned difference is an important one. In a Danish setting Henrik List seems to pull in the direction of confessional intimacy as proof of a reporter's integrity, and Morten Sabroe in the somehow more conservative direction of professionally playful literary journalism. They both expose their mixed motives and celebrate subjectivity in their writings, but one does it primarily on behalf of himself as a troubled man, the other primarily on behalf of himself as a troubled reporter. Eh?