Strictly Scandinavian

For those with knowlede of Danish: My PhD dissertation Skribenter der skaber sig (Writers Who Make a Scene) is now available as a pdf-file for download at Retorikportalen. Please feel free to comment on it here or there.

Don't be brief

By the way, I'm now receiving daily and well edited mail from WriterL and it sure seems promising. The thread running at first was about Polishing (your text) and has run on to Rhythm and Pacing. The welcoming email is a fine followup on their initial pickup line as they're explicitly saying that they

don't have any length limitations for posts, so when you join the discussion, please feel free to take the space necessary to clearly make your point.

That's a fine and serious invitation, isn't it?

Birth of a Salesman

I've now been through Love, Sex, Life and Work with Norah Vincent, and the Work chapter (I'll be sure to get back to the others later on) made me think of both Günter Wallraff's dressing up to pass for an ad man/copywriter at his job interview at the German tabloid Bild, and Danish artist Jakob Boeskov's dressing up in order for him and his fictive weapon (the ID Sniper) to blend in with professionals at a weapon's fair in Beijing.

To make his way as a tabloid reporter Wallraff has been using a sunlamp (this is the 1970'es) to tan his face, and he puts on way too much Aqua Brava aftershave in the hope that people won't notice how much of a cold sweat he's in. Which apparently they don't. 'Believe me, I'm a terrible actor,' says Wallraff, but is amazed to discover that his new employer doesn't notice all the false notes in his self-presentation: 'Apparently he's no better actor than I am.' (Lead story, 1977). (Reporting is not simply a sales job, of course, but Wallraff-disguised-as-'Esser' and his new colleagues are certainly treating it as one.)

"My black suit is my armour," says Boeskov as he walks through the crowd at China Police 2002 with shattered nerves and stomach cramps. But Boeskov isn't found out either, and the bluffing is so easy that it scares him. ("My Doomsday Weapon", Black Box 2003).

Norah Vincent/'Ned' - 2006 - has just spent a few weeks in a secluded abbey among monks who were uncomfortable and eventually became hostile towards her, basically because they considered Ned to be a homosexual (man) with an inadequate sense of discretion. Now, however, (s)he's entering the job market of what by the sound of the job ads "appeared to be fast-track corporate environtments" that were looking for "steam-spewing go-getters who were "high-powered" and "hungry for success"".

Norah Vincent's experience is similar to that of Wallraff and Boeskov: Being undercover as a self-invented man is hard indeed, but a self-made business man, in her case a door-to-door salesman, is remarkably easy to pull off:

"No business casual," they said. "Wear a suit." Even better, I thought. ... I was walking taller in my dress clothes. I felt entitled to respect ... For the first time in my journey as Ned I felt male privilege descend on me like an insulating cape, and all the male behaviours I had until then been so consciously trying to produce for my role, came to me suddenly without effort. ... Nobody ever thought this Ned was gay.

So - business is a game. Formal dress codes and corporate lingo make you feel safer, and your uniform serves to guide yourself and the people around you. Business people are basically role players, and the whole idea of self-made men stems, of course, from competitive business attitudes like those tried on by Wallraff, Boeskov and Vincent. On different occasions and for different reasons, but all three of them seem basically appalled by the experience. It makes them confident in passing, but basically it fills them with self-loathing.

Consequently, it remains an immense challenge for these under cover reporters to communicate more than loathing of the people whose shoes they have decided to step into. They can't help celebrating their own status as independent reporters, writers, artists in the process.

Wallraff and Vincent do accomplish more than that, and they do display a level of solidarity with the people they're impersonating. The time factor seems to be decisive here. They stay on longer, they stay in the field beyond the smooth birth of their business man. Long enough to get a sense of what might happen in the actual life of one.

The social motives of Bonzo Journalism

Speaking of Mads Brügger - and speaking of genre:

Brügger is a reporter who tends to steal a march on critics (and keep them entertained) by simply making the critical remarks himself. In "The Clown Wars" (Black Box Magazine 2003) he anticipates blogposts like this one by categorizing his text on his own:

I would also like to add a paragraph about genre. I call this kind of reality programming Bonzo. What defines Bonzo is no research at all, total honesty, no use of tape recorders, a self-confidence of grotesque proportions, self-inflicted sleep-deprivation and lots of alcohol.

So, well, Bonzo Journalism is constituted by one man's text on one single occasion - and so much for genre theory through the ages. This piece of journalism is obviously written for educated people taking a day off. You can relax and enjoy yourselves, he seems to be saying, there's no need to make clever observations on this one.

Anyway... neither textual features nor social motives are taken into account in Brügger's tongue-in-cheek definition of genre, but what is highlighted is the unprofessional-and-devil-may-care approach of the reporter which becomes the defining constraint for the way his piece of Bonzo is going to turn out (sort of an easy gonzo approach). And the story has a wallraffing dimension too as Brügger and a friend are basically infiltrating a clown festival disguised as clowns - and Brügger starts out by apologizing for this:

I'm sorry for faking my way into the dark and secretive world of the "claaaawn" ... abusing the trust of my fellow clowns, who really believed that my associate Caramba and myself are true-blue clowns when in fact we are nothing but dilettante impostors.

In some sense there's an ethnographic (or just feature journalistic) motivation to the setup. A subculture is being portrayed if in a very rude fashion. But to me these opening remarks on form (that I've been quoting above) is underlining a completely dominant social motive which is that of the writer being simply out to create a good time for himself and an exclusive group of readers. This is a valid motive and even more so in a halfway underground magazine like Black Box.

Or what? Can this motive stand alone? And does it? I might well have overlooked something. The way I see it and this is is due to the undercover approach in particular, the guys are having their fun at the expense of people that are never interviewed, but just observed (for no obvious reason) and ridiculed. The actual true-blue amateur clowns are portrayed as completely pathetic - and they may have been that, but reading this at length (oh, those long forms) leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.

I don't know what to make of the ironic or just insincere (?) apology above which seems to imply a bad taste in the mouth of the reporter too, which, however, he has chosen not to act upon. The text is there in print, richly illustrated and 12 pages long, and with Brügger serving as his own editor-in-chief. What to make of it? Is this a personal piece of journalism gone private?

Those long forms

More than anything else, literary journalism appeals to me because of the amount of time which is obviously invested in writing it. This dawned on me when I read Danish reporter Mads Brügger's report from World Economic Forum in Davos (Six Days that Shocked the World VIRUS magazine 5, 2000) which has made a lasting impression on me by being not only well-written (originally in Danish), but by being 40 pages long. And it told you so from the beginning:

We have a good offer for you; in front of you lies a very, very long article, but in turn, it has everything you need to know about the future that lies ahead of us.

I was so very well entertained by that article then. And now I have signed up for a subscription listserv called WriterL, not because it is advertised as 'reminiscent of Paris of the 1920'es', but because it is

tailored for the discussion of narrative writing, feature writing, explanatory journalism, book journalism and the high-level reportage that is associated with such writing.

This already looks extremely appealing to me, but then came the crucial cue: "Most of our members write narrative nonfiction -- those long forms that Tom Wolfe called "the new journalism."" The long forms part made me sign up - and it's only been about 5 days, but I haven't actually heard back from WriterL.

They may be on holiday.

The implied sort of genre theory

Concerning a theoretical discussion of genre possibly missing somewhere in my work:

Noone would bring this matter up for the sake of producing some free-floating genre theory in the middle of July. What is called for is an explication of theory which, supposedly, is already there. My implied genre theory simply needs to be taken seriously - by me, as I do realize that the genre perspective is fundamental to my approach.

It is a critical point in itself that I adopt a genre perspective on rhetorical artefacts which rather seem to call for something like auteur theory. I have singled out two writing auteurs, Wallraff and Thompson, who have each established their own personal brands of journalism: wallraffing and gonzo journalism. Hitherto they have been recognized for having as much in common as a somehow alternative approach to reporting which in both cases includes participant observation. Individually they have been hailed as original while the many colleagues that they've somehow inspired are often ridiculed as poor wannabes. And what I've done is ----- okay, I'll just be quoting my own English summary now:

This dissertation [Writer Who Make a Scene] argues for establishing spectacular personal reportage as a subgenre [of creative nonfiction] based on wallraffing and gonzo journalism as rhetorical patterns which include a common ethos based on a belief in the individual (and revealed) rhetorical agency of the reporter.

Through close readings [...] of texts by Wallraff and Thompson alongside texts by some of their prominent Danish successors (Michael Elsborg, Allan Nagel, Mads Brügger, Jakob S. Boeskov, Morten Sabroe, Claus Beck-Nielsen, Michael Jeppesen, and Flemming Chr. Nielsen), the dissertation highlights a number of rhetorical pitfalls regarding the writer’s presentation of self and enactment of agency.

Generally, however, an argument is made for recognizing this subgenre as a potential stronghold for rhetorical agency in the print media. More specifically, [...] the texts are read as performances of critical and mediatory epideictic work-in-progress. Each writer sets out to experimentally establish some common ground between the social situation in the field on the one hand and the rhetorical situation on the other. They seek, sometimes almost desperately, to affirm and exemplify basic standards of journalism or human interaction, in a substandard world.

All of the reporters in question pose as being more independent, alternative, sensitive and creative than reporters in general, and studying them as belonging to the same tradition and genre makes it possible for me to point out what is in fact traditional and typical about them and what counts as a more or less interesting variation or transformation of the personal&spectacular form. The genre perspective has supplied me with some sort of standard for making critical judgments - and I am being normative in my readings.

What has perhaps prevented me from discussing genre theory as such is precisely the overlap with my discussion of both rhetorical imitation and rhetorical tradition (in the latter I take my cue from Michael Leff's Tradition and Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric). Both of these discussions are similarly concerned with the writers' way of dealing with their rhetorical precursors and their being constituted by some sort of formal tradition.

So now I'm back to vague.

What if someone asked: What is a genre?

What sort of genre theory?

One thing my committee has asked for is a more explicit theoretical discussion of genre to form the basis of my characterization of spectacular personal reportage. I recall a fellow PhD student presenting her genre-studies-in-progress and saying: 'If any of you have been thinking about studying genre as such, I advice you not to do it... I'm serious...' And I have in fact kept discussions of genre theory to an absolute minimum, but made sure that I point to Carolyn Miller to express my trust in her

rhetorically sound definition of genre [which] must be centred not on the substance or form of discourse, but on the action it is used to accomplish. ("Genre as Social Action", 1984, p 84).

With my general focus on rhetorical agency, I have attempted to characterize precisely the social action which my particular band of reporters make such spectacular efforts to accomplish through personal recordings of their field trips. I read one or two reporters and one or two texts at a time, and I qualify their participation in the genre as I go along, but it's true that I haven't defined in any strict sense what is, for instance, a sufficient criterion for participation. And I wonder if I'm being strategically vague about it to spare myself some work, or whether I really don't find the more strict approach fruitful? Genre theory won't become fruitful by itself, I know, but if I ought to put work into it, I am simply wondering where to begin and for what reasons.

Meet Me on My Vast Veranda

From the speech-in-character to the song-in-character. When I opened this blog I thought about naming it My Vast Veranda to echo a line which was echoing in my head anyway - "Meet me on my vast veranda / my sweet untouched Miranda". One's own blog is always an appropriate place to point out a favourite song, I guess, but luckily (accidentally...?) We Both Go Down Together from the album above is even written in the first person singular, so here I go with no time to lose.

The following remarks are clipped from the Radio Paradise chatroom:

The lyrics make me giggle like a fool...i don't think I've ever heard mention of a veranda in a song before, much less a VAST veranda. Also: "cliffs so high you can't see over." Damn, now that is high.

Arrrgh, I was reading King Lear for class today, and every time they mention Dover, I would hear this nasal "cliffs so high you can't see over" in my head, and then, inevitably, the vast veranda/Miranda bit.

"you wept, but your soul was willing" does that creep anyone else out a bit?

Yeah, it creeps me out too. But then a lot of the Decemberists' lyrics creep me out. I imagine their stuff is what the Addams Family listens to.

Creepy it is. The song is a monologue by a rapist who is deceiving himself - but not the attentive listener, of course - by putting an epic and romantic spin on his crime. The rape part in itself might count as a good reason not to name your blog after it - the obscurity of the reference might count as another - but as hippiechick in the chatroom remarks

I hope they are being very ironic in pointing out violence and sickness. I think this is why i am drawn to their songs, plus I really dig the music.

The Speech-in-Character

Eating fish cakes with friends a few years ago, one of us was suddenly chewing a cigarette stub which must have been dropped into the cream of fish out the back of the fishmonger's shop at some point. Oh, bother. And when we went back to the shop the next day (well, not me, I wasn't ready to face their disgrace) and told them what had happened, all the man behind the counter could think of saying was: "I guess you weren't very pleased with that..."

That was all. No apologies, no free salmon, no please don't tell the local press...

That same year I had just started teaching composition, and Swedish colleagues had introduced me to the ancient progymnasmata programme, a sequence of 12-14 basic rhetorical exercises among which is: Impersonation. Frank D'Angelo calls it the Speech-in-Character and introduces it as

a speech put on a person's lips in an imaginary situation for the purpose of characterization. It is the imitation of a person's moral character, habits, and feelings. (198).

So - the following week I asked my students to compose a speech-in-character attributed to the guy at the fishmonger's. They were to estimate what was at stake in his rhetorical situation and compose a fitting response in the form of a dramatic monologue. As I remember it, the students (at least those who volunteered to read their versions out loud) composed some excessively rude responses, drawing a caricature of a man of very poor character, and I can see how I - as well as the man himself, of course - was asking for that.

When on a different occasion I tried out the exercise again, a friend of mine did in fact compose a more than appropriate response, a performance in damage control that I - as well as the man himself (not to mention his boss) - could only have dreamt of. It went along these lines: "We can't make this up to you, and I see how this incident might have put you off fish for a while--and I can't really blame you for not shopping here anymore--- still, why don't you come back in a few months when shrimp from the fiords are at their very finest, and we'll treat you and your friends an incredible amount..."

There's a fishdealer-in-character. Kind as well as proud in a situation which was nothing to be proud of.

I said it as plain as I could make it. "I'm not a man, you guys. I'm a woman."

Norah Vincent's book on her Year Disguised as a Man has arrived, and so far (taking a break between chapters 2 and 3) it's, well, interesting! well done! and really well-written.

The opening chapter - besides from Norah's figuring out how to dress, speak and act in order to pass for a man - includes her unceremonious reflexions on what siginificance it might have as a premise for this particular book that she's a lesbian: "Practically from birth, I was the kind of hard-core tomboy that makes you think there must be a gay gene."(5) "How else to explain..." she continues, recollecting incidents from her childhood and puberty, keeping matters open and allowing the readers to ponder them on their own.

She has a fortunate talent for describing people's manners (her own too) and takes good note of the way these manners change when she introduces herself as Ned and hangs around with the guys for a while. Eventually - and this is not the typical thing for reporters in disguise to do - she lets people know that she's really Norah. She is simply letting them in on her secret after a while and is taking their response into account as part of her research and part of her story.

So much for Getting Started. And for Friends. Next on Norah Vincent's table of contents is: Love.

Dear Old Louis

March 10, 1924

Dear Old Louis:
Since last I saw you I have come to the conclusion that style in prose or verse is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. Let the sound of Stevenson go through your mind empty and you will realize that he never took himself other than as an amusement. Do the same with Swinburne and you will see that he took himself as a wonder. Many sensitive natures have plainly shown by their style that they took themselves lightly in self-defense. They are the ironists. Some fair to good writers have no style and so leave us ignorant of how they take themselves. But that is the one important thing to know: because on it depends our likes and dislikes. A novelist seems to be the only kind of writer who can make a name without a style: which is only one more reason for not bothering with the novel. I am not satisfied to let it go with the aphorism that the style is the man. The man's ideas would be some element then of his style. So would his deeds. But I would narrow the definition. His deeds are his deeds; his ideas are his ideas. His style is the way he carries himself toward his ideas and deeds. Mind you if he is down-spirited it will be all he can do to have the ideas without the carriage. The style is out of his superfluity. It is the mind skating circles round itself as it moves forward. Emerson had one of the noblest least egotistical of styles. By comparison with it Thoreau's was conceited, Whitman's bumptious. Carlyle's way of taking himself simply infuriates me. Longfellow took himself with the gentlest twinkle.

Robert Frost to his friend Louis Untermeyer

Dear me

I'm puzzled by a critical response to my own academic prose: that I'm slightly inclined to use rhetorical figures like homoiotéleuton. I had to look that up to discover that what I do is that I tend to give words similar endings, sometimes they simply rhyme. (Looking for an example in the posts below: "I handed in my dissertation, and so far it doesn't feel much like a conversation"). Too much figuration like that is inappropriate in academic prose, and why is that?

The form of a prose composition should be neither metrical nor destitute of rhythm. The metrical form destroys the hearer's trust by its artificial appearance, and at the same time it diverts his attention, making him watch for metrical recurrences, just as children catch up the herald's question, 'Whom does the freedman choose as his advocate?', with the answer 'Cleon!'

That's Aristotle's functional answer (Rhetoric iii,8), and it's a good one, displaying even a certain sense of humour (no?). The last point about hearers collaborating with the rhetor through form, even against their will, is discussed by Kenneth Burke too:

Many purely formal patterns can readily awaken an attitude of collaborative expectancy in us. ... Once you grasp the trend of the form, it invites participation regardless of the subject matter. Formally, you will find yourself swinging along with the succession of anthiteses [for instance], even though you may not agree with the proposition that is being presented in this form. (A Rhetoric of Motives, 58).

So rhyming or homoitel. and other rhetorical figures can sometimes be distracting in themselves, and deceptively so. But what is more, of course: they tend to draw undue attention to the responsible rhymester too. And a prose rhymester might well appear smug and self-absorbed (without even introducing her first person singular).

Accidental tourist

Friday after posting my promise to discuss some female reporters, I turned too this week's issue of Danish paper Weekendavisen (the only paper that I subscribe to at the moment) and on the front page was editor in chief Anne Knudsen reporting from Iraq. The report is not spectacular in my sense of the word, no remarkable rhetorical strategy or formal concept is put into play, but it is very personal. So there I go. By 'shamelessly taking advantage of her position' (her own words), Anne Knudsen is visiting the Danish military camp in Basra where one of her own sons is stationed too. Her report is certainly not critical - except of other critics - of the work being done by these Danish forces and which is presented to the press on this occasion. Anne Knudsen is there as part of a group and is enthusiastically reporting from a guided tour. Mainly she identifies herself as a worried-but-proud mom and expresses her sympathy with other worried moms (and no, not parents, just mothers are included in the bonding). There is not much of a professional or inquisitive reporter about her when she is watching Iraqi police officers demonstrate how they go about searching cars and concludes that "it looks very convincing to me, but then again I'm only familiar with these things from the movies". At one point she is stressing how she takes special interest in the intelligence work at the camp, because "the truth about Your special correspondent is that I'm wholly and irrevocably an ethnographer or anthropologist at heart", and as such she is trained to make similar 'secret investigations' of local communities. Well, her background as an ethnographer certainly qualifies her for a field trip like this, but she seems to be telling us about this training as just another curious fact about herself on a line with a preference for sea food or liqourice. She is not showing us this professional attitude in action. As it happens, she falls ill and nearly dies from lack of salt in the tremendous heat on site which adds genuine drama to her story, of course, and tells us something about the general working conditions in Basra too. But generally Anne Knudsen's attitude in the text comes across as the attitude of a tourist - in a slightly comic contrast to the photo above which accompanies the article and to her general front cover appearance as chief editor leaving her desk on a special mission. And that's too bad.

First person female

Wallraff and Thompson became the main characters in my phd work, and I have studied them alongside contemporary Danish reporters (all of them male) who work in the same vein. So it is no coincidence that I mention Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America; Bait and Switch) in the blog decription above, or that now I hasten to add Polly Toynbee (Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain) and Norah Vincent. It is done in order for me to make the New Blog's Resolution that I will discuss (and preferably with other people than myself) the self-presentation of some female reporters too! Perhaps while reading Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man (I don't even have a copy yet, but I have ordered one).

Action or bubbling - or both?

Peter Elbow is still on my mind today with his point about getting-the-results versus getting-it-right - and I might as well put something down now and make the most of having no readers.

As we come closer to an audience, its field of force tends to pull our words into shapes or configurations determined by its needs or point of view. As we move farther away from the audience, our words are freer to rearrange themselves, to bubble and change and develop, to follow their own whims, without any interference from the needs or orientation of the audience (- that's more from Elbow, page 191)

This last part might be true of secretive beginners' blogging, but the distinction itself is important in spectacular personal reporting too. Suddenly, however, I've become confused as to which side of the distinction I've actually been celebrating in my PhD work when I have pointed out the "explicit rhetoricity" of this kind of journalism.

On the one hand, the readers watch the first person make a plan (to go under cover at a tabloid newspaper or to cover the Honolulu marathon) and carry out this plan. That is: the reporter is inventing, acting and getting-the-results, on a literal as well as on a rhetorical level. On the other hand, the reporters do exactly cover the process - the field trip as well as the writing process - with such care that the texts get an undetermined, essayistic quality about them. That is: the reporters make an explicit effort to get-it-right by letting observations bubble. They tend to slow the process down, pulling away from deadlines and from readers' and editors' expectations in general, perhaps by simply staying on their case longer than what is usual, by writing longer texts than what is usual and by using the first person singular to expose their planning as well as their pondering. In the case of Thompson, an essayistic quality is present in his definition of an almost metaphysical mission, say finding the American Dream (as in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), but the metaphysical dimension becomes situated in the matter-of-factly genre of reporting and thickened with specific details from the road. The two types of writing are pulling in different directions.

So does one kind of writing display more 'rhetoricity' than the other? Or is it the clash of genres which brings out rhetoricity? Well, rhetoricity is a quality which has to do with admitted perspectives and exposed textual choices. Which again makes my notion of "explicit rhetoricity" somewhat tautological...

Get-it-right writing

Turntaking in academic conversations is simply slow. The conversation that I announced missing yesterday is in fact beginning now, as I have received 7 pages of kind (yes!) and detailed comments from my committee. What a joy, and what a relief. Now I have more than six weeks to think about how to respond to their comments when I present and defend my work in public (on September 1 at 1 pm). This blog should be an excellent place to rehearse some of my arguments, but I have started out link-less, unconnected in the blogosphere, and it does feel strange to be writing in public and yet in almost total secrecy. A sense of direction is missing. And a title from Peter Elbow springs to mind: "Audience as Focusing Force" (and, hey, there was the full text online, go to page 191). Under this heading Elbow describes pragmatic, audience-oriented writing and contrasts it with more leisurely get-it-right writing (like this?) where you might be "writing to work out the truth about something important to you and you are trying to serve truth, not readers. Maybe the writing will in fact go to readers; maybe they'll like it; that's nice. But if they don't, that's their problem, not yours. (Of course you may use readers for get-it-right writing. Their reactions can help you enormously -- but for getting it the way you want it, not the way they want it.)"

Spectacular and personal

Spectacular personal reportage in the print media, yes -- I handed in my dissertation, and so far it doesn't feel much like a conversation. So I decided to switch from Danish into English and to do so in the blogosphere where the first person singular is a given and noone will ask you to "keep yourself out of the copy and let your subject talk directly through you to the reader" (as Jon Franklin once put it). The principle of transparency still serves as a rule of thumb when newcomers are introduced to the craft of reporting, but they are not all adopting the rule, of course. Some of them still go ahead and introduce themselves, body and all, in their texts, openly commenting on their own rhetorical situation, their constraints and rhetorical strategies. I see how the "I" becomes obtrusive and annoying, but generally I enjoy reading such explicit reporting and even found the topic worth a dissertation. Now let's see about this weblog.