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?

Me in the Media (among others)

The title of the programme Agenda earlier tonight on Danish FM-station P1 was Me in the Media ("Well, not ME in the media," as host Jacob Rosenkrands took the opportunity to point out). I was there on tape - interviewed by reporter Pernille Bach in my office last Friday - and in the studio with Rosenkrands were Camilla Stockmann from Politiken and Leonora Christina Skov from Weekendavisen, both of them writers and columnists and well-known users of the first person singular.

It was a good setup, and I was listenening carefully, especially when they too discussed the curious fact that there are no women represented in the textual material that I've been studying. Stockmann and Skov were reproachful on this account, and they brought up names like Martha Gellhorn and Åsne Seierstad, both good examples of bold female reporters appearing in the first person. Norah Vincent came up too, and she's an even better example in terms of being personal and spectacular in my sense of the words. None of those are Danish reporters though, and that's what I've been looking for: Danish reporters - in recent years - who carry out their somehow spectacularly conceptualized reporting on their own and consistently report from the process in the first person singular. Their rhetoric must be striking - on the level of invention and/or on the level of style - and not simply personal which means, for instance, that Anne Knudsen's report from Iraq doesn't really belong in the category.

Of course, questioning the category as such is still legitimate (and appreciated).

Leonora Christina Skov pointed to confessional literature as a highly feminine text format related to the one that I've designated as masculine, and generally the discussion took a broad scope as regards genres and rhetorical functions of self-centered media appearances.

At one point Stockmann and Skov readily agreed that appearing in the media in the first person has a price in terms of never knowing when you'll be called names in furious letters to the editor next - or when you'll be receiving excrements in your mail next: 'You too? It may be the same guy ---- '

Just another lost dog?

"And me, said the dog" - I wonder where this phrase came from? When Danes include themselves in a story they're telling, they may choose to add it and thus attribute the very mentioning of their first person singular to some dog. Please don't hesitate to post a comment if you happen to know which dog and why.

(Og mig, sagde hunden? Torben Sangild (dk) has posted this same question more than a year ago, but to no avail.)

How about your elf?

I have been reading Peter Elbow's Writing With Power on different occasions without ever noticing the typo which has caught my eye now and which by mistake is introducing a sprite or little creature; a mythological being, esp. one that is small and mischievous into the writing process.

The mistake is really quite insignificant: Elbow is summing up what he hopes to achieve with his book, and in stead of saying that the reader in the second person - and that's you! all through the book which quite a few students have found tiresome, but rarely without recognizing how much valuable advice is actually handed over in this undisguised friendly fashion - anyway, back to my original sentence: in stead of expressing the hope that you should become able to take charge of yourself in the writing process Elbow is actually expressing the hope that you should "take charge of yourelf".

And why is this significant after all? Well, Elbow is a sympathetic writing instructor who knows all about painstaking production of text that ties people in knots and makes them incoherent, and he is not afraid to discuss the somewhat magical aspect about (good) writing. Accordingly, a writers' elf is not really that strange a creature to come across in his pages. Actually Elbow is already explicitly speaking of both demons, snakes and steers to be dealt with:

To write is to overcome a certain resistance ... [But] somehow the force that is fighting you is also the force that gives life to your words. You must overpower that steer or snake or demon. But not kill it. (p 18)

I agree. A component of mysterious resistance and unpredictable challenge is a given when you're writing and it's okay like that. Especially in the self-indulgent types of writing that I'm exploring in this self-indulgent blog form. Over a solitary process of just me meeting myself and my own familiar phrases around every corner, I'd always choose collaborative writing performed by an unstable constellation of me, my elf and I.

A Rule of Thumb (on the other hand)

Perhaps the notion of a power struggle between rhetor and critic (a question of who's under whose thumb) is a crude one to introduce, as in a certain sense I do believe the critic should always be operating on the rhetor's terms. So to balance the picture I'll cite a passage which has for a while been my favourite description of rhetorical criticism as I'd like to practice it:

Interpretive criticism emphasizes the particular object of inquiry, and instead of seeking to rise above particulars, it adheres to the rough ground covered by the material of the discipline. From this perspective, since the genius of rhetorical activity consists in adaptation to constantly changing circumstances, rhetorical scholarship should not lead to and from static generalizations. Abstract principles can never govern the variety and mutability of rhetorical practice, and so they have limited utility when viewed in isolation or arranged within self-contained theoretical structures. The goal of criticism is not to generate governing laws that subsume critical observations but to offer what anthropologists call a thick description of the case at hand. Principles are not regarded as autonomous entities but as flexible tools that change configuration whenever they are asked to do rhetorical work, and they become intelligible only as they are instantiated in concrete cases.

Thus Michael Leff on Rhetorical Criticism in the Interpretive Mode (2003).

One should adhere to the rough ground and pay attention to the text, yes - of course? - but without simply reproducing points already made by the rhetor right there on the page ("Norman Mailer seems to be almost advertising himself here...")

And more importantly, one should adhere to the rough ground and pay attention to the text without letting the rhetor's assumed intentions limit the scope of inquiry. A study of the notion of polysemy, democracy, Italy, or irony in a given text may become fruitful even if the rhetor himherself didn't see that coming.

But this is beginning to sound banal, isn't it, and that may well be because I'm not discussing any texts in particular. There's no rough ground to adhere to in this post. I'll end it right away.

On Who's Under Whose Thumb

Last December at the Division of Rhetoric we did a seminar called something like "Where Does the Critic Stand? Norms and Values in Rhetorical Criticism". There was a morning of public presentations (Christian Kock, Hanne Roer, Lisa Storm Villadsen and Marie Lund Klujeff all took a stand), there was a student discussion panel and generally lots of students attending. As I recall it, Lisa Villadsen wrapped up the discussion that morning by saying something along the lines of:

"Where does the critic stand? Well, we seem at least to be able to agree that she shouldn't be under the rhetor's thumb (i lommen på retor)."

So what was pointed out as the bottom line was the fact that the rhetorical critic must set her own agenda and cannot let the speakers/writers prompt the norms or the conclusions! of her readings. This is certainly a sound principle which can still be rather hard to follow, especially when you're studying self-aware reporters like I've been doing (and I've been blogging about this issue before).

So for the Rhetoric in Society conference in Aalborg the coming November, I decided to take Lisa's cue and submit a paper about approaches to rhetorical criticism of self-aware reporters and calling my abstract Under Their Thumb? And I'll be returning to this when we get closer to November and as this semester's BA seminar on the Presentation of Self in Writing evolves.

Doctoral blogging

So hi there, I'm back with a PhD degree! As for blogging all about the event, I'm afraid that I gave up on immediacy on this occasion too. And the defense (including the celebration) seems to have taken place at the expense of my immune defense, but still - it's a thrill.

I used my newly adopted power point skills to show a few pictures, book covers and text examples - no key words or bullet points, but during the reception afterwards, my graphic illustration (see above) of rhetorician Richard Lanham's notion of a toggle switch was classified as "downright consultant chique" (konsulentlækker). There's a blurb for you - and a cliffhanger, since I won't be getting into Lanham and his 'toggling attitude towards utterance' and the 'at/through oscillations' tonight. But it's all about the rhetor's ability to toggle from depth to surface; from serious to playful; from being absorbed to being analytical - a quality and an ability that I argue can be especially well realized in spectacular personal reporting.

None of the three official opponents mounted a wild hobbyhorse of their own (as other opponents on these occasions have been known to do), but discussed my work more or less on the terms laid out in my dissertation. Not that they didn't question everything - the possibility of establishing a stable genre based on two such diverging figures at all, my way of analyzing, my way of interpreting and being sometimes too implicit, my somewhat essayistic writing style, my way of being normative, the immanent ideology of the texts under scrutiny - but it seemed to me that they questioned it for all the right reasons. For clarification or to make me develop a thought that hadn't been presented or treated with proper care. So they didn't just pass judgment, but were all pointing forward. And I really appreciate that.

There may have been about a hundred people there to listen, including my family and otherwise familiar faces, but none of them posed a question ex auditorio when the opportunity was there, so one out of five half hours was left unspent. I had expected to perhaps be confronted by visiting reporters - or readers - with first hand experience and strong opinions of personal and spectacular writing, but that didn't happen on this occasion. Looking in my mailbox though, it seems that there will be other such occasions in the coming months. So see you later, says Dr. I

All set

Yesterday was a mess, but today is Friday, and I'm fine. A benevolent audience of one volunteered for my rehearsal in the authentic (if empty!) auditorium that I'd booked for four o'clock on Thursday afternoon. At the last minute I had to skip that arrangement and go grind my teeth in my office in stead. So - I'll be going straight to the authentic auditorium at one o'clock today and see who's there. May the first person in print prevail.

I'll be returning to my blogspot with a report some time after the weekend.