Field work and imagination

The nature of Danish gonzo journalism is up for discussion on Thursday night at Vartorv, Farvergade 27H, 1., Copenhagen, at 8 PM. I'll be presenting the paradox of imitating a demonstratively personal and American style like Thompson's in a Danish context: What postures and rhetorical strategies are adopted, and how are they adapted and developed?

I'll be discussing the cases of Mads Brügger, Morten Sabroe and Henrik List -- so yes, the M&M's are back indeed, and adding List to the list doesn't improve that situation at all, of course, (even if his name is Henrik). I permanently welcome names of female reporters that ought to be included too. Gritt Uldall-Jessen has been pointed out to me as having "all the right credentials, only she's interested in avantgarde drama rather than journalism,"

--which brings back the question of whether a provocative attitude in itself and/or 'putting yourself on the line' in your work in general will make you or your work gonzo - ?

Well, I do in fact insist on keeping the gonzo label within the sphere of journalism, because gonzo is basically conceived as a way of handling and challenging journalistic constraints. On Feb. 20th one guy in the audience made the remark that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas might as well have been all fiction and written back home at Thompson's Colorado kitchen table. In my opinion though, no matter how much Thompson pushes the envelope for journalistic expression, it is exactly that particular envelope which determines the nature of the reading experience. Thinking of the book as a piece of professional reporting from the field (and not from the author's imagination alone) is what raises the interesting questions and enables us to appreciate or wonder about the social and rhetorical skills of the implied reporter as we go along.
The gonzo reporter persona should be viewed as a (linguistic) product of the actual field in which the reporter has actually been.

Who is genuine?

Does our rhetoric reflect our real selves and actual character? Are we virtuous prior to our fine performance, or do we create our voices, our selves and our virtues on the spot, by means of rhetoric, from one occasion to the next? In histories of rhetoric, Plato usually represents the first view and Aristotle the other. It's like,

"Am I genuinely eccentric? Or am I just wearing a funny hat?"

as Tom Waits put it to Sean O'Hagan in The Observer Magazine in October (adding that "all the big questions come up when you get sober.")

Down by the brook

"It is less effective to tell the whole news at once than to recount it detail by detail," writes Quintilian in a passage about evidentia as a virtue of style (Institutio Oratoria, 8,6,69). So this is about evidence not as logical proof, but evidence in the form of vivid description which makes remote things present, draws them before the eyes of the listeners and appeals to our emotions. About graphic details which give us a strong sense of having seen things for ourselves which we haven't.

A good detailed report comes from an eye witness whose ethos adds an air of documentation to the moving descriptions and assures us that in some sense they are factual. They may be highly selective, perhaps, but they're factual.

Sometimes, however, we may need and enjoy a detailed account so much that even if we know it's partly or wholly fabricated we still want to keep it. And we do keep it, if only because striking images tend to stay on our mind.

Queen Gertrude tells Laertes the whole news at once:

One woe doth tread upon another's heel,
So fast they follow; your sister's drown'd, Laertes.

But Laertes asks for details - Drown'd! O, where? - and then follows a gently spun account of Ophelia's suicide. Accurate facts are either unavailable or useless to live on by, and/so still we're allowed to see this for ourselves:

Queen: There is a willow grows askant the brook,
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream;
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

We know that noone witnessed this and that we've witnessed it nonetheless.

First Person Significantly Feminine?

When a woman journalist is invited to use the first person or inject some more 'attitude' into a piece, it is often a coded entreaty to beef up a specifically female perspective. The request may seem inocuous enough, but in taking such an invitation a woman takes her first step away from the neutrality and freedom of being simply a writer, towards the ghetto of writing 'as a woman',

writes Zoe Heller---quoted by Chambers, Steiner and Fleming in the volume below from 2004.

This book treats the topic of personalized journalism under the heading Confessional journalism and 'therapy news' and challenges anyone's intuitive and/or research based :-) appreciation of the personal perspective in journalism

1) by connecting it partly to intimate, personal columns, partly to Daily Mail style news stories which "frame the facts in emotive language and foreground... emergency workers' feelings over their tasks" (219); and

2) by attributing the trend to a history of journalism which holds female journalists responsible for bringing out the human interest factor - well, emotion as such - in news stories.

Zoe Heller's point seems fair and important (and supports a point made in another part of the book called (quoting Liz Trotta) 'But I don't do weddings': women's entry into the profession).

But - the general story strikes me as a very negative one to pass on: They let the women in and from then on it's been one long slippery slope to life style magazine type broad sheets and vulgar sensationalist tabloids?