When
confessional and
subjectivity intersect
By Saswat Pattanayak
Apart from the essay
by Hunter Thompson, I have chosen to dwell on Malcolm X’s Autobiography
(which was co-authored by Alex Haley) and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls
of Black Folk (the chapter on Meaning of Progress).
_______________________________
Words are political: not just by degree of how effectively they can be manipulated, but also by the kind of phrases they are put into by the writers. By the latter I mean, expressions are prerogatives of writers: some need to vent out, some strive to agitate and some find words in reminiscences.
Hence, the Gonzo could really get away with his description of a “belly-to-belly” afternoon and a bottle of whiskey even while covering the Nixon scandals. Indeed the insistence on a first class seat in the smokers’ section and the admission of the grind of doing the rounds are characteristic of Thompson. Underlying the confessions lays the bitter truth: “There was no denying the vast and historic proportions of the story, but covering it on a day-to-day basis was such a dull and degrading experience that it was hard to keep a focus on what was really happening. It was essentially a lawyer’s story, not a journalist’s.”
Confession and objectivity have a skillful juxtaposition in Thompson’s hard-hitting critique of the times. But I feel subjectivity has got a beating. The author has not introspected over what he thought of the times he lived in, neither did he pose a question if it was unnatural for Nixon to have behaved the way he did (lies, deceit, war and power hunger—was that Nixon’s innovation?). Thompson does not wear the shoes of the participant. He becomes the detached journalist with a professional complaint. Not a human being crying out in pain caused by Nixon’s war-mongering ambitions or a citizen questioning the system perpetuating such crisis (Nixon was not the first and certainly not the last). Gonzo, one of my most revered writers, is flawed with his comment that Nixon “has been cast down in the ditch with all the other geeks and common criminals..”
On the contrary, I view Nixon lived well off stolen money till 1994 quite naturally. Ford while respectfully letting Nixon go, said, "[Nixon's] is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can I must. Only I, as President, have the constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book."
Malcolm X would have
commented, in his characteristic “Chicken will come home to roost”
(about why Kennedy had to die) manner that Nixon was talking about a White
American Tragedy here, not of 22 million negroes and millions other peoples
of color, including the Japanese Americans. Malcolm, with Haley, was being
subjective with objective facts, if I may put it, when in the autobiography
he was describing what it meant for him to be a black man in a white country.
There was nothing of confessional nature in the chapter (“I am telling
it like it is.”-p 472), and the feelings of astute objection raised
against the legitimacy of the ruling class is one to celebrate for its
sincerity, if it can be corrected for assumptions.
Du Bois once
said, as Parini quotes him, “I have not always been right, but I
have always been sincere.” Although, the Communist leader’s
radical voices are not best represented in this chapter which actually
takes the form of more confessional than subjective tone, some statements
are sheer poetry: “I have called my tiny community a world, and
so its isolation made it………from the sight of the Veil
that hung between us and Opportunity.” (p 257)
I have found the
three selections relevant not just because I love the “voice”
of the despised, but also because of the manner in which all the three
essays have intersected social realities with personal narratives. Secondly
I can distinguish among them the use of language and the freedom of speech
as exercised by the free as opposed to the enslaved, forming a criterion
for privilege and lack of it when it comes to use and misuse. For me,
it means different when a have-not class speaks the have-not language
and when the have class speaks the have-not language. There is a level
of privilege used abundantly by the ruling elites when they mouth offensive
expressions, and a level of frustration (and also lack of sophistication
by a default anti-culture) used by the ruled masses when they mouth the
same language. The purposes are different, hence the means are incomparable.
In the above essays, Thompson was luxuriously confessional and highly
casual. Malcolm was experientially painful and dangerously subjective.
Du Bois was acutely confessional out of his need and very sincere to the
theme (on meaning of progress).
Saswat
Pattanayak
blog@saswat.com