In a brief email exchange over the past couple of days, my father has expressed curiosity at the style of writing I employed in a recently published piece. The following is my response to his questions as to the appropriateness and indications of Gonzo Journalism.
Having read a fair bit of Hunter S. Thompson’s work, I wouldn’t say that he used Gonzo journalism as a tool to point out problems with objective journalism, so much as he used it to completely avoid the pretense of objectivity. I think his philosophy was that journalism is irrelevant if it doesn’t spring from a personal invested interest in a story. As such, his work is effective because he frames the events of the stories in the context of his own personal investment in them. The result is a biased article, but one that often is able to penetrate the heart of the issue at hand.
His most famous work is “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” a bristling account of his infiltration of a law enforcement convention on narcotics while at the same time claiming to be on a myriad of illicit substances (including, but not limited to: ether, mescaline, cocaine, marijuana, and LSD. It’s a wonder he lived long enough to shoot himself in the head.). His point, obviously, was that the police were oblivious and that the greater law enforcement community was unable to grasp the extent of the drug culture in the early ’70s.
So, to answer your first question, it’s not so much a matter of appropriate material for Gonzo journalism, as a choice to on the one hand attempt to report an unbiased, impersonal account of an event, or on the other hand invest in the event personally and assess the result. Hence it’s label as experimental journalism.
As far as clues or indications of Gonzo style, the first and most glaring would be the presence of the personal pronoun “I”. In hard news, the journalist is a disembodied voice. The personal pronoun will occur in any number of styles of journalism, including human interest, editorial, etc. So it isn’t exactly a fool-proof indicator, but it will help you distinguish between an attempt at objectivity and a personal story. This is a fairly simple clue.
A slightly more subtle red flag might be that the story feels more like a narrative and less like a news brief. In your typical hard news article, the most pertinent information will be divulged within the first few paragraphs. In Gonzo journalism, the construct of the story is entirely dependent on the theme or thesis the author intends for it to communicate. Thus, you will often find at some point, a distinct tendency for the author to extrapolate personal insights to his audience without any apology for the forthrightness of his or her approach.
Once you have identified these clues, I would look for the central theme or aim of the piece, and disregard some of the smaller, more negligible details of the story. This may be difficult to swallow as someone who finds themselves dedicated to the love and discovery of truth. However, in this style of journalism, the truth isn’t in the details, but in the point of contact with the reader (whether that point is the personal insight, the statement made, or simply a connection to the characters in the story, is entirely up to the reader.)
Gonzo journalism falls neatly into a fairly contemporary critical theory of literature called “Reader Response,” which asserts that the burden of interpretation and, by consequence, significance of a given literary (or really any artistic) work falls primarily upon the reader. Once the author of the work has completed and put his or her work into the public eye, it is fair game. Clearly, there are certain inalienable truths and unequivocal points which exist. However, the manner in which these are absorbed by the reader are colored by personal experience and will therefore differ from person to person. Rather than attempting to make universal sense out of a multi-faceted artistic experience, Reader Response theory embraces the diversity and allows for personal divergences in the affect and interpretation of any given work.
I suppose I’ve rambled on for long enough. Hopefully this is a jumping off point for you. If you’re interested in reading any Thompson, I’ll try to get my copy back from xxxxx for you to borrow.
