Donkeys and Nubbly Jumpers

Emma Brockes interviewing Benjamin Zephaniah:

I ask him what he is reading at the moment. "Chomsky", he says. "I am always reading Chomsky."
I tell him I find Chomsky hard work. "Really?" he says. "Really? That's cos you ain't got a Birmingham accent." And he throws back his head and brays like a donkey.

Thus, Zephaniah's comment is magically 'refuted' by his own laugh. As punishment for mentioning Chomsky, Brockes turns him into a donkey. More of this in a minute.

First, the notorious Chomsky interview. An interview in which Chomsky manages to speak in scare quotes (as do those notorious ironists teenagers, it seems), in which Chomsky's own replies are subordinate to Brockes' interpolations, in which her interviewee 'vibrates' and 'threatens to explode' like some faulty electrical appliance; in which he stands indicted by his choice in jumpers, and so on. But the point is that Brockes' style of 'interview' is hardly unique. Reading it, I was first reminded of the appalling Hari-Negri encounter in which, among many other things, that fact that Negri was being interviewed only yards from Buckingham palace was enough to dismiss any claims to radicalism.

The genre is characterized by a number of features: the subordination of speech and ideas to pop-psychological profiling, moving the physical and circumstantial details of the interview to centre stage, the inclusion of the interviewer as a protagonist effectively on a par with his/her subject.

Let us take the second of these. The interviewer draws attention to physical details: the interviewee is eating a biscuit, has nasal hair, a spot of saliva escapes from her mouth, he's rubbing his forehead or wearing scruffy moccasins. This is perhaps not that different from those pictures of celebrities in Hello etc in which cellulite and other 'imperfections' are ringed with white pen. Goodness, this great thinker/ Famous person actually inhabits a body, and is surrounded by all the untidiness of corporeal worldly existence! But the details are more importantly used to smuggle in banalities and stereotypes under guise of neutral description. Thus, Chomsky's 'nubbly jumper' at once gestures to a whole 'alternative' politics, a crankiness, confirmed also by his choice of footwear; Negri's chance proximity to Buckingham Palace spuriously serves as a metaphor for his proximity to Power; Zephaniah's 'donkey' laugh undercuts his claims to intellectuality with a revelation of an animal soul.

X suggests that these details are 'just setting the scene'. Except the interview is little more than a mis-en-scene. What Brockes, Hari etc are trying to do is create a little piece of theatre, with its expressive props and its two protagonists. What the interviewee actually says can be included only in so far as it adds to the scene. Words are on the same expressive level as donkey laughs and nubbly jumpers. And what typically ends up being staged is a curious exercise in ressentiment. The interviewer is the Puck who, 'safely back in the office', places an asses head on her subject.