Abstract
Since Augustine penned his Confessions, authors of memoirs describing their transgressive behavior have teetered on a balance beam between telling an interesting, exciting, naughty story, and exculpating their character for their participation in it, through the use of deviance neutralizing devices; here sociologist Erich Goode explains how this balancing act is accomplished.
“I kill people,” says Joey, a hitman, in his autobiography, Killer. “It’s the thing I do best. This is my job. I shoot people and that’s it. I do my job like a guy lays brick, a guy tends bar, a guy cuts hair.” Joey accompanies the narration of his grisly deeds with stigma-neutralizing devices to make his readers feel better—at least not quite so bad—about him and his lethal crimes.
Memoir has become non-fiction’s most popular genre. Four times as many titles were published in 2012 as in 2005 and many now focus on transgressive behavior. A notable feature of these memoirs is how the authors portray putatively anti-social behavior in ways that make it seem less seriously bad and invite the reader to regard them as less culpable and more sympathetic.
How do criminals, white collar swindlers, drug addicts, alcoholics, philandering men, prostitutes and strippers, and political revolutionaries justify or contextualize their behavior in such a way that the reader can bond with the authors’ characters and judge them in a more sympathetic light?
In sociology, the rhetorical flourishes that make this possible are referred to as “deviance neutralization devices.” The Confessions of St. Augustine, ca. 400 C.E. (“I boiled over in my fornications”) represents the earliest surviving example of how this memoir technique works. Between 2003 and 2007, I enrolled in a non-fiction writing program at John Hopkins, receiving a master’s degree in 2007. My thesis specialized in memoir. Over the past three years or so I’ve read a considerable number of “transgressive” memoirs with an eye to explicating and understanding authors’ use of deviance neutralization devices that permit the reader to identify with both the deeds they committed and the authors themselves.
Corey Fields
One question that intrigues me about these memoirs is the authors’ ability to move from committing extreme forms of anti-social behavior to writing about this same behavior in socially empathetic, even redemptive ways. What do these verbal gymnastics tell us about the social self works?
How do criminals, white collar swindlers, drug addicts, alcoholics, philandering men, prostitutes and strippers, and political revolutionaries justify or contextualize their behavior in such a way that the reader can bond with the authors’ characters and judge them in a more sympathetic light?
I See Society Reading Me
Sociologist George Herbert Mead depicted the self as composed of both the “I” and the “me.” Mead’s “I,” the acting self, is uncertain, unpredictable, “never entirely calculable . . . always something different from what the situation itself calls for.” Contrarily, the “me” represents the voice of the community that calls for a response to the impulsive “I.” Mead theorized about how the individual negotiates between the satisfaction-seeking, egotistical activism of the “I”—the natural, impulsive, assertive self—and the restraints placed by the cultured self, the controlling, civilized social voice of the “me.”
In engaging in deviance, the actor veers more toward the “I,” seeking satisfaction or gratification. But in fashioning the memoir about unconventional behavior, the writer creates a more socialized and community-conscious self, veering more toward the “me.” To be successful, the author must be able to take the socialized position of the reader. How does the author reconcile the impulsivity of the deviant “I” while narrating such tales to the generalized community that make up the social conscience of the “me”?
How does a memoir writer fashion an appealing narrative of daring and interesting tales without offending a potential audience by exposing an excess of venality, cruelty, and cold-heartedness? The memoir is specifically that justification or explanation that issues from reflection and contemplation, taking into consideration the shock and objections of the generalized other, the various communities to which the actor—now an author—pays fealty.
Even actors who seem beyond the pale of respectable society—and supposedly have no need of approbations from respectable society—write memoirs that seek, if not absolution, then a kind of empathetic understanding for their transgressions. Sophisticated as reading audiences are, we might expect we’d be immune to the self-exculpations of the transgressor. But we have to distinguish between understanding terrible acts, and maintaining a moral stance toward them. Because a wrongdoer justifies a harmful, immoral, or reprehensible action does not mean that we have to set aside our sense of right and wrong.
Empathetic Engagement vs Moral Judgement
In A Drinking Life, Pete Hamill narrates the trajectory of a self-destructive alcoholic who successfully stops drinking in his late thirties. Downing a few, the author explains, is “what men do.” Not just drinking, but heavy drinking. Though his dad was an out-and-out alcoholic—and would have, common-sense logic dictates, given the son a kind of negative role model for alcohol consumption—this nonetheless forged the “magic potion” template for drinking and masculinity. During his newspaper days, Hamill describes with enthusiasm “hard loud whiskey-drinking, beer-swilling parties.” “I never thought of myself as a drunk,” he tells us. “I was, I thought…a drinker.”
Authors know that sectors of society disapprove of one or more aspects of their behavior and they must mount a preemptory assault against that disapproval.
His descriptions of drinking evoke an empathic impulse; they help us understand where he is coming from and temper our tendency to condemn the man for engaging in destructive drinking. Hamill also invokes the “then versus now” or transformative rhetoric, which is the case with all alcoholic memoirs; as with all other former substance abusers, he dramatizes the triumph of his repudiation of heavy alcohol consumption. He wants us to think well of him, and we do. Hamill condemns his facilitators (his culture made him do it), apologizes to the people he hurt, and pathologizes, at least a little (there must have been something wrong with me that I succumbed but most of my peers didn’t). But for the most part, Pete accepts responsibility for his sins.
In sum, Roman Polanski tells us in Roman by Polanski, “I gave champagne and Quaaludes to a 13-year-old girl I was photographing and then I had sex with her. But she told me she loved champagne—it was her favorite drink. Honestly, she looked eighteen, she was completely compliant, even seductive, and sexually experienced, and her mother practically threw her in my arms. States other than California don’t penalize sex with minors nearly so harshly as the sentence I got, and many offenders elsewhere don’t serve any jail time at all….I did what I had to do to protect myself. I’ve been victimized all my life—why should I allow myself to be victimized again? I didn’t do anything seriously wrong and I had no intention of going back to prison for making love. And let’s face it, everyone wants to fuck young girls; I only did what most men dream about.”
Polanski justifies his behavior: He makes the (blatantly false) inference that since all men want to do what he did, his act was not wrong. He justifies his flight from justice, condemns his facilitators—namely, the mother of the girl and the girl herself, the putative victim—and denies his victim’s victimhood. And he condemns his condemners. Specifically, he condemns U.S. culture and its criminal justice system for trying to give him jail time that other offenders don’t receive. Polanski comes extremely close to normalizing sex between a mature man and a very-early teen. Even if it is a sin, he argues, the sin of the criminal justice system was far worse than his. I did what any man would have done—I was a manly man. Why am I being railroaded into prison? Polanski disingenuously asks his reader. The man’s mock-naiveté is almost hallucinatory. But titillating as his memoir is, it doesn’t work as deviance neutralization.
In a related example, Jack Henry Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast narrates a difficult, even horrific life, but the author received breaks a lot of men who also suffered never got; and they didn’t end up committing murder once, let alone twice. His suicide may have represented the ultimate statement of his awareness that his book’s attempt at self-exculpation wasn’t successful.
In contrast, the narrative arc offered up by Eddie Bunker in Education of a Felon draws conclusions that are the opposite of Abbott’s: Whereas Abbott sees the blows inflicted upon this soul as justification for lashing out at society, Bunker claims that the trauma of his early life produced positive outcomes: his marriage, the books and screenplays he wrote, and the movies produced from his writings. Abbott says: Out of evil, evil comes; Bunker says: out of evil, good comes. Abbott justifies himself and his behavior and accuses his accusers; Bunker excuses and redeems.
Corey Fields
Both Manipulative and Sociable
Almost contradictorily, memoir writers wish to excite, impress, surprise, and even shock their readers—their audience—yet, at the same time, they also want to create a verbal cushion that reassures them that they are not deplorable human beings. Memoirs that describe normative transgressions seem to beg us for our love in spite of the sins. In his New Yorker memoir, Charles Van Doren cries out in remorse, “Papa, forgive me! Mama, forgive me! Uncle Carl, forgive me!” Although most of his readers are strangers, he is asking for much the same thing from us, his readers.
The autobiography is a “moral performance,” Diane Bjorklund tells us in Interpreting the Self; autobiographers “present a praiseworthy self to their audiences.” But autonarrators are both “manipulative” and “sociable,” positioning themselves “in terms of what is [considered] good and admirable,” presenting the particulars of their lives that they want audiences to hear.
The apologies, justifications, explanations, and self-absolutions for transgressions we read in memoirs may very well represent attempts by their authors to remind us that we are members of a collectivity.
The self both narrates and justifies; when authors cannot avoid describing behavior that is other that what it should be, they acknowledge their wrongdoing and admit their sins. In revealing the struggle they’ve experienced with their fallible selves, they acknowledge that their fallibility led to their transgressions. The memoir or autobiography is a particular stage on which transgressors enact moral performances.
Authors know that sectors of society disapprove of one or more aspects of their behavior and they must mount a preemptory assault against that disapproval. As a result of this high-wire act, these self-exculpatory devices provide an array of bonbons to the appreciative reader—especially the sociologist—attuned to humanity’s all-too-human side.
The apologies, justifications, explanations, and self-absolutions for transgressions we read in memoirs may very well represent attempts by their authors to remind us that we are members of a collectivity, and, however much we might stray from society’s mandates and expectations, we owe our fellow beings an accounting for what we did. Genuflection, though it’s self-exculpation, is, nonetheless, a sign that the rest of us are curious about what we did, why we did it, and how we try to talk our way out of their potential disapproval. It reminds us that we are all bound together in the same human community and, though we enact, and approve of, different things, we’re always looking over our shoulders at what others think of who we are, what we do, and how we feel. Attempts at self-absolution in memoir remind us that humanity is saturated with a distinctively human trait—empathy.