https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/hannah-gadsbys-song-of-the-self
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I didn’t hear that kind of nuance in “Douglas.” Instead, Gadsby holds you in an emotional choke hold through much of the show: if you don’t like her material, you’re one of them. She is more interested in performing truthfulness than she is in the truth of her performance.
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Recovering addicts are often advised not to go out in the world; they are too raw to cope with society without the buffer of drugs or drink. In a sense, “Douglas” is an act of recovery, or an act about recovery. Gadsby’s story about a failed love affair is especially painful to hear once she reveals that she has “high-functioning autism and it’s a terrible thing to have, in that it gives you the impression that you are functioning highly.” Of course, this confession silences or nearly silences any criticism you may have been harboring: how can you criticize that? Gadsby then said that a recent lover had referred to her, in a group text, as “retarded.” The audience gasped, but I wondered if the woman’s insensitive remark had perhaps been taken out of context to give Gadsby’s act a boffo ending. Gadsby, in her work, espouses a kind of puritan-minded radicalism in which someone else is always to blame for how messed up she feels. [emphasis added] But isn’t that messed-up feeling life? And what about other lives? What about the millions who have it worse, who are fighting to survive? On Gadsby’s stage, solipsism masquerades as art.
This literary moment reminded me of a time when I wrote extensively about a preacher's way of handling a text from the book of Esther. After going through a variety of not necessarily compelling claims as to why he thought Esther was some kind of whore Mark Driscoll wound up his presentation by invoking a story about his daughter Ashley saying that, were she in a situation like Esther's, she would not agree to serve in a Persian harem and would run away. What Driscoll did was to present a view by way of personal anecdote so that you couldn't address the dubious idea without going through the story about a teenager. In terms of rhetoric it could be said that Driscoll used his daughter as a kind of rhetorical meatshield, which seems supremely unmanly. His case for interpreting a text from Esther the way he did should have been able to stand or fall on his own competency handling the text. Instead ... after parading a series of not entirely compelling arguments the clincher was the story about his teenage daughter.
The mistake would be to see what Driscoll did as unique. Hilton Als has just shown us that wrapping one's self in personal narrative as a way to insulate potentially (or actually) weak arguments from criticism is something that can be deployed by anyone across the spectrum of thought. Mark Driscoll became a stage artist and blogging master at describing the things that caused him heartache, such as stories about times where sex offenders visited him in his home. Although back around 2001 Driscoll shared how his daughter prayed for a convicted offender and it was a powerful moment of redemption in that narrative, by 2013 Driscoll sharing a story of a convicted sex offender visiting his home was presented not as a defense of Driscoll having his family involved in ministry due to their spiritual gifts but as an indication of how threatening it was to do urban ministry in the Seattle area.
Als has concluded that Gadsby has been doing something conceptually similar.
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