Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

This book by Hunter S. Thompson, self-described as 'a savage journey to the heart of the American dream', and gilded with cult status by the film of the same name starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro, is one that undergoes much-hyped controversy as a novel. It is also one that I will try not talk about at too great a length, for having only yesterday departed from a festival outside Amsterdam to be picked up by my family and driven to a quiet farmhouse in the rural southeastern Netherlands, I am quite tired, and have done almost nothing today but lounge in a hammock with a sequence of beverages and read this novel in effectively one sitting (or hammocking).

   Firstly I will say that if you happen to come across the illustrated version of the novel, be wary as they are quite horrifying, though their ink-spattered sketchy grotesqueness does perfectly fit the tone of the prose, which in Thompson's true gonzo-journalistic style, is frank, bizarre, meandering, relatively transparent, amusing and discomforting in roughly equal measure.

   In the book, the narrator (a quasi-autobiographical Hunter S. Thompson thinly disguised in the anonymity of fiction) who is a journalist, and his Samoan attorney Dr. Gonzo, have a series of increasingly reckless and ruinous drug-related misadventures, while trying to (and to some extent succeeding to) proceed with their normal actual responsibilities, such as reporting on a dirtbike race, mingling in casinos, and even infiltrating a police narcotics conference. There is kidnap, theft, fraud, hotel-trashing, threatening strangers, scaring a young hitchhiker senseless, botched attempts at interacting with a range of entertainment industries, all spun wilder and darker from the book's driving force: powerful psychoactive drugs. It's hilarious in a deranged kind of way; one will laugh, but to mask fearful apprehension at the sheer outrageous madness of the events depicted and the edge-of-sane-reality teeterings of its two main characters.

   And yet this is not just a mad hallucinogenic romp; this is a truly significant work of American literature. Howandwhy? Oh, many reasons which I'm not enough of an English Literature student to answer, nor do I wish to spend long enough on this post to even begin to elucidate, but there is one of the deeper points from it (that I drew anyway) that I found a compelling provocation to thought - and that is Hunter's damning appraisal of the West's hopes and dreams that had come to a fore in the decade previous. Through the 1960s, strong economies, powerful democratic movements toward ideals of peace and equality, the emergence of popular culture in new forms of publicly accessible music, and yes, the increasing prevalence of and interest in psychoactive substances, all coalesced together to form what I as a child-of-1993 would be dimly aware of only as some kind of glorious hippy revolution. Having been born thirty-three years late, I glean only leftover snippets of its fullness: Volkswagen campervans, the Beatles, LSD, women getting men's jobs, Martin Luther King, protesting the Vietnam war, the Kinks, realising the need for global ecological protection, sandals, weed, tie-die shirts and bandanas, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, free love, a non-ironic and not-yet-nerdy obsession with science fiction, eastern spiritualism and western existentialism smudged together in a wonderfully blurry mess of simple comfort for those who indulged themselves in this kind of Woodstock lifestyle: basically, for fun-loving social-justice-loving friendly folks, it was a superb decade, full of spunk and purpose and hope.
   But despite the zeitgeist momentum of this wondrous counterculture, it did not prevail; inequality, distrust and war won out. Why? I don't know exactly; nor does Hunter's narrator give a scintillating analysis (as one would expect from a gonzo-style stream-of-consciousness in the head of a perpetually-tripping amoral wonk), nor would I care to explain my thoughts on each minor possible hint. A major part is the co-opting by consumer mentality of hallucinogenic drugs, which in counterculture were part of expanding one's empathetic spirituality, connecting with the universe and such - but by the 1971 events of the novel, these now-illegal substances are, being illegal so one may as well abandon all other scruples along with respect for the law in taking them anyway, mere fuel for reckless hedonism. Mad selfish individuals now guzzle these 'heinous chemicals' as part of their wider rejection of anyone's attempt to limit their getting exactly what they want, rather than the hippy notion of seeing one's humbler part in a cohesive vibrant world. At the heart of the 1960s counterculture was the desire to see peace and happiness (embodied in the hippies themselves) drive forth and help establish the American Dream: but established powers have always had other plans, and the American Dream promulgated within the capitalist increasingly-isolationist West instead of this has been one of hedonism, of personal gain with only secondary regard to others and the world. The two main characters fulfil these anti-hippy characteristics ideally, and Las Vegas, with its unapologetic over-commodification of everything, fulfils as a city the culture that most directly dissolves any hippy-esque mindfulness. That drugs therefore are such a prominent part of the novel maybe to show how easy such tools of introspective positivity can be corrupted if used by people who just want to trip balls and steal cars and scare hotel clerks. I rarely include quotes from books in these posts, but at one point, there is a brilliant passage alluding to what I've been trying to lay out my thoughts about.

"...the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant... History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave... So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

   

   Anyway. This blog is called Thoughts on Books, so you have to expect dense paragraphs of near-nonsense thoughts like that sometimes, I'm sorry. I notice that my posts often begin with a grumpy promise that "this post will not be a long one because I'm tired and/or in a rush dammit" but then, ah, look, oh yes, oops, again. But yes, I would recommend this novel to anyone who has a stomach for the grotesquely funny-but-not-funny, and if you want to read deeper into the book than simply two nasty idiots having weird adventures on drugs, then, as I hope I've shown, it's the kind of book whereby you absolutely can.