Here is the introduction to an in-progress paper about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In covenantal terms, it’s about ethics and sanctions.
Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas
Hunter Thompson used the phrase “fear and loathing” for the first time in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything” he told a friend, “much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder.” Thompson made the phrase, and the feelings it evoked, his writing’s trademark.[1] His published work demonstrates his willingness to attach the phrase to anything and everything he get could absorb into his drug-addled ken. The phrase’s quintessence, however, comes in the title and theme of his most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Next month marks fifty years since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas first appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine. Contra wags like Louis Menand who judge Thompson a period piece—“practically the only person in America still living in 1972”—the last twenty years have illustrated how prescient Thompson’s work was. Meet the new fear and loathing. Same as the old fear and loathing.[2]
The novel’s plot is not particularly complex. A journalist named Raoul Duke and his attorney Dr. Gonzo, fictional versions of Hunter Thompson and Oscar Acosta respectively, drive from LA to Vegas for a long weekend with a trunk-load of illegal narcotics. The plot has some basis in fact. Thompson really did drive to Vegas in the spring of 1971 with Chicano attorney Acosta to cover two real stories: a dirt bike race in the Nevada desert and the National District Attorneys’ Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Thompson intended to take fastidious notes of each chemically-filtered experience and publish the results without any editing: what Thompson called “pure gonzo journalism.” Instead, Thompson produced a roman a clef, a volatile cocktail of his journalistic instincts, acerbic eye, and penchant for fictional hyperbole.
My paper today is about how Thompson’s phrase “fear and loathing” relates to Soren Kierkegaard’s 1843 work Fear and Trembling, and my argument is simple: that reading Thompson’s novel with Kierkegaard in mind underscores the religious import of Thompson’s work, which, despite its preoccupation with America, is not primarily political.[3] Its savage journey is a spiritual one.
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is about another savage journey. Through the pseudonym Johannes de Silencio, Kierkegaard meditates on Abraham’s journey into the wilderness to sacrifice his son Isaac. Kierkegaard sees Abraham responding to God’s command not with resignation but as a knight of faith who has taken the latest step in a lifelong quest of belief. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas recounts a parallel quest wherein Thompson exchanges:
- God for America
- A donkey for a rented convertible
- Mt. Moriah for the Circus-Circus Casino
- Abraham for the American citizen in the foul year of our Lord 1971
- And Isaac for, well, that same American citizen.
For Thompson, the journey to the heart of the American Dream is a savage one precisely because it requires self-sacrifice.
Kierkegaard himself practices retelling the Abraham and Isaac narrative in Fear and Trembling, imagining four variations of the story in the book’s “Tuning Up” section. Each iteration illustrates a different way Abraham could have unfaithfully responded to God’s command. Abraham could have lied to Isaac about what he was doing. He could have lost his joy in the event’s aftermath. He could have hesitated at a key moment and caused Isaac to lose faith. Or he could have simply been unable to escape the feeling that the real act of faith would have been to refuse God’s command in the first place.
What’s remarkable are the variations Kierkegaard excludes. Through Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson implies that if Abraham would have either offered to sacrifice himself or handed the knife to Isaac to use on himself, then the path of faith would have been paved with fear and loathing, not fear and trembling. This sentiment is profoundly anti-Christian, but it is one whose power is undoubtedly religious, just as to journey to the American dream’s heart with Thompson is undoubtedly a twisted pilgrimage.
Why connect Kierkegaard with Thompson in the first place? Doug Brinkley, Thompson’s literary executor, testifies that Thompson attributed the origin of his trademark phrase to Kierkegaard. Brinkley himself doubts the phrase was mainlined from the Danish philosopher. The probable middle-man, the fear and loathing pusher, was southern novelist Thomas Wolfe. Still, whether accessed directly or through a mediator, “fear and loathing” comes freighted with Kierkegaard’s work on fear, trembling, resignation and faith. In what follows, I explore how Thompson bears that burden in his novel’s style, mode of reasoning, and narrative.
[1] It popped up in his reputation-making book on the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang where, of course, it described the reaction elicited by the Angels themselves. The phrase appeared in the Ur-piece of Gonzo Journalism, the narcotic besotted spin-off of the New Journalism that Thompson practiced and championed, called “The Kentucky Derby is Dacadent and Depraved, where Thompson used it to describe how audiences reacted to the visual artist Ralph Steadman. “Consequently, he was regarded with fear and loathing by nearly everyone who’d seen or even heard about his work.”
[2] Wondering if you have methamphetamine psychosis? The good doctor of journalism advises you to check yourself for the following symptoms: “bad waves of paranoia, madness, fear and loathing—intolerable vibrations in this place.”
[3] See, for instance, “What Happens in Vegas: Hunter S. Thompson’s Political Philosophy” by Jason Vredenburg in Journal of American Studies, February 2013, Vol. 47, No. 1 (February 2013), pp. 149-170.
Experiments in Criticism 