SECTION I: Twisted Reality
The key stylistic features of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling are:
- Its pseudonymous authorship, which opens up a gap between the author and the book’s argument
- Its dialectical interplay of narrative and analysis
- And, finally, its sense of humor. Kierkegaard satirizes staid Christianity and pretentious Hegelian philosophy in equal measures, and the result, while never lighthearted, is far from dour.[1]
Thompson echoes Fear and Trembling’s style this way:
- He too uses pseudonymous authorship, and the gap between the novel’s narrator and novel’s author widens or narrows depending on the circumstances.
- He, too, makes a collage of different kinds of writing, including news reports, drug fueled reveries and panics, and analysis of everything from John Lennon’s “Power to the People”[2] and heavyweight boxing[3] to Vegas itself (“After five days in Vegas you feel like you’ve been here for five years. Some people say they like it—but then some people like Nixon, too. He would have made a perfect Mayor for this town; with John Mitchell as Sheriff and Agnew as Master of Sewers.”)
- And, of course, the humor. Slapstick travelogues in a rented convertible. The grotesque carnival of souls inside the Circus-Circus Casino. The ripe-with-the-stench-of-the-worst-regional-MLA-conference-you’ve-ever-attended aroma of the National DA’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs wherein Duke and Gonzo, both completely wired, assume the guise of mild-mannered law enforcement agents in order to hear insider dope on the drug culture like, “The reefer butt is called a ‘roach’ because it resembles a cockroach.” To which Dr. Gonzo aptly responds, “You’d have to be crazy on acid to think a joint looked like a g**da** cockroach!”
Thompson’s style is an objective correlative to Vegas’s excess: copious lists, similes, and descriptive bursts.[4] “Reality itself is…twisted,” Duke remarks. That statement could be Kierkegaard’s motto for Genesis 22. It certainly functions as the thesis for the novel. You don’t have to intensify a reality this savage. Which prompts the question: why do the novel’s characters consume all those drugs?
SECTION II: Drug Logic
Throughout Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard criticizes Hegel and the Enlightenment project Hegel represents. If everything is subject to the power of human reason, what other conclusion can one come to but that Abraham was a failed murderer? One cannot properly universalize Abraham’s actions without inviting ethical terror. Against Hegel and his ilk, Kierkegaard stresses that Abraham’s faith is admirable precisely because it forsakes the approval of universal reason. Acting as an individual, Abraham resigns his own claim to Isaac then faithfully obeys God’s command out of a belief that God will keep the promise Isaac represents. Hegel’s totalizing system cannot properly account for this kind of faith.
Coming to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Hegel in mind sheds light on one of the book’s curious features: its frequent Nazi references. As in, “He’ll report us at once to some kind of outback nazi law enforcement agency, and they’ll run us down like dogs.” Or “Do I look like a g*dd**n Nazi?” I said. “I’ll have a natural American car, or nothing at all!” Or, “I could see myself lying in bed in the Mint Hotel, half-asleep and staring idly out the window, when suddenly a vicious nazi drunkard appears two hundred feet tall in the midnight sky, screaming gibberish at the world: “Woodstock Über Alles!” And perhaps most memorably at the Circus-Circus Casino, wherein Duke surmises: “The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich.” If Hegel is what the whole hep philosophical world would be spouting if we resigned ourselves to the exhaustive powers of human reason, then the Nazis, and their fascistic authority, are whose dream we’d be seeking if the American one finally died. Las Vegas is, in fact, a Hegelian twist on the American Dream, a towering monument to human reason and its relentless drive to quantify reality. The only way üout of this Hegelian hellscape, Thompson intuits, is through high-powered narcotics.
To engage in mild understatement, Hunter Thompson had a complicated relationship to drugs. Thompson is, in public lore, a drug-addicted degenerate reeking of ether who chewed blotter acid like bubble gum. But Thompson was no fan of LSD prophets like Timothy Leary, and Thompson also knew the grisly consequences of believing that drugs could expand your mind without occasioning its collapse. Still, Thompson sees the impulse behind drug consumption as the right one —to loosen the grip of reason’s total control on the mind and heart.
In opposition to fascist thinking, Thompson champions “drug logic,” a concept whose patron saints are America’s greatest lay philosophers, the Three Stooges. In the locus classicus of “drug logic,” a bit from 1939’s “A Ducking They Did Go,” Larry addresses a boat leak with the help of his rifle. “I’ll fix it!” he exclaims as he blasts a hole in the boat’s bottom. “I made another hole for the water to go out!” Larry explains to an exasperated Moe. This is the beauty of drug logic. It is at once the cause of and solution to life’s problems.
Just as Hegel cannot explain God’s command to Abraham, much less Abraham’s faithful response, neither can the architects of Nixon’s War-on-Drugs America understand why Thompson and the members of his generation chose to consume apparently self-crippling drugs. But if Las Vegas is a bad town for psychedelics, Thompson hypothesizes they are all the more necessary. Better to exercise drug logic than Nazi logic. Better to be a casualty of the drug war than the Vietnam War. Even after his weekend in Vegas, Thompson still believes in the American Dream (a clear case of “drug logic”), where despite all evidence to the contrary, he holds with faith the idea “that Americans can be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness.” Of course, this makes his sacrificial and savage journey all the more ironic.
[1] It’s worth noting too that Kierkegaard’s formal analysis of the Genesis 22 narrative beats Erich Auerbach to the punch by 100 years. Auerbach famously argues in the opening chapter of Mimesis that the representation of reality presented in Genesis shows a distinct progression beyond that of the Greeks in Homer’s epics. In his meditation on Abraham’s silence—i.e. why doesn’t he say anything to Sarah or Isaac or Eleazar about what God has asked him to do—de Silencio is himself explaining the power of the narrative’s understated style.
[2] (“Punks like that just get in the way when they try to be serious.”)
[3] (“a proper end to the sixties; Cassius/Ali belted incredibly off his pedestal by a human hamburger”)
[4] “In some circles, the “Mint 400” is a far, far better thing than the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby and the Lower Oakland Roller Derby Finals all rolled into one.” “A thing like that could send a drug person careening around the room like a ping-pong ball.”
Experiments in Criticism 