Experiments in Criticism

CONCLUSION

Kurt Vonnegut claimed that the New Journalists like Thompson practiced “the literary equivalent of Cubism.” By exposing the twisted nature of reality, they confronted readers with “luminous aspects of beloved old truths.” Reading Thompson’s cubist quest alongside Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling underscores three truths that, while not necessarily beloved, are pertinent nonetheless.

First, whether in God or America, faith is a lifelong quest. Kierkegaard mocks dilettantes who claim to achieve in a matter of weeks what for true philosophers has been “a task for a whole lifetime.” Thompson would concur. You can only take a weekend journey to the heart of the American Dream if you’ve spent your entire life preparing for it.

Second, a personal sacrifice is always political. Kierkegaard knows that Abraham’s sacrifice involves not just a son, but “all the generations of the world” which Isaac and his lineage would bless. Thompson knows too that the quest for the American Dream has political consequences, even if individuals must confront it alone.

And third, a political sacrifice is primarily religious. In this foul year of our Lord 2021, we take for granted that the personal is political, but Kierkegaard insists that any act of true faith begins with an individual’s confrontation with God, then with the body politic and its system of ethics and reason. Reading Thompson through Kierkegaard is a warning for MAGA Crusaders and Social Justice Warriors alike. We can’t access the heavenly kingdom through a redeemed America. First, we have to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice to God.

How’s that for drug logic?

SECTION III: Out on Highway 61

This is the heart of Kierkegaard’s insight into the story of Abraham and Isaac: we must resign any path to God that first takes us through a universal system of ethics and reason. Instead, the individual must confront the absolute God of the Bible directly. Then the individual can begin to redeem the world’s broken system of ethics and reason. The savage journey in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas charts a similar route to the American dream.

The question of whether or not that dream is universal hovers over the novel, which begins with Raoul Duke receiving a call to cover a Las Vegas motorcycle race. “But what was the story?” he wonders. “Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.” Horatio Alger wrote a series of rags-to-riches boys’ novels during America’s Gilded Age, bildungsromans about a homeless, orphaned bootblack who makes good. But because Ragged Dick, Alger’s hero, has no family, his upward mobility mainly affects him. These novels are not about the nation’s bootblacks unionizing. They show an individual bootblack pulling himself by his own self-shined bootstraps.

Still, Duke doesn’t go to Vegas alone. His fellow traveler is a 300-pound Samoan attorney named Dr. Gonzo, who, in his distrust of the white man’s culture, adds a necessary counterpoint to Duke’s narration. Their partnership is a synecdoche for the promise of the sixties counter culture: a communal quest to find the Dream that could redeem America. Though he is not American, Gonzo too seeks what the American Dream offers: love and freedom. What the pair actually find in Vegas is more hideous: war, sexual exploitation, misogyny, racial oppression, greed, religious perversion, and gargantuan pride and idolatry on sale to the lowest bidder. By the end of the novel, Gonzo has disappeared, leaving Duke to escape Vegas’s clutches on his own.

This narrative conceit echoes a realization Duke has about what made the sixties so electric. “There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right,” Thompson writes in the book’s most famous passage:

“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.”

This passage is the only time Thompson uses the word “universal” in the novel, and his conclusion echoes Kierkegaard’s analysis in Fear and Trembling. If your dream is universal victory, then that mission’s success will either be short-lived or so pyrrhic as to claim you among the vanquished. From the top of his own Mt. Moriah, Duke sees collective access to the American Dream die.

The most purely Abrahamic encounter in Fear and Loathing, however, happens in the desert proper where faith in the American Dream and faith in God collide. Duke is on his own, loaded on drugs with his attorney’s unregistered 357 magnum sitting next to him as he flees town in a rented car with a fantastically high unpaid hotel bill hanging over his head and a California Highway Patrolmen hot on his trail. His location: Highway 61. For those familiar with Bob Dylan, as Thompson certainly was—Dylan was one of Fear and Loathing’s two dedicatees—Highway 61 is an ominous road full of fear and trembling. Here is the first verse of Dylan’s song “Highway 61 Revisited.”

God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son.”
Abe say, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on.”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
Next time you see me comin’, you better run.”
Abe said, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God said, “Out on Highway 61”

Here on Highway 61, Duke is revisiting Abraham’s confrontation with God. In fear, he cries, “I want to confess! I’m a f*cking sinner! Venal, mortal, carnal, major, minor—however you want to call it, Lord … I’m guilty!”[1] But as he pleas for God’s help, his fear turns to loathing: “You’d better take care of me, Lord . . . because if you don’t you’re going to have me on your hands.”[2]

But the cop proves to be an angel, not a judge. He lets Duke go if he promises to stop and take a nap. Duke responds with textbook drug logic and heads back to the Vegas hell he just escaped.[3] This second trip elicits even more despair. The American Dream, Duke fears, is a sham, and God is part of the problem:

What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

Kierkegaard’s reaction to this criticism would be short and sweet: “Man, you must be putting me on.” Duke has committed a fallacy too. No wonder Duke find the American Dream. God isn’t the light at the end of the American Dream’s tunnel. God is the tunnel. Duke had better run.

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[2] But do me this one last favor: just give me five more high-speed hours before you bring the hammer down; just let me get rid of this g*dd*mn car and off of this horrible desert…this is an institutional debt—nothing personal. This whole g*dd*mn nightmare is the fault of that stinking, irresponsible magazine. Some fool in New York did this to me. It was his idea, Lord, not mine…And now look at me: half-crazy with fear, driving 120 miles an hour across Death Valley in some car I never even wanted. You evil b*st*rd! This is your work!

[3] stopping for a beer on the way. “I’m actually the district attorney from Ignoto County,” he tells the bartender. “Just another good American like yourself.” No such county exists.  Ignoto is an Italian word that means strange or unknown. It’s a county on that mythical Highway 61, a road that connects Mt. Moriah to the Circus Circus. When he finds the literal American Dream

SECTION I: Twisted Reality

The key stylistic features of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling are:

1. Its pseudonymous authorship, which opens up a gap between the author and the book’s argument
2. Its dialectical interplay of narrative and analysis
3. 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:

1. He too uses pseudonymous authorship, and the gap between the novel’s narrator and novel’s author widens or narrows depending on the circumstances.
2. 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.”)
3. 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!”

Continue reading “Work in Progress: Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas Part 2”