Grab that Gun

Hunter S. Thompson, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
"No, these were not the hoofprints of your normal, godfearing junkie. It was far too savage, too aggressive. There was evidence, in this room, of excessive consumption of almost every type of drug known to civilized man since 1544 A.D. It could only be explained as a montage, a sort of exaggerated medical exhibit, put together very carefully to show what might happen if twenty-two serious drug felons--each with a different addiction--were penned up together in the same room for five days and nights, without relief.

Indeed. But of course that would never happen in Real Life, gentlemen. We just put this together for demonstration purposes" (188).

i've been trying, this week in my AML 2070 class, to persuade my students to consider Thompson's book as something other than, or maybe something more than, a story of a drugged-out weekend. i suggested that we might read the figure of the drug trip as an extended metaphor for a failed utopian project: as an allegorical correspondence to 'the Movement' Thompson obsessively returns to.

This extension applies not only to 'the Movement', but also to the ontological rupture the movement presaged and provoked, but did not sustain. As a way of marking this unravelling, the above quote is doused, in the novel, with a heavily glopped paint splatter. A further denotation of the "demonstration purposes" to which Thompson's montage might be put. In other words, his juxtaposition of varieties of "consciousness expansion" perform an historical documentation of the impossibility of the 60s' brand of idealism Thompson is exorcising through a 1970's-welcoming Vegas drug binge, as well as the possiblity of a new historical moment, that of postmodernism. The story, as well as the telling, purges nostalgic pinings for truth, authenticity, or nature, and Nixon isn't the only one to blame.

Thompson argues these breakdowns through a variety of registers: insistence upon the impossibility of making a truth/fiction distinction, foregrounding of the necessity of this impossibility for seekers of the "American Dream," and a problematization of the conventional boundaries of his discipline. Nonetheless, these are not arbitrary stylistic choices. He tells his reader, "But their loss and failure is ours, too. 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" (178-79).

In other words, Thompson's departure from conventional grammar and organization in favor of a kind of fact/fiction montage holds onto the hope that a partial but consistent dismissal of cultural/ideological scaffolding begins the difficult utopic journey. The book, despite its disgusting heroes and destitute environs, has a mutated anticpation that Didion's similarly famous lament doesn't dare to suggest. Thompson begs readers to hold fast to a rejection of the "old-mystic" fallacies, not out of some kind of nihilistic cynicism, but out of a desperate longing for change.