Through the Maelstrom: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Why is it counterintuitive to point out the differences between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and, for instance, Naked Lunch, while trying to understand the latter? Avid consumers of literature on the far side of consciousness will know that both purport to navigate us through a junky's rugged mountain high. Fear and Loathing sells itself on the strength of an experience its audience can only obtain at the cost of a disposable party brain.

For instance, when the narrator states:

How long can we maintain? I wondered. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last aknown home of the Manson family. Will he make that rim connection when my attorney starts screaming about bats and huge manta rays coming down on the car? If so-well, we'll just have to cut his head off and bury him somewhere. Because it goes without saying that we can't turn him loose. He'll report us at once to some kind of outback nazi law enforcement agency, and they'll run us down like dogs.

it's all about context. We know that the two car buddies, Hunter Thumpson (aka Raoul Duke) and his attorney, have loaded their trunk with mescaline, acid, cocaine, and just about any drug their manically covetous claws could clutch, and they are themselves already in the grip of a wicked road-sampled chemical mash-up of the Periodic Table of Drugs: almost everything except the ether, which we are told is particularly treacherous and could push them right off that mountain top and tumbling down a ravine. 

Of course, this kind of fearful melodrama is precisely what makes Fear and Loathing work so well and keeps you, dear reader, turning the pages even when the paranoia and disgust run as thick as a sticky tumbler-full of cola syrup. The disco and the lights change even if the tune doesn't, and once you know how to dance you're in for one hell of a high. What's more, you didn't have to fork out a year's salary to get your kicks, nor did you have to draw on shady contacts that'd make a drug cartel chief envious in order to acquire them. 

If our narrator is to be believed - and with every corner taken madly at accelerating speeds his bizarre inclinations become more credible - this is all for a deadly serious trip into the dark heart of the American Dream. What fearful monster lies there in wait, and why would we want to meet him at our own expense? We suppress a shudder and are only too happy that our brave narrator has offered to do it on our behalf, even though we know who we are rooting for, if only because we have been suspecting the American Dream to be mixed with a hatful of hogwash anyway, and all that rejected karma from the lower dominions is bound to be some seriously vile shit. 

What we get is both a descent into the maelstrom, and a simulation of what it would be like to get dragged through the funnel. This phased distinction is crucial. When things rocket completely out of control and potentially incoherent, we are given a transcript of Raoul Duke's conversations ("Breakdown on Paradise Blvd"), rather than an attempt to restructure the medium of writing itself through the grainy sieve of a fragmented consciousness. The high is infused in the writing, and Hunter S. Thompson's hyperbolic juxtapositions of incongruous matter remind us that it requires a certain sanity to write so exhiliratingly well: 

I was slumped on my bed in the Flamingo, feeling dangerously out of phase with my surroundings. Something ugly was about to happen. I was sure of it. The room looked like the site of some disastrous zoological experiment involving whiskey and gorillas. The ten-foot mirror was shattered, but still hanging together - bad evidence of that afternoon when my attorney ran amok with the coconut hammer, smashing the mirror and all the lightbulbs. (p. 180) 

Compared to William Burroughs' sordid ramblings so pregnant with mental dissolution and an impenetrable thin white light beaming with the dripping regularity of water torture and which - surely - would get snuffed out instantly if only, if only we could find the light switch; Fear and Loathing is a work of dark romantic fiction whose rhetoric is powerful enough to turn its grimy capsule-lined subject matter into a thrill ride, a road trip on a desire-fuelled freeway of fear and loathing - but within the secure comfines of an understandable narrative. Burroughs' strength, on the other hand, lies in his unconventional adherence to a true punk ethic. He doesn't care if the reader is a little alienated and disoriented, because he knows that after shocking him into a vulnerable state he will be ready to get mashed up properly, via the medium itself, and then the reader will never be quite the same again. It is, ultimately, a rather more hardcore binge, and one that offers altogether a different set of rewards, somewhat removed from the glamour and Poe-esque grandeur that Thompson continuously invokes with his rhetoric full of here-comes-trouble-but-fuck-it attitude and seat-of-the-pants confidence. Instead, Burroughs' narrators have long since handed over their self-assurance and control for a dreamy submission and childlike acceptance of bizarre humanoids inhabiting suspended realities that would persuade even David Lynch that sci-fi is the new surrealism.

So here I am in the Land of the Dead with Mikey Portman....

No use. Death hasn't changed him a bit; the same selfish, self-centred, spoiled, petulant, weak Mikey Portman.
For years I wondered why dreams are so often dull when related, and this morning I find the answer, which is very simple - like most answers, you have always known it.              

- Burroughs, My Education: A Book of Dreams

Speaking of Poe, it is interesting to note how Thompson reinvents him for the 20th century. Thompson's dramatic adjectives swing in and out of sentences like a criminal in a high speed chase on a busy highway,  while Poe's more archaic style is a horse carriage with the Grim Reaper at the reins of gothic stallions foaming fire and blood at the mouths. But Poe loves doubling, tripling and quadrupling for effect, much like Thompson does. Poe's hyperbole is a baroque obfuscation that, through his disciplined focus on the trajectory of each story, leaves the reader in no doubt about the  mystery and the horror. The central theme is always enhanced, rather than diminished, through this method. It is like a magician's use of smoke that renders the magic object's materialisation more effective. 

In The Masque of the Red Death, the very first paragraph offers plenty of examples. "No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous", it starts, before ramping up. "Blood was its Avatar and its seal - the redness and the horror of blood." And as if that isn't enough, "there were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution." In this example it is not necessary for there to be any scientific correlation to the progressive phases - because in effect they are all one and the same, the Red Death - but rather it is the cadence, and the continuous embroidery on the central theme, that carry the descriptions forward. The Red Death is nothing other than the emotional storm created by this continuous dramatic rhetoric, a swirl of imagery enveloping a hazy crescending horror of blood, trauma, and melancholy.

With Poe we fall as if by gravity to the natural end of the arc, namely death. It is almost merciful compared to the hangover Raoul Duke wakes up with when the party is finally over.