Hunter S. Thompson's famous Roman à clef, helping to put gonzo journalism on the mark. For awhile I avoided this novel, because it seemed impossible to get passed the conversational tropes of drug culture that some seemed fixated on. It was hard to mine for deeper meanings among the text's drug induced debauchery, however endlessly enjoyable they are.
But the truth is, and you don't need me to tell you this, Hunter S Thompson was an amazing writer, and underneath the whole excessive weirdo mess in Fear and Loathing, is Thompson's sobering, True-with-a-capital-T reflection on what happened to the "hippie zeitgeist" of the 1960's:
"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again."
Fear and loathing takes off when the wave crashes...
The essay is a reminisce, a memory of Gonzo, sometime earlier, San Fransisco in the late nineteen-sixties. A super concentrated ball of reflective energy. A younger man maybe, capturing a moment in time that "no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories," Thompson says, "can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world." He is riding a 650 lightening across the bay bridge towards Oakland, riding "a hundred" miles an hour wearing L.L. Bean shorts and a sheep hurders jacket. Too twisted to find neutral while he fumbled for change at the toll on the bridge. "There was a universal sense that whatever we were doing was right," he says. "That we were winning."
Any direction up the coast, Thompson muses, things would be the same. Unexplainable forces were prevailing against evil, not in a military sense. "Our energy would 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..."
There is a pause here. A moment of suspended animation, the kind of peak that never comes again...
Some of us didnt experience the late sixties in San Fransisco/America the way that Thompson did but that is O.K. Because he does an excellent job describing the situation for us, one that isnt ours but his. More importantly, under the historical and cultural pinnings, is a universal theme of everything that is fleeting, hence an inability of an explanation or music or mix of words, that could possibly describe the energy that words seem to come short in describing.
All good things will eventually end, and all things will pass. "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation," in the immortal words of Wernher Von Braun.
The sixties counter culture eventually did fail. The environmental movement did fail. New media exposed Americans to the horrors of war in realtime. And somewhere in there, was the American dream mutating and peaking and distorting, crashed and burned somewhere in Las Vegas in the 1970's. At least from the seat in which Hunter S. Thompson saw the whole thing.
A Roman à clef, is by definition, a novel with a key, or a story of real life overlaid with fiction. The fictitious characters represent the real, and the "key" is a relationship between what is considered fiction and non fiction in the story.
Thompson chose The Wave often times, when asked to read a selection from his novel. Why did he chose this small portion in the 8th chapter to represent Fear and Loathing?
Maybe because The Wave is an essay, the heart or thesis (if you will) that the narrative recedes and gravitates towards. Thompson's writing here, represents, the essay at its most effective and optimal form. The expansion of an idea; almost as if reading it, bridges gaps to new cognitive and spiritual dimensions in the human brain. After all, isn't that the purpose of living?
And eventually, the essay closes, quite literally, like gravity, the metaphor of the wave coming full circle:
"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 finally broke and rolled back."
This essay was composed while traveling light speed across the state of Montana, on the evening of August 12, 2013, en route to Milwaukee, WI.
OK.
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