Gonzo Text

← vi | vii → Acknowledgments

Thanks are owed to a lot of people, but I will try to keep this manageable. Firstly, I must acknowledge the debt I owe to Bob Franklin and Paul Bowman of Cardiff University, who have been beyond supportive and beyond helpful. I would also like to thank everyone else at JOMEC who has helped, advised, talked to and/or employed me over the years of writing this book. Feeling part of the departmental community has meant so much, practically and otherwise. I am also indebted to the AHRC, for helping to fund my research. Beyond that I need to thank my family, Adele, Brian and Jessica for their aid, encouragement and support, and lastly, Emma Smith, both for her invaluable advice and suggestions regarding my research, and for everything else. ← vii | viii →

← viii | 1 → • Introduction •

Disentangling Gonzo

Alot has been written about Hunter S. Thompson. As a journalist, he rose to national prominence with his exposé of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang (Thompson, 1967) and cemented his reputation with the pioneering of ‘Gonzo’ journalism, his own exuberantly drug-addled, subversive, subjective method of writing the story—whether running wild in Las Vegas (Thompson, 2005a) or following McGovern or Nixon on the campaign trail (Thompson, 1983). His subjective, first-person, literary journalism includes elements of autobiography, and he also published autobiographical works such as Kingdom of Fear (Thompson, 2003) as well as volumes of his letters such as The Proud Highway (Thompson, 1997) and Fear and Loathing in America (Thompson, 2006). Much has also been written by others about the life of this journalist, author and activist, whose lifestyle and legendary exploits are inextricably entangled with the writings, Gonzo and otherwise, for which Thompson became famous.

Ralph Steadman, Thompson’s long-time illustrator and partner-in-crime, wrote a memoir of their collaboration (Steadman, 2006), and Thompson’s Aspen-based friends and neighbours Michael Cleverly and Bob Braudis wrote a collection of Untold Stories of Hunter S. Thompson (Cleverly and Braudis, 2008). Thompson, literary figure but also celebrity poster-boy for drugs, guns, and a wildly excessive interpretation of rugged individualism, lived a very examined life.

In addition to biographical works such as these, and others such as E. Jean Carroll’s Hunter (Carroll, 1993), McKeen’s Outlaw Journalist (McKeen, 2008) and the exhaustive Gonzo (Wenner and Seymour, 2007), which was an oral biography assembled from interviews with scores of Thompson’s friends and associates, Thompson the cultural icon and quasi-fictional character has shown ← 1 | 2 → up and continues to show up in all sorts of unlikely places in American culture. From Doonesbury (see Von Hoffman, 2010) and The Simpsons (Viva Ned Flanders, 1999) to films such as the fictionalised Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) or the theatrically distributed feature-length documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2009), and even a biography in the form of a graphic novel (Bingley and Hope-Smith, 2010), Thompson gets around as a cultural figure.¹

The fact of Thompson’s prominence is interesting, as a kind of celebrity outlaw journalist, famed for guns, outrageousness, ultra-activist politics and, perhaps most prominently, legendary alcohol and substance abuse. Arguably just as interesting, however, is that Thompson’s writing, though he was a writer by profession, is seldom the primary focus of all this attention. As Nuttall has noted in assessing continued interest in Thompson’s lifestyle, the King of Gonzo’s writing is worthy of study without reference to his counter-cultural exploits (were the two separable):

I should make clear that I am in no sense trying to plant a flag and claim first dibs on analysing Hunter Thompson’s contributions to literature. Many of the examples I refer to above discuss the nature of Thompson’s writing, and other works have examined his work in depth (see for example, Stephenson, 2012) and with particular reference to the history of what came to be called The New Journalism (see for example, Weingarten, 2005). It is, however, interesting that the life of the outlaw journalist tends to get more ink than the actual journalism. As Alan Rinzler puts the question, in his foreword to Hunter’s ‘graphic biography’:

While I think this assessment may overstate, at least a little, the extent to which Thompson’s work is obscured by his legend, it does seem clear that that legend has a prominent cultural life, worthy of consideration in studying the ← 2 | 3 → writings in which, let us not forget, the legend originated. The public persona of Hunter S. Thompson as (in)famous Gonzo journalist was principally constructed, after all, within and by Thompson’s works. That being said, the primary object of study of this work is ‘Gonzo journalism’, with reference to the figure of Hunter Thompson, and not the other way around.²

The figure of Thompson, and the ways in which Gonzo journalism makes reference to it, remain a part of Gonzo, and one which must be dealt with in classifying and interpreting the Gonzo Text. The books he produced include works that are (relatively) uncomplicatedly ‘Gonzo Journalism’, such as Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas (Thompson, 2005a), but also other books of non-fiction, as well as a novel (Thompson, 1998), which fairly straightforwardly aren’t a part of this category. Since Gonzo isn’t a sharply defined category or a clear label affixed to some works and denied to others, arguing over what does and doesn’t belong ‘in’ the Gonzo Text seems a fairly pointless exercise, but it is very interesting to note precisely this flexibility. I should make clear that throughout this discussion, the capitalisation of ‘Text’ signifies that the word is being used to refer to a cultural object being considered in terms of its possible meanings and cultural relevance(s), as opposed to text such as the text of a document, which signifies a piece of written language. This is what I mean when I speak of the Gonzo Text—at it’s simplest, the Text comprised of the many texts (as in ‘works’, ‘pieces’ or ‘articles’) of Gonzo journalism.

‘Gonzo’ is hard to pin down, yet it remains a powerful cultural signifier. The purpose of this examination of the ‘Gonzo’ literary journalism of Hunter Thompson is to attempt the fullest possible theorisation of how this Gonzo Text can be read, with particular reference to its peculiar nature in terms of style, subjectivity, journalistic conventions and methodology, and its representations of prominent themes such as drug use and counter-cultures, ultra-activist and dissident politics, edgework, big-money sports, and even the so-called death of the American Dream. It is perhaps worth noting that drug use, as subjectively experienced first-hand by Thompson, rather than as a socio-political phenomenon to write about, is an exceptionally prominent feature of the Thompson legend/persona (which will be considered in some detail; see especially Chapters Two & Three). It is a key theme of the type of construction of Thompson which allegedly obscures the writing, and for which Rinzler expressed such disgust.

In his foreword to Ralph Steadman’s memoir, even fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut introduces the figure of Thompson as a friend, a Kentuckian, and a brilliant writer, but also as a ‘gun nut and drug abuser and heavy consumer of grain alcohol’ before going on to address Thompson’s drug use: