Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
Author	Hunter S. Thompson
Illustrator	Ralph Steadman
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Gonzo Series
Genre(s)	Gonzo journalism
Publisher	Random House
Publication date	November 11, 1971 and November 25, 1971
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	204 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-679-78589-2
OCLC Number	41049769
Dewey Decimal	070/.92 B 21
LC Classification	PN4874.T444 A3 1998b

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a novel by Hunter S. Thompson, illustrated by Ralph Steadman. The book is a roman à clef, rooted in autobiographical incidents. The story follows its protagonist, Raoul Duke, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, as they descend on Las Vegas to chase the American Dream through a drug-induced haze. The novel first appeared as a two-part series in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, was printed as a book in 1972, and was later adapted into a film of the same name in 1998 starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro.

Origins

The novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas accounts for two trips to Las Vegas, Nevada, that Hunter S. Thompson and attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta took in March and April 1971. The first trip spawned from an exposé Thompson was writing for Rolling Stone magazine about the Mexican-American television journalist Rubén Salazar, whom officers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department had shot and killed with a tear gas grenade fired at close range during the National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War in 1970. Thompson was using Acosta — a prominent Mexican-American political activist and attorney — as a central source for the story, and the two found it difficult for a brown-skinned Mexican to talk openly with a white reporter in the racially tense atmosphere of Los Angeles, California. The two needed a more comfortable place to discuss the story and decided to take advantage of a Sports Illustrated magazine offer to write photograph captions for the annual Mint 400 desert race being held in Las Vegas from 21-23 March.

The 1971 Thompson and Acosta personae, on which Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo were based

Thompson wrote that he concluded their March trip by spending some thirty-six hours alone in a hotel room "feverishly writing in my notebook" about his experiences.^[1] The genesis of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is in that notebook.

What originally was a two-hundred-fifty-word photo-caption-job for Sports Illustrated grew to a novel-length feature story for Rolling Stone; Thompson said publisher Jann Wenner had "liked the first 20 or so jangled pages enough to take it seriously on its own terms and tentatively scheduled it for publication — which gave me the push I needed to keep working on it". He had first submitted a 2,500 word manuscript to Sports Illustrated that was "aggressively rejected".^[2]

Weeks later, Thompson and Acosta returned to Las Vegas to report for Rolling Stone on the National District Attorneys Association's Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs being held from 25–29 April 1971, and to add material to the larger Fear and Loathing narrative. Besides attending the attorneys' conference, Thompson and Acosta looked for ways in Vegas to explore the theme of the American Dream, which was the basis for the novel's second half, which Thompson referred at the time as "Vegas II".^[3]

On 29 April 1971, Thompson began writing the full manuscript in a hotel room in Arcadia, California, in his spare time while completing Strange Rumblings in Aztlan, the article chronicling the slain Chicano journalist Rubén Salazar.^[4] Thompson joined the array of Vegas experiences within what he called "an essentially fictional framework" that described a singular free-wheeling trip to Vegas peppered with creative licenses.^[5]

Rolling Stone magazine cover by Ralph Steadman.

In November 1971, Rolling Stone published the combined texts of the trips as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream as a two-part article illustrated by Ralph Steadman, who, two years before, had worked with Thompson on a Scanlan's Monthly article titled "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved".^[6] The next year, Random House quickly published the hardcover edition, with additional Steadman illustrations; The New York Times said it is "by far the best book yet on the decade of dope",^[7] with Tom Wolfe describing it as a "scorching epochal sensation".^[8]

Plot summary

The novel lacks a clear narrative and frequently delves into the surreal, never quite distinguishing between what is real and what is only imagined by the characters.

The basic synopsis revolves around journalist Raoul Duke and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, as they arrive in 1970s Las Vegas to report on the Mint 400 motorcycle race. However, they soon abandon their work and begin experimenting with a variety of recreational drugs, such as LSD, ether, cocaine, alcohol, mescaline, and cannabis. This leads to a series of bizarre hallucinogenic trips, during which they destroy hotel rooms, wreck cars, and have visions of anthropomorphic desert animals, all the while ruminating on the decline of American culture.

Major themes

The preface quotes Dr. Johnson: He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. The quotation alludes to the protagonists' profuse drug use in escaping the coarse realities of American life; passages detail the failed counterculture, people who thought drug use was the answer to society's problems. The contradiction of solace in excess is thematically similar to The Great Gatsby, a favourite novel of Thompson's.

H. S. Thompson posits that his drug use (unlike Dr. Leary's mind-expansion experimentation drug use), is intended to render him a mess; that he is the poster boy of a generation of "permanent cripples, failed seekers...;" their erratic behaviour depicts the restless failure his generation feels.

The "American Dream" is the novel's prevalent thematic motif, while searching for the literary and metaphoric American Dream, and for an eponymous real place in Las Vegas, Duke and Dr Gonzo find only a burnt psychiatric office. At story's start, Duke claims their adventure shall be a "gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country", an idea soon cooled when the excess and fear settle in them; the symbolism of the burned psychiatric office is clear. Throughout Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the protagonists go out of their way to degrade, abuse, and destroy symbols of American consumerism and excess, while Las Vegas symbolizes the coarse ugliness of mainstream American culture.

The "wave speech"

The "wave speech" is an important passage, at the end of the eighth chapter, that captures the hippie zeitgeist and its end. (Page 66)

Some critics and readers believe this wave speech was Thompson's favourite passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the writing of which he was most proud. Thompson often cited it during interviews, choosing it when asked to read aloud from the novel.^[9]

Title

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is Thompson's most famous work, and is known as "Fear and Loathing" for short; however, he later used the phrase "Fear and Loathing" in the titles of other books, essays, and magazine articles.

Moreover, "Fear and Loathing", as a phrase, has been used by many writers, the first (possibly) being Friedrich Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ. In a Rolling Stone magazine interview, Thompson said: "It came out of my own sense of fear, and [is] a perfect description of that situation to me, however, I have been accused of stealing it from Nietzsche or Kafka or something. It seemed like a natural thing."^[10]

He first used the phrase in a letter to a friend written after the Kennedy assassination, describing how he felt about whoever had shot President John F. Kennedy.^[11] In "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved", he used the phrase to describe how people regarded Ralph Steadman upon seeing his caricatures of them.

Thompson claimed that the name was derived from Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, though Jann Wenner claims that the title came from Thomas Wolfe's The Web and the Rock.^[12]

Reactions to the novel

When the novel was published in fall of 1971, many critics did not appreciate the novel's loose plot and the drug use of Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo; however, the reviewers understood that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was to become important American literature.

In the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt told readers to not "even bother" with the novel, and that "what goes on in these pages make[s] Lenny Bruce seem angelic"; however, he acknowledged that the novel's true importance is in Thompson's literary method: "The whole book boils down to a kind of mad, corrosive prose poetry that picks up where Norman Mailer's An American Dream left off and explores what Tom Wolfe left out".^[13]

As the novel became popular, the reviews became positive; Crawford Woods, also in the New York Times, wrote a positive review countering Lehmann-Haupt's negative review: the novel is "a custom-crafted study of paranoia, a spew from the 1960s and — in all its hysteria, insolence, insult and rot — a desperate and important book, a wired nightmare, the funniest piece of American prose"; and "this book is such a mind storm that we may need a little time to know that it is also literature . . . it unfolds a parable of the nineteen-sixties to those of us who lived in them in a mood — perhaps more melodramatic than astute — of social strife, surreal politics and the chemical feast"; about Thompson, Woods said he "trusts the authority of his senses, and the clarity of a brain poised between brilliance and burnout".^[14]

In any event, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas became a benchmark in American literature about U.S. society in the early 1970s. In Billboard magazine, Chris Morris said, "through Duke and Gonzo's drug-addled shenanigans amid the seediness of the desert pleasure palaces, it perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the post–'60s era".^[15] In Rolling Stone magazine, Mikal Gilmore wrote that the novel "peers into the best and worst mysteries of the American heart" and that Thompson "sought to understand how the American dream had turned a gun on itself". Gilmore believes that "the fear and loathing Thompson was writing about — a dread of both interior demons and the psychic landscape of the nation around him — wasn't merely his own; he was also giving voice to the mind-set of a generation that had held high ideals and was now crashing hard against the walls of American reality".^[16]

Although the drug use and its degree of autobiography remain tepidly controversial, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971) is often required reading for students of American literature.

As a work of gonzo journalism

In the book The Great Shark Hunt, Thompson refers to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as "a failed experiment in the gonzo journalism" he practiced, which was based on William Faulkner's idea that "the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism — and the best journalists have always known this".^[17] Thompson's style blended the techniques of fictional story-telling and journalism.

He called it a failed experiment because he originally intended to record every detail of the Las Vegas trip as it happened, and then publish the raw, unedited notes; however, he revised it during the spring and summer of 1971. For example, the novel describes Duke attending the motorcycle race and the narcotics convention in a few days' time; the actual events occurred a month apart.^[18] Later, he wrote, "I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight/crazy journalism".^[19]

Despite saying that ‘‘Fear and Loathing’’ was a failed experiment, critics call it his crowning achievement in gonzo journalism. One said the novel "feels free wheeling when you read it [but] it doesn't feel accidental. The writing is right there, on the page — startling, unprecedented and brilliantly crafted".^[20]

Illustrations

British cartoonist Ralph Steadman added his style of beautiful yet grotesque illustrations to the Rolling Stone issues and to the novel. Steadman had first met Thompson when Scanlan's Monthly hired Steadman to do the illustrations for Thompson's first venture into gonzo journalism called "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved."

Many critics have hailed Steadman's illustrations as another main character of the novel and companion to Thompson's disjointed narrative. The New York Times noted that "Steadman's drawings were stark and crazed and captured Thompson's sensibility, his notion that below the plastic American surface lurked something chaotic and violent. The drawings are the plastic torn away and the people seen as monsters."^[21]

Film adaptation

The novel's popularity gave rise to attempted cinematic adaptations; directors Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone each unsuccessfully attempted to film a version of the novel. In the course of these attempts, Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando were considered for the roles of Duke and Dr. Gonzo but the production stalled and the actors aged beyond the characters. Afterwards, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were considered, but Belushi's death ended that plan.^[22] Art Linson's 1980 movie Where the Buffalo Roam is based on a number of Thompson's stories, including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

In 1989, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was almost made by director Terry Gilliam when he was given a script by illustrator Ralph Steadman. Gilliam, however, felt that the script "didn’t capture the story properly". In 1997, Gilliam received a different script he felt worth realising; his 1998 film features Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro as "Raoul Duke" and "Dr Gonzo", respectively, and was critically and commercially panned.^[23] It has since become a cult classic due in large part to its release on DVD, including a Special Edition released by The Criterion Collection.

References

Editions

• ISBN 0-679-78589-2 (paperback, 1999)
• ISBN 0-679-60298-4

External links

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at the Internet Movie Database
• The Great Thompson Hunt
• Book Review by Nick Christenson
• Las Vegas Sun investigation into the actual historical events surrounding the book. Includes many other FLLV-related articles.