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Naked Lunch and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ” DIPLOMARBEIT Titel der Diplomarbeit “Drugs and Dissent: A Cognitive Approach to Strategies of Unreliability and Reader Disorientation in Naked Lunch and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ” Verfasser Bernhard Schubert angestrebter akademischer Grad Magister der Philosophie (Mag. phil.) Wien, Juli 2009 Studienkennzahl lt. Studienblatt: A 343 332 Studienrichtung lt. Studienblatt: Anglistik und Amerikanistik Betreuerin: Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Margarete Rubik TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication .................................................................................................................................................... iii 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Unreliable Narration and its Problems ..................................................................................... 3 1.2. Cognitive Poetics and Unreliability ........................................................................................... 5 2. William S. Burroughs – Naked Lunch .............................................................................................. 10 2.1. Preliminaries: The Discourse World and Paratext of Naked Lunch .................................... 11 2.2. Unreliability in Naked Lunch ..................................................................................................... 16 2.2.1. Content: The Novel Without a Plot ................................................................................ 16 2.2.2. Macrostructure: Exceptions to the Routine ................................................................... 31 2.2.3. Style: Speaking in Tongues ............................................................................................... 38 3. Hunter S. Thompson – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ................................................................. 55 3.1. Preliminaries: Fear, Loathing and Synaesthesia ..................................................................... 57 3.2. Unreliability in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ........................................................................ 67 3.2.1. Content: A Rude Awakening from the American Dream............................................ 67 3.2.2. Macrostructure: Devil in the Details ............................................................................... 83 3.2.3. Style: At Wit’s End and Beyond ....................................................................................... 92 4. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 105 4.1. From Interzone to Las Vegas: Evidence of a Silent Succession ....................................... 105 4.2. Closing Remarks ...................................................................................................................... 109 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................. a Table of Figures ............................................................................................................................................ c Index............................................................................................................................................................... d German Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... f English Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... g Curriculum Vitae .......................................................................................................................................... h Lektürehinweis ............................................................................................................................................... j i ii for my parents iii BERNHARD SCHUBERT DRUGS AND DISSENT 1. INTRODUCTION When psychoanalysis and the theory of relativity overturned the concept of objective reality at the turn of the 20 th century, authors like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were among the first to adapt literary conventions to suit the new world view Freud’s and Einstein’s discoveries engen- dered. While the Victorians had wanted to convey a realistic picture of society, the modernists sought to paint a convincing picture of the ways the human mind, its feelings, its memories, and its many shortcomings essentially lay the foundation for one’s world view. With this new-found interest in subjective experience came an interest in perceptive faults, which prompted writers to search for new ways of expressing errors of judgement or cognition. Literature should, in simulat- ing the human consciousness, be just as untrustworthy as one’s own sensations. While the idea to employ unreliable narrators was not entirely new (the German Roman- tics had used unreliable narrators already at the turn of the 19 th century; examples of early unreli- ability in English literature include Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Wilkie Collins’ Moonstone ), the concept ultimately rose to fame when the postmodernists took over the modernists’ distrust in objectivity and combined it with their irreverence of tradition and a celebration of the per- ceived cultural decline their predecessors had merely lamented at the turn of the century. Unreli- able narration, especially as employed by authors from the 1950s onwards, is a fascinating con- cept, since it completely overturns the expectations most readers hold towards literature. One is used to trusting narrative instances even if the perspective is clearly limited, but unreliable narra- tors cannot be trusted – for precisely this reason, one’s engagement with an unreliable narrator is inherently far greater than with a reliable narrative instance. In order to keep track of the histoire, one has to be very careful in evaluating narratives marked unreliable by various clues. Unreliability may stem from either moral or cognitive impairments on the side of the nar- rator; it thus offers deviant perspectives on the respective readers’ norms. When authors employ unreliability to challenge or even attack established values and practices, matters become compli- cated – uniting unreliable narration and valid criticism may, in fact, seem an irreconcilable para- dox. Still, writers do succeed in combining these apparently disparate elements, creating unique and influential works in the process, two of which will be examined in this thesis. Both novels are major underground narratives 1, cult classics in their own right, which combine both moral and 1 As regards the classification of the two novels as underground literature, Scott MacFarlane rightfully states that the term underground narrative, whether applied to the Beats [to whom Burroughs belongs] or hippies [to whom Thompson can be counted, albeit with some reservations], does not presuppose a lack of success in the marketplace and it is not about literature having been clandestine or hidden. Rather, a work of under- ground narrative connotes a message and story that is positioned to challenge the mainstream culture and its values. (13) - 1 - BERNHARD SCHUBERT DRUGS AND DISSENT cognitive unreliability with outspoken cultural critique – William S. Burroughs’ famously obscene Naked Lunch and Hunter S. Thompson’s shamelessly insulting Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . The aim of this thesis is to show that both works can be classified as intrinsically unreliable narratives of a very specific and elaborate kind that successfully allow for comments on culture and ideol- ogy. Therefore, it is essential to determine how unreliable narration functions from a cognitive point of view, i.e. how the reader detects unreliability in literature, and how this is specifically effected in the works chosen and on the various levels that unreliable narratives function on. Fo- cusing on the relationship between unreliability and cultural critique, it will then be clarified how unreliable narration complements ideological criticism and determine whether unreliability invali- dates cultural critique or whether it may, in fact, even strengthen its effect. In doing so, this thesis is meant to fill a gap: regretfully, neither Naked Lunch nor Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas have received the critical attention they deserve despite their widespread success. That both novels have been adapted into major motion pictures only makes their con- tinuing popularity more apparent. Therefore, I want to provide a contemporary and extensive scholarly perspective on these two classics that has long been overdue. The effect of the novels, after all, is intriguing: how do Burroughs and Thompson, authors of what is in one way or the other semi-autobiographical, transmedial and often outright offensive cultural critique turned drug fiction, achieve their unique effect of transgressing, even transforming a reality everyone is familiar with into a place where nobody is safe and anything is possible? In order to arrive at a satisfactory answer to this question, a recently sprung up discipline of literary criticism seems most suitable. Cognitive poetics, in its holistic view of literature that is no longer connected only with one side of the author-text-reader relationship and writing de- tached from context, offers a
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