The Gonzo Text – The Literary Journalism of Hunter Thompson PhD 2013 Matthew Winston Declaration This work has not been submitted in substance for any other degree or award at this or any other university or place of learning, nor is being submitted concurrently in candidature for any degree or other award. Signed ....................................... (candidate) Date .............................. STATEMENT 1 This thesis is being submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD. Signed ....................................... (candidate) Date .............................. STATEMENT 2 This thesis is the result of my own independent work/investigation, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by explicit references. The views expressed are my own. Signed ....................................... (candidate) Date .............................. STATEMENT 3 I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations. Signed ....................................... (candidate) Date .............................. STATEMENT 4: PREVIOUSLY APPROVED BAR ON ACCESS I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loans after expiry of a bar on access previously approved by the Academic Standards & Quality Committee. Signed ....................................... (candidate) Date .............................. ii Abstract More has been written about the life of Hunter S Thompson than about the writing which brought him fame, although the peculiar nature of his first-person literary journalism makes his life and his work impossible to separate. Although the legend of the outlaw journalist is an indispensible feature, the focus of this textually-oriented study is Thompson’s method, conventionally called ‘Gonzo journalism’, and how it operates. Drawing on theories of subjectivity and authorship informed by the work of Derrida, Foucault, Barthes and John Mowitt, I attempt to analyse the Gonzo Text, examining the place of various elements of ‘Gonzo’ style and content. Looking at key themes in Thompson’s oeuvre - principally the problematics around representing drug experiences and the subjective experience of edgework, the nature of myths of objective and professional journalism in the context of political reportage, the interrogation of the place of sports in American culture and ideology, and, ultimately, Thompson’s engagement with ‘the death of the American Dream’ – I examine the ways in which the Gonzo Text is constructed. The Text of Gonzo is placed in social, political and historical contexts in terms of both wider American history of the period, and the traditions of American journalism. Gonzo works can be read in terms of Thompson’s renegotiation of the boundaries of reportable experience, of journalism, and even of personal safety and legal liability, with the unusual place of the voice of the author within Gonzo facilitating a unique type of hybrid Text. Blending fact and fiction into undecidability allows the Text to operate in some senses as what Derrida termed a ‘pharmakon’ – a site and agent of the instabilities of categories which cannot hold it. Gonzo journalism destabilises conventional ideas of literary journalism, and of journalism itself, in its peculiarly unclassifiable nature. iii Acknowledgements 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 my supervisors, Bob Franklin and Paul Bowman, who have been beyond supportive and beyond helpful. I would also like to thank everyone at JOMEC who has helped, advised, talked to and/or employed me over the years of writing this thesis. Feeling part of the departmental community has meant so much, practically and otherwise. 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. iv Contents Declaration ii Abstract iii Acknowledgements iv Contents v Introduction - Disentangling the Gonzo Text 1 Wild Bursts of Madness 17 Freak Power 27 Chapter One - Fear and Loathing in Subjective Experience: Gonzo, Drugs and Receptivity 40 A Relatively Respectable Citizen 44 A Living Human Body 64 Hallucinations Are Bad Enough 73 Chapter Two - Unprofessional Journalism & Edgework: On the Campaign Trail '72 83 The Realm of Speculation 85 Cheap Thrills 100 At Least Neo-Respectability 116 Chapter Three - Media Sports are Decadent and Depraved 130 A Very Hard Dollar 137 Pictures of the Riot 154 This Bedrock Sense of Professionalism 172 Conclusion: The Final Wisdom 196 An Honest Living 201 Neutrality is Obsolete 208 The Place of Definitions 213 Private, Human Time 219 What Used to be Called the American Dream 224 Work Cited 230 v Introduction - Disentangling the Gonzo Text What were we doing out here? What was the meaning of this trip? Did I actually have a big red convertible out there on the street? Was I just roaming around these Mint Hotel escalators in a drug frenzy of some kind, or had I really come out here to Las Vegas to work on a story?1 (Thompson, 2005a: 56) A lot 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 1 The italics are from the original source material. I have made no such typographical changes to any of the quotations I use in this thesis. 1 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 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 figure2. 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): Although almost as much has been written about him as by him, no writer can remain alive solely through his biographers. There must be something in the work, the oeuvre, which demands posterity’s attention. In Thompson’s case it is the way he transformed not only political writing, allowing the private to invade the public, but also the very way we think about a journalist’s role as producer of the first draft of history. (Nuttall, 2012: 113) 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 2 While considering Thompson’s portrayal(s) in film is not a primary focus of this thesis, see for example McNair (2012) for a discussion of Thompson’s recent cinematic prominence, with particular reference to Johnny Depp’s work on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Gonzo (2009) and The Rum Diary (2011). 2 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’: Why isn’t Hunter S. Thompson taken more seriously? As his editor and literary goad for 35 years over four of his best books, I’m sorry to see that the public spectacle of Hunter as the King of Gonzo – a brain-addled, angry, deeply depressed, self-destructive lout – has prevailed in the popular consciousness while the real story of this ground-breaking prose artist and investigative journalist has all but disappeared.