Not much happens in Fear and Loathing. That’s the amazing thing about the book. Here is a famously colorful era’s finest specimen of the picaresque—a genre that, according to William Rose Benét, “deals sympathetically with the adventures of clever and amusing rogues”—and what gives? The rogues aren’t clever. Amusing is not the word for them. They accomplish little roguery. The author shows them no sympathy. And of adventures they really have none. Two men in early middle age visit Las Vegas while intoxicated. They frighten a few people (mostly each other), are rude to bystanders, and astonish a cleaning lady. Two rental cars and several bedrooms and bathrooms are left the worse for wear. A couple of large corporations are cheated of modest sums. As for serious malefaction, there is possession of controlled substances, a (poorly) concealed weapon, possible sexual contact with a woman who may be underage, and a skipped hotel bill. In a century marked by countless unspeakable crimes, we may speak of these, and they don’t count.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a bloodcurdling adventure where no one is murdered, robbed, imprisoned, or hanged. The only hairsbreadth escape is from a speeding ticket and DWI citation. And at the end of the story comes not triumph or tragedy or revenge or contrition but status quo ante like a TV sitcom. But Hunter Thompson is such a genius that it’s a thrilling saga. A thrilling saga in which nothing much happens—a fitting example of the picaresque for the Now Generation. One of the things Hunter did in this book was write a coda to, an obituary for, the nonsense of the 1960s. It’s important to recall that in the part of the 1960s known as “The Sixties” nothing much happened.
The war in Vietnam was widely and vigorously protested. And nothing happened, the war went on. Blacks rioted in the slums. Nothing happened, the slums are still there. Mysticism was practiced, psychedelics were ingested, consciousness was everywhere raised. Nothing happened. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered at Woodstock. Nothing whatsoever happened. And we were all freed from sexual prudery and repression. And nothing happened—at least nothing very splendid, though there were plenty of illegitimate children, venereal diseases, and hurt feelings.
We see the protagonists of Fear and Loathing in 1971, in the wake of this great generational blow-off, wallowing in the inanity of the times. It would be a masterly period piece if Hunter had decided to go no further. But Hunter is nothing if not a gone cat. Instead, the book is an entire description of all life as complete senseless idiocy.
Good and evil are a ridiculous mess. We hear much about the “vicious,” “twisted” “swine” who control American society and who threaten Raoul Duke and his three-hundred-pound Samoan attorney. But the only people we see being vicious or twisted or swinish are that attorney and Duke. Authority is described as nasty and corrupt. And nearly all the ancillary characters in the book, even the hotel clerks, are portrayed as authority figures. Yet these people are largely honest, forbearing, even hospitable. “Let’s have lunch!” says one hotel clerk as Raoul Duke absconds.
Threats are, indeed, made to Duke and the attorney, but only by innocents such as the carload of Oklahoma tourists who’ve had “Shoot! Scag! Blood! Heroin! Rape! Cheap! Communists!” screamed at them. And when we encounter actual “pigs”—as Duke calls law officers—they turn out to be, at worst, bemused. “What the hell’s goin’ on in this country?” a small-town Georgia DA quite reasonably asks when Duke and the attorney tell him narcotics addicts are everywhere, working in pairs and slitting people’s throats. And when Duke is apprehended drunk, stoned, and driving at 120 mph, the California highway patrolman is downright kind. And has a sense of humor: “I get the feeling you could use a nap.”
There is a terrific loneliness throughout the book. The protagonists are not friends. Duke shows occasional protective impulses toward the attorney. He forgoes an opportunity to electrocute him. The attorney threatens to carve a Z in Duke’s forehead. Duke locks the attorney in a bathroom. No explanation is given for these two being together. But neither mentions any other emotional bond. The only romance is when the attorney seduces a runaway who obsessively draws Barbra Streisand and has come to Las Vegas to present her portraits to the star. This, it hardly needs saying, comes to a sad end.
Duke and the attorney profess no moral, religious, or philosophical principles. The attorney makes no statement of conscience except to call Duke a “filthy bastard” for proposing to prostitute the Barbra Streisand artist. And Duke seems actively opposed to belief. He goes so far as to blame the failure of 1960s utopianism on “the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.” The only credo in Fear and Loathing is freedom in its most reductive and alienated sense, “a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country.”
Hunter gives us a harrowing portrayal of the human condition as absurd. This is anomie writ wide and deep. Compared to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Albert Camus’s L’Étranger is a lame jailhouse whine, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a puppet-theater skit about idleness and boredom. Thompson alone captures the—how else to put it?—fear and loathing that are at the root of the contemporary essence.
And he makes us laugh at it. This is something we’re unlikely to do during Waiting for Godot performances, even if we’re as high as Raoul Duke. Hunter takes the darkest questions of ontology, the grimmest epistemological queries, and just by posing them sends us doubled over in fits of risibility, our sides aching from armpit to pelvic girdle, the tops of our legs raw from knee-slapping, and beer spitting out of our noses.
Hunter performs this philosophical legerdemain by creating a pair of empty clowns who seem to have the brains of marmosets but who speak with the mouths of poets. They are utterly insensitive, lawless creatures who are nonetheless agonized by the dilemmas of being and nothingness. It’s as if two of the Three Stooges had discovered Søren Kierkegaard and William Butler Yeats.
Then Thompson fills his clowns with drugs. Drugs let us see things differently. Drugs give us new viewpoints. Drugs provide us with alternative perceptions, thousands of alternative perceptions, all of them wrong. Thus we see the futility of relying on the mind when facing the abyss. Contort the mind however we will, it cannot do the job. What’s more, drugs are all about the self. Thus we see the futility of ego. Drugs are potent agents of change, but they only change me. They have no effect on the outside world. So there everything is, just the way it’s always been, and I’m all changed—like somebody who shows up at a funeral dressed for an orgy. And Thompson fills his clowns with drugs so they can be clowns while also, presumably, being normal (well, more or less normal) men. If you want a truly frightening idea, consider Raoul Duke and the three-hundred-pound Samoan attorney doing all the things they do in Fear and Loathing sober.
Hunter Thompson takes two fools, incapacitates them, sends them on a farcical quest after a material manifestation of something—the American Dream—that has an immaterial existence, and sends them to look in the wrong place besides. After two-hundred-odd pages of perfect and lyrical writing about that “nothing much,” which twentieth-century hipsters insisted on thinking was the central fact of reality, the fools are back where they started.
Like all true comedy, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a cautionary tale. Live in a universe that stops at the end of your nose, and this is the life you will lead. Lead a life where you believe in nothing, and this is the universe you will live in.