Posted on 02/22/2005 11:43:18 AM PST by CHARLITE
Hunter S. Thompson did not invent Gonzo Journalism—but in a line borrowed from David Mamet, he gave it a name. Truman Capote attempted, with “In Cold Blood,” to fuse the fictional with the factual. Thomas Wolfe is a pioneer of the “new journalism” of the sixties, the meshing of the personal with the public. In academia, Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicists solidified the idea that history could only be known fully by being reduced to the personal.
But Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream” (1971) sits as a kind of manifesto on the vanguard of the death of the mainstream media in a way that his suicide serves to punctuate. For the heart of Thompson’s narrative is the way in which subjective reality overwhelms any sense of so-called journalistic objectivity. Yes, Thompson’s rants in that book were apparently drug-fueled—but that only masks a deeper shift in culture that itself was larger than the person of Hunter S. Thompson. Perhaps those forces by which he found himself swept overcame him. Perhaps he simply lost hope in the dream that reality is merely a matter of self-determination; or perhaps he discovered that the life ruled by self-determination alone is not worth living. Perhaps, more fittingly, Hunter Thompson did things for reasons that have nothing to do with anything anyone could ever really understand. Whatever the reason, Hunter Thompson killed himself on Sunday night.
The story goes that Thompson happened upon what would become Gonzo Journalism while he was covering the Kentucky Derby in his hometown of Louisville. As the New York Times notes:
It was in the heat of deadline that gonzo journalism was born while he was writing a story about the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan's magazine, he recounted years later in an interview in Playboy magazine.
‘I'd blown my mind, couldn't work,’ he told Playboy. ‘So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody.’
Instead, he said, the story drew raves and he was inundated with letters and phone calls from people calling it ‘a breakthrough in journalism,’ an experience he likened to ‘falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids.’
In light of recent events, T.S. Eliot could not have put it better: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think they will sing to me.”
So, Hunter S. Thompson, in a fit of professional pique, rips random notes of his personal experience from his notebook and sends them to the printer and journalism itself seizes a new mode of expression, forever to be changed by the Romantic idea that the story is important according to the narrator’s participation in its events.
There should be no surprise, then, that Thompson committed suicide at just that moment that witnessed the eclipsing of the idea that the teller was more important than the told. Eliot’s contemporary, Yeats, asked whether we could tell the dancer from the dance. He did so in the perhaps even more romantic notion that there was something valuable and artistic in the fusion of the dancer with the dance—that such was art and that such art had some claim to truth. But the modern and post-modern reaction to the Romantic notion of the relationship between the dancer and the dance was to privilege the dancer. For the hoplessly Romantic (that is to say, the sentimental), it is the dancer that gives value to the dance—and reduces it to the danced.
But recently, Dan Rather illustrated the darker side of identifying the teller with the told. Of course, Rather attempted to defend the Presidential Texas National Guard fiasco by saying that the “substance” of the story was true, even if the “facts” did not support it. But Thompson never would have made such a claim. He would have said something like the experience of tracking down whatever the story was was the substance of the very story that nobody was looking for in the first place. That’s Gonzo Journalism and that was the essence of what Thompson did.
Which is to say that Thompson did not practice journalism. He practiced autobiography.
In any event—that autobiography has come to an end at just that moment when the mainstream media has begun to discover (but not quickly enough) that there is a place for autobiography in media as well as in journalism. It’s just that people appreciate knowing the difference.
Thompson never attempted to dupe his audience—even if the style he helped to invent was the result of entirely selfish motivations. What you got from “Gonzo” was “Gonzo” and he made no bones about it.
There is an irony that his last column consisted of a conversation he had with Bill Murray about “Shotgun Golf,” a new sport Thompson had invented that consisted of having someone drive golf balls on a range while a partner attempted to shoot them with a shotgun—like skeet shooting. In Thompson’s mind, they could set up “Shotgun Golf” ranges just like the driving ranges in Japan—in high rise set ups in which participants drive from a platform within a multi-story building while their partners try to shoot their balls out of the air from towers that stretch fifteen or twenty stories into the sky. He called Bill Murray at 3:30 in the morning to discuss it with him.
But the column wasn’t really about “Shotgun Golf.” It was about being able to call Bill Murray at 3:30 in the morning for no good reason and have him pick up the phone.
And that was the problem.
It seems to me that the whole point of Gonzo Journalism was to make a statement about how the individual gets swallowed up by the machine of politics, society, and culture—to the extent that we lose that vital connection between the individual’s experience and the meaning of the wider world “out there.”
In the end, Hunter Thompson was making a living being paid by “the man” to imitate his rejection of the very world that in the end gave him a career.
Perhaps he became a contradiction to himself.
I won’t attempt to explain him—Mr. Thompson would not appreciate that and it would be false for an observer to do so.
God rest him, though.
About the Writer: Gregory Borse is assistant professor of English at Ivy Tech State College in Wabash, Indiana. Dr. Borse, a family man with "a beautiful wife and four beautiful children," enjoys writing, current events, media, politics, and disc golf. Gregory receives e-mail at
PJ's great, I'll be really interested in seeing what PJ has to say about all this. I always considered the primary difference between the two being that PJ actually sobered up long enough to realize he wasn't liberal (and to not let the drugs fry his abilities).
HST was not worthy to shine PJ O'Rourke's shoes.
They were friends. HST made Werner create the National Affairs desk at Rolling Stone which PJ took over (and for years provided the only thing in RS worth reading).
Tech school degree, probably.
Just a personal aside. Hunter Thompson came to our school to give a speech in the middle 1970s. What I remember most was the fact that he came and sat down with us to have some whiskey shots; he passed up the bong hits. (Yeah, it was the 70s.) I also remember him speaking with a deep irreverence for the ideas and posturing which are now called "liberal" and "progressive." Sadly, the dope and liquor clouded the details of the talk; I regret those choices made in my youth, but Thompson, in his own strange way, put me on the path toward thinking for myself.
and from what I have read...I'm glad I will. :)
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