Defining “Gonzo” Literary Criticism
Hunter S. Thompson’s elevation of his “outlaw journalism” into the ranks of literature is readily characterized by the publication and critical reception of his masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories. Fiction and Fact were combined to create considerable speculation that could, in all reality, become a reality in the novel. Thompson’s use of irony at unforeseen levels propelled him into a celebrity and made him “the father of gonzo.”
In his next book, and third, to be published, Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, realized that the mythology surrounding his unique, “gonzo” style was starting to grow even larger than his outrageous personality, Thompson disseminates for the reader what it takes for a text to be considered “gonzo.” By appropriating this definition and replying to these ideas from the world of “gonzo journalism” in literature criticism, “gonzo criticism” begins to be defined. Not all these Thompson-defined characteristics are translatable to literary criticism, and determinant factors were chosen with an atavistic homage to gonzo journalism. I compiled my complete list (see ATT.001), drank rum, and attempted to see which of these “gonzo” characteristics would particularly apply to my new literary criticism model.
The following are those gonzo traits used to define gonzo literary criticism:
Sarcasm. A defining characteristic of Thompson’s narratives, gonzo literary criticism’s use of this voice is paramount to a gonzo read of a test, “Well… as much as I hate to get away from objective journalism” (Thompson Gonzo 217). Thompson’s narrative subjectivity defines gonzo journalism. The gonzo critic embraces this voice and uses exaggeration and “selective grotesquery” (219). While voiced in sarcasm, the gonzo critic’s description of a text uses a lexicon based on hyperbole that may sometimes be grotesque or pornographic.
The gonzo critical read must be spontaneous: “The original idea had been to lash together a one-shot coalition and demoralize the local money/politics establishment by winning a major election before the enemy knew what was happening” (166). Thompson’s use of recording equipment and submitting their verbatim transcripts as stories was infamous (Gilmore 45). In the quoted text from Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, Hunter expands the spontaneity of Gonzo into the realm of politics as he describes his run for Aspen’s sheriff.
“All is written in hindsight and at the same time as if it were happening right then and there, “any re-writing now would cheat the basic concept of the book […] was to lash the whole thing together and essentially record the reality of an incredibly volatile presidential campaign while it was happening: from the eye in the eye of the hurricane, as it were, and there is no way to do that without rejecting the luxury of hindsight” (Thompson Gonzo 196).
This definition trait of gonzo criticism refers to the critic’s familiarity with a text. While the gonzo critic may have a pre-existing relationship with a text, its critical reading foregoes this.
The gonzo literary critic does not expect or even want people to take him seriously. In what could be argued as an unconscious homage to Barthes, the gonzo critic celebrates the unreliable narrator and critic. “Anybody who has spent time around late-night motel bars with the press corps on a presidential campaign knows better than to take their talk seriously […],
but after reading reviews of my book on the ‘72 campaign, it occurs some people will believe almost anything that fits their preconceived notions,” (Thompson Gonzo 255).
Tangents in a gonzo text are more than likely indicative of Thompson’s drug use, “Ah… mother of jabbering god, how in hell did I get off on that tangent about teenage street crime? This is supposed to be a deep and serious political essay about Richard Nixon” (327). These tangents are more Freudian to the gonzo critic and could reveal greater truth about the text or the critic.
Tantamount to a gonzo critical read of a text, the critic must be involved in the action at hand. Like Thompson, the journalist, the gonzo critic must thrust themselves into a text. “A journalist dealing with heads is caught in a strange dilemma. The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without firsthand experience is a fool and a fraud” (393).
The reader’s perception is the key to a gonzo reading of a text. Just as the writer’s relationship with the subject is essential in Gonzo, the reader’s relationship with the text will be essential to the Gonzo approach. Everything personal about the reader will go into their interpretation of the work. If a reader has had a personal experience that is mirrored or mimicked in the text, the reader will draw on that experience to interpret the text.
The gonzo critic will make themselves a character in the text. In a second-person narrative, they will become the main characters and have a personal relationship with the text, the other characters, and the author. The gonzo critic will know the author’s bio and use that about themselves. This effort also helps to define the critical reading as Gonzo (see bullet four).
The gonzo critic will think about how they would react to situations in the text and react to the text simultaneously. This precept finds its roots in Thompson’s early years as a sports journalist (Gilmore 44). It is a very familiar thesis that the task of criticism is not to bring out the work’s relationships with the author, not to reconstruct through the text a thought or experience, but rather to analyze the work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal relationships (Foucault 891). The task of a gonzo read would be to bring out the work’s relationship with the reader and with the reader’s relationship with the author, the environment in which it is being read, and the environment in which it was written.
Foucault again provides a thesis from which the gonzo method gains motivation:
Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual that we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice. All these operations vary according to periods and types of discourse (895)
These operations only vary according to the gonzo critic, further celebrating their gonzo nature. The gonzo reader essentially becomes the author. The author would no longer be an individual with power, therefore increasing the responsibility of the gonzo critic by making them play an active role in creating the rules based on their own experience that the work must follow.
Foucault, again, provides the lengthy, literary leash for the gonzo critic to run through a test on:
Modern literary criticism, even when—as is now customary—it is not concerned with the questions of authentication, still defines the author the same way; the author provides the basis for explaining not only the presence of certain events in a text but also their transformations, distortions, and diverse modifications (through his biography, the determination of his perspective, the analysis of his social position, and the revelation of his basic design) (Foucault 895).
In gonzo criticism, the reader provides the basis for explanation through their history and the author’s biographical information and transforms the original text.
Doing this means overturning the traditional problems of literary criticism (authorial intent, consciousness credibility, et al.). It no longer raises the question, “How can it activate the rules of a language from within and thus give rise to the designs that are properly its own?” Instead, the gonzo reading remains Foucault-derivative and raises the questions: “How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules?” (899). The gonzo reader becomes the subject.
The French literary critic says, “The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning” (899). The gonzo reader appropriates this idea and, by doing so, insinuates the reader as that principle.
Thompson’s affinity for technology was fueled by his spontaneity and the need for immediacy in recalling events. He utilized recording equipment, fax machines, and electric typewriters in an era when most journalists still relied on shorthand (Gilmore 46). Given the spontaneity of the criticism and level of critical involvement with the text, it is only appropriate for a Gonzo critical read to use the most utile technology available to encourage the gonzo relationship with the text. The Digital Age affords the gonzo critic that encouragement.
The latest editions of Microsoft’s Word provide an editing function that allows the reader to interact with, comment on, and even alter the original text while still leaving the original text approachable by the reader of the gonzo criticism. In a penultimate defining gesture, the gonzo criticism can be read in concurrence with the original text.
Selecting the Text of the Initial, Gonzo Critical Read
Thompson’s piece “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” was selected mainly for the irony of performing a gonzo read on an original gonzo text. As an author of this initial Gonzo read, my familiarity with the author of the text and the text affords me the level of comfort with the aforementioned traits that require both that of gonzo criticism. Probably one of the most subjective and self-realized texts of Hunter’s career, “The Kentucky Derby’s” selection as a text for a model of gonzo criticism seemed painfully apropos.
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