The Truth in Fiction: Analyzing Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo Journalism

In 1981, American business journalist and author Joseph Nocera wrote a scathing critique for The Washington Post of Hunter S. Thompson.

‘Thompson has given New Journalism a bad name,’ he declared, ‘instead of being exhilarated by (New Journalism’s) freedom, he was corrupted by it. Instead of using it in the search for truth, he used it for trivial self-promotion.’
This demonstrates a larger debate around the distinction between Fiction and Non-Fiction, and a larger animosity from certain critics towards the techniques pioneered by Thompson and the highly creative New Journalism generation.

But what is this ‘truth’ Nocera references? And why is Thompson so far away from his standard?

The ‘New Journalism’

The New Journalism, pioneered in the 1960s by the likes of Gay Talese, Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe, offered, in Wolfe’s words, a ‘full objective description, plus something that readers had always had to go to novels and short stories for… the subjective or emotional life of the characters.’

This was achieved through immediate, ‘gripping’ techniques previously associated with the realistic novel, including scene-by-scene construction and realistic dialogue, approaching, in Wolfe’s estimation, some sense of people’s status life.

In other words, the New Journalists characterized their subjects, and inferred their place in society; their hopes, dreams, desires and behaviours, making them three-dimensional. The journalist became immersed like the forebears of the realistic novel, in a sense of the lives of people, beyond empirical fact. Thompson takes this a step further by making himself a part of the story via a highly subjective first-person narrative (‘pure gonzo’). A step which proved, for the likes of Nocera, a step too far.

Fear and Loathing chronicles Thompson and his attorney's journey barrelling through Las Vegas in a drug-fuelled frenzy, looking, as he continually reiterates, ‘for the American Dream.’ Nocera’s problem begins with Thompson’s scattered, stream-of-consciousness narrative, which he sees purely a vehicle for Thompson's writing ‘persona’ onto which he can project a compelling, but flawed, vision of the world; a lazy shorthand ‘college students are particularly susceptible to.’ For Nocera, Thompson’s characterisation of self detracts from the purported journalistic ‘search for truth.’   

Ken Hogarty argues that the New Journalism arose from the failure of traditional, ‘empirical’ journalism’s desired elimination of the personal voice in the pursuit of an impossible standard of objectivity. He noted that, if nothing else, a journalist’s world view, language, and personal history unavoidably coloured what they determined newsworthy. Indeed John Hersey, an early practitioner of New Journalism, drew his own line in this territory, famously taking against Wolfe, Capote and Norman Mailer on the grounds that they were purely inventing as opposed to reporting to the degree that any semblance of 'journalism' was impossible. 
However in his most popular work, Hiroshima, Hersey borrowed his structure from the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey to link together the stories of six people who survived the atomic bomb. Though he remains relatively affectless in narration, the decision to focus on these six individual stories (and craft a narrative around them) arguably amounts to just as flagrant an invention (or construction) as Thompson's stream-of-consciousness, or Wolfe's imagined monologues.

To Hersey’s chagrin, it was Wolfe who most flagrantly abused this sensibility, often writing from the immersed perspectives of those he interviewed; perspectives which were impossible to successfully verify in any tradtional journalistic fashion. 
For Hersey, Thompson’s subjective first-person narrative, awash with author’s statements, perspectives, opinions, characterizations and interpretations, existed far outside the boundaries of traditional, disciplined non-fiction reportage. But is he right? Is this a fair comparison?

I argue that Thompson’s statements do tell us something factual, societal, political and, in other words, journalistic.
And the best way for me to present this argument is to define what we really mean when we use words such as ‘Truth.’


Early on in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson writes: ‘Vegas is the meanest town on Earth,’ (not a verifiable or empirical statement) followed by: ‘Until about a year ago, there was a giant billboard on the outskirts of Las Vegas, saying: DON’T GAMBLE WITH MARIJUANA! IN NEVADA: POSSESSION – 20 YEARS SALE – LIFE.’

These two lines actually give us quite a lot to go on in our analysis, because, if one is so-minded to see, they actually illustrate the two polarities in the classical dual concept of language (stay with me here)!



In Logical Positivism, language can be divided into that of either the emotive, or the symbolic. Symbolic language is the statement or recording of thoughts, the rational, whereas emotive language is the expression of feelings, the poetic (or aesthetic). In this dichotomy, language is symbolic only if it presents information which is empirically verifiable; whereas the emotive is for contemplation. For a Logical Positivist (A.J. Ayer for example), emotive language does not (can not) constitute a truth claim or convey meaningingful information about the world. It is neither true or false, it simply conveys preference.
By this logic, Thompson’s statements in Fear and Loathing… are merely emotional, and, though they may have aesthetic value, do not constitute a reasonable ‘Truth Claim,’ and, therefore, do not belong in the category of Journalism.
However, American Philosopher, Morris Weitz criticized this Positivist aesthetic by arguing that it’s not that authors don’t make truth claims, though much of their language is emotive, but that they make different kinds of truth claims to traditional journalists.
Weitz suggests an understanding of ‘depth meaning:’ those meanings which, psychologically, are suggested by the aesthetic surface meanings of a work.
For Weitz, ‘it is here that the emotive meanings of art become symbolic and where one is to look for the truth claims of literature.’
What Weitz takes umbrage with in Positivism is the notion that ‘meaning’ is reserved only for tautologous statements of pure fact, where, to him, ‘depth meanings,’ or ‘second-order meanings,’ have significant potencies (often moreso) too. 

For example, in the excerpt from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the ‘depth meaning’ of Thompson's statements about Las Vegas can be interpreted as a reflection of his own position. Thompson is, by his own account, ‘another ugly refugee from the Love Generation’ in a world gradually becoming more conservative (‘mean,’ in his words). This evocation of a world where ‘Joe Fraiser, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand – at least not out loud,’ is a deep‘second-order’ truth suggested by the surface, emotive language, which may well be un-empirical, but which presents itself for contemplation. 
On the semantics of verification, one might echo Weitz’s sentiment: ‘to refute the thesis that truth is successful verification would necessitate a discussion as long as the whole of this paper. Anyway, it’s not particularly relevant to our thesis since, even if truth were successful verification, the second-order meanings of art can be, in many cases, successfully verified.’ 
Through discussing Positivism, we can argue that ‘second-order’ meanings in a narrative may possess truth, but does using them in Non-Fiction undercut the facade of factual narrative? 
Does Thompson’s invocation of a ‘truth’ centred on his subjective perceptions intrude on (or perhaps infect) his supposed 'reporting' of the outside world? Hersey may well have argued that these second-order meanings amount to fictional invention. But this is the central problem of objectivity; a world conceived in and of itself might simply be impossible.

Nocera’s key issue with Thompson's writing is his ‘catering’ to prejudices of the counterculture of the day, propounding ‘intellectually fashionable’ stereotypes. 

Nocera homes in on a moment in the second half of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where an argumentative cop is characterized as a ‘noisy little asshole,' with the narrative rambling: ‘I had been there with these fuzzy little shitheads… mean-tempered rule-crazy cops.’ To this, Nocera writes: ‘Thompson always liked to claim that what he was really after was the “truth.” These, then, are his truths. You have to be a member of the Weather Underground to believe they contain any lasting insight.’

And Thompson’s statement is certainly subjective, but I think Nocera misses the key insight which makes such prose compelling. 
To demonstrate this, permit me to reference the work of Brett Lott, and his discussion of Non-Fiction, and also that of Ynhui Park, and his concept of a ‘linguistic convention’ in Fiction.

Now, we must clarify our epistemology! 
Park summarises his position well, and it is a compelling one: ‘there is no world tout court, no knowledge tout court. The world is made by the act of knowing it, and knowledge is constructed by a conceptual system. Since there are various ways of devising a conceptual system, and since knowledge is relevant to a conceptual system there are many forms of knowledge.’ 
Whichever way we explain/ think about (or narrate) the ‘unwashed mass of facts’ that constitutes our lives, it is only one of many, and it could never be any more or less than this. 

This is how Hersey’s lauded style, minimal though it may be, still amounts to bias in the construction and privileging of certain narratives in works like Hiroshima. 
We can extrapolate from this that ‘art,’ or ‘fiction,’ is just another one of the many possible symbol-systems constituting perspective, but one largely based in emotion and contemplation over cognition. 
For Park, the surface meanings of fiction are governed by a ‘linguistic convention’ which says: ‘the words and sentences in a linguistic product should not be taken as referring to any real things.’ Although novels, particularly realistic ones, may refer to things that are real (Park uses the example of Madame Bovary’s provincial northern France), ‘the convention says that the language in a fiction means what it means without its real referent.’ 
In other words: the ‘second-order meanings’ are its function and its cognitive surface meanings are either incidental, or serve the second-order meaning. 

Non-Fiction, on the other hand, is governed by the convention that its language is related to a real referent. So Thompson’s real referent then, via Nocera’s argument, one would assume to be the crudely caricatured police officer, and, thus, would violate this distinction by mixing the subjective and the objective. 
Well, not quite. And the reason, I believe, is that the real referent in this sequence is not the police officer, but, in actuality, Thompson himself.

Brett Lott introduces the idea of ‘the self as continent,' and us as its 'first explorer.’ For Lott, the ‘creative’ part of ‘creative non-fiction’ starts with you (or: the ‘self’ which Hersey and Nocera are nervous of). He explains: ‘without you and who you are, a piece of writing is simply nonfiction: a police report.' 
As we have covered, subjectivity is inevitable when we choose to narrativize something, instead of a ‘police report'-style listing of information. 
For Lott: ‘when I begin to incorporate the sad and glorious fact that the way I see (the world) shapes and forms what it is to be seen, I end up with creative nonfiction.’ Without this realization, Non-Fiction is merely a kind of notation. 
Hersey’s poise of ‘objectivity’ arguably still amounts to a narrative decision in its desire to remain affectless (‘quietly recitative’), and, perhaps, it is only due to the solemn subject matter of Hiroshima that this happens to also be the appropriate creative choice. It does, however, remain another kind of affectation nonetheless. 

What Nocera appears to miss in his original criticism of Thompson is that the example of characterizing the cop is not without context. Thompson’s subject is himself: an ‘over-thirty drug dilettante’ in 1971, three years after Nixon’s election, and a year before his re-election. 
Fear and Loathing remains ‘non-fiction’ because, though it holds the second-order, 'emotive' meaning of a lamentation (‘’Consciousness Expansion’ went out with LBJ… and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon’), conveyed through the aesthetics of Thompson’s drug-fuelled trip to Vegas, the ‘real referent’ is the verifiable, authentic figure of Thompson himself (not, it should be noted, this side character of the policeman) and his experience of said trip. Thompson discovers the ‘continent’ of himself (to use Lott's terminology) to be a creature of melancholy, caught in the socio-cultural morass of his ‘proper end to the sixties.’

My contention is that, as soon as Non-Fiction becomes Creative, it may well no longer be related exclusively to the cognitive sphere of communication, and bends more towards the emotive or poetic, but that doesn’t disqualify its claim to the cognitive (or, in journalistic terms, ‘truthful’).

To the question of falsity (‘in my attempt to put order to my days, am I deluding myself, inflicting an order that was and is nowhere to be seen?’), we can only respond with further introspection.

Our inability to find a true narrative means that we can only approach the self (and the world) with a rigorous and ruthless questioning. We must find order in chaos, resisting the temptation to create it, and the decision of where to draw the line can only fall based on the depth of our own introspection.

In this way, the task of writing non-fiction is tantamount to our very being.

As in Creative Non-Fiction, we are all fallibly, but necessarily, working towards an understanding of what it is that has happened, and an attempt to see order, however chaotic it may be. I think that Nocera’s criticism, and those broader criticisms leveled at the New Journalism, are at best reactionary, and at worst degenerative.

In the end, the only sense of truth we can ever hope to find is, and will always be, our own.

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