One of my goals for the coming year is to get back into the swing of academic writing by submitting some conference proposals. I've had a few ideas forming over the last few days and I'd like to take the time over my next couple blogs to explain the gist if my ideas and what I see to be their larger significance.
The first one I am going to attempt is one I attended in 2010: the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery. In 2010, I presented a talk on the western frontier in 20th century American literature by exemplifying Kerouac.
Next year's conference theme is "The Outsider." It calls for papers that explore characters in books, film, television shows, and the media who stand outside of the norm or are counter to the popular standard. The call for papers asks us to consider why these figures are often intriguing and enduring. No surprise here: Hunter Thompson came to mind.
An outsider is someone who doesn't buy into the dreams of the average. And this person, because he doesn't share their dreams, often to some extent frightens the average. He wants, openly wants, all the things the rest of us spend our time and energy sublimating, convincing ourselves is wrong to want. The outsider threatens the average's sense of security because it he can fall, if he can so easily give into his deviant desires, his deviant lifestyle, so can you.
Many of us do not feel the need or desire to examine our inner animals. And often what the outsider dares to do is not only explicate that animal, but show just how monstrous it can be. This is certainly the case with Thompson's penchant for exploring the extremes of alcoholism and drunk use: how insane, and at times inhuman his characters could be while under the influence. For a culture that see alcohol and the occasional drug intake as par for the course, yet not to be abused, such a presentation was particularly hard to take from a man who, despite his insights, proclaimed, "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity, but they've always worked for me." That's too much for the average American; just give us what's accepted and what we need to condemn. It wasn't until Johnny Depp more blatantly illustrated some of the humor for mainstream audiences that the book saw any kind of non-cult status popularity. By the way "cult" is the term we used before we had hipsters.
But, back to the original point here: Thompson's main issue with the average is that he doesn't want the same things and that is clear in his literature and in the foul dust that clearly sat upon his soul: he saw the game that so many of us play, he saw the rat race for what it is and that made him quite critical. Fear and Loathing criticizes what it meant to be an American in the 1970s and nobody wants to be criticized to such an extreme. His only audience: the few holdouts of hippiedom. And even they were likely none too thrilled with his bleak depiction of the failure that was the counterculture movement. And the average thought, if they thought about him at all, "this guy's crazy" for not sharing the desire to just get through this thing without making a ruckus and as unscathed as possible. Give us the picket fences and the security systems and the frozen dinners and we will leave well enough alone. If we are safe, we won't rattle any cages, at least not significantly.
And I get this desire. I too want my safe apartment and my crockpot and my comfy sofa.
But that's not all I want.
But my fear is not that I won't get those things or that wanting something else will take me away from them. My fear is that wanting those things could take me away from my real desires: to really experience this life, to see the world outside of a packaged vacation plan, to sacrifice benefits for fulfillment, to get scratched up.
And so for me, Thompson is not a person to be feared and his manner of living, completely on the outskirts of society, is not a method to be feared. His writing is something that should be used to remind us all to do crazy things every once in awhile and to always question, not to ignore that creepy feeling you get in your gut sometimes; according to Thompson, chances are it correlates to some hideous societal ritual in which you've take part unthinkingly.
We don't have to be as crazy as Thompson, but we don't have to shun him or laugh off every relevant thing he ever said (and man there were plenty) just to reconcile his existence with our very different ones.
I'm sure these initial thoughts are a bit rudimentary, but I'll be working on them!
-Leena
http://chass.colostate-pueblo.edu/SISSI/Documents/Call-2013.pdf
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