Wolfe's book is not a novel. It does record something that seemed hugely significant to a generation or two, but not really to my own.
Wolfe's early entrance onto then still building "new journalism" (which Hunter S. Thompson really wanted to be recognized for, but instead became a priest of the baccanal) chronicles his participation in the Ken Kesey Merry Prankster outsider chic, that was all of everything to be back in the mid sixties.
One can see it emerging, and partly responsible for the lauding of such average book like "Catcher in the Rye". The United States had emerged from isolation, or the story goes, and in doing so the public began to get a sense that what had formerly been much more of an open society of unlimited growth not only had its victims, but also that it was beginning to close.
I am arguing it is now closed: the Capitalists, having won that last barrier of opposition, have now Capitalized totally...hence we see the rich getting vastly richer, and no one else.
The chic of the outside was very popular among young people starting back in the fifties. It might not have been so relevant or so well depicted apart from the Modern Library, but in the Fifties, outsiders had become such a lucrative pose, that many actors were able to make themselves into icons.
So, the Merry Pranksters emerged from a collective surge of Outsider-ism...a social or popular convention that comes and goes, but emerged from the Modern to be a major theme of Post War America.
Being outside was "in" during my formative years in High School in the early 80's, but the supporting consumption of media had been going on for quite some time, and I believe it carried on even into the 1990's.
Its not mainstream now. Perhaps because all those who may have been consumers of the drama or trauma of alienation are medicated.
But back then Kesey had become part of the pantheon of acceptable representative of the Zeitgeist, of which I think Kerouac was the precurser (and better writer).
Those actors who seemed to be embodying it, like Steve McQueen and Humphrey Bogart and James Dean, probably themselves rejected any sense of that.
Kesey was not really a novelist. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" I had read (an then again) after seeing the movie, which to my teen eyes was quite emotional and profound.
One could get the sense of how significant a movie or Meme was, in how long it was advertised in the Entertainment section of the Newspaper. "One Flew..." the movie, was in the paper and in the theaters for over a year.
There is this turn in Western Media toward trauma over drama, wherein, "Drama" seemed to be kitchen sink protestations of people losing their individuality in more or less grungy circumstances, wherein, the "Trauma" genre represents individuals being so victimized it precluded any sense of wanting to belong to the outsider status.
Tom Wolfe's got on the bus, and became a part of Kesey's or the Pranksters movie. His narrative is probably more durable than Kesey's novel, a huge bestseller then, and perhaps the best narrative of what it was to be a "Hippy". Although, that is not how they see, it is probably how we will see it in the future, given the Musical "Hair" having too mawkish sentimentality to be considered Historically relevant.
It is a trip, and in it Wolfe takes acid and tries to describe the feeling, which he does so very objectively, and with the same sense of proportion (very difficult to actually get) that Pirsig has for "his" mental breakdown.
"One Flew..." of course tapped into the estrangement then going on with this closure of the blind faith in the possibility of an American Government not becoming so large as to resemble all those other "bad governments" nearly occupying all of History.
What had happened was the American Government had become top heavy, and totalitarian, as in the triumphant warrior class presented its picture of what it was to be an American, to a generation that was all to aware of the Totalitarian tendencies of a world divided between Good and Evil.
Largely, the heroes of the counter culture were from the previous Generation, termed the "Silent Generation", which seemed apt then to the loud and more numerous and unlettered "Baby Boom".
Much of what was being promulgated was the "white bread" culture of Coastal elites who wanted to keep the status quo just as it was beginning to coalesce around the Military Industrial complex.
This material culture, the officially approved stamp of culture, was what gave "Catcher in the Rye" its limited resonance.
This cultural counter-cultural dynamic was largely for the greater population looking for meaning, and not the political generation that found much more meaning in the emergence and cultivation of Civil Rights. That political generation was a fragment of an overall population whose alienation and disenfranchisement or outside status, concerned their deep individuality.
These search included, especially from the West coast, a tolerant attitude toward learning the thinking and values of outsider religions, which we see Kerouac also engaged in, even as a serious Catholic before Vatican 2.
Wolfe's chronicle of a Kesey's baby boomer update of "On The Road" was far more a spectacle of deranging freedom and inter personal exploration that was needed over Kerouac's more individualized road trip. There were so many individuated people who were not actually individuated, they were just grappling, safely, with the idea of this counter culture. Kesey tried to mock what had become a dividing line of Salingerian "phonies", but these were just ordinary people who had neither the powerful insight possessed by the disenchanted Silent Generation and Baby Boomer of writers, nor did they have the courage.
So Kesey now comes off as an asshole who sought to humiliate those who couldn't quite "get it". This exclusion and superiority of consciousness...the superiority of the "New Consciousness" became a real line of judgment in American Society.
There was a sense of how weak or strong one needed to be to belong to this group, and while Wolfe touches on this, its not on the radar so much as to capture the moment, in literature, of a phenomenon that is distinctly American and has substantial originality.
The book probably works so well as it is full of traumas of disconnection, and that "freedom of the road" now undestood as self-indulgence resulting in a useless increase in the carbon footprint.
The book also served to list the "New Gods" of this counter culture, this revolution in consciousness, that really had more to do with the original idea of looking for values outside the Media's more deeply disturbing Cold War narrative. More to do with Alan Watts and Kerouac than LSD and taking a long bus trip with a former cultural icon (Wolfe...if I remember correctly, touched on some of the staleness the hyperbole of the emergence, then termed the Beats).
The narrative makes a case for an alternative belonging that was now coming available.
This alternative belonging had been touched upon by Hesse in Demian, but represented a real alternative in terms of counter cultural icons who "made it", and could live off the grid of the uber Cold War narrative.
This eventually turned into Hippies starting communes, rejecting urbanity, and then from that emerged the culture of Whole Earth News.
This all vanished in my generation, in the early eighties. Well, it dropped off from marketability, even as the people who were in being bullied and mocked by those who were out then getting fed up.
My generation were children when this counter-culture, and its mockery and bullying of haircuts and dress, became part of the attitude of cool adopted by rich and popular people with a little bit of reading. That is, the counter culture of the late Baby Boom felt like they missed it (Fear and Loathing is the novel that grasped this..) and hence there was a sense of hysteria in trying to belong to not belonging, and brute politics of the schoolyard, between those teenage ideologues and we kids in Elementary and Middle School.
In other words, its curve had descended and those who emulated seemed like distant members of a sect.
Well, Electric Kool-Aid is a good description of Kesey's narcissism turned into a media cause celebre'. "One Flew..." was a cultural icon between the Beats and Hippies, and it captured the fear of the Totalitarian state, which was more a potential in everyone psyche. They, and perhaps Kesey self-consciously, sensed that they were their own enemies (as everyone who is pursuing identity politics can sense its tendency toward Totalitarianism).
"You know, be like me because I am not one of them."
Them being the fools.
What perhaps is lost, even in the wiki article I read, is that Tom Wolfe's interest lay in debunking wrong headed thinking. The wiki article states this: "Wolfe's book exposed counterculture norms that would soon spread across the country."Well, it had already spread, and Kesey was just exploiting it. Wolfe was also aware, and noted, how a charismatic leader can lead people into a cul-de-sac or limited "re-evaluation of values".
Wolfe's book is singularly, the best narrative but if that is all one sought then the Musical Hair suffices.
No, the whole counter-cultural movement has many insights and concerns, again, mainly those being the adoption of Eastern thinking. This is the most profound but it requires study and scholarship, and as the other Pope of the New Journalism made clear, and as Wolfe it can be inferred, makes a clear example without making too strong a statement, the "Acid Test" Kesey sought as a catechism for the religion of the New Counter Cultural America, was largely false. Because, it can be clearly stated now, its just artificially induced disturbance of brain chemistry experienced by White Christian Americans...who otherwise have no terms on which to describe the experience of altered brain chemistry other than subsequently wanting to belong.
Tom Wolfe journalism is affected by this need to belong as well, but Wolfe is a Journalist at heart and could not completely attach himself to any one movement or group or Saint, in America.
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