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"We were somewhere near Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . .' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals!?' "

The above are the opening lines of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book that first appeared in Rolling Stone magazine as a serial. In a sense, the book represented the extremes of what was being called the New Journalism - so much so, that it can probably not be called "journalism" at all.

The narrator is Raul Duke, a character based on Hunter himself. Duke is sent to cover the Mint 500, a major event on the American racing calendars. Instead, Duke and his attorney spend all their time in Vegas in a vicious drug frenzy. They "burn the locals", run up huge room service bills, and attend a police conference on narcotics while seriously under the influence. Hunter writes, "Our journey is to be a gross physical salute to everything right and true in the national culture."

At one level, the book is wild, exciting and humorous, but beneath the surface, something more substantial is achieved. The book contains some real and relevant social commentary, as suggested by the book's subtitle, "A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream".

Mainly because of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter achieved a kind of rock star status, a rare thing for a journalist. In 1998 the book was filmed with Johnny Dep as Duke, and Benicio del Toro as his attorney. The director was Terry Gilliam from Monty Python and Brazil fame.

But let's retrace our steps. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was published in 1971, the New Journalism reaches a bit further back. And furthermore, Hunter's work represents a far flung rogue manifestation of the art. At its centre was Tom Wolfe.

Whereas Hunter represented an extreme in the new form, Wolfe was at the forefront of a more serious kind of New Journalism. Along with writers such as Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Richard Goldstein, Rex Reed and Norman Mailer, he formed a core of quality writers experimenting in the new form.

Exactly what the new form was, is not that easy to define. Perhaps the most forthcoming definition is that of Wolfe in his introduction to the book New Journalism: "Journalism employing the techniques and conventions of fiction." This implies the use of a scene structure, dialogue, the use of point of view and descriptions of all the physical details.

The New Journalism immediately had its critics. Firstly, people felt that journalists were "piking it", making up details, possibly even scenes. Whereas Hunter might at times have done this, writers like Wolfe claimed that they always did as much research as traditional reporters did - or more. The New Journalists still went out to do all the leg work, gathering details with the meticulous accuracy needed to allow them to write their stories in a fictional form.

Critics also complained, however, that the New Journalism was too subjective, sacrificing the traditional ideas of objectivity in journalism. According to journalistic conventions, journalists were not supposed to reveal themselves in their writing. They were supposed to represent whatever happened as objectively and impersonally as possible. This objection was especially relevant where New Journalists tried to represent the inner dialogue of a person in the story. There is, after all, limits to how accurately one can know someone else's thoughts.

In his book Between the Lines, however, Dan Wakefield argues a strong case against anonymous reporting. Wakefield points out that no kind of objectivity is ever really possible. Reporters are always observing events and interacting with sources from inside their own subjective consciences, and this inevitable subjectivity will affect whatever they write. Making the subjectivity explicit in the text, as the New Journalists did, might not have been such a bad idea at all.

One could say that we are always viewing events through the distorted lens of our own ideologies, beliefs, history and so on. Wakefield's argument is that, if journalists allow themselves into their writing, we can come to an understanding of the nature of the lens we are looking through, and accordingly make the necessary adjustments in our understanding.

In a story called "Presenting: The Richard Nixon Doll (Overhauled 1968 Model)", Hunter wrote, "Richard Nixon has never been one of my favourite people, anyway. For years I've regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a fowl caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humourless; I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic and couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine."

The story relates some of Hunter's experiences while covering the Nixon campaign for the magazine Pageant. The above quote makes his stance clear. We know who is talking, and we know that everything we read is coming to us through the particularly warped lens of Hunter S. Thompson. There is no naïve striving for objectivity here, and despite the harshness of the quote, the article is hugely insightful, and allows for an angle on Nixon not often reported before.

In typical New Journalist style, Hunter writes about a failed attempt to attend the shooting of a campaign commercial, about reading articles in the bar, about riding with Nixon to the airport, and about how he almost blew Nixon's aeroplane by smoking near the fuel tanks. All this, interlaced with observations on Nixon and his campaign, achieves a kind of vividness seldom found in more "objective" pieces.

From where, this New Journalism?

It is hard to say exactly what caused the development and sudden prominence of New Journalism. It could in one sense be understood as a product of a changing society. Whereas a "new" journalism had always been possible, it suddenly became viable, was done, and people liked it.

The twentieth century philosophical movement known as Phenomenology provides some interesting parallels. The founder of this school, Edmund Husserl, argued for a more primary understanding of the world than that given by science and empiricism. It was possible to look at a tree or a stream and not see it as simply a combination of molecules. Husserl argued that something is lost in this form of observation; that the tree or stream could also be experienced at a more fundamental level, simply as the phenomenon "tree" or "stream".

The shift from a traditional to a New Journalism was in many ways the same. If you have the facts, does that mean you "know" what happened? Particularly in the work of Wolfe, it became clear that a deeper and more thorough understanding of events could be achieved employing the techniques of fiction, than by using that of traditional journalism.

In "Mau-mauing the flak catchers", Wolfe reports a story that probably would not have made it into any newspaper. If it did, it would warrant a paragraph or two at the most, starting with something like, "A group of twenty men invaded the down town poverty office yesterday, demanding jobs." It would continue in such a way, simply giving the facts.

What Wolfe does, is quite different. He starts by describing the huge Samoans and Polynesians taking part in the protest. Then he takes us inside the room where they confront an official from the poverty office. Wolfe recognizes the man as a "Flak Catcher", someone to take the blame. As the Samoans stomp their feet and walking sticks, the Flak Catcher grows ever more nervous. Wolfe describes his facial expressions, he quotes the dialogue, and in a sense we are right there with them.

At the end of the confrontation, the protesters threaten to come back the next morning to see the flak catcher calling his boss. Of course they do not come. Wolfe allows us the insight that what the protest was really about, was scaring the Flak Catcher - about some kind of victory over bureaucracy. Thus in some sense we leave with a greater understanding of a social reality, instead of just skimming over a paragraph or two in the more traditional "factual" mode.

The New Journalism might also be seen as a rejection of "boring" old forms of journalism. In this regard, the New Journalism fits well in the context of the sixties. Despite the legacy of the McCarthy trials, the sixties was a time when there was a new willingness to challenge the established forms of authority. Wolfe described the sixties in terms of the, however inadequate, tags "'the generation gap', 'the counter culture', 'black consciousness', 'sexual permissiveness', 'the death of God', . . . the abandonment of properties, pieties, decorums denoted by 'go-go funds', 'fast money', 'swinger groovy hippie drop-out pop Beatles Andy Baby Jane Bernie Huey Eldridge LSD marathon encounter stone underground rip-off . . . ."

All this created an atmosphere more conducive to the New Journalism, and also provided much of its subject matter. In the introduction to The New Journalism, Wolfe writes, "When I reached new York in the early sixties, I couldn't believe the scene I saw before me. New York was pandemonium with a big grin on it. It was the wildest, looniest time since the twenties . . . And the amazing thing was, that as a writer I had it all to myself."

He argues that the novelists of his time were obsessed with writing about ideas, and that they shunned away from realism. Novelists were not willing to confront and write about the vibrant changing world of the sixties, and much less life in New York. Wolfe saw the New Journalism as reverting back to the realism of nineteenth century novelists like Dickens and Balzac. Of course the literary world of the sixties was not as dry and unrealistic as Wolfe would have us believe. Novels like Ken Keasey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Jack Kerowac's On the Road (1957), and the works of Sol Bellow testify to the contrary.

Nevertheless, Wolfe felt that most novelists were ignoring the real world, and this left the gap wide open for the New Journalists. Wolfe's own Electric Cool-aid Acid Test, Hunter's Hells Angels, Norman Maylor's Armies of the Night and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood were of the first books to successfully employ the new kind of literary journalism.

These books dealt with topics like the Hell's Angels, the drug-frenzied world of Ken Keasey and the Merry Pranksters, and - in Capote's case - with two drifters that murdered a whole family. These works were all based on real events, researched and presented in a literary form. In the light of these books, Wolfe's contention that the New Journalists were in some way usurping the role of the novelist, seems viable.

For the most part, however, the New Journalism is and was a magazine form. In this regard Wolfe traces its roots to what he terms "the feature game". He writes about his days in New York, working for the Herald Tribune. Except for the undying urge to get the scoop, to break the story, there was another competition happening. This contest was between the feature writers, and it was in this context that journalists like Gay Talese and Wolfe himself started experimenting in the new form.

An increased willingness by magazines like The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Scanlon's and Pageant to run stories in the new form, contributed to its success. Rolling Stone reportedly ran stories as long as fifteen thousand words at times. Allowances like these opened the door to more and more elaborate and in depth stories.

Thus it happened that in 1971 Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was published over a few issues in Rolling Stone. The work was highly subjective, narrated through a drug-warped lens, and took all that was New Journalism to its extreme. In essence, it was a phenomenological work.

So what makes it what it is

Wolfe outlines four basic fictional techniques appropriated by the New Journalism. They are: The use of a scene structure, the use of dialogue, the use of a point of view, and the reporting of details concerning behaviour and the environment.

An excellent example of the use of a scene structure is to be found in Hunter's "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved". The story tracks the experiences of Hunter and Ralph Steadman, his illustrator, as they attend the prestigious Kentucky Derby horse race.

There are scenes set in a diner, a club house, a press box, and outside on the embankment. All the time the narrative moves from scene to scene like a short story. From Hunter's arrival at the airport, everything builds up to the race with a kind of epic quality. Hunter and Steadman are throughout searching for a specific image, one that would encapsulate the drunken vileness of the derby crowd. Eventually, in an Oedipus moment, they realize that they have become what they were looking for. The final scene sees a drunken Hunter shoving Steadman out of the car in front of the airport terminal. The scene structure makes the story read like fiction.

An example of the effective use of dialogue can be found in Wolfe's "Mau-mauing the flak catchers", which we considered earlier. It provides an excellent example of how powerful dialogue can be in constructing a scene and drawing in the reader. The dialogue manages to make the intimidation, and the Flak Catcher's unease, much more vivid.

Consider the following: "'Man,' says the blood, 'if you don't know nothing and you can't do nothing and you can't say nothing, why don't you tell your boss what we want!'" Another protester then interjects, "'Dat's right, Brudda! Tell the man!'" The Flak Catcher replies that the boss is in Washington, and that they will have to wait for him to come back. They retort:
"'Send him a telegram, man!'
'Well, all right --'
'Shit, pick up the telephone, man!'
'That's right, Brudda! Pick up the telephone!'"

The use of dialogue can thus be used to evoke the actual events much more vividly than could be done in traditional journalistic forms.

The use of point of view, as opposed to supposed objectivity, is particularly prevalent in Wolfe's work. The point of view often shifts within his stories, sometimes even within paragraphs. In a piece called "Radical chic", he starts from the point of view of the famous conductor, Leonard Bernstein, as he wakes up in the middle of the night and has a fantasy, or a vision. He is in a concert hall, making an anti-war speech. A black man climbs out of the piano and starts telling him what the audience thinks, saying things like, "The audience is curiously embarrassed." Bernstein finds the vision disturbing, particularly the appearance of the black man. Do note that Wolfe got the information from a biographical work on Bernstein.

Then suddenly the scene switches to a party the Bernsteins are giving in support of the Black Panthers. The point of view is now that of Wolfe, a guest at the party. Toward the end of the evening, some speeches are made, and the piece ends with a black man by a piano. Of course the context has changed, but the strange resemblance to the fantasy is very like the twist one might find at the end of a short story. And, the shift in point of view was crucial in achieving that effect.

In the same piece Wolfe also uses extensive details from the surroundings to create atmosphere. In a sense the objects in the rooms, the clothes the people wear and the things they eat say a lot about them. It is much the same as when in a novel, the author describes, for instance, a person's room, thus indirectly describing the person.

At the Bernstein party the guests eat, 'Roqueford cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts", "asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs", and "meatballs petites au Coq Hardy". Other details include the "table's mirrored surface", Felicia Bernstein's "pale blonde hair" and her greeting the Panthers with a "bend of the wrist" and a "tilt of the head". Details like these colour in the story, making it all the more vivid and real. These are all things a journalist can observe. Wolfe is simply taking it a step further, and writing about it.

The impact

The impact of the New Journalism remains huge. Books and magazine articles are still constantly written in the style. By now, however, there is nothing "new" about the New Journalism. The controversy over, it is now just another way to write.

Many of the heights reached in the sixties has not been emulated. In a sense, the New Journalism peaked in the sixties. In a famous passage from Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter writes, "We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave . . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Maybe the New Journalism also reached its high water mark, and pulled back.