Wolfe EKAT (1)

[Terrance]

John Hellmann, Reporting the Fabulous: Representation
and Response in the Work of Tom Wolfe, in his Fables of
Fact:
The New Journalism As New Fiction, University of Illinois
Press,
1981, pp. 110-125.


Previous discussion of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test has
nearly
always focused upon Wolfe's unique style, or else has
treated the
book as a mere documentary account of Ken Kesey's artistic
experiment with life.... While using material drawn only
from
interviews, tapes, letters, and personal observation, Wolfe
consciously uses language to transform his facts into shapes
with a
fabulist resonance. More particularly, he uses allusions to
classic
American literature to suggest the larger patterns within
which he
perceives the factual narrative to be unfolding. Wolfe draws
upon
a number of classic American literary works in The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test, but he causes the reader to view its
climactic
events through the lenses of Poe's short story A Descent
into the
Maelstrom. The highly stylized and allusive structure of his
narrative draws attention to itself as a pattern; it
functions clearly
as a thematic overlay, the product of Wolfe's interpretive
consciousness standing outside of the factual events. The
power of
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test lies in this dynamic balance
between the fictive nature of its created form and the
factual
nature of its content. (p. 110)

Wolfe views Kesey as an embodiment of the American drive to
attain perfect freedom and oneness with experience, as well
as a
religious figure seeking to attain the oriental idea of
breaking
through the illusory barrier between the subjective and
objective.
The combination of these two drives, of course, is not new.
Through allusion Wolfe tells us that Kesey's transformation
of
Perry Lane is viewed by visitors as Walden Pond, only
without
any Thoreau misanthropes around. ... Wolfe thus suggests
that
Kesey's quest has direct precedent in that of the American
transcendentalists. His desire to eliminate all lags between
experience and sensory perception, so as to embrace all
experience
in an eternal Now in which the objective and subjective are
dissolved into one transcendent experience, as well as his
impatience with craft in art in favor of a principle of
organic form
..., echoes Emerson's desire to become a transparent
eyeball.
The crucial distinction is that Kesey seeks that state not
through
nature but through technology. That distinction is obvious
in his
later version of Walden at La Honda, where he has redwood
trees
outfitted with music speakers and spiderwebs sprayed with
Day-Glo paint.

The drug-induced concept of the sky as a hole reaching into
an
infinity of possible experience, combined with the postwar
American belief that technology can make any fantasy
possible,
leads Kesey to organize the Pranksters into painting a bus
in a lurid
mess of primary colors, flying American flags from the top,
equipping it with an audio-visual technology, and then
taking it on
a cross-country adventure. They transform the bus into an
embodiment of Kesey's desire to pursue the American Dream to
its furthest limits through the unashamed alteration of
nature....


Most of the first half of Test follows Kesey's attainment of
a
messiah-like status among the Pranksters as he teaches them
to
assert their private fantasies against the rigid reality of
the
dominant culture. Eventually he conceives of the Acid
Testsdances to be held in San Francisco and, later, Los
Angelesin order to bring the larger society into his vision
of a
transcendent life attained through LSD and technology.

Immediately before his narration of the first Acid Test
midway
through the narrative, Wolfe refers to one of the books the
Pranksters revered, saying that The Acid Tests turned out,
in
fact, to be an art form foreseen in that strange book,
Childhood's