Wolfe EKAT (3)

[Terrance]

Wolfe uses this dual descent as the structural and thematic
principle of The Fugitive chapter. Drawing on interviews
with
Kesey as well as on the extensive letters, notes, and tapes
Kesey
made at the time, Wolfe portrays Kesey's growing paranoia
through a stream-of-consciousness interior monologue as he
sits in
a rented room on the west coast of Mexico, convinced that
FBI
agents are about to enter. Wolfe alternates this descent
into
unreality with an account of Kesey's journey through the
Mexican
desert into this spot in the jungle, describing it as a
movement into
total nothing, like the lines of perspective in a surrealist
painting.
...

The effect of Wolfe's alternating narrative is to unite the
physical
and fantasy flights in a single escape from actuality,
culminating in
Kesey's paranoid leap over the back wall into the unreal
picturebook jungles of Mexico ... as he imagines that the
FBI
agents are coming up the stairs. The person who actually
enters is
only a Prankster, but Kesey spends hours hiding in the
jungle,
alternately consumed by paranoia and by megalomania, first
surrounding himself with DDT to ward off the jungle insects
and
then exerting his will to draw them into his power. In
either case,
he has descended into a world of fantasy that seems
increasingly
unrelated to the facts of his situation. (pp. 11718)

Wolfe shows Kesey in Mexico continuing to alternate between
paranoia and megalomania, with the latter gradually coming
to
dominate his fantasies as he begins to conceive of himself
as a
secret agent who will defiantly reenter America.... As Wolfe
narrates it, Kesey succeeds in a Hollywood-movie escape from
the
Mexican police, again crossing the border in outlandish
disguise.
But these fabulous adventures only increase his fantasy
life. (p.
119)

Wolfe eventually brings this game into proper perspective by
juxtaposing Kesey's fantasy version of the grand finale with
the
actual arrest. Kesey envisions a masked Test in which he
will
appear in a Super-Hero costume and deliver his vision of the
future. ... Wolfe immediately follows Kesey's fantasy of
ascension (which recalls his desire to go through the hole
of infinite
experience he saw in the sky) with the factual arrest....
Trapped on
the highway by the FBI as he rides with a fellow Prankster,
Kesey
runs down an embankment which leads to a drain. Viewing the
scene through the witnessing Prankster's eyes, Wolfe
emphasizes a
detail of the setting which is resonant with irony.... The O
pattern
formed by the circling birds suggests the whirlpool motif,
an ironic
image of the big hole in the sky that Kesey had initially
perceived
as a route to infinite experience and through which he has
just
fantasized his ascension. It seems now to represent the
nothingness
to which his quest has led him as he descends into the
drain, a
vortex of modern America's waste.

Wolfe's description of this descent effectively combines
both the
fantasy and actuality of the experience, while also
investing it with
the symbolic impact of the maelstrom motif.... In this drain
Kesey
finds the end of his quest to go ever Further, finds the
last
blasted edge. With the confusing merger of words in the
stream-of-consciousness description, Wolfe suggests that
Kesey
himself has become nothing.... Kesey has symbolically met
the
annihilation that Poe's fisherman glimpsed but pulled back
from in
horror. In the ensuing chapters Wolfe shows that Kesey is
unable
to control or even direct the fantasy he started, the new
Haight-Ashbury drug culture. (pp. 11921)

Unlike conventional journalists, Wolfe shows himself as a
fallible
person who is nevertheless willing to learn. He gradually
abandons
his preconceived story and devotes his full time to not only
observing but also experiencing the subject.... [His]
account of
Kesey's quest is as intellectually outside as it is
experientially inside
the protagonist's fantasy; it both reports and shapes. The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test has validity precisely because
it
refuses to settle for either the unselective subjectivity of
Kesey's
movie or the rigid objectivity of the mass media's clichés.
By
combining exhaustive research with an experimental
willingness to
use and violate the formal conventions of journalism and of
the
novel, Wolfe creates a work which recounts factual events
while
conveying the subjective realities of his characters. And
from his
use of unusual punctuation to his allusions to Poe's A
Descent
into the Maelstrom, Wolfe insistently brings his subject
within his
personal vision, frankly interpreting extreme experience for
his
reader. Far from being the realist he calls himself, Wolfe
is an
assertively self-reflexive experimentalist who, through
pattern and
style, transforms as he reports, responds as he represents.
(pp. 124
25)


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.