George Will

[Terrance]

George Will?

Could you live forever....is there gas in the car....

This a good essay on Wolfe and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test

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
End, a form called `total identification'. ... This
reference is to
Arthur C. Clarke's science-fiction vision of an art form in
which all
senses would be stimulated to the point that a person could
mentally participate in any experience. Wolfe quotes from
Clarke's
description: And when the `program' was over, he would have
acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual
lifeindeed, indistinguishable from reality itself. ... Wolfe
follows
this quotation with an ominously intrusive comment, Too
freaking
true! ... Sarcastic use of the Pranksters' hip phrasing
indicates the
fatal error that he believes is behind the doom toward which
Kesey's quest is moving. For Wolfe, as for the dark romantic
authors of classic American literature, the inability to
distinguish
fact from fantasy in a reverie of transcendent experience is
a
profound error leading to dissolution of the self.

At this point in the narrative, as he is about to begin the
story of
the Acid Tests, Wolfe makes clear allusions which suggest
that the
reader should view these events in the framework of a
classic
work of American literature, one dealing with a true plunge
into a
vortex, Poe's Descent into the Maelstrom. It is not
surprising that
Wolfe, with his sociologist's belief in facts and analysis
as well as
his skepticism toward the viability of a purely subjective
reality,
should use a story by one of the great dark romantics as the
metaphorical framework for the climactic chapters of his
Kesey
narrative. Poe presents A Descent into the Maelstrom as an
oral
tale once told by a fisherman to the narrator, who now
presents it
to us in the fisherman's own words. As they stand at the
edge of a
cliff above a horrifying oceanic whirlpool, the maelstrom,
the
fisherman tells his tale of having been accidentally swept
into the
swirling vortex. (pp. 11113)

Wolfe introduces this motif in his description of the third
Acid
Test. As he describes approximately 300 heads gathered on
the
floor, well into LSD trips and about to experience the
Pranksters'
projection of The Movie and a psychedelic light show upon
the
walls, Wolfe sums up the moment with the allusive
exclamation,
Into the maelstrom! ... He describes the setting as a
chaotic
ocean of experience which the Pranksters have contrived
through
audio-visual technology.... Wolfe describes the experience
of a
man sucked into the developing maelstrom of the Acid Test:

into the whirlpool who should appear but Owsley.
Owsley, done up in his $600 head costume, has
emerged from his subterrain of espionage and paranoia
to come to see the Prankster experiment for himself,
and in the middle of the giddy contagion he takes LSD.
They never saw him take it before. He takes the LSD
and RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRROIL the
whirlpool picks him up and spins him down into the
stroboscopic stereoptic prankster panopticon in full
variable lag.... (p. 114)

The Acid Tests are the culmination of Kesey's attempt to
break
through to a total embrace of experience through technology
(both
the chemical LSD and the projected light show and electronic
music). But as he sees himself successfully projecting his
fantasy
experience to others, he is assuming the dangerous role of
seeing
his will as more powerful than actuality. Wolfe's perception
of the
satantic element of this role is apparent in the chapter
title,
Cosmo's Tasmanian Deviltry (a phrase he shows moving
through Kesey's thoughts as he controls the flashing
strobe-light at
the Acid Test), and in his emphasis upon Owsley's new view
of
Kesey as a demon. ... When Wolfe later recounts the Trips
Festival, which Kesey attends just before his flight to
Mexico, he
returns to the Poe allusion, describing Kesey with a
projection
machine on a balcony above the hall as up above the
maelstrom.
... At one point Kesey uses the projector to flash a message
in red
on the wall: Anybody who knows he is God go up on stage. ...
Kesey believes that he stands safely above the maelstrom, on
an
edge of perfect control. This edge, which is a metaphor
Kesey
often uses to describe the goal of the Pranksters' quest to
transcend the distinction between subjective and objective
reality,
is portrayed by Wolfe, as by Poe and Melville, as a
dangerous
position inducing a cosmic vertigo. He repeatedly emphasizes
Kesey's position as one high above the affairs of the world.
This
position provides him with the vantage point ... of an
overview of
experienceas well as with the illusion of being safely
distant from
its dangers. But that illusion inevitably leads to his
succumbing to
the danger of such a positiona fall into the whirlpool of
actual
experience below. While Kesey believes he is in control and
standing above the maelstrom, Wolfe shows that he is in fact
already caught in the whirlpool.... (pp. 11617)

Wolfe develops this pattern in a number of scenes in the
second
half of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The first portrays
Kesey's second arrest for possession of marijuana two nights
before the Trips Festival. This arrest occurs while Kesey
and
Mountain Girl are perched high above San Francisco on the
roof
of an apartment building. High both physically and mentally,
they
watch with blissful indifference as a police car pulls up
far
below.... For the reader who recalls the blinking red light
that
Kesey had felt he was praying to in his youth, the red light
which
symbolized Kesey's pursuit of technological fulfillment of
the
American Dream, Wolfe's description of Kesey watching the
police car's light repeatedly blinking red, nothing has
ominous
significance. And Wolfe's previous use of the whirlpool
image
lends an equally ominous significance to the feeling of
turning so
slow in the interferrometric synch. Indeed, Wolfe proceeds
to
show that the resulting arrest, which increases the
likelihood of a
lengthy prison sentence for Kesey, leads him after the Trips
Festival to descend geographically to the southwestern tip
of
Mexico, in a journey that is paralleled by a psychological
descent
into deeper fantasy.

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.