A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East: Neo-Colonialism and Self-Fashioning in Hunter S. Thompson’s The Curse of Lono

Abstract

This essay departs from the critical consensus on The Curse of Lono (1983) to argue that it forms an important part of Hunter S. Thompson’s oeuvre and shows significant developments from his celebrated 1970s work. The novel functions politically as a critique of late twentieth-century US neo-colonialism and thus anticipates the current globalization debate, at the same time as wrestling with the connected problem of its author’s acknowledged status as a celebrity or branded American product. The Curse of Lono’s complex structure of interwoven extracts from Thompson’s research sources, as well as Ralph Steadman’s drawings, reduces the importance of the central subjective voice that Thompson had employed since his 1970s books, enabling the novel to comment ironically on the notorious Gonzo persona in which, thanks to the very success of his earlier work, Thompson had become trapped, and on which he still depended commercially (I refer here to Michel Foucault’s concept of the author-function). The Curse of Lono mocks its Gonzo protagonist as both a tourist and a buffoon: it comments on the subjectivism of Gonzo ironically, pushing celebrity to its ludicrous limit by making the protagonist divine. At the same time, the novel demonstrates how authorship can emerge from the historical forces that fashion culture, such as globalization In order to unpack the satirical content of The Curse of Lono in the detail it deserves, this essay adopts a position broadly aligned with the Marxist stance on globalization that sees it as a term masking Western imperialism and the needs of finance capital: I refer here to the work of David Held, Anthony McGrew, Peter Cox, James Annesley and others.