































29Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

δι
αν

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PHENOMENOLOGICAL REPRODUCTION
in Thompson and Mailer's New Journalism

BRENDAN CHAMBERS

“The truth is no more nor no less than what one feels at each instant in the perpetual 
climax of the present.” – Norman Mailer, “The White Negro”

In his classic essay, “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of 
Organizing Experience,” David Eason sought to distance interpretations of New 

Journalism from what he saw as the facile, superficial description of its resemblance 
to novelistic writing, and to create a more complex conception of the relationship 
between style, culture, and consciousness. He argued that the widespread view of 
New Journalism as literary journalism (particularly as propounded by Tom Wolfe) 
“abstracts the reports from their cultural contexts [… giving] only passing attention to 
the experiential contradictions represented in many of the reports.”1 Within his own 
formulation, Eason proposed instead that we think of two countervailing subdivisions 
within this body of work, each reflecting a different approach to conceptualizing the 
relationship of reporter to the cultural fragmentation of the 1960’s and 1970’s. In 
so doing, Eason established categories that influence critical discussion to this day.2 

Eason called the first of these approaches “ethnographic realism.”3 This mode aims 
to enter a group and “constitute the subculture as an object of display,” from whence 
“the reporter and reader, whose values are assumed and not explored, are conjoined 

1 Eason, David L. “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience” in Critical 
Studies in Mass Communication (1984), 52.

2 For instance, Robert Alexander’s analysis of Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ role in the history of 
narrative journalism, or Norman K. Denzin’s work describing performance ethnography.

3 Eason, “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” 51.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

in the act of observing,” work “to reinvent textually the consensus which cultural 
fragmentation had called into question.”4 This approach, exemplified by the work of 
Tom Wolfe, effectively places the reporter and his reader outside of a given event (or 
cultural moment, as Eason was more wont to describe it), and in the passive role of 
bystander, observing without participating. By unifying them in this role, the text 
positions both reader and reporter within a shared culture and value system, often 
appropriating obsolete codes of understanding to do so. Scenes and subcultures are 
made accessible to the reader only by depicting him in relation to the (assumed) shared 
dominant cultural framework. Positioned in that way, the journalist then penetrates 
the world of the Other, affording the reader with a passage into its hidden reality. In 
Eason’s view, ethnographic realism, at its core, largely sought to assuage the fears of 
mainstream audiences about the fracturing of society by comparing what appeared to 
be new and frightening cultural changes to supposedly similar movements of the past: 
in Wolfe’s case, for instance, linking the worryingly impenetrable symbolic world of 
Ken Kesey’s ‘Merry Pranksters’ to the base human religious impulse. To Eason, this 
explanatory role also disguised an unequal power dynamic between reporter and 
reader. Though they are unified in the assumed shared cultural understanding, writer 
and reader are often simultaneously placed on uneven ground, with the reporter in a 
paternal role, guiding the reader from ignorance to understanding.5

Eason terms his second variant of New Journalism—the one that will interest me 
in the following pages— “cultural phenomenology.” This approach takes in some 
ways an entirely opposite angle in addressing cultural fragmentation. It not only 
acknowledges, but also embraces the mindset that “there is no consensus about a 
frame of reference to explain ‘what it all means.’”6 It equivocates on calling any one 
experience “reality,” instead sitting with the “experiential contradictions represented in 
many of the reports.”7 Finally, it joins together reporter and reader in the co-creation 
of a reality, engaging in a “multi-level interrogation, including that between writer 
and reader.”8 In contrast to ethnographic realism, this collaborative construction by 
reader and author puts both on a more equal footing, reflecting the cultural values 
of the time period that produced it. While ethnographic realism can exist at any 
time, cultural phenomenology is representative of a specific cultural moment; it is a 
manifestation and product of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, a time when “the doctrine 
of representation had crumpled [and] the center which separated image and reality 
were not holding.”9 Each approach reflects a methodology of understanding, a means 
to the end of reckoning with an unrecognizable world.

4 Ibid., 52.
5 Ibid., 54.
6 Ibid., 52.
7 Ibid., 52.
8 Ibid., 52.
9 Ibid., 51.



31Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Phenomenological Reproduction

As Eason suggests, the divergent means of “coming to terms with disorder” in 
the rapidly changing media world are reflected in the meta-analyses that crop up 
in each style.10 As Mas’ud Zavarzadeh explains in his Mythopoeic Reality, given the 
expansion and diversification of mainstream news media in the 1960s, readers grew 
to be wary of any text that sought to totalize experience, which presented a singular, 
universal understanding of events, as both traditional literature and reportage had. 
In Zavarzadeh’s telling, they began to eschew anything that presented a single, solid 
“harmonizing principle behind manifold reality.”11 Instead, readers often sought 
what New Journalism offers: a self-conscious, self-aware approach to representation, 
which recognizes the limitations of individual experience and makes explicit 
reference to them, so as to most accurately present information to the reader. More 
traditional forms of ethnographic realism attempted to keep pace with these changes, 
though it often left little room for the reader to decide whether the journalist’s 
representation was accurate, taking that truth-claim as a given. Ethnographic realism 
often creates the illusion that the processes of its creation could produce nothing 
other than an objective representation of reality, despite the sculpting necessarily 
done by matters of selection, point of view, and so on. I see Eason’s conception of 
cultural phenomenology as the opposing approach, calling attention to the inherent 
limitations of its form and method. It is not only cognizant of these limitations, but 
it also makes use of them in order to investigate, in conjunction with the reader, the 
possibilities available to construct a world “rooted in the interaction of ‘images of 
reality’ and ‘the reality of images.’”12 

If asked to distill the distinction between the two styles to a single phrase, I nominate 
authorial self-reflexivity. Cultural phenomenology recognizes the existence and 
effects of this liminal image-world13 on writing itself and any attempts, therefore, to 
represent such a world. By taking stock of the contemporary cultural moment, and 
the effects of the proliferation and dissemination of media, writers using a cultural-
phenomenological approach are careful to track the effects that the image-world have 
on their own actions and the events that they attempt to report. This reciprocity 
within Eason’s second model—which is quite similar, as he acknowledges, to what 
Zavarzadeh terms a “testimonial” approach to nonfiction novel writing—even shapes 
the decisions of the journalist as he is writing.14 If, for example, Norman Mailer 
changes his behavior to conform to, or to challenge, the constructed media image of 
Norman Mailer, then that image influences his account of “the real.” In this way, the 
author serves as a vehicle to represent our new lives simultaneously in the world, and 

10 Ibid., 54.
11 Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud. The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel. (University of Illinois Press, 

1976)
12 Eason ““The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” 55.
13 For the purposes of this paper, the image-world is “a realm which blurs the distinctions between fantasy and 

reality,” one which challenges the traditional dichotomy of image and real, instead imagining “a world in which 
image and reality are ecologically intertwined” (Eason 54, 53).  In practice, this is the conception of reality, 
formed through the consumption of media and experience, which exists in the collective consciousness of society. 

14 Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel, 128.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

outside of it, in the image-world. The distinction between the two—to this historical 
point well-established—has, in response to reality’s conceptual fragmentation, 
become blurred. Understandings of reality influence understandings of the self; thus, 
the self must now be understood to be similarly fractured, or lost in the liminal space 
that our “technotronic society” has opened between the image and the real.15  

I will now examine how Eason’s phenomenological method and Zevarzadeh’s 
testimonial approach16  are manifested in the works of Hunter S. Thompson and 
Norman Mailer. I will examine how Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and 
Mailer’s Armies of the Night conform to—and/or complicate—the categories that 
Eason postulates. I am interested in the reciprocal manipulation of artistic practice 
and public image in both writers, as well as the relation of that manipulation to 
each authors’ claims regarding epistemological authority. Additionally, I will explore 
both authors’ use of writing as a reconstitution of self, using the lens of Eason’s 
conception of cultural fragmentation as a point of departure. This question is critical 
to reckoning with the full scope of their works, as the centrality of self is an inherent 
characteristic of subjective reportage.

Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas embodies Eason’s description 
of cultural phenomenology as a “symbolic quest for significance in a fragmenting 
society.”17 Las Vegas’s image-world increasingly fractures the supposed object of his 
quest—an “American Dream” now irreparably divided into bike racers at the Mint 
400, the police at the National Conference of District Attorneys, or the various 
outcasts and addicts who populate the city’s casinos and fringe—making the search 
for concrete, universal truth increasingly more suspect and improbable. The actual 
quest thus becomes Thompson’s own struggle—and, at times, a fruitless quest—to 
establish new avenues for epistemological authority by constantly shifting stylistic 
modes and journalistic strategies. Thompson’s “savage dream” both exposes and 
displays the inconsistencies inherent in his own storytelling so as to construct more 
truthfully a new, fragile and even “failed” reality with his reader.18   

It is impossible to say definitively whether Thompson intended the process for this 
work as a rhetorical strategy, that is to say, understood the impossibility of finding a 
universal framework through which to unify his subjects. But what is certain—or, at 
least, what most critics believe19—is that Thompson embraces this disunity, working 
to document “what it feels like to live in a world in which there is no consensus about 

15 Zavarzadeh, 1.
16 The testimonial nonfiction novel, as Zavarzadeh terms it, “assumes that the only authority on appearance 

and existence is the witness himself.”  In other words, that the author’s epistemological authority derives from 
presence at an event, and that the only information that can be conveyed with absolute authority is that which 
was registered by “one’s participating senses” (128). 

17 Eason, “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” 52.
18 In his “Jacket Copy to Fear and Loathing to Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream,” 

Thompson describes the work as a “failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism.”
19 See, for instance, Hollowell, John. Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel. (University of 

North Carolina Press, 1977), 11.



33Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Phenomenological Reproduction

a frame of reference to explain ‘what it all means.’”20;21 Because of this, he makes forays 
into a variety of avenues for authority, seeking a method of communication that can 
convey experience. Thus on a diegetic and conceptual level, Fear and Loathing in Las 
Vegas serves simultaneously as a representation of the new “supramodern” world and 
as a documentation of Thompson’s attempts at recording it.22 

Thompson’s ultimate task, of course, is to establish the disunity of American society 
in the ’60s and ’70s and to articulate the absence of a unifying cultural framework 
(represented in FLLV by the American Dream). After eating at Terry’s Taco Stand, 
near the end of their ostensible quest, Duke and Gonzo reach what is left of the 
club they think is called the American Dream, finding only “a huge slab of cracked, 
scorched concrete in a vacant lot full of weeds,” and are informed that “the place had 
‘burned down about three years ago,’” leaving little interpretation necessary for the 
reader.23 It is not by accident that Thompson chose Las Vegas as the backdrop for 
this tale of fragmentation. The city is the preeminent example of what Eason calls 
“the marketing of worlds of experience,” and, therefore, is the ideal place to bring 
into question “the relativity of all worlds, including one’s own.”24 Las Vegas is also a 
perfect example of the bidirectional influence of the image-world, where “image and 
reality are ecologically intertwined.”25 Full of neon lights, unsavory spectacles, and 
uninhibited hedonism, Las Vegas is the “vortex” of the American Dream, a grotesque 
paradise and a world of its own.26 These excesses of Las Vegas of course influence its 
image, but to the same degree the collective perception of the city as a haven for vice 
and excess forces it to cater to this conception, the reality thus changing to conform 
to the image.

The same transformative process occurs through Thompson’s strategy of internalizing 
the image-world into a distorted caricature of his own identity. Raoul Duke is 
famously a rum-guzzling, drug-frenzied maniac: the “Gonzo” journalist.  Even 
Thompson’s so-called “biographies” document a self that has morphed into that 
Gonzo identity, as Thompson and his constructed image became inseparable.27 

20 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was originally serialized in two parts in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971 and 1972.  
As Thompson describes it, he intended to travel to Las Vegas and cover the Mint 400, “to buy a fat notebook and 
record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication—without editing.”  Instead, 
he laid the foundation for the work during “about 36 straight hours in [his] room at the Mint Hotel…writing 
feverishly in a notebook about a nasty situation that I thought I might not get away from” which was then 
compiled over the next six months at the behest of his editor, and put into print later that year.

21 Eason, “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” 52.
22 Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel, 1.
23 Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream. 

(Random House, 1998), 168.
24 Eason, “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” 51.
25 Ibid., 53.
26 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream, 47
27 The biography written by E. Jean Carroll, for example, opens with a schedule of Thompson’s daily drug use, 

beginning:
3:00 p.m. rise
3:05 Chivas Regal with the morning papers, Dunhills
3:45 cocaine



34

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

This image is constructed to a strategic end, however. By suffusing his writing with 
alternating mania and introspection, Thompson places himself in the tradition of 
the blind prophet, a strategy that stretches back to Tiresias, one who ostensibly 
cannot see, but who, in fact, “sees” better than most. Visionary hallucinations afford 
the opportunity to place the symbolic in the real without straying too far into the 
realm of the fictional: a hotel lounge full of humanoid lizards cannibalizing one 
another stand as a report of Thompson’s true lived experience, while simultaneously 
representing an allegorical understanding of Las Vegas’ patrons.  

In Thompson’s visionary brand of New Journalism, therefore, individual experience 
remains the highest source of epistemological authority, even as its hallucinatory style 
testifies to the author’s refusal to attempt a supposedly “objective” representation of 
reality. He eschews presenting a “harmonizing principle behind manifold reality,” 
instead working constantly to remind the reader of the constructedness of the very 
identity that bears witness to a surreal narrative.28 Throughout Fear and Loathing, for 
example, Thompson inserts small tags that allude to his process of creating the story, 
but they are themselves documents of immersion, chaos, haste and disorder: they are 
the notes from which he constructs his account, scribbled on “a pocketful of keno cards 
and cocktail napkins,” or on the handful of ink splotches splattered throughout the 
text, as if the pages the reader holds were torn straight from Thompson’s handwritten 
journal.29 Likewise, he includes qualifiers such as “As I recall” and “Memories of this 
night are extremely hazy,” so as to be candid with readers about his state of perception 
in a way that both qualifies and authenticates his report.30   

Perhaps the most revealing moment is the one in which Fear and Loathing claims 
to offer the rendering of an event from Thompson’s own notebook, sans edits; the 
section entitled “Breakdown on Paradise Boulevard” is presented as simply the 
transcript of the conversation between Duke and Gonzo.  The editor’s note, which 
heads the section, states:

At this point in the chronology, Dr. Duke appears to have broken down 
completely; the original manuscript is so splintered that we were forced to 
seek out the original tape recording and transcribe it verbatim.  We made 
no attempt to edit the section, and Dr. Duke refused even to read it […] In 

3:50 another glass of Chivas, Dunhill
4:05 first cup of coffee, Dunhill
4:15 cocaine
4:16 orange juice, Dunhill
4:30 cocaine
4:54 cocaine
5:05 cocaine

28 Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: the Postwar American Nonfiction Novel, 8.
29 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream, 41.
30 Thompson, 37, 41.



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Phenomenological Reproduction

the interests of journalistic purity, we are publishing the following section 
just as it came off the tape.31 

In this section, we might say, Thompson operates somewhere between Zavarzadeh’s 
testimonial and notational modes, complicating their distinction in his process of 
searching for avenues to authority. While the testimonial mode, Zavarzedeh writes, 
derives epistemological authority from presence during an event, the notational 
mode typically does so through the direct, unedited nature of the work, where the 
author serves only to record the event verbatim for the reader and to reproduce it 
exactly. Thompson intended Fear and Loathing to toe the line between the two. He 
sees “the eye & mind of the journalist […] functioning as a camera,” and wants 
the material to be unedited once recorded, but also recognizes that “the writing 
would be selective & necessarily interpretive,” since it is filtered through the lens 
of the author’s experience.32 The above section exemplifies Thompson’s operation in 
this liminal space: it is supposedly a direct recording of the events as they occurred, 
transcribed from “the original tape recording,” but given that it exists in a work that 
makes editorial decisions in other sections means, by necessity, that its inclusion is 
an editorial decision. In this way, Thompson operates in both modes simultaneously, 
notationally including verbatim recordings while testimonially shaping the narrative 
through decisions that most accurately represent his subjective experience. Though 
Thompson writes off this moment by judging the work “a victim of its own 
conceptual schizophrenia,” he tempers his own dismissal with a coda, claiming it as 
“a first, gimped effort in a direction that Tom Wolfe calls ‘The New Journalism’ has 
been flirting with for almost a decade.”33 

Perhaps most importantly, these moments of narrative discontinuity—from reminders 
of narrative construction to sudden style changes—execute a sort of Brechtian 
fourth-wall break, bringing readers out of an essentially immersive narrative and 
forcing them to evaluate their active participation in a more distanced, critical way. 
Through this, such readers are inoculated against taking the work as representative 
of the world, but rather shown that it is a world in a multitude of worlds. In Eason’s 
formulation, Thompson invites the reader to engage in a “multi-layered interrogation 
of communication […] between the writer and the reader, as a way of constructing 
reality.”34 Readers are empowered to reconstitute their own understanding of the 
reality presented to them—given the ostensibly unqualified facts of the experience 
and its conveyance—and thereby accept or reject its truth. 

Norman Mailer was as, if not more, aware than Thompson of the image-world, and has 
worked to complicate, engage, and interrogate traditional modes of representation. 
The first page of Armies of the Night opens with a selection from Time portraying 

31 Ibid., 120.
32 Ibid., 120.
33 Thompson, Hunter S. The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time. (Picador, 2012), 123, 122.
34 Eason, “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” 52.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

him as an uncontrolled drunk, “slurping liquor from a coffee mug” and expounding 
upon the lack of bathroom facilities in the theater where he is speaking.35 But just 
as for Thompson, Mailer’s constructed image is part contrivance in the moment (a 
construct next to the liberal but respectable Robert Lowell) and partly the result 
of a retrospective literary self-fashioning, as John Hollowell sees it, into “a kind of 
psychic president, a moral leader” for the contemporary cultural moment.36 He is 
“semi-distinguished and semi-notorious,” “the modern everyday fellow,” and “the 
wild man.”37 By crafting a complex, dipolar, and at times paradoxical self-caricature, 
he can implicitly criticize the media processes that would claim singular objective 
construction of his image while only selectively including observations from the 
event.  

In Armies of the Night, Mailer operates in two distinct modes: Novelist and Historian. 
As Novelist, Mailer performs two roles. First, the Novelist documents reality as it 
happened to him; he is, in Mailer’s words, the “narrative vehicle for the March 
on the Pentagon.”38 However, this experiential record is not entirely forthright or 
trustworthy. Of course, it includes retrospective revisions, as memory, especially since 
one apparently so often drunk as Mailer cannot be trusted to be entirely faithful 
to original perception. This leads to the second role of the Novelist, which is to 
construct as truthful an image of Mailer as possible, by which the reader can correct 
the effects of his biases on the narrative. In this way, the image of the Novelist is a 
tool, an “instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of 
light” that his construction of Mailer has produced.39 Having established this critical 
lens, as Historian, Mailer seeks to accurately “elucidate the mysterious character of 
that quintessentially American event,” the March on the Pentagon.40 In this way, 
Armies of the Night serves both as an implicit treatise on behalf of the New Journalism 
and as an explicit criticism of the old, demonstrating Mailer’s belief that reporting 
“intensity and wholeness of perceptions more closely approaches the truth, or the 
most important truth, of the thing perceived than objective reporting.”41 

By choosing an event whose literal occurrence maps onto his view of the Vietnam 
War, Mailer creates, as John Hollowell describes it in his Fact and Fiction, an 
“impressionistic history as seen through the lens of participant-observer.”42 Mailer 
presents the two sides of the literal-figurative war through a series of representative 
images, relying on connotative understandings to bolster his depictions: “healthy 
Marines, state troopers, professional athletes, movie stars, rednecks, sensuous life-

35 Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History. (Plume, 2017), 3.
36 Hollowell, Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel, 39.
37 Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, 13, 15.
38 Ibid., 54.
39 Ibid., 216.
40 Ibid.
41 Begiebing, Robert J. Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer. (University of 

Missouri Press, 1980), 135.
42 Hollowell, Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel, 90.



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Phenomenological Reproduction

loving Mafia, cops [etc.] Arrayed against…the Freud-ridden embers of Marxism, 
good old American anxiety strata—the urban middle class with their proliferated 
monumental adenoidal resentments.”43 Rather than maintaining a strict focus on the 
events that he is reporting on, Mailer often chooses instead to move into exegetical 
commentary. In this way, like Thompson, he complicates Zavarzadeh’s categories of 
‘nonfiction novel,’ using them as shifting modes of representation. Though Mailer 
seems to operate in the testimonial mode, absorbing and regurgitating events 
as “witness-participant-narrator,” just so often, he shifts to “a private interpretive 
scheme to reorder the seemingly random incidents into […] ‘a significant form.’” 
This is more in line with Zavarzadeh’s exegetical mode44, as, for instance, when Mailer 
moves from a debate with Lowell and Macdonald about the relative merits of being 
arrested, to an encompassing diatribe on the history of ideological changes of the Left 
over the course of a paragraph.45 In the testimonial mode, he operates as Novelist: a 
vehicle for experience. In the exegetical mode, he is Historian, providing interpretive 
commentary tempered by the reader’s use of his constructed image.

Diversions characterize Mailer’s work; he is even willing to concede the inaccuracy of 
his perceptions, recording his experience with inconsistencies included. At the height 
of the March’s frenzy, for example, Mailer notes that despite the literal erroneousness 
of his perception, he experienced a “superimposition of vision,” seeing real men fleeing 
and carrying an N.L.F. flag chased by phantom MP’s and policemen.46 Though he 
experienced that vision, he also acknowledges that his perception ran contrary to 
what other participants reported. In this way, he implicitly acknowledges Eason’s 
premise that phenomenological works are a representation of a world among worlds, 
each bearing the weight of epistemological authority over itself, but no other.47

Perhaps the most distinctive element of Mailer’s craft is the voice through which he 
expresses his ideas. In Armies, he creates the feel of a novel by having an unnamed 
narrator describe the events that occur to Mailer (of course, the author) as character. 
In this way, Mailer is able to split his presence and voice, paradoxically laying claim 
to both omniscience and subjectivity. Mailer the writer is omniscient because of his 
unfettered access to the thoughts and motivations of Mailer the character. However, 
he also simultaneously claims epistemological authority through documentation of 
his subjective experience of the event. Clearly, this technique seems to transcend 
both Eason’s categories as well as Zavarzadeh’s. Though Eason asserts that Mailer is 
operating in the phenomenological mode, third person narration typically creates a 
voice that mediates experience between recorder and consumer, and thus falls more 
neatly under the umbrella of ethnographic realism. Mailer wants his narrator to be 
“an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan,” and indeed often 

43 Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, 34.
44 Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: the Postwar American Nonfiction Novel, 129, 93.
45 Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, 85.
46 Ibid., 127.
47 Eason, “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” 51.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

maintains a strong commitment to unfiltered communication of the experience. 
In other moments, however, he does interpretive work for his readers, presenting 
them with a rather clean, uncomplicated understanding of events’ relationship and 
meaning.48 In this way, Mailer actually sits in a more intermediate space between 
phenomenology and ethnography, as well as between testimony and exegesis, since he 
is both the active communicator of participatory experience and passive commenter 
on the significance of events. Mailer in fact comments on this tension explicitly, 
explaining that the central figure of his story must, by necessity, be ambiguous, 
“to recapture the precise feel of the ambiguity of the event and its monumental 
disproportions.”49 

A telling example of Mailer’s complication of traditional media’s objectivity in Armies 
is his account of the evening at the Ambassador Theater. Whereas Time portrays 
Mailer “stumbling” about the auditorium, incoherently spewing a “scatological solo,” 
the novel delves into Mailer’s reactions to his audience, and the power struggles 
between the authors on the stage, which would have been invisible to anyone not 
participating in them. By placing his retrospective account in conversation with 
Time, a proxy for supposedly trustworthy news coverage, Mailer positions himself 
as the epistemological authority on this event. From the opening pages of the work, 
Mailer is playing with twin conceptions of “time,” both in its manifestation as 
representative of traditional news media as a whole, and in its distorting effects of 
retrospection on storytelling. The novel is framed as an attempt to supersede both 
of these impediments to understanding, working to “leave Time in order to find 
out what happened.”50 With his intimate knowledge of what occurred, and, more 
importantly, his very dispensing with a claim to objectivity, he invites readers to place 
their trust in the authority of his experience, placing (as Mailer writes) “adjectives” 
and especially “adverbs” (that is, qualifications of perception) beyond the authority 
of traditional reporting.51 

Collaterally, he is then well-positioned to expound his own views. Unlike Thompson, 
for whom creation of image is not the stated aim, but a byproduct of his writing, 
Mailer presents himself as setting out with the explicit intention of recreating himself 
in the image-world in the first half of the work, so as to provide the reader with a 
metric against which they can measure his report in the second half. Through what he 
alerts readers to—“our intimacy with the master builder” of the narrative itself—the 
reader can account for whatever limits they perceive in Mailer’s own ability to report 
accurately.52 During the early stages of the March, for example, Lowell and Mailer 
arrive to the sound of music, which the author initially notes “was being played by the 
Fugs,” but which Mailer quickly qualifies (being “scrupulously phenomenological”). 

48 Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, 53.
49 Ibid., 53.
50 Ibid., 4.
51 Ibid., 282.
52 Ibid., 218.



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Phenomenological Reproduction

As per usual, Mailer places himself in the third person: “Mailer heard the music 
first, then noticed the musicians and their costumes, then recognized […] it was the 
Fugs.”53 By comically highlighting the issue of phenomenology, Mailer demonstrates 
an awareness of the audience’s concerns, and preempts their questions before they 
even have them.

Thompson and Mailer thus adopt somewhat divergent strategies. By grounding 
himself in the first-person, Thompson plays on the epistemological authority 
of experience to give weight to his account; he then crafts his argument through 
the symbolic representations that largely appear through hallucination. Mailer, 
on the other hand, constructs his argument through a multifaceted approach to 
documentation, which addresses the weaknesses of both subjective and objective 
reporting so as to craft the truest retelling possible. “The History as Novel” contains 
both the strengths and weaknesses of subjectivity, strong in its documentation of the 
“history of himself ”—the story of an individual experience—and yet, it is weak in 
its necessarily limited scope.54 “The Novel as History” is in turn the embodiment of 
objectivity, with strength in its far-reaching account of events, and weakness in its 
necessarily biased universalization. As Begeibing comments in his Acts of Regeneration, 
Mailer responds to traditional objective journalism by “fusing the personal truths 
of the experience with the events themselves” and sits with the understanding that 
“neither kind of truth is exclusive to either book.”55 By operating in both modes, 
Mailer is able to account for the flaws of both the Novelist and the Historian, using 
the strengths of each to balance out the weaknesses of the Other. 

The central event in Armies of the Night, the March on the Pentagon, exemplifies 
Mailer’s skill at hewing metaphorical meaning from literal events. He considers the 
purpose of the March itself “to wound [the Pentagon] symbolically,” extending the 
ideas that he had developed as far back as “The White Negro.”56 In that essay, he 
suggested that hipsters, who (as he saw it) in Armies make up the shock troops of 
the March, seek to live not within the world, but outside of it, in a life and reality 
of their own creation. They interact with the world through energy and vibrations, 
where every interaction ends in either an increase or decrease in the energy that one 
possesses, and thus one’s ability to perceive the world. Mailer sketches the mindset of 
the marchers in the same terms, as they seek not military victory, but instead “new 
kinds of victories [that] increase one’s power for new kinds of perception.”57 Through 
this language of perception and energy, Mailer is able to construct a retelling of the 
event, which operates simultaneously on the literal and figurative level. He re-forms 
the march into symbolic civil war while simultaneously portraying the reality of what 
occurred.

53 Ibid., 119.
54 Ibid., 215.
55 Begeibing, Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer, 141.
56 Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. (Penguin Books, 2018), 54
57 Mailer, 76.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Upon arrival at this climactic scene, the first detail that Mailer notes is the chaotic 
mix of cymbals, chanting, and spoken word played by the Fugs. Throughout the 
beginning of the Pentagon episode, much of Mailer’s attention is focused on the 
Fugs’ role in the Yuppie army’s attempt to raise the Pentagon “three hundred feet,” 
where it would then “turn orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled this 
levitation.”58 Through his description of their production, Mailer implicitly draws a 
parallel between the intention of the Fugs’s artistic performance and his own:

The exorcism would proceed, and the Fugs were to serve as a theatrical 
medium…While the Indian triangle and the cymbal sounded, while a 
trumpet offered a mournful subterranean wail, full of sobs, and mahogany 
shadows of sorrow, and all sour groans from hell’s dungeon, while finger 
bells tinkled and drums beat, so did [Ed Sanders, lead vocalist of the Fugs’] 
solemn voice speak something approximate to this.59 

Mailer then goes on to describe Sanders’ extended meditation on the evils of the 
war in Vietnam. Here, in their role as “theatrical medium” the Fugs act as both 
representative of, and conduit for, experience, as their music simultaneously reflects 
and feeds the energy of the crowd. Meanwhile, Mailer does the same, recording the 
event while he participates in it, chanting along with the crowd. He describes a paper 
passed around in the terms of mutual co-construction of experience: “By the act of 
reading this paper, you are engaged in the Holy Exorcism,” a collective understanding 
of what the event is and yet also how a common vision means to transform it.60 

At the same time, the phenomenological information that Mailer conveys is 
permeated by a tone that matches the strangely serious and absurd approach of the 
protest itself. While the Fugs chant about the Pentagon’s first grope-in for peace, for 
instance, Mailer finds himself musing about how his “three divorces and four wives” 
have forced him to concede “the absolute existence of witches.”61 Though the protest 
of the Pentagon is deeply serious—addressing, after all, the horrors of war in general 
and the Vietnam War in particular—neither Mailer nor his Yippie shock troops 
can seem to broach the subject without a bent towards the ridiculous, or even the 
irreverent. Thus, by jumping back and forth between documentary and experiential 
modes, from straining “to see what was going on at the head of the column,” over 
to the Fugs playing “Out, demons, out!” to the people “streaming […] to see what 
the attack had developed,” Mailer mimics the head-turning hysteria of the March.62    

Yet, as Mailer’s participation in the event comes to its conclusion, his narration snaps 
back into the Novelist’s sharp focus on minute detail and reader-absorption.  After 

58 Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, 120.
59 Ibid., 120-121. 
60 Ibid., 121.
61 Ibid., 122, 123.
62 Ibid., 126.



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Phenomenological Reproduction

stepping past the rope meant to separate the marchers from the Pentagon, what 
occurs next is illustrated in stark relief, and in a coherent, logical order:

The MP’s stood in two widely spaced ranks.  The first rank was ten yards 
behind the rope, and each MP in that row was close to twenty feet from 
the next man.  The second rank, similarly spaced, was ten yards behind the 
first rank and perhaps thirty yards behind them a cluster appeared, every 
fifty yards or so, of two or three U. S. Marshals in white helmets and dark 
blue suits…He made a point of stepping neatly and decisively over the low 
rope.  Then he headed across the grass to the nearest MP he saw.  It was as 
if the air had changed, or the light had altered; he felt immediately much 
more alive—yes, bathed in air—and yet disembodied from himself, as if 
indeed he were watching himself in a film where this action was taking 
place.  He could feel the eyes of the people behind the rope watching him, 
could feel the intensity of their existence as spectators.63 

Mailer takes time to describe the smallest details, from his augmented perception 
of the light, to his feeling of being watched, to the “naked stricken lucidity” of 
the military police as he strides towards them.64 He also returns to an extended 
meditation, making attempts at recreating the interiority of the MP in front of him, 
wondering whether he quivered from a “desire to strike [Mailer], or secret military 
wonder […] now possessed of a moral force which implanted terror in the arms of 
young soldiers.”65 Throughout this sequence, he refers back to the air quality, calling 
it “mountain air,” though Washington sits firmly near sea level. He ceases referring 
to it as such only when he is finally brought away from the crowd and is placed out 
of view.66 In doing so, Mailer sets apart those moments at which his image is being 
created—when he is on display—not only for the people present, but also for those 
who will watch the BBC footage later on. Mailer writes of having felt—in a variation 
on Thompson’s claim, quoted earlier—at once “more alive […] and yet disembodied 
from himself, as if indeed he were watching himself in a film where this action was 
taking place.”67 Mailer paints himself as aware, in the moment of experience, of the 
simultaneity of the real and the image. He feels that his actions were being recorded, 
whether on video or in memory, shaping his conception in the public consciousness.

Though Eason’s separation of ethnographic realism and cultural phenomenology 
offers a critically important approach to New Journalism, Thompson and Mailer 
both illustrate that the distinction is not as dichotomous as Eason might suggest. 
For Thompson, representation of reality is not consistently an active, co-constructive 
act in conjunction for the reader, as Eason’s categorization of Thompson as cultural 
phenomenologist might suggest. Though Thompson often qualifies the faithfulness 

63 Ibid., 129-130.
64 Ibid., 130.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., 130, 138.
67 Ibid., 129. (Emphasis mine)



42

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

of his account in “Breakdown on Paradise Boulevard,” he presents the report to the 
reader as patently representative of what occurred, taken “verbatim” for the sake 
of “journalistic purity.”68 This sort of ostensible straightforwardness strays toward 
the realm of ethnographic realism in that it assumes a shared perception with the 
reader, namely that verbatim recordings are a “purer” representation of reality than 
memory or perceptual experience. However, the section also has elements of cultural 
phenomenology: it cedes the fragmentary nature of reality (indeed, the manuscript is 
“splintered,” acknowledging the inability to communicate that perceptual experience). 
These sorts of paradoxical, intermediate moments expose the weaknesses of Eason’s 
categories. Though they are at times not as strictly separate as one might wish, 
they still prove useful in the framework that they provide to describe the reciprocal 
interaction of the image-world and reality in these pieces, and how Thompson and 
Mailer’s understanding of that relationship shapes their reconstruction of self.

In spite of the fact that the world appears irreparably fractured, into brutish factions 
that populate Washington and Las Vegas, Mailer and Thompson both use the image-
world as a tool to construct a more stable, cohesive self. The March, for Mailer, is 
an almost incommunicably chaotic event; however, by placing himself at the center 
of it in his retelling, he builds an image of Norman Mailer which, though at times 
confusing and complex, is nonetheless solid. This reconstitution of the self comes as a 
result of the interplay of reality, in his actions, and the image-world, in his book and 
other representations. By this self-reflexive recreation, he puts forth an addendum to 
Eason’s categories, whereby the journalist is able both to penetrate the image to reveal 
the reality (for example in his rebuttal of the Time depiction) and to understand 
the implication and mutualistic relationship of the image on reality, and vice versa. 
Through these complications, we see how each journalist simultaneously supports 
and undermines Eason’s distinctions. By bringing each category into question, and 
the two into conversation with one another, we can then most fully explore these 
modes of representation. ◆

68 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream, 161.



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Phenomenological Reproduction

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Begiebing, Robert J. Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of 
Norman Mailer. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980. 

Eason, David L. “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of 
Organizing Experience.” In Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 1984.

Hollowell, John. Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel. Chapel 
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. 

Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History. 
Plume, 2017. 

Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. London: Penguin Books, 2018. 

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart 
of the American Dream. New York: Random House, 1998. 

Thompson, Hunter S. The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time. 
London: Picador, 2012. 

Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud. The Mythopoeic Reality: the Postwar American Nonfiction Novel. 
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1976. 


