Postmodern madness is involuntary, unlike the modernist chosen seer-trip

Evidence

Though the narrator describes him as ”psychedilic” [sic], and ”enjoying what the prophets of hallucinogen call ‘consciousness expansion’ ” (6), Raymond is not the sixties neoromantic, modernist archetype of the stoned/schizophrenic seer we see in R. D. Laing or Carlos Castañeda, or for that matter Allen Ginsberg or Timothy Leary. He has in no way chosen this visionary truth quest. He is an engineer from Phoenix who has come to Vegas for a good time; his is the involuntary cultural schizophrenia of postmodernity. Thompson will merge these two figures in his protagonist, who is on a self-conscious, volitional, though always ironic truth quest, yet is also produced by, and as, Las Vegas toxic schizophrenia. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 272

Categorization

• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Duke’s Vegas belonging marks postmodernity while his horror stays modernist. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 370; Psychic fragmentation names the postmodern condition better than alienation does — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 241; Postmodernism transformed the modernist experience of self-loss into a celebrated utopia of unbelonging — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 271 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Early modernist exile retained tragic intentionality that postmodern exile lacks #corroborates (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 234
• Postmodernism transformed the modernist experience of self-loss into a celebrated utopia of unbelonging #expands (0.82) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 271
• Psychic fragmentation names the postmodern condition better than alienation does #qualifies (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 241
• Postmodernism abolishes the inside-outside distinction that modernism still presupposed #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 259