Drug Themes in Fiction/Drug Themes in Fiction
DRUG THEMES IN FICTION
Literature, in all of its myriad forms, has historically performed as a mirror of mainstream culture, with only periodic nods toward the ghettos, hidden byways, and subcultures of civilization. Drug-related literature is no exception to this rule, for the literary references to drug use closely parallel popular attitudes toward drugs, from the earliest writings of man up to the present. The nineteenth century Romantics in France—particularly Baudelaire and his literary circle—provided the first concentration of drug-related literature which was not only a curiosity of Eastern exoticism, but an aesthetic mode. For reasons which will be made clear within this study, traditional drug literature in England and America from 1900 to 1945 was a faded continuation of Romantic literary notions inherited from the 19th century French tradition. The 1950's in America brought about a curious shift in the literary mainstream, placing sudden emphasis on the previously-ignored subcultural themes of sex, drugs, and race—a shift instigated by World War II experiences. Although the mid-1960's saw the most concentrated use of drugs in the American culture recorded in our history, it was not until the present decade that writers began to deal with spiritual and psychological explorations of drug experience as a way of continuing that Romantic visionary quest through the interior flights of chemically-stimulated fantasy.
Within English and American traditional fiction from 1945 to the present we may roughly distinguish three chronological and thematic categories:
1. Post World War II through the late 1950's. The prevalent drug is heroin; the central figure is the junkie; and the literary emphasis is upon a life style of existential alienation—a Romantic submergence in the drug subculture.
2. The Rock 'n Roll Flower Children of the 1960's. The prevalent drugs are marijuana and LSD; the central figure is the youthful student hippie; and the literary emphasis is upon experiential politics and social philosophy—the emergence of a "counter-culture" which challenges the dominant culture.
3. The Disillusionment of the 1970's. The prevalent drug (if you will) is imagination; the central figure is the visionary; and the literary emphasis is upon the drug hallucination—the imaginative projection as a mode of alternative reality.
The history of drug-related traditional literature is not only a study in shifting cultural attitudes, but a record of reaction to the increasing amount of knowledge in scientific areas, particularly in pharmaceutics. From the medieval exorcist to the Elizabethan alchemist to the fin-de-siecle apothecary, small growth in real understanding of biochemistry is seen; rather, the witchdoctor dressed in varying historical guises, always relying upon some form of narcotic. Well into the twentieth century, appalling mythologies and frauds were accepted as medical fact (Hechtlinger). World War II seems to represent a turning point. It was after this war, which prompted sophisticated medical research, mixed fighting men interracially, and took American fighting men into Japan and the culture of the East, that interest increased in such works as Baudelaire's Paradis Artificiel.
In the late 1940's, at the convergence of pharmaceutical knowledge and subculture discovery, literature turns to the world of the junkie, the Negro, the jazz musician, the homosexual, and the existential wanderer. From Frankie Machine in Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm to Hunter Thompson's pseudo-biographical antics in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, drug-related literature becomes more and more clearly the literature of picaresque experience. As intellectual currents have flowed away from the certain axioms of Marx and Freud toward the absurdity and nausea of Camus and Sartre, drug literature has become a symbolic quest through the ultimate frontier of the mind.
However, in order to follow the thematic development of drug literature in the twentieth century, we must look backward to the Romantic era, when a clear pattern of interaction between literature and drug use emerged in the French literary circle of Baudelaire. For research continuity, we are fortunate to have the only study of previous drug-related literature, by Professor Emanuel J. Michel, Jr., whose close reading of Baudelaire and his contemporaries reveals themes which continue to play throughout drug literature in England and America in the twentieth century (Mickel).
French interest in the Orient played a significant role in the development of drug literature, After the opening of trade relations with the Far East under Louis XIV, French aristocrats and intellectuals became fascinated with Oriental furnishings, clothing, curiosities, and various spices and perfumes—interest which continued to emerge periodically in later centuries. These symbols of exoticism hinted particularly to the 19th century French writers at a bizarre way of life, much as the "exotic Negro subculture" has titillated 20th century American intellectuals. And, much as our drug culture of the American fifties was accompanied by Zen Buddhism, late 19th century France was inundated by various esoteric philosophies that sought the Greater Reality and universal correspondences. The Romantic era saw drugs flourishing in a world of semi-mystics, occultists, magnetists, and spiritualists.
Secondly, the 19th century drug poets suggested a Romantic vogue for spiritual transcendence and mystical escape from the ugly world of scientific reality and rational limitations. This yearning quickly translated itself in the form of Transcendentalism in 19th century America. "Perhaps its most important use, however, was as a means of presenting the world as a place in which one cannot really find reality. It has been used effectively by authors in connection with a character who participates in two distinct existences, both of which appear to be authentic." (Mickel, p. 348.)
Finally, the French Romantics explored one of the least noted areas of drug use in literature (and one with great potential for contemporary examination): the effect of the drug experience upon aesthetic sensibilities. The Artificial Paradises in French Literature offers extensive insight into drug imagery and drug-influenced aesthetics in Baudelaire. But the list of French writers and painters of that era whose work was undoubtedly influenced by the use of opium or hashish includes Lamartine, Nodier, Musset, Hegesippe Moreau, Murger, Grandville, Nerval, Balzac, Barbey d'Aurvilly, Sue, Boissard, Karr, Gautier, Dumas, and Hugo.
Early in the twentieth century, literary continuations of the themes explored by both the drug-using French and English writers (e.g., Samuel Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey) continue to be manifest in English language fiction. Joseph Hergesheimer's Java Head (1919) is a popular novel of the period which indicates the continued association of drug use with exoticism. The theme of this work involves Chinese immigrants and their use of opium as a cultural curiosity, rather than a decadent delight. This same "Kubla Khan" attitude is expressed in Aleister Crowley's novel The Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922), Crowley, who was an eccentric English outcast given to sexual excesses and rites of black magic, saw in his use of heroin a plunge into an illicit experience which enriched and strengthened the personality. The Diary of a Drug Fiend is allegedly based upon an actual situation in which Crowley took a group of drug addicts to an abbey in Sicily where they were allowed to indulge their drug needs to the fullest. Crowley's Romantic attitude is evident in the following passage from the Diary:
Man has a right to spiritual ambition. He has evolved to what he is, through making dangerous experiments. Heroin certainly helps me to obtain a new spiritual outlook on the world. I have no right to assume that the ruin of bodily health is injurious; and "whosoever will save his life shall lose it, but whoever loseth his life for My sake shall find it." (Crowley, p. 253.)
Throughout Crowley's novel we find emphasis upon the magical exotic aspects of drugs, in addition to the romantic search for some form of transcendence. But Crowley clearly had little interest in aesthetics. In the novel, his persona King Lamus says:
What is modern fiction from Hardy and Dostoevski to the purveyors of garbage to servant girls, but an account of the complications set up by the exaggerated importance attached by themselves or their neighbors to the sexual appetites of two or more bimanous monkeys. (Crowley, p. 138.)
Crowley's work marks the appearance in English drug literature of two leit-motifs which continue to be prominent up to the contemporary period: first, the strong association of drugs with sexuality and, second, the use of drugs as a mode of personal development or exploration. This latter element of Crowley's writing connects with the Romantic notion that reality could be found within the drug experience—a notion quite clearly reaffirmed in the books of the contemporary author Carlos Castaneda, especially in A Separate Reality.
From the viewpoint of the 'thirties, the Crash of 1929 and the resultant Depression were penance for the decadence of the 1920's. In these circumstances, drug usage was viewed not as exoticism but as degeneracy. Somerset Maugham's Narrow Corner (1932), while not lacking in Maugham's wit, is imbued with a sense of social consciousness which continues to emerge periodically in all drug literature after. In Narrow Corner, an English doctor grows despondent and takes to the practice of opium smoking as a way of detaching himself from the woes of the Depression. He eventually retreats from all of his social obligations as a doctor and becomes an expensive nursemaid to a rich man in the Malay Archipelago.
With the advent of World War II, there was a frenzy for government research in pharmaceuticals. At the Sandoz laboratories in Switzerland, Dr. Albert Hofman took the first "acid trip" in 1943 when he accidentally ingested some d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate 25. Throughout Europe and the Pacific, U. S. soldiers became familiar with various types of narcotics, both in the form of painkillers and exotic thrills. And shortly after the war ended the literature of the contemporary drug culture began: The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), On the Road (begun in 1951), The Invisible Man (1952) and Junkie (1953).
The focal point of drug literature in the 1950's is undoubtedly William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. The victim of censorship trials, this work has most often been written about (by Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, et, al.) as a book dealing primarily with homosexuality. However, Frank D. McConnell offers a corrective perspective. Analyzing Burroughs' character of the addict, McConnell gives us insight into the thematic connections with the nineteenth century:
In the simplest terms, of course, the junky himself is an invention of the Romantic era. This disreputable, shabby, compulsive wanderer carrying his mysterious and holy wound is a figure first incarnated in the alcoholic Burns or in the mad Chatterton who so fascinated Wordsworth, and brought to a nearly final development in Coleridge himself…It is only after the Romantics had taught us the impossibility of a transubstantiation of things from above, that the negative eucharist of the outlaw and the sensualist became an aesthetic possibility. (McConnell, p. 672.)
This "aesthetic possibility" takes shape in the existential life of the addict. Here we must differentiate between literature in which addicts serve simply as exotica or representatives of social problems and the true "literature of addiction" which immerses the reader in the drug experience through story and prose technique. The Man with the Golden Arm, with its naturalistic study of the addict as anti-hero, fits into the former mode, as does even Burroughs' first book, Junkie. The "literature of addiction" is reserved for the likes of Samuel Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Malcolm Lowry, and William Burroughs.
This is, we should note, an experiential tradition, in which the validity of the writer's information, his life, gives weight to his drug metaphors. Yet ultimately, the drug writer is clearly concerned with the communicative function of all literature:
Those who are not addicted should really find Naked Lunch no less accessible than those who are—in fact, most of those who prize the book as secret cult-knowledge actually belong to a movement toward the non-addictive hallucinogens and marijuana which has less to do with the imaginative energy of Naked Lunch than the "straight" attitude toward drugs. The "hallucinations" which make up the bulk of the book are not the futuristic and numinous visions reported by users of LSD, but are rather clarified visions of present reality made more terrible by what we have already described as the addict's absolute dependence on real things in their aspect of maximum power. (McConnell, p. 675.)
Out of the San Francisco Renaissance of 1956-1957, an existential vision of reality was shaped by writers such as Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Gold, Kerouac, and Trocchi. This is summarized most simply in The Connection, Jack Gelber's off-Broadway play which was both a harshly realistic experience and an allegory. Like characters in the developing Theatre of the Absurd, the junkies in this play and in the books of the era live a life of no exit; they exist in tight, self-contained worlds of their own creation, existential men carving a separate reality out of nothingness with the hypodermic needle. Or to put it in Burroughs' own words, from Junkie, "Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life." (Burroughs, p. 128.)
Summing up the image of the junkie from the literature of this era, Marcus Klein writes:
It is not the junkie but the junkie's fabulous shadow that is news. The life of the drug, retreat under discipline ("There is no more systematic nihilism than that of the junkie in America."—Trocchi), might be a metaphor that will tell us who we are (our own poisoned blood; waiters who wait for another round of waiting); where we are (Nowhere, man; Heaven, man); where we are going ("One is no longer grotesquely involved in the becoming. One simply is."—Trocchi. "Running out of veins and out of money."—Burroughs); how to live (a man has his freedom; you can be very cool man; you don't have to live). And these matters are important. In a time of confusions and staggering possibilities of treachery, of engineered ideas and disillusion in the areas of volition and purpose, these metaphysical matters are imperative. (Klein, p. 364.)
Yet as literature rounds the bend of the decade of the 'sixties, it finds itself already outdistanced by the emerging counter-culture. The experiential fascination of drug literature has turned into experiential politics and social philosophy: while underground manufacturers of LSD such as Owsley Stanley stamp out pads of LSD for an hallucinogenic generation in the Haight-Ashbury, the imagery of the 'sixties is played out not in novels but in motion pictures like Easy Rider and 2001, psychedelic light shows, and the pulsations of the Beatles, the Stones, and the Grateful Dead.
The drug literature popular in this era is typified by mind trips such as Herman Hesse and Tolkien and nonfiction experiential reports, such as Carlos Castanenda's Teachings of Don Juan, or Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This complicated transitional era in drug literature is probably best analyzed by Theodore Roszak in "The Counterfeit Infinity", a chapter of The Making of a Counterculture, in which he utilizes Coleridge's rejection of science and objective consciousness to explain a philosophy of 1960's drug culture.
The contemporary excursions into drug literature are fragmented into continuations of the Romantic tradition, writers of the experiential vogue, new moralists, and commercial exploiters of a social phenomenon. Certainly the novels cited in the accompanying bibliography written by Richard Farina, James Leo Herlihy, and Gurney Norman reach out for new versions of the politics of ecstasy. Their joy-tripping is not always without moral judgment, but its central thrust is in the central pleasures of life enhanced by drugs. Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) or Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays (1970) recreate those tight, subjective existential worlds of the 'fifties junkies that more closely fit the "literature of addiction" pattern discerned by McConnell.
In Thompson, the modality of drug lunacy has not the purist aspects of heroin addiction, but rather embraces the entire spectrum of uppers, downers, drugs and alcohol that are available:
The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. (Thompson 1971, p. 7)
Through the nightmare combination of all these drugs, Thompson gives us a frighteningly realistic vision of Las Vegas in both physical and psychological terms. Similarly, in 1972 he followed the presidential campaigns in a drug haze, reporting to us through his hallucinations and distortions one of the best nonfiction accounts of how that crucial political game was played in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.
The ultimate frontier of the mind, offering a new reality to explore beyond the parameters of our humdrum existence, beckons for writers in the 1970's. In an essay on the drug counter-culture entitled "The New Mutants", Leslie Fiedler examines the literature and life style of this generation with a look at the new social psychiatry of R. D. Laing in the context of William Burroughs' works:
. . . poets and junkies have been suggesting to us that the new world appropriate to the new men of the latter twentieth century is to be discovered only by the conquest of inner space: by an adventure of the spirit, an extension of psychic possibility, of which the flights into outer space—moonshots and expedition to Mars—are precisely such unwitting metaphor and analogue as the voyages of exploration were of the earlier breakthrough into the Renaissance, from whose consequence the young seek now so desperately to escape. (Fiedler, p. 399.)
The co-existent themes of exploration and escape bring us nearly full cycle in the tradition of drug-related literature. Those Romantic plunges into exoticism, resulting in the aesthetics of Baudelaire, are being repeated by middle-brow writers of the 1970's such as Jacqueline Susann in Valley of the Dolls, with perhaps not the same quality of literary result. As the Romantic attempted to transcend the Industrial Revolution so our contemporary writer, particularly those from the counter culture—Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson, Theodore Roszak—are reaching for an ecological paradise outside of our polluted world of capitalism and technology. And after two decades of literature celebrating the junkie or drug-user life-styles, we are returned to an understanding of drug experience which is virtually as "magical" as that of the medieval exorcist.
It is the integration of the drug-user into society, the doper as Everyman, that opens a new phase of drug literature in the contemporary era. And it is in this newfound representative role that the drug literature of contemporary America may ultimately play a significant part a a mirror of our culture. Unlike the traditionally outcast black magician or the black jazz musician, we come to identify with the drug taker in contemporary writing as on a trip for all of us: an astronaut of inner pace.