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.
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