Pubdate: Sat, 14 Dec 2002
Source: New Scientist (UK)
Copyright: New Scientist, RBI Limited 2002
Contact:  http://www.newscientist.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/294
Page: 55
Author: Simon Ings

NOVELS AND NIRVANA

The Road of Excess by Marcus Boon, Harvard University Press, $29.95 / UKP 
19.95, ISBN 0674009142

Reviewed by Simon Ings

SOMETIMES the world transcends our physical experiences and expectations. 
But we have lost the art of how to speak about that experience.

In "The Road ofExcess: A history of writers on drugs," English professor 
Marcus Boon suggests that drug-taking became a necessary literary 
experiment the moment writers found themselves living in a materialist 
world. When neither church and state nor tree-clad mountainside reflects 
the face of God, where but in the "negative, transcendental space" of drug 
experience can writers express the poetry of human smallness and 
purblindness in an immense universe? Boon uses literary, historical and 
cultural analysis to reveal "how a society came to believe certain things" 
about drugs, about writers and about itself. He justifies this approach by 
asserting that drugs have "dynamic historical properties" Historical 
meanings, he says, are part of the user's experience.

And these have changed over time. In the 19th century, hidebound by 
institutionalised religion and a growing enthusiasm for mechanisation, a 
gulf seemed to separate everyday consciousness from the realm of the 
sublime. In the 21St century, that gulf is being healed. Where the radical 
early 20th-century critic Walter Benjamin, taking mescaline, experienced "a 
shower of gifts pouring out of gnostic darkness", modern writers on drugs 
are more likely to write about the way human consciousness participates in 
the workings of an infinitely open and interconnected Universe.

Their rhetoric has its failings, chief among them the ease with which 
drug-taking can be medicalised. Why else would we be using normalising 
drugs like Prozac to steer us away from the bracing terrors of the sublime? 
On the other hand, a rhetoric that sites the sublime within the mechanisms 
of consciousness does allow writers to fulfil the original Romantic 
ambition: to contend with science in explaining how we think.

Best of all, Boon, an ambitious thinker, puts his money where his mouth is. 
To take just a handful of examples, he shows that anaesthetics reproduce 
the rhetoric of philosophical analysis; that writers who use cannabis 
produce parody and tend towards the Rabelaisian; that culture and chemistry 
together underpin the amphetamine-fuelled world of "shining machines and 
traumatised human bodies"; that the unchallenged ego will make a 
"self-serving and deceiving charade" out of psychedelic experience; and 
that under the influence of many drugs, the language function itself will 
reveal its "essential autonomy".

Boon's observations speak as much to our scientific understanding of the 
brain as to our literary appreciation of writers like Henri Michaux and 
Charles Baudelaire, William Burroughs and Will Self, and they deserve close 
criticism. This alone makes Boon's ironic and perceptive book very welcome: 
it is that rare creature, a work of literary criticism that the scientific 
community can enjoy, contend with, and from which it can draw inspiration.

Simon Ings writes fiction and journalism about the senses
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