Pubdate: Fri, 10 Jan 2003
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, The (US)
Copyright: 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
Contact:  http://chronicle.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/84
Author: Carlin Romano

LITERARY HIGHS

It's easy to name all the professionals we wouldn't want nursing a drug 
problem.

We'd like our airline pilot not to amble giddily toward the cockpit, his 
mind on the pleasure palaces of Kubla Khan. We value the surgeon whose war 
experience with morphine makes him extra sensitive to side effects, but 
somehow prefer his drug-free judgment when he has scalpel in hand. We fear 
that the lawyer who shows up with one toke too many will metamorphosize 
into Al Pacino in  ... And Justice for All, suddenly frothing at the mouth 
and ranting that it's his client who's a dirty, rotten, guilty son of a bitch.

Ah, but the writer! Short of stocking the literary wannabe with a lousy 
childhood, hormonal imbalances, brutalizing parents, and easy adolescent 
access to a library of classics, what better equipment for the next 
imaginative giant of letters than mind-expanding, horizon-inducing 
pharmaceuticals of his choice?

Doesn't the Romantic tradition regale us with tales of Coleridge and De 
Quincey, the Modernist with the binges of Cocteau and Artaud, the Beat with 
the antics of Burroughs and Ginsberg -- psychological adventurers all? 
Literary culture usually sees them as guinea pigs for creativity, explorers 
of the cerebral beyond, voyagers to a usually inaccessible internal planet. 
And because our everyday activities don't depend on imaginative writers, we 
needn't substitute a designated driver if we find ourselves uncomfortably 
in their thrall. We just put down their books and pick up others.

Marcus Boon, an assistant professor of English at York University, in 
Toronto, tilled the well-seeded territory of druggy writers in his NYU 
dissertation and now brings it to fruition in The Road of Excess: A History 
of Writers on Drugs (Harvard University Press). His feat suggests that even 
in a literature department, a lively empirical topic can survive years of 
deconstructive indoctrination and cultural-studies overkill. On the 
evidence here, it can also profit from the demigodish influence of Bruno 
Latour, benefiting from his insights about conceptual hybrids (half nature, 
half cultural construction) without irritating the reader too much with the 
Latour nomen-klatura's nomenclature.

At least most of the time.

To read Boon's own initial account of his project might frighten away 
non-theory types faster than bad street-cut junk. "What interests me," he 
remarks unpromisingly, "is to affirm an inclusive, polyvalent movement 
around the boundaries that modernity has built for itself that would 
integrate transcendental experience within the realm of the possible."

Relax -- it's plainly a leftover votive offering to his committee. Boon's 
phantasmagoric trip through a gallery of historic horror stories provides a 
fine mix of sardonic apercu and higher drug gossip despite the occasionally 
stuffy academic underlining. When the unnecessary abstractness recedes, his 
governing understanding of drugs as what Foucault called "technologies of 
the self" makes sense.

Boon acknowledges straight off that a "discourse of the obscene lingers 
around drug books, a discourse of voyeurism, of a pleasure taken in other 
people's experiences, leading to inevitable moral corruption." Like drugs 
themselves, Boon submits, drug-connected books have "transgressive allure."

But his own aim is to write about the association of writers and drugs "the 
way an ethnographer would, studying how a society came to believe certain 
things." He wants to "historically situate literary drug use." He calls 
into question several commonplaces, among them the "Romantic vision of 
drugs as an aesthetic experience," and the more classical notion that 
literature, pace Romantic misconceptions, should be "drug free," and 
writing "a kind of pure activity of consciousness."

Boon's enterprising research soon takes the reader to intoxicating places, 
with no conceded chemical assistance except two or three daily cups of 
English breakfast tea. (That counts, as the author makes plain in his 
passages on caffeine.) He proceeds incisively, his double-helix narrative 
intertwining a fine strand of scholarly detail with an ongoing argument for 
transcendental subjectivity's importance to literature -- so powerful an 
influence it almost behooves writers to experiment with drugs. (It's easy, 
again, to imagine us smirking at the writer who waves away drugs at a 
party, yet understanding the soon-to-be-on-duty nurse who does.)

Some of the old anecdotes are simply irresistible department-party stuff. 
Sir Walter Scott, for instance, began downing opium "to fend off abdominal 
complaints that would leave him roaring like a bull." But his habit picked 
up, and by the time he "read the proofs of his novel The Bride of 
Lammermoor (1819), he claimed that he did not recognize a single character, 
incident, or conversation found in the book." Boon's wry packaging of such 
jewels comes across in his account of Goethe, Schiller, and three Jena 
students reportedly smoking hash, then experiencing "possibly the first 
recorded case of 'the munchies.'"

Boon's most important achievement is taxonomic and almost Linnaean: to 
strictly classify and distinguish different drugs, their histories, and 
cultural associations, while resisting a one-interpretation-fits-all view. 
When he writes that what "makes marijuana a drug and coffee a beverage has 
little to do with the pharmacological effects of each substance," he's 
thumbnailing the myriad ways historical happenstance controls substances 
and their cultural addresses: the link between cannabis and crime, for 
instance, that the federal Narcotics Bureau Commissioner Harry Anslinger 
helped mold into U.S. law in 1937, or the association of anesthetics with 
19th-century philosophical efforts to access the Hegelian Absolute.

The most arresting strain of Boon's book is thus its vast historical sweep. 
Like the pal in the park believed to have "tried everything," Boon appears 
to have read everything concerned with writers and drugs. He takes us back 
as far as Helen giving nepenthes, a "pain-relieving drink," to Telemachus, 
as back to the future as ketamine, the rave candy of the 1990s. In between, 
in keeping with his disciplined desire to "discriminate between different 
drugs" and their separate truths, he offers reflections on the development 
of addiction as a concept and phenomenon, and rich stretches on 
literature's link to narcotics, anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants, and 
psychedelics.

As Boon traces the rise of both recreational drug use and the "growing 
hostility of Western culture to narcotic use," he locates excellent 
ironies: "The materialist transcendental experience that drugs like 
morphine and cocaine offered was paradoxical, because the body was 
transcended only to be replaced by another kind of body, that of a morphine 
addict, which, far from being freed from the repugnant qualities of the 
material world, was ever more reliant on precisely the set of forces that 
it sought to escape."

At times, Boon's commitment to articulating his constructivist 
philosophical bent leads him to silly-sounding sentences: "The hybrid 
artifacts that we call drugs now appear because of the evolution of highly 
complex systems of economic, scientific, religious, and aesthetic 
production at the end of the 18th century."

Well, yes, drugs are socially constructed, like everything else outside of 
Kant's noumenal realm. But when that points Boon to a further declaration 
- -- "I believe that the association of drugs with literature may already now 
be a thing of the past" -- it sounds as if we've seen the final upshot of 
methodological overintensity: the good acolyte of French thought who 
deconstructs himself and his project before it can even make a splash. 
Maybe just as certain dormitory parties can't take off without controlled 
substances on hand, some university-press books can't make it through the 
eye of the editorial board without homage to "meta" considerations.

One can certainly welcome, with Boon, the idea of "opening up new realms of 
excess so that drugs no longer carry the whole weight of our legitimate 
desire to be high." Depending on how one interprets that line, it might 
draw the kind of attention from state legislators that greeted Judith 
Levine's Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex last 
year ("Just what is this guy recommending?!"), or position him as a 
decidedly peculiar drug foe. Despite his sensational subject, Boon seems to 
have inoculated himself against minor politicians by his multiple citations 
of exciting drug-free artistic credos, like Breton's strain of Surrealism.

In an era when critics warn that the literary monograph may soon die of its 
own nonelevating dust, one can only laud Professor Boon for his infinite 
resourcefulness.

Carlin Romano, critic-at-large for The Chronicle and literary critic of The 
Philadelphia Inquirer, is currently a Fulbright professor of philosophy at 
St. Petersburg State University, in Russia.
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