Literature and Intoxication

Writing, Politics and the Experience of Excess

Eugene Brennan, Russell Williams, Eugene Brennan, Russell Williams

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349565184, 9781137487650
• eBook ISBN: 9781137487667
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection traces the intersection between writing and intoxication, from the literary to the theoretical, exploring a diversity of experiences of excess. Comprising a variety of perspectives, this book offers unique insights into how politics and literature have been shaped by states of intoxication.

Part I
Cultural Histories of Intoxication

1

Writing and Intoxication: Drunken Philosophers, Crack Addicts and the Perpetual Present

Russell Williams

Attempting to articulate anything resembling an exhaustive examination of writing and writers who have been dedicated or devoted to intoxication is, particularly in the light of the broad definition of the topic proposed in the Introduction, doomed to sorry failure. This is, of course, at least in part due to the vast number of texts and authors who have found solace or inspiration in some form of intoxicant: from Noah’s apocryphal drunkenness and classical Dionysian frenzy to the dark and deliberate intravenous preoccupations of writers such as Burroughs and Will Self, notwithstanding the cigarette-smoke-filled air of Left Bank, Bloomsbury and Greenwich Village literary soirées. At worst, the prevalence of drink, drugs, drinking and drugging makes them banal and unworthy of discussion. At best, their abundance and near ubiquity renders them very difficult indeed to describe with any real accuracy due to the potential scope of critical inquiry. In this chapter, then, I have less lofty ambitions, but a strict and sober, if somewhat arbitrary, focus. I endeavour to extend the theoretical Introduction by considering various moments from within literary history – from its founding texts to the present day – to consider the relationship between writers’ theories and their inebriated experiences. Perhaps appropriately, the vast potential scope of such a project will inevitably be beset by its own aporia, or perhaps more appropriately expressed as the blackouts familiar to the serial intoxicator.

This chapter explores key instances of intoxication in French writing from the sixteenth century to the present day. I argue for the close relationship of inebriation, thinking and writing over that period. The chapter opens with a consideration of how Rabelais appears to celebrate drink, before discussing how Montaigne’s work can be viewed along similar, but more typically moderate lines. The analysis then proceeds to the nineteenth century and maps a literary interest in substances other than drink, tracing an evolution in Charles Baudelaire’s attitudes to both alcohol and hashish. I then consider how, in the same century, Émile Zola and Gustave Flaubert weave their fascination for intoxication into the novel form through a consideration of the social blight of drinking in the case of the former, and through a wider consideration of burgeoning, and unconventional, intoxicants in the latter. In the final section of this chapter I consider late-twentieth-century writing from Frédéric Beigbeder and Guillaume Dustan. I explore their apparent embrace of symptomatically ‘postmodern’ intoxicants – cocaine and ecstasy – and consider how these writers display an attitude to drugs that hesitates between nihilistic hedonism and a more productive state with implications for subjective identity. I conclude with a brief consideration of the role of alcohol in Michel Houellebecq’s work, suggesting it articulates an acutely contemporary predicament for the intoxicated subject.

Rabelais, the drunken philosopher

Of the most notable French figures to have considered the pleasures and pitfalls of drink, François Rabelais, described as a ‘philosophe ivre’ (‘drunken philosopher’) by Voltaire proves an appropriate starting point since he asserts a link between writing and intoxication that persists to the present day. While Voltaire initially dismissed the value of Rabelais’s work since he ‘n’a écrit que dans le temps de son ivresse’ (Voltaire, 1838, p. 807).¹ Rabelais’s rocambolesque Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534) include frequent considerations of alcohol. Laurent Zimmermann describes his writing as a ‘constant éloge du vin’, and stresses the close relationship of drink with knowledge and intellectual deliberation (Zimmermann, 2009, p. 12).² In his prologue to Gargantua, Rabelais asserts that ‘L’odeur du vin est ô combien plus est friant, riant, plus celeste et delicieux que d’huile! Et prendray autant à gloire qu’on die de moy que plus en vin aye despendu que en huyle, que feist Demosthenes, quand de luy on disoit que plus en huyle que en vin despendoit’ (Rabelais, 1992, p. 40).³ While the ancient Demosthenes was proud that his thinking was founded on sober reflection, or the studious late night toil indicated by the reference to lamp oil, Rabelais appears to proudly suggest that there is equally a profound knowledge that can be attained through liquid inspiration, one that, he implies, may even exceed that acquired through scholarship. He certainly suggests that his own process of thinking and writing, his ‘refection corporelle’, is founded on ‘beuvant et mangeant’ (ibid.).⁴ Rabelais, it appears, is prepared to make his own indulgences part of his research.

This link between drinking and philosophising is underlined consistently throughout Rabelais’s work. It is notable that when the narrative turns to Gargantua’s life, his two priorities on arriving in Paris to further his education, like many figures in both real and literary history who continue to follow him, are to ‘s’enquestant quelz gens sçavens estoient pour lors en la ville, et quel vin on y beuvoyt’ (Rabelais, 1992, p. 146).⁵ This suggests that the truly wise – such, we infer, as Rabelais himself – are unlikely to abstain. As a learned monk later stresses, ‘jamays homme noble ne hayst le bon vin’ (ibid., p. 226).⁶ While the good, the wise and the honest are marked out by their appreciation of fine wine, it is equally notable that those who abstain are viewed with suspicion – the Muslim figures in Pantagruel, ‘ces diables de Turcqs’ (Rabelais, 1997, p. 138), demonised as feared and reviled Others throughout Rabelais’s writing, are marked out by being forbidden by the Qur’an from drinking alcohol.⁷ The abstainers, by implication, cannot be described as ‘noble’ men.

The celebrated moraliste Michel de Montaigne also considered drunkenness in his Essais (1588) and draws conclusions similar to Rabelais, despite his work’s focus on considered reflection over bawdy corporality. While he accepts that inebriation can be responsible for leading the drinker to behave badly, Montaigne equally underlines how a moderate understanding of alcohol’s liberating potential can actually have more productive effects, particularly for the writer. In ‘De l’yvrongnerie’ (‘On drunkenness’), Montaigne is initially categorically cautious about the dangers of drink, noting that ‘l’yvrongnerie … me semble un vice grossier et brutal’ and stressing ‘les autres vices alterent l’entendement, cestuy-cy le renverse, et estonne le corps’ (Montaigne, 1979, p. 12).⁸ To underline these sentiments, Montaigne stresses that ‘le pire estat de l’homme, c’est où il pert la connoissance et gouvernement de soy’ (ibid.), which excessive drinking can bring about.⁹ He ultimately somewhat surprisingly proclaims temperance over total abstinence: ‘je le trouve bien un vice lasche et stupide, mais moins malicieux et dommageable que les autres, qui choquent quasi tous de plus droit fil la societé publique’ (ibid., p. 15).¹⁰ He concludes that ‘luy suffise de brider et moderer ses inclinations : car de les emporter, il n’est pas en luy’ (ibid., p. 18).¹¹ Excesses are to be avoided, but the occasional tipple is to be cautiously embraced.

Crucially, Montaigne outlines the important, and productive, role drinking can play for the writer, by metaphorically lifting him to heights of creative achievement:

Nostre ame ne sçauroit de son siege atteindre si haut: il faut qu’elle le quitte, et s’esleve, et prenant le frein aux dents, qu’elle emporte, et ravisse son homme, si loing, qu’apres il s’estonne luy-mesme de son faict. Comme aux exploicts de la guerre, la chaleur du combat pousse les soldats genereux souvent à franchir des pas si hazardeux, qu’estans revenuz à eux, ils en transissent d’estonnement les premiers; comme aussi les poëtes sont epris souvent d’admiration de leurs propres ouvrages, et ne reconnoissoient plus la trace, par où ils ont passé une si belle carriere. C’est ce qu’on appelle aussi en eux ardeur et manie. (Ibid., pp. 19–20)

[Our soul cannot from her own seat reach so high; ’tis necessary she must leave it, raise herself up, and, taking the bridle in her teeth, transport her man so far that he shall afterwards himself be astonished at what he has done; as, in war, the heat of battle impels generous soldiers to perform things of so infinite danger, as afterwards, recollecting them, they themselves are the first to wonder at; as it also fares with the poets, who are often rapt with admiration of their own writings, and know not where again to find the track through which they performed so fine a career; which also is in them called fury and rapture. (Montaigne, 1877, chapter 2, para. 17 of 17)]

A reasoned, temperate use of intoxication, then, can elevate the soldier or noble writer to unprecedented levels of insight, performance or acts of wonder, both figures joined in this quote by a suggestion of their mutually heroic status. Notably, for the poet, Montaigne credits the bottle with enabling a writer to capture a lost state of ‘fury and rapture’ which, as this volume suggests, is a state pursued by writers throughout history, though not always so moderately. Montaigne’s use of animal imagery here, ‘taking the bridle in her teeth’, is equally noteworthy and establishes a comparison between intoxicated man and beast. This, I suggest, has equally been a recurrent trope for much writing about drink and drugs since it provides a vibrant image of man regressing to a primitive state while concurrently asserting an energy or inner force absent from that expected within more ‘civilised’ society.

Baudelaire’s artificial paradises

As Mike Jay, one of the contributors to this volume, demonstrates in High Society, the burgeoning global trade markets of the nineteenth century gave aspiring writers and experimenters the opportunity to explore a wider variety of intoxicating substances. Alessandro Cabiati’s chapter considers the practical fieldwork of a young Arthur Rimbaud and its direct relationship with his writing; but it is Charles Baudelaire who posterity has cast as the most notorious contemporary theoretician of altered states, or what he describes as ‘les paradis artificiels’. Baudelaire wrote two important essays on wine and hashish, and a consideration of them both allows us to glimpse how his thinking developed regarding intoxication in a manner reflecting shifting contemporary moral attitudes. The essay ‘Du Vin et du hachish’ (1851), the misspelling of ‘haschich’ throughout arguably reflecting the ‘newness’ of the drug within contemporary Parisian circles, pre-dates the more renowned ‘Les Paradis artificiels’ (1860) and, between the two texts, a conservative attitude towards the psychotropic gives way to a more nuanced assertion of its profound potential for the literary imagination.

In the former text, alcohol is celebrated at the expense of hashish, which is described with suspicion. As a substance, wine is ‘profondément humain’ (Baudelaire, 1975, p. 308) in that it can empower and revitalise the drinker. It reflects the unpredictable nature of man: ‘le vin est semblable à l’homme: on ne saura jamais jusqu`à quel point on peut l’estimer et le mépriser, l’aimer et le haïr, ni combine d’actions sublimes ou de forfaits monstrueux il est capable’ (ibid., p. 305).¹² With a cautious acknowledgement of this, wine is celebrated and Baudelaire highlights its crucial societal role: ‘si le vin disparaissait de la production humaine, je crois qu’il se ferait dans la santé et dans l’intellect de la planète un vide, une absence, une défectuosité beaucoup plus affreuse que tous les excès et les déviations dont on rend le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: The Art of Hard Drugs by Andrew Hussey
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction: Writing, Politics and the Experience of Excess: Eugene Brennan and Russell Williams
• Part I Cultural Histories of Intoxication
• Part II Poetic Intoxications
• Part III Dipsomaniacal Novelists
• Part IV Political and Theoretical Critiques of Intoxication
• Select Bibliography
• Index