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Mystics of a Materialist Age
*Justus Nieland *
/ Michigan State University/
nieland@msu.edu
(c) 2006 Justus Nieland.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Marcus Boon, The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.
1. Marcus Boon's ambitious, lucid, and far-ranging cultural history
of the connection between literature and drugs eschews a "single
chronological history of drugs" and seeks instead "to reveal more
subtle, micropolitical /histories/ of everyday interactions
between human beings and particular psychoactive substances to
find out whether these histories had left their traces in
literature" (9). The answer, as any reader of De Quincey,
Coleridge, or Burroughs knows, is that they have. And how. More
pointedly, Boon's impressive study asks--and takes a valiant stab
at answering--"how it came to be that aesthetics and
transgression, and the literary genres associated with them, came
to be associated with drug use" (5).
2. This is a bigger question, and a tricky one to tackle in one book,
even one as sprawling and learned as Boon's. Any convincing answer
would have to address not only the dynamic interrelationship
between writing and the history of pharmacological
science--something Boon does well, and with often breathtaking
range--but also the co-evolution of drug writing with both
theories of the aesthetic and the variety of genres, anti-genres,
and subversive literary gestures that could be called
transgressive. Boon's catholic style of historicism would seem
well-suited to this task, since it is cultural studies written
"the way an ethnographer would," and sees literature in sublunary
fashion, as just "one out of many forms of human activity" (5).
Yet for all of Boon's anecdotal connoisseurship and dazzling
intellectual roaming--especially across the domains of the
literary-historical and the scientific--his study has surprisingly
little to say about the literary, or about new (or old) ways of
talking about literary transgression. Theories of the avant-garde,
or conventional critical stories about modernism's formal
subversions and its forays into the interior and the transcendent,
or indeed any sustained discussion of how drug use spawned
challenges to mainstream aesthetics or bourgeois expressive forms
like the novel--all of this is conspicuously absent in Boon's
study. So, while Boon claims that literature and drugs are two
"dynamically developing domains of human activity," the literary
is often the unsexy, occasionally inert partner in Boon's
narrative, waiting passively to receive the traces of its
psychoactive counterpart (5). Boon's writers are on drugs, but his
approach to literary history and theory is often way too square.
3. Perhaps this is a consequence of Boon's decision to forego a
"particular conceptual framework beyond that of a set names of
substances around which stories, texts, practices have clustered,
and that of chronology," used for convenience (9). Boon allows
himself a single, but effective, dose of theory in his
introduction, drawing on Bruno Latour's provocative argument about
the transcendental in We Have Never Been Modern (1993). Recall
that in Latour's anatomy of the modern constitution, modernity
works by erecting a divide between nature and culture, one
designed to liberate man from the superstitious /mana/ and murk of
the premodern but one that effectively produces a modern society
"permeated by the very hybrids of nature-culture that it
officially claims it has eradicated" (11). Drugs, Boon argues, are
hybrid in the Latourian sense--"material and at the same time
constructed," Trojan horses of the modern transcendental impulse
(11). In a world without God, drugs fuse soma and spirit, allowing
the moderns to have their otherwordly hashcake and eat it too.
Latour thus helps Boon "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" (12).
4. While Boon confesses that he has "no particular version of the
transcendental to push," he is sympathetic to "our legitimate
desire to be high" (12, 13). What's more, though he works to
disabuse us of the myth that drug use is a modern phenomenon, he
believes the desire for transcendence--and for drugs, its material
agents--was forced into a crisis of acuity in the shadow of
Enlightenment modernity, and shortly thereafter achieved its first
full flowering in early German Romanticism. In this fashion, Boon
hopes, on the one hand, to call into question the "Romantic vision
of drugs as an aesthetic experience" independent of history,
scientific practices, and market forces and, on the other, to
challenge the classical notion of literature as "drug free" (5).
5. However laudable Boon's desire to embed the Romantic attitude
towards drugs in "a more complicated matrix of historical,
cultural, and scientific developments" (6), who, truth be told,
believes otherwise anymore? Literary scholars peddling non-ironic,
ahistorical, or non-materialist versions of Romanticism, or its
modernist and postmodernist strains, are in short supply. Even
rarer are those making claims for writing "as a kind of pure
activity of consciousness or tradition" (5). The strength of
Boon's study is not to be found in its revisionist notes, which
sometimes ring hollow, but instead in the discursive breadth and
synthetic power of his synoptic approach. As Boon himself notes,
"the whole weight of my argument consists in separating drugs from
each other, showing how each has quite specific historically
emergent discourses attached to it, and avoiding theoretical
generalizations on the subject" (14). Here, Boon proves especially
instructive. He is able to trace a series of specific discursive
tropes entangled in each drug category with sufficient consistency
so as to reveal in each chapter what we might call, following
Matei Calinescu, the five stoned faces of modernity: narcotics,
anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants, and psychedelics.
6. The narcotic modernity of his first chapter is one set in darkness
and marked by the force of a relentless negativity, of revolt
against the profane world of science, industry, and reason. Boon
observes that "the evolution of opium in nineteenth-century
European culture follows a series of displacements," shifts he
traces nimbly in the chapter from the fields of "medicine to
philosophy, philosophy to literature, literature to social
mythology, and mythology to politics," where the drug "rejoins a
radically transformed medicine at the end of the century in the
Decadent movement and the theory of degeneration" (32). Boon
explains how the "specifically literary use of opium" begins with
the influence of eighteenth-century physicians Erasmus Darwin and
John Brown first on neoclassical poetic discourse, then on the
Jena Romantics, Novalis, and Coleridge, whom Darwin introduced to
opium through Thomas Wedgwood (23). Bruno understood illness to be
caused by a lack of stimulation, one that could be cured by wine
or opium. Brunonian science thus allowed the Romantics to "broker
a compromise between the Newtonian mechanism they detested and a
vitalism that was otherwise dismissed as superstitious or
unscientific" (27). For Novalis, opium became a "technology of the
self," a mode of producing sickness as, paradoxically, an
"unnatural state of health--of revolt against the limits of the
animal body" (30).
7. It is also Novalis, for Boon, who helps originate a modern Gnostic
approach to drugs, which sees the material world as fallen and
corrupt, to be abandoned for a space of transcendental
authenticity. And it is this Gnostic dimension of narcotics that
Boon explores in Coleridge's enthusiasm for Spinoza and laudanum;
in the evident proximity, in De Quincey and elsewhere, between the
narcotic abyss and the Romantic sublime; in Baudelaire's critique
of modernity's /paradis artificiels/; in the nihilism of Cocteau
and Artaud; in certain surrealists' quest for the chemical trigger
of the marvelous; and in the post-WWII figure of Beat junkie as
both Gnostic and saint. This brief list testifies to the
often-stunning erudition of Boon's study, whose scope, even in
this chapter, is capacious enough consider the role of poppy in
Chaucer's "A Knight's Tale," the discursive links between opium
and orientalism, the cult of morphine in /fin-de-siècle/ Europe
and America, the legalization of narcotics use and the rise of the
detoxification diary and addiction memoir following the Great War,
and the post-WWII literary connection between rebellious youth the
new psychopathology of the addict.
8. If narcotics are discursively enmeshed in the poetic night of
Romantic negation and gnosis, anesthetics, "with their ability to
shut down the body and mind in a single swift movement," are
particularly apt doubles of the transcendent (91). Yet anesthetic
literature, as Boon's second chapter demonstrates, is decidedly
less poetic than opium-infused reveries, encouraging a clinical,
philosophical attitude that is, surprisingly, Idealist. In fact,
anesthetics, for Boon "remain an anomaly in the history of drug
use: the only drugs for which the major cultural reference points
are Hegel and transcendental philosophy" (119). And Boon earns
this provocative claim by observing, for example, the specter of
Kant presiding over the experiments with nitrous oxide performed
in 1799 by British chemist Humphry Davy (a friend of Coleridge),
and later, the influence of American chemist James Paul Blood, the
"chief proponent of the philosophical use of ether," on William
James, for whom anesthetics and Hegel alike "offered a false
version of the infinite that remained entirely in the realm of
thought, without ever actually engaging the phenomenal world" (111).
9. Surprisingly enough, it is his chapter on the cannabis user that
allows Boon to engage most directly with the question of modern
sociality--its disjointed contours and possible reimaginings.
Potheads are poets of the social, since the cannabis user "is not
content to rest in the transcendental state" of anesthesia, or to
fall into the asocial swoon of the opiate user, but rather
experiences more modest shifts of consciousness that allow him to
exist on the boundary of transcendental and social subjectivity,
on the profane cusp of modernity's dreamworld, poised for
illumination (127). Intoxicated by hashish, one "wants to and is
capable of introducing esoteric secrets into the domain of the
social" (127). For this reason, hashish literature is particularly
given to the "utopian musings on the transformation of the world"
that one finds in Rabelais, Rimbaud, and the hashish writings of
Walter Benjamin, and to the "fractal social spaces" joining the
medieval Islamic Assassins to their modern, bohemian variants in
the Parisian Club des Hachichins, the cultic world of the jazzman,
and the North African Beat scene presided over by Paul and Jane
Bowles (166, 167).
10. Boon's writing and conceptualization are at their tightest and
most productive in his chapter on stimulants. Where the privileged
hybrid tropes of first three chapters slowly coalesce to unveil
modernities of poppied decadence and imaginative retreat, Idealist
transcendence, and utopian transformations, respectively, the
fourth chapter speaks breathlessly to the coked-up modernity of
intensification, speed, and cyberpunks; of man-machinism, Sartre's
speed habit, and the existential force of will. This is the
prosthetic modernity that would find a home for Italian Futurist
F.T. Marinetti, famously dubbed "the caffeine of Europe" even
though, as Boon notes, Marinetti disapproved of drugs and got
sufficiently high on dreams of war and violence. This is, finally,
modernity as /technique/: "the stimulants," Boon notes, "which
appear to offer us an almost mechanical increase in productivity .
. . pose the problem of technology at a more fundamental level"
since they are McLuhanesque "'extensions of man,' extensions of
our capabilities" (174).
11. Following this /tour de force/, the final chapter, "Imaginal
Realms: Psychedelics and Literature," comes as something of a
downer, and contains some of book's more underwhelming thinking
about the literary its relationship to psychoactive substances. As
in the other chapters, Boon's wide swath verges on the
disorienting--from the premodern drugs of Milton's Comus to the
non-literary happenings of sixties psychedelia, from European
encounters with Native American and Siberian shamanism to
postmodern returns to shamanistic ethnography in work of Michael
Taussig and Terence McKenna, with stops in Wonderland, the
mescaline experiments of Sartre, Heidegger, Jünger, and Artaud,
and the broader post-WWII interest in the virtual, microscopic, or
extraplanetary spaces accessed by drugs. The chapter aims "to show
how the history of what we now call the psychedelics is intimately
linked to the evolution of literature in the West, insofar as
literature provided a set of maps or blueprints for the imaginary,
and a place to situate and explore the imaginal realms, when this
was impossible elsewhere" (222). Let's set aside the chapter's
impossible ambition, and consider the substance of this claim
about substances: Drugs are /like/ literature because they provide
space for the faculty of the imagination, harboring humans'
transcendental aspirations in a disenchanted modernity. Boon makes
similar analogical claims throughout the book. What, then, do
psychedelics teach us about literature or the mind? Answer:
"Psychedelics point out in a very direct and dramatic way that
radical, rapid shifts in consciousness are possible" (273). No
argument there. Or: "Psychedelics offer a perspective on the
process of symbol formation, revealing the way that the creative
flux of the imagination is frozen into particular forms, concepts,
words. Literature . . . is necessarily a method of capturing the
flux of the mind" (274). That is, to be sure, /one/ way of
thinking about literature, but is it Boon's? Apparently so: "The
important thing to understand here is creativity, its source and
its power. Literature and psychedelic experience are both
fundamentally acts of poiesis--poiesis not as representation but
as creation itself" (275). These are rather airy claims about the
literary that, for this reader, become increasingly less
compelling until they run aground on romantic or belletristic
clichés about the imagination. When the lesson learned from Huxley
on acid is the same as Bloom on the Bard, the reputations of drug
writing and old-school literary humanism suffer equally. In
moments like these, Boon is furthest from his stated goal to
explain the association between aesthetics, transgression, and
drug use.
12. Boon is abstemious when it comes to theory, but his book might
have benefited from more of it, since his book is in silent
dialogue with a recent explosion of relevant scholarly work in
modernity studies--work on the concept of experience (Krzysztof
Ziarek's The Historicity of Experience, Martin Jay's recent Songs
of Experience); on theories of affect, boredom, and expressivity
(Charles Altieri's The Particulars of Rapture, Sianne Ngai's Ugly
Feelings, Patricia Meyer Spacks's Boredom, or Elizabeth
Goodstein's Experience without Qualities); on attempts to
materialize aesthetic modernity and uncover the everydayness of
the modern (Miriam Hansen's influential work on "vernacular
modernisms"); and especially work on modernity's host of related
transcendent outsides: spiritualism, anthropological magic,
secular (and technological) enchantments, etc. I'm thinking here
of Helen Sword's Ghostwriting Modernism, Michael Taussig's Mimesis
and Alterity (Taussig does make brief appearance in the final
chapter), Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels's Magic and Modernity, or
Simon During's Modern Enchantments. Finally, given Boon's sympathy
for the quintessentially modern desire for transcendence, and his
explicit "call for a proliferation of alternative methods of
obtaining gnosis," more attention might have been paid to the
specific political horizons that have historically given rise to
and constrained the moderns various attempts to imagine its
transcendent outsides (86). How might the position of drugs and
other transcendent "hybrids" on the map of Latour's modern
constitution be shifting in our post-9/11 climate; put another
way, who needs opium when you've got Jesus or Allah? If never
quite intoxicating, Boon's important, lively, and well-researched
study is consistently stimulating. In fact, the book proves that
the best cultural histories--and The Road of Excess is surely
that--are rather like stimulants, charging their users with
renewed energy and clarity, and later leaving them with the sense
that, after the rush and the inevitable letdown, there is still
more work to be done.
/Department of English
Michigan State University
nieland@msu.edu /
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