Addiction in Literature

Overview

Defining addiction remains a daunting task for the medical and academic communities. An uncontrollable craving for a substance or chemical, characterized by a painful withdrawal when the drug is removed, forms the most common definition of addiction; addiction is thus very different from the experience of most therapeutic or recreational drug use. Several Native American cultures, for example, employ psychoactive drugs such as peyote and magic mushrooms in religious rituals. Such use can hardly be called that of an addict. Many writers have experimented with altered states of consciousness, however, until they have become addicts. The literature of addiction may therefore be thought of as literature that seeks to render the intense psychological states wrought by drugs, whether euphoric, epiphanic, hellish, or insane. Writers have revealed the immense pain brought about by addiction on the user and the user’s family. A last aspect of addiction, recovery, is also chronicled in many literary works.

History

Addiction in North American literature begins with tobacco. Early woodcuts and colonial literature depict settlers smoking, for example, a peace pipe with the leaders of Native American tribes. Often overlooked was the addictive and destructive nature of the tobacco inside the pipe. Tobacco became one of the largest cash crops in the New World and continues to appear throughout literature. The poet T. S. Eliot, for example, refers to a “tobacco trance” in one of his ironic poems about urban life.

Addiction to other drugs appears in literature written after the Civil War. Many Civil War veterans became addicted to laudanum, a mixture of opium dissolved in alcohol. The warm, mind-numbing effect of the opium created a sense of well-being, warding off the agony of everything from amputated limbs to abscessed teeth. The snake oil salesmen who appear throughout US literature of the post–Civil War period, hawking their cure-all potions, were not working crowds as naïve as might be supposed, especially when a few swallows from one of their bottles appeared to cure whatever ailed the patient, temporarily. Opium addiction influenced the life and the work of nineteenth century writer Edgar Allan Poe. The terror and hysterical ravings rendered in Poe’s short stories may be read as a metaphor for the agony of opium addiction and withdrawal. The various governmental antidrug campaigns have been seen by some writers as failures whose purpose from the start was not the elimination of drug addiction but the erosion of civil liberties, allowing unlawful searches and seizures. The antidrug forces often saw the war on drugs as a kind of holy war, with its roots in the American Puritan tradition of sin and punishment.

In Literature

Dominant in the literature of addiction is the writing of the Beats. The Beats took their name from Jack Kerouac’s famous novel On the Road (1957), which tells of young people who have exiled themselves from the mainstream culture. To be Beat was to be open to all experience. To be Beat was to live the life of the artist and the philosopher. Specifically, to possess the red eyes of the marijuana user was to have “philosopher’s eye.” Also included in this counterculture were certain legal drugs, most notably Benzedrine, or “speed,” which could be purchased at a drugstore and which was said to have fueled the three-week frenzy during which Kerouac typed On the Road, which mentions addiction to speed.

Following on the heels of the Beats came the hippies, whose own counterculture movement grew much stronger and more visible than that of the Beats. A mix of environmental, free love, and equal rights philosophies, the hippie movement also spawned more literature of addiction. Many hippies practiced elements of Eastern religion, including yoga and Zen Buddhism. As a shortcut or alternative to the enlightenment attained through meditation, the counterculture used LSD, magic mushrooms, and other psychedelic drugs. Drug use, then, was seen not as merely recreational but as one way of opening a door to a higher consciousness. The pursuit of this chemical bliss is chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), a work of creative nonfiction that depicts the exploits of writer and drug guru Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters as they traveled across America in a wildly painted bus.

By the 1970s the casualties of the drug culture had risen. Many casualties—of drugs and violence—also returned from Vietnam to the United States. Fusing the promise of the counterculture and the horror of the war, Robert Stone’s novel Dog Soldiers (1974) renders heroin addiction in vivid, startling detail. The summer of love reached a winter of disillusionment.

In the 1980s the greed of bankers, stockbrokers, and lawyers was fueled by cocaine, as portrayed by the characters in Jay McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984).

Social Strata

Addiction is not limited to one economic level or to the young. Chemical dependency requires only that its victims be human and that they indulge in a chemical to the point that their lives are seriously harmed. Depending on social standing, however, the drug of choice may vary from alcohol to heroin. In the novels of John Cheever, for example Bullet Park (1969), many of the characters, who are middle-class suburbanites, are addicted to legal drugs prescribed by their doctors. Legal addiction is no less damaging than the illegal variety and has dire consequences for all who use, whether it be amphetamines (speed) or opioids. In either case, prescription drugs help Cheever’s characters survive a world of bleak business trips made between the prosperous suburbs of Connecticut and the offices of New York, a concrete enclave where Cheever’s characters work at mind-numbing jobs devoid of personal fulfillment. At home, their lives are no better, with failed dreams and unsatisfying sex lives driving them to the refuge of the pill bottle.

At another level of the social strata, far from Wall Street, African American writer James Baldwin depicts the life of heroin users in Harlem, most notably in Going to Meet the Man (1965). Attempting to escape from their bleak reality, Baldwin’s characters turn to addiction in order to give themselves a sense of control and purpose. Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” the story of a recovering heroin user, concerns a young man who finds a healing substitute in music, specifically in the blues. For only the blues can adequately convey the suffering of not merely an individual but of a whole people. When Sonny plays and the crowd applauds, the sensation is like being on heroin, and therefore he—and the reader—achieve a kind of transcendence, traveling upward from heroin through art and finally to God.

Implications for Identity

Identity is a crucial issue within the experience of addiction since often users indulge in a chemical either to escape their identities or to forge new ones. If the aim is recreational, the user may simply want to try on a series of different identities, much like one might try on a variety of disguises at a costume shop. Given the particular chemical, whether it be nitrous oxide, cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, or even nicotine and caffeine, the user will see different faces in the mirror, some more to his or her liking than others. The possibility of becoming another self has always been a strong lure. In some senses it may even represent the desire to experience death and the journey into heaven.

Recovery

The nature of addiction contains another dichotomy, an extrapolation of its fundamental property, which is that pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. While the addict is using, he or she vacillates between the intense good feeling generated by the high and the guilt and sickness generated by “coming down.” If this crash is intensified through family or legal problems, the lows sink even further. A tenet of recovery is that the addiction does not end until the addict “hits bottom,” or realizes complete defeat, usually after losing such things as health, home, or family. The addict who hits bottom experiences a lonely misery quite foreign to nonaddicts, a solitary confinement made all the more bleak because the sufferer can expect little sympathy.

Yet at this point, ironically, the addict is open to the experience of spiritual and physical resurrection. The addict who recovers breaks through to the other side of addiction to bask in the dazzling light of sobriety. The recovering addict is thus allowed a second chance in life, something denied to all but a lucky few. Many works describe recovery; examples include testimonials in books intended to help other addicts recover.

Bibliography

Colman, Adam. Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave, 2019.

Fiedler, Leslie A. “The Alteration of Consciousness.” In Waiting for the End. New York: Stein and Day, 1964.

Holmes, John Clellon. Representative Men: The Biographical Essays. Vol. 2. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988.

Kherdian, David. Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance: Portraits and Checklists. Fresno, Calif.: Giligia Press, 1967.

Levy, Lisa. "Addiction Books: 17 Modern Classics." CrimeReads, 19 Apr. 2018, crimereads.com/addiction-books-17-modern-classics/. Accessed 21 Aug. 2019.

Porterfield, Kay Marie. Sleeping with Dionysus: Women, Ecstasy and Addiction. Freedom, Calif.: The Crossing Press, 1994.

Shannonhouse, Rebecca. Under the Influence: The Literature of Addiction. Modern Library, 2003.

Stephenson, Gregory. The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.