Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 41-42, 2004

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 329-331

Francesco Ghelli, Viaggi nel Regno dell’Illogico. Letteratura e droga da De Quincey ai giorni nostri. Napoli: Liguori, 2003; 293 pp.; ISBN: 8820735466 (pbk.)

He may have turned away his interest
from human beings entirely.

Sigmund Freud, “The Schreber Case”

Never has Western literature been more in touch with reality than when it proposed the image of addiction and the addicted, with its inevitable corollary, the image of the modern intoxicated man. In contemporary drug novels this bizarre character usually splits into two individuals, almost becoming a schizophrenic person, and such a split personality is often essential to the individual’s survival. When he/she becomes a stool-pigeon, when he/she “sings” on pushers and other addicts, he/she turns into a police informer. In turn, very often policemen/women turn into addicts when they infiltrate the drug underworld, as has been wonderfully shown in the split personality of the narc agent/junkie Bob Arctor in A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, one of the greatest novels on drugs and drug-addiction.

In this volume by Francesco Ghelli, we have the opportunity to reread the Western literary tradition of the last two centuries under the uncanny light of drug addiction, from the elitarian fin-de-siècle addiction of some famous aristocrats and scientists (Freud included) to the mass-addiction of more recent years. Now that we are in a regime of “forced coexistence” with drugs, even if a hypocritical prohibitionism still tries to engage the ultimate struggle against this purportedly absolute evil, we can reflect on the power of a metaphor that has attracted hundreds of writers and scholars, and left them “strung-out in Heaven’s high” (David Bowie, Space Oddity).

Some of the best writers Ghelli analyses – beyond some venerated classics of the genre such as Thomas de Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Theophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, and Gerard de Nerval – are Antonin Artaud, Jean Cocteau, Henry Michaux, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, Don De Lillo and Irvine Welsh. The narratives of these later novelists can be defined not only as “texts on drugs,” but “texts of addiction” or even “addicted texts,” that is to say texts where the reference-reality itself seems to be the product of a hallucination.

This aesthetics of drug-addiction is also described by the author through the life and works of some of the gurus of psychedelic counterculture, such as R.D. Laing, Albert Hoffmann, Humphry Osmond, Timothy Leary, Carlos Castaneda and Terence McKenna. The noble [end page 329] fathers of this new aesthetic (or is it an aesthetics of the new?), which is also a new way of thinking dominated by split personality and paranoia, are some of the greatest thinkers of the 20^th century: Sigmund Freud, for example, with his insistence that nothing is casual and everything is connected in the psyche; Walter Benjamin, with his concept of modern allegory as a kind of “addiction to the news” and consequent “tolerance” (he also hoped that the energies liberated by hashish could be conveyed into the proletarian class struggle); Marshall McLuhan and Theodor W. Adorno, with their analyses on intoxicating mass-media and intoxicated mass-culture, and more recent attempts at a rigorous narco-analysis in the works of Jacques Derrida (Plato’s Pharmacy, 1981).

The “realm of the illogic” mentioned by Ghelli in the title, would thus be both a “literary” reference to Freud (who invented the formula to describe the deepest layers of the psyche in his Ergebnisse, Ideen, Probleme, 1938) and the suggestion of a new kind of logic. This latter is the symmetrical logic of the addicted brain and of the addicted mind, or maybe of the two halves of the brain working completely independently one from the other. A thought that abolishes the principle of causality, a thought that is based more on synchronicity (Jung) and pansignification (Todorov), would be, according to Ghelli, at the basis of the addicted texts of Dick, Burroughs, Pynchon and De Lillo, texts where we can no longer find a clear distinction between reality and hallucination. In these texts, the whole of reality seems to hallucinate in a general paranoid distortion of the stories narrated in the text and of History itself. The new logic that springs forth from such texts as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Naked Lunch, Nova Express, Gravity’s Rainbow and Underworld is the “illogic” of paranoia that characterizes our contemporary world, and we shouldn’t forget all those psychological and psychoanalytical scholars who attempted to define this very peculiar schizophrenic or paranoid logic: Sigmund Freud (again), Havelock Ellis, Matte Blanco, Gregory Bateson, and Oliver Sacks, to quote the most important.

Even the “romantic revolution” at the beginning of the 19^th century could be explained, according to the author, in terms of “a higher degree of tolerance” to this new “symmetric” logic. Working by contiguity, on the contiguity of apparently unconnected objects and feelings, the romantics discovered new ways of producing literature without being compelled to comply to the principle of causality. Even in paranoia, or in some well-known neurological disturbances, the contiguity between two objects becomes the pretext for a process of signification connecting the two, and these two to the whole “game.” All in all, this new logic can at times be a powerful propellant for the creation of new stories, even if Ghelli tends to downsize the “sheer visionary power” exalted by some gurus of [end page 330] psychedelia. In reality, the abuse of drugs in itself is not enough to open the doors of perception, as in the new-romantic vulgata of the Sixties, for example, in the “visionary democracy” imagined by Huxley, where everybody could have his/her visions. There’s an élite also in drugs abuse: for it is only in great minds that drugs can produce great visions. There have been millions of drug-addicts, but only one Burroughs, only one Ginsberg, only one Lou Reed.

Ghelli’s survey of addicted texts finally seems to stop in reverent admiration before the “postmodern” writings by William Burroughs: the only writer who was able to explore the world of drugs without the romantic embellishments due to the taste for forbidden things, to the frisson of transgression. In Naked Lunch, in Nova Express, and even in the recent Ghost of Chance, reality itself is hallucinated. In Burroughs hallucination and surreality have taken over reality itself. We are far beyond the casual encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.

Paolo Prezzavento

Università di Bologna