L'Imaginaire des drogues: De Thomas de Quincey a Henri Michaux (review)

Milner, Max. L'Imaginaire des drogues: De Thomas de Quincey à Henri Michaux. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2000. Pp. 458. ISBN 2-07-075748-X

L'Imaginaire des drogues sets out to illuminate the role that drugs have played in shaping literary creation in France and England, beginning with Thomas De Quincey's 1821 publication of Confessions of an English Opium Eater and moving chronologically through writers including Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Cocteau, and numerous others before ending with Michaux. Max Milner approaches his vast subject by any standard, it on a case by case basis, his interest lying mainly in the influence of drugs on specific writers and their work. However, as he notes in his introductory remarks, he wishes to study not only the imaginary that drugs have produced on an individual level but also the network of associations surrounding drugs in the larger cultural imaginary. To this end, he touches on the shifting notions of opium, hashish, mescaline, and other substances in different eras, and balances close textual readings with an overarching historical perspective. The result is a successful, methodical book that focalizes the history of literary invention through the lens of the history of altered states of consciousness. For Milner, the imaginary of drugs begins with Confessions of an English Opium Eater, when De Quincey becomes one of the first writers to analyze the effects of the drug on his mental state and, by extension, his writing. Chapter 1 is devoted largely to this seminal text and draws out interesting parallels between De Quincey's notion of the mind as a palimpsest, whose successive layers remain hidden, and the Freudian unconscious as well as Proustian involuntary memory. Milner also looks at Coleridge's Kubla Khan and refutes interpretations of the term "milk of Paradise" as a reference to opium, citing evidence to the contrary in a note that appears in the margins of one manuscript. Acknowledging the impossibility of determining the precise role opium played in Coleridge's work, Milner refuses to yield to the temptation to draw any conclusion that textual and historical evidence do not support--an admirable stance he adopts whenever necessary throughout the book. In Chapter 2, Milner turns to the origins of a French imaginary of drugs, which he places under the sign of Romanticism, in Alfred de Musset's translation of De Quincey's Confessions in 1827. Examining Musset's additions to the English original as an amplification of the Romantic themes of sentimentality and exoticism, Milner elaborates the general affinities linking the Romantic vision with a perception altered by drugs in the work of writers such Balzac, Poe, Sue, and Gautier, noting that the disintegration of boundaries between subject and object described in the latter's Club des haschischins, for example, was just as likely to appear in fantastic stories that had nothing to do with intoxication.

Milner offers excellent, sustained discussions of De Quincey's second French translator, Baudelaire, as well as Rimbaud in Chapters 3 and 4. Looking at Les Paradis artificiels, he analyzes Baudelaire's ambivalence vis-à-vis opium and especially hashish, which the writer felt destroyed one's will and decreased productivity. However, we can discern a relationship between Baudelairean correspondences and the synesthetic experiences hashish produces, and Milner wisely devotes more time to exploring narcotic influences on Baudelaire's poetics than to picking out literal references to drugs in poems such as "Le Poison" and "Le Voyage." Turning to the role of drugs in Rimbaud's work, Milner uses letters and other sources to reconstruct a time line that places the writer's first experience with hashish in the fall of 1871, some six months after he began developing his notion of a visionary project that would culminate in the Illuminations. In Milner's careful analysis, the hashish experience likely contributed to Rimbaud's existing creative vision by serving as a model for the altered...