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5 The Rhetoric of Addiction From Victorian Novels to AA Robyn R. Warhol 97 The goal of this chapter is to explore the intersections among narration, subjectivity, identity, and addiction to alcohol in canonical mid-Victorian Wction and in the discourse of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). I’m interested in continuities and discontinuities between nineteenth- and twentiethcentury constructions of alcoholism in and through narrative, and in the imbrication of rhetoric and recovery in British and American culture. Given the interdisciplinary nature of this volume, I want to emphasize that I will not be making a traditionally “historical” argument here, in the sense that I will not argue for a cause-and-effect relationship between the models of addiction and recovery to be found in Victorian novels and in AA literature. I am interested instead in identifying the structures of the stories of alcoholism these texts present to the twenty-Wrst-century reader. Furthermore, as a literary critic who focuses on narrative structure, I do not approach the stories of alcoholics in novels or in AA’s books as if they were the biographies of “real people”: I try to remain actively aware that the “alcoholics” I am writing about are Wgures created in and by texts. I focus particularly on canonical Victorian novels because the stories they tell have been so widely circulated for the past century and a half, playing a part in shaping cultural attitudes toward addiction. My argument proceeds from the belief that the narrative forms framing alcoholism and recovery in these texts influence contemporary ideas of what addiction is and how it operates. It is no coincidence that my chapter’s title echoes Wayne Booth’s classic analysis of narrative perspective, The Rhetoric of Fiction, because like that venerable literary formalist, I will end up arguing that just about everything—speciWcally beliefs and values, including and especially our understanding of identity and recovery—depends on (narrative) point of view. As Helena Michie and I have argued in a recent essay called “Twelve-Step Teleology: Narratives of Recovery/Recovery as Narrative,” the discourse of Alcoholics Anonymous structures “alcoholism” and “recovery.” Individual recovering alcoholics come to understand what they call their “disease” by repeatedly reading, listening to, and ultimately telling—and repeatedly retelling—“drunkologues,” or Wrst-person accounts of drinking behavior that is construed as “alcoholic.”1 The trajectory of the recovering alcoholic’s “AA story” typically follows a master-narrative, roughly corresponding to the actions described in AA’s “twelve steps for recovery.” The act of telling the drunkologue itself represents the Wrst step—“admitt[ing] we were powerless over alcohol and our lives had become unmanageable”; the happy ending suggested by the recovering person’s presence at an AA meeting is framed by the experiences recounted in steps two (“came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity,” that is, received some hope for relief through exposure to the AA program) through twelve. The master narrative operating in AA allows for the two modes of closure that narratologists would call “euphoric”—the happy ending, where in this case the addicted drinker “gets sober,” to drink no more—and “dysphoric ”—the tragic ending, where the story’s protagonist fails to reach the desired goal and ultimately dies.2 In AA stories of recovery from alcoholism, the narrative point of view and the mode of closure are closely connected. First-person accounts within AA are always structured as euphoric, because no matter what difWculties the speaking subject may be experiencing in his or her life at the time of speaking , the story reaches closure in the fact that the person is not, at the present moment, drinking, but rather is speaking of his or her recovery at an AA meeting, or writing about it for inclusion in the Big Book, or talking about it to a suffering alcoholic during a “twelve-step call.”3 It is unlikely that any AA group would invite someone to speak who had gotten drunk just moments before walking into a meeting, but even if they did, the act of speaking could be understood as the beginning of another iteration of the drunk’s sobriety story. In the contrasting mode, AA members hear the dysphoric narratives of alcoholism only at secondhand, as third-person stories circulate in AA communities about alcoholics who “went out” of AA or who “died of this disease.” No alcoholic can tell his or her own dysphoric story in the Wrst-person, because if he...

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