The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (review)

The prologue of Marcus Boon's The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, aside from violating the unwritten law that the PhD candidate's tortuous attempt to justify his topic to a sceptical committee be either revised or dropped entirely when the work is published in book form, is fascinating for its nervous recognition that when it comes to the topic of drugs in an academic setting, to paraphrase Catharine MacKinnon, to write it is to do it. 'In the process of writing this book I have been asked numerous times how much "research" I have done,' an exasperated Boon writes. 'To read a book about drugs, to write about books about drugs, is evidently a sign that one has been exposed to something, and possibly contaminated by it. I don't deny that this may be the case. But - exposed to what?'

What indeed? For all the mantra-like repetition of terms like 'transgression' and 'revolution' emanating from the ranks of academe in the last two decades, the contemporary university remains a remarkably conservative place, nearly as concerned with conformity, especially in the realm of personal 'praxis,' as your garden-variety corporation. Radical theory is one thing, but radical behaviour is another, and the English professor as junkie is an idea whose time has not yet arrived.

Ironically, however, the slightly offensive question constantly asked of Boon regarding the interrelationship of writing and chemical 'contamination' in his own life also partly informs his theoretical approach in The Road of Excess. Most valuable here is the interrogation not only of the usual suspects (Thomas De Quincey, William Burroughs) but also of lesser-known figures in the 'secret history' of drug literature, including the German poet and opium user Novalis, who 'believed in the possibility of exploring' the inner realm of the imagination as invoked by narcotic usage, and in 'bringing back data from that realm.'

While this quintessentially Romantic quest - in which the 'sickness' of the user functions as a 'critique' of 'normal' society - doesn't always end up well (Boon conjures 'the peculiar stench of abandoned, decaying bodies leaving hardly a trace of any discovered light' when describing the destiny of French playwright and drug enthusiast Antonin Artaud and his disciples), it nevertheless informs the lives and works of most of the literary figures, both obscure and well-known, historical and contemporary, who seriously pursue drug use of whatever stripe (chemist and writer Alexander Shulgin, for instance, claims to 'gaze upon the entire universe' after smoking a hundred milligrams of the psychedelic DMT).

What ultimately emerges here, from separate chapters on narcotics, anaesthetics, cannabis, stimulants, and psychedelics, is an overall theme (though Boon doesn't identify it as such) of drugs as a vehicle for the attainment of personal sovereignty, a tool for the transforming of the self through chemical means. Drugs, however, are only half of the equation: literature itself also functions as a mind-altering substance capable of affecting the consciousness of its users. For the gutter-dandy Jean Cocteau, opium becomes a potent literary symbol, 'one of the props ... used in the staging of his own identity'; Charles Baudelaire and others of his ilk, meanwhile, delight in the 'evil' role of literary pushers, as writing about vice becomes yet another form of vice, a way to 'consciously aestheticize self-destruction,' enticing and corrupting the complacent, repressed bourgeois masses.

Obviously not ready to join Plato in his call to ban the poets (or the drug users) from the ideal society, the author of The Road of Excess, in answering the query whether he inhaled, does provide a few hints that he is, to quote the old Merry Pranksters' motto, 'on the bus.' Speaking of the 'features of extension, elaboration of, and digression from an idea' typical of amphetamine-using writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Jack Kerouac, Boon suddenly enters his own text...