Page:Drug Themes in Fiction (Research Issues 10).djvu/10



Literature, in all of its myriad forms, has historically performed as a mirror of mainstream culture, with only periodic nods toward the ghettos, hidden byways, and subcultures of civilization. Drug-related literature is no exception to this rule, for the literary references to drug use closely parallel popular attitudes toward drugs, from the earliest writings of man up to the present. The nineteenth century Romantics in France—particularly Baudelaire and his literary circle—provided the first concentration of drug-related literature which was not only a curiosity of Eastern exoticism, but an aesthetic mode. For reasons which will be made clear within this study, traditional drug literature in England and America from 1900 to 1945 was a faded continuation of Romantic literary notions inherited from the 19th century French tradition. The 1950's in America brought about a curious shift in the literary mainstream, placing sudden emphasis on the previously-ignored subcultural themes of sex, drugs, and race—a shift instigated by World War II experiences. Although the mid-1960's saw the most concentrated use of drugs in the American culture recorded in our history, it was not until the present decade that writers began to deal with spiritual and psychological explorations of drug experience as a way of continuing that Romantic visionary quest through the interior flights of chemically-stimulated fantasy.

Within English and American traditional fiction from 1945 to the present we may roughly distinguish three chronological and thematic categories:

1. The prevalent drug is heroin; the central figure is the junkie; and the literary emphasis is upon a life style of existential alienation—a Romantic submergence in the drug subculture.

2. The prevalent drugs are marijuana and LSD; the central figure is the youthful student hippie; and the literary emphasis is upon experiential politics and social philosophy—the emergence of a "counter-culture" which challenges the dominant culture.