Page:Drug Themes in Fiction (Research Issues 10).djvu/11

 3. The prevalent drug (if you will) is imagination; the central figure is the visionary; and the literary emphasis is upon the drug hallucination—the imaginative projection as a mode of alternative reality.

The history of drug-related traditional literature is not only a study in shifting cultural attitudes, but a record of reaction to the increasing amount of knowledge in scientific areas, particularly in pharmaceutics. From the medieval exorcist to the Elizabethan alchemist to the fin-de-siecle apothecary, small growth in real understanding of biochemistry is seen; rather, the witchdoctor dressed in varying historical guises, always relying upon some form of narcotic. Well into the twentieth century, appalling mythologies and frauds were accepted as medical fact (Hechtlinger). World War II seems to represent a turning point. It was after this war, which prompted sophisticated medical research, mixed fighting men interracially, and took American fighting men into Japan and the culture of the East, that interest increased in such works as Baudelaire's.

In the late 1940's, at the convergence of pharmaceutical knowledge and subculture discovery, literature turns to the world of the junkie, the Negro, the jazz musician, the homosexual, and the existential wanderer. From Frankie Machine in Nelson Algren's to Hunter Thompson's pseudo-biographical antics in, drug-related literature becomes more and more clearly the literature of picaresque experience. As intellectual currents have flowed away from the certain axioms of Marx and Freud toward the absurdity and nausea of Camus and Sartre, drug literature has become a symbolic quest through the ultimate frontier of the mind.

However, in order to follow the thematic development of drug literature in the twentieth century, we must look backward to the Romantic era, when a clear pattern of interaction between literature and drug use emerged in the French literary circle of Baudelaire. For research continuity, we are fortunate to have the only study of previous drug-related literature, by Professor Emanuel J. Michel, Jr., whose close reading of Baudelaire and his contemporaries reveals themes which continue to play throughout drug literature in England and America in the twentieth century (Mickel).

French interest in the Orient played a significant role in the development of drug literature, After the opening of trade relations with the Far East under Louis XIV, French aristocrats and intellectuals became fascinated with Oriental furnishings, clothing, curiosities, and various spices and perfumes—interest which continued to emerge