Page:Drug Themes in Fiction (Research Issues 10).djvu/14

 familiar with various types of narcotics, both in the form of painkillers and exotic thrills. And shortly after the war ended the literature of the contemporary drug culture began: (1949),  (begun in 1951),  (1952) and  (1953).

The focal point of drug literature in the 1950's is undoubtedly William Burroughs'. The victim of censorship trials, this work has most often been written about (by Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, et, al.) as a book dealing primarily with homosexuality. However, Frank D. McConnell offers a corrective perspective. Analyzing Burroughs' character of the addict, McConnell gives us insight into the thematic connections with the nineteenth century:

This "aesthetic possibility" takes shape in the existential life of the addict. Here we must differentiate between literature in which addicts serve simply as exotica or representatives of social problems and the true "literature of addiction" which immerses the reader in the drug experience through story and prose technique. , with its naturalistic study of the addict as anti-hero, fits into the former mode, as does even Burroughs' first book,. The "literature of addiction" is reserved for the likes of Samuel Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Malcolm Lowry, and William Burroughs.

This is, we should note, an experiential tradition, in which the validity of the writer's information, his life, gives weight to his drug metaphors. Yet ultimately, the drug writer is clearly concerned with the communicative function of all literature:

Those who are not addicted should really find Naked Lunch no less accessible than those who are—in fact, most of those who prize the book as secret cult-knowledge actually belong to a movement toward the non-addictive hallucinogens