Page:Drug Themes in Fiction (Research Issues 10).djvu/16

 experiential politics and social philosophy: while underground manufacturers of LSD such as Owsley Stanley stamp out pads of LSD for an hallucinogenic generation in the Haight-Ashbury, the imagery of the 'sixties is played out not in novels but in motion pictures like and, psychedelic light shows, and the pulsations of the Beatles, the Stones, and the Grateful Dead.

The drug literature popular in this era is typified by mind trips such as Herman Hesse and Tolkien and nonfiction experiential reports, such as Carlos Castanenda's, or Tom Wolfe's. This complicated transitional era in drug literature is probably best analyzed by Theodore Roszak in "The Counterfeit Infinity", a chapter of, in which he utilizes Coleridge's rejection of science and objective consciousness to explain a philosophy of 1960's drug culture.

The contemporary excursions into drug literature are fragmented into continuations of the Romantic tradition, writers of the experiential vogue, new moralists, and commercial exploiters of a social phenomenon. Certainly the novels cited in the accompanying bibliography written by Richard Farina, James Leo Herlihy, and Gurney Norman reach out for new versions of the politics of ecstasy. Their joy-tripping is not always without moral judgment, but its central thrust is in the central pleasures of life enhanced by drugs. Hunter Thompson's (1971) or Joan Didion's  (1970) recreate those tight, subjective existential worlds of the 'fifties junkies that more closely fit the "literature of addiction" pattern discerned by McConnell.

In Thompson, the modality of drug lunacy has not the purist aspects of heroin addiction, but rather embraces the entire spectrum of uppers, downers, drugs and alcohol that are available:

Through the nightmare combination of all these drugs, Thompson gives us a frighteningly realistic vision of Las Vegas in both physical and psychological terms. Similarly, in 1972 he followed the