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: The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), On the Road (begun in 1951), The Invisible Man (1952) and Junkie (1953).
The focal point of drug literature in the 1950's is undoubtedly William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. 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:
In the simplest terms, of course, the junky himself is an invention of the Romantic era. This disreputable, shabby, compulsive wanderer carrying his mysterious and holy wound is a figure first incarnated in the alcoholic Burns or in the mad Chatterton who so fascinated Wordsworth, and brought to a nearly final development in Coleridge himself…It is only after the Romantics had taught us the impossibility of a transubstantiation of things from above, that the negative eucharist of the outlaw and the sensualist became an aesthetic possibility. (McConnell, p. 672.)
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. The Man with the Golden Arm, with its naturalistic study of the addict as anti-hero, fits into the former mode, as does even Burroughs' first book, Junkie. 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
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