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Article Excerpt
To gain access to the question of "Being-on-drugs" we have had to go the way of literature. We have chosen a work that exemplarily treats the persecutory object of addiction. It does so within a fictional space, according to the fanatical exigency of realism. Few other works of fiction have brought out evidence of the pharmacodependency with which literature has always been secretly associated--as sedative, as cure, as escape conduit or euphorizing substance, as mimetic poisoning ... So literature, which is by no means an innocent bystander but often the accused, a breeding ground of hallucinogenres, has something to teach us about ethical fractures and the relationship to law. Gustave Flaubert's book went to court; it was denounced as poison. (11)
Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania
La pipa de kif, Ramón del Valle-Inclán's poetry collection published in 1919, already has produced a very respectable panorama of readings that reflect the author's status asa literary icon and the work's ambiguous reception from its publication to the present time. Given that previous criticism, for the most part, has focused on this work's dialogue with various literary currents such as Modernism/modernismo, vanguardia, surrealism, and expressionism, or its function as the first of Valle's work to present the discourse and perspective of esperpento, (1) in this study I would like to explore another means of entry into this enigmatic work. I will suggest a reading that places this poetry collection not just within the boundaries of the Modernist or modernista in the literary sense, but rather the modern from a social, aesthetic and broadly cultural perspective because of the questions that it poses concerning the role of "high culture" and its ability to reflect aesthetic sensibilities and anxieties, as well as social realities contemporary to the author. I will be using Jacques Derrida's "The Rhetoric of Drugs" to provide a map of sorts to and through what has been termed narcotic modernity, and to suggest what implications are posited for culture, textuality, and language asa result of the ubiquitous and defining presence of drugs, their consumption and their effects on art, society and culture--Spanish or otherwise--in the last hundred years. (2) This reading of four poems from La pipa de kif is in consonance with the stance posited by both Angel Loureiro in his "Valle-Inclán: la modernidad como ruina" and Margarita Santos Zas, in Tradicionalismo y literatura en Valle-Inclán (1889-1910), in that the relationship of Valle-Inclán's ethics and aesthetics as expressed in these poems reflect an anxiety in regard to modernity. Loureiro comments: "El arte de Valle-Inclán tiene su fundamentación epistemológica, estética e idológica en su forma de negociar una experiencia de la modernidad que él concibe fundamentalmente como una forma de temporalidad portadora de decadencia y ruina. De ahí que cree mundos marcados por la manifestación o la amenaza de una carencia, un vacío o una ausencia, que él ve como un producto esencial de la modernidad" ("Modernidad" 296-97).
As various cultural critics already have noted, the relationship between literature and drugs has a long and colorful --of one could say psychedelic--history: their connection retreats into our misty and collective past, most probably originating in the ingestion of wild mushrooms, peyote or other natural plants and/or naturally derived products, which would produce visions or hallucinations that in their turn would serve a religious or community-based transcendental purpose in which some manner of storytelling and incantation would be involved. A classical example is, of course, the story of Homer's Odyssey, wherein the lotus eaters corrupt a few of Odysseus's men so that they wish only to chew lotus blossoms and no longer think of home. (3) This fascination with the drugs/literature connection continues through history to arrive at the twenty-first century's doorstep. (4) Here one may recall the more contemporary manifestations of the tradition of "writers on drugs" that include but are not limited to Sigmund Freud with his cocaine, Théophile Gautier and Edgar Allan Poe with opium, Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin with cannabis/hashish, or to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional Sherlock Holmes, a cocaine connoisseur. (5) One can then continue with the celebration of drug-induced euphoria of the so-called counterculture of the sixties and seventies--the "potheads" such as the musical bards of rock and roll--, and the later psychedelic designer drug producers, users, proselytizers and cultural icons such as Timothy Leary, which brings us to the so-called "heroine chic" of the eighties and nineties, and up to the glorification of crack cocaine, where drug runners and dealers are sometimes romanticized as modern-day Robin Hoods. (6)
Recent criticism has delineated very clearly this connection between drugs and literature, what they have in common, and how one arrives at the concept of narcotic modernity, where drugs are associated with a modern epistemology anda modern take on reality, existence, and the ability to "get high," that is, to get outside of ordinary experience, consciousness, and the means to represent that reality. (7) Derrida notes that both drugs and literature are inextricably bound to discourse, and both are ingested or taken in to the body in some fashion in order to cause an interiorization of altered perception: both originally depended on orality (33). (8) For drugs, it was the original taking in through the buccal orifice either in the form of eating or smoking. For literature, its origins depended on orality in the sense of transmission, and the metaphorical sense of ingesting the text into one's consciousness. Drugs and literature posit the inside/outside dialectic of consciousness and subjectivity, in that both allow the recipient -by ingesting the foreign object, whether it be drugs or literature- to get outside the confines of conventional perception and achieve split consciousness, that is, the ability to become one's own observer during the experience of either drugs or literature. Both literature and drugs may actas "sedative, cure, escape conduit or euphorizing substance or mimetic poisoning" (Ronell 11), providing either a handy labyrinth or trance for the consuming subject. (9) As either a reader or writer will attest, for example, the subject just wants to finish the paragraph, the page, the draft ...
Modern drugs as well as literature participate in capitalist marketing and production and both touch inexorably upon every citizen's interface with religion, politics and the law. For example, the Madrid or Guadalajara "Feria del Libro" as well as the Cali drug cartel demand careful execution of a finely detailed marketing campaign. Drug laws affect where, under what circumstances, and how much alcohol we drink: "Don't drink and drive" intrudes in most of a citizen's socializing away from the familiar domicile. And those same drug laws determine whether or not marijuana is available to us as a means of ameliorating the effects of chemotherapy or posttraumatic stress syndrome, and bring into focus a consideration of the cultural dialectic of public versus private when we get our luggage searched or reconnoitered by drug-sniffing canines and their handlers while passing through any major airport. Similarly, literature manifests itself asa discourse controlled by both social and legal parameters, in that, like drugs, it also pushes the limits of the law. Consider the original reception of James Joyce's Ulysses or Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, (10) both of which had to face obscenity charges, and were not permitted either publication or distribution in foreign markets until much later, or that Flaubert's Madame Bovary inspired an actual court case. One can also think of many texts from the years of Franco's dictatorship--even books of poetry--that were not known to the Spanish reading public, having been published abroad, or other texts that suffered the indignities of the censor's amputations. Also, citizen boards at local libraries and schools decide which literary texts are worthy of consumption, and which are not. Such seemingly innocent books as The Adventures of Toro Sawyer or Huck Finn share the dubious honor of having been banned as subversive or corruptive. Thus, from this perspective of narcotic modernity, both drugs and literature are treated as dangerous and poisonous toxins that need to be under strict social and governmental control, and both lead to questions concerning basic civil liberties. And clearly, Ramón del Valle-Inclán's La pipa de kif decisively inserts this concept of literature as an addictive substance into the dialogue on Spanish or Hispanic conventional culture.(11)
Modernity defines itself on the margins, and by implication posits hierarchical divisions. Thus, high culture--here understood as received, conventional, canonized literaturereveals its ambiguity and undecidability, because it cannot exist without its supplement, culture produced at the margins, the low or popular culture of bordello, tavern, street comer, back woods and backwater, places where convention, social and cultural mores do not exercise the controls that lead to stultification. So, high culture exists only because of its shady supplement, culture on the margins, which includes those literary texts such as La pipa de kif that celebrate both social and cultural practices deemed inappropriate for consumption by those portions of the population self-appointed as arbiters of so-called good taste. So it is that high culture in the conventional sense maintains its status because of the other definition of high culture, in the sense of "getting high" on drugs, as celebrated in Valle-Inclán's La pipa de kif, each participating in this implicit Manichaean dance in order to validate...
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