Travel and Drugs in Twentieth-Century Literature

Lindsey Michael Banco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136096983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines the connections between two disparate yet persistently bound thematics -- mobility and intoxication -- and explores their central yet frequently misunderstood role in constructing subjectivity following the 1960s. Emerging from profound mid-twentieth-century changes in how drugs and travel were imagined, the conceptual nexus discussed sheds new light on British and North American responses to sixties counterculture. With readings of Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Alex Garland, Hunter S. Thompson, and Robert Sedlack, Banco traces twin arguments, looking at the ways travel is imagined as a disciplinary force acting upon the creative, destabilizing powers of psychedelic intoxication; and exploring the ways drugs help construct travel spaces and practices as, at times, revolutionary, and at other times, neo-colonial. By following a sequence of shifting understandings of drug and travel orthodoxies, this book traverses fraught and irresistibly linked terrains from the late 1950s up to a period marked by international, postmodern tourism. As such, it helps illuminate a world where tourism is continually expanding yet constantly circumscribed, and where illegal drugs are both increasingly unregulated in the global economy and perceived more and more as crucial agents in the construction of human subjectivity.

Part I

Set and Setting

1 “Causing Frameworks to Shift”

Theorizing Tripping

[O]n the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eater, who live on a food that comes from a kind of flower flower. Here we landed to take in fresh water, and our crews … went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eater without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars.

—Homer's Odyssey (p. 75)

He was named Aloadin, and his religion was that of Mahomet. In a beautiful valley enclosed between two lofty mountains, he had formed a luxurious garden, stored with every delicious fruit and every fragrant shrub that could be procured. Palaces of various sizes and forms were erected in different parts of the grounds, ornamented with works in gold, with paintings, and with furniture of rich silks. By means of small conduits contrived in these buildings, streams of wine, milk, honey, and some of pure water, were seen to flow in every direction.

The inhabitants of these palaces were elegant and beautiful damsels, accomplished in the arts of singing, playing upon all sorts of musical instruments, dancing, and especially those of dalliance and amorous allurement. …

In order that none without his license might find their way into this delicious valley, he caused a strong and inexpugnable castle to be erected at the opening of it, through which the entry was by a secret passage. At his court, likewise, this chief entertained a number of youths, from the age of twelve to twenty years … who showed a disposition for martial exercises, and appeared to possess the quality of daring courage. … And at certain times he caused opium to be administered to ten or a dozen of the youths; and when half dead with sleep he had them conveyed to the several apartments of the palaces in the garden. …

Upon awakening from the state of stupor, their senses were struck with all the delightful objects that have been described, and each perceived himself surrounded by lovely damsels, singing, playing, and attracting his regards by the most fascinating caresses, serving him also with delicate foods and exquisite wines; until intoxicated with excess of enjoyment amidst actual rivulets of milk and wine, he believed himself assuredly in Paradise …

When four or five days had thus been passed, they were thrown once more into a drugged state, and carried out of the garden … The consequence of this system was, that when any of the neighboring princes, or others, gave offence to this chief, they were put to death by these his disciplined assassins; none of whom felt terror at the risk of losing their own lives …

—The Travels of Marco Polo (p. 53–55)

Homer's Odyssey and Marco Polo's Travels are paradigmatic in two ways; they are both prominent narratives considered integral to Western literature and culture, and more specifically, they are both quintessential travel texts. As such, they illustrate quite clearly how prominent a concept travel is in our cultural baggage. At the same time, both the Homer and Marco Polo extracts feature intoxicants, drugs that sometimes slip by unnoticed or remain deliberately ignored yet can become, when convenient, quite important indeed in thinking about travel as a paradigmatic experience.

In 1937, Harry J. Anslinger, commissioner of the Federal Narcotics Bureau of the United States, cited the Odyssey and the Travel s in making his case to the government for a prohibitive taxation regime that would effectively criminalize cannabis. “The drug is as old as civilization itself,” Anslinger claimed.

Homer wrote about it, as a drug which made men forget their homes, and that turned them into swine. In Persia, a thousand years before Christ, there was a religious and military order founded which was called the Assassins, and they derived their name from the drug called hashish which is now known in this country as marihuana. They were noted for their acts of cruelty and the word “assassin” very aptly describes the drug.¹

As Marcus Boon points out in his account of Anslinger's testimony in The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, Anslinger takes some liberties in his effort to caution lawmakers against the oblivion and murderous aggression in store for those foolish enough to ingest mind-altering substances. “Neither of Homer's plants has any known connection with cannabis,”² Boon explains, and in addition to pushing the date of the Persian myth back two thousand years, Anslinger's appropriation of Marco Polo's version of the myth ignores its lengthy history of Orientalist interpretation and elaboration.³ Despite Anslinger's infelicities, Boon qualifies his argument about the demonization of cannabis: “Although it was disingenuously convenient for Anslinger and company to exploit this literature regarding cannabis, and to create out of it a framework of criminality, it was no less disingenuous for writers to use cannabis as a way of framing up and selling the realm of the imagination in which they were so heavily invested.”⁴ In other words, the discourse of criminalization that claims drug use usurps mastery over one's own mind and freedom can easily be modulated to express its opposite: drugs function as a hortatory index of one's devotion to artistic creativity or spiritual and literal exploration, to say nothing of its value in expressing countercultural cachet. While no doubt an astute assessment of this early twentieth-century example of exploiting the ambivalence of drug discourse, Boon's analysis of Anslinger does not explore why the dualities we readily find in drug discourse are so intricately intertwined with travel or how the two thematics influence one another. He thus overlooks a host of questions about space, subjectivity, alterity, and perception. Why are drugs secreted in these foundational travel narratives, and what effects do they have?

In Homer's account, the intoxicating lotus flowers threaten to interrupt the journey by limiting the mobility of the traveler and imperilling the very construction of his travel narrative with poisonous forgetfulness. Anslinger frames these drugs in a particular way so as to constitute a cautionary tale, one perhaps akin to contemporary narratives linking drugs to border-crossing privileges: if you try to take drugs over the border, arrest will follow. Paradigmatic, self-defining travel must be guarded, Anslinger would say, against the drug's ability to halt the trip. Meanwhile, Homer's actual representation of drugs, as in many texts where drugs and travel come together, highlights a curious twist on what Mark Simpson calls the “orthodox sense of mobility's liberating power.”⁵ For Odysseus' men, the freedom of the open ocean and the thrill of exotic travel become compelled mobility, enforced travel to which they must submit despite the tremendous appeal of staying with the lotus-eaters and partaking of their “delicious” existence—especially when the alternative is being chained, weeping, to the rowing benches. In other words, Anslinger (who has proven surprisingly influential in developing not only current laws but broader contemporary attitudes toward drugs as well) is in fact suspicious of the pleasure and relief offered by the flowers because they suspend a predetermined and compulsory journey. They threaten to disrupt an enforced return to that most sacrosanct and nostalgic determiner of identity: home. Anslinger's distrust of intoxication as Homer represents it thus reveals his investment in compulsory mobility as the means to knowledge, certainty, and identity. Travel cannot be disrupted for any reason, because such disruption could threaten the required return home.

Anslinger's use of the Hassan-i Sabbah myth is both consistent and inconsistent with his use of Homer: consistent, because drugs in the latter myth disrupt originary identity and turn the young men into assassins; inconsistent, because Marco Polo's account reveals an even stronger reliance upon drugs for understanding the very nature of travel itself. Drugs in that myth are an essential component of the mobility the young men experience. Hassan-i Sabbah's mountain enclosure is, first of all, highly structured and designed to restrict movement. This feature will be explored repeatedly in this study, since attempts to attenuate the dangers or the fears or the unmasterability of psychedelic experience frequently take the form of spatial regulation, which the texts often thematize through physical enclosures and other restrictions upon mobility that are disguised to the travelers as hedonistic or utopian spaces. At the same time, however, the mountain enclosure functions powerfully to mobilize political action. The boys' trip into paradise and then out again leaves them willing to do anything for a chance to die heroically and return to what they think is heaven. Intoxication, however, is the transformative force in this tale. Intoxication is what allows for their transport into physical paradise in the first place, and intoxication is what serves as inspiration for a future trip, enabling movement instead of aborting it as it does in The Odyssey. The process of relating travel to intoxication again undermines conventional notions of the freedom of mobility, but it mobilizes in other ways, transforming the restrictive space of the mountain enclosure into the space of, for them, radical political action.

Drugs in the myth, instead of offering oblivion, consolidate the boys' identities as honorable killers by helping them transform their perceptions of the space in which they find themselves.⁶ Drugs allow them to recast the inescapable boundaries of their mountain prison and their enforced mobility into a paradisiacal realm that has the potential to prompt political action. Unlike Odysseus' men, these boys do not weep as they are transported. What they think they know about their situation and the spaces in which they find themselves—their epistemological state—come about as a result of traveling while high. Anslinger may call them delusional, but the space they inhabit, like the space we all inhabit, is almost entirely dependent upon how they conceive of it, how the minds doing the conceiving may be altered by chemical agents, and how those reconceptualizations affect their understanding of space. Henri Lefebvre, whose landmark study The Production of Space addresses the fact that “[t]o speak of ‘producing space’ sounds bizarre, so great is the sway still held by the idea that empty space is prior to whatever ends up filling it,”⁷ provides some helpful formulations here. He articulates at length the process by which “[t]he quasi-logical presupposition of an identity between mental space … and real space creates an abyss between the mental sphere on one side and the physical or social sphere on the other”⁸ and postulates theories to bridge that abyss. In Tripping literature, the spaces of travel are simultaneously produced out of the physical (e.g. the drug economy and drug phenomenology) and the metaphysical (e.g. being-on-drugs).

The tales Anslinger uses in his anti-cannabis campaign exemplify some of the ambivalences and chiasmatic conceptual crossings-over that structure the itinerary of this study. Intoxication for Homer is a dangerous distraction and another obstacle Odysseus must surmount at the same time that it is a source of pleasure and relief for his exhausted sailors, so to reconcile this ambivalence, travel becomes enthralling and enriching yet at the same compulsory should anything else endanger the return home. Mobility in the Hassan-i Sabbah myth is likewise forced and deceptive, yet drugs make that disciplinary space pleasurable and defining, which allows it both to function as an index of violent fanaticism and to offer a glimpse of paradise. In both cases, particular kinds of intoxication operate as narrative “responses” to particular kinds of travel at the same time that intoxications shape the understanding of mobility. The relationships between representations of travel and representations of mind-alteration, as these two examples suggest, are dynamic, unpredictable, and frequently result in paradoxical manifestations of the ambivalences of Tripping.

Anslinger's pursuit of prohibition in 1937 was, by most accounts, rooted in fear, racism, and confusion, but it was also integral to defining twentieth-century drug regulation and, by extension, contemporary relations to drugs and intoxication. Anslinger's efforts have bearing on how drugs do and do not move around the world, where people do and do not travel to seek out particular drugs, and which substances can impede and which can fuel travel. Anslinger has proven quite influential in terms of how intoxication gets spatialized and how contemporary space gets perceived as intoxicated. Coincidentally, 1937 is the same year Aldous Huxley moved to the United States and began the process of becoming another, though very different, influential figure in the development of mid-twentieth-century American conceptualizations of travel and drugs. The confluence of Anslinger's project and Huxley's arrival indicates that the conditions would soon be right for a vociferous debate in the U.S. between a burgeoning drug culture and an equally fanatical opposition, a debate that has proven definitive in the relationship between drugs, travel, counterculture, and late twentieth-century subjectivity. Along with growing mass tourism, post-World War II affluence produced a new consumer economy that raised standards of living to unprecedented levels and, at the same time, fomented a new anxiety over consumption that would mesh in intriguing ways with anxieties over the large-scale consumption of drugs. Anslinger's interest in Homer's and Marco Polo's representations of travel and drugs, coupled with Huxley's role in the impending psychedelic revolution, highlights the importance of travel and drugs in engaging with idealistic yet perpetually ambivalent countercultural identity, with the recurrent countercultural dialectic between hope and disappointment. This study thus originates simultaneously in Huxley's seminal trip across the Atlantic and the subsequent cultural revolution he helped spawn in the United Sates as well as in Anslinger's use of travel literature in the construction of a U.S. anti-drug policy that would help curtail—for good or for ill—sixties counterculture.

As The Odyssey and the myth of Hassan-i Sabbah suggest, the confluence of travel and drugs is a transhistorical, transgeographical phenomenon, but I focus my analysis on the latter half of the twentieth century because of the converging historical phenomena outlined in the previous paragraph. Following Huxley and Anslinger, electronic mediation, affordable high-speed mass transportation, and transnational capital—all of which contribute to a phenomenon David Harvey terms “time-space compression” and locates at the center of postmodernity—produced exceptional juxtaposition and dislocation.⁹ Such innovations in transportation and communication technologies have produced a postmodern, postindustrial self who, as part of the collapse of the opposing poles of reality and simulation as Jean Baudrillard has outlined them, exists in the realm of the hyperreal simulation. “[N]othing,” writes Baudrillard, “separates one pole from another anymore, the beginning from the end; there is a kind of contraction of one over the other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapse of the two traditional poles into each other: implosion … That is where simulation begins.”¹⁰ Travel writers ' efforts to reflect upon, interrogate, and respond to these...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Set and Setting
• 1 “Causing Frameworks to Shift”
• 2 Starting Selves
• Part II Drugs and the Disciplinary Power of Utopian Travel
• 3 The Permeable Self and the Horrors of Consumption Aldous Huxley's Island
• 4 What's He Smoking? Cannabis and Cigarettes in Alex Garland's The Beach
• Part III Drugs and the Revisions of Anti-Tourism
• 5 “Man, This is the Way to Travel” Seeing Vegas Anew in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
• 6 Eating in Africa Becoming-Animal in Robert Sedlack's The African Safari Papers
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index