Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature

212 Pages·2019·2.13 MB·English

by  Adam Colman

PALGRAVE
STUDIES IN
LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND
MEDICINE
Drugs and the Addiction
Aesthetic in Nineteenth-
Century Literature
ADAM COLMAN
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
Catherine Belling
Feinberg School of Medicine
Northwestern University
Chicago, IL, USA
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Adam Colman
Drugs and the
Addiction Aesthetic in
Nineteenth-Century
Literature
Adam Colman
Department of English
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst, MA, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-3-030-01589-3 ISBN 978-3-030-01590-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01590-9
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A
cknowledgments
This book would not exist without those who have read and generously
responded to my work. I owe many thanks to Suzanne Daly; thanks also
to Joselyn Almeida-Beveridge, David Katz, Daniel Levin Becker, Darren
Lone Fight, Cornelia Pearsall, Heather Richardson, and David Toomey.
Jonathan Crewe, William Keach, and Kate Thomas provided important
guidance at early stages in my studies. At the 2017 Friends of Coleridge
conference in Bristol, I was fortunate to learn from an array of scholars;
Sharon Ruston and Tim Fulford, among so many others, have helped me
find my way through Romanticism. More generally, a number of people
have helped me figure out what I’ve been seeking to do in academia, and
they include Lily Gurton-Wachter, Andrew Leland, Erin Moodie, Mazen
Naous, and David Pritchard.
An earlier version of this book’s sixth chapter appeared in the journal
Extrapolation, and I thank Liverpool University Press for the permission
to include that material here.
To Gerald Colman and Ruth Colman, the entire Colman family, the Gu
family, Kevin Johnson, Melissa Lok, and the Tam family, I owe much grat-
itude, and my utmost thanks go to Jessica Tam.
v
c
ontents
1 I ntroduction 1
2 Shelley, Alcohol, and the “world we make”: Habit’s
Patterns in The Cenci 53
3 The Labyrinths of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater 81
4 From Lotos-Eaters to Lotus-Eaters: Tennyson’s And
Rossetti’s Mediated Addiction 109
5 Bleak House’s Addictive Detective-Work 141
6 Optative Movement and Drink in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 163
7 Epilogue: Generic Variety in Marie Corelli’s Wormwood and
Beyond 187
Index 207
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This is the story behind the good sort of addiction. To be clear: that good
sort is not the medical condition of substance dependence, which is peril-
ous and so often devastating. Instead, by “good sort of addiction,” I refer
to a sense of addiction frequently used in pop-culture criticism. We find it
in descriptions of videogames, in essays on music, and in reviews of televi-
sion programs. Kirsten Acuna’s review of Breaking Bad, for example, uses
the language of drug use in praise of a television show (in this case a show
about a methamphetamine-dealer named Walt). “If you’re binge-
watching,” Acuna writes, “‘Breaking Bad’ becomes as addictive as the
blue meth Walt’s buyers can’t go without.”
Acuna is quite specific about the nature of Breaking Bad’s good sort of
addictiveness. She argues that the show’s habit-forming property comes
from its strategy of promising new information in each installment: “The
final 12–15 minutes of nearly every episode,” she writes, “usually has a
huge plot turn.” Acuna’s use of the word “addictive” here conveys a sober
inclination toward acquisition of more and more knowledge, a sustained
consideration of promised novelty and difference, and an orientation
toward constantly intimated potential. Substance dependence, as described
by the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Medical
Disorders (DSM), also compels ongoing pursuit of more and more through
“a pattern of repeated self-administration” (176), but it overrides will and
narrows the range of possibilities pursued. It can drive one to consume
© The Author(s) 2019 1
A. Colman, Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-
Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and
Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01590-9_1
2 A. COLMAN
repeatedly a substance “despite knowledge of having a persistent or
recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been
caused or exacerbated by the substance” (DSM-IV 181). The positive
sense of addiction used by Acuna—that of an aesthetic experience merely
like substance dependence due in large part to its similarly repetitive
nature—combines the propulsion of desire with a widened range of explo-
ration. Such an experience belongs to what I call the addiction aesthetic,
an aesthetic category characterized by a particular modality, or orientation
toward possibility. The addiction aesthetic’s modality, this book argues, is
one of intensely repetitive investigation of the possible.
It is hard to imagine aesthetic experience of any kind that does not
involve some combination of repetition and a sense of the possible, yet this
book particularly examines the intensified, exploratory version of such
experience in terms of addiction for two reasons. First, addiction-related
terminology continues to appear in descriptions of this sort of aesthetic
experience and, second, durable versions of such aesthetic experience
emerged with regard to nineteenth-century ideas about habit-forming
intoxicants. For a clearer idea of that emergence, consider the difference
between Beethoven and Bach, as well as the difference in their receptions.
Alex Ross, in a New Yorker piece on Beethoven, describes the nineteenth-
century composer’s work as “addictive” in order to distinguish it from that
of earlier composers such as Bach, whose music uses comparatively steadier
repetitions and variations. Beethoven, Ross observes, brings more elabora-
tion, greater scale, more obsessiveness—in short, more—to the musical tra-
dition represented by Bach, and the result is addictive. Ross writes:
More than anything, it was the mesmerizing intricacy of Beethoven’s con-
structions—his way of building large structures from the obsessive develop-
ment of curt motifs—that made the repertory culture of classical music
possible. This is not to say that Beethoven’s predecessors, giants on the
order of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, fail to reward repeated listening with
their cerebral games of variation. In the case of Beethoven, though, the
process becomes addictive [emphasis added], irresistible. No composer
labors so hard to stave off boredom, to occupy the mind of one who might
be hearing or playing a particular piece for the tenth or the hundredth time.
Here, a twenty-first-century writer uses the language of addiction to
describe a Romantic composer—to describe the greater intensity of that
nineteenth-century composer’s repetitive pursuit of something more than
the music of his predecessors.1 Ross also quotes E.T.A. Hoffmann’s praise
INTRODUCTION 3
of Beethoven as a composer whose music involves “infinite yearning”
(Hoffmann 98), using language further suggestive of addictiveness, espe-
cially given that Hoffmann’s own nineteenth-century aesthetic ideals have
been linked to his alcohol habit.2
Beethoven is said to have declared, “Music is like wine, inflaming men’s
minds to new achievements, and I am the Bacchus serving it out to them,
even unto intoxication” (Schindler 276). Such music resembled an intoxi-
cant because it provided a pathway toward “new achievements”—toward
novelty, toward possibility. Contemporaries including Hoffmann and later
writers identified a corresponding, addictive, “infinite yearning” in this
aesthetic experience. At a time when addiction discourse was on the rise in
Europe (in conjunction with broader post-Enlightenment discussions of
desirous habit) many saw aesthetic potential that matched addictive crav-
ing and intoxication; the quote from Alex Ross exemplifies the continued
presence of that aesthetic sensibility.3 Thus “the addiction aesthetic” still
proves useful as a label for this category of experience.
Again, the addiction aesthetic’s ongoing processions toward novelty, as
we see in Acuna’s review, are exploratory rather than strictly, oppressively
ravenous. Breaking Bad’s addictive allure sustains thoughtful curiosity
about “huge plot turns,” an investigatory attitude toward always-
developing and always-promised change. Rather than producing drab
compulsion, routine merges with its opposite for a figuratively addicted
audience’s delighted contemplation. Breaking Bad’s addictive form—its
episodically plot-driven tantalization—establishes the rhythms of routine
engagement with the non-routine, structuring the aesthetic experience by
which an audience might explore strangeness through intensified yet basi-
cally sober habit (the formal logic suggests something akin to that of
Beethoven’s music as described by Ross). In this book, I do not rule out
the possibility that such art deemed addictive may be experienced through
the same neural processes as drug addiction, but nor do I devote much
attention to the negative sense of addiction applied, for instance, to
songs—“earworms”—that get stuck in one’s head, override will, and work
in manners closer to the medically understood version of addiction associ-
ated with substance dependence. The scope of this book will mostly
remain limited to the origins of the aesthetic category founded upon a
positive sense of addictive repetition, a sense different from—though
clearly related to—the compulsions of the medical condition.4
This book focuses primarily on Britain in the nineteenth century, when
addiction became more firmly understood as a medical condition and so
became available as an aesthetic concept. The Society for the Study of