Waking Dreams: Modernist Intoxications and the Poetics of Altered States

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2016 Waking Dreams: Modernist Intoxications and the Poetics of Altered States Jason Ciaccio The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1501 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Waking Dreams: Modernist Intoxications and the Poetics of Altered States by Jason Ciaccio A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The City University of New York 2016 ©2016 Jason Ciaccio All Rights Reserved ii Waking Dreams: Modernist Intoxications and the Poetics of Altered States by Jason Ciaccio This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Professor John Brenkman Date Chair of Examining Committee Professor Giancarlo Lombardi Date Executive Officer Professor John Brenkman Professor Evelyne Ender Professor Moshe Gold Professor Joshua Wilner Supervisory Committee iii Abstract Waking Dreams: Modernist Intoxications and the Poetics of Altered States by Jason Ciaccio Adviser: John Brenkman Intoxication as a poetic principle is often identified with the romantic imagination. The literature of the intoxicated reverie is commonly thought of as synonymous with works such as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” DeQuincey’s accounts of numerous nightmares and reveries, a number of Keats’ odes, Novalis’ hymns, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories, and Poe’s oneiric Gothic tales. Each of these, in part through their opiation or the incorporation of various other draughts, evokes a realm of dreams and visions of various sorts that are commonly associated with romantic poetic practices. The ecstatic trance, the sense of passing into another domain that is cognitively, perceptually, and affectively differentiated somehow from the restraints of modes of normality and quotidian experience, receives unique articulations in each of these works and authors—indeed no two intoxicated modes of consciousness, much less their literary formulations, are ever quite the “same.” And yet if intoxication is commonly explored in relation to romantic poetic practices, its significance for the modernist imagination has received far less scholarly attention. I argue that the intoxicated reverie is a particularly significant modernist poetic category: I bring together Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Walter Benjamin’s writings on drugs and on the figure of the flâneur, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s various formulations of intoxication and dream, to suggest iv that the intoxicated reverie is given a rich variety of articulations in the era of literary modernism, and has a considerable bearing on modernist modes of knowing, creating, and embodiment. In an era in which intoxicants of all varieties for the first time become subject to widespread legislation, and likewise one in which dreams come to have increased relevance to understandings of the self, the intoxicated reverie becomes a particularly significant dimension of the literary imagination, and the figure of an inebriate visionary a recurring trope. I explore the various social, cultural, and political inflections of intoxicants of all sorts in these texts, as well as the broader historical and ontological concerns in relation to which they are situated—I do so with an eye turned in particular to the multiplicity of ways that texts incorporate intoxicated states. I argue that the materiality of the substance and the alleged inauthenticity of the experience it produces resonates both with the modernists’ heightened concern with the materialistic and corporeal, and with the questionable status of any definite signifiers to ensure the sobriety of representation. That intoxication opens an ambivalent space for the tensions between the divine and the material, or between the transcendent and the mundane, is a concern of mine throughout—I track the theological residues of the tropes of intoxication, and read the inebrieties that I address as part of a highly charged engagement with divinity and the western metaphysical tradition in the modernist era. The ephemeral or even illusory nature of the alterity of intoxication I understand in relation to the various enchantments and disenchantments of a distinctly modernist attunement. This study reflects an attempt to understand a social, cultural, and creative phenomenon that is both deeply rooted in human history and yet is often neglected by scholarship. v Acknowledgments: I would like to thank John Brenkman for his faith in this project from its earliest stages, and his guidance throughout its development; his rigorous intellect was always a source of insight and inspiration, and I can only ever hope to emulate it. Evelyne Ender offered help and encouragement throughout which has been greatly appreciated, and Moshe Gold and Josh Wilner provided useful insights at crucial junctures as well. A sadly belated thank you to Eddie Epstein, whose strains still echo, and whose joys still rejoice. for Julie. vi Table of Contents Abstract iv Acknowledgments vi Chapter 1: Towards a Poetics of Intoxication—from Romanticism to Modernism 1 Chapter 2: Between Intoxication and Narcosis: Nietzsche and the Pharmacology of Modernity 69 Chapter 3: Waking Dreams and Drunken Falls: Intoxication in Finnegans Wake 101 Chapter 4: Time Wasted—A Narcotic Analysis of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain 134 Chapter 5: Dreaming Intoxications: Walter Benjamin’s Curious Dialectics 166 Bibliography 198 vii 1 Chapter 1 Introduction: Towards a Poetics of Intoxication—from Romanticism to Modernism Euripides’ “The Bacchae” begins with Dionysus himself on stage. He tells the audience he has come from abroad—from Lydia, Phrygia, Persia, Bactria, Media, and Arabia Felix. “All Asia is mine” (396) he proclaims, identifying himself with no single location other than in antithesis to Greece. Accompanied by his female Bacchantes, he seems to represent everything antithetical to the Attic male citizenry that comprises the audience. The play’s topography, which juxtaposes the social order of the polis with the wilderness of the mountains, reinforces that clash of oppositions: in Dionysus, Greek urban life encounters its other. The unfolding of the play’s events is perhaps well- known: Pentheus comes under the sway of Dionysus; his desire finally provoked, he agrees to let Dionysus dress him as a woman, and pursues and spies on the revellers in the mountains. He is ultimately noticed, apprehended, and dismembered, his head carried through the streets in triumph by his own mother. The play is, of course, exceedingly rich in ambiguities, and perhaps nowhere more so than in relation to the issue of intoxication. On the one hand, “The Bacchae” seems to offer a strongly ambivalent warning against both the excesses of inebriation and the excesses of sobriety, while offering no successful ideal of moderation. Euripides’ play in fact very effectively dramatizes a host of tensions that surround intoxicants and their concomitant states. Dionysus is himself a foreign substance—not only is he consubstantial with the wine he brings, but he is clearly presented in the text as something external to the body of the polis of Thebes. The difference of his geographical origin resonates with the different modes of consciousness and perception that his 2 consumption produces. He appears to Pentheus as a stranger, as a handmaiden, and as a bull—as protean as any god of liquids might be. The play itself can be read as the enactment of his incorporation not simply by individual revellers, but by the polis itself— his effect is not limited to those who ingest him, but rather resonates throughout the entire body politic. Thebes itself is rendered inebriate. And yet while Dionysus is on the one hand foreign, his genealogy is decidedly culturally interior. He proclaims himself at the outset of the play to be the son of Zeus and of King Cadmus’ daughter Semele—the most culturally interior figures of the Greek city, Thebes. His conquest is on the one hand an act of foreign domination, and on the other hand a reclaiming of his homeland and affirmation of his Greek lineage. He claims to have conquered Asia as well, which seems to echo his ambivalent cultural identity— both foreign and native, divine and corporeal, Euripides’ Dionysus embodies a host of indeterminacies. King Pentheus by contrast seems to embody the sobriety of rationally organized life, and looks to preserve the ordered social codes of the polis. And yet, while he insists on the alterity of the foreign god, he not only reveals himself to be entirely susceptible to the god’s effect, but is himself a direct cousin of Dionysus, related through Cadmus. His intense repression of the influence of Dionysus in the play’s first half is ultimately overthrown by his tremendous desire for the foreign god’s lures. Dionysus is ambiguously intoxicant and placebo—it is not clear whether he is himself a causal agent of the madness of Thebes, or merely a marker of the surfacing of something already latent. Pentheus fears being supplanted by the wine god,

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