PSYCHEDELIC TRIPS Travel and Drugs in Contemporary Literature

PSYCHEDELIC TRIPS Travel and Drugs in Contemporary Literature by LINDSEY MICHAEL BANCO A thesis submitted to the Department of English in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada April, 2008 copyright © Lindsey Michael Banco, 2008 Abstract This dissertation studies interlocking representations of travel and drugs in contemporary American, British, and Canadian novels, exploring how those thematics alternately destabilize and assuage subjectivity, genre, and the perception of space. Following a prefatory chapter, Chapters Two and Three serve as a two-part introduction. The first part articulates a theoretical lens I designate by enclosing the word “tripping,” a colloquialism for a drug experience, in quotation marks. Through this lens, I examine travel and drugs in contemporary fiction indebted to sixties counterculture. In Chapter Three, I examine the work of William S. Burroughs and Aldous Huxley, contextualizing their mid-twentieth-century travel and drugs as foundational to later twentieth-century “tripping.” Chapter Four treats Huxley’s novel, Island , as a revision of the foundations I outline in the previous chapter; his instantiation and critique of utopia via “tripping” help conceptualize the psychedelic experience as protective spatial movement – physical mobility instead of psychedelic fungibility – in the service of preserving a stable sense of self. Chapter Five discusses Alex Garland’s The Beach , in which drugs reveals the limitations of utopian thought by underscoring the paradoxical notion of immobility hidden within the supposed freedom of mobility. In these novels, Huxley and Garland depict travel as a key to the process of rendering psychedelic intoxication knowable in familiar terms. ii Chapters Six and Seven, in exploring Hunter S. Thompson and Robert Sedlack, shift toward defamiliarizing conventional modes of travel using some of the radical possibilities of drug intoxication. Chapter Six examines Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , a text which, instead of attempting to understand inassimilable drug experiences by spatializing the drugged mind, explores mind-alteration as a way of understanding the postmodern space of Las Vegas that emerges following the demise of the counterculture. Chapter Seven constructs a reading of Sedlack’s The African Safari Papers , examining ways its representation of self-conscious tourism, inflected by intoxication and Thompson-inspired excess, deploys the figures of the shaman and of animals to complicate conventional understandings of tourism. Thompson and Sedlack explore how the subjectivities of domestic and global tourists are reshaped by, rather than resist, the radical alterity introduced by the drug experience. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Department of English at Queen’s for all of their aiding and abetting. I owe especially large debts of gratitude to my supervisors: Asha Varadharajan, whose brilliance and unflagging commitment made this dissertation possible, and Chris Bongie, whose generous and incisive criticism helped clarify my thinking and writing. Helen Tiffin’s advice on matters professional and editorial has proven invaluable; Sylvia Söderlind’s friendship and good humor have made these an enjoyable number of years; and Robert Morrison did no less than change the way I think about literature. My sincere thanks as well to David Lenson for serving as external examiner, for his guidance and support, and for having written such an important book in the first place. I would also like to acknowledge previous mentors at the University of Alberta, some of whom may not know how much of an influence they have had on me: Mark Simpson, Dianne Chisholm, Bert Almon, Michael O’Driscoll, Teresa Zackodnik, and Douglas Barbour. To my friends and family in Edmonton: thanks for listening to me even when I seemed to be talking all sorts of horrible gibberish. My time at Queen’s was made unforgettable by my fellow graduate students and dear friends. For all the beer and poker, thanks to Jeremy Lalonde and Christine McLeod, Jen Esmail and Eric Carlson, the incorrigible Sheetal Lodhia, the indomitable Jason Boulet, and the incomparable Heather Emmens. Above all, thanks to Sara, who has given me so much. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Part I: Set and Setting Chapter 2: Theorizing “Tripping” 15 Chapter 3: Foundations: Aldous Huxley and William S. Burroughs 41 Part II: Utopias and Failed Utopias Chapter 4: The Mind’s Antipodes: Psychedelic Utopia and the Horrors of Consumption in Huxley’s Island 79 Chapter 5: What’s He Smoking?: Drugs and Backpacking in Alex Garland’s The Beach 113 Part III: Monsters and Excesses Chapter 6: “Man, This Is the Way to Travel”: Drugs and Tourism in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 153 Chapter 7: Eating In Africa: Altered States and Animals in Robert Sedlack’s The African Safari Papers 193 Conclusion 241 Works Cited 245 v Chapter 1 Introduction Psychedelic Trips examines the confluence of travel and drugs, two seemingly disparate thematics that, following the end of World War II and coinciding with a rise in affluence among middle-class Americans and an exploding counterculture, underwent dramatic and concurrent shifts. Travelers in this period, participants in the burgeoning industry of mass tourism, started in larger and larger numbers to visit places further and further afield, while increasingly large-scale use of psychedelic drugs – celebrated and decried in roughly equal but constantly shifting proportions – provided a set of cultural reference points and an aesthetic that helped cement the prominence of this period in the public imagination. We tend to think of travel and intoxication in quite different moral, material, and epistemological terms, but at the same time, we imagine them combining pleasures and dangers in similar ways and functioning as oddly interchangeable cultural signifiers of rebellion. The similarities between these two thematics are actually quite striking. Drugs and travel are so discursively intimate, share so many of the same conceptual foundations, evoke such similar anxieties and pleasures, and illuminate such analogous problems that their combination is actually quite ubiquitous. Weston LaBarre locates one source for such entanglements in the etymology of the words we use to talk about drugs: “‘Hallucination’ derives from the Latin deponent or half-passive verb alucinari , ‘to wander in the mind’” (9). We see these entanglements in the notion of transport implicit in the ecstatic drug experience – the ec-stasis, the non-static, the movement – and by the 1 spatial metaphors governing our discourses about drugs: being high or tripping, for example, colloquialisms for what is usually a psychedelic drug experience. Like the pleasures of travel, which, according to Eric Leed, lie in the way the “passage through space shapes the experience of time and perception” (206 n. 14), the pleasures of drugs lie in their reformulations of chronology and perceptual experience. In offering similar threats to the boundaries between self and other and similar promises of alterity, travel and drugs are also subversive in similar ways. Leed stakes that claim for travel, but it is equally applicable to many forms of intoxication: “Travel is clearly subversive of the assumption implicit in all social structures that an individual has one real, consistent persona and character” (276). Such potentiality is a key reason both travel and drugs are simultaneously celebrated and vilified. Because mobility often exerts pressure on unified cultural categories and discrete identities by introducing difference and gradation, travel can be feared for its alienating effects and shunned for its disruptiveness, just as drugs can. The tourist, to name one supposedly distinct kind of traveler, allegedly seeks prepackaged experiences and manufactured authenticity as escape from real life, just as the drug user is said to opt out of reality and seek chemical escape or substitution. The purported inauthenticity of both hallucinations and all-expenses-paid resorts becomes the villain here. Travel, often a metaphor for “inner exploration,” can sometimes result in arrogant, enclosed selves who make comparisons and judgments from comfortable positions of interiority, just as drugs can allegedly promote comparable selfishness and solipsism. Travel is a powerful means of consolidating national identity and extending its influence, 2 as in the case of imperialism, and drugs are never very far from empire. 1 Finally, drug trafficking (which as far as most discourses of legality are concerned is worse than using), condenses the doubly-dangerous nature of travel and drugs into one offence.2 To move beyond simply enumerating similarities and to analyze how the conjunction of these two concepts affects our comprehension of the broader thematics it raises, I designate the amalgamation of travel and drugs by enclosing that provocative colloquialism in quotation marks: “tripping.” I use the term “tripping” in two ways. First, it circumscribes the genre that forms my object of study: fiction that employs the conjoined topoi of travel and drugs, of “two kinds of trip in one” (Harris “Introduction” xxv). I study fiction (as opposed to the non-fictional récit de voyage that often comes to mind when one thinks of travel writing) because how these two kinds of trips are imagined is central to how they

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