“A ghost in daylight”: drugs and the horror of modernity

This article examines how drug literature—writing on drugs by drug users—has consistently resorted to Gothic conventions, images and atmospheres for 200 years. It discusses some ways in which drug-addict writers have employed Gothicism to explore the formation of the addict self; its existence in, and reactions to, the conditions of life in capitalist modernity. The horrors buried in drug literature are exhumed here in a study of four texts: Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821–22), William Burroughs’ Junky (1953), Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book (1960) and Steven Martin’s Opium Fiend (2012). Modern drug literature’s genealogy descends from De Quincey; his Confessions launched the “sub-genre” that Carol Davison has termed “Gothic pharmography.” De Quincey spliced Gothic obsessions—mysterious visitations, dream states, mental extremity—with the first full-scale recounting of the wraith-like experience of an addict’s life. His nightmares of labyrinthine entrapment and distorted, menacing faces register a sense of shock: transforming his drugged navigations of nocturnal London into the stuff of nightmare. Romantic-era shock at Capital’s metropolitan monstrosity is revisited in Burroughs, Trocchi and Martin. All follow De Quincey in reporting their drugged explorations of urban capitalist modernity: haunted images, manias and hallucinations are doubles of Capital’s phantasmagoria. The argument begins with Jacques Derrida’s observations on the pharmakon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s conceptualisation of “addiction”—a form of repetitive-compulsive consuming habit—as an organising principle of life under capitalism from the early nineteenth century. The doctrine of “free will” collides with the syndrome termed “addiction,” and “drugs” becomes a metaphorical filament for an interrogation, and introjection, of market forces—literature mainlines Capital. As Burroughs wrote: “Junk [heroin] is the ideal product … the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.” The horror is the “real world,” defined by patterns of mass consumption that abjectify the individual self. After a Gothic-Marxist visitation to Confessions, the article follows De Quinceyan literary track-marks in Burroughs’ and Trocchi’s drugged psychogeographies of Capital’s physical and mental spatialisations. Finally, it uncovers the narco-Gothic’s persistence in Martin’s Opium Fiend—subtitled “A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Addiction” and asserting a discursive heritage. Burroughs, Trocchi and Martin render alienation in extremis, the ghastly transmogrification of the material human self into the apparitional: “a ghost in daylight on a crowded street” (Junky), “the grey ghost of the district” (Cain’s Book) and the “raw ghost … dead to the world yet still walking around among the living” (Opium Fiend). Like revelations of hidden genealogies in Gothic narratives, the article makes an uncanny and unique discovery about the identity of “the addict.” In Capital’s hellish regime, the addict represents the modern consumer par excellence.