After the French occupation of Algeria in the 1830s, hashish was introduced to bohemian and artistic Paris. The Paris hashish users resembled the Californian potheads of the 1960s in their idealism, poses and self-indulgence. "We were troubadours, rebels," said Flaubert, "above all we were artists." He and his contemporaries used hashish as part of their rebellion against middle-class conventions and industrial capitalism - what he castigated as "the shrivelled runt of human aspirations" typified by "railways, enema pumps, cream cakes and the guillotine". Parisian hashish smokers and eaters remained subversive types. As late as the 1870s, Arthur Rimbaud smoked hashish during the defiant phase of his adolescence when he was contemplating becoming an urban terrorist.
Balzac claimed to have "heard celestial voices and seen heavenly paintings" after sampling hashish, but it was Flaubert who published an irresistibly sexy account of drug taking. In L'Education Sentimentale he became the first novelist to eroticise drug paraphernalia. For 19th-century readers, the sexiness of drugs was clinched in a scene from Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo (1844). This great Romantic novel, beloved by generations of European schoolboys, included luxuriant accounts of Aladdin enjoying hashish supplied by Sinbad. These scenes climaxed - and that is the word - with a voluptuous drug-induced dream that was like every schoolboy's most tortuously wonderful wet dream. "The more he strove against this unhallowed passion the more his senses yielded to its thrall, and at length, weary of the struggle, he gave way and sank back breathless and exhausted beneath the kisses of his marvellous dream."
[...] In several novels [Wilkie] Collins described women who were yoked under male domestic tyranny, and repressed their frustrations with the help of opiates. The Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning developed an opium habit as a way of coping with the emotional tensions and male bullying of her family life. "Opium - opium - night after night! - and some nights even opium won't do," she confessed. Her drug habit helped her function and did little harm. It was the Victorian equivalent of the modern use of anti-depressants and sedatives by oppressed, unhappy women - "mother's little helpers" as the Rolling Stones called them.
[...] Although drugs didn't do much good to authors' creativity, drug sub-cultures provided wonderful material for their books. Opium dens became emblematic of urban sleaze. The scene in a sordid opium den with which Charles Dickens opened The Mystery of Edwin Drood became as enduring a literary image as the hashish dreams in The Count of Monte Cristo. The opium smoker pictured by Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Man with the Twisted Lip" was typical of the sensationalised junkies of fiction: "an object of mingled horror and pity... with yellow face, drooping lids and pin-point pupils, all huddled in a chair, the wreck and ruin of a noble man".
[...] Drugs provided a marvellously adaptable and popular subject matter for authors - as sexy, sensational or sordid as they wanted. It has been a more mixed story for literary drug users. Although authors who took drugs for pure pleasure were the most criticised, they usually did the least harm to themselves. Druggy authors trying to turn themselves into transcendental voyagers virtually always made fools of themselves. And some writers who used substances both to cope and to unwind, found they couldn't handle the stuff, and did themselves harm. Others took the pills and went on working fine. Overall, then, authors were pretty much like everyone else.

PS : je voudrais juste préciser que, même s'il a été écrit sous l'influence du speed (et ça ne m'étonne pas), L'idiot de la famille, le pavé de 3000 pages de Sartre sur Flaubert est tout à fait lisible. La preuve, je l'ai fait. En plusieurs fois, sur un an, mais je l'ai fait. Bon d'accord, faut vraiment aimer Flaubert. Mais c'est très lisible.
PS 2 : si quelqu'un me retrouve en français le passage cité du Comte de Monte-Christo, je serais plus que ravie de mettre l'original. Parce que Dumas en anglais :brrrrrrrr !!!!

Ecrit par Heileen, à 13:25 dans la rubrique "Littérature générale".

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