The Addict Mystique: Part Two
Addicts in the media, tuberculosis, and artistic creativity.
In the previous entry of this series, I laid out the “addict mystique”: the view that addicts (like Mad and chronically ill people) are tapped into the divine, that our pathology is irreducibly related to ingenuity and artistic creativity.
Moving on, I’ll describe a similar mystique from the past—the consumptive mystique—and then relate it to the portrayal of addicts in modern media. I’ll then dive deeper into the apparent relationship between Madness, art, and suffering.
Tuberculosis and the Bloody Handkerchief
There is perhaps no cultural metonym as immediately recognizable as the bloody handkerchief of end-stage tuberculosis. Writes Imogen Clarke: “This consumptive cultural trope has continued through to the modern day…we’re now almost trained” to peg a character who coughs up blood in Act One for “inevitable death” in Act Three.1 But what is curious about the bloody handkerchief, and the tuberculosis or “consumption” it represents, is that this association is not entirely negative. In nineteenth-century media, tuberculosis carries a valuable metaphysical component that mitigates or even outweighs its negative material wage. It ennobles; it improves; it transforms the sufferer and fascinates the observer. Like poverty in the Dickensian era, and Madness and addiction in the modern age, consumption in the late nineteenth century endowed the consumptive with an intrigue and depth inaccessible to the healthy. One might call it, in keeping with my wording, the consumptive mystique. Tuberculosis was then what alcoholism is now: cool. Deep down we all know it, despite our protestations otherwise. We might not want to have it, but we want to talk about, write about, and think about the people who do. One representative contemporary excerpt, taken from a 1909 text, claims that consumption’s
just vengeance, though terrible enough, is tempered with mercy, a mercy which, by way of compensation for the physical ravages with which we are all so grewsomely familiar, reveals itself in that saving grace, the spes phthisica, a trait which…has been a means of quickening genius, a fact wherefrom have flowed benefits that concern the whole world of intellect.2
In short, tuberculosis was fashionable. Consumptives were admired, even envied. Lord Byron is reported to have said he wished to die of tuberculosis: “The ladies would all say, ‘Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying!’”3 Consumption provided profundity, beauty, and wisdom; it conveyed “genius” in men and “beauty” in women.4 Its associated disposition (the euphoric spes phthisica) and visible symptoms (flushed cheeks, sparkling eyes) were desirable—not just in light of beauty standards contemporary to the time, but as indicators of their underlying cause. Another excerpt:
As the litterateur or artist may, occasionally, be inspired…by pathologic objects outside of himself, so, too, his own psychopathology may inspire him to creative labors, or at least color his productions; thus it is easy to discern the influence of psychopathologic states upon the works of such writers as Poe, Guy deMaupassant, Tasso, Cowper, Swift, Byron, and St. John the Evangelist…Now it is entirely conceivable that the tuberculosis by-products are capable of profoundly affecting the mechanism of creative minds in such a way as to influence markedly the creations. Indeed, they are bound to do so, for the spes phthisica…must necessarily affect the whole psychological switchboard.5
The interiority of the consumptive, and indeed of anyone with “psychopathology,” is totalizing. Illness leads to Madness, which lends meaning: the gift of artistic creativity.
The New Faustian Bargain
Probably the clearest distillation of this narrative can be found in Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus.6 By the time Mann wrote, consumption was no longer the fashionable “intellectual’s disease” of the day: instead, Mann took syphilis as his target. The book is a character study of the fictional composer Adrian Leverkuhn. Already regarded as an extremely promising artist, Leverkuhn aspires to a truly revolutionary insight, unattainable through typical means. So he deliberately contracts syphilis. His progressive madness provides his creative inspiration. His choice is a modern Faustian bargain: artistic genius at the cost of physical and mental degradation. Leverkuhn’s characterization draws heavily from Nietzsche, whose Birth of Tragedy frames the Apollonian/Dionysian tension in which art develops. The brilliant minds are the pathologized ones: they exploit and tether Bacchanalian disorder for the purpose of clarity, progress, and productivity. (Nietzsche himself was alleged to have contracted syphilis and later to have died of it; his own “descent into madness” has been extensively studied.7)
The new Faustian bargain is a theodicy. It makes being or becoming disabled the price of creativity and insight. Thus is disability justified; it has positive consequences. This is not the same as squaring the existence of disability with general goodness by claiming that the people whom it befalls “opt in” (such an account underlies the choice view of addiction, for instance). It’s not that Madness or illness is deliberately sought. The important point is rather that they would not be necessarily irrational to choose. There’s something you can access as a Mad person but can’t otherwise. Of course, there’s a caveat: any would-be Faust should be warned that being disabled is experientially miserable. That root commitment is never questioned on these views; it’s essential to them. It would only occur to us to conceptualize a tradeoff between the suffering of Madness and the glory of creativity if we were motivated by the question “Why are some people so unlucky as to be Mad?” The answer, according to the new Faustian bargain, is that maybe misery is worth it. Sure, something can be said for the happy life. But the miserable one opens secret doors to self-actualization—doors that are, absent suffering, unavailable.
Addicts in Modern Media
If it is still not clear how the totalizing consumptive psychology metastasizes into the addict mystique, one cultural example is particularly salient. Puccini’s 1895 opera La Boheme tells of an ill-fated love affair between a consumptive seamstress, Mimi, and an impoverished poet, Rodolfo. Mimi’s consumption does everything discussed above. It makes her all the more beautiful and interesting; it creates a plaintiveness, imaginativeness, and wisdom in her that she could not have accessed otherwise. At the end of the opera, she succumbs to tuberculosis, dying in Rodolfo’s arms.
The 1996 Broadway musical Rent by Jonathan Larson—a loose adaptation of La Boheme—reimagines the consumptive mystique as the modern glamor of addiction and illness. Mimi is now an HIV-positive heroin addict. Her lover Roger, a songwriter, meanwhile awaits his own apparently fated death from HIV, also contracted through heroin use. (He’s in remission; Mimi is still using.) His numbered days motivate him to write his magnum opus—one great song “before the virus takes hold.” His tragic circumstances, like those of Leverkuhn, compel his creativity. A hundred years before, consumption made women beautiful and men brilliant. Now Mimi and Roger, respectively, are transformed in the same way by addiction and AIDS.
But at least these characters, exoticized though they be, are sympathetic. The pull of the musical is that one can imagine oneself being them. That is not the case for most mainstream media depictions of addicts.
Take opioid addict Gregory House, the main character of the nine-season medical drama House. House’s addiction constitutes the overarching plot of the series. The central conflict of the third season is his power struggle against police detective Michael Tritter, who, after House humiliates him in a (truly disturbing) display of clinical power, makes it his mission to see House incarcerated. Tritter pulls House over on the road, finds his Vicodin, and has him arrested. A later search of House’s apartment reveals a tremendous stash of pills. As the legal charges pile up, Tritter agrees to advocate for House in the trial if House seeks treatment, which eventually—although for his own reasons—House does. Seeing that House is maintaining remission and appears to have transformed, Tritter reveals he was never good for the deal: “You ever trust an addict? You ever give one the benefit of the doubt? How many times did it work out for you?…People like you, even your actions lie.”
The viewer is supposed to dislike Tritter. He’s a bad cop even by neoliberal lights. He harms sympathetic characters, and his focus on revenge threatens many people’s medical care. But the audience could be forgiven for siding with Tritter, for House is arguably worse. I omitted above the “truly disturbing” reason Tritter despises House. I’ll come out with it now: House, his only apparent motivation being the desire to reaffirm his authority, subjected Tritter to a rectal temperature measurement for no clinical purpose, then threw the results of his tests away. And House wasn’t having an off day. Throughout the show, he’s deceitful, manipulative, and bizarrely, grotesquely self-pitying. Sometimes he improves his behavior, but always these changes are ploys: he will revert to his true self when it is no longer beneficial to appear kind and selfless. Sure as the sun will rise, Greg House will steal, lie, and cheat. Absent some self-interested reason not to, he will intimidate and insult his friends and colleagues.
House was popular throughout its run. Why? How could anyone root for a fundamentally unlikeable character—a doctor who brutalizes and harasses his own staff? The answer’s clear. We might not like House, might not want to be him, but we love to watch him. He’s interesting! That’s not because of his flagrant disregard for morality—this isn’t Silence of the Lambs. We love to watch House because, throughout it all, House is a bitter but beautiful genius. He knows what it means to be alive, because of his adjacency to the abyss. In this respect he’s no different from Mann’s Leverkuhn or Albee’s Martha, who are in turn no different from BoJack Horseman, Sterling Archer, or Don Draper. (Or Billy from the newly-released Daisy Jones and the Six.) He grasps the human condition in all its woeful glory. That’s what makes him representative of what I describe in this series. Addicts know something nonaddicts don’t—an unimaginable Lovecraftian insight into humankind—hence the drugs. We drink to fill the hole inside. Nonaddicts can imagine the abstract existence of such a hole, but not what it feels like to have one. That’s why people watch us. That is the addict mystique.
Or take Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty. Rick is an alcoholic rather than an opioid addict, but it makes no difference. Both Rick and House are brilliant scientists. Both are insufferable, in part because they are acutely aware of their own genius. Both make heavy use of casual cruelty, are totally disinterested in the world around them, and take any challenge to the notion that they are the main character of reality as a grave offense. Both are extremely manipulative, a feature they think is mitigated by their apparent awareness of it. And both have an automaton theory of other people: to the extent that they care about suffering, it is toward the objective of “solving” that suffering, to satisfy an impersonal scientific curiosity.
We might first conclude that on our current hermeneutics, addicts are egotists or sociopaths. Our culture has a fixation on sociopaths too—and that’s bad for Mad people; don’t take me here as huffily saying, “How dare you compare us to those people!”—but that’s not what makes the addict mystique tick. House and Rick didn’t come out of the womb this way. The most important commonality between them, shared by almost every other character I enumerated above (though notably and deliberately subverted in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?8), is the tragic backstory. Some awful event, far in the past and irremediable, caused both their addictions and their callous behavior. House was abused as a child, and clinically ignored when it mattered most: if only the attending physician had not assumed he was “drug-seeking,” his disabling injury would have been correctly diagnosed. Rick’s family was killed in an explosion meant to target him. Billy Dunne (and his foil Daisy Jones), BoJack Horseman, Don Draper, and Sterling Archer are all established early on in their respective shows as the victims of childhood trauma. But when we meet them, their suffering has metastasized to such an extent that even setting things right wouldn’t help. Hence they look out at the viewer, smoking or swigging from a flask, sighing at the unfair weight of knowing things beyond the scope of the median mind.
Art as Creation
I’ve been talking about “genius” and “artist” without defining them. I don’t really need to. We all have a received view of genius; it is a way we expect a certain kind of person to behave. He (for it is almost always a man) does two things: create sophisticated works, and be conspicuously unable to take care of himself. Picture Godel proving the incompleteness theorems—and also wearing tinfoil hats, being terrified of poisoning, almost blowing his U.S. citizenship interview by pointing out a logical inconsistency in the Constitution. Einstein characterizing general relativity—and also running around Princeton in a fervor, hair and teeth unbrushed, shoving uncashed checks into his desk.9 Enough said.
“Artist” is subtler. The reason isn’t some qualitative/quantitative distinction—for the purpose of the mystique, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a physicist or a poet. I don’t need to define “artist,” really, but I should lay out two competing theories of art. So: what is it that artists do? They make things: etchings, symphonies, arrangements of words, drapings of fabric, assortments of bricks and concrete, indentations in soft clay. They take components and organize them in new ways. The medium doesn’t matter, but the fact that there is some medium—that art is communicative—does. The task of the artist is to convey something. That thing: is it already known at the time she takes up her pen, paintbrush, or piano? Is she reinterpreting something familiar, using a new brushstroke method to make a representation more faithful? Or is she unveiling the previously unseen—painting what she, and only she, saw in a surreal dream? The metaphor is stretched; I’m sure painters won’t like it. But it’s not meant for them. It’s about how art is conceptualized by, generally, non-artists.
Some view art as primarily technical, about execution and skill. I call this the art-as-translation theory: artists are good at distilling things into particularly clear forms. Devising methodologies (depth rendering, impressionism, blank verse) to facilitate representation. Balancing melodic contributions among instrument groups. What the good poet does when she writes a beautiful account of romantic love is not illuminate some previously inaccessible interiority. The readers too have felt love; that’s how they knows the account is faithful. What she does is capture a likeness—there’s nothing to add. The Platonics of it all, the sentiments, are available to everyone. The artist’s contribution is the translation. She slices out an indexed piece of human experience, like a surgeon making an incision, and then puts it on display.
The competitor is what I call the art-as-creation view. On this theory, art is not a medium for finding new ways to say the already-known. It’s for saying new things. It consists in introducing people to things with which they previously could not identify. Theres a story from Norse mythology: the gods sealed peace by spitting into a vat, from which rose a wise man, Kvasir. At the end of a long sequence of negotiations and tricks, his blood was made into mead and strategically poured by Odin into those humans who would become the great artists. To be sprinkled with the mead is to be granted the divine spark of inspiration, a transcendent quality that existed before you and will exist after. It cannot be taught. This mead, the engine of the machine of art production, gives the artists access to a higher plane. The things they see there are not things just anyone can see. Artists are messengers, missionaries. They report back from the edge of the world, bringing this otherwise-inaccessible interiority to a lay audience. That receivership consists of those unluckies (or by contrast, and as is vogue now to say, luckies) spared the mead that was deposited unto her.
The dichotomy is not specific to visual art, or really any kind. I think of mathematics as an art, and the difference between the two types maps well onto the Hardy/Ramanujan dispute over the metaphysics of math. Hardy sought to distill aesthetic beauty from the empirics; Ramanujan’s goddess dropped the formulas on his tongue as he slept.
I don’t think either of these views is new. Nor are they necessarily mutually exclusive. Or exhaustive! There are plenty more metaphysics of art, most of which are probably more sympathetic than the two I’ve laid out. I’m not inclined to believe either account I describe is true; both are seriously flawed. What I mean to argue is that there have been shifts across time and culture not only in what constitutes art, but—holding constant, if we could, some demarcating criterion—what it is that good art indicates about the artist. That idea, what it means to be a good artist, can provide us some insight into how the addict mystique works and why it is so pervasive.
Return of the Confessional Poets
The consumptive mystique, the new Faustian bargain, the poete maudit—these all inherit from the art-as-creation view. What makes artists talented is not their capacity as storytellers. They’re not epic poets, especially good at conveying feelings through stories everyone already knows. Rather, they possess as-yet untold stories, specks floating in the mead. They’ve been to the edge of the world and have come back to tell us what lies there. That means they must be dramatically different from other people. They must have experiences—not just skills—that everyone else lacks.
As Valiunas writes about John Berryman: “His father’s suicide shaped him decisively as a man and a poet. Berryman became a manic-depressive, an alcoholic, a compulsive womanizer…For a long time he believed it was his obligation to ruin himself for his poetry’s sake.”10 Hence Berryman viewed his personal suffering as perversely conducive to his poetry. In a 1959 review of Lowell’s Life Studies—the poems in which characterize his “marital strife, generational struggle, and mental illness”—the critic M. L. Rosenthal coined the term “confessional poetry.” Rosenthal wrote that, through his honesty, Lowell had taken off an unspoken “mask” often borne by artists whose motivation draws from their experience.11 Lowell did not appeal to lofty language. He simply and uncomplainingly performed the task required of the poete maudit: he experienced the inaccessible and came back to tell us about it.
Confessional poets spurn metaphors, favoring situational descriptions and real people. They untether verse from rhyme and meter schemes. What is salient is not so much technique as location. To write good confessional poetry requires being contextually right. At a glance, how liberating that seems! “Now poetry is for everyone,” we might say, “its starched, prim conventions a relic of the past.” But that isn’t true. Why is it that the famous modern poets are disproportionately like Berryman, Lowell, Bishop, Schwartz? To be a confessional poet, to really bring back reports from alien worlds, requires self-conceptualizing and being conceptualized by others as different—the locus of a unique experience. It must be undertaken by the kind of person whose subjecthood is interesting. What’s obvious from the cultural fixation on consumption, the representation of addicts in the media, and the reception of the confessional poets is that interestingness isn’t in the cards for the well-adjusted bureaucrat. It is the purview of the consumptives, the disabled, the addicts, the Mad.
Clarke, Imogen (2019). “Tuberculosis: a fashionable disease?” Science Museum Blog. url: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/tuberculosis-a-fashionable-disease/.
Jacobson, Arthur (1909). Tuberculosis and the Creative Mind. Brooklyn, NY: Huntington. Accessed at https://wellcomecollection.org/works/jqe7cz25/items?canvas=7. p. 3.
Martin, Colin (2014). “Interweaving the culture and science of tuberculosis.” The Lancet 383 (9919): 883-774. ISSN 0140-6736. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(14)60392-5. url: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673614603925.
Mullin, Emily (2016). “How tuberculosis shaped Victorian fashion.” Smithsonian Institution. url: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-tuberculosis-shaped-victorian-fashion-180959029/.
Jacobson, p. 4.
Mann, Thomas (1947). Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn, As Told by a Friend. Leverkuhn is meant also, perhaps primarily, to serve as a metonym for the rise and wage of German fascism, but I won’t talk about that here.
One worries that the histories of Nietzsche are themselves informed by the received views of the bloody handkerchief, already well-underway as a cultural motif at the time of Nietzsche’s death. (For a contrast case, see Shelley Tremain’s critique of the historical literature on Phineas Gage.)
Early on, Martha and her husband are established to have a son who is later revealed to have died. At the climax, it becomes apparent that the couple invented the son; he does not actually exist, but is a manifestation of their bizarre and unsettling power plays.
Really the only example I can think of that doesn’t fit this narrativization pattern is von Neumann. People these days like to imagine him as an inhuman machine, which is weird, because he was very probably an alcoholic.
Valiunas, Algis (2018). “The fellowship of the cursed poets.” Claremont Review of Books. url: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-fellowship-of-the-cursed-poets/.
Poetry Foundation. “Confessional poetry: an introduction to a newly personal mode of writing that popularized exploring the self.” url: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/151109/an-introduction-to-confessional-poetry#:~:text=Confessional%20poets%20wrote%20in%20direct,sequences%2C%20emphasizing%20connections%20between%20poems.