and at the same time prevents the development of undesirablensocial traits.nGiven his interest in ESP, hypnosis, acupuncture, mysticism,nand his suspicion of the general direction of secularntechnological society, the value Huxley placed on druginducednpsychedelic experience may seem inevitable. Hisnown experiments with drugs were few enough—mescalinentwice and LSD three or four hmes, as he wrote to ThomasnMerton in 1959. Nevertheless, The Doors of Perception gavengreat comfort to many other experimenters, became, innfact, a sacred text for those who needed to believe that ifnthey had the courage to transgress the conventional censorsnof human perception, they might ascend to the mysticnstratosphere of Meister Eckhart and St. John of the Cross asnquickly as Chuck Yeager went through the sound barrier.nHuxley, like the denizens of his Pala, was a user, not annabuser, of drugs. The distinction is a comfortable one, sincenit classifies drugs with women and children as fundamentallynprecious things that ought to be protected from abuse innthe expectation that, b’ opening the gates of Paradise, thendrug will ultimately invalidate Kafka’s paradox. But in thencontext of a drug-abusing society, the distinction turns outnto be propaganda for Pala-seeking drug-users who beforenthey know it are drug-abusers. Indeed, even those writersnwho, like De Quincey, Baudelaire, and Burroughs, haenreported the horrors of the artificial paradise, can turn outnto be propagandists—just as role-modeling actors andnactresses can turn out to be propagandists for the antisocialnor extralegal conduct they dramatize, even when thenpropaganda is against the grain of the moies in which theynappear.nIf we consider De Quincey’s Confessions simply as anwarning about dangerous practices, then his problem is thatnof any writer with great gifts of language who writes truenconfession: how to keep from making an experience with annadmitted eil so attractive that he turns out to be inncomplicity with it. With popular true confession, the resultnmost of the time is the palpable hypocrisy of those pornographicnfilms that supply a moralistic framework as sop fornthe consciences of the naive and frisson for the morensophisticated. Ob’iously, this is a problem for any writernwho does not write exclusively about angels, who (becausenthey fail to get into the right kind of trouble) are in any eventnpoor story material. Great works of literature, involved asnthey are with the human experience of evil, are as abusablenas drugs. Nevertheless, they have a capacity to prove theirnmoral integrity throughout the ieissitudes of interpretation.nFew capable readers will take Dante’s Inferno asnpropaganda for hell, Shakespeare’s Macbeth as propagandanfor regicide, or St. Augustine’s Confessions as propagandanfor a Manichaean world ‘ievv.nNaked Lunch, which Burroughs was writing when Huxleynwas writing Island, might appear to be anything butnadvocacy for drug abuse, sandwiched as it is in the popularnGroe edition between prefatory and concluding anti-drugnstatements. Much was made of this fact by the writers whondefended the book in the famous 1965 trial in Boston. Theyn’ had no difficulty finding redeeming social value in itsntrenchant political satire, indictment of the evils of contemporaryncivilization, and metaphoric attack on addiction ofnall kinds. Indeed, here as in the earlier cases involving D.H.nLawrence’s Lady Chatterlys Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic ofnCancer, and Ginsberg’s Howl, the defenders seemed tonagree with Jeremy Collier that the end of all the arts is thenpublic good, however apparent it was that for some of them •nthe issue was less the literary value of the book than thenthreat of censorship—here directed once more against thenliberating coalition of drugs and pornography.nNorman Mailer stated in the Boston trial that Burroughsnwas “possibly … the most talented writer in America.”nMore significantiy, however, he also said that Burroughsnmight ha’e been “one of the greatest geniuses of the Englishnlanguage if he had not been an addict.” The problem herenis that the addiction to junk did for Naked Lunch whatnlaudanum did for De Quincey and Coleridge and whatnmescaline did for Huxley: it opened the doors of perceptionnthat made the book possible and at the same time publicizedna myth about the relationship between drugs and thencreative imagination conceived as a force radically andnirresistibly hostile to all censorship. That Coleridge thenlaudanum addict did not conceive of the imagination innsuch terms did not keep the myth from being well-waterednin romantic soil. Burroughs himself is taking refuge in thatnmyth when he says in his introduction, “I have no precisenmemory of writing the notes which have now been publishednunder the titie Naked Lunch.” He is simply thensensitive reed whom supernal powers had chosen as agency.nIn his 1934 The Milk of Paradise, M.H. Abrams writes:n”The important fact is that these four authors [Crabbe, DenQuincey, Coleridge, and Francis Thompson] did an incrediblenthing: they opened to poetry an entirely new world.”nAbrams’ updating preface for the popular 1970 edition ofnthis essay puts this sentence in a modifying context, but itnstill calls our attention, especially with that “incredible,” tonour romantic expectation that the true artist will open to usnnew worlds of intense and novel personal experience—annact so important that he must be permitted extreme ifnsometimes self-destroying means. This makes art a risky,neen martyrdom-courting business: the artist must be willingnto look over the dizzying edge, descend into thenhorrifying depths, open forbidden doors and go throughnthem in violation of ancient taboos. As Mailer puts it withnBurroughs in mind (and perhaps himself as well), the artistnmust be one “who can come back from hell with a portraitnof its dimensions.” Such an artist tests society also, for onlyn”a brave and honest society . . . can look into the abyssndescribed in Naked Lunch.”nIndeed, the work of such an intrepid hero of experience isnexpected to be just as salvational and therapeutic as AntoninnArtaud expected his theater of cruelty to be. In The Theaternand Its Double, Artaud, himself a drug-user, wants “to treatnthe spectators like the snakecharmer’s subjects,” to makenthem the subjects of a surrounding and overwhelmingnaction in a theater that “far from copying life, puts itselfnwherever possible in communication with pure forces.”nThe very language suggests an analogy between possessionnby art and possession by drugs, and it suggests too the extentnto which motion pictures, as well as much of the world ofnrock music, have become a captivating theater of cruelty.nAnd when Artaud adds that “there is a risk involved, but innthe present circumstances I believe it is a risk worthnrunning,” he is only assuming a by-now conventionalnnnOCTOBER 1986 /19n