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Definition
A prominent feature in drama, alcohol is a constitutive aspect of its very foundation. In his Poetics, Aristotle asserts that drama emerges from hymns in praise of Dionysus, the god of wine. Drinking and drunkenness plays a central role both in comedy, from Rabelais' Gargantua (1534) to W.C. Fields, and in tragedy, from Euripides' Bacchae (ca. 405 BCE) to Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night (1940). In addition to his portrayal of collective drunkenness as one aspect of the occult powers accorded to followers of Dionysus, Euripides depicts the peril of individual drunkenness in his Alcestis (438 BCE), in which Heracles' inebriated state almost leads to catastrophe.The reverse side of the warning about the evils of alcohol forms the climax of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64), in which the pilgrimage to the Oracle of the Holy Bottle leads to the oracular message, "Drink."Shakespeare's notable drinkers, Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night and Falstaff in his three plays, also celebrate the state of inebriation. More realistically, the Drunken Porter in Macbeth sees drink as playing an equivocal role in one area: "Lechery, Sir, it provokes and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance."Another notable imbiber is Sidney Carton, in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859), who before sacrificing his life to save another declares, "It is a far, far better thing I do than anything I have ever done."But despite its long lineage, alcohol does not "come of age" until the 20th century, when writers begin to examine the major role it plays in the lives of their characters. This is particularly true of modern American literature, where an astonishingly high number of the best writers have been outright alcoholics or extremely heavy drinkers. One reason for this phenomenon, it has been suggested, was Prohibition, which turned drinking into a defiant, rebellious act. Whatever the reason, the names of writers who came of age during the Prohibition years and became addicted include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Ring Lardner, Dashiell Hammet, Thomas Wolfe, Malcolm Lowry, the playwrights Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, the poets Hart Crane, Theodore Roethke, James Dickey, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell.Many of these writers engaged the subject of alcoholism in their writing. Among the finest explorations of the experience is Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947), which records the disintegration of an alcoholic British consul in Mexico. The hallucinatory visions and voices he experiences are interwoven throughout the novel, suggesting analogies between the alcoholic's disintegration and that of Europe on the brink of World War II.Another powerful and illuminating account of the alcoholic experience written by one who knew it at firsthand, is Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (1939, pub. 1946), in which reformed drinker Hickey forces the alcoholic habitues of Harry's Bar to recognize their pathetic self-deceptions as "pipe dreams." But at the play's conclusion he confesses that he himself has killed his faithful wife and is going to turn himself in. When he leaves, the drinkers fall back into their self-deceptive illusions.Notable novels written by writers who were not themselves problem drinkers are Graham Greene's study of an alcoholic priest hunted by an anticlerical government in 1930s Mexico, The Power and the Glory (1940), and Saul Bellow's The Victim (1947), in which the alcoholic Albee uses drink to achieve an abandonment, a loss of self that he thinks of as heroic, while his counterpart Levenson overcomes his fear of failure, which for him has been embodied in the person of Albee.Two films dealing with alcoholism are Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1947) based on a novel by Charles Jackson, and Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas (1995).
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