An Intoxicated-Aesthetic Form of Consciousness: Georg Trakl's Cocaine Use

Next in a well-trod line of the literary drug-experimentalists who precede us: At The Public Domain Review, New Zealand-based scholar Richard Millington explores Georg Trakl's cocaine use, as well as the cocaine symbolism in the Austrian poet's whiteness and snow imagery, indicating that "certain images come to look distinctly like premonitions of the poet’s own fate." But the piece, "Wild Heart Turning White: Georg Trakl and Cocaine," starts with Trakl's death: "His medical file lists the cause of death, complete with exclamation mark, as 'Suicid durch Cocainintoxication!'” And while Millington deciphers the biographical here, it's more complicated:

In contrast to his medical file, Trakl’s poetry contains no obvious traces of the heavy cocaine use of his final months – or indeed of any earlier, undocumented use. In this respect it differs from the literary work of his German contemporary Gottfried Benn, a doctor specializing in skin and venereal diseases who between 1915 and 1917 was stationed at a hospital for prostitutes in occupied Brussels. Benn’s cocaine experiments of his Brussels period have a clear literary correlative in several poems and dramatic scenes celebrating the euphoria and vitality associated with cocaine intoxication. Trakl’s reticence about cocaine is consistent with a broader pattern in his poetic treatment of intoxicants. Other terms excluded from his poetic lexicon despite denoting substances he is known to have consumed in considerable quantities include alcohol, beer, schnapps, chloroform, barbiturate, Veronal, morphine, and opium. Of themselves, these omissions might appear unremarkable. Like the Polish Modernist Witkacy, who signed many paintings not with his own initials but with those of the drugs he had consumed while producing them, poets of the post-Romantic age might sometimes choose to insert factual or fictional records of self-medication into their works as tools of self-stylization, but there is no expectation for them to do so. Yet in Trakl’s case, these omissions become significant because of the apparent contradiction they present to the overall prominence within his poetry of psychoactive substances and their effects.

One distinguishing feature of Trakl’s literary approach to drugs is the lack of an obvious confessional gesture, a lack that places him outside the dominant tradition inaugurated by Thomas De Quincey’s early nineteenth-century account of his opium-induced visions. Instead, direct and indirect references to intoxicants and intoxication are integrated closely into his poetic diction and contribute to its distinctive flavour. The poetry he wrote over the last five years of his life is chiefly concerned with plotting parallel processes of decay in the natural and human worlds, and intoxication plays a significant part in aestheticizing his lyric speaker’s confrontation with grim reality. “Towards Evening My Heart” from his first published collection Poems (1913) is illustrative:

Towards Evening My Heart

In the evening you hear the scream of bats,
Two black horses jump in the meadow,
The red maple rustles.
To the traveller the small inn appears by the wayside.
Wonderful the taste of young wine and nuts,
Wonderful: stumbling drunk into darkening wood.
Through black branches painful bells sound,
On the face dew drips.

Drunkenness here is more than an escape. What is “wonderful” about it is not that it changes or erases the content of the speaker’s consciousness, which remains “painful”, but that it gives his consciousness an intoxicated-aesthetic form. The instrument of intoxication mentioned is also representative. In his poetry, Trakl shows an overwhelming preference for wine, “young” or otherwise (other epithets include “fiery”, “golden” and “purple”), which is less a reflection of his real-life habits than a sign of how well this beverage fits into a wider framework of rich pastoral and religious imagery. The modern and medical connotations of a word like “cocaine”, by contrast, make it quite unsuitable for Trakl’s poetic purposes.

See more at The Public Domain Review.