Introduction: Cultural Representations of Intoxication

Abstract

Historian Phil Withington's introduction to the special issue of Past & Present on 'Cultures of Intoxication' (co-edited with Angela McShane in 2014) begins with a consideration of George Orwell's Animal Farm. 1 In the parabolic novel, drunkenness both precipitates the revolution, and ultimately poisons it, as humans and animals alike prove unresisting to the charms of various intoxicants, including beer, whisky and tobacco. Indeed, in the final 'tragic denouement' of the book, it is the pigs' emulation of the humans' culture of intoxication that means the other farmyard creatures 'looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which'. 2 For Withington, 'Orwell's beautifully told fable' captured many of the concerns of his and McShane's collection in interrogating the idea 'that intoxication is a universal and essential feature of the human condition -as quintessentially human as dwelling houses, clothing, money, trade, and inequality'. 3 We introduce our own special issue on 'Cultural Representations of Intoxication' by referencing Withington's citation of Orwell for several reasons. Firstly, to acknowledge the appropriation of the theme 'Cultures of Intoxication' for a symposium, held at University College Dublin in February 2020 (weeks before such in-person meetings became no longer possible due to Covid-19) from which this collection was birthed. Cultural representations emerged as a dominant and unifying theme at this event, one that many participants deemed worthy of further dedicated exploration. Secondly, to illustrate that it is difficult to write or talk about intoxication without appealing to its representations via cultural channels; and that, in turn, these portrayals provide a lens for studying the culture from which they emerge. Orwell's novel is viewed as perhaps the outstanding political satire of the twentieth century with its universal themes of power abused and utopian hopes dashed, but it is also of course very much of its time, and its assumptions and elisions reveal much about mid-century British attitudes to intoxicants. Withington's introduction, understandably for his purposes, does not attempt to historicise the cultural product itself at any length, but does note that '[a]s depicted by Orwell, [intoxication] was a source of masculine distinction that distinguished governors from the governed; that facilitated class solidarity among erstwhile political rivals; and that distracted elites from their paternalistic, social, and economic obligations'. 4 Thirdly, to acknowledge that Withington's own introduction saves us reiterating some of the framing concepts and theoretical insights, and provides a foundation on which the CONTACT Alice Mauger