Missing the Modernist Beat

Review of Psychedelic Modernism: Literature and Film (2024) by Raj Chandarlapaty

The relationship between modernism and drugs has only tentatively been examined by scholars, with nods to the likes of Walter Benjamin, James Joyce and Jean Cocteau. Considering modernism’s emphasis on experimentation, subjectivity, and abstraction, one might consider drug literature as having a positively modernist vibe about it—particularly the psychedelic variety with its embodied psychoanalytic framework. However, this has not translated into much explicit scholarly analysis.

In some respects, however, a historiographical problem emerges in thinking about modernism and postwar psychedelic discourse. The multimedia landscape, an increasing scepticism of ideological and rational thinking, and the desire to break apart notions of cohesive or consensual reality, speak to a more postmodern frame of mind. Historically, one might even go so far as to argue that psychedelics played a cultural and experiential role in the emergence of this mode of cognition.

It was with some interest therefore that I recently received a copy of Psychedelic Modernism: Literature and Film (2024) by Raj Chandarlapaty. The study, while weighted by literary figures and their works, instead centres on analyses of film—documentary and interview for the most part. Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Neal Cassady, and Philip K Dick all take prominent positions, and Chandarlapaty’s loosely critical theory approach renders the era in multimedia conversation.

‘The book’s purpose’ he states, ‘is to build psychological and societal relevance to the initial studies and experiences to derive commentaries, research, and authorial questions as the beginning points for greater studies of psychedelic drugs during the key period.’ In short, I would suggest, to provide social context and elucidate modes of thinking. It should be noted, for a scholarly work, there is a great lack of secondary works cited (less than 20); maybe the inclusion of many of the absent works might have aided this stated purpose.

Huxley, as he so often does, takes a prominent role, especially in regard to providing a kind of theoretical lineage. For Chandarlapaty, Huxley is a thread from interwar modernism, a movement he posits as counterculture, and thus draws a line between this earlier period and the emergence of psychedelia postwar. In doing so, earlier modernist concerns of overcoming Victorian morality (or ‘authoritarianism’) and nineteenth century norms form for him a lineage of activity.

For instance, in analyzing Neal Cassady: The Denver Years, Chandarlapaty writes, ‘this film underscores and relates poor Americans’ meandering spirit as they envision psychedelic drugs to be antidotes to the ills of Victorian social and institutional repression.’ Cassady was born in Salt Lake City in the mid-1920s, growing up in Denver, leaving one wondering if theory is getting in the way of the history here—the American Progressive era surely must have its own nuances compared to the British Victorian era?

To put this question another way: did Neal Cassady and, say, Virginia Woolf really respond to the world they inhabited from a similar cultural place?

There are, to be fair, some interesting angles being drawn out in Psychedelic Modernism, especially in regard to Kesey and his response to the institutions of mental illness. However, the book displays the absolute worse tendencies of critical theory in literary/cultural studies—obfuscation in language, failure to engage meaningfully with the history, and a lack of narrative cohesion in the writing. I was bewildered reading; rendered, I felt, as a postmodern audience.