Let us start at the end. In the Conclusion, Earnshaw writes:

In these particular works meaninglessness, self, authenticity, death, and alienation are brought to the forefront of consciousness by the commitment to drink. Throughout the twentieth century psychological and biological explanations have proliferated to capture such orientations, but from the Existential drinker’s perspective they are wrong every which way. For such figures, the reasons for drinking are ultimately metaphysical. A means to think, experience, and exist through profound Existential questions. [245]

Those ideas, the absurd, meaninglessness, self, authenticity, death and alienation are indeed the theme of the book in which Earnshaw provides a careful reading of several literary and philosophical works to reach that conclusion. Sartre and Camus provide a foundation for the existential analysis of the literary works investigated – from the 1913 Jack London work, John Barleycorn, to the 2004 A. L. Kennedy work, Paradise.

Albert Camus provides a working vocabulary for the analysis. The Myth of Sisyphus is an important starting point for the work to be done in the careful analysis of the literary works. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus establishes the epistemology on which he bases all his works.  And it’s a very simple epistemology.  He says: “This heart within me I feel, and I judge that I exist.  This world I can touch and likewise judge that it exists.  There ends all my knowledge and the rest is construction.  Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled.”  For Camus one finds that life has value but no meaning.  Meaning implies some sort of goal, some teleological approach, and, for Camus, there is no goal.  Life is not a pilgrimage, death is not an open door, but it is a closed and blank wall which functions finally, of course, to force us to concentrate on life.

In Camus there is a precise use of the word “absurd”.  “Absurd” comes from the Latin surdis – and in surdis we have a dual definition: it means irrational, insensible (from that side of it we still use the word in mathematics; a ‘surd’ is an irrational number).  But Camus concentrates on the other meaning which comes from the root.  That is, “deaf, silent”.  There are many examples in literature of this particular kind of silence.  Think of Romeo and Juliet when Juliet has been ordered by her parents to marry the County Paris, and in one of Shakespeare’s best scenes in that play, he has Juliet’s father talking (and, as you recall, he has already set up at the beginning of the play a certain moral stand, a certain set of values which he violates constantly; by the end of the play we know that Lord Capulet is at best a liar) in some very vicious language.  Lord Capulet orders Juliet to marry Count Paris.  She protests, to no end.  She then turns to her mother who only says that you will do as your father says.  Then, in desperation, she turns to her nurse, who, in her inimitable way, she says well, marry him, two husbands will be better than one, you will have more fun in bed.  At this point in the play Shakespeare has, and the stage directions are implicit in the lines themselves, left Juliet alone, alone on-stage, and she kneels, and she turns now from her earthly father to her Heavenly Father and says: “Is there no pity in the clouds that can see the depth of my grief?”  And there is no answer, only silence.  That is the absurd.

From the Existential view point, the first question one faces is If life is absurd and meaningless and there is no God why not commit suicide? Given that we humans are adrift in a meaningless universe with no God to provide answers, but also armed with free will and a desire for meaning what are we to do? One answer to that existential question has for as long as there have been humans to try drugs and or alcohol to help us cope. Alcohol may help in finding “truth as a way of disclosing who I am rather than as a form of rational and logical discourse.” Earnshaw’s analysis of the literary works tackles the notion of the writer as drinker in a careful and objective manner. Here he writes about Jack London: “. . . in John Barleycorn there is no intimation of ‘walking with God’. If there is any sense of transcendent revelation . . . it is that of Camus’s Sisyphus, where Existential stoicism in the face of the universe’s indifference, and in the face of the futility of all endeavour, is the order of the day.”

Wikipedia tells us that the term “alcoholism” was first used in 1849 by the Swedish physician Magnus Huss to describe the systematic adverse effects of alcohol. Alcohol has a long history of use and misuse throughout recorded history. Biblical, Egyptian and Babylonian sources record the history of abuse and dependence on alcohol. In some ancient cultures alcohol was worshiped and in others, its abuse was condemned. Excessive alcohol misuse and drunkenness were recognized as causing social problems even thousands of years ago. However, the defining of habitual drunkenness as it was then known as and its adverse consequences were not well established medically until the 18th century. In 1647 a Greek monk named Agapios was the first to document that chronic alcohol misuse was associated with toxicity to the nervous system and body which resulted in a range of medical disorders such as seizures, paralysis, and internal bleeding. In 1920 the effects of alcohol abuse and chronic drunkenness boosted membership of the temperance movement and led to the prohibition of alcohol in the United States, a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages that remained in place until 1933.

Within the medical and scientific communities, there is a broad consensus regarding alcoholism as a disease state. For example, the American Medical Association considers alcohol a drug and states that “drug addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use despite often devastating consequences. It results from a complex interplay of biological vulnerability, environmental exposure, and developmental factors (e.g., stage of brain maturity).”

The discussion of alcohol is an important one and Earnshaw is keenly aware that our attitudes have been varied over time from alcoholism as a moral weakness, to alcoholism as a disease, to alcohol as a way of heightening experience. The writers he analyzes are not alcoholics, but most enjoy drink themselves or write about alcohol in their works. Several emphasize how the use of alcohol can reveal new ways of looking at the world and its relationship to the human condition.

Earnshaw’s book is a careful and well-documented study of a number of important literary works that are concerned with the drinking of alcohol, by the characters and/or by the authors. It is an interesting and readable, as well as important book. It does not argue that if you drink you will be a writer. Nor does it argue that if you write then you drink alcohol. It argues that some writers have used alcohol as a means of seeing the world and its mysteries.

The writers considered in the book are Jack London, Jean Rhys, Charles Jackson, Malcolm Lowry, Hans Fallada, Brian Moore, Frederick Exley, Venedikt Yerofeev, William Kennedy, John O’Brien, and A. L. Kennedy. The works studied stretch from 1913 to 2004.

© 2019 Bob Lane

Bob Lane is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at Vancouver Island University.