Witkacy’s Paradises
Przestrzenie Teorii February 3, 2017 Giovanna Tomassucci 1 citation
Witkacy's Narcotics (Narkotyki, 1932) belongs to a literary genre begun by De Quincey and continued by Baudelaire, Cocteau, Artaud, and Huxley. Witkacy was the first Polish writer to explicitly address drug addiction and the role of narcotics in artistic creation, experimenting with cocaine, mescaline, and peyotl—discovering "the magic peyotl" in the same years as Artaud and Benjamin, years before Huxley. He also developed a theory of narcotics after his experiments. The work examines how his interest in addiction fits into the 19th- and 20th-century debate among doctors, writers, and artists; whether his literary and dramatic work shows familiarity with contemporary pharmacology publications; how his prohibitionist view aligns with his historiosophy; and whether Narcotics can be considered a literary work.