Morning After: Hangovers and Moral Exhaustion

“Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” Ernest Hemingway’s remark is usually taken as a piece of hard-won practical wisdom, though it depends, rather heavily, on the assumption that sobriety has the authority to correct what intoxication has distorted. Literature, for the most part, is less confident on this point and increasingly so as one moves into the twentieth century, where the corrective function of the morning after begins to look uncertain, attenuated, or, in some cases, entirely absent.

The hangover, in its conventional literary form, is structurally reassuring. It implies sequence, and with sequence comes intelligibility: an excess is committed, the body registers the cost, and some form of recognition (comic, moral, or physiological) follows. One drinks, one suffers, and one learns, or at least acknowledges the relation between cause and effect. The hangover is therefore not merely a physiological state but a narrative device which secures the connection between action and consequence, between indulgence and its price. It restores proportion. Even when played for comedy, it depends upon a residual belief that experience can be processed and that disorder will yield, however briefly, to understanding.

If this model were reliable, Under the Volcano (1947) would be a very different novel; instead, it follows Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul living in Mexico, over the course of a single day. Firmin drinks continuously, but the novel is not especially interested in individual acts of drinking. By the time the narrative begins, he is already in a state of physical and mental decline. There is no obvious starting point, no identifiable moment at which excess tips into consequence and what would ordinarily appear as an aftermath is simply the condition in which he exists.

What Malcolm Lowry does, in other words, is remove the interval on which the idea of a hangover depends, since there is no longer any clear sense in which one state follows another, but only a continuous present in which drinking and its effects are no longer meaningfully distinct. This becomes clearer as Firmin moves through the day, encountering people who in a more conventional novel might provide structure (his estranged wife Yvonne, his step-brother Hugh), yet these meetings fail to stabilise into anything that could be called development, because nothing accumulates. Conversations gesture towards reconciliation or decision and then dissolve, leaving behind no remainder that might shape what follows. The issue is not that events are lacking, but that they do not carry forward.

Nor is this simply a question of oblivion. Firmin is capable of recognising his condition with a certain accuracy—his remark that he is “in hell” is neither exaggerated nor especially self-pitying—but the observation is inert. It does not organise his experience, nor does it interrupt it, and it is precisely this failure of recognition to produce any consequence that begins to put pressure on the assumption with which we began, namely that awareness, once achieved, is capable of correction. Hemingway’s advice, read in this context, begins to resemble less a rule than a hope. It assumes that there exists a stable vantage point, sober, retrospective, capable of revision, from which one might correct oneself. Under the Volcano offers no such position. There is no external standpoint from which Firmin can reassess his actions.

I am not, strictly speaking, an alcoholic, though I have never found that this disqualifies one from taking a sustained interest in the novels that concern themselves with alcohol, or indeed in the writers who produced them, frequently under conditions that might themselves have benefited from restraint. Even now, when my own habits rarely extend beyond a single, fairly unremarkable glass of wine, there remains something persistently compelling about literature in which alcohol functions less as a social lubricant than as a slow and rather methodical agent of decline.

The Sun Also Rises, for instance, is not usually classified as a novel about alcoholism, though it would be difficult to ignore the extent to which its characters drink their way through both their days and their relationships, with predictably diminishing returns. In the case of Raymond Carver, the connection is less indirect, his stories returning with notable consistency to the small, cumulative forms of damage produced by alcohol, rarely dramatic but seldom reversible. Jack Kerouac’s later work, particularly Big Sur, is more difficult to treat with any degree of detachment, not least because it records, with uncomfortable clarity, the longer-term effects of sustained drinking, including the hallucinations associated with delirium tremens which are described with a level of detail that leaves very little to the imagination.

What these texts begin to suggest, taken together, is not simply that excess leads to ruin, which is hardly an original insight, but that the expectation of a reckoning may itself be misplaced. The hangover, which once secured the link between action and consequence, begins to lose its authority. The morning after resolves nothing.