The Value of The Drunk/Scoundrel in Terms of Purity/ Purgation

BY JOE WEIL

   I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the cultural stereotype of the drunk, yet charming and unforgettable Irish man. Frank Mc Court made a fortune writing about his alcoholic father, this man comprised of blarney, bone crushing loss, a stubborn pride, sentimental religiosity/ patriotism, and epic ineffectuality, a sort of travesty of Christ: full prude, and full rake. The classical Irish drunk never loses his sense of righteousness even as he is stumbling through whore houses, breaking his wife’s jaw, and his children’s hearts, and basically telling enough sad and funny tales to keep the pints flowing. (In AA they define the alchoholic as an ego maniac with an inferiority complex) If he’d been there when Christ addressed the crowd on behalf of the woman taken in adultery, he’d have offered to marry her on the spot (broad gestures of senseless acts of gallantry are this man’s meat and potatoes) or  thrown his rock and, for the price of a whiskey,  been willing to go into great scatological and theological detail as to why he felt worthy to stone the woman. He is a great figure in the hands of good writers and, if you are neither his wife nor his offspring, you can love him as a sort of disruption of the cosmic order (which in the terms of spiritual comedy, is exactly his function: he shows us what the rules are, and tests their merits and flimsiness, by breaking them). At the same time, he is a figure of purgation—what must be destroyed, expelled, or sacrificed to relieve and reenact the pressures involved in a social order’s sense of the beautiful and the good. He is scandal and abomination, and scandal and abomination are always spiritual. He is also “pure” in so far as the secret dictum of any society (and he would not be attractive as a figure if this were not so) is: “A little dose of vice, makes goodness nice.” We drink or drug or smoke or fuck, but never let it interfere with our overall sense of decorum and function. He does. He is too pure for a simple dose of naughtiness. Therefore he purifies our vices by taking them beyond the category of compromise and contingency. He tests and exceeds the limits and exposes us to our own failure to be hot or cold. “I would that thou wert hot or cold, but being luke warm, I shall spit you forth from my mouth” (John, somewhere in the beginning address to the seven churches in the book of revelations).

    Compromise and contingency are always signs that ultimate action has entered the realm of the social order, and the spiritual has been tethered to the moral/religious construct of acceptable normative behavior. In this sense, the only figure more scandalous than the epic wastrel is the saint. Saints also both test the moral order to its limits, and, by testing it, act as its highest affirmation and corrective. They “scandalize” with their virtue, provoke us by proving we are far from the kingdom of God. Saints must be killed, destroyed, offered up as sacrifices, or placed on a higher plane (which is a nice way of expelling them). They must either be expelled from the group dynamic or injected into it as a sort of inoculation against potential breakdowns in the “ideal” of that dynamic.    The proof that a prophet is genuine lies in our either turning a deaf ear or destroying him. We love prophets only in retrospect.

   Rock stars who kill themselves (Kurt Cobain) or destroy themselves (Elvis, Jimmy Morrison) are a pop culture equivalent of this mechanism of purity/purgation in terms of the mass culture, but what do we do with a figure like Keith Richard who has survived every excess and is thriving into his mid-sixties? Such a figure satisfies our attraction to purity (pure evil) while escaping the more purgative aspects of the cult of sacrifice. It is often rumored that such a figure has “sold” his soul to the devil (so that purgation is delayed rather than suspended) or, in secular terms, that he has “sold out.” I have heard both things said of Richard. He is one of the aspects of the satanic—indestructible in his excesses. There is another aspect to the satanic—the “goody two shoes” or moral prude who, though he obeys the law to the letter, seems ultimately evil—a party pooper, a Pharisee, a moral show off. Satan, in this aspect, never indulges in any of the petty aspects of vice. He does not drink, smoke, fuck, steal, or murder. His evil is “pure” in so far as it exists in the realm of pure action (intent): All his “virtue” is a suplanting against God, an act of pride, a non-servum. Whereas God requires the conversion of sinners, the prude (satan the accuser) requires that there be those he can rightly condemn and censure.

The prude needs the sinner—not to convert but to damn. One of the roles, one of the chief spiritual functions of the scoundrel and drunk in literature, film, and pop culture is to act as an arch enemy to the prude, to be our “hit man” as it were against this parody of God/saint.This mechanism of binary intimacy/antipathy (and antipathy is a form of intimacy) is so pervasive to the human group dynamic that it is played out in “real life” in the classic pathology of the drunk and his long suffering, saintly wife. A drunk in terms of literary mechanism never attacks a true saint. This would destroy his aesthetic and moral/spiritual value. If he does attack a true saint, I promise he will be redeemed, converted or neutralized by the end of the novel/play/poem/film. In stories where the drunk or scoundrel “corrupts” the saint and gets away with it, there is always a question of whether or not the saint was ever truly a saint. Part of the game is for people to wonder how a good woman like that ever got involved with such a bastard. Taking in the precepts of binary intimacy (strange attractors) it makes all the sense in the world that one extreme will seek its foil, either to define itself in high relief (to be seen more clearly by contrast), to convert the other to its ways, or to integrate into its own system those aspects of the shadow self it has disowned. This latter possibility is the symbiosis, or, rather, chemical catalysis of conversion: In literary terms, Don Quixote takes on certain aspects of Sancho Panza, and vice versa., a process for which the Spanish have coined a beautiful terminology: The Quixotification of Sancho Panza, and the Panchification of Quixote.   There is a third mechanism at work here that parodies the trinity and is the source of all comic teams: the prude (straight man), the drunk  (gag man)and the holy spirit which is the antipathy/intimacy between them. This triune works as: taken together, in relationship, they form one whole indivisible structure and dynamic which, while outside the norm, helps always to define the equilibrium of the norm. Of course, there are countless variants on these tropes: one is the Irish wastrel who breaks many hearts but forms no permanent relationships (Think the classic Irish ballad, Carrick Fergus) He functions as a sort of dream and ideal of anarchy who, by existing outside the culture, provides a sort of Aristotlean catharsis—a release, a pressure valve, a freedom from the pressures of absolute conformity. In Carrick Fergus, his life ends in ruin, and he begs to be layed down by the young men (streets of Laredo shares this aspect). In renaissance idealism, Henry the fifth, by incorporating some of the vices of Falstaff into his divine right of kingship, manages to achieve a balance of the humors—to be “good” tempered and made strong by learning the uses and energies of vice. We could amend our previous dictum to a less exact rhyme by stating: “A dose of vice, makes goodness wise.”

    IN the movie on Johnny Cash, we get the American country version, complete with a final redemption (in real life Johnny was prone to relapses) and happy send off. The American country tradition, exemplified by the honky tonk songs of great country singers like George Jones is a scotch Irish import. It’s the same man: he can drink, he can fight, he can fuck (or he always believes he can) and he seems to be pinned under the stars by a God with whom he talks directly, and with whom he struggles toward redemption. The woman often comes like grace into the picture, and in several basic flavors:

1. The prude who he brings down from her high horse while she raises him up from his lowliness, and, by the end, they have “cured” each other since the drunk has a bit of the prude in him (or the wannuh be prude) and the prude is secretly longing to be brought down a few pegs (Taming of the Shrew, Most romantic comedies, any literary construct in which something stoops and something rises so that the “mountains are brought low, and the plains raised to make straight the way of the lord”).
2.  The long suffering wife or mother who endures the drunk. Loves him unconditionally, and by prayer and unconditional love, brings about his conversion (Monica in Saint Augustine’s confessions). Here the prude is no prude, but rather a true saint, and, very often, his or her death or near death is called for in order to bring about the redemption of the sinner.
3. The hard-edged woman who knows the secret mechanism behind the drunk, who has “got his number” and who is both so beautiful and so unwilling to take his shit, that he realizes she is what he wanted all along, and changes in order to win her.
4. The woman who escapes the drunk with a new found knowledge of her own self worth and her responsibility in enabling him. In this version, the drunk either converts by being confronted and hitting bottom, or dies. He has acted as a catalyst for self realization. This is the most pervasive trope in self-help books on tough love, or “breaking the pathologies of co-dependency and addiction.” The prudishness here is both mitigated and heightened, and, if the drunk is surpassingly vital and lively, most readers or the audience will find themselves partly sympathizing with the drunk/scoundrel. This is one of the aesthetic problems of Henry The 4^th Part two. Falstaff’s liveliness seems to trump Henry’s reformation so that Henry seems cruel, a user and betrayer. Even when we know the betral is necessary, it leaves a slightly bad taste in our mouths.
5. Role reversal where the drunk reforms and the prude is either destroyed by this state of affairs or exposed as having secretly encouraged the corruption all along.
6. It is a truism in AA and NA that the enabler or co-dependent only leaves the drunk or quits playing the saint when he gets “sober.” He, in this sense has betrayed the enabler by ceasing to play the role of the evil one.

    In the second part of this essay I intend to study these mechanisms of purity/purgation, and the role of the drunk/scoundrel in terms of the social order through various literary works such as Henry The Fourth, The Basket Ball Diaries, and Irish/American songs and stories. I will then concentrate my efforts on the role of the epic drunk nere-do-well in terms of a conquered people and of a “manhood” usurped by oppressive and dominant social constructs. The Irish rogue, drunk, wastrel serves a political/literary as well as spiritual function. We will narrow