The Recovered: Addiction and Sincerity in 20th Century American Literature

The story of addiction can be told any number of ways: from behind a church basement podium surrounded by folding chairs, or twisted through the convolutions of an 1100-page experimental novel; in a president's declaration of war, a tear-jerker memoir, or an apparently formulaic story in the back of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. This dissertation is interested in how, and why, the shape of these accounts might differ. How does a literary narrative written with aesthetic ambitions differ from a narrative told to help people recover? How do some narratives, particularly those offered by institutional programs, shift "recovering" from intransitive to transitive verb? How do all of these narratives negotiate the difficulties inherent to the story of addiction—the banality, the monotony, the endlessness—or attempt to recuperate these qualities as narrative strengths?

This dissertation explores several tensions implicit in addiction narratives from spheres of literature and recovery: the tension between singularity and commonality, between authenticity and pedagogy, between artistry and sincerity, and between competing conceptions of sincerity itself. It examines how literary texts have absorbed—and in some cases, argued against—the narratives of recovery offered by various institutional programs: Alcoholics Anonymous, the grassroots recovery fellowship founded in 1935; a federal Prison-Hospital known as "The Narco Farm" founded in the same year; and the mid-century residential therapeutic communities now known simply as "rehab." This dissertation also examines how the kinds of self-consciousness manifest in literary narratives of recovery can return us to institutional narratives (more seemingly-formulaic) with heightened sensitivity to the ways in which these institutional narratives might already contain similar veins of self-awareness or self-critique.

In its attempt to map how the public imagination of addiction has been constructed and repeatedly reconstructed, this dissertation examines narratives from both literary and therapeutic spheres, and draws on substantial archival evidence—from institutional archives as well as the papers of authors like Charles Jackson, John Berryman, and David Foster Wallace—in order to examine the complicated relationships between literary texts and the larger recovery dialogues happening around them.

In AA's program of recovery, the addict is called upon to recreate a reformed "self' even as this self is surrendered to the alterity of divinity, interchangeability, or collectivity. "I'm fighting to stay sober—I'm fighting to stay sober," says an addict in a play by Denis Johnson, then pauses—"uh...yeah yeah. I'm surrendering to stay sober, I'm surrendering to stay sober."' This recovering self has to fight to give up a sense of itself doing the fighting. This self wants to overcome compulsion by overcoming any sense of its own agency behind the overcoming. Recovery calls for an ambidextrous sincerity that can hold will and relinquishment at once. One narrative of coming into sincerity—an integrated self reconstituting its selfhood through willpower—comes up against another, nearly inverted narrative: the trajectory of giving up individuated selfhood and autonomous will entirely. In the Third Step of AA's Twelve, the addict surrenders to an infamous Higher Power, or to the "Higher Power" of the program itself.

In addiction narratives, sincerity and addiction find themselves in symbiotic relation as mutually constitutive poles of opposition: Sincerity might serve as an antidote to addiction, but it also depends upon addiction for its shape and texture. Sincerity is granted gravity and traction by the compulsion it overcomes.

"Sincerity was nothing in this game," says Alan Severance, the protagonist of Berryman's unfinished rehab novel, Recovery. But this dissertation examines sincerity as a key concept in various literary narratives of addiction and recovery: Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend (1944), William Burroughs' Junkie (1953), John Berryman's unfinished Recovery (1973), and David Foster Wallace's seminal Infinite Jest (1996). In these novels, the possibilities and complexities of sincerity are sharpened into focus by addiction and its gravitational narrative force: From the surprising moments of "sincere" emotion and camaraderie in recovery institutions to the ways in which relapse constantly imperils the provisional sincerity of early sobriety; from the vexed sincerity of an alcoholic performing the story of his own dysfunction to the possibilities of writing "sincerely" under the cultural reign of irony.

This dissertation explores the ways in which recovery culture and literary culture offer divergent narrative imperatives, and—by examining the lives and work of writers who straddled these cultures—it offers an account of the ways in which sobriety, or its pursuit, transformed these writers' beliefs about what their writing could become.