Drunk the Night Before: An Anatomy of Intoxication. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, rpt. in paperback July 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-0-8166-4398-1, $22.50. 228 pages.
Review by Bridget Roussell Cowlishaw, Northeastern State University, Oklahoma

Marty Roth’s Drunk the Night Before (published as a paperback in July 2008) is a well-researched examination of how intoxication is represented or elided in three ancient Greek texts and three commonplaces. It is a study in the style of Alain Corbin: examination of a sensory experience as cultural concept. The research is so thorough that the reader, distracted by the brisk movement from scholarship to scholarship, may ignore the narrowness of focus and not ask the question, “Why the almost exclusive interest in ancient Greek texts when the work is nominally covering ‘the western world’?” Even if we grant the implied assumption that “the western world” is based on Greek art—an assumption that seems very stuffy for a study á la Corbin--why confine oneself to only Anacreon poetry, Euripedes’s The Bacchae, and Plato’s Symposium? But if the focus of Drunk the Night Before is both too narrow and too broad, that is perhaps a hazard of innovative scholarship. The text is certainly helpful in guiding future scholarship. In fact, Roth is most interesting when outlining research that has not been done on specific texts (e.g., comparative study of drinking poetry across cultures) and concepts (e.g., “Intoxication is visible and untheorized; addiction is invisible…and overtheorized” (xvii)). The scholar of cultures looking for a project will find more than a half-dozen worthy ideas here.In chapters dealing with the three chosen literary objects, the emphasis is on how scholarship has shaped the subject matter rather than on the literature itself. The reader is given a grand tour of the critical reception of these ancient Greek works rather than an analysis of the works themselves. We are warned in the introduction that the book is not an attempt to form a thesis, but rather an exercise allowing the texts to speak with each other. Though it is the scholars who are actually conversing in the first half of the book, it’s a conversation quick in its pace and wide in its purview.After the speedy tour of literature, the reader finds chapters devoted to three conceptions of intoxication: the bane of Christianity, the inspiration of artists, and the potion/poison of magicians. The discussion of Christianity’s views of intoxication begins with establishing an early understanding from Judaism, echoed again in Islam, that intoxication is always metaphorical: spiritual intoxication is sobering. We are then escorted through a history of how this idea reversed itself in the Christian church. In this chapter alone is there a conclusion--or, at least, a basic assumption that guides the conversation: notions of heaven and spiritual ecstasy are the result of alcohol and other drugs. This assumption renders the chapter on Christianity rather shallow since only here is intoxication reduced to its literal meaning.In contrast, the chapter examining “magic potions” finds references to alcohol in its various disguises. We are asked to consider the fact that in Eurasian myth and Arthurian narratives, wine is usually the drink into which magical ingredients are mixed. It is not the drink itself, but something unsubstantial though effective that is at work. In the case of love potions, the magic is desire itself, not a literal intoxicant. This is even the case when the elixir comes from Ponce de Leon’s fountain or Shakespeare’s fairies. Nineteenth-century prose being so rich in stories of magic potions, the reader wishes the journey through this period were less rushed. But Roth has more to examine than literary texts: he examines how the concept of intoxication enters theory as well when Bakhtin’s “carnival” is treated as a consequence of intoxication.The chapter dealing with intoxication as poetic muse is more familiar territory than others, but no less absorbing. Here the author returns us to mythologies that assert a common origin for intoxication and inspiration, moving on to classical and Renaissance conceptions of wine as an aid to art, and finally giving center stage to the Romantics. Several fascinating studies of the romantic notion of genius are cited with conclusions that assert genius is code for another perceived pathology: alcoholism, drug addiction, or homosexuality. In this chapter, we are treated to consideration of all the arts, not just literature, and it is stimulating to see the similarities among critics of music and painting alongside the literary. Perhaps most interesting in this chapter are citations of literary artists denying that the written word is enhanced by drink. When the denunciations come from such notorious drinkers as Fitzgerald, O’Neill, and Hemingway, one is obliged to take notice. But then we are shown the testimonies of writers who claimed the opposite: Wilkie Collins, Poe, and Faulkner, among others. In the end, Roth prefers the later conclusion, that the artist’s drinking is part of his work.Because there is no thesis driving the book, Drunk the Night Before ends abruptly. The reader is left with a sense that s/he has been given a quick tour of many small treasures. Happily, the desire to slow down and savor the treats can be satisfied somewhat by reading through the extensive endnotes. Scholars interested in what has been said concerning intoxication as a cultural experience will find this short text a great pleasure.