Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

it is marked by an absolute constant which orders values and which is precisely this opposition, activity/passivity.²²

It is this binary representation of active (male representation) and passive (female representation) that the male drug writer/character “uses to sustain himself”—quite literally at times.²³ More notably, the representation of women in male drug literature exemplifies Cixous’s observation of woman’s “place” in phallo-logocentric discourse: “Either woman is passive or she does not exist.”²⁴ A case in point is Burroughs’ 1953 novel, Junky. The novel is filled with very detailed descriptions of male drug users—even random characters like Joe the Mex are fully explored and described:

Joe the Mex had a thin face with a long, sharp, twitchy nose and a down-curving, toothless mouth. Joe’s face was lined and ravaged, but not old. Things had happened to his face, but Joe was not touched. His eyes were bright and young. There was a gentleness about him common to many oldtime junkies. You could spot Joe blocks away. In the anonymous city crowd he stood out sharp and clear, as though you were seeing him through binoculars. He was a liar, and like most liars, he was constantly changing his stories, altering time and personnel from one telling to the next. One time he would tell a story about some friend, next time he would switch the story around to give himself the lead. He would sit in the cafeteria over coffee and pound cake, talking at random about his experiences.²⁵

Yet the protagonist’s wife in Junky is without any character description—and she is not even referred to until almost halfway through the novel, when she is described as the “old lady” who bailed him out of jail. There is a brief reference by the police to her addiction to barbiturates but not the in-depth analysis of her addiction and its effects which the relatively insignificant character Joe the Mex was afforded. The protagonist’s wife is written as a silent figure, a flat character of insignificance in comparison to the protagonist and his drug addiction. She only “exists” when she is able to passively sustain that (male/active) addiction.