Drinking as Symbol – Matthew Allen
Drinking is meaningful. Alcohol is a vital and powerful substance: an intoxicant, a source of sustenance, a taxable commodity, an industrial product, an accompaniment to recreation and a perceived cause of social problems. Notice that in our society the word drinking implies alcohol: if we’re going for a drink, it’s assumed to be alcoholic unless we specify otherwise. This telling assumption illustrates the way that drinking alcohol has come to embody the socialising and celebration that are meant to accompany it. Indeed, alcohol often marks the boundary between work and play. In consequence, drinking and its material culture and rituals are symbolically powerful, and form both the subject and object of art.
Friedrich Nietzsche saw the classical Greek culture which produced this kylix as founded upon the tragic reconciliation of two primal cultural impulses he termed the Apollonian, representing moderation, order, progress and the rational individual, and the Dionysian, which stood for its opposites: chaos, emotion and the community of shared intoxication. Whether or not this is an accurate view of fifth-century Athens, his interpretation captures a fundamental cultural divide that is often symbolised by alcohol. This dialectic of drinking – sober restraint and drunken release – is central to Western culture, and hence to art.
As this kylix can also illustrate, drinking is an inextricably social and ritualised form of behaviour. We drink together and in public (solitary and private drinking is often problematised) and we do so in ways that are shaped by traditions, norms and rules. For the ancient Greeks, the symposium was an essential ceremony of civilised culture. The kylix was a drinking cup, only used during symposia, for the consumption of wine which was ritually mixed with water, and drunk according to the instructions of the symposiarch or drinking master. This mixing of the wine was a key practice of moderation that distinguished civilised Greeks from barbarians who drank their wine neat. Indeed, Greek drinking-wares often (though not in this case) depict such unrestrained excess in scenes of a drunken Dionysus and his satyrs.
Such restrained and rule-bound drinking, contrasted with wild drunkenness, often symbolises rationality and self-control – the capacity for self-government. But this capacity is typically restricted. The symposium was an exclusive space in which all the participant drinkers were aristocratic men and the only women present were hetairai or prostitutes. This is typical of the gendered nature of drinking and drunkenness which are often manly activities that simultaneously shame women, thus restricting access to the political authority restrained drinking can impart. Indeed, as I argue in my forthcoming book, this is also true of Australia as it became a democracy in the mid-nineteenth century. Drinking rituals, especially toasting, served as a kind of performative citizenship, with drinkers celebrating their fraternal equality and demanding political rights. But roles within this theatre of democracy were reserved for gentlemen, leaving others, notably women and Aboriginal people, on the political margins.
These three paintings – Norman Lindsay’s Hot blood (1936), Walter Dendy Sadler’s Empty Bottles (1896), and Clif Peir’s Still life (1934) – were all produced slightly later, during the peak years of the temperance movement, a popular campaign against alcohol as the leading cause of social problems. Not coincidentally, this was also the period in which Australians drank the least (approximately half what we do today). In 1916 temperance drove the introduction of six o’clock closing of pubs, initially as a form of austerity to show that civilians were taking the war seriously. But this law persisted for much of the twentieth century, helping to reify an intensely masculine drinking culture, concentrated during the hour between work and closing, which became known as the six o’clock swill. Public drinking was segregated by gender, and men proved their mateship by shouting rounds and knocking them down.
Lindsay’s creative work often, famously, celebrated the Dionysian but this image, with its allusion to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, is arguably a critique of male drunkenness and its capacity to inspire violence, a proverbial and recurrent problem. Sadler’s painting also speaks to the downsides of drinking, evoking the short-lived wisdom of the morning after the night before. But Peir’s still life perhaps best captures the ubiquity of drinking in our culture. The little glass of sherry on the side table, hints at a perhaps dubious habit, and shows how even our private worlds and domestic rituals are often governed by drink.
Dr Matthew Allen is a Senior Lecturer in Historical Criminology at the University of New England. His research is concentrated on early New South Wales and its unique transition from a penal colony to a settler colonial democracy, and much of his work has focussed on using alcohol as a means to understand the political imaginary that underlay this transformation. He has just completed his first monograph, entitled Drink and Democracy: Alcohol and the Political Imaginary in Colonial Australia, currently in publication with McGill-Queens University Press.
Image credits:
W. Dendy Sadler, Empty bottles (detail), 1896, oil on wood. Gift of Howard Hinton 1938. Howard Hinton Collection.
Kylix [wine cup] (detail), 5th century BCE, ceramic, Attica, Greece. MA1963.5.1. UNE Museum of Antiquities.
