Is WWX as much of an alcoholic as CQL and fanon makes him out to be? I know that we seem him drink quite a bit in the novel but does it cross over into addiction territory?
Weâre getting into my least favourite corner of internet literary analysis, which is the psychologisation/pathologisation of characters/behaviours, something that I find even more delicate when the source material is from a country where psycho pop language and mental health discourses are not as widespread as they can be in some parts of the West (psychology, letâs not forget, is not only a western-centric discipline, it can also demonstrate a pro-western bias).
Pathologisation is, first and foremost, a process which is deeply embedded in the social context and the social acceptance (or rejection) of a behaviour. That is the case even for pathologised behaviours that have supposedly âobjectiveâ biological markers.Â
Addiction, and what constitutes normal or harmless consumption of any addictive substance, does not have a universally accepted definition, especially when it comes to substances whose consumption does not bring on any social stigma (like alcohol or coffee, for instance). Go to one place to another, and people will hold different ideas of what is a normal amount of drinking, or what behaviours around drinking are normal. Some places, for instance, might find binge drinking more problematic than habitual drinking, or the opposite--or just find both perfectly normal and âhealthyâ.Â
Moreover, applying a pathologic lens to character analysis when there are no clear signs in the text that this is what the author meant to explore, or that the subtext pathology would deepen the themes or narratives of the text, is extremely tricky because it often then becomes more telling about the person doing the interpreting than about what is being interpreted. In other words, this form of analysis often ends up skewing the dialogue that is interpretation in favour of revealing things about the interpreter (wrt their ways of perceiving the world or their own personal experiences) rather than revealing anything new about the text itself.Â
But to answer your question and not to continue with philosophical rambles about disciplines and interpretation: as someone who grew up with a parent who was a functioning alcoholic, I donât find that WWX exhibits any of the signs of a person with an addiction, or at least the ones that I am familiar with. He likes alcohol a lot, probably more than is healthy, and has a very high tolerance, but he never showcases (imo) any signs of withdrawal or any urgency when it comes to getting a drink. WWX can go more than a day without drinking; he does not alter pre-established plans to try to find alcohol; he doesnât get moody or short-tempered in scenes where heâs not drinking or has not drunk in a while; when something goes wrong in his life he doesnât seem to need a constant supply of alcohol to keep going, etc. He also doesnât seem to drink to the point of being black-out drunk at any point, and does not engage in particularly risky or violent behaviors after drinking. As far as I can remember, we never see anyone suggest to him that he may have a problem with alcohol, and that he should slow down his regular consumption of alcohol. EDIT: there are actually suggestions in the text that WQ tried to curb down his drinking with acupuncture, my bad, I had forgotten.
All this leads me to say: I donât think MXTX intended for her portrayal of WWX to suggest that he was/is an alcoholic, nor do I think that what we do have in the text suggest that he suffers from addiction. But that, also, in any case, these types of questions often do not lead us to be able to discover more facets of the text in the process of interpreting it. Some texts might be further fleshed out and deepened by an engagement with addiction and mental health; but to suggest that any text benefits from this type of analysis is, imo, not greatest form of literary analysis (or maybe itâs just a personal pet peeve, who knows).Â
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