Tattoos and Heroin: a Literary Approach

Abstract

This article suggests that a parallel exists between the practice of tattooing and the injection of heroin as both activities are represented in a body of literature here called `Junk Narratives'. These texts include William Burroughs' Junky, Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. In these books, act and meaning, as in life, are inseparable: tattoos can be interpreted, but that they are tattoos, that they have been indelibly inscribed into the flesh, is also stressed. In these books tattoos are represented as, in addition to whatever specific interpretive significance can be attached to them, visible markers of the hatred junkies feel for their own bodies. It will be suggested throughout the article that the body in these texts is always a source of shame and horror. Tattoos in these books do not decorate a body, rather they visibly emphasize its pathetic corporeality: no flesh, no image. The central dynamic of these texts is toward the transcendence of the body by the injection of heroin, a use of the needle which mimics the practice of tattooing and stresses the subservient, inessential nature of the body.