4 - Ambivalence and Ambiguity

Summary

This chapter seeks to understand traditions of nocturnal conviviality, particular those that involved the consumption of alcohol, “from within,” that is, in the terms of those who partook in them. It begins with exploring the language and imagery of night and nocturnal devotion in contemporary poetry, which, as shown later in the chapter, also framed nocturnal sociability and invested it with meaning. Approached through this discourse, the night no longer appears as a mere a dark closet in which to hide while drinking, but rather as the ideal setting for cultivating intimacy and love, carnal, platonic, and divine. In fact, hiding in the night and investing it with spiritual significance were mutually dependent. By enveloping these traditions in darkness, the night allowed a space of “ambivalence and ambiguity” that would not directly challenge the unequivocal dictates of orthodoxy and authority. Social drinking, in short, and the wider cultural streams that legitimized it, found fertile soil in the nocturnal, and flourished in it, much like in a walled night garden.