Nicotine - Gregor Hens

Translated by Jen Calleja

 'I've smoked well over a hundred thousand cigarettes in my life and each one of those cigarettes meant something to me. I even enjoyed a few of them'.

Objectively, there’s nothing very interesting about smoking – anyone can do it, it requires no special technique or preparation, it doesn’t bring dizzying highs or mind-bending lows. In describing cigarettes as ‘the perfect type of a perfect pleasure’, Oscar Wilde explicitly stated that smoking always left one unsatisfied. To counter this mundane truth, a whole industry has sprung up with the express aim of glamorising smoking. The Marlboro Man was an early symbol; in recent decades, health risks and governmental disapproval have cemented smoking's outlaw quality, the cigarette becoming visual shorthand for the non-conformist attitudes of figures like Keith Richards and Bill Hicks. When I was younger, I was part of a group of musicians, DJs and artists who were paid to smoke a particular brand of cigarette; we were given an allowance to cover drinks and entrance fees, and a list of bars to be seen in; the brand was seeking to associate itself with creativity and credibility.

The genius of Gregor Hens’ essay Nicotine is that he entirely strips away the glamour of smoking. He is less interested by the cultural associations of the act than by what his habit says about the everyday details of his life. Individual cigarettes can be the spark for Knausgaardian streams of recollection. I was reminded of Peter Fletcher, who has, since 12^th June 2007, kept a record of every single time he has sneezed. By charting where he was, and what he was thinking, every time he sneezed, he has built up a highly representative diary, free from selection bias.

On his website, Fletcher explains that his project ‘has revealed curious regularities in the way I live my life. For example, it has revealed how much time I spend in the ‘Office/spare bedroom”, in front of a computer’. Cigarettes perform this function for Hens, helping to illuminate the everyday. Each event, a sneeze for Fletcher or lighting up for Hens, becomes ‘a single frame in the time-lapse animation of your life.’ The regularity of sneezing (and smoking), makes them ‘a curiously representative filter on a life… whilst it would not show the three-year-old me in my grandparents’ garden, wearing lederhosen and performing a mock golf swing with a shoehorn in the shape of a golf club, it would show me in my bedroom thirty-six years later staring at the photograph of the event’.

Hens’ first held a lit cigarette on New Year’s Eve, aged five. In this snapshot, he ‘accepted it with a reverence that was felt perhaps more truly and deeply than the humble spirit required of me a few years later at my First Communion'. Although he was too young to be aware of the cultural associations of smoking, he was influenced by his parents, both heavy smokers. This was his first experience of ‘a structure that governed nearly me entire life'. Part of Hens’ aim in writing this memoir is to gain a better understanding of the causes of his addiction, why it was imbued with such significance for him: 'I'm not looking for a gene. I don't want more rats to die. I'm looking for images, stories, the sensory aspect of my addiction'. At one stage, Hens cadges a cigarette from a stranger, and takes it home to dissect: a counterpoint to the psychological dissection which he undertakes through his writing. 

Hens is charting a disappearing landscape, in which smokers could freely light up in cinemas, buses, offices and restaurants. Unsurprisingly, if there is a political edge to Nicotine, it revolves around the question of agency: 'I am less interested in the thing itself,’ he says, ‘than what is at times referred to as self-management'. Hens examines the discourse of powerlessness and addiction, and asks whether we ever really have agency over what we do with our bodies? Most of our actions are governed by a mixture of legislation and social norms (our employers tell us where to be during working hours; abortion laws restrict women’s agency over their uteruses) – is smoking a rejection of what is good for us, or simply an extension of our willingness to have our actions controlled by an outside force? Like Michel Houellebecq in his most recent novel, Hens explores the almost religious feeling of relief which submission to a higher power can bring, associating the act of smoking with youth and joie de vivre.

Nicotine is a vivid and illuminating memoir, and one need not be a smoker themselves to get some benefit from reading it; Hens is overly modest when he says 'perhaps I’ve even succeeded in awakening and holding the interest of a few readers for whom the inner world I've laid out is completely alien, because they don't smoke and never have'; the issues he raises around agency and compulsion are almost universal. Besides, isn’t the purpose of literature to illuminate experiences which are different from our own? At the essay's close, Hens tells the reader, 'if you haven't for a while, light up a cigarette. But do what you do - seeing as you've just read a book about nicotine - more attentively than usual'. What Nicotine teaches us is that we should do everything more attentively: each time we act, is it from our own desire, or because an outside force compels us? And if we pay more attention to the act, what do we learn about ourselves?