Buried temples and open planes: Alethea Hayter and the architecture of drug-taking in Alan Hollinghurst's the Spell

Reading Alan Hollinghurst's third, and least appreciated, novel The Spell, alongside Alethea Hayter's famed study Opium and the Romantic Imagination, this article attends to the spatial metaphors of drug use as mobilized in Hollinghurst's intensely lyrical novel. The articles suggest that, through counterpoising architecture and Ecstasy, The Spell contests the teleology of a Romantic model of artistic completion, fulfilment, and spatial confinement. Set in motion by the rich and wry interplay between architectural design and the drug MDMA, the novel offers a considerable dismissal of any desire to seek permanence through the structures of a text or the structures around us. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.