Artificial Paradises Literary Elements

Non-fiction essays; drug lit; addiction literature

Europe in the late 1800’s. Several very specific places are mentioned: Savannah-la-Mar, Brocken peak in Germany.

The narrator is Baudelaire, writing in the first person point of view.

Mood and tone varies according to the subject at hand. On some occasions, it is direct and unemotional. At other times, however, the author indulges in an exuberance of exclamatory hyperbole which has the effect of raising the question not of whether Baudelaire was doing drugs while writing—that is implied—but the degree and extent to which drug use influenced the tonal shifts.

The protagonists of the story might be argued to be British writer Thomas de Quincey since a great portion of the text is biographical. In reality, however, there is no denying that there are two clear protagonists: hashish and opium. Institutional morality which insists on castigating illicit drug use as immoral is the clear antagonist.

The prime conflict is situated as existing between the forces of morality which restrict the acceptance of the central premise that illicit drugs stimulate the imagination and the fervent belief by the author that his premise is undeniably sound and scientifically proven.

The climax is the death of Thomas de Quincey as it brings with it irrefutable proof that the author’s previously stated contention that opium can make one godlike is false: death coms to all, even opium eaters.

Near the end of Chapter I, Baudelaire foreshadows how the second half of the book will transform into what is primarily a biography of de Quincey. Without mentioning either the author or his most famous text by name, he foreshadows this transformation of genre by writing: “The author, an illustrious man, of a powerful and exquisite imagination, now withdrawn and silent, dared, with tragic candor, to tell the story of the pleasures and tortures he once found in opium, and the most dramatic part of his book is where he talks about the superhuman efforts of will it took to escape the damnation to which he had recklessly dedicated himself.”

N/A

The text is rife with allusions, ranging from the mysterious works by three mysterious men named MM. Smith, Gastinel and Decourtive failing in their attempt to discover the active principle of hashish to the myth of Orpheus to the works of Edgar Allan Poe to the protagonist of the Faustian gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer.

For those who don’t share the author’s robust interest in narcotics, the pervasive use of equally robust imagery is likely to be the most interesting aspect of the book. These two worlds collide, of course, and often, with the result being entertaining at least: “O fair, subtle and powerful opium! You who, in the heart of the poor as well as of the rich, for the wounds which will never heal and for the anguishes which induce the spirit in rebellion, bring a softening balm”

The author himself volunteers an example of paradox in an anecdote:
“It was not without a certain admiration that I once heard the paradox of an officer who told me about the cruel operation carried out on a French general in El-Aghouat, and of which he died despite the chloroform. This general was a very brave man, and even something more, one of those souls to whom the term naturally applies: chivalrous. “It wasn't chloroform he needed,” he told me, but the looks of the whole army and the music of the regiments. So perhaps he would have been saved! ”The surgeon disagreed with this officer; but the chaplain would no doubt have admired those feelings.

N/A

The chapter titled “Morality” almost inevitably engages one of the most popular and oft-used metonyms in literature: referring to the Church to cover the entirety of its reach as a governing influence on codifying morality: “if the Church condemns magic and witchcraft, it is because they militate against the intentions of God, because they suppress the work of time and want to make superfluous the conditions of purity and morality; and that she, the Church, considers as legitimate”

Throughout, opium is personified in a rather disturbing manner: “eloquent opium! you who, by your powerful rhetoric, disarm the resolutions of rage, and who, for one night, make a man guilty of the hopes of his youth and his old hands pure of blood; which, to the proud man, gives a temporary forgetfulness.”