Lying at the heart of Charles Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises is a profoundly ironic paradox which has plagued scholars and critics (though hardly bothered or even seemed to be noticed by his most ardent fans) ever since publication. Why does the author expend so much energy trying to convince his reader that the ingestion of intoxicating stimulants for the purpose of creating artistic expression is a bad idea when that very author spend so much energy ingesting intoxicating stimulants for the purpose of creating artistic expression?
First, a little background. Charles Baudelaire was a French poet, critic, translator, and amateur artist who became one of the poster boys for the “live fast, die young” school of existence. Over the course of his life ingested a truly majestic amount of drugs while also driving him to work at an equally impressive level. While his poetry has been more influential among more widely read poets than actually read itself and his translation of the works of Poe is considered instrumental in elevating the author of “The Raven” from forgotten drunk into American legend, Baudelaire’s most persistent legacy has been his lifestyle which makes word Bohemian seem insufferably incompetent as an appropriate description.
Baudelaire was under the influence of drugs while working, while not working, while preparing to work, while trying to work and while having trouble working. He lived fast and did die relatively young at the age of 46. The last half-dozen or so of those years were hardly the stuff of legend. Photographs reveal a man who looks closer to 60, he was mired in economic deprivation, and the result of a massive stroke left him paralyzed and essentially helpless and dependent upon others. Going out like James Dean, Baudelaire did not.
So, perhaps the mystery of why he expended all that energy writing a tome which stands in almost complete opposition to his lifestyle is not all that surprising. If one takes the perspective that Baudelaire the man foresaw exactly where Baudelaire the artist was going, Artificial Paradises makes completely perfect sense. The title of the book refers to the self-awareness that conditions produced by taking stimulants are definitively artificial, which raises an obviously question. Can artifice be Art? Baudelaire the writer certainly thought so, but this book suggests that Baudelaire the man was not quite so certain.
The disconnect between what appear to be Baudelaire the man’s warning against artificially stimulated paradises and Baudelaire the artist’s commitment to it is at work in the book. While the message is clearly enough intended to be “just say no” the examples by which this message is forwarded does much to undo it. Central to the book is one of the most famous works of works of all time presenting a pro-drug argument: Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of English Opium-Eater. The result is something akin to making an anti-violence film that presents scenes of gruesomely realistic acts of violence. Baudelaire is saying the use of drugs to stimulate creativity is a bad idea while presenting as evidence seductive examples of literature written while under the influence of drugs.
Ultimately the book is a conundrum, but then that is exactly what one should expect. The entire legend of Baudelaire is a paradox. A live fast, die young icon who death was slow and agonizing. A workaholic whose work has remained almost unknown to the vast majority of the population. And a voracious abuser of drugs who was a primal engineer of the idea of intellectual exploitation of drugs for aesthetic purposes. Despite his embrace by a certain subculture of society, the thematic paradox which marks this volume goes a long toward revealing that Baudelaire himself was more artifice than art.
