October '11 / Gothic Novel : Confessions of an Opium Eater

[virginiawang]

As the writer stated near the beginning of the book that he considered himself a philosopher, he did love himself and everything he did to a certain degree, and he was being quite honest in telling his readers the fact that he did approve of himself as a whole, though people would absolutely laugh when they learned about him from his book. If some of you expect him to say he hates himself, you must be dreaming. It is because he loved himself and was honest in his writing.

[Sancho]

I was enchanted by almost all the ideas he presented in the second half of the book, some of which include a blur of his waking hours into his dreams, the depths into which he descended each night with melancholy, when he was not awake, and a miraculous return to the way a child views the world, in his wild dreams. He wrote down several scenes which he saw in his sleep, and some of which really stood out among the rest. I didn’t remember all of them, because it was the first time that I read the book. However I want to read the book for a second time and perhaps a third, to learn more. Now I am thinking of the never ending ladder which grows toward the heaven, more and more quickly, and the scene in which he played with crocodiles. He wanted to eat opium because he wanted those vivid dreams.

Hi Virginia, I enjoyed the dream-scenes too, even though his dreams may have been a euphemism for a narcotic trip. At any rate, I thought the dreams were written beautifully. Tom Wolfe wrote a memorable description of an LSD trip in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.

I haven't finished reading yet, but I'm having a hard time staying interested.
Our writer goes a long way to try to convince the reader (or himself) that he isn't just your average user, but he is.
He leaves school, takes to the streets, gets involved with some unsavory types, gets whatever money can from those who will give it to him (he says it never even occured to him to get a job) and, suprise, starts abusing drugs.
This story is not uncommon. It isn't now and it wasn't then.
I will continue reading, and I hope to get more out more out of it.
Right now, I have my doubts.

I think you’re looking at it all wrong. You may be projecting our early 21st Century values and our understanding of drugs and addiction onto a man who was firmly ensconced in the early 19th Century. While the physiological effects of opium haven’t changed from then until now, the understanding of the drug certainly has. At that time opium was largely understood as a pain-killer not a psychedelic drug. It was used in hospitals. De Quincey bought opium for the first time from a pharmacist not a pusher.

I made a similar comment on another thread a while back. A famous quote by Karl Marx came up: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” I tried to make the argument that modern readers often misinterpret what Marx meant. I don’t think Marx was trying to compare religion to a hallucinogenic drug but rather he was comparing it to a pain killer. And it seems to me that life was more painful then than now.

Whatever the case, if we’re going to superimpose our values on those people, we ought to consider what future folks may think of us. I have no idea where the drug culture will go, but I am certain it will not go away. I read a sci-fi book once where future druggies had figured out how to excite the pleasure centers of their brains with electricity, so they had these electrical plugs surgically implanted into their skulls and they could plug in and turn on any time they wanted to. The author had imagined a trajectory of the drug culture for humans which had started with naturally occurring substances (‘shrooms, poppies, and the like) and progressed on to pharmaceutical drugs that were created in the laboratory (LSD, Crystal Meth, Ritalin), and then proceeded to a system where the brain had been mapped in such a way that the same druggy experience could be had just by plugging in. They were called “wire-heads” – a sort of future version of a crack-head. Anyway, the wire-heads thought that crack-heads really should have known better.

To his credit, I think, De Quincey did figure it out. And he figured it out without the benefit of knowing the history of Rock-n-Roll. He wrote a nice section on the difficulties in weaning himself from the drug, and he was very frank about his withdrawal.

[Des Essientes]

The edition of the Confessions published in 1821 is the one that everyone reads today and, although it contains De Quincey's account of his weaning and withdrawal, he never quit eating opium once and for all. He continued using laudanum until his death in 1859 and the rambling revised edition of the Confessions he released in 1856 is though to have suffered from the deliterious effects the drug had upon his mind during the intervening decades.

[Paulclem]

I'm still reading this book - nearly finished now. (I've been reading other stuff).

I got to like his meandering style, though I still maintain that a bit of a tighter structure would have made a better book. His asides are interesting and informative such as head of a lake being the end from which it fills, and the foot from whence it drains. I also though it was funny about the left and right hand side of the bank - the correct denotation being left and right according to the direction it flows. (That's all very well, but I reckon it is only useful if everyone knows that - otherwise huge confusion will reign.)

I have to say it's not much of a confession either. Perhaps it was scandalous in its day, but he was hardly the kind of addict we find today. I think the closest comparison is to the wealthy's use of recreatinal drugs. I'm not convinced that his excuses for taking it are really to blame on his ailments. No doubt he first used it as a relief from pain, but he certainly chooses to go back to it without that reason.

[Sancho]

And there's rub, eh?

Once you realize what you've gotten yourself into, it's too late.

I read a novel last year that got at the desparation of addiction fairly well: The Man with the Golden Arm, by Nelson Algren. A young guy, Frankie Machine, comes home to Chicago from the war with a chunk of Nazi shrapnel in his liver and a serious addiction to morphine. Things end badly for Frankie.