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Books Like Les Paradis artificiels
Best books to read after Les Paradis artificiels by Baudelaire
Baudelaire's great essay on intoxication and the ideal (1860) — part original essay on hashish, part translation of De Quincey's Confessions, and part meditation on the relationship between artificial paradises and genuine spiritual life. If this complex, fascinating work intrigued you, these books explore similar territory.
- 1
Buy on AmazonLes Fleurs du mal
by Charles Baudelaire
The poetic companion — the same tension between the artificial paradise and the genuine ideal is the central drama of Les Fleurs du mal, developed through the image-world of poetry rather than philosophical argument.
- 2
Buy on AmazonConfessions of an English Opium-Eater
by Thomas De Quincey
The work Baudelaire translates and annotates in the second part of Les Paradis artificiels — the essential companion text, which Baudelaire reads as a account of the same states he is theorizing.
- 3
Buy on AmazonCuriosités esthétiques
by Charles Baudelaire
The art criticism collection — the aesthetic theory that Les Paradis artificiels develops in the context of intoxication is the same theory that underlies the art criticism; reading both gives the complete Baudelairean aesthetic.
- 4
Buy on AmazonUne Saison en enfer
by Arthur Rimbaud
Rimbaud's great prose poem — the account of a 'systematic derangement of the senses' that develops the Baudelairean project of intoxication and vision into its most radical form, ending in its repudiation.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Doors of Perception
by Aldous Huxley
Huxley's essay on mescaline — the closest twentieth-century equivalent to Les Paradis artificiels: a literary writer's account of the states of heightened perception that intoxication produces, with the same combination of description, theory, and philosophical reservation.
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Buy on AmazonRêve
by Gérard de Nerval
Nerval's dreamlike prose — the closest contemporary parallel to the states of consciousness described in Le Poème du haschisch; Nerval explores the same territories through dream and mental crisis rather than chemical means.
- 7
Buy on AmazonLe Grand Meaulnes
by Alain-Fournier
The novel of the inaccessible ideal — the closest novelistic equivalent to Baudelaire's argument that the artificial paradise is a simulacrum of the genuine ideal; Meaulnes's Domaine perdu is the perfect image of the paradise that cannot be reached by any shortcut.
- 8
Buy on AmazonOpium: Journal d'une désintoxication
by Jean Cocteau
Cocteau's diary of opium withdrawal — the most direct twentieth-century continuation of the De Quincey-Baudelaire tradition of literary writing about the experience of opium, equally honest about the appeal and the cost.
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