Why are we commonly drawn to the very uncommon? . Obviously, I hadn’t forgotten that line from “Lady Chatterley”: “I've asked my man if he will find me a Turk.” Maybe it was because of some inkling that this might still be what life had in store—that Lawrence hadn’t lived all that long ago, and it might still take a “queer, melancholy specimen” to want to marry a Turkish woman. And be sure to wash the ashtrays afterwards. He tells her. The villain M’Closkey, who has designs on both Terrebonne and Zoe, manages to have both put under the auctioneer’s hammer. He was a short, wan, elfin-featured, 36-year old Oxford University dropout who had long been on … However, sadness and gloom do not belong exclusively to addicts as Shelley points out in his poem "To a Skylark." Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, and Percy Bysshe Shelley are three examples of writers under the influence of opium. The son of a London bookseller, Hood became a “sort of sub-editor” of the London Magazine (1821–23) during its heyday, when its circle of brilliant contributors included Charles Lamb, The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. For me, the hour or so I spend, perhaps two or three Sundays a month, is one of those concentratedly “small” respites, where I breathe (really, despite the smoke), reflect on the triumphs and tribulations yodeling from the newsprint, and often consider a writing problem or possibility. And you like this play?” she says. Why? Abrams’ book The Mirror and the Lamp: romantic theory and the critical tradition, in which literature prior to the Romantics functioned as ... This is the basic dramatic situation: a black playwright, in 2014, is somehow unable to move beyond a likeable 1859 work, named after a forgotten word once used to describe nonwhite people in the same terms as breeds of livestock. In the meantime, Rabelais was dead, so why hold a grudge? The blend of the chummy and the appalling mirrors the ambiguity of Boucicault’s work. In an opening monologue, B. J. J., “a black playwright,” recounts a conversation with his therapist, about his lack of joy in theatre. The estate is eventually saved, by complex means involving an exploding steamship—but not before Zoe has poisoned herself in despair. For many readers, this exchange might have slipped by unnoticed. The author’s real name was Thomas de Quincey (b. The therapist has never heard of Boucicault, or “The Octoroon.”. “It shows a certain lack of fastidiousness.”. Of the many passages that gave me pause when I first read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” in high school, the one I remember the most clearly is this conversation between Connie, Clifford, and the Irish writer Michaelis: “I find I can't marry an Englishwoman, not even an Irishwoman...”, “Oh, American!” He laughed a hollow laugh. That smoky solace let me take a sharp turn on an essay I’ve been writing in my mind, something that to this point had been a tangled skein of thoughts without warp or woof. Thomas De Quincey believes that has this authority with his work Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. In Keats’ urn however, there is no. A few weeks later, I saw “An Octoroon,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s refashioning of the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault’s 1859 melodrama of almost the same title (“The Octoroon”). They were creative and sometimes crazy in the effects the drug had on them. The audience “hears” the play in two registers simultaneously: the register of 1859 and the register of 2014. You had to be a privileged person, because books always were written by and for privileged people. And in de Quincey, while we can recount strange dreams, and their impacts, we cannot enter into his visions the same way, as they always will be other experiences to us, no matter how similar of circumstances we may experience. The opening monologue—“Ha ha ha! It’s easier to just discard the works that look as ungainly to us now as “The Octoroon.” But if you don’t throw out the past, or gloss it over, you can get something like “An Octoroon”: a work of joy and exasperation and anger that transmutes historical insult into artistic strength. ... middle of paper ... Thomas de Quincey was born on August 15, 1785, in Manchester, England to Thomas Quincey and Elizabeth Penson. “He’s always trying to prove how he’s smarter than everyone else,” one student said, citing the line “From my very earliest youth it has been my pride to converse familiarly, more Socratico, with all human beings, man, woman, and child.”. So I try to make it a habit, when I’ve been gifted with something more than fragrant breath from my cigarish contemplations, to get to the keyboard lickety-split, and weigh and record the nugget from the Sunday pannings. For the purposes of reading an English novel from 1830, I thought, you had to be an upper-class white guy from 1830. (When that cuppa isn’t the occasional brandy, which is just another notch on St. Peter’s staff, so that when I arrive at the pearly gates, he says, “You’re kidding, right?” But don’t forget that Mrs. Browning did like a swallow of opium or two in the middle of all that poesy*. 123Helpme.com. “An Octoroon” exposes this ludicrousness, without prohibiting a sympathetic viewing of Boucicault’s play. A slave! Asked by Nicola R #493665 Answered by jill d #170087 on 1/13/2016 11:55 AM View All Answers (Jacobs-Jenkins was formerly on the staff of this magazine.) Jumpy writing ideas will turn to fool’s gold if you don’t stick a pin in them. Copyright © 2000-2020. *PS If you want to get a hint of writerly vices gone to polysyllabic extremes, read The Confessions of An English Opium Eater, by Thomas De Quincey. He suggests that his "dreams were accompanied by deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable by words" (971). A writer’s retreat, whether physical or philosophical, anachronism or not, is a yeasty place of stirring idea. Consider Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and apply it to your state. According to Alethea Hayter, author of Opium and the Romantic Imagination, it wasn't until the British writer Thomas De Quincey theorized the effects of opium on the imagination that many other British poets and writers began experimenting with it. Zoe’s soliloquy on discovering that she is to be sold at an auction—“A slave! In “Heidi,” the meanest goat is called “the Great Turk.”, “Rather dreadful for an English girl to marry a Turk, I think, don't you?” a character in Agatha Christie’s “Dumb Witness” says. “We are? And, more to the point, how? What our staff is reading, watching, and listening to each week. Believe me, we’re going to look just as bad to future generations.”. The everyday man also faces the same problem as De Quincey's opium eater as human beings have a tendency to focus, Encyclopedia Standard, 2004). How do you rehabilitate your love for art works based on expired and inhuman social values—and why bother? I explained that De Quincey would reasonably have expected his readers to know that “more Socratico” was Latin for “after the fashion of Socrates”—that, in 1821, Latin was taught to nearly everyone in a certain class, that people who weren’t in that class generally didn’t read books like this one, and that De Quincey had no way of knowing those things were going to change. All rights reserved. Yesterday was another turn on the wheel of one of my favorite Sunday afternoon pastimes (ahh, “Sunday pastimes,” which smacks of a gentler era seen through a bit of a mist): smoking a fat cigar and reading the newspaper, parked in a chair in my garage, which looks down our long driveway to the strawberry fields beyond. But it doesn’t mean you can just airlift his work into 2014 and expect it not to sound ludicrously offensive. All rights reserved. “What’s an octoroon?” she asks. (And for women worried that those stubby sticks will clash with their gold lamé gowns, really, there are some slender panatela and cigarillo-style stogies that lend themselves just as well as those fulsome fatties to stylish, airy gestures and erudite commentary.). The Confessions of An English Opium Eater. They didn’t take a huge liking to De Quincey. T o eat. Poets such as Thomas de Quincey, Percy Shelley, Samuel Coleridge, Charles Baudelaire, and John Keats were the most recognized for falling under substance abuse. But I always moved on, quickly. *PS If you want to get a hint of writerly vices gone to polysyllabic extremes, read The Confessions of An English Opium Eater, by Thomas De Quincey. Reading De Quincey, I had registered, with a shade of annoyance, the description of “Turkish opium eaters”—“absurd enough to sit, like so many equestrian statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves”—but hadn’t been particularly bothered by his claims of being the best Greek scholar in Oxford. Today, I was a privileged person, as I was frequently told at the private school my parents scrimped to send me to; someday, I would write a book. DE QUINCEY, Thomas, English miscellaneous writer: b.Manchester, England, 15 Aug. 1785; d. Edinburgh, 8 Dec. 1859. . Peyton’s nephew, George, has just returned from Paris to take control of the property; he falls in love with Zoe, the judge’s illegitimate octoroon daughter, who has been raised as a member of the family. B. J. J., following his therapist’s advice, decides to restage “The Octoroon,” but white actors refuse to work with him: nobody wants to play slave owners. Ad Choices. That night, I found myself seriously questioning this assumption I’d held since childhood: “You have to try to forget that while you’re reading.” You do? “But you have to try to forget that while you’re reading. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. He writes about his personal experience taking opium in a two part serial. When asked to name a playwright he admires, he can think of only one: Dion Boucicault. Boucicault’s original script is set on a plantation, Terrebonne, shortly after the death of its owner, Judge Peyton. In this sense, the most layered and ambiguous lines in Jacobs-Jenkins’s script are the ones originally written by Boucicault. 1785 – d. 1859). The word baroque has come to be applied to literature and especially to poetry. ), Of course, my particular prescription to invite the writing muse might not be for everyone. The Confessions was "the first major work De Quincey published and the one which won him fame almost overnight...". “There are too many niggas coming and going on this plantation. . There are long beds the length of the driveway host to a melange of flowering plants, shrubs and trees, so the flitting of the hummingbirds and the bumbling of the bees provides a palette of color and pleasant movement, where I drink in droughts of pastoral pleasure in between recoiling from the accounts of the latest global atrocity, or wagging my head at some pundit’s proclamations. In a striking sense, DeQuincey's life and writings are distinct; for by far the most interesting events in his life took place before 1821, the year of his first publication, after which the course of his life is of an interest wholly secondary to his writing. There I’d be, reading along, imaginatively projecting myself into the character most suitable for imaginative projection, forgetting through suspension of disbelief the differences that separated me from that character—and then I’d come across a line like “These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children” (“The Brothers Karamazov”). Many of my students are first-generation college students, and/or immigrants or first-generation Americans; several of them work forty hours a week in addition to carrying a full course load. Southey kept a dream journal, as did Sir Hymphry Davy, a close friend of Coleridge’s; Thomas Beddoes wrote of dreams from a medical perspective in Hygeia and dreams were often a hot topic of conversation at the dinner parties of those who kept company with poets and the like (Ford 1998:5). Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy. For some of my students, those Greek and Latin lines were like an electric fence, keeping them out of the text. How could I not have anything better to tell them than “Try not to think about it”? Part of the difficulty about such grievances is that they’re so isolating: they single out some people, and glide over the heads of others. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is an autobiographical account written by Thomas De Quincey, about his laudanum addiction and its effect on his life. . I suppose I could read Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the Kindle while I drink some herb tea, but that doesn’t supply the requisite amount of vice for my tastes. This experience is what De Quincey thinks gives him the authority to talk about opium and its effects on the “opium-eater.” The title of his work, however, shows that De Quincey does not have the credibility to discuss the matters of opium because the, grotesque? what though the field be lost? “No, I've asked my man if he will find me a Turk or something...something nearer to the Oriental.”. In the play within a play, B. J. J. puts on whiteface and acts both the hero George and the villain M’Closkey himself. De Quincey believed that opium, especially the dreams that resulted from its use, attributed, relationships between poets. George’s perorations, delivered by the ghastly complexioned Smith in tones of jovial, period-drama earnestness, are hilarious and painful. “Maybe the way we treat animals.”. But, as a Turkish American, I couldn’t prevent myself from registering all the slights against Turkish people that I encountered in European books. Confessions of an English Opium Eater is an autobiography. Yet the use of the, authoritarian" style - and exuberant and resonant declaration of the " glories of Heaven and Earth with an emphasis on earth." “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.”, Enter your email address to get the monthly blog posts through your favorite RSS reader, Writing Contemplation: Old Fogies, Big Stogies = Crisp Stories. And study of revenge, immortal, In Thomas De Quincey's essay "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," the speaker discusses the problems associated with drugs. It is a word-drenched testimony of the drug’s effect on his senses and his writing, and is worth at least scanning for the cascade of voluptuous compound sentences and twirling literary merry-go-rounds. And all is not lost; the unconquerable will, what though the field be lost? Particularly the over indulgence of opium and alcohol; especially during the Romantic era. De Quincey showed how the subject of his addiction helped create, is in the discussion of M.H. Quilting might substitute well for the newspaper, but then you might light your handiwork on fire with the cigar ash. Milton's Paradise lost (1667) and Thomas De Quincey's prose description of his dreams in `Confession of an English Opium Eater' (1822) are few examples of baroque writing. ...in the memory of his youthful visit. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. . There’s something about sitting in a hazy repose that’s of value to a writer, when the mind’s hummingbird dips into enough flowers to secure a sweet idea. Earlier this year, I assigned Thomas De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater” in my nonfiction-writing class at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. aspect of the autobiography is the writer’s authority to tell the story. There were many contradictory theories on the importance, interpretation and origin, The Christabel collection is thus riddled with the anxiety of irresolution that runs through the majority of Coleridge 's poetic career, and this is never more pronounced than in the case of 'Kubla Khan '. What do you do with your mixed feelings toward a text that treats as stage furniture the most grievous and unhealed insult in American history—especially when you belong to the insulted group? Kindling Your Writing Why?” a student asked, more Socratico. “Damn,” Minnie says, after a debate over whether it was Rebecca or Lucretia who got sold to the Duponts. . These encounters were always mildly jarring. When Smith declares, “The only estate I value is the heart of one true woman, and the slaves I’d have are her thoughts,” we hear both the nineteenth-century gallantry and what we now understand as the appallingness of the comparison (of Zoe to a plantation, and her thoughts to slaves). Is this a dream—for my brain reels with the blow?”—affords one of many glimpses at the basic horror that Boucicault, for all his sentimentality, never lost sight of: people, who viewed themselves as the protagonists of their own lives, were sold as property. Connie really wondered at this queer, melancholy specimen. Milton's Paradise lost (1667) and Thomas De Quincey's prose description of his dreams in `Confession of an English Opium Eater' (1822) are few examples of baroque writing. Earlier this year, I assigned Thomas De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater” in my nonfiction-writing class at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. His father, a successful merchant by profession, died when he was very young. But I think every writer should have a retreat, a place of studied measure and sifting, a place where you become The Thinker, only without the weight of all that bronze. Thomas McFarland claims 'Kubla Khan ' is "as fully terminated as any poem in the language": this in turn suggests that to define the poem as a fragment must be a thematic and biographical comment rather than a structural observation. The word baroque has come to be applied to literature and especially to poetry. The two are united only in the part of Zoe, which is taken almost intact from Boucicault’s script and played straight by Amber Gray; the harrowing effect is a testament to both of the playwrights, and to the actress. in this novel, Thomas De Quincey records the effects of using the drug laudanum for pain. The use of drugs both positively and negatively influenced their lives in different ways. The first known English opium-addict writer was Thomas Shadwell, a 17th century playwright, but it was never recorded in his writings. Coleridge lost his friendship with Wordsworth and Shelley sometimes became a bit aggressive with his relationship. To feel personally insulted when reading old books struck me as provincial, against the spirit of literature. “That’s the whole point—we don’t know!” I said. Pro-love, anti-lynching, anti-anti-miscegenation: looking back, Boucicault was basically on the right side of history. Besides, I take comfort in the rustle of the newspaper, the ever-morphing patterns of the rising and dissipating smoke, the acid balance of the big cup o’joe that’s always part of the picture. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and Your California Privacy Rights. One particular weakness many Western poets of this time suffered was substance abuse. British author Thomas De Quincey makes brief but frequent appearances in Woolf’s essays of literary criticism, in which she examines what she understands to be their shared aesthetic objectives in the areas of prose-style and (auto)biographic writing. "Nothing, indeed, is more revolting," wrote Thomas De Quincey in his famously freaky Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, "than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that 'decent drapery' which time, or indulgence to human frailty, may have drawn over them" (1). A similar realization underlies the comic banter, written by Jacobs-Jenkins, of the house slaves Minnie and Dido; their gossip about their lives periodically discloses a horror of which they seem half-oblivious. I can barely keep track.” In a later scene, when Dido is fretting over whether Zoe will poison herself, Minnie tells her, “You can’t be bringing your work home with you.… I know we slaves and everything, but you are not your job.” It’s funny because it isn’t true.
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