Colin Dickey surveys the literary career of Thomas De Quincey, who built “his reputation as a friend and colleague of Wordsworth and Coleridge with an astute and encyclopedic mind—all the while managing not to produce any actual writing.” That is, until he decided to write about the very thing that had prevented him from doing so – his opium addiction:
Long his artistic nemesis, it had now become his subject. For all its drawbacks, opium had one beneficial effect for De Quincey, that of acting as the ice-axe to free the frozen sea within him. Opium, as it happens, does not enhance one’s dreams, it suppresses them, so that it’s really as one gradually comes off of the drug that those dreams come flooding back with heightened urgency and intensity. It also seems to have freed him from the need to produce a grand, unified and cohesive philosophical treatise; part of what would come to define De Quincey’s style are his fragmentary tangents, his proto-stream of consciousness style that allowed him to move rapidly between dream, memory, and philosophy.
His style was an instant success:
The young De Quincey had wanted to be Wordsworth, but the Confessions is in many ways the complete antithesis of Wordsworth’s writing: prose, not poetry; urban, not rural; eschewing transcendence in favor of the darker side of English society. Most significantly, its approach to time was radically different. For Wordsworth, in poems like “Tintern Abbey” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the moment of epiphany came through recollection, and pleasure came from those moments, “In vacant or in pensive mood,” when memories flashed “upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.” There was a magical frisson in a memory recollected at leisure over the space of years, and that gap of time was necessary to an ability to process the beauty of those past moments.
De Quincey found in opium a completely different relationship to the world around him. Speaking of the impact of music while on the drug, he writes: “Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally, increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure.” Opium, in other words, could render the same kind of epiphany Wordsworth sought in recollection, but could do so in real time. Under opium, according to De Quincey, “Space also it amplifies by degrees that are sometimes terrific. But time it is upon which the exact and multiplying power of opium chiefly spends its operation. Time becomes infinitely elastic, stretching out to such immeasurable and vanishing termini, that it seems ridiculous to compute the sense of it on waking by expressions commensurate to human life.” In these passages, De Quincey is closer to Virginia Woolf than Wordsworth, and particularly that modernist conception of time as bifurcated between, as Virginia Woolf put it in Orlando, the “time of the clock” and the “time of the mind.”
The Dish 