Thomas de Quincey

Many years ago, a friend suggested I read Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Intrigued, I put in on my list, and this week read the first essay in this collection of three. 

I must say, for a book with such a great title - evocative at once of Rousseau and William S. Burroughs - the content doesn't quite follow suite. Effectively what de Quincey has constructed here is a sort of Romantic treatment of addiction, descent, and dreams. His meditations, while interesting, are meandering, and overrun with veiled homages to Wordsworth and the gang.

Which is not to say that I didn't enough the Confessions - because part of me did. For his honesty alone (especially at the start of the nineteenth century), de Quincey is to celebrated. Cause for equal celebration, I think, is his use of London as a backdrop for his travails. Often, the city serves as a measuring tool, as a sort of calibration. With it, de Quincey charts the thin line between addiction and recovery, between love and loss. Those sections of the book, I felt, were more effective. 

Ultimately, this is a collection that feels both ahead, and behind, its times: ahead in the sense that it anticipated the works, as I suggest, of Burroughs and Kerouac (sections of Opium Eater were strongly reminiscent of the Dharma Bums); but behind its time in the sense that its content (modern and raw) is rendered using an antiquated vernacular; it's as if the words themselves are slowing down the story; as if the prose can't quite keep up with tale (slow and clunky as they were). 

True, you can't necessarily fault de Quincey for his use of the language of his day: but I'm going to. This work is saturated with Romantic flourish, when what's called for here is actually the opposite: an exit from the trap, a step forward toward something less embellished and more exacting: something, that is, which would more accurately represent the experiences of the addict.

Still, the essay was engaging, and as I say, the bits about London were great. So here's to you, Thomas de Quincey: you opium eater, you.