On Not Being an Author: De Quincey's ‘Confessions’ and the Performance of Romantic Translatorship

Through his ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, Thomas De Quincey effects a meticulously crafted entrance onto the literary scene: less a series of confidential notes than a stage-managed performance, the ‘Confessions’ serve as a stage on which he announces his literary ambitions. One such set of performative acts has received little attention: it pertains less to establishing a ground from which to authoritatively create, than it does to laying down a structure through which to mediate. Acting on recent developments within literary criticism and translation studies, this article examines the ways in which the ‘Confessions’ launch their writer on a career in interlingual and intercultural transfer, and how this performance of minority is designed to operate alongside other Romantic writers. The article ponders the successes and failures of mediation on display in emblematic scenes, and attends to how these chart the uneasy relationship between authorship and translatorship.

‘To mask, by slight differences in the manner, a virtual identity in the substance’: Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and De Quincey's ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’

De Quincey's ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ (1821) and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique (1830) both take an unusual form in which seemingly digressive wanderings coalesce around an obsessively repeated motif: in both cases, an idealized young woman whose evasive near-presence is continually suggested through minimally varied repetitions of formal elements the artist associates with her. Although others have noted similarities between the two works – chiefly that both foreground a young artist-protagonist's opium visions – the works' structural parallels have been little discussed. This essay argues that an analysis of the commonalities between these strikingly similar formal innovations supplements previous arguments in significant ways, illuminating the oeuvres of both Berlioz and De Quincey as well as aspects of Romantic formal experimentation in general.

‘Two faces, each of a confused countenance’: Coleridge, De Quincey, and Contests of Authority

Thomas De Quincey exploits his rivalry with Samuel Taylor Coleridge to structure many of the key features of his most famous work, ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ (1821). De Quincey's idolization of Coleridge began early and survived the anger and disappointment he felt after the collapse of their friendship and his discovery of Coleridge's intellectual duplicity. In ‘Confessions’, De Quincey's accounts of himself as a scholar of Greek literature, Ricardian economics, and Kantean philosophy are all galvanized by his knowledge that Coleridge too has worked in these areas. As opium addicts, De Quincey's experience of the drug overlaps with Coleridge's in a number of ways, while De Quincey differs from Coleridge – at least on the surface – in his claims about both the moral implications of drugged euphoria and the resolve needed to defeat addiction.

Creativity and Receptivity in De Quincey's 1821 ‘Confessions’ and Baudelaire's 1860 Adaptation

The 1821 ‘Confessions’ is an oft-cited example of the Romantic association between creativity and drug use. However, upon closer inspection, De Quincey's memoir appears less concerned with questions of creativity than with questions of receptivity and interpretation. This sets him apart from otherwise similar authors of addiction with whom he is frequently conflated: from Coleridge, naturally, but also from Baudelaire, whose 1860 Les Paradis artificiels, ostensibly a translation of De Quincey's work, diverges considerably from its source material. Baudelaire, a poet, uses De Quincey as a starting point to investigate the effects of drug use on the poetic imagination. But De Quincey himself is less interested in the effects of opium on creativity than its effects on memory and the intellect. Differently from Les Paradis artificiels, his memoir is concerned from beginning to end with the capacity of the opium-eater to feel, to analyse, and to interpret – and not necessarily to create.

‘The Opium-Eater Boasteth Himself to be a Philosopher’: Bodily Subjection and Intellectual Self-fashioning in De Quincey's 1821 ‘Confessions’

De Quincey's assertion in the 1821 ‘Confessions’ that the effects of opium were ‘always, and in the highest degree, to excite and stimulate the system’, establishes him in contemporary medical discourse as a follower of Brunonianism. Yet, against this indubitably pharmacological and bodily strain, the ‘Confessions’ also insists upon an intellectual aspect to the opium-eater's dreaming, his ability to dream imaginatively. This essay seeks to relate these discursive tensions in De Quincey, rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the human nervous system held in equilibrium, to his self-presentation as an addict and a philosopher in his autobiographical writings, and to his critical thinking. As I argue, the physiological theory of Brunonianism in the ‘Confessions’ is complemented by an equal emphasis on moral and intellectual development embedded in the ideas of Hartleian psychology which provide a balancing view of body and (embodied) mind in De Quincey's thinking.

Delinquency (if I may coin that word) and the Conditions of an English Leg-Puller

In 1821, like a messenger out of the dark (or a literary leg-puller), the English Opium-Eater arrived as if offering some saving play of mind in an obdurately literalising age. He conflated the two most reputedly chthonic regions: Hell, and the East. The language was ravishing, precise, unpredictable, and viscerally xenophobic (‘… in China or Indostan … I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things …’). De Quincey was not to be taken too seriously. But the author of ‘Confessions’ has inspired some poised indignation. For example, for Albert Goldman, De Quincey was more of a literary taker than a giver, and not least as Wordsworth and Coleridge's most prolific plagiarist. Arguably though, such a criticism looks unhelpfully hard-nosed when one considers the self-consciousness of De Quincey's secondariness, the deeply disturbed state of his mind, and the counter-inflationary quality of his sense of humour.

De Quincey's Slowness

Much has been said about De Quincey's fascination with the speed and mobility of contemporary life. This essay argues that we need also to recognize an acute sense of slowness that develops alongside De Quincey's fascination with speed. Activities like walking and reading and the figure of the crocodile offer examples of slowness that complicate De Quincey's fixation with speed. Ultimately, this essay suggests that the fraught relationship between speed and slowness that colours De Quincey's experiences of media and mobility clarifies the emotional landscape of the ‘Confessions’, marked as it is by drawn-out affective experiences, including boredom, longing, and nostalgia.