SOURCE: “Literature as Resistance and Power,” in Reluctant Autobiography, Barnes & Noble Books, 1984, pp. 40-77.

In the following essay, Whale claims that De Quincey's autobiographical writings reveal a fertile tension between the power of imagination and the truth of past experience.

Resistance

In De Quincey's difficult situation as a journalist his progress in the act of composition could be both thwarted and encouraged by the varying degrees of intimacy and publicity connected with his context. An alignment of public and private responsibilities created a dichotomy in his appraisal of his own imaginative powers. This dichotomy is also present in his critical writings on other authors. De Quincey's work as a literary critic reveals how imaginative ‘power’ is in his view related to difficulty and suffering. The apparently negative experience of composition could eventually turn out to have been creative.

One of De Quincey's fundamental concerns as an autobiographer—his...