When Oscar Wilde said that J. M. W. Turner had invented sunsets, he was joking, but he wasn't only joking. He meant that Turner had made the sunset into a subject of art, and therefore people were now looking at, talking about, and thinking about sunsets in a new way; thanks to Turner, all of us now see sunsets differently. In the parlance of contemporary critical theory--often a barbaric dialect, but sometimes a useful one--Turner invented the "discourse" of sunsets. It is in this sense that Marcus Boon, in his theory-afflicted but nonetheless lively study "The Road of Excess" (Harvard; $29.95), says that Thomas De Quincey, with the 1821 publication of "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," "invented the concept of recreational drug use." More precisely, De Quincey invented the discourse of recreational drug use: the whole way of thinking about drug-taking as a hobby and an escape into what Baudelaire, writing about drugs in 1858, was to call our "artificial paradises." What's nice about that phrase of Baudelaire's is the way it packs three ideas into two words: that drugs are "paradise," i.e., they make you feel good; but that the paradise is fake; and that, in any case, paradise was a place we were expelled from. Drugs can be fun, but they ruin people's lives. This we know.

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