As this book's title suggests, its main argument is that Thomas De Quincey's literary output, which is both a symptom and an effect of his addictions to opium and writing, plays an important and mostly unacknowledged role in the development of modern and modernist forms of subjectivity. At the same time, the book shows that intoxication, whether in the strict medical sense or in its less technical meaning ("strong excitement," "trance," "ecstasy"), is central to the ways in which modernity, and literary modernity in particular, functions and defines itself. In both its theoretical and practical implications, intoxication symbolizes and often comes to constitute the condition of the alienated artist in the age of the market. The book also offers new readings of the Confessions and some of De Quincey's posthumous writings, as well as an extended analysis of his relatively neglected diary. The discussion of De Quincey's work also elicits new insights into his relationship with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, as well as his imaginary investment in Coleridge.
As this book's title suggests, its main argument is that Thomas De Quincey's literary output, which is both a symptom and an effect of his addictions to opium and writing, plays an important and mostly unacknowledged role in the development of modern and modernist forms of subjectivity. At the same time, the book shows that intoxication, whether in the strict medical sense or in its less technical meaning ("strong excitement," "trance," "ecstasy"), is central to the ways in which modernity, and literary modernity in particular, functions and defines itself. In both its theoretical and practical implications, intoxication symbolizes and often comes to constitute the condition of the alienated artist in the age of the market. The book also offers new readings of the Confessions and some of De Quincey's posthumous writings, as well as an extended analysis of his relatively neglected diary. The discussion of De Quincey's work also elicits new insights into his relationship with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, as well as his imaginary investment in Coleridge.
A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing
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As this book's title suggests, its main argument is that Thomas De Quincey's literary output, which is both a symptom and an effect of his addictions to opium and writing, plays an important and mostly unacknowledged role in the development of modern and modernist forms of subjectivity. At the same time, the book shows that intoxication, whether in the strict medical sense or in its less technical meaning ("strong excitement," "trance," "ecstasy"), is central to the ways in which modernity, and literary modernity in particular, functions and defines itself. In both its theoretical and practical implications, intoxication symbolizes and often comes to constitute the condition of the alienated artist in the age of the market. The book also offers new readings of the Confessions and some of De Quincey's posthumous writings, as well as an extended analysis of his relatively neglected diary. The discussion of De Quincey's work also elicits new insights into his relationship with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, as well as his imaginary investment in Coleridge.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804780766 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/1995 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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A Genealogy of the Modern Self
Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing
By Alina Clej
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1995 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8076-6
CHAPTER 1
An Unprecedented Discourse
In the introductory notice "To the Reader" that prefaces the first edition of Confessions, De Quincey's reticence is most visible — in spite of the protective cover of anonymity. As he is about to engage in an act of self-revelation or publicatio sui, De Quincey seems distressingly aware of the kinds of dangers involved in "breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve, which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities" (C: 1). For somebody who carried politeness to unusual extremes and would not disturb a maid without resorting to some florid apology, the possibility of committing an act of indecent self-exposure by allowing his confessions "to come before the public eye" may have been terrifying indeed. De Quincey recalls that he hesitated for many months about the "propriety" of publishing his narrative, and what he finally presents to the "courteous reader" is "the record of a remarkable period" in his life that he hopes "will prove, not merely an interesting record, but, in a considerable degree, useful and instructive" (C: 1). The convoluted apology that introduces the Opium-Eater's confessions is meant to justify their author's breach of decorum and anticipate his readers' objections to the unusual object of his confession: opium eating.
De Quincey's apparent fearfulness over publishing his confessions is in many respects understandable. One cannot overlook the boldness and originality of De Quincey's confessions, which were to make emotional distress and physical suffering a legitimate object of literary discourse. Afflicted selves had been publicly explored before, but the circumstances of this particular unveiling are dramatically altered. In the past some larger framework (religious or philosophical) had been used to legitimate what might otherwise have appeared to be a form of self-indulgence. That disease and bodily pain (as opposed to the afflictions of the mind) should be "interesting" for their own sake is a possibility that Montaigne would never have considered when talking about his kidney stones. As Virginia Woolf observed, De Quincey was perhaps one of the few to have written "on being ill" (the only other example she can think of is Proust), and in this respect he may stand as the prototype of the modern "artist as exemplary sufferer." Writing a confession on the "pleasures" and "pains of opium" meant taking the side of the body in as decisive a way as writing a novel "devoted to influenza" (Woolf's example), or so it seems.
One has to imagine De Quincey's prospective readership — the subscribers to the London Magazine, an urban and urbane middle-class audience — to appreciate his expressions of anxiety. Revealing moral stigmas in public, not to say the author's physical sores, was in bad taste. De Quincey, who favored an aristocratic composure, spares no pains to dissociate his confessions from the eighteenth-century confessional novel populated by "demireps, adventurers, or swindlers," that is, the kind of lowbred characters likely to confess their ignominious past. For De Quincey, even in French or German literature, where confessions seem "in sympathy with the decent and self-respecting part of society," these narratives are "tainted with the spurious and defective sensibility of the French" (C: 1). The comment is aimed at Rousseau's Confessions, which De Quincey later dismisses in his general preface on the ground that one could find in it nothing "grandly affecting, but the character and the inexplicable misery of the writer" (CW, 1: 15). At a time of general reaction in England, De Quincey wants to avoid not only accusations of plebeianism and possibly Jacobin leanings, but also suspicions of effeminacy, a trait the English associated with the French character.
De Quincey's harsh judgment of eighteenth-century confessional narratives is rather curious, given his youthful infatuation with the Gothic novel, in which characters are always ready to admit the most abominable crimes (perjury, murder, rape, incest, infanticide). Even more surprising is De Quincey's sarcastic comment on Rousseau, seeing that nothing would better describe his own opium confessions than "the inexplicable misery of the writer." Unlike Rousseau, however, De Quincey appears to identify with his audience's presumed distaste for the "public exposure" of the sinful self: "Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings, than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that 'decent drapery,' which time, or indulgence to human frailty, may have drawn over them" (C: 1). De Quincey's description of the confessional act as a theatrical display of moral wounds echoes a passage in Augustine's Confessions that warns against the lurid curiosity of the public. In Augustine's angry words, audiences are "an inquisitive race, always anxious to pry into other men's lives, but never ready to correct their own" (AC, Bk. X: iii, 208); they delight in "sensation[s] of sorrow and horror" or in the "freaks and prodigies [that] are put on show in the theatre" (AC, Bk. X: xxxv, 242). Where Augustine tried to reduce the potential theatrical appeal of his life story in the name of its edifying truth, De Quincey invokes similar precautions on behalf of secrecy, suggesting that what he has to confess is of a private, confidential nature. "Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude" — a "penitential loneliness," De Quincey adds, quoting Wordsworth's The White Doe of Rylstone (C: 1).
Even as De Quincey announces the confidential nature of his narrative, he teases the reader by suggesting there is something buried underneath the "decent drapery" in which he shrouds his confessions, something that implicitly invites scrutiny. De Quincey's image of guilt carries the idea of a double concealment. On the one hand, guilt and misery are literally buried in a churchyard: "even in their choice of a grave, [they] will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man" (C: 29). On the other hand, this concealment is provided by the subtext of Wordsworth's poem, the "affecting language" of which De Quincey is reverently quoting. In The White Doe the grave is occupied by the body of a noble young man (Francis Norton) who was treacherously killed during the political unrest of Queen Elizabeth's reign. The white doe that according to the legend can still be seen lying gently on the solitary knoll where the young man was buried is the ghostly embodiment of Norton's loving sister, Emily. As a subtext, however, The WhiteDoe requires a reversal of roles and gender. Following this subtext De Quincey personifies, by way of Wordsworth, the delicate figure of the sister mourning her brother.
De Quincey actually spent many hours lying on the grave of Wordsworth's young daughter, Kate, like the white doe huddled on the young man's tomb, as if to protect the peace of the "sequestered hillock." But Wordsworth's poem may provide a subliminal context for other grief as well. One is also left to wonder at the link between mourning and guilt and Wordsworth's text and De Quincey's confessions. If mourning can be as addictive as opium, why should De Quincey want to mask this addiction (at least in this preface) when he is willing to disclose his drug habit?
There is more than one indication that this Wordsworthian subtext is semantically active in De Quincey's apology "To the Reader," especially in the strong markers used to characterize De Quincey's hesitations concerning the propriety of his confessions. "So forcibly" does he feel the possible accusation of indecent self-exposure and "so nervously" is he "alive to reproach of this tendency" that one has to question the reasons for this excessive anxiety, which is certainly disproportionate to De Quincey's overall discreet palette in his confessions. One can sense in De Quincey's fear and revulsion at the "spectacle of a human being" exposing his or her "moral ulcers or scars" something akin to sacred horror, as if by writing his confessions he were committing an act of desecration or unspeakable coercion. De Quincey explicitly evokes a rape by comparing the act of self-revelation to a violent gesture of stripping (the "tearing away" of the "'decent drapery'" that covers "human frailty") and forceful penetration ("breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve" of the self).
De Quincey's "feminine" fears may be surprising, but the analogy between the confessing subject and the traditionally male vision of woman is neither unprecedented nor unwarranted. Both can be exposed to public scrutiny; both may expect some forceful intervention by a male authority, a violation that may also seem self-inflicted. Many eighteenth-century confessions that De Quincey found repellent and in bad taste were confessions of women, "demireps" and prostitutes, but also honest, naive female heroines whose honor had been violated and who in writing (or being imagined to write their confessions) were exposed again, symbolically at least, to the same treatment. Is De Quincey afraid of making his confession because he is fantasizing the reenactment of a rape in which he seems to play the role of both the aggressor and victim? Because Wordsworth's poetic imagery provides the cover for De Quincey's "guilt and misery," are we to assume the violation somehow relates to Wordsworth as well? Or is De Quincey simply afraid of harming himself with his potential public by "breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve" of the self and, presumably, of his upper-class audience?
By constantly proposing and then withholding the key to the Opium-Eater's "guilt and misery," De Quincey's multiple discourses baffle and ultimately seduce the reader. Whether the seduction is the unintended effect of De Quincey's moral sensitivity, his cognitive and expressive difficulties (an effect of repression), or the result of a deliberate manipulation of appearances and verbal postures (an effect of simulation) may at first be unclear. This impression of indecision is definitely reinforced and complicated by a reading of the general preface of 1853, which is, ironically, De Quincey's most serious attempt to clarify and systematize his abundant and largely erratic output.
The most intriguing thing about De Quincey's assessment of his own confessional writings in the general preface is that he claims their absolute originality. In his own words, The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Suspiria de Profundis represent "modes of impassioned prose ranging under no precedents that I am aware of in any literature." He feels entitled to claim their superiority not by virtue of their "execution," but by virtue of their "conception" (CW, 1: 14). To proclaim the absolute originality of his confessions, their "immaculate conception," so to speak, De Quincey has to deny as Descartes did before him the existence of previous models and distance himself from anything resembling a prior tradition or genealogy. He blithely ignores the Protestant confessional tradition, which was an important influence on Wordsworth's Prelude, a work De Quincey seems to have known by heart and that may have been the unacknowledged model for his own Confessions. His allusions to Augustine and Rousseau — the authors of "the sole Confessions, belonging to past times, that have at all succeeded in engaging the attention of men" — amount to a rebuttal. Even they lacked understanding of what confession truly requires: "The very idea of breathing a record of human passion, not into the ear of the random crowd, but of the saintly confessional, argues an impassioned theme. Impassioned, therefore, should be the tenor of the composition" (CW, 1: 14).
In spite of the conspicuous presence of the "saintly confessional," there is nothing pious or conventional about this definition. For De Quincey the object of the confession is no longer a "record" of sins, as was the case for Augustine, but a "record of human passion"; and "passion" here can cover a wide range of related but not necessarily compatible meanings: "a bodily disorder causing suffering or distress," "sexual desire," "something that commands one's love or devotion," "violent, intense, or overmastering emotion," "ardent affection," and finally "suffering" or "passion" in its highest sense modeled on Christ's example ("martyrdom"). Instead of being clearly articulated, the confession is surreptitiously "breathed," the way one would whisper a secret. Indeed, in the same preface De Quincey describes the confessional narrative in terms of its "confidential" nature rather than truthfulness (CW, 1: 9). In taking passion as its theme the confession abandons its high moral ground and, judging from De Quincey's wording, becomes a private mode of expression (that is, a confidence).
This type of discourse could easily be viewed as chatty, even trivial, if De Quincey did not ensure against this interpretation by excluding "the random crowd." There is something incongruous, however, in the juxtaposition of the "saintly confessional" and the monstrous organ represented by "the ear of the random crowd," especially given that De Quincey's "saintly confessional" was a public "organ of publication," the literary market constituted by the journals that published his confessions. De Quincey's sudden abhorrence of "the ear of the random crowd" is hard to reconcile with his interest in publicity and his speculations on the publishing advantages offered by the Greek theater and the agora, with their "scale of gigantic magnitude" (CW, 10: 236 — 37).
De Quincey boasts the unprecedented character of his Confessions and Suspiria from the perspective of this somewhat bizarre redefinition of the confessional genre, with its emphasis on "human passion," while underscoring "the utter sterility of universal literature in this one department of impassioned prose" (CW, 1: 14). "Now, in St. Augustine's Confessions is found one most impassioned passage, — viz., the lamentation for the death of his youthful friend in the 4th Book; one, and no more. Further, there is nothing. In Rousseau there is not even so much" (CW, 1: 14 — 13). By denying the relevance of previous models with only the exception of Augustine's "lamentation" for the death of his friend in book 4 of the Confessions, De Quincey clears the ground for his own unprecedented practice. He can thus claim unrivaled excellence in a new field of "universal literature," the "department of impassioned prose" that he seems to have created ex nihilo in order to be its only representative. But although De Quincey is eager to differentiate his practice from that of his predecessors, his "impassioned prose" remains far more attached to the tradition of the spiritual confession than he is willing to admit.
The influence is visible in De Quincey's distinction between an autobiographical and a "confidential" narrative (his equivalent of "impassioned prose"). He says the Autobiographic Sketches have a "mixed character": "Generally, they pretend to little beyond that sort of amusement which attaches to any real story, thoughtfully and faithfully related, moving through a succession of scenes sufficiently varied, that are not suffered to remain too long upon the eye, and that connect themselves at every stage with intellectual objects" (CW, 1: 9). Occasionally, however, the narrative can "reach a higher station, at which the amusement passes into an impassioned interest," which is when the narrative becomes "confidential" (CW, 1:9).
This privileged, almost mystical moment when "the [autobiographical] narrative rises into a far higher key" corresponds to a drastic withdrawal of consciousness from the surrounding world. The change or modulation appears "at a period of the writer's life where, of necessity, a severe abstraction takes place from all that could invest him with any alien interest; no display that might dazzle the reader, nor ambition that could carry his eye forward with curiosity to the future, nor successes, fixing his eyes on the present; nothing on the stage but a solitary infant, and its solitary combat with grief — a mighty darkness, and a sorrow without a voice" (CW, 1: 9).
Judging from De Quincey's own description, although autobiography is concerned with tracing the history of the self, a "confidential" narrative ignores the objective, external seductions of the autobiographical story (the "display" that might "dazzle" or divert the reader) and the historical or temporal dimension of the plot (the "ambition that could carry [the] eye forward with curiosity to the future" or "successes, fixing [the] eyes on the present"). The stage is empty; the focus is on the inward life of the biographical character and the subjective duration of his emotions. This setting inevitably recalls the economy of caritas in Augustine, although the dominant passion in De Quincey's case is "sorrow."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Genealogy of the Modern Self by Alina Clej. Copyright © 1995 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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