A Genealogy of the Modern Self

Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing

Alina Clej

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9780804780766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Englische Literaturkritik

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.

PART I

PRODIGAL ECONOMIES

His life had been an attempt to realize the task of living poetically. With a keenly developed talent for discovering the interesting in life, he had known how to find it, and after finding it, he constantly reproduced the experience more or less poetically.

—Kierkegaard, Diary of the Seducer

Throughout his adult life Thomas De Quincey pursued the project of “self-revelation” initiated by his first Confessions, a task he never seemed able to complete or abandon.¹ His autobiographical output (in the broadest sense of the word) includes two series of confessions (the 1821—22 version of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and the enlarged edition of 1856), a sequel to Confessions consisting mainly of dreams, Suspiria de Profundis of 1845, and a motley collection of memoirs, the Autobiographic Sketches, published in 1853. In addition are the posthumous “Suspiria” collected by A. H. Japp and the numerous autobiographical or confessional fragments that lie scattered among De Quincey’s essays and occasional pieces like the signs of some irrepressible dispersion of the self.²

Most literary critics, influenced perhaps by De Quincey’s description of his confessions as “impassioned prose,” associate him with the Romantic “confessional imagination” or at least with an exacerbated form of Romantic sensibility, an interpretation that implicitly takes an expressivist view of De Quincey’s language.³ De Quincey often presents himself as somebody engaged in the subtle and infinitely demanding task of communicating complex and unusual forms of experience: childhood sorrows, opium pleasures and pains, the evanescent memory of dreams, and, occasionally, feelings so intricate and obscure as to be “incommunicable.” Following De Quincey’s cue, critics have often focused on the narrator’s “reluctance to confess.”⁴ De Quincey’s prudish reticence and the ambiguity with which he defines his confessional practice only reinforce this expressivist view.

There are several reasons to differ with this line of interpretation. A problem not always apparent to the unsuspecting reader is that De Quincey’s confessional writings, like everything else he wrote, consist almost entirely of commissioned work produced to supply the journals’ demand for fresh copy and keep the creditors at bay. The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater originated in a request from the editor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and was finally published by the London Magazine when De Quincey was almost bankrupt and in dire need to support his growing family.⁵ This interpenetration of the private and the public, the confessional and the market, makes the internal and external motivations of De Quincey’s confessional project hard to separate.

Another difficulty that calls into question the nature of this project is that De Quincey adopted or devised a wide variety of genres in order to explore the self: the confession, the autobiographical sketch, and the sui generis “suspiria,” which taken together resemble a philosophical prose poem.⁶ To read De Quincey’s efforts in these genres is to experience an endless eddying and drifting away of the self presumably traced in them, an experience that undermines both the expressivist reading of De Quincey’s explorations and the notion of a stable, autonomous self that they (however imperfectly) express. More like an “interminable” self-analysis than a rigorous confession, De Quincey’s discourse constantly transgresses its own boundaries and meanders away from its course, obliging the interpreter to follow what is often a vanishing trail.

The same biographical elements are repeated and amplified, sometimes with substantial changes, from an earlier text to a later one or else reemerge in fictional guise in De Quincey’s stories and novellas. Like the figure of “Ann the Outcast,” a limited number of “pathetic incidents” in De Quincey’s life seems to have “coloured—or . . . shaped, moulded and remoulded, composed and decomposed” the body of his work, which is in many ways similar to “the great body of opium dreams” that De Quincey describes in his prefatory notice to the enlarged edition of his Confessions (CW, 3: 222). In fact, the overall pattern of his confessional work seems to be modeled on the structure of a dream or a musical fugue (a form De Quincey deliberately emulated in some of his “suspiria”), and like a dream his work preserves an air of disturbing inconclusiveness.

This inconclusiveness, however, is not fortuitous. As I show in Part I, the elusiveness that defines De Quincey’s confessional project is not the consequence of a “reluctance to confess.” On the contrary, this elusiveness is the result of De Quincey’s deliberate manipulation of the reader and of his own image, a manipulation designed to produce an “interesting” effect of the self—a marketable simulacrum. In De Quincey’s case expressivism becomes a matter of artifice, and self-revelation is inseparable from simulation. To begin to understand the simulacral quality of De Quincey’s confessions, we thus need to reexamine the various strategies he used to produce a self-revealing self that would appeal to the aspiring imagination of his bourgeois audience and that result in an unprecedented, if not original, discourse.

De Quincey is not making a single confession, but half a dozen at the same time, and all with the kind of anxious loquacity of a dreamer, untroubled by superfluity or contradiction.⁷ His “record of passion” is in multiple keys or registers and determined by a sequence of modalities or postures. A delinquent self crystalizes and dissolves at the intersection of variously competing and overlapping discourses of proof, power, and penitence as De Quincey deflects every focus by performing, at times simultaneously, the discursive roles of invalid and physician, defendant and judge, and prodigal son and dreamer. Prodigality in its various forms (existential as well as verbal) is not only the object of De Quincey’s endless confessions but also the mechanism that allows for their production and ultimately for the creation of a simulacral self. Opium eating in De Quincey’s case generates a concurrent set of prodigal economies because his opium addiction is also an addiction to confession and to the confessions of others.

But De Quincey’s confessions required further confessions— further explanations, justifications, disclosures, admissions, and denials—in prefaces and introductory notes addressed to his readers, in appendices to his works, and in the innumerable notes of apology he sent to his publishers. The result of perusing all this explanatory material is total obfuscation. From the preface to the original edition of Confessions (1821) to the preface to the revised edition of Confessions (1856), from the introductory notice to Suspiria de Profundis (1845) to the general preface to the collected works (1853), the object of De Quincey’s confessions keeps shifting from the “excess” of opium eating (C: 2), to “the power of opium—not over bodily disease and pain, but over the grander and more shadowy world of dreams” (C 1856: 215), to “displaying the faculty [of dreaming] itself” (S: 88), to a “record of human passion” described in the most general terms (CW, 1: 14—15). Biographical material seems to carry little weight in defining the object(s) of his multiple confessions. As De Quincey asserts in his introductory notice to the Suspiria: “The true object in my ‘Opium Confessions’ is not the naked physiological theme—on the contrary, that is the ugly pole, the murderous spear, the halbert—but those wandering musical variations upon the theme—those parasitical thoughts, feelings, digressions, which climb up with bells and blossoms round the arid stock; ramble away from it at times with perhaps too rank a luxuriance; but at the same time, by the eternal interest attached to the subjects of these digressions, no matter what were the execution, spread a glory over incidents that for themselves would be—less than nothing” (S: 94).

The reader is thus left to decide what the “true object” of De Quincey’s confessions might really be—the “physiological theme” of opium, a “record of human passion” (whether an intense affection or the grief of mourning), the unconscious world of dreams, or perhaps language itself, with its meandering, parasitical growth. Examining the various displacements of this “true object” from one preface to the other reveals how the undecidability of De Quincey’s confessional object creates an effect of depth and interiority because it allows the reader’s projective faculties to come into play. De Quincey’s apparent reticence to publish himself, his so-called “reluctance to confess,” can only seduce and addict his audience.

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.¹ 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.”² 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.³ 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.⁴

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).⁵ 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).⁶

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 somet...