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De Quincey's Literature of Power: A Mythic Paradigm Author(s): Robert Lance Snyder Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 26, No. 4, Nineteenth Century (Autumn, 1986), pp. 691-711 Published by: Rice University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/450619 . Accessed: 29/04/2013 00:26
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SEL 26(1986) ISSN 0039-3657
De Quincey's Literature of Power: A Mythic Paradigm

ROBERT LANCE SNYDER In his critical writings De Quincey consistently maintains that literature is the noblest of the arts, not "a mere embellishment of life" but "one of its deep-sunk props," and that it fulfills its supreme end by conveying "the sense of power and the illimitable incarnated as it were in pleasure.'' The arts generally, he stipulates, "can teach only as nature . . . [or] infancy teaches,-viz. by deep impulse, by hieroglyphic suggestion" (11:88), but imaginative literature is unique in its capacity for quickening man's awareness of "the infinite" and expanding his sensibilities through the "dark sublime. " Such a valuation revolves around several specialized terms which have a high currency in Romantic aesthetic theory. One is reminded, for example, of Wordsworth's emphasis in the preface to Lyrical Ballads on the instrumentality of "pleasure" in the disclosure of "powerful feelings," especially as he sought to rescue the mind from "a state of almost savage torpor"; one also recalls Shelley's comparable stance, in A Defence of Poetry, that the poet's creation of "power and pleasure" will annul "the selfish and calculating principle" among men, sensitizing them anew to the transcendent "wonder of our being."2 Clearly a vocabulary of literary power tied closely to the idea of human potentiality was shared by many during the period. Narrowing the immediate focus to De Quincey, however, we may note that his view of literature is typically affective in orientation, as John E. Jordan has discussed,3 and reflects his interest in psychology as it contributes to what he regarded as a "philosophic criticism" (11:294). The two texts in which De Quincey elaborates his conception of the literature of power, as contrasted with the literature of knowledge, are "Letters to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neglected"
Robert Lance Snyder, Associate Professor of English at Seattle Pacific University, has published several articles on De Quincey and is the editor of Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1985).
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(1823) and "The Poetry of Pope" (1848). In the third letter of the earlier work, by way of indicating what literature communicates, he describes the case "in which I should be made to feel vividly, and with a vital consciousness, emotions which ordinary life rarely or never supplies occasions for exciting, and which had previously lain un[a]wakened, and hardly within the dawn of consciousness" (10:48). Although the later essay on Pope shifts the definition from a psychological to an ethical context,4 the passage just cited leads directly to the core of De Quincey's own aesthetic, particularly as it is linked to his interpretation of the fall from youthful innocence. His point above is not that literature caters to some need for exotic sensation, but instead that it exerts "power" by revivifying "modes of feeling" (10:48) which are latent within the individual but which the normal course of life deadens or denies. These "primal affections" (11:55), like those mentioned by Wordsworth in the "Intimations" ode as a "master light of all our seeing,"5 date back to a state of undivided unity of being and are for De Quincey the source of spiritual identity. To the extent, therefore, that literature can capture the outline of "unawakened" or prereflective consciousness, it is hypothetically capable of restoring faith in the self's underlying coherence within the evanescence of time. Given my present objectives, it is neither necessary nor feasible to explore the issue of De Quincey's indebtedness for his theory of the literature of power. Certainly he borrows from Wordsworth and possibly from Hazlitt as well, although he admits only to the former influence.6 In the 1823 essay he thus credits "many years' conversation with Mr. Wordsworth" (10:48 n.) for the distinction between power and knowledge, and elsewhere De Quincey acknowledges the poet's profound impact on his thought in speaking of his reading of the Lyrical Ballads as "the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind" (2:138). More interesting than the intellectual provenance of his ideas, though, is the role which the concept of literary "power" plays in De Quincey's "impassioned prose" (1:14). In this regard I would like to argue the following theses: first, that the concept is meaningful to him principally because it enables him to surmount a metaphysics of absence; and second, that he provides us with a paradigmatic but equivocal myth of the agency of power in "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow" and "The Apparition of the Brocken," two of the four prose-poems that conclude Part I of Suspiria de Profundis (1845).
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I The recurrent nightmare which haunts De Quincey throughout his major works is that of vacancy and disconnection, a fear of being engulfed within a universe of fugitive design and purpose. J. Hillis Miller expounds on this pattern at length in The Disappearance of God,7 but it may be helpful to recount briefly how the obsession originates. Within his own experience De Quincey isolates the moment of his sister Elizabeth's death as that which forces upon him "the sudden revelation that all is lost" (SP, 153), a rupture which entails the loss of his "innocent" self. The consequences of this archetypal fall are developed further in Autobiographic Sketches (1853) where, drawing on the Suspiria, he presents a tableau of his gazing on his sister's corpse and witnessing while in a trance the throne of God receding into the empty vault of the blue sky. The lessons of this vision for De Quincey are both immediate and lasting. For one thing, it gives rise to his realization of the fragmentary nature of man's being and the enigma of identity: Man is doubtless one by some subtle nexus, some system of links, that we cannot perceive, extending from the new-born infant to the superannuated dotard: but, as regards many affections and passions incident to his nature at different stages, he is not one, but an intermitting creature, ending and beginning anew; the unity of man, in this respect, is co-extensive only with the particular stage to which the passion belongs. (1:43; cf. SP, 178) The suspicion that man is destined to know only the fractional stages which make up the ongoing "text" of his existence is, De Quincey proclaims, "the hideous incubus upon my mind always" (Page, 1:325). But another and equally significant consequence of the vision glimpsed by De Quincey is that its "shadowy meanings" activate what he calls "the deciphering oracle within me" (1:42). Employing other terms, we may say that the entire experience creates the impulse toward autobiography and the excavation of memory. It is here that the concept of "power" emerges most clearly. After the pivotal fall from unity De Quincey feels that he is merely "a phantom self-a second identity projected from [his] own consciousness" (PW, 1:21), but the schism also prompts his reliance on
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language as an activity which potentially both redeems and demystifies the past. Such an undertaking and outcome are possible, he suggests, in part because the palimpsest of the human brain is stocked with "everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings" (SP, 233) -inscriptions which first appear encoded as "involutes" (1:39) and which later become "dark unfathomed remembrances" (13:311).8 This network of subliminal elements forms the basis of the primordial self, that which endures whatever the other changes which may ensue. Moreover, De Quincey postulates that memory is not simply a faculty of conscious recollection but a spontaneous act of the mind whereby the truths of one's past being, enmeshed in the strata of unconscious knowledge, may be recaptured. As transmitted through dreams and the literature of power, both of which deal not with "the mere discursive understanding" but with "'the understanding heart"' (11:56), the "heraldries" of memory provide expanded insight into the self's essential vitality and coherence. Thus "power," for De Quincey, denotes the experience of discovering something of the relational depth of subjectivity-of being "suddenly startled into a feeling of the infinity of the world within" (10:49). To this outlook one might legitimately respond that a considerable difference exists between the way in which unconscious memory manifests itself in dreams and the way in which it is reshaped and disclosed in language. In the first instance, images and ideas seem to constellate almost effortlessly, without any organizing control by the mind, whereas in the second they are apprehended only through the "angular deflexions of words" (1:122) as instruments of reflection or thought. The question therefore arises as to how we are to understand De Quincey's position that language, as a form of mediation, can be a source of revelation akin to that of dreams. Although he never addresses the issue directly, he does offer some helpful clues. Differentiating literature of power from literature of knowledge, for example, he posits that the former is characterized by "impassioned" utterance which transcends its mediatory nature as discourse and speaks to the sympathetic heart of man, not to his analytical intellect. The distinction suggests that the affective strength of language lies in its approximation to the kind of elasticity and fluidity displayed by dream phenomena. In cadence and cumulative movement, he seems to believe, it can go beyond signification and virtually embody the rhythms of unconscious thought, or memory. Hence, although he recognizes "the perilous difficulty besieging all attempts to clothe in words the visionary
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scenes derived from the world of dreams" (1:14), he continually labors to achieve the lyrical intensity and fugal progressions which he admired in the works of Sir Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor. In this sense De Quincey stands squarely within a heuristic, formerly an exegetical, tradition of English prose: he writes in order to discover the self who writes, as revealed through his own works' evolving power of figuration.9 Underlying De Quincey's practice, of course, is his celebrated theory of the "ministeriality" (10:261) of language as a synchronic incarnation of thought. In his 1840-1841 treatise on "Style" he thus speaks of it as an organic art and comments on the crucial relation between subjectivity and the objectifying function of language: In very many subjective exercises ... the problem before the writer is to project his own inner mind; to bring out consciously what yet lurks by involution in many unanalysed feelings; in short, to pass through a prism and radiate into distinct elements what previously had been even to himself but dim and confused ideas intermixed with each other. Now, in such cases, the skill with which detention or conscious arrest is given to the evanescent, external projection to what is internal, outline to what is fluxionary, and this depends entirely on the body to what is vague,-all command over language as the one sole means of embodying ideas. (10:226-27) The capacity of style to strip away the darkness from a perplexed idea and to illuminate it "as applicable to the services of life" is an office, we are further told, "not essentially below the level of those other offices attached to the original discovery of truth" (10:261). In both cases the affective "power" of language centers on its potential for uncovering a new curvature of vision and for recovering the subjective grounds of our knowledge. The last tenet suggests that, despite his attention to final effects in the literature of power, De Quincey does regard it as a deeply expressive process. In order to articulate the "fugitive relations" (14:160) of thought and project the "inner mind,'' he consequently models his own artistry in prose after the polyphonic variations in music. The larger significance of these postulates is that in De Quincey's aesthetic the declensions of "impassioned" expression both affirm and confer the possibility of identity. The unique "power" of
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language, as he conceives it, inheres in the improvisational nature of

the linguistic gesture which originates in discontinuity and consti-
tutes a movement of self-delineation. By taking language over as a "horizon" or "field of action,"'10as Roland Barthes says, and making it resonate as speech, the writer inscribes himself within the register of his writing: he is his style. The fact that this activity is fundamentally inventive should not blind us to its revelatory dimension. "To autoschediaze, or improvise," De Quincey claims, "is sometimes in effect to be forced into a consciousness of creative energies that would else have slumbered through life" (5:307). The diversifying play of language, although unable to return him to the being he once was, attests to the strength of his imagination and is the field wherein he approaches self-apprehension. But another principle enters in here as well, that which he calls the law of antagonism. Invoked by De Quincey on a multitude of subjects, this law pertains to his conviction that "where two ideas are correlates and antagonist forces, they explain themselves and define themselves at the same time; for the one is a rebound from the other" (9:328). One state can thus be known only through its dialectical opposite: light and darkness, joy and sorrow, innocence and guilt, presence and absence-all become explicable to the mind by their complementarity. As an epistemological principle the idea is manifestly an ancient one, but De Quincey gives it a specifically aesthetic application. In his most famous piece of practical criticism, for example, on the premise that "all action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible, by reaction," he accounts for the solemn effect of the knocking at the gate in Macbeth by the sudden contrast or syncope between "the world of darkness" and "the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs" (10:393). The law of antagonism, however, operates most comprehensively in terms of his belief that the self cannot begin to evolve until, and unless, one has suffered the shock of some overpowering loss. Presenting his version of the paradox of the felix culpa, he implies this idea in proposing that anything approaching spiritual transcendence or self-realization comes about only through the antithetical experience of "sin," that "dark apporeton of the human race." In one of his posthumously collected writings he explains the concept in more detail: Yes, I affirm that there is no form through which the Infinite reveals itself in a sense comprehensible by man and adequate
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to man; that there is no sublime agency which compresses the human mind from infancy so as to mingle with the moments of its growth, positively none but has been in its whole origin-in every part-and exclusively developed out of that tremendous mystery which lurks under the name of sin. (PW, 1:226-27) The "Infinite," referring here to "the total phenomenology" by which the divine is adumbrated "more or less dimly in vast numbers of processes" (PW, 1:191), designates the world of primal subjectivity which for De Quincey, as for Wordsworth, is the fountainhead of spiritual identity. From this state, he contends, we retain an obscure sense of the noumenal or "dark sublime" mirrored more fully in dreams, but the self cannot come into being nor the mind know "power" except through the experience of disjunction. There thus can be no expansive integration without the nightmare of separation, "no perfect rapture" of the soul "without a basis of the dreadful" (SP, 259). In De Quincey's case the death of his sister initiates him into the mystery of "sin" and, in doing so, awakens him to the necessity of discovering the relational pattern of his being. By way of preliminary summary, therefore, we can say that the putative value behind the theory of literary "power" is, for De Quincey, the hope it entails for deliverance from a crippling metaphysics of absence. As he views it, the past is destined to remain a demonic and subjugating force unless, through the hermeneutics of art, it can be shown to contain "secret analogies or parallelisms" (3:332) that ratify some hidden but coherent design in his life." It is hardly surprising, then, that in the 1856 version of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater he should reveal his fascination with what he calls "oneiromancy," or a mode of divination "founded upon the interpretation of dreams" (3:290 n.), for that is effectively the symbolic pattern and ultimate goal of his autobiographical
narratives.
II All these ideas receive mythopoeic formulation in two sections of Suspiria de Profundis, the belated sequel to the original Confessions of 1821. The first of these prose-poems concerns "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow," chthonic figures who, according to De Quincey, often appeared to him during his years at Oxford. Levana, "she who raises aloft," is the Roman goddess who presides over the education of children "by that mighty system of central forces hidden in the
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deep bosom of human life" (SP, 238). A tutelary and traditionally benign deity, she is seen conversing with three Sorrows or "awful sisters": the eldest of these is Mater Lachrymarum, or Our Lady of Tears; the next in age is Mater Suspiriorum, or Our Lady of Sighs; and the youngest is Mater Tenebrarum, or Our Lady of Darkness. Under Levana's direction each of these "mighty abstractions that incarnate themselves in all individual sufferings of man's heart" (SP, 240) has propaedeutic influence over some phase of human experience. Although the precise significance of these avatars is not easy to pinpoint, collectively they represent successive stages in the history of De Quincey's own personal loss. Thus the first, as V. A. De Luca notes, is loosely emblematic of his traumatic separation from his sister in childhood, the second of his ensuing sense of having fallen into time and psychic division, and the third of his long immersion in the spectral horrors and blank confusion of nightmares that reenact his alienation.'2 In short, the triad of mythic Sorrows epitomizes man's spiritual Entfremdung, yet within such agencies allegedly exists a therapeutic purpose. For himself De Quincey imagines that he will be "seasoned" through their combined ministry until he is able to "read elder truths, sad truths, grand truths, fearful truths" and, eventually, to "rise again before he dies" (SP, 246). The didactic function of these allegorical figures is fairly obvious: they emphasize the concept that the process of being chastened through grief is a harrowing but necessary one if any kind of resurrection is to occur. Of more immediate pertinence, however, is the way in which the dream-encumbered De Quincey envisions their discourse. "Mighty phantoms like these," he writes, "disdain the infirmities of language. They may utter voices through the organs of man when they dwell in human hearts, but amongst themselves is no voice nor sound; eternal silence reigns in their kingdoms" (SP, 240). Similar to the fabled Muses or ancient Graces, these hieratic presences are the basis for artistic expression and a source of "power" for the author of the Suspiria: Like God, whose servants they are, they utter their pleasure not by sounds that perish, or by words that go astray, but by signs in heaven, by changes on earth, by pulses in secret rivers, heraldries painted on darkness, and hieroglyphics written on the tablets of the brain. They wheeled in mazes; I spelled the steps. They telegraphed from afar; I read the
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signals. They conspired together; and on the mirrors of darkness my eye traced the plots. Theirs were the symbols; mine are the words. (SP, 240-41) De Quincey here reverts to his favorite trope of hieroglyphics inscribed on the palimpsest of the mind to characterize the mantic network of mute "signs" that both informs and transcends his own text. Its arcane "heraldries," which correspond to the layered structure of consciousness and the convoluted images of dreams, reinforce his faith in some underlying teleology within his experience, a syncretism roughly comparable to what Wordsworth in The Prelude intuits as "a dark / Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles / Discordant elements."'3 De Quincey's belief is admittedly more tenuous and far less serene than the poet's. But insofar as his works repeatedly explore the typology of the realm represented by the phantasmal Sorrows, he is able to glimpse something of "the grandeur of human unity" wrought by the action of "organizing principles which fuse into harmony, and gather about fixed predetermined centres, whatever heterogeneous elements life may have accumulated from without" (SP, 233). The figurational "power" of art typified by the subaltern goddesses thus provides De Quincey with an iconographic map of his existence and suggests the possibility of some inherent purpose for his myriad woes. It is difficult, however, to feel that this mythic paradigm is either complete or adequate with the legend of "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow" alone. For one thing, the role of the three Sorrows appears adventitious: the synoptic perspective on De Quincey's experience which they embody, for instance, is actually no different from the "elaborate intellectual pleasure" which, by his own testimony in the Confessions, he enjoyed from a combination of opium and opera. While intoxicated with the drug and listening to an aria by Grassini, he found that "the whole of my past life-not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music," was "no longer painful to dwell upon,... its passions exalted, spiritualised, and sublimed" (3:391). Furthermore, if the Ladies of Sorrow enable De Quincey to view his life as a panoramic whole and if they restore faith in its fundamental connectedness, their function is limited by an inability to reveal the meaning of that presumed design. Though these "servants" of God manifest themselves in dreams, he as dreamer is still bound to a purely temporal vantage point: he sees per
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speculum in aenigmate and not, as he senses he must, sub specie aeternitatis. Finally, and most importantly, a profound ambiguity pervades De Quincey's treatment of Levana herself, an ambiguity that complicates and to some extent compromises the myth's sufficiency. As Joel D. Black has shown, De Quincey depicts this deity as raising the newborn infant up to the heavens only so that the child can know the antithetical movement of the second fall.'4 Ascent, the upward impulse of levitation, is thus contravened by descent, the downward pull of gravitation: transcendence, in other words, is betrayed by the weight of "sin" and guilt. In this respect De Quincey's conception of the Roman goddess differs markedly from that of Jean Paul Richter in his pedagogical treatise Levana, ein Erziehungsbuch (1807). More significantly, though, all these limitations indicate the need for an additional dimension, one involving interpretation of knowledge gained, to round out the paradigm's symmetry. De Quincey himself admits this need when, in a note appended to the close of the first dream-legend, he promises a second as "an interpolation requisite to the effect of the others" (SP, 246 n.). It is necessary, however, for better reasons than mere effect. In "The Apparition of the Brocken," the prose-poem immediately following "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow," we are introduced to a mediatory persona or voice called simply the Dark Interpreter who provides hierophantic access to understanding the mystery of human suffering. A variant of John Bunyan's kindly Interpreter in The Pilgrim's Progress (1678),l5 this shadowy "power of self-projection" (PW, 1:8) is gifted with a faculty elsewhere identified as "echo augury" (1:123) and so, unlike the Sorrows, can articulate the grand and fearful truths sought by De Quincey. As such, the Dark Interpreter is the mythopoeic crux of Suspiria de Profundis considered as a type of Bildungsroman. We first encounter this figure when De Quincey invites his readers to climb the Brocken with him on the morning of Pentecost in order to witness an unusual phenomenon associated with that peak in northern Germany. Given favorable atmospheric conditions, the silhouette of a Giant Man-a Blakean Spectre-can be seen displayed against the background of clouds or a distant expanse of rock. Although the spectator initially supposes it to be a separate entity, so repeating the mistake of earlier cultures, he soon recognizes the phantom as an aerial Doppelganger that mimics his every gesture and movement. "Make the sign of the cross" (SP, 248), admonishes
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De Quincey, suggesting the first of several actions by which the observer might verify the correspondence; but his advice carries another meaning, hints at apotropaic intent, when we realize that we are within a former stronghold of pagan superstition and blood sacrifice, '"the last asylum to a ferocious but perishing idolatry" (SP, 249 n.). Yet if, on the anniversary of Pentecost, the reality of this form linked to a benighted past can be so easily tested, it continues to serve a larger purpose of revelation and discovery. "You are now satisfied that the apparition is but a reflex of yourself; and, in uttering your secret feelings to him, you make this phantom the dark symbolic mirror for reflection to the daylight what else must be hidden forever" (SP, 251). It is in this context that one comes upon the key passage relating the Spectre of the Brocken, what one critic defines as "a symbol for the ambiguity of the subconscious and the phenomenology of dreams,"'6 to the Dark Interpreter and that figure in turn to De Quincey himself. Such a relation does the Dark Interpreter, whom immediately the reader will learn to know as an intruder into my dreams, bear to my own mind. He is originally a mere reflex of my inner nature. But as the apparition of the Brocken sometimes is disturbed by storms or by driving showers, so as to dissemble his real origin, in like manner the Interpreter sometimes swerves out of my orbit, and mixes a little with alien natures. I do not always know him in these cases as my own parhelion. What he says, generally, is but that which I have said in daylight, and in meditation deep enough to sculpture itself on my heart. But sometimes, as his face alters, his words alter; and they do not always seem such as I have used, or could use. No man can account for all things that he is a occur in dreams. Generally I believe this,-that faithful representative of myself; but he also is at times subject to the action of the good Phantasus, who rules in dreams. (SP, 251) The archetypal Interpreter is analogous to the protean Spectre atop the Brocken in being an isomorphic reflection of the narrator's self. However, the susceptibility to outward disturbance masks and skews his derivative identity, making of this being an alien double abstracted from the dreamer-narrator.'7 When such displacement occurs, De Quincey no longer regards the Interpreter as a reassuring,
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or continuous, facet of himself. As a result of this schism, the paramount challenge facing De Quincey in his "impassioned prose" is to reclaim the Dark Interpreter as his own self-projection, for in doing so he believes that he will capture a deeper understanding of his experience and consequently attain "power." De Quincey's attempt to identify himself with this persona governs the narrative strategy of all his major imaginative works. Central to his technique is the idea that the Dark Interpreter performs the office of a tragic chorus in Greek drama, for the leading function of both must be supposed this-not to tell you anything absolutely new,-that was done by the actors in the drama; but to recall you to your own lurking thoughts,-hidden for the moment or imperfectly developed, -and to place before you, in immediate connection with groups vanishing too quickly for any effort of meditation on your own part, such commentaries, prophetic or looking back, pointing the moral or deciphering the mystery, justifying Providence, or mitigating the fierceness of anguish, as would or might have occurred to your own meditative heart, had only time been allowed for its motions. (SP, 252) De Quincey's comparison calls to mind Nietzsche's later concept in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) that, prior to Socrates and the impulse toward dialectical knowledge, Attic drama was vested entirely in the chorus as embodying a Dionysian totality, an ecstatic dream-world of music, which had not yet been sundered through the Apollonian principium individuationis to result in a separate hero seeking redemption, according to Nietzsche, in illusion. The author of the Suspiria portrays himself as being just this type of isolated protagonist, yet also as one who, enmeshed in a drama beyond his comprehension, depends on the Dark Interpreter as a chorus-like voice disclosing the secret meanings of his own "lurking thoughts" and supplying an indispensable gloss on certain mysteries closed to the understanding. In short, far more than merely a dream-concocted daimon, the Interpreter is a subtle and necessary mask, a ploy, by means of which De Quincey is absorbed into his text and can delve further into the "pertinacious life of memory" (SP, 192). This strategy reveals much about the dynamics of his imaginative writing. It first of all makes possible a split between narration and signification, permitting De Quincey to efface himself from the foreground of his autobiographical works while he is engaged in
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construing the import of decisive events in his life. At another level it enables him to invent a complementary mythos of "power" which posits the capacity of language to express the inexpressible, to be a vital incarnation of the subliminal mind. At the same time, however, his aesthetic entails risks which validate De Quincey's fear that "undesigned equivocation prevails everywhere" (1:77). If he relies on the Dark Interpreter as a mediatory subterfuge, for example, he also finds that "like his gloomy counterpart, the shy phantom of the Brocken," the Interpreter can "assume new features or strange features, as in dreams always there is a power not contented with reproduction, but which absolutely creates or transforms" (SP, 25253). On the basis of such passages in the Suspiria Elizabeth W. Bruss shrewdly observes that it is as if De Quincey were being "reduced to a character within his own ostensible creation," the work itself in danger of becoming "a self-sustaining artifact from which there is no referential exit."'8 To escape the autotelic world of shadows, therefore, he must pretend that he both is and is not the Dark Interpreter, but ultimately assimilate that figure's privileged perspective to his own experience.
De Quincey accomplishes the feat in Suspiria de Profundis by incorporating in the main body of his narrative elements of what he seems to learn in the "Finale to Part I." In "Savannah-la-Mar," his concluding prose-poem, he visits in dreams a necropolis that "fascinates the eye with a Fata-Morgana revelation, as of human life still subsisting in submarine asylums sacred from the storms that torment our upper air" (SP, 253-54). Surveying this city which God enshrined in the ocean's depths as an admonition to man, the Dark Interpreter acknowledges the pity of the spectacle but then articulates a lesson in the "infinite declensions" of chronological time versus the sempiternal nunc stans of God. The time which is contracts into a mathematic point; and even that point perishes a thousand times before we can utter its birth. All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in its velocity of flight towards death. But in God there is nothing finite; but in God there is nothing transitory; but in God there can be nothing that tends to death. Therefore, it follows, that for God there can be no present. The future is the present of God, and to the future it is that he sacrifices the human present. Therefore it is that he works by earthquake. Therefore it is that he works by grief. (SP, 255)
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Although this Christian argument may seem enigmatic and equivocal, it is yet one which De Quincey accepts as part of his aesthetic commitment. Thus in "The Affliction of Childhood" section of the Suspiria, after the pivotal account of his sister Elizabeth's death and the vision of God's receding throne, he presents a countervailing vision that builds upon the Dark Interpreter's sobering augury in "Savannah-la-Mar." While attending Anglican services after his sister's funeral, De Quincey reports, he was accustomed during recitation of the litany to lift his eyes to the stained glass of the upper galleries. There, amid illuminated panels of apostles, martyrs, and saints, he one Sunday morning beheld "though the wide central field of the window, where the glass was uncolored" (SP, 185), a pageantry of dying children suspended in the gulfs of the sky. "God, for some mysterious reason," writes De Quincey, "could not suddenly release them from their pain; but he suffered the beds, as it seemed, to rise slowly through the clouds," and "slowly, also, his arms descended from the heavens, that he and his young children,... though they must pass slowly through the dreadful chasm of separation, might yet meet the sooner" (SP, 186). This "self-sustained" vision, reversing that earlier by his sister's corpse and reworking images drawn from the "dream-theatre" (SP, 223) of his childhood, is particularly interesting for what it prefigures. Through the clear glass framed by art or "earthly emblazonries of what is grandest in man" (SP, 185), De Quincey looks not into vacancy and fugitive design, as before, but into what Shelley in Adonais (1821) calls "the white radiance of Eternity"19and glimpses the Christian promise of resurrection. Significantly, however, it is not an epiphany of a completed apotheosis but rather of the movement toward rapturous reunion, and this imaginative possibility helps to lessen anxiety over a metaphysics of absence occasioned by the archetypal fall. In a sense, then, what De Quincey outlines in terms of his own experience coupled with his mythic paradigm of "power" is not unlike Keats's theory of the world as being a "vale of Soul-making" wherein we acquire a "Soul" or "sense of Identity" through necessary "Pains and troubles. "20A passage in Part II of the Suspiria clarifies the parallel and underscores its author's profound conviction: "Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow, and without intellectual revelation" (SP, 259). This statement could well serve as an epigraph for De Quincey's entire career as a writer.
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III of conclusion I wish to examine a seldom discussed By way of the 1856 version of segment Confessions of an English OpiumEater in order to extend my argument, which so far has been predicated primarily on Suspiria de Profundis. My larger purpose in doing so is to suggest the consistency of De Quincey's aesthetic of "power" by means of which he moves toward self-apprehension through the reshaping of memory. This process, which I shall describe as "stereoptics," involves his envisioning a crucial scene or incident related to his past from several perspectives, so that its full meaning stands out finally in relief against the flow of time.21 The term itself, though not one De Quincey uses, bears kinship to his comparison of the mind to a "mysterious camera obscura" (13:335), a device precursive of the stereoscope as well as the invention of photography during the 1830s,22 and denotes a technique which grows out of his belief that "it is impossible, with respect to any memorable grief, that it can be adequately exhibited so as to indicate the enormity of the convulsion which really it caused, without viewing it under a variety of aspects" (SP, 209). By constructing in the 1856 Confessions a montage of "memorable grief," he is able to recognize eidetic interconnections among past events in his life and to achieve the "power" that comes with amplified understanding. When at age seventy De Quincey set about revising the original Confessions of 1821-1822 for his collected works, he more than doubled its former length and added as a pendant at the close a dream-parable titled "The Daughter of Lebanon" which, according to his later editor David Masson (see 3:450 n.), he probably once had intended for the Suspiria. Most critics today are agreed that in expanding the text he compromised the symmetry and economy of the early version,23 yet the annexed piece offers substantial insight into the work's inner logic or stereoptic design. A brief review of the narrative's highlights will demonstrate the actual pertinence of the addition. Part I of the enlarged Confessions is structured around three seminal episodes in De Quincey's life before he became "the OpiumEater." The rationale for their being recounted, we are told, is that these incidents comprise "the entire substratum, together with the secret and underlying motive" (3:233), of his subsequent dreams of spiritual isolation and oppressive loss. The first concerns the year and a half that he spent enrolled at Manchester Grammar School, shortly before which time the "bubble of visionary happiness"
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(3:245) had begun to dissolve and after which period, as though responding to some "dark oracular legislation external to mnyself" (3:278), De Quincey abruptly decided to leave. The next phase involves his four-month vagrancy among the mountains of North Wales, an idyll shown to be marred from the start. The third and last episode is that of his deprivations while homeless in London, climaxed by his failed rendezvous with Ann of Oxford Street who becomes his spiritualized and "youthful benefactress" (3:362). These three phases, it should be noted, closely approximate the pattern symbolized by the triad of mythic Sorrows in the Suspiria. Moreover, in sketching out these events De Quincey is manifestly attempting to construe, retrospectively, auguries of his later destiny. What he specifically seeks, as he wrote in the previously cited passage comparing the Dark Interpreter to a tragic chorus in Greek drama, is the ability to view things "in immediate connection" through "commentaries, prophetic or looking back, pointing the moral or deciphering the mystery, justifying Providence, or mitigating the fierceness of anguish." However, an ambiguous causality wraps itself around the past and prevents him from fully understanding what it enfolds. His life thus seems imbued with all the frightening indeterminacy of a dream, and it is in this context that "The Daughter of Lebanon" vision proves significant. As appended to the 1856 text, the piece functions not only as a "crowning grace" which De Quincey claims he "reserved for the final pages of this volume" (3:221), but also as a key to the oneiric coherence of the entire work. The third and culminating part, it may be recalled, focuses on "The Pains of Opium," among which are horrific fantasies of Piranesian architecture, of unbroken expanses of water, and of Asiatic scenery exuding "a killing sense of eternity and infinity" (3:443). A pair of climactic vignettes closes the main portion of the work and looks forward to "The Daughter of Lebanon" parable. In the first, set on an Easter Sunday morning in Grasmere, De Quincey resolves to forget old griefs over his sister Elizabeth's death and to celebrate the spirit of resurrection. But in the distance there suddenly appears an Oriental city and, in the foreground, Ann of Oxford Street: "She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly; and I said to her at length, 'So, then, I have found you at last.' I waited; but she answered me not a word" (3:445). The ominous tone of this encounter and its abortive end suggest that again he is forced to realize the futility of his desire to recover lost innocence, as personified by Ann who is explicitly compared to his
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own sister (see 3:367). On this note the vision quickly passes away, followed by another of similar pattern and consequence. Like that just traced, the second dream opens with exalted expectation but soon blurs into total ambiguity. Hearing the tumultuous prelude to some apocalyptic event, De Quincey supposes that the morning was come of a mighty day-a day of crisis and of ultimate hope for human nature, then suffering mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, but I knew not where-somehow, but I knew not how-by some beings, but I knew not by whom-a battle, a strife, an agony, was travelling through all its stages-was evolving itself, like the catastrophe of some mighty drama. (3:446) He intuits that some grand revelation is at hand but is unable to fathom the issue which hangs in the balance. Worse, he feels that he has the power to decide its outcome, yet he is incapable of exerting himself because "the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt." Helplessly shackled by passivity, he sees the moment of his opportunity sweep by amid the "deepening confusion" and, anguished by the sense that "all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me" (3:446), awakens to vow that he will sleep no more. Aside from a few pages on his eventual renunciation of opium, so ends the main narrative of the Confessions. Both dreams forcefully express De Quincey's lifelong need to transcend enslavement to the past and achieve imaginative freedom from guilt. Although a certain ambivalence of intention pervades the book as a whole, by 1856 he seems to have defined more clearly his artistic purpose and the hieroglyphic meaning of his sufferings as mirrored in these visions. In his prefatory notice to the later edition, for example, he justifies appending "The Daughter of Lebanon" by explaining that the fable pertains to his abiding search for Ann or the "lost Pariah woman" (3:222) who haunts his dreams. He is fascinated with her as a symbol because she represents his own spiritual fate; she is the innocent who finds herself caught in the mysterious web of "sin," yet her tribulations in De Quincey's eyes purify, indeed sanctify, her as an emblem of himself. In hoping that she can be reached "with an authentic message of peace and forgiveness, and of final reconciliation" (3:362), he is also articulating his greatest
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personal hope. We therefore may read "The Daughter of Lebanon" as a tale which responds to resolved tensions within the Confessions itself and which discloses its author's stereoptic view of the past. Set in biblical Damascus, the piece is both a sentimental account of the fallen though wronged woman and an inquiry into the enigma of Christian redemption.24 The eponymous heroine, a transfiguration of Ann of Oxford Street, is presented as one driven into "criminal compliances" (3:453) by her lover's betrayal and her father's rejection. Visited by an itinerant Evangelist who is God's messenger and, like the Dark Interpreter, "one learned in the afflictions of man" (3:451), she makes the request that she be allowed to return to her father's house. Assuring her that her petition will be heard, the apostle baptizes her and poses the question of whether she will suffer God "to give by seeming to refuse; to give in some better sense, or in some far happier world" (3:454). At this she wavers, divided by her attachment to a twin sister from whom she had been separated in "infant days," but upon an epiphany of her sister in Paradise she willingly forsakes the mortal world and is received into "her Father's house" as "the Magdalen of Lebanon" (3:456). Even such a brief precis indicates that De Quincey has expanded upon several elements of the miain work. To cite only a few eidetic variations, Damascus, for which he gives the Arabic name of "Om el Denia" or "Mother of the World" (3:450), is a transformation of Oxford Street as the "stony-hearted stepmother" of life's outcasts and spiritual orphans; the Daughter of Lebanon herself is exalted as a "Magdalen," the term used by De Quincey earlier to express his consolatory hope for the lost Ann (see 3:375); and the consuming fever which the Daughter suffers prior to her final rapture is comparable to the malaise of sorrow and despair in the primary narrative (see 3:445). But these correspondences are relatively minor when balanced against an underlying concern in the Confessions which the juxtaposed piece develops as its governing themenamely, the mystery of how God "give[s] by seeming to refuse." De Quincey's belief in Christian doctrine is clearly in evidence, but of equal if not greater interest is the artistic process by which he has moved toward an oblique understanding that serves as a denouement for the entire Confessions. By unraveling the "dark sublime" of his dreams through the guise of the Interpreter, he has exposed a stereoptic coherence among the otherwise disconnected "memorials" of his life. Virtually all of De Quincey's "impassioned prose" projects a similarly visionary design. While recreating some scene
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etched deeply in memory, he gradually explores its continuing hold on his imagination until the whole culminates in a moment of heightened insight or divination. Aesthetic practice of this kind reveals De Quincey's affinity with a central impulse typical of British Romanticism. If at times he appears divided in his creative allegiances and approaches literature as both a transcription and a transcendence of personal experience, he still subscribes to the principles which define the Romantic enterprise of self-discovery. In his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840) Coleridge observes that man's object in life is "to leave behind, and lose his dividual phantom self, in order to find his true Self in that Distinctness where no division can be."25This is essentially the animus behind all of De Quincey's autobiographical writings, one which his mythic paradigm in Suspiria de Profundis as well as his critical pronouncements on the literature of power help to illuminate. In the end De Quincey finds, as Jorge Luis Borges might say, that in exploring the hieroglyphics of his past he sketches the lines of his face, the outline of his own identity.26
NOTES lThe Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, 14 vols. (Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1896-1897), 4:308and 10:47;8:142;and 1l:173n. All subsequent citations from De Quincey's works except those noted immediately below refer to this standard edition and will be documented parenthetically by volume and page number. For references to Suspiria de Profundis, identified in my text by the abbreviation SP followed by page number, I have relied on Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Suspiria de Profundis (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852) which, unlike Masson's version, reprints the original Suspiria series that appeared in the March-July 1845 numbers of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. In my essay I also use shorthand references, Page and PW respectively, for borrowings from two other primary sources: Thomas De Quincey: His Life and Writings. With Unpublished Correspondence, ed. H. A. Page (pseudonym of Alexander H. Japp), 2 vols. (London: John Hogg; New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1877); and The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Alexander H. Japp, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1891). 2The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), 1:126, 128; and Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 503, 505. 3See John E. Jordan, Thomas De Quincey, Literary Critic: His Method and Achievement (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1952), pp. 89-119. 4Fora fuller discussion of this difference see Sigmund K. Proctor, Thomas De
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Quincey's Theory of Literature (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1943;rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1966), pp. 107-47. Also helpful is John W. Bilsland, "On De Quincey's Theory of Literary Power," UTQ 26 (1956-1957):469-80. 5The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford Univ. Press, 1940-1949), 4:283. 6John E. Jordan provides an illuminating account of Wordsworth's impact on De Quincey's pattern of development in De Quincey to Wordsworth: A Biography of a Relationship (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962). See also Vincent A. De Luca, "'The Type of a Mighty Mind': Mutual Influence in Wordsworth and De Quincey," TSLL 13 (1971):239-47. 7See J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (1963; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 17-80. 8De Quincey's analogue of the palimpsest (see SP, pp. 225-36) is strikingly similar to Freud's metaphor of the Wunderblock in his 1925essay, "A Note upon the 'Mystic Writing-Pad,"' in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1966), 19:227-32.For recognition of this parallel I am indebted to Robert M. Maniquis, "The Dark Interpreterand the Palimpsest of Violence: De Quincey and the Unconscious," in Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1985), pp. 109-39. 9Cf. Stephen J. Spector's point in "Thomas De Quincey: Self-effacing Autobiographer," SIR 18 (1979):508, that "De Quincey's activity as a writer of autobiography is a continual redrawing, a rewriting of his own face, a selfportraiture that exists always as a simultaneous erasure." See also Laurence Stapleton, The Elected Circle: Studies in the Art of Prose (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), p. 7. Explaining there her reasons for encompassing such writers as Browne, De Quincey, Emerson, and Thoreau by the metaphor of her title, Stapleton observes that for them "the purpose or intention disclosed by a piece of imaginative prose is not predetermined, and must be generated by the work as it proceeds." My argument regarding the epigenetic cast of De Quincey's writing obviously agrees with her view. '?Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 9. '1Cf.Roger J. Porter, "The Demon Past: De Quincey and the Autobiographer's Dilemma," SEL 20 (1980):591-609, esp. 600-601. '2See V. A. De Luca, Thomas De Quincey: The Prose of Vision (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1980), pp. 75-76. Also, as Erich Neumann suggests in The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim, 2nd edn., Bollingen Series 47 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), p. 228, Western time is often described by a threefold articulation of beginning-middleend, birth-life-death, or past-present-future. So conceived, De Quincey's mythologem undoubtedly projects both an ontogeny and a phylogeny. '3The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 47; Bk. I, lines 341-43(1850 text). '4See Joel D. Black, "Levana: Levitation in Jean Paul and Thomas De Quincey," CL 32 (1980):42-62, esp. 51-55. Black develops these ideas further in his essay "Confession, Digression, Gravitation: Thomas De Quincey's German
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Connection," in Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, pp. 308-37. '5This connection to Bunyan's allegory is one which Professor Maniquis establishes as the framework for his larger argument in "The Dark Interpreter and the Palimpsest of Violence" (see note 8 above). To the best of my knowledge his study is the only extended analysis of the symbolic importance of De Quincey's Dark Interpreter, a central device in Romantic aesthetic theory and practice even when he is not formally identified. This is precisely Tilottama Rajan's use of the trope in her provocative book titled Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980), although nowhere except for a few scattered allusions does she deal with De Quincey's works or the mythopoeic role of the Dark Interpreter in them. '6Elizabeth W. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. 106. '7Cf. De Luca, Thomas De Quincey: The Prose of Vision, p. 77: "The Dark Interpreter is primarily the voice of the self in dreams, that inevitable 'I' who is their protagonist, but he maintains an 'otherness' that removes him from full identity with the dreamer." '8Bruss, Autobiographical Acts, pp. 116, 114. '9Shelley's Poetry and Prose, p. 405. 20The Letters of John Keats: 1814-1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), 2:102. 2'Cf. Porter, "The Demon Past," p. 595: "De Quincey's common strategy in the autobiographical writings is to take an episode from one phase of his past, seize upon some phenomenological aspect that coalesces his emotional response to it, and then either amplify it or discover similar though variant moments in later time." 22Fora classic treatise on the stereoscope, first invented and so named by Charles Wheatstone in 1838-1839, see David Brewster, The Stereoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction (1856; rpt. Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Morgan and Morgan, 1971). In recent years the principle of stereoptics has been discussed in terms of Proust's literary achievement-an illuminating parallel because, like the novelist describing his work in a letter of 1922, De Quincey also tries "to render visible to the consciousness unconscious phenomena, some of which, having been entirely forgotten, are situated in the past" (as quoted and translated by Roger Shattuck, Proust's Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time, and Recognition in "A la recherche du temps perdu" [New York: Random House, 1963], p. 46). "The most thorough and authoritative comparison of the two versions is that by Ian Jack, "De Quincey Revises his Confessions," PMLA 72 (1957):122-46.See also David F. Clarke, "On the Incompleteness of the Confessions of an English Opium Eater," WC 8 (1977):368-76. 24JohnR. Reed comments briefly on the parable, which he sees as exemplifying "the Magdalene" or fallen woman, in his book Victorian Conventions (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 59-60. "Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit and Some Miscellaneous Pieces, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (London: William Pickering, 1849), p. 77. "Parts of this essay were included in papers that I delivered at the Annual Convention of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in 1980 and at the Seventh Annual Conference on Literature and Film at Florida State University in 1982.

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SEL 26(1986) ISSN 0039-3657

De Quincey's Literature of Power: A Mythic Paradigm

language, as he conceives it, inheres in the improvisational nature of

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