Abstract
This chapter begins by considering the echoes of Thomas De Quincey found in detective fiction. Colman argues that De Quincey, whose work on opium was foundational for modern understandings of drug addiction, specifically links addiction to repetitive investigation. De Quincey’s understanding of consumption habit, Colman shows, was influenced by the Brunonian medicine that had previously influenced Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and De Quincey shared but intensified the Brunonian sense of addictive habit as a corollary to exploratory, literary habit. Colman in particular closely reads one scene in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater—the description of a labyrinth in the work of Piranesi—to illustrate how De Quincey forged a new, addictive sense of literary worlds, worlds in which one might repeatedly, desirously pursue possibility.
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Notes
- 1.
Conan Doyle’s “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” for instance, involves an addict specifically compared to De Quincey.
- 2.
When referring to the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, unless I note otherwise, I refer to an edition edited by Barry Milligan (London: Penguin, 2003), 3–88.
- 3.
Poe’s “various debts to De Quincey,” as Robert Morrison writes, “are most clearly revealed in the Dupin detective stories, which draw on a series of seminal narrative features De Quincey put in place” (424).
- 4.
The quote is from Christopher Lawrence’s essay “Cullen, Brown and the Poverty of Essentialism” in Brunonianism in Britain and Europe, eds. W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1988).
- 5.
Pursuit of knowledge is, for Doležel, central to a basic category of narrative modalities; these are “epistemic modalities,” which “release their story-generating energy because of uneven distribution of knowledge among fictional persons” (126).
- 6.
Much scholarship on De Quincey in recent decades has concentrated on two focal points: De Quincey’s attitudes toward empire, particularly in his discussions of Asia (Barrell; Leask) and his recursiveness—his endless reflections on himself, things he has read, or things he has internalized (Clej; Russett). By focusing on a continuous orientation to labyrinthine conjecture in the Confessions, by which De Quincey repeatedly considers the external world from the vantage of his isolated self, I hope this chapter might begin to resolve some of the tension between the two approaches.
- 7.
Louise Foxcroft describes the basic understanding of addiction that did indeed precede Romanticism. She writes that “eighteenth-century physicians investigating the consequences of taking opium regularly … knew very well what they were dealing with” (117).
- 8.
I refer in part to what Walter Jackson Bate calls “the burden of the past.”
- 9.
This is a quote from Wordsworth’s 1802 preface.
- 10.
Alina Clej writes, “Nothing is more difficult than placing De Quincey’s work within a literary movement or under a well-defined aesthetic rubric” (6).
- 11.
For more on this period, see Mike Jay’s Atmosphere of Heaven. The scientific method of repeated (often delighted) experimentation exemplified by the work of Thomas Beddoes, Davy, and Coleridge at the Pneumatic Institute suggests ongoing, reiterative desire such as that described by Slavoj Žižek in Looking Awry, a desire whose “realization … does not consist in its being ‘fulfilled,’ ‘fully satisfied,’ it coincides rather with the reproduction of desire as such, with its circular movement” (7).
- 12.
I quote here from the 1800 second edition.
- 13.
This, too, comes from the 1800 second edition’s preface.
- 14.
Burke , promoter of custom’s repetitions, believer in the sublimity of repetitions, did nonetheless observe some threat of habits that in their potency might change things; he alludes to intoxicants, including liquor and gas (in a passage referring to the work of the pneumatic chemists) to characterize unrestrained revolutionary passion:
When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared … (Reflections 90)
The tendency toward (mostly metaphorical) intoxication could, Burke feared, seize even traditional authority, which necessitated certain bracing measures: “To secure any degree of sobriety in the propositions made by the leaders in any public assembly, they ought to respect, in some degree perhaps to fear, those whom they conduct” (Reflections 129). Sobriety was not guaranteed in even customary authority, in other words; some fear, or at least a suggested jolt, would be needed to keep leaders walking a steadier line. And so, though modern addiction discourse did not exist at the time of Burke’s Reflections, Burke was concerned with what something like regular intoxication might mean for customary power.
- 15.
Fusion of social sympathy with authoritative sublimity in particular constituted Burke’s idea of successful governance; as Tim Fulford observes, “sympathy is directed by the careful arrangement of the performance towards the awestruck submissiveness that Burke makes a characteristic of the sublime response” (43).
- 16.
Burke’s theory of sublimity, as Sharon Ruston has noted in Creating Romanticism, specifically proposed in the manner of a “scientific theory” a physiological experience by which bodily passions are registered (140–141).
- 17.
De Quincey also makes frequent mention of religious authors similarly capable of ambitiously digressive statements. In a later edition of the Confessions, De Quincey writes, “‘Philosophy:’ – At this point it is that the main misconception would arise. Theology, and not philosophy, most people will fancy, is likely to form the staple of [Donne, Chillingworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Milton, South, Barrow]. But I have elsewhere maintained, that the main bulk of English philosophy has always hidden itself in the English divinity” (55). See Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1862).
- 18.
Jorge Luis Borges, avowed admirer of De Quincey, refers to the opium-eater in some of his own labyrinthine literary explorations of endless potentiality. For examples of the Borgesian interest in De Quincey, see references to the opium-eater listed in the index of Borges’s Selected Non-Fictions (551); also of note in this same collection is Borges’s essay on “The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton,” in which he explicitly links those labyrinths to “appetite” (of different varieties) (112).
- 19.
When these repetitive digressions are applied in De Quincey’s story of repetitive digression in addiction, form joins with content—and De Quincey believed in the value of a coincidence of the two. He maintains, in part four of his “Style” writings, that “style, or, in the largest sense, manner, is confluent with the matter” (227). He is also clear about the scientific ramifications of this literary aesthetic in his “Style” essays. There, in part four, he compares imaginative literary endeavor to a “subjective science,” created out of the solitary subject’s mind in order to understand better how that mind makes sense of its world (220). This subjective science works through repetitive digression to reveal the mind’s nature and imaginative capabilities.
- 20.
Coleridge described a possibility that was, specifically, hoped-for. See Coleridge’s Letters I.557.
- 21.
Kierkegaard, in Repetition, observes the way repetition brings past and future together; he writes, “Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward” (131).
- 22.
See John Barrell’s The Infection of Thomas De Quincey for more on De Quincey and panicked imperialism.
- 23.
Others have noted how addictive repetitions operated through science and culture to chart similarly vexed global space in the nineteenth century. Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee, and Peter Kitson write in Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era of a knowledge “instrumental as much as theoretical: it told people how to repeat what others had already done. In particular, it showed them how to go to foreign places and to come back safely—by systematising what the first successful explorers had done and seen” (27). Habits established precedence that solidified understandings of space and place, allowing the individual explorer to pursue with some connection to what came before, and thus to return to the familiar even while venturing into the new. De Quincey, however, collapses the enormous with the familiarly small-scale. In The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, John Barrell relates De Quincey’s unsettled/unsettling tendencies to an overwhelming anxiety the opium-eater has regarding Asia (76). De Quincey’s health concerns are his geopolitical concerns, in other words. The relationship between Orientalism and opium use in De Quincey’s writing has also been covered by Barry Milligan in Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture and by Nigel Leask in British Romantic Writers and the East.
- 24.
Hayter notes many related clichés of addiction literature, often ones that involve bridging a position of isolation with something enormous, such as the “intention but failure to write a great philosophical work” (27) and “the pleasure-dome, the airy music, the sorceress, the half-living statue, the embracing lovers in the icy wind” (102). She emphasizes opium intoxication as the cause of these dreams, but I argue that De Quincey uses, specifically, the repetitive structure of addiction and addiction-like thinking to shape those spaces that Hayter finds central to the literature of opium use.
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Colman, A. (2019). The Labyrinths of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. In: Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01590-9_3
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