Hallucinogesis: Thomas De Quincey’s Mind Trips

Abstract

Hallucinogesis: Thomas De Quincey’s Mind Trips Elizabeth Fay (bio) Elizabeth Fay University of Massachusetts Boston Elizabeth Fay Elizabeth Fay’s most recent publication is Fashioning Faces: The Portraitive Mode in British Romanticism (UP of New England, 2010). Her other publications include Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (Palgrave, 2002), A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Blackwell, 1998), and Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics (U of Massachusetts P, 1995). Her current project is on Romantic Egyptology. Footnotes 1. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985) 67. All references to the 1821 Confessions, “Suspiria de Protundis,” and “The English Mail-Coach” will be from this edition. All other references are to David Masson’s edition, Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 14 vols (Edinburgh: Black, 1897). 2. Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997) 48. De Quincey’s Gothicized imagination reveals itself throughout his autobiographical writings, and he wrote a Gothic novel as well, Klosterheim (1832). See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986). 3. Charles J. Rzepka, Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1995) 10. 4. Alina Clej, A Genealogy of The Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (Stanford: Stanford UP, 199) 8. 5. Joshua Wilner, “Autobiography and Addiction: The Case of De Quincey,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 14.4 (Winter 1981): 493–503; Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000) 70–75. 6. John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991). 7. Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995). 8. Frederick Burwick reads this economic parallel as one of mental rather than bodily economy in relation to political economy. See Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power (New York: Palgrave, 2001). I take seriously De Quincey’s reference to his physical economy, however: “The first notice I had of any important change going on in this part of my physical economy, was from the re-awakening of a state of eye generally incident to childhood, or exalted states of irritability” (Confessions 67). 9. See John Barrell’s analysis of self-innoculation as a centering metaphor in De Quincey’s writings (Infection of Thomas De Quincey 15–18). 10. Confessions 5n; this was Hazlitt’s failing, De Quincey informs us: Hazlitt is “an acute thinker” rather than “a subtle one” because “he has not read Plato in his youth (which most likely was only his misfortune); but neither has he read Kant in his manhood (which is his fault).” 11. Burwick complicates this critique, claiming that for De Quincey the sublime must be co-present with reason and imagination (Thomas De Quincey 86). Although Burwick describes the De Quinceyan aesthetic experience, the co-presence of mental faculties applies to the properties of hallucinogesis, with its combinatory mental powers. 12. Barrell, for instance, follows this line of thought when he reads the later revised Malay passage (Masson 3: 402–6) as one in which the Malay is associated with another seaman, the murderous John Williams of “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts,” a figure De Quincey Orientalizes. By “stoning” the Malay, Williams–through a complex of various other Williams populating De Quincey’s life and texts–the destructive other is ritually defeated (74–76). 13. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) for his discussion of hybridity as that which usefully challenges cultural constructions of identity. 14. See Charles J. Rzepka’s Sacramental Commodities. 15. Tilottama Rajan is behind much of my formulation of a De Quinceyan hermeneutic. See Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980). 16. The essay is a review of Janies Gillman’s biography of Coleridge, his patient and house companion for Coleridge’s final 19 years of life. De Quincey’s essay was first published in 1845, revised in 1859. 17. Ehregott Andreas Christoph Wasianski, Immanuel...