In the Name of the “Incestuous Mother”: Islam and Excremental Protestantism in De Quincey's Infidel Book

Abstract

The fact has often been overlooked that the schizo indeed participates in history; he hallucinates and raves universal history, and proliferates the races. . . . All delirium possesses world-historical, political, and racial content, mixing and sweeping along races, cultures, continents, and kingdoms; some wonder whether this long drift merely constitutes derivative of Oedipus. The familial order explodes, families are challenged, son, father, mother, sister-- (Deleuze, Delirium 116, 120)And from where did these 3 incorrigibly filthy accomplices of the father, the son, the holy ghost (the father, mother and son), come to equal 1 and not 3?- (Artaud, Letter Against the Kabbala 114)In one of the fragments that were never included in the publication of Suspiria De Profundis: Being Sequel to the Confessions, Thomas De Quincey relates story about sick author who confesses his sin to father:I remember at this moment with laughter the case of man on sick bed, who was deploring to his Confessor the awful mischief likely to affect his own and future generations from an that he had published. But the kind-hearted father entreated him to take comfort upon the ground that . . . except for stray trunk-maker or so, and few vagabond pastry-cooks, no man to his own certain knowledge had ever bought copy. Whereupon the sinner leaped out of bed; and, being [a] member of the 'fancy', he . . . floored the Confessor as the . . . proper reward for his insulting consolations. (Suspiria drafts, notes, and fragments, 549)The author of this infidel book does not atone for his sin; instead, he subverts the religious sacrament of the confession. As comic expression of anger and disbelief, the flooring of the fatherly confessor symbolizes an ironic wish to scandalize religious and paternal authority. In that same fragment, De Quincey interprets the allegorical significance of this story:I cannot in strict literal sense appropriate the benefit of the good father's suggestion. First, [it] is past all denying that [o]n 1822 very many people (trunk-makers not included) did procure copies, and cause copies to be multiplied, of the Opium confessions. But I have yet to learn that any one of . . . was inoculated by me, or could have been, with . . . first love for drug so notorious as opium. (549)If the confessional mode fails to absolve the blasphemy of the writer, then De Quincey's inoculation against opium addiction fails to restore the English body to its proper national health. Consequently, the inoculation of Confessions is not potent enough to cure the dangerous social contagion-a radical religious that overthrows civil and ecclesiastical law. This metaphorical understanding of disease, intoxication, and madness draws attention to the political discourse of enthusiasm that began with the English Civil War of the mid seventeenth century and became defining feature of British Romantic aesthetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.1 In this regard, Confessions was written by a crazy enthusiast or visionary, fanatic who supersedes the biblical laws of previous patriarchs (De Quincey 47).De Quincey's allegorical story tells us something important about his use of parody in Confessions: the St. Augustian narrative of Christian confession that his autobiography appears to model itself after is nothing more than humorous farce. In conflating the sublime romantic visions of the opium-eater with the mad ravings of vulgar enthusiast, Confessions may strike its readers as political handbook on how to be Jacobin rather than (as De Quincey intended it to be read) self-help manual on how not to become an unrestrained opium addict. This peculiar ambivalence appears in De Quincey's address to his readers: he exposes his confessions to the public in the hope that they will prove useful and instructive, even though he knows, Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings, than the spectacle of 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 (9). …