Serpentine Sighs: De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis and the Serpentine Line

Abstract

1. Here pause, reader! Imagine yourself seated in some swing, oscillating under impulse of lunatic hands; for strength of lunacy may belong to human dreams, fearful caprice of lunacy, and malice of lunacy, whilst of those dreams may be all more certainly removed from lunacy; even as a bridge gathers cohesion and strength from increasing resistance into which it is forced by increasing pressure. Seated in such a swing, fast as you reach lowest point of depression, may you rely on racing up to a starry altitude of Ups and downs you will see, heights and depths, in our fiery course together, such as will sometimes tempt you to look shyly and suspiciously at me, your guide, and ruler of oscillations. (1) SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS (1845) exemplifies waving, even writhing, path of Thomas De Quincey's autobiographical project. Here, at turning point between the lowest depth of [his] nursery and his first exalting opium dreams, reader is exhorted to pause. Mimicking maneuvers of relevant digressions in classical forensic oratory, orator steps aside from his path to solicit sympathy for his wayward client, autobiographical text. (2) Presented as a kind of temporal stepping-back from Confessions (1821), to narrate childhood afflictions preceding Opium-Eater's career and acting as opium's coefficient (15:169), Suspiria digresses ever further from chronological autobiography through a series of visionary vignettes and reflections on time, memory, dreams, grief, and interpretation. Suspiria, in its defense, had to be an arch, balancing] a sweep downwards with a corresponding ascent. This well-engineered stability is lost, spoiled by contingent, external accidents of press. Yet rhetoric of stability is, of course, already undermined by metaphor of cloud-scaling swing: Suspiria is no static house of fiction, but something irregularly and continually oscillating. No single moment conveys its balance; if it exists, inheres in opposing movements. These movements, moreover, are not necessarily balanced: whole arch of ascending visions on which De Quincey had meant to launch us is replaced by an improvised stopgap: a too short, too steep peroration about ascent (15:169). There seems nothing reliable] about our path or our destination. Even pausing might simply be a variety of text's erratic movement. De Quincey's readers can accept his claims to balance and cohesion, or examine cracks in bridge that point to underlying instability, fragmentation, and incoherence. Each pole of interpretation marks one side of a swinging pendulum that, if brought to rest at its moderate center, would fail to describe his texts. [A]ccidents or plan; victim or ruler--the cloud-scaling includes them all, not exactly by reconciling chance and necessity, heteronomy and autonomy, but through very movement of oscillation. A particular formula expresses balanced form of such oscillation: plot arc of a swing over time, and a sine curve appears. Twist double curve through space, and you have something like what William Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty (1753) called line. (3) This article offers first examination of De Quincey's serpentine lines, in dialogue with Hogarth's crucial theorization of form. After sketching Hogarth's serpentine line and its context, I discuss Suspiria's appropriations of this much-mediated figure through four striking images of waving lines: caduceus; a vibrating magnet; waterfowl over a lake; and an undulating river. Each indicates intrication of serpentine lines with De Quincey's diverse interests in aesthetics, natural science, philosophy, and theology. Together, they suggest an autobiography, and autobiographical subject, formed by indefinitely oscillating lines of memory and interpretation. …