Saturday, December 12, 2009

Love in Ruin: De Quincey and Fear of an Other

Thomas De Quincey, in The Confessions of an Opium Eater and Suspiria de Profundis, relies on oppositions to establish and explain his internal relationship to the world around him. The oppositions, or antagonisms, present in these works serve as metaphors for his larger inability to come to terms with self-identification defined against an Other. Using the analytical framework he provides in Suspiria, we can then read Confessions as a meditation on how the death of his sister both establishes self-identification as predicated on an Other that must die and, subsequently ruptures this self-identification. These movements create a desire to escape from death in solitude. Human solitude, in which a direct and eternal relationship with God is established, becomes a way for De Quincey to deal with the fear attached to death. But this same desire reveals the psychoanalytic mechanism at work in Suspiria – namely, that it is not solitude that he desires, but love, particularly as is found in connection with another. To find this love, even in traces, would necessitate De Quincey coming to terms with death as a natural and necessary element of self-identification, which entails a psycho-social part of being he refuses to come to terms with. In this framework, the primary opposition he sets up in Confessions – self vs the Orient – can be read as a fundamental fear of that very thing which he desires. He articulates a rule of antagonism in Suspiria, but refuses to embrace this as a way to deal with his own trauma. Instead, he creates a system to mediate this antagonism, ultimately leaving his trauma never confronted and his fear of death never wrested from his consciousness.
Upon the same analogy, view me as one (in the words of a true and most impassioned poet) – ‘viridantem floribus hastas’ – making verdant, and gay with the life of flowers, murderous spears and halberts—things that express death in their origin (being made form dead substances that once had lived in forests, things that express ruin in their use. The true object of my ‘Opium Confessions’ is[…]those wandering musical variations upon theme […] which spread a glory over incidents that for themselves would be less than nothing (De Quincey).
It would seem that Confessions is a way for De Quincey to illuminate and make poetry of elements in his life which, as such, ‘would be less than nothing’. In this reading, his relationship to Opium is read as one of play and imagination, and immediately distances his confessions (at least ostensibly) from any revelation of his nature, his anxiety, or of his trauma. But a reversal is at work underneath the surface of his writings. His dreams do not merely adorn a halberd – decaying as it is both consumed by and reborn through the flower – but they embody and utilize the halberd, piercing his unconscious in a sublime revelation of the underpinnings of his thought. The flowers do not adorn, but hide from De Quincey his own nature, in which death lurks as a constitutive element that all else hinges on.
In Suspiria, De Quincey makes a concerted effort to distance himself from the caprice that characterized Confessions and begins the process of establishing an analytical framework through which he can read the antagonisms of his dreams and writing. We learn that the death of his sister influenced him in a fundamental way. If we analyze his relation to his sister’s death through his explication of Adam and Eve in paradise, the psychoanalytic desires motivating De Quincey surface.

If God should make another Eve,’; that is, if God should replace him in his primitive state, and should condescend to bring again a second Eve, one that would listen to no temptation, still that original partner of his earliest solitude even now […] could not be displaced form him by any better or happier Eve (De Quincey).

The paradox here is that, in spite of the trauma /loss Adam experiences in his relation to God, it is still Eve that he desires because it is not until the rupture of the relationship that he can, in retrospect, come to terms with his initial relationship as one of fulfillment. This depiction of Adam and Eve is the direct precursor to his relationship with his sister;
Hadst thou been an idiot, my sister, not the less I must have loved thee, having the capacious heart overflowing, even as mine overflowed, with tenderness, and stung, even as mine was stung, by the necessity of being loved (De Quincey).
It is the ‘necessity of being loved’ that I would like to posit as the central and motivating cause of De Quincey’s trauma. And it is this necessity that he seeks in one person. With his sister, both had love ‘overflowing’. It was a relationship of a reciprocal excess—his self-identification could be posited directly against an Other that returned this same excess. The fact that his relationship to his sister, in his mind, would not have changed had she ‘been an idiot’ undermines much of his later claims and reveals that it is not her intellect, but this fundamental necessity that he found in her.
When De Quincey is in the chamber of his dead sister and looks out of the window in a moment which “instead of a short interval expanding into a vast one, upon this occasion a long one had contracted into a minute,” he tries again to form that perfect connection of reciprocal excess. It is, after all, not God that gives De Quincey this moment, but the sublime power of his unconscious desires to reveal to him “the parting which should have lasted forever”(De Quincey). In this moment, where he leaves himself, he wants, again, to find love, but fails to do so. This failure corrupts the unquestioned love he previously experienced. Love has been revealed as it exists in death – a necessary and natural part of human nature; attached to the human body; part of the ‘archetype’ of human relations he refuses to accept. This loss wrests from him sublime images of restored love free from the chains of death. Thus, he finds his “higher faculty for an electric aptitude for seizing analogies, and by no means of those aerial pontoons passing over like lightning from one topic to another” (De Quincey). Analogy is not used loosely here, but in strict accordance with the ideas of ana and logos, he seeks to reckon word with idea, to form a relationship of reciprocity between words and the ideas that they demand account for. His use of the word seize is also important, as it reveals an effort – an agency – exerted in his construction of this moment of union. De Quincy is constructing the reciprocal excess, in a moment of trauma, that faded with the life of his sister.
In Confessions, De Quincey’s narrative of loss is repeated, but focuses on Ann instead of his sister. His relationship to Ann is defined in economic terms, so as to make his desire for reciprocity all the more clear. After his last interaction with her, in which he promises to find her again, he desires to “reimburse her,” to offer her a message of “reconciliation.” Ultimately, he asserts that “all minds which have contemplated such objects [sorrow] have early encouraged and cherished some tranquilizing belief as to the future balances and the hieroglyphic meanings of human sufferings” (De Quincey). Again De Quincey, in the loss of his ideal Other, cannot come to terms with loss. If death can also be understood as figurative, then the death of a relationship is still a trauma that he must come to terms with. It is after this that De Quincey describes his relationship to opium, in which his “pains had vanished […] in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed.” For De Quincey, this “secret of happiness,” in the context of his desire for the necessity of love, promises him a relationship of reciprocal excess in pure form. He, without risking death in relation to an Other, uses opium as a means to establish a direct connection with a false sense of love. This is where his view of solitude is at work in Confessions.
Drawing from the analytical framework he sets up in Suspiria, solitude is a necessarily religious agency that forms our relationship to birth and death. Solitude has the capacity to transfix children in a sense of fear and fascination. In solitude, “above all things, God holds ‘communion undisturbed’ with children. Solitude, though silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man” (De Quincey). This ‘communion undisturbed’ is the ‘necessity for love’ in different form. It is in this context that opium is surrogate for God; “This is the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium: of which church I acknowledge myself to be the only member, -- the alpha and the omega”(De Quincey). Opium is a drug that he takes, in solitude, to satisfy his desire for love, for communion, with an Other than can elude and escape death as a necessary condition.
This antagonism between feminine life and death, feminine other and masculine self continue and are made theatrical in the dreams of Confessions. If God is really De Quincey, then he is not forming a direct relationship with an Other, but is actually forming a reciprocal excess with his own identity, including his fears. The gendered dichotomy between self and other begins to implode as his solitude and ‘communion undisturbed’ morphs into terrifying experiences of the Orient. Beyond racial antagonism, the Orient is a metaphor embodied for the relationship between self and Other, particularly as it is mapped onto a psycho-social framework. In solitude, one can escape this aspect, at least it would seem. But this escape assumes there is something that one is escaping to. De Quincey’s solitude is not one of escape, but of being trapped in his own fears. It is one of being transfixed by the sublime terror of the trauma that he has yet to deal with.
John Barrell describes De Quincey’s Oriental as "a name for that very power, that process of endless multiplication whereby the strategy of self-consolidation, of the recuperation or domestication of the other, always involves the simultaneous constitution of a new threat, or a new version of the old, in the space evacuated by the first" (Barrell 19).
In opposition to the Orient, then, De Quincey places himself, particularly in Sysperia, as a singularity in direct connection with what he sees as the 'infinite'. His relationship, as experienced when he sees his sister’s dead body, is one of total Otherness (eternity) embodied within a single experience (instant). In this way, we can see his ‘necessity for love’ articulated within a temporal paradigm. The Orient is articulated not as absolute otherness embodied in a singularity, but an infinite mass of individuals that, in their totality, overwhelm de Quincey. For this mass of individuals translates directly into a Mass of Others that will face death. Even more, De Quincey projects a desire and an agency to kill onto this Orient, staging the trauma of death in his mind;

This incident I have digressed to mention, because this Malay (partly from the picturesque exhibition he assisted to frame, partly from the anxiety I connected with his image for some days) fastened afterwards upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him worse than himself, that ran “a-muck” at me, and led me into a world of troubles (De Quincey).

It is clear that De Quincey is projecting his fear of death onto the multiplicity of Malays. Accordingly, he displaces the responsibility of death onto this absolute Other, the Orient. He asserts that “Southern Asia is […] the part of the earth most swarming with human life […]Man is a weed in those regions” (De Quincey).
To swarm with human life is to swarm with death as an imminent force. It is for this reason why summer, the time of year most suited to the growth and development of life, reminds De Quincey of death. The antagonism between the life of summer and the looming death he feels is abstracted and expressed as his principal of antagonism:

For it may be observed, generally, that wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other. On these accounts it is that I find it impossible to banish the thought of death when I am walking alone in the endless day s of summer; and nay particular death, if not more affecting, at least haunts my mind more obstinately and besiegingly in that season (De Quincey).

There is a certain truth in his law of antagonism but it is not a truth that he is willing to believe or act on because to do so would leave him vulnerable to the same death he seeks to escape form. His relationship with his sister is the initial trauma of real death, his relationship with Ann is a figurative death as it is manifest in his relationship with her. De Quincey cannot confront the trauma of death because he operates on a constant fear of losing his self-consolidation through the death of the Other. The antagonisms most immediate to De Quincey engender each other based on his circumstances. For his sister, it is engendered as a tale of loss akin to Adam and Eve. In relation to Opium, it is engendered by a projection of his internal anxieties onto a projected imperial nightmare. There is a melancholy humor in his insistence on “a faculty developed […] for comprehending the whole and every part,” because for De Quincy it is all a question of self-referencing. Too timid in the face of death, De Quincy’s interaction with antagonism leaves him with the choice to either form a ‘communion undisturbed’ with an omnipotent Other untouched by death or place death completely under his control. De Quincey, when faced with real loss, was never prepared or willing to confront it as trauma. In his prose, there lingers a chilling sadness, an abyss (as he calls it) that we are supposed to believe, and which De Quincey wants to believe is matched by a counterbalancing fullness in God as the eternal Other. But God has been unmasked as the self and De Quincey seems to beckon us, though not consciously, to find in death a sublime motivation to love the Other as it risks and necessitates decay. Death is ever-present for De Quincey, yet it eludes him and ultimately oppresses him with its power.

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