Thomas Dequincey's Mind Trips

Hallucinogesis: Thomas De Quincey's Mind Trips
Author(s): ELIZABETH FAY

Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 49, No. 2, Nostalgia, Melancholy, Anxiety: Discursive
Mobility and the Circulation of Bodies (SUMMER 2010), pp. 293-312
Published by: Boston University
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ELIZABETH FAY
Hallucinogesis: Thomas
Quincey's Mind Trips
DE QUINCEY'S ENTIRE OEUVRE IS PREMISED ON A CON

the lost thing, that which had been held close - a pers
vision - as medically and culturally implicated. From his fir
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) to his late essa
India in 1857, he is haunted by the ephemeral. His dreams, h
and reflections all participate in a kind of nostalgia-laden an
that the instabilities of his time fostered, even encourag
were, or believed themselves to be, sensitive. Losing things,
becomes a condition of De Quincey's life, a life lived as reme
face of loss.
De Quincey's sensitivity makes him vulnerable to other
despite the vigorous ratiocination of which he believes h
while the remedial work of his autobiographical writin
and understood through a pharmacologically induced dr
stemological and visionary knowledges self-contradict in
landscape resulting in fleeting - sometimes layered - momen
am calling "hallucinogesis." These are the moments of i
knowing resulting from particularly powerful opium dream
as solitary and isolating as prophetic vision, operate in De Q
like a palimpsest, layered in an intertextuality that does not
ther the reader's or the authoring dreamer's prior knowledg
matters. The "sighs from the depths" that constitute his clo
potentiality of palimpsest, the "Suspiria de Profundis" (
larger affinity for layered emotions and pre-verbal states, bo
pose him toward what the rational mind contests but the
yearns for. This is the lost thing as a priority, a prior, cent
him. It is the knowledge of this unnameable thing tha
Quincey's grappling with nostalgia as a symptom of th
hallucinogesis that is both pathological and enlightening.
tates De Quincey's disorder, his sense of loss had already
toward it.
SiR, 49 (Summer 2010)
293
294 ELIZABETH FAY
In Confessions of an English
landscape of his life and choo
brief survey of the current m
effects. "Suspiria de Profun
develops more thoroughly
contaminants that have trans
in- training to a man enslave
scientific witness. In "The
nostalgia for a better past is d
ish culture irrevocably conta
transformed into mythicall
What begins as a confident
Confessions descends into dis
by which empirical evidenc
face of a seductive drug, an
formed: "The first notice I h
part of my physical economy,
erally incident to childhood,
piria" the perturbed, halluc
ing knowledge, and in "The
populated landscapes. It is the
transforming surface into un
rendering the dream code i
narratives of mental travel, a
transcendent capacity to drea
with Kant, to think the world
of knowledge, "hallucinoge
through both analytic and im
cursive nature of De Quince
gressive narrative of his autob
points of intersection.
Walter D. Mignolo warns us,
ity, Subaltern Knowledges, an
such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Fernando Ortiz have not accounted for
understandings and articulations of local and world events that arise from
non-European epistemological systems. In pitting Western knowledge
(framed on the difference between epistemology and hermeneutics) against
native knowledges (gnosis or gnoseology), Mignolo sets up a dichotomy
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 Profundis," 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).
THOMAS DE QUINCEY'S MIND TRIPS 295
that helpfully locates the impasse at the heart of empire.

not have occurred without the categorization of the e
Occidentally determined categories of racial and colonial di
colonial experiences for Western and Eurocentric indivi
mean those adopting Western epistemology, knowing
through their colonial status) were subjectively ackno
pressed, a one-sided conversation took place, revealing
ences came up against, and were in an alienating tension w
was usually referred to as the mysterious East, the Eastern
knowable. The constructed "other" can be known and sc
gorized; our very definition of self depends on it - such is
vation of monotheism, an ancient and yet continually m
The unknowable, however, is beyond the pale. Whethe
effable or inferior, the unknowable "other" created an imp
standing what could be valued or effaced, but not erased. I
the palimpsest of cultural awareness requires that epist
edge be juggled as variously available depending on the l
ness one is in, prior layers seeping through to dominating
ing. At all times one is vulnerable to a strike from a di
somewhat eclipsed or forgotten narrative or gnosis, and w
the experience is hallucinogenic and the effect is mind-exp
other as both knowable and unknowable, as a prior or subs
stimulated the need to construct epistemological certitu
this insoluble impasse. Thomas De Quincey, who both
tempted to reject such perplexity, is remarkable in his obs
cid accounts of this aporia effect stemming from the pit of
rather, the depths of discordant knowledges.
Scholars have come at De Quincey's highly wrought pr
navigation of conflicting cultural identities and know
ways. Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's lead, scholars
The Confessions as belonging to the Gothic. Cannon Schmi
rective and reads it through the lens of nationalism, claim
fessions "can accurately be described as a Gothic autobio
that allowed De Quincey to "represent not only the stru
but the travails and triumphs of the English nation as wel
admits to De Quincey's search for a responsive approach
spite the claims for nationalism when he cedes that De Qui
2. Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth- Century Gothic Fictions an

(Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997) 48. De Quincey's Gothicized
itself throughout his autobiographical writings, and he wrote a
Klosterheim (1832). See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Goth
York: Methuen, 1986).
296 ELIZABETH FAY
alized the Gothic (61). To un

modity, Charles Rzepka br
Quincey's aesthetics of sacr
manded by the sublime. Conf
ducing "the transactional log
trajectory of the alienated an
that De Quincey is modernist
rhetorical uses of intoxicat
ulacral culture of the self," a
the ontological crisis of a c
gime, and everyday practices
Wilner has studied De Quin
point of addiction, tracing op
jectivity into object-being.5 A
tion from authoring subject
an infectious relation (foll
Quincey) between the two sta
the effects of addiction clear
My own reading borrows fr
derstand better an anxiety th
commonly experienced from
politico-economically cent
anxiety, combined with a h
orientation caused by opium
the awareness that a differ
face of ontological crisis. De
through rhetorically worked
his awareness of impasse, as t
phabets of "the burden of the
riddling sphinxes as much
(Masson 3: 315). Clej remark
can become a form of encr
meaning," that is, in resignin
this does not go far enough
3. Charles J. Rzepka, Sacramental C
(Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1
4. Alina Clej, A Genealogy of The M
Writing (Stanford: Stanford UP, 19
5. Joshua Wilner, "Autobiograp
Forms of Discourse and Culture 14.4
Romantic Rhetoric of Intemalizatio
6. John Barrell, 1 he injection oj 1 h
Haven: Yale UP, 1991).
eroglyphic knowledge so much as to ingest it, to know it t

a dreamtext, to be subject to it and yet to be divided from
not deny communication, but rather invites another wa
refusing to promise the supplicant any of its fruits.
In his rhetorical use of aporia, De Quincey often resor
that sidestep the impasse set up by the frustrations of oth
what Mignolo calls gnoseology when it refers to the co
which here I will use for all Eastern knowledge systems -
scriptions of his opium-induced hallucinations. These hallu
deed palimpsests, layers upon layers of recessive and reced
each more empowering and threatening in the sacrifice
exchange value established between desire and dreams, the
summation of consumption. Opium causes De Quincey
what longingly that "A young Chinese seems to me an
renewed" (73); he substitutes hallucinogesis, a kinesthet
generates "knowledge" about the other as a reconceived
going back to the beginning, for that gnosis.
I want to suggest two things at this point. First, that th
pire, with the destabilizing effect empire had for Wes
caused by the confounding of otherness, provides a local h
ficulty of impasse. Romantic writers, poised before Britai
heights, often considered the tensions of empire as frissons
mas because, I suggest as my second point, epistemologi
would come to be defined by sociological and economic
utilitarianism, was not yet in place. De Quincey himse
to theorizing systems of knowledge, such as that of opi
fect, without feeling it necessary to concede truth to the
by the end of his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, h
ceded this ground to the troubled nets of colonial thi
true knowledge of the other can only be hallucinated, for
ically grounded assessment of otherly knowledge is irreme
framed. At the very least hallucinogesis produces a suspect
which all inhabitants including the visionary are held up f
Indeed, far from "going native" at home through use
fantasies, or acting the flaneur in London scenes of want a
ognizable to those London Magazine readers apt to prowl th
frequented quarters, De Quincey conceives a self-aliena
alterity that imported substances, rather than imported
These substances force an acculturation to which he is incr
As Franz Boas described it at the end of the century (18
should be merely the accommodation that one or both
each other in order to co-exist, or simply to adopt certain
298 ELIZABETH FAY
vendons of another culture. Y

laudanum drops, but inexpli
extends to dream states, me
roaming or rogue-state subjec
become rogue, producing a t
opium use. Whether accultu
has been the subject of colo
1940s, but certainly the
Quincey's geographical passage
landing in Wordsworth's poet
journey from native to accult
based epistemological ground
This ground cannot be rest
Quincey's portrait scene of hi
fleeing his school without lea
don, the young De Quincey
cal history - he is rejected he
discovering the "pleasures o
home without realizing that h
will become more Eastern by
roam Britain. He does not con
point he believes himself in co
passes that disorient him agai
psychically restored past of s
Although I am most intere
mind and soul, I want to de
the cultural nostalgia that ari
tural knowledges, and which
ence and its effects on the cu
ences, Asian immigration to E
sensibility), became a way of
British identity. That is, Briti
ness, as a suppressed but alw
knowledge. In the "Suspiria,
literary history: Greek traged
low chivalric romance. As the
vides the cultural superiority
assertion always ready to
Quincey's positioning of the l
the way in which knowledge
the dreams. It does so as a pos
dox also applicable to opium
his hands, both an alien and incorporated entity that c

hurtle him through swathes of verbiage. De Quincey's
opium is both medical, objective and distilled, as he relates
and familial, incorporated into the fabric of who he is thr
and trade of his East Indian uncle, as Barry Milligan h
Thus his knowledge of opium is both new and old, a pr
investigation and of mercantile adventure mixed, inevitabl
for another life and thus producing the peculiar circumsta
adventure and mental travel. His epistemological framewor
himself superior in knowledge to Easterners about control
effects of opium arises from this double ground of knowl
old, distilled and embodied. The bodily source, arising from
gestion as well as from his mercantile lineage in which
father and his uncle have surely passed on their trading
duces a self-gnoseology, a knowledge liminal in its fami
sides of each commercial equation.8 Analytic commerce, we
resulting frisson, the same frisson caused by self-inoculat
fights mightily against being prepossessed by analytic comm
hermeneutic mastery, developed from studying classica
thinking," and dabbling in philosophy against gnosis, but
Again and again, pure logic fails him, causing his ratioc
into counting drops of laudanum endlessly to achieve th
as this waxed (up to 8000 drops) and, through hard effo
In The Confessions, De Quincey sets out to prove that
opium need not be dangerous. Ill health might necessitate
tion should prevent immoderate use. When it doesn't, self-
cies, will serve the purpose. "I read Kant; and again I un
fancied that I did," he comments after taking "only 100
num" (55). Yet here "fancying" indicates that self-knowled
meneutic mastery, that aporia is functioning as a better r
Notably, the fancy of understanding Kant occurs just 1 Vi
quote from Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independenc
altogether, if it move at all. " De Quincey uses the quot
7. Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteen
Culture (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995).
8. Frederick Burwick reads this economic parallel as one of menta
economy in relation to political economy. See Thomas De Quincey: K
(New York: Palgrave, 2001). I take seriously De Quincey's reference
omy, however: "The first notice I had of any important change going
physical economy, was from the re-awakening of a state of eye gener
hood, or exalted states of irritability" (Confessions 67).
9. See John Barrell s analysis of self-innoculation as a centering meta
writings (Infection of Thomas De Quincey 15-18).
300 ELIZABETH FAY
how "the cloud of profound

one day almost inexplicably d
seen roll away from the sum
stranded ship that is "floated
turn to mental health and
functions as healthily as ev
1000 drops of laudanum a day
Kant even if his brain is perf
has occurred in his understan
that one must read Kant10 bu
the sublime, are now some
(what Kant misses is that the
inative transformations, a ke
phors, associative and based o
etic than the great poet's li
even trite. Ensconced in Do
etical fancy from Wordswo
cally but textually. He sets th
isolate and elevate it, even as
allusion and the noumenal -
epistemologically by catego
what purpose? We might hav
incident occurs toward the bo
ing Kant.
"One day a Malay knocked
have to transact amongst E
Neither Wordsworth nor Kan
enal other. The young serv
Asiatic dress of any sort: hi
De Quincey's subsequent revis
tween British national identi
picture there could not be im
girl, and its exquisite fairness
tude, contrasted with the sal
10. Confessions 511; this was Hazli

thinker" rather than "a subtle one"
likely was only his misfortune); bu
fault)."
1 1 . 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 de-
scribes the De Quinceyan aesthetic experience, the co-presence of mental faculties applies to
the properties of hallucinogesis, with its combinatory mental powers.
veneered with mahogany, by marine air ..." (Masson 3:

scription distances, perhaps alienates, De Quincey from
more than in the original version where De Quincey's m
derision of epistemological categories signified by the infer
vant, the known quantity of a turban-wearing other, a
classification of the Malay as "a sort of demon," belies the
wrought by the comparisons with Kant and Wordsworth. F
he writes this he will have already passed through a terrib
opium produced ocular proof that household furniture
monically. The passage is a commentary on his own halluci
cinogenic hermeneutics. There can be no confirmation
return to cognitive health, no realization of great achievem
lucination puts epistemology in doubt and hermeneutics pr
able aid. The Malay is surely real although the reason f
"I cannot conjecture" De Quincey notes - not I could no
yet cannot know or even conjure, for the necessary Kantia
intuition are missing, let alone those for a priori reasoning
The Malay offers readers all sorts of possible interpr
whether tracing the guilt of possibly overdosing the Malay
the unknowability of someone who can bolt three opiu
apparent ill effect; or the transversal of self and construc
when he imagines the Malay imagining that De Quincey
ing him for sacrifice to an English idol (if the native Engl
to physic the Malay traveler out of his overdose).12 Which
we choose, we cannot determine the underlying cause f
mockery of this passage, only note its unease and put it do
dis-ease both of an infected mind and of a colonizing cultu
some hint that far from the Malay bringing contagion
doorstep through the cultural miscegenation his presum
cupation represents, De Quincey has contaminated him and
the polluting factor in the cultural equation. Even De Q
tion that the Malay is a seaman is neither inductive nor de
reotype he has put upon the man that categorizes him w
for any particularity beyond the clues of turban and skin
so that his connotative assumption colonizes the forei
epistemological ground, as De Quincey's ambivalence m
12. Barrell, for instance, follows this line of thought when he reads th
passage (Masson 3: 402-6) as one in which the Malay is associated with
murderous John Williams of "On Murder Considered as one of the Fin
Quincey Orientalizes. By "stoning" the Malay, Williams - through a
other Williams populating De Quincey's life and texts - the destructive
feated (74-76).
302 ELIZABETH FAY
A possible cause for the mo

hybridity's tensions and an
guage and native cottage life
vating metaphorical imager
sense that Kant and Wordswo
to develop gnoseology as an
medical theory of the apot
1763, in the beginning of his
not abandon his own attempt
consciousness relies increasin
ance by a Malay on the thre
ther decenters and sidelines h
would be glad to publish "my
vided the College of Surgeons
understandings upon this sub
ity, perhaps even questionin
edge cannot translate, just
perhaps, to another knowledg
rather than enabling here,
else must be at work.
Can decentering the self be a way of knowing that reconnects past to
present without nostalgic layers of stabilizing misreadings? This would
mean a rerouting of nostalgia from a yearning that is quelled through
proper dreaming to a sickened dreaming that finds what we did not know
was lost. As he makes his way through his proto-Freudian case study of
himself, De Quincey's medicalized account begins to disintegrate. When
scholars focus on the lack of intellectual rigor and logic operating in
the Confessions, are they in fact uncovering De Quincey's exploration of
gnoseology through hallucination? His recurrent tracing of beginnings -
the return throughout his career to the early years recounted in the
Confessions - indicates a dreamwork hermeneutic ("the imagery of my
dreams . . . translated everything into their own language" ["Suspiria" 90]).
In a methodology by which life texts are read as dream texts, the attempt
would be to watch for patterns to indicate the multiple layering of experi-
ential memory, dream memory, and what can be recovered of what has
been irreparably lost. Memories of the English mail coach layer themselves
in a palimpsest of irony and horror as his youthful days of riding the coach
combined memories of racing victories, war horrors, Oriental fables, Miss
Fanny, and her grandfather the coach driver. Digging into the layers to re-
cover memories of the Welshman's dry remarks on the coach race with the
Birmingham "Tallyho," De Quincey finds that dreams are inseparable
from memory traces: "But alike the gayest and most terrific of my experi-
enees rose again after years of slumber, armed with prete

shake my dreaming sensibilities; sometimes . . . through s
pricious association with images originally gay, yet openin
evolution into sudden capacities of horror. . . (Mail-Coa
It is notable that the shift from pleasurable to horri
"evolution" rather than a devolution or, more accurately, a
flux. Is De Quincey's inability to sustain analytic phil
search for a different neural network rather than a succum
degeneration? It is possible to read his autobiographical
for transcendent mental powers in a continual self-analyti
undulations of his symptomatology. Discernible in drea
depths of the Freudian unconscious and the Jungian collec
tive truth: dream texts are more informative, more imme
than the impoverished empirical data accessible from a Ma
step. By self-mystifying through an Occidentalized view o
edge, perhaps De Quincey achieves something beyond a
his biases and predeterminations built in Kantian style thr
similarities and differences. His confessions force the
whether an alternative past could be reconstructed throug
ences, a past that is more realized and of a higher order th
provides.
Such a strategy would place gnoseology above epistemology, the
noumenal above the phenomenal. It would create a fuller connection to
the Malay through opium - not a hybridity but a transcendent connec-
tion - than with the ignorant English servant, or the merchant guardians of
his youth whose bourgeois horizons De Quincey despised. Homi K.
Bhabha's definition of hybridity, which indicates the interplay of cultural
influence necessarily in place when colonial operations disrupt cultural sys-
tems, applies particularly to discursive systems as instanced in the encounter
with the Malay, a representative De Quinceyan moment.13 The parlay be-
tween impasse and knowledge, silence and writing reveals hybridity as the
balancing act it is. De Quincey's transcendent bonding with the Orient,
occurring empirically through somatic changes introduced by opium and
transcendentally through his dreams, produces a knowledge reflected in the
discursive changes to his writing. Opium acts like a discursive agent in
its ability to facilitate or block his writing, but also to change its shape.
The rigorous logic he desires to produce, the epistemology he wants to re-
produce textually, transforms into structures that combine Western with
Gnostic organizational schémas, widely read as Gothic or Piranesi-like, but
13. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) for his dis-
cussion of hybridity as that which usefully challenges cultural constructions of identity.
304 ELIZABETH FAY
perhaps also influenced by t

ing, chinaware motifs, and
shifts into and recycles mock
the Malay's power to abso
changes direction as it attemp
lay's reaction, but such reacti
Malays, shifting perspective
appearance "amongst English
transaction "with" the Engl
Wordsworthian and Kantian sublimes to that of an Oriental sublime: the
Malay as uncanny other, magically transported to an English threshold. Yet
the Malay appears to be no mystic and the sublime gives way to sublima-
tion as "conjecture" yields to a mental power that De Quincey elsewhere
calls "the faculty of dreaming" ("Suspiria" 88).
The hybridity of that moment, which usefully exposed De Quincey to
himself, should not be undervalued, even though it is superseded by a
demonization of the Malay. If De Quincey's self-mockery foregrounds his
own colonial abuse and misreading of the other, preparing us for his trans-
ference of guilt onto the Malay, the incident's destabilizing effect is corre-
spondingly imaginatively powerful. The dark figure that in later opium
dreams draws De Quincey through the threshold into self-transport ("I
have been every night, through his means, transported into Asiatic scenes"
[Confessions 72]) also forces the moment of hallucinogesis, when hybridity
facilitates kinesthetic transcendence of cultural norms. The violence De
Quincey wrought on the Malay is returned as he guides De Quincey each
night for months to "Asiatic scenes," "oriental imagery," and "mythologi-
cal tortures" (72-73). But we do not move logically from the framing mo-
ment of transport to those scenes of divine persecution ("I fled from the
wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid
wait for me" and Isis and Osiris said "I had done a deed . . . that the ibis
and the crocodile trembled at" [73]). Instead we wander circuitously, re-
cursively, through the interconnections between daytime meditation on
the nature of cultural difference ("I have often thought that if I were com-
pelled to forgo England, and to live in China, and among Chinese manners
and modes of life and scenery, I should go mad"), universal history ("As the
cradle of the human race it [southern Asia] alone would have a dim and
reverential feeling connected with it"), anthropology (the "superstitions of
Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere" [72]), and the sheer weight of culture
("Man is a weed in these regions" [73]). Here the authoring moment in-
trudes and hybridity is momentarily rejected before De Quincey again en-
ters the dream narrative of hallucinogesis: "In China ... I am terrified by
the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence, and
want of sympathy, placed between us by feelings deepe

lyze." This particular dreamtext proves prescriptive: b
and "The English Mail-Coach" take up its structural cir
works transfer the guilt over the Malay's opium over
opium itself (the dark figure of the Malay becomes "the d
"Suspiria" [89]) or reworks that guilt from the alien ot
subject (De Quincey is responsible, somehow, for the m
and his family's crocodile reversions).
Having remembered his aversion to Oriental manner
am terrified"), De Quincey recounts the horrible dreams in
logical beings terrify him with their modes of life, mann
rence, and want of sympathy. The terrible weight of hist
him in these transcendent dreams in which he travels t
time to understand the archetypal nature of "feelings deep
lyze" that provoke both worship and sacrifice, gift and gu
whether composed of his nightmares of being a divine
Eastern idol or his perversion of that nightmare from the
Malay, would parallel the nightmare visions of Druidi
Wordsworth imagines at Stonehenge: "It is the sacrificial a
living men" (Salisbury Plain, 1793-94: lines 184-85). Aga
most direct reference is most unpoetic compared wit
dream: "I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centuries, a
in secret rooms; I was the idol, I was the priest; I was
sacrificed" (73). If Wordsworth's imagery of ritual sacr
Plain is frightening, De Quincey's scares himself.
In poetically envisioning his own sacrifice, De Quincey
real history of Wordsworth's reimagined scene, a history
and geologists were beginning to reconstruct and documen
ent form of Occidentalization. If the dreams were mere fa
represent cultural fantasy, but instead they touch on Jung
suggest a connection at a deeper, more powerful, and y
ative level. He will achieve the same effect in his introduction to the
"Suspiria" through recourse to Gothic novels when he suggests that the
terrors of medieval judgments, exploited so well in the paranoid world of
Gothicism, precisely parallel his pathological dreaming ("The case was be-
yond that" ["Suspiria" 91]). He explores it more thoroughly later in the
same text when he vivifies Gothic affect through the story of the German
phantom, "the apparition of the Brocken." Not having traveled to the
Brocken himself, he cites Coleridge's failed attempt to witness the phan-
tom, and then imagines the scene as if onsite himself: "Pick an anemone
14. See Charles J. Rzepka's Sacramental Commodities.
306 ELIZABETH FAY
. . . which once was called the

his horrid ritual of fear; carry
heathen altar" ("Suspiria" 15
ritual offering of the anemon
gone - the cruelty is gone
phantom ("Look, now! The a
it on an altar. . ."). But the p
the Malay, mocks De Quince
the ritual's curative effect. A
trol the dark other falls victi
ous rites" and sacrifice hang
As in the Confessions, know
tures, a fact that is unsettlin
controlling otherness whereas
verities of selfhood. The writ
then yield to hybridity's agen
ing of himself, a divulger of
the phantom is "the Dark In
(156).15 Importantly, the Mal
idol," opium, redounds on him
essary to transcendent halluc
of the palimpsest of turns an
rates fear, Oriental climes, Pa
hallucination, death, hauntin
and explained to us the chie
104), a fact he recounts in rel
ing in agonizing detail the
haunted ... I in spirit rose as
ever; and the billows seemed
before us and fled away conti
dread rattle ascends . . . and
coffin - the face are sealed
happen to himself in his Mala
into this account are recurren
subtextually to the grave of
sions that also appear repeated
beyond the hallucinogenic jou
ally fears no return.
15. Tilottama Rajan is behind much

See Dark Interpreter: The Discourse
Where De Quincey's poetic power connects past to pre

to experience in powerfully realistic terms, he struggles a
tions of his dreams, putting them down in the Confessions
haps madness, and something that revolts. His repulsion, a
hang on to the Western order of things that he equates w
and analytic philosophy is frustrated in all his prose works
think clearly, that is, to express his thoughts in episte
ways. Relying on labyrinthine structures metaphorically,
maze and Piranesi print recollection of the "Suspiria,"
structures into the organizational format of his works. The
that he realizes most fully in the "Suspiria" has been there
plicated in every instance by the connective networks, we
digressions of associative memory that thread their way t
of memory, hallucination, cultural fantasy, and dream. Th
Quincey fears are recorded formally in the crab-like sides
edge; the dark impasse prevents a forward march, but
about his circuitous progression cannot hide its revolut
deed, his logic may not be at fault; rather, it may be other
the mind-body as it is altered by Eastern medicine thr
question is whether the knowledge produced is truly bord
De Quincey's unacknowledged project disintegrates into
gia of cultural fantasy in which constructions of the othe
other. For, is the Malay merely a man in a turban spea
tongue, or is he "a sort of demon," as De Quincey's se
bodily text - and De Quincey's astonishment at the Mala
opium suggests he comes to consider the possibility.
The meeting of the Malay at his doorstep does not end w
disappear in the unknowability of his identity, his life
opium habits, but continues with a multiplication of Malay
Quincey's dreams, revealing that his self-assurances at this
to health through drug moderation are delusory (he will a
in the introduction to the "Suspiria," but the Confessions is
a knowledge of no return, a nostalgia that cannot be reme
at the door leads digressively yet inexorably in The Confe
doorstep account, both connected as ruminations on death:
it was a Sunday morning in May, that it was Easter Sunday
early in the morning. I was standing, as it seemed to me,
own cottage" (75). And yet, as the dream recalling Ca
worth's death and grave transforms into "an oriental one;
was Easter Sunday," we find hallucinogesis in moment
haunting of the Malay is put to rest as De Quincey's ga
308 ELIZABETH FAY
that of Judean palms under

(76). East and West unite in r
scene is always suspect: "Th
"Suspiria":
is a thousand times more int

tions a thousand times harsh
is felt ... by a young man
hood. One earliest instinct of
it could be revealed to itse
birth. . . . (161)
Projected from this passage

It does so in The English M
Quincey's pleasure in Miss
grandfather "too much res
becomes a guardian of the t
penultimate generation" (19
the Confessions, he also becom
liance with Miss Fanny, and t
brance. "In after years of
literalized as hybridity occur
ligator, is just as good for r
raohs," but even if the croc
. . . domineered over Egyp
mental celerity among crocod
awful comparative: he dream
in-hand from the box of the
Fanny awakens mythical beas
key to her sublimity. But t
hybridity as an agent against
and love " awaken [s] the path
that madden the grief that gn
creations of darkness that s
man" (199). Transcendence o
of dreaming, " in a paranoica
Yet, is this the transcendenc
return to the inner demon, t
his own" (Mail- Coach 201)? T
"How, again, if not one alien
are introduced within what
himself?" (201). As frighteni
they are perhaps the inculcat
hybridity, that not only permits but insists on intercultu

lytic commerce is effectively that of the exchange of self
tions, of sanctities when these might be parsed and recoun
understanding what has transacted. They "challenge th
cealment" so as to undermine cultural superiority, the inv
De Quincey keeps losing. Without secrets the self is v
otherly regard, the self is held up for observation, for a c
thropology that is drawn from "the kingdoms of anarc
(201) - not hell, for these are a plurality, but kingdoms of
otherness.
In thinking about man's otherness, De Quincey focuse
attention on another opium eater, Coleridge. Approachi
lytically, as a man much given to self-contradiction, De Qu
subject on his intellectual weaknesses: "Another instance of
aptitude for such studies as political economy is found in
gre and trite, that taxes can never injure public prospe
economy was not Coleridge's forte" ("Coleridge and
[Masson 5: 189]).16 De Quincey likewise derides Coleridg
ity, his command as a Grecian, his logic. What De Quinc
the great man instead is his "monomaniac [al] antipat
likings - equally monomaniac" (195). His enthusiasms ar
tention, if not regard, and they are the result of opium
ridge, we are well convinced, owed all these wandering
estimates of men - these diseased impulses, that, like th
lakes and fountains where in reality there were only arid
derangements worked by opium" (199). In not analy
Quincey is able to resist the moment of hybridity, but
nevertheless. To see what is not there is a form of hallucin
lation of what meets the eye into otherly knowledge w
evidence - as in Coleridge's reinterpretation of nobodie
ridge's "delirious wanderings" may instead be gnoseology,
be what drew De Quincey to Coleridge's own genius. Th
his discursive brilliance: "the great distinguishing principl
conversation . . . was the power of vast combination. He ga
cal concentration the largest body of objects, apparently d
any man ever yet, by any magic, could assemble, or, h
could manage" (204). Mocking such mental wanderings
gages in his own circuitous structure as he reviews Colerid
man, but he picks out precisely the principle behind h
16. The essay is a review of James Gillman's biography of Coleridge,
companion for Coleridge's final 19 years of life. De Quincey's essay
1845, revised in 1859.
310 ELIZABETH FAY
genie moments of transcen

hidden connection, layered m
Resistance recurs, of course,
stance, at the end of the Conf
tory reunion with the Orien
battle, suffering and crisis. Th
mie logical organization and ea
of a haunted imagination. In
centering tactics are called int
transcendence defers to guil
cottage, he himself is either s
addiction, completely displac
chance that he is still in a rogu
amelioration of cultures, bu
between-ness, as aporia.
In The Confessions1 s final dr
and of final hope for human
the climax unbearable - no Pr
parture, a "sigh . . . [from the
Eden is succeeded by hell, th
that isn't, the poetry that est
not wisdom, the inoculation t
not hold. Gnoseology proves t
Acculturation might streng
strength and knowledge syst
the mysterious handwriting
selves successively upon the p
leaves of aboriginal forests, or
all these can revive in strengt
145). The fear is that waking
of single-minded knowledge.
ing the hellish dream of the n
at last" (Confessions 76) dispen
the miracle of the palimpse
worthy of Hermes Trismegist
for so many centuries ("Cou
done more?" ["Suspiria" 141]
Confessions with Milton's lost
agony, a divisive epic altogeth
dom - "With dreadful faces
time the poetic authority is a
deferral to a greater compreh
But resolution is not opium's way: the story must be rep

back, its shifting place in the layers of memory text r
yzed. Even in non-autobiographical essays, such as the late
Days of Immanuel Kant" (1853), connections to earlier h
sistible.17 Kant's death, treasured by the German biogra
equally treasured by De Quincey, and the words De Qui
polate into his translation suggest a hallucinatory relation
losopher. Kant's body is "swathed like a mummy," recal
own nightmare of Egyptian burial; Kant's wine decante
are of particular concern for De Quincey who, one feels
and somatically present with the dying man.18 In the s
translates this account, he also publishes "Coleridge and
for like Kant, Coleridge is the prophetic philosophe
whom De Quincey imaginatively bonds and whose dream
semble his own. Kant is at a farther remove than Coleridg
De Quincey typically approaches him through translation r
itation. Yet his direct translation from the German account of Kant's
death - "His dreams become continually more appalling: single scenes, or
passages in these dreams, were sufficient to compose the whole course of
mighty tragedies, the impression from which was so profound as to stretch
far into his waking hours" (Masson 4: 359) - might accurately describe
De Quincey's own nightmares, suggesting perhaps why he was drawn
to this biographical text. As a form of sympathetic, gnostic knowing, De
Quincey's translation of Kant the man exceeds Gillman's translation of
Coleridge; the interpolations into the text create a hybrid identity, a eulogy
of both Kant and De Quincey himself created out of somatic factors such
as bodily misery, the ingestion of wine and opium, the embalming of
self. Here the Oriental effects of opium have regained De Quincey some
sense of belonging, of re-Occidentalization; oddly, mummification creates
a transcendent bond.
Embalming the body is the pharmacological opposite of an existential

disembodied experience. Encryption is the textual opposite of an epistem-
ological leap into comprehensible gnosis. Perhaps hybridity must hold
such opposites simultaneously rather than hold them in tension. What
De Quincey's hybridity might mean, as dislocating and disembodying as
it proves to be, is that in discovering how to medicate himself not by a
17. Ehregott Andreas Christoph Wasianski, Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren
(1804; Immanuel Kant, ein Lebens-bild, ed. Alfons Hoffmann [Halle: Peter, 1902]). De
Quincey's translation is in Masson 4: 328-79.
18. See Paul Youngquist's analysis of these textual moments in "De Quincey's Crazy
Body," PMLA 114 (1999): 346-58, and Charles Rzepka's comparison of Wasianski's and De
Quincey's texts in PMLA 115 (2000): 93-94.
312 ELIZABETH FAY
Western means but by what

Quincey realigns his mental
are as powerful in their disq
thoroughly inflected with cul
If Wordsworth's embedded
sonal nostalgia, he turns them
them through the authorit
dreamscapes are embalmed and
like Wordsworth's spots yearn
adopts a Wordsworthian admis
gained from such psychic vi
and its Easternness is frighten
but that De Quincey is never
keep the Malay at his cultural
and world view. Such failure
Eden, of a return to a pre-pal
tion with the lost thing.
University of Massachusetts B

Thomas Dequincey&#39;s Mind Trips

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Hallucinogesis: Thomas De Quincey's Mind Trips

Author(s): ELIZABETH FAY

DE QUINCEY'S ENTIRE OEUVRE IS PREMISED ON A CON

SiR, 49 (Summer 2010)

that helpfully locates the impasse at the heart of empire.

2. Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth- Century Gothic Fictions an

alized the Gothic (61). To un

eroglyphic knowledge so much as to ingest it, to know it t

vendons of another culture. Y

his hands, both an alien and incorporated entity that c

how "the cloud of profound

10. Confessions 511; this was Hazli

veneered with mahogany, by marine air ..." (Masson 3:

A possible cause for the mo

enees rose again after years of slumber, armed with prete

perhaps also influenced by t

want of sympathy, placed between us by feelings deepe

14. See Charles J. Rzepka's Sacramental Commodities.

. . . which once was called the

15. Tilottama Rajan is behind much

Where De Quincey's poetic power connects past to pre

that of Judean palms under

is a thousand times more int

Projected from this passage

hybridity, that not only permits but insists on intercultu

genie moments of transcen

But resolution is not opium's way: the story must be rep

Embalming the body is the pharmacological opposite of an existential

Western means but by what

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