The Somaesthetics of Thomas De Quincey's Psychogeography

Chapter 11 “Terrae Incognitae”: The Somaesthetics of Thomas De Quincey’s Psychogeography

Evy Varsamopoulou

…it is true that the calamities of my noviciate in London had struck root so deeply in my bodily constitution that afterwards they shot up and flourished afresh, and grew into a noxious umbrage that has overshad- owed and darkened my latter years […] Thus, however, with whatsoever alleviations, years that were far asunder were bound together by subtle links of suffering derived from a common root.1 ∵

1 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Somaesthetics

In this early passage from Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey uses the language of plants to express the profundity and fixedness of painful early experiences. They literally make the self their ground and coun- teract the centripetal forces of time and physical movement on individual identity. This “common root,” woven by “calamities,” that maintains cohesion and continuity has its seeds in his first experience of independence and of London. In this essay, I trace the ways in which the body, dreaming, drifting, and opium transform the cityscape in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. It is a Romantic autobiographical narrative that re- inscribes the modern, anti-Augustinian Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau for the English tradition. Like Rousseau, and contrary to Augustine, there is no spiritual conversion in these Confessions. More darkly than in Rousseau,

1 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 35. This text was first published in the September-October, 1821 edition of London Magazine.

250 Varsamopoulou here there is no deliverance from the “noxious umbrage” of early suffering, no thanks, in part, to the unbeatable habit of opium. Instead of deliverance from mundane sufferings through a conversion to truth and a new life, De Quincey enfolds his sufferings –bereavement, separation, hunger, opium nightmares – into a cherishing experimental discourse of self-exploration at the limits, in which truths lead to more truths, always tantalizingly beyond reach. The autobiographical exploration becomes itself an unbeatable habit, continuing into further formal experimentation in the unfinished sequel (perhaps because un- finishable), Suspiria de Profundis.2 Finally, by transposing the idyllic promise of nature into the hallucinatory power of the urban metropolis, De Quincey’s Confessions pushes both Rousseau and his beloved Wordsworth into a more recognizable metropolitan modernity. The unresolved conflicts of class and aspiration persist and mark his Confes- sions as a text riven by the contrary desires of its narrator/autobiographer. At the outset, De Quincey renounces Rousseau and Frenchified European autobiographical/confessional tendencies.3 However, the Confessions of an English Opium Eater not only continues in a Rousseauistic vein, made acceptable by the mediating figure of his idol, Wordsworth, but also can be seen to emulate the deep significance of wandering the countryside, drifting freely from one situation to another and rejecting any restrictions to freedom, especially free movement. These are only some of the features exhibited by De Quincey’s ret- rospective narration of the period spent in Wales and London. De Quincey’s Confessions, however, is at the same time anti-Romantic, and looks forward to modernism in the replacement of the idyllic countryside by the dark, chaotic, cold and dangerous allure of the cityscape of the great metropolis. Whereas Rousseau’s dream is of pastures and healthy living on a farm, De Quincey’s well-being is initially guaranteed only by wine, which he describes as a kind of prelude to his later addiction to opium. No “artificial paradise” of wine and opium however is romanticised because their consumption is clearly stated to be due to the contraction of his stomach through chronic hunger and the in- ability to hold down food as a result. Later on there is another kind of pain, the

2 Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 87–182. 3 The third sentence of the Confessions begins with the very long disclaimer (a sentence of just over eleven lines in the Oxford edition): “Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feel- ings, than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars […] for any such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation from those who can be supposed in sym- pathy with the decent and self-respecting part of society, we must look to French literature, or to that part of German, which is tainted with the spurious and defective sensibility of the French” (3).