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Je est un autre: Memory, Self, and the Autobiographic Text Constance Chien Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in English April 2014 Contents Introductions 3 Distance/Artifice 16 Memory/Altered Substrate 31 Allegory/Floating Symbols 44 Conclusions 56 Bibliography 59 2 Introductions I began this project hoping to understand Julia Kristeva's concept of palimpsest in relation to two texts: the Confessions of Thomas De Quincey, and Les paradis artificiels of Charles Baudelaire. Through reading criticism that has emerged in conversation with these two texts, I discovered that the palimpsest is a fruitful metaphor for many literary operations, and has a wide range of applications. In the context of these works, it is a useful figuration for understanding the autobiography, the processes of memory, and the experiences of the self as fractured into the self and a literary self. In addition, it is impossible to read these works without attempting to understand the place of intoxication in these texts, and in this project, I will also compare the varying approaches to intoxication that these writers take, and how their relationships to intoxication reflect on their constructions of the autobiographical text. Echoing De Quincey's declaration at the beginning of his essay “The Palimpsest,” collected in Suspiria de Profundis, I will take this opportunity to describe the actual object of the palimpsest. A definition: "palimpsest" comes from Latin "palimpsestus," which is derived from Hellenistic Greek παλίμψηστος, a compound of πάλιν ("again") and ψάω ("I scrape"). The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word as "[a] parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing." The OED refers also to the use of the word as an adjective and verb, in which the word respectively describes such an overwritten manuscript or writing surface and also the process of overwriting an earlier text. 3 Palimpsesting was practiced in Roman wax-coated tablets, which could be smoothed out and reused. Later palimpsests were formed on parchments prepared from animal hides. Costly to produce, but more durable than paper or papyrus, these writing surfaces were scraped by knives or chemically effaced and overwritten, growing increasingly thin with accumulating surface scrapings and recycling. Traces of old writing could often be clearly visible; a single parchment potentially contained a multitude of successive layers of text. In the nineteenth-century, the innovation of chemical analysis of parchment palimpsests gave metaphorical weight to the object of the palimpsest. The palimpsest, in other words, became a figurative entity with reaches beyond its former status as quaint relic of another era. It gained such significance due to its metaphorical value because it had become an object that could never fully destroy its past histories; past writings could now be revealed through a chemical analysis. They could accumulate and become unified through the palimpsest; disparate though they may be from each other, chronological distinction among them was imperceptible. In a figurative sense, the palimpsest presents a vision of wholeness despite fragmentation—of the potential of literature, as Jacqueline McDonagh argues, to erase distinctions of time and place, and to "revive a lost, idealized past," a Romantic aspiration manifest in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and longed for in an increasingly industrialized society that, according to the Romantic vision of Wordsworth, held to a nostalgic vision of ownership and tradition in a regression to nature1. In a slight variant, in another light, one could understand the writing on the very top of the surface—the most recent writing on the palimpsest—as a text that is 1 McDonagh, 31. 4 inevitably "contaminated," so to speak, by the writings of the past. The project of interpreting a text becomes a matter of navigating a kind of intertextual framework. The reader here has before her a multiplicity of interpretative systems and possibilities of meanings. This vision of the palimpsest emphasizes that the essential quality of a text is that it has entire histories behind it; all text, as Kristeva formulates it, is intertext. Understanding the text according to this intertextual framework requires the reader to approach the text and to see behind it a multitude of effaced texts. The palimpsest provides a model of the text as part of a network of many other texts, disparate though they may be. Interpreting a text becomes a matter of navigating these complex webs of meaning. Thomas De Quincey's reference to the palimpsest in his 1845 essay "The Palimpsest," collected among other pieces in Suspiria de Profundis, is one of the earliest notable figurative uses of the palimpsest2, and in the essay he compares the paleographic object of the palimpsest to the individual consciousness as processed by the human brain. Describing the rising and falling of various empires in the course of history's passing, he insists upon the persistence of the parchment palimpsest as a kind of constant substrate throughout such vast passage in time. He describes the layers of text a single hypothetical palimpsest might collect over many centuries. A great variety of dissimilar texts from widely different cultures might collect on a single parchment. Compunctions of style and religious order might cause one to overwrite an original text 2 Preceding De Quincey's figurative use are Coleridge's “palimpsest tablet of my memory” in the poem “The Wanderings of Cain,” and the classical metaphors of palimpsests used by Cicero and Catullus. However, these images refer explicitly to the waxen tablets of the classical era, rather than to the nineteenth-century innovation of chemical analysis on animal hide parchments—a slightly different figuration of the palimpsest. Thomas Reisner argues in “De Quincey's Palimpsest Reconsidered” (Modern Language Studies, 12.2 (1982)) that no one, however, can truly claim first figurative use of the palimpsest. 5 of Grecian tragedy, which would be proclaimed "heathen's tragedy" by the monks and subsequently erased and overwritten with monastic legend. The parchment might then be overwritten once more by knightly romance due to changes in taste and style invoked by history (SP 148). Despite the disparate nature of all these texts, they in fact combine into one document; one cannot view a single text without also seeing the past traces of others, as they never are fully effaced. The mind, De Quincey writes, is but a palimpsest of the human brain where "[e]verlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen…softly as light" (SP 150). Though it seems that the impression of the newest layer has obliterated the past, past texts are in fact never fully "extinguished." Likewise, the varied events of one's life contribute to the unity of the whole, coming together and harmonizing always despite the individual, isolated nature of distinct occurrences and events in one's life. The Grecian tragedy, the monastic legend, and the knightly romance are never fully eliminated by the passage of history and repeated attempts at erasure from the parchment, even though it may seem at the time to be so fully overwritten by the new text. Such is the case with the human mind, as De Quincey wistfully writes on the passing events that imbue a life with meaning and that may haunt a person in the deep recesses of her consciousness many decades after the fact. In this manner, he describes in Suspiria de Profundis the poignant realization he has at an early age that humans have the capacity for cruelty, a realization that continues to affect him into his adult life, though perhaps not as directly as it had at the time, but in ways that always shape his present moment. The incident that so affects him is when he overhears an account of how a maid had mistreated his sister in the days before she 6 died, perhaps contributing to her poor state. He describes how it changed the essential quality of himself, and how he would never truly forget this incident though it was a “whisper” at the time, and perhaps an exaggerated account of what had truly happened. But De Quincey writes that smaller, seemingly more insignificant incidents have more greatly affected people's lives. He describes a mother who tapped the sole of her son's foot slightly more harshly than usual, and how her son had died soon thereafter. She held the vision of her perceived cruelty for years after the fact, and on her death, it continued to affect her. Likewise, De Quincey writes of continually remembering a vision of a prostitute named Ann he had befriended during his time living on the streets of London, and how he continues to think of her in his opium-induced dreams and in reminiscence, despite the many years that have passed, and the brevity of their acquaintance. These figurations of memory form the kind of vision of a human life with which De Quincey concerns himself, and it is a vision that is essentially based in the conception of the multilayered palimpsest. Dreams and Opium The palimpsest challenges the primacy of linearity in a model of writing an autobiographical account of one's life, a model that resembles De Quincey's description, in the introduction to Suspiria de Profundis, of the faculty of dreaming as running against the strict linearity of waking life. He emphasizes the necessity of dreams and their grand potentiality—the ability to dream, in combination with the corporeal being, "forces the infinite into the chambers of a human brain, and throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirror of the sleeping mind" (SP 90).

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