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Fearful Spaces: Thomas De Quincey's Sino-Anginophobia

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Fearful Spaces: Thomas De Quincey's Sino-Anginophobia Fearful Spaces: Thomas De Quincey’s Sino-Anginophobia Markus Poetzsch Wilfrid Laurier University rom his 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater to his later politi- Fcal essays on the “China Question” dating from the 1840s and 1850s to his revised and expanded Confessions of 1856, the orientalist rhetoric of Thomas De Quincey reveals a persistent vacillation between virulent John Bullism and an anxious, indeed fearful, entrancement with the Orient and its powers of possession and imaginative expansion. John Barrell has argued that De Quincey’s writing seems “entirely divided” between these modes, which he glosses as “repudiation and identification” (155), yet I will suggest that the barrier of separation is rather more permeable. The Orient in its unfathomable otherness and intimate familiarity leaves De Quincey, in his own words, “loathing and fascinated” (Confessions 321, emphasis added). The apparent inseparability of these emotions is captured most vividly in his description of his oriental dreams, which, as he notes, “filled me always with such amazement at the monstrous scenery, that horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and left me, not so much in terror, as in hatred and abomination of what I saw” (Confessions 321). For De Quincey, the Orient, whether as inner or outer reality, is the ultimate complexio oppositorum; it elicits “astonishment” and “hatred” ESC 41.2–3 (June/September 2015): 27–41 simultaneously, one emotion relying on the other to give it shape. The Orient as concept thus appears to take upon itself, as its nature, these same bifurcations and paradoxes.¹ It is surprising therefore that modern criti- Markus Poetzsch is cism has tended to focus almost exclusively on the extreme manifestations Associate Professor of of De Quincey’s emotional responses—the bipolarities—rather than the English at Wilfrid Laurier fluxes and refluxes, the inherent interweaving or hybridity, of his oriental- University, specializing ist rhetoric. Like Barrell, for example, Charles Rzepka adroitly extracts in British Romantic “[t]he Tory jingoism, crude orientalism, and imperialist apologetics” from literature. He has written De Quincey’s political writings and sets them at a distance not only from extensively on aesthetics the narrative of opium addiction but also from “the portrait of the artist in the Romantic period commonly derived from his confessional works”—the portrait, that is, of and published “Visionary a “bullied and humiliated … child, [who] declares his sympathy with the Dreariness”: Readings pariahs and scapegoats of all lands” (38). What emerges thus is the image in Romanticism’s of a “divided” body of writing and of divisions rooted specifically in child- Quotidian Sublime hood trauma. As Barrell maintains, for De Quincey “the worst of oriental (Routledge 2006; reprint horrors can be represented only by being connected with … personal 2014). His current traumas” (149). More recent analyses of De Quincey’s oriental horrors research pursues various have tended to adopt Barrell’s psychoanalytic rhetoric and methodology, threads in ecocriticism, with the “traumatic bewilderment” (Faflak 183) of childhood becoming including animal studies, the predominant and often exclusive lens through which adult fear is read. the politics of eighteenth- Dianne Simmons, for example, sets out in The Narcissism of Empire to century landscape establish a “link between [De Quincey’s] childhood losses … his opium use, gardening, and the role of and … his project of demonstrating the sub-human nature of the Chinese” Romantic pedestrianism (29). Her conclusion, that De Quincey relives in his Opium War essays “the in shaping environmental fury of a child at the cold, withholding omnipotence of the parent” (43), consciousness. He is reiterates Rzepka’s account of the author’s “displaced Oedipal struggle” interested in how the (40). Even where the analytical focus ostensibly transcends the Freudian Romantics moved narrative of psychic trauma, as in Joel Black’s illuminating engagement through nature and with the geopolitics of nineteenth-century temperance movements, De how the nature of those Quincey’s “anti-Chinese animus” (159) is read as “a classic instance of movements affected their projection … screening [his] own masochistic abuse” (158). Such a conclu- relation to the world and sion—what Daniel Sanjiv Roberts characterizes as a worrying tendency to one another. in De Quincey studies to “read broader cultural phenomena as psycho- logical aberrations” (42)—in effect neutralizes the threat that the Orient, and specifically China, appears to pose for De Quincey by reinterpreting 1 The termcomplexio oppositorum, coined by Nicholas of Cusa, literally means the logic or, in some translations, the tension of opposites. Robert C. Greer de- fines the idea inMapping Postmodernism as “a reality that cannot be rationally conceptualized or articulated but can nevertheless be evidenced in the unending interaction of opposites” (235). 28 | Poetzsch and displacing it elsewhere. Fear becomes a neurotic, even pathological, response to unresolved psychic trauma; it serves no other purpose than to insulate the self by projecting its energies, what Freud characterizes as its “repressed instinctual impulses” (“Pleasure Principle” 14), onto others. Not surprisingly, the scholarly emphasis on a psychoanalytic or what one might call a clinical reading of De Quincean fear has led to a compara- tive disregard for the astonishment that accompanies horror. Yet according to De Quincey, these emotional poles are not merely counterbalanced but interconnected: horror, as he notes, is absorbed in astonishment. To put it another way, De Quincey’s oriental fears have an unmistakable aesthetic component. They recall in their “sense of eternity and infinity” (Confes- sions 321) that ennobling terror, that expansion of the imaginative faculty, which, according to eighteenth-century theorists like John Baillie and Edmund Burke, is distinctive of the sublime. For De Quincey, the Orient in its specific manifestation as China and as opium—unknowably other and intimately familiar—is “productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (Burke 36). The Orient accommodates horror and astonishment; it inflames hatred in De Quincey and induces fascination, indeed, even a prostration of the self. This latter reflux is indi- visible from the De Quincean experience of horror and it signals, more importantly, what Homi Bhabha characterizes as the “productive ambiva- lence of … colonial discourse” (67). In De Quincey’s case, ambivalence yields a multivalent construct of oriental otherness, one that comprehends both “desire and derision” (Bhabha 67), entrancement and repudiation. De Quincey’s orientalism is neither clear in its objectives nor confident in its power to bring the Orient under control; it vilifies but also cowers before the “felt reality” (Fanon 95) of oriental culture; in the binary of self and other, it occupies both positions, seeking to be possessed even as it endeavours to rule. For De Quincey as for Bhabha, “colonial power is anxious” (Huddart 6). Yet this anxiety, culminating in De Quincey’s ruminations on sublime terror, is also potentially productive. Indeed, by the very nature of its fluxes and refluxes, its unsettledness and irresolution, De Quincey’s work invites a non-clinical reading of fear, one that attends to the links between fear and what G. Stanley Hall in his 1897 “A Study of Fear” designates as our “strongest intellectual interests” (242). Hall’s pioneering work in this area, centred as it is on the idea that “[f]ear is … the chief spur of psychic evolution” (“Synthetic Genetic Study” 149), offers a counterpoint to the later Freudian emphasis on trauma and also accommodates a discussion of the sublime—“the most refined form of fear” (Hall 242)—so essential Fearful Spaces | 29 to De Quincey’s own reflections on his oriental dreams. “[F]ear,” as Hall observes, “has its fascinations” (“Synthetic Genetic Study” 153), and his work, accordingly, dwells on the objects of fear as well as on the responses This is space they elicit in order to chart “the evolution of the affective life” (“Synthetic Genetic Study” 153, 170). In De Quincey’s case, that “evolution,” at least as that we can it concerns his oriental rhetoric, is not reducible simply to a ratcheting up of imperialist xenophobia until it reaches, in Barrell’s words, a “danger- contain, ously apoplectic level” (156) with his 1857 writings on China. The political essays and, in particular, the expanded Confessions of 1856 offer refluxes encompass in of astonishment to their own expressions of horror, and they do so by foregrounding a paradoxical manifestation of oriental power as space. the mighty hand This is not the unfathomable and impenetrable space that stretches out in infinite dimensions and is associated with sublime terror; rather, this of imperialist space is what Burke, in an often-overlooked addendum to his discussion of vastness, relates to “the infinite divisibility of matter” (66). This is space expansion, but that we can contain, encompass in the mighty hand of imperialist expan- sion, but never in fact penetrate. To use the language of Gaston Bachelard, never in fact this is the space of “intimate immensity” (183).² Let me offer an example of the rhetoric of intimate immensity from De penetrate. Quincey’s 1840 essay “The Opium and China Question,” his response
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