Autobiography as "Involute": De Quincey on the Therapies of Memory

The Palimpsest as a Double Structure of Memory

“…It is in the reversing hinge of this double figuration, in the point that divides the palimpsest into its two competing readings, which creates one structure of memory in destroying another, that this paper situates itself, and that it places its readings of the two Thomases of Bog School fame . Both have been called ‘theoretical and practical autobiographer[s]’ (Shilstone , 20); both are writers of texts of memory that have been called victories as often as they have been branded ‘failure[s]’ (Perry , 809); and both have invited complex responses to their ‘fundamental dualism’ (Shilstone , 21): this paper is about that dualism.…”

“…Elizabeth's redoubled loss, first in death and then in forgetting, comes to figure the double impact of time, which is to sever the connections between people and, worse, the connections between memories. The loss also comes to figure the solution, however: embrace the ‘therapies of memory’ (Shilstone ); that is, simply remember Elizabeth, and counteract oblivion, and in counteracting oblivion, defeat even mortality itself. Elizabeth is edified as the essence of a metaphorically inclined reading and writing of memory; as a reparative ‘ nexus , some system of links, that we cannot perceive, extending from the new‐born infant to the superannuated dotard’ that makes man ‘ one ’ (De Quincey , 44).…”

“…This incident lays out a very different kind of circuitry in De Quincey from his established metaphorical circuit de sens . The structure of this alternative circuit represents the other side of the involute, which is a term that Shilstone has noted has two distinct meanings for De Quincey: one is a ‘logical’ and ‘sequential’ structure of associations familiar from his palimpsestuous exercises; the other is a more amorphous, material and ‘visual’ system (Shilstone , 23). The latter manifests as what Benjamin in his descriptions of historical materialism calls ‘Trümmer auf Trümmer’ (Benjamin , 132): in De Quincey's case, this moment appears as throngs upon throngs of faces that remain stubbornly unyielding to any form of unification.…”

“…It is tempting at this point to close proceedings; to say with Shilstone that De Quincey's and Carlyle's ‘thoughts on memory exhibit a fundamental dualism, a belief that recollections and the words that describe them are of (at least) two fundamental types’ (Shilstone , 21). It is certainly true that the palimpsestuous and the palimpsestic palimpsest represent polar extremes of Romantic thought on the structure of memory texts: the one is primary, literary, figurative and metaphorical; the other secondary, derived from critical self‐reflection, literal and material.…”

“… There have been some valuable if limited attempts to decode De Quincey's seemingly aberrant interest in economics, which he declared was the only thing that exercised his interest when he was at the very height of his depression (De Quincey , 63–65). The topic invites much closer study; for now, suffice to say that his biographers’ deafening silence on the question is immensely reductive, as is Shilstone's suggestion that ‘De Quincey turns to political economy to exercise the only faculties – the logical, sequential ones – that operate for him at the time’ (Shilstone , 30). What political economy delivers to De Quincey is a structure that he will come to call a vortex; a spiralling progression towards a point of absolute meaning, or of absolute materiality. …”