Writings on the mind: Thomas De quincey and the importance of the palimpsest in nineteenth century thought

The Palimpsest as a Double Structure of Memory

“…The palimpsest is a trope for memory and absolute origins; for its own origins, it invokes the name of Thomas De Quincey. It is not absolutely correct in doing so, however: another Thomas, Thomas Carlyle, holds a clear lead over his contemporary and long‐time literary partner in arms in his 1830 essay ‘On history’ (McDonagh ; Gosta ); as does Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1828; as do Shelley, Plutarch and a whole array of others (Reisner , 93). Although Dillon does footnote some of these sources in an article (Dillon , 260), she forbears to antedate the alleged discovery of the metaphor, and indeed all but erases them from her later book.…”

“…Palimpsests, after all, do not actually arrive in neat layers that can be peeled down to their ever delayed core like the skins of an onion: they are by definition a single surface inhabited by multiple dissociated discourses, each of which is its own irreducible moment. They provide no more than an ‘illusion of depth’; they ‘feign a sense of depth while always in fact operating on the surface level’ (McDonagh , 211).…”

“… Reisner , McDonagh and, in spite of his outspoken criticism, Maniquis and 2011 all describe exceedingly similar trajectories: the logic of their chosen master trope easily reflects on itself and compels them to determine its own origins; when they find that these origins are streaked through with increasingly uncertain influences and when they find that they may very well be lost to history, they promptly declare the entire enterprise insignificant to the palimpsest's ‘persistent figurative power’ (Dillon , 260) and instead study the afterlife of De Quincey's purported invention. One may doubt the value of etymological quibbling, but not to a term that is itself so very invested in the possibilities of memory. …”

Acoustic Palimpsests and the Politics of Listening

“…4 In a section of De Quincey's autobiography (Suspiria de Profundis, 1845) titled "The Palimpsest," the author metaphorically links the reinscribed parchment with human cognition, memory, and history-and this eighty years before Freud's "mystic writing pad" (see the next footnote)! As Josephine McDonagh (1987) writes of De Quincey's text,…”

“…De Quincey asks, linking historical and psychological models (208). 5 Freud's brief and idiosyncratic "Notes on the Mystic Writing Pad" does not deal with palimpsests per se; nonetheless, it is regularly, almost ritualistically, cited in literature that explores the palimpsest's metaphorical significance (see for example McDonagh 1987;Dillon 2005 andElsaesser 2009;Derrida and Mehlman 1972). In this essay, Freud proposed that the human perceptual apparatus functions roughly like the "mystic writing pad," a child's toy tablet with a celluloid cover, upon which one can create text or images with a stylus.…”