Serpentine Sighs: De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis and the Serpentine Line

MIRANDA STANYON Serpentine Sighs: De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis and the Serpentine Line i. Here pause, reader! Imagine yourself seated in some cloud-scaling swing, oscillating under the impulse of lunatic hands; for the strength of lunacy may belong to human dreams, the fearful caprice of lunacy, and the malice of lunacy, whilst the victim of those dreams may be all the more certainly removed from lunacy; even as a bridge gathers co­ hesion and strength from the increasing resistance into which it is forced by increasing pressure. Seated in such a swing, fast as you reach the lowest point of depression, may you rely on racing up to a starry altitude of corresponding ascent. Ups and downs you will see, heights and depths, in our fiery course together, such as will sometimes tempt you to look shyly and suspiciously at me, your guide, and the ruler of the oscillations.1 S uspiria de profundis (1845) exemplifies the waving, even writhing, path of Thomas De Quincey’s autobiographical project. Here, at the turning point between “the lowest depth of [his] nursery afflictions” and his first exalting opium dreams, the reader is exhorted to pause. Mimicking the maneuvers of relevant digressions in classical forensic oratory, the ora­ tor steps aside from his path to solicit sympathy for his wayward client, the autobiographical text.2 Presented as a kind of temporal stepping-back from 1. Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, general ed. Grevel Lindop, Vol. 15, Articlesfrom Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Tait’s Edin­ burgh Magazine, 1844—6, ed. Frederick Burwick (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 169. Suspiria hereafter cited in the text by volume and page. All other works by De Quincey hereafter cited in the text as Works. 2. There is extensive literature on De Quincey and digression. See especially Alina Clej, A Genealogy ofthe Modem Self(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 22, 35, 65—68, 108, 202, 227—28; Joel Black, “Confession, Digression, Gravitation: Thomas De Quincey’s Ger­ man Connection,” in Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder SiR, 53 (Spring 2014) 31 32 MIRANDA STANYON the Confessions (1821), to narrate the childhood afflictions preceding the Opium-Eater’s career and acting as opium’s “coefficient” (15:169), Suspiria digresses ever further from chronological autobiography through a series of visionary vignettes and reflections on time, memory, dreams, grief, and in­ terpretation. Suspiria, in its defense, “had meant” to be an “arch,” “balancing]” a “sweep downwards” with a “corresponding ascent.” This well-engineered stability is “lost,” spoiled by contingent, external “accidents of the press.” Yet the rhetoric of stability is, of course, already undermined by the meta­ phor of the “cloud-scaling swing”: Suspiria is no static house of fiction, but something irregularly and continually “oscillating.” No single moment conveys its “balance”; “cohesion,” if it exists, inheres in opposing move­ ments. These movements, moreover, are not necessarily balanced: the “whole arch of ascending visions” on which De Quincey “had meant to launch” us is replaced by an improvised stopgap: a too short, too steep “peroration” about ascent (15:169). There seems nothing “reliable]” about our path or our destination. Even pausing might simply be a variety of the text’s erratic movement. De Quincey’s readers can accept his claims to balance and cohesion, or examine cracks in the bridge that point to underlying instability, fragmen­ tation, and incoherence. Each pole of interpretation marks one side of a swinging pendulum that, if brought to rest at its moderate center, would fail to describe his texts. “[A]ccidents” or “plan”; “victim” or “ruler”—the “cloud-scaling swing” includes them all, not exactly by reconciling chance and necessity, heteronomy and autonomy, but through the very movement of oscillation. A particular formula expresses the balanced form of such os­ cillation: plot the arc of a swing over time, and a sine curve appears. Twist the double curve through space, and you have something like what Wil­ liam Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753) called the “serpentine line.”3 This article offers the first examination ofDe Quincey’s serpentine lines, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 308-38; Joel Black, “The Second...