SOURCE: Wallen, Martin. “Body Linguistics in Schreber's Memoirs and De Quincey's Confessions.” Mosaic 24 (spring 1991): 93-108.

[In the following essay, Wallen discusses Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater as “straightforward and careful descriptions of real experiences.”]

Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs was written by a man confined for three years to a padded cell, and Thomas De Quincey's Confessions by an opium addict. Neither text comfortably belongs in the literary category into which it has been fitted; as a result, instead of being regarded as authentic accounts of genuine personal experience, Memoirs is seen as a document of psychosis and De Quincey's Confessions is seen as the product of drug-induced delirium. Thus when Margaret Ganz compares the Memoirs to the autobiographies of Wordsworth, Carlyle and Mill, she concludes that whereas these British writers' “consciousness of reality harnesses imagination and intellect sufficiently to guarantee an authentic experience. … Schreber's solipsistic presentation baffles reason and forbids imagination” (44, 49). Likewise, Robert L. Platzner argues that “De Quincey … simply fails to crystallize that image of a creative and reflective self which is the primary desideratum of literary autobiography” (605).

Yet it could be argued that the authenticity of Schreber's Memoirs and De Quincey's Confessions lies precisely in each author's refusal to excuse his particularly individual understanding of his experience or of his world in order to accommodate the dominant discourse. Accordingly, we may begin to see that the value of these texts lies in the way they manage to bring to the surface what would be obscured in more sublimated discourse. To the very extent that Schreber's Memoirs and De Quincey's texts appear to be aberrations or mere curiosities they serve to highlight the repressive nature of our mainstream cultural discourse. If we attempt to put aside our bias that the Memoirs and the Confessions present only distorted and diseased views of reality, we may be able to see these texts as straightforward and careful descriptions of real experiences.

Both works reflect an organization of the world based on individual experience and in both we find an account of the subject founding itself on a conceptualization of its body which it then metaphorizes into an expansive incorporation of the body politic and of the cosmos. What is starkly apparent in these texts, a memoir and a confession, is no less evident, albeit less openly, in all linguistic organizations of the world. Whether we treat such accounts as literary or delusional depends on our response to their individuality. The research of Nancy Andreasen and Pauline Powers into the relation between psychosis and creativity (especially among Romantic and Confessional poets) shows that an extremely individual experience can give rise either to poetic imagination or to psychotic delusions (73). We generally locate a work in one of these two categories on the basis of the degree of individuality it manifests: on the one hand, we want a work to show some individuality, since, as Andreasen contends, we are unwilling “to separate a writer's life from his art” (36). On the other hand, we reject extreme individuality as aberrant and uncontrolled. The relation of human experience to language has long been fundamental to Western belief, from Socrates's comment in Phaedrus, that the “divisions and collections” of discourse give him “the power to speak and to think” (266b) through Martin Heidegger's definition of Dasein as “that living thing whose Being is essentially determined by the potential for discourse” (47).

My purpose in this essay, therefore, is to suggest that extremely individualistic texts like Schreber's and De Quincey's lay bare the extent to which discourse does determine one's being, while they question the divisions imposed by the mainstream. After first exploring Schreber's narrative not as a pathology but as an attempt to establish a cosmogony through his body, I will then move to De Quincey's Confessions and his essay on “The English Mail Coach” in order to show how his particular efforts at expanding his body through metaphor function in much the same way as Schreber's.

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Schreber's aim, he says in his “Open Letter to Professor Flechsig,” “is solely to further knowledge of truth in a vital field, that of religion” (33), and he feels that his memoirs “will one day become an important source of information about the structure of an entirely new religious system” (155n). Freud describes Schreber's religious aims thus: “[Schreber] believed that he was dead and decomposing, that he was suffering from the plague; he asserted that his body was being handled in all kinds of revolting ways; and, as he himself declares to this day, he went through worse horrors than any one could have imagined, and all on behalf of a holy purpose. … His delusional ideas gradually assumed a mystical and religious character; he was in direct communication with God” (13-14). Freud stresses throughout his reading that the origins of Schreber's illness are sexual. “The roots of every nervous and mental disorder are chiefly to be found in the patient's sexual life” (30); the cause of Schreber's illness “was an outburst of homosexual libido” (43). What is significant for my purposes is the connection Schreber sees between body and religion; he holds “direct communication with God” through his body, and this in fact is the reason that his body is put through such tortures. The “most gruesome time” of his life, Schreber tells us, “was also the holy time” (79). It is holy because it is the time when Schreber's body constituted the entire cosmos, serving as the battleground for the two warring aspects of God.

Schreber comes to embody the cosmos because of the attraction he holds to the departed souls which constitute God's nerves, or the fibrous rays emanating outward from him. Schreber's inordinate attractiveness is due to the nervousness which arose from Flechsig's early attempt to take over his soul in order to gain power—the process of “soul murder” (51). His nervousness threatens the order of the world as the rays of the departed souls become increasingly attracted to Schreber. When the rays approach him, they give their nerves over to his body (83). The vast number of souls accumulating in him leads to “a shimmer of light” around his head, “like the halo of Christ is pictured, but incomparably richer and brighter, the so-called ‘crown of rays’” (88). The radiance signifies his “voluptuousness,” which runs counter to the usual order of the world, since such expansiveness is usually experienced by someone only after death.

At all times God maintains immediate contact with Schreber's nerves, either in his capacity as the lower God, Ahriman, or the upper God, Ormuzd. “God is inseparably tied to my person through my nerves' power of attraction … there is no possibility of God freeing Himself” (209). Whenever Schreber stops talking, however, God is tempted to withdraw, since at those times “soul-voluptuousness is not met with in my body” (165n). In this way Schreber is made to talk (or to gaze on a female) continually to provide the soul-voluptuousness necessary to keep God close.

Schreber's key discovery is the Nerve-language by which God maintains direct contact with him. This language has its basis in the rays which connect him not only with God but with distant stars and the angels and all the birds and insects. In turn the rays originate as nerves, since “the human soul is contained in the nerves of the body” (45), and “God … is only nerve, not body, and akin therefore to the human soul. But unlike the human body, where nerves are present only in limited numbers, the nerves of God are infinite and eternal. … They have in particular the faculty of transforming themselves into all things of the created world; in this capacity they are called rays; and herein lies the essence of divine creation” (46). By confining God to the nerves, Schreber does not remove him from the body; on the contrary, he effectively expands the body to contain God all the more fully through language.

Schreber's body is his religion, but it is not, as Freud claims, because his body threatens him in its potential homosexuality. Rather, it is that his body has expanded outward to incorporate everything. As Lucy Bregman contends, “psychoanalysts and psychiatrists have translated the language of God in the Memoirs into language of father and Oedipus complex,” and “assume that the ‘religious’ language is a code that conceals something more basic and authentic” (119-20). Indeed, even commentators like Antonio Quinet who only indirectly follow Freud confine themselves to reading the Memoirs as a complete departure from reality (40). I, however, shall take Schreber at his word that he is recounting actual events.

Schreber's body is his religion, and is the reason for his religious conversion, since he comes to see that “everything that happens is in reference to me” (197). He explains that “since God entered into nerve-contact with me exclusively, I became in a way for God the only human being, or simply the human being around whom everything turns, to whom everything that happens must be related and who therefore, from his own point of view, must also relate all things to himself” (197). Schreber's body becomes the universe, as the rays caught up in the attractiveness of his nerves are literally tied to distant stars (through the process called “tying-to-celestial-bodies”) in order to prevent the dissolution of the universe (118). God, who is himself only nerve, is in full and direct contact with Schreber because of his cosmic expansion and his irresistible attractiveness brought on through increased nervousness (83). When the wind rises, it is due to God's attempt to move from Schreber (166). A change in Schreber's bodily condition results in an essential change “in celestial conditions” (149).

The complete physical presence to which Schreber has brought God bypasses the mediational problem of transcendental theories. “In fact,” Schreber says, “since the dawn of the world there can hardly have been a case like mine, in which a human being entered into continual contact … not only with individual departed souls but with the totality of all souls and with God's omnipotence itself” (88-89). Schreber's knowledge of God does not depend on imagination or logical deduction, but, in Bregman's words, on the “erotic, ecological harmony” (133) of “nerve-contact.”

As Schreber's primacy within the universe increases, it becomes imperative that he be transformed into a woman. Women's bodies commonly hold large bundles of nerves in the state of voluptuousness, while men's commonly hold only small quantities of such nerves. Because Schreber already holds a great number of voluptuous nerves in his body due to his increased nervousness, he proves extremely attractive to the rays, despite the fact that he is a man. Were he already a woman his attractiveness would present no disturbance. The problem appears to be that he is both man and woman simultaneously, threatening the order of gender. His transmutation into a woman, “Miss Schreber” (as he anglicizes himself), is nothing more than the extreme expansion of his body into its generic opposite. He begins to recognize that “beyond doubt … the Order of the World imperiously demanded [his] unmanning” (148).

Schreber explains why his transmutation into a woman holds such cosmic necessity: “I believe that God would never attempt to withdraw (which always impairs my bodily well-being considerably) but would follow my attraction without resistance permanently and uninterruptedly, if only I could always be playing the woman's part in sexual embrace with myself, always rest my gaze on female beings, always look at female pictures, etc.” (210). If he could maintain a sexual embrace with himself, he would have expanded so completely as to become both himself and his complete other. Because of his central position in the universe, because he in effect has become the universe, he necessarily embodies all things, even his opposite. More simply stated, he must embody his opposite, “man and woman in one person,” in order to maintain the unity of the cosmos which is himself (208). As long as God is fully and constantly present, Schreber himself can claim his own immediacy to everything, including his feminine counterpart. His expanding body literally tropes itself by turning into his other. Despite the fact that he avoids imaginative or rationalist mediations in his bringing to presence of God, he does make use of this crucial trope. More accurately, he undergoes this trope, for he is physically, and immediately, made into metaphor, having all his thoughts written down by the rays transforming themselves from his nerves into everything (122). To Schreber, his body does not signify something other and beyond itself, God or Miss Schreber, but turns itself into these others even while remaining itself.

This self-metaphorizing is what compels Schreber to think of himself as the founder of a new religion, since he does not merely represent a possibility of transcendence but sensually embodies it. His body, as Nerve-language, projects itself infinitely to incorporate everything, including his womanly opposite. He radiates throughout the cosmos linguistically and bodily at once, since language is his body, “the so-called ‘crown of rays.’”

We should also note that Schreber identifies his female identity, Miss Schreber, in English rather than German or the archaic abbreviated German of the Nerve-language. To find himself with God, and to serve as the locus for the reconciliation between the warring aspects of God, Schreber must first conceive of himself as the union of opposites. In this same way, then, Miss Schreber represents not merely the crossing of gender lines, but of linguistic lines as well. His body discourse, the Nerve-language, tropes body into language, language into what is most distant, the stars, God, woman, and incorporates what exceeds his language, German, by naming him as his female other in English, the linguistic other of his native tongue.

As Allen Weiss points out, language supports transcendence (72), and the linguistic element which specifically achieves the transcendental gesture is metaphor. Schreber's particular fusion of body and language changes metaphor from the medium through which a present body is projected, into the event of expanding the body itself. Rather than depending on the non-corporeal languages of reason or imagination to transcend the present, Schreber radiates linguistically in the immediate corporeal present. The languages he turns away from achieve their projection through symbols which point beyond themselves. For Schreber, his religious body need not rely on such devices, for through its nerves it reaches further than symbols can point. In this way Schreber insists that he is not driven by “sexual desires towards other human beings (females) least of all sexual intercourse” (208). Schreber does not desire his other, he becomes her. Anthony Wilden supports this point in his critique of psychoanalytic readings. Rejecting Freud's “homosexual aetiology of paranoia” (290), he argues that for Schreber “female” is not opposed to “male”: “The total eroticism or blessedness which Schreber seeks has therefore to be defined as a Symbolic and differential union of the Manicheistic oppositions of male and female, mind and body, soul and body, which he sees all around him” (298).

Lacan's interest in Schreber focuses precisely on this metaphorical aspect. According to Lacan, Schreber never successfully submitted to the law of the father, which works as the symbolic replacement of the child's desire for the mother, because a gap developed in the symbolic law preventing affirmation of the father's sexual identity (Ecrits 200-01). The fantasies of Schreber's later life attempt to fill this gap left from his childhood: since he could not be the phallus his mother lacked, through a simple reversal he became the woman men lacked (Ecrits 207). The encounter with Flechsig, during his early bout with hypochondria, recalled the unresolved relation to the father. Ultimately, by linking the supposed genealogies of the Flechsig family with his own (playing on the name of God common to both ancestries—Gottlob and Theodor), Schreber managed to establish God as the replacement for the missing father. By the reversal of replacing the missing phallus with the missing vagina, Schreber became God's bride.

Entry into the law of the father effects an identity for the individual in the father's discourse, but at the cost of imprisoning the individual. By extending himself into his opposite, by reconciling the two Gods, Schreber manages to restore the order disrupted by Flechsig's attempted soul-murder. He effectively becomes holy as the result of his long suffering, but he must also endure the endless chatter of the rays and numerous physical torments like sciatica, paralysis and the headaches “caused by the attempt of rays, tied-to-celestial-bodies, to withdraw from me” (201). Any effort within the universe to end the discourse of his body directly inflicts the pain of punishment. The torture imposed upon the subject prevents his rebellion against the discourse, and legitimates the discourse into the dominant law. Schreber's holy suffering allows the order of the world to be restored. The order can take charge, limiting its subjects to identities determined within the discourse.

Schreber is bodily enslaved by the Nerve-language: the order of the world has been disrupted and rearranged because of the constant abuse leveled at him by the rays. The rays molest him “all day long with unconnected phrases” (175n). The process called “not-finishing-a-sentence” is used to compel his mind into the inescapable impulse to think (173-74). He describes the impulse thus: “what I directly feel is that the talking voices (lately in particular the voices of the talking birds) as inner voices move like long threads into my head and there cause a painful feeling of tension through the poison of corpses which they deposit” (174). Hence, he explains, the rays infringe enormously on his “most primitive rights,” namely, “of being master in my own head against the intrusion of strangers.” They try to provoke him into talking aloud “with the question: ‘why do you not say it?’ or by means of insulting phrases” (175n). The freedom on which the rays infringe is that of thinking nothing. In other words, he has lost the freedom from language. His entire existence depends on language just as much as it does on his body. In fact his existence is nothing more than the language of his body.

Schreber is also enslaved by the readings of his Memoirs that must categorize it to maintain their own rationality. As Lacan says of Freud's “deciphering” of the unconsciousness, “he assumed the position of mastery in all its eminence” (Speech 5). Karen Bryce Funt extends Lacan's critique of mastery even further. She argues that the result of the attention paid to them by Freud and Lacan is that his Memoirs are no longer “read in themselves; they are now only one component in the series which provides a means of articulating theoretical difference” (113). Psychoanalysis has itself become the institution torturing the Memoirs for its confession. As we impose our mastery on such texts as Schreber's, we enslave them to our valuations, making them into “fleeting improvised” texts. We become more concerned with preserving and extending our own rationalism than with admitting the legitimacy of counter-structures in any way but under the category of madness.

Imprisonment does afford Schreber an identity, but of a problematic sort. The expansion of Schreber into Miss Schreber forces us to recognize the boundary of our own dichotomous discourse. Jean-Francois Lyotard points out that in libidinal discourse there is only “immensity, absence of measure” (146). The nature of such libidinal discourse is that it does not support “character,” which depends on such boundaries as those between man and woman, inside and outside.

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The enslavement to a discourse which imposes its distinctions of character can also be found in the texts of De Quincey, and here the analogy De Quincey uses to contrast Coleridge's addiction with his own provides an instructive point of departure: “A slave he was to this potent drug not less abject than Caliban to Prospero—his detested and yet despotic master. Like Caliban he frets his very heart-strings against the rivets of his chain” (144).¹ Prospero's power consists largely in the ability to determine what will be perceived as reality by such characters as Ferdinand and Alonso; Caliban's powerlessness derives from his inability to avoid speaking:

                                                                                                              His spirits hear me,
And yet I needs must curse. But they'll nor pinch,
Fright me with urchin-shows, pitch me i' th' mire,
Nor lead me, like a firebrand, in the dark
Out of my way, unless he bid 'em.

(II.ii.3-7)

What allows Prospero to overhear and control Caliban is that he has taught the monster language:

                                                                                                                                                      I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known.

(I.ii.352-58)

Caliban responds appropriately: “You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language” (I.ii.363-65). Because Prospero taught him language, Caliban curses aloud and within the hearing of Prospero or Ariel. Thus what enslaves Caliban to Prospero is language which Caliban can no longer avoid, however much he curses it or wishes himself free of it. Once having learned to speak, Caliban understands, he can never again be without speech.

The significance of De Quincey's allusion comes out in part at the end of “The Pleasures of Opium,” when he exclaims, “eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath” (83). Opium, we might infer, is eloquence, to which the addict is enslaved in the same manner as Caliban to Prospero. We could even go a step further with De Quincey's statement that “not the opium-eater, but the opium is the true hero of the tale” (114). De Quincey subjugates himself completely to opium, and effectively assigns opium the role of the speaking subject of the confession.

Apart from his dubious and oft repeated excuses, such as his ruined stomach damaged from years of starvation, De Quincey's accounts of how he came to his addiction create a character who acts out the inherent necessity of its being. He states toward the beginning of “The Pains of Opium,” “This then, let me repeat, I postulate—that, at the time I began to take opium daily, I could not have done otherwise” (87). And then a paragraph later: “from this date, the reader is to consider me as a regular and confirmed opium-eater, of whom to ask whether on any particular day he had or had not taken opium, would be to ask whether his lungs had performed respiration, or the heart fulfilled its functions.—You understand now, reader, what I am” (88).

Again, we find the crucial reference to the body, a rhetorical move to found the continuing discourse in physical necessity. Opium eating and opium speaking are activities inherent to De Quincey's body, without which it cannot possibly survive, just as Caliban and Schreber can no longer exist non-linguistically. Each is necessary to the other, and has always been through the other; to rid the opium-eater of his addiction would be to rid him of his body. For De Quincey, however, opium does not determine merely the physical half of a dichotomized existence, but is the base of his whole being, not only the primordial foundation to any subsequent dichotomy but both terms of the dichotomy: “You understand now, reader, what I am.” His body and the eloquent opium are identical. In precisely this same way, Schreber explains that the law of nerves is “expressed in the phrase ‘do not forget the rays must speak’, and this was spoken into [his] nerves innumerable times, particularly early on” (121). For both De Quincey and Schreber language is corporeal.

First identifying eloquence with opium, then his body with opium, De Quincey then makes the third crucial identification with opium when he turns to the accounts of his dreams. These accounts are purportedly his main preoccupation here and in other texts such as “The English Mail Coach” and Suspiria de Profundis. The Confessions works in one way to show how De Quincey came to take opium, which then led him to dream of images and events apparently taken haphazardly from various times of his life. The present and the past fuse together for the opium-eater, so that his entire existence takes on the sense of dream. Thus he tells us, “Sometimes I speak in the present, sometimes in the past tense” (97). He has been determined completely by his addictive body, “under the Circean spells of opium,” which have cast him “in a dormant state” (101). The dreamer is the body rather than a non-corporeal conceptualized subject.

The non-opium world is temporal, the opium world is atemporal. The non-opium subjectivity functions through its individual will to achieve its aims. The opium-eater functions according to the drive of opium: he is without “the natural or chronological order” (97), and his will cannot be distinguished from the opium. Robert Maniquis shows that for the opium-eater, the “past and the future are combined into that eternal now.” I would dispute, however, Maniquis's more fundamental concern that the fusion of temporal states occurs only in service to “historical purpose,” to the individual serving “the central will” (68). As we have seen, for the opium-eater, the only will is that of opium, which cannot be externalized from the one who eats it: opium is De Quincey's being, his will, his history.

Opium's eloquence is dreams, and opium follows its own logic, just as dreams do. “The power of dreams” reconciles “into harmony” the disparate forms and the distant times (111). De Quincey's body, as the narrative of opium-dream, follows its own architectonics. The dream expands by bringing the most disparate objects possible into a syntactic conjunction, periphrastically encompassing vast spaces, and managing to suggest ever vaster ones. De Quincey's dream-narrative does not merely enclose space by shutting it inward, but appropriates as much space as possible, filling it through compression on the one hand, while implying the continual expressive movement on the other.

In this way De Quincey accomplishes the task which Frederick Burwick identifies as “the revelation of the ‘moving intellect’ in the interstices of language” by which De Quincey attempts “to bridge the gap between the letter and the spirit” (270). By encompassing space within a structure of dream-narrative, De Quincey opens an inward space which expands outward: “I seemed every night to descend, not metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever reascend. … Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity” (104). In the opium dream, interior and exterior become indistinguishable as each grows into infinity. It is in this regard that Hillis Miller speaks of the “magic of opium” as the “power to stir a man to his depths, and to put him in immediate possession of every last corner of his mental space” (33). Miller also makes the important point that, in possessing everything immediately, De Quincey “does not distinguish himself from the scene he beholds” (34). De Quincey gains this fusion through his dream rhetoric which is based on the sensual experience of what he beholds. For, as Stephen Spector points out, “What is named ‘De Quincey’ is effacement, metaphorization, and metamorphosis without beginning, without center, and without end” (520). The only possible ethos is generated through the expansive discourse of the body, whose logic is the architectonics of dream.

Recognizing in this expansive architectonics Joel Black's description of “a literature … of uninterrupted interruption, [which] provided the only available approach to a realm of pure vision, to the world of the dream” (315), we can see that for both Schreber and De Quincey, the fantastic is identical to the somatic. As with Schreber's voluptuousness, De Quincey's periphrasis expands his body to encompass all that he encounters, actually or imaginatively.

In the Confessions De Quincey also provides the directives necessary for reading an opium text like “The English Mail Coach.” Rather than attempting a direct account of opium as in the Confessions, this work focuses primarily on other events. The result is textualized opium dreams. “But the Dream knows best,” he says at the very end of the “Dream Fugue”; “and the Dream, I say again, is the responsible party” (330). De Quincey subordinates himself entirely to the event of the dream—entirely, that is, to the eloquence of opium.

At the outset of the essay he explains that he chooses to expand on mail coaches because of their “having had so large a share in developing the anarchies of my subsequent dreams: an agency which they accomplished, first, through velocity at that time unprecedented—for they first revealed the glory of motion” (271). Of particular importance here, for our understanding of the nature of opium's discourse, is the conjunction of dreams and motion and, to ensure that we understand precisely what he means by the latter, De Quincey devotes the entire first section of the essay to “The Glory of Motion.” He does not enjoy motion in the abstract; it must be motion which will induce the quality of his dreams by which he determines his own character. Thus he distinguishes between those purveyors of motion which induce the desired experience and those, such as trains, which do not. The velocity of trains is “fact” “resting upon alien evidence,” rather than “a consciousness.” On the mail system, “the word was not magna loquimur, as upon railways, but vivimus. Yes, ‘magna vivimus’; we do not make verbal ostentation of our grandeurs, we realize our grandeurs in act, and in the very experience of life” (283-84). The evidence provided by trains is alien because it comes from without, it is told him. The motion of the mail itself is the experience and the dream, just as the experience of space which he recounts in the Confessions is not figurative but literal.

The genuine and immediate experience of motion is found on the coach where

the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first. But the intervening links that connected them, that spread the earthquake of battle into the eyeball of the horse, were the heart of man and its electric thrillings. … But now, on the new system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man's heart from the ministers of his locomotion. … The galvanic cycle is broken up for ever; man's imperial nature no longer sends itself forward through the electric sensibility of the horse.

(284)

The rhetorical development works through glorification of the thematic terms. The “animal sensibilities” equated with motion engage De Quincey completely. That the experience remains physically dependent on animals provides the basis for “the electric sensibility” between De Quincey—who physically sits on the box and prefers that spot to one inside for this reason—and the movement of the world. The physical movements of the horse involve De Quincey in the “galvanic cycle” which he equates with “the glory of motion.” Animal movement becomes sympathetic sensibility. This rhetorical glorification is the very same process by which the base opium transmutes itself within De Quincey into eloquence, expanding him, the horses, the mail coach and system—everything involved in the scene—outward to include even the Napoleonic wars. This particular kind of motion transposes him from an individual man to an entire era moving forward through history; in the words of Maniquis, we see the “individual spiraling metaphorically out of himself into a sense of collective epic” (67).

That De Quincy entitles this section “The Glory of Motion” is most significant, since he was well aware of the place held by glory in the Romantic vocabulary, himself perpetuating it in his “The Spectre of the Brocken.” Although the role of this image has been analyzed as self-representation or self-projection (Spector 514-15; Maniquis 79-80), we need also to see it in terms of Schreber's account of his own head being “frequently surrounded by a shimmer of light … the so-called ‘crown of rays’” (88). This connection guides us to see how the Spectre-Glory connotes the electric radiation of the physical self through rhetoric. De Quincey applies this weighted term to the mail-coach horses because the fusion he experiences with them carries all the significance of the Brocken Spectre and the Dark Interpreter, not simply as projection but as electric fusion. The sensuality of the description of the horses, and his insistence that the direct physical experience of animal exertion remains crucial to a genuine sense of motion, emphasize the radiance of the body into linguistic spirit.

De Quincey is showing us how widely disparate elements will radiate from a dominant image to constitute his dreams. This is the principle of electricity he introduces here, and which he puts to work in the division of the essay into its three parts: the second part is a specific experience of the motion glorified in the first, which Maniquis says stretches “out an event of only a few seconds into self-conscious timelessness” (73). The third part is the “Dream Fugue,” where all elements mentioned in the first two are galvanized into a bizarrely sympathetic whole. The motion he glorifies is not simply the moving from one place to another that is afforded by trains (“we find ourselves in York four hours after leaving London” [283]), but the electric motion of sensuous expansion into all modes of being, expanding itself into all possible areas of human involvement, architecture, natural science, politics. This is why he dwells on the nationalistic pride of the Napoleonic wars. In this sense, the expansion of the glory works less as what Miller calls “the Piranesi effect,” the endless repetition of a form (67), than as an uncentered radiation of electricity.

De Quincey outlines such expansive electric logic in the expository part of the essay, and then illustrates it thematically and formally in the second and third parts of the essay. Maniquis details De Quincey's occupation with this expansion, tracing its origins to the lack of center in the technological world and its development into De Quincey's racism and his faith in the expansion of empire (57-76). Fruitful as this reading is, and most especially in its account of the nationalist propaganda which extends beyond De Quincey and the nineteenth century, Maniquis comes dangerously close to ignoring the opium aspect in favor of seeking a participatory role for De Quincey's dreams within an organic whole. Coming to De Quincey's texts from Schreber's, we find that what seems temptingly like organicism is actually something that threatens organicism by continually disclosing the dreaminess, the fantasy which must be accepted as the dominant force of this rhetoric. De Quincey's electric logic, the sensual rhetoric bonding him to a world, does move beyond the limits of the individual, but through metaphor, and always with the continual effacement of center and ground. As Spector points out in regard to “the glory of motion”: “the rose of metaphor must fall in order for a new metaphor to spring up and take its place; the face must be effaced in order for a new face to be drawn in” (507).

To De Quincey's disappointment, his electric logic was too arcane, forcing him to add the postscript, wherein he attempts to clarify the essay for those who “professed their inability to apprehend the meaning of the whole, or to follow the links of the connexion between its several parts” (328). The obscurity of the essay lies in the fact that De Quincey relies on the logic of dreams and the eloquence of opium, which to non-addicts (or, more properly, non-dreamers) appears pathological. De Quincey's periphrastic style fuses expression and embodiment as dream. De Quincey's body expands most completely through the non-discursive logic of dreams which brings all things together. The dream space is vast, but just as the mail system contains the entire country within its network of coaches, so De Quincey's consciousness sensuously contains that vast space within itself as he sweeps “with bridal rapture” through the necropolis of his dream fugue (323).

In opium dreams, De Quincey experiences the jouissance of rhetoric. His body becomes metaphor. Thus, having recognized the sense of De Quincey's rhetoric, we can understand Bataille's comment on Schreber:

Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne's thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.

But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream i am the sun an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.

(5)

Opium transmutes the body into soul through metaphor to provide De Quincey with a conceptualized subjectivity: this is the process of expansion which Schreber identifies as voluptuousness, and De Quincey as the electric sympathy. Schreber's Nerve-language consists of physical nerve fibers connecting him to the cosmos and to God, and which lead him to recognize the necessity of becoming a woman—of being transmuted into his other. By reading from Schreber to De Quincey, we, with Bataille, can see language in its most basic function of physically expanding the individual through addictive imprisonment. Through metaphor the individual moves beyond itself as soul to become its other. These two pathological texts lay bare, as no successfully sublimated subject could, just how corporeality transmutes itself expansively into culture. As Charles Rzepka states, “Unlike the body as passive object of others' interpretations, [De Quincey's] book possesses the ‘subtle’ power … to establish the categories by which the embodied self will be judged, indeed, to withhold the embodied self entirely from view” (148). Ephemeral though such manifestation may be, it still manages to conceal the vast and terrifying abyss which always threatens the subject with dissolution and fragmentation.

It does not matter, ultimately, whether we read Schreber's text as the document of madness or as an account of the effort to develop a new system of belief (in many ways no less disturbing than the texts of Blake or Boehme). The importance of the Memoirs lies in the text's discursive nature. As Mannoni states, “what most mars the Memoirs is not so much its delusional content (this exists elsewhere in literature) as the element of reason it contains” (43). Suspending all such value judgments as whether or not Schreber was mad, we find that almost all the comments made about his Memoirs by the various readers from Freud to Lacan apply equally to De Quincey's writing. Schreber's discourse thus compels us to examine De Quincey's text as something more than an example of addictive pathology.

A goodly amount has been written about De Quincey's digressive style, and the significance of that style in relation to his desire to manifest an encompassing synthesis. In an account of Humphrey Davy's experiments with opium, Molly Lefebure stresses that the desire for (and claim to) a consciousness diffused throughout an expansive cosmos is not so much a characteristic of Coleridge and De Quincey as of opium. If we accept her claim, as I believe we must, we begin to see the full weight of the apostrophe, “eloquent opium!” The desire for expansion, along with the digressive discourse which manifests it, belongs less to the man than to the opium. Schreber's discourse is the product of his sexuality, and disturbs us with its frankness in that regard. De Quincey distinguishes himself from Coleridge by pointing out that the older man tried to disavow his addiction, while he himself openly admitted it (Works 2:204-05).

With reference to Schreber, Allen Weiss has observed that “the instauration of the world through the word, the differentiation of the self and the other, is marked by the differentiation of thanatos and eros. Such a world, soon to be ordered and categorized … is founded upon ressentiment. Ressentiment entails the entry into temporality; temporality is the separation of the invisible (mother) from the visible (self); and language supports the invisible, which prolongs my world into transcendence” (72). This comment could just as easily apply to the distinction between Coleridge and De Quincey. While both opium-eaters stretched language over the abyss to form a world, Coleridge's efforts are continually marked by the denial and self-hatred of ressentiment. Coleridge's linguistic efforts always aim for transcendence, the escape from this existence to a much better one. De Quincey, however, turns himself over completely to opium, so that his texts are the full and joyful embodiment of the drug. As jouissance, De Quincey's eloquence is itself the depth of being which Coleridge sought in transcendence. As Arden Reed points out, “the inside and outside of the mail-coach … prove as reversible as the inside and outside of the self in De Quincey's dreams” (290). Such reversibility extends itself into temporality, reversing future or past with the continual present of the body.

The implications of my discussion are thus potentially far-reaching. First of all, in accordance with Robert Lance Snyder, we can see in De Quincey's writing a serious critique of Romantic organicism (353). Those commentators like John Beer who posit a contrapuntal reconciliation as a dominant characteristic of De Quincey's rhetoric (or of Romantic theory) fail to recognize that the unification does not occur within the polarity itself, but because of the rhetoric which allows for the polarity (339). The disparate terms can occur only in the same manner as their harmonization, that is through the discourse which brings them into recognition in the first place. For Schreber and De Quincey the discourse which reconciles the disparity of dominant terms—the subject with its other—is sexuality in the one case and opium in the other. In both cases, then, the discourse is simply the body which enslaves its subject within a rhetorical world-order, generating conflicting forces in time and space, and in metaphysical constructs.

The digressive, uncentered eloquence of opium dreams and sexuality draws us away from the need for closure and determinate meaning. We might admit ourselves to the language where opposites no longer require reconciliation but may coalesce through the open-endedness of the body's Gelassenheit. This is an ideal realm, characterized by oxymoronic and synesthetic fusion, and always at the same time entirely corporeal. Like Caliban, however, we become enslaved by our talk. The continual conversing we engage in, in all disciplines, is but Caliban's cursing. We endlessly go on in the effort to escape the corporeal confinement of language, in the effort to control ourselves through the languages of the disciplines.

More specifically, we talk of Schreber and De Quincey as though they lie outside our world, as though our activity is different from theirs. With its implicit claim that it has freed itself of the nineteenth century, our talk curses itself through its claims to privileged positions in the opacity of marginality or in the clarity of mainstream certainty. Because we speak of neurosis and addiction as aberrations, we can say that the texts of Schreber and De Quincey do not belong in our discourse. In saying that, we turn away from our cursing, to say we speak of the true and genuine, the concrete and scientific world.

Both Schreber and De Quincey exemplify the nineteenth-century effort to bring into language precisely what is most resistant to linguistic embodiment. This is the effort identified at the beginning of the century as Romanticism, and which gave rise to the studies of Freud and the anger of Nietzsche at its close. What De Quincey and Schreber attempt to articulate is a personal sense of vast spaciousness, which is no less an authentic experience of the world than that promoted by science, itself also largely a product of the same century and of the same effort toward articulateness.

Note

1. I quote from Hayter's edition of the Confessions because it relies on the 1821 version while including the 1856 revisions. References to De Quincey's other works are from the Masson edition.

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