Thomas De Quincey and the Cognitive Unconscious

Markus Iseli

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137501080
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This book examines Thomas De Quincey's notion of the unconscious in the light of modern cognitive science and nineteenth-century science. It challenges Freudian theories as the default methodology in order to understand De Quincey's oeuvre and the unconscious in literature more generally.

Part I

Language

1

The Need for Neologisms and the Emergence of Subconscious

[T]he best word always comes up.

John Wilson, qtd. in George Gilfillan
Galleries of Literary Portraits

New ideas and concepts require new terms. Until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when psychology as a discipline did not exist yet, it was the philosophers’ task of describing mental phenomena and in particular the growing notion of the unconscious mind. However, by the early nineteenth century scientists engaging with the human body and its relation to the mind and creative writers were also taking keen interest in mental phenomena that elude awareness. Authors such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, and De Quincey were among the first to find the words to voice observations on the workings of the mind. Given the need for new terms, these authors account for a large number of English neologisms during that period.¹ De Quincey is one of the most prolific contributors of new terms and definitions, and a range of his neologisms have become words of daily usage, including pathologically, aesthetically, post-natal, and picnicker. While coining new words and phrases often seems to have been a pleasurable and playful activity for De Quincey, he also considered it a necessity for the ideational development of a society.

Some of De Quincey’s neologisms display his interest in psychological issues and reveal his larger project of exploring the hidden powers of the mind. The most interesting if not most famous of these coinages, is subconscious, which has become a very popular term of everyday usage.² From its earliest usage to the present day, subconscious has been applied in various contexts and carries a range of similar but distinct definitions. It became popular in the second half of the nineteenth century, mostly due to psychiatric writings in France and the United States. Although it is often used to refer to psychoanalysis, subconscious was only briefly used in the works of Freud and his followers. A historical sketch of the coinage, specification, and the subsequent popularization of the term is necessary to prevent any possible misconception of its earliest usage due to the manifold connotations it carries today.

De Quincey’s Neologisms

According to De Quincey’s account in the first part of ‘A Sketch from Childhood’ (1851), his attention to words and language was already well developed when he was a young boy. He cultivated it in an attempt to avoid angering his eldest brother William, ‘a boy of fiery nature’ who ‘naturally despised’ (WTDQ 17: 73, 76) his younger brother. De Quincey tells the story of the ‘feud’ (WTDQ 17: 83) between the Quincey brothers and a group of boys in Manchester. He and William ended up having skirmishes every day on their way through Manchester to their guardian Reverend Samuel Hall.³ De Quincey, who was reluctant to fight, still obeyed his ‘brother’s military commands with the utmost docility’ (WTDQ 17: 85). At the same time he showed great ‘scrupulosity about the exact value and position of his [brother’s] words’ (WTDQ 17: 92). This led William, the ‘commander-in-chief’ (WTDQ 17: 84) of the two-man Quincey troop, to accuse young Thomas of ‘what he called “pettifogulising” – that is, to plead some little technical quillet, distinction, or verbal demur, in bar of my orders, under some colourable pretence that, according to their literal construction, they really did not admit of being fulfilled, or perhaps that they admitted it too much as being capable of fulfilment in two senses, either of them a practicable sense’ (WTDQ 17: 91). This account is not surprising. The definition of ‘pettifogulising’ in this passage illustrates De Quincey’s obsession with verbal accuracy and how he notoriously analyses, comments, and coins words in his own and other authors’ writings.

De Quincey uses various synonyms and phrases with slightly different meanings for the first part of his definition of pettifogulising. He moves from a quibble, the ‘quillet’, to a ‘distinction’ and finally – as William considered it – the actual objection, the ‘demur’. The second part is less repetitive. It broadens the scope and adds clause after clause in order to cover all possible schemes of evasion that ‘pettifogulising’ covers: the mention of pretension, the focus on the literal understanding of the orders, and the various ways in which this understanding can prevent a straightforward execution of the orders. It is very likely that De Quincey first practised this verbal skill – which eventually led in his published writings to abundant footnotes, parenthetical remarks, and subordinate clauses that engage with the exact meaning of words – as a young boy in the attempt to get out of the daily war without drawing his brother’s wrath. Ironically, William’s neologism apparently inspired De Quincey, who became a zealous neologist later in his life.⁴

In retrospect, De Quincey does not justify his tendency to overanalyse with the wish to avoid his brother’s commands. Whereas William saw schemes of disobedience in Thomas’s ‘pettifogulising’, his little brother was just eager to execute all orders with ‘mere excess of sincerity’, as he claims sixty years later:

And thus far there was great injustice in my brother’s reproach; true it was that my eye was preternaturally keen for flaws of language, not from pedantic exaction of superfluous accuracy, but, on the contrary, from too conscientious a wish to escape the mistakes which language not rigorous is apt to occasion. So far from seeking to ‘pettifogulise,’ or to find evasions for any purpose in a trickster’s minute tortuosities of construction, exactly in the opposite direction from mere excess of sincerity, most unwillingly I found, in almost everybody’s words, an unintentional opening left for double interpretations. (WTDQ 17: 92)

This passage describes a young boy who had a remarkable awareness of the inaccuracies of language and the ambiguous usage of words. While De Quincey is often pedantic, this account of his somewhat naïve but sincere attempt to follow William’s orders to the letter shows his general tendency to avoid the pitfalls of language in his published writings. Furthermore, he repeatedly dissects other author’s texts, pointing out the lack of logic and cogency or justifying the choice of grammatical construction and terminology. This scrutiny and the profound consciousness of language’s limits remained with him for the rest of his life and is characteristic of his writing.

Thirty years after De Quincey was accused of being a pettifogulizer, Richard Woodhouse noted in his 1821 Cause Book that:

The Opium-Eater appears to have read a great deal, & to have thought much more. I was astonished at the depth & reality, if I may so call it, of his knowledge. He seems to have passed no thing that occurred in the course of his Study unreflected on, or unremembered. His conversation appeared like the elaboration of a mine of results: … his opinions were the fruits of his own reflections on what had come before him, & had not been taken up from others. (5–6)

In a later entry Woodhouse adds that De Quincey would ‘overlay every topic with rich discussion, & valuable information & reflection, thrown in quasi ex abundanti’ (13). The image Woodhouse depicts here is that of a man who is ever widening his horizon and manages to phrase his knowledge and opinions in astonishingly captivating ways. What had been fodder for criticism at age seven eventually turned into a cause for praise. It is not simply the accumulation of knowledge – De Quincey is well known to have been a bibliophile and to have devoured books from an early age – that impresses Woodhouse, but also the extensive and elaborate formation of the latter’s own opinion and his ability to communicate it so effectively. Taking nothing for granted, De Quincey seems to have an opinion about any- and everything; or at least he manages to present himself in this way. Woodhouse’s account provides the sense of an ‘unresting intellect’ (WTDQ 17: 56) who strives to acquire, analyse, and synthesize knowledge. De Quincey’s linguistic proficiency, which partly consists in his particular talent of coining new terms and extending the meanings of old ones, enables him to reproduce and expand this knowledge in the precise and captivating manner Woodhouse describes.

De Quincey enjoyed discussions with friends and acquaintances enormously. Even though writing at times proved to be a laborious and painful process he considered language a vast playground. Accordingly, there is a good deal of playfulness in his attitude toward neologisms, which he often consciously displays. In ‘The Vision of Sudden Death’ (1849), the follow-up to ‘The English Mail-Coach’ (1849), De Quincey calls chariot driving ‘the diphrelatic art’ (WTDQ 16: 435) and jocularly adds: ‘Excuse, reader, a word too elegant to be pedantic. And also take this remark from me, as a gage d’amitié – that no word ever was or can be pedantic which, by supporting a distinction, supports the accuracy of logic; or which fills up a chasm for the understanding’ (WTDQ 16: 435). The tone throughout the passage is humorous and so is his coinage of ‘diphrelatic’. De Quincey describes his own unfruitful attempt to learn this art from a one-eyed mail-coachman, whom he calls ‘Cyclops diphrélates’ (WTDQ 16: 435), a derivation from the Greek word for charioteer, hence ‘diphrelatic art’. The ‘gage d’amitié’,⁵ the well-meaning advice to the reader, which has nothing to do with the story as such, follows in the same jocular vein. At the same time it contains a good deal of sincerity and reflects De Quincey’s stance towards language. He repeatedly alludes to the necessity of coining words in order to overcome the ‘mistakes’ and ‘double interpretations’ (WTDQ 17: 92) he spotted as a child.

In his defence against William’s accusations of pettifogulizing, De Quincey insists in a more serious tone on the indispensability of paying attention to the limitations of language in order to overcome them. The ‘single-eyed servant of truth’ is most likely to ‘insist upon the limitation of expressions too wide or vague, and upon the decisive election between meanings potentially double’ (WTDQ 17: 92). De Quincey found it indispensable to coin terms because precise language is the only way for a society to advance intellectually and to reach ‘truth’. Johann Gottfried Herder also theorized the central role of language in intellectual progress.⁶ Lancelot Law Whyte, who traces the history of the concept of the unconscious all the way back to the second century, argues along a similar line that ‘a decisive phase in the social development of man’ (43) is mirrored by developments in language and, more specifically, ‘the first usage of a word in a language marks a significant moment in the development of religious, philosophical, or scientific ideas’ (66, emphasis added). While not every neologism is significant in such a way, De Quincey’s subconscious arguably marks such a moment. He himself maintains that while a ‘high civilisation is an indispensable condition for developing the full powers of a language’ (WTDQ 17: 58), language in turn contains and displays ‘the full powers of’ the intellect. Put differently, language is an integral part of a civilisation’s intellectual progress and hence paying attention to language is a meritorious skill. Unspecific expressions need specification, which in turn calls for coinages that render language more precise. This means that neologisms are not mere sport of the bibliophile word acrobat; they are imperative for intellectual progress.

‘On the Present Stage of the English Language’ (1850) contains De Quincey’s most emphatic plea for neologisms. Reiterating several points made in previous articles on language, style, and neologisms, he argues that far from being ‘an infirmity of caprice’, neologisms are ‘a mere necessity’, notably for the ‘unresting intellect’: ‘New ideas, new aspects of old ideas, new relations of objects to each other, or to man – the subject who contemplates those objects – absolutely insist on new words’ (WTDQ 17: 56). Without neologisms the ‘unresting intellect’ is not able to think beyond already existing concepts. Alongside ‘coinages’ of new words De Quincey stresses the importance of more general linguistic ‘innovation, in which no process of coinage whatever is manifested, but perhaps a simple restoration of old words’ or ‘an extension and emancipation of terms’ (WTDQ 17: 56–57). De Quincey’s suggestion here bears a self-reflexive element that is acutely present in the case of subconscious, which makes the notion of an unconscious mental realm explicit. Not only was De Quincey an ‘unresting intellect’ in conversation, as described by Woodhouse, but his own neologisms show that he equally pushed the limits language imposes on the articulation – and consequently the conception – of ideas, such as that of the unconscious.

The need for neologisms cannot be considered a carte blanche for boundless lexical innovation, though. At the same time that he is keen on specifying, enlarging, and renewing the English language, De Quincey opposes the distortion and disfigurement of language. While journalists are constantly ‘seeking distinctions through novelties of diction’ (‘Style’ 11), De Quincey argues that ‘good writing’ and ‘fluent reading’ demand an ‘unwordy diction’ (‘Style’ 77).⁷ Capricious additions of words to a language do not clarify but obscure the possibilities of expression. De Quincey believes that language develops naturally and that new vocabulary should follow the same rules. While ‘a few insulated words have been continually nourished by authors; that is, transferred to other uses, or formed by thoughtful composition and decomposition, or by skilful alterations of form and inflexion’, language is not ‘consciously “invented” ’ (WTDQ 11: 330). De Quincey argues that it develops according to three ‘modes of instinct’: ‘abbreviation’, ‘onomatopoeia’, and – most commonly – ‘distinction’ (WTDQ 11: 331). Hence, to achieve ‘purity and simplicity’, a coinage should grow through a process of derivation from ‘that which preceded’ (WTDQ 3: 155). Freely quoting Coleridge, with whom he shared a similar interest in language and who also coined a large number of words, De Quincey adds that ‘the best explanation of a word is often that which is suggested by its derivation’ (WTDQ 3: 155), which is why he expresses the need for an etymological dictionary that would ‘record the exact succession of [each word’s] meanings’ (WTDQ 3: 155).⁸ If one keeps track of the precise development of a language one also keeps track of the history of ideas, that is the record shows when an idea becomes substantive. As humorous as some of De Quincey’s coinages are, these comments show how serious he is in principle when it comes to the usage and expansion of language.

De Quincey illustrates these ideas in ‘On the English Notices of Kant’ (1823). Defending Kant against accusations of using a ‘ “barbarous” … nomenclature’ (WTDQ 3: 91), he explains the necessity of these designations: ‘When Kant assigned the names, he created the ideas; i.e. he drew them within the consciousness’ (WTDQ 3: 93). His ‘scheme of philosophy would have been incommunicable’ (WTDQ 5: 171) without linguistic specification, the restoration of old words, and reminting of synonyms. This endeavour not only enhanced Kant’s ‘system’ but ‘human thought’ (WTDQ 3: 92) in general. The lack of neologisms would consequently indicate a lack of ideational progress or a preliminary stage of this progress, which De Quincey describes as an ‘insensible clinamen’ (WTDQ 3: 91), a mere inclination. Similarly, one could argue that subconscious ‘drew’ the unconscious ‘within the consciousness’. On the same grounds, De Quincey defends the English language against accusations of vernacularity in the negative sense and of being a ‘ “bastard” language’ or a ‘ “hybrid” language’. He establishes that what others consider impurities are a ‘fortunate inheritance of collateral wealth’ (WTDQ 11: 325); thanks to the national vernacular ‘some leading ideas in the Paradise Lost – ideas essential to the very integrity of the fable’ can be expressed.⁹ Elsewhere, De Quincey explains more specifically that the term sin cannot be properly translated into Greek or Latin because there was neither the concept nor the word for it in ‘Pagan ages’ (WTDQ 17: 15). Again, the lack of terminology indicates the lack or underdeveloped stage of a mental concept. De Quincey keeps returning to the issue of neologisms because he believes in their value as indicators of the advancement of ideas in a society. Only when a thought can be verbalized can the concept be said to exist.¹⁰ His own coinage of subconscious arguably helped to turn a ‘clinamen’ into a more solid concept.

The OED confirms the notion of De Quincey as an ‘unresting intellect’. Approximately 150 neologisms (author of first quotation in entry) and over 400 extensions of a meaning (author of first quotation in additional sense of a word) are listed under De Quincey’s name.¹¹ De Quincey’s extensive knowledge of Greek and Latin was, of course, an enormous fund for his linguistic endeavour to analyse and widen the English language according to the rules he describes. Many neologisms (for example macrobiotics, focalize, picnicker, post-natal) and word extensions (for example bivouac, cometary, many-sided, revaluation, spidery) have become frequently used words. De Quincey was an acute observer of his own writing and displays a high degree of awareness concerning the coinage of terms not only in theory but also in practice. In terms of neologisms and particular meanings of words and phrases De Quincey’s acuity is conspicuous. His writing is full of remarks on the use of words and phrases, which demonstrate his constant striving for accurateness, expressiveness, and stylistic excellence.

While De Quincey often draws attention to his own coinages, innovations, restorations and extensions of words in different ways, some of his neologisms go surprisingly unnoticed. At times he explicitly calls attention to a coinage, habitually humbly asking ‘if I may be allowed such a coinage’ (WTDQ 3: 91) but occasionally ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Language
• Part II: Body and Brain
• Epilogue
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index