Regard for the Other

Autothanatography in Rousseau, De Quincey, Baudelaire, and Wilde

E.S. Burt

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780823230921
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Although much has been written on autobiography, the same cannot be said of autothanatography, the writing of one's death. This study starts from the deconstructive premise that autobiography is aporetic, not or not only a matter of a subject strategizing with language to produce an exemplary identity but a matter also of its responding to an exorbitant call to write its death. The I-dominated representations of particular others and of the privileged other to whom a work is addressed, must therefore be set against an alterity plaguing the I from within or shadowing it from without. This alterity makes itself known in writing as the potential of the text to carry messages that remain secret to the confessing subject. Anticipation of the potential for the confessional text to say what Augustine calls "the secret I do not know, " the secret of death, engages the autothanatographical subject in a dynamic, inventive, and open-ended process of identification. The subject presented in these texts is not one that has already evolved an interior life that it seeks to reveal to others, but one that speaks to us as still in process. Through its exorbitant response, it gives intimations of an interiority and an ethical existence to come. Baudelaire emerges as a central figure for this understanding of autobiography as autothanatography through his critique of the narcissism of a certain Rousseau, his translation of De Quincey's confessions, with their vertiginously ungrounded subject-in-construction, his artistic practice of self-conscious, thorough-going doubleness, and his service to Wilde as model for an aporetic secrecy. The author discusses the interruption of narrative that must be central to the writing of one's death and addresses the I's dealings with the aporias of such structuring principles as secrecy, Levinasian hospitality, or interiorization as translation. The book makes a strong intervention in the debate over one of the most-read genres of our time.

II
WRITING DEATH, WITH REGARD TO THE OTHER

CHAPTER 4
Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas chez De Quincey

What would a Levinasian autobiography look like? Is such a thing imaginable? The question is directed in the first instance at autobiography, as a question concerning its ability to go beyond the representation of the subject to write the encounter with the absolutely other for which Levinas’s ethical philosophy calls. But it is also, in the second instance, a question for Levinas, concerning the potential of autobiography to represent an alterity perhaps not fully accounted for by his philosophy. This double question presides over the reflection that follows.

Certainly, the notion of Levinasian self-writing is, at first blush, unpromising. In the accepted notion of autobiography, the aim of the genre is the disclosure of the I’s self-sameness through the representation of its experience. Experience can be thought only as my experience; as De Quincey says in the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, “No man surely, on a question of my own private experience, could have pretended to be better informed than myself.” We assume that autobiographical knowledge comes through the consciousness of an individual subject standing apart: “each man’s consciousness [is shut up] into a silent world of its own, separate and inaccessible to all other consciousness. 1

But Levinas’s ethics, as he explains in Humanisme de l’autre homme, contains a critique of experience, representation, and the isolated individual:

It is rather a matter of the questioning of EXPERIENCE as the source of meaning, of the limit to transcendental apperception, of the end of synchrony and its reversible terms; it is a matter of the non-priority of the Same and, throughout all these limitations, of the end of actuality, as if the untimely [l’intempestif] were come to upset the agreements of representation.2

To quest after meaning in representation misses the point for Levinas. Thought is not equivalent to a knowledge derived from experience, and the subject’s aspiration to knowledge of objects always neglects something more fundamental—the question of the other as source of a meaning that is not reducible to my representation. As for the self, self-identity (le Meme) and self-presence (l’actualité) stand indicted. In short, if we accept that autobiography is indeed limited to the representation of the egocentric subject’s experience with a view to securing self-sameness, it would seem quite impossible to conceive of it along Levinasian lines.

Perhaps, however, Levinas’s concern with the other might link his thought to another aspect of autobiography: namely, its performative dimension. Without an address to the other—be it Augustine’s prayers to God, Lazarillo’s ironically obsequious “Vuestra Merced,” Rousseau’s over-the-shoulder references to le lecteur, or Jane Eyre’s abrupt addresses to “Reader– —there could be no autobiography or autobiographical fiction. As Gusdorf already understood, the autobiographer does not write a treatise on experience, but rather testifies to it or gives its apology.3 In saying experience, the I attests, excuses, premises, promises, confesses, testifies, or otherwise translates the discourse of knowledge into that of power and justice. And Levinas’s insistence on the “pure sign made to the other; sign made from the giving of the sign” (HAH13), his concern with a language that is not one of message (“an incessant unsaying of the said”)4 but of address “from the revelation of the Other,” places him squarely in the domain of the performative.5 A consideration of the performative might allow Levinas and autobiography to be linked.

Besides, as Levinas knows very well, there is no escaping the subject, even if that subject has to be conceived as in crisis, a subject whose unstable horizon is given and threatened by the other. In its address to the other, the subject constitutes itself as an ethical being, while violently usurping the former’s place in the world by the same speech act. At least one reading of the performative in Levinas makes it a privileged form of the face-to-face with the other. There, the I comes to be responsible for the other that both constitutes and menaces it. Levinas explains the double relation: “the subject is hostage, ” and also, the “subject is host” (AE 142, 276) [or guest, hôte]. Levinas’s subject in crisis, his subject constituting itself as ethical in the face-to-face, provides a promising avenue for approaching the relations of the subject to the other in autobiography. For Levinas, the I determined as self-knowledge is deprived of its origination in the encounter with the other. That is as much as to say that a Levinasian autobiography would bring the subject into remembrance of its vexed relation of violence and gratitude to the other.

After all, then, we may be able to imagine an exemplary Levinasian autobiography. It would tend to feature the subject in crisis, prey to the untimely occurrence (l’intempestif) in a narrative troubled by discontinuity, where experience is a moot point and the account of the I’s relations to the other is central. I’d like to put forward as an anachronistic candidate for this role of Levinasian autobiography De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Already on the score of style—De Quincey’s digressiveness is generally agreed second to none—the Confessions rate our consideration. As De Quincey explains it, the rambling, disjointed narrative is the effect of his having privileged not his experience, but its detritus and the extraneous ornaments that are its trappings: “parasitical thoughts, feelings, digressions . . . spread a glory over incidents that for themselves would be—less than nothing.” 6 This digressiveness, moreover, can be associated with De Quincey’s concern with what he baptizes, in contradistinction to a “literature of knowledge,” a “literature of power.” As spelled out in “The Poetry of Pope,” the literature of knowledge is a teaching literature addressed to the discursive understanding. It has truth as its aim, and it interests through novelty. The literature of power, on the other hand, is addressed to “the higher understanding or reason, but always through the affections of pleasure and sympathy.” 7

There are other reasons besides style for seeing the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater as quintessentially Levinasian. Chief among them is that fact that De Quincey’s I does not come into existence alone, nor claim the relative autonomy we are accustomed to granting it in autobiographical literature of the Rousseauian variety.8 De Quincey’s confessions proceed from other motives and develop other motifs than those that characterize the self-sufficient I. Nowhere in the text will the portrait of “a man in all the truth of nature . . . Myself alone” even be attempted.9 Instead, his I is dependent upon the other for its emergence. This is true at the anecdotal, experiential level, as represented in the story, as well as in discursive, performative terms. The preface provides a good example of the way that the address to the other motivates the story. The I does not emerge as a Romantic subject reflecting upon sensation or emotion. Rather, it emerges in a Modernist pose, in nervous reaction to an imagined accusation. This is what De Quincey says to justify his writing an account of “a remarkable period” in his life:

I trust that it will prove, not merely an interesting record, but, in a considerable degree, useful and instructive. In that hope it is, that I have drawn it up: and that must be my apology for breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve, which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exploration of our own errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings, than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that “decent drapery,” which time, or indulgence to human frailty, may have drawn over them . . . All this I feel so forcibly, and so nervously am I alive to reproach of this tendency, that I have for many months hesitated about the propriety of allowing this, or any part of my narrative, to come before the public eye . . . and it is not without an anxious review of the reasons, for and against this step, that I have, at last, concluded on taking it. (OE 1, my emphasis)

This is not the calm, rational power of a self-conscious subject reviewing a lived past in a narrative. Rather, the fragmentary narrative will feed off the anxieties of a being whose main claim to our notice is that he worries about whether and when to obtrude himself on us. It is first and foremost De Quincey’s present act of confessing rather than his addiction that is to be judged. We even see De Quincey tying his very existence to the other’s call in the passage, literally springing to life to write a response to the reproach that he should be contemplating writing an autobiography: “All this I feel so forcibly, and so nervously am I alive to reproach of this tendency” (my emphasis).10

A dependency on others for survival is characteristic and, reaching sublime and ridiculous proportions, makes the De Quinceyan I into the counter-example of the self-reliant man. Instead of looking for a job to tide him over during a period of want, for instance, De Quincey works hard to collect the largest possible chain of people on whom to rely, always deferring the actual pocketing of money: He wants to borrow on his paternal expectations from moneylenders; to do so, he obtains money from a family friend so as to be able to travel to solicit a letter of attestation to his identity from a noble friend, finding sustenance for his journey in Ann’s tenderness and on the shoulder of a stranger. The friend turns out to be absent, but another provides him the needed letter instead. All of this effort comes to naught in literal terms—the money is not forthcoming from this quarter, and comes instead unexpectedly from another. However, the gathering of support works to fuel the narrative with a good deal of lively incident.

It is moreover evident that the others on whom the I relies will not be those to whom he is related by nature or friendship. From the first lines of the narrative proper, our hero is deprived of home, family, and friends; and gone among strangers: “My father died, when I was about seven years old, and left me to the care of four guardians. I was sent to various schools, great and small; and was very early distinguished for my classical attainments, especially for my knowledge of Greek (OE6). One can hardly emphasize enough the lengths to which De Quincey goes to depict the I as deprived by circumstance of any sense of rootedness in the family group. In the 1821 Confessions, we never once see him at home with his mother and siblings.11

His youth is spent at school or as a runaway living precariously in the houses of others. Even where his actual circumstances were of a rich family life, the narrative deliberately seizes him apart from them (in London while they are in Grasmere); or, where he is himself at home, his family is most often absent—evoked at most by a tea-table laid for two, or by an interior scene peopled by servants and strangers. When his children do briefly haunt his bedside, it is to sharpen the contrast between his nightmares and the peaceful life from which he has been exiled. His wife is mentioned as an amanuensis whose absence helps explain the sorry state of the finished manuscript. It would be very hard to imagine a hero more deprived of the ordinary sources of autobiographical pathos, or a narrator working harder to make do without the literary resources a rich personal experience provides.

De Quincey’s hero lives instead on intimate terms with strangers. As a runaway, he occupies a makeshift bed for weeks with a forsaken child about whom he knows little, but whom “I loved . . . because she was a partner in my wretchedness” (OE 20). Ann is the very type of the stranger, the human being “that chance might fling my way” with whom “it has been my pride to converse familiarly” (OE 20), and she is “loved . . . as affectionately as if she had been my sister” (OE 27). Ann’s very name suggests her status as first comer; not only does De Quincey not know her family name, but her given name hints by paronomasia at the indefinite article, as if she were an example of the undetermined other, An(n) Other.12 One of the most affecting moments in the early part of the Confessions shows the I, on the verge of running away from school, mournfully taking leave of “a place which I did not love, and where I had not been happy” (OE 8). The elegy reaches its apogee as the hero plants a filial kiss on the portrait of a woman who is a total stranger to him. In brief, the others the hero encounters bring out the bonds that tie him to a community rather than to a family, and are correspondingly ethical rather than erotic in nature.

Even his preferred language is not the familiar, maternal language of English. De Quincey picks out as the distinguishing characteristic of his boyhood his development of a remarkable ability to speak the dead language of ancient Greek. Generally speaking, we think of the newspaper as a matter of knowledge, where content is all. But for the young De Quincey, the content was merely a pretext. If he read the news, it was so as to translate it into Greek, a written language of no earthly value for communicating knowledge but having great symbolic power.13 In short, the Confessions show De Quincey deprived or depriving himself of the familiar, actively seeking out the other, estranging himself habitually even from his own tongue. It is in the company of strangers that De Quincey is at home, on others that he depends for his existence and sustenance. Like Baudelaire’s poet, whose soul wanders in the gutters outside its apartment, De Quincey is always wandering outside home.

The connection between the I’s state of deprivation and his reliance on the other can be variously understood, resulting in two distinct narrative structures. It can be thought as causal. The I may live with strangers because it cannot rely on itself. Its recourse to others, meanwhile, further impedes it from developing its own resources. Thus, in trying to borrow against his paternal inheritance, the young De Quincey dissipates his money on a vain journey to find a friend to stand him surety for the loan. What is true of the hero is also true of the narrator, whose dearth of material leads him to lay hold of topics and texts extraneous to his subject that, while meant as stop-gaps, end by replacing and thus further depleting his life narrative.

The connection of the I to the other can also be viewed within a teleological framework. There, the structure would not be one of debilitating dependency but of a reenergized relation where the subject is infinitely grateful to and responsible for the other that helps it to transcend its natural state. De Quincey’s I is hungry for the relation to the other that lets it come into being, with self-destitution a step that will bring it again into that more primordial relation. Had the hero not deferred the moment of touching his inheritance—had he never run away, met Ann, and nearly died of hunger—he would never have owed his life to her, and thus could never have discovered gratitude and the longing for a transcendence of the here and now that accompanies that feeling. Each instance of suffering recounted is an opportunity from the narrative point of view to repay an obligation to the other on whom the I depends for its existence as ethical subject. That can be seen in the gratitude expressed for Ann’s having spent her few pennies on a glass of wine to revive the hero:

O youthful benefactress! how often in succeeding years, standing in solitary places, and thinking of thee with grief of heart and perfect love, how often have I wished that, as in ancient times the curse of a father was believed to have a supernatural power, and to pursue its object with a fatal necessity of self-fulfillment,—even so the benediction of a heart oppressed with gratitude, might have a like prerogative; might have power given to it from above to chase—to haunt—to way-lay—to overtake—to pursue thee into the central darkness of a London brothel, or (if it were possible) into the darkness of the grave—there to awaken thee with an authentic message of peace and forgiveness, and of final reconciliation! (OE 22)

The speaker wants to render to the other the favor the other has done it. Ann has resuscitated the hero with a glass of wine, a “powerful and reviving stimulus . . . [without which I was convinced I] should have died upon the spot” (OE 22). Nor is the narrator content to remember her merely. He wants to pursue his benefactress into the grave, to revive her as Christ did Lazarus, and that desire emerges in the shift to a transcendental register, expressive of a sudden recognition on the part of the I of a relation to the absolutely other.

In short, both causal and teleological ways of structuring the I’s connection to the other fall in with Levinas’s discussion of the proximity of the other. The encounter with the other sets the I in crisis, shaking it out of its narcissistic complacency and endowing it with a sense of responsibility and of dependency not limited by experience.14

The resemblance between Levinas and De Quincey is clinched by the fact that both think the I’s relation to the other in terms of hospitality. That relation is not fully exhausted by interest, appropriation, exchange, or any of the terms that characterize a limited economy. Instead, Levinas, as Derrida has shown, has recourse to terms like “hospitality and “the gift” to describe an encounter that has an unlimited, an an-economic side.15 For De Quincey too, perhaps under the influence of Kant’s essay on Perpetual Peace, scenes of hospitality frame the hero’s entrance into the world as well as the scholar’s retreat from it. The theme of drug addiction also involves an intact space—the home, the family, the self—exposed to an alterity that at once threatens its healthy functioning and provides th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. A Clutch of Brothers: Alterity and Autothanatography
• I. Autobiography Interrupted
• II. Writing Death, with Regard to the Other
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index