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Reinscribing De Quincey's palimpsest: the significance of the palimpsest in contemporary literary and cultural studies

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360500196227

1470-1308

Sarah Dillon,

French Literature and Poetry

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The Oxford English Dictionary's citation of De Quincey's essay as the first figurative use of the palimpsest is misleading here. Earlier figurative uses may be found in Plutarch and St John Chrysostom. See Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, An Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), pp. 64–5, and Charles William Russell, 'Palimpsest literature, and its editor, Cardinal Angelo Mai', in The Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art (London: Bell and Daldy, 1867), p.100. Moreover, in the Preface to 'The wanderings of cain' (1828), Samuel Taylor Coleridge declares that 'I have in vain tried to recover the lines from the palimpsest tablet of my memory'. 2. Thomas De Quincey, 'The palimpsest', in Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of An English Opium Eater And Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 104. All subsequent page references to De Quincey's writings are to this edition and are given in brackets in the text, preceded by TDQ. 3. The term 'palimpsestuous' was coined as the French 'palimpsestueuse' by Philippe Lejeune in Moi Aussi (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1986), p. 115. It is used by Gérard Genette in Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1982), p. 452, and is first used in English by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky when translating Genette, in Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 399. The term has subsequently been employed in French by Jacques Derrida in Papier Machine: Le ruban de machine à écrire et autres réponses (Paris: Galilée, 2001), p. 46, and in English by Peggy Kamuf translating Derrida in 'Typewriter ribbon: limited ink (2)', in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 83. It is also used by Nicholas Royle in The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 284. I wish to thank Nick for first drawing my attention to this term. 4. Robert M. Maniquis, 'The dark interpreter and palimpsest of violence: De Quincey and the unconscious', in Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), p. 133. 5. Jacques Derrida, 'Border lines', trans. James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller (New York: Continuum, 1999, orig. pub. 1979), p. 137. 6. Maniquis, 'The dark interpreter', p. 134. 7. I am indebted to Nick Levett for drawing my attention to this double reading. Earlier in 'Border lines' Derrida in fact comments precisely on the untranslatability of the French 'pas': 'I have published a text that is untranslatable, starting with its title, 'Pas,' and published in 'La double séance', referring to 'dissemination in the refolding {repli} of the hymen': Pas de méthode {'no method', but also 'a methodological step'} for it: no path comes back in its circle to a first step, none proceeds from the simple to the complex, none leads from a beginning to an end' (p. 96). 8. Gerald Gillespie, 'Here comes everybody/nobody: self as overly edited palimpsest', New Comparison, 9 (1990), pp. 3–15: here, p. 4. In this essay Gillespie traces the breakdown of the notion of the unitary self in Hume, Schopenhauer and Stirner in order 'to provide a backdrop against which to appreciate the artistic cooptation of the notion of the dissolution of self in Modernism' (p. 7). Gillespie provides a brief and fragmentary account which is significant for drawing attention to the larger picture of the post-Kantian breakdown of the concept of unitary identity in a proliferation of writers other than those normally attributed with the fictionalization of identity – Nietzsche, Bergson and Freud. His sketch is thought-provoking, but let down by an uninformed dismissal of the place in such an account of twentieth-century thought in this area, particularly that of Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault, whose work is passed off as 'the epigonal reverberations of nihilistic deconstruction' (p. 7). And, considering his title, Gillespie's elision of De Quincey in this history seems strange. 9. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. xix. 10. Jacques Derrida, 'Living on', in Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 77. 11. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, 'Introjection-Incorporation Mourning or Melancholia', in Psychoanalysis in France, ed. Serge Lebovici and Daniel Wiidlöcher (New York: International Universities Press, 1980), p. 3. All subsequent page references to this essay are given in brackets in the text, preceded by I. 12. Jacques Derrida, 'Fors: the Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok', Foreword to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xxxvi. All subsequent page references to this essay are given in brackets in the text, preceded by F. 13. Abraham and Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic Word, p. 80. 14. See Josephine McDonagh's insight that the palimpsest 'feigns a sense of depth while always in fact functioning on the surface level', in 'Writings on the mind: the importance of the palimpsest in nineteenth century thought', Prose Studies, 10 (1987), pp. 207–24: here, p. 211. 15. McDonagh, 'Writings on the Mind', p. 209. 16. McDonagh, 'Writings on the Mind', p. 209. 17. Freud uses the palimpsest to figure the superimposed structure of the meanings of dreams which he describes as 'one of the most delicate, though also one of the most interesting, problems of dream-interpretation', in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 4 (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 312. For references to palimpsests in Freud see Dreams, n. 2, pp. 215–16 and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 6 (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 128. 18. Such is the argument of Robert J. C. Young in his ingenious and seductive essay 'Freud's secret: The Interpretation of Dreams was a Gothic novel', in Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Laura Marcus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 19. In 'Reasons to forget: scientists count the ways we get it wrong' (2004), John McCrone explains that it is only recently that social psychology and basic neuroscience has begun to break down the persistent fantasy of the brain as perfect archive and the general belief that memories must be captured as fixed traces. Recent advances have revealed that 'brains are evolved not for retrospection and contemplation but for intention and anticipation – for looking forwards rather than backwards, outwards rather than inwards, for being selective rather than merely retentive', and that what we understand as 'recollection' is better understood as 'imaginative reconstruction', or, in fact, anticipatory images. See 'Reasons to forget: scientists count the ways we get it wrong', Times Literary Supplement (30 January 2004), pp. 3–4. 20. Jacques Derrida, 'Freud and the scene of writing', in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 227. Such is the insight of Derrida's reading of Freud in this text, a text in which he formulates his reservations about 'the presuppositions of modelling itself', Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 15. 21. Michael Foucault, 'Nietzsche, genealogy, history', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996; first pub. 1977), p. 139. Subsequent page references to this essay are given in brackets in the text, preceded by NGH. 22. Russell, 'Palimpsest literature', p. 110. 23. Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Harlow: Longman, 1980), pp. 50–1. Subsequent page references to this text are given in brackets in the text, preceded by PK. 24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Can the subaltern speak?', in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 281. 25. Spivak, 'Can the subaltern speak?', p. 281. 26. Daniel Cooper Alarcón, 'The Aztec palimpsest: toward a new understanding of Aztlán, cultural identity and history', Aztlán, 19 (1988–90), pp. 33–68: here, pp. 35–6. 27. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 'Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: an introduction', in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 16. 28. For instance, see The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel (1991) in which Zabus Chantal uses the palimpsest to figure 'the ways in which the imported and imposed standard code has been overwritten by indigenous writers in the processes of 'indigenization'', Bill Ashcroft, 'Review of The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel. By Chantal Zabus', Modern Language Review, 88 (1993), pp. 191–3: here, p. 192. 29. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination, 2nd edn. (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000; first pub. 1979), p. 73. 30. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), pp. 61–2. 31. Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, Paris 1900–1940 (London: Virago, 1994; first pub. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 350. 32. Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 76. 33. Jagose, Queer Theory, p. 3. 34. Jagose, Queer Theory, p. 77. 35. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 228. 36. Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 228. 37. Maniquis, 'The dark interpreter', p. 134. 38. Maniquis, 'The dark interpreter', p. 134.