Thomas De Quincey and the serpentine line

© 2010 Miranda StanyonThis thesis provides the first examination of the roles played by the serpentine line in De Quincey’s work, where it shapes representations of textuality, autobiography, aesthetics, epistemology and hermeneutics, and characterises a digressive sublime that forms both texts and individuals. When De Quincey began writing, Hogarth’s serpentine line was widely disseminated and threaded into the weave of European culture. This is perhaps why De Quincey’s explicit references to Hogarth are sparse and the relationship between the two artists has been neglected by critics. Nonetheless, the serpentine line as image and structure convincingly characterises important strands of De Quincey’s work. It offers him, as it had Hogarth’s Renaissance forebears, a concordia discors. In his hands, the undulating line becomes a flexible image of harmony in discord or discord in harmony, and a visual ground for the dynamic, dialectical antitheses so important to Romanticism. In a further iteration, De Quincey’s serpentine lines model an oscillation that incorporates without collapsing many of the dichotomies of the post-Kantian world. It thus performs on an aesthetic level the very kind of two-in-oneness demanded by post-Kantian and Romantic dilemmas. To establish the serpentine line’s particular relevance to De Quincey, as well as his deviations from his predecessors, I chart the historical trajectories of the serpentine line from the Renaissance figura serpentinata into the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on Hogarth’s paradigmatic definition and exploration of the line in his Analysis of Beauty (1753). This genealogy reveals the serpentine line’s repertoire of associations and possibilities, the contrary roles it could be cast in and lines it could be made to deliver—radical, conservative, fluid, static, progressive, aimless, translational, nationalist, chaotic and orderly. The central text through which I read De Quincey’s reworkings of this tradition is the late autobiographical work Suspiria de Profundis (1845). Hogarthian principles of variety, intricacy, lively movement and pursuit are evident in Suspiria’s pervasive images of wavy lines; but De Quincey’s serpentine lines are also shaped by his distinctive concerns in literature, theology, science, and philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Kant. De Quincey’s engagement with Kant is elucidated by an examination of ‘On the German Literature and Kant in particular,’ another autobiographical text shaped by serpentine lines—this time primarily structurally, in the undulating course of the digressive textual sublime. Analysis of this essay throws light on the Kantian cast of De Quincey’s epistemology, particularly in Suspiria’s ‘Palimpsest,’ which imagines the mind as a text. Conversely, the last scene in Suspiria illuminates the Kantian cast of De Quincey’s aesthetic hermeneutics. Suffused by serpentine lines, Suspiria’s final pages dally with a German Romantic transformation of the serpentine line into an ironic arabesque, but finally reject this involuted, utopian figure of total chaos or total sense for a progressive English serpentine line, infinitely oscillating between chaos and order, forgetting and remembering, death and resurrection, nonsense and sense, relevance and irrelevance, heteronomy and autonomy, identity and difference