Crocodiles and 'Inoculation' Reconsidered: De Quincey, Opium, and the Dream Object

Schmid, Thomas H.

doi:10.1086/twc24045184

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The over‐emphasis on the oriental threat could also, as John Barrell has argued, serve to diminish potentially dangerous differences between English classes or European nationalities by portraying these groups as unified in their difference from the oriental Other. Other scholars have approached the oriental threat of De Quincey’s dreams from a more psychological perspective; Thomas H. Schmid suggests that, for De Quincey, the true “pain” of opium is its “horrid inoculation…of incompatible natures” like human and crocodile, the crocodile being a De Quinceyan stand‐in for all things horrifyingly oriental (37). Schmid follows Grevel Lindop in pointing out that De Quincey uses “inoculation” in the eighteenth‐century sense of the word, meaning “the grafting of one botanical species upon another” (35).…”

Section: Oriental Childhoodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Child of the City and the Palimpsest at Sea: De Quincey’s Chronological Constraints

Walker¹

2012

Literature Compass

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This article concerns De Quincey’s attempts to materialize the experience of time. It takes as its focal point De Quincey’s relationship to childhood and his attempts to arrest time in the body of the child. It addresses De Quincey’s encounters with childhood in “Confessions of an English Opium‐Eater,” the Savannah‐la‐Mar section of “Suspiria de Profundis,” and his little‐read story “The Spanish Military Nun.” For De Quincey, children share with the opium eater the ability to transgress the boundaries between then and now, here and not‐here. Like the drowning woman and the opium‐eater, they can access information and experiences ordinarily closed to adults, and like the drowning woman and the opium eater, their access is produced through ruin.

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Section: Oriental Childhoodsmentioning

confidence: 99%