The Palimpsest as a Double Structure of Memory

Abstract

This paper joins the recent revaluation of the palimpsest as a key image for the writing of memory. Its specific contribution is to regard the concept less on a thematic, and more on a rhetorical level. To that end, the paper constructs from two contrasting Romantic reflections on the palimpsest, Thomas De Quincey's Suspiria de profundis and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor resartus, a concept of the palimpsest that persistently acknowledges its constitutive dualism. The palimpsest will be argued to enshrine an irresolvable confrontation between two fundamentally different attitudes towards time, memory and history; in the writing, reading and interpreting of memory texts, these two attitudes express themselves as two distinct, if mutually intrusive, rhetorical structures: the palimpsestuous and the palimpsestic palimpsest. The former operates through metaphor and finds neat chronological sequences; the latter instead proceeds from the material document, and finds only fragmentation. As this paper conducts its analyses of the manifestations of the palimpsest, it will suggest that De Quincey and Carlyle both seize on its dual nature in order continually to break through any kind of monistic or dichotomous definition of memory, and to advance towards a non‐dialectic sublime.

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