 |
Đóa hoa hồng vùi quên trong tay Like the Coleridge hero who
wakes to find himself holding the rose
of his dreams, I knew these objects were not of the second world, which
had
brought me so much contentment as a child, but of a real world that
matched my
memories The Flower of Coleridge I wonder what my reader thinks
of that imagining. To me it is
perfect. It seems quite impossible to use it is the basis of other
inventions,
for it has the integrity and the unity of a terminus ad quem, a
final
goal. And of course it is just that; in the sphere of literature as in
others,
every act is the culmination of an infinite series of causes and the
cause of
an infinite series of effects. Behind Coleridge's idea is the general
and
ancient idea of the generations of lovers who begged for a flower as a
token. The second text I shall
quote is a novel that Wells drafted
in 1887 and rewrote seven years later, in the summer of 1894. The first
version
was entitled The Chronic Argonauts (here chronic was the etymological
equivalent of temporal); the definitive version of the work was sailed
The Time
Machine. In that novel Wells continued and renewed a very ancient
literary
tradition: the foreseeing of future events. Isaiah sees the destruction
of
Babylon and the restoration of Israel; Aeneas, the military destiny of
his
descendants, the Romans; the prophet of the Edda Saemundi, the return
of the
gods who, after the cyclical battle in which our world will be
destroyed, will
discover that the same chess pieces they were playing with before are
lying on
the grass of a new meadow. Unlike those prophetic spectators, Wells's
protagonist travels physically to the future. He returns tired, dusty,
and shaken from a remote humanity
that has divided into species who
hate each other (the idle eloi, who live in dilapidated palaces
and
ruinous gardens; the subterranean and nyctalopic morlocks who feed on
the
eloi). He returns with his hair grown gray and brings with him a
wilted
flower from the future. This is the second version of Coleridge's
image. More
incredible than a celestial flower or the flower of a dream is the
flower of
the future, the unlikely flower whose atoms now occupy other spaces and
have
not yet been assembled. The third version I
shall mention, the most improbable of
all, is the invention of a much more complex writer than Wells,
although he was
less gifted with those pleasant virtues that are usually called
classical. I am
referring to the author of The Abasement of the Northmores, the sad and
labyrinthine Henry James. When he died, he left the unfinished novel
The Sense
of the Past, an imaginative work which was a variation or elaboration of The Time Machine. (1).
Wells's protagonist travels to the
future in an outlandish vehicle that advances or recedes in time
as other
vehicles do in space; James's protagonist returns to the past, to
the
eighteenth century, by identifying himself with that period. (Both
procedures
are impossible, but James's is less arbitrary.) In The Sense of the
Past the
nexus between the real and the imaginative (between present and past)
is not a
flower, as in the previous stories, but a picture from the eighteenth
century
that mysteriously represents the protagonist. Fascinated by this
canvas, he
succeeds in going back to the day when it was painted. He meets a
number of
persons, including the artist, who paints him with fear and aversion,
because
he senses that there is something unusual and anomalous in those future
features. James thus creates an
incomparable regressus in infinitum, when his hero Ralph Pendrel
returns to the
eighteenth century because he is fascinated by an old painting, but
Pendrel's
return to this century is a condition for the existence of the
painting. The
cause follows the effect, the reason for the journey is one of the
consequences
of the journey. Quite
probably Wells was not acquainted with
Coleridge's text; Henry James knew and admired the text of Wells. If
the
doctrine that all authors are one is valid, such facts are
insignificant. (2).
Strictly speaking, it is not necessary to go that far; the
pantheist who
declares that the plurality of authors is illusory finds unexpected
support in
the classicist, to whom that plurality matters but little. For
classical minds,
the literature is the essential thing, not the individuals. George
Moore and
James Joyce have incorporated in their works the pages and sentences of
others;
Oscar Wilde used to give plots away for others to develop; both
procedures,
although they appear to be contradictory, may reveal an identical
artistic
perception—an ecumenical, impersonal perception. Another witness of the profound
unity of the Word, another who
denied the limitations of the individual, was the renowned Ben Jonson,
who,
when writing his literary testament and the favorable or adverse
opinions he held
of his contemporaries, was obliged to combine fragments from Seneca,
Quintilian, Justus Lipsius, Vives, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Bacon, and the two
Scaligers. One last
observation. Those who carefully copy a
writer do it impersonally, do it because they confuse that writer with
literature, do it because they suspect that to leave him at any one point is
to deviate from reason and
orthodoxy. For many years I thought that the almost infinite world of
literature was in one man. That man was Carlyle, he was Johannes
Becher, he was
Whitman, he was Rafael Cansinos-Assens, he was De Quincey. Jorge Luis Borges 1. I have not read
The Sense of the Past, but I am
acquainted with the competent analysis of it by Stephen Spender in his
book The
Destructive Element (pp. 105-110). James was a friend of Wells; to
learn more
about their relationship, consult the latter’s vast Experiment in
Autobiography. 2. About the
middle of the seventeenth century the
epigrammatist of pantheism, Angelus Silesius, said that all the blessed
are one
(Cherubinischer Wandersmann, V, 7) and that every Christian must be
Christ
(ibid., V, 9).
|