The Flower of Coleridge

Around 1938 Paul Valery wrote that the history of literature should not be the history of the authors and the accidents of their careers or of the career of heir works, but rather the history of the Spirit as the producer or consumer of literature. He added that such a history could be written without the mention of a single writer. It was not the first time that the Spirit had made such an observation. In 1844 one of its amanuenses in concord had noted: "I am very much struck in literature by the appearance that one person wrote all the books; . . . there is such equality and identity both of judgment and point of view in the narrative that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman" (Emerson, Essays: Second Series, "Nominalist and Realist," 1844). Twenty years earlier Shelley expressed the opinion that all the poems of the past, present, and future were episodes or fragments of a single infinite poem, written by all the poets on earth.
  Those considerations (which are, of course, implicit in pantheism) could give rise to an endless debate. I am invoking them now to assist me in a modest plan: to trace the history of the evolution of an idea through the heterogeneous texts of three authors. The first one is by Coleridge; I am not sure whether he wrote it at the end of the eighteenth century or at the beginning of the nineteenth: "If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Ay!—and what then?"                                                     

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).