Coleridge's Flower

J.L. Borges

Around 1938, Paul Valery wrote: "The history of literature should not be the history of authors and the course of their careers or of the career of their works, but rather the history of the Spirit as the producer or consumer of literature; such a history could be written without mentioning a single writer:' It was not the first time the Spirit had made this 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. These considerations (implied, of course, in pantheism) could give rise to an endless debate; I invoke them now to carry out a modest plan: a history of the evolution of an idea through the diverse texts of three authors. The first, by Coleridge-I am not sure if he wrote it at the end of the eighteenth or beginning of the nineteenth century-s-says: "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 such a fancy; to me it is perfect. To use it as the basis for other inventions seems quite impossible, for it has the wholeness and unity of a terminus ad quem, a final goal. Of course, it is just that: in literature as in other spheres, every act crowns an infinite series of causes and causes an infinite series of effects. Behind Coleridge's idea is the general and age-old idea of generations of lovers who craved the gift of a flower.
The second text I shall quote is a novel Wells drafted in 1887 and rewrote seven years later, in the summer of 1894. The first version was called The Chronic Argonauts (chronic in this rejected title is the etymological equivalent of temporal); the final version, The Time Machine. In this novel, Wells continued and renewed an ancient literary tradition: that of foreseeing future events. Isaiah sees the destruction of Babylon and the restoration of Israel; Aeneas, the military destiny of his descendants, the Romans; the prophetess of the Edda Saemundi, the return of the gods who, after the cyclical battle in which our world will be destroyed, will discover, lying on the grass of a new meadow, the same chess pieces they played with before .... Wells' protagonist, unlike those prophetic spectators, travels physically to the future. He returns tired, dusty, shaken; he returns from a remote humanity that has split into species who hate each other (the idle Eloi, who live in dilapidated palaces and ruined gardens; and the subterranean and nyctalopic Morlocks, who feed on the Eloi). He returns with his hair grown grey and brings from the future a wilted flower. This is the second version of Coleridge's image. More incredible than a celestial flower or, a dream flower is a future flower, the contradictory flower whose atoms, not yet assembled, now occupy other spaces.
The third version I shall mention, the most improbable of all, is by a writer much more complex than Wells, though less gifted with those pleasant virtues we usually call classical. I refer to the author of "The Abasement of the Northmores," the sad, labyrinthine Henry James. When he died, he left an unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past, a fantastic invention that was a variation or elaboration on The Time Machine (1): Wells' protagonist travels to the future in an outlandish vehicle that advances or regresses in time as other vehicles do in space; James' protagonist returns to the past, to the eighteenth century, by identifying himself with that period. (Both techniques are impossible, but James' is less arbitrary.) In The Sense of the Past the nexus between the real and the imaginary (between present and past) is not a flower, as in the previous stories, but an eighteenth-century portrait that mysteriously represents the protagonist. Fascinated by this canvas, he succeeds in going back to the day when it was painted. Among the persons he meets, he finds, of course, the artist, who paints him with fear and aversion, having sensed 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 portrait, but Pendrel needs to have returned to the eighteenth century for that portrait to exist. The cause follows the effect, or the reason for the journey is a consequence of the journey.
Wells was probably not acquainted with Coleridge's text; Henry James knew and admired Wells' text. If the doctrine that all authors are one is valid, such facts are, of course, insignificant (2). Strictly speaking, it is not necessary to go that far; the pantheist who declares the plurality of authors to be illusory finds unexpected support in the classicist, to whom such a plurality barely matters. For the classical mind, literature is the essential thing, not individuals. George Moore and James Joyce incorporated in their works the pages and sentences of others; Oscar Wilde used to give plots away for others to develop; both procedures, though apparently contradictory, may reveal an identical sense of art, an ecumenical, impersonal perception. Another witness of the Word's profound unity, another who defied the limitations of the individual, was the renowned Ben Jonson, who, upon writing his literary testament and the favorable or adverse opinions he held of his contemporaries, simply combined fragments from Seneca, Quintilian, Justus Lipsius, Vives, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Bacon, and the two Scaligers.
One last observation. Those who carefully copy a writer do so impersonally, because they equate that writer with literature, because they suspect that to depart from him in the slightest 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.

[SJL]

Notes by 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.  Around the middle of the seventeenth century the epigrammist of pantheism, Angelus Silesius, said that all the blessed are one (Cherubinscher Wandersmann V, 7) and that every Christian must be Christ (ibid., V, 9).