J.L.Borges's
essay "Coleridge's Flower", in the collection Otras
Inquisiciones, brings an assortment of themes that appear to
have had a special repercussion in Nabokov's work and thought, although his
response was seldom a positive one.
It is
Borges intention
to "present the story of the evolution of one idea along three
heterogeneous texts, written by three different authors". Their
writings comprise Coleridge's short note about a flower seen in a dream (that
the dreamer finds in his hands when he is awake); H.G.Wells's "The Time
Machine," in which a time-traveller returns from the future holding a
wilted flower; and Henry James's unfinished novel "The Sense of the Past". In
the latter, it's not a flower that brings together what is real and what is
imagined, but an old portrait that represents a present day character,
Ralph Pendrel, who travels to the past to have his portrait painted,
in a typical process of "regressus in infinitum."
Borges's intention is to
demonstrate the impersonal and ecumenical sense of a work of art. Copying,
quoting, and incorporating another author's sentences into one's
writings will indicate that these works stem from a common
source or "soul.."
Coleridge's flower might have
made an appearance in Pale Fire (Shade's brown shoes in the garden) and
in La Veneziana (a dark lemon from a painting that may have appeared in
the lawn) but it may have stemmed from the more terrifying narratives,
either by H.James or by H.Wells (most probably the
latter).
The other two
references are more difficult to prove. I tried to reach them in the
original works indicated by Borges (Shelley's Defence of
Poetry; Emerson's Essays), but I think Borges paraphrased them
to emphasize his singular interpretation of what he read, instead of
quoting directly from them.
Below are the few paragraphs I
extracted from the two essays and which I think are related
to Borges's citation from Shelley and
Emerson.*
A translation of Borges's
original paragraph is available in the internet and it is related
to a scientific research about memes made by two Brazilian scholars in
2007.**
'In ..."La flor de Coleridge"
("The flower of Coleridge"; Borges, 1974, p.639), Borges, mentioning Paul
Valéry, asserts:"Around 1938, Paul Valéry wrote: "The History of Literature
should not be a history of the authors and the events of their careers or the
career of their works, but the History of the Spirit as a producer or consumer
of literature. This history could be written without mentioning a single
writer". This was not the first time that the Spirit had formulated that
observation; in 1884, in the town of Concord, another of its amanuenses had
noted: "it could be said that only one person has written all of the books in
the world; there is in them such a central unity that it is plainly the work of
one omniscient gentleman" (Emerson: Essays, 2, viii). Twenty years later,
Shelley opined that all poems of the past, present and future are episodes or
fragments of a single infinite poem constructed by all of the poets of the
earth."
Borges's summary of Shelley's
opinion also reminded of "Pale Fire," by the comment by Charles
Kinbote to John Shade's (I underlined what I saw were their points of
touch) "Man’s life as commentary to
abstruse/ Unfinished poem. Note for further
use." and CK notes: "If I correctly
understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that
human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished
masterpiece." and he now seems to link these lines to another
set: "Life is a message scribbled in the
dark./Anonymous." in which the "Anonymous" gains a
particular resonance, concerning Shelley's purported thesis. It is curious
that both Shade and Kinbote focus a "man's life" as being intrinsically
dependent on words ("commentary/poem/ scribbled
message")
Another paragraph from
Shelley's Defence could also have been echoed by Shade or Charles Kinbote,
but there are significant differences that may destroy the tenuous
link I only glimpsed in a
flash. Shelley writes: "A
poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth [ ]A
story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which
should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is
distorted[ ] The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the
composition as a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be considered as a
whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated
portions; a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought."
And I wanted to compare these
lines to Kinbote's reference to Prof. Hurley's arguments about the
incompleteness of Pale Fire, - a poem whose perfect
structure would be envisioned by Shade "in a glass, darkly"
- to Borges's thesis and examples. However, the "platonic" ideal of a
perfect eternal work of Art is diluted all over poem and commentary,
and no clear example may be extracted from the whole.
I think that the scholars who
attempted an analogy "between Borges' poetic narrative and memetics"
(they explain that the latter is "an attempt to interpret human nature
in terms not only of genes but also of memes – that is, ideas understood as
cultural patterns"), reacted to the same conjectures Borges brought about in the
succession of articles comprised by "Otras Inquisiciones" that I related to
"something" also present in Nabokov. The chess-playing gods and the plexed
artistry in PF might be related to what the authors consider to be the
fate of Borges's characters: they are prisioners inside
dedalian labirynths of memes...(see below
**)
btw: I'm not sure I share their
opinions!
..............................................................................
* "We live
in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the
soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part
and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which
we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only
self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing
seen the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see
the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the
whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision
of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back on
our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in
every man that we can know what it saith."
(Emerson,Essays,2,viii)
"... the poet 'beholds' intensely the
present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things
ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present and his thoughts
are the germ of the flower and the fruit of the latest time [ ] A
poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates
to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms
which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the
distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry
without injuring it as poetry...All high poetry is infinite; it is as the
first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be
undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great
poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight;
and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which
their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another
succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen
and an unconceived delight...They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written
by Time upon the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills
the theatre of everlasting generations with their harmony. "[ ] "In
the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their auditors are
fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it acts in a divine and
unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness; and it is reserved for
future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in
all the strength and splendor of their union. Even in modern times, no living
poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgment
upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers:
it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many
generations." (Shelley: Defence of Poetry)
** História,
Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos Print version ISSN 0104-5970 Hist. cienc.
saude-Manguinhos vol.15 no.1 Rio de
Janeiro Jan./Mar. 2008 http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-59702008000100011 A replicator in movement: similarities between
Borges' poetic narrative and the memes research agenda, by Ricardo
Waizbort and Lucia de la Rocque. ABSTRACT: Jorge
Luis Borges' extensive fantasy writings have been read as a critique of
traditional science and logic and as a repudiation of the individual's
importance, of the presumption of reality itself, and, consequently, of the
forms of knowledge accessible to us. The article presents a new way of
understanding Borges' poetic narrative, evincing this narrative's ability to
grasp cultural phenomenon from a scientific perspective. An analogy is drawn
between Borges' poetic narrative and memetics, the latter being an attempt to
interpret human nature in terms not only of genes but also of memes – that is,
ideas understood as cultural patterns. Although any literary work is a vehicle
for ideas, Borges, who writes in an extraordinarily critical fashion, seems
particularly aware of the independence of ideas and therefore, the article
asserts, his characters can be seen as prisoners inside labyrinths of
memes.