With three chapters down and the final two roughed in, I am rounding the corner toward the last 10% of my diss work, with a whole luxurious week spreading out before me! Here’s an excerpt by way of update:

“KUBLA KHAN,” THE CONFESSIONS OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT, AND THE DECOMPOSING SUBJECT IN COLERIDGE’S CORPUS

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

I joy, that in these straits, I see my West;        

            For, though theire currants yeeld returne to none,    

What shall my West hurt me? As West and East        

            In all flatt Maps (and I am one) are one,        

            So death doth touch the Resurrection.  (Donne “Hymne” 11-15)

 

            As John Donne lay in bed, made “flatt” by illness, he also answered to the cries of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, years later, arising from horrifying dreams caused by nervous disorder and withdrawal from opiates.  Donne did so in language Coleridge would recognize:  with the parenthetical “I am one,” Donne explicitly labels the subject “Donne” in the poem as an exemplary subject, a representation to be read among the representations of “West and East,” “flatt Maps,” and “death [and] Resurrection” in the poem.  The “I” that can “joy” and “see” perceives approaching death as “my West,” a representation of European hopes which at the time of Donne’s writing already had mutually-reinforcing religious and political dimensions as both “New World” and “City on a Hill.”  These hopes are represented in Donne’s poetic language as the text-inscribed images on “flatt Maps.”  The “I” who identifies himself as such a map, in which “West and East . . . are one,” is the subject of both “death” and “Resurrection”; by being written as such a subject in a poem, this selfsame “I” serves to exemplify the general case of “death” and “Resurrection” for the reader.

            Coleridge’s poetic voices and the representation of the subject “Coleridge” in his prose works serve a similarly exemplary function.  Similar fluidity of representation characterizes such poems as “Kubla Khan” and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which also deal with “West and East” as personal even in their political and religious dimensions.  Coleridge uses a prose introduction to link “Kubla Khan,” which he terms a “psychological curiosity,” with another such example, “The Pains of Sleep.”  This explicitly exemplary use of these poems provides the clearest poetic entrée to Coleridge’s complex representation of the human subject, the “self” which both represents and is represented in every movement of language.  The catastrophic failure of the response to sickness represented in “The Pains of Sleep” contrasts sharply with Donne’s more successful response.  Donne assimilates the representing and represented “I” into his experience of a more authoritative system of representation, representing himself as a faithful and responsive reader of Scripture:

And as to others soules I preach’d thy word,

            Be this my Text, my Sermon to mine owne,  

            Therfore that he may raise the Lord throws down. (28-30)

In stark contrast, Coleridge’s exemplary “I” attempts to secure himself by appealing beyond text to an inarticulate “sense” which is, paradoxically, also a composition:

It hath not been my use to pray

With moving lips or bended knees;

But silently, by slow degrees,

My spirit I to Love compose.  (2-5).

The contradictions intrinsic to this attempt to “compose” without admitting any prior text, to pray with “no wish conceived, no thought exprest, / Only a sense,” account for the catastrophic failure of Coleridge’s theorizing of the subject which is depicted in “The Pains of Sleep.”  The prose introduction and “Kubla Khan” link this very personal suffering still more clearly to the global political and religious concerns bound up in Coleridge’s philosophical and poetic works.

Here’s a section that comments on the prose introduction and turns to examining “The Pains of Sleep,” with a key quotation imbedded in it:

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            The prose introduction, in repeating the figuration of the subject in “Kubla Khan” for the subject Coleridge and the “youth,” thus adds additional turns to the poem.  Each of these turns clarifies the reflection of the subject self in Coleridge’s works, making it plainer that the “decree” and the “music loud and long” and the “still surviving recollections” and the “fragments dim of lovely forms” are formations of what Jacques Derrida calls “the invisible interior of poetic freedom.”  Says Derrida,

To grasp the operation of the creative imagination at the greatest possible proximity to it, one must turn oneself toward the invisible interior of poetic freedom.  One must be separated from oneself in order to be reunited with the blind origin of the work in its darkness. (“Force and Signification”)

At this passage, Derrida’s usage and Coleridge’s correspond with an exactitude which calls for further exploration.

            There is, however, an important and often omitted turn in the poetry to be explored first:  in the prose introduction most closely associated with “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge also presents another “psychological curiosity” with confessional characteristics (the more pronounced for having been first included in a letter to Southey).  “The Pains of Sleep” plainly tempts a naïve reading, but one need not dismiss the personal pain expressed here to acknowledge the difference between the composition of a poem and the scream that it mentions.

            In the poem, the speaker attempts to recover the meaningful totality “in me, round me, every where” that is lost when sleep uncovers “the unfathomable hell within” that overwhelms “the powerless will.”  In this case, the attempt is recast in terms of a specifically spiritual and moral expectation of meaning.  The speaker in the poem attempts to read the series of events, to discover the tropological allegory in sleep broken by dreams of “Deeds to be hid which were not hid” that seem to defeat such reading, as he cannot even know “Whether I suffered, or I did” these deeds that caused “soul-stifling shame.”

            In that allegorizing conscience lies another turn in Coleridge’s figuration of the subject in “Kubla Khan” and the prose introduction.  In these two texts, the relationship between the writer’s creative “decree” and “music” and “recollection” and the inarticulate core of such utterance is figured with relation to historical concerns on the global scale, and with literary concerns on the local scale, and with “psychological curiosity” on the personal scale.  In each case, the particularity necessary to realize the hoped-for recovery is defeated by the ideality (figured as unreality, deferral of historical being) of the primal unity to be recovered.  The descent into the “romantic chasm” in “The Pains of Sleep,” however, is “of a very different character”; it is not figured elegiacally as a melancholy plight productive of transient beauties, but agonistically, taking place “in anguish and in agony.”

Just turned in the draft–it’s a (ha!) stable text, that is, polishing & documentation yet to be added, but the paragraphs are where I expect them to remain, for now.

Here’s a clip from near the opening that contains a blueprint of the diss to come:

An attempt to give Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit its proper significance among and within the Coleridgean corpus, then, will develop through several stages: First, an understanding of the patterns which reveal the nature and degree of artificiality in this apparently naïve text and justify taking it as a post-hoc pretext for reading Coleridge’s works. Second, a development of these patterns as exemplified in Coleridge’s use of a prose introduction to collocate the early “Kubla Khan” and later “The Pains of Sleep” near the middle of his career. Third, an examination of “the working of the work,” the project being wrought by Coleridge’s work, as suggested by Confessions and the collocation of “Kubla Khan” and “The Pains of Sleep” and informed by references to the whole Coleridgean corpus; Fourth and finally, a turn to the specifically Biblical accounting for this project called for by Coleridge’s own confessions, and called for in certain terms. Such a project will call for close reading of particular, exemplary texts, as well as for theoretical discourse at the limits of textuality; will be involved by Coleridge’s own words in the workings of theology, and the problems of spiritual works in general; and will address especially the inward relationship (the difference) between original sin and the origin of the work of art.

And, from Chapter 3, some of the internal workings of the argument:

The work of self-composure so clearly marked—and so painfully questioned—in “The Pains of Sleep” is also, of course, being wrought throughout Coleridge’s works. As Kearns says in discussing Coleridge’s use of a “fictional letter from ‘a friend’” (156) to account for Coleridge’s incompletion of chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria, “to maintain the objective status of self-consciousness [. . .] he finds that he must engage in a process of perpetual self-duplication. Thus we have Coleridge’s continual re-appropriation of his own texts, as well as those of others” (161). If Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit is properly called confessional, it is so partly because it is another reworking of Coleridge’s work of self-composure. The confounding of distinctions among the Khan, the writer, the narrator, and the subject Coleridge in “Kubla Khan,” like the revising of the poem into a “psychological curiosity” with the prose introduction, thematize the constitution of the self through working with language. Jerome Christensen explores this theme in terms of the allegory of the writer in Coleridge’s works, expressly reading Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit as a key allegorical text treating the personal and political problem of the “constitution” of the subject, including the subject Coleridge. With regard then to the working of the work of writing as self-composition, then, and the allegory of the writer thus produced in every text, special attention must be paid to the role of the subject (Coleridge) in Coleridge’s body of work, as in the “Essay on Faith,” Logic, Aids to Reflection, and of course Biographia Literaria. Equally significant, though is the role of the subject (Coleridge) in the text of Scripture as read by Coleridge, frequently treated in these same texts, and most pointedly in what H. N. Coleridge calls “the key” to Coleridge’s diffusion of “Biblical criticism,” Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. Such an examination sets the groundwork for a more direct evaluation to come of to what extent Coleridge reads Scripture as a Coleridgean text, and to what extent as a Biblical text—an evaluation whose urgency is suggested by “The Pains of Sleep.”

Seems pretty compressed? It is. Somehow this 5-7 years of obsessively reading works that interact with Coleridge’s ideas on Scripture, the subject, hermeneutics, and theology all come out into a book-length manuscript–but before I can write that, I have to make a very, very short paper out of the same material. It’s . . . challenging.

And here, from Chapter 3 again, the closing and transition out toward Chapter 4:

In this dissolving of differences, Coleridge treats with an aggressive catholicity not only such terms as “symbol” and “creed,” which have been related since the days of the Greek Fathers, but also “sacrament,” “miracle,” “Scripture,” “prophet,” and “poem.” As James Cutsinger has it, “the most important thing to realize about Coleridge’s vision of unity is that it excludes attention to the particular elements united” (70). The symbol’s “translucence” to a state in which such differences are dissolved also makes the diversity of authors and texts very nearly a thing of indifference to Coleridge. Scripture in such a scheme is seen as differing in degree, rather than kind, from other texts: it is a more perfect symbol, as “Revealed Religion . . . is in its highest contemplation the unity, that is, the identity or co-inherence, of Subjective and Objective” (Confessions). The work thus worked, then, participates in an historical movement of language toward totality, toward a dissolution of differences (including the difference between Scripture and other texts, and between subject and object) into unity, a unity which Coleridge professes to believe is divine and primeval (as well as eschatological, the parousia), but which “The Pains of Sleep” and the “ancestral voices prophesying war” call into question.

And, then, the concluding paragraph of the prospectus–there’s still quite a lot undeveloped, here (we skipped all of chapters 2 and 4, for example), but you can see where I’m going:

The origin of the self, of the body of work of art and life, is for all fallen creatures original sin—that is, an originary aversion to the Creator, an effort to become an un-created being. Like Artaud, with his sense of a “stolen body” [check quotation], the fallen creature must eventually either compromise (becoming one of Nietzsche’s Last Men) or press on to further inarticulation. Coleridge, in composing Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit and the rest of his works, is clearly complicit in this scheme, as are all humans. At the same time, Coleridge, recognizing in Christianity the “remedy” which “affords all the solution which our moral interests require,” is eased in the dilemma between the madness of increasing inarticulation (as Nietzsche, Holderlin, Artaud) and the deeply conflicted economizing measures of civilization (as Heidegger, Derrida, De Man, Bloom, Rorty). He is near enough to see it, and, with his opium addiction, to be reminded (as he says of original sin in all its baffling manifestations) “to walk humbly with the Lord his God.” In this, then, lies the possibility of an origin of works of art and life—of enactment and confession—which recognize and critique the presence of original sin in the Coleridgean corpus, as every other, but which are enabled by reliance on the language of Scripture to articulate both the Creator / Creature and the creature / fallen difference, resigning the violence intrinsic to the fallen creature’s writing for the humility becoming the faithful reader’s confession.

Obviously, one needs not only the several days I spent on just this one sentence out of about a month’s revisiting of my research to date, but an Introduction to set the stage, here. Nonetheless, I have come up with the following condensation of my argument in the diss:

Taking Coleridge’s Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit as a pretext to reading his collocation of “Kubla Khan” and “The Pains of Sleep” as developments of his efforts to “compose himself” and re-ground Christianity links the success and failure of Coleridge’s work to a Biblical accounting for his complicity in rendering language inarticulate concerning himself and God.

Possible revisions:

• “Taking … as a pretext” seems to fit my intent, here, but may need further clarifying
• Obviously, as written, this is one stylistically kludgy sentence; will appear differently in decent prose
• “concerning himself and God” is more particular and personal than I want, but
• “concerning God and other people” is too general, and too obviously indebted to personalist thought, while
• “concerning the Creator/creature and creature/fallen relationships” is seemingly more precise, but until the groundwork is laid, probably conveys no more than the language above

All in all, though, this seems workable to me.

Arnold (Function of Criticism)

So immersed are they in practical life, so accustomed to take all their notions from this life and its processes, that they are apt to think that truth and culture themselves can be reached by the processes of this life, and that it is an impertinent singularity to think of reaching them in any other. “We are all _terræ filii_,”[45] cries their eloquent advocate; “all Philistines[46] together. Away with the notion of proceeding by any other course than the course dear to the Philistines; let us have a social movement, let us organize and combine a party to pursue truth and new thought, let us call it _the liberal party_, and let us all stick to each other, and back each other up.

(Nietzsche, Thoughts out of Season)

At all events, the belief seems to be rife that we are in possession of a genuine culture, and the enormous incongruity of this triumphant satisfaction in the face of the inferiority which should be patent to all, seems only to be noticed by the few and the select. For all those who think with the public mind have blindfolded their eyes and closed their ears. The incongruity is not even acknowledged to exist. How is this possible? What power is sufficiently influential to deny this existence? What species of men must have attained to supremacy in Germany that feelings which are so strong and simple should he denied or prevented from obtaining expression? This power, this species of men, I will name—they are the Philistines of Culture. As every one knows, the word “Philistine” is borrowed from the vernacular of student-life, and, in its widest and most popular sense, it signifies the reverse of a son of the Muses, of an artist, and of the genuine man of culture. The Philistine of culture, however, the study of whose type and the hearing of whose confessions (when he makes them) have now become tiresome duties, distinguishes himself from the general notion of the order “Philistine” by means of a superstition: he fancies that he is himself a son of the Muses and a man of culture. This incomprehensible error clearly shows that he does not even know the difference between a Philistine and his opposite.

Arnold:

seen from this side, our august Constitution sometimes looks,–forgive me, shade of Lord Somers![41]–a colossal machine for the manufacture of Philistines? How is Cobbett[42] to say this and not be misunderstood, blackened as he is with the smoke of a lifelong conflict in the field of political practice? how is Mr. Carlyle to say it and not be misunderstood, after his furious raid into this field with his _Latter-day Pamphlets?_[43] how is Mr. Ruskin,[44] after his pugnacious political economy? I say, the critic must keep out of the region of immediate practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere, if he wants to make a beginning for that more free speculative treatment of things, which may perhaps one day make its benefits felt even in this sphere, but in a natural and thence irresistible manner. Do what he will, however, the critic will still remain exposed to frequent misunderstandings, and nowhere so much as in this country.

still Arnold:

When one looks, for instance, at the English Divorce Court–an institution which perhaps has its practical conveniences, but which in the ideal sphere is so hideous; an institution which neither makes divorce impossible nor makes it decent, which allows a man to get rid of his wife, or a wife of her husband, but makes them drag one another first, for the public edification, through a mire of unutterable infamy,–when one looks at this charming institution, I say, with its crowded trials, its newspaper reports, and its money compensations, this institution in which the gross unregenerate British Philistine has indeed stamped an image of himself, –one may be permitted to find the marriage theory of Catholicism refreshing and elevating.

Thompson on Shelley:

Again, Shelley desired a religion of humanity, and that meant, to him, a religion for humanity, a religion which, unlike the spectral Christianity about him, should permeate and regulate the whole organisation of men. And the feeling is one with which a Catholic must sympathise, in an age when—if we may say so without irreverence—the Almighty has been made a constitutional Deity, with certain state-grants of worship, but no influence over political affairs. In these matters his aims were generous, if his methods were perniciously mistaken. In his theory of Free Love alone, borrowed like the rest from the Revolution, his aim was as mischievous as his method. At the same time he was at least logical. His theory was repulsive, but comprehensible. Whereas from our present via media—facilitation of divorce—can only result the era when the young lady in reduced circumstances will no longer turn governess but will be open to engagement as wife at a reasonable stipend.

back to Nietzsche:

Culture is, before all things, the unity of artistic style, in every expression of the life of a people. Abundant knowledge and learning, however, are not essential to it, nor are they a sign of its existence; and, at a pinch, they might coexist much more harmoniously with the very opposite of culture—with barbarity: that is to say, with a complete lack of style, or with a riotous jumble of all styles.

and to Arnold:

But let criticism leave church-rates and the franchise alone, and in the most candid spirit, without a single lurking thought of practical innovation, confront with our dithyramb this paragraph on which I stumbled in a newspaper immediately after reading Mr. Roebuck:– “A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.” Nothing but that; but, in juxtaposition with the absolute eulogies of Sir Charles Adderley and Mr. Roebuck, how eloquent, how suggestive are those few lines! “Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole world!”–how much that is harsh and ill-favored there is in this best! _Wragg!_ If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of “the best in the whole world,” has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original short-coming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names,–Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than “the best race in the world”; by the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing!

Arnold:

What then is the duty of criticism here? To take the practical point of view, to applaud the liberal movement and all its works,–its New Road religions of the future into the bargain,–for their general utility’s sake? By no means; but to be perpetually dissatisfied with these works, while they perpetually fall short of a high and perfect ideal. For criticism, these are elementary laws; but they never can be popular, and in this country they have been very little followed, and one meets with immense obstacles in following them. That is a reason for asserting them again and again. Criticism must maintain its independence of the practical spirit and its aims. Even with well-meant efforts of the practical spirit it must express dissatisfaction, if in the sphere of the ideal they seem impoverishing and limiting.

and still Arnold:

Again, judging is often spoken of as the critic’s one business, and so in some sense it is; but the judgment which almost insensibly forms itself in a fair and clear mind, along with fresh knowledge, is the valuable one; and thus knowledge, and ever fresh knowledge, must be the critic’s great concern for himself. And it is by communicating fresh knowledge, and letting his own judgment pass along with it,–but insensibly, and in the second place, not the first, as a sort of companion and clue, not as an abstract lawgiver,–that the critic will generally do most good to his readers.

and Arnold again:

criticism may have to deal with a subject-matter so familiar that fresh knowledge is out of the question, and then it must be all judgment; an enunciation and detailed application of principles. Here the great safeguard is never to let oneself become abstract, always to retain an intimate and lively consciousness of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment this fails us, to be sure that something is wrong. Still under all circumstances, this mere judgment and application of principles is, in itself, not the most satisfactory work to the critic; like mathematics, it is tautological, and cannot well give us, like fresh learning, the sense of creative activity.

and Nietzsche:

What does our Culture-Philistinism say of these seekers? It regards them simply as discoverers, and seems to forget that they themselves only claimed to be seekers. We have our culture, say her sons; for have we not our “classics”? Not only is the foundation there, but the building already stands upon it—we ourselves constitute that building. And, so saying, the Philistine raises his hand to his brow. But, in order to be able thus to misjudge, and thus to grant left-handed veneration to our classics, people must have ceased to know them. This, generally speaking, is precisely what has happened. For, otherwise, one ought to know that there is only one way of honouring them, and that is to continue seeking with the same spirit and with the same courage, and not to weary of the search.

And thus the pragmatics of process toward the ideal-as-unreal triumphs in English and German simultaneously, both deferring to the French in the middle, and defining the age between them in the same (Arnold, Nietzsche, Shelley, Bultmann, etc.) terms.

If you understand the above, you also understand the incoherence of politics, these days.

Mobipocket has about the slickest interface for annotation that I’ve seen. Microsoft Reader is nice, but the client is a bit sluggish and heavy (slick looking, though). And I’m just tinkering with Plucker so far.

(fwiw, this is especially interesting b/c I was given a Pocket PC which comes in very handy for keeping up with reading & notes–provided I can actually get my texts to it in a manageable format, which turns out to be the challenge)

diss being on Coleridge, the key one is Romanticism.

“contiguous historical” should be Victorianism

“other historical” will be 20th-C English (religious) poets

and the “open” area will be lit-crit / religion in the 20th C

This is all shockingly modern compared to what I would have said I was going for back in 1999 when I headed off to grad school.

Now, about Sisson, Byron, and Gadamer….

Start, as they say, at the beginning.