Subject
{THOUGHTS] Borges, idealistic influences,
allusions and memetics...
allusions and memetics...
From
Date
Body
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.
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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.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
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