Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

Literaria
, he announces, for example, that he will devote a coming chapter to explaining the difference between reason and understanding, or between fantasy and imagination. And then the chapter in which he lays out these important differences ends up being translations of Schelling or ofKant, whom he admired. It has been said that Coleridge promised the printers that he would turn in a chapter, then turned in something plagiarized. 7 What is most likely is that Coleridge had forgotten he had translated it. Coleridge lived what we could call a purely intellectual life. Thought interested him more than the writing of thought. I had a more or less famous friend, MacedonioFernández, and the same was true about him. 8 I remember that Macedonio Fernández moved around from one boardinghouse to another, and each time he moved he left behind a collection of manuscripts in a drawer. I asked him why he lost what he wrote, and he answered, “What, you think we are so rich, we have something to lose? What I thought up once, I’ll think up again, so I lose nothing.” Perhaps Coleridge thought the same way. There is an article by Walter Pater, one of the most famous prose writers in English literature, who says that Coleridge, for what he thought, what he dreamed, what he carried out, and even more, “for what he failed to do,” represents an archetype, we could almost say, of the romantic man. More than Werther, more than Chateaubriand, more than anyone else. And the truth is, there is something in Coleridge that seems to fill the imagination to overflowing. It is life itself, filled with postponements, unfulfilled promises, brilliant conversations. All of this belongs to a particular kind of human being.
    What’s curious is that Coleridge’s conversation has been preserved, as wasJohnson’s; but when we read Boswell’s pages—those pages full of epigrams, those short and clever sentences—we understand why Johnson was so admired as a conversationalist. On the contrary, the volumes of
Table Talk
—of Coleridge’s after-dinner conversations—are rarely admirable. They abound in trivialities. Perhaps in a conversation, more important than what is said is what the interlocutor feels is lurking behind the spoken words. And undoubtedly there was in Coleridge’s conversation a kind of magic that was not in the words but rather in what the words suggested, in what was revealed behind them.
    Moreover, there are, of course, admirable passages in Coleridge’s prose. There is, for example, a theory of dreams. Coleridge said that in our dreams we are thinking, though not with reason but with the imagination. Coleridge suffered from nightmares, and he noticed the fact that, even if a nightmare was horrific, a few minutes after waking up, the horror of the nightmare had disappeared. And this is how he explained it: he said that in reality—when awake, I mean, because nightmares are real for those who dream them—when awake, a man has been known to go insane because of a pretend ghost, a ghost invented as a joke. On the other hand, we dream horrible dreams, and when we wake up, even if we wake up shaking, we calm down after five or ten minutes. And Coleridge explained it like this: he said that our dreams, even the most vivid ones, the nightmares, are part of an intellectual process. That is, a man is sleeping, there is a weight on his chest, and in order to explain that weight, he dreams that a lion is lying on top of him. Then, the horror of this image wakes him up, but all of this has been part of an intellectual process. That is how Coleridge explained nightmares, as imperfect, atrocious reasoning, but still works of the imagination—that is, intellectual processes—and that is why they do not mark us so deeply.
    And all of this about dreams is very important when talking about Coleridge. In the last class, I told one of Wordsworth’s dreams. In the next class, I will talk about Coleridge’s most famous poem, “Kubla Khan,” which is based on a dream. And this reminds us of the case of the first English poet,Caedmon, who dreamed of an angel who forced him to compose a poem based on the first verses of Genesis, about the origins of the world.
    Next, Coleridge is one of the first who backed the Shakespeare cult in England. GeorgeMoore, an Irish writer from the beginning of this century, says that if the Jehovah cult came to an end, it would be replaced immediately by the Shakespeare cult. And one of the people who