The Poetics of Dreaming in Borges

The Poetics of Dreaming in Borges, Coleridge, and Kafka

Imagination, Coleridge argues, "is the mind in its highest state of creative insight and alertness; its acts are acts of growth, and display themselves in breaking down the hard commonplaceness which so easily besets us, and in re-moulding this stubborn raw material into new and living wholes."[1] The imagination is further divided into Primary and Secondary forms: "The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation."[2] This divine faculty of the infinite "I am" is imbued with especial importance as an ordering tool. It is the inner creatrix that crafts our understanding and reaction to the world. Sensations, then, dream visions, and flights of creative imagination are the true sources of meanings, and the inspirations behind the craft of literature. That is, for Coleridge, Literature, or Writing, is the act that manifests the faculty of imagination.

Such a formulation admits to two things. Firstly, it polarises two modes of being. If imagination is the primary ordering tool and meaning maker, if it uses as raw material a stubborn commonplaceness, then it signals the presence of two modes of being - the mode of Reason, that stubborn commonplaceness that reeks of rationality and definition and mechanisation on the one hand, and the mode of creation, that prime agent of all human perception, organic and natural, on the other. In essence, the two modes of being are mutually exclusive. They are the antitheses of themselves.

This leads us to the formulation's second admission: Literature, or writing, is diametrically opposed to the world, or rather, it transcends the seething everyday, the surging flow of that which constantly intervenes and crashes against and into and over; writing is a beatitude that exceeds the quagmire of the concrete, a vessel broken away from its moorings. If only Literature can gain access to this "infinite I am," then it belongs to the Gnostic arts and not to the world, if by world we take to be the burgeoning conflux of virulently copulating phenomena.

Yet, a paradox emerges from this. Because already within this virulent copulation resides the aesthetic sensibilities of the creatrix. It is here that the two worlds that Coleridge erects collide, with such gentle force that it goes unnoticed, or else it disappears into a lesion in the skin of phenomena. It fills the void that lies on the other side of this crack, on the outside of phenomena, but always within its very core. It is here in this absence that something anonymous is allowed to fester and bubble into existence.

Coleridge, however, insists on the "separative projection"[3] as he calls it by stressing that "the body is but a striving to become mind."[4] The material is a grotesquery, to use a Bakhtinian construct, that owes its very existence to the more prescient faculties of the mind. In the poem Kubla Khan,[5] for instance, a decree is issued by the Mongol Emperor that a stately pleasure-dome[6] is to be built upon "that deep romantic chasm,"[7] spanning "twice five miles of fertile ground,"[8] enclosed by "Walls and towers."[9] The Khan's vision of an earthly paradise, his dream of heavenly pleasures materialise in the form of a dome, a mathematical resolution to structural integrity, and towers that signal the desire to lock in, to hold the vision of the mind in the grip of the Concrete. The latter must strive, through its unnatural, rationalistic instruments - stone walls, fortifications, and mathematics - to become the realisation of the Vision of the mind. The Mind, Kubla Khan's imaginative faculty, is the seat of his creatrix, the true author of the "stately pleasure-dome," and the vision the artistic medium of its realisation.

Yet, even as the vision is transcribed into a more palpable form, the tension between the two modes of being begins to mount, the two worlds collide: Kubla Khan's vision made manifest is

haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail.[10]

Kubla's sense vision belongs not to the world, for it chaffs violently against "the caverns measureless to man"[11]

Kubla's failed sense vision is matched with the Speaker's own vision of a "damsel with a dulcimer"[12] whose "symphony and song"[13] he is unable to revive, or make material. It is a realisation that points to the deep abyss, those "sinuous rills"[14] where meaning collapses. The distance that separates the vision from the world, the idea or sensation, from the material or real, is the abyss, Blanchot's space of death, his absence, which dismantles language, and perception, and reconfigures the text and its relationship with the world. It is in this space that Literature, or writing, is born, the dark non-place, where both vision and materiality is begotten and entwined. The failure of Kubla's project, in the eyes of the Poet/Speaker, is the failure to recognise that the pleasure-dome is both sensation and materiality, both mind and body. They are both the mirrors of each other. It is Mallarmé's dice throw which, Deleuze argues, the former conceived in "a way that chance and necessity are opposite terms."[15] The dice throw fails if the chance succeeds in being present. The dice throw succeeds if chance is annulled. However, even when the resulting number is the 'correct' one, it is still the consequence of chance, still the product of an ever-present cycle of chance and design, of desire and death.

As such the "infinite I am" is never reached. The vision and the act of writing, which is the moment of execution, which is also at that very moment the time of "time's absence," as Blanchot argues, become dissolved into the melting pot of the abyss. Blanchot further suggests that time's absence, or the abyss, is "the time when nothing begins, when initiative is not possible,... it is a time without negation, without decision, when here is nowhere as well, and each thing withdraws into its image while the "I" that we are recognises itself by sinking into the neutrality of a featureless third person."[16] Coleridge is at odds here with Blanchot. While the former locates the "I" in the mode of creation, the imaginal realm, the latter dismantles the "I" and locates only absence and death. Blanchot cites Georges Poulet's work on Mallarmé:

Death is the only act possible. Cornered as we are between the true material world whose chance combination take place in us regardless of us, and a false ideal world whose lie paralyses and bewitches us, we have only one means of no longer being at the mercy either of nothingness or of chance. This unique means, this unique act, is death. Voluntary death. Through it we abolish ourselves, but through it we also found ourselves.[17]

The choice Poulet allows us is in effect an embracing of "the caverns measureless to man," an acknowledgement of the vision's materiality, and materiality's visionary quality. In other words, it encourages us to discard all notions of what is natural and what is not, what is organic and what is mechanical. Poulet's voluntary death, is the dissolution of all the binary oppositions that Coleridge sets up in his poetic sensibility. Blanchot argues, following this, that writing requires the writer "to lose everything he might construe as his own "nature," that he lose all character and that, ceasing to be linked to others and to himself by the decision which makes him an "I," he becomes the empty place where the impersonal affirmation emerges."[18]

While, Coleridge sees the Imagination, and its true expression, writing, as the means to access the infinite "I am," Blanchot sees writing as impossible without the negation of the "I" and also of materiality. Coleridge's distinction between the Imagination and the real can only be sustained if the "I" is external to Literature, if it is merely a striving to get to the outside. However, writing, Literature, according to Blanchot, can only occur in absence, in the time before speech, when there is a complete negation of the self, in order for the voices within texts to emerge. This writing can only occur when a disappearance is effected. Foucault argues that the subject of Literature is not the language that allows for its communication, but the void that it becomes or takes when it articulates itself.[19] Coleridge dreams the poem, Kublai the Pleasure-dome, and his counterpart the damsel with a dulcimer. Each dreamer fails, the task aborted, or the project imperfect. Each dreamer is negated by the other, by the consecutive dreaming of each other. They are no more than mere signifiers chasing each other, an endless impulse to move forward but never getting there. In this multiple dreaming, in this flux of the naked space of death, we find the confluence of voices that hum and drone and become what we call Literature. It is an anonymous zone of pre-language. It is a negation of both dreamer and the dreamed.

The double negation results in an anonymous zone of voices where the fundamental truth or idea is reflected in Beckett's words: "What does it matter who is speaking?"[20] Who is speaking in Kubla Khan? If all three dreamers have dreamed each other, then their individual voices are drowned and dissolved into a mixture we could call Literature. Argentinean fiction maker, Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay, "Coleridge's dream," argues that Coleridge's vision in a dream is less than ordinary and goes on to cite examples in literary history of similar occurrences- the case of Giuseppe Tartini, the violinist and composer who dreamed that the Devil, his slave, was playing a marvellous sonata on the violin. When Tartini awoke, he composed from imperfect memory the "Trillo del Diavolo."; there is the case of Caedmon, a lowly old shepherd who in his dream one night was asked to sing "about the origin of created things." When he awoke, he repeated them word for word to the monks at a monastery in Hild. Caedmon's ability to sing the creation of the world, the monks report, was not learnt from men, but from God.[21] Borges highlights, however, a more curious 'fact' about Coleridge's dream. In the 14th century Persian text, "Compendium of Histories" by Rashid al-Din, one line reads: "East of Shang-tu, Kublai Khan built a palace according to a plan that he had seen in a dream and retained in his memory." The person to whom this line is attributed is Ghazan Mahmud, a descendant of Kublai Khan.[22] So, a man dreams of a palace, builds it, and then it ends in ruins. Five centuries later, an English poet dreams a poem about the very same dreamt palace. A dream about a dream. The ambiguity that fascinates Borges is not a question of who dreamt it up first, but who has dreamt whom.

In Borges' short story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the narrator says, "All men, in the climactic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare."[23] Borges' thoughts on Coleridge's dream is at best a simplistic and, dare we say, romantic idealisation of the dream vision inspiration. However, Borges is unwittingly pointing us towards what Shakespeare's Prospero would call "the dark backward and abysm of time."[24] (Evans, 18). He is pointing us towards that dark space that Blanchot calls the space of death, where dying allows us entry into a multiplicity of loci-less voices, an absence that must be present before speech or writing can occur.

In Borges' "Circular Ruins,"[25] a magician dreams another man to put him into reality. After many repeated attempts, working amidst the ruins of an ancient temple, he finally succeeds, but in order to bring him to life he requires the help of the God of Fire, previously worshipped at the temple which now lies in ruins within the abyss of time. There he meditates on his project. In return for the help received he sends the newly dreamt man, essentially his son, down the way to another ruined temple to worship the Fire God. He is concerned, however, that his son might discover the fact that he has been dreamed because he learns of rumours of a man who can walk on fire without being burned ( a clear sign of his insubstantiality), and worries that if his son were to walk through fire and remain unscathed, he would soon discover his shadowy origins. Such a humiliating discovery he would not want to wish upon anyone, let alone his son.

Years later, when his own temple is surrounded by a forest fire, he walks into the flames, and is relieved to find that he is unscathed. Then, he understands with terror that he, too, is an illusion, that someone else had been dreaming him. The circular inversions of the dreamer and the dreamt, of dreaming and being dreamt, is firstly suggested by the epigraph, the incomplete thought implied when Tweedledee and Tweedledum explain to Alice that she is part of a dream the red King is dreaming at the moment: "And if he left off dreaming about you..." Alice is confronted with the possible unreality of her self, since to be dreamed is to be nothing. This is a delightful infinite regress since the Red King is part of Alice's dream. The dreamer in Borges' story fashions a text, and immerses it into reality, not realising, or having forgotten the words of another dreamer: "There is nothing outside the text."[26] The Dreamer suffers the very same vertigo from which he hopes to protect his son. Set amidst the ruins of ancient temples, themselves the beatific visions of earlier dreamers, all sense and all reason crumble. He and his son are nothing more but the voices that congregate in "the caverns measureless to man" where can be heard a woman wailing for her demon-lover, ancestral voices prophesying war, or a damsel in dulcimer singing of Mount Abora. This dark space, Borges' "unanimous night,"[27] is the space of death. It is not an in between, not a utopian other, but a crack or lesion in the skin of the empirical and conceivable.

The annihilation of Borges' dreamers in the fires of Reason and Sensation is not without some promise, however. If each dream engenders yet another, and every dreamer always already implies another, then the dreamer must find meaning in his or her unremitting resurrection within the abyss. To enter the abyss, to plunge into a chorus of floating voices that cancel each other out, so that the cacophony melds into a silence, in order to re-emerge subsequently in the form of a dream, dreamt by another, is to establish language's incessant hunger for the world, not its rejection of it.

In Kafka's Diaries dated 13th December 1914, we read:

I shall lie very contentedly on my deathbed... the best things I have written have their basis in this capacity of mine to meet death with contentment. All these very fine and very convincing passages always deal with the fact that someone is dying, that it is hard for him to do, that it seems unjust to him, or at least

harsh, and the reader is moved by this, or at least he should be. But for me, who believes that I shall be able to lie contentedly on my deathbed, such scenes are secretly a game; indeed, in the death enacted I rejoice in my own death.[28]

Kafka realises here the intimate relationship between art and death. To produce art, to engage in it, one must be master of death, or personify it. This recalls for us, Georges Poulet's recommendation. Voluntary death. In death there is a becoming, an almost Nietzschean zeal whose goal is not the goal of truth or meaning, but a realisation of one's death, an unknowing knowing that embraces the idea that "only as an aesthetic phenomenon is the existence of the world justified."[29]

Kafka's quietude is a desire to become nothing, to pass into the ether of things without a trace through writing. Through writing, one is ultimately also written. To rejoice of one's own dying through the enactment of the death of a character is not only to effect a negation of one's self, but also to be re-written in the form of a text. By dying through his characters Kafka dies endlessly, repeatedly but he is also resurrected endlessly. In short, to rejoice in another's death as one's own is to immerse oneself in the text, which is the anonymous abyss where only voices speak, and faces are unseen.

The mole in Kafka's The Burrow,[30] contemplates the architecture of his entire existence, and spends his days modifying and rectifying structural faults that arise both from the burrow's inherent nature as well as from the natural phenomena and occurrences within the environment: the problem of entryways and exits becomes the predominant problem plaguing the mole. A perfect structure, to construct one, is foolhardy. What ensues, hence, is an account, detailed in its scope, of the mole's efforts to ensure that despite the imperfection of the monumental subterranean structure, he, the mole, remains safe and comfortable and satisfied. The narrative takes us through the steps taken to ensure the structure remains free of intruders, going through the same procedures, each time, however, with new and added complications, since the 'imperfection' of the burrow necessitates a constant repetition of defensive measures. The burrow can only be managed through a framework, abstract in its reach, of repetition, an open-ended search for what the mole terms "the sweet sleep of tranquillity, of satisfied desire, for achieved ambition,"[31] a framework that, by the very nature of its execution, is always reconstituting itself from one moment to another. This tranquil sleep, this foetal region, must constantly be breached. The text of The Burrow itself is a repetition, and on-going sequence of negotiation and re-negotiation, of death and resurrection.

In order to ascertain the safety of his abode, the mole crawls out of his burrow and conceals himself within eyeshot of the entrance to his home, and watches the passing traffic, and then imagines himself in the burrow peacefully busying himself with the activities common to a keeper of a fortress. In effect, he transforms himself into a doubled figure, one standing watch in the upper world (let us call this figure Kafka), while the other is safely going about his duties below. Kafka creates and makes 'material' a character and an underground pleasure-dome. He, keeping a constant vigil on his burrow and its imagined, but real occupant, safe in the burrow that at that moment of dreaming is already dead, already merely a construct, a vision of perfect organisation. There in his secret observation post, he not only watches over his burrow, he dreams it, dreams himself ensconced in the burrow, dreaming the secure burrow into existence. However, the mole within the burrow has already dreamed him who is at the observation post, dreamed the perfection of the burrow observed by Kafka who has made it ready for observation.

Kafka at the observation post re-enacts himself in his burrow, by doing so, transforming himself into the abyss, in order to imagine himself later coming out of it, for surely he must scavenge for resources. He and his burrow are at once part of the space of death. Materiality and sensation cease to exist here. The moment the burrow is put under observation, it loses its materiality and the measured and rationalised organisation of its construction. Its concreteness is henceforth conceptualised in the cognitive imagination of Kafka. The sensation of peace and security is also part of the realm of the conceived, for it is no longer Kafka who is experiencing it, but the dreamed mole in the dreamed burrow-pleasure-dome. The doubling and repetition that occurs here is a negatory instrument: the intertwining elements are in constant conflict with each other. When the mole decides to observe the burrow he banishes it and himself to exile in the space of death. He chooses Poulet's voluntary death. He chooses Zarathustra's death: "My death I praise unto you, the voluntary death which cometh unto me because I want it."[32]

Writing, Blanchot argues, is the art of the Night. The night declares the disappearance of everything. Coleridge dreams Kublai, Kublai dreams his palace, Borges's dreamers are surrounded by the night, the mole's vigil is conducted in silence, in the stillness of his mind. In Kafka's text the last line is: "But all remain unchanged."[33] This "all" is the interminable flux, of voices that die and are resurrected, that chase after each other, that speak and fall silent and rise up again in the Night of writing. Orpheus' descent into the Underworld is a descent into the darkness of this Night, to look into the face of the night to see what it is concealing. Orpheus' mistake is to believe he will see something, something which will illuminate his own "I." What he does not realise, what Coleridge could never have known, is that the abyss, while marked by death, is also marked by a turning away, an endless desiring and an inability to. To enter the abyss is to dismantle the infinite "I" and become that "I" yourself, to become God. This silent doubling is Kirilov's dilemma: "God is necessary, and so must exist.... But I know that He doesn't exist and can't exist.... But... a man with two such ideas cannot go on living?"[34] And yet the Kirilov man does. This nightly oscillation is the dream that connects Coleridge with Kafka with Borges. Perhaps, Borges is right. We are all one person in the abyss. We are all dreamed the moment we dream. The "I" is merely a falsehood that dreams itself into reality.

Endnotes

[1] Basil Willey, Coleridge on Imagination and Fancy (London: G. Cumberlege, 1947). 5

[2] J. Robert Barth, S. J., The Symbolic Imagination: Coleride and the Romantic Tradition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). 18

[3] Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). 76

[4] Barfield, 80

[5] Elizabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (New York: Octagon Books, 1983). V

[6] line 2

[7] line 12

[8] line 6

[9] line 7

[10] lines 16-22

[11] line 27

[12] line 37

[13] line 43

[14] line 8

[15] Gilles Deleuze, "Nietzsche and Mallarmé," Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts, ed. Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: The New Press, 1962). 246

[16] Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). 30

[17] Blanchot, 44n

[18] Blanchot, 55.

[19] Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, trans. Robert Hurley and Others, Essential Works of Foucault 1954 - 1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, vol. 2 (London: Penguin Books, 2000). 149

[20] Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, 1929 - 1989 (New York: Grove Press, 1995). 109

[21] Jorge Luis Borges, The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922 - 1986, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine and Elliot Weinberger Esther Allen (London: Penguin Books, 2001). 370

[22] Borges, Total Library. 371

[23] Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1964). 1n

[24] William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare (London and New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997). I. ii.50

[25] Borges, Labyrinths. 45-50

[26] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997). 158

[27] Borges, Labyrinths. 45

[28] Franz Kafka, The Diaries: 1910 - 1923 (New York: Schocken Books, 1976). 321

[29] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (London: Penguin Books, 1993). 32

[30] Franz Kafka, Collected Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (London, New York, Toronto: Everyman's Library, 1993). 467-503

[31] Kafka, Stories. 469

[32] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1997).

[33] Kafka, Stories. 503

[34] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Devils, trans. David Magarshack (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960). 611

Works Cited

Barfield, Owen. What Coleridge Thought. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Barth, J. Robert, S. J. The Symbolic Imagination: Coleride and the Romantic Tradition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001.

Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Short Prose, 1929 - 1989. New York: Grove Press, 1995.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 1964.

---. The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922 - 1986. Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine and Elliot Weinberger Esther Allen. London: Penguin Books, 2001.

Deleuze, Gilles. "Nietzsche and Mallarmé." Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: The New Press, 1962.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Devils. Trans. David Magarshack. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960.

Foucault, Michel. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Trans. Robert Hurley and Others. Essential Works of Foucault 1954 - 1984. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Vol. 2. London: Penguin Books, 2000.

Kafka, Franz. Collected Stories. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. London, New York, Toronto: Everyman's Library, 1993.

---. The Diaries: 1910 - 1923. New York: Schocken Books, 1976.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. London: Penguin Books, 1993.

---. Thus Spake Zarathustra. 1892. Trans. Thomas Common. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1997.

Schneider, Elizabeth. Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan. New York: Octagon Books, 1983.

Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. London and New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997.

Willey, Basil. Coleridge on Imagination and Fancy. London: G. Cumberlege, 1947.