Subject:	A correction: Spinoza, not Leibniz
Date:	Mon, 28 Aug 2006 23:08:52 -0300
From:	jansymello <dorazander@terra.com.br>

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Dear List,
I must ask you all to bear with me again: I exchanged the names of "Leibniz" and "Spinoza" in my former posting in which I mentioned "Leibniz, monads and pantheism" in Jorge L. Borges' 1966 Lectures on English Literature. Borges wrote about the influence of Spinoza on Coleridge, not Leibniz!
No wonder Dave Haan could not place my reference.

Haan remembers a relevant Borges essay: "Coleridge's Dream" , before he reminds us of another "classic example of unconscious cerebration is that of Robert Louis Stevenson, to whom -- as he himself described it in his 'Chapter on Dreams' -- one dream gave him the plot of Olalla and another, in 1884, the plot of Jekyll and Hyde."

Borges establishes curious intertextual readings which take us from Carlyle's criticism of Samuel Johnson and his curiosity about ghosts( in "Sartor Resartus"), before he suggests that Johnson, himself, had been transformed into a character by Boswell.

He also doesn't forget to add a small gossip and so, after describing the unequal partnership between Wordsworth and Coleridge, he mentions Byron's joke about Wordsworth's "The Idiot Boy" ( Byron said it was... an autobiographical poem").

Still remaining on the theme of Coleridge and "poetic associative background", now focusing on sound and rythm, I want to bring up again the opening lines of Canto Two in Pale Fire:

"There was a time in my demented youth/ When somehow I suspected that the truth/"... because if, at first these lines brought to my mind T.S.Eliot's "There will be time to murder and create" ( line 28, S.A.P) and Eliot's own explorations about "time before and after.", soon two other associations appeared, both stemming from Wordsworth. The first, his Ode on "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood", begins with "There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,/ The earth, and every common sight,/ To me did seem.../"
The second, a reference in "Tintern Abbey" that goes from PF' s Canto Two to Canto Three, through a river "Wye" : "How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,/ O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,/...

But then Coleridge's own lines rushed in ( thanks to Borges):
"There was a time when, though my path was rough,/ This joy within me dallied with distress,/ And all misfortunes were but as the staff/ Whence Fancy made me dream of happiness/ For hope grew round me, like the twining vine/ and fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine./ ...And haply by abstruse research to steal/ From my own nature all the natural man/ This was my sole resource, my only plan:/ Till that which suits a part infects the whole,/ And now it almost grown the habit of my soul" ( "Ode on Dejection" ).

If one does not realize that here Colerige is describing his "habit of despair", the line that deals with "that which suits a part infects the whole" might also seem to apply to Stevenson's Jekyl& Hyde...

And here I see a distinction between the poets contained in such a spider-web and VN's own creation.
In "Pale Fire" I don't encounter pessimism following sadness and loss, nor self-pity dominating over nostalgia. There is hope mingled with VN's common coupling of "pain and panic" ( "Pnin", "Ada"). there are parodies, games, humor and - most probably, wisdom!