Gregg Biglieri

MEDIUM COLERIDGE:
Thinking the Relation in-between Poet and Critic

Introduction

     Is it possible, fruitful, or confusing to view Coleridge's aesthetic ideas as fragments (parts) toward the composition of a kind of larger theoretical poem (whole)? In other words, can one use Coleridge's art criticism to comment upon his practice as a theorist? Are his aesthetic ideas applicable to his practice as a critic of the practice of poetic composition? Is it possible that some leverage could be obtained by torquing Coleridge's theoretical statements about poetry in particular and art in general to comment on his own compositional practice as a critic? Quite simply, is Coleridge's theory true to the ideals of his critical practice? The caveat here is that it is precisely my intention to answer these questions indirectly. The idea is to use these problems as the hub of a wheel of a widening set of questions whose fragmentary sections, like the spokes of the "old coach wheel," radiate outward from a central ambiguity (Genial 472). The method is guided by Adorno's thoughts on the subject of the essay itself, which he suggests "incorporates the anti-systematic impulse into its own way of proceeding and introduces concepts unceremoniously, 'immediately,' just as it receives them. They are made more precise only through their relationship to one another" (12). Though the argument appears to be circular it would be more accurate to say that it circulates, and thus reflects upon a process of reciprocal exchanges. One might say of Coleridge that his intuition unfolds over thinking, rather than under-standing.

     The presentational aspect of the work of art works form. Form is never static, it is always forming and being formed ("forma informans"-- shaping form). Imagination takes on, spreads out and over, bleeds into all the other faculties as a shaping force. Imagination becomes autonomous. The poet is, therefore, an autonomous creator of forms, not an automaton merely re-creating already inherent forms. Form is always being formed. The key is composition (arranging parts in relation to one another and to the whole) because it leaves room for the poet to work out his imagination upon material forms. The activity of writing manifests "the conscious will" of the poet as active maker and not merely as passive recipient of inspiration. The act of composition then is an activation of intuition and self-consciousness leading to expressivity. Imagination is made manifest through the artistic creation which it actively forms. It is unseen strictly in the sense that circular patterns are in the "golden wheel of the chariot of the sun:" "Of all 'the many,' which I actually see, each and all are really reconciled into unity: while the effulgence from the whole coincides with, and seems to represent, the effluence of delight from my own mind in the intuition of it" (Genial 472). The key here is how much leverage one wants to allow Coleridge in the pressure he needs to place on the words "effulgence" and "effluence." The former signifies a radiant splendor or shining forth, and the latter the action or process of flowing out. The mind working actively between part and whole in relation is represented by the radiant splendor of the "golden wheel" which shines forth to meet the mind flowing out to connect with the whole shining forth.

     In Raphael's Galatea painting, the circular pattern is visible, but the complex, "multiplicity of rays" are dynamic and proliferating and oscillating. Whether these patterns actually exist in the painting or are merely the proliferations of Coleridge's restless imaginings is less important than the example it provides of a mind in the act of overthinking its object and, consequently, informing its own subjectivity in the process.

"...with what an endless variety and sportive wildness in the component figure, and in the junctions of the figures, is the balance, the perfect reconciliation, effected between these two conflicting principles of the free life, and the confining form! How entirely is the stiffness that would have resulted from the obvious regularity of the latter, fused and (if I may hazard so bold a metaphor) almost volatilized by the interpenetration and electrical flashes of the former." (Genial 473)

     In this sense they re-create the original activity of the mind of the artist's imagination, stimulating a similar activity in the mind of the spectator. This interpenetration occurs through the artistic object as a form in which, by which and through which active minds are able to experience a "multeity in unity." Coleridge values the dynamic reciprocity of the powers. The volatility of the principle of "free life," in the sense of evanescence or difficulty of capturing or holding permanently, flashes through the principle of "confining form" such that the two principles are "fused" (recalling the "dif-fuse" power of the secondary imagination). One should note that Coleridge gets the same play out of the word "interpenetration" that Schiller gets out of "reciprocal relations."

     But what are we to make of Coleridge's neologisms? His syntax, diction and coining of words would bind together oppositions and disparities into provisional unions. Coleridge's paradoxes are both active and passive, voluntary and involuntary. How far does this go toward licensing his own self-contradictions? Although he uses "diffuse" as a verb, in its adjectival mode it means "being at once verbose and ill-organized," and thus leads to "confusion" in his attempts to metaphorize in similar ways concepts which are distinct and particular to their own field: as if he could make homologous concepts which are at most analogous. The active verbs Coleridge employs to describe the secondary imagination ("dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate") each partake of the tiny prefixal motor "di-"(twice, twofold, doubling) which already multiplies the directions that they are propelled toward. Each of the verbs signifies a scattering, or break up, or separation into component parts, while "diffuse" has the added significance of distributing (light) by reflection. The repetition of verbs that are roughly synonymous underscores Coleridge's bent toward what I call the corrosivity of the imagination which is not, however much he may believe it, recuperated by tying up the sequence with re-create. Nor do I find it strange that this discussion of terms of the imagination hovers around a drama of affixes. For the poet is the one who is producing and directing the words (subjective agent to predicate action).

     Since we have begun conceptually, let us move to a more concrete example of Coleridge's methodology. For this purpose it will be instructive to analyze syntactically the argument of the forma informans and the "illustrative hint" of the gemstone which occurs in On the Principles of Genial Criticism. It's as if Coleridge finds perverse pleasure in obscuring the presentation of his ideas in order that his mind can keep oscillating between constructions rather than stabilizing in any one structure. Paradoxically, I find it helpful to diagram the argument in the arrangement of poetic lineation:

Something there must be to realize the form,
something in and by which the forma informans reveals itself:
and these, less than any that could be substituted,
and in the least possible degree,
distract the attention,
in the least possible degree obscure the idea,
of which they (composed of outline and surface) are the symbol.
          (Genial 474).

     It seems that Coleridge is most obstinately obscure when he least wants to be. If one were ungenerous one would say that his obscurity is part and parcel of the confusion of his own ideas. But I think that there is something else going on as he strings out his argument in clauses that would appear to restrict and clarify but actually work to complicate and make opaque. The repetition of the "something" does not come any closer to specifying an actual thing. But somehow his insistent non-specificity enacts the concept of the "shaping form" without designating what exact shape that form must take. That is, in order "to realize the form" there must be an interplay of revealing and obscuring. And the actual form that takes shape is less important than the fact of the power to shape it in the first place. Now, as is his wont, Coleridge proceeds to offer an "illustrative hint" which succeeds in adding another layer to the confusions already displayed above. This is the example of the gemstone:

An illustrative hint may be taken from a pure crystal,
as compared with an opaque, semiopaque or clouded mass,
on the one hand,
and with a perfectly transparent body,
such as the air, on the other.
The crystal is lost in the light,
which yet it contains, embodies, gives shape to;
but which passes shapeless through the air,
and, in a ruder body,
is either quenched or dissipated. (Genial 474)

     If one can get beyond the apparent obscurity, the example can be seen as quite "beautiful." The crux of this passage centers on Coleridge's notion of "transparency." A quick look at the dictionary reveals that to be transparent is "to show through." In this example Coleridge is making a distinction between a "perfectly transparent body" (air) and a "clouded mass" (opaque gem) in order to come up with a medium between those two poles in the "pure crystal" which is "transparent," but not perfectly so. The fundamental paradox is that "the crystal is lost in the light." If the light simply passed through the air it would be "invisible" (i.e., nothing but light) and if it passed through "a ruder body" it would be blocked or obscured (i.e., no light at all). The crystal, in that it is neither perfectly transparent nor completely opaque, is the perfect medium in which to figure the forma informans because "it contains, embodies, gives shape to." Even though it is "lost" the crystal provides the medium which shapes the light which would otherwise be "shapeless." I admit to a certain fascination in Coleridge's use of the terminology of a diaphanous membrane (a transparent showing through) in order to express the passing through of a physical medium (crystal). As we shall see when he arrives at the definition of the symbol, Coleridge will use the word translucence (to shine through) as if to flesh out the literary figure with a more solid embodiment. That is, in the sense that a translucent body "transmits and diffuses light so that objects beyond cannot be seen clearly." In this instance he needs to reduce to a see-through shape that which is an otherwise visible, solid body, while in the description of the symbol he needs to augment an abstract invisibility with a slightly more substantial quality. Whether the reciprocal conduits of this argument can be shifted onto the register of poetry versus criticism is still open to debate. Although clarity is not Coleridge's strong suit as a critic, to argue that it is the poetic elements in his language which cause this cloudiness is unfair, if not simply untrue. I think that there is a difference between the precise articulation of ambiguous relations and the use of a slippery logical bias that would skew the angle of reasoning toward the obtuse. To make this less abstract one might say that Coleridge's poetic intuition "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates" that aspect of his critical understanding that would seek out fixed definition. And does this not lead us back to the mind in activity as the site of this reciprocal transference of mental energies, as the location of the beautiful: "The beautiful, therefore, not originating in sensations, must belong to the intellect ... "(Genial 475)? At the risk of making too much "sense" out of Coleridge's reasoning, I would argue that it is efficacious to view Coleridge's aesthetic theories through the refracting lens of his poetics only if one also, reciprocally, views his poetic practices through the equally diffusive lens of his criticism. The result is a curiously hybrid text: one in which the imagination as forma informans (shaping form) reveals itself through its action upon the critical ideas as "confining form[s]."

     There seems to be an increasing proliferation of dichotomies that each require a particular mediational membrane (or medium) which enables the relation on in-between. It is as if the medium itself arises out of the need for the doubling binaries to figure themselves in relation to each other. That is, without the medium there would be only distinction and separation and no unity. On one level the mediation is between allegory and symbol, then the symbol itself is bifurcated and its binaries are placed in relation through the means of another medium, and then the mind itself is split between faculties of reason, understanding and imagination, and then the imagination is split, first between primary and secondary powers, and then between the corrosive or diffusive elements and the reconciliation of opposites or its power to re-create or unify again the distinctly dissolved parts into a "multeity in unity." Perhaps in order to make sense of Coleridge's contradictions one must either simply accept them or construct an elaborate apparatus to defend his circular reasoning as yet another form of his favored symbol of the "the old coach wheel" or the circle in the Galatea. And yet in this case the parts work in relation to each other as components of an impossible system but the whole is not thereby unified.

Now an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture language, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the sense; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot. On the other hand a symbol . . . is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general; above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative. (Statesman's Manual 476)

     Allegory is avoided (elided) through tekne, or the active composition of the artist. Allegory would inhibit role of poet/artist because it would skip beyond the presentational medium (erase, as it were, its own materiality) and land directly in the realm of static, fixed meanings. In other words, artistic agency would be reduced to a specifically abstracted agenda. It leaves no room for the poet to work the forms.

     If the philosopher viewed the increasing amount of artistic production as always already "thought" in the world (at least as idea), then the poet (i.e., Coleridge) could imagine the prolific nature of the creative artist as always expanding and extending the amount of knowledge of the world and of himself as self-consciousness (which is will). Could we say that this aspect of the creative process leads to NEW productions, rather than implying a fixity which would hold that every new production is already a re-production of ideas already existing in the world?

     There is a mirroring effect in that the allegory translates abstract notions and picture language back and forth as between two mirrors and the ceaseless reflection and precise identification between insubstantialities (idea and phantom) removes the medium, or in-between in which it would be possible for a "multeity" of perspectives to exist translucently.

     The allegorical poet or painter would jump from insubstantial phantom to referential idea, and this mirroring effect between "abstract notion" and the always already reproduced reproduction doesn't leave room for the poet to operate as positive active agent. This is why Coleridge needs the leverage of translucence. The symbol is more a window than a mirror. Perhaps it is like a one-way mirror that allows for movement in both directions: that is, from one side it is a window that can be seen through, while from the other it acts, functions as a mirror.

     Without the medium to obscure or contain the multeity, we're left with an exact referential pinning which precludes the imagination of the spectator as well as reducing the role of the artist. In this case, the paradox is that what obscures or clouds is Coleridge's notion of the "translucent." Without the medium the image cannot "shine through" the mind, and the mind cannot flow out into the image. One might say that for Coleridge, without complexity there is no multeity (only simple unity); without the intervention of an active mind there are only "fixities and definites;" without the medium there is no message.

     Though the poetic inspiration or genius is spontaneous and immediate, the immediacy of the act is translated through the medium of words to produce poetry as a material manifestation. This fact disturbs any notion of glassy, see-through transparency or immediacy (of idea-to-idea without the necessary intervention of language as mark of will of artist as agent of poetic production). Interpenetration, though a vexed concept, at least gets at the idea of not simply playing with fixed and definite counters (as in fancy).

     The relation of part to whole in the construction of the poem such that the work must exist materially on the page to restructure the temporality of the moment of writing. For the imagination to be re-created and stimulated by the poem, the poem must not con -- tain (the back of the mirror) the energies but set up a system of relations which are re-activated by the reader in the process of using his imagination.

     Because allegory goes from "abstract notion" to "picture language" that is, from insubstantiality to insubstantiality, double phantoms, Coleridge uses the notion of symbol as a mobile linchpin, or as a diaphanous membrane subject to reciprocal interpenetration (out into the world from the poet; infused into the poet from the world). Thus, the poem as material artifact is a medium. Ideas are seen through the dissolving, diffusing, dissipating corrosivity of the imagination, which simultaneously takes from the object its appearance and solidity AND gives shape and substance to the immaterial idea and/or inspiration. The poem makes visible invisible and invisible visible through timing and tracing the racing imagination. So that the resulting image is not strictly fixed, but loosely reined, its definite contours allowing for the interpenetration of indefinites and infinites. The medium of eye. Eyes as transparencies that project and retain; they "see" invisibilities as the language bodies them forth; they receive visibilities and re-create them as thresholds to "spiritual" ideas.

     Allegory enables the spectator's understanding to falsely assume that the presentations of the imagination to which it attaches fixed definitions are adequate to the artistic idea without accounting for the intervention of the artist's imagination as active agent in the process of artistic creation. What bothers Coleridge is that in his view allegory moves directly from "abstract notions into a picture language," so that once the spectator recognizes the intention of the artist to represent an idea by "proxy", what might have existed as in-between or medium disappears, and the mental activity of the artist as creator of the work is elided as its intentions have been fulfilled by a "counterfeit" simulation. In other words, once the spectator "gets" the idea, the mind no longer has anything to work with and its activity is thus suspended rather than oscillating in complacency. It doesn't give the idea of the "many", only a single, fixed definite idea. That is, is provides unity but not multeity. And we know that the beautiful must do both: "the beautiful . . . is that in which the many, still seen as many, becomes one" (Genial 472). The kind of reciprocal identification that Coleridge does valorize is that which obtains between the description of the mind in activity and writing as activity of composition. In this instance, we have two analogous activities, whereas in allegory we have two analogous passivities.

Water strider: "any of various long-legged bugs (family Gerridae) that move about on the surface of the water" [one should be forgiven if one sees Derrida transposed in Gerridae]. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to light on the spot which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous (Biographia 72).

     I choose this example from Ch. VII of the Biographia Literaria for the sheer number of reasons. First, the notion of cognitive leaping seems to be apt description of Coleridge's activity as a thinker and his methodology as a theorist. What interests him are the imaginative leaps and bounds the mind makes from one idea to another. His reasoning is never point-by-point or step-by-step, but rather forms a series of trajectories as if the separate itineraries were plotted only in retrospect, after the actual mental travels had taken place. The overall structure of the Biographia is nothing if not a sequence of loosely connected digressions. So much depends upon whether one views the digressions as the traces of a scattered thinker or as the embodiment of a methodology which privileges the primary process of the mind in its activity. Thinking (i.e., leaping) occurs between two acts: "purely voluntary" and "voluntary in part." As is usual in the case of Coleridge's examples, the analogy at first seems clear, distinct and appropriate. The problem, if it is a problem, is that the analogy does not remain fixed and definite but continues to proliferate.

     At this point it would be fruitful to jump ahead in order to see how Coleridge superimposes this argument onto the experience of the reader of poetry. Again, in Coleridge's terms the reader should neither be an automaton, nor subject to his own interested desire, but rather re-create in his own mind the activity of the poet's mind in the act of composition:

The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at a final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. (Biographia 173)

     On the one hand, this statement can be viewed as a justification for a digressive mode of both reading and reasoning. It also coincides with Coleridge's notion that the reader should not be seeking after some final resolution, but merely enjoy the ride for the sake of its twists and turns. It should be clear that what Coleridge values in the great poem is its ability to stimulate in the reader the same process of secondary imagination which inspired the poet to arrange his imaginative activity into the form of a poem. But let us return to the original quotation to see how Coleridge complicates his analogy.

Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking. (Biographia 72)

This passage proves that Coleridge the poet is inextricable from Coleridge the critic. If the initial thrust of the analogy was to exemplify the mind in the act of composition, here the analogy is deepened through a poetic description in order to analogize an even more basic concept of the mind in "the act of thinking." I would argue that here the critic informs the poet and the poet re-forms the critic. For it is the poet who, in his description of the water-insect, subtly injects a deepening (literally) of the image by pointing out the shadow of the insect upon the bottom of the stream, simultaneously calling out the translucence of the "prismatic" medium of the water and indirectly reinforcing the other medium (the skin of the surface of the water) upon which the insect alternately "pulses" and yields. Thus, in the process of reading this passage the reader must pass through the lens of the poetic description to return to the original analogy of "the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking." What is important here is not Coleridge's "naturalizing" of the activity of the mind by referring it to an image from nature, but the fact that he calls attention to the mind's ability to metaphorize. In other words, it is not the mind seeking in nature to contain its activity in an emblematic image, rather it is the capacity of the mind to see everywhere images which correspond to its own activity of making. Nature is not a ready made stockpile of images waiting for the poet to perceive and to conform to their patterns. It is the mind which makes itself ready to conceive of its own activity as the shaping of forms.

     To jump-cut back to the experience of the reader from Ch. VII in order "to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for further propulsion" should not, I think, be perceived as an arbitrary (as opposed to digressive) tactic. In any case there is a certain quality of momentum that needs to be worried.

. . . at every step he [the reader] pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which carries him onward. Precipitandus est liber spiritus, says Petronius Arbiter most happily. The epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer words [Satyricon, 118: "The free spirit (of the epic poet) must be hurried onwards (through digression,etc.)."]. (Biographia 173)

     The roles of the reader and the poet coincide through the relation of active minds. The idea of pausing and collecting (or recirculating) one's thoughts has the advantage of showing that the leaps one makes are neither arbitrary nor involuntary. Coleridge "happily" cites Petronius because it allows him to mark the freedom inherent in his concept of poetic agency. In this scenario the poem is the medium which facilitates the fusing of the mental activities of reader and poet. It is in no way fortuitous that Coleridge latches onto this liber as a way of injecting active agency into the poetic process. It reminds us of the function of the imagination ceaselessly producing predicates to the "infinite I am." Coleridge complicates analogy through the proliferation of the mediations through which and by which the mind both shapes and takes shape. Perhaps one should be forgiven if he has forgotten by this time the metaphor of the water-insect which has been subsumed, if not positively obscured by so much thinking. But to return a final time to the original passage:

There are evidently two powers at work which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. (In philosophical language we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations the imagination. But in common language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary controul over it.). [Biographia 72].

Coleridge, as always, is concerned with the relations between things, images, ideas, faculties. And it is the mode of relationality that necessitates the endless production of intermediate zones to substantiate the membranes of the in-between. In this final twist to his analogy Coleridge is nonetheless explicitly inconclusive. For it is not his intention to find ultimate "solutions" to the problems of thinking as an activity. He realizes a kind of intermediate form of argumentation, between critical and poetic theory which can either be viewed as maddening or as fruitfully confusing. Ultimately, he resituates the problem between the poles of activity and passivity through the "intermediate" faculty of the imagination. Perhaps it is obvious to state that this nuances the distinction between immediate and mediate. Somehow the poem is then the aesthetic object of mediation in which immediate intuition is made manifest through the intermediate faculty of the imagination.

Works cited

• Adorno, Notes to Literature. vol. I. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.
• Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: New Left Books, 1977.
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. London: Everyman, 1991.
• ---. On the Principles of Genial Criticism. Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. 471-76.
• ---. The Statesman's Manual. Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. 476.

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