(Note: This is something I wrote while working on
Susquehanna: Speculative Historical Commentary and Lyric (Buffalo: Punch Press, 2008). Somehow it makes sense to post it here, today, with thanks to Josh Gunn.)
An early poem of Samuel Taylor Coleridge(1) describes a utopian dream:
No more my Visionary Soul shall dwell
On Joys that were! No more endure to weigh
The Shame and Anguish of the evil Day,
Wisely forgetful! O’er the Ocean swell
Sublime of Hope I seek the cottag’d Dell,
Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray,
And dancing to the moonlight Roundelay
The Wizard Passions weave an holy Spell.(2)
The following lines of this sonnet, written with a letter to his classmate and reformist confidant, Robert Southey, in 1794, celebrate revolutionary vision. During these years of bourgeois revolution in France, Coleridge sees, impressively, in the violence of revolt “New Rays of Pleasance trembling to the Heart.” Perhaps the romantic zeal in the poem puts us off with its allegorized binaries and revolutionary zest, but I find in it a relation of dream and private vision that erupts within the causal forces that are too frequently read as history. We can read this pantisocratic vision, however, within the coordinates of what Walter Benjamin calls the “dialectical image”—a forceful rhetorical point of departure for understanding history as an open and ongoing project of recovery, wherein the subject and the historical artifact are intricately bound. In Benjamin’s rhetorically enacting theses on historical materialism,(3) we see how the claims of the past return to haunt the present. The imagination is confronted with ethical demands through the “dialectical image,” and this can lead to the recovery of submerged historical content. By looking at Coleridge’s early vision of Pantisocracy as such a “dialectical image,” we might apprehend the significance of that stillborn dream and its geographic claims to the Susquehanna—an important waterway of the American Northeast. The aborted substance of that dream still passes through its waters.
2
As a young man in what was to be his final year at Cambridge, Coleridge “insisted on wearing rough workmen’s jackets, loose trousers, (rather than gentleman’s breeches and stockings), and carrying canvas knapsacks,”(4) favoring the plain traditions and sartorial outfittings of workers. With Robert Southey, Bob Allen, and other attendants on long walking tours, Coleridge developed his “scheme”(5) of Pantisocracy. Letters to Southey indicate the intellectual bedrock for Pantisocratic ideals were to be found in Rousseau’s essays on nature, Godwin’s anarchist political tracts and the idea of communism, David Hartley’s publications on the psychological motivations for human action, and Joseph Priestley’s idealization of the United States as a home for utopian visionaries. Coined from Greek sources, “Pantisocracy,” an all-equal-society, would propose an experiment in pastoral living, shared property, labor, and self-government for both men and women. Coleridge and Southey with great passion discussed their visionary plans, abandoning school to prepare for the execution of their schemes.
In Bristol they spread the word to others, and in that climate of progressive Unitarianism, they gathered a number of young intellectuals who enthusiastically threw themselves into the Pantisocratic community. Twelve couples originally planned to migrate to America to form the commune, with each man contributing an investment of £125 and labor expectations of about three hours per day. The rest of the time would be spent in study. As Coleridge’s friend and financial benefactor, Thomas Poole, recalled, “[t]he produce of their industry is to be laid up in common for the use of all, and a good library of books is to be collected, and their leisure hours to be spent in study, liberal discussions, and the education of their children.”(6) In July 1794, the Pantisocrats planned to purchase 300,000 acres 150 miles west of Philadelphia near the head of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.
3
What happens next should be read into the dream of Pantisocracy, for the very real dangers of life began almost immediately to intrude on Southey and Coleridge. Their vision fell to pieces for a number of reasons—mostly interpersonal ones of strained feelings and bruised friendships, not to mention the intrusion of real domestic responsibilities when Southey and Coleridge married two sisters—Edith and Sara, respectively—of the Fricker family of Bristol. The birth of children and other intrusive events burdened the dreams of Susquehanna, understandably. A falling-out between Southey—whose zeal for Susquehanna quickly cooled once he became accustomed to the routine of domestic pleasures—and Coleridge—whose passionate desire for the commune remained intensely felt—finally doomed the project. Over time, Coleridge would turn to writing reviews and articles for London trade journals; Southey would ossify into bourgeois steadfastness, becoming a respected writer, the sturdy man of English letters. Coleridge would distort his mind and body on opiates; struggle with his addictions and a failing marriage; meet William and Dorothy Wordsworth; move to Germany; depart for Malta; return to London, mind-wrecked, a man who lived in notebooks and who read in nature a great contrast to the industrialized city of London where he would live out the rest of his life as a conservative cultural and literary critic.
We can see, however, in 1794, how material circumstances intruded on the poetic and revolutionary image. Tensions form around any imaginative aim often because of the insubstantial nature of a dream’s claim on the world. Limits arise from the arrangements of dialectical forces that question our willingness to interpret the inner motivations of psychic life. For Coleridge, the physical body became uncannily present over time, a membrane through which he negotiated dreams by ingesting laudanum and liquor. Intense personal insecurities distorted the revolutionary trajectory he had anticipated. The historian, looking back, can read the failure of Pantisocracy as a youthful experiment in Godwinian social order. And yet, too, failure was made internal to Coleridge; he absorbed it as preparation for the poems he would eventually write. And again, another perspective might reveal how the wreck that Coleridge became over time grew also from the actual conception of Pantisocracy—which was only a dream deprived of the manifest waters of Susquehanna.
4
The world receives its defining features through the stories we bring out of our experiences. What history and dreams share are a language in the mouths of the living, and through whom come the words of the dead. What can this mean?
Suppose that all attempts at narrative trace a kind of genealogy, retrieving through the present significant images gathered from a reservoir of personal and collective experience in the imagined coordinates of history. The rhetorical impact of this suggests a poetics of montage through assimilation and transformation—a dynamic and almost alchemical understanding of the mutable substance of dream. Benjamin argues for this precisely when he claims that “every generation that preceded us” has been “endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim. Such a claim cannot be settled cheaply.”(7) How, then, attend the past without cheapening it? Benjamin says that we must “appropriate a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.”(8) Moreover, “[e]very age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it.” The moral force of this argument is staggering, if we are to hear it, I think, as Benjamin intends it: “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that
even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.” These astonishing claims for historical materialism assault the reader in Benjamin’s essay with extraordinary force and oracular dream energy. The passion of historical engagement enters the text with Benjamin’s uncanny ability to bring the needs of the dead to his work, and he too would join them while trying to escape France in 1940. Or, perhaps, his understanding of history kept him close to the dead all along; perhaps his affinities for that legion of lost souls relieved for him the horror of European Fascism.
We typically do not think of history as being in any way rhetorical. That progressive, positivistic notion of a succession of causal events certainly denies space for rhetorical readings of history. Benjamin’s theses, however, provide a way of reading the past rhetorically (or, to be even more accurate, it is utterly poetic), because he insists on viewing history, through the image of Klee’s angel,(9) as a dynamic wreck. In that dynamo into which we too are folded, images persist to lay claims on our attention. How should we respond? Do we not complete the historical image when we absorb its call, turning it through us, digesting ancient horrors and grim commands against the submerged moments of hope that arrive disfigured and abused by the force of that wreckage?
5
In a paraphrase of Marx, Benjamin says: “[r]evolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.”(10) But suppose we can’t reach the brake in time? What if, like Coleridge, for a moment we possess a dream that is powerful enough to fuel an imagination for a lifetime? Perhaps in its failure to materialize, Pantisocracy receives greater historical presence than any actual community along the banks of Susquehanna?
“Articulating the past historically,” Benjamin writes, “means recognizing those elements of the past which come together in the constellation of a single moment.” And in these moments we discern the images as they form through us.
Historical knowledge is possible only within the historical moment. But knowledge within the historical moment is always knowledge of a moment. In drawing itself together in the moment—in the dialectical image—the past becomes part of humanity’s involuntary memory.
The dialectical image can be defined as the involuntary memory of redeemed humanity.(11)
The Susquehanna reveals the “messianic world … of universal and integral actuality,” despite that nothing happened within the causal nexus of “progress” that so disgustingly asserts itself in our every day understanding of the connecting links of history. To use Benjamin, I do not read Susquehanna for how the failed Pantisocratic dream receives a “written history,” but for understanding “festively enacted history… purified of all celebrations.” If “[e]very moment is a moment of judgment,”(12) can we not see how the dreams of 1794 demand a revival within the coordinates of time we actualize in the present circumstances of life, thereby allowing the dead to appropriate our eyes and ears for purposes of their own?
6
At my desk an image: I arrive in San Francisco to study poetry in a Marxist college. Excitement glows in my face; short hair; Kerouac khakis; black shirt. Behind me a façade of buildings from the lower Haight; some low trees; an black man crossing the street becomes a blur. And through friends I meet a poet who introduces me to Coleridge. I forget the immediate coordinates of the conversation. We sit in his kitchen of a second storey flat. Occasionally he gets up, opens a back door to light a cigarette. Espresso he has made boils on the stove. We share an interest in this figure, Coleridge, and also, in Walter Benjamin, whom I have recently begun reading. I remove a copy of
Illuminations. Fog darkens the late afternoon sky. I calculate the time in anticipation of a meeting with a woman I have recently met and who will become my wife three years later. And still later, when my son is born, I return to Coleridge and to Benjamin, reading again this failure of Pantisocracy as a constitutive event in my life. And moving still farther ahead, beyond the addiction and decay of mind in Coleridge, the soft water of the Chesapeake, where I’ve stood, receives the Susquehanna, which is a material fact of inland drainage.
History receives many uses. What Benjamin hovers over so closely—the dynamic wreck of his angel’s attention—enters us too, and shows that material historical patterns are meaningful only in their particular address to us, in the imagined conditions of our expanded perspectives in language.
(1)Born in the Ottery St Mary in Devon on October 21, 1772, S. T. Coleridge began his literary career as a radical reformist and preacher in Bristol following his study at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he met Robert Southey. See: Richard Holmes,
Coleridge: Early Visions (New York: Penguin, 1989);
Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834 (New York: Pantheon, 2000); and I. A. Richards,
Coleridge On Imagination (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000).
(2) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Pantisocracy,” Poems, ed. John Beers (London: Everyman, 1993), 23.
(3) See Timothy Bahti, “History as Rhetorical Enactment: Walter Benjamin’s Theses ‘On the Concept of History,’”
Diacritics (Sept 1979) available http://www.jstor.org/view/03007162/ap020035/02a00010/1?frame=noframe&userID=803e5e59@utexas.edu/01cce4405b00501c9c16c&dpi=3&config=jstor accessed 23 September 2007.
(4) Holmes,
Coleridge, 61.
(5)Holmes,
Coleridge, 62.
(6) Mrs Henry Sandford,
Thomas Poole and his Friends (privately published, 1888); see Holmes, Coleridge, 59-88.
(7) Walter Benjamin, “On The Concept of History,”
Selected Writings vol 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 390.
(8) Benjamin, “History,” 391
(9) Benjamin, “Concept,” 392.
(10) Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’
Selected Writings vol 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 402.
(11) Benjamin, “Paralipomena,” 403.
(12) Benjamin, “Paralipomena,” 407.
