TRANSFIGURATIONS (COLERIDGE, DE QUINCEY, GEORGE ELIOT)

The basis of this study lies in Coleridge's failure to transfigure philosophy into critical principle in the first volume of the Biographia Literaria. This failure not only affects Coleridge but also critical reflection in general. In the Biographia, Coleridge's failure to achieve such a transfiguration may be traced to his declaration that truth may only be spoken by ventriloquy, that is, truth must conceal its author if it is to possess any authority. Two aspects of the Biographia are emphasized in relation to this declaration: first, why Coleridge writes in the form of a biography, and second, the role Schelling's philosophy plays in overcoming the problems produced by both this formal procedure and the concept of truth that lies behind it. Rather than resolve these problems, the principal works of Schelling's to which Coleridge turns permit the discernment of a more radical difficulty (here it is a question of what Coleridge omitted from Schelling rather than what he "borrowed"). Not even the symbolic unity to which Coleridge resorted with increasing emphasis after the Biographia is able to overcome such a difficulty. What this difficulty amounts to is subsequently analyzed in discussions of the image of the labyrinth and the description of its construction in Greek mythology, texts from De Quincey's Suspiria de Profundis, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and passages excerpted from Plato's Sophist and Statesman. These works form a sequence which permits the gradual development of the problematic shared by Coleridge, Schelling, and critical reflection: the problem of the joining or interlacing of discourse. Through this sequence, the conditions of continuance and continuity in narrative are analyzed thematically by focusing upon an activity which recurs in each of the works discussed: the activity of weaving. As becomes apparent from Plato's discussion of interlacing, this activity involves a dissembling which serves to ensnare what would threaten the very existence of discourse and therefore deny the possibility of joining or interlacing particular discourses such as philosophy and criticism. At the same time, Plato relates this discourse to a process termed recollection. This process, which lies at the center of representation and referentiality, involves, however, the forgetting of what is to be recollected. It is the problem posed by such a forgetting which Coleridge's critical principle, if attained, would have discovered at the basis of its deduction, yet, as is apparent from Middlemarch, this forgetting is also essential to both narrative continuity and the production of a history to which this narrative may refer.