The Paradoxical Project of The Friend

Doubt succeeds to doubt, cloud rolls over cloud, one paradox is driven out by another still greater, in endless succession.

Hazlitt, Examiner (8 Sep 1816), quoted in Jackson, 250-251.

Would to Heaven that the verdict to be passed on my labours depended on those who least needed them! The water lilly in the midst of waters lifts up its broad leaves, and expands its petals at the first pattering of the shower, and rejoices in the rain with a quicker sympathy, than the parched shrub in the sandy desart.

Coleridge, TF, 1.111.

‘Tis true, indeed, the Republick of dark Authors, after they once found out this excellent Expedient of Dying, have been particularly happy in the Variety, as well as Extent of their Reputation. For, Night being the universal Mother of Things, wise Philosophers hold all Writings to be fruitful in the Proportion they are dark; And therefore, the true Illuminated (that is to say, the Darkest of all) have met with numberless Commentators, whose Scholiastick Midwifry hath deliver’d them of Meanings, that the Authors themselves, perhaps, never conceived, and yet may very justly be allowed the Lawful Parents of them: The Words of such Writers being like Seed, which, however scattered at random, when they light upon a fruitful Ground, will multiply far beyond either the Hopes or Imagination of the Sower.

Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 118.

Biographical and critical representations of Coleridge’s career generally divide his corpus into three parts. The first part, which includes his early public prose and poetry, is usually figured as a bright dawn, while the third part, figured as a dark night, comprises the later theological ruminations of the ‘Sage of Highgate’. The middle part is figured as a period of obscurity, and bridges the abyss separating the young radical poet-lecturer and the old conservative mystic-oracle, incorporating Coleridge’s early nineteenth-century literary lectures and criticism and his rather Orphic ‘descent’ into opium and Kantium from around the time of his departure for Malta in 1804 (where Richard Holmes splits his biography between Early Visions and Darker Reflections) to the publication of the 1818 Friend.¹ The middle years, in other words, are the muddle years, and most of the criticism on Coleridge’s work in this period focuses on explaining away the obscurity of ‘Coleridge’s philosophy’ by explaining away one particular text which in its darkness binds them, the Biographia Literaria.² Because it is centralized in readings of Coleridge’s muddle years, the Biographia is seen as the source of his figuration as a quasi-metaphysical foreignish philosopher, a plagiarist, a duplicitous apostatical self-reviser, and the perennial scourge of undergraduates. But the story of Coleridge’s emergence in this period as a figure of philosophical obscurity is more complex, and neither begins nor ends with the Biographia as a centre to which all other texts are peripheral;³ as Peter Kitson has remarked, ‘[i]t is not easy to date the beginning of Coleridge’s passage from idiosyncratic dissenter to idiosyncratic conservative’.⁴ Part of the reason for this difficulty is that during the muddling years of the Poet-Critic-Mystic trinity so beloved by Coleridgean biographers, Coleridge both engages in and is subject to a sustained project of self-production and self-transformation that is not exhausted by a criticism which centralizes the Biographia Literaria.

Rather, it is in the larger context of the reflexive public projection of his character in these years, in what I call ‘the project of The Friend’, that we can best see the constitution of Coleridge as a figure of Romantic obscurity. The project of The Friend corresponds roughly to the years encompassed by the three incarnations of The Friend in 1809-10, 1812, and 1818. By focusing on The Friend as a process rather than a single work, I mean to invoke a sense of incoherence and progressive, reflexive, reactionary revision in a single project which took place over a significant period of time. Like the single life that is divided into a Trinitarian ‘Coleridge’, the single work of The Friend is divided into the periodical-Friend, the bound-Friend and the book-Friend, and all are reflexively united in the single identity of the public character of The Friend which also speaks in the Biographia and the two Lay Sermons. Because the project of The Friend takes place over a period of time and across different works, like The Friends themselves it can embody a series of revisionary and metaphorical responses to the charge of obscurity. When we discuss Coleridge’s obscurity without an understanding of the uses and abuses of ‘obscurity’ in relation to this project, we merely reproduce the revisionary discourse of attack and defence in which Coleridge and his enemies engaged – leaving the ‘centre’, the nature of obscurity itself, undefined, indefinite, indeterminate. In other words, explaining away the obscurities of the Biographia does not contribute meaningfully to a discussion of Coleridge’s Romantic obscurity, but explaining Coleridge’s projected engagement with the concept of obscurity does.

It is in the project circumscribed by the threeFriends that Coleridge most explicitly and directly encounters, articulates, and tries to resolve the problems and paradoxes of a positive, Romantic obscurity. The movement from ambivalence to a private and finally to a public commitment to a positive obscurity in the periodical-Friend (and a further articulation of this resolution in the bound-Friend) resulted only in further charges of obscurity from Coleridge’s friends and reviewers. Ultimately Coleridge developed his commitment to obscurity in a series of defences from and attacks on his public and private correspondents as the project wore on. In the book-Friend, this pattern emerged in a structure of unresolved ‘staircases’ which involve a consideration of obscurity in relation to labour, a critique of clarity, an analysis of the dangers of obscurity, and finally the relationship of obscurity to the function of Coleridge’s metaphysics. Coleridge became a philosopher of obscurity, thematising the obscurity which he meant his readers to overcome, and he was forced, in the face of real or anticipated readerly resistance, to convince the revolting reader in turn that his was the obscurity of the dawn, not the dusk.

But this reactionary appropriation of the charge of obscurity was always in a sense preliminary, and the ‘staircases’ of obscurity are unresolved because of their relationship to the Romantic obscurity of the delay of full interpretation, or the fulfilment of a prophecy of philosophical completion and coherence. Paradoxically, before Coleridge could convince his readers to begin their ascent through transformative obscurity, he had to provoke them into a charitable investment in a reading (rather than out of a reading) of The Friend which assented to a form of delayed repayment. In his own provocative words, he had to convince his readers that ‘[i]gnorance seldom vaults into knowledge, but passes through it into an intermediate state of obscurity, even as night into day through twilight’.⁵ Consequently the works that make up the project of The Friend are invested with an expanding proliferation of introductory material, even in relation to Coleridge’s early Watchman days, which correlates to an increased anxiety of public reception. Theorizing philosophical obscurity turns into philosophical theorizing about obscurity which turns into theorizing about philosophizing obscurity, et cetera, carrying Coleridge down a metarhetorical slippery slope to a vanishing point. Thus the works of The Friend take on the form John Livingston Lowes applied specifically to The Friend ¸ that ‘quintessentially mid-Coleridgean omnium gatherum’⁶. And as Paul Hamilton points out (adapting Jerome Christensen), this tendency to ‘reduce a text to the reading of a text – to reduce its meaning to its reading – only “figures” a philosophy: it does not yet state it’.⁷ Christensen claims rather charitably of The Friend that during this activity ‘it is not as though nothing is getting done’,⁸ and while this is true, in another sense it is precisely nothing that is getting done: as the philosophy disappears behind its endless self-contemplation, so does The Friend in its endless self-defence. But as Christensen also claims, what remains is precisely ‘a defense of [Coleridge’s] tortuously obscure style’.⁹

The final project of The Friend is Coleridge himself. The infamous method of self-projection associated with the Biographia began in the first number of the periodical-Friend, where Coleridge stated ‘I shall deem it my Duty to state [my arguments] with what skill I can, at a fitting opportunity, though rather as the Biographer of my own sentiments than a Legislator of the opinions of other men’.¹⁰ I would like to pursue a reading for obscurity in which Coleridge’s real project is ‘Coleridge’, the public representation of his identity which will be determined by his critics and readers (and friends), and which will also determine their determination. If he is to inspire public confidence in his work, he must make Coleridge into a friend, The Friend. The goal is to control the reception of his literary projects by the people by controlling in turn the reception of his own character as a guide. To control ‘obscurity’ was to achieve the goal Coleridge had dreamed of since his Moral and Political Lecture: authorial and authoritative control of the reception of his work, and thus control of the transformation of society.