5,150 Words
New Academic Review
At the Water’s Edge with the Ancient
Mariner
June 13, 2013
William
Cooper
“Unspeakable
Discovery: Romanticism and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
by
Matthias Rudolf
March
2013
European
Romantic Review, 33 pp. $0.10
“Striking
Passages: Memory and the Romantic Imprint”
by
Ashley Miller
Spring 2011
Studies in Romanticism, 23 pp. $0.10
Spring 2011
Studies in Romanticism, 23 pp. $0.10
Still, the poem slowly acquired an audience, culminating with its inclusion, after
several revisions, in Coleridge’s proprietary book of poems, Sibylline Leaves, in 1817. But at the same time the ballad continued to defy
interpretation. Fans of the poem seemed content to regard it as a work that,
while powerful and resonate, was beyond understanding. By the second half of
the century, though, readers began to gleam from the Rime’s occult symbolism various religious themes. One reading held
the work to be a narrative of crime, punishment, repentance, and reconciliation;
another as an analogy of the Fall, with the killing of the albatross equal to
the eating of the apple; still another as
the story of the moral history of humanity. But a comprehensive unpacking of
the poem’s imagery would have to wait for Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 essay, “A
Poem of Pure Imagination: An Experiment in Reading.”
Coleridge
had always insisted that imagination lay at the heart of his poem, and Warren fused
this theme with that of the sacramental in order to show how the Rime’s aesthetic privileges the way to
the love of god, man, and animals. His interpretation was to influence those
for the next two-to-three decades. Some critics emphasized the Christian aspect;
others focused on the more broadly spiritual features, but most readings in
some way or another engaged Warren’s. Of course, there were also those critics
who read the Rime in order to access Coleridge’s
troubled psyche, beginning in 1947 with George Whalley’s “The Mariner and the
Albatross, and followed by the usual suspects of Freudians who found in the poem
signs of the poet’s repressed conflicts over incest, homosexuality, and sadomasochism.
Overall, however, the idea of the Rime as
a poem of transgression and redemption had stood unabated since the middle of
the eighteenth century. All of these interpretations made the Mariner’s killing
of the albatross the ballad’s thematic focal point.
The
interpretative field began to expand in the 1970s. Inspired by the new wave of post-colonialist
and historicist criticism, scholars found symbolic meaning in the poem’s images
and events that corresponded with the social and political currents of the Romantic
Age, i.e., the French Revolution, the slave trade, and imperialism.
Concomitantly, poststructuralists found meaning in the Rime’s structure and style. One of the most influential studies of
the Rime’s form was Jerome McGann’s “The
Meaning of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” McGann’s 1981 essay shows how Coleridge
structured the Rime as an allegory
for what was known as the Higher Critical Tradition, a hermeneutic approach to
reading the Scriptures that sought to make the Bible compatible with current scientific.
During
the late eighteenth century in Germany, a coterie of German intellectuals
believed that, rather than an account of certain “fixed” events, the Bible was
a “collection of poetic materials” that evolved over the course of human
history. These critics held that the Scriptures originated from the oral
narratives of eye-witnesses, and the witnesses of witness, and grew by “accretion
and interpolation” into written accounts that reflected the ideological
perspectives of their respective religious communities. The Bible was not the
word of God, but the word of God filtered through ordinary mortals. Its universality
rested on its adaptability to successive generations of religious adherents. Moreover,
each generation of priests and theologians orally interpreted its printed language
for their constituents. The common man was not capable of doing this himself since
he lacked knowledge of the languages, customs, and opinions that privileged
these readings. Thus, instead of weakening the authority of the Church, which
the vernacular Bible had tended to do by allowing people to read the Bible on
their own, the Tradition helped restore the Church’s influence, thereby making
it a conservative movement. As a form of criticism, the Tradition sought to
unravel the various diachronic layers of the Bible.
According
to McGann, the form and language of the poem replicate a culturally redacted
text. Coleridge was acquainted with the Tradition in 1792 when he wrote the Rime but fully invested in it by the
time he composed the 1817 revision, which, with its marginal gloss, represented
the most radical exposition of the Tradition. As the version most people read
today, its appearance is distinguished by four layers: the original Mariner’s
tale; the ballad narrative of that story; the gloss added when the ballad was,
supposedly, first printed; and Coleridge’s own point of view—the religious
theme—as lodged in his materials. What’s more, each layer contains words from
the lexicon of its corresponding historical epoch, from the time of Henry VII
to the sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century to Coleridge’s age.
Each layer indicates the changes that would have been made by a succession of
mediators—balladeers, minstrels, a fictive editor for the gloss, and Coleridge
himself, with each contributor investing his ideological perspective in the
text. Many of Coleridge’s readers would have been acquainted with the
Tradition, so they would have recognized the Rime’s significance not only as an allegory for the Tradition but
for Coleridge and the Romantics’ idea of literature as a living and processive
organism.
In
the wake of McGann, two recent articles—“Unspeakable Discovery: Romanticism and
the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Matthias
Rudolf and “Striking Passages: Memory and the Romantic Imprint” by Ashley
Miller and—also contain readings of the Rime
that illuminate Coleridge’s literary theories. Rudolf shows that, in
addition to the Rime’s form, its content allegorizes Coleridge’s hermeneutics,
while Miller explains that the materiality of the poem reflects Coleridge’s
belief in the effect of the new print culture on memory.
In
citing McGann—in an endnote, curiously—notes that another difference between
them is that while McGann “locates [the allegory] in Coleridge’s exegetical
High Church Tradition,” he (Rudolf) situates it in discovery, particularly
maritime discovery. So right from the start Rudolf plunges us into deep water.
Allegories generally use material forms to represent abstract ideas, the reason
being that material things, be they one-dimensional characters or concrete
objects, are relatively easy to define, and abstract thoughts, whether they are,
say, issues of morality or theories of literary criticism, are not; they are
messy and variable. Thus the author uses the materiality of her source to shape
and give meaning to the abstract ideas or theme that she wants to convey. But
discovery is an abstract term; therefore, Rudolf is reading the Rime as an allegory of one abstract term
for another, of discovery for a theory of literary criticism. Granted, the
Tradition is also an abstract term, but Rudolf errs in saying that this is
where McGann locates his allegory. McGann situates his allegory in the Rime’s structure and linguistics, not in
the Tradition. The Tradition is what the Rime
allegorizes. The bottom line is that it is quite a bit more complicated for
Rudolf to walk us through a definition of discovery that will sustain his
reading of the Rime than it is for
McGann to direct our attention to what’s before our eyes on the printed page.
A
discovery, Rudolf says, consists of two parts: an “event” of discovery and a “matter
of fact” of discovery. The former is a non-entity. (I assume that by this
Rudolf means that, since naming is a social function, something does not acquire
an identity until the community bestows it.) In order for the “event” of discovery
to become a “matter of fact” of discovery, the discover must represent it so
that others will verify it. But representations of discovery contain a paradox:
in order to establish their claim to the discovery, discovers must produce the conditions
that foregrounded the “event” of discovery. But since this production is
necessarily separate and distinct from the first event, there will always be a
gap between the two. Yet the discoverer must “portray the event as the
condition of possibility of that knowledge.” Thus, Rudolf concludes, discoveries
are poetic because they are “precariously constituted” as the discoverer
endeavors to represent the relation between of the “event” of discovery and the
“matter of fact” that privileged it. Furthermore, the process is organic
because the discoveries are continually verified, repeated, and transmitted.
Rudolf
gives the example of Newton’s apple: the event—Newton’s discovering—is distinct
from what is discovered—gravity—but the discovery of gravity only becomes
available in and through the event of its discovery. Conversely, while the
event of discovery is contingent on the prior existence of gravity, it is not
determined by the characteristics of gravity itself. Unfortunately, Rudolf stops
short of explaining how the discovery of gravity is “precariously constituted” in
the representation of the relation of the “event” and the “matter of fact” that
occasioned it, which would have illuminated how discovery is poetic.
Rudolf
takes a breather from his epistemological dissertation on discovery to note that
there is some precedent for reading the Rime
as a poem about discovery. The first modern study of the poem, John
Livingstone Lowes’ The Road to Xandu (1927), describes the various travelogues and
explorer diaries that Coleridge read. Although Lowes doesn’t draw any
conclusions about discovery as a theme in the poem, William Empson makes this
connection when in 1972 he characterizes the Rime as a poem about adventure and discovery. Subsequently this
theme was thoroughly mined by the historicists of the 1980s and 1990s, who made
associations between the Rime and the
slave trade, colonialism, imperialism, the French Revolution, and yellow fever.
Rudolf compliments the historicists for their exhaustive research, but he seems
to temper this when he says that their work consisted of “mapping the text onto
a preexisting field of reference.” Rudolf states that he will take a different (loftier?)
course. He writes:
Inasmuch
as modernity is made possible and even actualized by the Cartesian idea of
method, as Pfau argues, and inasmuch as discovery designates the radical
contingency of the event of the new entering into knowledge, discovery appears
as an always proliferating site of the struggle to define the conditions and
terms in which modernity comes to characterize itself, its past and its future
aspirations. In this sense, the Rime figures
as a literary and historical site in and over which that struggle is carried
out.
For
those readers not familiar with Thomas Pfau’s article, he explains that Coleridge
considered modernity a “miscarriage.” Tracing the historic path of modernity from
Cartesian skepticism to Lockean empiricism to nineteenth-century Nominalism,
Coleridge, along with several German Romantics—among them Goethe, Schlegel, and
Schopenhauer—criticized its emphasis on the reality of what Pfau calls “individual
things.” This resulted in (1) the fractionalization of knowledge into
specialization and professionalism; (2) the inauguration of the
“self-certifying, liberal-progressive optimism” that dominated current thought;
and (3) the abandonment of the ancient notion of knowledge as the fortuitous
fusion of theoria [contemplation] and eudaemnonia [human flourishing] in order
to produce the vita contemplativa [the contemplative life].
What
Rudolf seems to be saying is that modernity is inextricably linked with
discovery, as both emanate from the product of Cartesian I-think-therefore-I-am
rationality, which foregrounded the empowerment of Man. The reason that
discovery is a site of ongoing tension is that as a new discovery enters the
arena of the existing field of knowledge, there is a struggle between them: the
part (the event of discovery), seeking to acquire an identity (become a matter
of fact of discovery), threatens to alter the existing identity of the whole (the
current philosophical body of knowledge). It is this process that the Rime allegorizes.
You
might expect that in the next paragraph Rudolf would put the rubber to the road
and explicate the Rime through his conceptualization
of discovery. But two more waves need
to be negotiated. The first one, and biggest, is a synopsis of the theory of
criticism of the philosopher whose writings most influenced Coleridge and the Romantic
Movement, Immanuel Kant. Readers should be forewarned, however; as difficult as
Kant is to read, a summary of him is more difficult, and a summary of a summary
is more difficult than that.
As
Kant articulates in The Critique of Pure
Reason, criticism as a “contest between mapping and discovery.” Mapping is
the agreement of “our cognition [our senses] with “the objects of possible
experience” [the empirical data that our senses engage]. Maritime discovery, in
contrast, involves the transcendental use of “our a priori principles of the understanding” [our raw intuition],
which expands our knowledge beyond the reach of our senses to “the very being
of things as things”—what Kant calls noumena.
But when the Mariner ventures out to sea, “where many a fog bank and rapidly
melting iceberg pretend to be new lands,” he is continually in danger of being
deceived; therefore, the Mariner must always keep an eye on the map and ask
himself whether the potential reward of what may be discovered is worth the
risk of forfeiture of the land that he leaves. This is the Kantian bargain: the knowledge that knowledge was
obtained at the price of ceding knowledge of the thing in itself. But although Coleridge
rejected the Kantian bargain, he conceded that critical discoveries occur at
the limit of knowledge, and thus they cannot be grasped by thought. This is
what makes discoveries “unspeakable”: they can only be explained in terms of
the “boundary” that “encloses” their truth. Thus they appear to us as “figures
of translation, as the outline of what they are not but yet make possible.”
Generally, then, translation involves not only reading and explaining what was
read but transporting “something” over a border or abyss, be it geographical or
textual. Translation “represents” for
the first time something that was
somewhere else but is not yet here, making it understandable in a familiar
idiom. But as representation,
discovery is always provisional, because at the time of the event of discovery the practice of a
translation has already begun. The paradox is that the discovery that is privileged
by each subsequent translation interrupts this translation
processes, causing it “to stutter, to begin again, and altering its course, to
continue.”
Moving
onto less heady stuff, Rudolf allows us to regain our sea legs by, well, taking
to sea. It’s an exciting trip. From information gleamed from the poem, Rudolf interpolates
the path of the Mariner’s ship, and charts it on a map taken from Shelvocke’s
1726 book about an actual sea voyage around the world. Rudolf then compares the
path with that of Captain Cook in his discovery of Antarctica, as chronicled in
his 1777 memoir, A Voyage Towards the
South Pole. Rudolf’s purpose is to show that the geography of the Rime is not as fantastical as it is
believed to be. Plus there are a number of parallels between Cook’s and the Mariner’s
voyages that corroborate the poem’s investment in discovery. Although Coleridge
did not read Cook’s account, his discovery of Terra Incognita anticipates the mariners’
discovery of the silent sea. Although Shelvocke’s map was outdated as a result
of Cook’s voyage, Coleridge is not known to have read Cook while Shelvocke is
the one whom he and Wordsworth discussed when they jointly planned the Rime.
In
their respective discoveries, both the mariners and Cook enter into uninscribed
space; however, the mariners discover the silent sea by direct experience; Cook
discovers Terra Australis Incognitia (Antarctica) by inference. Cook catalogues
temperatures and sea currents, and observes the irregular latitudinal
distribution of the icebergs and pack-ice that prevented his ship from sailing
farther. Expressing Cook’s accomplishment in Kantian terms, Rudolf says, “Cook’s discovery of the existence of the southern
continent takes place as an event of thinking in accordance with concepts that
posit Terra Australis Incognita as the ‘unknown something,’ the absent cause
and origin of the empirical phenomena – icebergs, currents, weather patterns –
whose appearance he had mapped.” Occasionally, though, Rudolf gets carried away
with his rhetoric (he “overcooks” it?), as he does here in restating his
conclusion: “Cook stakes his claim that Terra Australis existed on its
very inaccessibility to discovery.” Rudolf would have been more accurate if
less artful had he said that Cook stakes his claim on the existence of Terra
Australis on the geographic data before his eyes, some of which, like the ice formations, prevented direct
confirmation of the land mass but privileged its inference.
Like
Cook, the mariners assess the natural environment, in their case in the form of
the wind, fog, and mist. But instead of discovering land, they discover the
Mariner’s character. Immediately after the Mariner kills the albatross, the
crew condemns him because their superstitious minds convince them that the bird
had brought the south wind. But after the sun rises and the fog and mist
disappear, the shipmates praise the Mariner for killing the bird that brought
the fog and mist. But it seems to me that Rudolf’s analogy is slightly flawed because
Cook sets out to discover the southern continent while the mariners’
“discovery” is only a collateral event. Nevertheless, the mariners do make a
discovery. This figures as the second discovery that the mariners make.
In
using the collective “we” when he narrates the discovery of the silent sea, (“We
were the first that ever burst / into that silent sea”), the Mariner indicates his
reinstatement into the ship’s community as a result of the mariners’
superstitious reversal. The discovery of the silent sea joins together two
narrative strands: the ship’s voyage into the unknown and the shipmates’ engagement
with the Mariner’s character. But the Mariner cannot say where these
discoveries happen. Although “bursting” implies the crossing of a threshold or
barrier, this could have occurred anywhere on the ship’s northward path between
Antarctica and the equator, when the sun stood directly over the mast. Like
literature, its origin is variable, multifarious, untraceable.
Also
like literature, the ship is subject to being viewed from paradoxical perspectives.
This is suggested by the first two lines of the silent sea stanza: “The breezes
blew, the white foam flew, / The furrow follow’d free:” To a person on the ship
the white foam seems to fly, but only to someone viewing from a distance would
the furrow seem to follow the ship.” In a thorough, incisive analysis, Rudolf
mines this trope throughout Coleridge’s work. It is represented by, among other
things, the poem’s two beginnings (“It is an ancient Mariner” versus “There was
a ship”); the Mariner’s change from one who misrecognizes (the promise of the
first sight of the spectre-bark) to one who recognizes (“that moment that his
face I see”); the change from being acted on (as Wordsworth criticized the poem
for) to acting (repeatedly telling his tale); the mariners change from discovers
(of the silent sea) to being discovered (by the spectre-bark); and the oscillation
between acceptance and ostracism (by the community).
But
Rudolf can test our patience too. Such is the case when he dissects the “it” in
the stanza: “Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched / With a woeful agony, /
Which forced me to begin my tale; / and then it left me free” (my emphasis). Rudolf devotes a paragraph to
unpacking the multiple meanings of “it.” I wonder if the conclusion he draws is
worth the expenditure of words,
providing the reader can understand the conclusion: “An interrupted
translation, brought to a premature end, “it” is nevertheless complete in its
incompletion: complete in that the Mariner is left free, incomplete in that the
Mariner is bereft of the very “it” that set him free.”
Fortunately,
Rudolf’s brilliant passages outweigh the convoluted ones. His explication of
the end of the poem resonates with insight. Whereas the discovery of the silent
sea denotes an event of discovery, the matter of fact of discovery occurs when
the Mariner represents it to the hermit through the first telling of his tale.
Thus the shriving marks the end of the Mariner’s voyage of discovery. It also
occasions the moment of translation. The eddy figures as the key symbol of the
poem. It foregrounds “a jump into time from beyond
time, and so one that has no existing beginning.” After being rescued by the pilot
boat, the Mariner’s return is interrupted when the craft is swept up in eddy. In
the boat’s circuitous path, it symbolizes that the albatross as alive and the
Mariner is freed from his guilt. What’s more, as the boat emerges from the eddy,
it both “reflects and reverses” the mariners’ voyage of discovery.” The
characters metaphorically change identities. The hermit becomes the Mariner as
he was on the ship, and the Mariner becomes Nightmare Life in-Death. Like an eddy,
discovery is “constant, but never completed.” As critics we too are “dragged
into an endless search for beginnings.” Quoting Kant, Rudolf calls this search something “from which [we] can never escape
and yet also never bring to an end.” This, Rudolf suggests, is the predicament
posed by the Rime and literary
criticism.
Thus,
Rudolf concludes, the Rime’s engagement
with discovery always leads to a “crisis of origin.” He calls this the “romantic
event tout court” that inspires the
Romantics’ production of literature. The Rime
figures its own beginnings as the absence of the poem. All we know is that
the Mariner tells his tale in response to the hermit, who figures the
constitutive, supplementary role of criticism. Hermit’s question is corollary
of the Kantian question that animated Romanticism: “who or what is man?” To
shrive is not only to hear confession but prescribe a penance or self-critique.
The Mariner’s tale amounts to the self-reflective writing of criticism.
Although
Miller doesn’t call the Rime an
allegory, her reading suggests that the Mariner is an allegorical figure in
everything but name. In Miller’s view, the Mariner “embodies the new mnemonics,”
which is Romantic science’s understanding of the impact of the printed page on
memory. In an oral culture, memory was seen to be associative; people’s memory
of a ballad relied on its rhythm and rhyme. But, as Coleridge writes in his Biographia Literaria, with the advent of
a print culture, people memorized poetry in the form of excerpts that were disassociated
from the context of the poem; they processed poetry in ways that were “irregular,
striking, and self-replicating.” Hence the term “striking passage.” As engaging
as Miller’s thesis is, though, it’s questionable whether it merits twenty-three
pages. She devotes half of her article to the scientific groundswell behind Coleridge’s
thinking, and she gets too repetitive in articulating her thesis.
As
she explains, Enlightenment scientists saw memory as operating through logical
causes and effects, and through paths of associations. The eighteenth century
English philosopher, David Hartley, wrote that ideas are dictated by the
logical flow from other ideas. But by the late stages of the Romantic era,
physiological memory was held to be impressionistic. Scientists posited memories
as consisting of permanent and recurring imprints that are stored in the mind
as individual units. These unruly imprints, as Miller calls them, act
autonomously and can surface unexpectedly at any moment. What’s more, they are linked
with the materiality of reading Repeated case studies showed that striking
passages had a power that came not from rhyme and rhythm but from their pattern
on the printed page.
Romantic physiologists
were particularly interested in the link between the phenomenon of uncontrollable,
autonomic memory and hallucinations. One case study involves the case of Mrs.
A, a “person of high character and intelligence” with an excellent memory, who
would recite memorized poetry in her sleep in a way that drew attention to the
visibility of the lines on the printed page. She would string together random
lines from poems that began with the last letter, not the sound, of the last
word of the previous random line she had recited. The scientist, a distinguished
optical physiologist named Brewster, diagnosed apparitions as memories gone
awry.
Other studies found
evidence of a temporal connection between illusions and printed matter. It was
as if the materiality of the page possessed the memory (and body) of the
reader. However, all of the studies that Miller cites occurred after 1798, when
Coleridge wrote the original version of the Rime, and many after 1817, when he
wrote his major revision. Nevertheless, Miller claims that these beliefs “had
been in place for decades.” They were behind the Romantics’ insistence that
ghosts were merely spectral illusions.
Particularly interesting
is Miller’s account of how the new mnemonics changed Coleridge’s view of the
source of the power of Wordsworth’s poetry. As we know form Wordsworth “Preface”
to the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, his
theory of poetry stressed its oral quality; he believed that poems should be
written in the language of ordinary people as opposed to stilted poetic
diction. But in the Biographica Coleridge
holds that the rhetorical effectiveness of his former friend’s verse lay not in
its regulated and contextual structure—the product of the poet’s tranquil
recollection—but in the “decidedly untranquil poetics” of the striking passage
that “starts up anew in the mind.” It’s curious whether Coleridge would have
made this statement had he and Wordsworth still been friends in 1817 when the Biographica was published.
This is not to suggest,
Miller cautions, that Coleridge was comfortable with all the ramifications of
the new mnemonics. For one thing, in depriving the reader of agency, it
undermined the Romantics’ emphasis on the power of the individual. Also, the
new mnemonics was associated with the growing trend of periodicals to publish
striking passages of various poems, thus detracting from the importance of
viewing them as an organic whole. But according to Thomas Pfau, Coleridge might
not have been as unhappy with the de-emphasis on individual agency as Miller
suggest. Certainly, though, Coleridge would have objected to the fragmentation
of poems. Miller writes about how Coleridge thought that periodicals—themselves
a product of the rising print culture—promoted a taste for “unconnected
writing” and “reading made easy.” He even criticized lending libraries for
promoting a “rather a sort of beggarly daydreaming.” Yet at the same time
Coleridge enjoyed the thought of his writing producing involuntary repetition among
his own readers. It pleased him to read in the newspapers phrases that he had
written repeated unawares by members of the House of Commons.
Although Miller
produces no evidence of Coleridge’s belief in the new mnemonics as of 1798, this
does not interfere with her claim that the Rime
posits memory as autonomic, visual, and repetitive. As she posits, the
Mariner “is an hallucinator, a passive victim of a wandering memory that has an
autonomous, and physical agency.” (“Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched /
With a woeful agony, / Which forced me to begin my tale—/ And then it left me
free.”) His first telling of his experience is followed by a continual
retelling. ("Since then, at an uncertain hour, / Now oft-times and now
fewer, / That anguish comes and makes me tell / My ghastly adventure.")
His repetition is involuntary and irregular. Not only is the Mariner gripped by
a compulsion but the narrator continually repeats words and phrases throughout
the text. (“Alone, Alone, all all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea.”) Thus
does the Mariner function as the living emblem of an imprinted memory.
Critics
view the frequent repetition as underscoring the Mariner’s claim to having
“strange power of speech,” yet Miller points out that it’s not the Mariner’s speech
that commands the wedding guest’s attention but his “glittering eye.” In fact,
she characterizes the poem’s “gestures toward orality” as “an alibi of
immateriality for a poetics grounded in the reproductivity of print.” The poem
seems “to be mocking” those critics who claim that the poem’s power emanates
from speech when in fact it derives from the involuntary reproduction of
imprinted memory.
Miller perhaps overstates
her case; speech is the Mariner’s primary
means of communication. What’s more, the poem uses sound to leverage meaning in
remarkable ways. Consider the teeming pace suggested by the sound of the line that precedes the ship’s
bursting onto the silent sea: “The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, / The
furrow followed free.” It’s even been suggested that the phonetic “F” simulates
the sound of a boat moving through water. Or the monotony conveyed, as the ship
is stalled on the painted ocean, by the sound
of the line: “Day after day, day after day.” Or the difficulty in producing the
sound of the line that describes the
condition that disables the mariners’ own speech: “With throat unlack’d, with
black lips baked, / We could not laugh nor wail.”
In her antepenultimate
paragraph, Miller acknowledges the contribution of McGann in advancing our
understanding of the Rime as a
“creature of print” rather than as a testament to the oral tradition. She
spends nearly a paragraph summarizing McGann’s interpretation of the poem as
the facsimile of a culturally redacted printed work. Then, in her final
paragraph, she concludes, “The Rime
draws inspiration for both its form and its content from the Romantic
reconfiguration of the mnemonic imprint.” The implication is that McGann’s
reading evidences Coleridge’s exploitation of the new mnemonic theory. This is
a flawed application of McGann. It’s true that McGann underscores the poem’s
investment in print culture, but his thesis, of the Rime as an epochally-layered work, is neutral on Coleridge’s
interest in the physiology of memory.
Works
Cited
Haven, Richard. “The Ancient Mariner and the
Nineteenth Century.” Studies in
Romanticism. 11.4 (Fall 1972): 360-74. JSTR. Web. 25 May 2013.
Bougler, James D. ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice
Hall, 1969. Print.
Bougler, James. D. ‘“The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner’—Introduction.” Bougler 1-20.
Hill, John Spencer. “Critical Approaches to The Ancient Mariner.” A Coleridge Companion.
London: McMillan, 1983. www.english.uga.edu. 5 May 2013.
Pfau, Thomas. “The Philosophy of Shipwreck:
Gnosticism, Skepticism, and Coleridge's Catastrophic Modernity.” MLN. 122.5 (Dec. 2007), Comparative
Literature Issue (Dec. 2007): 949-1004. JSTR. Web. 31 May 2013.
Warren, Robert Penn. “A Poem of Pure Imagination: An Experiment in Reading.” Bougler
21-47.
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