No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
DAMIAN WALFORD DAVIES Diagnosing “The Rime ofthe Ancient Mariner”: Shipwreck, Historicism, Traumatology F orging a new historicism avant la lettre in the road to xanadu (1927), John Livingston Lowes claimed that in his voracious consump tion ofvoyage narratives prior to writing “The Rime ofthe Ancient Mari ner,” Coleridge read “with an eye which habitually pierced to the secret spring of poetry beneath the crust of fact.”1 Recognizing the poem as “a supreme crystallisation of the spirit of maritime expansion,”2 New Historicism has subsequently embraced the task of excavating the poem with an eye that pierces to the secret layers of “fact” beneath the crust of “poetry.” History’s quarried particulars, identified since the early 1960s, have ranged from (premonitions of) a slaver,3 “colonial expansion,” “Eu ropean racial guilt,” the killing of a slave, and “abolition propaganda”4 to the pathogenesis and “material conditions” of yellow fever,5 the terror of impressment,6 “tremors of political faith,” “political complicity,”7 mis placed jacobinism, national political guilt,8 and the psychodrama of i. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways ofthe Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930 [1927]), 36-37. 2. J. R. Ebbatson, “Coleridge’s Mariner and the Rights of Man,” SiR n, no. 3 (1972): 1753 . See Malcolm Ware, “Coleridge’s ‘Spectre-Bark’: A Slave Ship?” Philological Quarterly 40 (1961): 589-93; William Empson, “The Ancient Mariner,” Critical Quarterly 6 (1964): 298319 ; William Empson, “ ‘The Ancient Mariner’: An Answer to Warren,” The Kenyon Review 15 (1993): 155—775 and William Empson and David Pirie, eds., Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection (London: Faber, 1972), 28-30. 4. See Ebbatson, “Coleridge’s Mariner,” 182, 198. 5. Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylva nia Press, 2004), 49. 6. See Ve-Yin Tee, Coleridge, Revision and Romanticism: After the Revolution, 1793-1818 (London: Continuum, 2009), 58. 7. Patrick J. Keane, Coleridge’s Submerged Politics: The Ancient Mariner and Robinson Crusoe (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 250, 268, 270, 271. 8. Peter Kitson, “Coleridge, The French Revolution and ‘The Ancient Mariner’: Collec tive Guilt and Individual Salvation,” Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 197-207. SiR, 55 (Winter 2016) 503 504 DAMIAN WALFOKD DAVIES Coleridge’s own neuroses (“a projection, albeit an exaggerated one, of in tellectual and emotional tendencies in himself”).9 10 * Each has been tailored with varying degrees ofpersuasiveness to the layered contours of “The An cient Mariner.” In all of this, the ostensible—and not easily exorcisable— master-narrative of unthinking transgression, horrific castigation, com pound penance, and compulsive restitution has retained its power both to accommodate and to contest historicist readings. Carl Thompson has em phasized that “The Ancient Mariner” is crucially “indebted” to what he terms the “scripts” of contemporary shipwreck narratives and the litera ture of “maritime misadventure.”1" In this essay, I offer a new interdisci plinary reading of “The Ancient Mariner” that identifies the traumatic sub jectivity of the Mariner-as-shipwreck-survivor as the very condition of the poem’s narration. Further, I credit Coleridge with a remarkably pre scient dramatization—an empathetic inhabitation—of a condition of trauma codified only in the late twentieth century: post-traumatic stress disorder. i. Diagnostic Uncertainty As the core event to be excavated in “The Ancient Mariner,” luuifrage (lit erally, the breaking of a ship) and its traumatic aftermath clearly represent a different order of “fact” from those already listed above. However, some of the critical methods I deploy will be recognizable to those familiar with materialist excavations of Romantic texts. At the outset, it is worth profiling the acute hermeneutic challenge posed by the poem. Interpreta tion is taxed by the poem’s “sheer excess”11 and “omnisignificance”;12 its multiple vocalities that collapse “borders of speech”; its relativization of centers of authority; and its knowing interpellation of the reader by means ofseductive totalizing schemas that elicit what J. R. Ebbatson has described as “Pavlovian” critical responses.13 As Raimonda Modiano has shown, some of the most robust historicist readings fail to extricate themselves from the alluring, essentialist interpretative frames the poem promotes, just as the Mariner himself can be seen to order his nightmare experience 9...
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.