ブックタイトルRILAS 早稲田大学総合人文科学研究センター研究誌

概要

RILAS 早稲田大学総合人文科学研究センター研究誌

WASEDA RILAS JOURNAL The Catastrophic NO. 1 (2013. Global 10)Order in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient MarinerThe Catastrophic Global Order in Samuel TaylorColeridge’s The Rime of the Ancient MarinerJerry Chia-Je WENGAbstractBritish Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s celebrated poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798,1814) narrates the shipwreck and survival of a globetrotting mariner set against a backdrop of ghastly supernaturalforces. The plot revolves around the mariner’s arbitrary killing of a sea-bird and his subsequent chastisementon the seas by otherworldly spirits, eventually generating a form of survivor’s trauma in the mariner to narrate hisstrange tale compulsively.Influential modern interpretations of the poem have cast it as a narrative of sin and redemption, or crisis andregeneration, centered on the individual soul and moral action. In light of recent studies on travel and geographyin the British Romantic period, however, this paper seeks to situate the poem within the material context of theimperial world order and to reexamine its global reach. I argue that the poem embodies profound anxieties ofempire and the forms of navigation that make possible the expansion of empire. As such, the poem can be read asan allegory of the new global order in the early nineteenth century, in which the heady growth of the BritishEmpire is already perceived as unstable and tainted, foreboding unknown and unnatural forms of disaster andcatastrophe. The supernatural machinery in the poem is thus crucial to imagining scenarios of impending collapseof the world order; the mariner’s guilt and trauma represent on a global scale the rupture and alienation from thenatural order when imposed upon by British imperial geography.Literary narratives of disaster and catastrophe ?whether fictional or inspired by real events ? offerrevealing glimpses into the writer’s tragic imaginationas well as the collective anxieties and apprehensionsof a historical period. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s TheRime of the Ancient Mariner (1798, 1817), one of themost celebrated narrative poems of the British Romanticperiod, has perennially fascinated readers by itseerie, supernatural plot and its strange literary powerthat seems at once archaic and modern. The plot centerson a loony, old sailor who mesmerizes a weddingguest and forces him to listen to a strange narrative:the mariner tells of a sea voyage in which he senselesslykills a sea-bird and is thereafter haunted by ahost of malignant supernatural forces; after much penanceand suffering, the mariner finally returns to hisown country but is doomed to repeat his tale compulsively.On the most rudimentary level, the narrative isabout a supernatural catastrophe at sea and its traumaticaftermath as experienced by an individualtraveler; I shall also argue that the poem expresses adeep-rooted unease concerning the global order establishedunder British naval and imperial expansion. Thecatastrophic sea voyage is allegorical of a global orderthat is haunted by unknowable forces and prone tounpredictable disaster.Traditional interpretations of the poem havefocused predominantly on its Christian context andseen it as“a myth of guilt and redemption”about theindividual soul (Bowra 71). Robert Penn Warren, representativeof this line of thinking, insists that thepoem teaches the doctrine of the“One Life”in whichall creation partakes, and the doctrine of the creativeimagination. I would read the poem as a narrative ofcatastrophe in a divergent metaphoric and symbolicsense: as a meditation on the crisis of western modernityand its submerged other, the specter of colonizedlands and peoples, both of which constitute the globalorder of imperial expansion. My argument will betwofold: first, that“The Rime”embodies symptoms ofmaritime expansion and colonial guilt; second, that thepoem functions as an etiology of the malaises of occi-141