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 JOURNALdental modernity. These two aspects of the poem arelinked inexorably ? which is to say that the advent ofthe condition of occidental modernity is irrevocablybound up with imperial expansion and its exploitationof the other.Nearly half a century ago, William Empsonremarked that the poem“appeals to a proud nationaltradition and evokes a major historical event, the maritimeexpansion of the Western Europeans”(297).Decades before Empson, John Livingston Lowes haddefinitively shown in his exhaustive source study, TheRoad to Xanadu, that Coleridge had read and absorbedcontemporary and historical captains’reports whichfound their way ? sometimes verbatim ? into thepoem. For instance, the narratives of Captain JamesCook (1728-1779), the famed explorer who undertookthree legendary voyages to the Pacific, providedColeridge with the images of the phosphorescentwater snakes and the visceral horrors of shipwreck. Asthe authors of a recent study of British and Europeanexploration in the period remind us, the act of“exploration”is never scientifically objective but must beseen as“a social and political construct, one that isbound up with the history of imperialism”(Fulford 3).Regardless of whether each voyage had a direct colonialimpact, the act of navigating, mapping, andcharting unknown regions of the world cannot be aninnocent endeavor, entwined as it is with the imperialdrive to knowledge, or the desire for instrumental reason? the rationalist reduction of the world as a meansto a given end.Within the poem, the actual course of the ship’svoyage deserves attention. Departing from England,the ship sails south, crosses the equator, and is thenceborne by a storm into the glacial regions of the SouthPole:And now there came both mist and snow,And it grew wondrous cold:And ice, mast-high, came floating by,As green as emerald.And through the drifts the snowy cliftsDid send a dismal sheen:Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken?The ice was all between.The ice was here, the ice was there,The Ice was all around:It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,Like noises in a swound! ?(51-62)Besides the obvious change in climate, the seascapetakes on a phantasmagoric quality as the lighting turnsunnatural and the explorer becomes lost in the undifferentiatedsaturation of the single element of ice. Thesounds that echo from the ice are menacing because oftheir dreamy unreality, creating a nightmarish effect.In terms of cartography, the region may be seen as aninversion of imperial knowledge ? an area devoid ofhuman interest or identity, useless in its lack of instrumentality,and composed of both solidity and flux,which makes it resistant to any enterprise of mapping.Fulford convincingly argues that“The Rime”is ultimately“a poem about polar exploration”in which“thesouthern sea becomes the uncanny polar opposite ofthe safe harbor of his home; a place where self-identityis challenged and perceptions are altered”(172-73). Indeed, what makes the scene so terrifying to themariner is also the anxiety of the European traveler’srational identity, which is threatened by the lack ofdifferentiation in the landscape and the sheer difficultyof defining oneself against the unknowable region.In the voyage, the equator emerges as the horizonof crisis ? most of the narrative’s disasters occur nearor at the tropical zone, and venturing out into sea doesnot pose a problem until the ship encounters the equator.Coleridge’s marginal gloss in the 1817 editionreads:“The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southwardwith a good wind and fair weather, till it reachedthe line”(25). The earlier 1798 edition makes the pointmore saliently in the“Argument”prefaced to thepoem:“How a Ship having passed the Line was drivenby Storms to the cold Country towards the SouthPole…and of the strange things that befell; and inwhat manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to hisown Country.”The“line”is significant for it demarcatesthe main extent of the British Empire from thethen unfamiliar and un-colonized territories, and designatesthe threshold of imperial knowledge. To crossthe equator is to venture beyond the establishedbounds of empire, and the catastrophes in many waysreflect this anxiety. (A few exceptions contemporaneousto the poem: New South Wales was only recentlyestablished as a British penal colony in 1788; CapeTown became a British colony in 1806). In a more142