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

The Catastrophic Global Order in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Marinerspeculative vein, American philosopher Stanley Cavellreads the equator in the poem as“an implied image ofa mental line to be crossed that is interpreted as a geographicalor terrestrial border”(46). Cavell draws ananalogy between the equatorial horizon and Kantianepistemology as“a line below which…experience,hence knowledge, cannot, and must not presume to,penetrate”(47). He further makes the bold suggestionthat“the initiating act of transgression ? that which forme evokes the Fall ? is the act of‘crossing the line’”(57). Even before the mariner commits the primetransgression of shooting the albatross, he is in a sensealready fallen. For Cavell, that Fall is a crisis in westernepistemology concerning consciousness andskepticism that the mariner attempts to confront whenhe ventures beyond the equatorial point into theunknown, and this journey symbolizes a Fall into theknowledge and self-consciousness of modern existence.In my reading, this skeptical moment ofattempting to penetrate beyond Kantian epistemologycoincides precisely with the explorer’s plunge intopossible colonial realms of instrumental value to theimperial project.After the mariner’s killing of the albatross at theSouth Pole, the ship drifts back north through thePacific. Coleridge makes the path explicit in the 1817gloss:“The fair breeze continues; the ship enters thePacific Ocean and sails northward, even till it reachesthe Line”(103). The poem is also unambiguous aboutthe mariner’s expedition into a brave new world,yielding the famous lines:“We were the first that everburst / Into that silent sea”(105-6). The new expeditioninto the Pacific brings another round ofcatastrophes. The wind abruptly stops, leaving the shipstranded in the unforgiving tropical climate:“All in ahot and copper sky, / The bloody Sun, at noon”(111-12). The ship comes to a standstill in the famous lines,“As idle as a painted Ship / Upon a painted Ocean”(117-18). The equatorial line signifies a halting place,a midpoint between the colonized and uncolonizedrealms at which the entire project of exploration mustbe reckoned with; the result of that reckoning is a kindof unreal stasis, as if the global order constructedthrough instrumental planning were a mere illusion.In order to cross the threshold back into the familiarhemisphere of the homeland, the mariner and hiscrew must undergo a series of punishing purgatorialacts. As Alan Bewell has demonstrated, these terrorsare reminiscent of colonial disease and death in theslave trade. Bewell perceptively observes that theMariner“undergoes a symbolic‘blackening’throughoutthe poem”(103). The wedding guest describes themariner’s appearance as“long, and lank, and brown, /As is the ribbed sea-sand”(226-27). There is no doubtthat the mariner’s skin has been scorched by the sun,but it is also possible that he is being seen metonymicallyas a complicit figure in the British slave trade.The two ghastly figures that appear on a ghost ship,named“Death”and“Life-in-Death,”have the appearanceof a black slave and a prostitute ? signalingcommon diseases in the colonies: leprosy and syphilis.The two figures play a game of dice, at which Life-in-Death wins the mariner, and Death wins his crew. Themariner looks on in horror as his two hundred shipmatesproceed to drop dead one by one, cursing himwith their eyes. The mariner is reduced to a patheticstate of alienation and desperation:“Alone, alone, all,all alone, / Alone on a wide wide Sea”(232-33). Theexternal world and the expedition voyage have beencontaminated by decay and decomposition:I looked upon the rotting sea,And drew my eyes away;I looked upon the rotting deck,And there the dead men lay. (240-43)As Bewell argues,“‘The Rime’powerfully suggestshow far colonial disease and death wereunderstood as fitting retribution for the crime againstnature (both human and natural) implicit in colonialism”(107). The human costs of expedition, empire,and the slave trade are compressed into the graphicimage of the phantasmal ship, the alienated mariner,and the diseased and rotting dead bodies strewn abouthim. This is underlined even after the mariner’s supposedredemption, when the dead bodies arereanimated and continue their labor in zombie-likefashion:The mariners all’gan work the ropes,Where they were wont to do:They raised their limbs like lifeless tools ?We were a ghastly crew. (341-44)In a way, the spectral image is a reflection of coloniallabor in real life, which reduces human beings into143