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 JOURNALautomatons in service of the empire-building project.Their bodies have literally become“tools,”existingsolely for their utility and efficiency in the moderncapitalist West. The geography of“The Rime”is suchthat the West/non-West distinction is restructured as anorthern/southern hemispheric division of colonization;likewise, the natural/supernatural difference inthe poem is collapsed in its critique of modern instrumentality.The mariner, the dead shipmates, and thesupernatural beings“Death”and“Life-in-Death”allcoincide and constitute parts of the systemic globalorder.The crux of the poem revolves around the killingof a seabird for no satisfactory reason; that unexplainedact is the turning point in the plot that bringsabout all the suffering and penance that the Marinermust undergo. William Wordsworth, Coleridge’s closecollaborator at the time of the poem’s composition,relates the incident’s genesis during a walking tour:In the course of this walk was planned the poemof the“Ancient Mariner,”founded on a dream, asMr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. Cruikshank…I [Wordsworth] had been reading in Shelvocke’sVoyages, a day or two before, that, while doublingCape Horn, they frequently saw albatrossesin that latitude, the largest sort of sea-fowl, someextending their wings twelve or thirteen feet.(Wordsworth 107-8)The albatross appears to the ship at the South Pole,and is hailed by the secluded crew as if it were a“Christian soul”(65);“And every day, for food orplay, / Came to the Mariner’s hollo!”(73-74). But themariner, with an undisclosed motive, kills it:“Withmy cross-bow / I shot the Albatross”(81-82). Thisunexplained action has taken on central importance innearly all interpretations of the poem. Perhaps wemight begin with Coleridge’s own gloss on these linesin the 1817 version, which reads:“The ancient Marinerinhospitably kills the pious bird of good omen”(79).“Inhospitably”is the key word here, pointingtoward ideas of neighborliness, reciprocation, andcommunal interchange. In the context of explorationthat I have been sketching out, the albatross representsthe exotic, the foreign, the indigenous, the unknown:the other of the European traveler. Noting Coleridge’sactivist interest in the slave trade and his reading inslave narratives, J. R. Ebbatson provocatively arguesthat“the shooting of the albatross may be a symbolicrehearsal of the crux of colonial expansion, theenslavement of native peoples”(198). The explorer iswelcomed with hospitality but necessarily violates thatgood will as a consequence of the imperial system inwhich he is complicit. The shooting of the albatross, inthis line of argument, is a symbolic act bound to occurin the explorer’s reification of global order.I want to conclude by speculating on the implicationsconcerning modernity that the killing of thealbatross represents. One way of viewing the act in aphilosophical context is to take recourse to the notionof the Fall and Coleridge’s theory of the Will. If thekilling is seen as a reenactment of the Fall and the perpetrationof Original Sin, then the mariner’s lack ofmotive can be taken as the intractable, obdurate exerciseof human will without regard to divineinjunctions. Yet Coleridge conceives of the human willas a reflection of the divine by virtue of its absolutefreedom:“The Will, the absolute Will, is that which isessentially causative of reality, essentially, and absolutely,that is, boundless from without and within. Thisis our first principle”(Opus Maximum 220). ForColeridge, the Will lies outside the objective world ofcausality as a mysterious, transcendent, and absoluteprinciple, which, like the Imagination, creates realityinstead of being dictated by it. The mariner’s motivelesskilling is thus representative of the absolutenessof the Will that eludes and transcends all causal principles.The mariner violates the natural order throughan absolute revelation of the Will, and subsequently,by the mysterious act of grace, is reconciled with thedivine order ? thus mirroring the Christian progress ofFall and Redemption.What this view neglects is a sense of the largerforces at work at the secular horizon of the poem’shistorical moment, which reflects not so much theologicalbeliefs as the continuing crises of modernity.Stanley Cavell, for instance, takes issue with the poemas an allegory of the Fall.“Rather on the contrary,”Cavell argues,“I take it to provide an explanation ofwhy it fits the Fall, that is, of what the Fall itself is anallegory of”(48). For Cavell, the Fall is an allegory ofphilosophical skepticism in the light of Kantian epistemology;historically, the Fall may also be an allegoryof the modern reduction of consciousness into a toolof empirical and methodical observation. This reduc-144