Abstract
“The Ancient Mariner” is not good at finishing: it offers a weak formal conclusion and a tale presented as only one of many tellings. The restless self-repetition of the Mariner’s story, together with his more marginal but equally unaccomplished procession to the kirk “With a goodly company!” (604) are not innocent forms of open-endedness but fraught modes of incompletion. The desire for completeness and arrival is doubly skewed within the poem; though telling the tale brings temporary relief and perhaps changes it in some way (we have no means of telling), it is destined to be summoned up at that “uncertain hour,” which will compel the Mariner to repeat it, when it will once more consume narrative space and time without being able to tell what exactly it is a narrative of. Or so we as readers assume. We do not actually know whether the Mariner is telling us the truth of how his tale convulses him with the need to repeat it, and we easily forget that this claim (which we do take seriously) occurs as part of the same weak or Christianizing conclusion we tend not to take seriously. The founding narrative repetition compulsion is not in itself wholly central to the ballad, but is distinctively offset by the Mariner’s wish to walk in company to the kirk, so as to participate in another narrative with, potentially, another mode of interminability.
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Notes
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 291;
Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 181–2.
Robert Penn Warren, Selected Essays of Robert Penn Warren (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), 198–305.
See John Spencer Hill, A Coleridge Companion: An Introduction to the Major Poems and the “Biographia Literaria” (London: Macmillan, 1983), 155.
Raimonda Modiano, “Sameness or Difference? Historicist Readings of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’” in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ed. Paul H. Fry (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999), 187–219.
John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 71.
See David Jasper, Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker: Inspiration and Revelation (London: Macmillan, 1985), 49.
David Jones, “An Introduction to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’,” in The Dying Gaul and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 193.
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; Repetition, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 212.
The Mariner’s life is one of enslavement to superstition, by which he becomes a magnetic figure because he has uncannily touched the dead. See Tim Fulford, “Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790’s,” Studies in Romanticism 43, no. 1 (2003): 57–78.
David Bunyan, “Compulsive Repetition and ‘The Ancient Mariner’: Coleridge’s Romantic ‘Uncanny,” Journal of Literary Studies 6, no. 1–2 (1990): 110–11.
D. Stephen Long maintains that the argument that truth is contingent on language denotes an originary ontological violence functioning like a transcendental condition for the possibility of knowledge, and problematically exceeding its own prescribed contingency. See D. Stephen Long, “Radical Orthodoxy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 130.
See George Whalley, “The Mariner and the Albatross,” in The Ancient Mariner and Other Poems, ed. Alun R. Jones and William Tydeman (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1973), 177.
See Graham Davidson, “Coleridge in Malta,” Coleridge Bulletin 17 (2001): 86.
See Stephen Happel, Coleridge’s Religious Imagination (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1983), vol. 3: 812–47.
This phrase is used by Jerome J. McGann, “The Meaning of The Ancient Mariner,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 1 (1981): 57
Happel, Coleridge’s Religious Imagination, 873; for the relation of Coleridge’s poetic to his later prose, see James D. Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 196–219.
For Coleridge on “personeity,” see J. Robert Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 89;
Mary Anne Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 208.
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© 2012 Peter Larkin
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Larkin, P. (2012). Repetition, Difference, and Liturgical Participation in Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner”. In: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010940_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010940_15
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