The Symbiosis of the Internal and the External and the Temporalisation of Social Space in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Abstract

When the Albatross falls from the Mariner’s neck into the sea, it metamorphoses into a symptom and the Mariner can cope with the demands of the social space only if he can tell his narrative to others. His narrative, which is fictionalization of his own unorganised psychodynamics, creates an interface between his subjective space and the social space of the wider world. His narrative functions for him as a sinthome, a self-narrative through which he creates a sense of self-continuity between the internal and the external. This is also an acting out of the Lacanian idea of the Moebius strip, which turns the Euclidean representation of space inside out, and which temporalizes space. His tale lacks unity in the traditional sense, but it has (psychological) coherence as his narrative as a sinthome provides him with a semantic ground on which he can meaningfully bring together all the fragmentary elements at the threshold of the imaginary and the symbolic. In this essay, I aim to give a Lacanian hearing to the interface between the subjective and the social, and discuss different forms of space along this interface created by/within the narrative(s) in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner using Lacanian ideas of symptom, sinthome, jouissance and the Moebius strip as my conceptual backcloth.

Keywords

• Coleridge
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Lacan
• sinthome
• Moebius

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