Métamorphoses de la lecture dans Le Dict du Vieux Marin

Résumé :

Metamorphosis is essential to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner in several respects, as the poem is the narrative of a radical change of appraisal of the outer and inner world. That is true of the Ancient Mariner himself, but also of those who listen to him, like the Wedding Guest, on whom the story can be directly seen to have a transforming effect, and therefore it must also be true of the reader. Certainly, all this is part and parcel of staple analyses of this canonical poem : the Wedding Guest “rose a wiser man” the day after, and it is easy to interpret this as an illustration of the didactic dimension of literature, in accordance with the romantic ideology and the idea of poetry as the “schoolteacher of the people”. However, it seems to me that the matter is a little more complicated than that, and, in this paper, I propose to analyse the scarcely investigated hypothesis that this poem was also most probably conceived of as a kind of experimental study in reader response. I would like to try and demonstrate that the reader is meant to be caught in a process of romantic irony, which compels him to a critical, and problematic interpretation. In the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I contemn, the reader’s response itself is made to undergo a metamorphosis. Of course, it would be possible to argue that this is an effect of passing time, and that our response to the text today is necessarily different from that of readers in Coleridge’s time. But I think it is demonstrably not entirely so, and I would like to argue and try to demonstrate that this transformation is literally built in the text itself and programmed by it. It is most probably the reflection of a metamorphosis that occurred in the mind of Coleridge himself as he worked on his poem, for it is possible to trace the same phenomenon in other poems as well, as for instance his own Kubla Khan, where it is so to speak an explicitly declared theme. This metamorphic quality is a characteristic of many works of the romantic period, and can be found, for instance, in Heine’s Lorelei, etc. With Coleridge, however, it seems to be very close to the heart of his particular genius.