Identity Theft & the Demonic: Image Play & Repudiation in Coleridge

Abstract

This essay is a chapter in a developing book, the Head of Orpheus: the West, the Image‐Cult and the Wasteland. The book examines a range of literature from Hesiod to the Romances of Chretien, Malory ,to 19th and 20th century literature and art to examine how the West is defined by its drive to idealize, ‘purify’ and re‐present itself in art, imagery and fictions. The West is an unstable hybrid of Hellenic and Hebraic sources jammed together by a declining Roman Empire from which a new religion drew its authority. To a great extent the West always has been a cult of aesthetics, a passion play that requires assertions of belief in fiction and that reflects the metamorphic play of passions in its Greek sources. Its fissionable dynamics and innumerable heresies play out the metamorphic Hellenism and fissional quality of the West’s hybrid character. In flight from the complex substrate of its cultural body, the West’s drive to define, know and present itself in images, as an “artifice of eternity” gives it an apocalyptic and elegiac tenor as its body is continually rejected, etherealized and grieved. The image project, also termed the Orphic project or image play is intrinsic to the West’s Hellenic matter and intensified by its efforts to bury or suppress its hybrid roots and foundational theft of Jewish land, code of life and identity. The core of this impulse to possession, displacement and transposition is a site of the demonic, of trauma and metamorphosis filled with ambiguity often represented as a nightmare or wasteland. The image‐project generally includes erotic trauma in working out its intensely dramatic transpositions of identity in complex narratives of transgression, ruin and estrangement. The brilliances of the image‐project are ironic; to the extent that identity and society become located in images, shadows, phantoms, spirit, dreams and ‘show’ its social forms tend toward sterility, fragmentation, disembodiment and collapse. It arises from a ‘Wasteland’ of elemental ambiguity and collapses back into it, a trajectory seen in pure form in the Arthurian romances or “the Pains of Sleep.” The supposed redemptive purity of the imagination, image or idealized cultural identity occasions and intensifies the corruption of the social ‘body.’ In what is often termed the split of sacred from secular, enchantment leads to disenchantment. This essay examines the intense ambivalence toward image‐play and the demonic in five major poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge whose inner conflicts make him an epitome of the tensions in the West’s project of aesthetic self‐formation. Coleridge’s genius was strongly linked to the demonic, its traumatic metamorphoses and meta‐fictions, that is, its over‐determined tropes for image making. Transpositions of cultural sources, of gender, relationship and an emphasis on liminality mark these works as does the poet’s martyred feelings toward his “shaping spirit of Imagination” leading to his repudiation of the image‐project in its explicitly poetic form. Beyond its literary interest, this study of five of Coleridge’s great poems helps build a means to examine the goals, structure, aesthetic, cultural and even geopolitical imperatives of the West especially in the last two centuries and the foreseeable future.