It has been, as made obvious especially by Mircea Eliade’s thorough study, a way for archaic societies and religious people to comprehend and make sense of the world. The myth of the eternal return has been a part of various cultures throughout the World. Over the course of the essay I will deploy a reading of the narrative as indicative of the subject’s severance from and progressive re-assimilation into the Other, a process which is at once arduous, inevitable and ultimately incomplete by the poem’s conclusion. The main theoretical framework I will be using to unpack this reading is the theory of subjectivisation developed by Jacques Lacan, in particular his use of the concepts of subject, Other and alienation. In this essay, I aim to read the crime and subsequent punishment of the mariner as a problematisation, never entirely resolved, of the Coleridgean moral ontology and its relation to Coleridge’s variant of the sublime. What Keats called the ‘egotistical sublime’ (Keats 2006: 1375) of Wordsworth is not apparent in the Unitarian Coleridge, whose method of obtaining the sublime is always one of deferral and absorption before assertion and personal transcendence. As a Kantian in a far stricter sense than Coleridge, Wordsworth may have been more sympathetic to a figure whose only crime was an act of radical self-assertion amidst a literal sea of externalities. It is unlikely, were The Rime of the Ancient Mariner written by Wordsworth, that its central figure would have suffered so miserably. The synchronistic events of the poem take place on a bed of poetic expressions of the primordial images mediating between the Mariner's psyche and the world outside, resulting in his inner growth through the process of individuation, wherein, the Mariner comes to the realization that nature and he form an inseparable part of a greater system which is unified through the flow of an invisible spirit-the collective unconscious.
The causally unrelated but meaningful succession of events in the course of the poem, finding expression through the archetypes, helps the Mariner get a deeper insight into the universe and further his movement in the process of individuation-the quest for self-realization. The theory of synchronicity, being the principle explaining the concurrence of psychic states and external events which bear no causal relationship, could be employed to bring up a novel interpretation of the poem. As a Romantic poet who was especially interested in the workings of the mind, Coleridge, in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, has dealt with notions, ideas, and images that lend themselves to a Jungian reading, specifically from the perspective of the principle of synchronicity which is to be the focus of this analysis.
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