An unreliable modern "Mariner": rewriting Coleridge in Harold Brodkey's "The State of Grace." - Brodkey's refashioning of Samuel Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' into a short story

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1994 by Martin Bidney

Harold Brodkey is not the first modern American to refashion Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" into a short story. Sherwood Anderson has that distinction. But Brodkey's "The State of Grace," the opening tale in his collection First Love and Other Sorrows, is a brilliant remaking of the Coleridgean Mariner's narrative and, as such, it is fully worthy to stand beside Anderson's "A Man of Ideas" (in which "Mariner" joins "Kubla Khan") and "Respectability" (where "Mariner" combines with "Christabel" [see Bidney 221-35]). Indeed, Brodkey's reimagining of Coleridge's "Mariner" strikingly recalls Anderson's achievement in three ways: the narrator of "The State of Grace" is a grotesque; his story is a profoundly ironic psychological study; and the result, as with Anderson's two tales, is a highly effective tragicomic neo-Coleridgean parody. Like Anderson's narcissistic visionary Joe Welling and his frustrated idealist-turned-misogynist Wash Williams, the unnamed narrator of Brodkey's tale is incurably if unwittingly self-centered, a supreme narcissist even at the moments when he thinks his attention is most urgently directed toward others. As a result, Brodkey's modern Mariner experiences a grotesque parody of a "state of grace."

The story as a whole (not analyzed, so far as I can discover, by any previous critic) is delicately balanced between two contrary tendencies: witty, comical takeoffs on the major "Mariner" motifs contrast with the seriousness of the protagonist's problem - his towering egotism, so complete and yet so unconscious that it makes him an unwitting hypocrite. Brodkey's protagonist, a first-person narrator who remembers the adventures he had at age 13, remains nameless throughout the tale: because he doesn't care what anyone might have to say to him, this egotist never describes himself as being addressed by anybody. Yet Brodkey's Modern Mariner, like Coleridge's ancient one, preaches a gospel of universal love; in fact, he preaches it with a zeal that is in direct proportion to his unwitting hypocrisy.

Brodkey's light, playfully caricatural transformations of "Mariner" images and episodes are so entertaining that only gradually do we come to perceive the sadder wisdom of the tale, the moral and psychological expose of the Modem Mariner as supremely unreliable narrator. But analysis will show that, in this story, entertainment and exposed strengthen each other. As we look in detail at Brodkey's refashioning of Coleridge's poem, we can observe in each episode how the comic deflation of "Mariner" motifs simultaneously deflates the grotesque ego-puffery of the Brodkeyan narrator's self-deceiving rhetoric. Coleridgean caricature is Brodkey's subtle but incisive technique as modern moralist.

The icy polar travels of Coleridge's Mariner are whimsically refashioned as the Modern Mariner's retrospective narration of his adventures at age 13 gets underway. Rather than crossing the equatorial "line" (Coleridge, marginalia to "Ancient Mariner" 24)(1) or encountering "mast-high" icebergs like those confronting the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge 53), the young imaginative quester simply finds a job as babysitter in the apartment of the formidable Mrs. Leinberg ("line" plus iceberg), who also happens to have a "birdlike" voice (Brodkey 24), introducing the albatross theme. The albatross's place in the Modern Mariner's adventure-tale is taken by Mrs. Leinberg's son, a so-called "queer duck" (Brodkey 28) named Edward.

But the Modern Mariner's tale is a tightly woven fabric of misperceptions, and nowhere is this clearer than in his depiction of Edward, who will play the albatross role in his unreliable narrative. Edward is depicted in language that suggests a vulnerable bird that the narrator fatally mistreated, as it were, through a failure of love: -1 wouldn't love him" (Brodkey 29). Edward's father was allegedly guilty of the same lack of empathy: "he thought Edward was a queer duck, and effeminate- (Brodkey 28). The narrator also calls Edward "a precocious and delicate little boy, quivering with the malaise of being unloved" (Brodkey 28), language that ties in with the "queer duck" idea by making us think of a quivering bird. Finally, the narrator avers that "When we played, [Edward's] child's heart could come into its own, and the troubled world where his vague hungers went unfed" by unresponsive parents would "disappear, along with the world where I was not sufficiently muscled or sufficiently gallant to earn my own regard" (Brodkey 28). Just as the Coleridgean albatross "for food or play, Came to the mariner's hollo!" (Coleridge 73-74), so, too, the previously "unfed" vague "hungers" of the quivering, vulnerable, birdlike "queer duck" Edward were supposedly allayed, briefly and intermittently, by the nourishment of the Modem Mariner's company as playmate.

We have only the Modern Mariner's word for all this, however, and he himself has admitted his love of self-deception playful or otherwise), for in sharing his imaginings with Edward he felt his own sense of unpopularity and weakness and self-disapproval gratifyingly disappear. The narrator's extravagant fancies not only feed Edward's alleged "hungers"; they also dissolve the "world" in which the narrator himself is neither -muscled" nor "gallant" enough to earn his own "regard." He enjoys thinking that he is Edward's psychological savior because this role gives him narcissistic nourishment, but he never notices the self-preoccupation he has revealed. The narrator does not realize that he has projected his greed for love, his need for ego-nourishment, his vulnerability, onto Edward.