'Supernatural, or at Least Romantic': the Ancient Mariner and Parody

An ancient literary practice often aligned with satire, parody "comes of age as a major comic expression during the Romantic period," as Marilyn Gaull has observed, the same era that celebrated and became known for the literary virtues of sincerity, authenticity, and originality. Significant recent anthologies of Romantic-period parodies make the sheer bulk and topical range of such imitative works available for readers and critics for the first time, providing ample evidence for the prominence of the form. The weight of evidence in these collections should also put to rest the widespread assumption that parody is inevitably "comic" or gentler than satire, that it is essentially in good fun. At least during the politically volatile Romantic period, as Linda Hutcheon has asserted, parody "is almost always aligned with satire; that is to say, parody is the literary shape taken by social satire." The very act of imitation implies a closeness and familiarity rather than a mere dismissal of the target. This is why many parodies have historically been seen as a form of flattery, tributes to their originals. As Hutcheon says elsewhere, parody is "imitation with a critical ironic distance, whose irony can cut both ways," producing in some cases "scornful ridicule" and in others what looks like "reverential homage." Nonetheless, Romantic-period parody often served as a powerful mode of topical satire—a particularly galling and intimate way of ridiculing a target by stealing and distorting one's very voice. It is often observed that, considered etymologically, "parody" can mean either "beside" or "against" another poem, and that parodies can serve either to pay tribute to or to ridicule the targeted work. Samuel Taylor Coleridge approached the same matter from a slightly different direction in the following epigram for anonymous inclusion in Robert Southey's Omniana: This way of putting it helpfully focuses on historical context as necessary to any interpretation of a parody's tone and purpose; but it is important to notice that it also emphasizes by implication the canonical status of the targeted work. The difference between parodic "satire" and parodic "compliment" is time, according to Coleridge, the distance traveled from a "new" to an "old" poem. But the chosen example of an old poem is telling; in 1812, when Coleridge wrote the passage, Shakespeare had begun to stand at the head of an English vernacular canon. The kind of old poem that both survives the test of time and is at the end still considered worthy of parody is likely to be a work of recognized "genius," which is to say, a canonical work. Coleridge's gnomic and ironic remark suggests that whether a parody counts as satire or compliment depends in part upon the process of canonization, a process in turn dependent upon the kind of critical judgments offered by parody. Such parodic judgments identify the works worthy of being remembered and taken seriously enough to be parodied in the first place, and help to define the qualities of those works that make them worthy of (even negative) attention. There is a double circularity at work in this scheme: parody helps to shape the context that partly determines the effect of other parodies; and, in a kind of poetic Doctrine of the Elect, only the man of genius can rest securm in eventual victory, in the promise that his satiric "attackers" will eventually, in the due course of cultural change, be transformed into his encomiasts. The canonical have the last laugh. But whether a work is worthy of such canonization only becomes known when the work is no longer "new" but still considered significant, literally imitable. In most cases, …