The Literary Imaginations of Equiano and Coleridge

O.K. Mantz

A strong writer displays imagination, intuition, insight— qualities that are expected to radiate through their work. Surpassing merely literary values, this intuition elucidates truths outside the work of literature. The imagination of a writer ultimately serves to discern vital details pertaining to a culture or society. It points beyond literature to the life that literature examines: the literary imagination provides insights into the nature of life, affecting the reader’s thoughts and sensibilities. Further following the thought, it may be deduced that the writer’s works are not simply insights, but direct commentary on the surrounding culture. But is the responsibility of the imagination, by exploring society in its own right, to provide illuminating awareness to and about society?

Although a great portion of Equiano’s adult life may be verified as consistent with historical evidence, the account of his childhood in Nigeria, along with his first Atlantic voyage appears to be derived from secondary rather than primary sources. A baptismal record and a ship’s register identified Equiano as “born in South Carolina” (Lovejoy 3). Additionally, Equiano rarely alludes to his white, English wife and remains extremely ambiguous concerning his position as a plantation overseer (Unigwe 449). This elucidates that Equiano’s account should not be treated as objective, but must be read with a literary lens focused on the “creative self-fashioning and political aspiration” along with the historical events (Eckstein 4). In The Interesting Narrative, Olaudah Equiano attempted to alter public opinion and project himself as a believable character concerned with the slave trade in Britain. He strove to “excite…a sense of compassion for the miseries which the Slave-Trade has entailed on [his] unfortunate countrymen” and the work succeeded by offering a vivid autobiography depicting the horrors of the slave trade (Equiano 7). Through fusing his narrative with historical evidence, personal experience while simultaneously filling in the gaps of his knowledge with his own imagination and insights, he sought to prove his veracity and persuade the multitude. Yet The Interesting Narrative is also a providential narrative in which Equiano voyages from slavery to freedom (both physically from Africa to London and metaphorically), from pagan to Christian, while concurrently molding his character. In short, the narrative connects the places he visits with his spiritual journey. Following the moral and psychological growth of Equiano, the narrative becomes a Bildungsroman marking the growth of his person. Ergo, he amalgamates the historical events and his personal growth with his imaginative faculties, persuasive ambitions, and societal insights.

Coleridge’s imagination branches out into two foci: the primary and secondary. The former relates to the creative faculties that reflect nature and is marked by the human capacity to produce images and order chaos. The latter is formed by a poetic faculty that not only gives shape to the natural world, but retains the power to build new ones. Nature, for Coleridge, does not merely signify a vast and lifeless landscape, but a “bridge between concreteness and value” (Coleridge 30). Imagination (which echoes and reduplicates nature and, ultimately, God) fuses reason (the faculty of immediate truths and direct insight into universal truths) and understanding (the faculty of mediate truths; classifies, generalizes, and abstracts from sense impression). The imagination incorporates the reason in the images of the sense (i.e. the understanding); the products or educts of the imagination must be vitalized as nature is. Reconciling the image with the conception is the work of the imagination that aids the “process of union which sustains and fulfills [the universal and the particular]” (Coleridge 30).

In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge applies imagination similar to intuition and as a faculty that flourishes along with the natural and supernatural that lies beyond human comprehension. The Ancient Mariner demonstrates through his obligatory story-telling that the imagination is a force making the individual respond to the natural world. Thrust into a world in which the transcendental or supernatural seems a part of the natural, the Mariner, for example in regards to the sea snakes, comes to appreciate both aspects of the world. Thus Coleridge identifies imagination as a bonding element between the individual, the natural, and the miraculous.

“Dejection: An Ode” began first as a letter produced out of Coleridge’s state of depression due to his unhappy marriage and affection for Sara Hutchinson (Broughton 241). The poem may be read as both a realization of an unattainable love or as the product of a creative crisis for Coleridge. Just as Shelley questions the sublimity of nature without the human mind to perceive it, Coleridge accentuates that perception remains key, and only through the imaginative faculty is life endowed to external objects or circumstances. Attempting to excite his imagination in the midst of his despair by witnessing the natural world, he fails, realizing that he “may not hope from outward forms to win the passion and the life, whose fountains are within” (156). Perception of external things remains “a vain endeavor” without the internal ascription of meaning. The light that forms nature into the meaningful sublime does not originate from the “inanimate cold world,” but “from the soul itself must issue forth” (156). Here, Coleridge portrays the vitality of the imagination within nature, the attribution of meaning, and the combination between internal and external experiences.

In writing Kubla Khan, Coleridge crafts an entirely new world through sublime description: this proves as a parallel to imagination as man may perform the impossible as long as the imagination remains as limitless as “caverns measureless to man” (182). Pure reason alone is not equipped to comprehend the environment in which Kubla Khan is set, thus through evocative scenery and a multitude of images he embodies the secondary imagination and demonstrates the faculty unique to man able to achieve “the romantic ambition of reuniting” the individual with nature (Cheyne 39).

Although the writings of both Equiano and Coleridge remain vastly divergent, both authors draw upon a fusion of reality and imagination (along with insights into their time) to project forward an idea with a corresponding objective. Equiano blends the historical veracity with inserts of secondary experiences and imaginative enhancements; similarly, Coleridge blends the natural settings with imaginative narration for his own purposes. Each cater to the faculties of reason rather than the senses: Equiano, in one instance, reminds the European that “his ancestors were once, like the Africans, uncivilized, and even barbarous,” rhetorically asking whether they should be enslaved to which he answers “no” (Equiano 45). When writing “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge elucidates how the Mariner comes to appreciate the natural and the supernatural world (as with the sea snakes, the setting, and the seamen in regards to the albatross), defining imagination as the bonding element between the individual, the natural, and supernatural. Equiano also experiences that shift in his attitude toward the natural and miraculous out on the ocean. He spent a significant amount of time on water, which is how he discovered God and turned from a terrified state to one of understanding both in regards to the great ocean and his relationship with Christianity. Both Coleridge and Equiano place enormous emphasis on a relationship with God and retain the ocean as a bond between the physical world and the spiritual. Coleridge explicates in “Kubla Khan” that pure reason alone may not comprehend the environment, but through evocative scenery and images embodies the secondary imagination. If Equiano had believed that reason alone would sway the general public to abolish the slave trade, then the heartfelt descriptions of the horrors of slavery and the images of Africa, London, Montserrat he would have excluded. Each author utilizes the secondary imagination to transcend reason and reunite the individual with nature through descriptive and provocative imagery.

Equiano aims to persuade his audience in The Interesting Narrative of the horrors of the slave trade. With his audience and social context in mind, he criticizes the cruel aspects of the slave trade, delineating that it “violates that first natural right of mankind, equality and independence” (111), but supports slavery lying under the umbrella of kindness. Although the veracity of his narrative remains questionable, his fusion of historicity and insights create an imaginative landscape for political aims. His focus lies on political and social change, which he brings about through perspicacity drawn by pointing beyond literature to the life that his literature examines. The purpose of Coleridge’s imagination is to reunite the subject with the object: the world of the individual self with the natural world. Of the mental powers, he orders the senses as the lowest and thus reason as its counterpart, as he does with fancy and imagination. He defines his era as the “epoch of the understanding and the senses,” for understanding, although retaining access to reason through abstraction, has turned backward in its quest for knowledge through the impressions of the sense (Coleridge 30). His aim is not a political or social one: he desires to reunite the mental faculties with reason rather than sense, which he believes to be present in nature, yet only present to the higher understanding. Alluding to a “logos implicit in nature,” his purpose is to set forth a connection between the individual self with the natural world through reason (Cheyne 41).

Baptized in 1759 as a Christian in London at St. Margaret’s church, Equiano writes that a female relation of his master often explained that he would not enter the kingdom of heaven unless he was baptized. Miss Guerin baptized Equiano and later taught him to read so that he could understand himself the tenets of his faith. In Savannah after the span of six years, he listened to George Whitefield preach and was intensely moved (132). His faith was rooted in communion with other people and those of faith around him and preachers and scripture helped shape and strengthen his religion. In “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge considers that individuals create a stronger relationship with God through nature. He argues that since God created the natural world, the environment is how God speaks to humans, and partaking with and contemplating nature aids to commune with God. Nature is the language of God: the “lakes and shores and mountain crags” are the “lovely shapes and sounds of [God’s] eternal language” (lines 62-65). Thus, according to Coleridge, faith is rooted in nature and one strengthens one's faith by communing with nature and therefore with God.

Coleridge and Equiano both aim for their writing to reveal the genius of the artist and place the reader, through the artist, in touch with their conception of reality: for Equiano it remains a political transmutation regarding the slave trade while for Coleridge it is the revelation of the soul before nature and, ultimately, before God. The genius, for both authors, proves to be a combination of the senses and “energies of reason,” that remain “consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors” (Coleridge 35). Rarely, if ever, does an author write simply to place words unto a page. In every stroke of the pen lies a more deeply rooted meaning and an intentional profundity flowing from the writer’s heart. Whether through fashioning entirely new worlds or simply recreating nature’s sublimity, the imagination of a writer directs the reader beyond the mere words and phrases bound between the covers. And this life, exposed through its relation to the word, and by the fusion of reality and sensibility is thus consummated.

WORKS CITED

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Eckstein, Lars. Transatlantic Slavery and the Literary Imagination. 2009.

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Hoggart, Richard. Speaking to Each Other: Essays: (2.Impr.): Vol. 1-2. Chatto & Windus, 1970.

Lovejoy, Paul E. Construction of Identity: Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? The Historical Society, 2006.

Unigwe, Chika. The Black Messiah: Writing Equiano. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2019.