SYMBOLISM SEGUE WITH SAMUEL AND SUSANNE

The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.-- S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIII.

"...the psychological basis of this remarkable form of nonsense [the fairy tale] lies in the fact that the story is a fabrication out of subjective symbols, not out of observed folkways and nature-ways [in "myth," with which Langer contrasts fairy tales]."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 173.

Susanne Langer's symbolic theory has been getting quite a bit of play here since I began the "Rules of Estrangement" series, but Coleridge's theories of the imaginative faculty not only have many interesting points of comparison with Langer's theory, they also bring up some issues regarding the nature of narrative fiction in general-- whether one speaks of myths, folklore/fairy tales, high literature or popular literature. Coleridge's opposition of his own "high literary" poem RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER to a fairly simple Arabian Nights story was already referenced in RULES OF ESTRANGEMENT 4:

Mrs Barbauld tole me that the only faults she found with the Ancient Mariner were — that it was improbable and had no moral. As for the probability — to be sure that might admit some question — but I told her that in my judgment the poem had moral, and that too openly obtruded on the reader, It ought to have no more moral than the story of the merchant sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and the Genii starting up and saying he must kill the merchant, because a date shell had put out the eye of the Genii's son.

Though it's possible that Coleridge wasn't entirely serious on this point, one still must allow for the possibility that the statement exemplifies some artistic ambiguity. Did Coleridge, who loved fairy tales and Arabian Nights stories in youth, equivocate about the desireability of one's art being overruled by what Langer would call "discursive" concerns, perhaps at the cost of the immediacy to be found in the "presentational" mode of the fairy tale? If that were the case, that sentiment would contrast strongly with the theme of Coleridge's ruminations on "primary" and "secondary" imagination. Certainly the poet makes it sound as if he has greater esteem for the "secondary" form, where the author has gone beyond the "fixities and definites" of the primary stage and has a more "vital" function thanks to the efforts of the "conscious will:"

[The secondary imagination] dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.

Now, I'm not interested in Coleridge's apparent ambiguity in terms of sussing out the long-dead poet's particular likes and dislikes. I'm interested rather in Coleridge's critical conception of "fanciful" and "imaginative" narrative works respectively; how he seems in one passage to esteem the latter as more "vital" than the former and yet in another to envy the casual lack of shaping morality upon the story of "The Merchant and the Genie." Given the terms Coleridge sets for the two faculties, it's hard to believe that Samuel Taylor would fail to consider "The Merchant and the Genie" (and perhaps fairytales and folktales as a whole) as belonging to his "fancy" category. While Coleridge's precise attitudes toward "fanciful" stories proves ambiguous, Susanne Langer's orientation is quite clear. She devotes Chapter 7 of NEW KEY to demonstrating that the often-nonsensical fairy tale, being formed of "subjective symbols," evinces a "very low stage of human imagination." This stage is surpassed by a "thematic shift" which gives birth to mythic stories, which possess deeper roots in objective aspects of reality, as characterized by "observed folk-ways and nature-ways." One may note the perhaps coincidental resemblance of these otherwise-unexplained categories with two Kantian categories, *Naturwissenschaften* and *Geisteswissenschaften,* and an even more fruitful comparison could be made between between Langer's emphasis on the objective elements in myth and similar formulations by Joseph Campbell. Langer is essentially right about the "thematic shift" but wrong about the extent to which folktales or fairytales (which I'll call "tales" from now on) exist without such objectively-rooted symbols. A more correct formulation would be that tales incorporate "observed folk-ways and nature-ways" as do myths, but that tales do so more intermittently and indirectly than do myths. For instance, Coleridge's example of "The Merchant and the Genie" does seem more fanciful than imaginative, lacking any deeper objective content. But not every tale is so simple, not even among those in the Thousand and One Nights' repertoire. And though it is possible that every myth ever conceived did so with input from one *wissenschaften* or the other, scholars have often observed the process by which sacral myths lose their special religious character and end up being recounted as simple tales. A close look at Coleridge's BIOGRAPHIA excerpt above reveals that one particular way Coleridge uses to distinguish primary and secondary imaginative faculties (which I believe to be strongly comparable to Langer's presentational and discursive modes) is as follows:

The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation.

For me at least, Langer's modes can be subsumed by Coleridge's "mode(s) of operation." But what I find particularly suggestive is Coleridge's unexplained reference to some kind of "degree" that separates primary and secondary. While I don't imagine a living Coleridge would especially agree with the terminology I've borrowed from the myth-critical tradition of Cassirer, Jung, and Frye, my *own* take is that Langer's argument re: myth and tale fails to take into account the matter of degree-- that is, the degree of *complexity* of the symbols used in a given narrative, be it myth, tale, "high" literary work or "low" popular entertainment. Thus I would say that while almost all tales are dominated by Langer's presentational mode, they may possess high or low degrees of symbolic complexity, or *mythicity.* Myths are statistically more likely than tales to possess higher degrees of *mythicity* (hence the name for the term mythicity in the first place), but they represent a transition point for narrative as it begins to use discursive elements to structure presentational tropes. So-called "high" and "low" forms of literature, then, preserve some of the myth-tale dichotomy in terms of the usage of presentational or discursive modes, but either can be strong in the *mythicity-force* irrespective of what mode it dominantly takes. And all the foregoing is necessary for the discuss of story-function in the next GESTURE AND GESTALT essay.