A sickness of the soul : the Coleridgean spectrality of Anthony Catania's galleon-ghost

Abstract

If there is anything in Anthony Catania's Spectre-Bark exhibition that instantly evinces his unnerving revision of Coleridge's Rime, it is arguably 'Fatal Flight' - for what this black pastel drawing seizes as the avenging aftermath of the Mariner's sacramental crime is his implied spectralisation into a Coleridgean death-craft. Significantly, what soars into the albatross' vanishing vision, while it plunges like an lcarian phoenix in reeling resurrection, is Cruickshank's 'skeleton ship' distilled to clawing Coleridgean 'ribs' (1.185). Strangely, however, no crossbowwielding Mariner looms anywhere. It is as if the albatross' screech unleashes a sea-change into something sable and sinister: a Mariner transfigured, like Stoker's Dracula on the Demeter, into a phantom rigger. But equally pivotal to 'Fatal Flight' is the albatross' parallel spectrality, initiated by propelling the bird's descent to the title drawing's darker fate - a Catania catalyst more weirdly subversive than that of other Rime artists. That no Coleridgean neckhanging albatross haunts 'Spectre-Bark' or any of Catania's drawings and paintings like it does Peake's Doreinspired illustration is in fact only half the point. Equally crucial is that Catania transcends Peake's touching notion of making, to quote Gavin O'Keefe, 'the lower section of the Albatross almost merg[e] with the stomach of the Mariner', by blending man and bird far beyond 'their nether-ends' (p.9). For Catania, by sharing none of Palmer's predilection for what Stephen Hebron calls 'a solidity [that] softens the nightmare aspect' of his Rime engravings (p. 111 ), mutates the Mariner into a bizarre concoction of Coleridge's assassinated albatross and his 'Nightmare Life-in-Death' galleon (I. 193) - a 'spectre-bark' (I. 203) whose emaciated masts take flight like an avian presence crucified. 'Spectre-Bark' is nothing but a sickness of the soul transmogrified. For by transmuting the Mariner into an undead ordeal of cross-like sails and arrow-like beaks, 'Spectre-Bark' distils its Coleridgean spirit to an eternity of albatross-slaying.