“The Space Between”
Christabel and the Occupation of the Liminal
Right from the start, there is something claustrophobic about Coleridge’s unfinished gothic ballad, Christabel. We find ourselves thrust, almost immediately, into a landscape characterized by an oppressing sort of sonic density, a density also inflected meta-textually for us via repetitive internal and end rhymes: “clock,” “cock,” “cock” (again) “tu,” “whoo,” “crew,” “whit, and “it” (Coleridge 1, 2, 4, 3, 5). One after another, we are confronted by a series of different, yet seemingly intertwined, sounds and sound sources – a sort of a poly-vocal, cross-species cascade of calls-and-responses. The “castle clock” sounds “midnight;” the “owls” make their haunted call (“Tu–whit!––Tu–whoo!); the “cocks” “drowsily” – and anachronistically – cr[o]w;” and the “mastiff bitch”, “making answer to the clock,” barks her own “sixteen short howls,” “four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 10). To borrow the words of critic Debra Channick, the “section” “teems with uncanny repeating sounds and images, echoes that do not establish unity but produce disharmony and incongruity” (Channick 5). In spite of the open air, in other words, the atmosphere feels congested, insular.
This feeling is further compounded by the way Coleridge takes advantage of our own inability to ‘immediately’ perceive the full ‘effect’ of the scene. That is to say, there is a clever disconnect here between the linear chronological presentation of the events – i.e., the way in which they appear to us a sort of chain reaction: clock, owl, cock, bitch – and the actual articulated reality of their occurence. While the sounds may appear to us textually as discrete linear ‘vocalizations,’ in other words, it is clear that what we are actually witness to – or should be – is in fact four separate, simultaneously sounding, sequences of sounds, all overlapping simultaneously: the clock tower tolling one note, twelve times, the owls’ hooting in intermittent sequences of “Tu–whit!––Tu–whoo!,” the cocks crowing multiples of their own infamous utterance (cock-a-doodle-doo), and of course the mastiff howling sixteen times (3). The true claustrophobia of the scene, in this sense, is one of delayed cognition – the way in which the ‘spaces’ between these seemingly discrete events are ’retroactively’ filled in for us, forcing us into a game of perpetual cognitive catch-up. We only learn of the “mastiff bitch’s” “answer to the clock,” for instance, until long after the clock has finished tolling twelve (9). Accordingly, we as readers are forced to return to that moment and retroactively ‘fill’ in the spaces between the tolls with 16 howls of the dog; the same is true, naturally, for the owls and the cocks. As such, while the narrator is unable to render in real time the chaotic overlap of the utterances, we are ultimately still made to feel it, our minds manipulated into filling in the gaps ourselves.
To some extent, then, you might say that Coleridge seems engaged here in something like an exercise in eliminating – or by the same token, occupying – the liminal. In the emptiness between the utterances of other beings, in other words, Coleridge places the irremovable potentiality of another such utterance; that is, we are forced, always, to feel the presence of sounds which are ambiguously both there and not there. In this act of retroactive ‘filling,' then, Coleridge manages to create what you might call a sort of ‘phantom’ beat, one which, in its ambiguity, is able to fill whatever space it is given. Between the regularly spaced instances of each discrete utterance, in other words, we are made to hear the possibility of all the other sounds – a sort of fugue of liminal occupation. Thus, while critic Ewan Jones, in her essay “Rhythm and Affect in Christabel,” is perhaps not wrong to suggest that the passage is “a running play on accentual regularity,” such a reading only tells part of the story (Jones 276). While the ‘sounds’ are indeed being articulated regularly, the overall effect of all of them together is ultimately not one of intervallic distinguishability, or of “unyielding temporality,” but rather one of sonic congestion and ambiguity (Jones 276). In such a dense, sonically overwrought environment, the discrete is transformed into the continuous.
Perhaps not so surprisingly, this sonic-spatial phenomenon is not limited to the first few stanzas of the poem. In fact, in Part II of the poem we find a near perfect reenactment of the so-called phantom beat – Colerdige’s exercise in liminal elimination – in the form of the echoing “matin bell” (320). Though here, of course, there is only one regularly repeating sound, as Bracy the Bard elucidates for us in his mini-soliloquy, the same liminally-occupying effect is ultimately still born out:
Saith Bracy the bard, "So let it knell!
And let the drowsy sacristan
Still count as slowly as he can!
There is no lack of such, I ween,
As well fill up the space between.
Just as with the sounds which open the poem, in other words, here too the “space between” the regularly-metered ‘discrete’ is “fill[ed] up,” though this time with the reverberations of the very sound itself (338). In fact, the notion of the ‘phantom’ beat takes on an almost literal meaning here, especially in light of Bracy’s fantastical schematic description of the matin bells echo:
In Langdale Pike and Witch's Lair,
And Dungeon-ghyll so foully rent,
With ropes of rock and bells of air
Three sinful sextons' ghosts are pent,
Who all give back, one after t' other,
The death-note to their living brother;
The sounds which fill the liminal, in other words, are quite literally created by phantoms, “sinful” ghosts who “give back” phantom “note[s]” to “fill the space between” (343, 338). Furthemore, as critic Debra Channick points out, the very “ambigui[ty]” of Barcys’s “metaphor” – does “space between” mean “the space between the first ringing of the bell and the second ringing, or between the first bell’s echo and another echo”? – ultimately functions to only further densify the space of the liminal, raising the possibility of a sort of infinite progression of liminal occupation wherein ‘one’ liminal is itself always made to occupy another, one echo placed between another. (Channick 10). Just as with the opening sequence, then, we are given a sort of endless fugue of ‘betweens’ filling ‘betweens’ – a zeno’s paradox of occupying intervallic liminality.
This passage arguably does more than merely mimic the spatio-sonic effects of its predecessor, however. That is, as critic Debra Channick suggests, this scene also reveals the way in which the elimination of the liminal – though this is not her choice of metaphor – can result in a sort of indeterminacy concerning the “primacy and impact of each sound” (Chanick 10). In particular, Channick argues that “if the echoes’ can be ‘give[n] back one after t’other’” with seemingly “equal” “force” as the matin bell,” then one can suppose that each echo haunts Sir Leolone with the same impact as the initial matin bell” (Channick 11). Accordingly, the presence of a so-called phantom beat, or in this instance of the interrupting “echoes” of the matin bell, necessarily “call[s] into question the assurance of signification, that one can determine an original sound and not mistake it for its ghostly echo” (Channick 11). Simply put, when too many sounds come to occupy the same space – or rather, when they come to overlap so much that they cross into each other's liminalities – they become functionally uncoupled from their sound sources, from their sonic origins. Accordingly, they are set free into a sort of ambiguous netherworld of associative possibility, set free to attach themselves to sources from which they did not actually arise. An echo, for instance, is able to heard as its own original, or an original as its own echo – a kind of aural ‘free-love.’
In this manner, you might say the Barcy the Bard’s poetic ‘reading’ of the matin bells – and it should certainly be taken as no coincidence that he is the poem’s own poet – actually functions a sort of explanatory schematic or key for making sense of the poem’s own strange spatio-sonic phenomena. In particular, Bracy would seem to present us with a way of understanding the relationship between two of the poem’s outstanding phenomenological obsessions: spatial insularity, and what you might call ‘vocal possession.’ More specifically, Bracy’s monologue would seem to suggest that the strange sort of ovidian vocal fluidity – wherein voices and sounds in the poem are seemingly taken over, or possessed, by the voices of other characters and animals – which dominates the poem is in fact a function of the poem’s equally strange ‘architectural’ insularity. That is to say, just as the bell’s echo is able to be mistakenly ‘voiced’ by the actual bell itself due of the sonic density of the atmosphere, so too are the various voices in the poem, trapped within the dense reflective atmosphere of the poem itself, able to possessed – or seemingly possessed – by the voices of others.
This is perhaps most immediately apparent in the ‘mis-prefaced’ entrance of the owl all the way back in line three of the poem: “Tu––whit!–––tu––whoo!” (3). That is, arriving directly after the narrator’s invocation of the “crowing cock[s’]” “awaken[ing],” the owl’s vocalization at first ‘reads’ as belonging to that of the cock (2). Not only this, but the line’s 4-syllable breakage from Coleridge’s metrical scheme – “the [syllables] may vary from seven to twelve” – suggests that this case of ‘mistaken identity’ is not an exclusively textual effect for us as readers; that is, since these are therefore not be the ‘official’ lines of the narrator (they are out of ‘scan’), we must presume, naturally, that the narrator’s mis-prefacing of the sound is in fact his own mistake (Coleridge, Preface). We are witness, in other words, to the narrator’s own inability to witness the various sounds as distinct from one another. The sounds, it would seem, are coming in too fast and too close to be distinguished; just like the ‘matin’ bell and its echo, then, here one sound ends up voicing another.
A similar event occurs just a few lines later with Christabel’s first encounter with Geraldine (or at least what we later learn is Geraldine):
The lady leaps up suddenly,
The lovely lady, Christabel!
It moan'd as near, as near can be,
But what it is, she cannot tell.--
More specifically, having been so bombarded by the repetitive invocation of Christabel’s subjecthood as “lady,” when are we suddenly confronted by the moaning “It,” we can not help but draw an association between the two characters, especially without having any other known subject on which to attach the sound (40, 41). For a moment, in other words, we are tricked into thinking “it” must be Christabel (41). This vocal confusion between Christabel and Geraldine only seems to continue throughout the whole rest of the poem, seeming to increase in intensity as they progressively move into smaller and smaller spaces. In seeming observance with the Bard’s spatio-sonic schematic, then, by the time the two of them have entered Christabel’s small, ‘cranial’ bedchamber, the dialog between the two of them has become so dense, so insular, that we as readers struggle to separate the two from another. They become like the bell and its echo.
In this manner, the Bard’s ‘matin-bell’ metaphor may in fact be a way of not only understanding the relation between space and voice in the poem, but in fact the central character relation in the poem: that between Geraldine and Christabel. In particular, though critical discourse around the relationship often focuses on either, as critic Christian La Cassagnère argues, Geraldine as “a double of Christabel,” an externalization of her “alien within,” or, as Jonas Spatz argues, the “projection” “repressed [sexual] desires,” Bracy arguably adds his own reading to the mix: Geraldine is simply Christabel’s ‘ghostly echo.’(Cassagnére 86, Spatz 110, 100). While these interpretations are not mutually exclusive, of course, this reading nevertheless arguably offers a means of understanding the presence of Geraldine’s on a purely mechanical-poetic level, one which does not need resort to outside theories. That is to say, Bard’s schematic allows us to think of Geraldine’s presence as merely a function of the poem’s strangely claustrophobic atmosphere.
Perhaps most intriguing in all of this, however, is the way in which such an effect is ultimately just as much rendered for us textually as it is rendered in the space of the world itself – if not moreso. That is to say, while it may be the case that at times the narrator is himself unsure who or what is speaking – “is it the wind that moaneth bleak?” – oftentimes the confused cross-voicing of characters is an effect which we ourselves ‘perform,’ or rather, an effect which is performed through us by the poem’s own textual manipulations (46 Take for instance, the vocal ambiguity created by (what we later learn is) Christabel’s exclamatory ‘greeting’ to the newly discovered Geraldine: “Mary Mother, save me now!”/(Said Christabel,) “And who art thou” (67-68). That is to say, as critic Ewan Jones writes of the scene, the tardiness of the “parenthetical diegetic check” “(Said Christabel)” “arrives too late for us to take it into account,” thereby forcing us to voice Christabel “before we know that it is she that we are voicing” (Jones ––). Accordingly, our own voicing of Christabel effectively “bears the echoes of even those non-humans or non-characters that have preceded her” (Jones –). The narrator, for instance, can be ‘heard’ here in Christabel’s vocalization, his ‘private’ narratorial prayer– “Jesu, Maria, shield her well” – echoed both in rhythm and chiasmus in Christabel’s own prayer, “Mary Mother, save me now!” (56, 67). As, of course, can Geraldine herself, having been visually introduced just immediately before: “‘twas frightful there to see/A lady so richly clad as she/ – Beautiful exceedingly” (64-66).
In this context, we can begin to comprehend the reason behind so many of the claustrophobic formal decisions made Coleridge in the construction of the poem – the near-suffocating repetition of rhymes, the strange rhetorical trappings of the narrator (“Is the night chilly and dark?/ The night is chilly, but not dark”), the frequent use of direct textual repetition (“So free from danger free from fear…”), and even the genre of the gothic itself, a genre known for its symbolic densities and atmospheres (14-15, 130). That is to say, inasmuch as Coleridge may be exploring themes of repressed sexuality, of externalized otherness, and so forth, arguably lurking behind it all would seem to be a sort of architectural experimentation. Christabel, in other words, should ultimately be thought of as a kind of test-tube poem, one designed from the ground up to test the effects of specific poetic devices. And what better a place to conduct such an experiment than the Gothic? Out of space, out of time, the gothic is the ultimate insulate.
Works Cited:
Channick, Debra. "“A Logic of Its Own”: Repetition in Coleridge’s “Christabel”." Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, number 50, may 2008, p. 0–0. https://doi.org/10.7202/018144ar
Jones, Ewan. “Rhythm and Affect in ‘Christabel.’” Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form, edited by Ben Glaser and Jonathan Culler, Fordham University Press, 2019, pp. 274–295. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2019400981&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
La Cassagnère, Christian. “The Strangeness of Christabel.” The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 32, no. 2, 2001, pp. 84–88. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1086/twc24044790.
Spatz, Jonas. “The Mystery of Eros: Sexual Initiation in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel.’” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 90, no. 1, Jan. 1975, pp. 107–116. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2307/461353.
Wordsworth, William, et al. Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800. Broadview Press, 2008.