Final Paper

“Kubla Khan” and the Origin of Romance

            Romance is a form of literature that seeps into all other forms of literature and which simultaneously is intruded on by all other forms of literature. This idea is echoed in works of literary critic Northrop Frye who wrote: “No genre stands alone, and in dealing with romance I have to allude to every other aspect of literature as well.” (Frye 4) The interconnectedness of stories: fantasy and reality, comedy and tragedy, myth and history, is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in the novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, in which the boyish hero finds himself on the ocean of the sea of stories. Each story is represented by a single colored fluid strand “And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become ne versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories . . . . It was not dead but alive.” (Rushdie 72) Within the world of stories and within the genres of stories, there is a continual mixing and mingling of thoughts, themes, and characters. In fact, many would argue that there are no new stories, there are only old stories retold in new ways.

            With this understanding, we return to the world of romance. Romance, traditionally, has been seen in opposition to realism. “The realistic tendency [of literature] moves in the direction of the representational and the displaced, the romantic tendency in opposite direction, concentrating on the formulaic units of myth and metaphor.”  (Frye 37) Myth and metaphor are two expressions of the overarching world of literary imagination. It is perhaps here that one finds the purist form of story telling. For if our imagination at its core is fed by the world of reality, than it is in romance that we discover those stories that are the best displaced and most creative retellings of the concrete world.

            In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, there is an ultimate source to all the stories of the sea – the story from which all other stories are twisted and recreated. In the world of romance, this source is Samuel Coleridge’s poem, “Kubla Khan”:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:

And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight 'twould win me

That with music loud and long

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

The fact that this poem was written in 1797 betrays the reality that “Kubla Khan” is not truly the originator of all romance. If, however, there were in fact only one original story from whence all other romances were formed, “Kubla Khan” would have to be the perfect romance from which all prior romances were prematurely formed. The source nature of “Kubla Khan” is first demonstrated through rivers. Just as Rushdie represented the nature of stories through fluid streams that cumulatively form a sea of literature, so too does Coleridge use the mythology of rivers to create an underlying romance. The sacred river Alph, referred to in line three of the poem most likely alludes to the sacred river Okeanos, which in Greek myth was considered to be the originator of all rivers and clouds. It marked the boundaries of the earth, and symbolized the eternal flow of time. Beyond Okeanos, at the end of the universe, one could find where the edge of the sky-dome came down to meet the earth. This dome encompassed the cosmos, and was believed to be the home of the gods. The elite nature of Mount Olympus suggests a likely link between Colidge’s pleasure dome and the sky rising from Okeanos. This symbolism creates a link between the world of myth and the world of romance. However, the tangled sea of story threads described in Haroun and the Sea of Stories would suggest that romance must go beyond the simple act of a single metaphor – and indeed the romance of Kubla Khan continues much father.

In the writings of explorer Samuel Purchas, we find the historical account of Xanadu whose language is nearly identical that of Coleridge’s opening lines nearly two-hundred years later: "In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest [sic] thereof a sumpuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place [sic].” (Purchas 52) This description of Xanadu, which Coleridge claims to have read immediately prior to entering an opium-induced dream state, is nearly the exact prose image of “Kubla Khan”.

Whether or not Coleridge was aware at the time of composition that he was so closely mirroring the words of this historian, it is difficult to say. However, based on the discrepancy in the stated size of the pleasure dome – Purchas claiming a size of 16 miles while Coleridge chose “twice five miles” – it seems plausible that Coleridge was unaware of how strongly these words had seeped into his subconscious. This is a perfect example of what Carl Jung has labeled as the collective unconscious. Placed in Frye’s terms, the collective unconscious is the idea that “the fabulous writer may seem to be making up his stories out of his own head, but this never happens in literature, even if the illusion of this happening is a necessary illusion for some writers. His material comes from traditions behind him which may have no recognized or understood social status, and may not be consciously known to the writer or to his public.” (Frye 10) Once again, we must face the realization that there are no new stories – only new renditions of the old.

What makes “Kubla Khan” the original romance, the romance from which every other romance ought to have sprung, is the fact that the myth from which it was written, is the myth of origination. “Alph”, short for alpha – the Greek letter equivalent to the number one and to the “beginning” is simultaneously a river of origination. From the river Okeanos sprung all other rivers – rivers which continue to run forth just as the story of Kubla Khan continues to run forward. The continuation of “Kubla Khan” is seen in the works of Salmon Rushdie, who, roughly a hundred years after Coleridge, Rushdie continued the written pleasure dome: “In this Pleasure Garden were fountains and pleasure-domes and ancient spreading trees, and around it were the three most important buildings in Gup, which looked like a trio of gigantic and elaborately iced cakes.” (Rushdie 88) It is in this purposeful rebirth of Kubla Khan that we see precisely what Coleridge created. His work transformed the realistic, the finite, and the historic into the mythical, the infinite, and the romantic. Through the rivers of his story, he created a world that did not exist until he called it into being. The identity of Xanadu had no solid formation until he placed it on the pedestal of imagination and gave it the life of the story streams. This calls to mind a poem by Wallace Stevens:

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,   

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker. (The Idea of Order at Key West, ln 37-40)

The world of romance is the world of creation. “Kubla Khan” is the ultimate poem of origination and regeneration. It is for this reason, that I chose to believe that “Kubla Khan” was indeed the original romance from which all other romance has sprung. And according to both Frye and Wallace, the act of naming is the act of creating, and therefore it is so.