Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu: The intermingling of dream worlds and romance

I wanted to discus the origins of the dedication of Haroun and the Sea of Stories that we discussed earlier in class. I feel as though the presence of this dedication is an open introduction into the world the reader is about to enter. All three of these worlds are mythical. All three of them stand for imagination and romance. And the blending of the three onto one page in this story is a testament to the living quality of stories.

Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu:

All our dream-worlds may come true.

Fairy lands are fearsome too.

As I wander far from view

Read, and bring me home to you

                                                      -Salmon Rushdie

As Ashley mentioned in her blog, Zenda refers to the 1894 novel by Anthony Hope Hawkins titled The Prisioner of Zenda in which the fictional king of the fictional country known as Ruritania is drugged immediately before his coronation and thus the aid of a decoy is needed in order for the situation to be salvaged.

Zembla is taken from Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire. Zembla is the former homeland of the protagonist and ex-king, Charles Kinbote. Although it is later revealed that Kinbote is a schizophrenic and that Zembla and Gradus (the man whom Kinbote believes is trying to kill him) exist only within the realm of his imagination and the text. I love Zembla because its very appearance in Rushdie's text proves one of the main points of Pale Fire, that stories never cease to live. At the end of the novel, we are told 

"whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out—somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door—a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus." . . . i.e. the story will be retold and retold within the pages and words of future stories for time immemorial. 

Xanadu was historically the location of the summer capitol of Kublai Khan's Yuan Dynasty. However, it has now become more famous as a representation of a dreamland thanks to "Kubla Khan". It is in this world that we see a true marriage of reality and fantasy. History becomes legend, and the dream consumes the remnants of its origin.