WE all know now that Samuel Taylor
Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan" is a masterpiece. But how do we know this? And has
it always been known?
"Kubla Khan" was first published in 1816 in a
booklet that also contained "Christabel" and "The Pains of Sleep". Looking back
at the first reviews, it is clear that the poem's importance was at first in
some doubt. The Monthly Review of January 1817 is typical -- its review
felt the poem was "below criticism" -- and the opinion of the Critical
Review of May 1816, in its entirety, was that it was "one of those pieces
that can only speak for itself". As for the British Lady's Magazine of
October 1816, it rounded off five and a half columns on "Christabel" with the
words: "Kubla Khan, or a Vision in a Dream, Mr. Coleridge describes as the real
production of sleep: it is wild and fanciful."
Most of the reviews
adopted the same strategy as the British Lady's Magazine, and
concentrated on Christabel to the near-exclusion of "Kubla Khan" and "The Pains
of Sleep". There were of course reasons for this. "Christabel" was the first and
far and away the longest of the three poems, so it seemed natural to treat it as
the central part of the book. And it had been read and talked of in admiring
terms by the literati for quite a few years before it was actually published,
whereas "Kubla Khan" was little known even among Coleridge's friends.
But
perhaps the main reason for the neglect of "Kubla Khan" was Coleridge's
notorious preface, in which he claimed that the poem was composed during a
profound sleep. "Perhaps a dozen more such lines", suggested the Edinburgh
Review in September 1816, "would reduce the most irritable of critics to a
state of inaction". The Academic was equally scathing in September
1821: "... all his works appear to have been composed in a sort of day-dream;
and in this he has the advantage over his readers, who must exert themselves to
keep awake".
Perhaps surprisingly, no-one seemed especially intrigued at
the idea of involuntary composition. In June 1816 the Eclectic Review
found nothing strange in the idea that people who wrote a lot of poetry should
dream in it as well, while a month later the Literary Panorama agreed and the
Augustan Review recalled tales of Milton waking from sleep and writing
down "twenty or thirty verses, inspired during the night". But while the role of
unconscious processes in artistic creation was taken for granted, art was
considered admissible only if it was tempered and controlled by conscious
thought and technique: "There seems to be no great harm in dreaming while one
sleeps", the Augustan Review concluded, "but an author really should
not thus dream while he is awake, and writing too".
Coleridge was writing
at the tail end of the Age of Reason. The conscious mind was the key to progress
and enlightenment; unbridled self-expression had yet to become fashionable;
tradition and continuity were valued more than novelty; and artifice in art was
still a sign of quality. With few exceptions the reading public adhered to
critical standards based on experience and reason, and there was little room in
either for unadorned dreaming. Indeed, it wasn't until the Surrealists and their
popularisation of Freud and Jung that the idea of dreams as somehow
intrinsically artistic became even remotely respectable. Before then, the
automatic writing of an Andre Breton or the admission by a Samuel Beckett that
he didn't know what his works meant would have been met with blank looks and
derision.
After Freud, we modern readers can if we wish recuperate "Kubla Khan" as a poem by claiming that it shows the poetic unconscious at work. But this isn't the only strategy open to us. In these times of textuality and author-functions and the so-called death of the author many readers feel free to ignore the preface and the author's psychology with equal aplomb. And the empiricists can do the same thing, on other grounds, thanks to the discovery in 1934 of a draft of the poem which showed traces of revision, traces which hardly supported the poet's claim that composition had happened "without any sensation or consciousness of effort". Since this discovery the main drift of the reasonable and experienced inheritors of the Age of Reason has been to praise the poem for the amount of controlled and conscious artistic effort it displays.
In recent years a further way has opened up for the determined critic: that of questioning the troth of the famous story of opium, sleep and the person from Porlock, while accepting its presence in the name of a kind of poetic troth. Readers can treat the preface as an integral part of the poem, a kind of restatement of the main argument, which is that the vision has passed and left the poet with nothing but a fragment that would amaze the onlooker if it could only be completed. This is part of a broader movement that seeks to make the "romantic fragment" a literary genre in its own right. By pulling in the preface and making a perceived lack of conclusion part of the message, this approach has the advantage of forging greater unity in the work. As readers generally demand unity in literary texts, this strategy appears peculiarly satisfying.
In his book Doing What Comes Naturally, the American academic Stanley Fish suggests that the changing reception of a work of art can be explained by the extent to which readers see other beliefs, events or techniques as being relevant to what they read and the way they read it. We can see this process at work in the different weight given to unconscious composition before and after readers started to take Freud's theories into account. We see the other side of the coin, the discounting of evidence once taken as conclusive, in the decision of many to call Coleridge a liar in order to stress the amount of work he put into his writing. And we see the same appeal to presupposed 'troths' in the activities of those who, having assumed unity in all literature, come to the less than startling conclusion that bits of literature must be meant to be in bits, and so must be complete.
The present state of affairs in the appreciation of "Kubla Khan" is, I would suggest, a fairly good guide to the state of literary appreciation as a whole. We have Freudian Kubla Khans, Jungian Kubla Khans, structural Kubla Khans, deconstructed Kubla Khans, generic Kubla Khans, prophetic Kubla Khans, political Kubla Khans and sexual Kubla Khans, feminist, gendered and secular Kubla Khans, and on and on, depending on which particular theory (or theorist) has persuaded the reader into its (or his or her) way of thinking. In the last few decades especially, the acceptance by smaller and smaller groups of readers of endlessly proliferating, widely differing criteria for interpreting and valuing literature has turned relative unity of purpose into a babel of argument, and has opened up the unsettling possibility that the process may continue indefinitely.
Of course, no-one has so far suggested that two words in the title and 54 lines prove that "Kubla Khan" is really a crossword clue with a two word answer of 5 and 4 letters. But when some critics look for anagrams and others diligently try to read what isn't said, there is nothing intrinsically absurd about such a project. From a point in 1816 where "Kubla Khan" was meaningless, it could at some time in the future come to mean anything, or everything. Today's lovers of words no longer enjoy the firm certainties of "Kubla Khan"'s first reviewers. Instead we are faced with so many different ways to make sense of a text that, knowing too much, we end up knowing hardly anything, including what we are reading and why we are reading it. Whether this will lead to the death of literature as an object of serious study, provoke some draconian or Leavisite backlash, or spur us on to dizzier heights, only time and the press will tell.
