The Idylls of the Khan (Part I)

On “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, and Orientalism by Edward Said.

(source, source, source)

Kublai Khan requires no introduction. He was the grandson of the great conqueror Genghis Khan, emperor of the Yuan Dynasty, and a mythic figure in our cultural consciousness. We know him through tales – his meetings with Marco Polo, his failed invasion of Japan, and perhaps other, more fanciful tales from the pages of English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Italian novelist Italo Calvino.   

Let us consider Kublai Khan, neither as a historical figure nor as a real man, but in the form that he exists for both Coleridge and Calvino, as an illusion, a mirage, a fragment, a dream, ruler of an inscrutable and hallucinatory realm. It is this Khan that lives in the pages of “Kubla Khan” and Invisible Cities, centuries after his death. But what was is about this figure, or the idea of him, that drew two very different writers, writing a century and a half apart, to him? And what makes him still appeal to us readers today?

(source)

Before I venture a response, a little bit of background both on Coleridge’s poem and Calvino’s novel.  “Kubla Khan” is not only a personal favorite of mine, but it is also perhaps the quintessential Romantic poem. According to popular account, Coleridge woke one night from a vivid dream in which he saw China, in all its glory, ruled over by the great Khan, full of “gardens bright with sinuous rills, / Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree” and “forests ancient as the hills, /Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.”*

Coleridge, full of this vision, began scribbling furiously at his writing desk and his vision became more violent. The exotic landscape explodes with cataracts of water and rocks dancing “like chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail”. The Khan himself barely appears, but that is beside the point. The real Kublai is secondary to the vision itself of a foreign land, presided over by “a damsel with a dulcimer”, inspiring the poet towards visions of madness.*

Calvino makes more use of the Khan as a character in his incredibly lyrical novel. In Invisible Cities, the aged Kublai receives the young Marco Polo to his court and asks him to report on the state of his empire. In response, Marco Polo describes city after city, fantastic and beautiful, none of which could exist on Earth, but all of which occupy fantastic psychic spaces. “No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you the city must never be confused with the words that describe it,” Marco Polo says to the Khan.¹ 

If there’s a tether connecting Coleridge to Calvino, it’s a shared interest in the work of the poet. Coleridge’s vision allows him to write, serving as the “honeydew” and “milk of paradise” that empowers the Romantic poet. Calvino, in a 20^th-century tradition, is more interested in the ways that we construct stories, places, people, and events using nothing more than our words as brick and mortar.

(source)

We could leave it at that, but there is a much more pervasive theme that connects Coleridge to Calvino, a theme that I will depend on Edward Said to explain. In his incredibly influential essay, Said identifies a way of thinking common to all western thought, be it “aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, [or] philological”.² This way of thinking divides the world into diametrically opposed halves. Said writes that on one hand “the Oriental is irrational, depraved, childlike, ‘different’,” while on the other hand “the European is rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal’”.³ In this way, we westerners have repeatedly and consistently constructed our cultural identity in opposition to the Eastern “other”.

Said calls this way of thinking “Orientalism”, which he defines succinctly as “a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different world”.⁴

(source, source, source)

This is the tradition in which Coleridge and Calvino are writing, one wherein the dichotomy between West and East, between Orient and Occident, becomes the dichotomy between familiar and exotic, between self and other, and by extension, between real and illusory, hallucinatory, or dreamlike. This Orientalist view completely erases Kublai as a human being, and turns him into a narrative device to serve as a foil for a westerner – in Coleridge’s case, the narrator, in Calvino’s, Marco Polo.

Having arrived at this conclusion, I do not love either work less, and neither should you. But as you read, do so with a critical eye. And as your write, understand that you, too, may be working in this Orientalist tradition. Calvino, writing around the same time as Said, may have very well understood this. “The emperor is he who is a foreigner to each of his subjects,” he writes, “and only through foreign eyes and ears could the empire manifest its existence to Kublai.”⁵

We will return to this topic at some later date. Until then, I hope I have given you something to ruminate on, dear reader.

¹ Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1974), p. 51.

² Orientalism by Edward Said (1978), p. 20.

³ Orientalism, p. 48.

⁴ Orientalism, p. 20. 

⁵ Invisible Cities, p. 20. 

*“Kubla Khan” by Coleridge

Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark.