Open AccessPleasure Domes and Sunbeams: An Anti-Oedipal Reading of “Kubla Khan”
Author(s) -
Robert Tindol
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
anglica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.101
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 0860-5734
DOI - 10.7311/0860-5734.26.1.04
Subject(s) - pleasure , poetry , decree , reading (process) , statement (logic) , philosophy , paradise , psychoanalysis , focus (optics) , art , literature , art history , psychology , law , epistemology , linguistics , physics , optics , neuroscience , political science
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1797 poem “Kubla Khan” begins with the statement that Kubla Khan once caused a pleasure-dome to come into existence by dint of a kingly decree. The last line states that the narrator, should he gain sufficient poetic vision, would have “drunk the milk of paradise” and would “build that dome in air.” A new reading may be derived from a focus on precisely what these lines say and what they imply within the perspective of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work Anti-Oedipus. If the process of the narrator’s gaining poetic insight is set in motion by a conscious decree from Kubla Khan, then an Anti-Oedipal reading considers whether the end result is simply the consequence a powerful individual’s wishes, or else is paradoxically a liberation from those wishes.