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"Kubla Khan"
and the Implied Critic's Decision Style

Symbol and the Ineffable
Many readers who believe that "Kubla Khan" is a great poem, feel that its greatness may have to do with the irruption of the irrational and of chaos into our rational and ordered world, with a force that is unprecedented in lyric poetry. This irruption, with the enormous energy that infuses this poem, generates what is frequently characterized as an "ecstatic quality". When we say that "'Kubla Khan' is an ecstatic poem", we do not report the successful arousal of an ecstatic experience in the reader, but the detection of an ecstatic quality. The ecstatic quality is, then, a perceived quality of "Kubla Khan"; it is also a "regional quality", that is, a quality that belongs to a whole, but not to any of its constituent parts. Readers who consider "Kubla Khan" a great poem, usually feel that this ecstatic quality is present in the poem; readers who tend to regard it to be less than a major poem, usually have doubts as for the presence of this ecstatic quality. Coleridge himself contributed to the controversiality of his poem, by adding the famous preface to it, in which he claimed to have composed it in an opium induced dream. Some readers believe that being in direct contact with the unconscious mind is the source of real greatness in poetry, and no poem can be credited with this virtue as much as a poem composed in an opium dream. On the other hand, Coleridge himself suggested that the poem remains "a psychological curiosity". Now notice this. When we say ecstasy, we denote a compact concept, no less conceptual than the words logic or concept themselves; whereas the state of mind "ecstasy" appears to be inaccessible to a conceptual language. Since a literary discourse can hardly escape the denotative use of language, the paradoxical conclusion seems to be, that an ecstatic poem is a contradiction in terms; which we know, it is not. 

It is sometimes suggested that this poetic dilemma is solved through the use of symbols, and that the symbol somehow partakes in, and "conjures up", an unspeakable reality. This is, precisely, said to be the difference between symbol and allegory: whereas the latter presents the reader with what can be expressed in a clear conceptual language, the former gives us some mysterious insight into an unspeakable spiritual reality. Coleridge himself was one of the chief exponents of this conception. Here I shall mention only one of his most frequently quoted formulations of this distinction. An allegory merely translates abstract ideas into a "picture-language". A symbol, on the other hand,

is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general; above all, by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative.

In a paper abounding in wise formulations, Peter Berek (1978:121) makes the following observation, giving Coleridge's distinction a special twist:

Symbolism is a literary resource based on a metaphysical assumption: the assumption that there exists an order of being inaccessible to the analytic mind and inexpressible in discursive logical language. [...] Indeed, for the symbolist the imagination is a synecdoche for the Transcendent.

And later, again,

Symbolism is perhaps a yearning after allegory in the absence of positive ideas to allegorize, and as such it is a particularly valuable allegorical resource for romantic and modernist writers whose intellectual subject is the difficulty of the process of search, not the clarity of the thing found (ibid).

Coming back now to Coleridge's passage, it emphasizes the revelation "of the special in the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general; above all, of the eternal through and in the temporal". Now, how can we distinguish a piece of literature which "merely translates abstract ideas into a picture-language", from one which reveals the special through the individual, etc., and above all the eternal through and in the temporal? In many cases, I believe, it will be impossible; unless we consider the latter as a special case of the former: symbols translate abstract ideas into a picture-language, where the picture itself "is always a part of that, of the whole of which it is the representative". But even this restriction is quite frequently applicable to allegories. Allegoric images most typically have metonymic relationships to the thing represented (the allegoric image of Summer bears flowers; the allegoric image of death is a skeleton, and so forth).

It will be noted that I have misquoted Coleridge's passage in the preceding paragraph, substituting revelation fortranslucence. The key to the distinction between symbol and allegory is to be found in the meaning of translucence. The American College Dictionary compares the adjectives transparent and translucent. They "agree in describing material that light rays can pass through. That which is transparentallows objects to be seen clearly through it. That which is translucent allows light to pass through, diffusing it, however, so that objects beyond are not distinctly seen". One important feature that distinguishes symbol from allegory is, that the spiritual reality presented in and through the "picture-language" is perceived as more diffuse and less distinct in the former than in the latter.
This, precisely, seems to explain, why the realities represented by symbols cannot be expressed in conceptual discourse, in "ordinary language". Words refer to concepts, to categories, not to occurrences out there, in the external world, or even to subjective mental events; the word ecstasy refers to the concept "ecstasy" and not to the mental event ecstasy. The resulting problem can be explained by reference to "lateralization", to the specializations of the two hemispheres of the brain. Language, logic, mathematics are "linear" activities, and are typically associated with the left hemisphere of the brain.

If the left hemisphere is specialized for analysis, the right hemisphere [...] seems specialized for holistic mentation. Its language ability is quite limited. This hemisphere is primarily responsible for our orientation in space, artistic endeavor, crafts, body image, recognition of faces. It processes information more diffusely than does the left hemisphere, and its responsibilities demand a ready integration of many inputs at once. If the left hemisphere can be termed predominantly analytic and sequential in operation, then the right hemisphere is more holistic and relational, and more simultaneous in its mode of operation (Ornstein, 1975: 67-68). 

The right and the left hemispheres do not necessarily differ, then, in the kind of information processed, but rather in the mode of processing. Words refer to compact entities accessible to the analytic mind: categories or concepts; the experiences associated with the right hemisphere, on the other hand, are typically diffuse and global, accessible to "holistic mentation". Consequently, words may capture the information associated with the right hemisphere. What they cannot capture, is its diffuse mode of processing. That is why it is so often felt that information given about certain human experiences may be all true, and still, the experience itself may be "unspeakable". States of consciousness associated with mystic and ecstatic experiences are typically such experiences related to the right hemisphere. In some poetic styles at least, among them in romantic poetry, poetic language typically has recourse to poetic devices that tend to render information as diffuse as possible; and, at the same time, to integrate diffuse inputs through simultaneous processing (cf. Ornstein, 1975: 95). Some of these devices, at least, achieve this by activating the right hemisphere at the time when the left hemisphere is involved in the processing of the linguistic input.