Literary Synthesis Essay

Of all the elusive, seductive concepts shared by the disciplines of literary studies, art, and psychology, genius is among the most scoffed at, the least understood. To hear, as I have heard, a literature professor say that he "doesn't believe in genius," as if millions of people haven't attained I.Q. scores in excess of 140, or as if anyone, if he or she only worked vigorously enough, could pen a single work comparable to The Canterbury Tales or Paradise Lost or The Rape of the Lock, is to know, with a certain queasiness, that the Romantic genius has been nonsensically demystified in our Postmodern moment (Jara n.pag.). Reviving the Romantic genius might seem like a conservative enterprise, but, by concentrating notional force on the unstandardized,
subjective dimension of creativity, as opposed to intellect, such an enterprise evades its disconcerting (politically incorrect) Darwinianism. The anchoring text for this revival will be Samuel Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," the quintessential depiction not only of Romantic genius, but of the skepticism and dread that have surrounded the concept of genius and possessors of genius since at least the Romantic era.
The auxiliary text, Wordsworth's "The Tables Turned," will provide a Romantic counterpoint: the (often destructive) ambition of Romantic genius is willed into submission by the affectation of a Romantic counterforce of mindfulness and sobriety. "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree": unmindful of consequence, the Romantic genius is not content to observe the world as it is, but imbues himself or herself with the authority to alter it in as self-gratifying a way as possible (NAEL 460). In 2016, this might look more benign--might, in fact, acquire a heroic luster--as artists are surveilled by their governments and intellectually gifted youth are increasingly ill-served by an educational system that forces them to self-educate and self-stimulate--to, in effect, create their own Xanadus (Finn
n.pag.). Coleridge invests the last lines of "Kubla Khan" with greatest thematic intensity: "That with music loud and long / I would build that dome in air, / That sunny dome!
those caves of ice! / And all who heard should see them there, / And all should cry, Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair! / Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise" (NAEL 460-61). The poem's narrator is speaking hypothetically, of course; he's imagining a grandiose scenario in which his fearsome ambition, self-willed social isolation, and vivid fantasy life are not only noticed by society, but matter to it, and even galvanize it into a controlling, hysterical response. In one of my favorite commentaries on this poem, Camille Paglia writes, "Even if the artist's achievements are eventually accepted, he is not. He remains a pariah, strange and uncouth. 'Beware! Beware!': society must expel him, since he is contaminated by genius" (83). Two other voices suddenly butt in: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's (always butting in, always welcome to), which asks, "What does it mean to fall in love with a writer?" and Agatha Christie's, which remarks, "It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize how much you love them" (Touching Feeling 117, GoodReads n.pag.). My affection for Paglia engorges itself on the endearing obtuseness of this reading. Society is not
"expelling" the "genius"; on the contrary, it is encircling him in order to better contain him: "Weave a circle round him thrice" (461). And don't make the mistake of assuming that because society closes its eyes to the artist, it ignores him: the artist's position in the center of the circle is meant to evoke his cultural centrality even in the midst of backlash. There is enclosure and distance, for society can't help but spectate, even if it doesn't want to get too close. "His eyes are 'flashing' with inner visions," Paglia writes--a more synced-up reading (83). The artist has what Neil Young would call "the far-away look in [his] eyes" (Young n.pag.). I prefer a literalizing cinematic reading, in which the artist, like a modern-day computer, goes into "hibernation mode" and is enthralled by a private welter of mental activity. The eyes flash hauntingly like slowed-down strobes. (The end of M83's "Midnight City" music video, in which gifted youth use their combined powers to induce nighttime, seems directly inspired by this chilling image.) As an analogue for contemporary manifestations of the gifted individual's abject relation to society, perhaps "Kubla Khan" is more awkward than one would like to admit. Although Paglia sees the poet being expelled--the main criterion for the abject--the actual poem complicates this interpretation. Claire May, in an analysis of abjection in Coleridge's Christabel, offers a useful reconciliation when she notes "the ambiguity of the abject as both abhorred and adored" (709). Fearsome and fascinating, the "abhorred and adored" abject genius is suspended precariously between public embracement and ostracism, and so must provide his or her own footing: a paradisal, self-generated imaginary escape.

"Brilliance of Talent vs. Brilliance of Intellect"

Let's start with a convenient dichotomy, one that is fairly obvious even in its oversimplified falseness: the way genius supposedly divides between extraordinary intelligence on the one hand and extraordinary talent on the other. It's a fluff-minded notion, to be sure, one that no mature thinker would entertain with even an irony-arched brow, much less fashion into a lens through which to bring all its occurrences in the works of indisputably mature thinkers into synesthetic relief. (Anyone who's seen, for example, a synesthete instantly home in on a lower-case b among a chaos of lower-case ds will understand that adjective, and anyone who's seen the particular episode of 60 Minutes that I'm alluding to will understand this example. In lieu of the exact source: Mabrey n.pag.) It should surprise no one, then, that I've fashioned this very lens, and it isn't even my own invention: I plucked it from a documentary about one such mature thinker, the regarded woman of its title: Regarding Susan Sontag. At some point in the documentary, Stephen Koch says of Sontag's exposure to Bohemia, "Susan discovered the brilliance of talent as opposed to the brilliance of intellect. There were these remarkable people who didn't know anything about the issues that were so important to her. Who had never read Nietzsche. Who can't spell or pronounce his name. That was a jolt for her; and a liberating one" (Kates n.pag).