The Arabian Nights - A Companion, page 26
Todorov’s book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (French version 1970) was an attempt to demarcate a genre and to discover its peculiar rules. Todorov wished to define the fantastic by its deep structure, rather than by its trappings – that is, not by ghosts, creaking castles, witches, jinn, magic rings, and so on. According to Todorov, fantastic tales are set in a world in which the laws of nature appear to be being broken. However, the reader is expected to ask himself if those laws are really being broken. Ambiguity is crucial to the fantastic story, and in the truest form of the fantastic tale, as in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the ambiguity is never resolved. (Are the children really being threatened by the ghost of Quint, or is the reader the victim of the governess’s unreliable narration?) If a tale’s ambiguity is resolved, then how it is resolved will determine whether a particular story is to be characterized as ‘uncanny’ or ‘marvellous’. If at the end of the story we learn that no law of nature has actually been broken (for example, the ghosts were human impostors), then the story is uncanny. If, however, the laws of nature have been broken, then the story is marvellous.11 Most of the fantastic tales in the Nights resolve themselves into marvel-tales. Wicked women turn out actually to have been transformed into dogs; Abdullah the Fisherman actually travels to the kingdom under the sea; and the Ebony Horse actually flies. The ambiguities characteristic of such writers as Cazotte, Potocki and Henry James are rarely present in the Nights. The stock-in-trade of the Nights is unambiguously the marvellous – a marvellous based on hyperbole (e.g. Sinbad and the great fish), on the exotic (e.g. Sinbad and the rhinoceros) and on the instrumental (e.g. the flying carpet).
Todorov’s typology of the marvellous fits some stories well enough, but it is difficult to see how it fits, say, ‘The Tale of the Hunchback’, ‘The Sleeper and the Wakened’ or ‘The Mock Caliph’. At times it is hard not to feel that Todorov gets results not so much from his methodology as from close readings intelligently conducted – as in his account of ‘The Second Dervish’s Tale’. In this story, which Todorov characterizes as a story about metamorphoses and magical powers, Todorov interprets the jinn who turns the man into a monkey as the personification of that man’s bad luck.12 Supernatural beings often stand in for fate or happenstance in the Nights stories.
Todorov’s observations on the Nights and on other select works of European fantasy fiction are unfailingly interesting. However, only a certain kind of fantastic fiction is covered, and it is hard to see how Todorov’s restrictive theory of the fantastic genre might be stretched to encompass such works as George Macdonald’s Phantastes, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. What is needed is a formal system that not only can account for what has been written within a particular genre, but also can indicate what the limits of the genre are and what can or cannot be written in that genre. At present, however, each attempt to give a formal or structuralist basis to the analysis of fiction seems to begin from a new starting-point.
The influence of both Propp and Todorov is evident in the Egyptian writer Ferial Ghazoul’s The Arabian Nights: A Structural Analysis (1980). Ghazoul argues that the Nights stories have rules, but within those rules it is possible to construct an almost infinite variety of stories (just as English grammar has rules, but by following those rules it is possible to construct an almost infinite variety of meaningful sentences). The stories are generated by a series of binary oppositions and through bricolage (a term taken from another structuralist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, meaning a cunning use of those materials which come readily to hand). Thus, in the case of the Nights, the redactors made use of old bits and pieces of stories in order to make new ones. It is unfortunate that Ghazoul’s penetrating book, which was published in Cairo, is not easy to come by in the West.
David Pinault, in Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights (1992), has taken quite a different approach. One of his main preoccupations has been the detection of oral characteristics in the surviving literary versions of the Nights, and, like others who have explored the frontiers between orality and literacy, he has drawn on the work of Parry and Lord. From 1902 to 1935, Milman Parry studied the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey. After his death, the work he began was completed by Albert B. Lord and published as The Singer of Tales (1978). This book studied the characteristic formulaic epithets used for the description of challenges, battles, ships, council meetings, men, and so on. Such epithets, Parry and Lord argued, served the early Greek bards as hand-me-down descriptions in the appropriate poetic metre. Such formulaic adjectives and phrases, which were easy to memorize, facilitated improvised performances by the bards. Parry and Lord found confirmation of their Homeric thesis in twentieth-century Yugoslavia. There they tape-recorded and analysed the performances of the illiterate Serbian guslars, or bards, and they also interviewed the guslars themselves. In this manner they acquired some understanding of how the bardic memory worked and how the guslars could recite long epics without having recourse to a text, by improvising (no two performances were exactly the same) and by making use of ready-made phrases. Parry and Lord argued that the two Homeric epics were formed by the stringing together of shorter ballads, which were originally created by the extempore performances of bards. Parry’s and Lord’s conclusions, though widely accepted, have been challenged in some quarters. The debate about the authorship of the Greek epics goes on, and, as a character in Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves facetiously remarked: ‘It’s like the question of the authorship of the Iliad . . . The author of that poem is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.’
Pinault argues, surely correctly, that in much the same way as the Greek bards made use of ready-made epithets and phrases, so those who composed the Nights drew on and rearranged pre-existing material and that ‘a system of formulae is also at work in the Arabian Nights, though at the level of the story rather than the epithet or phrase’. Thus plot clichés served as building blocks for the orally transmitted stories. In ‘The Story of the Fisherman and the Demon’, ‘the redactor . . . is clearly playing with the motif of the benevolent wish-granting genie familiar to us from other tales in this genre’. However, in this particular example, the redactor reverses the convention by making the demon, or jinn, very unbenevolent indeed. Pinault goes on to examine ‘The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban’, which is framed within ‘The Story of the Fisherman and the Demon’. Evidently the two tales are thematically linked, for just as the fisherman is threatened by the demon, so the sage is threatened by the ungrateful king; but Pinault shows how the two tales are linked by the careful use of the Leitsatz (key sentence) ‘Spare me, and God will spare you!’ Even more effective is the use made of the Leitsatz ‘It is a warning to whoso would be warned’ in ‘The City of Brass’. Pinault also studies the use made of the Leitwort, or ‘leading-word’, by the redactors of the Nights. A Leitwort in the Nights is a triliteral word root which in its various forms generates words with cognate meanings. (Most Arabic words are formed by additions to a root form consisting of three consonants.) Such linked key-words can be used repeatedly to create a stylistic effect or to emphasize a story’s message. (The notion of Leitwortstil, which was first deployed in biblical criticism, has also been used to analyse sections of the Koran by John Wansbrough in his The Sectarian Milieu (1978).) Pinault shows how, in ‘The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies’, ‘The Tale of the First Lady’ plays with the root form s-kh-t, with the repetitive use of maskhut (meaning a man turned to stone by the wrath of God or more generally metamorphosed) and sukht (meaning displeasure or divine wrath). In this and other studies, Pinault seeks to derive pattern from the stories, rather than impose pattern on them. The implication here is that the pattern was chosen by the storyteller rather than imposed as an unconscious constraint upon him.13
Although this chapter is mostly concerned with structuralist approaches to the Nights, this should not be taken as implying that only disciples of Propp, Todorov or Lévi-Strauss have had anything of value to say about the Nights. Mia Gerhardt, unlike David Pinault, is no Arabist. Nevertheless, her book The Art of Story-Telling (1963) is one of the best literary studies of the Nights, as well as being the most readable. It is possible to detect the influence on her of André Jolles’s essay in structuralism, Einfache Formen (1969) (which offered a morphology of what Jolles held to be the universal simple forms of the legend, the saga, the myth, the riddle, the proverb, the case, the memoir, the tale and the joke). However, Gerhardt’s study is not methodology-driven, nor is its approach seriously constrained by morphological considerations. Patrice Coussonet, in Pensée mythique, idéologie et aspirations sociales dans un conte des Mille et une nuits: Le Récti d’Ali du Caire (1989) and in a number of shorter studies, has undertaken close readings with a view to dating individual stories and thus placing them in a correct social and ideological context. Each story has to be taken on its own merits, for it may happen that an old version of an old tale may survive only in a relatively recent text (for example, in the Bulaq or Habicht recensions). Andreas Hamori has produced a number of short but highly influential studies of individual stories, which serve to draw attention to aesthetic qualities (which are often neglected in the more austerely structuralist approaches to storytelling). Hamori’s readings tend to discover hidden allegories in the stories. Finally, two general surveys, Suhayr al-Qalamawi’s Alf Layla wa-Layla and Wiebke Walther’s Tausendundeine Nacht, may also be recommended to readers of Arabic and German respectively.
Towards the end of The Fantastic, Todorov remarks that
psychoanalysis has replaced (and thereby made useless) the literature of the fantastic. There is no need today to resort to the devil in order to speak of an excessive sexual desire, and none to resort to vampires in order to designate the attraction exerted by corpses; psychoanalysis, and the literature which is directly or indirectly inspired by it, deal with these matters in undisguised forms.14
So far, publishers’ lists hardly seem to confirm Todorov’s thesis that fantasy is obsolete, and the idea that fantastic literature has to be useful may strike some readers as curious. Be that as it may, psychoanalysts take the utilitarian function of fantasies for granted. In The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976), its Freudian author, Bruno Bettelheim, assumes that children are the natural audience for fairy tales and he argues that the function of fairy tales is to educate children for adulthood, by dramatizing in disguised fictional forms the difficulties that they will eventually encounter in life. Very often, the various protagonists in the stories personify different aspects of the human personality. Fairy tales are interpreted by Bettelheim, as Freudians interpret dreams, as having a latent as well as a manifest content. Although most of his demonstration texts are taken from Grimm and Perrault, tales from the Nights are also drawn into the argument. Thus in ‘Sinbad the Seaman and Sinbad the Landsman’, the two Sinbads represent opposed parts of the human personality, for Sinbad the Landsman embodies the ego and Sinbad the Seaman the id, and, in a sense, Sinbad the Seaman’s adventures are the fantasies of the hard-working, landbound ego. (It could be said in criticism here that Bettelheim gives too much prominence to Sinbad the Landsman, for in the Arab story he features only as the perfunctorily sketched-in audience for stories of his bolder namesake.)
As Bettelheim reads the frame story of the Nights, Sheherazade features as a medieval psychoanalyst and Shahriyar as her patient. She tells him a great many stories to bring about his cure, because ‘no single story can accomplish it, for our psychological problems are much too complex and difficult of solution. Only a wide variety of fairy tales could provide the impetus for such a catharsis. It takes nearly three years of continued telling of fairy tales to free the king of his deep depression, to achieve his cure.’ Shahriyar is a disturbed id, while Sheherazade is a ‘superego-dominated ego’. Thus the nightly encounter of Sheherazade and Shahriyar becomes a parable of integration.15 Many have read the frame story in the same way as Bettelheim. However, nowhere in the medieval text is Shahriyar described as ‘mad’, and nowhere is it said that Sheherazade ‘cured’ him. If we attend to what the frame story seems to be saying, it is that Shahriyar’s perception of the world in general and of women specifically is broadly speaking correct; for, if one excepts that paragon Sheherazade, it would appear that all women are indeed sexual betrayers. More generally, Bettelheim’s interpretation of the stories as little dramas starring the id, ego and superego seems depressingly claustrophobic and reductive. It is hard to believe that the secrets of any medieval Arab tale can only be unlocked with the help of a twentieth-century western psychological theory.
Like the Freudians, the Jungians are eager when studying myths, legends and fairy tales, to elide the differences that separate one culture from another and one historical period from another. Thus Joseph Campbell, the Jungian mythographer, seems always to be more concerned with resemblances than differences. In his preface to a selection of stories from the Nights published in the United States, he remarked:
The battle scenes might comfortably appear in the Morte d’Arthur; the tales of enchanted castles, miraculous swords, talismanic trophies, and quest in the realms of the Jinn are reminiscent in numerous features of the favourites of Arthurian romance; the pattern of romantic love is in essence identical with that of twelfth-century Provence; the pious tales breathe the same odor of spiritual childhood and the misogynistic exempla the same monastic rancor as those of Christian Europe.
In his well-known study The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell treated Qamar al-Zaman in ‘The Tale of Kamar al-Zaman’ as a hero conforming to the same essential type as Cuchulain, Moses and Krishna. The Jungian formation apart, the influence of Propp on Campbell is perhaps also detectable. The jinn who bring Qamar al-Zaman and Budur together are recognizably helpers of the Proppian sort. In Campbell’s eyes, the encounter of the two young people, engineered by the jinn, and Qamar al-Zaman’s reception of a ring from Budur signify Qamar al-Zaman’s recognition of his unconscious deeps and of the equal validity of its truths with those of ordinary waking life. ‘Not everyone has a destiny: only the hero who has plunged to touch it, and has come up again – with a ring.’16 (Pasolini’s filmed treatment of the same story in his Arabian Nights may be recommended as a counter-weight to Campbell’s unhealthily obsessive preoccupation with heroes and heroic destiny.)17
Propp has remarked that the ‘folktale, like any living thing, can only generate forms that resemble itself’. Although the formalist or structuralist approach strips a story of style, setting, characterization and imagery – of almost everything that might make it pleasing to the reader – the dissection of the bare bones of plot nevertheless may be useful in providing a framework for the study of the generation and survival of stories. Moreover, Propp’s regular recourse to biological metaphors is striking. In a passage on the survival of ideas, in Le Hazard et la nécessité (1970, translated 1971), the French biologist Jacques Monod observed that ideas, like biological organisms, ‘tend to perpetuate their structures and to multiply them; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their contents; in short they can evolve, and in this evolutionary selection certainly plays an important role’.18 It is a commonplace to speak of the modern novel as ‘evolving’ from stories, such as those found in the Decameron or The Canterbury Tales. But surely it is time to move beyond the unconsidered use of the word ‘evolving’ and time to speculate on the laws that might possibly govern the evolution of literary forms.
Taking a lead from the geneticist Richard Dawkins, it may be useful to think of the story as a ‘selfish word-string’, on the lines of the selfish gene.19 This word-string has no volition of its own, but it is nevertheless unconsciously engaged in a blind struggle for survival through replication. I use the word ‘replicate’ advisedly. Word-strings are carried from coffee-house to coffee-house, and from library to library. At present, however, many problems remain to be resolved. How does a story’s ‘generation’ take place? And what is the unit of replication? Is it the story? Or is it the story-motif? In the latter case, would the story be merely a way for the story-motif to reproduce itself? If stories compete with one another for the attention of audiences and thus survival, what forms of adaptation will enhance a story’s memorability and assist its transmission and survival? Stories must offer something to their human hosts in order to make the crucial leap from memory to memory or page to page. One way a story may commend itself to its host is if the host can make a living by telling it (and here Arab beggars’ tales of legendary generosity are a particularly cogent case in point). Alternatively, a story may promote the survival of a group by promoting its cohesion and sense of common history (a saga like that of Omar bin al-Nu’uman might serve as an example). Two stories may link together in order to improve their chance of survival (as we have seen the ‘weeping bitch’ story-type link up with ‘The Wife’s Clever Response’ to form ‘The Tale of the Woman who Wanted to Deceive her Husband’). Similarly, by inserting themselves within a framing story, if the frame story survives, then the stories are likely to survive too. A number of quite dull and insipid tales thus survived under the umbrella of Sheherazade’s narration. Stories have to adapt to the culture in which they find themselves (thus the specifically Indian features of tales taken from Katha Sarit Sagara – for example, Indian names and references to the Hindu pantheon – have been weeded out in the Nights versions). As in genetics proper, so in storytelling, error, or mutation, may occasionally enhance the viability of stories (for example, the error of transmission which caused Cinderella’s fur slippers eventually to become glass ones).
