Open Sesame

Hey all -- I hope you're enjoying the weekend and the first half of Midnight's Children (hopefully not so much, though, that you are expectorating your own long red jets of betel-juice onto your apartment walls). "Expectorations" are actually relevant to the Bakhtin reading, which includes the by now familiar elaboration of the carnivalesque. It will also be appropriate as a follow-up to The Arabian Nights reading from last week, which was littered with its own exaggerated renditions of bodily functions and overturning of social and political hierarchies. There are also a few readings listed from Imaginary Homelands for this Tuesday, too, but I'm aware of the reading load for the week and I'm inclined to begin seeing these IH essays as supplemental (and nearly optional) readings (unless otherwise noted). I'll certainly be referring to them at times, and they will undoubtedly find ways of cross-pollinating effectively with the primary reading. By the way, given how densely allusive and frenetic Rushdie's narratives can be, you might think about beginning some manner of personal indexing initiative as you proceed through Midnight's Children and beyond; it's never too early to start hatching and tracking ideas for your final papers, and archiving page numbers and passages will be very beneficial to you as the reading piles up and the semester matures.

Are there any residual comments out there regarding The Arabian Nights, I wonder? It's such a quirkily fascinating entry on the schedule that maybe we won't quite realize its full value and place in the semester's program until we look back a bit retrospectively. I certainly value it as a work that offers art and storytelling as an alternative to violence. That's why, I guess, Scheherazade's particular response to paternal authority is so notable before the tales themselves get going; her father tries to invoke his authority (and the cautionary tale he tells her involves a punitive relationship between a man and his wife) and she responds by boasting she can tell stories to beat his. The power of the word ("Open Sesame!"), the power of the story, the power of wit, poetic skill and improvisation are valorized time and again in this work. As we consider pre-Islamic and early Islamic culture and society, too, this is a fact that resonates. Islam was just a few centuries old when the oral versions of these stories started circulating: it was a time, perhaps, when the religion's dogmas were not yet quite established, when there was cross-cultural understanding, when Christians, Jews, and Muslims weren't as given to making distinctions between their respective faiths. One suspects that such multi-dimensional pluralism may be an important part of the appeal of The Arabian Nights in Rushdie's adult imagination.

Our conversation about the interplay between the frame story and the nested tales also makes me that much more interested in the ethical dimensions of this text: not only is there Scheherazade's project to change and rehabilitated Shahrayar, but there's also the broader implications surrounding the tales' tendency to criticize tyranny, to extol forgiveness, to counteract self-centered identities, and to posit alternative societies and realities. Maybe this is a thread to which we can return when we get to Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Somehow, too, I think our discussion of the formal aspects of The Arabian Nights can profitably be carried further: the division of the work into nights, the various experiences and understandings of time in the tales, the competing ideas of linearity and simultaneity, the twin strategies of interruption and continuity, the forward movement and the recursiveness, the narratological rhythm, the narrative strategies that invoke such ideas as boundaries, transitions, perspectives, empty spaces, intervals, separations, connections, gaps, divergences and diversions, opposites and contradictions ...

I don't think we discussed the role of the verse/poetic material within the tales, either. This is another area where the translators become an issue: Lane mostly omitted the verses, Dawood eliminated them altogether, and Burton translated them into an inflated style. They were, in any event, according to Haddawy, "intended to heighten the action, raise the literary level, and intensify the emotional effect," and many of them trace back to the most prominent classical Arab poets. The Prophet Muhammad, by the way, is reported to have said that "verily eloquence includes sorcery," thus suggesting an uncertain line between writing a poem and casting a spell (and thus earning him a place in any history of classical rhetoric).

One last little aside, regarding the humor of The Arabian Nights: I chuckled when I encountered the title of "The Tale of the Second Lady, the Flogged One." Another tale that seems like it could resonate in the context of our course and Rushdie's work, too, is "The Tale of the King's Son and the She-Ghoul" -- the one where the King is amazed to consider that the head of the sage Duban will speak to him after being lopped off. The detached head does indeed speak, instructing the King to read the book, but the latter must lick his fingers to turn the pages of a book that has been poisoned and that contains no stories. Here it's the blank pages -- the absence of narrative -- that kills ...