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Arabian Nights week 6
Stories
Enchanted prince's story
- Prince overhears that his wife is unfaithful
- He follows, spies her pleading with her lover
- It's revealed she's a sorcerer of some form.
- Prince attempt to kill the lover
- Wife builds house of grief, secretly nurses wounded lover
- Eventual confrontation, wife curses the prince (to half stone), the people (to fishes), the land (to a lake)
Enchanted prince
- King kills the lover and hides
- He tricks the wife/sorceress into undoing her spells
- Returns home, all live happily ever after
Porter and three women
- A beautiful woman hires a porter, buys varied and exotic foods
- They eventually go to her home, where she's greeted by even more beautiful women, in a private home
- Porter talks his way into staying for a while, sworn to secrecy, but is overwhelmed and becomes bawdy
- The women become bawdy, debauchery ensues
- Porter asks to stay, accepted when he promises to ask no questions
- Three dervishes arrive, porter declines to answer their questions
- Then the incognito caliph appears, is invited in
- Later, the owner beats two chained dogs, the buyer sings to the keeper, who is mysteriously covered in bruises
- The men conspire to ask the women their story, but are captured and must tell their stories for their lives.
- The porter tells his and leaves
Comments
Enchanted Prince's story
- How much should we read this story as a comment on Shahriyah's cuckolding and revenge, and how much is this just a fun adventure tale in its own right?
Enchanted prince
- Re note 66 (p. 73): is this story more engaging than others?
- The style has moved from fable to horror
- The notes stress the importance of speech and words in the story. Do you agree?
- Different styles of magic: Duban's of potions for healing or killing, the womans of chants to transform
- Various dangling elements in the story: the admonition to only fish the lake once per day, the woman talking to the cooked fish.
- Very obviously two disconnected tales put together. I've not been able to find anything about the origin of this frankenstein-story.
Porter and three women
- I remember reading this one in the other translation, and it's fun.
- A story of the Islamic golden age, Abbasid caliphate
- What do you think of the flowery language describing the market, the women, the house?
- wine drinking is not unheard of
- Do you get the impression that the women's house is outside the mundane realm? Is that a good bit of writing?
- The set-up of just these people arriving on this night: more or less believable than the fisherman and jinni, or other stories?
Comments
A few thoughts, mostly disconnected from your comments (
)
When the prince is told about the infidelity and fakes drinking wine "When my wife returned, the feast was served, we had a bite and went to bed. I only pretended to drink from the cup, then spit it out and made a show of sleep" - the footnote reads, with particular reference to the last phrase "in adopting iambic pentameter for passages such as this, the poet shows through the translator. The regular rhythm brings the prose closer to spoke language and to song"
My thoughts - it is kind of a long stretch to suggest that Yasmine Seale has "adopted iambic pentameter" when it's just for one phrase - the previous phrase "I only pretended to drink from the cup" is fairly obviously in triplets. Because of how English works as a language, it's easy to see iambic pentameters in what is actually a fairly ordinary sentence. In short, I'm happy to go along with the idea that one can use regular rhythms in language to suggest artistry or song, but I'm not convinced that this is happening here.
The prince follow the wife/witch - her skills has curious shortcomings! She can command locked gates to open but apparently not realise that her husband has climbed up on a roof and is spying on them... But then, it's these little flaws that are usually the downfall of baddies!
The wife/witches curse on the city talks of
"a ruin for the owls and crows to haunt,
a playground for the foxes and the wolves".
There's a couple of interesting echoes way back into the Hebrew Bible here, where Isaiah says of Edom
"the great owl and the raven will nest there,
she will become a haunt for jackals, a home for owls"
and Jeremiah of Babylon
"So desert creatures and hyenas will live there,
and there the owl will dwell"
Perhaps there's a long-standing middle eastern curse formula of this kind.
Also curious here is the annotators failure to notice the poetic device of parallelism , which I've highlighted here in the lineation of the Arabian Nights extract as well as the biblical ones. Parallelism is a standard poetic and rhetorical device all around the fertile crescent and into Egypt, and a far more likely device to be used in the original than metrical feet! I strongly suspect that Yasmine Seale was perfectly aware of this, but the annotator sems not to have been.
No particular thoughts about the Porter and Three Women story but it's very compelling and I am very much enjoying it
Difficult to say, really. Maybe this was just a common theme and this element existed in the story before it was ever collected into the Nights - in which case I guess the answer might 'none' if its presence is accidental. Or perhaps the was added specifically to bring the tie-in, in which case 'some'. But perhaps the story was purposely invented and, as note 66 suggests, designed to draw the king's suspense because he could identify with all these cuckolded characters, in which case 'tons' might be the answer.
Not to me, but maybe to an Arab audience, or to the King.
I might disagree with the annotator here - many fables have pretty horrific elements, so I don't think we've changed lanes.
Yes, the notes do stress that.
Yes, odd that, given how many times the story has been passed down - the details must have been left behind. The next story has even more dangling elements.
Arabian Nights might be the first fix-up novel. Oh, no - on second thought, that's Gilgamesh.
Frankly I love it. The opening of this story is my favourite part of the book so far.
I didn't, but I do now that you mention it - good sussing.
I suspect were back in Fix-up land, here, but let's see where this goes.
I don't really have much in the way of notes of my own, though I wonder at the porter's ability to remain flaccid through all of this. He might, of course, suffer from ED.
By my reading, he really didn't. There was a lot happening between the bathing and the arrival of the dervishes, and the porter is now recovering from all his exertions.
@RichardAbbott I agree with you that the annotator seems to be stretching, not just about "poetic language," but also in using contemporary genre for analysis. I am not getting much out of the annotations, but I think that's likely because they were not written for me. I think that this text is intended to be of use in an undergraduate university course.
I am noticing a consistent use of water to eliminate the power of magic / the supernatural - a kind of cleansing of the "stain" of the non-human world irrupting into the human, with its corresponding effect of regressing people into animals. At the same time this story is different as it is humans who bring the stain into the human world, and we have a fairly common "heroes' quests" type of stories. It's interesting how so much of the RPG world seems to have systems that permit, maybe even reward "accountant's quest" kind of scenarios.
I was also interested in the Enchanted Prince series how the protagonist moves from the fisherman to the King - presumably the fisherman hasn't levelled up enough to face the monsters on the second level of the dungeon. Off hand Ars Magicka is the only game I can think of that provides systematic methods to enables that kind of switch within a dungeon crawl scenario, let alone a campaign.
Re reading the Enchanted Prince as critique: It's hooey of course. While the story seems to challenge the social order (the society is rescued because of the actions of the lowly), the tension is released by the restoration of a proper king ruling the lowly by another king from "far away and long from now" who uses violence to restore the "natural" social order. Cue questionable analysis and discussion of the tension between patriarchal societies trying to establish dominion over matriarchal homes, restorative vs retributive justice, etc.
Anyway, it seems to me that the stories as told here are at the end not transgressive or revolutionary at all, they function to enhance and restore the current state of affairs by presenting them as how we have eased the stress of living. That state of affairs consists of a "brotherhood" of kings who intervene to maintain the hegemony of that substitute for actual family relations. Another mirror - here society is a reflection of family, with the implicit assertion that the reflection is more important than the object reflected. These are originally theological concepts.
About the Porter and Three Women:
I see what you did there - slow hand clap.
Not sure what you mean by mundane realm. Seems to me that that human realm can be divided into two: The family world managed by women inside, the social world managed by men outside. This inside / outside structure can be nested, reflected etc.
Beyond this polar human world is the natural world, which is not human, i.e. not inhabited, tamed, etc., although humans do go between human worlds (habitations) for e.g. commerce. It's a place of danger, and also of reward, in short of transformation which threatens the stability humans need for flourishing while also providing the necessities for flourishing. The polarity human / natural again can be nested, reflected, etc.
The relation between these two worlds is fraught. So far I haven't seen much of the supermundane world (God, angels, etc.) in the stories. I think there's a point about a non-European secularity here, but that is just a speculation.
In the case of the house, one needs to be invited in, and then there’s the recitation of the formula inscribed on the wall. I think it’s a fascinating idea.
This is interesting. I would like to play Ars Magicka someday. This idea of a sacral inside space is something I see being used in all kinds of scenarios (a church, a castle, a prison, a dungeon, a wardrobe, a train, a space-ship, etc.), but in so-called "realistic" settings its other-worldly nature and rules seem to be unconsciously implicit rather than explicitly designed as an aspect of building a world that is believable but different from our own. It's also a great way to create the taste of a culture that is not our own (i.e. the borders of the spaces are not delimited they way they are in our world).
I still think that the cultural context of these stories means there is obvious play upon the tension of there being a private domestic life governed by women within the public house of the ruler / governor, and the reversals of status that occur there - e.g. the Caliph's discomfort having entered the domestic realm at night. OTOH the Porter did find that particular domestic arrangement a faerie realm as you so nicely put it.
That was the idea. And it's not in conflict with @BarnerCobblewood 's idea. The women's house is a place where "normal" rules don't apply, where the "normal" social order is upended (promiscuous women, the caliph in hiding, obviously magical requirements being fulfilled). How much of that is about the private realm being different from the public, and how much is about the world of jinni and sorcerers being different from everyday life, is a good question.
Yep. The story is still one about how a king re-establishes the "correct" order and removes the transgression.