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Arabian Nights week 7
Stories
First dervish
- Son of a king
- cousin persuaded him to escort cousin and a woman into a chamber below a tomb
- Dervish couldn't find the tomb
- Captured by usurping vizir on return home
- Blinded by vizir for childhood accident
- Executioner allows the dervish to flee
- Returns to uncle, finds the tomb, finds cousin and woman turned to charcoal. Uncle is pleased
- Uncle reveals incest between cousin and his sister, adopts dervish
- Vizir attacks uncle
- Dervish goes into hiding as a dervish
Second dervish
- Son of a king, well-learned.
- Ambushed while travelling to king of India
- Wanders, finds a city, but in a feud with his father
- Takes up woodcutting to make ends meet
- Finds a hidden chamber containing a beautiful woman.
- She was kidnapped by a jinni, who "visits" her every ten days
- She invites him to stay for a while, they fall in love
- Drunk, he summons the jinni intending to kill him, but flees
- He seals the chamber, leaving jinni to torture the woman
- Jinni tracks him down, takes him to the woman's chamber
- Collusion via eyebrows, refuse to kill each other
- Jinni kills(?) the woman, about to transform the man
Envied and envier
- Envied man lives blameless life, receives reward
- Envier pushes envied into a well
- Jinn haunting the well discuss him, the king's daughter, and how to rid her of possession
- Next day, the envied does that and, over time, becomes vizir then king.
- Later, rewards envier and does not punish him
Second dervish
- jinni persuaded by the moral, spares the man, but transforms him to an ape
- Eventually leaps aboard a ship
- Gains sympathy of captain, then proves worth with calligraphy
- King's daughter sees through the enchantment, revealing her magical abilities
- She battles the jinni, shifting shapes. Eventually wins, breaks the spell, but dies soon after
- King exiles the man, who becomes a dervish mystic
Comments and questions
General
- From the length of the comments, it's clear that these are fast-paced stories with little description and character development. Do you think a more novel-type writing, with a slower pace, would be better?
First dervish
- More drinking being a plot point
- Lots of reversals of fortune.
- What killed the incestuous cousins?
- Note on . 105. Is there evidence of the first dervish not adhering to his faith? How are we supposed to learn this lesson?
- Do you think this tale hangs together? Is it anything other than a run of bad luck? What lessons should we learn from it?
Second dervish
- Contrast between dangerous countryside and safe cities. Again, stories by and for the urban people
- Another story of royalty laid low.
- If he was in the city for a year, couldn't he arranged to have left and returned home? Bah, logic isn't for stories!
- Jinni has a family, and treats the woman as a hidden mistress! Jinni are human in many ways
- Leaving a woman to be tortured: not exactly heroic acts!
- Virtuous nature of hte kidnapped bride: a contrast to the cuckolding wives of earlier in the book?
Envied and envier
- Pretty clear moral here! Does the story do anything other than present the moral?
Second dervish
- Accepting of fate as a monkey: fatalism is good?
- Why didn't he write down his story at first? Again, bah, logic.
- Fun magic battle! What did you think of this?
- Again, the belief that the caliph will make everything good.
Comments
You're right, there are a lot of plot holes in these stories! Presumably Shahrazad or whoever simply reckoned that their listener would be carried along in the moment and not question it...
The transformation into ape - there was a 19th century fascination in England (and maybe elsewhere) for animals exhibiting human-like skills. So for example there were several "learned pigs" (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_pig) who on command could pick out letters or shapes. This got turned into the novel Pyg by Russell Potter (see https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13045593-pyg) and make sa fun read. So... this all made me wonder if the idea of a speaking / writing / whatever creature might have entered British consciousness by way of The Arabian Nights, or whether it's simply an obvious idea.
The shape-shifting battle has (obviously) been taken up by all manner of fantasy authors - one such treatment that I know is Patricia McKillip's Riddlemaster of Hed (which I believe we read together a while back) where a similar battle takes place.
All in all a fast-paced and fun section to read! (and again, the length of the hypothesised nightly sections was very irregular)
Arabic Folktale: something happens by chance to lay a good person low, and they need to climb back up. A tossed date put kills an invisible jinn child, or a man gets robbed, or runs afoul of a witch.
European Folktale: A man meets an outwardly ugly person but does well by them and that person is magically restored to the princess she once was, and they get married.
I think something common to both might be:
Or a woman is told she must never do some innocuous thing (like open a door, or inquire of someone’s past) and when she does something good is taken away.
Thoughts?
Also - more Mesopotamian roots are revealed in the sentiment that the city is good, and the countryside bad. Also in that the king will be the saviour. And the wizard’s duel goes back that far, too - as mentioned in one of the Enmerkar myths, in which Sagburu the wise woman defeats the sorcerer from Hamazi in a wizard’s duel of transforming animals.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enmerkar_and_En-suhgir-ana
I'm not sure the preference for urban life is a uniquely Mesopotamian thing. I think it's a reflection that these stories are told for and by urban people, and there are plenty of cities in the Islamic world. If you're a middle-class city dweller, the city is home and the countryside is a hostile wilderness where you can't even get a decent cup of coffee.
Yes, there are loads of familiar tropes in these stories. Are they independent inventions or did they draw from each other? I don't know enough folklore research to know, but I guess that most of the time the answer is "Probably both, but we don't really know." Different cultures were separated, but not that separated, and travellers spread stories as they go.
I enjoyed the Second Dervish's tale more: it had ups and downs, while the First Dervish's tale was a constant run of misfortune.
> Also - more Mesopotamian roots are revealed in the sentiment that the city is good, and the countryside bad. Also in that the king will be the saviour.
James C Scott argues that we should see this as a common response countering problems rooted in 1) Urbanization, e.g. increased transmission of disease, 2) Overreliance on agriculture which is labour intensive, leading to 2a) Loss of leisure time due to the structural division of work into classes who support others (the loss of leisure happens to both sides), 2b) Increased vulnerability to famine due to loss of mobility etc. when climate or environment changes.
I think these problems were first dealt with through a mythological reasoning based on a sacred and sacrificial agent-object, which I think was gradually symbolized and structured into an intentional political system of kingship.
What do you think is the relation between Mesopotamia and Egypt?
I found this an interesting idea to explore! You could probably argue that the biblical story of Job fits your "Arabic" pattern, once again pushing this storytelling motif back into the ancient world. And of course the European tradition from the late Roman period onwards has already been influenced via the Bible from the ancient near east, so yo'd kind of expect cross-fertilisation to have taken place.
So I was wondering about classical Greek myths, a lot of which seem to involve a person running foul of one or other god (usually by making some unkind or overly proud statement) and having to cope with the consequences, which might last years or even be life-long (eg turned into an animal or whatever).