Arabian Nights week 9
Stories
Three apples
- Random fisherman pulls up chest containing a murdered woman
- Caliph gives Jafar three days to find culprit, but spends first two in a funk
- At the last minute, two men confess to the murder
- Young man tells of his faultless wife, her illness, and craving for an apple
- He travels to Basra, gets apples, but she doesn't want them
- Then young man meets his wife's lover with one of the apples
- He then murdered his wife.
- Then his son reveals that the slave stole the apple from the boy
- Caliph orders the slave executed instead
- Jafar waits, then finds apple was stolen by one of his daughter's slaves
- Caliph laughs at the tale, no executions
Dalila the crafty
- Sets out to prove her equal to the men
- Assembles strange collection of items: pitcher with coins, beads, flag
- Hassan Road-Hazard is angry because he has no son, blames his wife Khatun
- Dalila targets Khatun
- Cons her way to Khatun
- Gets her clothes, the merchant's purse, the contents of the dyer's shop, the donkey
- The victims fight
Notes and comments
Three apples
- Is this the inspiration behind the modern detective novel?
- Is this a mirror for princes, a comment on Shahriyah's murder spree
- Trope of caliph in disguise
- Caliph responsible for the actions of his people. True in other Arabian Nights tales? True in European tales?
- If this is a detective story, Jafar doesn't do much detecting
- Story ends with laughter: do you think this a fitting end?
Dalila the crafty
- Lovable rogue character: heists, capers, cons
- Cairo setting
- Translation avoids assumption of deceitful women, clever men
- Commonplace magic, visions, etc allow Dalila to run her con
- Who deserves to be a victim of the crimes? Khatun maybe, but the others?
- We've got to an actual mid-story cliffhanger. Does this break-point work make you keen for next week?
Comments
The apples - a fun story, though personally I don't see it as leading towards modern detective stories! The emphasis is on fate leading inexorably towards the self-revelation of the perpetrator, rather than anybody's skill in finding it out. There are, perhaps, closer links with The Brothers Karamazov, in which the guilt of the criminal forces him inevitably towards confession, though even there the policeman has in fact deduced it, and the waiting game is not to reveal the truth but to ensure that the criminal confesses it. But I enjoyed the tale anyway!
An interesting connection to Genesis in the apple - the wife says "I crave an apple. If I could only smell and take a bite of one, I would die happy" which kind of echoes Eve, but in this case an Eve who already knows that death will follow. (Of course, the Hebrew only has "fruit" rather than "apple" though for obscure reasons an apple seems to be the fruit most commonly assumed).
Leader responsible for the misdemeanors of his subjects? (Even when he cannot possibly have known). To me this feels like something that has emerged in modern Europe in a democratic context rather than a feudal or monarchic one - a politician or business leader is supposed to resign under similar circumstances, though as we know it doesn't always happen. I think the European trope is more that the king suffers with his people, and King George VI was popularly felt by many to have exemplified this during the Second World War.
Dalila - quite a different feel to this, with its solidly urban context rather than moving between the city and the countryside. Again a fun story, and very much in the vein of the origins of the Disney Aladdin who is a "street rat" usually on the wrong side of the law and constantly pilfering in the marketplaces. I watched most of the 1992 version (with Robin Williams as the genie) at the weekend and reading this book has given some extra depth. For one thing, I never spotted before that the vizier is Jafar, just as in many of the tales we are reading - though Jafar in Aladdin is of the wicked-vizier lineage rather than honest-vizier. And we have a sultan rather than a caliph, and I'm hazy on the differences! But all great fun, especially seeing how the imagery and background of the Tales was adapted for a children's audience.
Here again we see the swift reversal of fortunes that frequent so many of the tales. And boy, how different is Harun al-Rashid’s personality here. Gone is so-called the king of justice. He’ll hang not only his trusted advisor, but 40 of that advisors cousins, too. And nobody batted an eye.
About the king being responsible for the well-being of people in his realm, this is yet another idea that has its roots in ancient Iraq, because in those old days, in those very old days, the king or governor of a city was responsible for the well-being of travellers in his country. This was to protect the lives and property of merchants from afar, and encourage them to come. The king held the ultimate responsibility, but often deferred this to district leaders or mayors.
I have less to say about Dalila, but this story has so many great character names: Aladdin of the Beautiful Moles, Ahmad the Plague, Calamity Hassan, Mercury Ali, Zaynab the Sly, The Sheikh of Plenty (who sounds like a furniture salesman).
Makes me want to play the setting.
Also, it’s rather convoluted in terms of plotting. I’m sure Barbara Mertz would have something to say about that.
Oh yes, totally! There's no grand master plan to accomplish the end-goal, just a series of opportunistic seize-the-moment actions based on chance encounters. It has the feel of something that could be endlessly added onto by a storyteller who could go on all night inventing random meetings that she could exploit.
Dalila's story is convoluted, but it's a con! Convoluted stories are a hallmark of the genre. As for just adding random meetings, the fun comes when all those seemingly-random parts come together for the final master plan. That's the hard bit to pull off. I thought it was a fun story.
Kind of like Ocean's Eleven And I agree it was fun