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Arabian Nights week 19
Story
Tailor's son
- Aladdin grows up an ungrateful wastrel
- Maghrebi magician arrives, says is Aladdin's uncle, gives money.
- The magician sets up Aladdin as a cloth merchant
A ring and a lamp
- Magician takes Aladdin to the gardens outside the city, then further.
- In a mountain pass, the magician casts a spell and reveals a trap door. He forces Aladdin to open it and go down.
- Aladdin follows instructions, takes the lamp and plenty of jewel fruit
- Aladdin refuses to hand over the lamp before he emerges. In a rage, the magician traps him in the cave.
- We get the magicians backstory as he leaves
Slave of the ring
- Aladdin rubs the ring, summons the jinni, and is rescued from the cave. He walks back to the city
- He returns home and recounts his story to his mother.
Slave of the lamp
- The mother cleans the lamp in preparation to sell it. Another jinni appears. Aladdin asks it for food.
- Aladdin realises he has power, but must be circumspect.
- He sells the silver tableware for much less than it's worth.
- He matures, no longer playing with boys.
- He eventually understands the true value of what he has, and waits to take advantage of it.
Notes
- Galland tried to connect the story to the frame; Diyab just told a story
- Do the North Americans have christmas panto, or know about it? (Oh no they don't)
- Aladdin the wastrel: is this the version of the character you know? Do you prefer a more sympathetic one?
- Aladdin can't take other treasures: again, the idea of restraint and worthiness. But this time it's imposed, not innate.
- What do you think of the magician throwing away all this work, so easily?
- As per note 50, p. 437: these jinni are good servants, not hostile and not twisting the wishes into something unpleasant.
- This is a pretty obvious "coming of age" story, with Aladdin going from the carefree boy to mature, sensible adult. But this is different from the earlier stories, where people abandon themselves to fate.
Comments
Although these later stories are more adventurous, and more developed as stories, the earlier ones were better adapted to the frame story in that they seemed to provide ‘lessons’ to the king, and their seemingly random events gave a sense of wonder (in the sense of ‘how on earth could this happen?’, whereas the later stories (while still containing wonders) seem better explained and less mysterious. Also, we get fewer cliff-hanger breaks. I think I actually prefer the later stories, but just noting the difference.
One thing I do now remember about Aladdin is the fact their were two genies, and even back then this didn’t make sense to me. If the magician already had a genie in his service who could grant wishes, why does he need a lamp with a genie at all? And if a genie is so valuable, why give the ring to Aladdin and so easily walk away from both ring and lamp later? This whole plot point never really made sense to me. Somehow in the child’s version I heard, I was able to reconcile these things (like maybe the ring only granted 3 wishes and was therefore of limited value compared to the lamp, and the magician had used up his three.)
I found this story quite fascinating, because of both its similarities to and differences from the Aladdin stories I know - mostly of course the Disney version with Robin Williams but other pantomime versions too. By strange coincidence, the amateur dramatic group here in Grasmere did a version this Christmas which was set in China, and I'd thought at the time how weird, shouldn't it be somewhere in the middle East, but apparently the screenplay writer was staying faithful to the original!
What else? I found the comments about the transformation of Aladdin from lazy-good-for-nothing to misunderstood-nice-but-poor-guy very interesting. It's certainly true that over here we don't like, as a rule, the idea that good fortune is entirely undeserved, so we look for some hidden virtue if there's no obvious noble deed mentioned.
I noticed that there was no "three wishes" limit here - apparently the owner of the lamp or whatever can just keep going as long as they want. That puts quite a different complexion on the story than the idea that wish #3 has to undo and repair all the problems caused by wishes #1 and 2. I suppose it's one of the changes that occurred during the assimilation into Europe, but I found it odd that the commentator didn't make anything of this.
Who can read of Aladdin opening the secret entrance without hearing Disney Iago the parrot saying "Squawk! Cave of Wonders!"
Hilarious that for quite a long time Aladdin's apparent best use of this artefact is to get meals delivered on silver trays and flog the trays to merchants! You'd think even he would have a better plan than that...
Other notes I made going along.
1) The opening interlude referencing Shahrazad and Dunyazad makes quite different reading than most of them we've had so far (and all the rest in this tale so far) - here it's Dunyazad who is tasked with reminding Shahrazad to carry on with the next exciting episode, and seems to have taken on the role of go-between with the sultan.
2) We keep getting drip-fed clues that the magician is up to no good, eg he is suddenly described as "the wily magician", and shortly after he clobbers Aladdin "so hard that he fell to earth" (and I wondered in passing if this was a forward reference to David Bowie? Is he space traveller supposed to be a kind of Aladdin who discovers that the earthly cave of wonders can't in fact be resisted?)
3) The sapphires and other gems that looked like fruit - again used by CS Lewis, this time in The Silver Chair where similar descriptions are used of the gemstones in the deep land of Bism.
4) I don't think we yet know why there are two artefacts - ring and lamp - rathe than just one.
And the album Aladdin Sane has the track Jean Genie