TALES IN THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
II. The Arabian Nights
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armory and everything found among his treasures. There was nothing in his palace or in all his kingdom that Hezekiah did not show them. Then Isaiah the prophet went to King Hezekiah and asked, "What did those men say, and where did they come from?" "From a distant land," Hezekiah replied.
"They came from Babylon." The prophet asked, "What did they see in your palace?" "They saw everything in my palace," Hezekiah said. "There is nothing among my treasures that I did not show them." Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, "Hear the word of the LORD: The time will surely come when everything in your palace, and all that your predecessors have stored up until this day, will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the LORD.”
(2 Kings 20: 12-17)
Like Psyche in mythology, King Hezekiah opens his house completely to visitors.
After the visit, in both stories the visitors conspire to replace the hosts and become the new masters of their possessions. Psyche is tested and seduced by her sisters and she agrees to test her husband Cupid. Cupid therefore leaves her. Nevertheless, unlike King Hezekiah, in the story of Cupid and Psyche, a series of adventures start when Psyche attempts to seek her husband back. They are lovely adventure-stories, and they account for my argument that hospitality diverts the orbit of life and colors life with surprises. It may not necessarily be the transcendence of life, but is certainly the transformation of it.
II.
The Arabian Nights
Arguing the limits and twists in our ethical concern as they are realized in hospitality and gift-giving, this dissertation purports not only to understand some of
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the most important works of Derrida and Levinas but also to understand certain literature better.10 From this perspective, many literary works with plots of hospitality and gift-giving merit our academic attention because they shed light on the ambiguity, dilemma, and wishes in human existence and relationship from a previously less employed angle. The following discussion is based on some of the most popular stories in the Arabian Nights in order to investigate how they reveal the most basic human desires.
A. The Opening Scenes of the Arabian Nights
1. Once upon a time, there was a gift. It draws our attention to see how a classic of marvels and adventures starts the narration. In a word, the stories to be discussed start by gift-giving and substitution—two pivotal ideas of our discussion in this dissertation—because it initiates by explaining how a gift-giver forgets his gift and how a woman volunteers to replace all the others to be the victim of a cruel marriage:
In time long gone, there was a King of the Kings of the Banu Sasan. When he died, the doughtier and also the elder of his two sons succeeded to the empire. His name was King Shahryar, and he made his younger brother Shah Zaman, King of Samarcand. Each ruled his own kingdom “with equity and fair-dealing to his subjects, in extreme solace and enjoyment; and this condition continually endured for a score of years.” One day the elder King yearned to see his brother, but his Prime Minister advised him to invite his younger brother to visit him instead. Handsome gifts were prepared, and the King wrote a touching letter for the Prime Minister to take to Shah Zaman. After the younger King Shah Zaman received the Prime Minister, he agreed to visit his beloved brother. But on the first night of his journey he remembered that he had forgotten in his palace a gift (ﺔﻳﺪه), a string of jewel bead (ةزﺮﺨﻟا), which he should
10 Cf. Irwin, Robert, The Arabian Nights: A Companion. London: Tauris Parke, 2005.
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have taken with him.11 He returned for it alone, entered his apartments privately, and found the Queen’s adultery. He then slaughtered the two, without letting anyone know of his pain.
As the story developed, even the elder brother King Shahryar was similarly betrayed by his queen—perhaps even worse and more humiliating than his young brother. So the elder King Shahryar decided to marry and slaughter one woman each day to relieve his hurt.
The volunteer visit of the Prime Minister’s daughter, Shahrazad, surprised not only her father, but also the King. The King might have guessed that all his brides from the past days were forced to be sacrificed, yet he definitely would not expect a beautiful bride-visitor (ﺔﻔﻴﻀﻟا) like Shahrazad to come. Most importantly, Shahrazad asked the King to let her welcome her sister at the wedding night, which was beyond his expectation again. As soon as the sister, Dunyazad, arrived at the palace,
Dunyazad made a request. She said that as a guest, she would like to listen to Shahrazad’s stories the whole night. It is because before leaving for the palace, our story teller had a plan for her life, though it required the compromise of the others: her sister and the king. Before she left for the palace, Shahrazad said to her younger sister, Dunyazad:
Note well what directions I entrust to thee! When I have gone into the king I will send for thee and when thou comes to me and sees that he has his carnal will of me, do thou say to me:--O my sister, an thou be not sleepy, relate to me some new story, delectable and delightsome, the better to speed our waking hours; and I will tell thee a tale which shall be our deliverance,
11 Cf. Arabic version of the Arabian Nights at web.
<http://ar.wikisource.org/wiki/لوﻷا_ءﺰﺠﻟا/ﺔﻠﻴﻟو_ﺔﻠﻴﻟ_ﻒﻟأ>.
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if so Allah please, and which shall turn the King from his blood-thirsty custom. (Burton 26)
If her sister had not dare to request, or the king had wanted not to be interrupted, then the whole life course of these characters would be totally different, and surely we would not have Shahrazad’s tales which have lived on, perhaps in different forms, in many kinds of literature.
2. Welcoming and my relation with the other. That night should have been a wedding night, not a night of story-telling and hospitality. The coming day break should have been a slaughter, not the continuation of story-telling. Yet under the circumstance of hospitality, the demand of hosting the guest outweighs the demand of marriage. Henceforth, Shahrazad told her stories night after night, to the number of one hundred and eighty stories over one thousand and one nights. She bore three children to the King, and deferred the vengeful rule of the deeply hurt king, which is beyond what the king could have imagined. The small gesture of hospitality launches a new page of life. This is not an accustomed rule of hospitality; therefore, it is genuine hospitality: the host does not expect the arrival of the guest and does not know what a guest could bring to the host and the household (Derrida 2000: 5, 21).
Shahrazad plans and tells stories out of love—love for her life, for the other women, and perhaps for the king. Her love is to take initiatives in the most passive form of requiring hospitality from the king. Her love is self-conscious, as much as Aristotle has argued that it is more worthwhile to love (philia) than to be loved. Regarding love, we know that it is possible to be loved (passive voice) without knowing it, but it is impossible to love (active voice) without knowing it (Derrida 1997b: 9). By giving love a subject is assigned to a sentiment of which, precisely, one remains the subject.
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By requesting the passive form of hospitality, the loving subject achieves a
transformation of the host. Furthermore, this incommensurability between the lover and the beloved will unceasingly exceed all measurement and all moderation—that is, it will exceed the very principle of a calculation (1997b: 10). Shahrazad does not want more women to be killed by the king; she loves the women in the kingdom. In the Arabic text, she loves them to the level of substituting them as the scapegoat for them:
ﻦﻬﺻﻼﺨﻟ ﺎًﺒﺒﺳو ﻦﻴﻤﻠﺴﻤﻟا تﺎﻨﺒﻟ ءاﺪﻓ—she will be the scapegoat for Muslims girls and action may cause a salvation.12 This philia has several sides of effect: first, Shahrazad’s love to these women makes her the same as the other: they all share the same husband. Her sister, Dunyazad, also marries the king and bears children to him during those years.
However, Shahrazad is also different from all the other women: the King marries none after her and her gift (Dunyazad). Lastly, in a sense, Shahrazad gives a gift to her sister as well as the king by matching them. We are not sure how these two women view the gift. Does Dunyazad desire the gift of marriage after all? Does Shahrazad regret inviting her sister? As for the king, does he marry Dunyazad out of obligation, out of desire, or out of love, and if so to whom? The answers to all of these questions are not revealed in the Arabian Nights. We can only conclude that Shahrazad takes action and tells of adventures to give her life as a gift to the king, even though she is not sure what will happen to her. All she can rely on is that the king grants her request of hospitality to her sister—allowing them to stay together and listen to Shahrazad’s stories. Furthermore, Shahrazad, as the queen, also hosts her sister to the degree of sharing her palace/husband with her.
Derrida, in interpreting Oedipus, says:
The stranger [Oedipus], here the awaited guest, is not only someone to
12 For the Arabic text, see web. <http://ar.wikisource.org/wiki/لوﻷا_ءﺰﺠﻟا/ﺔﻠﻴﻟو_ﺔﻠﻴﻟ_ﻒﻟأ>.
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whom you say “come,” but “enter,” enter without waiting, make a pause in our home without waiting, hurry up and come in, “come inside,” “come within me,” not only toward me, but within me: occupy me, take place in me, which means, by the same token, also take my place, don’t content yourself with coming to meet me or “into my home.” Crossing the threshold is entering and not only approaching or coming. Strange logic but so
enlightening for us, that of an impatient master awaiting his guest as a liberator, his emancipator...the guest becomes the host of the host. (Derrida 2000: 124-25.)
By listening to stories from his bride-visitor, the King is liberated from his trauma. As for the story-teller herself, we do not know whether Shahrazad is happy or not during those years, and how much “otherness” she has to confront: the palace life, the teaching of Islamic laws of polygamy and her personal values, and the nightly weaving of interesting adventures to her stories. As a guest to the king’s home, she liberates the king, but she also has her own Other to welcome, be it her sister, or the king, or her new form of existence in the world, which we cannot illustrate further here. According to the Arabian Nights, she seems to be content. What we can be sure is that in her case, the philia, a love to humans, comes to her mind before marital love, and she seems to end up having both kinds of love. And after she has love, she stops giving (stories)—or does she produce stories exactly out of a lack of love?
B. The First Story in the Arabian Nights
So, what is the story which Shahrazad tells on the first night? Similar to the structure of emboxment in a Russian box, where each box is within another box, Shahrazad’s tales are one within several others. The title of this collection is from
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Arabic, Alf (thousand) Layla (nights) wa (and) Layla (one night). Therefore, in her introduction to Sir Richard F. Burton’s (1821-1890) edition of the Arabian Nights, A.S.
Byatt, an important contemporary English novelist and poet, claims that “the
collection of stories known as the Thousand and One Nights is in itself a symbol for infinity” (“Introduction” xiii). Byatt’s genuine comment comes from the following observations: the addition of the extra “one” to the round thousand not only suggests a way to mathematical infinity—you can always add one more to any number—but also produces a circular, a mirrorlike figure, 1001.13 From this structure comes the first story, the stories of “the Merchants and the Demon,” which includes three sub-stories:
the first Sheikh’s, the second Sheikh’s, and the third Sheikh’s. On the first night, Shahrazad told part of the first Sheikh’s story: a merchant traveled away and his mistress used black magic to turn his first wife and the son into a cow and a calf.
When he returned home, the mistress forced him to kill the cow for a festival feast.
After the cow was killed, then she wanted him to slaughter the calf, too. Fortunately, before the merchant was to repeat the same horrible mistake by putting his son into death with his own hands, a talented woman stranger visited and revealed the tricks which the mistress had played. She expelled the mistress’s black magic and
transformed the calf back into the youth he originally was. (Very intriguingly, she applied the same magic on the evil mistress by turning her into a gazelle. It is intriguing because basically the visitor exerted on the mistress-hostess—supposedly also a stranger to the house at the beginning—the same logic and manner of cunning.) Many years later, when the Sheikh was aged and he wished to search for his traveling son, he took the gazelle with him and it was during this journey that he ran into the
13 “Introduction.” The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights. Translated by Sir Richard Burton. Introduction by A. S. Byatt. New York: Modern Library Mass Market Edition, 2004. xiii.
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demon in the desert.14 The demon was about to kill a passenger who happened to spit out a date nut and then accidentally murdered the demon’s son, who was passing by at that moment. Since the Sheikh was amazed at this cause of the accident, he pleaded with the demon to let him stay so that he could see what would happen later. The demon swore to kill the unfortunate passenger for revenge, but he also allowed the Sheikh to stay and to let him tell his own unbelievable tale, agreeing that if the tale was really as unbelievable as his son’s accident, he would spare one third of the passenger’s sin. Therefore, when the first Sheikh revealed the story of his gazelle, the demon said, “indeed it is unbelievable, so for your sake, I am forgiving him one third of his sin.”
The demon was not obligated to agree to the Sheikh’s request. But he agreed. We find that in sum, there are three Sheikhs who brought three different animals, each with his own story related to his animal, but each pleaded the same petition. Each wants to sit down, to share his unbelievable story, and hopefully to spare one third of the sin of that ill-lucked transgressor. Finally, when put together, the three saved the passenger’s life. Why should the demon approve such a request at all? He could have dismissed them, or required them to keep quiet. In fact, now the scene of the demon and the Sheikhs recalls the event between the king and Shahrazad’s request: the master simply allows the visitor to stay and tell stories. But this is enough for reversing the course of lives. Who is the beneficiary? Is it the innocent and ill-fated passenger who almost lost his life, yet was saved? Is it the three Sheikhs, who after all did something good and important to the other, and who also have learned about unbelievable tales from each other? Is it the demon, whose anger and revenge are consoled by knowing that misfortune happens when Allah seems to agree to it? In the
14 The word “demon” in the Arabian Nights refers more to a Jinni, and is thus different from its biblical association.
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journey of life, who really owns mastery and who takes the initiative of knocking on the door of so-called fate?
C. Gift-Giving and Its Problematic Model: The Jinni’s Tale
1. A gift not taken. Even though gift-giving could initiate a journey of
experiencing the impossible for both the giver and the receiver, not every one wants to give or accept these kinds of gifts. The universally famed Jinni’s tale is a wonderful example. Let us look at the Jinni’s famous confession in the Arabian Nights to his savior the fisherman:
There I abode an hundred years, during which I said in my heart, “Whoso shall release me, him will I enrich for ever and ever.” But the full century went by and, when no one set me free, I entered upon the second five score saying, “Whoso shall release me, for him I will open the hoards of the earth.” Still no one set me free and thus four hundred years passed away.
Then quoth I, “Whoso shall release me, for him will I fulfill three wishes.”
Yet no one set me free. Thereupon I waxed wroth with exceeding wrath and said to myself, “Whoso shall release me from this time forth, him will I slay and I will give him choice of what death he will die; and now, as thou hast released me, I give thee full choice of deaths.”15
The Jinni was confined and thrown into the midst of the sea by King Solomon, the son of David, for hundreds of years. During those long years of waiting, he kept on changing the proposed content of the gift he planned to give to whoever released him.
At first he had hope, he had imagination of his savior, and he intended various,
15 Burton, “The Fisherman and the Jinni.” 33.
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amiable, precious gifts which were extremely attractive and materially abundant. As time went by, finally he became resentful to whoever answered his silent call to save him because he had waited too long: No one had answered his call, and therefore his gift could not be given at all. In other words, we have someone who wishes to give a gift, but there is not receiver. The Jinni’s gift turned into a poison: he promised himself that he would take his savior’s life instead. In this monologue of his lonely days preparing for the gift to whoever saved him, a specific situation which, as far as I know, no gift theories have seriously discussed: what if a gift-giving event cannot be realized as originally intended? What if the receiver is always absent and thus the module of giver-gift-receiver will not stand? Considering the same etymology of gift and poison, the indication of otherness, the time interval in gift-giving, we may
amiable, precious gifts which were extremely attractive and materially abundant. As time went by, finally he became resentful to whoever answered his silent call to save him because he had waited too long: No one had answered his call, and therefore his gift could not be given at all. In other words, we have someone who wishes to give a gift, but there is not receiver. The Jinni’s gift turned into a poison: he promised himself that he would take his savior’s life instead. In this monologue of his lonely days preparing for the gift to whoever saved him, a specific situation which, as far as I know, no gift theories have seriously discussed: what if a gift-giving event cannot be realized as originally intended? What if the receiver is always absent and thus the module of giver-gift-receiver will not stand? Considering the same etymology of gift and poison, the indication of otherness, the time interval in gift-giving, we may