Texts:
- Edward W. Lane, trans., "The City of Brass" (1838-40): from the Course Book of Readings: 151-74.
- David Pinault, "Story-Telling Techniques in the The Arabian Nights" (1992): from The Arabian Nights. Norton Critical Edition (2010): 504-19.
Plot Summary:
A Caliph, Abd al-Malik bin Marwan, of Damascus, is speaking with his Sultans, Kings and Grandees when their conversation turns to Solomon, who was lord over all kinds of beings. Solomon imprisoned and commanded Jinns and Marids with his ring. One man, Talib bin Sahl, tells the Caliph about how his father once travelled to an unknown land, where fishermen regularly caught copper bottles with the seal of Solomon. When one was opened, a Giant emerged and vanished. These Giants do not realize that Solomon is dead, and are still seeking forgiveness.
At the Caliph's request, Talib has his brother write to Musa bin Nusayr, govenor of Morocco. They form a group travelling through the desert, until they reach a hill where a horseman of brass is. They rub the statue's hand and it turns to face the city. On the way they find a black stone pillar, in which an Ifrit named Dahish, son of Al-A’amash, is imprisoned. Dahish worked against Solomon but was captured by Al-Dimiryat, the king of the Jann, and imprisoned and chained in the pillar by Solomon.
Dahish tells the group that they can find more Ifrits in brass bottles in the sea of Al-Karkar, and that the City of Brass is nearby. They find the city walls, but also marble tablets covered in warnings. They build a ladder to get over the wall, but the first man seems to go mad and throws himself down into the city. This continues with each climber until Emir Musa goes up. By reciting from Allah's Book, he is able to avoid falling under the spell of the ten maidens in the city, who were causing men to throw themselves to their deaths.
Musa explores along the wall and finally opens the gate. Investigating, they find the corpses of the city's inhabitants. In a palace they find the enbalmed body of Tadmurah, an Amalekite princess. Against Musa's orders, Talib greedily tries to take some of her treasures. The statues begin to move and kill him.
They take some of the treasure not belonging to Tadmurah and leave. They meet a cave where some black men are staying, and are given twelve brass bottles. They arrive in Damascus and tell the Caliph everything that has occurred. He frees the Ifrits from their bottles, and the treasures are divided among the Faithful.
– Adapted from The Arabian Nights Wiki
My writings – novels and all – are simply so much propaganda, as effective as I can make it, for my philosophy of life.– John Cowper Powys, Autobiography (1934)
At the beginning of section 6, above, I listed Psychology, Politics, and Philosophy as the best one-word summations of (respectively) the approaches taken to The Fantastic, Magic Realism and Metafiction in this course. To those three I would add Paradox – the desire to look at the most perverse and counter-intuitive aspects of each question – as a good running definition of the underlying themes of New Wave SF. I think that it should be clear by now how these concepts can be linked to some of the more interesting developments in contemporary fiction.
However, your simultaneous close reading of a series of stories from the 1001 Nights should also have signalled the degree to which these approaches and angles have been with us from the very beginning, from the first oral storytellers, then the scribes who began to shape complex narratives in writing, all the way up to the present day.
The theme of the next section might be summed up similarly under the weasel-word Propaganda. Should our creative work strive to be pure, driven solely by aesthetics, unsullied by social and political pressures? Or is more useful to think of it as just one more way of putting over a particular point of view, pre-determined and didactic, in as effective a way as possible?
Clearly no absolute answer can be found for this question, but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily unproductive to think about it. The Anglo-Welsh writer John Cowper Powys, author of some of the strangest novels of the twentieth century, novels where doorposts hold conversations with boats, people with standing stones, and where disturbances in the aether are portrayed as every bit as important as acts of murder or adultery, wrote a whole novel, Morwyn (1934), set in hell, simply to put on record his hatred of vivisection.
Certainly, he was not a state propagandist – not like a Soviet-era employee of the Writers’ Union, churning out novels and poems to justify the latest shift in the Communist Party line – but he did see his art as a means to an end, a personal quest to justify his own way of thinking in the world’s eyes.
Perhaps the best way, then, of characterizing his works is to see them as a series of thought experiments.
It’s important to note that literature has always relied on thought experiments. What if? is the indispensable question behind all projections into possible experience. What if a man could make himself invisible? How would he behave? (H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man); What if a child was born to an imprisoned debtor. What would life for her be like? What would she be like? (Dickens’ Little Dorrit); What if a wealthy bootlegger could think only of one thing: trying to impress a – now unhappily married – girl he’d met in passing many years before? (Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby).
Once the question has been asked, the problem becomes how to construct an appropriate experiment to test it. Making an analogy here with theoretical physics may seem a little over the top, but the idea of a ‘thought experiment’ does really originate there – from situations where a more conventional laboratory experiment can be impossible to arrange. Here’s one of the most famous of Einstein’s many thought experiments – the one which led him to his theory of relativity:
Einstein heard the Bern Zytglogge toll one evening in May 1905. He had been confounded by a scientific paradox for a decade, and when he gazed up at the tower he suddenly imagined an unimaginable scene. What, he wondered, would happen if a streetcar raced away from the tower at the speed of light?If he happened to be sitting in that streetcar, he reasoned, his watch would still be ticking. But if he were to look back towards the tower, the clock – and time – would seem to have stopped. It was a break-through moment. Six weeks later, he finished a paper outlining his special theory of relativity.
Here’s an even more famous example, the paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat, designed to show some of the stranger properties of quantum physics – in particular, its inability to decide such basic questions as whether light moves as a particle or as a wave, or whether one can ever know both the position and the direction of an individual particle.
Is the cat alive or dead? In the strange world of quantum physics, it’s actually both – until you open the box to check, that is. After that it can only be one of them, but which of the two is entirely unpredictable.
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Edward W. Lane, trans.: The Arabian Nights, illustrated by William Harvey (1838-40)
Workshop:
Creative Portfolio (ii)
Discussion of ideas and workshopping of portions of text for your final portfolios.
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