A psychoanalytical interpretation of the Thousand and One Nights must necessarily begin with the prologue, the overall frame that introduces Shehrazade as teller of healing tales.
Fabrice Dubosc (Milan)A psychoanalytical interpretation of the Thousand and One Nights must necessarily begin with the prologue, the overall frame that introduces Shehrazade as teller of healing tales.
A king has been betrayed and cannot acknowledge his own guilt. Shehrazade spells out the thousand possible conjugations of the conflict between power and desire allowing the king access to repentance, forgiveness and justice. From their complex intercourse the one thousandth and first night is born when the implicit order of narration finds its fulfilment in the acknowledgement of Shehrazade as Queen and saviour of the kingdom.
Therefore - far from being a narrative artifice - this prologue introduces the main theme: the radical gender conflict that will be amplified by Shehrazade's tales in progress. Its main characters are a mad king and the last of his wives of one night. The result of their encounter will be the imaginal treasure of the One Thousand and One Nights.
I briefly resume their tale.
King Shahriyar rules with justice over China and India, winning the favour of his subjects. Gnawed by boredom or nostalgia he invites to court his younger brother, Shahzaman, king of Samarkand. The latter has already begun his journey when he suddenly remembers he has forgotten something at Court and goes back to fetch it.
He thus discovers that his wife, the queen, betrays him with a black slave. The invitation to visit his elder brother turns therefore to disaster for Shahzaman, but also for Shahriyar who full of mistrust discovers that his queen betrays him as well, even with forty slaves and handmaids.
Both brother-kings are therefore catastrophically wounded in their feelings and in their very identity: but whereas the younger feels better when he discovers that the elder is also betrayed, the latter, 'having lost his wits', tells him:
"Come, let us leave this place, for our kingdom is now useless, unless we meet some other to whom such thing has happened, otherwise it is better to die." The two meet a demon-djinn that holds a young woman in bondage. While the genius sleeps she forces the two brothers to have intercourse with her, threatening to awake the demon. Then she takes their rings which she adds to her necklace made of five hundred seventy three rings. She explains: "This genius kidnapped me on the eve of my wedding; he put me in a chest and the chest in a trunk, bound with seven locks; and he laid it on the bottom of the stormy sea, without knowing that when one of us women wants something, nothing can defeat her."
Shahriyar comments thus: "If this is a demon and something worse has befallen him than what has befallen us, then we may comforted..." This experience permits him therefore to return to the order and charge of the kingdom. He represses altogether the premises of the woman's tale, the fact that she was kidnapped on the eve of her wedding. He identifies so completely with the jealous and cuckold demon that from that time onwards every night the king chooses a virgin, takes her maidenhood, and at dawn has her killed. The tale would have thus ended with this 'ginecide' if Shehrazade had not decided to "intercede for the daughters of the Muslims". Accepting the risk of the death penalty hanging on all potential wives, buried alive in the Harem, she attempts like Isis to recompose the fragments of the king. With the help of a silent witness, her little sister Dunyazade, Shehrazade tells the king, night after night, the tales that will heal him, at once speaking for the women of the kingdom, and giving meaning to the wounds of the Sultan. At the end of the Nights, Shehrazade presents to the king the sons that they have begotten together and who represent a new possibility of transmission. Shahriyar acknowledges her as bride and Queen and the younger brother also marries Dunyazade. This double wedding gives light to the eschatological kingdom for it is written that the final night was "as bright as day".
Our first elements of reflection focus on the unfulfillment, on the boredom and longing of the king, of this Sultan described as "good and righteous", who, in spite of the fullest possible recognition and social mirroring, feels a lack, a defect that leads him to call his younger brother to court, discovering thus the betrayal of the Queens. The theme of a 'removed or unknown betrayal' touches the problematic area of early childhood's wounds: the Little Emperor syndrome!
Neither does the obliging mirroring provided by his subjects nor the honoured Persona which is thus sustained suffice to cover his more radical lack.
The king is surety for a social pact. He incarnates the possibility of order and consent: he represents the power who protects the socius from impermanence. He therefore embodies both a legitimate guarantee of cultural continuity and - as much as he stands against the law of impermanence - he also represents a collective delusion. It is this very hypostatisation of cultural transmission which falters under the blows of the Queens.
As Jamal Eddine Bencheik tells us the betrayal acted by the royal brides "constitutes a crime against the religious, moral, political and social order." The betrayal is perpetuated with black slaves, which was even more humiliating. But "the Queens' betrayal is worthy of Queens." Their desire appears beyond measure and incomprehensible, like the young woman's who had been kidnapped by the genius on the eve of her wedding. And it appears symmetrical to the violence she has had to bear, a violence radically repressed both by the genius and by the king who - strengthened by his new identification with the djinn - acts out his demons every morning, depriving at dawn each bride of any possible desire.
If we imagine dawn as the moment in which conscience arises we cannot but agree that to such dawn of consciousness corresponds a radical repression.
It seems that we have here two converging motives: the first theme is the attribution of guilt to womankind and the second the specificity of female sexuality, experienced as upsetting and radically foreign to men's way of thinking.
The first theme should be considered in the context of Islamic culture and of its definition of women's role.
As put in a few poignant words by Bencheik:
"Arabic-Islamic culture attributes the responsibility of evil to woman. We know that this terror of betrayal has much deeper roots and that anterior cultures expressed it more or less in the same manner."
It would seem that the desire to marry - so violently denied by the djinn - and the symmetrical desire to betray her betrayer might in some ways bear the echo of Lilith crying out her despair at not seeing the dignity of her passion recognised, a passion "which can lead to the very extremes of being".
Let us try to understand if, in our tale, the story of the young woman enslaved by the djinn can help us to understand what happened between kings and queens. We seem to be dealing here with both ends of the scission. The evil djinn can be interpreted as a split aspect of the masculine - an autonomous complex with whom the king himself identifies - but also as an untameable and unrepentant Animus who has exiled the feminine to the bottom of the sea/unconscious and humiliates her inducing her co-dependent coercive behaviour. If the encounter with the other gender cannot take place on a ground of equal dignity in diversity, what comes to pass is a sort of equivalence between marriage itself (in the case of the Queens) and the rape/kidnapping that forbids the marriage (in the case of the woman enslaved by the djinn) -
The possibility of a true encounter remains excluded from the forms defined by the patriarchal/matriarchal institution. Its very idea can only survive marginally as an imaginal possibility in the 'delirious words of the night.'
As it were, the betrayal acted out by queens and slaves reveals that the marriage institution hinders a deeper coniunctio between male and female principles.
Moreover, the collapse of the king shows that the kingdom is ill. So ill that the Sultan feels that if he will not find someone else to whom such a disgrace may have happened he will not be able to continue his rule, he will not be able to commit to his children the order he received from his father.
At once we see at the core of the crisis the problem of transmission and of its difficulties. In fact, in this perspective, only the sterilised contents of established order can be transmitted; this modality excludes a priori any knowledge concerning knowledge, any form of transmission based on experience. The value of what is transmitted is rather defined by the forcefulness of tautology and power (since the main value is indeed the furthering of power itself) rather than by an authentic (therefore individual) ethical basis. In this respect the initiatic quality of traditional cultures has been lost.
As a result, when the order of paternal transmission falters, Shahriyar starts seeking a new and 'superior' identification and finds the demon, the djinn, who represents in some way his own dissociated complex, the split on which patriarchal power is built. This identification strengthens, with a sort of delirious and perverted insight, the repression of the king's guilt, which is projected on the female gender. It has been argued that the situation generates an unredeemed Animus which also hinders the possibility of erotic encounter.
The murder of brides at the hand of Shahriyar prefigures almost prophetically the cruelties of today's young Algerian fundamentalists, who, instigated and armed by their elders, kidnap and rape their young teen-age victims before killing them. This issue seems therefore crucial for the Islamic 'cultural unconscious'.
The identification with the djinn can only lead back, in a sort of vicious cycle, to the ruling 'cultural' categories. The king reconstructs for himself a pseudo-identity, with accents of grandiose denial revealed by the compulsion to kill his own attempts at relation, a sort of extreme defence against deepest despair. Shehrazade frees him from this very compulsion through a sort of reversed verbal therapy, in which the subject is neither the 'patient' nor the 'therapist'.
In fact, whereas during the day the king holds court, passes judgement and formulates laws, at night he turns wordless. With her 'delirious words of the night' Shehrazade holds the wisdom of tales; she speaks as dead and tells her tales to live and she thus manages to free herself (and the king) from deathly repetition. But how does this word of woman work? She does not even need to ask 'What aileth thee', as Parsifal to the Fisher King. She does not judge the king, but narrates with a thousand variations the conflicts of passion and power, giving a voice back to Queens and Slaves, but also to the king himself.
"From a love story to the next she pursues, in different forms the selfsame conflict between law and desire. That the one may triumph here to be overthrown elsewhere does not matter. The goal is not to guarantee a happy or unhappy end to love, but to represent its passion, whether it may end in joy or disgrace. Shehrazade will always return to tell the eternity of this quest..." (M.Chebel)
Shehrazade's cure is not interpretative: no single tale has in itself an exhaustive explanation of the king's plight. And it is on the other hand interpretative because the king's curiosity is alerted and he has to patiently wait and reflect on the development of unexpected, sometimes repetitive, never conclusive, often extraordinary plots by which he is led to a sort of suspension and incubation of the complex. And in fact he suspends the sentence, possibly because the reflection he gets from Shehrazade's tales is never unilaterally exhaustive, neither does it aggravate the guilt of his own lack. As Isis recreates the lost phallus of Osiris after recomposing his dismembered body, thus the plural narration of Shehrazade uncannily restores what the king lacks, granting him access to a new living and ordering system of meaning.
The paradoxical courses and recourses of fortune, the unforeseeable misadventures of all the players, the courage of the word shown by a concubine who knows her death sentence, guide the king in a concentric pilgrimage about the themes of destiny and forgiveness, universal motifs which comprehend but transcend his own tale...
In the end the complex labyrinth appears dated; the walls crumble or sink, leaving but a trace on the ground, a maze without walls. Finally the king himself must have found his own story and must have told Shehrazade, because when he charges her of faithful transmission - a central theme in Islamic culture - and has her supervise the transcription of the Nights, his tale is the very first of the collection.
To understand how the word of Shehrazade operates it is enough to read the first of the tales of the Nights:
It tells of a merchant who, in the course of a journey, throws away the seeds of the dates he has just eaten unwittingly killing the son of a djinn. The djinn condemns him to death but accepts a delay and postpones the sentence for one year.
Shehrazade offers thus a paradoxical analogy with her own situation, and stresses the disparity between the guilt imputed and the action which has led to the offence, without removing the tension of the situation. From a certain viewpoint our complexes/demons always punish us beyond the offence that their undermining dissociation has determined. But however incidental here guilt is not removed.
In fact the merchant accepts his destiny and after having put his affairs in order goes back to the agreed place to be killed. On the way he meets three blind old men, each followed by an animal. He tells them what has befallen him and they promise they will try to intercede for him. When they come to the presence of the djinn, the first intercedes thus: "O djinn and joy of the king of djinns, if I told you my tale with this gazelle and if you were to find it marvellous, would you give me the third part of this merchant's life.
Shehrazade establishes thus a point: that a tale can be worthy of a life - or maybe that a life can be worthy only if it is recognised as a 'tale'. And so each of the three blind men tells, poignantly enough, the story of how he was betrayed. The narration is interrupted by the break of dawn and the tale is suspended at its climax. The king then says in his own heart: 'I swear that I will not kill her until I will have heard the rest of her tale."
Here we have a first role reversal, a first victory of Shehrazade's word.
Touching at once the heart of the matter, Shehrazade states that a fault can be accepted and transcended thanks to a plural and collective narration. This mirroring is the only one the king can bear because it is the only one that really corresponds to his situation.
'Shehrazade and the Jealous King' is taken from 'Thus spoke Shehrazade' (Italian version, published 2002). Further information contact the author at: <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Fabrice Dubosc is a Jungian analyst. He has a practice in Milan and is currently working on issues related to fundamentalism and cultural interpretation.
© Fabrice Dubosc 2002. All rights reserved.
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