The Literary Mind.pdf

SINGLE LIVES 127
beg you to cease humbling her, or her heart will break!' Then the bride's
mother will rise, and, filling a cup with wine, will give it to her daughter,
who will offer it to me with all submission. But I, leaning idly upon
my elbow among the gold-embroidered cushions, will take no notice
of her. With a trembling voice she will say: 'I beg you, my lord, to take
this cup from the hand of your slave and servant.' But I will maintain
my dignified silence. She will raise the cup to my mouth, pressing me
to drink from it. Then I will wave it away with my hand, and spurn her
with my foot, thus—"
So saying, Al-Ashar kicked against the basket of glassware, knocking
over the contents and crashing them in fragments to the ground.
Al-Ashar narrates his daydream from the viewpoint of one who wishes to
inhabit the central role of its story. But the story of Al-Ashar's internal narration
is being told by Al-Ashar's brother, the barber, as one of the stories about
his brothers that he tells in the court of the caliph, to impress the caliph with the
wisdom the barber displays as an actor in each story the barber relates and also
with his ability as a wise storyteller.
But, one step up in this nesting, this story of the barber's telling stories to
the caliph is being told by someone—the barber again!—at a dinner party, so
that he may impress the dinner guests. He is telling a story of himself telling
stories. At this dinner party, the barber is attempting to discredit the lame young
man who has just told a devastating story about the barber's garrulousness, fraud,
and incompetence and has left in a huff, refusing to stay in the same room as the
barber. So the barber's role at the dinner party gives him a certain outlook on the
story he is now narrating of his earlier narration.
The entire narrative space within which the barber does all his storytelling
at the dinner party is being related by the tailor in the court of the king. The
tailor has reason to tell a very long story, the longest story he can imagine, and
he does this by finding a way to include as an embedded story the tale of what he
comes to call the "exceptionally garrulous" barber who considers himself fabulously
smart when in fact everyone else thinks he is a charlatan and a blatherer.
The barber, relating at the dinner party the story of his narration of several stories
to the caliph, views that story from the "mental position" of one who thinks
well of the central character, himself. But the tailor, telling the story of the barber
doing the telling of his previous telling, does so in such a way that anyone
with a different "mental position" must see that the barber is "exceptionally garrulous."
The barber, in the tailor's narration, is made to condemn himself out of
his own mouth: