The Literary Mind.pdf

130 THE LITERARY MIND
own life. If King Shahriyar can merely project this onto his own present story,
he will see an extraordinarily honest admission from Shahrazad of what she is
doing and how she hopes he will respond. On that reading, she is actually hoping
for a lot out of him; she is hoping that he holds a reservoir of humanity and civility
that can be tapped. Some of her stories are even sharper and push deeper: The
barber's sixth brother has his penis and lips cut off by an enraged chieftain whose
wife is discovered "dallying" with the sixth brother, and in that story, the sex is
clearly initiated by the wife. Now, the big causal event of The Thousand and One
Nights was Shahriyar's discovery of his own wife's "dallying" with a slave. Shahrazad
clearly means to acknowledge the reality of stories of the sort that led
Shahriyar to his practice. Does this projection justify the rage and violence of
Shahriyar, by making him the counterpart of the chieftain? No, because Shahrazad,
who makes it clear that the chieftain's rage is understandable, also makes
it clear that something better is expected of Shahriyar: the chieftain is an uncultivated
and discreditable outlaw, while Shahriyar is a king.
To my mind, Shahrazad's riskiest story is the deeply embedded story of the
barber's fifth brother, Al-Ashar. Al-Ashar—he with the basket of glassware to
sell—is a jerk in the opinion of everyone, possibly even himself. He is profoundly
insecure about his masculinity. To feed his vanity, he daydreams about the complete
submission of women to him, about his aloof command and indifference
to all affection, about women who are perfect and lovely and who beg, with trembling
voice, to submit to him, women who can imagine nothing better than to
fall at his feet. He imagines women who have never had a thought of any man
but him and who are obviously not equipped ever to have any thought of any
man but him. Al-Ashar imagines a life in which there is no chance of any sort of
parity between himself and his wife, and he imagines that such a life could be
desirable. In his mind and story, he represents such a life as kingly. Of course,
he destroys everything, losing even the little he has. Yet when he does so, neither
the reader nor Shahrazad despises him. We are amused. It is a funny story.
Maybe there is some hope for him. We pity him a little. We recognize how juvenile
his ambitions are.
This is a daring story to be telling to a king who is a jerk, profoundly insecure
about his masculinity, and who, to satisfy his obsession for control over
women, has instituted an ingenious and apparently successful zero-defects program,
at the cost of ever having anything like affection, companionship, or parity.
It is more daring still: The woman Al-Ashar spurns with his foot in his
indifference is his wife and the daughter of the vizier, which is of course exactly
Shahrazad's double role. It is just possible that the reader who is engrossed in
the story could miss for a moment this connection, but surely Shahriyar could
not. Al-Ashar is portrayed as an absolute idiot for his action. The only possible
mitigation in Al-Ashar's case is the fact that the woman he spurns doesn't amount