The Literary Mind.pdf

132 THE LITERARY MIND
of someone's viewing a story from a mental position. From that mental position,
we may view the story as conditional, hypothetical, nonactual, and so on. We
may view it from the "viewpoint" of a particular role. We may view it, in imagination,
from someone else's mental "viewpoint." We could not operate in our
environment, physical or social, without extremely sophisticated imaginative
abilities of viewpoint and focus on stories in imagination. The narrator of The
Thousand and One Nights is merely asking us to use a capacity we already have,
just as Shahrazad is asking Shahriyar to use a capacity he already has.
We may become engrossed, in Erving Goffman's phrase, and forget that
this is a story, and get angry, and claim that Shahriyar does not deserve to be
rehabilitated, that it is perfectly horrible that Shahrazad should have to go through
this humiliation just because some pig is on the throne, and that the story of her
life merely reconfirms all the old patterns of patriarchy. Of course. But the story
makes some of those claims itself. Shahriyar never comes off well in The Thousand
and One Nights. He is your run-of-the-mill insecure male who has only just
enough intelligence to be able to see, when it is laid out masterfully before him,
that he has it good and would be a fool to keep his old psychology. Shahrazad,
by contrast, is an absolute genius. She is convincingly portrayed as starting from
a position of no institutional power at all and bringing about what no one else of
any institutional authority could possibly have done. It is Shahrazad that we
admire and remember.
She accomplishes all this through parable: the conjunction of story and projection.
She may have other ways for helping Shahriyar change his mind, but it
is parable that we hear about and parable that she invites us to apply to our own
life stories.
ROLES, CHARACTERS, AND LIVES
To be quite accurate, I ought to give a different name to
each of the "me's" who were to think about Albertine in
time to come; I ought still more to give a different name to
each of the Albertines who appeared before me, never the
same. . . .
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
For any story, we can develop a great variety of mental spaces. For the
extremely simple story of the first time a baby shakes the rattle, for example, we
can imagine the mental spaces of the story as viewed spatially from above, behind,
ahead, or either side; as viewed temporally by his mother on his sixteenth birthday,
as viewed from his mother's psychological viewpoint as opposed to the baby's