Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

212
A Th ousand and One Nights
Sindbad knows about many cultures, as befi ts an avid traveling
man, and he intersperses the retelling of his exploits and adventures
with ethnological details. For example: “when the folk have a mind to
get camphor, they bore into the upper part of the bole with a long iron;
whereupon the liquid camphor, which is the sap of the tree, fl oweth
out and they catch it in vessels, where it concreteth like gum” (404).
During the fi rst voyage, when Sindbad is saved by King Mihrhan’s
groom, the fi rst question Sindbad asks after telling his own story is
“who thou art and why thou abidest here under the earth and why
thou hast tethered yonder mare on the brink of the sea” (392). After
food and water, Sindbad next needs stories that satisfy his ethnological
curiosity. Oftentimes the plausible ethnological details one would
expect from a travel narrative (the information about the camphor
tapping) are mixed in with tall tales about fantastic animals (a rhinoceros
that impales elephants on its horn and wanders around the island
while the fat of the elephant runs into his eyes, or a gigantic Rukh
bird that plucks the rhinoceros off the beach to feed his young [405]).
When Sindbad arrives in a new city, he is a stranger, observing foreign
customs. His cleverness gains him patrons (as Joseph in Egypt), and
he enters the new society. In two instances (during his Fourth and
Seventh voyages) his marriage to a patron’s daughter sanctions his
integration, and yet he never completely assimilates (reminiscent of
the stories of Moses and King David).
Sindbad the trickster is perpetually in-between states and places:
When he is in Baghdad he fancies the sea; when he is at sea he yearns
for land; when he arrives at an exotic locale, he wants to return to
Baghdad. Lewis Hyde, in his book Trickster Makes this World, describes
the mythic trickster as “the spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the
crossroad at the edge of town. . . . [h]e is the spirit of the road at dusk,
the one that runs from one town to another and belongs to neither”
(Hyde 6). Not only does the trickster move around in space (from land
to ship, from island to island), but he can also move between the living
and the dead, as we shall see when we look at the Fourth Voyage.
At some point during every voyage, someone who hears Sindbad’s
story, saves his life, or recognizes him after his near-death escapades
proclaims that Sindbad has accomplished a feat that no one
ever has before. At the end of the Th ird Voyage, for example, after
a hair-raising adventure during which Sindbad discovers a Rukh
egg, tethers himself to the parent Rukh, becomes stranded at the