UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ “NEVER TRUST THE TELLER,” HE SAID. “TRUST THE TALE”: NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE FROM THE ARABIAN NIGHTS TO POSTMODERN ADAPTATIONS BY RABIH ALAMEDDINE AND PIER PASOLINI A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in LITERATURE by Sobia Saleem December 2012 The Thesis of Sobia Saleem is approved: ___________________________________ Professor Wlad Godzich, Chair ___________________________________ Professor Vilashini Cooppan ___________________________________ Professor Maria Evangelatou ___________________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Sobia Saleem 2012 Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Arabian Nights and an Islamic Aesthetic 20 Chapter Two: Framing, Embedding, and Interlacing 57 Chapter Three: The Hakawati 88 Chapter Four: The Flower of the Thousand and One Nights 119 Conclusion 169 Works Cited 186 iii Abstract Sobia Saleem “Never Trust the Teller,” he said. “Trust the Tale”: Narrative Technique from the Arabian Nights to Postmodern Adaptations by Rabih Alameddine and Pier Pasolini This thesis stems from an examination of Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati’s embedded narrative structure. The roots of this structure reside in the Arabian Night’s renowned frame structure, which can be traced to the Islamic aesthetic, primarily its textile culture and organization of the Quran. To further investigate framing, embedding, and interlacing as narrative techniques, the thesis draws upon discussions by M. M. Bakhtin, Erving Goffman, Mieke Bal, and Gerald Prince, applying their ideas and definitions to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red. The postmodern text The Hakawati is then reexamined in reference to these backgrounds, and finally, Pier Pasolini’s Arabian Nights is analyzed as a cinematic adaptation of the frame narrative. iv For Wlad A True Hakawati v Introduction The following introduction will first explore how my initial interest in the topics discussed throughout this thesis developed, then it will give background on the primary text from which this project stems, after which it will follow the course of the development of this Master’s project, and finally, it will end with a brief discussion of each resulting chapter of this thesis. The seed of my Master’s thesis lies within a single text: Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati.1 The novel, whose title translates as “the storyteller” in Arabic, is a relatively quick and easy read despite its 500 plus pages distributed amongst 21 chapters. Moreover, and significantly, the book is an absolutely delightful read with its innovative retellings of classic Islamic folklore woven with tales of transnational citizens. Mostly, I found myself drawn to the text’s unique style of storytelling in which stories were presented in a strikingly fractured fashion. However, when I sat down with the book, pen and highlighter in hand, ready to analyze its intriguing narrative structure, I found the task to be much more difficult and complex than I first naively imagined. The Hakawati is truly a jewel of a text, praised as being a “seductive,”2 “delightful,”3 and “poignant,”4 “multilayered new novel”5 in large part because of the same narrative style and innovatively adapted stories that made me fascinated with the text in the first place. Alameddine’s postmodern text consists primarily consists of two main story strains: the first, in accordance to appearance in the text, the emir’s 1 Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati (New York: Anchor Books, 2009). 2 O, The Oprah Magazine 3 The Washington Post Book World 4 The Boston Globe 5 The Seattle Times 1 story, opens with the emir and his wife trying to conceive a son and their servant Fatima aiding and advising them; and the second, Osama’s story, is that of a Lebanese-American, Osama-al-Herat, who visits his dying father and remembers his family’s tales, particularly recalling those of his grandfather, a hakawati. The first story, the emir’s, continues by following Fatima on her journey to seek advice on how the emir can conceive a son with his wife. On this journey, Fatima loses her hand to Afreet-Jehanam, the djinn king of Hell, whom she follows down to the underworld to retrieve her hand, meeting his imp prophets at each of the seven gates along the way. Fatima and Afreet-Jehanam conceive a son who is born at the same time as the emir and his wife’s son. These babies, switched at birth, become a complementary couple, Shams and Layl, the “sun” and “moon” respectively in Arabic, with two mothers: Fatima and the emir’s wife. The babies grow to love and lust after each other but are torn apart by the jealous emir’s wife, then becoming the Layl and the “Majnoun,” or “the crazy one” in Persian. While the emir’s wife had been pregnant with his son, the emir had begun telling her the story of Baybars, a legendary Mamluk king, so that his son could osmose the legendary king’s moral and masculine characteristics. This story, however, with the birth of his son, eventually takes on a life of its own in The Hakawati, continuing without a narrator, independently embedded within the emir’s story while simultaneously parallel to the story of the emir’s son Shams. Even within these two levels of tales, there are often disjunctures as well as smaller tertiary level tales, all of which are always connected in some way—whether by theme, motif, 2 icon, symbol, style—to the larger stories in which they are framed or with which they are embedded. Like the first main story strain, the second story, that of Osama, also has layers, but of a different kind. His story does not necessarily follow the major “stories” of the Arab world or Islamic culture. It instead follows the stories of the storytellers Osama knows and with whom he identifies: his family members. As Osama sits next to his father on his deathbed, surrounded by family and old family friends, he reminisces about the stories his deceased paternal grandfather, a hakawati, would tell him, implicitly retelling them to himself in the greater text. The Hakawati traces the story of how Osama’s grandparents and great-grandparents met and created large families as the story of how he—the “he” at times being Osama and at others his grandfather—came to be. Osama’s story strain winds through the stories of his uncle, father, mother, sister, and even close family friends at the same time that the Lebanese civil war resounds in the background. Within Osama’s grandfather’s story is also embedded the story of Abraham, a story his English great-grandfather would often tell his grandfather who would tell little Osama in kind. The stories of Osama and the emir are embedded such that various events and themes seem to flow through the different embedded stories’ sections, as if they are sharing a conversation or really are one common story. Like in the strain of the emir’s story, in Osama’s story strain there are also often other tertiary level stories that branch out, filling in the gaps and shading the readings of embedded story segments. Throughout The Hakawati, the strains of the emir and Osama’s stories interweave, embedding each other and at 3 times even intersecting; moreover, within these main story strains are also often smaller embedded stories, like morsels caught in a narrative webs, and smaller tales that branch off into independent although related stories that then embed other stories in their own right. Thus, the structural style of The Hakawati is founded on this oscillation between one story strain and another, and yet what is most difficult to analyze about the text is the way in which these story strains both relate to each other while also functioning to support the unity of the text. To briefly describe the narrative layout of The Hakawati, chapter one begins with the emir’s story, which is broken by a fleuron about three pages in, followed by Osama’s story, which is also soon broken by a fleuron, followed again by the emir’s story, and the pattern continues. Chapter two has the same pattern; however, it begins with Osama’s story instead of that of the emir. Clearly, the narrative framing order is being manipulated to suggest that in one moment it is Osama’s story strain that is being embedded by the emir’s, while in the next it is the emir’s being embedded by that of Osama. The remaining chapters in The Hakawati continue in a similar pattern with stories embedded within and interacting with each other. The strains’ embedded sections, however, start and end without creating explicit or direct links between the different stories, which I found puzzling because despite this lack, there still exists a sense of connection between the story strains’ segments, perhaps offered through the mutual thematic, symbolic, or emotional currency between sections. Readers, such as myself, imperceptibly and almost unconsciously bridge the gap between unrelated story strains by reading non- 4 existent links into the gaps between embedded sections precisely because the embedded structure of the text fosters this kind of response. As a graduate student who initially read the text for entertainment purposes, I found it difficult and even extremely frustrating at times to work on The Hakawati because the process of analyzing the text would continuously force me to self-reflexively examine my own contribution to and participation in the reading of the text and ultimately in the manufacturing its illusion of unity. Hence, because of this way in which the stories of The Hakawati are structured, fitting into each other at times and juxtaposing themes, characters, motifs, and symbols in such a way that manipulates readers into forming links between stories, I found myself questioning the operational mechanisms and roots of the embedded narrative structure like that of The Hakawati.