Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange (Hardcover Classics) Read Online Free Page A

discord, but it also means seduction, temptation or distraction from the service of God.
Heightened Pleasures and Pains
    In
The Waning of the Middle Ages
the Dutch historian Jan Huizinga wrote of the medieval sensibility as follows: ‘the outlines of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us. The contrast between suffering and joy, between adversity and happiness, appeared more striking. Allexperience had yet to the minds of men the directness and absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child-life.’ 5 So it is with the characters in
Tales of the Marvellous
. Tuhfa faints from longing for Talha, while Talha, for his part, rubs his cheeks in the dust when he learns that she has been sold to another man, and then his grief becomes so extreme that he is taken for mad and is locked up in an asylum. ‘Umair, on hearing verses that speak so strongly of his own emotional state and his love for Budur, gives a loud cry and tears his clothes before collapsing unconscious. People beat their cheeks from despair. They faint from surprise. They tear their clothes from heightened passion. They also fall off their chairs from laughing.
    Misfortune breeds misfortune. The authors of the tales in
Tales of the Marvellous
delighted in being cruel to their characters, and Schadenfreude is definitely one of the dark literary pleasures provided by this collection. Hands and feet are lopped off, eyeballs plucked out, lips cut away, penises slit off, people burned alive, women raped, cripples and blind men mocked and robbed, and the ugly have their deformities seized upon and exaggerated. Here political incorrectness has gone mad, and there is ‘Laughter in the Dark’. In fact, as in fiction, public executions were popular entertainments. But the good suffer almost as much the bad in these ruthless stories. Read what Kaukab, Ashraf and the various lovers of ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is have to undergo. Thomas Hardy would have approved, for he wrote: ‘Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can’t get out of it if we would.’
Misogyny and Rape
    As a character in A. S. Byatt’s long short story ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ observes,
It has to be admitted … that misogyny is a driving force of pre-modern story collections … from Katha Sarit Sagara, The Ocean of Story, to
The Thousand and One Nights
, Alf Layla wa-Layla. Why this should be so has not, as far as I know, been fully explained, though there are reasons that could be put forward from social structures to depth psychology – the sad fact remains that women in these stories for the most part are portrayed as deceitful, unreliable, greedy, inordinate in their desires, unprincipled and simply dangerous, operating powerfully (apart from sorceresses and female ghouls and ogres) through structures of powerlessness. 6
    In ‘Julnar’ the sorceress Queen Lab’s voracious sexual desire leads her to sleep with one man after another, before turning them into animals (perhaps metaphorically as well as literally). Yet even her passion pales beside that of ‘Arus al-‘Ara‘is.
    The depiction of women as man-eaters is one side of misogynistic fantasy; the other is their portrayal as the victims of rape. In the story ‘Sakhr and al-Khansa’ ’, Miqdam, the chieftain of one tribe, steals into another tribe’s encampment and ‘seeing al-Khansa’ alone and defenceless, he lusted after her, and although she defended herself she had not the power to stop him from raping her’. But all is square when Sakhr, the brother of al-Khansa’, rapes Haifa’, the sister of Miqdam. Rape also features prominently in ‘The Talisman Mountain’ and in ‘ ‘Arus al-‘Ara‘is’. (The latter story includes the rape of a mermaid.)
Deceitful Women
    As already noted, women are frequently portrayed as deceitful. In the tale of the tailor, included in ‘The Six Men’, a female customer lures the tailor to her house with the promise of sex, but there he suffers an evil