The origin of the tales told by Shehrazade is lost in the mist of times. Borges says that the Nights evoke the cathedrals, the labours of generations.

Fabrice Dubosc (Milan)

The origin of the tales told by Shehrazade is lost in the mist of times. Borges says that the Nights evoke the cathedrals, the labours of generations. The central nucleus, probably of Indian derivation, develops in Persia and from there - passing though Baghdad - descends into Egypt.

At each new passage the weft grows, breathing and changing, integrating new threads, as each tale resonates with each new tale.

We know that a Persian collection including the theme of the royal slave/concubine who, every night, tells a story to save her life is mentioned for the first time by al-Masudi in 956 c.e. Researchers agree that the collection known as The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa Layla) was compiled between the IX and the XIV centuries from a variety of sources. The most recent classical versions are Egyptian.

Except for rare exceptions, only in the last twenty years Western criticism has stopped considering the Nights as an exotic collection with no particular literary or psychological value. Arabic commentators have often tolerated them as childish literature, not quite recommendable, or have perceived them as dangerously alien to the rigid categorisations fostered by medieval Islamic clerks. In actual fact, these clerks had marked the tales as al-asmar wa l-Khuriyat, which more or less means 'delirious words of the night'.

However there were also "theologians of the faithful of love " such as Ibn Dawud for whom the Nights were a source of wisdom, complementary to the hadith, the 'apocryphal sayings' of Islam which make up the corpus of reliable traditions concerning the words of Mohammed and his closest disciples. Both of these positions seem to question the Nights from opposing shores. On one hand we have an imaginary pole, intended as vain fantasising, on the other an Imaginal pole, the alchemists' vera imaginatio (in Arabic alâm-al-mithâl) intended as the source of esoteric knowledge (Corbin). One could add, with the words of Ibn Arabi, that the imaginary pole itself can be perceived under the guise of 'imaginal forms in bonds'. These can be freed by the fullness of imaginal wisdom.

These conflicting interpretations are not matters of the past: on one hand, in the recent radicalisation, fundamentalists have publicly burned the Nights; this childish literalism was answered by the distraught voice of the rich and poliedric Arabic culture through the essays and novels written by Jamel Eddine Bencheik, Abdelfattah Kilito, Malek Chebel, Assia Djebar, Fatema Mernissi - to quote but a few passionate lovers of Shehrazade's tales.

Without the conceptual wealth of these contemporary Arabic sources my research would not even have begun. In the capacity of these matrioska-tales to generate further tales there is something Borges has recognised as essential. Reading of Shehrazade's labours weaved between Night and Day, reconnecting the listener/reader to his most hidden psychic roots, we are impressed by the gradual and complex declination of the human plight, a sort of grammar of destiny. Even more we are impressed by the perception of a dynamic symbolic field, well summed up by Malek Chebel when he writes that he Nights seem "to know more than they say and say more than they know."

We can well play with the idea of a 'latent text' to be decoded, but we cannot read the fairy tales as mere representation of the pulsional life! We would rather consider fairy tales as a "universal human foundation" as well as an indecipherable mystery

The findings of folklore represent mankind's stratified attempts to question the enigmatic human condition concerning reflective consciousness and mortality. But when man begins to question himself does he find any touchstones? All the works of man can be interpreted as an attempt to answer this auroral doubt of consciousness.

I like to imagine that with this originary awareness of the unknown, our furthest ancestors had already volunteered to name and tell the tale of the world; that the act of naming, daring the magic of language, offered an intuitive birth to hope against determinism.

To put it in the language of myth: in some versions of the Edenic story Adam was capable of naming the animals. Lucifer was not and that's what made him so envious.

A contemporary author returns on this same theme writing of the "enigma of God's ignorance towards his own creation. Because God creating all things knows nothing about what he creates. God who creates the animals does not know their names "(Christian Bobin)

Therefore along with such 'original questioning' and through such initial naming of reality, each culture begins to tell their great and little stories about 'the beginning'. As a parallel process social organisations seemed to structure themselves with tales intended to defend group identities from the ghost of transience.

Each conscious conquest increases understanding and reaches for a vision of man's role in the Cosmos but is rooted in culture and time and therefore in an unavoidable partiality of vision.

A legitimate question would therefore be: is it at all possible to perceive a pattern in the history of cultures?

I think that some general 'progress' in this overall individuation process of humankind can be caught only if we focus on the peculiarities of human consciousness: considering the tragic awareness of individual and collective death, the instinctive urge to guarantee the survival of genetic heritage, turned into a cultural venture involving gender conflict. Such venture has been defined for thousands of years by patriarchal domination.

The study of Prophetic consciousness (but also of poetic, mythic, folk consciousness) shows that in the deepest narrations of the collective unconscious, the themes of differentiation, transmission, and 'meaning' must face the founding paradox of diversity and first of all the gender question. But why mankind's cultural evolution has ended up endangering other species and even its own?

Today's King of the West - the commercial technoscience of goods and life - seems determined to ignore its own archetypal matrix. This seems to confirm what myths were saying long ago: that man's clonation of what is identical to itself, eliminating the very possibility of differentiation, might bridge the gap between evolution and extinction.

This work references are psychoanalytical but widely interdisciplinary. I have tried to perceive how the healing principle is at work in the Nights, how: "the tales of the Thousand and One Nights aim at correcting, in almost a therapeutic manner the misplaced ideas and the erroneous attitude of the Sultan towards the feminine principle" (von Franz)

And my prayer is that Shehrazade's ability to reconnect the listener/reader with his or her deepest psychic roots may contribute to heal the deep split manifesting itself both in the Islamic and in the Western world.

'Shehrazade's Word is taken from 'Thus spoke Shehrazade' (Italian version, published 2002). Further information contact the author at: <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Fabrice Dubosc is a Jungian analyst. He has a practice in Milan and is currently working on issues related to fundamentalism and cultural interpretation.

© 2002 Fabrice Dubosc. All rights reserved.

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