Class Exercise 4

Learning "the art of discourse":
Questions for The Arabian Nights, a.k.a The Thousand and One Nights.

In Arabic, the word for "conquest" also means an opening up of the world. "To speak," in any language means to conquer, or at least to have control. It would even imply revealing the truth - at least this would be the ideal of speaking eloquently and faithfully. Keep this in mind as we read this collection of oral "wisdom" and wit.

Throughout the tales of the Nights ask yourself what each story and sub-story tells you. What lesson does it try to teach? What's the moral? Then ask yourself how the tale works to posit this moral or lesson. Sometimes it will happen that you can conceive of how the tale works at the same time that you understand what message it is trying to communicate to you. The trick will be to find a way to draw out this phenomenon back into a description of the process that the story enables - without having to resort to too much to the story itself. So, as you read, taking notes will be useful; and writing some descriptions will be even better.

Points of view: first and third.

"Prologue: The Story of King Shahrayar and Shahrazad, His Vizier's Daughter"

Forewords and backwoods.

1.) What word in the first paragraph of the Foreword might indicate that, as a literary creation, the setting of The Arabian Nights is fictitious, is artificial, despite that it is a description of the divine creation of the world in which we live?

2.) Tell me about the structure of the Foreword.

- What are the functions of the two paragraphs in the Foreword, and how are they related?

- What effect might writing the two paragraphs as one have on the Foreword? Or, what effect is accomplished in writing two paragraphs?

- Literature has long been the tool of instruction as well as a mode of entertainment. From the Foreword, what are some of the other ways of discussing these concepts of literature and its uses? Why was this book written?

Shahrazad's father, the vizier, tries to use the art of discourse to influence Shahrazad's desire to marry king Shahrayar. What do the fables and old sayings he recounts tell us about the way discourse and language work? What does Shahrazad's manner of response tell us about the way discourse and language work?

Why is Shahrazad best suited to save the kingdom? Does Shahrazad say this, or is it part of the story? What reason does Shahrazad give as her reason for marrying the King?

Symbols and Signs.

What is a symbol? What is a sign?

Wedding rings are symbols of love and devotion.
What do they become in the prologue?

A stoplight is composed of three colors; red, yellow, and green; each indicating an action or responsibility a driver must enact or take on. Within a story a thing may function as a sign, or an indicator. Justifying or explaining their worthiness as indicators involves telling the story of a sign. In a sense, a sign indicates, in the least, a set of relations, or, more, they indicate a set of actions, events, or in other words, a story. In The Arabian Nights, part of the storytelling involves explaining the reality of what we take to be given or ordinary, much in the way signs explain, or indicate their relationship to something larger than themselves. They tell us of the meaning of things in the world, or they indicated to us that there is something, or some meaning, waiting to be revealed to us. The tales in The Arabian Nights work in this way, often telling supernatural stories that turn ordinary things into extraordinary tales. Talk about how this might be true for the deer in "The First Old Man's Tale" in the cycle of "The Tale of the Merchant and the Demon."