Corin Braga

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

CorinBraga@yahoo.com

 

 

A Thousand and One Nights – An Anarchetypal Epos[1]

 

 

Abstract: A Thousand and One Nights is a cyclic corpus of stories that compiles narrative material from various cultural sources. As such, it has an open structure, born from the superpositioning of a series of epic alluvia. In order to describe such a multi-layered work, I introduce the concept of anarchetype. An anarchetype is an anti-model, an anti-pattern that refuses the influence of pre-existent structures and moulding types.

Keywords: A Thousand and One Nights; Literary theory; Archetype; Anarchetype.

 

 

“To survive, you must tell stories,” Umberto Eco says in The Island of the Day Before.[2]

The same thing happens with civilisations. What else are the Greek cyclical poems (which include the Iliad and the Odyssey, the only epics that have been preserved from a vast mythical epos), the Bible, the Vedas, the Panciatranta, A Thousand and One Nights, Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, as well as so many of the Flowers of the Saints, the Decameron or the Pentameron, but huge salvation capsules, genuine Noah’s Arks for preserving the wisdom of certain cultures or epochs?

Given their alluvial and palimpsestic nature, such writings are real narrative monsters. They gather encyclopaedically, in one place, the most diverse of information; they cannibalise upon various myths, legends and stories, integrating the latter within their own bulk. It would be difficult to concede to their having a round, closed structure, such as that characterising a novel or another such work. Overall, it may be shown that the cyclical poems describe the Trojan war and the return of the Achaean heroes to Greece, or that the Old and the New Testaments tell the sacred story of mankind, from Genesis to Apocalypse; however, these descriptions offer a rather loose and general coverage of what is in fact a very dense texture of episodes shooting off in all directions, in amoeba-like or acromegalic fashion.

In the case of suites of tales like A Thousand and One Nights, the Decameron or, why not?, Mihail Sadoveanu’s Ancuţa’s Inn, the narrative coherence, the cohesive thread holding the narrated stories together resides in the storyteller’s figure and the story-telling ritual. Against this rather conventional background, stories are lined up like the pearls on a string or, if my comparison may be excused, like laundry hanging to dry on a clothesline. Scheherazade is a veritable story-producing human apparatus which, in order to satiate the bulimic King Shahryar, swallows up and reworks everything she heard during her childhood and adolescence from her wet nurses, parents, relatives, friends, foreign travellers, renowned storytellers, and everything she has accumulated during long hours of reading. The thread of the one thousand and one nights gathers together an entire epic thesaurus of the Arabic, Persian, and Indian civilisations, as well as of other bordering cultures.

How does such epic machinery work? A novel, a novella, and a theatre play usually have a backbone, an internal logic, a plot heading towards resolution. By contrast, A Thousand and One Nights only benefits from an “exoskeleton” (the framework provided by Scheherazade and the king), which allows for a sequential articulation of the stories but does not impose a logos of the entire ensemble. The book may go on indefinitely; the one thousand and one nights and the stories narrated throughout them may be extended forever, nothing preventing this from happening.

One might conclude that this is the very narrative convention of this type of “collections,” that such compilations assume, from the start, a principle of openness and non-finitude. There are, however, also other works, belonging to theoretically “closed” and “finite” species, which behave in a similar manner. Such are the romances of the Renaissance or the “extraordinary voyages” of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, in which, instead of following an initiation path and leading to maturation, to an apogee, instead of amounting, in other words, to a Bildungsroman, the protagonists’ adventures continue freely, uncontrollably, as variations generated by the pure narrative pleasure of the writers and of their readers.

This is why the epic convention in A Thousand and One Nights raises a much deeper issue, pertaining to the very manner of articulating the epos. Although they are apparently only an intelligent artefact meant to hold together a cluster of diverging tales, the mechanisms that are at work in such a narrative leviathan are symptomatic of a specific mode of conceiving the narrative, of organising “le récit” (in Paul Ricoeur’s sense, as a way of structuring temporal sequences through discourse). They form a mental paradigm, which deserves being investigated as such, rather than being reduced to an artifice of construction.

In order to describe theoretically this metatypology of disarticulated and “unfinished” works (truly unfinishable except through an arbitrary gesture) as the opposite of the other, more familiar metatypology of structured and “closed” works, I shall propose two antagonistically constructed concepts, the archetype and the anarchetype, or archetypal structures and anarchetypal narratives.

 

The Archetype

 

The archetype is a concept with a venerable history, which goes back to Philo of Alexandria and even to Plato. At present, the term is regarded with reservation and has rather idiosyncratic acceptations. It sounds somewhat obsolete, as it appears to refer to an outdated conception of the issue. We live in a world where a certain nominalist scepticism makes us distrust the concept of initial, immutable models, located in a religious or metaphysical illud tempus. The premise of such invariants with hard ontological presence has long ceased to trigger the same adherence as in ancient philosophy, in medieval scholastics or in Renaissance Neoplatonism. On the other hand, the concept of archetypes has also been compromised in its psychological sense, which regards it as an anthropological invariant, with a subjective existence, rather than a metaphysical invariant, with an objective existence. I am, of course, referring here to the Jungian theory of archetypes, which are conceived as matrices of a purported collective subconscious – a theory that contemporary epistemologies tend to eschew. Moreover, Jung’s archetypology is also tainted by the fact that it was invoked in disseminating an anti-Semite message, given that the notion of psychological invariants lent itself to serving as the basis for a theory of the races.

However, despite the validity of these objections and critiques, it would be regrettable if they led to the burial of a term with a much richer and more venerable conceptual and ideational potential than some of its later ideological evolutions and slippages. Even if Jung’s system were to be discarded in its entirety, it would be erroneous to also dispose of the archetype, his terminological offspring. The concept is, after all, much wider than the acceptation imparted upon it by Jung, Eliade, Durand or any other contemporary thinker and philosopher. It is true, its very longevity has subjected it to a process of augmentation and inflation, which has led to the erosion of certain well-defined contours and outlines and to overloading it with the most diverse of contents and meanings. What is therefore required is a historical overview of the evolution of the concept, which may discriminate between the diverse acceptations it has acquired throughout time, and, secondly, a restitution of its operational meaning.

In the volume entitled 10 Studies of Archetypology (10 studii de arhetipologie), I distinguish between three major meanings with which the term archetype has been invested in European culture: a metaphysical meaning (in the sense of the Platonic ideas), a psychological meaning (in the sense of the Jungian psychic schemata) and a cultural meaning (in the sense of Curtius’ topoi or loci).[3] In the third acceptation, the archetype designates certain constants, certain invariants of a trend or a culture, without averring anything that might be “compromising” or unsustainable as regards their objective-metaphysical or subjective-psychological existence. Divested of ontological or anthropological ambitions, taken in a cultural sense, the archetype has all the necessary “modesty” for serving as an operational instrument in the field of cultural studies. Its simplest and, hence, most efficacious acceptation is that used in the field of philology. In researching the transmission and migration of the variations upon an original text via the copying system practised in the Middle Ages, the archetype designates a primary text from which stems an entire array of copies; it is the root of the genealogical tree which comprises all its derivatives.

Having located the archetype within the frame of a “culturalist” conception, I shall define an archetypal structure as that structure which organises itself in accordance with a unitary and centred model. An archetypal work is a work in which a quantifiable scenario may be detected, a scenario that may also be identified in similar works, forming a sort of skeletal structure, a genetic imprint of the entire group of works. This identifiable scenario may be defined in thematic or formal terms.

In thematic terms, all the great myths, whether archaic or modern, may form an archetypal scenario, as it happens with Joseph’s episode from The Book of Genesis in Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, or with the Homeric Odyssey in James Joyce’s Ulysses. It was not by chance that Northrop Frye saw the Bible as the “great code” of European literature.[4] World literature may thematically be divided into large corpuses of texts whose familial gene derives from an archetypal pattern. For instance, Christopher Booker identifies the seven great “plots” of world epics: the quest, the confrontation with a monster, the evolution from rags to riches or from low to high, the journey, the rebirth, comedy and tragedy.[5] Similarly, starting from Mircea Eliade’s syntheses of religious rites and initiations,[6] Léon Cellier[7], Simone Vierne[8] and Isaac Sequeira[9] have defined the vast category of initiation novels. Other series of texts organised in accordance with certain themes may also be identified: the katabatic descent in the inferno,[10] the shamanic voyage of the soul,[11] the spiritual quest,[12] regressus ad uterum, etc. Such an undertaking may even generate a Dictionary of Literary Myths, as that coordinated by Pierre Brunel.[13]

In formal terms, archetypal schemata indicate a principle of internal organisation and coherence in works that are similar at the level of their architecture, even though they may be built from non-homogeneous thematic “bricks.” Such a formal archetype, which organises the species of the English novel from the eighteenth century until the late twentieth century is the so-called Bildungsroman, the novel of a character’s formation. The blend between the novelistic epic and the Protestant idea of an individual destiny introduced a rather rigorous scenario, which, in the modern novel, no longer permitted the vagrancy and uncontrollable digression that wreaked havoc in the romance and the Renaissance or baroque picaresque novel, as it demanded that the plot should be ordered within a unifying scheme – the shaping of a character.

I shall therefore define archetypal works as those works that are built in accordance with a unifying explanatory scheme, irrespective of the nature and origin of this scheme. An archetypal text may be “summed up” in a few words or phrases, and the summing up consists exactly in identifying the unifying scenario. This scenario has the role of a backbone, which prevents the narrative from becoming disarticulated or disaggregated. It is responsible for the impression of the text’s coherence and unity, no matter how many digressions and narrative pockets that discourse might give off. Generalising, one might say that an archetypal model describes a culture based on what Baudrillard calls the “great explanatory scenarios” (be they religious, philosophical, historical or literary). An archetypal culture is a culture dominated by centred and globalising schemata, which polarise phantasmatic matter along pre-established routes that may be ordered within a harmonious and downright Pythagorean solar system. The archetypal would thus define a cultural metatypology, a dominant paradigm of works with a monopolar and totalising configuration, with a well-defined centre and a rapidly identifiable vertebral column.

 

The Anarchetype

 

In opposition with the archetype and archetypal structures, the complementary concept of the anarchetype may be defined. As it can easily be seen, the term “anarchetype” is composed of three Greek words: the privative particle a, an, “a-, without, anti, contra” + arkhaios, “old, originary, first” or arkhê, “beginning, origin” + typos, “type, model.” Two by two, these Greek roots are already present in the concepts of “anarchy” (an + the verb arkhein, ”to command, to lead”) and “archetype” (“originary model, first type”). The anarchetype would be, depending on how we want to combine the three words, either an “anarchic model” or an “anti-archetype.”

The concept of the anarchetype may be built starting from the Platonic theory of ideas. As it is well known, Plato considered that the real world is an image (eikon), a copy (eidolon) of the ideal world, which is made up of essences (eidos), or ideas (idea). The multiplicity of the empirical world is the result of an ontological mimesis, of an ultimately inexhaustible material replication of the stock of essential models. What would happen, however, if the real world diverged from the models and started to generate itself an-archetypally? This would be the nightmare of Plato’s metaphysics. In the dialogue entitled Parmenides, Parmenides confronts Socrates with the following aporia: should we not assert the existence of a separate, ideal form also for “things of which the mention might provoke a smile, such things as hair, mud and filth?” Socrates confesses that the perspective of assigning a form or a prototype (paradigma) to each thing in existence troubles him and gives him the feeling that he is “falling into an abyss of nonsense.”[14] The implicit explanation suggested by Socrates is that such unworthy things are but accidents, botched, imperfect exemplars of ideal forms.

Talking about the species of the art of the image, the Stranger from Elea, in the dialogue entitled Sophist, distinguishes between the art of exact reproduction, which gives birth to icons (eikon) and fantasist art, which engenders phantasms (phantasma).[15] Let us assume for one moment that the Platonic Demiurge started fashioning the physical world using not the icons of Ideas as a model, but phantasms and aberrant, unruly and unpredictable concoctions. Anarchetypes involve the activity of an anarchic mimesis, which refuses conformity with ideal types and produces fortuitous and irreducible, singular entities, a gallery of “monsters.” In such a situation, the emphasis would be laid upon the quidity of concrete existence, of unrepeatable individuality, which does not depend upon a project or a pre-established typology of a metaphysical, anthropological, psychological, cultural or any other nature.

As its name suggests, the anarchetype is a concept that manifests itself anarchically in relation to the idea of a model or a centre. The archetype and the anarchetype describe two types of imaginary and creative configurations and “behaviours.” Archetypal structures are organised in accordance with a central model, which imparts meaning to all the components deriving from it or depending upon it; anarchetypal structures are structures in which the components are anarchically related, systematically avoiding the imitation of a model or integration within a unique and coherent sense. The opposition here is, of course, not that between the real and the virtual, since both the archetype and the anarchetype have the same reality; what distinguishes them is the fact that the former has a central organising nucleus, being like a solar system configured around a star, whereas the latter is diffuse and centreless, like galactic dust that has either not coagulated into a solar system yet or is the result of the explosion of a supernova. As these two antagonistic metaphors – the astral body and the galactic cloud – suggest, it is not compulsory for the archetype and the anarchetype to derive from one another (although both cases are possible); they may well coexist without there being a question of a succession relation between them. It is true that the very term an-archetype is etymologically constructed via the negation of a pre-existent term, the anarchetype, but this negation does not necessarily entail a derivation via the destruction of something that existed before; it is merely the case of organisation according to a centrifugal, rather than a centripetal, principle.

Through its configuration, the archetype entails the presence of a principle of closure, finitude and completeness. An archetypal work has a roundness that does not allow for unlimited and uncontrolled amplifications and developments. Any organising skeleton allows, naturally, for unpredictable developments, but only within the limits of a certain tolerance that guarantees the coherence of the whole. Overstepping these boundaries would lead to an outburst of the whole, to the dissolution of meaning. In contrast, the anarchetype is by definition an open, extensible, continuable form. Its sequences are chained together without depending upon a centre of gravitation, since no matter how distanced from one another they may become, along the most unexpected of trajectories, they will not endanger the nebula which they are a part of. Let me give an example: The Saragossa Manuscript, Jan Potocki’s fantastic novel, is built on an archetypal schema – the initiation of the protagonist, Alfons van Worden. Upon this narrative thread, however, is grafted a series of tales and anecdotes which outweigh by far the epic mass devoted to the main story. What would happen if, were we to imagine a small theoretical experiment, we extracted the backbone of the initiation schema and maintained only its peripheral narrative flesh? We would obtain a sort of narrative mollusc, in the manner of A Thousand and One Nights. To such an invertebrate may be appended countless new episodes and sequences without their upsetting any sense of coherence and finitude. Another mind-blowing book is in a similar situation: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a nightmare clad in the garments of a fairy tale. Built upon the principle of oneiric associations, the book consists of a suite of tableaux and occurrences that do not add up and are not combined in a unitary scenario. At any moment a new episode might be inserted, without its damaging the overall picture, since the very nature of this book is anarchetypal.

It seems to me that introducing the concept of the anarchetype is necessary in order to explain a series of works and, in a wider sense, of cultural and social configurations. There are several works (which may be literary, as well as filmic, musical, visual, etc.) that, in the absence of a concept capable of assuming them, risk being perceived as refuse, as deviations from a generally accepted norm. Since such a norm usually has all the prerogatives of a canon, in the sense that it confers value, the works that exceed this canon are relegated to the periphery of non-value, of the inexpressive, of the unintelligible. The only chance for non-canonical creations to impose themselves in an “archetypal” environment is that of posing as an exception, which may be accepted exactly because of their oddity, because they represent singularities that only serve to reinforce and valorise the norm itself. What I have in mind here, for instance, are works like Boris Vian’s novels or Cortázar’s Hopscotch, which are atypical works, deconstructive of the canon, but which have been validated particularly as peculiarities that go against the grain of the great models.

Besides such examples of intruders that have, nonetheless, been accepted into the canon after having been made fully aseptic, there are entire series of creations that have circulated along parallel routes to those of the official paradigm. In his vast synthesis of the “anatomy” of literary genres, Northrop Frye also finds a place for writings that are subordinated to a certain “technique of disintegration.” Thus, the critic diagnoses a common creative behaviour amongst the “exuberant chaos” of the works written by Petronius, Apuleius, Rabelais, Swift, or Voltaire (Micromegas), which we might integrate within the so-called “extraordinary voyages”: “This type of [fantastic satire] breaks down customary associations, reduces sense experience to one of many possible categories, and brings out the tentative, als ob basis of all our thinking.”[16] Still, Northrop Frye sees these works, which he subsumes to the genre of satire, as mere excrescences of the great literary archetypes, accidents drawing their sap from their contestation and destruction of norms. In my own view, however, anarchetypes are not simple deconstructivist parasites on archetypes, but their very autonomy and internal reason for being.

In light of the terms proposed here, it is not difficult to see that the European cultural canon has largely been dominated by archetypal art. The creations that have been accepted and appreciated are those works that have been built according to an intelligible, logical, centred and unidirectional scenario. Around and outside this mainstream literature, however, are constellations and galaxies of creations that criticism usually dismisses as rambling, chaotic, de-centred, prolix, without a message, unintelligible, badly constructed, ejected. What would happen, however, if we were to discover that the badge of failure attached to these works is the result of an incompatibility between paradigms rather than that of an actual decline? The concept of the anarchetype aims to affirm the existence of certain atypical structures where only a lack of structure is visible. Moreover, it also intends to exculpate de-centred and multipolar configurations, whose value the archetypal canon dismisses.

In what follows, I shall give examples of anarchetypical creations; these examples shall include sets or corpuses of works, rather than individual works, which, throughout various periods of European literature were considered to be sub-literature. The first class is represented by the novels of the late antiquity, novels that have been characterised as “Alexandrine,” in a relatively pejorative acceptation, as opposed to “Attic” works. Novels of imaginary voyages, of mythological inventions, or of avant-la-lettre picaresque fashion, the works of Lucian, for instance, have been regarded as mere amusements and fantasies, as epiphenomena or excrescences of the great literature, whose canonical models were the epic, tragedy, the philosophical poem, etc. The second corpus is that of the romances from the period of the Renaissance, which flourished starting with Amadis de Gaula and were thereafter paralysed by Don Quixote. Giving free reign to utterly uncontrollable imaginative impulses, these novels follow the most profuse and unveridical narrative pathways, behaving anarchically towards any idea of organisation or finitude. If we are to think well, even Cervantes’ novel, which withered the genre, is not in itself more unitarily structured; it might go on indefinitely, or even veer into another genre (the pastoral novel, for example, threatening to destroy thus yet another species).

A third corpus of anarchetypical works is that of extraordinary voyages, which experienced a remarkable flourishing in the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries. At the end of the eighteenth century, around the time of the French Revolution, an editor called Garnier even thought fit to select from the enormous array of texts of this type a relatively small number, which nonetheless added up to an impressive collection, in 39 volumes, of Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions et romans cabalistiques, works of exuberant inventiveness.[17] Criticism has also disdained these, attributing them to a fantasist, pleasurable sub-literature without pretensions. A symptomatic example could be Margaret Cavendish’s labyrinthine novel, The Blazing World, which was published in 1668. Its anarchic structure (as well as the duchess’s fantasist nature) made not only her own contemporaries but also modern analysts consider the book as a failure, as a literary “whim.” Frank E. Manuels, one of the great taxonomists of utopian narratives, does not include The Blazing World in the canon of the genre (which he otherwise gives a rather ample scope), treating it as a delirious book, which he compares with Freud’s Schreiber case.[18] Another commentator, Marina Leslie is right to critique this “execution” of Margaret Cavendish, showing that Manuels overlaps fiction and reality and gives vent to his own apprehensions regarding the transgression of the boundaries of psychical normality, of social behaviour norms, of sexual preferences and gender identity.[19] Beyond, however, phallocratic biases, excluding such a novel from literature (and assigning it to the pathological) may be explained through its anarchetypical composition.

That the onslaught against these classes of works may not be legitimate is suggested by the creations from a fourth epoch, namely the contemporary (modern and postmodern) period, which are much more assertive in their anti-canonical rebellion. This period has seen the proliferation of “anarchic” works, rebellious towards schemata and models. The most blatant example remains, of course, that of Nietzsche, who dispelled all the systemic pretences of metaphysics and of Hegelian history. A sample of the pressure exerted by the canonical archetypal mentality is to be found in all the attempts made by later commentators to integrate the Nietzschean fragments within a system. Proust’s great novelistic series also behaved anarchetypically in relation to the standards of the epoch; Proust’s work is so difficult to understand and accept particularly given its non-architectural logic, which is reminiscent of invertebrate organic biology. Thomas Pynchon’s novels V. or Gravity’s Rainbow are also texts that are anarchetypically constructed and that have opened, amongst others, the way towards postmodernity.

Today, the recurrence of anarchetypical writings, which arouse perplexity, which cannot be retold and seem not to have a message since they do not have a logocentric structure, is on the rise. Unlike the corpuses of works I evoked beforehand, which their own authors – perhaps blaming themselves for the manner they used their imagination – considered to be sub-literature, contemporary anarchetypical works refuse more and more insistently the indictment of non-value entailed by their non-canonicity. The lack of such complexes of axiological inferiority (as is the case of Fellini’s, Bergmann’s or Tarkovsky’s films) clearly suggests that these authors have deliberately assumed what might be called the anarchetypical creative paradigm.

Might this be the explanation for the fascination our epoch feels towards the “light,” “open” works of the past, for its need to freely revisit the writings of other epochs? A Thousand and One Nights seduces not only through its narrative pleasure and its heavy, Oriental perfume, but also through its power of “postmodern” self-proliferation, through its capacity to create fictional worlds undergoing expansion. Its tentacular configuration pertains to a decentred, multipolar paradigm, in which postmodern man, obsessed with multiple personalities, rejoices in finding himself. Of course, an objection might be brought that A Thousand and One Nights does not form an anarchetype per se, since (almost) all the stories narrated by Scheherazade end by closing in upon themselves, by making sense, even when they are dislocated from the technique of frame narratives, of stories within stories. However, the book is anarchetypical in its entirety, given the coexistence within it of so many narrative kernels, of so many different mythemes, which do not lend themselves to organisation within a final scenario. Anarchetypical is any constellation of suns in which no star manages to impose itself as the centre, even though each of them is the centre of their own solar system. A Thousand and One Nights foretells the anarchetypal decomposition of the contemporary epos, the unbridled pleasure of narration and of plunging into fictional universes, which brings about the destruction of all rigid frameworks and dividing limits.

 

 

Notes