Ruxandra Cesereanu
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
RuxCes@yahoo.com
The 1001 Days and Nights Creative Prose-Writing Workshop
– The Avatars of an Experiment –
Abstract: The present essay focuses on the creative prose-writing workshop, hosted by Phantasma, the Centre for Imagination Studies (in Cluj, Romania) and devoted to the art of narration in The 1001 Nights series of stories. The workshop, entitled The 1001 Days and Nights, spanned a period of 500 days (between 1 March 2008 and 13 July 2009). The experiment was also exported to America, rallying narrators from Romania and from New Orleans, in the form of a symbolical contest held between 22-24 September 2010, during The 1001 Nights Story-Telling Festival in New Orleans.
Keywords: The 1001 Nights; Creative prose-writing workshop; Art of narration; Narrative ceremonies; Ludic dimension; Fictionalisation; Irrealism.
Between 1 March 2008 and 13 July 2009, I proposed and carried out a creative prose-writing workshop, hosted by Phantasma, the Centre for Imagination Studies and devoted to the art of narration in The 1001 Nights series of stories. The workshop, entitled The 1001 Days and Nights, usually took place on Saturday mornings (except during vacations and exam sessions) at the Faculty of Letters, in Popovici room or in the Phantasma offices; its sessions lasted for two or three hours and it spanned a period of 500 days. The experiment was concluded with a ten-day camp, which was organised at the Cetate Cultural Pole in July 2009 and was sponsored by the Romanian Writers’ Union and the Mircea Dinescu Foundation. The last revisions of the manuscript that will some day be submitted for publication (probably in 2012 or 2013) were made in a three-day micro-camp in July 2010. The experiment has also been exported to America, since, at my suggestion, a small-scale story-telling festival was organised there, in the form of a symbolical contest, between 22-24 September, rallying narrators from Romania and from New Orleans. Sponsored by the Romanian Cultural Institute from New York, The 1001 Nights Story-Telling Festival in New Orleans was logistically supported by the Gold Mine Saloon from New Orleans and by the Centre for Imagination Studies from Cluj. The Romanian team had six participants, including the undersigned, two of the students who took part in the The 1001 Days and Nights workshop (Marius Conkan and Bogdan Odăgescu), the director of the Centre for Imagination Studies – Corin Braga, plus two narrators from Iaşi, Lucian Dan Teodorovici and Florin Lăzărescu. The American team featured Andrei Codrescu, Dave Brinks, Bill Lavender, Jessica Faust-Spitzfaden, R. Moose Jackson, James Nolan, and DeWitt Brinson.
Here is a synthesis of the outcomes of The 1001 Days and Nights creative prose-writing workshop: 1. the experiment involved 16 students, most of whom were from the World and Comparative Literature Department, and, sporadically, 2 special external guests (from Bucharest and Constanţa); 2. over 100 stories were written, out of which 94 (4 collectively written, 6 written at 2 hands – that is by 2 authors – and 84 individually written) stories have been retained for the final manuscript, destined for publication. Besides the stories themselves, the manuscript also required writing several explanatory epic connections (bridges) between the texts in question, in certain cases, these bridges also turning into stories.
The aim of the workshop was the drafting of stories that, from a technical, stylistic perspective, were related and similar to those in The 1001 Nights, developing, however, epically “paralysed” characters, who had appeared, indeed, but had had a rather reduced, minimal score in the consecrated text of the story suite, which allowed for the epic development of a new suite of tales. The narrative convention was preserved unchanged: the starting point was a uterus – or hollow-story, serving as the matrix for the following stories, which required thematic links and bridges, so much so that the transition from one text to another could unfold naturally. In the new suite of tales, the protagonist is not Scheherezade, but her sister, Doniazade, and one of her slaves, Rashazade (the latter character is not to be found in The 1001 Nights but has been made up); these two characters are both storytellers who impose the narrative ritual and, at the same time, exquisite listeners. To them is added a third storytelling character, king Shah Zaman, the brother of the famous, blood-thirsty king Shahryar, whom Scheherezade attempted to persuade, through nocturnal ritualistic narratives, to stop killing maidens. At a mimetic level, we aimed to ensure that the experimentally designed stories written within The 1001 Days and Nights creative prose-writing workshop should meet three explicit requirements: the plot should maintain the reader’s curiosity; the writing style and the atmosphere should abide by the Arabic, Persian, Indian or any other Oriental conventions peculiar to The 1001 Nights; and thirdly, each text should demonstratively evince a fable-like moral.
What I was interested in while carrying out this experiment of creative prose-writing was not only the unveiling and deconstruction (and, implicitly, the reconstruction) of the art of narration, but also the completion of a bazaar-like book, with a hybrid structure (relying on oppositions, but also on the coincidence of contraries!), in which fantastic and gothic stories (with genies and djinns) could coexist with realistic, witty, prankish stories of the anecdotal kind. At the ideational level, I also had in mind a hybrid aim: the world of scholars and the erudite (the bookish world) should blend with that of simple people, of quotidian life and ordinary diction; dreams and nightmares should be counterbalanced by concrete life. The urban atmosphere should merge with the world of the desert; exotic, fantastic spaces should fuse with real cities, here and now. I also simultaneously aimed for religious ideational constructions, as well as for (culinary, erotic) lasciviousness and opulence. I proposed diverse picturesque geographies, erring, at times, through an excessive descriptive hedonism and resorting, redundantly perhaps, to the theme of the voyage in order to work on invariants from the journeys of Ulysses and Gulliver (which are also to be found in the classical suite of The 1001 Nights) or famous magical abilities (Circe’s and Merlin’s, variations on whom are also encoded in the suite of Arabian stories).
The guiding line of the creative prose-writing workshop I proposed was, however, always that of valorising the narrative ceremonies, the manner whereby the epic art is born and manifests itself. To that end, we invented a series of narrative tricks, we refined our skills and became storytellers as we wrote along, especially since the first texts were either too simplistic (and schematic) or too mazy and intricate, with hardly verisimilar characters and clumsy adaptations to the oriental style, given that the new and rather young storytellers from Cluj were influenced by the narrative conventions of European tales. As most of the characters from The 1001 Nights are avid readers, we also attempted to make the storyteller himself or herself be the key character of each new tale, either overtly or covertly! That is why the new stories were always read in front of all the others and commented on as such, suggestions and even critiques being in order.
What was equally our concern was writing stories about extreme experiences: passions, obsessions, beliefs, hallucinations, as well as abominable, grotesque or absurd matters, so that the texts would alternate in presenting human virtues and flaws. Some texts were written fervently, others used irony and humour (even dark humour) prevalently; many of the storytellers from Cluj preferred farce as the ground they built their narratives on.
There was a certain thematic discipline underlying the stories, albeit a relative one, strictly depending on the “paralysed” (that is minimally portrayed) characters from the original suite of tales that the Cluj group took over in order to bestow them with a new performance (a new genesis) and a new life. It was all like a game of second-hand puppets that eventually came to life and took control of the “reality” of the story whose protagonists they had become. In most of the cases, these characters had their revenge by becoming true characters (with a narrated life) now.
Just like the old stories, the new stories also combined, at times, prose and poetry. The (implicitly hermeneutic) definition provided by Caliph Harun Al-Rashid in The Tale of Sweet Friend and Ali-Nur remained valid for the texts written in the Cluj workshop: “Prose […] is only speech, but poetry is strung pearls” (p. 271). Prose is a construction following a strategic narrative plan, and strategy resorts not only to an epic manner of arousing curiosity and the craving to understand the world (wisely), but also to a panoply of tropes that tame and smooth the prose (narrative) itself. Poetry is conceived of in a similar way, lacking, however, a pretentious architecture: it is wrought in small surfaces, concentrating on the level of stylistic figures, which are always foregrounded. Prose is pretentious couture, poetry is intricate jewellery, but the working material (for both the “tailor” and the “jeweller”) is essential: silk (for prose), precious stones and noble metals for poetry.
Another dimension that captivated the participants in the creative prose-writing workshop from Cluj, who successfully completed another series of stories in the manner of The 1001 Nights, was the promise of redemption through story telling, which escaped its soteriological framework and aimed for sheer aesthetic redemption, achieving, obviously, an ontological effect. The twenty-first century has inherited doubt and relativism from the twentieth century – which are also applied to the figure of God; in the absence of God, however, or with a hidden (jaded, vanishing, etc.) God, the tales written in The 1001 Days and Nights workshop took over the task of re-sacralisation and redemption through story telling. As leader of the workshop, I believed in this idea and suggested such a direction, even though I may not have specifically indicated it.
The ludic dimension was important in the creative prose-writing workshop: I tried and managed to stage a narrative carnival, with an attested and explicit theatricality (blending into the epic ritual, hence the evident persuasion strategies!), in which the act of narration was passed from one storyteller (participating student) to another through various epic “balls”; this explains the abundance of trickster characters – jesters, pranksters, farceurs – from the new suite of “Arabian” tales from Cluj. Narrative games were also used in order to uphold another idea that was intentionally materialised: the notion of a narrative carpe diem, of textual jouissance (the voluptuousness implicit in the production of a text). In short, the pleasure of reading was targeted as the utmost goal of the new suite of tales produced in The 1001 Days and Nights workshop.
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In The Fictive and the Imaginary, Wolfgang Iser focuses in his theoretical model of analysing a literary text on the triad: the real, the fictive and the imaginary, as well as on the interaction between these. What is essential is the act (action) of fictionalisation:
Although each component of the triad fulfils a significant function, the act of fictionalising is of paramount importance: it crosses the boundaries both of what organizes (external reality) and of what in converts into a gestalt (the diffuseness of the imaginary). It leads the real to the imaginary and the imaginary to the real, and it thus conditions the extent to which a given world is to be transcoded, a nongiven world is to be conceived, and the reshuffled worlds are to be made accessible to the reader’s experience. (Iser, pp. 3-4)
It is this very act that was our concern in The 1001 Days and Nights workshop, since such an act of fictionalising amounts to a transgression of rigid boundaries and to a blending of opposites through connecting bridges – a demonstrable and demonstrated, de facto transgression. What we aimed for through such a transgression was “a rehabilitation of narrative imagination in our post-modern culture” (Kearney, p. 241). This rehabilitation was, however, not unitary, but forking and heterogeneous: on one hand, we respected the canonical narrative conventions from The 1001 Nights (through a prevalent epic mimesis), while on the other hand, we resorted to parody, in an intentional (albeit not an exclusively postmodern) sense. The postmodern nature of the narrative experiment conducted in The 1001 Days and Nights workshop resided, above all, in the very fact that we dared to conceive and propose a new suite of Arabian tales now, in the twenty-first century, even though, in the majority of the stories, we strictly complied with classical epic conventions. The puzzle-like structure of the final manuscript, its mosaic architecture, its hybrid matrix, all plead, perhaps, for the terms of irrealism, as it is explained by Nelson Goodman:
Irrealism does not hold that everything or even anything is irreal, but sees the world melting into versions and versions making worlds, finds ontology evanescent, and inquires into what makes a version right and a world well-built. (Goodman, p. 29)
Bibliography
Goodman, Nelson, Of Minds and Other Matters, Harvard University Press, Cambridge & London, 1984
Iser, Wolfgang, The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore-London, 1993
Kearney, Richard, Poetics of Imagining. Modern to Post-Modern, Edinbourgh University Press, 1998
The Arabian Nights. Tales of the 1001 Nights. Volume I, Translated by Malcolm C. Lyons, with Ursula Lyons, London, Penguin Classics, 2010