Shehrazade and the Jealous King

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Last Updated: Sunday, 27 October 2013 20:37
Written by Fabrice Dubosc
A psychoanalytical interpretation of the Thousand and One Nights must nec-
essarily begin with the prologue, the overall frame that introduces
Shehrazade as teller of healing tales.

Fabrice Dubosc (Milan)

A psychoanalytical interpretation of the Thousand and One Nights must nec-

essarily begin with the prologue, the overall frame that introduces
Shehrazade as teller of healing tales.

A king has been betrayed and cannot acknowledge his own guilt. Shehrazade
spells out the thousand possible conjugations of the conflict between power
and desire allowing the king access to repentance, forgiveness and justice.
From their complex intercourse the one thousandth and first night is born
when the implicit order of narration finds its fulfillment in the acknowledgment
of Shehrazade as Queen and savior of the kingdom.

Therefore - far from being a narrative artifice - this prologue introduces the
main theme: the radical gender conflict that will be amplified by Shehrazade's
tales in progress. Its main characters are a mad king and the last of his wives
of one night. The result of their encounter will be the imaginal treasure of the
One Thousand and One Nights.

I briefly summarize their tale.

King Shahriyar rules with justice over China and India, winning the favor of
his subjects. Gnawed by boredom or nostalgia he invites to court his younger
brother, Shahzaman, king of Samarkand. The latter has already begun his
journey when he suddenly remembers he has forgotten something at Court
and goes back to fetch it.

He thus discovers that his wife, the queen, betrays him with a black slave.
The invitation to visit his elder brother turns therefore to disaster for Shahza-
man, but also for Shahriyar who full of mistrust discovers that his queen be-
trays him as well, even with forty slaves and handmaids.

Both brother-kings are therefore catastrophically wounded in their feelings

and in their very identity: but whereas the younger feels better when he dis-
covers that the elder is also betrayed, the latter, 'having lost his wits', tells
him:
"Come, let us leave this place, for our kingdom is now useless, unless we
meet some other to whom such a thing has happened, otherwise it is better to
die." The two meet a demon-djinn that holds a young woman in bondage.
While the genius sleeps she forces the two brothers to have intercourse with
her, threatening to awake the demon. Then she takes their rings which she
adds to her necklace made of five hundred and seventy three rings. She ex-
plains: "This genius kidnapped me on the eve of my wedding; he put me in a
chest and the chest in a trunk, bound with seven locks; and he laid it on the
bottom of the stormy sea, without knowing that when one of us women wants
something, nothing can defeat her."

Shahriyar comments thus: "If this is a demon and something worse has be-
fallen him than what has befallen us, then we may comforted..." This experi-
ence permits him therefore to return to the order and charge of the kingdom.
He represses altogether the premises of the woman's tale, the fact that she
was kidnapped on the eve of her wedding. He identifies so completely with
the jealous and cuckold demon that from that time onwards every night the
king chooses a virgin, takes her maidenhood, and at dawn has killed her. The
tale would have thus ended with this 'ginecide' if Shehrazade had not decided
to "intercede for the daughters of the Muslims". Accepting the risk of the
death penalty hanging on all potential wives, buried alive in the Harem, she
attempts like Isis to recompose the fragments of the king. With the help of a
silent witness, her little sister Dunyazade, Shehrazade tells the king, night af-
ter night, the tales that will heal him, at once speaking for the women of the
kingdom, and giving meaning to the wounds of the Sultan. At the end of the
Nights, Shehrazade presents to the king the sons that they have begotten to-
gether and who represent a new possibility of transmission. Shahriyar ac-
knowledges her as bride and Queen and the younger brother also marries
Dunyazade. This double wedding gives light to the eschatological kingdom for
it is written that the final night was "as bright as day".

Our first elements of reflection focus on the unfulfillment, on the boredom and
longing of the king, of this Sultan described as "good and righteous", who, in
spite of the fullest possible recognition and social mirroring, feels a lack, a de-
fect that leads him to call his younger brother to court, thus discovering the
betrayal of the Queens. The theme of a 'removed or unknown betrayal'
touches the problematic area of early childhood's wounds: the Little Emperor
syndrome!

Neither does the obliging mirroring provided by his subjects nor the honored
Person which is thus sustained suffice to cover his more radical lack.

The king is surety for a social pact. He incarnates the possibility of order and
consent: he represents the power who protects the society from imperma-
nence. He therefore embodies both a legitimate guarantee of cultural continu-
ity and - as much as he stands against the law of impermanence - he also
represents a collective delusion. It is this very hypostatization of cultural
transmission which falters under the blows of the Queens.

As Jamal Eddine Bencheik tells us the betrayal acted by the royal brides
"constitutes a crime against the religious, moral, political and social order."
The betrayal is perpetuated with black slaves, which was even more humiliat-
ing. But "the Queens' betrayal is worthy of Queens." Their desire appears be-
yond measure and incomprehensible, like the young woman's who had been
kidnapped by the genius on the eve of her wedding. And it appears symmetri-
cal to the violence she has had to bear, a violence radically repressed both by
the genius and by the king who - strengthened by his new identification with
the djinn - acts out his demons every morning, depriving each bride of any at
dawn possible desire.

If we imagine dawn as the moment in which conscience arises we cannot but

agree that to such dawn of consciousness corresponds to radical repression.

It seems that we have here two converging motives: the first theme is the at-
tribution of guilt to womankind and the second the specificity of female sexu-
ality, experienced as upsetting and radically foreign to men's way of thinking.

The first theme should be considered in the context of Islamic culture and of
its definition of women's role.

As put in a few poignant words by Bencheik:

"Arabic-Islamic culture attributes the responsibility of evil to woman. We know

that this terror of betrayal has much deeper roots and that previous cultures
expressed it more or less in the same manner."

It would seem that the desire to marry - so violently denied by the djinn - and
the symmetrical desire to betray her betrayer might in some ways bear the
echo of Lilith crying out her despair at not seeing the dignity of her passion
recognised, a passion " which can lead to the very extremes of being."

Let us try to understand if, in our tale, the story of the young woman enslaved
by the djinn can help us to understand what happened between kings and
queens. We seem to be dealing here with both ends of the split. The evil djinn
can be interpreted as a split aspect of the masculine - an autonomous com-
plex with whom the king himself identifies - but also as an untameable and
unrepentant Animus who has exiled the feminine to the bottom of the sea/un-
conscious and humiliates her inducing her co-dependent coercive behaviour.
If the encounter with the other gender cannot take place on a ground of equal
dignity in diversity, what comes to pass is a sort of equivalence between mar-
riage itself (in the case of the Queens) and the rape/kidnapping that forbids
the marriage (in the case of the woman enslaved by the djinn) -

The possibility of a true encounter remains excluded from the forms defined
by the patriarchal/matriarchal institution. Its very idea can only survive
marginally as an imaginal possibility in the 'delirious words of the night.'

As it were, the betrayal acted out by queens and slaves reveals that the mar-
riage institution hinders a deeper conflict between male and female principles.

Moreover, the collapse of the king shows that the kingdom is ill. So ill that the
Sultan feels that if he will not find someone else to whom such a disgrace
may have happened he will not be able to continue his rule, he will not be
able to commit to his children the order he received from his father.

At once we see at the core of the crisis the problem of transmission and of its
difficulties. In fact, in this perspective, only the sterilized contents of estab-
lished order can be transmitted; this modality excludes a priori any knowledge
concerning knowledge, any form of transmission based on experience. The
value of what is transmitted is rather defined by the forcefulness of tautology
and power (since the main value is indeed the furthering of power itself)
rather than by an authentic (therefore individual) ethical basis. In this respect
the initiatic quality of traditional cultures has been lost.

As a result, when the order of paternal transmission falters, Shahriyar starts

seeking a new and 'superior' identification and finds the demon, the djinn,
who represents in some way his own dissociated complex, the split on which
patriarchal power is built. This identification strengthens, with a sort of deliri-
ous and perverted insight, the repression of the king's guilt, which is projected
on the female gender. It has been argued that the situation generates an
unredeemed Animus which also hinders the possibility of erotic encounter.

The murder of brides at the hand of Shahriyar prefigures almost prophetically

the cruelties of today's young Algerian fundamentalists, who, instigated and
armed by their elders, kidnap and rape their young teen-age victims before
killing them. This issue seems therefore crucial for the Islamic 'cultural uncon-
scious'.

The identification with the djinn can only lead back, in a sort of vicious cycle,
to the ruling 'cultural' categories. The king reconstructs for himself a pseudo-
identity, with accents of grandiose denial revealed by the compulsion to kill
his own attempts at relation, a sort of extreme defense against deepest de-
spair. Shehrazade frees him from this very compulsion through a sort of re-
versed verbal therapy, in which the subject is neither the 'patient' nor the
'therapist'.
In fact, whereas during the day the king holds court, passes judgment and
formulates laws, at night he turns wordless. With her 'delirious words of the
night' Shehrazade holds the wisdom of such; she speaks as dead and tells
her tales to live and she thus manages to free herself (and the king) from
deathly repetition. But how does this word of woman work? She does not
even need to ask 'What aileth thee', as Parsifal to the Fisher King. She does
not judge the king, but narrates with a thousand variations the conflicts of
passion and power, giving a voice back to Queens and Slaves, but also to the
king himself.

"From a love story to the next she pursues, in different forms the selfsame
conflict between law and desire. That the one may triumph here to be over-
thrown elsewhere does not matter. The goal is not to guarantee a happy or
unhappy end to love, but to represent its passion, whether it may end in joy or
disgrace. Shehrazade will always return to tell the eternity of this quest..."
(M.Chebel)

Shehrazade's cure is not interpretative: no single tale has in itself an exhaus-

tive explanation of the king's plight. And it is on the other hand interpretive be-
cause the king's curiosity is alerted and he has to patiently wait and reflect on
the development of unexpected, sometimes repetitive, never conclusive, of-
ten extraordinary plots by which he is led to a sort of suspension and incuba-
tion of the complex. And in fact he suspends the sentence, possibly because
the reflection he gets from Shehrazade's tales is never unilaterally exhaus-
tive, neither does it aggravate the guilt of his own lack. As Isis recreates the
lost phallus of Osiris after recomposing his dismembered body, thus the plural
narration of Shehrazade uncannily restores what the king lacks, granting him
access to a new living and ordering system of meaning.

The paradoxical courses and recourses of fortune, the unforeseeable misad-

ventures of all the players, the courage of the word shown by a concubine
who knows her death sentence, guide the king in a concentric pilgrimage
about the themes of destiny and forgiveness, universal motifs which compre-
hend but transcend his own tale...

In the end the complex labyrinth appears dated; the walls crumble or sink,
leaving but a trace on the ground, a maze without walls. Finally the king him-
self must have found his own story and must have told Shehrazade, because
when he charges her of faithful transmission - a central theme in Islamic cul-
ture - and has her supervise the transcription of the Nights, his tale is the very
first of the collection.

To understand how the word of Shehrazade operates it is enough to read the

first of the tales of the Nights:
It tells of a merchant who, in the course of a journey, throws away the seeds
of the dates he has just eaten unwittingly killing the son of a djinn. The djinn
condemns him to death but accepts a delay and postpones the sentence for
one year.

Shehrazade thus offers a paradoxical analogy with her own situation, and
stresses the disparity between the guilt imputed and the action which has led
to the offence, without removing the tension of the situation. From a certain
viewpoint our complexes/demons always punish us beyond the offense that
their undermining dissociation has determined. But however incidental guilt
here is not removed.

In fact the merchant accepts his destiny and after having put his affairs in or-
der goes back to the agreed place to be killed. On the way he meets three
blind old men, each followed by an animal. He tells them what has fallen on
him and they promise they will try to intercede for him. When they come to
the presence of the djinn, the first intercedes thus: "O djinn and joy of the king
of djinns, if I told you my tale with this gazelle and if you were to find it mar-
velous, would you give me the third part of this merchant's life.

Shehrazade establishes thus a point: that a tale can be worthy of a life - or

maybe that a life can be worthy only if it is recognized as a 'tale'. And so each
of the three blind men tells, poignantly enough, the story of how he was be-
trayed. The narration is interrupted by the break of dawn and the tale is sus-
pended at its climax. The king then says in his own heart: 'I swear that I will
not kill her until I will have heard the rest of her tale.'

Here we have a first role reversal, a first victory of Shehrazade's word.

Touching at once the heart of the matter, Shehrazade states that a fault can
be accepted and transcended thanks to a plural and collective narration. This
mirroring is the only one the king can bear because it is the only one that re-
ally corresponds to his situation.

'Shehrazade and the Jealous King' is taken from 'Thus spoke Shehrazade'
(Italian version, published 2002). Further information contact the author at: <
biodiv@planet.it >

Fabrice Dubosc is a Jungian analyst. He has a practice in Milan and is cur-

rently working on issues related to fundamentalism and cultural interpretation.