Wednesday 30 May 2012

Sinbad and the Book as Mirror

I came to Steven Millhauser after realising that he told the kinds of stories I most want to tell - stories which explore the uncanny alongside the canny, which deal in realism yet with a dark strain of fantasy always lurking in the background. The ambiguity you can create, and hopefully control, when balancing these two poles is something I'll come back to soon, but I've been momentarily sidetracked by a story that reneges on his usual parties of illusionists and unexplained mystery, and deals with an issue close to any storyteller - how stories themselves are told, and interpreted in any multitude of ways, how they evolve differently in different minds.

  1. Late afternoon, the slant sun bright and the sky blue fire, Sinbad the merchant sits in the warm shade of an orange tree, in the northeast corner of his courtyard garden.
  2. The first European translation of The Arabian Nights was made by the French orientalist Antoine Galland, in twelve volumes published between 1704 and 1717.                                                                     
  3. I abode awhile in Baghdad-city savoring my prosperity and happiness and forgetting all I had endured of perils and hardships and sufferings, till I was again seized with a longing to travel and see strange sights, whereupon I bought costly merchandise meet for trade, and binding it into bales, repaired to Bassorah.
These are the first sentences of the first, second and third paragraphs of The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad, originally from Millhauser's collection The Barnum Museum, but also found in We Others: New and Selected Stories. Three narrative strains are established, which repeat in the same cyclical pattern, a paragraph at a time, till the end of the story, 23 pages later. A paragraph examining an old Sinbad in the third person as he sits in his garden, remembering and misremembering past adventures, followed by an authoritative paragraph detailing the history of The Arabian Nights and in particular the story of Sinbad, and finally a paragraph in the first person, in the voice of a still young Sinbad who has decided to undertake an eighth voyage. 
                  The effect is a carefully crafted work of metafiction - the middle sections point out to the reader that what he is reading is fiction; the first sections give Sinbad's consideration of the way he has altered his voyages by describing them, so that there could be 'three septads: the seven voyages, the memory of the seven voyages, and the telling of the seven voyages.' In a similar vein it is pointed out that there are three narrators of Sinbad's story - Sinbad himself, Scheherazade who is describing Sinbad telling his own story to the King of Persia, and an omniscient narrator who is telling the reader of A Thousand and One Nights the story of Scheherazade, telling the story of Sinbad, etc. The third section seems to be an original story, although there is one curious moment. The young Sinbad is transported to a Baghdad where no one can see or hear him, and discovers his old self, sitting in his courtyard. He becomes a viewer of the old Sinbad, as we readers are viewers of the old Sinbad. He exists in his own story as something outside his own story, highlighting the theme of multiple interpretation. 
                  Another exploration of this theme occurs when the old Sinbad remembers not individual voyages, but bits and pieces from each voyage, 'so it comes about that within the seven voyages new voyages arise, which gradually replace the earlier voyages as the face of an old man replaces the face of a child.' Scheherazade herself may distort the stories - she is telling them to King Shahriyar of Persia to save her own life - might she not put words in Sinbad's mouth, exaggerate to prolong her story or to make it more fascinating?
                  Then there is the question of time. As Millhauser writes: 'Sinbad recites each of his voyages from start to finish in an unbroken monologue during a single day ... [the story] therefore takes seven full days ... Scheherazade begins the story at the very end of Night 536 and completes it towards the end of Night 566' - it takes her thirty nights, evening to dawn, even though Sinbad manages to tell it in only 7 days. Finally, 'The reader may complete the entire story of Sinbad at a sitting, or he may divide his reading into smaller units, which will not necessarily coincide with the narratives of Sinbad or Scheherazade, and which will change from one reading to another.'
                  And the role of the imagination? What if, as the old Sinbad wonders, 'he imagined the voyages in his youth, and now remembers them as if they had actually taken place, or whether he imagined them in his old age and placed them far back, in a youth barely remembered. Does it matter?'
                  Whether it matters or not, it gradually becomes clear that there are 'as many voyages as there are readers, as many voyages as there are readings.'
                  So what does this tell us about the art of storytelling? An obvious truth, but one which can be hard to remember. Everybody sees the world in a different way. What we believe is established is not necessarily so to another individual. To Western ears, music in a major key is associated with happiness and joy, but in certain parts of China, for example, when people first heard Western music in a major key they described it as being melancholy and sad. 
                  If, as a writer, you can maintain this notion, another layer may start to develop in your work . If you remember that the book or story or poem, as well as being something hopefully read by many individuals, is read, still, by individuals, and so acts as a mirror - the individual reader will have their own interpretation, in effect giving this meaning to the text through the act of reading it - if you think of your audience as an audience of individuals, rather than a collectivist mass, could this one-to-one connection be exploited? How far can you go in this direction? How many voyages can you create?


Tuesday 29 May 2012

The First Post

This blog is for myself. My main aim is to write - to get myself writing, to reflect on my writing, and to reflect on what I'm reading, while my thoughts are still fresh. Some posts will take the form of personal reviews, focusing on short stories, novels, poetry, movies, etc, but with personal being the operative word. For example, if I were to review Steven Millhauser's short story, The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad (which I will do soon) it won't be a general review, but a look at what interests me enough to make me write about it - i.e. the way the three narratives parallel and work with each other, mixing fiction and 'meta'fiction to create a story about storytelling. Other posts will be about things I want to explore in my writing, writers I admire, problems with my writing I'm trying to resolve, etc, etc, etc. Hopefully this will be interesting to other people too, maybe even interesting enough to read on a regular basis. So if you're interested in writing and reading, and reading about how people write and read, read what I write and write back.