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Journal
Complete your weekly journal for the ready by 11:59 p.m. Sunday.
You must work with a passage from this week’s reading. Thanks!
Week 4 (Read this post first for full directions)
This weeks’ readings take us East of the Greek civilization. The Bhagavad-Gita is a central text to Hinduism, but also, an important text that had widely influenced thinkers world-wide. In the mid 19th century, for example, English translations of the text reached the US. Major American writers from Emerson to Thoreau to Walt Whitman were widely influenced by the text, and it surely played a role in developing the Transcendentalist movement (useful here is the ways in which Eastern ideas influenced the ways in which some Christians re-evaluated their conception of God and human experience).
On a more fundamental scale, the Bhagavad Gita is a philosophical text that unearths key understandings of the Hindu religion in a narrative form–but more widely than viewing this specifically in the context of religion, the text forces us to think about larger discussions of ethics and differences between what is right and wrong that pertain to all cultures. Likely, this is the reason for the text’s popularity around the world: The simplicity of the two actors in the text, as well as the fundamental problem facing Arjuna, are compelling to anyone and everyone.
The reading here is challenging in that there are lots of new terms and ideas here. There is no way to become an expert on another religion in a week…do the best you can and look up words and terms as you need to. Please keep an open mind to this reading. I am in no way trying to challenge any kind of religious foundation you have, the point here is to read and to be exposed the world at large.
This week’s second reading focuses on one of the most popular narratives to come out of (now) middle East–then part of Persia. The text, however, is a mix of stories collected from no singular cultural or linguistic group. Instead, the stories in the text suggest wide-flung influence, most likely stemming from the “Silk Road,” a complex set of trade routes that bridged the Middle East to India and Asia. The complex mix of cultures, then, is likely at the heart of this sometimes strange collection of stories. The manuscript for Nights is the most complete of any text from the middle ages, although the manuscript itself suggests that the tales were penned much earlier and, like Greek myths, began from an oral story-telling tradition.
As Europeans began trade routes with the East, by the 1700s early translations of One Thousand and One Nights were available in France, and soon after, in England, which helped set into European minds a complex set of stereotypes and images of the East that were culturally and historically inaccurate: flying carpets, magic lamps, hyper-sexuality are all stereotypes we can pull out of our own popular culture about that part of the world, and largely stem from this text. Differences between the East and West have often culminated in cultural misunderstandings: and, certainly, post-2001 we understand this concept. In scholarly terms, the term “Other” and/or “Othering” refers to how this relationship works: when people define a foreign group of people they do not understand, they often attribute a set of qualities that directly contrast how that group thinks of itself. This often turns into a case of oppositions: we are good, they are bad; we are modern, they are uncivilized; we have the right religion, they are barbarians, etc. So then, some texts, like this one, when taken out of its cultural context, have the extreme power to both delight and partake in cultural stereotyping.
As you begin to read the text, a few notes:
· Likely, part of the appeal of Nights in 17th century France was likely due to the graphic sexual content in the narrative. Two opening scenes in the book are likely much more graphic than modern readers would ever guess.
· The book is violent, especially toward women, but there are also important moments of violence against men. We are going to discuss this in the forum.
· Shahrazad’s storytelling is critical to think about as we investigate this work. How do her stories reflect on her own circumstances? Do her stories work to “teach” the Shahrayar?
· The complete text, which is huge by the way, only documents around 270 nights, yet by the end of the original manuscript, there is no end. As A.S. Byatt, a famous British novelist, notes, “Storytelling in general, and The Thousand and One Nights in particular, consoles us for endings with endless new beginnings.”
However, English and French translations in the 18th and 19th centuries penned a variety of endings, the most common conclusion dating from 1850 (Burton trans.) imagines that Shahrazad bore three children secretly and by the 1001st night, presented the King with his children & the sight of them changed his mind about killing Shahrazad (if we take the 1001 nights at a practical level, it would be impossible to bear three children in the time-frame). The “happy ending” motif here, however, fits more in line with Western storytelling than it likely does to Persian/Eastern traditions. Other endings suggest that Shahrazad uses her storytelling as a moral and ethical instructional device and convinces the king that killing wives is wrong. Still, others see the lack of an ending as a larger symbolic point: the never-ending storytelling is symbolic of our human ability to understand our lives, to formulate an understanding, and to make the world safe.
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