The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade
An Alternative Reading of Myths – Part 3
Let’s start the third and final part of our Alternative Reading of Myths with a brief recap.
In part 1, I criticized Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey by pointing out that mythology could not be shoehorned into a universal, archetypal narrative because myths are hardly ever composed of linear stories with a beginning, middle and end; but of a far more complex rhizome of cyclical, intertwining episodes. In part 2, I explored how myths could be best understood as being built from recurring cellular themes, which I in turn linked to the contemporary memetic language of #hashtags.
I posited that any mythical story arc could be broken down into a sequence of four themes: 1) a Desire, which sparks the action of the myth, 2) a Plan, or the course set to fulfill the Desire, 3) a Means, or the unique resource needed for the Plan to succeed, and 4) the Deed, or the Desire’s achievement, which follows the Plan and uses the Means. Each of these themes could, in turn, be expressed as a #hashtag, to provide an adequate level of abstraction that helps schematize a myth while making it easy to compare with others.
Flash quiz: Which well-known myth would this be?
Desire: #PunishInfidelity
Plan: #VirginTributes
Means: #RoyalPower
Deed: #KillThemAll
You may have guessed that I’m referring to Sultan Shahryar in the opening chapters of The Arabian Nights. Betrayed by his unfaithful wife, he is driven by the Desire to preemptively chastise future adultery (#PunishInfidelity) and so Plans to marry a new woman every night (#VirginTributes), only to have her beheaded the next morning by Means of his power as Sultan (#RoyalPower). He thus achieves his uxoricidal Deed (#KillThemAll).
Furthermore, I had explained how a single story arc like this can catalyze a sequel in which the Deed is Undone. Following the same example:
Counter-Desire: #RestoreFidelity
Plan: #Stall
Means: #SilverTongue
Deed Undone: #SaveThemAll
Thus, every story told over the book’s one thousand and one nights is inscribed within an extensive sequel in which our heroine, Scheherazade, is driven by a Counter-Desire for Shahryar to overcome his distrust in women (#RestoreFidelity). She hatches a Plan to postpone her own death (#Stall) by Means of her extraordinary storytelling skills (#SilverTongue), and finally accomplishes the Deed Undone by lifting the Sultan’s murderous decree (#SaveThemAll).
This is where we left off.
Let’s place the two story arcs I’ve just described in The Arabian Nights side by side. The first is an introductory arc where Shahryar decides to kill all his wives; the second –which takes up most of the book– is Scheherazade becoming his wife without getting killed. Within the structure of the Deed / Deed Undone, can we think of a hypothetical third story arc, in which Shahryar’s forgiveness of his wife is now reverted? Edgar Allan Poe could, and did, in his 1845 short story “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”.
If you haven’t read the story (available here), you can begin to imagine its plot by pinning down its Deed Undone: the imminent death sentence of Queen Scheherazade. And so the story goes: On the first night after the Sultan’s faith in women is restored, Scheherazade tells him one more story describing places, characters and technology from the Industrial Revolution, but in the wondrous wording of her time. She unwittingly trades fantasy for prophecy, and Shahryar finds it all so preposterous that he has her beheaded the next day. Though satire is not myth, this one follows a mythical structure to a tee.
If our reading of myths is cyclical –one story arc spawns the next and so forth– how far can we stretch this chain reaction in the doing and undoing of events? One need only think of the Star Wars franchise to see that there’s a limit to how far a mythical storyline can be milked through this revolving-door narrative.
For those unfamiliar with the movies: in A New Hope, the Death Star is built (Deed) only to be destroyed by the Rebels (Deed Undone); in Return of the Jedi it is rebuilt bigger and more badass (Deed Redone), only to be destroyed again by the Rebels (Deed Undone); and in the Force Awakens, it is rebuilt even bigger and even more badass (Deed Redone), only to be destroyed again by the Rebels (Deed Undone). If this sounds silly because it’s Hollywood consider that, in Greek mythology, Cronus overthrows his father Uranus (Deed) and then eats his children to avoid being overthrown in turn (Deed Undone); Zeus eventually overthrows his father Cronus (Deed Redone) and then eats his first wife, Metis, to avoid fathering a son who would overthrow him (Deed Undone). Apollo eventually leads the gods to overthrow his father Zeus (Deed Redone), but his coup fails (Deed Undone).
While this repetition in Greek mythology generally works, its Star Wars counterpart quickly becomes trite, which leads me to assert that there is such as a thing as a “better” form of myth-building. Just to tread this path carefully, I will frame it as a quality of richness in myths, a mixture of conceptual depth and narrative allure that can make some stories more compelling than others.
The structure we’ve put forth so far –the four tropes expressed as #hashtags (Desire, Plan, Means & Deed) inscribed in the Deed / Deed Undone cycles– can provide a good measuring stick for this exercise:
Foundations for better myth-building
1. Complex #hashtags
I find that the more extraordinary the four #hashtags, the richer the myth. When these components become common and pedestrian –and in some cases, even absent– myths lose narrative charm.
2. Recurring #hashtags
The more the four #hashtags reappear across different mythologies, the more powerful they become. When #KillThemAll is not only evocative of Shahryar but of the Biblical version of Herod the Great, and #Stall summons not only Scheherazade but Penelope at Ithaca; myths become multilayered to the reader, who can enjoy their resonance through different cultures and times.
3. Multiple #hashtags
The more #hashtags can be associated to each of our four themes, the richer the myth. So far, we’ve been abstracting myths into one #hashtag per trope, but that doesn’t mean that more cannot apply. For instance, Perseus uses several Means to kill the Gorgon Medusa: #WingedShoes, #InvisibilityHelmet, #AdamantSword, #MagicPouch, and #MirrorShield.
4. Additional #hashtags
There are several other components of myths relating to characters and context beyond our four #hashtags that can enhance their richness. For example, we had used #MadKing to describe Shahryar in the first entry of Applied Mythology, even though this refers to the myth’s protagonist, who is not himself a Desire, Plan, Means or Deed.
Following the points above, the more complex, recurrent and multiple these additional tropes are, the richer the myth becomes.
5. Complex Deeds Undone
This is where Star Wars fails. While doing and undoing the same Deed follows a mythical structure, myths have the option of undoing Deeds through various, much more creative channels. The death of a hero, for instance, can be undone by his resurrection but also by his avenging…
6. Multiple Deeds Undone
…or by both. To point to an earlier example, the death of Baldr triggers not only the death of his wife, the birth of his avenger Váli, and a (failed) attempt to resurrect him, but ultimately sets the beginning of Ragnarök into motion. The ramification of Deeds into a multiplicity of Deeds Undone is what gives a body of mythology complexity and depth.
This is where we’ll stop setting the table for our Alternative Reading of Myths. Future entries in Applied Mythology will jump straight into myth analysis and use the four #hashtags and Deed / Deed Undone as our default structure. I’ll be sure to link this entry for future reference and new readers.
Coming up next. Our first architectural intermezzo: how can our structure for reading myths be applied to designing a house?
…and a Fun Fact. Sultan Shahryar’s brother, Shah Zaman, also discovers his wife’s infidelity at the start of The Arabian Nights and, according to some translations, mimics his brother’s decree to marry and behead a new wife every day. This implies that, during the thousand and one nights that Scheherazade spent telling Shahryar stories, Shah Zaman was murdering one thousand and one additional women in Samarkand, where he ruled as Sultan. In true doppelgänger fashion, Shah Zaman only stops when his brother does, and ends up marrying Scheherazade’s sister (and wingwoman) Dunyazad.
!! Thrilling anticipation of your first “architectural intermezzo”
Excellent insights, thank you!