Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 A Cognitive Reading of the Qurʾanic Story of Joseph
- 2 Joseph in the Life of Muḥammad: Prophecy in Tafsīr (Exegesis), Sīrah (Biography) and Hadith (Tradition)
- 3 Joseph and his Avatars
- 4 Intertextuality and Reading: The Myth of Deliverance in al-Faraj baʿd al-Shiddah
- 5 Imposture and Allusion in the Picaresque Maqāmah
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Anagnorisis in Arabic Falsafah
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Imposture and Allusion in the Picaresque Maqāmah
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 A Cognitive Reading of the Qurʾanic Story of Joseph
- 2 Joseph in the Life of Muḥammad: Prophecy in Tafsīr (Exegesis), Sīrah (Biography) and Hadith (Tradition)
- 3 Joseph and his Avatars
- 4 Intertextuality and Reading: The Myth of Deliverance in al-Faraj baʿd al-Shiddah
- 5 Imposture and Allusion in the Picaresque Maqāmah
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Anagnorisis in Arabic Falsafah
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
[He] experienced the freedom that lies behind the mask, within dissimulation, the freedom to juggle with being, and, indeed, with the language which is so vital to our being.
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus, p. 103The Poetics of Family Stories
Recognition stories lend themselves to easy parody. A few examples exist in the Arabian Nights, depending on how one leans in interpretation. There is a case to be made that the maqāmāt (sing. maqāmah, often rendered ‘seances’ or ‘assemblies’) are in large measure parodies of the art of storytelling or of the values with which stories can be burdened by a culture. Intrigues of disguise and imposture all make for good stories in which manifold deceit is veiled at first, and then exposed. Sometimes the story itself may be exposed, for a good story about forgery will stir suspicions that the story too has been fabricated. Allusive narratives exacerbate the point since they are texts in which much detail and significance lie under the surface in the play on language. The rhetorical figures of al-Ḥarīrī's ;maqāmāt emphasise the sensation that one thing – a word, or even just a phoneme – can have two very different, and sometimes even contrary, meanings. Indeed, they mirror Cave's remarks about Western literature:
in the Aristotelian tradition of antiquity, anagnorisis is … a focus for reflections on the way fictions as such are constituted, the way in which they play with and on the reader, their distinctive markers as fiction – untruth, disguise, trickery, ‘suspense’ or deferments; the creative effects of shock and amazement, and so on.
These comments were originally made about both Odysseus and the Odyssey. With Homer's Greek, we are culturally a far cry from the Arabic maqāmah. But to insist on the distinction is on some level spurious, for the poetics of disguise and disclosure – of the art of telling stories in a long cycle of itinerant impostures so fundamental to the divagations and return of Odysseus – justify the stretched comparison.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Recognition in the Arabic Narrative TraditionDiscovery, Deliverance and Delusion, pp. 246 - 312Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016