Arabian Nights week 21

NeilNjae

Story

Palace of Wonders

• Jinni makes the palace in one night
• Huge and ostentatous procession by the princess to Aladdin's palace
• Completing the window takes all the sultan's jewels and some of the vizir's. It's still incomplete.
• Vizir expresses opinion that the palace is magical.
• Aladdin spreads largesse to town and country, making himself popular.

New lamps for old

• Magician divines Aladdin's fate, travels to there.
• Sees the palace, resolves to recover the lamp. While Aladdin is away, "New lamps for old!"
• Badr gives away the magic lamp; magician leaves the city.
• Magician commands the jinni to take him, the palace, and the princess to North Africa.
• Vizir reiterates the use of magic. Sultan arrests Aladdin. Townsfolk protest.
• Vizir stops the execution lest the palace be stormed.
• Sultan agrees to give Aladdin 40 days to find his daughter.

Princess's revenge

• Aladdin stumbles (literally) into using the jinni of the ring. The jinni takes Aladdin to the palace in the Maghreb.
• Aladdin concocts a plan to poison the magician, which Badr must enact.
• She steels herself, puts on a show, and poisons the magician.
• All return, Badr tells her father the story of magic.

Magician's brother

• Magician's evil brother seeks revenge. Travels to China, disguises himself as Fatima (whom he kills).
• Disguised, Badr invites him into the palace. He says the palace needs a rukh egg as decoration.
• In a plot contrivance, the jinni reveals the brother's plot.
• Aladdin kills the brother.

Epilogue

• Explicit moral, back to the frame story of Shahrazad.

Notes

• Rather naive sultan who believes the palace can be built in one night with mundane means.
• Aladdin showing off with the window. What does this say about his character? Is he the child, or the maturing adult?
• The panto version of this story has the wicked vizir as the villain. But here, he's a concerned advisor (with a bit of intrigue thown in). Which version do you prefer?
• When Aladdin uses the lamp, be becomes noble; when he loses the lamp, he returns to being nondescript. What do you think of this connection between material worth and social standing?
• No reaction from the sultan on being told that Aladdin's wealth and power comes from magic (not what the vizir thought)
• Do yyou agree with reading of Aladdin's progression from boy to active man? Is that the key dramatic thread that holds the story together? Or is this just a progression of anecodes?

RichardAbbott

I guess for me this felt like a kind of weird ending to the story. I didn't mind the palace-in-a-night business - why not, with a genie on your side? But it was never really clear what the vizier was trying to achieve by claiming it was all done by magic? Was he trying to work up a kind of religious pogrom against Aladdin? If so, the sultan was unswayed, and one presumes the rest of the population likewise.

Once his son was out of the picture as a credible husband for the lovely princess, I couldn't quite see what role the vizier was supposed to be playing. The panto / Disney rendering where the wicked magician and the vizier are the same person makes more sense. (Ditto these remarks for the sudden appearance of the magician's brother, who appeared quite literally out of nowhere to add a kind of tailpiece to the saga).

Why o why is Aladdin so forgetful? This time it was the turn of the ring to be overlooked and rediscovered by pure chance. I don't think I buy the commentator's theme that it's all deliberate and intended to show how Aladdin's rise (and fall, and rise) is nothing to do with his own merits - my take is that what we have is more of a mish-mash of different storytellers' renderings - along the lines of "a camel is a horse designed by a committee". So yes, I go along with your second suggestion that's it a set of anecdotes, roughly analogous to how we glue all kinds of Robin Hood stories together to give the semblance of a grand saga.

All that said, I kept enjoying the tale of Aladdin from start to end, and am glad to have actually read something close to the original version.

Apocryphal

String on anecdotes? Yes, I can see that - but I think that holds true for most of the tales we've read so far. The glue that connects these particular ones into an overarching tale are not that strong. As per earlier comments (and I think Irwin reflects this in his book) these sort of rags-to-riches stories were appealing to certain people at a certain time, and that really seems to be the main theme. Interesting that at the end, it's the princess who inherits the throne and Aladdin rules at her side. Obviously, Aladdin's fortune derives from a string of happy coincidences, though he seems to do his best (and better over the course of time) to live up to his fortune by being honorable.

I would guess the vizier's motive in pointing out the magic would be to say - 'don't be so hasty to just this fellow based on appearances, there's more than meets the eye here'. In the end, I think I like it more that the vizier is not underhanded, which is too often a cliche now. The episode with the Magician's brother is a sort of 'scouring of the Magreb' chapter, a guess designed to show Aladdin's and Badr's ability to work as a team to overcome new obstacles.