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Jul. 20th, 2003
Polite Fiction, and Polite Fictions
Jul. 20th, 2003 01:22 pmAfter-dinner speaking group last Friday. It happens once a month, everybody speaks about once in six months. IIRC I'm the youngest current member; Rey's parents are members too, and most others are of that generation, in their fifties and sixties. It started out with some emigres from a South African parent club, and there's a lot of overlap with Rotary etc. Nice people, but a fairly conservative group.
So, we don't talk about religion. We don't talk about politics. And, most of all, we don't talk about sex.
Speakers get given the topic about six weeks in advance, and this one was "In the beginning... but then." And I spent six weeks trying, without any success, to figure out what I could get from that topic.
Eventually, with one day to go, I thought of something, but was rather worried it might not be suitable. Come 3 pm, day of the dinner, I hadn't come up with any alternatives, and decided to damn the torpedoes.
So I prepared my speech on the train, then got up and talked about the human tendency to sanitize stories that we disapprove of. I started with a tale from my mother's schooldays, in which she studied a version of Hamlet without the Ghost in it, then a brief mention of the Grimm stories and how they've been sanitized - both by the Brothers, and afterwards. And then I got into the main part of the speech, telling them about the life of Richard Burton. 19th-century explorer, linguist, spy, poet, translator, diplomat, and - I've never had the chance to use the word in polite conversation before - xenophile. Illustrated by an excerpt from the 1001 Nights.
Specifically, from the tale of Kamar-al-Zaman and Princess Budur, which follows a time-worn formula: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl, boy marries girl, girl loses boy, girl disguises self as boy, girl-disguised-as-boy meets girl, girl marries girl, girl-disguised-as-boy finds boy, girl-disguised-as-boy gets boy, boy marries girl-not-disguised as boy, and all three live happily ever after.
And then I explained that although it might sound as if I'd broken the Wafflers rules by talking about such things, in fact I'd been telling them the life story of a very moral and proper man who was a good Catholic and a faithful husband.
Because his biography says so, and Mrs. Burton, who wrote it, should know.
They loved it. I've given three or four speeches at Wafflers now, and even though this one went several minutes overtime it was the best-received of the lot. It's amazing what a polite fiction can achieve :-)
"Little Dunyazad [Shahrazad's sister], whose cheeks were usually so white, had grown very red at the last part of this tale; her eyes were round with pleasure, curiosity and confusion; so that at last she covered her face with her two hands, but looked through the fingers.
...
"Then King Shahryar, whose sadness had quite disappeared at the opening sentences of the tale of Budur and who had heard it through with the greatest attention, said: 'O Shahrazad, I must confess that the tale which you have just told pleased me, even rejoiced me, even incited me to find out more about that new fashion which Budur described in prose and verse. If the stories which you promise us contain explanatory details of this unknown pastime, you may begin at once.'
"But at this point Shahrazad saw the approach of morning and discreetly fell silent.
"King Shahryar said to himself: 'As Allah lives, I will not kill her until I have heard many more details of the new fashion, for at present it seems to me both obscure and complicated.'"
People are people, in every time and place :-)
So, we don't talk about religion. We don't talk about politics. And, most of all, we don't talk about sex.
Speakers get given the topic about six weeks in advance, and this one was "In the beginning... but then." And I spent six weeks trying, without any success, to figure out what I could get from that topic.
Eventually, with one day to go, I thought of something, but was rather worried it might not be suitable. Come 3 pm, day of the dinner, I hadn't come up with any alternatives, and decided to damn the torpedoes.
So I prepared my speech on the train, then got up and talked about the human tendency to sanitize stories that we disapprove of. I started with a tale from my mother's schooldays, in which she studied a version of Hamlet without the Ghost in it, then a brief mention of the Grimm stories and how they've been sanitized - both by the Brothers, and afterwards. And then I got into the main part of the speech, telling them about the life of Richard Burton. 19th-century explorer, linguist, spy, poet, translator, diplomat, and - I've never had the chance to use the word in polite conversation before - xenophile. Illustrated by an excerpt from the 1001 Nights.
Specifically, from the tale of Kamar-al-Zaman and Princess Budur, which follows a time-worn formula: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl, boy marries girl, girl loses boy, girl disguises self as boy, girl-disguised-as-boy meets girl, girl marries girl, girl-disguised-as-boy finds boy, girl-disguised-as-boy gets boy, boy marries girl-not-disguised as boy, and all three live happily ever after.
And then I explained that although it might sound as if I'd broken the Wafflers rules by talking about such things, in fact I'd been telling them the life story of a very moral and proper man who was a good Catholic and a faithful husband.
Because his biography says so, and Mrs. Burton, who wrote it, should know.
They loved it. I've given three or four speeches at Wafflers now, and even though this one went several minutes overtime it was the best-received of the lot. It's amazing what a polite fiction can achieve :-)
"Little Dunyazad [Shahrazad's sister], whose cheeks were usually so white, had grown very red at the last part of this tale; her eyes were round with pleasure, curiosity and confusion; so that at last she covered her face with her two hands, but looked through the fingers.
...
"Then King Shahryar, whose sadness had quite disappeared at the opening sentences of the tale of Budur and who had heard it through with the greatest attention, said: 'O Shahrazad, I must confess that the tale which you have just told pleased me, even rejoiced me, even incited me to find out more about that new fashion which Budur described in prose and verse. If the stories which you promise us contain explanatory details of this unknown pastime, you may begin at once.'
"But at this point Shahrazad saw the approach of morning and discreetly fell silent.
"King Shahryar said to himself: 'As Allah lives, I will not kill her until I have heard many more details of the new fashion, for at present it seems to me both obscure and complicated.'"
People are people, in every time and place :-)