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A Magical Mystery Romp
| Article
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18647 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
2,120 Words |
| Author
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Richard Howard
Richard Howard is the author of nine volumes of poetry
(Pulitzer Prize, 1970), two books of criticism, and is the
translator of some 150 works from the French, including
Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, which won the National Book
Award in 1983. President of PEN-American Center in 1978-1980,
he is currently University Professor of English at the
University of Houston, a member of the American Institute of
Arts & Letters, and holds the Ordre du Mertie from the French
government. |
ON THE ROAD TO BAGHDAD
Guneli Gun
Claremont, California; Hunter House Inc.
377 pp., $19.95
The author--the teller of tales, the singer of songs, the maker of myths--declares on her title page that her magical adventures, which constitute the substance of any and all such picaresque notations, from Kim to Kerouac, are "begged, borrowed, and stolen from the Thousand and One Nights." At once she puts herself in that fabulous company which merits a moment's loitering before any account is given of her own achievement. For in English, there has been, in our century, the Scheherazade already, who has drastically inflected the acceptation of the role: the Danish Karen Blixen, who wrote her tales in English under the name Isak Dinesen, and who told them not in order to keep her head, like her great precursor, but to keep her lover. On an unsuccessful coffee plantation in Kenya, the young Baroness Blixen, tainted with the syphilis contracted from her husband and the narrative genius inherited from her family of writer-adventurers, attempted to beguile the attentions of Denis Finch-Haton by her stories that were to become--upon Finch-Hatton's death in a plane crash--the Gothic Tales, the anecdotes of destiny, the excruciation of a great occidental tradition which the writer herself traced back to her countryman Hans Christian Andersen, and which we can now recognize as one more installment of the great seduction undertaken by women in world of men and of male privilege. I am probably in error to ascribe this story-telling impulse to an occidental tradition, as to an oriental one in the case of Scheherazade--it is merely (merely!) human, it would appear, this endeavor to catch the ear and hence the heart and mind of whatever man happens to be wielding power, or to be wielded by it, as the philosophers would say. In any case, when I saw the tiny, withered Danish sorceress carried onto the stage of the YMHA in New York, thirty-five years ago, and listened to her speak, intone actually, her circuitous recitals, I knew I was hearing the same desperate, hilarious plea for attention that I was to encounter in 1979 in a little book published in England, recommended on the jacket by William Golding and John Barth (both notable fiddlers with the substance of the Arabian Nights): Book of Trances: A Novel of Magic Recitals by Guneli Gun.
And now, a mere dozen years later, here is much of the same material writ large, as we say, or at least told in much greater detail: the matter of Ottomania, a circulation of semantic energy continually made up renewals, rearrangings, repetitions,
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