The 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:

These comments were originally made about both Odysseus and the Odyssey.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.