Talismano by Abdelwahab Meddeb Jane Kuntz

Author:Abdelwahab Meddeb, Jane Kuntz
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 1987-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Cunning storytellers make strategic use of passing the hat to suspend their stories: come now, what are you waiting for, open your purses, let it rain coins, manna, show your appreciation that this land shaken by our footsteps was showered with the good fortune of my birth; otherwise, I’ll tell you nothing more and you’ll never know the burial site of the dragon’s severed head, carried off by the two sons of Sidna. On their way, they encountered terrible hardships, allies of the dragon, and again they were compelled to fight for possession of the head, their trophy to display, relic to inter, fleeing the far-off oases of Mesopotamia. Come now, why delay in giving me what I want? Penny-pinchers, are you?

Money is customarily disbursed only a coin at a time, in keeping with the untiring spirit of frugality. But our tenor manages to get around this closely regulated exchange thanks to his exaggerated gestures and howls, the sounds of the night forest, the ferocity lurking deep in the entrails of the desert; the sign as sound, gestating potential, narrative imagination: all this contributes to shattering the storyline while inviting into the very womb of this radical break a new beginning, leaving open the multiplicity of possible directions. The tale accumulates as a series of tiny dramatic samples, rarely played out.

These sounds and gestures, while reinforcing the solidity of the message, likewise extend the scope of the story. They entrance us more than straightforward language, for they comb through the territory of meaning in search of an ambiguity haunting the already familiar scenery, described over and over, though never worn thin. The dialogue of the dragon and Sidna is now nothing but cries and ululation. The wind furrowed by the saber’s spark is revealed in the dryness of grass, and thus removed from language and its univocal resonance, its somehow native clarity.

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