A Matter of Stories: Transcorporeal Entanglements in [A. S. Byatt's] ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ (original) (raw)

Wonder Tales in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt, edited by Alexandra Cheira, 2023

Abstract

A modern rendition of the Arabian Nights’ vortex of embedded stories, intertwining Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and Anglophone traditions, A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ (1994) is a veritable treasure chest of narrative voices, intertextualities, and the magic of storytelling. Read as either ‘a feminist narratology’ (Campbell: 190) or an orientalist exploration of how a western female traveller fares in an exoticized east (Renk: 115), this postmodern novella intersects the power of stories with the material contingencies of embodied experiences. Indeed, Byatt’s protagonist Gillian, a female narratologist championing western second-wave feminism while experiencing the qualms of ageing, is juxtaposed to the more-than-human djinn: sharing stories becomes not only a regenerative act of mutual support and a tool in the inevitable romance, but also a strategy to question hierarchies between male and female, east and west, layered, infinite temporalities of supernatural life with the finite, determined scope of human life. Mixing the metatextual concerns that characterise Byatt’s oeuvre as a whole with a preoccupation with non-human forms of agency which emerges most prolifically in the writer’s later works, I argue here that the magical tropes of glass, water, and – more ambivalently- stone, become key transcorporeal entanglements where the human and the non-human intersect, opening the possibilities of shared, infinite narratives. Enmeshed in a tripartite system of chronological frameworks (linear, circular and layered), the novella balances a focus on the politics of its here and now, the 1990s, with the expanded temporality of the overlapping narratives, becoming storied matter, and bridging the boundary between narrative and embodied materiality, between word and world.

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