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PrintA Story for Schizophrenia
Well, I went for something you might think of as obvious, a version of the ‘genie in the bottle’ story from the Arabian Nights. If you remember, the fisherman has found a bottle and opened it, but the genie inside turns out to be not the wish-giving kind at all, more your murderous bastard in fact.He allows the fisherman only the chance to ask one question after which he’ll kill him. The fisherman elects to know how such an enormous spirit could possibly have fitted inside the bottle and, when this very powerful but fortunately stupid genie demonstrates by shrinking and hopping back inside, he corks it up again. He then has the option of throwing the bottle back into the sea, keeping it by him corked up or letting the genie (who now promises wishes and all sorts) out again.
In folklore (as also in different ‘arrangements’
of the Arabian Nights) there are all sorts of versions of what
happens next and all sorts of treatments of the same fundamental
plot motif of the ‘trapped being of power’. It might
be worth mentioning (since these things sometimes get in the way)
that, in different tellings from different cultures, the fisherman
figure changes gender and class, time and place whilst the genie
becomes devil, demon, ghost and all sorts of other things.
But I suppose, however it is dressed and wherever or whenever
it is told, there’s an essential element that communicates,
makes metaphorical sense, perhaps particularly to someone going
through what my untimely visitor was going through.
Anyway, listening to the tale calmed him down at least, part of
the power of storytelling. Afterwards he swore that it had made
a huge amount of immediate and practical sense too, maybe partly
because, on that occasion, I left the ending open in the manner
of what is called a dilemma story and we talked about the fisherman’s
options.
There are two themes I’d like to draw out of this instance.
The first is around the story itself and tales like it. As I’ve
already suggested, it’s one of many so-called ‘universal’
tales - it crops up in many different cultures in different disguises.
It’s a short example; longer tales are often made up of
various shorter plots and motifs as it were stitched together
in different ways.
Many of the fairy tales we grew up with are examples. For instance,
hundreds of variants of the Cinderella story have been recorded
around the world. In 1893, Marian Roalfe Cox abstracted 345 (mostly
European) variants in a study for the Folklore Society hailed
as the first ‘scientific’ investigation of a tale
and its variants, and her list has been much augmented in the
century since with studies of Cinderella in other cultures.
The trouble with folklore study though, at least in its more old
fashioned orthodoxies (modern folklore study is different) , is
that it’s a bit like Victorian butterfly collecting. Specimens
caught, preserved and ‘pin-stuck under glass’ as it
were. A marvellous colourful display but you can’t always
guess that the ‘items’ were once alive, much less
imagine how they were alive.
