Notes from a Reading Life
We are not told why Aladdin - a tearaway street kid who is
the despair of his impoverished mother - is selected for favors and a
potentially fatal assignment by the African magician who poses as his uncle.
(This fools no one but the largesse he delivers gets him in.) Aladdin is to go
down a well and through tunnels and overcome many obstacles to obtain a lamp
the magician (for reasons unexplained) can't get for himself. In addition to
directions Aladdin is given a ring that is a talisman. He finds the lamp,
empties it as instructed, and wraps it inside his garment where it is soon
buffered by all the beautiful balls of colored glass the boy plucks from the
trees, not knowing them to be precious jewels.
The magician's plan is to seize the lamp from Aladdin as he
comes up the tunnel, and seal him below the stone lid to die. But Aladdin
evidently has some street smarts. He won't yield the lamp before he gets out.
In a rage, the magician seals the tunnel and leaves him to die. Rubbing the ring,
he produces a genie (called a demon in Husain Haddawy’s recent translation),
hideous but required to serve him without conditions. He wishes to be out and
so he is.
At home he discovers that rubbing the lamp produces a bigger
and even scarier genie and a whole host of jinn (perhaps the best term for this
genus)all bound to serve the master of the lamp. There is no limit to the
number of wishes and their magnitude and no conditions for the user. Aladdin
goes from ordering up a good dinner to demanding vast riches and armies of
slaves that persuade the king to give him the beautiful princess in marriage.
They live in a palace more splendid than the king's created by demons
overnight.
Things go on until the African magician returns, guided by
his geomantic box of sand. Aladdin survives the first take back attempt but not
the magician's brother, who takes possession of the lamp when Aladdin is away
hunting and has the whole palace including the princess transported to Africa.
The genie of the ring eventually enables Aladdin to locate them. When he has
possession of the lamp he can move everything back to "China" where
the main action is supposedly playing out
Utterly amoral. Whoever owns the lamp has full control of
the genie - in fact legions of genies - unconditionally. Things created by
enchantment don't vanish. They stay solid in the world. A couple of quick
prayers to Allah are said here and there but not a modicum of virtue or any
appeal to higher powers or even personal intelligence are required for success.
There are no threats to the immortal soul, not even a hint that - as in other
tales of invoking captive spirits - there will be dire consequences if the
genie escapes captivity, or even that he can escape.
This puts the story on a cruder level than Scheherezade's tale
of a genie confined in a copper jar who has been made to wait so long that-
having originally promised to reward his liberator with untold riches- he will
now kill him.
When RLS develops the theme in "The Bottle Imp" he introduces conditions and concern for the state of the soul (though on a transactional rather than moral basis). An imp perceived as a mysterious white shadow inside the bottle will manifest your wishes but as a result you will be sent to hellfire when you die unless you can sell the bottle to someone else for less than you paid for it, after apprising them of the risk. The money must be paid in coin. Our protagonist pays the $50 he has in his pocket to the haggard owner of a mansion in Nob Hill who got his house from the imp.
The
drama now turns on a series of efforts to sell the bottle at ab ever lower price
(after fulfilling a series of wishes) until we are down to one cent and hell
for the owner is certain. Then it is recalled that there are places where there
are coins worth less than a cent. And we are off to Tahiti and traffic in
centimes. It ends with a drunken longshoreman, not afraid of hell, taking the
bottle with its imp for one centime.
Illustration by René Bull' (1872-1942)
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