『아라비언 나이트』: ‘유혹’의 텍스트

Seduction of the Text in The Arabian Nights

&nbsp;&nbsp;By assuming the role of storyteller in The Arabian Nights, Shahrazad translates King Shahrayar&quot;s desire for body to the one for text. This transition is facilitated by the shared quality of &quot;seduction.&quot; Seduction excites but never fully gratifies one&quot;s textual and erotic desires. Shahrazad&quot;s tales provoke curiosity and, at the same time, postpone its complete satisfaction. Seduction is, therefore, the fusion of simulation of an end and resistance to it. It is the seduction that enables Shahrazad to extend her tales for ever in a &quot;metonymical&quot; way.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;In "the Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies," the female subjects&quot; naming their own genitalia undoes the male gazers&quot; textualization of the female body. The discursive power of the males inscribed in the body is turned into a female narrative pleasure so that the difference in sexes is viewed as the one in language. More interestingly, by purchasing the rules of the female game, the porter, in turn, partakes of the game and produces a narrative which capitalizes on the female ludic language. Here, the porter undergoes the death of his male prerogative and accepts the &quot;symbolic&quot; value of the female game. This &quot;symbolic exchange,&quot; i.e., seduction, makes a binary opposition always reversible.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;The Nights finally stops being a text and returns to a biological body. As a mother of three sons, Shahrazad&quot;s body now is much less threatening than that of a slave girl or a maid. But the simultaneous cessation of the seductive body and text at the end of the Nights does not represent a &quot;metaphorical&quot; end, i.e., the beginning of a new paradigm, but a return to the community free from perversion and repression. Shahrazad reconciles King Shahrayar&quot;s death instinct (Thanatos) with his life instinct (Eros). In the course of her storytelling, in fact, Shahrazad has functioned as a "superid" that modulates the relation between superego and id, the reality principle and the pleasure principle, and Thanatos and Eros. And this is exactly the way in which the &quot;seduction&quot; is meant to work.