Hasan M. El-Shamy’s Beyond Oedipus: The Brother-Sister Syndrome as Depicted by Tale-Type 872* is a curiously fascinating book. To begin with, the book is a rewriting/revisiting of his 1979 book, Brother and Sister: Type 872*: A Cognitive Behavioristic Text Analysis of a Middle Eastern Oikotype. In Beyond Oedipus El-Shamy seeks to clarify his earlier text, respond to related criticism, and reassert the importance of examining the Brother-Sister oikotype in a regionally specific context. The problem, of course, with considering the oikotype globally is that the term itself is rooted in regionalism and vernacularism, rather than global elements. El-Shamy is correct to respond to folklorists who insist on placing the oikotype of the Oedipal syndrome into a global arena, particularly into a North African/Southwest Asian context. It is, in large part, this critique that is the major element driving the argument in Beyond Oedipus.
At its academic level the book is an analysis of folkloric tale types, with a particular concentration on AT 872, rooted in Arabic folktales and literature. On another level, however, it reads like a postmodern pastiche of associated musings, interesting footnotes and endnotes, defenses by the author against past criticism leveled against him, and a collection of Arabic tales from a variety of sources including people El-Shamy had personal relationships with. Although perhaps it was not intended to be this latter iteration, the book’s merits do lie within its fluid-feeling boundaries and within its abstractive elaborations of tale-types. Its intangible personality comes as a contrast to other works by El-Shamy such as his canonical study, A Motif Index of The Thousand and One Nights (2006), which is a straightforward index based on Stith Thompson’s motif analysis.
In Beyond Oedipus, as in his other works, El-Shamy rightfully fills a much-needed gap in folktale studies by expanding the field beyond its traditionally European subjects and into Arabic folk stories. In addition, El-Shamy bases his book on the notion that previous related studies insisted on European models of understanding Arabic tales that limited their understanding. These misunderstandings, according to El-Shamy, are rooted in the misapplication of notions such as the Oedipal syndrome, and limit the wealth of potential analysis in other areas, such as the relationship between brother and sister. He notes, for instance, in the book Oedipus Ubiquitous: The Family Complex in World Literature (1996) by Allen Johnson and Douglas Price-Williams, that the authors fail to make a case for their Oedipal interpretation of some particular Arab folktales. El-Shamy writes that “none of the four folktales the authors provide from Africa north of the Sahara nor the text they give from Persia (No. 16), is an ‘Oedipus story’. Although an incestuous theme is present in all the chosen texts, the Oedipus Complex (a la Type 931) fails to materialize in any of them” (36). El-Shamy spends much of the early part of the book responding to studies of this sort, ones that insist on positioning North African/Southwest Asian folktales into an incorrect oikotype.
The book is divided into five sections. The first revisits El-Shamy’s earlier work as well as sets up his themes of analyzing the regional folktales he does via AT 872 and through a cognitive and behavioristic lens. He also outlines his topic, the Brother-Sister syndrome: situations in folktales that involve relationships between brothers and sisters. These relationships can be incestuous, inconspicuous, romantic, violent, and more.
Part II delves into an analysis of several folktales, focusing especially on “Text ‘0’: The Girl Who Fed Her Brother the Egg While She Ate the Shell” and on its many variants. One of the most interesting things about this book is the number of different variants that not only this tale has, but that AT 872 has when looked at regionally. In his appendix, Part V, El-Shamy indexes many of these, and they are all fascinating glimpses of remarkable-sounding tales: “Virgin made to look pregnant. Magic potion (snake’s eggs, etc.) used,” “Conception from ‘wearing’ semen-stained clothing item,” “Sister raises infant brother on slain mother’s marrow (flesh),” and “Sister’s corpse is placed on horse’s (camel’s) back to wander, awaiting resuscitation.” His list showcases the wealth of materials awaiting any folklorist interested in this region’s tales, and rightfully positions them into a very particularly vernacular framework. By doing so, El-Shamy’s book raises a great many questions regarding European based tale types in general, and in the focus of tale types on globalizing things from a limited perspective.
The most interesting part of the book for me is El-Shamy’s relationship with his household worker, a woman named Galilah (Part IV: Profile of a Typical Household Tale Teller). This section is especially revealing when El-Shamy relates Galilah’s upbringing. Her family’s history is dense with intermarriage, break-ups, and multiple family units cohabitating. Her father’s brother, for example, somehow takes, contentiously, Galilah’s father’s inherited land from him (the bracketed additions below are El-Shamy’s):
“But God[’s justice] pursued him. He remarried and ended up squandering all the land; he even squandered the house. [Originally] he was married to his paternal she-cousin; she died. He then married his maternal-aunt’s daughter….He sold the house to his younger brother [i.e., to the youngest of all three brothers]. That youngest brother of his [who is also my youngest paternal uncle] does not drink tea, nor smoke cigarettes, nor…[spend money on similar nonessentials]: his land is intact. This youngest paternal-uncle of mine is also not kind to us. Since we came to Cairo he has not visited us at all. Even when we go to the village he would come, like a stranger, to greet us and leave [quickly]. He would not say, ‘Come stay with me for a while’” (158).
Galilah’s lengthy biography is followed by some folktales told by her to El-Shamy. Her biography’s inclusion in the book, however, is vital actually to understanding Beyond Oedipus’ point. In the above quote there are so many internal complexities regarding family, not just in terms of their quarrels, but also in terms of their biological interrelationships, that to “map” a family like Galilah’s into grid-like folkloristic certainties is a nearly impossible task. To place Galilah’s family into a Western-centered familial understanding is equally impossible. What El-Shamy does here, even if he does not overtly state it, is to make his thesis live and breathe—the oikotype is a regional occurrence. To suggest that Oedipus is somehow involved is to misunderstand the background of the folktales from this region itself, and limits our understanding of the complexities involving regional relationships between brother and sister.
There are some elements of the book that could be construed as faults. It is not as clearly focused as El-Shamy’s other works, but this appears to be part of the point. He also spends some considerable time in the text responding to past criticism of his work, also in third person. In response to a critique by Suad Joseph who wrote, “El-Shamy, while recognizing significant psychodynamics of the brother/sister relationship, sees little of the hierarchy and so does not link the relationship to Arab patriarchy (emphasis added).” To this El-Shamy responds: “Joseph’s anthropological study, meritorious as it is, is inaccurate in prematurely characterizing El-Shamy’s thesis as belonging to the ‘Romantic View’…. Additionally, ‘patriarchy’ was not a focus for the study at that early stage of research” (27).
His study also attempts to globalize the region he writes about. Although he does pay much attention to some variations by country (Algeria vs. Egypt, for example), his topic of folktales of Arab origin is itself a bit generalizing. In addition, the tales he choses to exemplify AT 872 are fairly limited as well. This notion of generalizing the “Arab Folktale,” however, is actually a good place to begin discussion about what that term actually means and encompasses. El-Shamy’s book is a suitable starting place to begin this sort of conversation and investigation.
Despite these minor—and actually interesting—diversions El-Shamy’s book adds to his legacy as a canonical figure in global folklore studies. Beyond Oedipus not only goes past conventional boundaries of folktale study but also, in its very form as an academic work in nontraditional packaging, opens up an interesting future for the field’s global expansion.
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[Review length: 1357 words • Review posted on April 29, 2015]