The Ocean of Story

       The eleventh-century Sanskrit Ocean of Story got mentioned in that foregoing symposium statement because, between writing the Chimera novellas, I was reading through that huge, peculiar work and registering my reactions to it in a demi-essay. When Henry Sams, chairman of the immense Department of English at Penn State during most of my stay there, retired from that office, his colleagues published the somewhat presumptuously titled Directions in Literary Criticism: Essays in Honor of Henry A. Sams.* My grateful contribution to that Festschrift follows: no Direction in Literary Criticism, merely a bemusement I knew Henry would share.

* Eds. Weintraub and Young. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973.

       The road to India is a long road, but it is the only way to India. One can't expect to get through The Thousand and One Nights in one night. When I worry that one of my stories is growing overlong, I tell myself the story of a really long story: Katha Sarit Sagara, or The Ocean of Streams of Story, more or less by the eleventh-century Indian poet Somadeva.

       Its title haunted me for a dozen years (as did Calderón's La Vida Es Sueño) before I ever read beyond it. As an undergraduate book-filer in the classics and Oriental Seminary stacks of Johns Hopkins's Gilman Hall Library, I would push daily past the ten huge sea-green volumes of Penzer's edition (privately printed in London in 1924 and still the only English-language edition one sees) of Tawney's nineteenth-century prose translation of Somadeva's Sanskrit redaction of King Satavahana's third-century publication of his minister Gunadhya's Paisachi versification of the demigod Kanabhuti's retelling of the demigod Pushpadanta's version of the Great Tale first told by the god Siva to his consort Parvati. Inevitably, semester after semester, that golden title, The Ocean of Story, took my eye and fancy. But waiting on the book cart to be reshelved (and read, surreptitiously, on company time) were more-navigated ways of narrative: The Thousand and One Nights, The Panchatantra, the Pent-, Hept-, and Decamerons. One never found allusions to The Ocean of Story in other literature or heard it mentioned by one's professors and better-read friends; indeed, one never saw Somadeva off the shelf -- where I filed beside his mare incognitum my resolve one day to embark upon its endless reaches. For the present there were those more famous works to be read, more of them than one ever would find time for, and from the springs of literature issued unceasingly a torrent of new writing as well, to be breasted if possible. Presently one's own outpourings were added to the general flood. There was no time.

       Until one arrived, enough years later, at the free port of understanding that, like Magellan, one will never accomplish the whole voyage. One will not likely ever get around now to Camöens's Lusiad, I came to realize, or the rest of Hardy, or the end of Eugene Onegin, or the beginning of Jerusalem Delivered; and even a second lifetime would not suffice to get said the whole of what oneself had aspired to say. This recognition, when not traumatic, grants an extravagant liberty: The voyage being incompletable, one may take side trips of any length in any number, at one's pleasure! In connection, therefore, with a casual research of some years' standing through the whole corpus of frame-tale literature, I lately made at last my leisure-cruise from end to end of The Ocean of Story.

       Was it that too long deferral of the journey staled its charm? Or that no merely actual fiction could realize the long work of my imagination upon that title? In any case, I must report that:

       1. In the main, alas, the tales rehearsed by Somadeva (whose noble ambition was to tell them all) are less memorable than Scheherazade's, say, or Boccaccio's or Chaucer's -- or less memorably recounted, in the several instances where the plots are analogous. In keeping with Somadeva's (and his precursors') conceit of an ultimate narrative ocean into which all the streams of fancy flow at last, entire Gangeses of pre-existing fiction are tapped and incorporated, such as the Panchatantra and the Vetalapanchavimsati, or 25 Tales by a Vampire. It is principally through the numerous redactions, recensions, and meanders of these tributaries -- Siddhi-Kur, The Seven Sages, Kalilah and Dimnah, Syntipas the Philosopher, The Fables of Bidpai, Sindibad's Parables -- and later reworkings of these reworkings -- Johannes de Alta Suva's Dolopathos, John of Capua's Directorium Vitae Humanae, Firenzuola's Discorsi degli Animali, and Doni's Novelle, for example -- that waters from The Ocean of Story finally enter the mainstream of Western literature, and in most instances they gain flavor from their circuitous journey. To put the figure more accurately: Several of the springs that fed The Ocean of Story trickled westward also and separately, with the consequence that Somadeva's vast poem strikes one less as a source of Western narrative motifs than as a kind of anthology or compendium of such sources. Hence, in part, its persisting obscurity, except among Orientalists, despite its being, in Penzer's odd phrase, "for its size, the earliest collection of stories extant in the world."

       2. The frame-structure, too, is less arresting or fecund than that of The Thousand and One Nights, The Decameron, or, for that matter, the anonymous seventeenth-century English delight entitled Westward for Smelts. Nothing in the circumstantial history of Prince Naravahanadatta and the Vidyaharas captures the imagination as does the image of Scheherazade yarning through the night to save her neck, or Boccaccio's twilit company beguiling themselves with fiction in despite of plagued fact. On the other hand, Somadeva's structure is considerably more complex -- the most complex, I think, among the nearly 200 specimens of frame-tale literature I've thus far noted. Not only is the narrative at several points involved to the fourth degree (tales within tales within tales within tales), but at any degree, including the first or outermost, the frame may be serial and achronological -- as if, for example, the pilgrimage to Canterbury were only one among several frame-conceits in Chaucer's poem, and began outside Rochester at that, the departure from London being filled in only later; as if, moreover, his Troilus and Criseyde were one of several tales told by Patient Grisilde, whose tale in turn were one of several told by Chanticleer, whose tale were one of several told by the Nun's Priest, et cetera. The intrication is enormous (stout Penzer uses a schematic outline in his table of contents: The story of King Brahmadatta, for instance, is Tale 1BB in the midst of Tale 1B in the Cont[inuation] of Tale 1 in the Cont[inuation] of the M[ain] I[ntroduction] in Chapter III of Book I); but like the complexity of termite tunnels or lymphatic cancer, it is more dismaying than delightful from the human point of view.

       3. Just as the accounts of Hakluyt's voyagers may be more fascinating than the places they voyaged to, the Burtonesque notes and appendices (by many hands) to Penzer's edition of Somadeva -- disquisitions on such heady matters as the place of collyrium in the history of cosmetic art, or the Bitch-and-Pepper motif in the literature of the world -- are frequently more engaging than the texts they illuminate. In the course of an indifferent sub-sub-sub-tale about the founding of the city of Pataliputra, for example, a poker-faced note describes two remarkable ancient customs alleged to prevail there: The first is the ancient custom of the women, annually in the rainy season, to bake cakes in the form of phalluses and offer them to any Brahman whom they judge to be (what the English field-researcher translates as) "a blockhead." The second is the equally ancient custom of the Brahmans, always to refuse those cakes because they regard the first ancient custom as disgusting. One's conviction is affirmed that it would be a more splendid destiny to have cooked up Burton's version of The Thousand and One Nights -- footnotes, Terminal Essay, and all -- than to have written the original.

       4. These reservations notwithstanding, The Ocean of Story contains at least one narrative conception of the very first rank, without real analogues that I know of in any of its contemporaries or predecessors, and more gloriously elaborate by far than any of its several analogues in later fiction: I mean the Kathapitha, or "history of the text" of the Katha Sarit Sagara itself, which history comprises the primary narrative frame of Book I and the M[ain] I[ntroduction] to the entire work, and happens to be among my very favorite stories in the world:

       One day the god Siva is so delighted at the way Parvati makes love to him that he offers her anything she wishes in reward. She asks for a story. Perching her on his lap, he tells her a short one on the subject of his own splendid exploits in a former life, including his romance with a beautiful woman whom he tactfully supposes to have been Parvati herself in one of her former incarnations.

       The goddess abruptly cuts him off. She has heard that one before; so has everybody else. What she craves is an absolutely original story that no one at all has heard and, it is implied, that no one but herself will ever hear, unless she chooses to repeat it. Siva comes up with the Brihat Katha, or Great Tale -- actually seven great tales of 100,000 couplets each. It takes a very long time to tell (if the Odyssey, as has been estimated, was sung in four evenings, the same minstrel at the same pace would by my reckoning need 509 evenings -- a little under a year and a half -- to do Siva's piece), but in this instance teller, tale, and told all happen to be immortal; Parvati sits silent and presumably entertained -- until she learns that the tale has been overheard after all, by one of their house staff! The Gana (servant deity) Pushpadanta, who has hidden invisible in the divine boudoir (as the monks in Marguerite of Navarre's Heptameron squat behind the shrubbery of the monastery every evening to overhear the tales Marguerite's friends exchange), repeats the Great Tale to his wife, who repeats it to Parvati, who is so incensed that she condemns not only Pushpadanta but his friend Malyavan -- who had merely pled on his behalf -- to be born as mortal men: Pushpadanta will have to live on earth under the name of Vararuchi until he crosses paths in the woods with the hermit Kanabhuti (in fact the demigod Supratika, also currently doing time) and repeats to him the entire Great Tale; Malyavan will be obliged to mortality under the name Gunadhya until he happens to cross paths with this same Kanabhuti/Supratika, hears the Great Tale from him, and writes it down -- whereupon, like the others who have been delivered of it, he'll enter heaven.

       Got that?

       The first of these redemptions comes to pass with comparative ease in the space of a mere four chapters properly laced with narrative digression; the second with more difficulty and corresponding interest and structural extravagance. Malyavan is reborn as Gunadhya and works his mortal way to a ministership in the court of King Satavahana, an adequate monarch in every particular except that he makes mistakes in his grammar. Satavahana himself could perhaps live with this failing, were it not that one of his favorite harem girls is an intellectual who teases him with his solecisms. Humiliated, he demands that his ministers educate him. Gunadhya volunteers to teach him Sanskrit grammar in six years flat; his rival for the King's favor, Sarvavarman, rashly declares he'll do the job in six months or else wear Gunadhya's shoes on his head for a dozen years. Gunadhya counters that if Sarvavarman makes good his boast, he, Gunadhya, will renounce forever the three languages he knows: Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the vernacular dialect. Inasmuch as Sanskrit grammar could not in fact be taught in six months at that time, Gunadhya is full of confidence. But Sarvavarman, alarmed at his own impulsiveness, petitions the gods for help, and for reasons never disclosed they reveal to him a revolutionary new concise Sanskrit grammar, the Katantra, which wins him the bet and reforms subsequent education.

       Reduced to silence, Gunadhya takes to the woods with a pair of his favorite students. After an unspecified wordless interval, he comes across Kanabhuti/Supratika, who has in the meanwhile been told the Great Tale by Vararuchi/Pushpadanta and is anxious to pass it along so that he too can return to heaven. But what to do about the language problem? Kanabhuti solves it by teaching Gunadhya a new tongue -- Paisacha, or "goblin-language" -- and reciting the Great Tale in that. It takes Gunadhya seven more years in the woods to throw the thing into written couplets, owing to its length; no doubt also to the Nabokovian difficulty of versifying in an adopted goblin-language; and perhaps to the nature of his medium: He writes literally with his own blood. But he finally sets down the 700,000th distich, and his two faithful students rush off with the masterpiece to King Satavahana -- who takes one look at it and says, presumably in perfect Sanskrit: "Away with this barbaric Paisacha!"

       Back to the woods it goes, where its rejected author, as a last resort, commences reading it aloud to himself. All the animals of the forest gather motionless to listen, moved to tears not only by the beauty of the composition but by the spectacle of Gunadhya's burning each page of manuscript in a hole in the rock as he finishes reading it, rather like Rodolfo in Act One of La Bohème.

       Presently King Satavahana, though eating regally, falls ill of malnutrition. Medical research discloses that the cause of his malaise is a deficiency of nutritive value in the meat fetched in by the palace huntsmen, and still further investigation reveals the cause of this deficiency to be a certain mad poet out in the bush, whose narration so spellbinds the beasts of the country that they forget to ruminate. The king hurries to the forest, recognizes his minister Gunadhya, and snatches from the fire what's left of the Great Tale: alas, a mere 100,000 distichs, the other six-sevenths of the magnum opus having gone up in smoke. Anyhow vindicated, Gunadhya/Malyavan proceeds to heaven; the students are promoted to administrators; and Satavahana, to redeem himself, prefaces the truncated masterwork with a book called Kathapitha, the History of the Tale or Story of the Story, which I've just rehearsed, and publishes the whole (in ordinary ink) under the title Brihat Katha, or Great Tale. Eight centuries later, the Kashmirian court-poet Somadeva, to amuse another royal lady, pares down this Brihat Katha, including Satavahana's prefatory Kathapitha, to a radically terse 22,000 couplets -- the mere ten folio volumes of Penzer's edition, scarcely twice the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.

       Whether Queen Suryavati was as pleased with this revised and abbreviated version as the goddess Parvati was with the original is not recorded. But we may assume that in order to recite to her from memory such a short short story, Somadeva -- Mr. Soma -- wouldn't even have needed to make use of a certain great secret recipe for epical recall, from the chief constituent of which he takes his name. Since it may be that this pharmacological formula, rather than the narrative ones analyzed by Professors Milman Parry and Albert Lord,* is the real key to epical composition, I offer it here from my own memory of the Samavidhana Brahmana as quoted in a footnote from the unfrequented deeps of The Ocean of Story:

       1. Fast for three nights.

       2. Recite a certain incantation and then eat of the soma plant one thousand times.

       3. Or bruise the soma plant in water and drink that water for a year.

       4. Or ferment the soma plant and drink that liquor for a month.

       5. Or drink it forever.

* In The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971).

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