On the Frightening Story by Scheherazade

On The Frightening Story

By Scheherazade 

The inclination to startle and scare others is as old as that of storytelling itself. One may even say that these two habits manifest the same natural instinct. Partly to adorn a tale and partly to express our known and unknown fears, we have been adding startling and supernatural events to our stories for a very long time. The stories of A Thousand and One Nights are an excellent example of this, but there are also thousands of secrets in the domains of life and death, and countless natural manifestations, that astonish us to this day. It is our nature’s peculiarity to rake and search through these mysteries, to sift through our imagination and seek answers to such questions in the form of stories. 

We have been composing stories on horrific events from the time of ancient Greece into the present. As I have mentioned above, in the writing of these stories there is, apart from the desire to startle and to search, also a desire to terrify, and we may locate this last desire in humanity’s fundamental sadism. Just like a child experiences a strange delight and strength from twisting a butterfly’s wings and watching it convulse, the story writer feels a special pleasure in painting pictures with their imagination that make our hair stand on end. Indirectly, we feel this pleasure, too. Whether the story narrates physical pain; our own or the protagonist’s encounter with a supernatural being, spirit, or power; or a chain of shocking events that compels us to anticipate and yet fear its conclusion, in each situation we feel a strange emotion that arises from confronting events that both do and do not affect us. We fear death when we are dead or dying in a dream, and yet our unconscious retains the awareness that though we are dying we won’t die. Reading a frightening story we feel (only for a moment, yes, but again and again) that we are witnessing the unseen powers of nature and the universe in their naked and bestial glory, freed from the entrapment of space and time.

Though in other languages frightening stories have been categorized by subject and have thus been accepted as permanently distinct genres, the sleights of hand these art forms share in terms of their technique, intent, and deployment make them a single genre: “the frightening story” [bheyānak afsānah] (I use “sleights of hand” intentionally here and will explain it later). Since few Urdu writers have tested themselves in this field of writing, I present below a list of the different forms of the frightening story for purposes of description. I categorize the following under the frightening story: 

1. The Horror Story (khaufnāk afsānah)
2. The Terror Story (wahshat-angez afsānah)
3. The Ghost Story (bhūt afsānah)
4. The Black Magic Story (shaiṭānī afsānah)

1. Under the category of the horror story fall stories which relate occurrences of bestiality and bodily suffering that provoke in the reader fear and compassion but also emotional sickness and mental disgust. The depiction of sexual cruelty in de Sade’s stories does not produce queasiness in our minds, though we abhor humanity’s bestial treatment of itself. In contrast, the horror story has no truck with abhorrence or love, but its descriptions make our hair stand on end. On the other hand, it renders our nature strangely opaque and generates disgust. There is a good example of this in an English story whose protagonist avenges himself by leaving an earwig in his adversary’s ear. The creature breaks through his enemy’s eardrum and moves through the meat and nerves of his brain. It eventually leaves from the other ear after travelling inside him for a few months. 
2. The terror story also takes suffering for its fundamental subject, though its cruelty is more spiritual or mental than bodily. At one end, the story’s protagonist must confront situations that provoke or lead them to madness. At the other end, the reader is overcome by the same peculiar emotional state that arises at the sight of a sharp blade hanging from the ceiling by a length of worn thread. Besides such mental suffering, the terror story also relies on startling twists and improbable coincidences, which are real insofar that they make the heart tremble. For example, there is a story whose female protagonist perceives that the patterns of her wallpaper are moving. The woman is caught in a kind of mental struggle and feels trapped inside the wallpaper. In the end, in a fit of insanity the woman murders her husband because she feels that he is stopping her from merging with the wallpaper. The power of this story lies in the realism of the images and in the interminable struggle between the woman and her husband. The woman’s mind is falling apart and, in the end, her husband becomes an allegory for the boundary between consciousness and insanity. The modern terror story takes this struggle between consciousness and madness as its subject. The storywriter works at this boundary to untangle a variety of psychological and parapsychological knots.
3. The ghost story, as is clear from the name, builds on situations and events pertaining to ghosts and spirits. Broadening our understanding of these situations and events allows the category to encompass many incomprehensible phenomena and the influence of mysterious powers on our consciousness. The power of the ghost story resides precisely in the absence of any rational or logical justification for what plagues its protagonists. Presenting such occurrences as deceptions of the mind or eye punctures the mystery and eliminates all space of ambiguity. It means we no longer feel ourselves confronting the machinations of a secret, vengeful power. The ghost story produces a state akin to a nightmare, as when in the darkness of a dream someone strangles us and we cannot will ourselves to scream. At that moment our body and mind are paralyzed. Characters who encounter spirits in ghost stories—and we their readers—are aware of our situation and yet are condemned to it.  
4. The last genre, the black magic story, is built around magic and events pertaining to it. Because Satan-worship is the first condition of magical practice, these stories often mention Satan as well as other evil forces and the people that harness their powers. The writers of such stories are not concerned at all with abstract forms of good and evil. 

It will be clear from the above discussion that almost every frightening story reflects some aspect of each of the four genres, the difference being in its approach and the intensity of the effect. An element of madness clearly accompanies the mental torture of the earwig story, which also evinces a nightmarish quality. And even though the manner of the black magic story is not especially obvious, Satanic evil manifests nonetheless. The best example of this is in a story which, though I have never seen it written anywhere, is still imprinted on people’s tongues. It is told like so: 

“A young man buys peanuts from a hawker on his way home at midnight. As he extends his hand to pay he notices that the hawker’s hands are like horse’s hooves. The young man screams, terrified, and runs aboard a nearby tonga. On the way home he tells the driver what’s just petrified his heart. The driver listens attentively and sympathetically to the whole story; as they reach home he presents his hands. ‘Babuji’, he asks, ‘those hands weren’t like mine, were they?’ The young man feels his mind giving way. He sees that the cart-driver has hooves for hands.”

Not only do all four aspects of “fright” emerge here, but so does an excellent example of the technique of the frightening story. As I noted earlier, the frightening story’s construction depends upon sleights of hand. Its storyteller relies on unexpected and dramatic conclusions, manifestly incomplete endings, plot twists, improbable yet incredibly affecting coincidences, and an atmosphere brimming with hints and signs. If this were not the case then the frightening story, which is simple in terms of structure and completely empty of the dramatic collision of characters and the study of an entire psyche, would lose its effect. Coleridge’s saying that we happily suspend our disbelief under poetry’s influence proves similarly true in the case of the frightening story. The secret of the storyteller’s success lies precisely in how, and for how long, they can jolt our imaginative power into keeping disbelief at bay. 

This essay was published in the first issue of Shabḳhūn (or Night-Attack), dated June 1966. Shabḳhūn was a modernist literary and intellectual venture that saw itself as a caretaker of Urdu culture. It was founded by the writer and literary critic Shamsurrahman Faruqi with the integral support of his wife Jameela. Faruqi was the key force behind Shabḳhūn, especially in its early years, when he wrote and translated many of the journal’s pieces under a variety of assumed names. The essay above, ascribed to the legendary narrator of The One Thousand and One Nights, was written by Faruqi. It was published with a “frightening story” by this Scheherazade herself. The story and analysis accompanied each other on pages specially partitioned into two columns, perhaps indicative of Shabḳhūn’s integrated literary and intellectual mission. The journal would publish nearly three hundred issues over the next four decades, ceasing publication in 2005.