Literary Interdisciplinary Research

Deconstructing Friendship and Enmity in One Thousand and One Nights Fables Based on Jacques Derrida’s Theory (Case Study: The Fox and the Wolf and the Fox and the Crow Stories)

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Zahra Izadi 1
Fatemeh Parchegani 2

1 PhD Candidate of Arabic Language and Literature, Kharazmi University ,Tehran ,Iran

2 Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran

https://doi.org/10.30465/lir.2025.48598.1844
Abstract
Introduction
The doctrine of deconstruction was proposed by the French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida, which has had a tremendous impact on various philosophical and literary fields. Deconstruction is a complex and broad concept, to the point that Derrida wrote a book called A Letter to a Japanese Friend to explain it to Izutsu, explaining that this concept is so broad that it includes dimensions such as meaning, literature, philosophy, ethics, politics, many concepts, and in general, philosophical and non-philosophical teachings. This breadth goes so far as to include deconstruction itself. As Derrida himself says, “Deconstruction deconstructs itself.” (Lucy, 2010: 210).
     One Thousand and One Nights is a multinational collection and is considered an ancient book in the field of stories and legends, and parts of it may have been formed before Islam and parts during the Islamic period (Mahjoob, 2007: 369-379). Unlike its ancestors, namely the Thousand Fables and Indian collections, etc., this book seems to be a different book (Eghlidi, 2014: 4). In this book, whose narrator is Shahrzad and whose direct addressee is Shahryar, various stories and legends, many of which are intertwined, are seen. Of course, not all of its stories have the same literary value. But it seems that the fables in it contain valuable and cryptic meanings .Since animal stories have a wide audience and include children and adults, fables can be used in teaching philosophical concepts in addition to their traditional use. The contrast of friendship and enmity is one of the common philosophical concepts in literature, including fables, which dates back to Aristotle. Therefore, the natural nature of fables, along with the need for narrative formats to explain philosophical concepts, became an incentive for the present study to address it. For this purpose, two stories from the fables in One Thousand and One Nights were selected for deconstruction. Based on what has been said, the following essay seeks to deconstruct selected stories about animals in One Thousand and One Nights using a descriptive-analytical method and Derrida's philosophical approach and to answer this question:
-What new meanings does the deconstruction of the oppositions in the story of the fox and the wolf and the story of the fox and the crow create?
Materials & Methods
Derrida's method of deconstructing literature and writing is based on finding binary oppositions in the text that determine its dominant ideology. The next step is to deconstruct these oppositions by finding contradictory elements in the text, and finally, a new reading based on this deconstruction completes the work.
Discussion & Result
Derrida considered deconstruction indefinable and described it as mysterious, mystical, and an experience of the impossible.“The main reason for the indefinability of deconstruction from Derrida's perspective is that he assumes ambiguity to be an inherent characteristic of meaning” (Haghighi, 2000:47-48). However, since an acceptable and close definition of deconstruction must be provided, the concept of presence, absence, and difference must be explained. One of the foundations of Western philosophy is logocentrism and the centrality of reason. It is necessary to know two points to understand Derrida's criticism of Western philosophy. First, Western philosophy has assumed existence to be equivalent to presence (Ahmadi, 2021: 384). Second one, it considers the presence of meaning in dualistic oppositions that always give priority to the first pole of otherness, which is called logical focus or logos and implies the distinction of the presence of meaning on the first side with its owner (Al-Ruwaili and Al-Bazei, 2002: 108). Derrida also assumed language to be a kind of metaphysics in which the duality of speech and writing is considered the axis of speech. In this opposition, speech has always been preferred over writing, because it has been assumed that meaning is present in speech and is absent in writing. Derrida focused all his attention on saying that the complete presence is found in writing as much as in speech (Honarmand, 2021: 202). He believes that the centrality of speech in the text must be broken, the text neutralized, and the reader saved from the dominance of speech (Shamisa, 2014: 224). In this research, an attempt has been made to free the audience from the constraints of the structural dualities that govern the text. The results of the deconstruction of the two stories are listed below:

-Deconstruction targets the ideologies present in the text and, like the action of an architect, destroys and reconstructs the current aspect of the word axis. In the story of the fox and the wolf, the presence of enmity is superior to friendship. However, this valuation is not definitive, but rather the contradictory evidence in the text highlights the relationship of friendship. At the beginning of the reading, only the form (either friend or enemy) was conceivable, but in the end, these two concepts were mixed and created the form (both friend and enemy(.
-The deconstruction of the fable of the fox and the crow identifies two separate thematic axes for each of the characters in the story. The preference for friendship in the fox's view and the preference for enmity in the crow's view is what it seems. However, after the deconstruction, the text moves in favor of the absent side and ultimately presents an inverted state. So that The audience perceives the crow as seeking friendship and the fox as supporting enmity. This deconstruction continues and makes the absent form (neither friendship nor enmity) present.
Conclusion
In the deconstruction of the two stories, structural dualities are continuously collapsed and new structures are built. These successive collapses and formations raise the question that the results obtained are not definitive and that the meaning of friendship or enmity is being violated at every moment. This issue can be answered by returning to Derrida's teachings because, in his view, deconstruction creates an unstable state of the meaning of the text that constantly deconstructs the results of the deconstruction. Therefore, creating doubt in the results can be a sign of successful deconstruction of the text.

Keywords

Deconstruction
Derrida
Fable
One Thousand and One Nights
Friendship &‌
Enmity

Subjects

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