‘[I]n the midst of fierce forces’: Orientalizing Decadence in A. S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994)

Abstract

The closing and titular novella in A. S. Byatt’s collection of five fairy stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), introduces an unlikely decadent heroine, the narratologist Gillian Perholt, ‘an unprecedented being, a woman with porcelain-crowned teeth, laser-corrected vision, her own store of money, her own life and field of power’.[i] The fairy tale plays with the tropes of the 1001 Nights (also referred to as The Arabian Nights), and wish-fulfilling lamps (found in associated tales such as ‘Aladdin’), as Gillian finds a glass bottle containing a djinn in an Istanbul market. The world in Byatt’s novella is one she understood and constructed through a variety of sources,  by reading The Arabian Nights and undertaking academic research related to the tales, and through dialogue with fellow writers, notably the Turkish poet Cevat Çapan (pp. 279-80). Gillian’s encounter with the ‘Oriental Daimon’, largely staged in her hotel room, involves the granting of three wishes: one for Gillian’s body to be restored to a younger version of herself; another, that the djinn might fall in love with her; and a third, gifted back to djinn for his freedom (p. 206).

[i] A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories (Vintage, 1995), pp. 104-05.  Subsequent references to the novel are given inline.