Rukh's Eggs

What the heck's a Rukh egg? This picture makes it look like some sort of demonic vulture with bat wings. It's certainly not something you'd want to have swoop down on you in the middle of the desert. In any event, this symbolic egg, I believe, served as the catalyst for the recognition in Ala al-Din. It was only after the demon in the lamp revealed to Ala al-Din that the "false" Fatima was in their midst that this romance is allowed to have its happy ending. But is this the true "recognition" that we speak of when we look at the requirements of romance? Or was he recognition in Ala al-Din back in Africa? Or somewhere else? This is a subject I feel we have not spent much time on, though it represents a fairly significant part of the romance formula.

The recognition, revelation, romance, whatever you'd like to call it, is noted by Frye in regard to the "revolutionary quality...the proletarian element rejected by every cultural establishment" (163). Here Frye points out what I would call the irony of romance, in that it is designed to be accepted by the masses, but features characters and circumstances that are distinctly the realm of the nobility, far from the understanding of everyday subject. But this is worth considering further, in that the recognition in a story like Ala al-Din may be different on different levels.

What causes Ala al-Din to lose everything and descend back into the life of a peasant, with no wife, no palace and no money? Losing the lamp. Is that his revelation? Perhaps, if you believe that individuation demands suffering. So many of us only seem to appreciate what we have only when it is taken away from us. Or was the recognition later in the book, as Frye says, "near the end of a romantic story" (163)?

We've mentioned that many of these stories have such complicated plots and so many twists and turns that serve to keep the story going, is it possible to have several recognition phases? I think this is worth spending some more time looking at some of the other stories we've read in order to get to the bottom of this murky concept of revelation. Frye uses the story of Christ "rising from the dragon of death and hell with his redeemed captives" (163) as an example of the recognition. Certainly this is the revelation in the Christian faith, but was it Christ's individual revelation? A fitting question for the Easter weekend and one for which I don't yet have an answer.