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This chapter represents a narratological breakdown of the tale. Drawing on the theory of Seymour Chatman, Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács, I discuss the tale and its relationship to the ʿUdhrī love tale, the popular epic and the novel in terms of its discourse, setting, characters and events. I argue that the tale has a plot with a ‘homophonic’ texture, whereby a ‘melody’ of singular events (such as the abduction, torture and rescue of Laylā) overlays a ‘drone’ of repeated events (namely battle scenes). I conclude with a comparison of the tale with its twentieth-century novelistic adaptation and a discussion of what the comparison reveals about the pre-history of the Arabic novel.

This chapter explores the harmonic resources of the instrument and builds upon the fingerboard harmony material in chapter 1. Playing homophonic textures on the guitar creates problems of smoothness and connection. Fernando Sor recognized this and provided rests between chords in his Op. 35, No. 11 and Op. 31, No. 20. Two arpeggio pieces of special harmonic interest are also included. This chapter challenges the widely accepted instruction that recommends the placing of all the left-hand fingers that are to form a chord at the same time, whether or not the notes of the chord are arpeggiated or struck simultaneously. This advice, repeated in almost every guitar method since the early 19th century, accounts for one of the reasons guitarists have difficulty performing convincing legato phrasing. The chapter presents alternative advice, the reasons behind it, and exercises to help develop this technical and artistic refinement.

One method much-practised by the Oulipo is ‘homophonic translation’: taking the sounds of one language and trying to recreate them in another. Thus Keats’s ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ becomes in French ‘Ah, singe débotté, hisse un jouet fort et vert’ [‘Oh, unshod monkey, raise a stout green toy’]. But this type of extended punning has also always had a crucial role in psychoanalytic interpretation, and in this chapter we find members of the Oulipo framing their exercises in homophonic translation as spoof scholarship, thereby sending up reductive or overzealous reading in both psychoanalysis and literary criticism. The chapter also introduces two of the Oulipo’s acknowledged precursors: the poet Raymond Roussel, and the quack etymologist J.-P. Brisset, who believed that phonetic similarity was never merely coincidental (thus, if grammar sounds like grandma, then this tells us something about grammars, grandmas, and the world at large).