The Oceans of Cruelty
Douglas J. Penick
New York Review Books, October 2024

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ouglas J. Penick’s The Oceans of Cruelty is a collection of twenty-five stories—twenty-six, if we include the frame-story (in which the nefarious Yogi Valkalāśana tricks the legendary King Vikramāditya into bringing him the Vetāla—the corpse possessed by the spirit of its former inhabitant—which narrates the core twenty-five to the King along his journey). Their origin is in the Vetala Panchavimshati whose earliest written recensions date from between the Eleventh and the Fourteenth Centuries CE, but whose own origins lie in oral traditions so timeless and so protean that it would hardly make sense to discuss them in terms of ‘origins’ at all. How, then, with none of the usual certainties afforded by a definite genesis, should we begin to interpret them? 

Perhaps the immediate temptation is to attempt some kind of feverish crosschecking—to analyse The Oceans of Cruelty in terms of its borrowings and departures from the other recensions. But such an approach would miss the sheer accessibility of Penick’s text, which demands no prior expertise on the part of its readers (and is certainly not, say, a series of in-jokes for aficionados of the Vetala Panchavimshati). That, and it would quickly become completely absorbed in the text’s own artifice. The Vetāla intends to ‘get this King [Vikramāditya] to respond to each story as if it were real’, and The Oceans of Cruelty requires that its own audiences respond in much the same way. Of course, meeting this requirement is harder than it sounds. The Oceans of Cruelty is constantly drawing attention to its own artifice, reminding us at every opportunity that it is not the slightest bit ‘real’. Furthermore, it is quietly scathing of those audiences who completely ‘immerse’ themselves in stories—that is, of audiences for whom fictions are real—eventually warning us (albeit, with comically late timing) of an apocalyptic future in which ‘Men and women would soon be completely unable to distinguish the human realm from stories about the human realm’. The challenge here is to know full well that the twenty-five (or twenty-six) stories are outright fabrications, painstakingly (co-)constructed over multiple centuries, whilst treating them as if they were not. Fiction is a subjunctive art, and The Oceans of Cruelty is no exception. 

To complicate the question of origins, The Oceans of Cruelty offers its own account of the genesis of the twenty-five:

Brahman [who subsequently becomes the Vetāla, his corpse possessed by his own spirit] slept next to his wife and dreamed . . . He dreamed he saw Śiva and Pārvatī, whispering one story, then another, twenty-five in an unbroken stream. In the morning, when he woke, Brahman could not help himself. He made love to his wife and told her these stories as he heard them. 

Of course, it is easy to remember that this story is itself a further fabrication (indeed, if we do succumb to the temptation to crosscheck, then we can even guess at when it might have been fabricated, for the device in which Lord Śiva is the ultimate source of the Vetāla’s stories appears in Somadeva’s Kathāsaritsāgara from 1070 CE but not in Kṣemendra’s Bṛhatkathāmanjarī from 1037 CE). But how does our interpretation change when we treat this fabrication ‘as if it were real’? The rub here is that it does not. As Chandra Rajan explains in the introduction to her 1995 translation of Śivadāsa’s recension:

By positing such a hoary antiquity to storytelling and projecting it far back in time to the quasi-eternal and temporal abode of divinity, and by making the divine pair Śiva and Śaki (Parvati) as the primal narrator and audience, tradition is pointing to a very ancient and undateable origin for it. This apocryphal story underlines what is central to the genre of oral storytelling, and defines its special nature. Storytelling is timeless. Like fire it is brought down to earth for man’s use and entertainment. A narrative is a re-telling and will always be that. However far back in time it is traced to it always remains a re-telling. We are still left, not with an ‘original’, not with ‘absolute beginnings’ of a narrative, of any narrative, but with successive re-tellings . . . To place the initial, the original narration on Mt. Kailāsa, in the divine world of the timeless, is simply to state this ineluctable fact in a mythic form. 

Whether we prefer to accept the fact that The Oceans of Cruelty has come down to us via tradition’s grapevine, or to entertain the idea that it has come down to us from Śiva himself (or—ideally—to do both at once), the result is the same: The Oceans of Cruelty derives its affect from its being an imperfect, mutant text, distorted and corrupted—a single moment within a long process of entropy. The important thing here is not to attempt to reconstruct the entire process, but simply to trace the particulars of the iteration at hand. 

What are those particulars? To repeat: The Oceans of Cruelty is constantly drawing attention to its own artifice. It is not simply a collection of stories but a near-exhaustive demonstration of storytelling’s every device—a heaving compendium of mistaken identities, calculated revenges, surprise revelations, and reversals in fortune. But what makes it especially hard to ‘respond to each story as if it were real’ is the abundance of additional, embedded stories. Some good examples occur in ‘Wise Birds’ (which, of course, is itself embedded within the story of Vikramāditya’s bringing the Vetāla to Valkalāśana): King Rūpasena, who keeps a pet parrot, marries Princess Surasandarī, who keeps a pet mynah. The parrot propositions the mynah with sex. The mynah is not interested, and in her defence tells a story about her previous owner’s daughter, Ratnavati, who was seduced, murdered, and robbed by the deceitful philanderer, Dhanaksaya. Partway through this story, Dhanaksaya himself starts regaling a merchant with a (false) story about losing merchandise in a shipwreck. We have, to put it bluntly, a story within a story within a story within a story. The parrot responds by telling a story of his own about his previous owner, Jayshri, whose husband, Śridatta, was killed in bed by thieves without Jayshri’s realising. Partway through this story, moreover, Śridatta starts regaling Jayshiri with a story of ‘his voyages and how he had longed for her’; Jayshri, however, ‘covered her ears and grimaced’. The joke here is that the device has already been taken too far—that the actual audience, Penick’s flesh-and-blood reader, has already been subjected to one too many embedded stories and that anything more will result in unmanageable chaos. The Oceans of Cruelty is not simply a showcase of the storyteller’s art but a delineation of its outermost limits—one that constantly pushes it to the point of breakdown.

Making it still harder ‘to respond . . . as if it were real’, The Oceans of Cruelty often reads like an allegory of the actual mechanics of storytelling. ‘True Love’, for example, begins with a Princess making signs—that is, telling a story (or narrating excerpts of her biography)—to Prince Vajramukuta: 

The Princess . . . took a lotus flower that she had twined in her hair and held it to her ear. Then she bit the flower, stopped, put it under her right foot, then retrieved it and placed it between her breasts.

But the Prince’s friend, Buddhisena, proves to be the more sensitive audience, and it consequently falls to him interpret these signs—to ‘hear’ or ‘read’ the Princess’ story:

‘She was telling you her name, the name of her homeland and certain other things too . . . When she moved the lotus from the side of her head down to her ear, she was indicating that she comes from the south, from Karnakubja, the place where Karnatic singing began. By biting the flower, she told you that she is the daughter of King Dantāghatā which means “Bite”. Pressing the lotus under her foot, she showed that her name is Padmāvati, ‘She who is like a lotus’. When she pressed the lotus to her heart, she showed you that you have entered her heart.’

Sure enough, the Prince and Buddhisena find the Princess at Dantāghatā’s palace in Karnakubja, but her response to their arrival appears to contradict the latter part of Buddhisena’s interpretation: ‘She spat on the fingers of both hands and spread the spit on the sole of one of her sandals. Suddenly she slapped her old nurse on the face with the sandal.’ Hence, Buddhisena must provide further interpretation of these new signs:

Using all ten fingers to wet her sandal, the Princess meant that when the ten nights of moonlight have come to an end, she will meet you in the dark. Slapping [her nurse] meant she had to reject [her] until then.

The Prince and Buddhisena return in ten days’ time, but still the signs are unfavourable: ‘the Princess had put saffron paste on three of her fingers . . . lashed out and again struck her old nurse’. Accordingly, Buddhisena provides still further interpretation, this time claiming: ‘The Princess is in the state that afflicts all women every month.’ The remainder of Buddhisena’s initial reading is finally validated three days later when the King returns and is told by the Princess, ‘I wish only to serve you, great lord’. Before long, however, she starts to spin false signs, to tell fictional stories: when the Prince requests to visit Buddhisena, she indicates that she is happy for him to do so, but then attempts to poison both men. The Prince and Buddhisena take revenge by concocting a fictional story of their own—that the Princess is a rabid nymphomaniac who gave the family treasures away to a Yogi in exchange for further sexual prowess—and by manipulating the signs (even marking the Princess’ leg with a trident) so that their fiction appears to be real. Convinced of her guilt, the Princess’ father punishes her by editing her out of the world of stories altogether: 

He didn’t want her in his mind for another second. He would no longer speak her name. He commanded that this terrible child be placed in a palanquin and taken immediately to the wilderness outside his kingdom’s border. The guards were neither to explain nor speak to her.

The Vetāla eventually has King Vikramāditya interpret the whole story, the entire system of signs, asking him: ‘Who, of the five people in this tale . . . deserves the lowest rebirth?’ The King’s answer is a revealing one: ‘the King, Padmāvati’s father, should never have judged her without questioning her directly.’ Here, the harshest judgement falls on the story’s worst audience, its most incompetent reader, the person who fails to properly interrogate the signs. When, at the end of ‘A Question With No Answer’, King Vikramāditya finds himself unable to interpret any more—when, as ‘A Wave Beginning’ phrases it, ‘words fail him’—there is, once again, a sense of having reached an outermost limit, a breakdown in meaning:

It was a chaos of simultaneous possibilities . . . It was the kind of irresolvable confusion that, as he knew, often follows war. There was no untangling it. 

The Vetāla’s stories eventually bring us, in other words, to the very place where stories fail: to the real itself—unspeakable and unreadable, disorganised and infinite.

In addition, much of The Oceans of Cruelty appears to present something like a coded apology or manifesto for storytelling. Its most common line of defence is that storytelling offers a diversion from the trauma or ‘cruelty’ of the real. Just before he starts narrating ‘True Love’, for example, the Vetāla whispers to King Vikramāditya, ‘this world we now traverse together is, as you know, a sea of insatiable desires and cruel deceits. Let me distract you with stories from other places and times’. The distraction motif recurs throughout The Oceans of Cruelty, but what is brilliant about it (and what ultimately enables us to respond to The Oceans of Cruelty ‘as if it were real’) is that it too breaks down. On the one hand, the Vetāla’s stories are every bit as teeming with ‘insatiable desires and cruel deceits’ as the world which King Vikramāditya inhabits (and perhaps even as the world which we, Penick’s flesh-and-blood readers, inhabit). On the other hand, the distinction between the real world and the Vetāla’s fictions turns out to be eerily unstable. In ‘Uncaused’, for example, we are told that ‘The Corpse-Demon’s stories which he offered as distractions had become the most real part of the King’s journey’. In ‘Unchanging’, we learn that: 

When the Vetāla spoke, the outer world faded and the stories grew real. At each tale’s conclusion, King Vikramāditya knew he would be required to make judgements as if he ruled in these storylands. Then, briefly, storytelling would end, and the outer world return ever less substantial.

Likewise, in ‘Love and Ruling (2)’, we find that ‘The painful tedium of the King’s labors dissolved within the reality of another tale.’ The implication is that storytelling does not just offer an escape from the world, but a more immediate point of access—a purer and more concentrated distillation of reality than life itself ordinarily provides. 

Concurrently, The Oceans of Cruelty makes the case that stories do not just distil life, but actually enable us to live—especially, beyond the physical and temporal limitations of biological life. In ‘Love and Chaos’, the Vetāla reminds King Vikramāditya, that ‘we the dead, live only as tales are told.’ Similarly, having finished telling his twenty-five tales, he announces:

O Great King Vikramāditya, the twenty-five tales I told have long been the essence of my being. Now they live in you; they are part of your life, and you will carry me into millions of places and times. My existence is inseparable from the story of your life and will continue in whoever hears your history. I will be woven into them. As one tells another, in hundreds of millions of minds, I will become part of hundreds of millions of beings. In eon after eon, I will come to life in times and circumstances beyond imagining and without limit. But, O Merciful One, my continuing depends on your survival. Your story must not end.

Of course, King Vikramāditya’s story does not end. The final words of The Oceans of Cruelty are these: 

Legends about King Vikramāditya began at once, and were written down in the Brihatkatha, the Hatha-sarit-Sagara, the Gatha-Saptasati, Vasavadatta, and in innumerable later texts, dramas songs, and spoken stories which are current now.’

The thesis developed here, as Penick phrases it in his Foreword, is that ‘Our existence beyond the bounds of a single life, as well as our posterity, depends entirely on [stories], on becoming one of them.’ But what is brilliant here is that this thesis has a catch: to live beyond the physical and temporal limitations of biological life is essentially to be a corpse-spirit. Earlier, Penick’s Foreword explains that ‘a story is something that takes possession of whoever reads and hears it’, adding that ‘it is the Vetāla itself that embodies this demonic aspect of narrative’. To exist in other people’s accounts of oneself, then, is to possess those people, to be a demon, to lack a properly embodied existence of one’s own. It is to be, as ‘A Wave Beginning’ says of the Vetāla, ‘filled with seething mist, neither live nor dead’. Vikramāditya eventually sacrifices the Vetāla, triumphs over the Yogi Valkalāśana, and thus becomes an immortal legend; in doing so, however, he also becomes a kind of Vetāla. (As it happens, the historical record concurs: it remains inconclusive as to whether Vikramāditya was a real personage, a composite of several real personages, a mythologised version of one or several real personages, or an outright fabrication. He has always been, in a sense, ‘neither live nor dead’.)

But The Oceans of Cruelty also contains a further defence of storytelling: that it offers a sort of existential geometry—a set of shapes and delineations with which to order our experience of the world; that we can navigate or make sense of the chaos of existence by organising it into a compendium of mistaken identities, calculated revenges, surprise revelations, and reversals in fortune. On learning that his stories for Pārvatī have been overheard and retold, 

The great god [Lord Śiva] was enraged that the intimacy of his love, the merging, caressing passions, the scents and colors and textures emerging and dissolving as he moved within the great goddess, whispering and licking, that this play of love should somehow be overheard, that its expressions be somehow stolen and used to debase a world and corrupt it by names and forms.

Without narrative, then, the world is—as in Genesis (and Jeremiah)—‘without form’. Here, however, the emergence of storytelling is a catastrophe, a fall from grace. The Oceans of Cruelty does not have a beginning as such (that is, it does not begin, like Genesis, ‘In the beginning’, but ‘Before Beginning’—or, more accurately, with two ‘Before Beginning[s]’), but its opening words are these:

As has been told:

Primordial space, the undivided, the signless, where sentience and non-sentience, awareness and unawareness have not divided, where there is neither life nor death, nor time, nor stasis, continuity or discontinuity, void or phenomena. Primordial sea undivided. Primordial Sky undivided. Primordial Darkness undivided. Primordial Light undivided. Chaos moving and alive without reference to order or disorder. Neither noun nor verb. Continuity continuing in its own reference. A vast and empty luminous expanse. 

What is crucial (or divine) about the ur-stories, the proto-narratives with which Śiva pleasures Pārvatī, is that they do not disrupt this ‘primordial space’—that they do not divide ‘the undivided’ nor carve up ‘the signless’ into neat little signifiers and signifieds. They are, as the text puts it, ‘stories unconstrained by meanings, shaped from chaos’ (and not, say, in opposition to chaos). By contrast, the stories told by us mortals de-eroticise the world. They are a turn-off. What is more, the obverse proves to be true as well: in ‘Three Fathers’, a Brahmin’s daughter, Mohini, attempts to describe her first sexual encounter, explaining, ‘I lost all consciousness of being myself’. Sex, in other words, is messy. Like Primordial space, it muddles divisions—in particular, those between self and other. 

The final paradox—and, in fact, the reason why storytelling continues to be worthwhile (that is, in spite of the terrifying/tedious ubiquity which stories have assumed in our own era)—is that the only way out is through: we can only arrive at the unnarratable by means of narrative. It is not just that ‘Primordial space’ is only known to us because of the existence of tales—including Penick’s—about ‘Primordial space’ (although, in one sense or another, this is almost certainly the case). It is that the world which exists prior to or beyond storytelling—the world in which all divisions (not just those that are muddled by sex—that is, between self and other) are effaced beyond recognition—is most directly and fully accessed via the breakdowns in storytelling itself: in stories which push their own devices to their limits, which allegorise their own unreadability, which are insufficiently distinct from reality, which fail to immortalise their subjects, which are incapable of providing life with form, which do not manage to begin and end, which lack definite geneses. The Oceans of Cruelty is a collection of twenty-five such stories—twenty-six, if we include the frame-story. It is, in a manner of speaking, ‘better than sex’ (at least, the sex practised by us mortals).