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Volume 16:

Stories from the Thousand and One Nights (full text)

The stories in the Book of the Thousand and One Nights first came to Europe early in the 18th century, in Antoine Galland's French translation. Translations into the other European languages followed quickly. The book had a huge influence on 19th century writers like Nerval and Flaubert, who each travelled to Egypt and came back with stories infused with opium and hashish smoke, many of which betrayed odd resemblances to these five hundred year old tales. To the extent that we still see the East as a land of Sultans and Genies, it is because of this book. Edward Said and others have argued persuasively that exoticized Orientalism -- the Western view of the Near East as a romantically backward place -- has served the political ends of Western imperialism. Especially given the current state of East-West relations, it bears noting that this selection from the 1,001 Nights --this wonder-book of the mysterious east, as the volume's introduction calls it -- is one of only three volumes of the Classics devoted to non-Western texts. (The others are the religious works in Volumes 44 and 45, most of which have been wholly assimilated by Judeo-Christian Europe.)

And so we should allow upfront that these tales probably teach us less about the history of the Orient than about the history of Western misunderstanding of the Orient. Still, as Ernie McCracken would say, they sure are fun, though. This volume has been the most purely enjoyable of the Classics I've read so far. (It's also an easy choice for my second Ted-Should-Read-This pick.)

The book's framing story, as most readers will know, involve a jealous Shah who marries a series of virgins only to kill each one after a single night. Finally, he marries Scheherazade (transliterated as Shahrazad), the daughter of his Wezir. She entertains him on their wedding night by telling a story, which she leaves unfinished so that he must let her live in order to hear the end of it. The next night, she finishes the first story, but begins another, which she in turn leaves unfinished. And so on, for 1,001 nights, by which point the Shah decides to let her live.

Scheherazade extends her stories in part through a series of nesting device. A typical example, included in this selection, is the Story of the Humpback. The story goes like this: a tailor and his wife are playing drunkenly with a hunchback who chokes on a chicken bone. Believing they have caused the hunchback's death, the couple takes him to a Jewish doctor, who comes in turn to believe that he is responsible for the hunchback's death. The doctor brings the hunchback to the house of his neighbor, a Christian broker, who also comes to believe he is responsible for the death. Eventually, all three parties are brought to the Sultan by his steward and sentenced to be beheaded. So far, so good. But each party attempts to win clemency from the Sultan by telling his own story. We are then given a series of nested stories: The Story of the Sultan's Steward; The Story of the Christian Broker; the Story of the Jewish Physician; the Story of the Tailor. The last of these includes a further layer of nesting stories involving a barber and his brothers. After the tailor has finished his story, the sultan summons the barber to verify the story, and the barber removes the chicken bone from the hunchback's throat, restoring him to life.

The theme of characters who attempt to put off or avoid an execution by means of telling stories is pervasive throughout the Nights -- beginning, of course, with Scheherazade herself. Taken together, the Nights seem to propose a kind of human will to narrative as the ultimate sign of vitality in the face of impending doom. In the past few generations, the Nights have been taken up by metafictionists like John Barth, who seem more interested in this formal aspect than in any romantic notion of sultans and harems. In fact, reading the 1,001 Nights, with its proliferation of narratives, I was reminded above all of authors like Pynchon or Rushdie or David Foster Wallace, novelists whom James Wood has termed hysterical realists. Storytelling has become a kind of grammar in these novels, Wood argued; it is how they structure and drive themselves on. The primary characteristic of such novels, Wood went on, is a pursuit of vitality at all costs. The term hysterical realism is both catchy and apt enough to have become a common shorthand even for those who admire this kind of fiction (which I do, with certain qualifications). But if one had to go looking for another name for these tendencies in contemporary fiction, I might suggest the Scheherazade School: these are novels written as if under a sentence of death from which only stories can save them.


--CRB, April 29, 2007

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