Then comes the almost off-handed punch line: “As a consequence,” concludes this story-of-the-story-of-the-stories, “the tales became famous, and the people called them The Marvels and Wonders of the Thousand and One Nights. This is all that we know about the origins of this book, and Allah is omniscient. . FINIS.”
GET IT? THE book that we’ve just finished reading is not The Thousand and One Nights, exactly, but a book about a book called The Thousand and One Nights. FINIS indeed — and wow! But so lightly and engagingly does this outermost Scheherazade, so to speak, lead us into and out of the narrative labyrinth of tales within tales within tales, we’re scarcely aware of all this structural complexity. Nor need we be, any more than venturers through an amusement-park funhouse need appreciate the intricate mechanics of its serial gee-whizzes: quite okay just to go along for the ride, at least the first time through. Closer examination has its rewards, however, and may well lead one not only through this expertly edited two-volume Signet Classics version, but on to the ten- or twelve- or thirty-volume feast of which it is a rich sampling. Ms. Scheherazade is, among other things, a storyteller’s storyteller par excellence, whom writers as otherwise dissimilar as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, and Yours Truly have found irresistible. Goethe was impressed by the stories’ mix of fantasy and realism, humor and terror, delicacy and ribaldry, even downright scatology: his journals note that the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther was particularly taken with Night 410, the Tale of How Abu Hasan Farted. And as David Beaumont notes in his introduction to Volume I, Marcel Proust — whose seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past is itself a fiction of Scheherazadean proportions, though not of Arabian Nights flavor — frequently refers to her epical narrative in his. Likewise the late great Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges (who, being blind, was himself necessarily a storyteller rather than a story-writer, composing his splendid ficciones in his head and then, like Scheherazade after her narrative menopause, dictating them from memory for inscription), and many another storyteller from all over the globe.
That’s no surprise to this one, who most certainly includes himself among the Vizier’s daughter’s long-time ardent admirers. As a child in the time before television, video games, and the Internet, I was charmed by a much-abridged and radically expurgated one-volume kiddie edition of the Nights, discreetly but handsomely illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. No gas-passing villagers in it, as in the tale that so amused Goethe (the unfortunate Abu Hasan, mortified by his accidental flatulence during a prayer-service, exiles himself for years; returning finally to his village in hopes that his embarrassing faux pas has long since been forgotten, he happens to overhear a lad ask his mother how old he is, to which she replies that he’s ten years old, he having been born “on the very night that Abu Hasan farted”); no lascivious sultanas cuckolding their royal spouses with ape-like “slobbering blackamoors” who swing down from the trees to service them and their handmaidens while hubby is out of town; no sad but dutiful Grand Vizier showing up at the king’s court every morning, shroud over his arm, expecting royal orders to lead his daughter off to execution as he has led her thousand deflowered predecessors — but there were Aladdin and his magical lantern, Ali Baba and the forty thieves, Sinbad the Seaman and Sinbad the Landman; there were the mighty wish-granting genies/jinnees/djinns in bottles and other innocent-looking containers (even as a kid, I wondered why it never occurs to Aladdin and other wish-grantees to cover their bets by wishing for more wishes!); there were the mermaids and dragons, the Open Sesames and other charms…. I was hooked.
And re-hooked for keeps years later, when — as an undergraduate book-filer in the Classics stacks of my university’s library, re-shelving cartful after cartful of tomes to help defray my tuition and eagerly perusing as I re-shelved, while at the same time feeling the first stirrings of writerly Vocation — in the alcoves of what was called the “Oriental Seminary” I discovered among other marvels the ten folio volumes of Somadeva’s enormous Katha Sarit Sagara: the 11th-century Sanskrit Ocean of the Streams of Story spun out by the god Shiva to his consort Parvati in reward for a particularly divine session of lovemaking. It contains not just tales within tales, but such entire cycles of tales-within-tales as the Panchatantra (“Five Principles”) and the Vetalapanchavimsati (“25 Tales Told by a Vampire”), and is assumed to be among the antecedents of the Persian Hazar Afsaneh (“Book of a Thousand Tales”) later translated and transmuted into the Arabic Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night. That too was there to be re-filed, in Burton’s version and others, as were (in neighboring alcoves) such frame-taled European spin-offs as Boccaccio’s ten-night Decameron, Marguerite of Navarre’s seven-night Heptameron, Giambattista Basile’s five-night Pentameron (or Tale of Tales), and other more or less racy delights, none of which were included in my otherwise excellent world-lit undergrad survey courses. What wannabe fictionist wouldn’t lay into such a narrative smorgasbord?
I did, for sure, and Scheherazade in particular became an important navigation star in my own writerly adventures over the succeeding decades. While not presuming to her narrative achievement, I’ve found myself returning from time to time both to the Vizier’s daughter herself, who shows up in several of my novels and stories, and to her appalling but endlessly fascinating situation. How can she expect to succeed where her thousand predecessors failed? Not by erotic expertise alone, for sure, although she’s probably no slouch in that department: while properly virginal, she has, we’re told in the frame-story, “read the books, annals, and legends of former kings, and the stories, lessons, and adventures of famous men. Indeed, it was said that she had collected a thousand history books [note the number] about ancient peoples and rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart. She had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts, and practical things. And she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred.” One bets that her library included the classic Sanskrit sex manual Kama Sutra, and one notes that at her and Dunyazade’s double wedding at her stories’ end, the kid sister “paced forward like the rising sun, and swayed to and fro in insolent beauty,” while Scheherazade herself “came forward swaying from side to side,” “shook her head and swayed her haunches,” and “moved so coquettishly that she ravished the minds and hearts of all present and bewitched their eyes.” So she can belly-dance too! Long live the Queen!