Eastern Dreams (7 page)

Foremost among mysteries is the question of what actually constitutes an
Arabian Nights
story. The common assumption—that a full version of the
Nights
contains 1001 stories, with a single, separate tale for each of its 1001 evenings—is false. Many stories resemble Chinese box-puzzles, with smaller or different tales contained within a larger, sometimes much larger, framework. “The Hunchback's Tale,” for instance, which occurs on the twenty-fourth Night in the mammoth Richard Burton edition, contains no less than eleven sub-stories; Scheherazade needs some ten nights
to recite the entire series before she is able to embark on the next self-contained tale.

Fittingly, characters within the
Nights
are obsessed with storytelling, exchanging tales with one another until the work resembles a fountain of gushing narrative.
Arabian Nights
' characters tell stories for a variety of reasons—to entertain, to warn, to instruct, to make points and, in more than one instance, to save lives. Scheherazade is not the only character who talks to preserve life, as in more than one tale, storytelling becomes the price or purpose for existence.

It is true that most editions of the
Nights
not designed for children tend to bear a common core of stories, but thereafter the length, content and editing varies enormously. One of the book's chief characteristics is the extreme difference in story length, as well as the tonal shifts that can occur from tale to tale. Many stories run just a few paragraphs while others (such as “The Tale of King Omar bin al-Nu'uman and His Sons Sharrkan and Zau al-Makan”) can reach the size of a lengthy novella. Changes in mood occur with jarring abruptness, as when a tender tale of two lovers reconciled by a dream is succeeded by two stories involving bestiality—it's as if a Harlequin romance contained an epilogue of pornographic vignettes.

It is also a disappointing certainty that some of the most famous and beloved stories found in most editions—Sindbad's voyages, Aladdin's lamp and Ali Baba among them—are probably not part of the original work at all but were added later, either because of a general demand for more stories or a desire to incorporate enough material to enlarge editions toward the magic number of 1001 Nights. Independent stories, or story cycles inserted to flesh out the whole, account for both the great size of some versions (even a paperback edition can run near nine hundred pages) and the many variations in style and feeling. This makes
The Thousand and One Nights
one of the most unusual books in all literature. It's not only
the sole major western literary work originating from outside the West, but also the only one possessing no clear origins, a variable core, some standard additions culled from other sources and a number of “orphan stories”—tales lacking apparent antecedents, or whose provenance is suspect.

With such obscure origins and ever-shifting content, it has been argued that there is no true end to
The Thousand and One Nights;
that as a book with no definable limits, it has no real conclusion but is unique in that it is constantly developing and reconfiguring itself. In many ways, this very formlessness gives the work its greatest strength, for it imbues the text with a singular flexibility of form—an ability to alter itself to fit the expectations of those entering its fantastical world. Few books of any time or language have the power to become whatever one wants them to be as does the
Arabian Nights' Entertainments
.

Even so, within this seemingly chaotic panorama, it is possible to detect a kind of organized, coherent sense to at least some of the
Nights
' earlier tales. In his famous “Terminal Essay” on the
Nights
, Sir Richard Burton notes that a common thirteen stories tend to appear in most of the editions published during his day:

1  The introductory frame story, including the incidental story “The Tale of the Bull and the Ass,” told by Scheherazade's father

2  “The Trader and the Genie” (with either two or three incidental tales)

3  “The Fisherman and the Genie” (with four incidental tales)

4  “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad” (with six incidental tales)

5  “The Tale of the Three Apples”

6  “The Tale of Nur al-Din Ali and His Son Badr al-Din Hasan”

7  “The Hunchback's Tale” (with eleven incidental tales)

8  “The Tale of Nur al-Din Ali and the Damsel Anis al-Jalis”

9  “The Tale of Ghanim bin Ayyub” (with two incidental tales)

10  “Ali bin Bakkar and Shams al-Nahar” (with two incidental tales)

11  “The Tale of Kamar al-Zaman”

12  “The Ebony Horse”

13  “Julnar the Sea-Born”

Together, Burton says, these forty-two tales take up 120 Nights, or less than a fifth of the most extensive Arabic text in existence, the “Calcutta II” edition with 264 stories spread over 1001 Nights. After working for years, Muhsin Mahdi arrived at the conclusion that the reconstructed archetype of an important fourteenth- or fifteenth-century manuscript of the
Nights
contained no more than 270 to 275 nights involving either thirty-five or thirty-six stories, and these are all he included in his critical Arabic edition of the work.

But setting aside the numbers game for a moment, it seems that in its earliest tales, most unabridged versions tend to follow a common, albeit rough, scenario. Following the vizier's story about the bull and the ass, Scheherazade begins her storytelling by reciting to Shahryar and Dinarzade the tale of the merchant and the genie with its incidental stories, then immediately launches into a second cycle involving a fisherman, a cruel genie and the tales the fisherman tells. Depending on the edition, there then follow cycles of “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” “The Tale of the Three Apples,” “The Hunchback's Tale” and “The Tale of Nur al-Din Ali and the Damsel Anis al-Jalis.” Most major translations of the
Nights
—with perhaps some minor variation
of placement—follow this sequence before veering off into their individual collections, depending on their sources or the wishes of the translators.

There could well be a structural reason for this basic grouping, since issues of cruelty, envy and preserving life through storytelling occur in several of these narratives, not just in the frame tale of Scheherazade but in the stories themselves, especially those involving the trader and the fisherman and their respective encounters with angry demons, all-powerful beings who would do them harm. Subsequent stories also touch on themes of infidelity (“The Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince”), malicious envy (“The Eldest Lady's Tale”) and rage leading to murder (“The Tale of the Three Apples”)—literary motifs reflecting the same forces spawning Scheherazade's predicament. Common as these elements are in storytelling the world over, this particular sequence cannot be a mere accident, and it is possible that it or something like it was the original sequence used to create Arabic versions of
Alf Laila
from the Persian
Hazar Afsanah
.

It appears, then, that the basic scenario of
The Thousand and One Nights
runs something like this. Having made her decision to marry the sultan to stop his butchery of women, Scheherazade finds that her father, the vizier, tries to dissuade her by reciting his own warning story (“The Tale of the Bull and the Ass”), which he hopes will preserve her life. Shahryar's vizier thus becomes the first
Arabian Nights
character to relate a tale while introducing the concept of instruction through storytelling. Scheherazade, however, holds firm, marries the sultan and then, as the first night—their wedding night—progresses, begins (with Dinarzade's collusion) a process of telling stories not only to prevent her execution and the executions of more innocent women but also to plant the seeds of her raging husband's redemption by an almost subliminal process of inducing the better angels of Shahryar's nature to reassert themselves.

She does this by reciting stories involving the arbitrariness of chance and the cruelty of the powerful visited upon the innocent or unfortunate. The genies in the first and second story cycles may be seen as supernatural representations of Shahryar himself, powerful entities holding the fate of others in their hands. The actual guilt or non-guilt of those involved is not at issue in the face of an all-encompassing authority that may be just or unjust according to its inclinations; it is the simple fact of the authority's power that allows it to dispense clemency or punishment.

But through her stories, particularly in the first two cycles, Scheherazade demonstrates that the cruelty of power can be defective to the point of self-destruction, and that storytelling has the capacity to thwart death and restore justice. By telling the enraged genie tales, which help Shahryar see that the trader should not die for the accidental killing of the genie's child, the two sheikhs (some versions add a third old man) calm the demon with entertaining stories, but only after each first extracts a promise that a portion of the trader's life will be spared if the genie finds their stories sufficiently entertaining. He does, and the trader lives. In this way, Scheherazade reflects her own desire to “
die as ransom for others” should she fail in her plan, and subtly tells the sultan so in her first tale, in which stories are the device whereby a life is spared.

She continues this practice in the next cycle of stories, where in one tale involving a king and his sage, the king's unjust execution of the sage rebounds on him, causing his own death as retribution for abusing his power. The analogy of this king, who dies because he has acted in an unjust manner, and the sultan, killing the virgins, is very clear, and it can be argued that Scheherazade recites this story deliberately to make her new husband consider his own security as a monarch who has acted in a similar way to his counterpart in the tale.

By demonstrating that hate, envy, greed and vanity often lead to disaster, Scheherazade chastises the sultan through oblique means, reminding him that for all his power within his kingdom, he remains a mortal man beset by mortal failings. Even a king, she admonishes, is responsible for his actions, and can expect to be judged for his dealings with others. So Scheherazade and Dinarzade spin tales not only to stave off the executioner's visit but also to plant in the sultan's wounded psyche the means to heal itself. It has been remarked that the
rawi
who channelled Scheherazade's stories to their listeners were providing their audiences with a kind of rough education in various aspects of life. In a more specific way, Scheherazade is doing the same for her husband, teaching him through enlightening narrative the evil nature of the path he has undertaken in the hope that Shahryar will return to his former self.

Since as daughters of the vizier Scheherazade and Dinarzade are exempt from the sultan's decree, it is an awe-inspiring act of sacrifice on Scheherazade's part to marry Shahryar and risk her life to save both others and the sultan. Her maturity and goodness ally with the forces of life to battle lethal and arbitrary cruelty. When the rage clouding Shahryar's judgment is banished by Scheherazade's instruction in the duties of life and authority, the world is returned to its former tranquility. The sultan regains his princely virtue, Scheherazade preserves her life and those of the kingdom's daughters, and the ultimate story in
The Thousand and One Nights
ends on an appropriately happily-ever-after note.

There is a fifth Muslim reference to the
Nights
, although it appears decades after the book's publication in Europe. At the end of the eighteenth century, in the preface to a Turkish storybook entitled
Phantasms of the Divine Presence
, the translator, Ali Aziz Efendi
the Cretan, notes that he employed a work called
Elf Laila
(“A Thousand Nights”) as one of his sources, claiming it was written by a ninth-century philologist and companion of Haroun al-Rashid named al-Asami. Beyond this mention, however, there is no supportive evidence that anyone called al-Asami ever fashioned a version of
Alf Laila
, so he joins Muhammad al-Jahshiyari among the legendary “non-compilers” of
The Thousand and One Nights
.