by John Barth
The advent of word processors, “hypertext,” online interactive fiction, and even an Electronic Literature Organization may make such Marshall McLuhan-era innovations seem as quaint as tail-finned autos. But it may also remind us (if we need reminding) that the mature and stable technology of the printed book, like the narrative/ dramatical conventions of Beginning, Middle, and Ending—older than print, older even than writing—can be jiggered and redeployed to memorable effect as long as homo sapiens still savors the eminently human pleasure of hearing and recounting tales. As Donald Barthelme liked to say (and as I’m fond of repeating), the important question about a story isn’t whether it’s realistic or irrealistic, traditionalist or “experimental,” pre- or post-Modern: The important question is “Does it knock your socks off?”
To which one might add that a real socks-knocker of a story may have a deliberately low-keyed opening (“Call me Ishmael”), just as a first-rate movie may start with nothing more “dramatic” than a man shaving or a woman pouring the breakfast coffee. Contrariwise, a lapel-grabbing opening shot or sentence—car chase, pistol fired as if at viewer, string of Boldface all-caps obscenities!—may open an eminently forgettable yarn. The wannabe novelist Joseph Grand in Albert Camus’ The Plague tinkers endlessly with his manuscript’s first sentence (“One fine morning in the month of May, an elegant young woman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne,” among numerous other versions) in a vain effort to get it so exactly right that any editor must cry “Hats off!”—while Camus’s chef d’oeuvre itself opens with the simple declaration that “The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194_ at Oran.”
Do I have your attention, Reader? On with the story, then....
The Morning After
In 2009, at the invitation of Penguin Books, I revisited my longtime narrative navigation star Scheherazade by writing the following introduction to their new Signet Classics edition of The Arabian Nights, Volume II, published in 2010.
DAVID BEAUMONT’S MASTERFUL Introduction to Volume I of the two-volume Signet Classics edition of The Arabian Nights opens in true Scheherazadean style: “The story of the book called The Arabian Nights, it has been said, is a story worthy of being in The Arabian Nights.”
To that introduction-to-an-introduction, your present introducer of Volume II—no scholarly authority like Professors Beaumont and Jack Zipes (whose Afterwords to both volumes are likewise excellent), but a longtime yarn-spinning fan of Ms. Scheherazade—cannot resist adding that “the story of the book called The Arabian Nights” in fact is in The Arabian Nights, or anyhow just outside it. It’s the frame that frames the frame, so to speak.
I mean this literally. The stories, stories-within-stories, and stories-within-stories-within-stories that comprise the Kitab Alf Laylah Wa Laylah, or, as it’s variously called, “The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night” or “The Arabian Nights Entertainment,” are from all over the Indian/Persian/Arabic map. Over the centuries, like old-time merchant-traders traveling the Silk Road and adding to their stash of goods along the way, the book’s innumerable compilers picked up yarns from here and there and stitched them into their narrative quilt. And they’re famously framed by the best story of them all: the story of their teller, the courageous, canny, beautiful, and learned young daughter of the king’s Grand Vizier—a monarch so murderously deranged by his wife’s infidelities that after executing her he “marries” a virgin every night and has her killed in the morning before she too can cuckold him. For the story of that story, see Beaumont’s preface to Volume I—and then read the opening story in that volume, “The Story of King Shahryar and His Brother,” which explains why and under what circumstances Scheherazade will spin out, by my count, no fewer than 169 “primary” tales, at least 19 of which contain tales-within-the-tale: 87 “secondary tales” in all, at least four of which contain tertiary tales-within-the-tale-within-the-tale, for a total of some 267 complete stories, plus about ten thousand lines of verse in Sir Richard Burton’s original unexpurgated ten-volume translation of the Nights (1885–1886), of which the present version is an artful two-volume abridgment. And that’s before we even get to the seven volumes of Burton’s later Supplemental Nights.
But this apparently outermost frame—the tale of King Shahryar of “the lands of India and China,” his similarly-cuckolded and similarly-vengeful brother King Shah Zaman of Samarkand, and Scheherazade and her younger sister Dunyazade, which begins more than a thousand nights before Night 1 and winds up well after Night 1001—is itself framed, sort of, by an intriguing formulation (intriguing to some of us later storytellers, anyhow): In all versions, after the ritual invocation to Almighty Allah, the anonymous narrator-scribe declares in effect, not that “There once was a jealous king named Shahryar,” et cetera, but that “There is a book called The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, in which one will find the story of King Shahryar and his brother Shah Zaman [and Scheherazade and Dunyazade], which goes like this. . . .” A thousand-plus nights later, after that so-productive young talester—talestress?—has delivered herself not only of those several hundred stories, but also of three male children (“one walking, one crawling, one suckling”) sired by her entertain-me-or-die consort, and has delivered the king as well from his pathologically murderous, kingdom-wrecking jealousy, she successfully pleads for her life, officially weds the father of her children and inspirer of her stories in a regally elaborate joint ceremony with her now older and less innocent kid sister and Shahryar’s up-till-then equally murderous kid brother, and the foursome are declared to have lived happily thenceforth—not “ever after,” as in Western fables, but more realistically “until the Destroyer of Delights and Severer of Societies and Desolater of Dwelling-places came upon them”: the standard wrap-up of Scheherazade’s own stories. Whereupon the successor to Shahryar’s throne (One of those three sons? We’re not told) discovers in the late and no doubt unlamented king’s treasury the tales that not only entertained him but saved his kingdom and their teller’s life, and which grateful Shahryar had therefore obliged his scribes to record after the fact in thirty volumes for posterity (another story: imagine weary Scheherazade having to recollect and re-tell all those tales to the royal clerks!); and said successor is so delighted with them that he has his scribes re-copy the whole shebang and “spread them throughout the world.”
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 se
ven-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!
But as I’ve noted elsewhere,1 she has a few other things going for her as well. We’re told specifically that as word of Shahryar’s homicidal virgin-a-night policy spreads, so many parents flee the country with their daughters that by the time of our story there’s not a maidenhead remaining for the Vizier to produce (on pain of death if he fails to) except those of his own daughters, whom Shahryar has been sparing as a political courtesy. Deranged though he is, one suspects that the King too is aware of that circumstance, and that if he kills Scheherazade the jig is up in any case. Moreover (as Scheherazade’s dad will doubtless also have told her), back when the King first learned of his brother Shah Zaman’s habitual cuckolding but was as yet unaware of his own, he’d vowed that if he himself were ever thus disgraced he would kill “a thousand women in revenge,” despite the fact that “that way madness lies”—and now he’s done so, and thus the time is ripe to re-think his modus operandi.
But hey, this is a Monarch we’re dealing with, and a nut-case one at that, and so the royal Face must be saved even though the situation is staring him in it. Like, maybe, give him a little more time to come to terms with the obvious? Some sort of face-and-butt-saving interlude? How about an unobtrusively pointed story—or better yet, a whole string of stories and stories-within-stories, their delivery artfully timed to break off daily at sunrise just when the plot is really revving up, the way TV drama-serials will do a thousand years later?
And so on Night One, what will become a ritual is established: Against her rueful father’s wishes (whom she disarms with a couple of also-pointed stories), Scheherazade “goes in unto the King,” and as he prepares to go in unto her, she pleads with him to let her sister (whom she has prepped for the role) be with her on this “last night of my life.” The King consents. Dunyazade takes up her position at the foot of the royal bed, witnesses her sister’s defloration and the couple’s post-coital nap, and at midnight, on cue from Scheherazade, begs for a story to entertain all hands till dawn. Big Sis secures permission from the King (who, not surprisingly, “happened to be sleepless and restless”) and obliges with the intricated “Tale of the Merchant and the Jinee,” itself involving three tales-within-the-tale, all having to do with the tellers’ lives being spared by their stories, and the last winding up exactly at their teller’s appointed doom-time, the crack of dawn. Dunyazade praises her sister’s narrative performance; Scheherazade pooh-poohs it, declaring it to be nothing compared to what she could come up with tomorrow night, if only.... The King says okay (“By Allah, I won’t slay her until I hear more of her wondrous stories!”), rises to go about his kingly business of “bidding and forbidding between man and man” (but neither bids the Vizier to go execute his daughter nor explains the reprieve), then returns for a second night of sex/sleep/storytelling—and the pattern is established for 999 nights thereafter, Dunyazade maintaining her rather kinky foot-of-the-royal-bed position as Primer of the Narrative Pump, Scheherazade turning out story after story (always, as each ends, immediately beginning another and then interrupting it at dawn’s early light) and—so we learn on Night 1001—turning out baby after baby as well, for whose sakes she pleads on that fateful morn for her life to be thenceforth spared.
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WHY THEN, RATHER than on Night 666, say, or 777, or 1111? Why indeed are there 1001 nights instead of some other number? Mainly, no doubt, because just as “a thousand” is traditional shorthand for “a lot” (as in the Hazar Afsaneh’s “thousand tales” and Scheherazade’s “thousand books about ancient peoples and rulers”), so 1001 is “plenty and then some,” like Simon Bond’s popular 101 Uses for a Dead Cat. But think again: three sons conceived, brought to term, and delivered over the same span of time that Shahryar previously took to fulfill his threat to “kill a thousand women” in revenge for his cuckolding. The moment is doubly auspicious, especially if it happens to coincide with Scheherazade’s having . . . exhausted her narrative repertory, perhaps?
Maybe, maybe not. But while numerical appropriateness is sufficient cause, and narrative exhaustion a not-impossible extra reason for Scheherazade’s choosing Night 1001 to plead for the reprieve that she no doubt understands (and Shahyrar promptly acknowledges) to have been long since tacitly granted her, my imagination was piqued some decades ago to come up with yet a third possibility, an additional coincidence suggested by her sons’ approximate ages: “one walking, one crawling, one suckling.” For the messy details, see the aforenoted essay “Don’t Count On It,” which half-seriously imagines that by way of additional life insurance the Vizier’s cunning daughter will have timed her volunteered devirginization to coincide as closely as possible with one of her monthly ovulations, in hopes of a prompt impregnation (with her life hanging in the balance, she would most assuredly not want her menses to arrive early in the game!). Assuming for gee-whiz story-purposes a successful conception on Night 1 (Why not? It’s an Arabian Night) and working then from the arithmetical average number of days from human conception to birth (266), then the average time from delivery to first subsequent menstruation (49 days), and from then to earliest next ovulation and possible second conception (14 days), et cetera, one arrives at the fascinating possibility that on that fateful 1002nd morning, when Scheherazade orders the nurses to fetch in the kids and pleads for permanent absolution on their behalf, not only will her three boys have been at the right ages for “walking” (two years + four days), “crawling” (thirteen months + ten days), and “suckling” (two and a half months), but their mom—having resumed post-partum menstruation 49 days after her third delivery (Night 974)—might to her own dismay on Morning 1002 have found herself, after only a normal lunar month, for the first time re-menstruating instead of having been re-impregnated per usual by the King! It’s a circumstance of which Shahryar would have to be apprised immediately, since by Muslim law he cannot “go in unto” his wife that night, as their whole past history will have led him to anticipate doing. Having just concluded the Tale of Ma-aruf the Cobbler and Fatimah the Turd (her final narrative performance in the complete 10-volume Burton edition), this most resourceful of storytellers must either launch into some new one—surpassing it and Sinbad and Ali Baba combined—or else surprise her lord and master with something no less extraordinary than, so to speak, her first-ever Second Menstruation in their 1001-night history. Like, say, trotting in their offspring and saying, in effect, “Enough of this Let-Me-Entertain-You thing already: Why not come off it, marry me, and make our kids legit?”
