The Arabian Nights, Part I

After a long chain of philosophy and other nonfiction posts, I'm glad to be writing about fiction again. This particular post took a while to write, but I'm happy with how it turned out and the conclusions I came to. At any rate, it seems like just yesterday we were reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses and commenting on his extraordinary, Matryoshkan narrative style. Alas, those days are behind us, but with today’s post, we are free to reminisce about Ovid as we consider his Middle Eastern counterpart, the beautiful Shahrazad, lying in bed with a husband whom she fears and a sister who fears for her. This post will only cover the older of the stories in the Arabian Nights. Several of the more famous ones, such as Aladdin and Sinbad, were not written until a few hundred years later, though they are usually included with the others.

The framing device, for those unfamiliar with the Arabian Nights, tells the story of two brothers, Shahrayar and Shahzaman, who are both kings. One day, Shahzaman discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him. Overwhelmed by blinding misery – the world “turned dark before his eyes” – he leaves his kingdom and his home to stay with his brother, Shahrayar. There, he keeps his sadness a secret until one day when he stumbles upon his brother’s wife and her maidservants engaging in a Bacchanalian, Ron Jeremy-esque orgy. At once, he is thrilled to realize that he is not alone in his misery and tells his brother everything that has transpired. Now, his brother is not like him; he is not prone to running from his problems in the same way. Instead, he kills his wife and, having utterly lost his trust in the fidelity of women, proclaims that he will marry a new woman every night and kill her in the morning before she has a chance to betray his trust. While this is completely reasonable, the women of his kingdom do not like the idea. However, Shahrazard, the daughter of the vizier, is the only one with the cleverness to do something about it. She devises a plan to keep him occupied at night with stories, ones that will end with cliffhangers so that he will have no choice but to keep her alive so that he can hear the ending, which is also known as the Lost approach to relevancy.

We will consider two main aspects of the Nights in this post. First, there is the matter of the storytelling. Whenever interesting narrative techniques crop up, there will undoubtedly be differing opinions about them. In this case, we have an interesting proposal by Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who suggested:

"every tale in The Thousand and One Nights begins with an 'appearance of destiny' which manifests itself through an anomaly, and one anomaly always generates another. So a chain of anomalies is set up. And the more logical, tightly knit, essential this chain is, the more beautiful the tale. By 'beautiful' I mean vital, absorbing and exhilarating. The chain of anomalies always tends to lead back to normality. The end of every tale in The One Thousand and One Nights consists of a 'disappearance' of destiny, which sinks back to the somnolence of daily life ... The protagonist of the stories is in fact destiny itself."

He argues that each story is precipitated by an anomaly of fortune or circumstance – such as the common trope of sudden confrontations with demons (in my edition; “genie” may be more accurate, although they seem more menacing) – rather than the actions or choices of any character. These anomalies of fortune "appear" or "confront us" because they, unlike the normal progression of fortune, are different and stand out in some obvious way. It is Fortune that acts, and we can do nothing but react and wait until the anomalies resolve themselves.

Second, there is the story of the two viziers. Since there are so many stories, we cannot address all of them directly – I’m not terribly interested in doing so, anyway – so we will just discuss the most intriguing of the ones I read. Aside from being one of the longest complete stories in my volume, it is also an incredible intergenerational saga, and I would not be surprised if it was an influence for later stories like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Sitting Pretty

Pasolini’s claim that Fortune is the protagonist of the Nights leads to some interesting conclusions. We should first be aware that if the filmmaker is to be believed, then the characters are kept in the dark about this fact. Fortune, to the residents of Shahrazad’s worlds, is not a character, but a menace. For many, fate has long ago determined their lot in life, and social mobility is impossible. Fortune has predestined some to a life of happiness and others to a life of suffering, and the lamentations of the misfortunate are painful:

“Reduce your toil, for gain is not in work. Look at the fisherman who labors at his trade… And sells [his catch] to a man who sleeps the night, safe from the cold and blessed with every wish. Praised be the Lord who blesses and withholds: this casts the net, but that one eats the fish.”

And again:

“Your livelihood is not in your own hands; neither by writing nor by the pen you thrive. Your luck and your wages are by lot… The wheel of fortune lowers the man of worth… Come then, O death, and end this worthless life, where the ducks soar, while the falcons are bound to earth.”

There is a recurring theme of the prosperity of the wicked at the expense of the good. (Also, notice Boethius' wheel of fortune.) This leads to an interesting consideration. If fortune is truly the protagonist, subject to anomalies like men in the world are, then people can come to misfortune even by living good lives. By following the righteous path, the one that is in accordance with nature, they are still not always safe, as if nature were not prescriptive, the way it was conceived by, say, the Stoics; rather, living in accordance with nature is more like being provided a roadmap: the paths are laid bare in front of you, but those paths are still subject the weather, potholes, construction, etc.

In spite of the difficulty of social mobility, fortune is not cast as the villain. Fate is “blameless,” and “not meant to be fair.” Though people may be irked by misfortune, they seem to remember that, in the grand scheme of things, “one day is troubled, one day fair.” Ultimately, it is they who, through their own actions, retain control. Thus, the weight of personal responsibility has never been greater than it is in the Nights. In Sophocles, for example, Oedipus is sickened by his actions and casts himself out of his kingdom for what he’s done; but as the chorus reminds us, the events were caused in no uncertain terms by Fate. Fate follows the family of Orestes in Aeschylus, and gods and men alike are subject to it in Homer and Virgil. Moreover, the story of Job and the Divine Comedy of Dante are both filled with the notion of retributive justice, fortune as reward or punishment.

Everywhere else, fate causes, it punishes, and it rewards; it is in control. But in Shahrazad’s world, it is not. Anomalies as Pasolini calls them force fortune to be almost human, and this seems to take away the ability to call fortune the arbiter of people's lives. Indeed, as one character is reminded, “’tis tit for tat; blame not just destiny.” Destiny is outside of our actions, not fully, but at least partially. We act – or react, as the case may be – to the twists and turns that fortune suffers. What an astounding conception. Indeed, we can hear this in the words that are repeated throughout the Nights: “We would be sitting pretty, if not for our curiosity.” Demons come and demons go, but our actions are always our own.

Behind the Curtain

But why personify fortune in this way? And why now? I would propose that it is because Shahrazad herself feels the weight of responsibility.

We must remember above all else that Shahrazad is telling these stories to a king who has made it clear that she is going to die. She has not found herself in this situation by an anomaly of fate, but by her own hand. As much as we emphasize how clever she is for coming up with such a solution, and as much as we may scoff at the king for being so easily fooled – hell, even Lost fans caught on after a few seasons – the fear of death is still real, and the sword of Damocles still hangs perpetually over her. Shahrazad is scared, and her fear leaks into her stories.

And this, to me, is what makes the Arabian Nights so powerful and a highpoint of storytelling. The stories themselves give no indication of Shahrazad’s fear. They are not punctuated by asides about her crying or anything silly like that. She always appears completely in control of the situation. But in her subconscious, the weight of her undertaking and the fear for her safety comes out.

The Two Viziers

Moving on, I’ll give a very, very abridged version of the Tale of the Two Viziers, because it’s long and complicated, and I don’t feel like recounting the whole damn thing. Essentially, there are two brothers, Nur and Shams, who are the sons of a vizier, and they get in an argument: They have agreed to marry two sisters, consummate the marriages on the same night, have a boy and a girl, and marry them to each other, thus creating some tightly knit but super creepy family. However, Shams feels entitled to a dowry for his imaginary son, and this leads Nur to leave the country in anger. Fate, however, works to their best interest. Nur has a son, Badr, and Shams a daughter, Sit, and when Nur dies, he tells Badr about Shams and the deal that the brothers struck so many years ago. While the son mourns his father, he encounters two demons who tell him that Shams has had a daughter. Badr, with the demons' help, travels to Sit's country, where she is about to be married to a hunchback as punishment for something. He ends up impregnating his cousin on the night of her wedding, but she doesn’t learn who he is. Her father, however, is well aware, and, upon discovering that his brother has passed, decides to go find Badr. During this time, Badr has taken up residence in Aleppo, and it is not until Shams arrives with Badr's son – 'Ajib, now a young man – and the two come looking for him that he recognizes them and agrees to go home, marry the wife he was intended to marry, and live a happy life.

The focus of the story is reconciliation, and although this fact alone makes the story interesting -- several generations are reunited after decades apart -- it is the means by which they are reconciled that make the story incredible.

The two brothers are reunited through their children, but their children are reunited only by them; specifically Nur is able to reunite Badr and Sit, and when they are separated again by the vicissitudes of fate, Shams reunites them a second time. Shams, in turn, would have been unable to reunite Sit and Badr without ‘Ajib, for it is because of ‘Ajib that Badr makes himself known.

The ending -- this is one of the few stories in the Nights with a satisfying resolution -- reunites three generations of the family. Nur and Shams are reunited only spiritually, since Nur has died; Sit and Badr physically; and ‘Ajib and his parents “socially,” we might say, since their family unit is complete for the first time.

Moreover, the reconciliations occur in chiasmus. Nur and Shams are the first to be separated and the last to be reunited, since, with Nur being dead, they cannot be truly reunited until Shams passes as well. Sit and Badr are separated secondarily and reunited secondarily; and 'Ajib, who grew up being teased for not having a father, is the first to find a complete family. I drew a diagram showing these connections, but I'm too lazy to upload it. Needless to say, the structure of the story is truly awe-inspiring, and if the story seems difficult to understand, it is only because of my hasty and shitty narration: the story in the Nights flows elegantly.


Stray Observations

• A vizier is more or less the king's right-hand man, but it literally translates to "one who bears burdens."
• Returning to the idea of endings, it is telling that the king, so desperate to hear the ending to Shahrazad's many stories, quickly loses track of which storylines have not been completed and only seems to remember what happened a couple days ago. Besides being an interesting account of the nature of memory, it probably also means that Shahrazad only needed to tell stories for a couple weeks before he forgot that he was going to kill her. 
• I found this passage particularly striking, and in particular the first few words: “Once in Damascus I spent such a night that time swore ‘t would never the like allow. We slept carefree under the wing of night till morning smiled and beamed with dappled brow, and dewdrops on the branches hung like pearls, then fell and scattered when the zephyr blew, and birds chanted the words traced on the lake, as the wind rose and the clouds the points drew." Once in Damascus... what a lovely phrase. It reminds me of the Nabokov story titled, "That in Aleppo Once..." 
• The world going black is another trope, occurring when people suffer great shock. Compare with Oedipus' self-imposed blindness.
• “The departure of my soul from my body is easier for me than my departure from your company."
• “He who says that life is made of sweetness a day more bitter than aloes will see.”
• A parallel to the Tree of Knowledge: the third dervish is in a mansion with 100 chambers. His lover, whose mansion it is, leaves and tells him that until she returns, he may go into all of the chambers except one. He obeys at first, but eventually finds himself entering the last as well. Recall Kafka: "There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return."
• About travel: “And if the sun stood in its orbit still, both Arabs and barbarians would tire of the sun, and if the full moon did not wane and set, no watchful eyes would the moon’s rising mark. If in the lair the lion stayed, in the bow the dart, neither would catch the prey, or hit the mark. Deep in the mine, gold dust is merely dust, and in its native ground, fuel aloewood. Gold, when extracted, grows much in demand. And when exported, aloe fetches gold.”
• “He was so faultless in character and looks that the deer stole from him their necks and eyes and every other grace.”