1001 Nights

Scope: This lecture deals with the 1001 Nights. After a brief account of the unusual origins of the
book, we discuss its frame story and some of the ways in which the frame influences
narrative technique, especially vis--vis Chaucers frame technique in The Canterbury
Tales. We then put 1001 Nights back into its context within the great books of stories it
had to draw on, particularly three collections from India. We will also look ahead to some
of the ways these stories have been used in subsequent world literature, noting especially
how the contemporary American writer John Barth has focused on Shahrazad in his
novels and stories. We conclude by suggesting alternate ways in which the bookand
particularly its framehas been interpreted: as pure entertainment or as a manner of
therapy designed to cure King Shahrayar of his misogyny and cruelty.

Outline

I. The 1001 Nights, sometimes called the Arabian Nights, has no single author and grew over
many centuries, collecting stories from India, Persia, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq.
A. Many of the stories are associated with a Caliph of BaghdadHarn el-Rashid (r. 786
809)giving Iraq a special place in the stories.
B. Even his stories, however, were not written down until years (or even centuries) later;
there is no single authoritative manuscript of the book, and different texts contain
different stories.
II. Our interest is with the implications of the frame story for the way the stories in 1001 Nights
get themselves told.
A. This is perhaps the most famous frame story in all of literature, involving King Shahrayar,
his brother Shahzaman, and the sisters Shahrazad and Dinarzad.
1. Having discovered that his wife is unfaithful and having assured himself that no
woman can be trusted, Shahrayar takes a virgin to bed every night and then kills her
in the morning, thus guaranteeing that she will be faithful to him.
2. Eventually Shahrazad, daughter of the vizier who has to find a new virgin every night,
volunteers to be the next one.
3. On her night with King Shahrayar, she takes her sister with her and towards morning
asks Shahrazad to tell one of her good stories, which she does. The story is
interrupted at dawn when it has reached a climactic point.
4. The King spares Shahrazad for one night so that he can hear the end of the story; she
finishes that one and begins another, which is similarly interrupted, and the pattern is
repeated for 1001 nights.
B. The frame influences the shape of the stories which are told. What kind of story does this
frame require?
1. The frame is more limiting than that in Chaucers The Canterbury Tales, which had 30
storytellers, each with a varied audience for the story.
2. Shahrazad is the only storyteller here, and she has an audience of one (two, if we count
Dinarzad).
3. Her job is to stretch a single story over as many nights as possible, which she does by
nesting her storiesthat is, embedding stories within stories, as when a character
within a story tells a story, within which another character tells another story and so
on, until at some point there are as many as 11 stories being told simultaneously.
 4. The inside stories duplicate the theme or situation of the frame story or are at least
parallel in some way.
III. The frame of 1001 Nights is embedded in the entire history of world literature. It serves as a
crossroads where many stories from the past and other cultures meet and from there are sent
out into the future and the rest of the world.
A. When the Islamic Empire was at its height, Arab storytellers had access to the greatest
collections of stories in the world.
1. Some scholars think that this collection originated in India and came to the Arab world
via Persia.
2. India already had some collections of stories, including the Jtaka, the Pacantantra,
and the Kathsaritsgara, all of which use frames to hold together anthologies of
stories.
3. In the Pacantantra a wise Brahman is teaching his princely students things they need
to know in order to rule wisely. He does so by means of stories, which are framed by
conversations and discussion; within individual stories characters tell other stories, so
that they are nested in complex ways.
4. The Pacantantra was translated into Persian in the 6th century and into Arabic in the
8th century, after which it made its way into Syria, Hebrew, and eventually most of
Europe. It provided stories for 1001 Nights, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and even some
Grimm Brothers fairy tales.
B. From 1001 Nights these stories make their way into the rest of the world.
1. They were translated into French in the 18th century and became part of an Oriental
craze that lasted in Europe throughout the century; 19th-century children grew up
with these stories.
2. Marcel Proust, at the end of Remembrance of Things Past, makes an allusion to
Shahrazad that he knows his readers will recognize.
3. Bits of the book run through Leopold Blooms mind on his day in Dublin in Joyces
Ulysses, and the book provided a lifelong inspiration for the Argentinean writer Jorge
Luis Borges.
4. John Barth, the American fiction writer, has centered a great deal of his work on
Shahrazad and 1001 Nights in such works as Chimera and Tidewater Tales, focusing
on narrative structure in ways that make storytelling and playing with nesting
techniques into the very subjects of the books.
C. All of these references suggest once again that literature is a cross-cultural process that
borrows and learns not just across language and geographical boundaries, but across
temporal ones as well.
IV. Of the many ways in which 1001 Nights can be read, two are worth mentioning here.
A. The first way is to read it as a wonderfully entertaining book, gathering some of the best
stories of the world into one place.
1. There is every kind of story here: romantic, edifying, moral, bawdy, and tragic; and the
genres include anecdotes, animal fables, fairy stories, and serious stories about love
and deception.
2. The stories are entertaining enough to save Shahrazads life and to allow her to live
happily ever after with King Shahrayar; they certainly can entertain us as well.
B. The second way to read the book is as a lesson in maturity; Shahrazad, in the process of
telling her stories, neutralizes Shahrayars misognyny and ruthlessness and helps him
grow up.
1. Some of the stories, like The Merchant and the Demon, seem to parallel Shahrazads
own situation and give storytelling a redemptive quality.
 2. Shahrazad is also perhaps teaching Shahrayar new patterns of response that, according
to critic Fedwa Malti-Douglas, substitute extended and continuous desire and
pleasure for the immature male pattern of excitement, satisfaction, and
termination. The new pattern continues desire from night to night in a way that
combines sexual and textual issues.
3. The Indian collections we previously discussed already noticed the parallels between
sexuality and storytelling; John Barth develops these in his work with Shahrazad.
4. In this reading Shahrazad becomes the wise woman who initiates a man into maturity
and sophistication.
C. 1001 Nights reflects another development in the sophistication of the art of storytelling
that parallels Chaucers achievement but does so in a different way.
1. The book shows us how frames can function.
2. The frames require stories to become more artful, especially in terms of nesting.
Essential Reading:
1001 Nights. Also titled The Arabian Nights.
Supplementary Reading:
Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion.
Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Womans Body, Womans Word.