A Thousand and One Recaps – Reading and recapping 'The Arabian Nights'

August 17, 2020April 12, 2025Edit

The End of the Story?

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a story called ‘A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain.’ When originally published it was assumed to be a work of non-fiction, but was later discovered to be a product of his imagination. In the story, Borges imagined Quain as the creator of myriad literary works, built from the same set of modular chapters. The order in which the blocks of text were placed created different stories in different genres: romance, mystery, or adventure.

As we conclude the Arabian Nights, it’s clear that this collection operates in a similar manner. Over the days and weeks we have encountered the same tropes, plugged together in hundreds of different ways, to create sagas, comedies and tragedies. The final trio of stories were built entirely of blocks we have encountered before: radiant young men on a quest, Bedouin bandits, feminine trickery, conspicuous spending, perfidious brothers, snake-jinn… and giant metal rings in the ground.

In the brief, preposterous epilogue, the king discovers that he has fathered three children with Shahrazad, and he lifts the clear and present threat to her life. But one wonders whether that’s end of her storytelling: At no point in the finale does our meta narrator tell us that Shahrazad stops talking. And I find myself doubting that Shahrazad would break her streak by taking a night off. Would Shahriyar consent to the end of the routine he has found so entertaining? I doubt that too — because there are still new ways to remix the tropes, new tales still to be told.

August 10, 2020November 10, 2024Edit

Nights 963 to 1001: The Final Tales

963—978 Qamar al-Zaman • 978—989 Abd Allah ibn Fadil and his brothers • 989—1001 Ma’ruf the cobbler

The final three stories in the collection begin with an extremely liberal take on sex and sexuality. The titular protagonist is Qamar al-Zaman, and his face is so beautiful that even the men have lusty feelings for him. This induced fluidity of the sexualities is presented as entirely normal and permitted in the circumstances.

The effect that our hero has on the world is personified in the character of a pious dervish, who has had a chequered past. I enjoyed the simple yet telling phrase

He had experience of both nights and days
Tasting both licit and illicit love
A lover of both women and of men.

Burton has this as:

He had studied Love both by day and night
And had special knowledge of Wrong and Right;
Both for lad and lass had repined his sprite …

So the dervish seems to be openly bisexual. This is not presented as a moral failing per se, but Qamar’s father does seem anxious to protect his son from any advances, and resolves to kill the dervish if he succumbs to Qamar’s temptation. Bizarrely, in an unfair and creepy scheme, the father then encourages Qamar to attempt to seduce the dervish, the better to test the limits of the dervish’s self control. The dervish manages not to succumb and is spared, thus telling the tale of a beautiful woman he has seen in Basra. Like so many naive heroes before him, Qamar becomes obsessed with the story of this woman and sets himself the quest of finding her.

August 3, 2020Edit

Aladdin the Selfish

The Story of Aladdin; or The Magic Lamp

Late in the project, I’m going off-piste. The story of Aladdin, translated by Ursula Lyons, sits at the very end of Volume III of my Penguin Classics edition. The tale is not part of the Calcutta II text, but the publishers have included a version anyway. This is presumably due to its popularity and cultural impact.

However, I am reluctant to read it after I have finished the main work. After so many Nights in the world of Shahrazad, I would like the conclusion of her story to be the finale to my reading experience. So this week I skipped ahead to Aladdin. My next recap will return to the proper sequence, and the last set of stories before Shahrazad finally falls silent.

July 13, 2020Edit

Hashtag #ArabianNights

When I began ‘A Thousand And One Recaps’ I created a dedicated Twitter account for the project: @1001recaps. I post links to each of the recaps and the other blog posts on this site, and share other people’s tweets about The Arabian Nights.

To that end, I have a saved search for ‘Arabian Nights’ on Tweetdeck. It presents a stream of tweets that use that phrase, which in turn has revealed many interesting thoughts, articles and artworks about Shahrazad and her stories.

But I have also noticed four major recurring themes. They are:

Disney’s Aladdin films
Magic The Gathering
Justin Trudeau
Porn

July 12, 2020Edit

Sunday Images: Sara Piper

A few weeks ago, I used an image by artist Sarah Piper to illustrate my recap about Delilah the Wily.

The scene with Delilah is actually one of a series of Arabian Nights prints created by Sarah, collected on a dedicated blog.

What I like about the series is how they are reminiscent of the images that accompanied one of the very first editions of The Arabian Nights published in Arabic, the ‘Bulaq’ text.

July 7, 2020November 10, 2024Edit

Nights 946 to 963: Caliphs, Incognito

946—952 Harun al-Rashid and Abu’l-Hasan of Oman • 952—959 Ibrahim and Jamila • 959—963 Abu’l-Hasan al-Khurasani

Two of the three stories in this sequence start with a caliph venturing incognito into the streets of his city. This is a common trope in The Arabian Nights, but not one to which I have devoted many words to so far. It’s not unheard of in reality: There’s a marvellous story about a young Charles I (when he was just a prince) taking a road-trip through Europe; and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret famously ventured onto the streets of London during the V.E. Day celebrations in 1945. I do not doubt there are examples from elsewhere in the world, too. Continue reading “Nights 946 to 963: Caliphs, Incognito”

July 6, 2020Edit

The Tales of The Arabian Nights: A Visualisation

To help plan my recaps, I created a list of every story in The Arabian Nights. This is derived from the indices at the back of the three volumes of the Penguin Classics editions. I thought I may as well post on the site, and it is pasted below.

I used the same list to create a rudimentary visualisation of the stories: their relative sizes, and how they nest within one another.

First, I created a spreadsheet (Arabian_Nights_Contents.csv, 18KB) which lists the stories by ‘level’ (i.e. whether they are told directly by Shahrazad, or one of the characters within one of her stories). The sheet also lists the number of Nights that a story spans, and also the number of pages the story covers in the Penguin Classics edition.

(Given more time, I might have also listed the number of bytes that each story consumes when rendered the HTML format found on the Project Gutenberg editions).

I used this data to generate a simple webpage. My version presents separate columns for each of the three Penguin Classics volumes, but could just as easily have been a single long list.

1001recaps.org/visualization.html

As you will see, the aesthetics of my visualisation leaves a lot to be desired. I cannot help but wonder what someone with more design and artistic flair could do with the same data.

Continue reading “The Tales of The Arabian Nights: A Visualisation”

July 5, 2020Edit

Sunday Images: Willy Pogany

Willy Pogany (1882 – 1955) was a Hungarian illustrator. These images are taken from a 1915 edition of Lane’s More Tales From The Arabian Nights.

July 2, 2020Edit

Night 930 to 946: The Disruptors

930—940 Abu Qir and Abu Sir • 940—946 ‘Abd Allah of the land and ‘Abd Allah of the sea

I had planned to recap four stories, all the way to Night 963, and I have actually read that far. But I wrote a fair amount on the first two stories, so I will post a recap of the second two (the tale of Ibrahim and Jamila; and the tale of Abu’l-Hasan al-Khurasani) later in the week.

We’re getting close to the end now. Back in Volumes I and II, and even in the early part of Volume III (before the long tale of Hasan of Basra) the nights seemed endless. A permanent fixture in my world. Now we’re on Night nine-hundred-and-something, the world becomes uncertain again. The book is contained, finite, mortal, and it is coming to a close.

Anyone who loves books or box-sets knows this feeling. ‘Bereavement’ is too strong a word, but it’s on that emotional spectrum. Re-reads and re-watches can never recreate the experience of the new. Prepare for the inevitable withdrawal, as “I am reading” becomes “I have read.” The last page of this book will be particularly jarring, because the book has dominated my reading, and my conversational repertoire, for months now. What will I talk about? Continue reading “Night 930 to 946: The Disruptors”

July 1, 2020Edit

The Arabian Nights and The Work of Julia Donaldson

Earlier:

Shrinas’s son does this through a fairly simple trick, convincing the foreign king’s messenger that Wird Khan’s power is far greater than in reality – a classic military tactic. The modern literary parallel that springs immediately to my mind is the Mouse in The Gruffalo…

Throughout my reading of The Arabian Nights, I have often thought of the work of the British children’s author Julia Donaldson. Her books all seem to have “some element of surprise, shock, astonishment,” that ‘Borgesian quirkiness,’ that also imbues most of Shahrazad’s tales. Such a sensibility is not unique to Julia Donaldson, of course… but it is a trait that seems particularly strong in her œuvre. Indeed, the commonality even extends to many of the extremely short phonics books that she has written for children learning to read. Continue reading “The Arabian Nights and The Work of Julia Donaldson”