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.

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Nights 963 to 1001: The Final Tales

963—978 Qamar al-Zaman978—989 Abd Allah ibn Fadil and his brothers989—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.

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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.

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