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.
In one of his ‘Seven Nights’ lectures, Borges points out that ‘a thousand and one’ is really just a floral way to say ‘infinity.’ So when, in the final lines of this book, the authors say that “his kingdom continued to enjoy prosperity, happiness, pleasure and joy,” I read that to mean that the story goes on. Perhaps the true, hidden name of this collection is The First Thousand and One Nights, and continuing the never ending story is left as as task for the reader. It is for us to imagine, and to write, more of the stories.
This is surely what humanity has been doing with this anthology for centuries. Everyone agrees there are multiple authors, living in different centuries in China, India, Persia, Arabia, the Levant and the Mediterranean. Each of them added new stories, giving breath to Shahrazad and breadth to the collection. With Aladdin and Ali Baba, it’s likely that Antoine Galland himself continued that tradition, passing off new creations as part of the main corpus (Borges tilts at this too: in ‘Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth’ he suggests that the story is worthy of interpolation into the Nights but “passed over by the prudent Galland.”)
The novelist Tade Thompson once said (perhaps on my Facebook wall, but I now cannot find the link) that the Arabian Nights is “the greatest work of collaborative fiction ever made.” In my view, this is to be taken not just as a piece of literary analysis, but also as a challenge. If we imagine that Shahrazad keeps talking, then it is our task to create those new stories for her to tell. A brave and wily heroine, she is a fitting avatar for humanity’s compulsion for storytelling. Because when we stop creating, we die. We are all Shahrazad now.