Jorge Luis Borges – A Thousand and One Recaps

August 17, 2020April 12, 2025

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.

July 1, 2020

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”

May 27, 2020

To Infinity and Beyond!

Last week I noted how much I enjoyed the way the tale of Buluqiya tries to describe the almost-infinite, and to invoke a sense of the overwhelming scale of God’s power.

In a lecture, Jorge Luis Borges (discussed previously in relation to these tales) made a marvellous point about the title A Thousand and One Nights, which itself alludes to the eternal:

I want to pause over the title. It is one of the most beautiful in the world … I think it lies in the fact that for us, the word thousand is almost synonymous with infinite. To say a thousand nights is to say infinite nights, countless nights, endless nights. To say a thousand and one nights is to add one to infinity. Let us recall a curious English expression: instead of saying forever, they sometimes say forever and a day. A day has been added to forever. It is reminiscent of a line from Heine, written to a woman: “I will love you eternally and even after.”

— Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights (Faber and Faber, 1986), translated by Eliot Weinberger from Seite Noches (Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1980)

Continue reading “To Infinity and Beyond!”

May 12, 2020

Jorge Luis Borges and the Arabian Nights

351—352 The rich man who lost and then regained his money

From an earlier recap, where I tried to stick a pin in a certain structural style shared by many of the stories in The Arabian Nights:

Almost all of them include some kind of surprise: A twist in the tale, a moment of irony, or some clever thinking … [an] out-of-the-box moment

I might also have quoted Adam Roberts, who, in comparing the structure of science fiction to that of a joke, writes that

The structure of a joke is a knight’s move: it leads you along a particular narrative trajectory only to finish with a conjurer’s flourish of the unexpected.

Before reading The Arabian Nights I would also have used the word ‘Borgesian.’ The short stories of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) often exhibit precisely the quirky quality I am trying to describe. But of course these tales I am reading pre-date Borges by hundreds of years, so it is certainly more accurate to say that one can perceive the blueprints for his stories in The Arabian Nights. Continue reading “Jorge Luis Borges and the Arabian Nights”