The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1 the Near and Middle East, 124) [Lam ed.] 9004362533, 9789004362536

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The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction

Handbook of Oriental Studies Handbuch der Orientalistik section one

The Near and Middle East Edited by Maribel Fierro (Madrid) M. Şükrü Hanioğlu (Princeton) Renata Holod (University of Pennsylvania) Florian Schwarz (Vienna)

VOLUME 124

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ho1

The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction Intertextual Readings By

Richard van Leeuwen

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Stories from the Arabian nights retold by Lawrence Housman, illustrated by Edmund Dulac, Hodder and Stoughton Publishers, London 1907. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Leeuwen, Richard van, author. Title: The Thousand and one nights and twentieth-century fiction :  intertextual readings / by Richard van Leeuwen. Description: Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2018. | Series: Handbook of oriental  studies. Section one, The Near and Middle East ; volume 124 | Includes  bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018002370 (print) | LCCN 2018015459 (ebook) | ISBN  9789004362697 (E-book) | ISBN 9789004362536 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | Arabian  nights—Influence. Classification: LCC PN3503 (ebook) | LCC PN3503 .L37725 2018 (print) | DDC  809.3/04—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002370

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0169-9423 isbn 978-90-04-36253-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-36269-7 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyrights holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 The Thousand and One Nights 3 Incorporation into World Literature 7 This Study 10

Part 1 Enclosures, Journeys, and Texts 1 Enclosures, Letters, and Destiny: Hugo von Hofmannsthal and André Gide 21 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Kunstmärchen, and Orientalism 22 The Contingency of Fate: André Gide’s Les faux-monnayeurs 41 2 Going Home: Al-Tayyib Salih and Ibrahim al-Faqih 59 Season of Migration to the North and the Thousand and One Nights 62 The Forbidden Room: The Thousand and One Nights and Ibrahim al-Faqih’s Gardens of the Night 75 3 Writing and Enclosures: Michel Butor and Abilio Estévez 93 The Portrait of an Author: Michel Butor’s Portrait de l’artiste comme jeune singe 93 Imprisoned Imagination: Abilio Estévez 102 Conclusions to Part 1 112

Part 2 Capturing the Volatility of Time 4 The Return of Time: Marcel Proust and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar 117 Proust and the Thousand and One Nights 118 Times of Life and Society: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar 128 5 Narration and Survival: Vladimir Nabokov and Margaret Atwood 149 Nabokov, the Thousand and One Nights, and Life After Death 150 Narrating Against Death: Margaret Atwood 171

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Desire Unbound: The Marquis de Sade and Angela Carter 185 Angela Carter: The Feminist-Narrative Complex 188

Temporal Dystopias: Botho Strauss and Haruki Murakami 211 War and the Reinvention of Time: Botho Strauss’s Der junge Mann 211 Haruki Murakami and the Constraints of Time 223 Conclusions to Part 2 242

Part 3 The Textual Universe 8

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The Celebration of Textuality: James Joyce and the Argentine (Post-)Modernists 251 The Thousand and One Nights and the Textuality of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake 255 Textual Worlds: Fernández, Arlt, Borges, and Piglia 269 Stories Without End: Italo Calvino and Georges Perec 317 Italo Calvino and Narration: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller … and the Thousand and One Nights 319 Georges Perec: The Imperative of Form 332

The Celebration of Hybridity: Abdelkébir Khatibi and Juan Goytisolo 348 Abdelkébir Khatibi: Narration and the Body 349 Juan Goytisolo: Hybridity as a Refuge 358 Conclusions to Part 3 372

Part 4 Narrating History 11

The Traumas of History: William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and André Brink 381 Form 383 History 386 Absalom, Absalom! and the Thousand and One Nights 389 The Haunted House: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and André Brink’s Imaginings of Sand 395

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The Enchantment of History: Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie 407 Gabriel García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude 409 Salman Rushdie: History Gone Awry 423

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Words Against Death: Roberto Calasso, David Grossman, and Elias Khoury 440 Roberto Calasso: The Ruin of Kasch 442 David Grossman: Fighting the Nazi Beast 446 Violence and the Boundaries of Narrativity: Elias Khoury’s Yalo 458 Conclusions to Part 4 476

Part 5 Identifications, Impersonations, Doubles: The Discontents of (Post-)Modernity 14

Aladdin’s Nightmare: Henrik Pontoppidan and Ernst Jünger 485 The Curse of Aladdin: Henrik Pontoppidan 486 The City of Brass, Aladdin, and the Discontents of Modernity: Ernst Jünger 493

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The Sindbad Syndrome: Gyula Krúdy and John Barth 525 Gyula Krúdy: The Nostalgic Nomad 528 The Intrepid Traveler: John Barth 539

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The Mock Caliph: H. G. Wells, Arthur Schnitzler, and Orhan Pamuk 558 A Modern Harun al-Rashid: H. G. Wells’s The Research Magnificent 559 Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Traumnovelle 564 The Writer and His Double: Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book 570

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The Multiple Faces of Shahrazad: Leïla Sebbar and Waçiny Laredj 591 Leïla Sebbar: Shérézade 592 Waçiny Laredj: Les ailes de la reine 610 Conclusions to Part 5 621

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Part 6 Aftermaths: The Delusions of Politics 18

The 1002nd Night: Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Husayn, and Najib Mahfuz 629 Tawfiq al-Hakim: Shahrazad 633 Taha Husayn: The Dreams of Shahrazad 645 Najib Mahfuz: The Predicament of Shahriyar 650

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Fabrications of Power: Hani al-Rahib and Rachid Boudjedra 667 The Curse of Repression: al-Rahib’s Alf layla wa-laylatan 668 A False Utopia: Rachid Boudjedra 682

20 The Secret Lives of Sindbad: Mostafa Nissaboury and Bahram Beyzaï 690 Mostafa Nissaboury: Shahrazad’s Suffering 691 Sindbad’s Return: Bahram Beyzaï 695 Conclusions to Part 6 699 Conclusion 701 The Narrative Universe of Paul Auster 701 The Framework: The Invention of Solitude 702 The Locked Room 708 Doubles 715 Narrativity 725 Bibliography 735 Index of People and Places 759 Index of Subjects 770

Acknowledgments The number of colleagues and friends who have helped me trace the material for this research over the years is, I’m afraid, too vast to mention individually. Special thanks go to Aboubakr Chraïbi, who has played a crucial role in revitalizing Thousand and one nights studies in the past decade, and Dominique Jullien, Wen-chin Ouyang, Antonella Ghersetti, and Frédéric Bauden, and others who invited me to conferences in which I could present preliminary findings of my research and discuss them with colleagues. Some parts of chapters have already appeared in previous publications in earlier versions, especially conference proceedings.1 I would like to thank my partner Djûke Poppinga and our daughter Nynke for providing a stable environment for my research. I apologize to them for the recurrent avalanches of books which inevitably haunted our living space as the research proceeded. Special thanks are due to Valerie Turner, who patiently and meticulously corrected and edited the text. Needless to say, any shortcomings in the present book are not attributable to the colleagues mentioned above, but are strictly my own. 1  I.e., the analyses of Hofmannsthal’s ‘Märchen’ (chapter 1, “The Thousand and one nights and European modernism: Hugo von Hofmannsthal,” in A. Chraïbi and C. Ramirez (eds.), Les Mille et une nuits et le récit Oriental en Espagne et l’Occident (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), 175– 188; Salih’s Season of migration to the north (chapter 1), and al-Faqih’s Gardens of the night (chapter 1, “The forbidden room: The Thousand and one nights and Ibrahim Faqih’s Gardens of the night,” in S. Boustani, I. Camera d’Afflitto, R. El-Enany, W. Granara (eds.), Desire, pleasure and the taboo: New voices and freedom of expression in contemporary Arabic literature, Supplemento no. 1, Rivista degli studi orientali, new series, vol. 87 (Pisa and Rome: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2014), 45–62.

Introduction In one of his essays on the Thousand and one nights the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges remarked that not long after Boileau proclaimed, at the end of the seventeenth century, the laws which should govern European literature, his codex was turned upside-down by the intrusion of an exotic literary work: the tales of Shahrazad. With his observation, Borges presumably had two intentions: He wanted to indicate that the carefully conceived system of generic conventions based on classical examples and codified by Boileau was destroyed by something that transcended and disrupted generic prescriptions: an act of pure, imaginative narration. The appearance of the Thousand and one nights marked the end of a literary era and the beginning of another, characterized by new spaces for experiments and exploration. In addition, Borges’s remark should be seen as a statement about his own art and his efforts to use Shahrazad as a source of inspiration for his exploration of the boundaries of modernist literature. With this remark, Borges identifies the first European translation of the Thousand and one nights, published by Antoine Galland in 1704–17, as a water­ shed in European literature, and even in world literature. Its appearance coincided with developments in literature and history which determined the nature of European modernity and its relations with the parts of the world in which it was becoming increasingly involved. In the eighteenth century, the interest in eastern civilizations was at its height; intellectuals and literati fervently experimented with literary forms, new genres, and concepts of literature to accommodate new perceptions of the world. In spite of Boileau’s prescriptions, the field of literature was still fluid and had not crystallized into clear generic demarcations, thus, the reception of the Thousand and one nights in western literatures is closely linked to literary history itself, as the work became part of the various experimental trends that henceforth defined the literary landscape. It gradually penetrated into the capillary veins of “modern” literature. By the end of the nineteenth century the Thousand and one nights, as a literary and cultural phenomenon, had become deeply rooted in the western imagination, but it was also vibrantly alive in non-western cultures, in new guises and forms, often conveyed through European literary influence. In this study, my aim is to show that in the twentieth century, the triumphal procession of Shahrazad has not subsided; on the contrary, it has received a new impetus from contemporary literary trends and newly emerging media. Although several good studies of the influence of the Thousand and one nights on European literature, especially its influence in the eighteenth century, have

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_002

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appeared, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have hardly been touched upon. It is only in recent years that the importance of the Nights as an intertextual source of modern literature has begun to be acknowledged. The first to draw attention to the significance of the Thousand and one nights in modern English literature was Peter Caracciolo, who edited a collection of essays revealing the traces of the Nights in the work of authors such as Coleridge, Collins, Thackeray, Gaskell, Conrad, Wells, and Joyce.1 Another landmark was Dominique Jullien’s book on the sources of Proust’s À la recherché du temps perdu, the Thousand and one nights and Saint-Simon’s Mémoires, followed more recently by a study of the Nights in French modernism.2 Other studies are more fragmented and incidental, but they show that there is an increasing recognition of the continuing importance of the Nights as a source of literary inspiration. These efforts contribute to our insights about the Thousand and one nights as a structural phenomenon not only in literature, but in many segments of world culture; this appears in a multitude of ways. Still, the available information remains fragmented and focused on single authors, specific media, and specific interpretations; we lack a more extensive survey to reveal a more systematic pattern. For instance, some specialists in the work of specific authors have studied traces of the Nights in an individual novel; others have focused on cinema or translations; still others have used the perspective of orientalism to see how references to the Nights reveal attitudes toward the oriental Other. All these partial inquiries are of course valuable in themselves, but they tend to present the influence of Shahrazad as incidents rather than as a systematic process in which the Nights has been incorporated into a textual and visual aesthetics. In particular, the Saidian concept of orientalism highlights ideological aspects of the reception of the Nights, at the expense of other aspects, such as textual and literary mechanisms. Attention has focused on forms of “othering” rather than on the procedures of transmission, adaptation, and incorporation of narrative material and narrative techniques. Of course, the phenomenon of the Thousand and one nights has become so omnipresent and recognizable in global culture that it is not possible to present an all-encompassing overview of its significance. In the present study, we present an analysis of the influence of the Thousand and one nights on prose 1  Peter L. Caracciolo (ed.), The Arabian Nights in English Literature (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1988). 2  Dominique Jullien, Proust et ses modèles: les Mille et une nuits et les Mémoires de Saint-Simon (Paris: Corti, 1989); Dominique Jullien, Les amoureux de Schéhérazade: variations modernes sur les Mille et une nuits (Geneva: Droz, 2009).

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literature in the twentieth century, as an intertextual reference for a number of authors who together have shaped the landscape of literature on a worldwide scale. We will see that these traces of Shahrazad are by no means incidental or merely an expression of exoticism, but that they were, rather, structurally incorporated into the reservoir of literary models, strategies, and concepts, especially as a source of inspiration for literary experiment and innovation. For many important authors, the Thousand and one nights is not a mere literary curiosity, but a work of huge narrative potential and force, one that reveals quintessential characteristics of storytelling, narratives, and texts. For some, Shahrazad embodies their alter ego, representing what for them is the essential nature of writing. Before expounding on the procedures we have followed in this book, we first briefly outline the textual history of the Thousand and one nights and its gradual incorporation into world literature from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards. Of course, this field is in itself quite broad, but we limit our survey here to what is essential for a good understanding of what follows. The Thousand and One Nights The textual history of the Thousand and one nights still contains some unsolved mysteries.3 Scholars agree that the first versions of the collection were probably modeled on Sanskrit examples based on the same concept of a frame story containing a number of embedded tales. Presumably, the material was transmitted through a Persian collection called Hazar afsane, which was probably translated into Arabic in Baghdad in the ninth century. From then on, we find references to a work called the Thousand nights or the Thousand and one nights in Arabic sources; these probably referred to a work that was originally Arabic but molded on Indian and Persian examples. These references are too scarce and too brief to give a clear picture of the nature and contents of the work. The earliest substantial manuscript that we have probably dates to the first half of the fifteenth century. This manuscript, which contains only 282 nights, was used by Antoine Galland for the first European translation, which appeared between 1704 and 1717. We know little about the circulation of the Thousand and one nights in Arabic literary circles. Some later manuscripts and an Ottoman translation of 3  For a more extensive survey of the textual history of the Thousand and one nights, translations, reception, contents, etc., with bibliographical references, see Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen, The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2004).

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the work dating from 1636–37 indicate that the work was in circulation at that point, and some stories probably were transmitted in oral storytelling circuits. Whatever the case may have been, toward the end of the eighteenth century the Arabic tradition of the Nights was revitalized by a number of manuscripts produced in Egypt especially; these contain the core part of the Galland manuscript, supplemented with material from various sources until the number of nights reached one thousand and one. The supplemental stories clearly show traces of Persian, even Indian, origin, and late reworkings of older material reveal that in Ottoman times narrative material migrated over large geographical/literary realms. Apparently, the Ottoman Empire provided the framework for a renewed interest in these kinds of narrative texts and the Thousand and one nights became a rather diverse repository of narrative material. In 1835, these manuscripts were used for the first printed edition of the Thousand and one nights in Egypt; it was edited by Shaykh al-Sharqawi, and became known as the so-called Bulaq edition. This version became the starting point for what may be called the ‘modern’ Arabic tradition of the Nights. The renewed popularity of the Thousand and one nights in the Arab-Ottoman world coincided with an increasing interest in the work in Europe during the eighteenth century. The French translation by Antoine Galland, who had spent some time collecting manuscripts in Istanbul, was based on the aforementioned text from the fifteenth century, and was supplemented with similar material from other sources. For instance, he added the cycle of ‘Sindbad of the sea’ from a separate manuscript preserved in the Royal Library in Paris, and incorporated some stories which he heard from Hanna Diyab, a Syrian priest introduced to him by a friend. These stories, which included ‘Ali Baba and the forty thieves’ and ‘Aladdin and the wonderful lamp,’ became known as the ‘orphan stories,’ because there was no extant version of them in the Thousand and one nights; they nevertheless became the most well-known and popular stories in Europe. Thus, Galland’s Mille et une nuits is a rather diverse collection of material from different sources. Still, it became tremendously popular in France and was soon translated into English, German, and Dutch. It became the – rather shaky – foundation of what may be called the European tradition of the Nights, a tradition that continues until the present day. The interest raised by Galland’s translation stimulated scholars to look for more manuscripts and to use these for new translations. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a series of translations appeared which became the backbone of the European tradition of the Thousand and one nights and which fostered its incorporation into world literature. Interestingly, the most important of these translations reflect cultural trends in Europe and the attitudes toward the Orient of their times. Galland’s translation

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appeared in a period of great intellectual fervor that marked the beginnings of the European Enlightenment. The translation is correct and fairly precise, but it was stylized and bowdlerized to suit the taste of the audience, as was common practice at the time. It is philologically ambivalent, as we have seen, but it is lively and aims to give a truthful and positive representation of oriental society. The interest it engendered led to German translations by Joseph von Hammer Purgstall (1804–06) and Maximilian Habicht (1825), who also published an Arabic edition based on manuscripts he collected in European libraries (1825–43). A third German translation, based upon allegedly ‘authentic’ manuscripts, was published by Gustav Weil in 1838–41. In England, the first significant translation (1838–40) was made by the ethnographer Edward Lane. Lane resided in Egypt for several years, during which he gathered material for his impressive book, Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians (1836), and in the meantime, he translated the Egyptian manuscript version of the Nights as it had been compiled at the end of the eighteenth century. His anthropological interest inspired him to add a huge apparatus of explicatory footnotes that contain all kinds of information about the cultural, social, and religious background of the work, partly based on information provided by a local shaykh. Apart from this anthropological touch, the translation is known for its archaic, almost biblical, idiom, and its prudery: several passages and even complete stories were left out because they were deemed too obscene or too bizarre, or because they would give “an erroneous idea of the manners of the behaviour of Cairene ladies.”4 It thus exemplifies the conventionalism and priggishness of the Victorian period. Lane’s work was succeeded by the translation by John Payne (1882–84), which went almost unnoticed, because it was soon superseded by the animated version of the polyglot, explorer, ethnographer, diplomat, and enfant terrible, Richard Burton (1885–88). Burton criticized his predecessors because he considered their translations too reserved to do justice to the temperament of the Arabs. His own translation is characterized by its exuberant, sometimes pompous language, full of archaic and invented expressions. Burton justified his eccentric style by saying that it represented the speech of the Arabs, if English had been their native language. Therefore, he claimed, his version gave a more truthful picture of the Arabs’ culture, society, and mentality. Apart from this, as a connoisseur of the sexual habits of indigenous peoples, he emphasized the erotic passages of the work, adding ample information in footnotes. His aim was not only to explain the true sexual ‘temperament’ of the Arabs, 4  Edward William Lane, The thousand and one nights, ed. Edward Stanley Poole, 3 vols. (London: East-West Publications and Cairo: Livres de France, Cairo, 1979), 1:193, n. 22.

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but, more likely, to scandalize his Victorian readership. His version thus shows the other side of Victorian morality; it was prohibited by censors several times. Burton’s translation was based on the Egyptian edition, but he added the ‘orphan tales’ and material from other – both printed and manuscript – sources. The first translation in the twentieth century was the French version published by J. C. Mardrus in 1899–1904. This text was a reworking of earlier translations supplemented by tales from other, non-Arabic sources and was consciously eroticized and exoticized to accommodate modern orientalist trends. Although fiercely criticized by scholars, who considered the text a free adaptation rather than a translation, it was acclaimed by literati and engendered a vibrant wave of orientalism in literature, art, design, and fashion. Another translation that appeared somewhat later was the German version of Enno Littmann (1921–28), who used the Egyptian edition. This work can be considered the first ‘modern’ translation in the sense that it conformed to modern philological standards; it is precise and avoids mystifications, additions or censorship (except for some erotic verses translated into Latin). These translations, from that of Galland to Littmann, laid the foundation for the European tradition of the Thousand and one nights, as it steadily expanded and permeated European culture. They were the main channels for the incorporation of the Nights into European and world literature, since they were re-translated into many European and non-European languages, and were continuously reprinted and re-translated during the twentieth century. Apart from these re-translations, and a plethora of anthologies taken from them, original translations from Arabic versions have appeared throughout the twentieth century until the present day, into Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Hungarian, Croatian, and many other languages. The fame of the Thousand and one nights was spread, too, by media other than translations, such as children’s books, pop-up books, magic lantern shows, movies, theater, advertisements, design, comic books, television series, etc., culminating in the great Disney production of Aladdin in 1992. All these manifestations of Shahrazad’s tales have contributed to their iconic status in global culture. In contrast to this jubilant reception in Europe and elsewhere, the Thousand and one nights was evaluated in the Arab world more ambivalently, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although it was acclaimed by some as a work of genius from the indigenous Arabic tradition, others thought it was not up to the standards of the Arabic literary and cultural heritage. They relegated the Nights deprecatingly to the category of ‘popular literature,’ to distinguish it from the stylistically more sophisticated corpus of adab literature. Moreover, some considered it too frivolous and scandalous to be considered

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representative of the Islamic cultural heritage, and interpreted the western interest in the work as a sign of patronizing, colonialist, and orientalist condescension toward Arabic culture. On several occasions, efforts were made to prohibit the publication and distribution of the work on religious grounds, and many censored editions appeared in Arab bookshops. These restrictions were contested by secular intellectuals who considered the Thousand and one nights an indigenous example of a literary text that fostered the freedom of expression and imagination in Arab societies. The Thousand and one nights thus remained a controversial work, both in the Arab world and in the context of cultural exchange between Arab and western cultural domains.

Incorporation into World Literature

Clearly, the translations of the Thousand and one nights have been of vital importance for their literary impact outside the Arabic literary realm; this is evident from the fact that authors and readers did not refer to the original work, which they could not read, but rather to its hybrid and adapted versions in other languages. This implies that the ways in which the Nights was cultivated in Europe sometimes seemed far removed from the significance of the original versions. The translators encouraged this by consciously emphasizing certain aspects of the work or taking liberties to adapt it according to their wishes. Galland, by adding tales, of course introduced the germ of mystification and manipulation into the Thousand and one nights tradition. Perhaps paradoxically, this tradition became imbued with the terminology of authenticity: translators were anxious to advocate their version as the most truthful, complete, and authentic, while stressing that it was a faithful representation of Arab society and mentality. These truth claims, combined with characteristic interventions by the translators, enhanced the public’s fascination with the Nights. The enormous popularity of the Thousand and one nights in the eighteenth century was caused in part by its unbridled exoticism. From the seventeenth century onwards, European interest in the Orient increased rapidly as a result of growing economic, diplomatic, and cultural interactions. Traders, travelers, diplomats, and scholars together shaped networks between East and West in which the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul, and the Arab Levant, were important links. Gradually, knowledge about oriental societies, religions, and cultures trickled into Europe and the evaluation of this new information became a central interest of Enlightenment scholars. The confrontation with the religious Other necessitated a complete revision of the world, which had hitherto been centered around Europe and Christianity. The common

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perceptions of the Orient, based on Catholic polemical discourses that dated back to the Middle Ages, were now accommodated to support broader visions of world history, the relations between cultures, and the place of religion in the history of civilizations. Galland’s Mille et une nuits came at a point when this cultural movement was gathering momentum. The work was seen as an authentic testimony of life, customs, and culture in the Orient, not mediated by a western traveler, but gleaned from a real oriental source. It triggered fantasies about the Orient as a world of magic, fate, and fancy, but it also allowed a unique insight into an exotic society that relativized European self-images. Moreover, it was a work that somehow escaped the narrow discourse of religious polemics, thereby opening the space for a new look at the oriental Other. This space was used, especially, to investigate philosophical, political, and religious ideas outside the paradigms of Christian doctrines, within the ‘neutral’ environment of a non-Christian society, which in turn afforded a critical look at European society and culture from outside itself. In this sense, the Orient supplemented antiquity as a source of foreign moral and civilizational models. Although the exotic element in the Thousand and one nights was important for its reception, it was not the only and perhaps not even the most important factor in the appreciation of the work in Europe. Whereas orientalism alone could pass as a temporary trend or a transient vogue, the work struck roots in European culture mainly for its literary value. As noted, in the eighteenth century European literatures were still in a formative stage. Authors were experimenting with form and genre, attempting to shed the obsolete categories of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and looking for concepts more adequate for the ‘enlightened’ spirit of the times. In this atmosphere of intellectual ferment and experimentalism, the sudden appearance of the Thousand and one nights, seemingly from nowhere had an enormous impact. It added a new element that brought fresh inspiration, relativizing the significance of ancient culture as the repository of literary and moral types. The Thousand and one nights can be seen as an alien element that suddenly intruded into a literary landscape which had exhausted its resources and was fervently searching for new forms and concepts. The Thousand and one nights provided these, not only through its strangeness and exoticism, but also, and perhaps even more, through its peculiar nature as a literary work. First, the concept and form of the work were new: the technique of the frame story was not unknown, but here it was implemented in an especially intriguing way, as Shahrazad’s sequence of storytelling was designed to avert her almost certain death. Second, the frame contained a seemingly endless and strangely diverse chain of tales, drawing attention to the act of ‘fabulation,’ the essentially

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boundless dynamics of narration and fantasy. Third, the work proposed new configurations of the real and the imaginary, the natural and the supernatural, incorporated into a fictional form. These three characteristics were not only fascinating in themselves, they also contributed to what may be called its ‘generic instability,’ a fundamental diffuseness that prevented it from being easily placed within existing literary categories. It defied literary conventions and genres and for this reason had to be defined in order to be incorporated into the literary field. Conversely, traditional literary conventions had to be revised to include this strange trespasser, thereby a process of redrawing the generic relationships in the literary field was engendered. Through its form and inherent dynamism and instability, the Nights stimulated literary experiments; it was disassembled, re-assembled, supplemented, reshaped, parodied, and emulated according to the author’s fancy. But it was not only emulated and internalized, it also stimulated debates about the nature of fictional literature and its relationship to reality. At a time when religious conceptions of the supernatural were losing authority, new forms of imagining the supernatural were able to replace them in literary fiction. An undercurrent of ‘fantastic’ literature emerged in Europe and became, over time, a structural phenomenon. The potential for literary experiments provided by the Thousand and one nights was immediately and eagerly exploited by authors in France and England, especially. Imitations of the Mille et une nuits appeared, such as Mille et un jours by Pétis de la Croix (1710–12), a collection of Turkish tales modeled after Galland’s translation; Nouveaux contes orientaux by Comte de Caylus (1743), also translated from Turkish; and Suite des Mille et une nuits by Jacques Cazotte (1788), translated from an Arabic manuscript compiled in Paris. Pseudo-translations were published by Abbé de Bignon (Abdalla fils d’Hanif, 1712) and Gueullette (various works), while prominent authors and thinkers such as Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, Johnson, and Wieland, produced oriental tales with a moral, philosophical or satirical purport. Gothic and other fantastic tales inspired by the Nights were written by Walpole, Cazotte, and Beckford. All these authors set out new directions in European literature, drawing inspiration from the Thousand and one nights and explicitly or implicitly referring to it. In the nineteenth century, this deep fascination with the Thousand and one nights continued and even expanded in the works of such prominent authors as Goethe, Hoffmann, Scott, Dickens, Balzac, Melville, Poe, Gauthier, and many more. Here again, exoticism was important, especially for romantic authors, but narrative elements, such as plot, embedded stories, the linking of narration and death, the relationship between reality and the imagination, remained

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essential as features that attracted European authors. During the course of the nineteenth century, the narrative techniques that make the Thousand and nights so intriguing were rapidly adopted by European authors, and were used as tools to complete the incorporation of the exotic intruder into the European literary field. Rather than characterizing the European reception of the Thousand and one nights as a form of orientalism and as part of the western colonial discourse, we prefer to present it as a phase in the gradual incorporation of the work into world literature. The European translations allowed the Nights to escape the confines of Arabic literature and spread around the world to inspire authors and artists of all cultures. This expansion certainly has an element of exoticism and orientalism in it, but to reduce the interest in the Nights to these ideological discourses does not do justice to its intrinsic value as a narrative and literary text. It is, above all, the vitality of the work as a narrative concept that contains ‘secret’ mechanisms of storytelling which made it such a rich source of inspiration for narrative strategies, experiments, and literary ingenuity. This potential was inherent in the Arabic original, possibly based on Asian sources, but was released in a unique way through its hybridization, which was a fruitful effect of the processes of transmission and translation. To see this process as part of the colonial ideology of orientalism, and thus as manipulation, or appropriation, or a side-effect of cultural hegemony, is to deny not only the mechanisms of textual transmission and cultural exchange, but also the force of the work itself, as a literary text. The European tradition of the Thousand and one nights was not a marginal manifestation of exoticism, but an example of the influence of Arabic literature on European literature, of the influence of Arabic aesthetics on European art.

This Study

After this brief overview of the phases and mechanisms of the incorporation of the Thousand and one nights into world literature, we now turn to explicate the aims, organization, and limitations of the present study. First, it is helpful to explain what it is not: the following chapters do not offer a comprehensive or exhaustive inventory of twentieth-century literary works that are in some way or another influenced by the Thousand and one nights. The references to the Thousand and one nights in twentieth-century literature are so numerous that a full survey would require a work of encyclopaedic scope. Although this study is certainly ambitious, its scope is still limited. As we see, these limitations are not only relevant for the amount of material studied for this research,

Introduction

11

but also for the methods applied and the organization of the book. For some readers, the limitations may be reason enough to reject a project such as this as too ambitious to be meaningful. However, we argue that an attempt to obtain a fuller picture of the intertextual influence of the Nights in twentieth-century literature is not only desirable but even necessary as a starting point for further research. The main caveats of the book can be summarized as follows: [1] It is of course impossible for one researcher to master all the languages involved in this kind of project. The present author’s abilities are limited to reading works in English, French, German, and Arabic, and articles and secondary sources in these languages and in Spanish, Italian, Danish, and Dutch. This means that the analysis of works written in other languages was based on translations, and that untranslated works remained inaccessible. This may have resulted in omissions and a western-centered perspective, and, although translators in general should be complimented on their dedication, skill, and effort, we cannot exclude the possibility that their work contains errors, misinterpretations or inadequate solutions to translation problems. This means that the analyses in our study will not be based on detailed evidence from language or style, or on evidence that can only be found in the original version; and we may even adopt mistakes made by the translator. Quotations in the text from German and Arabic are my translations (when English translations were not available). [2] It is not immediately evident how terms such as ‘influence’ or ‘intertextuality’ should be defined or how their effects can be determined in literary works. As the survey above has made clear, the Thousand and one nights was omnipresent in western culture at least from the second half of the eighteenth century and authors may have had stories from the Nights in mind while writing without explicitly referring to them. To go even further, critics and scholars may detect intertextual parallels in literary works that the author himself was not even aware of. In the research for this study it was not always easy to distinguish between authors inside or outside the scope of the Nights. As a rule, we only selected authors who explicitly refer to the Thousand and one nights either in their work or in interviews, essays, etc. An exception is Margaret Atwood, who makes no reference to the Nights (except perhaps a mention in Alias Grace), but whose novel The blind assassin clearly follows its narrative procedure. Conversely, Juan Carlos Onetti’s A brief life was not included although Mario Vargas Llosa saw it as an example of the technique of the frame story derived from the Thousand and one nights. Surely, some of the choices made in this book will be contested.

12

Introduction

[3] Apart from these considerations, in some cases readers may ask whether a single reference to the Thousand and one nights is sufficient proof of an intertextual relationship. An author may mention Shahrazad, for example, with the intention of evoking an association, without wanting to suggest that the whole text is permeated with the figure of Shahrazad or intertextually related to the Thousand and one nights. So although the extent of intertextual influence is always a matter of debate, an explicit link between two works allows the critic to examine whether a structural relationship can be determined. Still, the boundaries are vague; are there sufficient grounds to include Toni Morrison’s Beloved, with only one reference to the Nights, and exclude Mikhail Bulgakov’s The master and Margarita, with its mention of Harun al-Rashid? Clearly, there should be secondary arguments involved, for instance the relationship between a specific novel and a cluster of novels influenced by the Nights. [4] After weighing and applying these criteria, a rather large group of authors and works remains. Of course, not all of these works are equally interesting. Although some authors represent an interesting cultural trend or phenomenon, their work may not be sufficiently interesting in the literary sense. Since this study focuses on influence from a narratological perspective, that is, based on a literary analysis of the work rather than on contextual indicators, we have only selected texts that were interesting as works of literature. This does not mean that contextual aspects are deemed unimportant or are systematically neglected; in cases when they help to situate or explain a work and thereby better understand an author, we engage with references to contextual and historical embedding. An example is the cluster of German authors discussed in chapter 5. In general, the literary significance of a work or an author is what is decisive, and, as we see, most authors discussed belong to the category of major contributors who have shaped the literary landscape of the twentieth century. The demarcation is rather strict: only two of the novels analyzed were published after 2000: Khoury’s Yalo and Auster’s Oracle night. [5] Although these criteria have limited the group to some extent, it is still large and diverse. This has some important implications, especially with regard to the methodological approach and the organization of the book. First, the book is not a ‘literary history’ tracing a progressive chronological trajectory of influences of the Thousand and one nights; it is a discussion of specific authors and works, either limited to narratological analysis, or related to their culturalhistorical context. Because the material is so varied, no single overall method has been applied; approaches are different for different authors, according to their peculiarities, in order to find the most fruitful perspective. Discussions may be more or less elaborate according to the relevance and general importance of the work. Since the influences of the Nights are so varied, no effort

Introduction

13

is made to shape them into a single pattern. The result is a rather mosaic-like overview of different kinds of intertextual relationships. [6] Because of the multifarious nature of the material and the potential overlaps, the analysis is not ordered chronologically or according to linguistic or cultural domains, but rather divided into six main themes. The authors/ works have been grouped according to the aspect of the work that reveals their link with the Thousand and one nights. Of course, the theme that we have chosen may not be the only parallel with the Nights, but it may be the most instructive one, or it may add to our view of the thematic connections between the Nights and twentieth-century literature. In this way, it is possible to avoid overlap and to present a broad overview of the different types of intertextual influence. The themes are, briefly: enclosures and journeys; the manipulation of time; metafictionality and textuality; history; orientalism and identifications; aftermaths and politics. As noted, in several cases more than one theme may be relevant; it is, for instance, difficult to separate spatial structures from temporal structures, and historical concerns are often connected to politics. We have attempted to organize the analyses in such a way that the different types of influence are presented gradually to reveal the complexity of the intertextual relationships. Within the chapters/sections a chronological order is adopted, starting with modernist authors and concluding with postmodernists. In general, in each section we relate two or three authors to each other, to show sometimes unexpected similarities. In some sections, specific countries or cultural domains are combined (Argentina, Germany), and sometimes a single literary trend is discussed (magical realism, OULIPO), but only if there is sufficient thematic coherence. In other instances, combinations are primarily thematic. This rather associative organization will probably remind some readers of the Thousand and nights itself, an association which is not wholly unjustified. [7] Most authors discussed in this book are major figures who have shaped the literary landscape of the twentieth century. This implies that their work has been studied in a vast array of books and articles. Most of them have been ‘adopted’ by excellent specialists who have spent their lives scrutinizing their work and discussing it with other specialists. It is of course impossible within the scope of this book to do justice to the depth of this scholarly effort. It was our aim to collect sufficient material for the purpose of our research, to analyze the intertextual influence of the Thousand and one nights, without pretending to gain expert knowledge of all the authors involved. In some cases, conclusions may add new insights to the work at hand, while in others it may only add an element to existing views. In any case, we hope that specialists in the various fields will see this book as an incentive to discussion and further research.

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Introduction

[8] Although this book is meant for readers of a variety of backgrounds, it assumes the presence of a minimum knowledge of the contents of the Thousand and one nights, and the frame story; that is, King Shahriyar, after being deceived by his spouse, establishes a system of marrying a virgin every night and having her executed in the morning, until Shahrazad begins telling Shahriyar stories which are interrupted each morning. She thus succeeds in postponing and eventually preventing her death. Most people know the stories of ‘Aladdin,’ ‘Sindbad,’ and ‘Ali Baba,’ but they may not be aware that the collection contains a wide variety of stories, ranging from animal fables and short edifying tales to long romances of love and chivalry, tales of magic and strange journeys, etc. For more information about the Nights the most convenient reference is Marzolph and van Leeuwen’s The Arabian nights encyclopedia, which contains abstracts of the stories and entries about the textual history of the work, reception, translation, approaches, etc., with an extensive bibliography. Taking these limitations into account, in this book we aim to present a startingpoint for a re-assessment of the significance of the Thousand and one nights in twentieth-century prose literature and for new approaches to its intertextual effects. We attempt this not by presenting a mere inventory, nor by discerning a pattern of orientalism, but through an analysis of specific texts and an examination of intertextuality, primarily at the level of narrative concepts and techniques. After all, as noted, over the course of time the influence of the Nights was not limited to exoticism, but rather penetrated the level of narrative strategies and procedures. We hope that this study will lead to a more general acknowledgment of the significance of the Nights in the shaping of prose fiction in what, in the twentieth century, came to be called world literature.

Part 1 Enclosures, Journeys, and Texts

∵

⸙ In many stories of the Thousand and one nights the narrative dynamism is derived from a disruption of the spatiotemporal structure at the beginning of the story. The main inner logic of the story is the opposition between forms of enclosure or imprisonment, usually by a spell or the authority of a father or a king, meant to preserve a status quo, and the regular passage of time; this opposition engenders forms of transformation and change. The enclosed space represents an anomaly, an enclave within the course of history, while the open space, the realm of journey and adventure, stands for forces of contingency, change, and fate. Often this opposition is constructed around the imprisonment of a young maiden by a jinn or by her father, and a young hero who undertakes a journey to rescue her and have nature/history take its course. It is through the journey, the displacement in space, that the stagnancy of time is broken and a new spatiotemporal equilibrium is established. A second motif connected with enclosed spaces, which occurs in several stories of the Thousand and one nights, is the forbidden room. The hero, who has arrived at an enchanted palace, is allowed to open all the doors except one. It is this door, of course, which he is curious about and irresistibly attracted to and behind which his destiny lies. The forbidden room is thus associated with desire, with human deficiency, with man’s irresistible inner urges, but also with the boundary between man and his fate. In all these spatial motifs, the spatial boundaries are obstacles which must be overcome, which are fraught with taboos and restrictions, but which in the end provide the hero with the possibility of restoring the equilibrium between the forces of contingency and destiny. But before this happy ending is reached, the tensions between enclosures and ‘journeys’ produce an essentially unstable and seemingly incoherent spatial setting. The spatial experience of the hero is disrupted, he wanders aimlessly in a world full of labyrinths and deserts, without a ‘home’ or a refuge. Space becomes entangled with his condition and his desire and loses its referential potential; space is thus a reflection of his inner disequilibrium, rather than a setting that provides him with consolation.1 It is this essential subjectivity of the experience of space in several stories of the Thousand and one nights which seems to have inspired a number of modernist and postmodernist authors to refer to the Nights in works which specifically explore the nature of spatial settings and boundaries in fictional 1  See Richard van Leeuwen, The Thousand and One Nights: Space, Travel and Transformation (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).

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narratives. At the end of the nineteenth century, modernist artists began to assimilate the influences of the huge processes of transformation caused by colonialism, globalization, and economic and technological innovation. One of the main elements of this process, an element that is found both in the arts and literature, is a change in the awareness and experience of time and space. Time lost its all-embracing objectivity as a coherent framework of experience, as it was fractured into personal, subjective senses of temporality. Space, too, lost its integrating function as a unified continuum obeying the laws of perspective and mathematics, as it came to be seen as part of the subjective experiences of a dispersed and fragmented spatiality.2 The transformation of the perception of time and space was rooted in the experience of a changing reality within modernism. Technological inventions accelerated the pace of life and shortened the distances in geographical space. It gave rise to what may be called a sense of simultaneity, that is, an intensified awareness that events occur in their specific spatiotemporal context; that they can be perceived from different subjective perspectives; and that several events, occurring in their spatiotemporal contexts, can be perceived simultaneously from a single point of view and within one complex experience. The idea of simultaneity is best expressed by the example of the collage, or montage, in the visual arts; it presents multiple visions of reality overlapping each other, to show the complexity of the experience of reality, which combines both objective and subjective elements. Still, this form of fragmentation is not absolute; it remains part of a unifying context: it is the task of the modernist artist to discover the nature of this underlying unifying dimension.3 In the field of literature, the breaking up of spatiotemporal experiences as unifying frameworks also resulted in collage-like texts. Subjective accounts of experiential time occur in objectified evocations or even replace them altogether, and the spatial structuring of narratives no longer obeys the laws of Euclidean ‘realism.’ There was an increasing sense that language, as a medium to convey the experience of reality, had lost its unifying potential as well and that it was a deficient means to faithfully represent an objective reality. 2  For a discussion of visions of time and space in modernism, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 3  For an introduction to literary modernism, see Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); also see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989) and Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

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Thus, narratives not only became fragmented and dispersed, but language structures, too, broke up as the complex relationships between sounds, ideas, and reality were explored. The unity of the texts was broken up into its smallest components, as it were, to examine its representational value. Conversely, experiments were aimed at inventing new ways to use these components to build new forms of narrative. The awareness of the ambivalence of the representational potential of texts resulted in forms of self-reflexivity and the incorporation of different narrative techniques in a single text. Since visions of reality had become complex, narrative texts became complex and multilayered as well; a text contained visions of itself, just as reality contained many realities hidden in itself, and these could only be disclosed by creating ruptures and fragmentation. Still, the underlying realities reveal a deeper, hidden coherence that is ordered by invisible continuities. Apparently, reality is subjected to contingency, and this is reflected in literary texts, but at the same time these texts seek to explore and restore a system of meanings which may heal the fractures and rebuild some unifying meaning. It is not surprising that the typical modernist view of a diversified, fragmented reality developed simultaneously with the rapid discovery of the nonEuropean world and the intensification of global communication. The sense of multiple realities was strengthened by the exploration of other civilizations, or perhaps more accurately, civilizational Others, living in different spatiotemporal contexts. New means of communication enhanced contacts between various parts of the world and fostered the sense of simultaneity. In the field of culture these developments stimulated processes of cultural exchange. Writers and artists could travel to exotic worlds relatively easily and soon the influences of Asian and African art were incorporated into European culture. Of course, forms of orientalism already existed in European culture, but in the course of the nineteenth century it took on new shapes in accordance with newly emerging currents in Europe. As we argue below, in modernist representations, visions of the Orient were used, in particular, to stress the heterogeneity and discontinuity of reality, the awareness of a multilayered, fissured world, both in experienced reality and in visions of the self.4 In this chapter, we examine the ways in which these modernist perceptions are reflected in the works of six authors who sought inspiration in the Thousand and one nights and integrated some of its typical spatial elements in their narratives: the opposition and interaction between closed spaces and 4  The relationship between modernism and early globalization is discussed in Jean-Michel Rabaté, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).

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journeys, and the motif of the forbidden door. We see that references to the Nights and the Orient contribute to the destabilization of the hero, both in the context of orientalist ‘othering’ and in the narrative dynamism of the story itself. Our analysis shows that in some cases this destabilization of spatial settings leads to a focus on the workings of texts and storytelling, and the fragmentation of textual unity.

Chapter 1

Enclosures, Letters, and Destiny: Hugo von Hofmannsthal and André Gide In his memoirs Die Welt von gestern the Austrian author Stefan Zweig paints an ambiguous picture of the atmosphere in Habsburg Vienna at the close of the nineteenth century. Zweig describes a well-ordered society, steeped in a spirit of stability and progress, cultural sophistication and cosmopolitan tolerance, a society interested more in the arts than in the intricacies of politics. At the same time, this stability harbored the bud of unrest, especially represented by the young generation, which began to oppose the stifling conditions implicit in the educational system that was based on a strict morality, class consciousness, and an ideology of ‘good breeding.’ Among the intellectually and artistically inclined youth, an aversion grew against the artistic scholasticism which was typical for the period and which dominated cultural tastes. For no apparent reason, Zweig’s generation strove for something ‘new,’ for a break with the complacent tradition and for a renewed aesthetics in harmony with the acceleration of the times, new experimentalism, and more passionate forms of expression. Perhaps this unrest was partly due to the sense that the Habsburg monarchy was rushing toward its end. Barely twenty years into the twentieth century, the age-old empire had collapsed.1 In this contradictory atmosphere, seemingly stable traditions met an urge for change and the sense of an approaching catastrophe and led to the Austrian brand of modernism, with the painters of the Sezession, the group of composers around Arnold Schönberg, Jugendstil decoration and architecture, and literary figures such as Stefan Zweig and Arthur Schnitzler. Among these illustrious figures one person stands out as perhaps the most prominent personification of the cultural atmosphere of the fin de siècle and most certainly as a model for a new, ambitious literary generation: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who lived in Vienna from 1874 to 1929. After the first publication of his poetry in 1890, von Hofmannsthal’s star rose quickly; he published under the pseudonym Loris, and soon became Vienna’s foremost writer of plays and librettos, traditionally the most appreciated literary genres in the Habsburg capital.

1  S. Zweig, Die Welt von gestern (Leipzig: Renovamen Verlag, 1985).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_003

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He remained the main exponent of Austrian literary modernism until his untimely death in 1929.2 Von Hofmannsthal’s oeuvre consists of poems, novellas, plays, librettos, and essays, all of which convey, both in content and form, what may be called the spirit of modernism. They are imbued with elements that have become associated with early and high modernism, such as a preference for the aesthetic, symbolist fantasies, a sense of rupture, the co-existence of multiple realities, the fragmentation of language, and the compression of temporal and spatial experience. These by now familiar components of modernist literature are combined with a distinct interest in exoticism, and specifically, in the Orient as it is represented in the Thousand and one nights. Von Hofmannsthal often acknowledged his indebtedness to the Thousand and one nights, as a source of inspiration with regard to narrative structures, motifs, ‘spirit,’ and moral purport. We can find, in many of his works, including the major ones, references to the Thousand and one nights. In some works, the traces of Shahrazad’s tales are less explicit, but they can nevertheless be perceived in the structure, characters, and dramatic setting. In this chapter, we investigate the influence of the Thousand and one nights on two of von Hofmannsthal’s most celebrated works, the novel Andreas, which was never completed, but is nevertheless considered a pivotal text, both in von Hofmannsthal’s oeuvre and in the history of literary modernism; and the well-known novella Das Märchen der 672. Nacht. We argue that in its typical modernist characteristics, Andreas was deeply influenced by the example of the Thousand and one nights.3

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Kunstmärchen, and Orientalism

Von Hofmannsthal can be situated in two traditions that are relevant for our analysis: orientalism as it developed in the Habsburg Empire; and the German literary tradition, especially with regard to the so-called Kunstmärchen, or literary fairy tale. In the context of the Habsburg Empire, orientalism should be seen in the context of its traditional opposition with the neighboring Ottoman Empire. The Balkans were the scene of continual clashes between 2  For von Hofmannsthal’s life, see the short biography by Hans-Albrecht Koch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004); and Werner Volke (ed.), Hofmannsthal mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1967). 3   For bibliographical data, see Hans-Albrecht Koch, Erträge der Forschung: Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989); also see Rabaté, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism, 171–178.

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the Habsburg and Ottoman armies; the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 was an especially traumatic experience in the popular imagination. Relationships were not only characterized by hostility, however, and especially after the gradual weakening of the Ottomans from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, communication became more friendly. The figure who personifies the complex relationship between Vienna and Istanbul in the nineteenth century was Joseph Freiherr von Hammer Purgstall (1774–1856), an oriental scholar and diplomat, who was a prominent founder of oriental studies in Europe. He also translated the Thousand and one nights, presumably based on a manuscript that he had found in Egypt. Because of its age-old contacts with the Turks, who were also neighbors, Austrian orientalism was slightly different from the orientalism that developed in other European nations.4 German versions of the Thousand and one nights go back to 1706, when Galland’s Mille et une nuits was translated for the first time.5 A second, more famous translation was published in 1781–85 by Heinrich Voss, a friend of Goethe and Schiller. Other translations and reworkings followed over the course of the nineteenth century, these included the versions of Habicht (1825– 38), Weil (1838–41), Hennig (1895–97), and von Hammer Purgstall (1823). At the beginning of the twentieth century, a translation made by Enno Littmann (1921–28) appeared. Although some of these translators were recognized scholars, their translations do not always attain modern scholarly standards, since the philological status or even the identity of the source texts is often unclear. Only in the case of Littmann’s translation was a conscious effort made to deliver a reliable version based on clearly identified Arabic texts.6 The German tradition of the Thousand and one nights was not limited to the regular publication of translations. From the outset, the collection was used by literary authors as a source of inspiration, in two fields especially: poetry and the Kunstmärchen, or the ‘literary fairy tale’ – as opposed to the popular folktale. The tradition of the Kunstmärchen was, from the beginning, interwoven with the Thousand and one nights. It emerged as a genre in the course of 4  For Austrian orientalism, see Paula Sutter Fichtner, Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526–1850 (London: Reaktion, 2008); for von Hammer-Purgstall and the Thousand and one nights, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 2:581–582. 5  Arabische Liebes-händel und andere seltsame Begebenheiten welche von einer Sultanin in Tausend Nacht-Gesprächen erzehlet, trans. Peter Marteau (Cologne: Amandern, 1706); unfortunately, only the title page is extant. 6  For translations and translators of the Thousand and one nights, see the various entries in Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia.

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the eighteenth century, and was inspired by the French model of the ‘conte des fées’ and the exoticism of the Thousand and one nights. It was utilized by such prominent authors as Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), and Novalis (1772–1801). The genre is usually considered to have reached its final form in the work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, although some extend its development to include the work of Franz Kafka and Alfred Döblin. Most of the authors mentioned above were in one way or another influenced by oriental tales in general, and the Thousand and one nights more specifically.7 It is interesting to see the development of the Kunstmärchen, which spanned almost two centuries, from a typical genre of Enlightenment literature to a medium for modernist experimentalism. In 1786–89 Christoph Martin Wieland wrote his Dschinnistan, a collection of mostly oriental tales, clearly inspired by the Thousand and one nights and the retellings of Thousand and one nights’ tales by the French author Jacques Cazotte.8 The stories evoke a magic, fantastic world, intertextually intertwined with the Thousand and one nights, which is juxtaposed to a ‘modern,’ rationalist, view of the world. Here orientalism is used to disclose hidden realms which allegedly exist alongside the ‘real’ world and are separated from it by the belief in magic and demons. The tales are not written to entertain, but rather to instruct and educate the reader: “The fairy tale is not told for the sake of the marvellous, but to explain the marvellous in a natural-rational way. The fairy tale is only an instrument, not because the marvellous is true, but the marvel is traced back to its – rational – truth.”9 7  For the Kunstmärchen and its relationship to the Thousand and one nights, see Mathias Mayer and Jens Tismar, Kunstmärchen (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1997) and Volker Klotz, Das Europäische Kunstmärchen (Stuttgart: Fink, 1985); for orientalism in German literature, see Klaus-Michael Bogdal, Orientdiskurse in der deutschen Literatur (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2007); Debra N. Prager, Orienting the Self: The German Literary Encounter with the Eastern Other (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014); Todd Kontje, German Orientalisms (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Andrea Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus: Regeln der deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination in 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); Nina Berman, German Literature on the Middle East: Discourses and Practices, 1000–1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). 8  Jacques Cazotte, La suite des Mille et une nuits: contes arabes, ed. Raymonde Robert (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2012). Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 2:514–515. 9  ‘Das Märchen wird nicht um des Wunderbaren willen erzählt, sondern um das Wunderbare auf natürlich-rationale Weise zu erklären. Das Märchen ist nur ein Instrument, denn (noch) nicht das Wunderbare ist Wahr, sondern das Wunder wird auf seine – rationale – Wahrheit zurückgeführt.’ Mayer and Tismar, Kunstmärchen, 38; also see 2–3, 39.

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Hugo von Hofmannsthal was, of course, familiar with the tradition of the German Kunstmärchen and he quite consciously situated his own works in this tradition, referring to Goethe and Novalis in his diaries and essays. Still, as we argue below, at least part of his work transcends the conventional definitions of the genre and seems to represent a transitional phase between the traditional form of the Kunstmärchen and a modernist variant which – as in Kafka’s case – is more related to the fantastic or even surrealistic story. The main difference between the two types, we argue, is that the split world of the conventional fairy tale is no longer represented as different realms existing alongside each other, but rather as a fractured world which resides, partly, in the human psyche. Thus, the symbolist fairy tales of the fin de siècle are not merely explorations of invisible realms, as in the case of the Kunstmärchen, but they are also explorations of the depth of human nature, the laws governing the human fate as reflected in his consciousness and soul. They seem to herald the eventual conceptualization of the human subconscious. As noted, von Hofmannsthal’s work is deeply influenced by the Thousand and one nights. We know that in his youth von Hofmannsthal was acquainted with the tales through a German translation of Dalziel’s illustrated anthology. Moreover, he wrote an introduction to the German edition published by Felix von Greve in 1907–08. It is also possible however, that he read other German versions as well, although this cannot be confirmed by direct documentary evidence.10 From an early stage von Hofmannsthal mentions the Thousand and one nights in his notes, letters, and diaries as a source of inspiration, especially with regard to the novellas Die Frau ohne Schatten, Das Märchen der 672. Nacht, Der goldene Apfel, and the unfinished Assad und Amgiad. He repeatedly states that Shahrazad’s tales served as an important reference with regard to atmosphere, setting, and narrative motifs.11 In the introduction to Felix von Greve’s edition, which was republished in the Littmann translation in 1921, von Hofmannsthal expands on his experiences with the Thousand and one nights. He sketches his development and history with the tales; he read them as a child, then renewed his experience with the text as a twenty-year-old young man and as an adult. Von Hofmannsthal was, especially, acquainted with the figures of the “erring prince” and the 10   Dalziel’s illustrierte Tausend und eine Nacht. Sammlung persischer, indischer und arabischer Märchen (Berlin: A. Warschauer, c. 1880); H. B. Lewis, “The Arabian Nights and the Young Hofmannsthal,” German Life and Letters 37, no 3 (April 1984): 186–196. 11  See references in Wolfgang Köhler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal und “Tausendundeine Nacht”: Untersuchungen zur Rezeption des Orients im epischen und essayistischem Werk (Bern: Peter Lang, 1972), 56, 71, 96–97, 125, 128–129.

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merchant’s son, whose father dies and who delivers him to the enticements of life.12 In the second phase, the ‘threats and enticements’ of cities such as Baghdad and Basra simultaneously attract and repel him: The enticements and threats were mixed in a peculiar way; we felt unsettled and desirous; we felt horror for inner loneliness, for being lost, but still a courage and longing spurred us onwards to a labyrinthine road, always between faces, between possibilities, riches, vapors, half-hidden faces, half-open doors, and angry glances in the enormous bazaar which surrounded us on all sides.13 Later, the experience of sensuality remains, but the sense of the narrative world of the Thousand and one nights as an unbounded realm of fantasy and dreams is replaced by a sense of realism. From a threatening, ominous world it becomes an endlessly merry and humorous world: “… The exotic world is not an aesthetically invented refuge for reality, [it is] not an artistic and at the same time threatening and enticing dream world, but a colorful, merry real world.”14 For von Hofmannsthal, the exotic world of the Thousand and one nights not only represented a source of narrative material, an inspirational atmosphere, and a reservoir of elementary motifs, such as the wandering prince, the labyrinthine city, and the merchant’s son; it was also a model in terms of its narrative techniques and strategies. For example, von Hofmannsthal projects his idea of the ‘trope,’ which he defines as a form of metaphoric signification, hidden behind the directness of the actual sentence, on the Thousand and one nights. In a sense that reminds us of the symbolist characterization of literature, von Hofmannsthal aspires to transfer “from the meaning itself to a higher meaning behind it, which leads rapidly to the illustrious.”15 In other words, the Thousand and one nights is seen as the model of a text which contains various layers of meanings, just as Shahrazad’s tales contain hidden and mysterious forces. Hugo von Hofmannsthal considered the Thousand and one nights an explicitly exotic text that reflects a deeply perceived dualism separating Europe from the Orient. In von Hofmannsthal’s eyes, Europe was threatened by individualism, mechanization, and mercantilism; it was searching for the means for existence, not the aim of existence; it had lost “being” in favor of “becoming,” 12  Köhler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 61. 13  Ibid., 61–62; my translation here and throughout. 14  Ibid., 64–65. 15  Ibid., 68.

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it had given up the “law” in favor of a “phantom freedom.”16 In contrast, in this “terrible collapse of a spiritual world,” the Orient represented a strong, unshakable spiritual order and comfort. It is by re-incorporating the spirit of the Orient that European culture could revitalize and renew itself. Asia can still offer us the “timeless, human interaction instead of machines,” the “beauty of things,” the “generation long humanizing power of labor.”17 Clearly, this summarizes quite accurately the attraction of the Orient, as an Other whose presence adds a dimension to European culture, and, at the same time, conveys a critique of modernity that was quite common among intellectuals at the time. It would be too easy, however, to consider von Hofmannsthal’s orientalism a form of aesthetic escapism, to denounce and evade the materialism of modern European life.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Fairy Tales and the Thousand and One Nights The influence of the Thousand and one nights on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s work can be perceived, in particular, in his novellas. Köhler, who has studied von Hofmannsthal’s fascination with the Nights, analyzes the stories Das Märchen der 672. Nacht, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Der goldene Apfel, and Assad und Amgiad, which are clearly modeled after the Thousand and one nights, in addition to von Hofmannsthal’s references in diaries, letters, and essays. His observations show a literary world in which the Thousand and one nights is fully incorporated, as a meta-text imbuing the structures of the stories and providing motifs and characters which to a large extent determine the nature of the narratives. In Frau ohne Schatten, for instance, the motifs of metamorphosis, of a talisman imposing a threat on the characters, and of the intervention of demons linking the worlds of reality and the supernatural, give the story its characteristic atmosphere. The incorporation of the supernatural world of the Thousand and one nights is not intended to give the story a specific exotic flavor; it is intended as a separate dimension within the text, a domain of symbols, fate, and magical powers that exists underneath our existence and constantly interferes with the course of events. It represents a symbolist link between transitory human affairs and the eternal powers of fate and morality.18 16  Ibid., 52. 17  Ibid. 18  Ibid., 125–150; also see Nina Berman, Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne: zum Bild des Orients in der deutsch-sprachigen Kultur um 1900 (Stuttgart: M and P, 1997); Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke: Erzählungen, erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, Reisen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979), 342–439.

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In the story Der goldene Apfel – an unfinished novella – the example of the Thousand and one nights is used in a similar way, to suggest a hidden structure underneath the narrative’s ‘visible’ events. The motif of the apple/jewel as a symbol of love and separation can be found in the stories of the ‘Three apples’ and ‘Qamar al-Zaman and princess Budur.’19 The motif of the underground corridor, surrounded by a taboo and the possibility of some spiritual insight, evokes similar motifs from the Thousand and one nights. In this story, the motifs are not borrowed from the Thousand and one nights to construct a fairy tale similar to an oriental atmosphere; rather they are integrated into a new story with its own narrative structure and message, although the final purport of the story is not clear, since it remained incomplete. Yet here too the motifs are ordered to suggest that they point to some mysterious, hidden force determining the course of events, which seems to be produced by mere coincidence.20 These two stories can both be classified as fairy tales, and Der goldene Apfel more specifically as a fairy tale of the oriental type, since they are located either in the Orient or quite explicitly in a world where the real and the supernatural are entwined. This is also the case in the story of Assad und Amgiad, which is unfinished as well and which is preserved almost entirely in the form of notes and remarks. However, the title refers unambiguously to the story of ‘As‘ad and Amjad’ in the Thousand and one nights21 and from the notes it is clear that von Hofmannsthal was fascinated by the story and that he saw its theme as a structural concept in his own work. First, there is a dualism between the two brothers, who of course represent a unity and a contrast at the same time, and who, forced by their character and development, obstruct and complement each other. While one of the brothers has a ‘talent for life,’ the other does not, and their attitudes reflect the contrast between dream and reality: The first: for him the wonders of life have become so entangled that one always closes the mouth of the other. It appears to him as uncontrollable, too great for human understanding. He has the gift of life. Glory, power, force, effort are meaningful for him, but also dedication, reserve.22

19   For summaries of these stories, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:341–345, 414–415. 20  Köhler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 107–122; von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, 104–120. 21  For a summary, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:107. 22  Von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, 42; Köhler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 96–106.

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And: The other: he sees life as ever harmonious, but as behind glass, unreachable: he is unable to combine the “I” with the course of events. It always confuses him that the same adventure in his imagination and in reality seem not to be related, his soul is not completely caught in Hades, he also looks out over life with a half eye, like someone who dreams but is also affected by the real world because he does not sleep sufficiently.23 In the novel Andreas, we find the motif of the two brothers who are bound to each other by fate, but at the same time are juxtaposed to each other, as part of an essentially moral dilemma. More important, however, is the major theme of the story: the peregrination of the two half-brothers after their father curses them and sends them into the world to encounter its threats and bounties. Fate has evicted them from their protected environment and exposes them to the harsh realities of life, forcing them to prove whether or not they are capable of living in an essentially hostile environment. This theme, which is also mentioned in von Hofmannsthal’s introductory essay to the Thousand and one nights, can also be found in what is arguably the most interesting story for our discussion, Das Märchen der 672. Nacht. There has been a great deal of speculation about the title of this story and its relationship to various versions of the Thousand and one nights, since in spite of its obvious reference to the Nights, in the story itself we cannot perceive explicit references to the narrative model. None of these explanations is very convincing, however, and it is clear that we must seek the intertextual relationship in thematic elements.24 The main character of Das Märchen der 672. Nacht is a wealthy merchant’s son who has inherited a mansion in which he lives the life of a recluse with his four servants. The house is filled with beautiful objects, which, for the hero, contain the very essence of life and the universe. They represent the magic and the coherence of the cosmos, immanent in the material world. He feels comfortable in his seclusion, although his servants and the way they observe him give him the sensation that he is being watched ‘from outside’ and that they are able to look into his ‘deepest being,’ his mysterious human fallibility and insufficiency. They seem to have hailed from a ‘forgotten nightmare,’ and fill him with anxiety and a deep fear of the inescapability of life. Thus, the house 23  Von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, 42. 24  Ibid., 70; Berman, Orientalismus, 172–182.

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contains the beauty of creation and the pleasures of life, but also the doom of fate and the transitory nature of the human condition.25 One day the merchant’s son receives a letter in which one of his servants is accused of betraying his former master. Indignant, he decides that he cannot let this pass uncontested and he sets out into the city. There he finds that his house is closed and, without being able to enter it, he begins a labyrinthine journey through parts of the city that he has never seen before. He finds a jeweler’s shop where he buys a mysterious gem and passes through backyards, staircases, narrow crossings, etc., until he arrives at a courtyard where some soldiers are gathered. He inadvertently drops the jewel that he has bought and while he bends down to pick it up he is kicked by a horse and dies, in an entirely trivial, senseless way. In his analysis of the story, Köhler links Das Märchen der 672. Nacht to the story of the ‘Third qalandar,’ in which the son of a rich merchant is hidden underground to escape a fatal prediction.26 In von Hofmannsthal’s story, the merchant’s son is seen as the personification of the aesthete’s view of life: he prefers retirement to indulging in narcissistic pleasures, he opts for isolation over social intercourse, and he refuses to find ways to reconcile with the world ‘outside.’ This attitude is doomed to fail, since it becomes clear that the hero cannot escape his fate. He is forced to leave his secluded environment and go out into the world, and it is then that life takes its revenge and provides fate with an opportunity to take its course. The merchant’s son suffers a completely meaningless and banal death, which contrasts starkly with his previous life, in which he was surrounded by beauty, luxury, and a sense of meaning, albeit compressed in an enclosed space.27 Although this story is not easily recognizable as a fairy tale, it is linked to the stories mentioned above in a way that confirms its fairy tale-like structure. In this story, there are several focal points in the hero’s experience that ultimately seem to be connected to some hidden, underlying reality. The objects in the house, the piercing gaze of the servants, and several ‘landmarks’ that appear as he wanders through the city – the jewel, the greenhouse, and the child – guide the merchant’s son toward his destiny, all as he obeys the invisible forces of fate. Forces that are stronger than the human will are immanent in material reality and manifest themselves in specific objects, persons, and spaces. Ultimately, existence is captured in a coherent set of laws that transcend the

25  Von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, 45–66. 26  Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:340–341. 27  Köhler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 73–94; for other studies, see Koch, Erträge der Forschung.

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logic of reality, divest material reality from its superficial meanings, and transform it into the emanation of a different world. The story of the merchant’s son is usually read as a critique of the aesthete’s attitude of the young generation of von Hofmannsthal’s time, who shunned social and political commitment, indulged in a decadent fear of life, and isolated themselves from the vicissitudes of modern society. The merchant’s son tries to escape from his fate by surrounding himself with a pseudo-reality, a self-constructed, totalized world, and by avoiding any relationship with others. When he is forced to leave his enclosure, he is unable to confront the world, connect with others, and survive. This interpretation is related, too, with von Hofmannsthal’s vision of himself as an essentially narcissistic individual, closed in upon himself; he is someone who sees the need to break out of his isolation and socialize with other people, with reality, and with the forces of fate, but is unable to do so. Part of him resists, although emerging is the only way to develop the ability to live and find a meaning to life, a process which von Hofmannsthal labeled ‘Allomatie,’ the necessity of engaging with the ‘other.’28 Whether interpreted as a portrait of the psychological struggle which von Hofmannsthal underwent with himself, or as an anti-modernist critique, this explanation of the story seems a bit too simple. Von Hofmannsthal’s vision of himself in the turbulent environment of modernity is obviously an important aspect of the story, but it seems illogical for a critique of narcissistic isolation to be accompanied by such a senseless and horrific death, once the isolation is finally broken. The death of the hero is not the result of the mistakes he makes because he misunderstands the world, nor is it the result of an unfortunate collision with others. The story is far from an incitement to plunge into social life and seek its myriad pleasures. It rather suggests that breaking out of an isolated life inevitably leads to an abominable death. The full complexity of the story is apparent when it is related to the Thousand and one nights, not merely at the level of motifs, but on a deeper level of intertextuality, which shows the structured relationship between Shahrazad’s tales and von Hofmannsthal’s modernist experiment. The key sentences are, first, the “king who loses his way while hunting in an unknown forest under weird trees heading towards a strange and splendid fate”; and, second: “If the house is complete, death will come”; and, third: “Where you will die, that’s where your feet will carry you.”29 Taken together, these three sentences construct a framework of space, time, and fate, which is typical for many stories of the Thousand and one nights. It is here that the intertextual relationship between 28  Berman, Orientalismus, 38, 194, 201ff. 29  Von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, 46.

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the Thousand and one nights and von Hofmannsthal’s work becomes visible in its most structural way. As I have argued elsewhere,30 many stories of the Thousand and one nights are constructed such that they depart from a disequilibrium in the spatiotemporal balance in a given narrative setting. This disequilibrium is often caused by a disruption of the regular interaction between space and time, for instance, a jinni casts a spell imprisoning a maiden, thereby inhibiting the regular course of events. The opposition and dissociation of time and space is mostly symbolized by the confinement of the hero or the heroine; he or she is separated from the world outside and ‘protected’ from the laws of time. In the story of the ‘Third qalandar’ a similar spatiotemporal blockade is at work: a merchant, having heard that his son will be in danger on his fifteenth birthday, locks him up in an underground palace on a deserted island, to protect him against the threat of ‘fate.’ But, of course, fate knows where to find him and the son is killed in spite of all precautions. A similar ‘cautionary confinement’ can be found in the story of ‘Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat,’31 in which a merchant hides his beautiful young son in order to protect him against from the envy of others. In the story of ‘Ali Sharr and Zumurrud’ a merchant’s son is isolated after the death of his father, and, finally, in the story of ‘Qamar al-Zaman and Budur’ the prince is imprisoned in a palace tower when he refuses to obey his father and marry one of the princesses offered to him. There are differences between the story of the ‘Third qalandar’ and these three stories: in the first case the course of fate is restored because ‘time’ succeeds in penetrating the enclosed space, whereas in the latter cases, the hero is either forced or enticed to leave the enclosed space and is once again subjected to the regular course of time. He thereby becomes an actor in the restoration of the balance between space and time, and ultimately realizes his destiny. This is usually achieved by long adventurous peregrinations in which coincidence, luck, and contingency seem to govern the hero’s experiences, before a new state of equilibrium is reached.32 It would seem that the latter type of pattern, in which the disrupted and restored interaction between time and space is constructed by the sequence of confinement, release, wandering, and ‘arrival’ fits the schema of von Hofmannsthal’s Das Märchen der 672. Nacht much better than the story of the ‘Third qalandar.’ After all, it is the opposition between confinement and wandering that is the crux of the story, and the idea of confinement is used as a 30  Van Leeuwen, The Thousand and One Nights. 31  Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:85–87. 32  Van Leeuwen, The Thousand and One Nights.

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form of essentializing the world by dissociating it from the laws of time, preserving a state of timeless bliss. And it is the notion of wandering that restores the power of time, as a force driving man toward his destiny. This interpretation of the story, and its connection to the Thousand and one nights is strengthened by the three key sentences mentioned above. First, the confinement preserves its protective power only to a certain extent: when the construction of the home is finished, death will come; second, there is no escape from the tyranny of time, and fate will ultimately triumph; and, third, the merchant’s son is compared to the ‘wandering king,’ linking the story to a theme recurring in the Thousand and one nights. Thus, an enclosed space can exclude the destructive force of time and maintain a timeless essence of life; but time cannot be kept out indefinitely; it is present in an immanent form and will re-impose its laws. This takes place through the labyrinthine journey of the hero, in which spaces are distorted and contingency seems to reign, until, finally, the hero is overtaken by his fate. If we take into consideration this structural reference to the Thousand and one nights, the interpretation of the story as an anti-modernist critique or as a psychological self-portrait of the author becomes a bit too self-evident. Instead, the story seems to represent a typical modernist effort to explore the complex relationship between time and space; it not only separates the two from each other, but also suggests multiple ways in which they interact. Time and space are fragmented, layered, and compressed; they appear to hide various forms in themselves, some of which only incidentally come to the surface, but all influence each other and inevitably become manifest in each other. The space of the house harbors the ‘gaze’ of the other, whereas the space outside is marked by traces of the house, thus a landscape, which is shaped by an inescapable, though largely invisible, system of laws, is created. This interpretation of the story throws a different light on von Hofmannsthal’s use of the Thousand and one nights as a narrative model and his orientalism. It may be true that he used the Thousand and one nights as a reservoir of motifs to enhance the exoticism of his stories and construct his own form of orientalism, but the impact of the work is not limited to this, as becomes particularly clear in Das Märchen der 672. Nacht. Here the influence of the Thousand and one nights is not visible through exotic motifs, but rather in a structural narrative ‘discussion’ of spatiotemporal patterns as a basic, dynamic element in fictional texts, and, through these texts, in social communities and individual lives. By doing this, von Hofmannsthal is not merely transposing a narrative device from the Thousand and one nights; rather he reworks a narrative model to conduct a modernist experiment, and explore the subjective, composite nature of spatiotemporal experiences. As we see below,

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this p ­ rocedure marks the transition of the intertextual use of the Thousand and one nights, from a mere repository of oriental images, to a deeper level of narrative constructions related to human experiences. This experiment is continued in Andreas, which is not obviously ‘orientalist,’ but which nevertheless contains the main elements that we have observed in Das Märchen der 672. Nacht, and that link von Hofmannsthal’s oeuvre to Shahrazad’s tales. Andreas Hugo von Hofmannsthal worked on the novel Andreas from 1907 until his sudden death in 1929, at which point the work was still incomplete. Nevertheless, the fragments and notes the author left behind give us an idea of the notions underlying the novel, and although it is usually not regarded as one of von Hofmannsthal’s ‘oriental’ narratives, we see that the different forms of von Hofmannsthal’s orientalism converge in this important work. There are several explicit remarks, especially in the notes, which link the text to the Thousand and one nights, such as the reference to the Kaf Mountain33 and instances of ‘oriental’ storytelling. The main reference, however, is the figure of Andreas, a literary character who is similar to the merchant’s son in Das Märchen der 672. Nacht.34 It is here that we should seek the structural intertextual relationship. The text of Andreas is too fragmented for us to be able to present a full, coherent summary of the story. The story concerns the journey of a young man – Andreas – to Venice as part of a Grand Tour, made in 1778, to explore life and the world. Andreas grew up in Vienna in a wealthy, civilized, but apparently stifling, milieu and was sent out by his father to travel and become acquainted with the habits of man and the secrets of the world. His adventurous journey from Vienna to Venice is told in flashbacks after Andreas’s arrival in Venice. After his departure from Vienna, Andreas is immediately confronted with the wickedness of man, when a crook, who offers him his services as a servant, steals his horse and money when they reach a farm to stay for the night. For two days Andreas is forced to wait at the farm, where he has several strange experiences and is initiated into love by the beautiful farmer’s daughter, Romana. This initiation fills him with happiness and even a pseudo-religious euphoria, and he wants to write a letter to his parents, announcing that he has become a man.35

33  Von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, 289. 34  Ibid., 305. 35  Ibid., 224; for references related to Andreas, see Koch, Erträge der Forschung.

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This flashback is inserted in the text after the episode of Andreas’s arrival in Venice. Here Andreas meets a strange masked figure, who brings him to a house where he rents a room. The house is inhabited by a rather unconventional family that seems to be involved in the mysterious, dreamlike spell with which the spaces of the city are imbued. During his explorations, Andreas meets the ‘Maltese,’ whose conversations become a frame of reference for Andreas’s restless search. The Maltese (later, Scaramozo) tells him about his philosophy of life and about his journey to Persia, where he engaged in storytelling séances with the sultan. Eventually, Andreas becomes involved with the sisters Maria and Mariquita, to whom he is fatefully attracted. Here the notes for Andreas end; it is impossible to try to reconstruct the countless possible endings of the novel. According to some scholars, von Hofmannsthal stopped working on the manuscript because the figure of Andreas had become fused with his own self-image, and this forced him to disclose too many discretions about his inner life and too much autobiographical information. The rather schematic sequence of events provides the framework for the true contents of the novel: the inner development of Andreas’s character and the exploration of the nature of his experiences. Initially, Andreas is portrayed as a diffuse character who consists of two components: he lacks ‘substance’ and agency, but is endowed with ‘moral courage.’ The reason for his journey was, initially, the snobbery of his father. During the journey, Andreas rarely acts with purposeful consideration, rather he lets himself be led by circumstances, incidents, and the interventions of others. This ambivalence is partly changed by his experience of love with Romana: She gives his soul a center and transforms his body into a ‘temple’ as a protection against the passage of time. Moreover, she makes him aware of a world lying beyond the visible world; this world is less empty and desolate, but is, seemingly, unreachable. The unification of these realms seems to be the purpose of Andreas’s journey: First he must be capable of love; then he must learn that body and spirit are one.36 The ultimate duality of reality, or at least of the experience of reality, is the theme that is explored throughout the novel. In spite of his partially unifying experience with Romana, Andreas realizes that everything, including human beings, is twofold. Nothing is determined by one, unified, experience. This duality is symbolized by the city of Venice, where people are accustomed to wearing masks. Andreas wants to mask himself, and thus comply with his consciousness of the essential distinction between ‘being’ and ‘appearing.’ Thus, the essential duality is twofold, it separates reality and appearance, and 36  Von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, 289.

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divides the inner nature with which this duality is experienced, into a divided self. This complex duality is personified by the sisters Maria and Mariquita, who obviously form a unity, but at the same time represent each other’s opposites. Maria personifies religious aestheticism, ethereal virtue, order, and harmony, whereas Mariquita embodies physicality, freedom, disorder, sensuality, viciousness, and a devilishness; she is restless, godless, libertine, cynical, and lustful. These two antithetical characters awaken the contradictory components of Andreas’s soul and reveal the essential duality hidden in the appearance of unity. Andreas is unable to choose between the two sisters: his inner fragmentation, which they symbolize, cannot be cured.37 The antithesis to Andreas’s duality is the Maltese, who appears to be, unaccountably, ‘at home’ in reality and who states that the ‘spirit’ is a unifying force that penetrates everything. The Maltese makes Andreas feel that all disparate experiences will somehow converge, but he does not understand how this will happen. In the company of the Maltese, Andreas’s existence is refined and ‘collected.’ He feels elevated and superior; love and hate are closer to him and he begins to believe that there might be beauty within his own nature. The Maltese makes him more receptive to his own nature.38 Thus, although Andreas cannot share the Maltese’s almost mystical consciousness of unity, it still has a unifying and revitalizing effect on his self-awareness. His communication more or less removes the veils that hide his inner self, that structure his experiences, and give them their proper meaning. It is through the Maltese, for instance, that Andreas realizes that he is truly in love with Romana. Moreover, he makes Andreas aware of the way in which the spirit imbues not only the soul, but also the material world: “Spirit is doing…. People are the suffering and the acts of the Spirit.”39 Within this struggle between fragmentary and unifying forces, which takes place in reality and in the soul, a parallel opposition between the Orient and the Occident is drawn. The link between the two realms appears in the figure of the Maltese, who has traveled to Persia and has met the sultan. The journey not only symbolizes the oriental spirit, but explicitly exposes the dying Europe to Asia, to present it with a new and wholesome synthesis. This synthesis is concentrated in the mysterious space of Venice, where East and West meet, and where several historical epochs converge: “M moves in a time that is not fully present, and in a place which is not fully here. For him Venice is a

37  Ibid., 273–279. 38  Ibid., 272–273. 39  Ibid., 271–272.

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fusion between Antiquity and the Orient.”40 For the Maltese, too, temporal and spatial realities are fragmented, but they are interwoven, integrated into each other to form a unified whole. Time and space have their own reality, which manifests itself in the spatiotemporal labyrinth of Venice, where multiple realities can coexist. At the end of von Hofmannsthal’s notes for Andreas, the ‘spirit’ of the Orient is linked to storytelling, through the medium of the Maltese. According to the Maltese, storytelling shows the essential curiosity of the East and the limitations of Europe; this is clear when he tells Andreas about the sultan: “His way of listening to fairy tales is varied, sometimes enjoying them, or with the City of Brass or the Queen of the Serpents [stories from the Thousand and one nights] with an indomitable: Ha, I have seen this. For him the Europeans are the people of boundaries.”41 It is clear that von Hofmannsthal did not intend for the story­ telling motif to be incorporated indirectly, as a reference; rather he intended to incorporate several stories in the text of the novel, to diversify the generic structure of the narrative, enhance its composite structure, and comment on the generic qualities of the oriental tale, as opposed to European fiction. The insertion of stories would have incorporated the theme of duality into the text itself, and created two layers to interact with each other and reflect upon each other’s ‘nature,’ influence the other’s status and function in the narrative. Of course, the inclusion of oriental tales within the framework of the novel confirms the intertextual relationship between Andreas and the Thousand and one nights, as a reference to the Orient and as a means to convey ideas. However, it is not only here, but throughout the novel that the structural relationship is evident in the pattern of the story, especially if we take into account the model of Das Märchen der 672. Nacht. In Andreas, too, we have an opposition between enclosure and wandering: an oppressive milieu dominated by the father, from which the son must break free by embarking upon a journey. The son is innocent and naïve, unacquainted with the evils and threats in the world outside, and the journey is explicitly characterized as an initiation, an intentional introduction to the world and the habits of man. This initiation is meant to complete the process of growing up, or the discovery of the hero’s individual identity. This is achieved primarily by an initiation into love and sexuality, which is the source of mental and physical self-perception, particularly in relation to others. Through a love experience, Andreas develops a consciousness of the self as part of a physical reality.

40  Ibid., 298. 41  Ibid., 313.

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As in the case of the stories of the Thousand and one nights, the journey of Andreas is typified as a labyrinthine peregrination. Although Andreas has a destination (Venice), and an aim (to know the world), his actions are rarely motivated by willful decisions, but rather by chance events. Soon after his departure, he allows himself to be (mis)led by an adroit villain – we see the similarities to the story of ‘Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat’ – and he learns his first lesson about the evils of the world. He is forced to stay at the farm, where he comes under the influence of a young woman. In the sequence of the story this status of Andreas as an homme récit, a narrative character who is shaped by external interventions rather than by internal decisions,42 is confirmed when he allows himself to be molded and steered by others. In some instances, these others reflect the often-contradictory components of Andreas’s character, and show the complexity of the perception of self and others, and the moral dilemmas that inevitably must be confronted when one mixes his sense of self with that of the outer world. The paralysis of Andreas’s will is caused, in part, by this insolvable complexity. As in the case of the Thousand and one nights stories, Andreas’s inner development and his dependence on external events is reflected in the spatiotemporal setting in which he moves. The spaces he travels through are not neutral backdrops, but rather reflections of his inner states. They are, so to speak, landscapes of experience that simultaneously shape his self-awareness and are shaped by it. The settings are distorted to reveal his mental state and his progress on the road to self-awareness, and form a dreamlike spell in the physical environment. The farm in particular, the landscape through which Andreas travels, and Venice are all subjective ‘mindscapes’ and reflections of emotional states. Space is a labyrinth that permanently hides and reveals, without apparent logic, and thereby reflects Andreas’s discoveries and experiences. Space offers obstacles and openings that enable Andreas to gradually come to grips with his environment. Likewise, the spatial framework of the novel is compressed and stretched to conform to Andreas’s experiences; it allows him to linger in particularly meaningful situations – such as the days at the farm, or the ‘excursion’ to the church in Venice, and reflect on the significance of these situations for his self-exploration. Moreover, the experience of time is complicated by several narrative techniques, including the recounting of personal memories, lengthy flashbacks, dreams, hallucinations, and, finally, a form of narrated time, for 42  For the concept of the homme récit, see Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire du Décaméron (La Hague: Mouton, 1969); this is discussed in more detail in part 5, chapter 15, “The Sindbad syndrome.”

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example, when the Maltese tells him the stories that he exchanged with the Persian sultan. Most of these manifestations of time are imposed upon him by circumstances, such as postponement, sleep, self-exploration, or the magical forces of reality. It is clear that the past plays an important role in Andreas’s mental state and that part of his effort is directed at creating a present that can contain his past and transform his past experiences into harmonious communication with others. He must find harmony between time and experience. These narrative uses of the spatiotemporal framework resemble the patterns in many of the stories in the Thousand and one nights and for the most part they serve the same purpose: they describe a process of individuation, growing up, and the shaping of a sense of self. It is the hero’s reflection on and awareness of these subjective experiences of space and time that distinguishes Andreas from the models of the Thousand and one nights. Whereas in the Thousand and one nights the spatiotemporal milieu is not homogeneous, but still experienced by the hero as a whole, Andreas is increasingly conscious of the experiential nature of time and space and gradually discovers their fragmented character and instability as a co-efficient of subjective experiences. Reality is a composite construction in which perceptions, inner states, and material reality all contribute, often in confusing and contradictory ways. This complexity prevents Andreas from forming a unified coherent self, since the various components of the spatiotemporal experience keep interrupting his search for coherence. The story, however, suggests that such a unity exists; it is personified in the Maltese, who has ‘internalized’ the essence of the Orient and who believes in the unifying ‘spirit’ (Geist) immanent in matter and soul. These concerns, of course, are eventually regarded as typical of the modernist experiment. If we consider the influence of the Thousand and one nights on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s prose works, we find that it is not confined to the insertion of specific motifs or characters in a collage-like manner, nor by relocating them in a familiar setting or by using them to enhance the exotic atmosphere of the story. We have seen that intertextuality penetrates into the narrative on a deep structural level that defines the framework of the story, the generic complexities, and the dilemmas that are central to the text’s intentions. Moreover, it is clear that this intertextuality is crucial for precisely those aspects of von Hofmannsthal’s work which give it such a prominent place in the history of modernism. Von Hofmannsthal marks an important transition in the reception of the Thousand and one nights in European literature, from the Kunstmärchen as a specific genre, via the fantastic tales, to the conscious, typically modernist, effort to problematize concepts of space and time, reality and subjective experience. The incorporation of the Thousand and one nights in

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von Hofmannsthal’s work reflects the way in which the tales could be related to a new awareness of reality, which, by the modern period, had lost its essential unity. The ‘otherness’ of the Thousand and one nights as an exotic text and the exploration of the various components of reality in the stories themselves were perfectly suited to question objective, unified visions of reality. The stories that we have analyzed above seem to be connected by a single theme, one which pervades von Hofmannsthal’s prose works: the exploration of an existential dichotomy. This dichotomy is visible on various levels; first, it is represented by the text itself, through the incorporation of texts of various genres and by the suggestion that behind the representational function of a text, deeper meanings are inevitably hidden. This concept, defined by von Hofmannsthal as a ‘trope,’ is explained specifically by reference to the Thousand and one nights: “From the apparent meaning to a higher one behind it, which leads us in a flash to the Sublime.”43 The text, it would seem, is itself part of an epiphany that shows the intricate surface of a predominantly hidden system of meanings. Second, von Hofmannsthal’s exploration revolves around the discovery of the essentially dichotomous nature of the human soul. This is most explicitly represented by the figures of As‘ad and Amjad, the two wandering half-brothers, and Maria and Mariquita, who personify contradictory, contesting drives in the same character, drives that expose the struggles that take place in the human soul. This dichotomy is also expressed by the oppositions: confinement and wandering, isolation and promiscuity, enclosure upon oneself and openness toward the other. It is connected with the concept of Allomatie, defined by von Hofmannsthal as the giving up of autistic isolation, which is sterile, and the urge to communicate with others as a source of change and “connectedness,”44 the relocation of the self within the regular sequence of time. Finally, the dichotomy becomes manifest in the inseparable mingling of reality and subjective experience. This is especially expressed in the fragmentation of perceptions of space and time, the ‘real’ presence and influence of dreams, memories, and stories, but also by the hero’s discovery of an inner world, derived from a spiritual connection between himself and those forces which seem to undermine the laws of objective reality, but which at the same time obey some hidden authority, or, perhaps, fate. This awareness causes the ‘other’ to penetrate even the most enclosed spaces by way of ‘signs,’ people or epiphanies blurring the boundaries between reality, perception, and the 43  Köhler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 68. 44  Von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, 305.

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imagination. The initiation of the hero, his departure from his confinement, his wanderings through ‘real’ space, his ‘allomatic’ interaction with others are all directed at the experience of this subjective world, with its own spatiotemporal laws, and its fixedness in fate. The initiation is, at the same time, the discovery of dichotomy and the first step toward finding a new synthesis in which contradictory experiences are integrated. This complex of interconnected themes is explored in the framework of orientalism, which uses the intertextual potential of the Thousand and one nights. The different forms of dichotomy seem to be reflected in the dichotomy between Europe and the Orient. Hugo von Hofmannsthal suggests that Europe increasingly isolates itself in materialism, individualism, and the subjection of time and space for the sake of progress. This isolation is sterile and must be revitalized through interaction with the Orient, which represents the ‘Other,’ spirituality, and an enduring concept of time. In this sense, it is true, as Berman argues, that von Hofmannsthal’s orientalism can be seen as stereotypical and as a critique of modernity. However, the way von Hofmannsthal uses the Orient, and the complex of metaphors connected with it, to lay bare the ontological dichotomy which he observes in human existence and objective reality would seem to be much more important. This dichotomy is located in the city of Vienna: “Vienna is the old porta Orientis for Europe … Vienna is also the porta Orientis for the other mysterious Orient, the realm of the unconscious.”45 For von Hofmannsthal the Orient is the empire of the unconscious, the world that reveals the essential ambiguity of reality. It is this preoccupation that determines the importance of the Thousand and one nights for von Hofmannsthal’s work as a source of modernist concepts. And it is in Andreas that this inclination is most prominently expressed.

The Contingency of Fate: André Gide’s Les faux-monnayeurs

In the two works by Hugo von Hofmannsthal discussed above, letters play a crucial role as the hero crosses the boundary between his enclosed space and the open spaces of his ‘journey.’ In Das Märchen der 672. Nacht a letter stimulates him to leave his protected domain, while in Andreas the letters of the protagonist convey his new experiences, stressing the differences between the two phases of his life; and, moreover, the letters themselves are the main substance of the narrative. Looking at the notes outlining the further concept of the novel, this procedure was not coincidental, but rather part of a broader 45  Berman, Orientalismus, 183.

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experiment to include a variety of narrative forms in the novel, especially those derived from storytelling and those that use inserted stories. In true modernist fashion, this experimental textual strategy destabilizes the spatial setting of the narrative and its coherence as a completed story. This urge to experiment with textual form was developed further by the author analyzed in the present section, André Gide; his novel Les faux-monnayeurs (1925) makes use of the complex structural model of the Thousand and one nights. One of the most intriguing aspects of the Thousand and one nights is the way in which it relates its own origin. In the frame story of the text, in which the tragedy of Shahriyar is explained and Shahrazad begins her nightly narration, it is made clear that the collection came into being for a reason, that the chain of stories was set into motion by a cause, and that the narration of these stories had a specific purpose. This implies the existence of a direct relationship between the stories that are being told and the course of events which form the context in which they are embedded. This self-reflexivity is achieved by juxtaposing a frame story which structurally and thematically contains a reservoir of embedded stories, and the device of interruption, which establishes the link between the frame and the stories. Through the interruptions, the two components in the text interact and their parallel continuums are broken. As we have seen above and see below in various cases, this structural setup inspired many later authors, who used the Thousand and one nights as a model for constructing a variety of complex texts. Theoretically, the structure of the frame story containing embedded stories operates in the narrative in three ways. First, in the text itself two levels are created which inescapably influence each other, not only in relation to the deployment of the narrative itself, but also with regard to its possible interpretations. The frame story determines the setting of the story, and represents a narrative reality that defines the parameters for the text as a whole. The characters that appear in the frame story may have counterparts in the embedded story and their attitudes, problems, and situations may be the incentive for the storyteller to tell specific stories. By contrast, the events related in the stories may affect the attitudes, opinions, and actions of the characters in the frame story, and create new openings for the continuation of the narrative. Thus, the interaction between the two levels of the text produces a form of narrative dynamism by introducing new impetuses and opening up new narrative spaces and directions on both levels. Apart from this, the frame story defines the perspective from which the whole work should be or can be read. It not only elucidates the narrative parameters for the stories themselves, but also the parameters of interpretation,

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and, moreover, the generic characteristics. In the case of the Thousand and one nights, for instance, the frame story explicitly refers to the wisdom and knowledge of Shahrazad, to the didactic nature of the stories she is about to tell, and to miraculous events and marvelous figures that occur in them, thereby the text is linked to other collections of the same type – whether ironically or not – and demarcates the ways in which it should be understood. Moreover, in the frame story the narrative is clearly associated with the struggle between the sexes and, more specifically, with forms of male dominance. Finally, the art of storytelling is unambiguously related to eroticism as a female strategy against male violence. Since the frame story is so explicit about these narrative ‘markers,’ it is difficult to read the subsequent stories without bearing them in mind. Second, the structure of the embedded story usually not only creates an interaction between two textual levels, but also between the two textual types. The formal technique may be used to report on narrative events from different perspectives, for instance, events viewed by a variety of people; this adds an element of subjectivity and multiplicity to the narrative. In this way, the stories show that the nature of the events that are described is not self-evident, that different versions of events may exist alongside each other, that there is no objective description of them, that a subjective description may alter their apparent nature, and that several events that were seemingly unrelated were in fact linked, or at least occurred simultaneously. In this way, composite texts are conducive to the deconstruction of unifying, homogeneous, and monolithic visions of events within the narrative, or at least, they are able to show the complexity of unifying visions. There are many stories hidden in each event, which in turn contains and disseminates multiple visions. This interaction between different perspectives is strengthened by the juxtaposition of different types of texts. In the Thousand and one nights, the frame story is presented as the narrative, diegetical ‘reality,’ which is governed by Shahriyar’s obsessive behavior, his royal authority, and his sexual fears. This ‘realistic’ level is contrasted with the imaginary world conjured up by Shahrazad; it represents an alternative to Shahriyar’s reality and a different approach to and evaluation of events. Although at first sight, Shahrazad’s stories may not seem ‘real,’ in fact they are part of reality, not only as systems of thought and explanations imposed on the apparent incoherence of events, but also as narrative performances that take place within the scope of Shahriyar’s reality. Thus, in this way, too, the composite narrative contradicts the simplicity of certain visions of reality, and adds new dimensions derived from alternative forms of discourse. The device of juxtaposition is of course temporary,

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since the final aim is to show that the two discourses should converge and ultimately the imagination should have its rightful place in Shahriyar’s vision of reality. Third, by describing the interaction between a narrative ‘reality’ and an imaginary, discursive reality, the composite text indirectly comments on the relationship between texts and reality in general. In the Thousand and one nights, this relationship is, literally, embodied by Shahrazad, who links the imaginary world of her stories to Shahriyar’s reality by combining sexuality and the performative act of storytelling. In this way, she hopes to influence the course of events; but throughout the story, the reader knows that a positive outcome is by no means guaranteed: at any point Shahriyar could decide to execute her and stop her narrative. Apparently, for a narrative to effectively intervene in the course of events, it requires specific characteristics, such as suspense and marvel. Still, it can be powerful and decisive, although its effectiveness is determined by the mutual interaction between reality and narrative. Ultimately, the narrative should change reality, that is, it should transform Shahriyar’s psychological aberration. It is not difficult to see that the compiler of the text saw the relationship between reality and narrative in the frame story as a model for the effect that his narrative should have on the reader: he, too, should be transformed by the stories and learn from them. But the reader, too, can stop reading at any point and refuse to accept the storyteller’s admonitions. Thus, narratives are capable of interfering with real life and the course of events, but this implies that they are subject to the general contingencies of life. In this section, we discuss the way in which André Gide made use of the conceptual potential of the Thousand and one nights in his important novel Les faux-monnayeurs. But first, we must outline briefly Gide’s specific form of orientalism and its relationship to the Thousand and one nights. Gide’s Orientalism In his study on orientalism in the work of André Gide (1869–1951), Raymond Tahhan discerns two constitutive and influential reading experiences in Gide’s youth: The Bible and the Thousand and one nights.46 These texts reflect two major influences that shaped his life and oeuvre, namely, religion and the Orient. While the first filled him with moral anxiety, caused by its conflict with his homosexuality, the latter provided him with the means to liberate himself, mentally, from the burden of strict morality and feelings of guilt. His first journey to North Africa, in 1893, brought about a far-reaching aesthetic and ethical experience and led to his lifelong passion for the Orient and Africa. This 46  R. Tahhan, André Gide et l’Orient (Paris: Imprimerie Abécé, 1963).

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passion is reflected in his works, especially Le voyage d’Urien (1893), Nourritures terrestres (1897), El-Hadj (1899), and L’Immoraliste (1902). Apart from these fictional works, Gide left reports of his travel accounts of his journeys and his journal.47 For Gide, the Orient was not a well-defined geographic region, but rather a diffuse concept defined by an atmosphere and specific emotions. When he visited North Africa, he identified himself with the exotic environment, which for him represented a form of estrangement from reality. In this atmosphere, he was able to cast off the moral restrictions imposed on his sensuality; he experienced a new sense of beauty and a lust for life and its pleasures. This applied especially to sexuality and the liberation from the taboo on homosexuality that had oppressed him in his native France. In Gide’s thought and writing, the Orient remained intimately associated with eroticism and sexuality: D’abord Orient de rêve et de civilisation pastorale inculqué au jeune André, par la Bible et les Voyages de Sindbad le Marin, cet Orient se transforme, sous l’influence du Symbolisme, en literature de fin de siècle, pour s’épanouir, un peu plus tard, par le contact direct avec l’Afrique, en une réalité vivante qui pénètre le corps malade de Gide pour le guérir, envahit son âme ankylosée par un puritanisme trop étroit, pour la libérer de toutes les contraintes, le lance corps et âme disponible et désinvolte dans les jouissances des sens et dans l’exercice de toutes les functions de la vie. Ce dernier Orient, prisme déformateur, sera son viatique jusqu’à la fin de ses jours.48 The Orient was thus not merely a setting for stories or poems that provided an exotic alienation, rather it was an experience in which Gide indulged himself and which he shaped to answer his needs. This emotional identification with the Orient can be perceived in Gide’s relationship to the Thousand and one nights, which he read at an early age and praised as a major influence on his thought and work over the course of the rest of his life. In his diaries and letters, he refers to the Thousand and one nights several times.49 In addition, he was friends with Mardrus, whose translation of the Nights appeared in installments from 1899 to 1904 in La revue blanche, to which Gide was affiliated. In 1901 Gide wrote an article in La revue blanche in which he compared the Mardrus translation with that of 47  André Gide, Journal, vol. 1, 1887–1925; vol. 2, 1926–50 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996–97). 48  Tahhan, André Gide, 26. 49  Gide, Journal, 1:290, 292, 699, 1275.

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Galland; he reproached the latter for adapting the text to French taste, obliterating the color, historical context, language, and civilization of the original. Everything that could ‘alienate’ the reader had been systematically deleted. In contrast, Mardrus’s translation was authentic and showed the ‘real’ thinking, feeling, speech, acts, and life of Arabic society. Mardrus had penetrated the spirit of the text and retrieved its original naiveté.50 Gide defended Mardrus against the accusation that his translation was too ‘personal’ and subjective, mainly by arguing that the Thousand and one nights was an anonymous work that had its own style and authenticity. It was a work in which a whole world, a whole nation, revealed itself; it was full of sensuality and free of moral restraints. According to Gide, reading the Thousand and one nights removes moral principles, makes the reader oblivious of the past and morality, and fills him with consciousness of the present. The work showed that sexuality in the Orient was seen as natural and liberating, whereas in the West it was suppressed and laden with taboos. Thus, Gide used the Thousand and one nights, in its ‘authentic’ form of the Mardrus translation, as a textual equivalent to his Orient; it served to deconstruct the oppressive atmosphere of his homeland and offered unbounded sensuality, at the same time it was a place of the imagination and a source of authenticity. The influence of the Thousand and one nights can be perceived most clearly in Gide’s Le voyage d’Urien, a novella that was published in 1893. The story is about a writer who, tired of his work, imagines himself on a ship that sails to exotic places, where he experiences strange adventures of various kinds. A key characteristic is the visit to princess Haïatalnefus, who has a magic ring with which she imprisons sailors. The novella is a frame story set in a temporal frame and indulges in symbolist fantasies with clear sexual overtones. It is filled with exuberant emotions, fears, guilt, and an anxious search for beauty. According to Tahhan, the story should be read as a Freudian account in which the author searches for his true, oriental, identity through the figure of Urien. He explores his resources, fights hedonistic impulses, and transforms a sensual nostalgia into an artistic creation. It is the account of a journey meant to exorcise a demon and restore creative harmony by confronting a radical alterity steeped in sensuality.51 The story of Le voyage d’Urien shows the influence of the Thousand and one nights both in form and content. In other works, references are more incidental, except perhaps Protée mal enchainé, which has the composite structure 50  Tahhan, André Gide, 1:220–222; and in André Gide, Prétextes; sur quelques points de littérature et de morale (Paris: Mercure de France, 1923), 151–159, 212–213. 51  Tahhan, André Gide, 83–109.

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of the Nights. The influence of the Thousand and one nights on Gide’s only novel, Les faux-monnayeurs, is less obvious, but the two texts are unambiguously linked in the episode in which Vincent visits Lilian’s apartment (which is decorated in oriental style) and dresses in oriental garb to listen to her story. As in the case of von Hofmannsthal’s Andreas, in Les faux-monnayeurs the influence of the Thousand and one nights must be sought, in particular, at the conceptual and structural levels, which echo Shahrazad’s narrative strategies. Les faux-monnayeurs The novel Les faux-monnayeurs was written, consciously, as a literary experiment, as a text that would defy the conventions of the novel as a genre. Gide explicitly stated his intentions to break the rules of novel-writing and the limits it imposes on the author. Therefore, for a good understanding of the novel we must, inevitably, take into account of Gide’s statements about his project, not only those statements in his diaries, but also those in Le journal des fauxmonnayeurs, in which he explained his initial ideas for the novel.52 Thus, from the beginning, he intended for the novel to be part of a cluster of texts; the Journal formed a kind of framework for the actual novel. The multilayered nature of the text is repeated in the novel itself: several chapters are taken from the ‘journal’ of Édouard, one of the main characters. In this journal, Édouard, who is a writer, meditates about a novel he is planning to write and title Les faux-monnayeurs. Given its unconventionality, or even anti-conventionality, the story of the novel is quite difficult to summarize. The story is based on two historical incidents, first the discovery of a gang of counterfeiters of money, and, second, the “accidental” suicide of a pupil at a boarding school. Whereas the counterfeiters are part of a thematic layer in the story, and structurally support the image of a fraudulent, hypocritical society, the incident of the suicide does not serve the plot or unify the story as a whole. Gide rejected the conventional method of structuring the events of the narrative in such a way that they inevitably or even logically lead to a specific, preconceived outcome. Moreover, he denounced the tradition of filling a story with fictional events, figures, and descriptions only to mold an imitation or realistic representation of life. For Gide, this method was too artificial and, in spite of its pretense to realism, was essentially unrealistic. For a narrative to be authentic, according to Gide, it must not develop according to a preconceived plan, but rather unravel itself in a natural and unstructured way, like the growth of a plant. 52  André Gide, Journal des faux-monnayeurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1927).

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In his Journal, Gide explains that he does not want to construct his novel by artificially relating events to each other. The story should not have a center, or intrigue supported by conscious, deliberate, rational motives or logical sequences of scenes. The events should group themselves independently from the main characters, as mere coincidences, not steered by a unifying plot. The sense of realism is not produced by adding descriptions and presenting the reader with a conceptually coherent narrative; it is not evoked by a truthful representation of supposedly real events, but rather by the coincidental nature of the reported events, their seemingly incoherent succession that causes unexpected effects, which seem unconnected. In this way, Gide hoped to involve his readers in the process of narration. It is through their participation and imagination that the narrative acquires both its authenticity and its full shape. Or, in the words of Gide himself: “Le génie du roman fait vivre le possible, il ne fait pas revivre le réel.”53 The main protagonists of the novel are Bernard Profitendieu and Olivier Molinier, two adolescents who are the sons of judges and are just finishing their high school education. In the first chapter, Bernard finds a seventeen-year-old letter addressed to his mother, suggesting that he was conceived during a love affair and that his father is not his real father. Indignant and hurt, he decides to leave his home and take control of his life. The story observes Bernard and his best friend Olivier as they tentatively find their way in society. The adolescents are fascinated by the third main character of the story, Olivier’s uncle Édouard, who has been in England for some time, but was called back to Paris by a letter from his former lover, Laura, who asks him for help after she is abandoned by her new lover Vincent – Bernard’s older brother – who has left her pregnant. Olivier meets Édouard at the train station, where the latter loses the receipt for the luggage deposit, which Bernard finds. When Bernard fetches Édouard’s suitcase, he finds his journal, which initiates him into Édouard’s inner world. Édouard’s counterpart and antithesis is Robert de Passavant, the opportunistic friend of Vincent and a writer of secondary rank. The unscrupulous Robert is planning to establish a literary journal and asks Olivier to become its editor-in-chief. At the same time, Bernard travels with Édouard and Laura to Switzerland, hoping to be employed as Édouard’s secretary. There they meet Boris, the grandson of an elderly couple who has befriended Édouard. Boris receives psychotherapeutic treatment in a holiday resort and after his return is lodged in a boarding school. Because of their divergent loyalties – to Robert and Édouard – Bernard and Olivier drift apart and their friendship becomes strained. Eventually Olivier realizes that he is more attached to the honest 53  Ibid., 113.

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and authentic Édouard than to the deceitful Robert, but he falls prey to an inner struggle that ends in a suicide attempt. Finally, he recovers in the care of Édouard and Bernard. These antithetical main characters are surrounded by minor figures who weave a web of intrigue around them. First, the parents of Bernard and Olivier personify the traditional straitjacket of morality and authority. Among the story’s characters are their brothers: Vincent is an arrogant opportunist, who, after his dismal affair with Laura, is seduced by Lilian Griffith, who is equally opportunistic – she travels with him to Africa; Georges, Olivier’s younger brother, is prone to theft and participates in the gang of counterfeiters. He steals letters from his father that reveal the latter’s adultery. The couple La Pérouse are Boris’s grandparents; they live a secluded life and are connected with the Azarais boarding school. All these characters not only provide intrigue and the networks in which the adventures of the main protagonists are embedded and thus enable them to reveal their character and meditations, but they also personify different levels of insincerity, dishonesty, and fraud. Thus, they strengthen the metaphorical layer of ‘counterfeit,’ which is the landscape in which Bernard and Olivier must find their way. The novel concludes with the “accidental” suicide of Boris in the Azarais boarding house. A group of pupils have signed a kind of suicide pact, which started as a game, and Boris’s name is drawn from a hat. The conspiracy is only meant to frighten the boy, but the pistol turns out to be loaded. This tragic accident seems, at first sight, to represent the climax or the plot of the novel, thus it would appear to be a contradiction of Gide’s initial refusal to insert a structural denouement. A closer view shows, however, that the accident is not related to the previous events and there is no logical, ‘instrumental,’ connection between the sub-plots and the intrigues and Boris’s death. If there is a structural relationship linking the tragedy to the rest of the novel, it may be that the death of the boy is the ultimate result of the accumulation of fraud, lies, and hypocrisy that permeate society and are gradually but systematically revealed by the narrative. Otherwise there is no structural build-up to support the plot or make it the logical outcome of events. It is one of many possible events occurring in the lives of the protagonists. This brief summary only superficially touches on the complex and rich texture of the narrative. Still, for our purposes it is sufficient to stress, first, the multi-centered nature of the narrative, which consists of many sub-plots that influence each other and together shape the course of events and the development of relationships in an apparently arbitrary way; and, second, the composite setup of the text, which consists of several layers that refer to each other and emphasize the fragmented nature of the narrative of the events that are

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related. We now proceed to examine how these fundamental characteristics may relate to the Thousand and one nights. Les faux-monnayeurs and the Thousand and One Nights Les faux-monnayeurs makes a clear reference to the Thousand and one nights when Lilian Griffith has Vincent wear a silk, pistachio-green jallaba with an oriental ribbon and a turban, and sit on the bed to listen to a story. It is Lilian’s intention to ‘civilize’ Vincent, to educate him and teach him, as a self-indulgent man, how to best utilize his abilities. This reference is, first, significant for the episode itself: it reveals the essentially opportunistic nature of the relationship between the two lovers, their spirit of adventure, and their indulgence in sensual pleasures. It also has a broader significance for the novel as a whole, in the way it refers to Shahrazad as the primeval model of storytelling, with its primary functions as a form of communication between the sexes and as a source of didactic exempla. Rather than directly imitating the model of the Thousand and one nights, the episode links the two texts through a miniature incorporation of the concept of the Nights. It exemplifies the rationale of inserting stories within the text, thereby creating different narrative levels. Apart from some minor motifs, such as the talisman that Boris wears, we can note other parallels to the stories of the Thousand and one nights. For example, the beginning of the story, in which Bernard leaves his parental home, is a familiar motif in many stories of the Nights, where princes or the sons of merchants leave their homes to discover their destinies. In particular, the novel brings to mind the story of ‘As‘ad and Amjad,’ in which two half-brothers are banned from the royal palace after a (forged) letter is discovered that reveals their alleged treason against their father, the king. Here, too, the father is the quintessential symbol of authority, he sets the standards of morality and law; the letter suggests the disloyalty and unreliability of women. The two brothers set out on a labyrinthine journey through a world full of dangers and enticements, in which they must find their way, gather experience, and discover their place in the world. Their adventures seem to be governed by coincidence and luck, or perhaps more generally, by fate. At a certain point – as in the case of Bernard and Olivier – the two half-brothers go their separate ways, only to meet again at the end of the story.54 In the Thousand and one nights, the theme of adolescent princes growing into adulthood is usually set in a distinct spatial framework, especially by juxtaposing the enclosed, confined spaces symbolizing authority, tradition, and 54  For a synopsis of the story, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:342–345.

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social order against the disorderly outer world that is full of danger, strange events, and extraordinary people. The princes must prove that they can survive in this ‘wilderness’ before they are able to take on their new role as heirs to the throne. In Les faux-monnayeurs, we perceive a similar pattern. Bernard and Olivier attempt to escape from the stifling claustrophobic atmosphere of their homes and start exploring the world. Most interior settings symbolize stagnancy, authority, and social control, while Bernard and Olivier search for freedom and new relationships and experiences by seeking mobility and change. These elements clearly fit into the pattern of an initiation marking the transition to adulthood: the dissociation from a familiar environment, a liminal status in which new (especially sexual) experiences are gathered, and finally, their reincorporation into the social order. In the ‘reconstruction’ of this initiation, Bernard and Olivier are, at the same time, ‘twin’ figures and opposites complementing each other. Apart from these parallels on the level of motifs and themes, Les faux-monnayeurs resembles the Thousand and one nights in its composite, multilayered structure. As in the case of the Thousand and one nights, Les faux-monnayeurs is primarily structured as a frame text. The first frame consists of the Journal des faux-monnayeurs, the text which explains the origin of the narrative, and, within the novel, of the perspective of the omniscient narrator, who directly addresses the reader and who, as a director, switches the focus to the various characters. A third level is represented by the texts and text fragments embedded in the account of the narrator, especially Édouard’s journal, but also several other written texts, such as letters, quotations, etc. Another, fourth, level can be found in Édouard’s journal, which refers to the novel he is writing or other written texts. Thus, as in the Thousand and one nights, a complex structure is created when different levels are applied within the narrative; these levels interact and together produce the dynamism of the narrative as a whole. We now examine the function of these different levels for the Thousand and one nights: the interaction between the components; the juxtaposition of multiple, subjective views; the perspective of interpretation; and the exploration of the relationship between text and reality. Frames and Self-Reflexivity As in the Thousand and one nights, the self-reflexive character of the text is produced by using cross-references between two levels of the text, especially the journal of Édouard and Gide’s own Journal des faux-monnayeurs. Gide states that his journal is in fact Édouard’s journal, and Édouard’s journal contains meditations about writing a novel entitled Les faux-monnayeurs, which clearly resembles the intentions mentioned in Gide’s journal. This identification of

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the two texts is expressed explicitly when Édouard says: “Oui, si je ne parviens pas à l’écrire, ce livre, c’est que l’histoire du livre m’aura plus intéressé que le livre lui-même; qu’elle aura pris sa place; et ce sera mieux.”55 Thus, perhaps Édouard’s journal is the most important part of the novel, as it reflects on how a novel evolves and is extrapolated from the events that the author experiences and his relationship to them. Like Gide, Édouard, in a search for a deeper authenticity, wants to force a break with the traditional conventions of the novel: Mon roman n’a pas de sujet…. Mettons si vous préférez qu’il n’y aura pas un sujet … “Une tranche de vie,” disait l’école naturaliste. Le grand défaut de cette école, c’est de couper sa tranche toujours dans le même sens; dans le sens du temps, en longueur. Pourquoi pas en largeur? ou en profondeur? Pour moi, je voudrais ne pas couper du tout. Comprenez-moi: je voudrais tout y faire entrer, dans ce roman. Pas de coup de ciseaux pour arrêter, ici plutôt que là, sa substance. Depuis plus d’un an que j’y travaille, il ne m’arrive rien que je n’y verse, et que je n’y veuille faire entrer: ce que je vois, ce que je sais, tout ce que m’apprend la vie des autres et la mienne …56 In this process, the author is like a ‘prime mover’ who sets the narrative in motion, but has no clear conception of its structure, rather he lets it acquire its shape by responding to events. This implies that the narrative is essentially endless: X … soutient que le bon romancier doit, avant de commencer son livre, savoir comment ce livre finira. Pour moi, qui laisse aller le mien à l’aventure, je considère que la vie ne nous propose jamais rien qui, tout autant qu’un aboutissement ne puisse être considéré comme un nouveau point de depart. ‘Pourrait être continué …’ c’est sur ces mos que je voudrais terminer mes Faux-Monnayeurs.57 It is this function of self-reflexivity in the levels of the text that most clearly echoes the Thousand and one nights, where the frame story provides the key that unleashes a huge reservoir of stories, which seem to be self-generative and self-reproductive. But apart from this structural parallel, the frame text of 55  André Gide, Les faux-monnayeurs (Paris: Gallimard 2008), 208. 56  Ibid., 205–206. 57  Ibid., 358.

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Les faux-monnayeurs presents the reader – as in the case of the Thousand and one nights – with an interpretive perspective as well. Events are commented on, not only to provide a personal view of them, but rather to discuss the ways in which they should influence the setup of the novel or be incorporated into it. There is an ongoing examination of narrative representation that sets the parameters for the interpretation of events if they were to be described in Édouard’s novel. By this technique, of course, Gide in fact presents the reader with a discussion of the possible ways in which his own novel could or should be understood. In this way, we can see how a novel (Gide’s) generates a new novel (Édouard’s) through the repeated framing of texts (both journals). Édouard explains that this unending self-reproduction is made possible by the open-endedness of the novel itself. It is a frame which brings the story into being, but the story produces a new frame, which will produce a new story, etc. In this process, the story itself has no structure; it is an amorphous reflection of events, which can only be structured by the new frame that they generate and that provides them with meaning. Apparently, a story that unfolds in a natural way requires a frame for its structure and interpretation. Thus, the meaning of the account at one level is disclosed at another level of the text. This function indicates how the different levels of the text interact, and, it is important to note, as in the Thousand and one nights, that the different components of the text belong to different discursive types. A narrated reality is constantly interrupted by a representation of reality in the form of incorporated, written, texts. Here, again, Édouard’s journal is the main inserted text that provides a disruption of the course of events to give a personal, subjective, view of these events. The journal reveals Édouard’s feelings and motivation, his view of others, his intentions, and so forth, and thus adds a dimension to our knowledge of the hidden aspects of events and the behavior of characters, and shows that the events are not self-evident, but can be interpreted in a variety of ways when viewed from different angles. Reality, as it appears to us, is not a continuum, but fragmented and shaped by the juxtaposition of various subjective visions. It is this subjective vision which brings order to the events and endows them with meaning. The function of the alternation between narrated and written components does not stop here, however. Apart from Édouard’s journal, the text of the novel is full of interventions by, references to, and quotations from various kinds of written texts, such as books, poems, letters, notebooks, receipts, talismans, magazines, contracts, notes, etc. These written texts together form a separate layer within the narrative, each with specific functions. One function is mentioned with regard to Édouard’s journal; it lays bare the hidden aspects of events and the secrets of the protagonists, it is a kind of concealed reality

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underlying the course of events and the characters’ responses to it. By doing this, however, these texts also produce the incentives for specific actions and thus directly interfere in the course of events. The main example is the cache of letters found by Bernard and Georges, which reveal the secrets of their parents, but which also spur them to take their lives into their own hands. Other examples include the receipt which enables Bernard to ‘steal’ Édouard’s suitcase and his journal, and the cheque that Édouard is asked to bring to Boris – it gives Bernard the opportunity to travel with Édouard and Laura and meet Boris. Furthermore, the literary journal brings Olivier into contact with Robert and estranges him from Bernard, and several letters determine the behavior of the characters toward each other. The role of written texts in the narrative is so prominent that we are justified in saying that together they form a sub-narrative that actively interferes with narrative reality, not only by revealing a hidden rationale, but by ‘creating’ events out of other events and imbuing the story with a dynamism that enables it to unfold. It is a letter which induces Bernard to leave his home, it is a letter which induces Édouard to return to Paris, literary texts determine the relationships between Bernard, Olivier, Édouard, and Robert. Even Boris’s fate is determined by written ‘texts’ as well, first, when his ‘talisman,’ which was meant to protect him, is taken from him, and, second, when the small note warning that the pistol used in the suicide may be loaded goes unheeded. In addition, Boris draws his name on a scrap of paper from a hat; ironically, the smallest of words on a paper determines his life/death. It seems that fate, or the dynamic force of events, or the determining contingency of events, is not part of narrative reality, but rather an invented discourse inserted into this reality, just as imagined stories both explain and determine the course of events in the Thousand and one nights. To some extent, then, the interaction between textual levels is meant to investigate the interaction between a narrative reality and alternative forms of text. This is made explicit in Édouard’s journal, when he explains that he always carries a notebook to establish a direct link between ‘real’ and ‘narrated’ events. It is even his intention to examine the relationship between the real world and the form it assumes in our imagination: Je commence à entrevoir ce que j’appellerais le ‘sujet profond’ de mon livre. C’est, ce sera sans doute la rivalité du monde reel et de la representation que nous nous en faisons. La manière don’t le monde des apparences s’impose à nous et don’t nous tentons d’imposer au monde extérieur notre interpretation particulière, fait le drame de notre vie. La résistance des faits nous invite à transporter notre construction idéale

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dans le rêve, l’espérance, la vie future, en laquelle notre croyance s’alimente de tous nos déboires dans celle-ci.58 To retain its authenticity, his novel is not derived from a preconceived plan: “Nothing is invented beforehand. I wait until reality dictates me.”59 Gide believed that the narrative should be a recording of reality, not by forms of mimesis or ‘realistic’ description, but by obeying the contingency of events. This leads us to the question, whether the notes about the novel in the journal are not in fact the book that should be written, since they contain the ‘history’ of the book, which is directly linked to the reality from which they sprang forth. Édouard’s earnestness and dedication to his writing is contrasted to the opportunism of Robert, whose works are sold in the bookshop at the railway station and who is applauded by the critics. According to Édouard, Robert only seeks attention and wants to please his public in a superficial way. This theme of authenticity versus the ‘counterfeit’ or ‘fake’ is repeated when Olivier declines the offer to become editor-in-chief of Robert’s literary journal, and Armand, who has no talent, takes his place. Armand includes his own poem in the journal, a poem that Olivier had rejected as trivial. A binary opposition is clearly construed between the characters who seek authenticity and a serious, deep engagement with the reality, in its ethical and aesthetic aspects, in which they live, and the characters that only try to manipulate reality for egocentric reasons and to foster their own interests. Here the thematic significance of the motif of the counterfeiters comes to the surface; some are satisfied by a surrogate reality for their own profit, others strive to extract a genuine, meaningful, experience from reality and transform it into an ethically and aesthetically authentic text. It is not certain that this latter, ambitious aim can be realized, however, and at a certain point “Edouard sighs: ‘Ce qui m’inquiète, c’est de sentir la vie (ma vie) se séparer ici de mon oeuvre, mon oeuvre s’écarter de ma vie.”60 His relationship to reality remains ambiguous and he fears that he may only “exist” in his imagination: Rien n’a pour moi d’existence, que poétique (et je rends à ce mot son plein sens) – à commencer par moi-même. Il me semble parfois que je n’existe pas vraiment, mais simplement que j’imagine que je suis. Ce à quoi je parviens le plus difficilement à croire c’est ma proper réalité. Je 58  Ibid., 225. 59  Ibid., 207. 60  Ibid., 102–103.

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m’échappe sans cesse et ne comprends pas bien, lorsque je me regarde agir, que celui que je vois agir soit le meme que celui qui regarde, et qui s’étonne, et doute qu’il puisse être acteur et contempleur à la fois.61 Bernard discovers this dilemma between writing and life as well; in his explorations, his idealized images of the world clash with harsh realities. He is unable to decide whether he will become a writer, since writing may estrange him from reality and imprison him: “Non, je ne sais pas si j’écrirai. Il me semble parfois qu’écrire empêche de vivre, et qu’on peut s’exprimer mieux par des actes que par des mots.”62 Eventually he realizes that he can only learn to live his life by living it. Written texts thus seem to become a substitute/surrogate for reality. A journal about writing a novel may become a substitute for the writing of the novel itself; a travel guide for Algeria may become a substitute for the actual journey; a conversation may be written down and subsequently be given to and read by a third person. There is a direct relationship between life and narrative, and although the true nature of this relationship remains ambiguous, we are certain that it is subjected to the forces of contingency. To make this more complex, in the case of von Hofmannsthal’s Märchen, acting on textual interventions can also be fatal. They both generate narratives and events in a continuous flow, and can suddenly interfere with the ‘flow’ of the other. Only by imbuing reality with the ‘truth’ of narrative can it (reality) be understood. But, as von Hofmannsthal’s Märchen shows, both heeding and not heeding textual interventions can lead to death. The exploration of the relationship between reality and narrative is not only conducted by Édouard, in his journal; it is, of course, also the intention of Les faux-monnayeurs itself. Gide leaves no doubt that he is looking for ways to incorporate reality into the text, that he wants to let his text be governed by contingency, and even that he wants the reader to participate in completing the unfolding of the narrative in his mind. Here, Gide’s position, as a ‘narrator,’ becomes significant too. The story can take any shape; narratives can only intervene in reality when they are made part of reality by the presence of the narrator, who, like Shahrazad, subjects himself to contingent reality. Thus, in the last instance, the text is generated as a means for Gide to explore his relationship to reality. This relationship is in fact established through the act of narration.

61  Ibid., 82. 62  Ibid., 294.

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Our analysis above shows the ways in which Les faux-monnayeurs is intertextually related to the Thousand and one nights, on both the thematic and the conceptual levels. The theme of the adolescent youth leaving home to embark on peregrinations that lead to self-discovery and awakening to the laws that govern life and society is very common in the Thousand and one nights, in particular, the figure of the “twin-brother,” who represents the opposite and the other half of the hero, is typical of several romances in the collection. The representation of the liminal status of the hero, who experiences forms of mobility and homelessness, confronts pleasures and dangers, and undergoes a sexual initiation is also typical. In Les faux-monnayeurs, Bernard and Olivier follow this path, and gradually find their position in their social surroundings and develop a sense of their individual identities. As in von Hofmannsthal’s Andreas, here, too, this search is represented as an interaction between closed, claustrophobic spaces that symbolize authority, social conventions, and control, and forms of mobility and nomadism. We should note, however, that in contrast to the stories of the Thousand and one nights, these stories lack the concluding denouement which assures the ‘homecoming’ and social re-incorporation of the heroes. In both Andreas and Les faux-monnayeurs, the most conspicuous inter­ textual resemblance to the Thousand and one nights can be found in the structure and concepts of the novels, which combine to destabilize the spatial context and the narrative itself. In Andreas, which is unfortunately incomplete, we can perceive this mainly in the outline that has been preserved. In the case of Les faux-monnayeurs, the form of the novel is primarily based on the dialectic between different textual levels that interact in such a way as to produce a perpetually self-generating chain of narratives, similar to the perpetuum mobile that sets in motion the frame story of the Thousand and one nights. The interactions between the textual levels function in ways similar to those in the Thousand and one nights: they engender narrative dynamism within the various textual layers; they break up the ‘objective’ narrative continuum by interposing a subjective view; and they explore the relationship between text and reality. Each of these functions provides a form of self-reflexivity, a contemplation of the origin of the story, the narrative logic which it obeys, and the framework of interpretation. For Les faux-monnayeurs, these narrative strategies are strengthened by the supplemental frame provided by the Journal des faux-monnayeurs, in which Gide himself reflects on his ideas about Les faux-monnayeurs in the same way Édouard does in the novel. All these thematic and structural elements are subservient to the main theme of the novels, that is, the exploration of the relationship between the fictional narrative and reality. Here the parallels with the Thousand and one

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nights are obvious as well, since in the frame story Shahrazad attempts to manipulate reality through her storytelling, while reality may interfere in her storytelling at any possible moment. On the one hand, Shahrazad strives to incorporate ‘imagined realities’ within reality; on the other hand, reality itself creates the necessity of conceiving these imagined worlds. The link in this mutual interaction is the figure of Shahrazad, whose physical presence makes the interaction between the two realms possible: her act of storytelling introduces the imagined worlds into the real world; and her possible death would end the process of interaction. In the case of Les faux-monnayeurs, the role of Shahrazad is assumed by Édouard, and, of course, Gide himself. On the one hand, both are anxious to situate themselves within the reality that surrounds them and to establish contact with it, and subsequently to transform this experience into a narrative text. In fact, the two intentions become inseparable and gradually, it appears that writing the text is not an aim in itself, but a means to establish a relationship with reality, aimed at a total amalgamation. First, by exploring the relationship between imagination and reality, the book gradually becomes a mechanism for transforming reality into imagination. Thus, like Andreas, instead of finding contact with reality, Édouard increasingly feels that the writing detaches him from reality, to the point that he can conceive of himself only as an imagined person. The narrative both establishes contact between the worlds of reality and imagination and defines the boundary between them, and finally confirms the impossibility of amalgamating them. Still, as in the case of the Thousand and one nights, evoking the possibility of interaction between the two radically subjects both to the forces of contingency. The physical presence of Shahrazad thus represents the element of contingency. Ironically, it is this contingency which, ultimately provides the ‘plot’ of the novel, which suddenly looks like the inevitable outcome of a seemingly unrelated series of events, or, perhaps, of fate.

Chapter 2

Going Home: Al-Tayyib Salih and Ibrahim al-Faqih In the two novels discussed above, Andreas and Les faux-monnayeurs, the journeys of the heroes create a rupture with the point of departure. Driven by their adolescent curiosity and seeking an independent sense of identity, the heroes cross a boundary which allows no return; their ‘home’ is irretrievably lost. In the two novels we analyze in this section, some form of ‘homecoming’ is achieved, but the journey is only partially successful in creating a firmer sense of identity and a full command of social roles. Rather, it produces further uncertainty, and a sense of estrangement, even in the pseudo-familiar home environment. This is mainly because the journey they undertake leads them across the complex boundary between Africa and Europe. This boundary is constructed not only by geographical, historical, and cultural differences, but also by the complex relationships instilled by colonial hierarchies. The colonial discourses of power determine the interaction between mutual imaginings of Self and Other; they influence not only images of the Other, but, ultimately, of the Self. At least in narration, home is not self-evidently synonymous with the place where someone is born. A home is not a starting point, a neutral point in space, where one co-incidentally comes into the world. It is rather a place of destiny, a place where the various forces that steer the course of life bring a person as the fulfillment of his potential fate. That is, a place where there is harmony between a person’s inner space – his temperament, his thoughts, his desires, his ambitions – and his outer space – his spatial setting, spatial organization, social relationships, etc. This harmony implies a coherence which not only consists of a person’s physical presence in a convenient spatial surrounding; it requires a story as well, a narrative that explains one’s presence in that place, one’s relationship to it, one’s position there, and the meaning of one’s presence in that place. The connection between origin and place is a strong foundation for a story of belonging, and, it is no coincidence that home is often defined by the outcome of a story rather than by its beginning. Since it is partly based on the imagination, on a narrative, the concept of home is a construction, an invention, an imagined congruity between a sense of self, social relationships and a spatial setting. This construction is defined as an enclosure, a place set within a system of boundaries that not only organize it in a hierarchical or qualitative way, but also separate an ‘inside’ from an ‘outside,’ an indigenous space from a foreign space, and a space of intimacy © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_004

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from a space of formality or even hostility. Since the enclosure is deliberately constructed to establish this kind of dichotomy, its shape, its organization, and the narrative which explains it and gives it its meaning are marked by the nature of the opposites which it is meant to keep separate. That is, its shape is determined by its function to close off a space in which specific elements are excluded or seldom admitted; thus, it is permeated by what it excludes. It can only exist by incorporating the idea and presence of its opposite. One of the main characteristics of the concept of home is the lack of the necessity to move. It quintessentially embodies the idea of immobility, of rootedness, of the potential fulfillment of desires. However, precisely because of this essence as the embodiment of immobility, it is constructed and defined in contrast to, but also in relationship and interaction with mobility. For this reason, a place of birth is not automatically a home; before it can become a home, it must be brought into a relationship with the outside world. What it represents must be clarified by finding out what it seeks to exclude. And this relationship can only be established by travel, by mobility. A home is not a selfgiven place; it must be found, it must be discovered and constructed on the basis of experiences, which can only be gathered outside the potential home. The experience of mobility is indispensable to the process of finding harmony in a state of immobility. If a birthplace and a home coincide, then this can only be the result of a return from a journey. Whoever aims to find a home must leave his birthplace, separate himself from his family and friends, and venture into and then through the world. He must conquer difficulties, overcome obstacles, meet people of all kinds, see strange lands, become initiated into love, sexuality, and the human character. He must relinquish himself to fate, test his will, and become the person he is destined to be. Only after experiencing all this, does fate lead him back to the place he came from, which can, henceforth, be his home. Before it can be his home, he must discover why this particular place should be his home, what makes it different from other places, why his future is destined to unfold there. He must assume his position in his home society, his family; he must know himself in order to fit into the harmony of his home and he must prove that he is able to defend his home from what is alien and foreign. This idea of the home as the outcome of an initiatory journey is the theme of many literary works, especially narratives characterized by what is sometimes called the ‘adventure chronotope,’ that is, stories of an adolescent hero, often a prince, setting out from the palace of his father, traveling through the world, getting lost, defeating enemies, surviving hardships, and outsmarting crooks, before finally returning to his ‘home’ as an adult, an experienced man, usually accompanied by some form of trophy, such as riches or a beautiful,

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loving spouse. After his adventures, he is sufficiently experienced to assume the throne from his father and ensure the continuity of the dynasty. As I argue elsewhere, this type of story, or at least its main motif, is especially characteristic of many of the tales of the Thousand and one nights, in which the harmony between the hero, a spatial setting, and the narrative itself is essential for every plot: a disequilibrium in the spatiotemporal setting is usually the incentive for the hero to travel, but it is also the incentive for telling the story. To restore equilibrium and create harmony between the hero and his ‘home,’ his destination must converge with his destiny; only then can the story end.1 In this section the matrix of the ‘adventure chronotope’ is used to discuss one of the most famous and celebrated novels of modern Arabic literature, alTayyib Salih’s (1929–2009) Mawsim al-hijra ila al-shimal, translated into English as Season of migration to the north, published in 1966 and 1969 respectively.2 There are a number of fine studies of this novel in English and Arabic; these focus especially on the psycho-analytical dimension of the story, which is unmistakably important.3 Here we confine ourselves to the aspect of the journey, and the way in which spaces are constructed by the mobility/immobility opposition, and we focus on the role of narration in the process of homecoming. As noted, we refer to the ‘adventure chronotope’ as a narrative model, but also to other themes and motifs which can be traced back to the Thousand and one nights, especially, the forbidden room. It is the forbidden room that reveals the plot in Season of migration to the north, and which is the central trope in the other novel we analyze in this section, the trilogy of novels Sa-ahibuka madina ukhra, Hadhihi tukhum mamlakati, and Nafaq tudi’uhu imra’a wahida (1991) by the Libyan author Ahmad Ibrahim al-Faqih (b. 1942), translated into English as Gardens of the night (1995).

1  Van Leeuwen, The Thousand and One Nights. 2  Tayyib Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson Davies (London: Heinemann, 1976). 3  See the selection of studies in English: Samar Attar, Debunking the Myths of Colonization: The Arabs and Europe, 136–154 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010); Saree S. Makdisi, “The Empire Renarrated: Season of Migration to the North and the Reinvention of the Present,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 804–820; M. Siddiq, “The Process of Individuation in al-Tayyeb Salih’s Novel Season of Migration to the North,” Journal of Arabic Literature 9 (1978): 67–104; Yasser Tarawneh, “Tayeb Salih and Freud: The Impact of Freudian Ideas on ‘Season of Migration to the North,’ ” Arabica 35 (1988): 328–349; also see Waïl S. Hassan, Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002).

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Season of Migration to the North and the Thousand and One Nights

Al-Tayyib Salih’s novel, Season of migration to the north, tells the story of a homecoming, or, more accurately, of two homecomings. The unnamed narrator returns to his native village in Sudan after studying English poetry in England for seven years. In the village he finds a stranger, a Sudanese man a generation older than he, who has settled there after staying and studying in England and traveling all over the world. The narrator develops a rather ambiguous friendship with the mysterious man, called Mustafa Sa‘id, and slowly uncovers his turbulent past. Mustafa Sa‘id grew up without a father; he was noted for his extraordinary intelligence and given the opportunity to study in Cairo and England. He became a well-known economist and specialized in colonial economic relations. However, during his stay in England, his life went astray: he became a relentless womanizer, who hunted women and used them as prey to satisfy his perverted lust. Three women committed suicide after love affairs with him; he was finally convicted to seven years’ imprisonment for murdering the woman he married, Jean Morris. While Mustafa slowly reveals the story of his life to the narrator, their relationship is disrupted, when he disappears suddenly. It is suggested that he has committed suicide, probably by drowning himself in the Nile. When, soon after Mustafa’s death, his widow is pressured by one of the village elders to marry him, the village is shocked that she kills him and herself when he tries to force himself upon her. In the story of the Season of migration to the north, there are two main paradigms we must analyze. First, many descriptions of Mustafa Sa‘id’s attitudes and his relationship with the narrator suggest a psychological approach. Mustafa grew up without a father and his sharp mind is marked by a clinical coldness, deprived of emotions, humor, and compassion. In England, he became obsessed by the power he had over English women, who were fascinated by his Afro-Oriental appearance. He encouraged this fascination by conforming to the image of a primitive, passionate, and savage African and a sophisticated, sensual, and romantic Arab, even as he himself realized that upholding this image made his life a permanent lie. Jean Morris was the only lover who did not immediately subject herself to his overtures; therefore, she became an obsession for him. He pursued her for several years before she finally surrendered and agreed to marry him. Even in marriage, though, she rejected him and challenged him until he killed her with a knife during sexual intercourse. The mysteries and complexities of Mustafa’s mind and past are gradually unraveled and shape his relationship with the narrator, who sees him as a gentle, capable man, but also, unmistakably, as a stranger and an outsider. The narrator’s affection for him is mingled with a sense of aversion and distrust,

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although he is his main confidant in the village. It is suggested that his fascination for Mustafa is caused by a sense that he represents his alter ego, a mirror image, or an alternative version of himself. He becomes obsessed by him to such an extent that he seems to see him as the embodiment of his inner self, enacting a fate that is inextricably linked to his. The union of the two characters reaches the point that the reader begins to wonder if Mustafa Sa‘id is in fact a projection of the narrator’s urges and fears for an imagined alternative self, or if the narrator’s life will be gradually absorbed by Mustafa’s life. This is also suggested when the narrator falls in love with Mustafa’s widow and becomes the guardian of his two children. In the end the narrator throws himself in the river, thereby, seemingly, surrendering himself to his/Mustafa’s fate. The second paradigm we must analyze concerns the deep hostility between Europe and Africa, between the colonizer and the colonized. Mustafa Sa‘id is taken from his Sudanese environment and ‘planted’ in England, where he spends thirty years. From the beginning of his stay there, he sees England as a hostile territory, as the center of colonial oppression. His grudge takes shape during his studies, which focus on colonial economics and strategies of resistance. The books he wrote include The cross and gunpowder, Colonialism and monopoly, and The rape of Africa. His tumultuous love life is molded as a form of revenge: “I have come to you as a conqueror,” and, “I will liberate Africa with my penis.”4 The novel, therefore, is an example of ‘the Empire writes back,’ and is part of the framework in which the colonizer and the colonized are perceived. This is confirmed by Mustafa’s willful exploitation of common European stereotypes and clichés about the Orient and Africa, visions of the Other which he turns against the colonizers themselves. These two dimensions are incorporated into a narrative that is structured as a frame story, in a formal structure in which we can perceive a resemblance to the Thousand and one nights. The frame contains the account of the narrator’s return to his village and his relationship with Mustafa. Within the frame, fragments of Mustafa’s life story are embedded; most of these are told in the first person, by Mustafa. Only in the end do the two levels mingle, as the story of Mustafa is completed and the narrator seems to be fatally consumed by his identification with Mustafa, or at least with his story. In the story, there are two explicit references to the Thousand and one nights, when Mustafa describes himself as a “slave Shahriyar” and Jean Morris as a “beggar Scheherazade” and as a “mendicant Scheherazade.”5 The identification of Mustafa with Shahriyar is supported by his actions: he possesses women at random and treats them as 4  Salih, Season of Migration, 60, 120. 5  Ibid., 34, 155.

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sexual objects, leaving behind a trail of ‘casualties.’ He is ruthless and calculating, the embodiment of male prowess and arrogance. Jean Morris challenges this arrogance; she does not surrender to him immediately, rather she provokes him with a strategy of deferred gratification, forcing him to pursue her, and ultimately driving him crazy. This is the only way to subdue his radical masculinity, or more precisely, to lay bare the essence of it, reveal its inseparable symbiosis with violence and death. Of course, Jean Morris is a Shahrazad in reverse, since she is continually aware that she is only postponing her death and not escaping from it. We even come to think that her strategy of postponement is not intended to secure her survival, but to gradually force him to kill her. The violence is equated with love, however, and in her death struggle, Jean begs Mustafa to join her and not let her go alone. Out of fear, Mustafa fails to do this; we can say that Jean’s strategy to push love to the point of a shared death fails. For the rest of his life Mustafa seems to regret that he did not kill himself in that moment of ultimate passion. Apart from this parallel between Mustafa Sa‘id and Shahriyar, there are other direct and indirect references to the Thousand and one nights, or similar material, for instance, when the narrator refers to ghouls, al-Khidr, and Ali Baba’s cave. At the end of the novel we find an important reference to the opening of a ‘forbidden room’ in Mustafa’s house. This motif links the novel to several stories in the Nights, in which closed rooms contain the wonders of the world, treasures and delights, or taboos and doom. These rooms are, as a rule, spatial elements in a context of travel and mobility, in contrast to the real world. They juxtapose mobility (the passage of time) to stagnancy (the exclusion of time) from a spatial ‘container.’ Since the two spaces are counterparts of each other, they presuppose each other, they have a certain relationship to each other, and, in narrative logic, they are bound to interact with each other. They usually represent an artificial anomaly in the structure of space, which must be ‘repaired’ by the ingenuity of the hero. In the following paragraphs, we discuss the Season of migration to the north from the perspectives summarized above, as being modeled after examples provided by the Thousand and one nights, as a novel that depicts the psychological implication of constructing an alter ego, and the repercussions of colonial exploitation; as a novel that focuses on the spatial embedding of the story, as the account of a journey, with the ‘home’ as a central element. The Journey In love/journey adventure novels, the hero usually leaves the place of his birth as an adolescent, and sets off in search of a beloved, who is subsequently ‘transformed’ into his spouse. When he reaches the marriageable age, the hero

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experiences a lack of something, a desire that disrupts the harmony between himself and his spatial surroundings. To fulfill his desire, he must leave his paternal home, dissociate himself from his social ties, and roam the world to be initiated in the vicissitudes of human existence and prove his individual qualities. In Season of migration to the north, Mustafa Sa‘id leaves his village not in search of love, but to gather knowledge. His impressive intellect sets him apart from his environment and alienates him from the other children and his family. He grew up without a father and without a close relationship with his mother. In fact, it is not only his intelligence that facilitates his departure, but also his insensitive character which has prevented him from establishing emotional ties with his environment. Even before he leaves, he seems to be already detached from the social and emotional setting of his youthful life. This detachment continues and even increases while he is in England. From the beginning, Mustafa perceives England as enemy territory, not only in the political sense, as the center of colonial domination, but also in the psychological sense, as the place where the ‘colonial mind’ is shaped into the vision of a superior self vis-à-vis an enslaved other, with its connotations of the noble savage and its contradictory components of allurement and threat. Of course, the construction of these images is vital for the very foundations of colonial authority, but instead of fighting them, Mustafa appropriates them and uses them as a stronghold from which he embarks upon a kind of guerrilla warfare. He uses the imagery of colonial exploitation that has distorted the English mind as a way to penetrate it and spread devastation. From being a tool for domination, the image of the noble savage becomes an obsession, because it responds to a need, to a specific vision of a self and its alter ego. Mustafa’s identification with the image which is imposed on him defines his bond with England in a negative way; it emphasizes the impossibility of identifying with England itself and his refusal to become incorporated into it. Ironically, Mustafa despises the clemency with which he is treated in court; he considers it a refusal to treat him as an equal human being and another indication of the patronizing colonial attitude. Mustafa is aware that the life he is leading in England is governed by illusions, or, as he himself repeatedly says, that his life is a ‘lie.’ By traveling to England, he has crossed a boundary and entered another realm. Here he cannot establish any affinity with his spatial surroundings, and instead of trying to construct a harmony between himself and the space in which he lives, he enters a state of hybridity. He lives in an imaginary world of fantasy and illusions. This state of hybridity is, in part, forced upon him by the stereotypes of colonial hegemony; these mark him as a figure coming from an exotic, imaginary realm, a fairy tale world that is not related to the real, English, world, except

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through the channels of the imagination. But in fact his identification with the colonial images is induced, too, by his own inability to establish emotional ties with his surroundings. There is no ‘reality’ which is able to incorporate him: Mustafa himself lacks the ability to let himself be incorporated. Thus, he remains a ‘phantom.’ Mustafa succeeds in manipulating the imaginary world in which he is ‘exiled,’ so that he can seduce women, who are preconditioned to see the illusion he represents as well-established reality. But Mustafa is a phantom who cannot be possessed, and ultimately the discrepancy between illusion and reality has fatal consequences. The women commit suicide not only because they are disappointed in love, but also because the illusion of Mustafa is deeply interwoven with their self-images and their identification with the roles in the colonial master-slave matrix. Once the falsity of the image is revealed, it becomes clear to them that their self-images are part of the same falsity and no ‘true’ basis exists for their self-perception. The two partners in the colonial illusion hold each other in a fatal grip. The only woman who is able to withstand Mustafa’s manipulation is Jean Morris, because she realizes that what he stands for is nothing more than an illusion. She succeeds in delaying the disclosure of the illusion – she prolongs it and forces Mustafa to admit to himself that there is nothing behind the illusion that he embodies and that, ultimately, he cannot live with this knowledge. Like Shahrazad, by postponing the moment of her death by refusing to break the spell, Jean Morris forces him to ‘kill’ the illusion by killing her and himself. Mustafa repeatedly states that he should have died in that fatal moment in which he killed Jean Morris, and that she realized this, too, as the apogee of the illusion did not harbor a life of fulfillment, only a deferred unmasking and the acceptance of the inability to go on living. Mustafa Sa‘id considers this course of events pre-ordained. On several occasions, he states that the fatal outcome was inevitable, that it was part of an unchangeable process. It was like an arrow shooting toward unknown horizons. In the period before the encounter with Jean, he was filled with premonitions; the women fell victim to an infection that had stricken them a thousand years ago, which he has stirred up.6 What happened had been lying dormant in history for a long time, waiting for its moment to reveal itself. It appears that this association of the events with the inevitability of fate and the course of history relieved Mustafa from any responsibility or guilt. He believed that he was merely an instrument of fate, acting not of his own volition, but inescapably driven to violence. The anomaly of his character was nothing more than 6  Ibid., 28, 34.

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a streak of fate that enabled fate to use him to enact a predetermined course of events. He saw himself as only the locus of a clash between historical world visions. This might have been true if he had died, but ultimately, he felt a deep remorse after his crime and states that the remainder of his life could not be anything more than an apology for what he had done. In spite of his limited agency, he did not feel expiated from his guilt. The fatal cycle of living in a realm of illusions, committing a pre-ordained killing, and roaming through the world filled with remorse is systematically associated with rootlessness, mobility, and nomadism. Fate prevented him from putting down roots in the village of his birth, it prevented him from establishing a balance between a stable sense of identity and the country he exiled himself to, and it forced him to wander through the world as a nomad. Even during his journey to England, as a boy, he sensed his uprootedness: “The whole of the journey I savoured that feeling of being nowhere, alone, before and behind me either eternity or nothingness.”7 He is likened to al-Khidr, the traveling prophet, who protects travelers against mishaps and who can appear in any place in the world at any moment. One of the villagers says: Mustafa Sa’id is in fact the Prophet El-Khidr, suddenly making his appearance and as suddenly vanishing. The treasures that lie in this room are like those of King Solomon, brought here by genies, and you have the key to that treasure. Open, Sesame, and let’s distribute the gold and jewels to the people.8 Many fanciful stories are inspired, in particular, by his life and travels abroad: he has amassed immense fortunes; he held important diplomatic posts; and he was married to English women. Although his own perception of his life as a lie may have ended, it became the object of the fantasies of others, who constructed his life as a fanciful story. Mustafa’s territorial instability, his permanent mobility, has prevented anyone from forming a stable account of his life. It seems that this final stage of his life has no coherence or purpose; it is only the postponement of return. Mustafa is sharply aware of this: He feels he should have died that night. The remainder of his life consisted merely of journeys to “put off the decision to die.”9

7  Ibid., 27. 8  Ibid., 107. 9  Ibid., 69.

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Return and Narration The narrative of Mustafa Sa‘id’s journey is composed after his return to Sudan, where he lives quietly in a village on the bank of the Nile. Since Mustafa is secretive about his adventures abroad, no one has a comprehensive, linear account of his experiences or his life. Rather the account is constructed from stories that are told by other people, from fragments Mustafa tells the narrator, who has become his confidant, and by the narrator’s efforts to make a complete reconstruction. It seems that Mustafa has deliberately left only fragmented bits and pieces, as a puzzle for the narrator to put together. Of course, this is an indication that there is something wrong with the story, that Mustafa cannot give a structurally coherent account of it. There are several causes: First, his experiences have taken place, in part, in a realm of unreality, fantasy, and illusion, the relationship between these experiences and the ‘real’ environment is uncertain. Second, the events are traumatic in nature and defy an ordinary, rational, reporting. And, more importantly, the story, apparently, has not yet come to a conclusion; there is no plot and no coherent retrospective that would make a full reconstruction of events possible. If the story has not yet come to a conclusion, why is it told? The telling of Mustafa’s life story is prompted by two reasons: First, the return of the narrator from his English ‘adventure’ provides Mustafa with a mirror image, a double. This creates a dialogical situation that encourages him to confide in the narrator and tell him his story. Not only is the narrator more likely to understand his story than the others, since he has experienced the same complex dichotomy; but also, as an alter ego, he can be used as a repository for Mustafa’s secret, and will not make judgments. Of course, the story cannot be told without consequences. Inevitably, the narrator soon starts identifying with Mustafa and even becomes obsessed by him. He is infected by the story and asks himself if his life is a lie, too. The reader also begins to compare the two ‘returns,’ Mustafa is a stranger and a mystery in the village, while the narrator is immediately incorporated into the familiar, stable environment, where his grandfather embodies the age-old stability of the village traditions and their harmony with nature. In spite of this clear contrast, the two lives of Mustafa and the narrator gradually converge, and in the end, they seem to be united: the narrator becomes the guardian of Mustafa’s children and falls in love with his widow. Mustafa is prompted to start telling his story, or at least to allow some glimpses of it to appear, because he is aware of his approaching ‘disappearance.’ During one of the sessions in which Mustafa reveals fragments of his life to the narrator, he declares that, after having failed to kill himself that fatal night, the rest of his life has been only an effort to ‘put off the decision.’ Apparently,

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with his life continuing, Mustafa is aware that the narrative of his life has no conclusion. After his time in prison, his life is merely the spill-over of his fatal experience; it has no other significance that would secure the unity and completion of the story. Therefore, the reconstruction of his life is a confession, but not with the purpose of self-justification. There is no final, overarching perspective which would allow such a judgment. The only way for Mustafa to ‘depart’ from his story is to pass it on to someone else, to transfer it to someone who will keep it alive after his death. His secret, a still bleeding wound, will henceforth be carried by his younger alter ego. Mustafa’s confessions to the narrator and his urge to tell his life story culminate in a farewell letter that he leaves behind after his disappearance. In this letter, he entrusts the narrator with the care of his wife and two sons. He emphasizes that he has chosen him because he has ‘glimpsed’ in him a likeness to his grandfather, a paragon of health, stability, and ‘rootedness.’ In particular, he asks him to spare his sons “the pangs of wanderlust”10 and let them grow up “imbued with the air of this village, its smells and colours and history, the faces of its inhabitants and the memories of its floods and harvestings and sowings,” because then “my life will acquire its true perspective as something meaningful alongside many other meanings of deeper significance.”11 In this farewell letter to the narrator Mustafa acknowledges that the best thing for him to do is to continue living quietly among the villagers, but he knows that he will be unable to do this. “Mysterious things” in his soul and blood “impel him towards faraway parts.”12 But still he must be sure that his story is passed on to his sons. Mustafa makes it clear that he has disclosed his secrets to the narrator in the hope that, at the proper time, he would be prepared to help his sons to “understand the truth about me,” not to judge him, but because “my life should not emerge from behind the unknown like an evil spirit and cause them harm.”13 He has kept his life a secret from the villagers only in order to lead a peaceful life among them, but after his ‘departure’ there is no justification for secrecy anymore. It is clear from these passages in the letter that Mustafa has not found the proper ending for his life story, that he is forced to die with lies and deceit, because there is no ‘truth’ or ‘peace of mind’ in the life he is living in the village. Since there is no adequate ending, the story must continue, in order to imbue his sons with a form of ‘truth’ that will enable them to live a stable 10  Ibid., 65. 11  Ibid., 66. 12  Ibid., 67. 13  Ibid., 66.

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life in the village, after his ‘departure.’ Apparently, according to him, the lie is not in the story, but in his person, in his bodily presence. The fractured nature of Mustafa’s life in the village is centered around his secret and the imagined fragments of his past and is represented spatially as well. In his farewell letter to the narrator, Mustafa reveals the existence of a secret room in his house: I leave the key of my private room where you will perhaps find what you are looking for. I know you to be suffering from undue curiosity where I am concerned – something for which I can find no justification. Whatever my life has been it contains no warning or lesson for anyone…. If you are unable to resist the curiosity in yourself, then you will find, in that room that has never before been entered by anyone but myself, some scraps of paper, various fragments of writing and attempts at keeping diaries, and the like…. I leave it to you to judge the proper time for giving my sons the key of the room and for helping them to understand the truth about me.14 Clearly, the room was built separately from the rest of the house, in order to contain his secret and preserve it after Mustafa’s death, such that it can be disclosed at the proper time. Naturally, after Mustafa’s disappearance, the narrator enters the secret room. He finds an English parlor filled with Victorian furniture, an English fireplace, bookcases stuffed with English books, notebooks, a newspaper from 1927, drawings, photographs of the English women with whom he had the fatal affairs, and a huge painting of Jean Morris. The narrator’s first impulse is to burn down the room, since by now it represents for him the ‘haunted’ side of Mustafa, which he fears will contaminate him, as his double. Significantly, when he enters the room in the dark, he sees the image of Mustafa before him, but then he realizes that it is his own face in a mirror. He is still afraid that Mustafa represents his own dark side, or at least that he has been contaminated by the curse of his secret. Finally, curiosity gains the upper hand, although the narrator still feels manipulated: “He wants to be discovered, like some historical object of value…. There was no limit to his egoism and his conceit; despite everything, he wanted history to immortalize him.”15 As we see,

14  Ibid., 65–66. 15  Ibid., 154.

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this is also suggested by the way Mustafa recounted his ‘endless’ story to the narrator; he did it to immortalize himself through the narrator, and through the continuation of the story. During his inspection of the room, the narrator associates the space with various similar spaces, such as a wax museum, a mausoleum, a prison, and a treasure chamber, all spaces that are closed off from their surroundings by boundaries that indicate a qualitative difference: Inside something is preserved which is separated from the regular course of time, through a form of replication, through death, through punishment, or through hiding and storage. Time has, so to speak, been banned from an enclosed space to preserve some essence that is subsequently immortalized, preserved in its essential form. Still, in all these forms of enclosure, some interaction with the outer world is inevitable. They are closed off, but thereby represent a spatial imbalance which will at some time or another be put straight. The treasure will be found (‘Open, Sesame’), the prisoner will be released, the mausoleum and the museum will be visited and admired. At this time, a relationship between the contents of the enclosed space will be restored, a relationship that will never be harmonious, since the enclosure was separated from the outer world by an act of enforcement, or violence, and the energy of that violence will be released suddenly. When the narrator enters the room, in spite of the English ambience, he inhales the smell of sandalwood incense. This immediately reminds the reader of another enclosed space that fulfilled a vital role for Mustafa Sa‘id: his bedroom in London, where he received his lovers. This room is described as follows: My bedroom was a graveyard that looked on to a garden; its curtains were pink and had been chosen with care, the carpeting was of a warm greenness, the bed spacious, with swansdown cushions. There were small electric lights, red, blue, and violet, placed in certain corners; on the walls were large mirrors, so that when I slept with a woman it was as if I slept with a whole harem simultaneously. The room was heavy with the smell of burning sandalwood and incense, and in the bathroom were pungent Eastern perfumes, lotions, unguents, powders and pills.16

16  Ibid., 30–31.

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It is clear from this description that this room was also intended to contain some essence, a timeless epitomization of an eastern/African setting, the spatial embodiment of the oriental soul that had spilled over into the material world. The two enclosed spaces are each other’s counterparts, each contains an essentialized and eternalized vision of an identity, an image that appeals to a hidden, underlying awareness that requires that this epitomized, enclosed form become manifest in the world. In both cases, they represent Mustafa’s anomalous presence in his environment, as an oriental in England and as an Englishman in Africa. In both cases, they show that the concealed parts of his identity belong to a timeless archetype. It is through the confrontation between the outer world and this archetype that Mustafa creates an effect, a clash that is apparently designed to produce a form of harmonization between the timeless parts of himself and his time-bound surroundings. Ironically, the room in England is acknowledged to contain a lie, whereas the room in Sudan is said to be a repository of the ‘truth.’ As is proven by Mustafa’s ‘departure,’ this truth obscures the fact that his life in the village was still a lie. In spite of his attempts to fossilize the past and freeze it in its essentialized form, time continues, life continues, and the lie continues. The mirror images of the closed rooms in England and Sudan, and the spatial rupture which they represent, indicate that Mustafa’s situation in Sudan and England is not essentially different: His life is not in harmony with his spatial surroundings; his ‘soul’ is not integrated into a spatial system; or perhaps conversely, the fragmentation of his soul prevents him from achieving harmony in any place. In both cases, in England and Sudan, Mustafa is a traveler, a passerby, who has temporarily alighted in a certain place, but will certainly move on. This permanent mobility is a result of his inability to reconcile images of himself into a coherent identity, to regulate the establishment of a coherent identity into his spatial environment. He is haunted by images of himself that intervene in reality but which he does not experience as ‘true.’ Thus, even in the quiet village, Mustafa does not find his home. It is this deficient homecoming of Mustafa Sa‘id which frightens the narrator. Because he has also traveled and returned, he identifies with Mustafa and he fears that he, too, is afflicted with the curse of wanderlust. Has he not really returned either? Or has his knowledge of Mustafa’s past, his psyche, uprooted him from his environment because he recognizes the same urges inside himself? Appropriately, the ending of the story remains open. We have seen that the paradigm of the adventure-chronotope is based on a spatiotemporal disequilibrium which forces the hero to travel. Usually this imbalance arises when the hero reaches marriageable age and feels a need,

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implicitly or explicitly, to go in search of his beloved. The disequilibrium is thus the result of a lack experienced by the hero, a deficiency in his soul which, perhaps, can be best defined as the emergence of desire. After the hero departs from his ‘home’ in search of the fulfillment of his desire, he usually crosses an imaginary or spatial boundary and enters a realm in which he is exposed to various dangers, challenges, difficulties, and deprivations. This realm can be magical, filled by jinns, or a desert, or a landscape that reflects the inner disorientation of the hero. The hero must deploy all his ingenuity, courage, and artfulness to overcome the obstacles blocking his way and gain access to the object of his desire. What remains is ensuring that his passion and love are transformed into legal wedlock and that the young couple return home safely. When the hero has stilled his desire and acquired his bride, the spatiotemporal equilibrium is restored. Thus, the paradigm of the ‘adventure chronotope’ can be best described as an account of the ‘management’ of desire. The hero’s adventure is not only an initiation into love and the ways of the world, it also signifies the ways in which the potentially destructive forces of desire are tamed and regulated to neutralize their harmful effects. These forces are unleashed when boys and girls reach adolescence and must be transposed from one protective domain to another (in the case of girls from the supervision of their fathers to the supervision of the husbands) to ensure that sexual relationships only take place within the bounds of legal matrimony. They are forces caused by the passage of time and are therefore related to fate: The management of desire is also an effort to ‘adjust’ the powers of fate to the individual person involved, to ensure that his desires will not prevent fate from taking its course, or vice versa, that fate will not prevent desire from being fulfilled. The anarchic nature of desire resembles man’s struggle with his fate and this struggle is the incentive to narrate the events. Once the forces of desire are tamed, and fate has allowed for the survival and safe return of the hero, the story can end. At that point, the temporal, spatial, and narrative components of the journey are in harmony; the hero can be considered to have found his ‘home.’ In principle, the story of Season of migration to the north fits the pattern sketched above. Mustafa’s departure from Sudan is stimulated by a psychological lack, a sharp mind craving knowledge and an emotional deficiency, perhaps caused by growing up without a father. He departs and enters a strange, almost imaginary domain, where he lives as a nomad, driven by his desires, depending on his ingenuity, imagination, and knowledge to demolish the obstacles that prevent him from satisfying his lusts. Ultimately, he finds his beloved, but here things go awry, the management of desire gets out of control, perhaps not because Jean Morris dies, but because Mustafa fails to die at the proper

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moment. When Mustafa returns to Sudan the treasure that he has conquered is not a beloved spouse, riches, or wisdom, rather it is an experience which has not yet come to an end. Desire has sought fulfillment in death, but has failed to reach it; the destructive forces of desire, which should have been neutralized by death, remain untamed. Mustafa’s failure to fulfill his desire indicates that his return is not a ‘return’ in the sense of the adventure chronotope. He has not succeeded in restoring the spatiotemporal imbalance which forced him to go on his journey. To contain desire, to ‘manage’ it, he is obliged to build a separate, secret, closed space, in which part of his identity is deposited, as it were, to isolate it from the regular passage of his life. This space is a secret room with the ‘trophies’ of his past. These are the treasures that he gathered in his journey: books and knowledge, notes, an authentic English ambience, and, especially, photographs of the objects of his passion. It is no coincidence that the room contains only fragments of his past; they show only glimpses of Mustafa’s life story and not a coherent narrative. Only fragments remain because the story has not yet come to a conclusion. There is no coherent narrative, there are only scattered pieces waiting to be put together. The story is still unfinished. The secret room symbolizes Mustafa’s efforts and final failure to return. It makes clear that in spite of appearances, Mustafa has not succeeded in establishing a harmony between space, soul, and narrative. There is still an incongruity which forces him to continue his journey. There is still a narrative that seeks continuation. There is still a residue of desire which seeks either fulfillment or destruction. For this reason, the new spatiotemporal imbalance produces new calamities and uncertainties. The curse of the story is transposed on the narrator and others, and will continue to rage until it finds its destiny. Mustafa is an instrument of fate, which has not reached its fulfillment and is therefore transferred to the lives of others. By showing his inability to establish a home, the story of Mustafa Sa‘id reveals the mechanisms that are necessary to construct a home. These are located, partly, in social relationships, in one’s identification with a specific status and position, but also in narratives, one’s justification for being in a certain place at a certain time, but most of all the congruity between a certain place and the containment and fulfillment of desire. Thus, inner and outer forces combine to create the required balance, and it is because of this balance that, perhaps paradoxically, mobility is indispensable for constructing a home. Every home needs its opposite with all its essential qualities. In al-Tayyib Salih’s novel, there is no explanation of what causes Mustafa Sa‘id’s inability to eliminate his alienation. Is it the contradictions inherent in colonial relationships? Is it a deficient sense of self? Is it only a personal lack of power, or

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have others become contaminated as well? Whatever the case, the sequence of the story after Mustafa’s disappearance shows that the destructive forces of desire, the continuation of Mustafa’s life story, are irrepressibly bound to manifest themselves.

The Forbidden Room: The Thousand and One Nights and Ibrahim al-Faqih’s Gardens of the Night

As we have seen, the journey of the narrative hero is often spurred by desire, which forces him into exile. This desire is expressed not only in the indomitable influences of specific places, but also in the contrast between enclosed and open spaces; this reflects the relationship between place and the passage of time, but, as in al-Tayyib Salih’s novel, it also reflects the secret inner life of the protagonist, which must be protected against the influences of the world outside and the passage of time. Since enclosures are often associated with the inner life and desire of the hero, they are usually protected by a taboo of some kind, or by the prohibition to enter them. This contrast between journey and enclosure, between desire and taboo, is a major theme in the novel that I discuss presently: the trilogy by Ahmad Ibrahim al-Faqih which consists of Sa-ahibuka madina ukhra, Hadhihi tukhum mamlakati, Nafaq tudi’uhu imra’a wahida (1991), and which was translated into English as Gardens of the night (1995). We examine how al-Faqih used the motif of the forbidden door to explore and symbolize a hidden realm, which is located, in part, in the human soul, but which is also shaped by its confrontation with an apparently wellordered system of social interaction. Before starting our discussion of the three novels, we briefly summarize the function of the motif of the forbidden door as it occurs in the Thousand and one nights. The prototype of the motif of the forbidden door can be found in the story of the ‘Third qalandar,’ which is part of the oldest core of the Thousand and one nights. In this story, the protagonist sets out on a dangerous journey which brings him to a realm filled with mysterious symbols and signs. It seems that he is steered not by his own will, but by the power of fate. At one point the hero enters a castle where he sees ten young men complaining bitterly. When he asks about the cause of their grief, they sew him into a sheep’s skin and put him outside, where he is soon lifted up by a giant bird and taken to a deserted land. There he finds a castle that is inhabited by beautiful young women. He lives happily among them for some time, until the women go on a journey and leave him alone in the castle. They have given him the keys to forty doors and, during their absence, he is allowed to open all forty doors, except one. Every

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day the hero opens a door which reveals a chamber full of splendors. Finally, he is overcome by curiosity and opens the forbidden door. Here he finds a white horse, which he mounts; it flies with him back to the castle with the sorrowful young men.17 The pattern of the short narrative motif is, with some variation, repeated in the stories of ‘Hasan of Basra’ and ‘Janshah.’18 In ‘Hasan of Basra’ the hero is taken to a magical land by a deceitful sorcerer and, like the qalandar, is sewn into an animal skin and taken to the top of a mountain by a giant bird. He wanders and finds a castle full of young women. When they are away, he opens a forbidden door and climbs a staircase to a lush terrace with a water basin. Suddenly he sees birds approaching and alighting on the terrace; they take off their robes of feathers and turn out to be beautiful maidens. Hasan steals the feathers of the most beautiful girl and succeeds in marrying her, but this is only the beginning of an adventure that takes him deep into the land of the jinn. In the story of ‘Janshah,’ the motif is narrated in a similar way and has a similar function, but in ‘Janshah’ the castle is explicitly referred to as the castle of King Solomon. As a narrative element, the motif of the forbidden door has some essential characteristics that recur in all three variants of the stories of Thousand and one nights. First, the door is part of a castle that is located in a domain whose reality is, to say the least, ambiguous. It is not only far away, it is also associated with mystery and magic, or at least with some kind of supernatural force. Second, the motif is related to some form of taboo, not only through the prohibition itself, but also because the prohibition is contrasted with the happiness, bliss, and lustful pleasure in which the hero finds himself. It seems that this bliss can only exist through its co-existence with – and separation from – some negative counterpart. Third, the door gives access to some enchanted space that is not normally accessible for humans. Hasan and Janshah enter the realm of the jinns, and even marry a jinniyya, which is an unusual course of events. The qalandar finds the splendors of the world behind the thirty-nine doors, but the winged horse in the fortieth room suggests that he, too, has entered a magical realm where he is not meant to be. Finally, the motif refers to the moral weakness of human beings, who become over-confident while indulging in the pleasures of the flesh and are unable to contain their curiosity. In spite of all warnings, in spite of all the blissful things they possess, heroes do the one thing that will destroy their pleasure and return them to a state that is even more pitiful than before. Evidently, 17  For a summary of this story, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:340–341. 18  For summaries of these stories, see ibid., 1:207–210; 238–241.

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curiosity represents a much more general set of human weaknesses, such as covetousness, lasciviousness, hubris, stubbornness, and lack of self-control in the face of temptation. In the end, however, these flaws in the nature of man do not cause the outcome of the stories. These shortcomings are allies of an allpowerful, unpredictable, and uncontrollable fate. It is fate that bestows earthly pleasures upon the heroes, and it is fate that takes them away. Ultimately, there is no human will, there is no agency which can change the course of fate. The motif of the forbidden door is built on the concept of a spatial, narrative, and moral boundary which is linked to human weakness essentialized by curiosity, and which is an instrument that enables fate to realize its aims. Within the narrative structure, the motif marks a series of transitions: spatial, from one realm to another; moral, from one state to another; and narratological, from one phase of the story to another. In every case, it marks the end of a temporary, anomalous situation after which the hero continues his journey toward his destiny. As a boundary, it symbolizes a disequilibrium, a meeting point between qualitatively different realms that must somehow be reconciled. In a Freudian interpretation, the forbidden door represents the confrontation between human desire and the obstacles to its realization, the domination of the id over the ego, which is not inhibited by rules and regulations. It may also close off what is repressed, what must be excluded to realize the state of bliss. In this sense, the narrative motif of the forbidden door is an element that orders the text’s representation of what we call the ‘management’ of desire. How, then, does this set of associations relate to the forbidden door, as it is recycled by al-Faqih? The ‘Forbidden Door’ in Gardens of the Night Ahmad Ibrahim al-Faqih’s novel, Gardens of the night, is in fact a trilogy, containing I shall offer another city, These are the borders of my kingdom, and A tunnel lit by one woman. Initially, the three parts do not seem to be clearly interwoven or complementary. The first part is set in Scotland and concerns Khalil Imam, a Libyan hero who has passionate love affairs with two Scottish women; the second part contains a dreamlike vision of an ideal society and a blissful love with two women; and the third part is located in Tripoli, Libya, and relates the story of the hero’s love – again for two women – and his downfall. The elements linking the three parts are the hero, Khalil, and his infatuation with the Thousand and one nights, which is shown through the many references to the collection. These two components determine the coherence between the three parts and provide an exploration of Khalil’s psychological inclinations in three different settings. They provide an intertextual matrix and what may be called a metaphoric substructure which is referred to in direct and indirect ways.

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The first part of the trilogy, I shall offer another city, describes the adventures of Khalil in a Scottish university town, where he has settled to write a PhD dissertation about ‘sex and violence in the Thousand and one nights.’ He starts a love affair with Linda, a young woman who is unhappily married with an infertile man. Just when Linda reveals that she is pregnant, Khalil begins another love affair with the adventurous and promiscuous Sandra, who shows him another side of western permissiveness in social and sexual relationships. This passionate affair was intended to be temporary, and when it ends, Khalil asks Linda to marry him. Linda refuses, however, and after finishing his dissertation Khalil decides to return to Libya. The main thematic structure of the story is built around the opposition between East and West. In a piecemeal fashion, it is revealed that Khalil has fled a traumatic, oppressive childhood marked by the heat, desolation, and austerity of the desert, and the sufferings of his family, who live among the minefields in the desert. His paternal grandfather was a Qur’an teacher and his great-grandfather a religious judge, two functions that determined the ethical outlook of the family. However, his maternal grandfather was a highwayman and a murderer, who was ‘domesticated’ when he married and settled down. Khalil, who inherited these contradictory mentalities, rebelled against the mentally and materially suffocating conditions of his youth, and now enjoys the liberties of the West. However, his ‘Eastern’ component is still within him and these new experiences unsettle him and generate a fierce inner struggle which prevents him from engaging in a stable relationship: Hardly aware of what I was doing, I roamed the streets, not knowing how to escape from the person who was in my blood, occupying a murky side of my soul. That creature had been fashioned from the mud of lean years, and the ashes of times of drought and dearth and the remnants of the exploding hell of the minefields, from the cries of women wailing in the wake of sudden death, and it was this creature which had woken up suddenly in the jungles of the soul and was destroying the other person moulded from books, literature, legends of the night, odes of the poets, singers’ grief and the chalk of school and tickets to distant cities – the one who would remain as fragile as the paper and chalk material of which he was made. This I was the man who could not stand up for himself against the primitive man who took it into his head to destroy any pleasant relationship he saw sprouting and with his granite daggers hurt the people I loved, and put to flames the houses which afforded me safety.19 19  Ahmad Faqih, Gardens of the Night, trans. Russell Harris, Amin al-Ayouti, and Suraya Allam (London: Quartet Books, 1995), 89.

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Khalil’s rebellion and his migration to the West not only failed to obliterate his ‘eastern’ past, but they also did not result in his assimilation to western norms and standards. He has reached a kind of no man’s land, which keeps him in a seemingly permanent state of ambivalence, in which he must define his own standards: I did not judge [the relationship] within the values of the society from which I came, for I was now distanced from all that. Neither did I judge it by the values of the society in which I was living, because I did not truly belong to it. Rather I judged it according to the values I myself had created in order to deal with myself and with others, by the criteria of the stone rolling over the fields. I was now living a temporary life, in a no man’s land. That free area which falls between the boundaries of two countries where no flag demands loyalty, except the one I make for myself. A condition that was created for me by this pile of papers.20 It is, however, not the freedom of sexual relationships which exhilarates Khalil in his love affairs, since sexual permissiveness is a part of the ‘eastern’ tradition as well; and, in any case, women are not able to soothe the scorching drought in his soul.21 What attracts him most is the freedom to change roles. This is allowed in the West; he can shed his former selves and adopt new ones.22 It is by shifting identities that Khalil is able to enter western society and enjoy its liberties. Paradoxically, the best way to do this is to act like the stereotypical oriental man, “a creature who has just come out of the pages of legends.”23 This identity is a mere role, however, but one that fits into Khalil’s passion for acting and the theater. He himself not only becomes an actor, he is also fascinated by the theatrical impersonations of figures such as Othello and Henry VIII. Furthermore, the Orient is represented as a sensual realm in an erotic show in oriental style which Khalil and Linda attend. By accommodating these oriental stereotypes Khalil is accepted in western society, but he is aware that he is only acting out a fiction, that his eastern identity and western lifestyle are not authentic. Khalil is a nomad, then, a traveler without a fixed abode, mentally or physically, and Linda represents a form of stability: “Linda was a tent for my soul, a house for my body in a city I had come to as a traveler without my tent, and

20  Ibid., 56. 21  Ibid., 7. 22  Ibid., 59. 23  Ibid., 7.

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with no possessions except my body.”24 This stability is subverted by the more frivolous Sandra, who sees through his adopted identities and rationally points out the impossibility of reconciling the opposites that Khalil wants to combine: “There is no such thing as something both permanent and temporary…. As long as you’re living this stage of your life here, you’re living and you’re permanent. These days could be your whole life…. Isn’t our whole existence in this life a temporary existence?”25 And, just when Khalil realizes that he must sever his ties with his past and his family once and for all, Sandra warns him that his unwillingness to make choices in real life will detach him from any ‘true’ identity: You always want to be what you aren’t. You want to be moral and dissolute, religious and irreligious. You want to live in the Middle Ages and modern times, belonging to the East and the West. You have one foot in the present and one in legends. You’ll end up neither in reality nor in legends. You belong neither to the East nor to the West.26 Linda and Sandra symbolize two opposite forms of femininity, the first represents love and comfort, the latter represents passion and adventure, but also a clear vision of reality. Neither can offer Khalil stability in life, Linda because she cannot silence the ‘wild’ man inside him, and Sandra because she does not believe in permanence and stability. The loss of both Linda and Sandra makes Khalil realize that his indulgence in lasciviousness has left him in a mental and social void. He contrasts himself with his friend Adnan, who has found a cause to fight for and leaves the West to participate in the Lebanese Civil War. Khalil, unable to identify with any political cause, remains a homeless nomad: Adnân had found a home for his “ego” which was satisfied by grand aims and hot causes and went along enjoying his self-righteousness, certain that he had found himself – found a way of satisfying his “ego” and achieving his desire to gain that recognition. I was still astray, not having found an abode for my “self,” nor a balcony suspended in space to display myself from. I had gone to the most direct and lucid form of self-display, which was acting, trying to find a market for myself in the hall of mirrors, I had brought home with me the worlds of the Thousand and one nights 24  Ibid., 61. 25  Ibid., 66–67. 26  Ibid., 116.

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and had gallivanted about between the Middle Ages and modern times, between the cities of the East and the West, looking for an empty space to stand on, plant my banner on and say “this is the border of my domain,” but I found only emptiness. I envied Adnân his commitment, his sense of purpose, and blamed myself for the wasted life I was leading.27 In this quotation, the Thousand and one nights represents Khalil’s vacillation between two worlds, his inability to choose and his lack of a steady orientation. Khalil has chosen to occupy himself with the Thousand and one nights because of its potential to provide an escape from his harsh past. The work hovers above the borderline of reality and unreality, between reality and the imagination. Khalil realizes that his fixation on the Nights threatens to estrange him from real life, but he does not consider it a refuge in superstition: Appreciating the world of the imagination doesn’t necessarily mean belonging to a different period or a different world. It’s part of our world, part of our existence. I think it was your poet, William Blake, who said that in the imagination we find our true lives, which there are more real than in what people call the real world.28 It is the regenerative force of the stories that fascinates Khalil, and their concern with eroticism and sexuality. His thesis is about the way sex regenerates itself in the text, through the internal relationships and the narrative structure. The Thousand and one nights used in its structure the method of procreation and fertility, the way some stories spring from the wombs of other stories. Secret and evanescent sex was worked into the texture of the narrative as another facet of the sex which Scheherazade talks about in her stories … a confirmation of the essence of sexual life as a weapon against death.29 However, sexuality, as portrayed in the Nights, has a darker side, too, a cruel and violent aspect, represented by the figure of Shahriyar. As Khalil indulges in his sexual relationships with Linda and Sandra, he comes to realize that this cruel force is also hidden inside him; it is a remnant of his past that prevents him from finding tranquility and stability. Shahrazad, the high-priestess of 27  Ibid., 142. 28  Ibid., 100. 29  Ibid., 105.

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narration, who succeeds in defeating the violence of Shahriyar, should support him in overcoming this destructive force. Shahrazad could teach me how to tame killers and along with them the other person who forever slept in the forest of my soul. I would learn from her how she had managed, through the power of the imagination and her stories of love, jinn, magic, violence, sex and the wonders of the world, to save her neck and those of her doomed sisters, to humanize a killer who took pride in shedding the blood of maidens.30 Gradually, however, Khalil becomes aware that he has become a captive of the Thousand and one nights, that he has become both Shahrazad and Shahriyar, who fight their struggle inside him. Instead of helping him to escape from his predicament, the Thousand and one nights seems to perpetuate it, to take over his life and imprison him in a permanent state of liminality and exile. Ultimately, his main concern is how to escape from this world of legends and mirages: [The Thousand and one nights] was using me and not the other way around. It was extending its control over my mind, my heart and my behaviour, making me a mere tool that could speak only with its voice, preoccupied only with its causes and concerns…. It had chosen me for its thesis, appointed me as a representative of its time, painted my life in its colours. I became certain that there was now no way for me to regain my freedom – to restore my personality which had been stolen from me by myth – except by finishing my dissertation as quickly as possible.31 An escape from Shahrazad is the only way to ‘return’ to reality, whatever it may be. In the second part of the trilogy, These are the borders of my kingdom, we find Khalil back in Tripoli, recovering from a mental crisis which has apparently culminated in an attempted suicide. He is a professor of English at the university and unhappily married. Although he feels partly cured, he is still haunted by a feeling of emptiness and by frightful nightmares. All he wants is “to get away from it all, to be in some other time, some other place, to have some other face, some other name, and to see different faces from those I saw

30  Ibid., 93. 31  Ibid., 142–143.

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every day.”32 At that point he spots a copy of the Thousand and one nights, and he is still irresistibly attracted to it: My struggle with those legends had worn me out, as I had tried to shake myself free from their hold and influence. Was I still trying to avoid surrendering to them? Was I still afraid of the spell and effect they could work on my life? It seemed strange to me that I should wonder about this, for I was yearning for one of those moments from which I had been running away. But how could the Thousand and one nights create its own world around me in this environment, which had preserved its chastity, fortified itself with misery and sterility and surrendered itself to be an everlasting gift for the winds of the desert. These legends singled me out while I was away from my country, and their magical atmosphere took me by surprise when I was living in a place untouched by the Bedouin wisdom, which opposes taking delight in this transitory life.33 Khalil starts reading the stories again and decides to write another study, this time not on sex and violence, but on “how Scheherazade dealt with metamorphosis, disfigurement, death and suicide,” in the hope that it will throw some light on his predicament.34 It should alleviate his sorrows and provide a “substitute for, and escape from, the misery of reality.”35 As in the first book of the trilogy, this renewed interest in the Thousand and one nights marks Khalil’s transition from his ‘real’ life to a state of uncertainty and liminality, in which the dividing lines between reality and the imagination are blurred. One day he is irresistibly drawn to the house of his childhood, which is now deserted and ruined. He enters the neighboring house where Shaykh Sadra, the local Sufi, used to live, and finds him – or his apparition – inside. While the shaykh treats his mental problems, and seems to manipulate his mind, Khalil suddenly sees himself running through the desert, a “sunburnt wasteland.”36 While he still hears the voice of the shaykh, he sees a city in front of him and its inhabitants waiting at the gate. It turns out that their prince has just passed away and it is their custom to accept the first stranger arriving at the city as his successor, so he is installed as their new prince. After all, only

32  Ibid., 178. 33  Ibid., 178. 34  Ibid., 179. 35  Ibid., 180. 36  Ibid., 186.

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someone who is sent by God would be able to cross this harsh desert infested with birds of prey, snakes, and demons. The city appears to be a utopian society living in isolation in the desert. No one is forced to work, there are no conflicts, crimes or controversies, and everyone enjoys a common share of welfare. Khalil tastes the pleasures of this society to the full. He marries the beautiful princess Narjis al-Qulub and has a love affair with an even more beautiful mistress, Budur; his wife appeals to his rational mind, and his mistress stimulates his emotions and senses. At one point, his wife shows him around the palace and leads him to the door of a room which had remained locked ever since the palace had been built. Its key had been thrown into the lake outside the city, so that no one would think of opening it; it had been decreed by the wisdom of the ancestors that this room was to remain shut for all eternity…. I asked Narjis al-Qulub why that particular room had been locked, and she replied that no one knew for certain, but that there were many legends about the room. One of them stated that a certain righteous man had collected all the vipers, scorpions and poisonous insects which used to plague the inhabitants of the city, and had locked them up behind that door. Another rumour affirmed that a prince of the city, who had had power over the jinn and demons, had rounded up all the evil spirits and sealed them in that room. A third story contradicted those two and stated that the room symbolized people’s ability to overcome the curiosity which brought disaster in its wake, and that to open it would bring evil and destruction upon them.37 When Budur, Khalil’s mistress, visits the palace, Khalil shows her the door and she surmises that the room may contain the fountain of youth. Gradually, things begin to change. Khalil introduces the peaceful inhabitants to his – superficial – knowledge of science and technology, and after some time they succeed in constructing a dangerous weapon. Then Budur disappears, but Khalil can still hear her singing in his mind and he imagines that she is still with him: I realized that my relationship with Budûr was witnessing a new stage, where her invisible presence meant more to me than her physical presence. She was part of the spirit of the place, part of the air I breathed, 37  Ibid., 201–202.

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even if she were only the echo of my own thoughts, the embodiment of a desire lying deep in my memory.38 Finally, Khalil realizes that this whole society, this blissful city, exists only in his own imagination. This means that he built it and organized it and only he could penetrate its secrets. This gives him a strange feeling of confidence: I felt closely linked to everything about the place. I felt certain that what linked me to the manifestations of life there was a bond greater than that which usually links the beholder to the things he sees, something greater than simple excitement at what his senses perceive in the eternal world…. I attained a deep tranquillity when I told myself that I had found the secret keys to the city, and since it had materialized from a dream of mine, my relationship with the city was that of a creator with a picture invented by his imagination.39 At a certain point, Khalil hears Budur’s singing inside the palace. The sound appears to come from the room behind the forbidden door, and he wonders if she has entered the fountain of eternal youth. He fetches an axe, destroys the lock and opens the door, which reveals a darkness, a ‘musty’ odor, and the smell of Budur’s perfume. When he enters he finds a second door: The light filtering in through the door enabled me to see that what I had taken to be darkness was in fact the side of a hill, black volcanic rock surrounded by walls. In the middle of the rock there was a circular, metal door which I thought must conceal a tunnel in the hill. The room was thus no more than the entrance to a cave. The writing on the locked door bore a warning in silver paint, its letters were legible despite the darkness, requesting whosoever was foolish enough to open the first door to profit from this second chance and return whence he came. However, the beautiful singing was still so resonant that I gave no heed to the warning.40 When he opens the door, he unleashes a tremendous noise, a hot, stale, yellow, stinking air, and a fire that scorches him. He flees into the desert and runs away, while behind him the city is destroyed. He wonders why this blissful town had

38  Ibid., 280. 39  Ibid., 218–219. 40  Ibid., 288.

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to be ruined and finds an answer only in man’s deficiencies, which are also hidden inside himself: Its only flaw had been man’s intrinsic destructiveness, a flame burning across time, making wars and razing cities and people alike. I knew that this was the heritage I shared with all mankind and which I carried with me. It was a crude, primitive, blind force which brought about murder, death and destruction, which invented the gallows, prisons and torture chambers. It was a power which slumbered in the fibres of the brain, and the moment it saw human achievement at its best, it reared its ugly head to annihilate and stain everything with blood. I knew then, as I faced my own destruction, that I was not the victim of that secret room buried in the mountain side, but the victim of that other secret room, buried deep within the caves of the self, which had been full of foetid yellow air ever since Cain killed his brother Abel. No matter how much we managed to pretend that it did not exist, one day it would show itself and overwhelm the world with its accursed air.41 Khalil then wakes up in the empty room of the shaykh and returns home. While in the first part of the trilogy the Thousand and one nights is referred to as a catalyst of illusive and imaginary forms in real life, in the second part Khalil is literally absorbed by one of Shahrazad’s stories and decides to ‘act out’ what he has read in the Nights. His experiences are a dream, a vision, a fantasy that exists outside the boundaries of space and time. When he returns home after his strange adventure, he has the feeling that he has been away for an entire year, but his wife says that he left the house just one hour before. The unreality of the Thousand and one nights is mingled with the transcendental state evoked by mysticism, or at least the manipulative powers of an – illusive – shaykh. Thus, in this part, the imaginary world of the Thousand and one nights swallows him, or, perhaps more accurately, allows him to enter his own mind, live in his own visions. As in part one, however, he is unable to restrain the destructive forces within himself and relish his blissful situation. In the third part of the trilogy, entitled A tunnel lit by one woman, Khalil resumes his ordinary life as a university teacher, although it is repetitive and has lost all flavor. He tries to preserve the balance between the banality of life and his insistent fantasies: “I was trying to combine the limited with the unlimited, the time of dreams with reality, and I kept on trying to preserve 41  Ibid., 290.

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those balances so that the system of the universe would not be disrupted.”42 Then something happens which turns his whole life upside down. At a university outing he meets a young colleague who perfectly resembles Budur, who, in his perception, is the Budur of the imaginary city. He is immediately infatuated with her; he starts a relationship with her and asks her to marry him. This leads to all kinds of difficulties and intrigues, though initially everything goes well. Sana, the young woman, does to him what “Shahrazad does to Shahriyar”: She “fought his lust and brought him an emotion purer than any desire.”43 After some time, Khalil starts frequenting the parties of a group of bohemian musicians and intellectuals and there he meets the libertine and lustful Suad, who captivates his imagination. Intoxicated by alcohol and the entrancing atmosphere of the parties, he has sexual relations with her, although he realizes that he may be approaching his doom. He philosophizes: There was something about Sana which obviously stirred the darker side of my nature. Although I felt somehow purified by my love for Sana, bathing in the light of her affection, that darker side of my nature still clung to the shadows, panicking from the power of this love. I was well aware just how much I loved her and how meaningless life would be without her, but it was this very feeling which had made me sleep with Suad, trying to prove how strong I was while it was a sign of weakness and despair. I resented my actions and was aware that I did not know how to love Sana, that my love for her was deficient and sick because something in me was so corrupt that it was incapable of loving. The scorching southern winds were still howling within me, spewing up their dust in my chest, refusing to fit in with the world around me, in the least degree.44 For him, Suad is the real, quintessential woman; Helena, Ophelia, Julia, Shahrazad, and Sana are only counterfeit images of her; she wears no mask and is the embodiment of purity and sincerity. Although matters become increasingly complicated with Sana, he still sees her as his dream wife: “I kept warning myself that this fear of losing Sana would eventually cause me to lose her.”45 His love for Suad awakens an animalistic lust in him, which haunts his body and re-kindles the sufferings of his youth:

42  Ibid., 307. 43  Ibid., 412. 44  Ibid., 441. 45  Ibid., 466.

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It was possessed by the madness of the days it had spent crying, begging in the streets for a word of love, hammering on the windows of the night, beseeching the spirits of darkness, weaving its dreams out of the barren roads of a city which killed off its birds, suffocated its trees and turned its rose gardens into garages. My body’s sinews and arteries were being ripped apart under the pressure of frustrated desire, strangled love songs, and the thorns of pain which had been wounding and bleeding it since my youth. It bore a thousand-year-old heritage of repression and deprivation but was creating a new heritage for itself, listening only to the music of the blood in its veins and dancing only to its own tune.46 Khalil realizes that the dichotomy between the two women is part of his fate, since it reflects an inner dichotomy from which he cannot escape. The struggle is gradually relocated to his mind and soul, and he no longer distinguishes between what is real and what has sprung from his imagination. In a final confrontation Khalil fights and mutilates himself in an effort to kill the monster that lives inside him, but in the end, he realizes that he is unable to solve the contradiction in himself. His efforts to be the person whom he imagines himself to be are in vain. Suad is the “truth” and Sana is the “lie.”47 Now that he is aware of this, the stalemate is broken and a new time begins, “a time of beautiful terror, beautiful, beautiful terror.”48 In this part, the references to the Thousand and one nights seem to be less thematic than in the previous parts, although we could argue that the exploration of the Thousand and one nights theme of metamorphosis, suggested in part two, continues here. After all, it is suggested that ultimately the process of transformation is complete and the ‘evil’ side hidden in Khalil’s soul has taken possession of his body and his mind. Still, there are several references to elements of the Nights in part three, such as the mention of Harun al-Rashid, Masrur and Ja‘far, who are ‘present’ at one of the parties, waiting to execute him if he cannot invent a story; Sindbad, the quintessential random traveler; the jinn, an intervening force in the guise of Suad; and Shahrazad, who vainly attempts to appease his wild urges. Here the boundary between what is real and the illusion is represented more by aspects of Sufism (dancing, music, dhikr) than by the control of ‘legends’ of the imagination. These references to the ecstatic and physical aspects of Sufism, which evoke his lust for Suad, are contrasted by Sana’s interest in the renowned woman Sufi, Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya, 46  Ibid., 481. 47  Ibid., 487. 48  Ibid., 488.

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a paragon of asceticism, contemplation, and religious devotion. Sana conceives a play about Rabi‘a but Khalil criticizes it, thus indicating that in part three he is no longer interested in ‘acting’ and will no longer, consciously or unconsciously, play roles. Each of the three parts of the trilogy begins with variations of the same formula: “A time has passed and another has not yet begun. Between the time which has passed and the next which refuses to come, there is a third time, a desert of red sand burnt by the sun that stands still in the midst of a leaden sky.”49 This indicates that the events described in the novels take place in a kind of temporal limbo, a period taken out of the regular passage of time. This reflects the way in which in the frame story of the Thousand and one nights the regular course of events is interrupted to give Shahrazad space for her storytelling. Through the strategy of postponement Shahrazad creates a temporal impasse, which fills the imagination. Likewise, in Gardens of the night the interruption in the passage of time causes a blurring of the boundaries between reality and the imagination. This blurring is strengthened by the hero’s displacement in Scotland and Tripoli: The disintegration of the spatiotemporal structure makes possible the penetration of fantasy into reality and produces a kind of interface between real life and imagined life. This lapse into a world which lacks a stable reality destabilizes the hero’s sense of identity. He is a wandering nomad, with no home; he is an actor, only playing roles that are in harmony with his environment; and he flees into fantasies, dreams, and legends, to create an alternative reality that functions as a buffer zone between the outer world and his ‘distorted’ soul. This liminal state is explicitly linked to the Thousand and one nights, but also to manifestations of Sufism, which involve various rituals that evoke states of ecstasy and trance, and the ability of shaykhs to manipulate the mind and provoke visions and virtual realities. Both the Thousand and one nights and Sufism are invoked to create states of in-between, between times, between places, and between realities. Although in the beginning this state of liminality seems to be Khalil’s only refuge, gradually he begins to experience it as a prison, a trap, which has taken away his freedom of mind. His life is governed by the fantasies which he himself has released. In all three parts, the state of in-between which dominates Khalil’s life is symbolized by his love for two women of different, even opposite, dispositions. He is unable to choose between them because they represent conflicting components of his own soul; Linda, Narjis al-Qulub, and Sana represent stability, tranquility, and rationality, while Sandra, Budur, and Suad represent 49  Ibid., 3, 173, 301.

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passion, freedom, sexuality, and rebelliousness. He realizes that his love for these women is determined by the deprivations of his youth, the traces that his nomad descent, and the scorching harshness of the desert have left in him. He is attracted by the opposites they represent and is incapable of reconciling the dichotomy of his feelings, which derives from a deep rift in his soul. He cannot choose because doing so would entail killing an essential part of himself. It is not only a struggle between the mind and the body, spiritual love, and sexuality; it is a struggle against the evil drives in human nature, a struggle symbolized by the mystical rituals to purify the soul. Within these psychological configurations, the central metaphor, which structures the novels thematically and binds them together, is the forbidden door, which occurs in the middle of part two. It is in this metaphor that the association of Gardens of the night with the Thousand and one nights is most decisive. As noted, as a narrative element, the motif of the forbidden door has several specific functions in the tales of Thousand and one nights, and in Gardens of the night these functions are to a large extent similar. Here, too, the forbidden door is related to a taboo. Khalil has established himself in a remote, blissful palace where he enjoys all the pleasures of life; so the taboo is related to a form of hubris, since Khalil only opens the door after he has convinced himself that he is, in fact, the creator of the utopian town and therefore he has the power to control it, as a product of his imagination; Khalil is tempted to open the forbidden door by a combination of curiosity and seduction, both of which are stimulated by Budur, who wonders what may be found behind the door – perhaps the fountain of youth – and whose voice seduces him to break the lock. The door marks a boundary, a separation between two realms, and an access to a realm that is closed off from the ‘regular’ world. When, in spite of the warnings, Khalil opens the door, it seems that he has opened the gate to hell. It is a hell from which the forces of destruction immediately gush out to engulf and destroy the city of bliss, which throws him out of his dream and back into reality. This crossing of the boundary resembles the stories of the Thousand and one nights, where trespassing into the forbidden room unleashes the irresistible forces of another realm, which inflict either direct punishment, or a chain of difficulties. Khalil immediately recognizes that his trespassing was the result of human weakness and the deficiencies of the human soul. This is the same as acknowledging that Man cannot control his will and actions, that he is unable to change his destiny, that he is at least, to a certain extent, governed by fate. Khalil feels that he was bound, by fate, to open the forbidden door.

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If we apply the metaphor of the forbidden door as it is presented in part two to parts one and three of Gardens of the night, it is not difficult to see that the dichotomy of the separated spaces is paralleled by Khalil’s attraction to the various women; Khalil acknowledges the bliss provided by the loving and caring of some women, but is unable to repress his body and soul’s ‘evil’ passion for the other women and so he submits to his infatuation, although he knows that it will destroy his happiness. The forbidden door thus provides access to a repressed part of his soul, a part of his nature which, if it is unleashed, will take control of him and wash away all forms of civility and social behavior. In this state of liminality, the temptations to open the forbidden door are too strong to resist, and thus the Thousand and one nights is part of the web of temptations that leads Khalil into a state of liminality and shows him glimpses of hidden, happy worlds. Although al-Faqih associates the motif of the forbidden door with the human psyche in general and with Khalil’s state of mind in particular, it is also linked to the social environment in which Khalil’s character was shaped and governed. At the end of the novel, al-Faqih mentions the ambivalent situation of modern Libyan society, which emerged from a culture of stifling morality and frugality, but has adopted a lukewarm form of modernity that has cast off all sense of authenticity: But in spite of the fact that we had Tripoli in our very blood, the city still appeared grim and devoid of happiness. It was stuck in a time-warp, no longer village but not yet a city. It was neither Eastern nor Western. It did not belong to the past or the present. It was suspended between the sea and the desert, between an age which had passed, and another which had not yet begun – an historical oddity…. It had refused to be part of [the modern world] and remained in limbo between the past and the present, with no sense of belonging and full of suspicion towards the outside world.50 Ultimately, it is societies that determine the location of forbidden doors and the destructiveness of the forces hidden behind them. In both Season of migration to the north and Gardens of the night, the journey of the hero is compelled by an uncontrollable urge that draws him to Europe and into fateful relationships with European women. The dynamic of their 50  Faqih, Gardens of the Night, 472.

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journeys is expressed not only by the influence of alien, alienating, spaces, but also by the contrast between enclosed and open spaces, which reflects the relationship between space and the passage of time. However, it also reflects the secret inner life of the protagonist and the incompatible components of his psyche, which must be protected against the passage of time. Since enclosures are often associated with the inner desires of the hero, they are usually protected by some taboo, or by the prohibition to enter them. It is this contrast between journey and enclosure, between desire and taboo, which is the main theme in both novels. Both novels use texts, in the form of a book or a letter, to open the closed space. In both novels, we find an emphasis on uncontrollable passions; these are the result of a lack of emotional discipline (as in Mustafa), or a reflection of the fractured self of the hero (as in Khalil). In both cases this fatal passion is related to the crossing of cultural boundaries and the entering of the realm where colonial relationships are expressed in discourses of masters and slaves, in the political and economic sense, but also in the psychological and sexual sense; these determine the love relationships of the heroes. Mustafa takes revenge but fails to redeem himself; Khalil falls victim to his blind passion and is estranged from his native environment. The two heroes come ‘home,’ but neither one is able to heal the wounds created by their exile and thereby find a balance between place and inner state which is a precondition for the experience of a ‘homecoming.’

Chapter 3

Writing and Enclosures: Michel Butor and Abilio Estévez As we have seen, the interaction between closed spaces and journeys is often in some way regulated by texts. These texts are either read by or written by the protagonist. Sometimes confinement in a closed space is an incentive or even a precondition for writing, and sometimes the written text represents an outside intervention. In the two novels discussed in this section, the act of writing is the central theme in the play between spatial domains. It is the confinement of the author in spe which generates the possibility of writing.

The Portrait of an Author: Michel Butor’s Portrait de l’artiste comme jeune singe

In most of the works discussed in this chapter the juxtaposition between enclosure and journeys is thematically related to the idea of the stagnation of time, either as the result of a traumatic experience or as the ‘silence before the storm,’ that is, the preparation of some decisive intervention of fate. In the enclosure, the forces of time are suspended and substituted by those of the imagination or some other pseudo-magical state. Sometimes the great change announced by the phase of liminality is set in history, for instance on the eve of a great event, while in other cases the transformation is limited to the main character, who undergoes a process of initiation, or of reconciliation or of accommodation, by traversing a kind of diffuse zone. In some cases, this transformation concerns what is often the basic preoccupation of writing, the process that changes the proto-author into an author and stimulates the author’s ability to write through some process of catharsis or maturation. The stagnation of time is a period of incubation, a pupation, from which the author will emerge in all his glory. This kind of self-reflexivity, in which the burgeoning of writing and narration is described, is popular among modernist and postmodernist writers who deal with the nature of texts and narration. One such author is Michel Butor (1926–2016), who became one of the main representatives of what is usually called ‘le nouveau roman.’ The main theorist of this trend, which became somewhat notorious because of its tendency toward incomprehensibility, was © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_005

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Alain Robbe-Grillet, who led a cohort of writers to deconstruct the techniques and principles of the traditional novel; this cohort included authors such as Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, and Robert Pinget. Perhaps the main architect of this style of writing was Samuel Beckett, who, in French and in English, explored the limits of what could be called a text. He used techniques of disruption, radical estrangement, introversion, and minimilization of verbal expression to lay bare the scattered bones of what was once seen as a narrative organism, and thereby he radically established the predominance of textual mechanisms over narrative contents. Writing, thinking, is just words, without any essential natural coherence. The emphasis on the textual character of literary narratives was further developed in the ‘nouveau roman,’ with its famous principle of the ‘death’ of the author, the dismantling of the idea of ‘character,’ a focus on the material setting of the story and the ‘role’ of objects, a disruption of the temporal sequence, and using stagnation, repetition, and fragmentation as a means to destroy the coherence of narrative structure. The literary text thus becomes a self-contained unit, an object that no longer projects narrative logic upon our experience of reality and denies any representational value of the text. Of course, these procedures were not invented overnight by the authors involved; they were rather developed over the course of time, in the writing of these authors. In the work of Michel Butor we can see a gradual development from his early novels, such as Passage à Milan (1951) and La modification (1957), to the more radical textuality of Matière de rêves (1975–85). The basic urge to write is illustrated in La modification, in which a young Frenchman migrates to England and is caught in a web of customs, words, situations, signs, and behavior, whose meanings he is unable to comprehend. His only refuge is the spatial framework of the city and a detective novel; these spur him on to undertake an investigation, to somehow construct the meaning of his own environment. During his wanderings in this space he discovers clues and signs which together constitute a pattern to help him to organize his observations and experiences, and, especially, his relationships with those around him. In La modification, the hero’s search is typical of Butor’s literary universe: the world is filled with signs and indications which we, as human beings, must detect and interpret in order to make sense of an essentially chaotic reality. The signs are predominantly projected into space and the quintessential search for meaning is a journey. This journey has no predetermined schedule or destination; rather by moving through space fragments of meaning can be gathered. Although the world may seem chaotic, these fragments of meaning are not scattered through the world at random; the world is governed by

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a cosmic order which lies underneath perceptible reality and which shines through the surface of matter as a pattern of indicators that reveals glimpses of meaning. This esoteric dimension permeates all of Butor’s writing and not only contains the secret meanings of life, but also the secrets of the process of writing. Therefore, writing is not a personal act, but rather an esoteric ritual, or an alchemic experiment to distill the truth from seemingly opposing elements. The interrelationship between writing and esoteric procedures is explored in what is usually called Butor’s key novel, Portrait de l’artiste comme jeune singe (1967). In this novel Butor describes how, during a period of retirement in an isolated German castle, he received insight into the art of writing. It is in this novel, too, that Butor’s dependence on the Thousand and one nights is most explicit. The novel Portrait de l’artiste comme jeune singe consists of two interconnected narrative levels. On the first level, we follow the adventures of the narrator (in the first person), called Butor, and, more particularly, his research into the esoteric sciences and his intellectual maturation. The second level contains a variation of the story of the ‘Second qalandar’ from the Thousand and one nights. On this second level, we follow Butor’s parallel adventure, which takes place in his dreams, which are spread over seven nights and constitute a continuing story. The first level is set during a number of days, while the second level is situated during the nights, thus the alternation of day and night is used as the interaction of two components of the author, together these shape his intellectual initiation and reveal the visible and the hidden processes at work. Another structural reference framing the text, apart from the Thousand and one nights, is that of ancient Egypt, which the narrator considers his “seconde terre natale, j’y ai vécu pour ainsi dire une seconde enfance,” and where the god of writing, Thot, is often represented as a monkey.1 In the first part of the book the narrator relates his youth and the first phase of his intellectual interests. He is of Hungarian descent and took refuge in France, where he started working on a thesis about the sixteenth-century alchemist Paracelsus. His home is filled with books about alchemy, the history of phantoms, science fiction novels, and all kinds of esoteric works. During World War II he is invited to attend a meeting of students, intellectuals, and clerics in a castle near Paris, to discuss the occult sciences. He felt himself on the threshold of a treasury of knowledge:

1  Michel Butor, Portrait de l’artiste comme jeune singe: capriccio (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 54.

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Il me semblait que j’avais un mot de passe, un Sésame, une entrée secrete, me permettant de m’introduire, presque frauduleusement, dans un caverne de trésors intellectuels, de discussions à consigner d’une écriture d’or sur feuillets de pourpre, ou plutôt graver, d’une très grande industrie, avec une pointe de fer, en belles et très nettes lettres latines colorées, sur déliées écorces de tendres arbrisseaux, l’entrée ouverte au palais fermé du roi.2 The company was diverse, some participants were well versed in esoteric matters, while others were only beginners, erring without guidance, like “grands dignitaires d’une cour sans Khalife, d’une fabuleuse académie de Bagdad ou de Laputa.”3 He himself also felt lonely and ignorant: “J’étais frère lais, j’étais un singe.”4 Many years later the narrator is invited to spend some time in an old castle in Germany, owned by count W, who has a large library of books on the occult. Earlier, the narrator had visited Germany to attend international student conventions aimed at fraternization and denazification after World War II. The narrator accepts the invitation and travels to Germany, with the novel Joseph und seine Brüder by Thomas Mann, and Les demeures philosophales by Fulcanelli, as a gift to his host. When he arrives, the story splits into two levels. The first level follows the narrator in his explorations of his new environment, the castle, with its mysterious spaces, walls, and towers, its huge library, its intriguing collection of minerals and precious stones, its caves and gallery of paintings, and the neighboring villages and castles. In between his excursions, he studies old esoteric texts of various kinds and plays cards with his host. The day section of the narrative is presented as a repository of esoteric texts, references to artists and authors, and a variety of esoteric symbols. These include Musaeum hermeticum, Mysterium magnum, Le cabinet des fées, Jacob Boehme, Tripus aureus, Practicum cum duodecim clavibus, Iter extaticum, Almanach de Gotha, Max Ernst, Maurice de Maeterlinck, Verlaine, Crébillon, Fulcanelli, Caspar Friedrich, Franz Weifel, l’Art d’être heureux par les rêves, China illustrata, La Jérusalem délivrée, Piranesi, Athanase Kircher, Alfred Kubin, Les désastres de la guerre, and many others. The castle is a microcosm of the European occult and literary tradition, steeped in the signs and interpretations of what is secret and hidden in the universe and the forces that link 2  Ibid., 39. 3  Ibid., 40. 4  Ibid., 42.

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the worlds of matter and mind, the macrocosm and the microcosm of human understanding. It is an alchemic laboratory, not one that contains the instruments to transform matter into gold, but one that enables the transformation of the mind merely by compressing esoteric knowledge in a closed space. This saturation of occult knowledge is extended to the night section of the story, which contains the narrator’s dreams. He sees himself as a student belonging to a sect, which knows the Mysterium magnum by heart and is fascinated by descriptions of imaginary regions and fabulous eras. Since he is a talented calligrapher, he is invited, by the rector of the University of the Holy Empire, to join the staff. However, on the way there he is attacked by a military convoy and then begins to roam through the unfamiliar country. An old man advises him to hide himself and take a job as an assistant forester. One day, wandering on his own, he finds a stone slab with a ring covered with letters and figures. Underneath is a staircase to a subterranean cave, where a girl lives; she turns out to be the daughter of the famous Fulcanelli, writer of the great esoteric work Les demeures philosophales, who disappeared mysteriously in the 1920s and whose true identity has remained unknown. She tells him that she was abducted by a vampire who has imprisoned her in this cave and comes once a week to sleep with her. He proposes that they flee together, but the girl refuses and tells him that he can stay six days and leave the seventh day to the vampire. This ‘night tale’ follows the well-known ‘Second qalandar’s tale,’ in which a one-eyed mendicant recounts his life story: he used to be a prince, who on a journey was robbed by a group of Bedouins. Earning his living as a woodcutter, one day he finds an underground hallway where a beautiful girl is held captive by a jinn. He spends a delightful night with the girl, but inadvertently touches a stone that summons the jinn to the cave. The jinn captures him, kills the girl, and turns him into a monkey. Later he is brought to the court of a king where he shows his skills as a calligrapher and the spell is broken, although, in the process, he loses an eye.5 As we see, the two-layered narrative of Portrait de l’artiste brings together the various elements of the ‘Second qalandar’s tale.’ As in the ‘Second qalandar’s tale,’ the narrator, intoxicated by Tokaj wine, becomes defiant, touches the stone which summons the vampire and narrowly escapes before the vampire arrives. However, the vampire retrieves him from Budapest, takes him back to the cave, and forces him to kill the girl. The vampire then takes him from the cave to the planet Mercury, with “ses mers métalliques, ses tables d’éméraude, ses monuments à l’inventer de l’alphabet, son cil 5  About this story, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:338–340.

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torride.”6 When they return he changes him into a monkey. He is picked up by a ship and arrives in a port town with an illustrious university. The dean needs a secretary and asks everyone to write some lines in German. The narrator/ monkey writes some lines from Basile Valentin, Jacob Boehme, Athanase Kircher, Jean-Paul Richter, Hegel, Marx, and Enno Littmann. Surprised, the king shows him to his daughter who, being a sorceress, sees through the spell, exclaims that the monkey is in reality the student Férenc de Télek: “Le vampire Orfanik, fils de la fille de Nosferatu, lui a fait cette malice, après avoir cruellement ôté la vie à la Stilla, cantatrice du theatre San Cailo à Naples, fille du recteur de l’Université des Figures Fulcanelli.”7 The dream narrative then takes a sudden turn, and leaves the Thousand and one nights model to relate the narrator’s early history, which merges with the history of the castle told previously in the day section. In the end, he is chased away: “Je voulais parler, mais il me fermait la bouche par le plomb de ses jeux flavescents, et rebuté, chassé, abandonné de tout le monde, ne sachant ce que je deviendrais, je me mettais en chemin …”8 As in the day section, the dreams are full of references to occult texts and symbols. The cave is called the ‘demeure philosophale,’ where the girl, called ‘l’étudiante,’ is studying esoteric books; the sails of the ship which rescues the narrator/monkey carry the images of David, Charlemagne, Pallas, Judith, Cleopatra, and Alexander, and the eyes of the girl and the vampire continually change colors – these are compared to gems and celestial bodies. But the main reference to occultism lies not in these motifs, but rather in the broader theme of metamorphosis. At the same time, the symbols of occultism are systematically interwoven with references to texts and to an intertextual dynamic which permeates the whole narrative. Texts, symbols, objects, nature, and signs, together, are the components of something new that has yet to appear in some visible form. They are the ingredients for the alchemist to concoct his mysterious brew. In this process of arranging the alchemical ingredients, the narrator systematically refers to the Thousand and one nights. In each day chapter the narrator includes a reference, which becomes increasingly central to the process of metamorphosis. In chapter 3 the narrator sees a small book with a quotation; in chapter 5 there is an interrupted quotation from Schéhérazade; in chapter 7 we find a more elaborate reference:

6  Butor, Portrait de l’artiste, 143. 7  Ibid., 179. 8  Ibid., 223.

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‘… je pris le sabre en main Schéhérazade s’arresta en cet endroit …’ – (et elle était pour moi semblable à la Force, vêtue de rouge, avec ses yeux de schorls bleus) – ‘… parce qu’elle apercevait le jour ma soeur dit alors Dinarzade – (pour moi semblables à la prudence, vêtue de celeste nuance, avec ses yeux de talcs nacrés) – ‘… je suis enchantee de ce conte qui soutient si agrablement mon attention si le Sultan me laisse encor vivre aujourd’hui …’ – (semblable au dieu Mars, furieux et ardent, avec ses yeux de néphélines) … – ‘… repartit Schéhérazade vous verrez que ce que je vous raconterai demain vous divertira beaucoup advantage Schahriar curieux de savoir …’ – provenant aussi bien des Mille et une nuits de la Bible, – ‘… ce que deviendraient la Princesse de l’Isle d’Ébène & son amant …’ – car ce roi pouvait être Pharaon ou Schahriar, cette reine la femme de Potiphar ou Schéhérazade, ce ministre le grand vizir ou le grand échanson, ces frères les trois kalenders ou les tourmenteurs de Joseph.’9 In chapter 9 again, we find a longer, interrupted, quotation: ‘… la cinquième nuit étant venue’ … (j’imaginais la lune) ‘… le Sultan et son épouse se coucherent Dinarzade …’ – (et elle avait sur ses chevilles nues qui sortaient de la couverture des anneaux de topazes gouttes d’eau) … se reveille a son heure ordinaire & appella la Sultane Schahriar … – (sur sa poitrine nue où s’étalait sa longuebarbe noire un collier d’érythrines fleurs de cobalt – ‘… pregnant la parole je souhaiterais dit il d’entendre l’histoire de ce singe je vais contenter votre curiosite Sire repondit Scheherazade … – (sur ses bras nus des bracelets de galènes) – ‘… le Sultan continua le second Kalender fils de Roi en s’adressant toujours à Zobeide …’ – (un diadème formé de feuilles d’hématites irisées)’ – ‘… ne fit aucune attention aux autres ecritures …’ – Je vis une ombre passer sur la page, le comte se moquait de moi.’10 In chapter 11, finally, we find a similar reference, and in chapter 12 the figure of Schéhérazade is intermingled with the reports of executions and massacres. Gradually, the Thousand and one nights, Schéhérazade, and the act of narration are integrated in the broader alchemist scheme; it is related to the celestial bodies and gems and the gods they represent; and, ultimately, it culminates with the narrator receiving ‘permission’ to narrate. 9  Ibid., 129–130. 10  Ibid., 165–166.

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The references to the Nights in the day section interfere with the continuing story in the night section, which consists of a parody of the story of the ‘Second qalandar’s tale.’ The two tracks come together in chapter 9, when the qalandar is mentioned in the story of the monkey, and in the final chapter, when the narrator leaves the castle with a damaged right eye, which is reminiscent of the qalandars in the story of the ‘Second qalandar’s tale.’ It is here that the two processes, which evolved in the night story and the day story, converge and the metamorphosis is completed. The spell is broken, and the alter ego of the narrator, who existed only in the imagination, is reincorporated into its origin.11 The narrator is en route again, chased away by the ‘king,’ wounded, uncertain of his fate. Still, as the closing ‘envoi’ says, After all these experiences, how could he not travel to Egypt as soon as possible? Now he is prepared to undergo his “second birth.”12 Initiation into Art Naturally, by the end of Portrait de l’artiste comme jeune singe, the reader understands that the narrator of the story is Michel Butor, who is recounting his own development to becoming an author. In fact, the title refers to James Joyce’s famous work Portrait of the artist as a young man, which describes his intellectual maturation, the intellectual influences and dilemmas of his youth, and his gradually developing outlook on life which is the precondition of literary art. Butor, too, returns to his history as a writer and analyzes the way in which the various components of his experiential world come together to shape and mark his authorship. In contrast to Joyce, however, his trajectory is represented as an initiation and a rite of passage. It seems to be a process which is not shaped by his internal development, his intellectual discoveries, and his tensions with his environment, but by historical and even transcendental forces connected with the innermost nature of creation. We can clearly discern the various phases of the “initiation” rite. The narrator’s abode is a place that is isolated from the world, yet contains a microcosm of the gnostic heritage of humanity. The castle is likened to an “island in time”;13 it is situated in a timeless silence, a forgotten place, where the forces of occultism still lurk. Within this liminal state, he undertakes an imaginary initiatory journey that is realized in a series of dreams, which are not real dreams, however, but willfully constructed fantasies. After all, whoever writes down his 11  Ibid., 192. 12  Ibid., 231. 13  Ibid., 107.

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dreams makes mistakes, or lies. Therefore, “plutôt que de prétender me souvenir suffisamment des rêves que j’ai pu faire au château de H. pour pouvoir les noter après tant d’années, je préfère délibérément les construire, rêvant méthodiquement à ces rêves d’autan dissous.”14 Thus, the dreams are constructed in a way that is not random, but carefully interwoven in an existing pattern of narrative and esoteric symbols and texts. In this way, the dreams attract and reveal their deeper significance, since dreams, too, are related to the broader mechanisms of fate. The actual transition takes place in the cave, or the ‘demeure philosophale,’ where Fulcanelli’s daughter is studying the occult sciences and sacrifices herself to enable the vampire to perform the metamorphosis. Butor is sent to Mercury and is subsequently transmuted into a monkey. Here a first amalgamation takes place: he acquires esoteric knowledge and is transformed into the symbolic appearance of Thot, the Egyptian god of writing. This episode brings to mind the famous novel by Novalis (1802), in which an encounter between Henry von Ofterdingen and a girl in the subterranean cave heralds the birth of literary inspiration. Here, too, in a rather savage ritual, an old, redundant form of study is sacrificed to create a new form (the art of writing) in Butor. Subsequently, the author must continue his search, because he has not yet reached his destiny; he is still a monkey and a calligrapher, not a mature, human, author. His art must be discovered, his spell must be lifted, and he must be ‘reborn’ in his new state. One of the important motifs in the narrative is the recurrent reference to war. From the beginning, there is the suggestion of a tension between France and Germany, which apparently relates to World War II. Butor states that, in his youth, he participated in denazification meetings; and his stay in the castle is a comprehensive search for the common roots of German and French culture in the esoteric heritage. Historical developments have brought this heritage together, but also separated it, though it is still preserved in this timeless ‘enclave’ in central Europe. But this heritage, too, is built on a history of violence and bloodshed, which is somehow an integral part of human fate. This bloodshed is also related to the cosmic cycles that are expressed by the symbolic language of the celestial bodies and the glimmering minerals and gems. Only when the god of war has reconciled himself with the forces of peace and love can true art emerge:

14  Ibid., 60.

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En ce point, ô philosophes, resident la force et l’action de votre prévu précieuse, de votre teinture qui rend vives les eaux pâlies en Lune; car ici Jupiter est prince et le Soleil roi et Dame Vénus la plus douce ‘epouse du roi. Mais Mars Lucifer doit auparavant deposer son sceptre, Christ l’enchaîner et render vive avec son huile de sang celeste la pauvre Lune souillée, afin que la colère se transmise en délices. V’est ainsi qu’est né le grand Art …15 It is only after the hidden forces in the cosmos have formed a favorable conjunction that the conditions for art are created. However, these macrocosmic forces alone do not enable the birth of an artist. The artist himself must also shape his microcosm to enhance his susceptibility to the forces emanating from the mystic spheres, and to enable his initiation into the esoteric knowledge of his craft. After all, writing is an alchemical amalgamation made from matter, celestial forces, and spiritual knowledge. Writing is the effort to discover ‘secret knowledge’ hidden in the spirit and matter of creation. In Portrait de l’artiste comme jeune singe, Butor describes his passage from a naïve student, with intuition, into a potential writer. The Thousand and one nights served as his ‘alembic’ to establish a link between the cosmic forces and the art of narration, and reflect these forces in the domain of literature. Shahrazad symbolizes the conjuration of violence and the eternal continuity of narration and the ritual and formal framework enabling the transition. Butor uses these connotations to characterize his own authorship, which, apparently, starts here. Jennifer Waelti-Walters considers Portrait de l’artiste comme jeune singe a preparatory work that cleared the way for Butor’s ambitious series of novels Matières de rêves, which show a similar pre-occupation with spaces, gems, and occult forces. Significantly, and at least in part because of his references to Shahrazad, she calls the series Butor’s ‘Mille et une nuits.’16

Imprisoned Imagination: Abilio Estévez

In Portrait de l’artiste comme jeune singe, the art of writing is not seen as a trade, or the result of combined talent and technical skill, but rather as the outcome of some macrocosmic constellation in which the author must penetrate a process of initiation. The macrocosm, history, and art, as inspirational forces, converge in the isolated spaces of the cave and the castle, and are internalized 15  Ibid., 185. 16  Jennifer Waelti-Walters, Michel Butor (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1992), 10, 80.

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through the fictional journey and transformation of the author. Only when all these conditions are met can the author set out into the world to develop himself as an artist. This interaction between spaces, which we have seen in our discussions above, and its relationship to writing, is also the constitutive element of a remarkable novel by the Cuban author Abilio Estévez (b. 1954), Tuyo es el reino (Thine is the kingdom), which was published in 1997. Here, too, we find an author breaking out of the straitjacket of realism, freeing his imagination, and permeating the resulting visions with the erotic fantasies from which they ultimately derive. The story of Thine is the kingdom is about the inhabitants of the Island, a small, isolated quarter in Havana, which, like an outskirt, has gradually grown to become a hodgepodge of buildings without order or harmony. It is divided into two parts by a narrow door into This Side and the Beyond, alongside the river. The Island is a repository of stories which should not be believed; rather it is a mosaic of many ‘islands’ that confuse even the people who have lived there for many years. Moreover, the Island is isolated from the rest of the world by the sea, which determines the worldview of the inhabitants. For the islanders “the perpetual discord of man against God does not play out between earth and heaven, but between earth and sea.”17 God and the devils live in the sea. The setting of the Island is further marked by trees that are not endemic to Cuba, and by a number of statues, most of them copies of ancient Greek statues, such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Venus of Milo, Laokoön, Apollo, the Discus Thrower, etc., but also a bust of Greta Garbo. In the first chapter the reader meets the inhabitants of the eccentric domain, which seems to be separated from the real world not only by its geographical isolation, but also by its mysterious unreal nature, as if it is half immersed in a spell-like unreality. The inhabitants are not introduced in a straightforward manner, but rather as ‘imagined’ persons, or rather as persons who imagine themselves as they are imagined by the narrator. We meet Miss Berta, who thinks she is always being observed; Martha, who dreams of leaving the Island and traveling to beautiful places; the Barefoot Contessa, who is a little crazy; Professor Kingston, who hopes to return to Jamaica one day; the blind Marta; the boys Sebastián and Tingo; and Uncle Rolo, who is desperately searching for his lost son Chavito, the sculptor of the statues; and Melissa, who wanders on her terrace roof naked, with her parrot. Their stories are projected from their own imagination, from one imagined world into another.

17  Abilio Estévez, Thine is the Kingdom: A Novel, trans. David Frye (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999), 7.

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One evening, at five o’clock, the mysterious atmosphere in the Island is shaken by a sudden darkness and the advent of a tremendous storm, which seems to herald the end of the world. There is rain which is not real rain, only a strange wind. In this unsettling ambience, strange things are seen: some of the statues are suddenly stained with blood and several of the inhabitants see a strange boy surreptitiously pass by dressed in white like a sailor, seemingly out of a book by Huysmans. The sailor has a mysterious, oriental beauty, “as in the Thousand and one nights.”18 He knocks on the window and disappears to The Beyond, leaving bloody stains on the glass. Everyone hears someone, or sees the white figure walk away: “There’s someone in the Island. There’s always someone in the Island, the black man replies. I mean, a stranger, a wounded man.”19 They hear the flapping of wings, as if a giant bird has come from out of nowhere and is attacking the Island. The sailor looks like “he has come from far away, though he’s obviously not in any rush but is absolutely certain that he’s going down the only possible road.”20 Then, finally, a boy is found lying unconscious, covered in blood. The next chapter is named, mysteriously, ‘My name is Scheherazade.’ It begins with the contemplation of Elisio, the owner of the bookstore: “It’s beautiful the way everything is disappearing, even the Island, turning into an impression, a mirage, I love the rain: it makes you feel outside time and space, I love the rain, it takes me out of the monotony of one day after another, I’ll close the bookstore.”21 In the meantime, the Wounded Boy has been brought to Irene’s house, where he lies unconscious and is taken care of by the ladies of the Island. His appearance is surrounded by a halo of holiness: he looks like Christ, and his body is not pierced by bullets, but by twenty-seven arrows. For every inhabitant of the Island the sight of the Wounded Boy is like “having access to a saint.”22 The Wounded Boy is an unfathomable mystery, which in one way or another touchs upon the deepest feelings of the Islanders. His presence seems to announce the end of the world and at the same time it is as if time is standing still. There is a sense of disaster and hopelessness. At the end of the chapter the Wounded Boy opens his eyes and says: “Scheherazade, my name is Scheherazade.”23

18  Ibid., 39. 19  Ibid., 45. 20  Ibid., 65. 21  Ibid., 71. 22  Ibid., 121. 23  Ibid., 145.

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Two important elements in this chapter deepen the narrative expressiveness of the story. First, the narrator consciously treats the characters not as persons, but as literary characters, he shows that they obey his command. The characters are not representations of human beings, but have only an oblique connection to them: “Like human beings (on whom they draw, after all these characters are unaware of an infinite number of things about themselves.”24 And, “Like other human beings, the characters in this tale feel helpless and in need of a higher being.”25 It seems as if someone is taking control of the story, although the narrator cannot completely fill in the blank spaces in the narrative. He observes certain qualities in the characters, but apparently, he is unable to change them. They obey his commands, but it appears that he cannot change their inherent qualities. Second, as the book continues, the Island is more and more described as a claustrophobic space. The rain, the darkness, the absence of time, the sense of impending disaster and senselessness all combine to give the Islanders a feeling of imprisonment; it is a place where even dreams are absent. The very essence of the Island is its being stuck, in movement and time: “This country isn’t even a country; just a horrid little thing we call an Island for lack of a better word. (and islands aren’t countries, just ships run aground forever – and time, ay! Doesn’t move in ships that have run aground forever).”26 Not only is there no way to physically escape this enclosure, the ‘islandness’ of the Island also imprisons and isolates the minds of the inhabitants. This sense of isolation is elaborated in the next chapter, ‘The faithful death.’ The following observations show the interference of the narrator and the stifling isolation of the Island: And perhaps this is not the proper place to call attention (though in the end it will have to be done in some page of the book) to the fact that there’s nothing so enchanting for an inhabitant of the island as knowing that someone has dared to break through the encirclement of the sea, has overcome the fate of the horizon, someone has been outside and learned what the world is. For an inhabitant of the islands, traveller is synonymous with wizard; travel synonymous with good fortune.27

24  Ibid., 121. 25  Ibid. 26  Ibid., 137. 27  Ibid., 149.

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And, For any islander, a ship (one that plies the seas, of course, this isn’t about the grounded ship that is an island) constitutes the most sublime image of freedom. A ship cutting through the water is the symbol of hope. If it arrives, you should caress it to get the smell and the air of the other lands on your hands. If it sails off, you should caress it so that the smell and the air of other lands will know our hands exist.28 The imagination is the only way of resisting this sense of enclosure, although, if it gives any solace at all, it increases the yearning for the world outside. The Island, it seems, is a curse, because it is separated from normal life and from the regular passage of time. The reader becomes increasingly aware that the main character of the story is Sebastián and there is a connection between him and the narrator, or, more generally, with narration: Sebastián will try to write in the sand, on the seashore. Sebastián will try to write, with his index finger, that phrase he heard from the tall suited mulatto who went one day to buy books at Eleusis. Sebastián will write, I don’t understand anything, I’m a simple soul, while one wave after another will come and erase the phrase each time. For all Sebastián persists in rewriting it, each time the sea will erase it.29 At a crucial point a conversation takes place between Sebastián and the Wounded Boy, who seems to emanate a strange blue light and whose appearance is increasingly androgyne. When Sebastián asks him what he is doing on the Island, the Wounded Boy answers: “I came for you, he says in a voice that could be a man’s or a woman’s, you can’t tell. What do you need me for? It’s me that you need. What do I need you for? Be patient, Sebastián.”30 The Wounded Boy thus appears to have come as a guide for Sebastián, as a Master, a Virgil, who will lead him to an insight. This insight is linked to literature and narration, which is in turn linked to the ‘curse’ of the Island: “One of the virtues of literature is perhaps that through it one can abolish time, or rather, give it a different meaning.”31

28  Ibid., 150. 29  Ibid., 173. 30  Ibid., 200. 31  Ibid., 201.

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There is a connection with the barrenness of history as a source of narration: What am I doing in the Island without a history to tell…. The main problem, dear Wounded Boy, is that we have to understand once and for all that life can’t just be for living, my opinion is that God also gives us life so we can tell it as a story, a history, that will entertain and be useful to others.32 Storytelling seems to be an escape from this temporal exile: “I will never die…. I’ll be in every word, I’m a combination of words. I’m all the words, my words, ascending to the stars and from there we should direct the destiny of mortals.”33 There seems to be a connection, therefore, between narration and the predicament of the Island. One moment Sebastián sees the Wounded Boy writing in a notebook: So speaks the Wounded Boy to Sebastián, sitting in the gallery, in Irene’s rocking chair, with a notebook open on his lap in which he writes from time to time. From the notebook emerge the prints of the various paintings of Saint Sebastian, on which he has been writing the galleries where they can be seen. (Sebastián sees the Wounded Boy writing in the notebook. What are you writing? Notes. What for? For continuing the story.)34 Simultaneously, the characters enter a new, dreamlike state, in which they are not sure if “every part of their body is responding to their brain’s commands. Their voices die before escaping their mouths…. Nor do they know whether time continues to pass or whether it too has stopped.”35 Sebastián and the Wounded Boy go to some of the inhabitants of the Island, who, in their hallucinations, are cured of their obsessive thoughts. There is a sense of apocalypse: it is December 31; it is the day when the house of Consuelo, one of the founding settlers in the Island, is destroyed by fire. The fire symbolizes the destruction of the life of the narrator as he knew it. We now realize that the narrator is the young Sebastián, who flees from the fire to the bookshop, goes down a trap door in the floor, and enters a world of absolute calm: “And it was like in those tales of the Thousand and one nights where the magic words open doors that seemed closed for ever, or allow the djinn to 32  Ibid., 206–207. 33  Ibid., 218–219. 34  Ibid., 231. 35  Ibid., 224.

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appear and resolve any problem and load us down with treasures.”36 Just when the boy succumbs to despair, he is taken to an old man who takes on various subsequent appearances: You are authorized to call me Scheherazade. It seemed the light was becoming intimate. Surprisingly, the man became young again, turned, to my astonishment, into the Wounded Boy with his handsome Honthorst face, and from there he went on to become a woman, a beautiful woman. As the cruel sultan is eternal, she exclaimed in a powerful and even more mysterious voice, Scheherazade has found herself obliged to use countless pseudonyms throughout countless centuries.37 Shahrazad personifies all writers who, through the ages, have created literature and who thus, through their writing have become eternal: “… Scheherazade was (she is, I am, I will be). Storytelling is the only way to gain eternity.”38 And now Sebastián identifies with him/her: “I felt that I had disappeared. Only he existed.”39 In this chapter, the ‘secret’ of the preceding chapters becomes clear: we have witnessed the transformation of the boy Sebastián into the adult Sebastián, who has become a writer. The Wounded Boy, who seemed to enchant the Island with his mysterious spell, is the embryo of the later, adult, Sebastián, in whom his new nature, as a writer, already heralds itself: “… and the ingenuous young boy who’s already thinking of writing novels, the young boy who has been struck with thousands of arrows and for whom thousands of arrows more are waiting all along his path, that ghostly boy, dead, living, and dead, is you, Sebastián.”40 Sebastián is Saint Sebastian, who was wounded by arrows, and portrayed by so many painters: “… here you have before you Sebastian of the knives, the martyr non pareil, he who knows-not-the-meaning-of-pain. At a distance of four or five yards from the man, with rare equilibrium, the adolescent balanced on a beam, eyes closed, arms and legs wide open, expression of waiting resignation.”41 It shows his vexed body, an image which provokes horror and 36  Ibid., 302. 37  Ibid., 308. 38  Ibid., 309. 39  Ibid., 310. 40  Ibid., 316–317. 41  Ibid., 177.

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pity, the beauty of torture, the essence of martyrdom. It illustrates the consecrating function of pain, the celebration of deprivation, sacrifice, and pain as a means of redemption. It is a ‘cathartic spectacle’ which reveals the relationship between God and the human body, the castigation of the human flesh, the sanctity of suffering, and the hope of redemption through God. It is one of the many references to religion and the aesthetic imagination, symbolized especially by paintings and by statues, which “like the Virgin [were] a means of feeling we were protected by a superior and eternal order, something sure in the midst of contingency, something that would outlive him.”42 For Sebastián, of course, it symbolizes the growing pains of the transforming body, which must be rescued from childhood and prepared for adulthood, and the mental suffering of the martyr who will dedicate himself to writing. But writing itself is a process of transformation, too. In the last chapter, it is revealed that the mysterious Island is to a certain extent a reflection of Havana, which is just as unreal. The “light in Havana makes us feel that everything here is non-existent, invented and destroyed by the light…. Havana is an illusion. Havana is a trick. A dream.”43 Havana is not real because it is not rooted in anything. It is a case of ‘torpor,’ of lethargy, lacking materiality; it is a hallucination which erases the sense of time: You wander between past and present, back and forth, never coming to glimpse the future. The future doesn’t exist. The light is so overwhelming that time in Havana is motionless. There is no time, though this hardly means that Havana is eternal; quite the contrary. There is no time, so Havana is the city where you comprehend, with almost maddening intensity, what it means to be ephemeral. This is why bodies search each other out in Havana like nowhere else. Physical encounters, bodies touching one another, become the only act of free will that can restore your sense of realness. In an ever-disappearing city, the need for a physical encounter becomes a matter of life or death, or rather, of appearance or disappearance.44 The Island evokes the Havana of Sebastián’s youth, which came to an end with the fire:

42  Ibid., 289. 43  Ibid., 235. 44  Ibid., 235.

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Perhaps I’ll be moved by what I myself have to lose, be moved by the things of mine that will turn to dust in this fire; all the memories, all the happiness, the only place where I could ever be happy, so much so that I’ve come to think that my actual life, my real life, was the life I led on the Island, and that the rest of it, everything I lived after that, has been nothing but poor variations, pretexts for recalling my past, finding the best way to retell it, sometimes well, other times not so well. So you can conclude that my life really lasted only eleven years.45 The fire and the end of Sebastián’s childhood coincide, however, with a farreaching change in the history of Cuba: The characters (I was in the courtyard) abandoned the gallery and entered the Island … unaware of the confusion the rest of the country was going through at that exact moment, since it’s time to reveal that at that exact moment the President of the Republic, Fulgencio Batista, was fleeing by plane to the Dominican Republic with his family and his money, and the Columbia military base (two or three blocks from the Island) was left powerless, and the Rebels, with their long impetuous beards, were taking control of the situation.46 A double metamorphosis takes place; history has taken a decisive turn, while Sebastián emerges as an author. The convergence between the two is prepared by a truly Proustian procedure, that is, the remembrance of things past, or childhood reminiscences. As in the case of Proust, these reminiscences are not ‘realistic’ in the regular sense, but rather deformed by an anachronistic, literary, view: Being conscious of how deeply the question of truth is pondered in literature, I would like to swear to the reader that I am being truthful, that I am narrating the exact impression that everything I experienced then had on me, that I am striving for realism (yes, realism) insofar as possible, I’m not exaggerating, nor has it occurred to me for one second to distort the events I lived through, which today, thanks to the resplendence of words, I can relive more intensely.47

45  Ibid., 297. 46  Ibid., 298. 47  Ibid., 314.

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But the memories, the impression of the people of the past, cannot be presented in a straightforward, superficial, way, as an omniscient narrator would do. The persons are characters in a novel, whose ‘reality’ is at least paradoxical: “Now I should restrict myself, however, to the unequivocal, powerful fantasy whose true name should be reality. Each time Scheherazade made a different character appear … and he was retelling the story of each one in his own way, as he would have liked to tell it.”48 It is his task, no, his fate, as a writer to tell their stories, to construct rather than reconstruct them: They are waiting. They are ready, I know, to come to life and repeat, transformed, the brief but vigorous period between one afternoon at the end of October (rain is threatening, they sense an unknown presence in the Island) and that historic date of December 31, 1958, when the devastating fire took place. They enliven. As I write, they enliven.49 But it is not only they whose lives are preserved; through the process of writing, the writer, too, stays alive: To feel that I’m alive, I return to my writing. I return immediately to the paper. Words are enough. Allied, conspiring, powerful words. Is it not perhaps just and even necessary that in the beginning there was the Word, that the complexity of the world began with the simplicity of the Word?50 The word is an instrument of creation, and the novel ultimately tells the story of a metamorphosis of life through storytelling and art. The world is aestheticized, filled with images which derive not only from fantasy, but from desire, as a life-seeking, transforming, irresistible force that allows or forces everything and everyone to grow into its/their final form. This is accentuated by the many references to paintings, artists, and writers who represent the infusion of reality with beauty and desire, but who also know the growing pains of artistic creation. The figure of Saint Sebastian not only personifies this transformation, but also associates it with an element of (homo)sexuality, as he is combined with the figure of the sailor (Sindbad) as in the painting of Alfred Courmes (1934). This androgynous image represents an imagined escape from the stifling timelessness and enclosure of the Island, the perception of a world outside, which allows Sebastián to breathe and to become the writer he has always 48  Ibid., 318. 49  Ibid., 323. 50  Ibid., 324.

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been destined to be. Only contact with the outside, even through the imagination, can end the stagnation of time and allow the metamorphosis to occur.

Conclusions to Part 1

In the novels discussed in this part, examples from the Thousand and one nights are used to explore the interactions between enclosures and open spaces and the crossing of boundaries of various kinds. These interactions are usually set in motion as a result of some anomalous situation or an enforced imbalance in the spatiotemporal structure, through some event, an experience, or from the hero’s adolescence and resulting desires. In the six novels discussed, enclosures are used to exclude the forces of time and create a kind of protected sphere, but this enclosure always has a complex relationship with what it intends to shut out: the world outside, which is subject to the forces of time. The anomaly of the enclosure is in all cases countered by forms of a ‘journey,’ the hero enters the world outside his realm and subjects himself to the hegemony of time and, thereby, to fate. Boundaries must be crossed, time must take its regular course, the secrets hidden in the enclosure are, in the end, revealed; the hero must be initiated into life and reach some form of maturity. In all the cases analyzed above, texts play a crucial role. In von Hofmannsthal’s stories, letters serve as the cause or medium of the transformation that reflects the tension between enclosure and movement; in Les faux-monnayeurs, letters induce the heroes to leave their enclosure, and their subsequent fate is governed by various kinds of texts, which reflect the ‘labyrinth’ of their adolescent experience; in the novels by Salih and al-Faqih the closed room harbors the secret desires of the hero, which are evoked by forms of narration and letters, the discovery and opening of which are instrumental. In the Thousand and one nights, the equilibrium between time and space is usually restored in the end. These (post)modern novels show how authors explore the subjectivity of the spatial experience and its connection with literature, and reveal that the consciousness of instability and lack of coherence of the spatial experience, which arose in modernism and was intensified in postmodernism, are not neutralized; rather they are emphasized. The pregnant use of destabilized spatial settings in the Thousand and one nights, in combination with the textual intricacy of the work, provides ample models for the literary processing of this consciousness.

Part 2 Capturing the Volatility of Time

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⸙ With regard to the Thousand and one nights, the patterns of the disruption and restoration of spatiotemporal balances discussed in the previous chapter are characteristic for romances, in which the beloved is enclosed and the hero must travel to realize the consummation of his love. In these instances, especially, the journey is necessary to fulfill some deep desire, to achieve a goal that is not merely rationally conceived, but is also shaped by an irresistible inner urge. Therefore, the spatial setting, which consists of the juxtaposition of closed and open spaces, is not neutral, but is related to the unbalanced mental state of the hero. In this landscape of desire, which is molded by the relationship between the protagonist and the object of his desire, the hero projects his unbound ego. Deserts, forests, seas, and castles are all coefficients of the hero’s mental and emotional state and these mark the phases of his search for his beloved and the progress of his endeavors. They indicate obstacles, loneliness, endurance, inventiveness, despair, etc. They are not realistic, but subjective, experienced, spaces. Like the spatial settings, in stories of this kind the temporal regime, too, is not measured by objective demarcations, but linked to the subjective experiences of the protagonists. The princess, who is prevented from pursuing her desires, is imprisoned; it is impossible for her to continue her projected trajectory in life. She is imprisoned both spatially and temporally, locked in a stagnancy that obstructs the regular course of time. Through his energetic, labyrinthine peregrinations, the hero represents the opposite of stagnation, the indefatigable desire that wanders in a boundless, unstructured space, delivered to the vicissitudes of time, and anxiously searches for a fixed place in which his desire can be fulfilled. Because of his desire, he seems to be subject only to the forces of time, which push him forward until he is united with a ‘timeless’ space and the balance between the forces of time and space is restored. Narrative conceptions of time are thus linked to the inner states of the protagonists, and change according to their progress on the path toward fulfilling their desires. As in the case of spatial settings, the instability of the experience of time became a central concern of modernist and postmodernist authors and artists. This was, first, a result of the far-reaching changes in social life and the advance of modernity and technology that disclosed new geographical worlds and new scientific insights, such as relativity theory and quantum theory, and developed new means of visualization, such as film and photography. Especially after the publication of the widely-read book by the philosopher

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Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1888), the subjectivity of the temporal experience overhauled traditional perceptions of time as a force structuring life and human experience. The novel which most clearly and emphatically expressed this new vision was Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1922), which radically posited and explored the subjectivity of time. Proust’s views were followed by later modernist authors who questioned whether time could provide a coherent framework for experience, and by postmodernist authors who even questioned the ontological status of time.1 The narrations of the journeys involved in conquering the dissociation of time and space are usually accounts of deferral. Of course, the hero is determined to conquer his beloved, but the narrator profits from the many obstacles in his way and the possibility of his desire remaining unfulfilled. The aim of the story is not the final union of the beloved, but the representation of the trajectory toward it, that is, the phase in which desire is engendered, perpetuated, and strengthened. Without the deferral of the plot, there would be no story; without the perpetuation of desire, there is nothing to tell. The object of desire is often of limited relevance and perhaps no more than a construct meant to give some meaning to the landscape and the journey, and to the obstacles as impediments to the achievement of a certain goal. Within this complex structuring of spatiotemporal regimes in stories, narration is a crucial element. As the example of Shahrazad in the frame story of the Thousand and one nights indicates, storytelling is a means to manipulate time, to initiate processes of postponement, to fill the passage of time with alternative, invented, events, and to create a state of liminality in which the course of events can be influenced. For Shahrazad, this manipulation of time is, literally, of vital importance: if her flow of stories is halted, she will be killed; her manipulation of time is ultimately intended to avoid death. Storytelling is thus a means to survive, not only by giving meaning to life, filling it with imagined realities, but also by postponing the end. In this part, we discuss the works of seven authors from different backgrounds; all of them focus on the manipulation of time, in some form or another, as their main theme, and they all relate it to the Thousand and one nights. Beginning with the modernist author par excellence, Marcel Proust, we end with the postmodernist authors Botho Strauss and Haruki Murakami.

1  See for instance, Kern, The Culture of Time and Space; Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2005).

Chapter 4

The Return of Time: Marcel Proust and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar In our discussion of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s novella Das Märchen der 672. Nacht we have seen how the author used the opposition between the enclosed space of the protagonist’s house and his ‘journey,’ when he ventures into the labyrinth of the city. According to some analysts, the protagonist’s enclosed environment symbolizes the self-chosen, splendid isolation of the aestheticist artist, who surrounds himself with the splendors of the world in order to enjoy them and project all dimensions of life into them; he indulges in a trance-like creativity separate from the influences of the vulgar, trivial world outside. In order to reach the zenith of his aesthetic abilities, the artist must shut himself off from society and delve into the depths of his own soul and mind, where the eternal values of art are hidden. For the artist, the ultimate bliss is the discovery of a beauty that is not sullied by the external world and that can only be revealed by pure inspiration. However, true to his concept of Allomatie, von Hofmannsthal seems to doubt that this ideal of artistic self-sufficiency can be achieved. Inside his realm, the protagonist is haunted by the feeling that the outside world is intruding upon him. And when he is forced to leave his enclosed space, he feels that the outside world is marked by visions of people from his realm that lead him to unknown places, and, ultimately, to perdition. Complete isolation is not possible, and cultivating the opposition between inside and outside realms leaves one unable to bring the two realms into a structured harmony. The world beyond the self becomes a nightmarish labyrinth, in which there is no meaning, there are no landmarks, nothing is familiar; the only signs hide an unknown significance and the sense that everyone is subject to an all-powerful fate. While seemingly in control of his own self-constructed domain, the protagonist loses all control of his life when he chooses to enter into a realm where other forces, other laws, are at work. In his book on Marcel Proust (1871–1922) and memory, Richard Terdiman argues that the idea of the artist who lives in isolation, separate from the trivial influences of society, as a focal point of creative inspiration, is a concept typical of modernist art. He perceives the same ideal perception of the artist in Proust’s masterly novel À la recherche du temps perdu, in which the narrator places himself in a vantage point from which he develops memories and © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_006

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observations without participating in events himself, as if he is conducting an experiment and evaluating the results, or working in a closed room with the outside world gazing at him. Since the narrator deals only with memories – that is with the remembrances of experiences, not with the experiences themselves – not with the aim of giving a narrative reconstruction of events, but rather with the goal of constructing his vision of himself, he in fact acts at a distance from these events and only relates to them indirectly. He is isolated from the society surrounding him and tries – or perhaps is forced – to re-establish links with the reality in which his vision of himself is embedded.1 These two visions of artistic isolation and its rupture share an obsessive fixation on the phenomenon of time. Spatial enclosure is meant to exclude the forces of time, to encapsulate a form of eternity, to ban the various forms of temporal disintegration; in contrast, the world outside is presented as relentlessly subject to the tyranny of time, which breaks up the structures of control, forces the protagonist to subject himself to a fate-like process of contingency, a manifestation of time which is either rediscovered or re-imposed. In chapter 1 we linked this motif to the Thousand and one nights, and the many stories that explore and use this opposition between enclosed spaces and time as a basic dynamic of the narrative, especially in stories in which the protagonist’s ‘imprisonment’ is juxtaposed to his subsequent labyrinthine journeys. In this chapter, we discuss Proust’s Recherche from the same perspective, and make use of a previous analysis of the concepts of time and space in the Thousand and one nights.

Proust and the Thousand and One Nights

Analysts agree that Proust’s Recherche is one of the quintessential texts of European literary modernism. It is generally acknowledged that the work not only contains many features that are typical of modernist literature, but it also more or less demarcates the area and dimensions of the modernist inquiry. According to Terdiman, the novel springs forth from the typically modernist concern about the growing complexity of the relationship between the present and the past. The growing pace of life created a rupture in man’s experience of time, and this rupture found expression in a ‘crisis of memory.’ Memory became unreliable as a mechanism to provide continuity and stability to

1  Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 5, 166ff., 234.

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individual and collective experiences, and this resulted in a crisis of representation, since forms of representations could no longer be based on coherent perceptions of time. This is the dual ‘crisis’ that induced Proust to carry out his immense investigation of the nature of memory.2 The newly experienced ambiguity of time, as a source of continuity, is expressed in the Recherche’s complex vision of time, or, perhaps of the interaction between the various intertwining experiences of time. Time is presented as a manifold phenomenon, which changes according to experiences, settings, moods, associations, desires, etc. Different manifestations of time are embedded in each other, and together represent a process of continuous flux, but one that takes place at varying paces and connected with varied temporal experiences. The boundaries between past, present, and future are diffuse, everything becomes transitional and vested in potential paths connecting the various aspects of time. There is no coherent order in the perception of time, and as a result time loses its potential as a basis for organizing and integrating perceptions of reality. The experience of time, and with it the interpretation of reality, are governed by a radical subjectivity; it is this essential sense of fragmentation that renders the Recherche into a model of modernist visions of reality. There is no doubt, either, about the great influence of the Thousand and one nights on Proust and the Recherche. Several authors have stressed the importance of the Nights as a narrative model of the Recherche, on various levels. Besides the passage in which the narrator reports his reading of the Mille et une nuits in the Galland and Mardrus translations, Dominique Jullien has inventoried the many references to the Thousand and one nights in the Recherche; these references often relate to the interference of different levels of consciousness of the narrator, a distant past, a flash of imagination, or the experience of involuntary memory.3 The images of the Thousand and one nights are signposts of a hidden layer of reality which is not so much a magical realm, but rather a subconscious reservoir in the mind of the narrator. These images refer to the ability to penetrate into this reservoir and thereby transform the perception of reality. They symbolize the lack of stability in notions of reality and remind the narrator of the possibility of intrusions by forces from unseen domains. They represent a form of exoticism, not only cultural, but also psychological, and reveal unknown domains of the soul.

2  Terdiman, Present Past, 5–6, 165, 167, 239. 3  Jullien, Proust et ses modèles.

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Thus, references to the Thousand and one nights are used to create the interaction between several levels in the text. This formal connection is strengthened by the novel’s reference to itself as a ‘book of the night,’ this evokes the metaphorical associations of the night to structure a specific perspective or layer in the text. This is especially clear from the often-quoted passage at the end of the Recherche, which explicitly links the novel to the Thousand and one nights: ‘Moi, c’était autre chose que j’avais à écrire, de plus long, et pour plus d’une personne. Long à écrire. Le jour, tout au plus pourrais-je essayer de dormer. Si je travaillais, ce ne serait que la nuit. Mais il me faudrait beaucoup de nuits, peut-être cent, peut-être mille. Et je vivrais dans l’anxi’té de ne pas savoir si le Maître de ma destinée, moins indulgent que le sultan Sheriar, le matin quand j’interrompais mon récit, voudrait bien surseoir à mon arrêt de mort et me permettrait de reprendre la suite le prochain soir. Non pas que je prétendisse refaire, en quoi que ce fût, les Mille et une nuits, pas plus que les Mémoires de Saint-Simon, écrits eux aussi la nuit, pas plus qu’aucun des livres que j’avais aimés, dans ma naïveté d’enfant, superstitieusement attaché à ceux comme à mes amours, ne pouvant sans horreur imaginer une oeuvre qui serait différente d’eux. Mais, comme Elstir Chardin, on ne peut refaire ce qu’on aime qu’en le renonçant. Ce serait un livre aussi long que les Mille et une nuits peutêtre, mais tout autre. Sans doute, quand on est amoureux d’une oeuvre, on voudrait faire quelque chose de tout pareil, mais il faut sacrifier son amour du moment, ne pas pense à son gout, mais à une vérité qui ne vous demande pas vos préférences et vous defend d’y songer. Et c’est seulement si on la suit qu’on se trouve parfois rencontrer ce qu’on a abandonné, et avoir écrit, en les oubliant, les ‘Contes arabes’ ou les Mémoires de Saint-Simon d’une autre ‘epoque.4 This self-reference defines the night as the time for storytelling; significantly, many of the crucial experiences told by the narrator occur at night, when the stability of the day is replaced by the precariousness of darkness and an oblique ‘nocturnal’ perception of reality. We later return to this aspect of the novel and explicate how the night is used as a temporal setting. The observations above imply, of course, that the quoted passage does not refer to some future book that the narrator intends to write, but to the Recherche itself, a book imagined by the narrator and subsequently written by 4  Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 3:1043–1044.

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Proust. This identification of the Recherche as a modern(ist) metamorphosis of the Thousand and one nights is corroborated not only by the many motifs referred to above, but also by other structural parallels, both formal and thematic. First, the novel is constructed as a frame story in which the narrator weaves his web of reminiscences from a point outside the narratives themselves, the location of which remains somewhat vague. It has been characterized as an observatory, but perhaps the narrator’s role is more active than mere observation; he is not a participant in the narrated events, but a manipulator of the stories and their characters, a storyteller molding his narratives to examine possible courses of events. The novel is about the interaction between the two levels of the frame story: the relationship between remembrances of the past and a given reality, which together shape the experiences of time. Second, the narrator explains that the origin of the collection of narratives should be sought in a traumatic experience; this is presented in the beginning of the novel, in the famous episode of the night kiss. As a child, the narrator experiences being separated from his mother, but at the same time he is aware that it is unjust to demand her continuous presence and feels guilt when she cedes to his wishes. This causes a psychological disequilibrium and a traumatic wound. It results in his sense of isolation and alienation, which becomes manifest in his inability to accept the tyrannical, destructive forces of time, and eliminate the sources of this complex combination of separation and attachment. This trauma can only be comprehended by embedding it into a ‘landscape’ of stories, which re-evoke the sensation but simultaneously represent the trauma from various perspectives. Third, the process of narration springs forth from a situation of liminality, which is caused by the initial trauma, the effects of which are perpetuated in the narrated events, but are also accompanied by the oblique version of reality created by involuntary and voluntary memories. For the narrator, the passage of time is temporarily halted in order to plunge into another temporal dimension of reality, namely, a past that continuously intrudes into the present, like an alien specter threatening his internal world. The process of narration creates an alternative, constructed time that harbors the possibility of constructing reality anew. The narrator acts as an observer of his own experiences, as an outsider who tells the adventures of an outsider who is anxious to become part of the regular course of events, to make the events accessible for him, or himself accessible for the events. Fourth, there is a clear association throughout the novel between narration and desire. The telling of reminiscences is a means to explore the forms of human desire, which becomes manifest in all kinds of human behavior, in language, and in art. In fact, there is no event which is not, to some extent,

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impregnated or shaped by forces of desire and sexuality. This inherent, latent presence of desire gives events and persons a certain hybridity, and transcends the regular well-defined boundaries of relationships between human beings, between human beings and their acts and words, and between human beings and objects and their representations. In addition, narration itself is an act of desire, producing the hybridity and ambiguity which is presented as a source of sexual pleasure throughout the novel. There is no difference, it seems, between narration and eroticism; narration is not a substitute for the sexual act, but an unavoidable component of it; there is no sexual pleasure without narration, and no narration without some form of sexual pleasure. This is an insight that emerges in the space created by the liminality of the narrator, and detaches him from the boundaries of an imposed reality. Fifth, the notions of liminality and desire converge in the narrator’s representation of his narration as an apprenticeship, a process of growth and maturation. This apprenticeship is directed at several aims. First, the narrator continuously seeks access to the world of the Parisian elite, by carefully maneuvering to establish relationships, evaluating the status and authority of society figures, recording forms of propriety and their infringements, the ascendancy and decline of tastes and trends, and their subtleties and hypocrisies. Second, the narrator longs to be initiated into the manifold experiences of love and sexuality. He carefully studies the love between Swann and Odette, molding it into a model for his own love experiences, and projecting it onto his love for Albertine. It is Albertine who personifies the mystery and elusiveness of love and sexuality, which is a phenomenon that cannot be defined, that is directed at an object that has no inherent qualities, but, perhaps because of its emptiness, becomes irresistible. It is desire which shapes it, creates it, without possessing it or even aspiring to possess it. The narrator wants to know Albertine, but he also does not want to know her, and his apprenticeship is meant to discover the balance between these two contradictory urges. Third, the narrator aspires to become a writer, an artist, initiated in the mysteries of art, knowledgeable about the secrets of the representation of reality, and the presence of art and beauty in reality as it appears before his eyes. He studies various forms of art, the way others and he himself appreciates them, and the contradictory relationship between art and material reality. Perhaps it is justifiable to say that the first two apprenticeships are subservient to this larger, all-fulfilling ambition. The main ‘apprenticeship,’ however, is the healing of the wound which was caused by his separation from his mother. The narrator uses his phase of liminality to examine the impact of this separation in his own life; he uses narration

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to re-enact the experience and its effect at the different stages of his adolescence, to study his responses and those of others, to project the complexity of the experience on other configurations between human beings, and to identify the impenetrable areas from which the sense of loss springs forth. The narration does not explain the traumatic moment, it rather transfers its complexity and its incomprehensibility to other situations, people, and relationships. This is the only way of learning how to live with such a devastating experience. Sixth, the novel suggests a direct relationship between narration and death. Death is described as a force that causes the disintegration of everything, but also as the origin of the imagination and as an integrative factor. The necessity to survive, to ward off death, and to ‘create’ time to live, is equivalent to the continuous act of narration, to the creation of a suspension of reality, and, perhaps more importantly, to the creation of a subjective experience of time, one that is independent of the pace of the process of disintegration. It is only by memorizing/storytelling that time can be manipulated in this way, and the narrator is able to enter into a temporal liminality, and also postpone the confrontation with death. Narration functions as a strategy of deferral that creates temporal space to continue living, creating an illusion of life in order to survive in reality. Of course, this effort to evade death confirms its omnipresence as a force that not only terminates life, but fundamentally shapes it. These six structural elements of the Recherche represent the main intertextual framework linking it with the Thousand and one nights. In Proust’s work, references to the Thousand and one nights are numerous and obvious, but the actual function of the collection as an intertextual matrix is smoothly incorporated into the narrative texture, not by initiating narrative techniques and themes, but by remolding them into a form that can be used as the ‘skeleton’ of a modernist novel, as ambitious and varied as the Thousand and one nights itself. But the skeleton is carefully integrated into a flourishing, vibrant body. In particular, the influences show that the Thousand and one nights is linked to the fundamental ideas that underlie the novel and its main theme: the equilibrium between time and space, and the narrator’s persistent efforts to restore ruptures in spatiotemporal balances. These are the efforts that are related to the ‘absence’ of time and its recovery, to the exclusion of time, its manipulation, and, ultimately, its acceptance. As is clear from these thematic parallels between À la recherché du temps perdu and the Thousand and one nights, the intertextual relationship between the two works is structural and all-pervasive. In addition, there are specific references that link the two works. One of them is the episode which illustrates

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Proust’s use of the motif of the closed space, the episode in which the narrator attempts to enforce the effectuation of his love for Albertine by ‘imprisoning’ her in a small apartment. We now proceed to look at this episode more closely. Albertine Imprisoned A large part of the Recherche is dedicated to the narrator’s love for Albertine, who, rather than being a well-defined character, is an elusive entity who wanders through the narrator’s world and serves as a focal point for his exploration of love and sexuality, and his relationships to others, to society, and, ultimately, to reality. She represents the component of desire within the experience of reality, but does not take on a definite shape. She is a destabilizing force in this experience of reality; perhaps she is not merely a focal point for the narrator, but also a force that fragments his experience, similar to the traumatic experience in the narrator’s relationship with his mother. Albertine is a representation of the scene of his trauma, as the place in which this trauma is re-enacted, a prism revealing the components hidden inside this experience, and presenting possible paths to follow in order to escape from it. At the same time, because of her diffuseness, her presence as an object of desire impregnates all the narrator’s experiences, as if the trauma cannot be separated from them and is inherent in all experiences, in all people, in all objects, in all events, but in the guise of Albertine. She may be indefinite, but her indefiniteness imbues every aspect of reality. It is because of her ephemeral nature that it is unclear precisely why the narrator is so obsessed with Albertine, unless it is because she evokes the formative trauma that initiated his understanding of the complexity of reality. She is the cause of his feeling of loss and isolation, of his inability to control his life and reality, both of which constantly change and strain his relationships with others. She is the embodiment of a desire which evades his comprehension and subverts his understanding of his position in life. Albertine’s role in the texture of the Recherche is epitomized in the famous episode in La prisonnière, in which the narrator ‘imprisons’ Albertine in his apartment in an effort to finally penetrate the essence of his relationship with her. This episode, which is explicitly linked to the frame story of the Thousand and one nights, when the narrator characterizes his position as that of Shahriyar, shows the use of ‘enclosure’ as a narrative element shown above. As in the story of ‘Shahriyar and his brother,’ the protagonist uses spatial confinement as a means to domesticate an evasive femininity that he is unable to control. Albertine, the symbol of passion, irrationality, and alleged adultery, is, so to speak, brought under a spell; he lifts her out of the regular temporal flow of her daily life and imprisons her in a space which is subjected to a different, constructed, time, one that excludes the influences of ‘real’ life. The narrator

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has divided the world into an inside and an outside, which obey different laws and which exist in a complex relationship to each other; one derives its raison d’être from the exclusion of the other. From the outset, it is clear that Albertine’s confinement is meant as an act of power. The narrator delineates his domain as the domain for their struggle, and in order to force an outcome that meets his wishes. However, it is unclear to him what this outcome should be. Can fulfillment be obtained by sexual gratification, by knowledge of Albertine’s true intentions, or by exerting control over her life? Bowie describes the relationship between the narrator and Albertine as the struggle between two uncompromising desires, each bends to complete fulfillment, concedes nothing, and strives for absolute control of the other.5 On the other hand, it is the absence of fulfillment, perhaps even the fear of fulfillment, which is the driving force behind the desire, which seeks to perpetuate itself rather than to possess its object. Desire invokes the urge to exert power, but simultaneously undermines its effectuation. For the narrator, the spatial setting is of crucial importance. His apartment is a space separated from the outside world; it is an enclave which is under his immediate authority. It can be seen as the setup for an experiment in which he eliminates, as much as possible, interferences from the outside world, so that he can maximize control of the conditions and the process. However, as we saw in our analysis of von Hofmannsthal’s Das Märchen der 672. Nacht, sealing off a space always implies that the space in question is imbued with the forces that its isolation was meant to ward off. Since the confined space is intended to exclude the outside world, the outside world is inherently present in its structure. The nature of a confined space is always determined by the forces that it is meant to exclude. As a result, a delimited space is always subject to some form of communication with the outside. In La prisonnière, it is Albertine who, during the daytime, leads her life outside and returns to tell the narrator her ‘adventures.’ The narrator’s domain is thus not hermetically closed, but rather semi-permeable and used as a receptacle where experiences in the outside world can be gathered and scrutinized in a setting determined by a specific power configuration. The narrator questions Albertine about her behavior outside, in order to discover the truth about, especially, her sexual desires and experiences. The confined space functions as a vacuum, attracting Albertine’s outside experiences into its sphere, in a kind of purified, essentialized form. The narrator’s main means of power is vested in his ability to decide whether to continue or end his relationship with Albertine. This power is subverted, 5  Malcolm Bowie, Proust Among the Stars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 215.

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however, by his own excuses to prolong the relationship and by the stories she tells him about her life, which prevent him from pronouncing the final verdict, even though he is convinced of her deceitfulness. Although the narrator is certain that her stories are lies, he is unable to use this as an argument to stop loving her. On the contrary, it seems that his curiosity and desire are increased and perpetuated because her stories are untrue. The lies feed his desires because they simultaneously hide and demarcate the object of desire, which remains unseen, an emptiness that may well be infinite, but from which he cannot separate himself. The whole staging of these scenes has the character of a process of deferral, in which Albertine is placed in his regime of self-constructed time. Thus, Albertine not only personifies desire, but also the perpetuation of desire, as a substitute for ‘real’ time. Bowie formulates it nicely: “The whole thing is the chronicle of a loss that perpetually stops short of completion, of an absence that is never absence enough, and of a narrative structure that constantly threatens to dissolve into a plotless pattern of vanishings and reappearances.”6 The narrator’s fascination with Albertine is partly inspired by his inability to grasp the parts of her life from which he is excluded. This acknowledgment that he is not admitted to her ‘hidden lives’ increases his fear of losing her, but simultaneously strengthens his longing for her, as she remains an elusive focus of desire. Albertine is an indispensable part of his imagination; his relationship with her consists of his ongoing attempts to reconcile this imagination with an essential truth that is rooted in reality. Without knowing the hidden parts of her life, the narrator is unable to grasp his reality, because he needs his imagination to define a meaning for his own experience. Thus, Albertine personifies the impossibility of knowing reality in an objective way, and this impossibility produces the contradictory feelings of fear and desire. This tension is enhanced by Albertine’s ‘stories,’ which reveal nothing about ‘reality,’ but only continuously reconstruct her imagined life. The narrator suspects that Albertine has homosexual relationships with her female friends, and therefore he fears that he is not an object of her sexual desire and that she is ultimately incomprehensible to his mind. She represents a female sexuality that is not only beyond his reach, but even beyond his imagination, and this leaves him in total isolation from the interaction of desires. At the same time, he derives a voyeuristic pleasure from observing her, questioning her, and listening to her lies that confirm her nature as an undefinable object of desire. This voyeurism is made possible by the device of confinement, which creates a vantage point from which the others can be observed. 6  Ibid., 290–291.

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In the end, the experiment does not give the narrator the results that he had envisaged. Instead of discovering the ‘truth’ about Albertine’s life, her true nature remains, more than ever, hidden in a web of fabulations. In her book on postmodern approaches to the Recherche, Margaret Gray circumscribes Albertine’s narration as ‘écriture féminine,’ which gradually amalgamates with the narrator’s ‘authoritative’ speech and undermines it. The narrator must finally accept the delusive nature of the lives of others, of a reality that is shaped by a complex of interacting desires, and by his own inability to construct an objective view of reality. The only way to counter the effects of this traumatic experience is not to explain it or fix it into a rationally conceived reality, but rather to acknowledge its creative potential within a subjective, changeable, and ultimately incomprehensible world. Traumas are part of the processes of transformations, they are the source of indirect visions of reality, of the inherent instability of reality, of the narrative constructions that determine our relationship with reality. Albertine is set free, the narrator matures to the point that he can accept the essential fluidity of reality, that is, the irresistible force of time. He accepts that life does not consist of the fulfillment of desire, but rather of the deferral of gratification, the perpetuation of desire. Becoming an Author The spatial enclaves of von Hofmannsthal, Shahriyar, and Proust were constructed to isolate a space from the regular passage of time, in order to increase the protagonist’s control over destiny. Spatial enclosures are essentially a manifestation of power, the power to create a reality that is impregnable to the forces of transformation and time, to protect the protagonist against forces which threaten his integrity. In these cases, the enclaves are penetrated by outside forces, in the form of what may be called a ‘narrative event,’ which re-establishes the protagonist’s relationship with the regular passage of time. This may lead to a new spatiotemporal equilibrium, but ultimately requires the acceptance not only of the passage of time, but also of the finality of life. Time is an aspect of death; life is a permanent effort to postpone the end; desire only ends in death and should be perpetuated rather than fulfilled. The transformation of the narrator could only be brought about through his immersion in the phenomenon of narration. Narration deconstructs his sense of reality; narration re-constructs an alternative, subjective, reality; in narration, desire seeks its multiple manifestations. Narration divests reality of its essences and restores its opacity and otherness. Through its dispersive nature, it simultaneously destabilizes and constructs the narrator’s vision of himself vis-à-vis others and teaches him the essence of art. By accepting the subjectivity of the perception of reality, the narrator grasps the essence of

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art, which is comparable to the nature of the ‘lie,’ of fabulation and imagination, rather than seeking to imitate reality. This awareness changes his person and marks the birth of a writer. From being a Shahriyar who must be cured of his traumatic experience by narration in a liminal situation, the narrator becomes Shahrazad, who is able to manipulate life through imagined realities and changeable, indirect, fluid visions of life. The process is complete: the narrator survives his trauma by accepting the finality of life. While he himself lived in an enclave of suspended time, he comes to see that other people have grown older, that death is on their faces. The Shahrazad in him survived, but the Shahriyar in him must confront the prospect of death.

Times of Life and Society: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

The typical subjectivity of Proust was developed in a world that was collapsing into one of the major cataclysms of the twentieth century. This period of enormous historical consequences not only affected Europe; it also, tragically, involved the Ottoman Empire, which, after a period of 400 years of independent rule, disintegrated in the turmoil of World War I. The Turkish author Ahmet Tanpınar was inspired by Proust, and like him, looked for a vantage point from which he could disentangle himself from the dramatic conditions that surrounded him. His novels show the precarious consequences of historical disruption, the manipulation of time, and the search for an ‘enclave’ of narrated, or even dreamed, time. The collapse and subsequent dismantling of the Ottoman Empire during the first decades of the twentieth century was a historic catastrophe whose immense significance is only rarely appreciated. Histories of the twentieth century usually focus on the transmutation of the empire into the modern state of Turkey, as if this were part of the natural course of history; these histories smooth over the ruptures and stress the continuities. The inclination of historians to present history as a process, a story, tends to obscure the deep cultural and psychological disruptions that are caused by sudden historical change. During and immediately after World War I, a political, social, and cultural structure that had been the framework of the life and worldview of millions of people for more than four hundred years suddenly came to an end. Rather than a ‘natural birth,’ perhaps Turkey’s emergence from the debris of the Ottoman Empire should be seen as the survival of the core of an amputated body, which is only barely kept alive. Although the collapse of the Ottoman Empire as a political structure took only a short span of time and was brought about by the calamities of war, the

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forces of the empire had been waning for a long time. From the eighteenth century, the Sublime Porte realized that it was losing ground on the world stage; processes of reform were initiated to modernize and revitalize the administrative and economic potential of the empire and counter the encroachment of European nations that were expanding into its territories. However far-reaching these reforms were, especially during the Tanzimat period in the nineteenth century, when a major reform program to restructure the foundations of the empire was implemented, they were not sufficient to disrupt the superstructure of an Islamic, Turkish-Ottoman culture that formed the basis of ideologies of power and the framework of self-awareness in the political and cultural sense. In spite of its sophistication and solidity, the imperial administrative structure gave way to outside pressures and the absence of internal coherence. As in the case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the idea of world empires belonged to the past. Although the implosion of the Ottoman Empire implied the destruction of the administrative, political, and ideological structures in the Arab regions as well, the new circumstances in the core Turkish lands and the Arabic provinces differed in an important way. Many Turks considered the formation of Turkey after the prolonged death-struggle of the empire as a leap into modernity, an opportunity to build a new future among modern nations, but it was also clear that the reforms imposed upon the new state by its founder, Kemal Atatürk, deepened the rift rather than healing it, and for many it remained an artificial construction. While the structure of the state was built in a few years, based on a completely new vision of the world, the ‘soul’ of the populace was not transformed at the same rapid pace. There remained a discrepancy between the traumatic experience of the historical catastrophe and the optimistic vision of a bright future. The appearance of modern Turkey concealed a suffering Ottoman soul. The artificiality of the political entity that was set up and the ideological discourses supporting and legitimizing it, were intended to lay the foundations of a new future, but in fact betrayed the reality, that they were meant to impose a structure rather than to let a new structure grow in a more or less natural way. They tended to obscure the fact that a transformation of historical scale was pressed into a brief period of time; that a revolutionary change was imposed without a revolution; and that social formations had to adjust to the new political structures rather than the other way around. In an extremely short period of time, the new political and administrative organization required a massive re-orientation in various discursive fields, such as the construction of political and cultural identities, a redefinition of relationships with the West, a revision of history, and the cultural incorporation of modernity. These issues,

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especially, have dominated the field of literature in Turkey and the Arab world during the twentieth century, both in literary works and the in the debates surrounding them. They not only strengthened the link between literature and politics, but also the link between politics and cultural orientation. In this section, we discuss the work of an author whose central theme is the nature of historical change, perceptions of historical time, and the artificiality of the historical formations that aimed to cover up, so to speak, the lack of real historical transformation. Ahmet Tanpınar (1901–62) is not only one of the foremost Turkish authors of the twentieth century; his work is also a crucial testimony to the process of change which Turkey went through after the cataclysm of World War I. Here we briefly discuss Tanpınar’s comic novel The time regulation institute (1961) and, his more elaborate A mind at peace (1942–6). Both novels explicitly refer to the Thousand and one nights and are analyzed here in relation to the intertextual references. Ahmet Tanpınar and the Trauma of History Ahmet Tanpınar was born in 1901 and died in 1962; his lifespan more or less coincided with the dramatic fall of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the Turkish republic. As a young adult in the 1920s he witnessed the foundation of Turkey, and he was clearly aware of the immensity of the task of building a new society on the ruins of the empire. Moreover, he was conscious of the farreaching, revolutionary changes that had disrupted the course of history and cut off Turkish society from its past. Although he accepted the innovations introduced by Atatürk, he feared that the westernization of society would remain incomplete and that Turkey would remain a divided nation deracinated from its past but not fully integrated into its present. His skepticism about the authenticity of Turkey’s version of modernity led many to accuse him, wrongly, of right-wing conservatism.7 Along with his concerns about the transformation of Turkish society, Tanpınar had a lively and sincere interest in European culture. He was acquainted with the works of modern thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud; he admired authors such as De Nerval, Hoffmann, Poe, and Goethe, and poets such as Baudelaire and Valéry. In the field of music, he was fond of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach. Probably his most engaging interest in European culture, however, was his fascination with Proust and his 7  For Tanpınar’s biography see Beatrix Caner, Tanpınars Harmonie; der Höhepunkt der türkischen Moderne (Franfurt am Main: Beatrix Caner, 2009); Berkiz Berksoy, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, écrivain turc (1901–1962); esthétique baroque dans l’oeuvre en prose (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013).

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monumental work À la recherche du temps perdu, which was a main source of literary inspiration throughout his life. Like Proust, in his work Tanpınar explores the nature of time at the various levels of human experience. Like Proust, he was influenced by Henri Bergson’s ideas about time; Bergson stressed the fluid, subjective nature of time as opposed to its measurable objectivity. It is, of course, especially this new perception of time which firmly links Tanpınar’s work to European literary modernism. In the period from 1943 until 1961, Tanpınar wrote five prose works, apart from scholarly texts and essays.8 His two most important novels are Huzur (1949), translated into English as A mind at peace and Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, translated as The time regulation institute; the latter was published shortly before his death in 1961. Huzur was written during the years from 1942 to 1946 and is permeated with the pessimistic spirit that was obviously inspired by World War II. In all his work, the main themes are the problematic nature of time, both as a personal and as a social and historical experience, and the condition of Turkey, as a Fremdkörper in modernity, estranged from its past and thereby from its authentic identity. Although his works are not free of a certain nostalgia for a harmonious past, it is clear that Tanpınar was not averse to embracing modernity and working to develop a new society. This, however, was hampered by many complex problems and contradictions that were woven into its very foundations. In Tanpınar’s second major novel, The time regulation institute, his main themes are playfully fashioned into what can best be described as a picaresque novel. The story is about the young good-for-nothing Hayri, who is apprenticed to a clockmaker. He wanders off and meets a variety of people, is involved with various groups, and is finally ‘adopted’ by Halit who has a plan to found a Time Regulation Institute to supervise and regulate the clocks in Istanbul, to ensure that they all indicate exactly the same time. With government support the institute is soon ready to start its beneficial work, with its own building and employees, and Hayri as its adjunct director. In the slipstream of the booming institute, Hayri’s family is lifted out of its poverty and distress and is integrated into the social life of the upper middle-class. Hayri himself becomes famous and popular. In the end, however, financial support for the institute is suddenly withdrawn and it collapses.

8  Tanpınar’s main scholarly work is a history of modern Ottoman literature: Histoire de la literature turque du XIXe siècle, trans. F. Bilici, C. Erikan, F. Fidan, G. Mete-Yuva (Arles: Sindbad, 2012).

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In The time regulation institute two main themes are systematically used as leitmotifs of the story: the nature of time and the power of the lie. At the beginning of Hayri’s fascination with time, it is mentioned that, although he was born in 1310 (1902), his actual birth took place at the moment he was given his first watch. In his parental home there were several clocks, of which the most peculiar specimen was a large antique pendulum that had been in the family for a long time. It was originally from a family mosque and it ran at irregular intervals, choosing its own pace and adapting time to its whims, or perhaps it ran in accordance with some deep-rooted law. It would stop for a long time and then suddenly strike at a moment completely independent from regular time. The clock seemed to be possessed by demons, or a saint, and was called the ‘Blessed’ and the ‘Cursed’ by Hayri’s mother and father respectively. The second clock was a small ‘secular’ clock with a musical box, and the third was his father’s watch, which indicated Turkish and European time, and had a compass to determine the direction for prayer. This watch was so complicated, however, that no one could make it work. Hayri is more thoroughly initiated into the world of time during his apprenticeship to the clockmaker Nuri Efendi, who has an almost mystical obsession for the phenomenon of time. For Nuri Efendi, time is the secret to life, it creates the space of life; clocks endow man with time and with his awareness of life. He abhors clocks that do not run on time, since they are the work of the devil. This respectful, even reverent perception of time increases Hayri’s fascination with clocks and the phenomenon of time, but he is clearly torn by the diversity of its manifestations, which are represented by the many types of clocks. In the period before he begins working at the Time Regulation Institute, he is unable to grasp the passage of time, which seems like a force outside his control. For Hayri, time is connected to fate, a force to which he is subjugated and which throws him from one disaster into the next. He is a slave of time, rather than its master. This subservience changes when he meets Halit, who enlists him in the foundation and development of the institute, and who has a more pragmatic attitude toward time: time is primarily work, and irregular clocks represent a waste of time, a loss of precious hours. Before his joining the institute, Hayri had been, for some time, a member of a theater group, and spent some time in a hospital discussing ‘forensic medicine,’ attended the meetings of a spiritist society, and became a regular visitor of a coffeehouse, where all kinds of people came to tell their stories, in a peculiar and rather haphazard confluence of tales and performances. This latter group in particular represents idle talk, escapism, and the lack of participation in society – theirs is an absurd and senseless life, a quagmire. By joining the institute, Hayri flees their lethargy

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and, in fact, his life changes dramatically. He and his family rise in social status and are elevated by the vitality and élan with which the institute inculcates society. The change brought about by the Time Regulation Institute is evidently buttressed by the ideological propagation of modernization, which is systematically associated with westernization. The uncoordinated efforts by society to introduce western ideas and practices are first shown by the various people and groups Hayri meets early in his life. The theater group, the society of spiritists, the alchemist Aristidi with his laboratory, and the psychoanalyst Ramiz represent not only a colorful entourage of characters that reveal the burlesque and endearing efforts of a society to invent itself anew, but they are also examples of the gradual and ineffective influence of western science on Turkish society. These people think that the secret key of modernization, or even of life itself, lies hidden in these ‘scientific’ innovations; these ideas are contrasted, for instance, with the views of the popular preacher Seyit Lutfallah, who believes in miracles and exploits the superstitions of popular belief, and who is one of Hayri’s early role models. These budding and isolated efforts to forge a new westernized society are ‘swallowed’ by the Time Regulation Institute, which incorporates some initiatives, but imposes its own model for modernity. The transition seems to reflect the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the Turkish republic, a transition that is symbolized by the death of Emine, Hayri’s traditionally minded wife, and his remarriage to Pakize, a woman wellequipped for the modern age. In spite of its apparently limited practicality, the Time Regulatiom Institute represents a great ideological potential that results in an upsurge in society and the economy, and which penetrates all social strata. It is not only the outcome of an effort at modernization, it is a means to establish modernization, to embody it, and to promulgate it. Moreover, it represents the standard of modernity, that is, it is authorized and equipped to measure the progress of society toward modernity. It is not only a creative, energy-producing body, but it is also an instrument of control and harmonization. After all, the diversity of clocks and their particular measurement of time is connected to their owners’ experience of time; they adapt their pace to the slowness or speed of their owner, ‘his married life and political convictions.’ Thus, the harmonization of clocks is at the same time a conformation of political views and an attempt to push the flock into a single, common direction. One of the tasks Halit, as adjunct-director of the Time Regulation Institute, assigns to Hayri is the project of writing a book about the life of the eighteenthcentury shaykh, Ahmet Zamani (his name means, lit. ‘time,’ ‘temporal’), who is the patron saint of the clockmakers. The book Hayri is to write should, of

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course, confirm the central position of time in Turkish society, history, and culture and the roots of the institute’s work in the past. However, the illustrious Shaykh Zamani never existed, he was invented for strategic purposes. When this begins to bother Hayri, he is told not to worry and keep working at his important task, since in these cases there are no such things as lies or truth. Truth is conditional upon need, and the figure of Zamani is needed to show that their ancestors have always been revolutionary and modern. This distortion of history and the conversion of lies into truth is, of course, the main mission of the Time Regulation Institute: to inculcate in society an illusion that provides it with a new vitality. Hayri is not really disturbed by this. Throughout his life, he has encountered situations in which he had to take on appearances and distance himself from reality; in the theater group, in the mental hospital, in the group of spiritists, and now in the Time Regulation Institute. But in particular, during a court case in which he was accused of hiding a diamond, merely on the basis of rumors and an innocent joke, he became aware of the essential role of lies in society and he learned how to turn them to his advantage. Apparently, everyone had his own truth and everyone recreated it according to the occasion. In true picaresque fashion, he uses the tricks that were used against him and that made his life a misery to escape from his predicament. In due course, then, Hayri accepts that his life is an illusion and that he must continue the lies in order to go on living, whatever may be the consequences. He has assumed a false personality and thinks that all others have likewise abandoned any form of authenticity. His wife, Pakize, for instance, effortlessly imitates western film actresses in her daily behavior, as if she has no personality of her own. But maybe this keeping up of appearances is in fact what personality is, a great and coincidental collection of masks in the storehouse of memory. Still, this acknowledgment ultimately cannot relieve him of a sense of estrangement, a loss of identity that is not compensated by his proficiency in lying. In a dream Hayri sees himself standing before a large mirror and does not recognize himself. Of course, the estrangement Hayri feels and the construction of the Time Regulation Institute refer to the way Turkey attempted to modernize society and impose reforms that would imbue it with a new élan. It is suggested that these reforms were legitimized by the construction of a system of lies and illusions, which left society bereft of its sense of truth and authenticity. The manifestations of modernity were artificial, separated from history, and detrimental to the population’s sense of self-awareness. It is not truth or authenticity that counts, it is the demands of the ‘modern’ age and progress to a vision of the future.

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In this play between reality and illusion lies the main conceptual reference to the Thousand and one nights. Of course, the genre of the picaresque story in which the (anti-) hero falls from one predicament to another and tries to outsmart his adversaries to secure his survival is well-known in Arabic popular literature and the Thousand and one nights. The generic connection is made stronger by a text that Tanpınar left to a friend; this text contains a fictional letter from Halit Ayarci, who says that he received the manuscript of the book from Doctor Ramiz, who found it in the possessions of Hayri Irdal, who spent the last years of his life in a state of paranoia in a mental clinic: Thus, although the letter was never added to the text of the novel, Tanpınar apparently saw the book as a frame story, he thereby relativizes the truthfulness of Hayri’s account and typifies the narrative as part of a cure.9 The most important association with the Thousand and one nights, however, consists of the implicit reference to the story of ‘Ma‘ruf the cobbler,’ the last of Shahrazad’s tales.10 In this story we are told that Ma‘ruf, a poor wretch, living a miserable life, is suddenly transported by a jinn to another city, where he meets a merchant who instructs him to tell the other merchants in town that he has come in advance of a caravan of merchants. As a result of this lie, and the expectations of riches it evokes, Ma‘ruf is overloaded with gifts and loans and acquires a lofty status among the wealthy merchants. In the end Ma‘ruf is suddenly confronted with his previous life and he becomes aware of the illusory nature of his new life. It is the duality between the contrasting states of Ma‘ruf’s two lives and the act of magic that enabled him to go from one to the other, and, ultimately, it is the lie that buttresses Ma‘ruf’s new status that clearly fascinated Tanpınar and epitomized for him the situation of Turkey after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. War and the Disruption of Time: A Mind at Peace The thematic aspects of the story of ‘Ma‘ruf the cobbler’ are also a matrix for Tanpınar’s second major novel, A mind at peace, which, however, is a tragedy rather than a tragicomedy like The time regulation institute. As we see, the Thousand and one nights is mentioned explicitly and the story of ‘Ma‘ruf the cobbler’ is referred to in particular, to illustrate the psychological condition

9  ‘Nawoord’ by Hanneke van der Heijden in the Dutch translation of the work: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Het klokkengelijkzetinstituut (Amsterdam: Athenaeum, Polak & van Gennep, 2009), 445–451. 10  For an abstract of this story, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:291–293.

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of the protagonist. But before we turn to these parallels and investigate their significance for the novel, we should briefly summarize the story. The novel A mind at peace (Huzur) relates an episode in the life of Mümtaz, and more particularly the episode of his love relationship with Nuran, on the eve of World War II (May 1938 to winter 1939). Mümtaz is a young man who suffers from traumatic memories of the death of his father and mother during World War I and its violent aftermath; after which he was raised by his uncle Ihsan in Istanbul. In spite of his tormented youth he is full of vigor and eager to engage in constructing the new Turkish society; he is aware of his public and moral responsibility as an intellectual. In Nuran, who has separated from her husband, he finds the woman who is a perfect complement to his soul, and they plan to build their future together. Their bliss is soon destroyed by circumstances, however, when Nuran’s daughter seems not to accept her mother’s new relationship, her former husband returns and asks her to come back to him, and the cynical Suat, a former friend of hers, declares his love for her and subsequently hangs himself in their prospective marital home. Two major narrative matrixes structure the story of A mind at peace. The first matrix is war, which overshadows the story from two sides. Mümtaz is aware that his experiences in World War I have had consequences throughout his life. The memories haunt him like a seven-headed serpent and determine even his daily experiences and his love for Nuran. Even the traumatic memory of his father’s death is associated with eroticism, since he had his first sexual experience with a strange peasant woman while he and his mother were fleeing their burning native village. Thus, the sensation of love is connected not only with feelings of pain and loss, but also with the awareness of some profound dimension of existence that manifests itself in death. Moreover, the war deprived him of his past, both as an individual, and as a member of a society that has been cut off from its history. The war destroyed the old society and left little more than the inescapable necessity that something new must be built. The second matrix is Ihsan, the uncle who took care of Mümtaz after the war. Ihsan provides the framework of the narrative – the story of Mümtaz’s love is told while he sits by Ihsan’s sickbed; this suggests, of course, a connection between Mümtaz’s love story and Ihsan’s fatal illness. Ihsan represents the relative safety and protection of the old social order, which has survived the cataclysms of war and altruistically taken care of its victims. Nuran opens up a vision of the future, a glimpse of hope, but also a life of uncertainty. Mümtaz is unable to choose between the two: trying to heal and preserve the positive things from the past, or embarking upon an uncertain journey into the future. The story of his love is thus related to the postponement of death and the possible ways to survive. Ultimately, all hope is destroyed when Nuran

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breaks off their relationship, Ihsan dies, and news arrives that a new war has set the world aflame. The harsh experiences of his youth left Mümtaz with a fundamental conflict that takes him to the verge of schizophrenia. His life seems to have been split into two irreconcilable lives in which he is alternately thrown: Truth be told, Mümtaz lived a twinned life, like the cobbler in the story from A thousand and one nights. On the one hand, remembrances of halcyon days never left him, but as soon as the sun rose, the nighttime of a separation spread within him in all its torment. By and large, the young gentleman, who effectively lived in his imagination, bore heaven and hell together. Between these two boundaries, he lived the life of a sleepwalker, punctuated with violent awakenings along the edges of an abyss. Between these two opposing psychological states, he conversed with those around him, taught his courses, listened to his students, explained their assignments, helped with his friends’ concerns, and argued when he was backed into a corner; that is, he forged through his everyday life. At each step, Mumtaz suffered the tribulations of attempting to live fully amidst these distracting throngs.11 This dichotomy penetrates into his whole life, all his thoughts and actions, to such an extent that it affects his sense of reality, his perception that his surroundings are situated in the same world as he is: Numerous diaphanous membranes separated him from material objects. Or maybe the realm in which he moved, thought, and spoke was not the same realm in which he physically lived … as if he engaged his surroundings through a persona that was purely observational. Despite this, he perceived, registered, and contemplated his context. But this perception, cognition, and even communication transpired through an identity that had lost its mass and had all but atomized.12 We are justified in saying that the significance of the whole narrative lies in Mümtaz’s desperate efforts to restore some unity to his life, to mend the ruptures that have ravaged it, and to find some harmony. The first rupture that

11  Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, A Mind at Peace, trans. Erdag Göknar (New York: Archipelago Books, 2008), 70. 12  Ibid., 411.

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he must overcome is the violent destruction of the old order and the inevitable need to invent new structures in all domains: Of course we feel in our lives – rather, in our flesh and blood – the vast fallout of two centuries of disintegration and collapse, of being the remnants of an empire and still unable to establish our own norms and idioms. Allowing this suffering to drive us to nihilistic inkâr, in effect, would be to accept even greater catastrophe, would it not?13 To avoid inkâr, or cynicism, and begin a process of modernization is the only option, but somehow, necessarily, the ties with the past must be re-established: On one hand we’re for better or worse attempting to appropriate a certain technique, to become people of a contemporary mind-set. As we adopt that mentality, by dint of circumstance, we have to discard traditional values. We’re exchanging models of social relations. On the other hand we don’t want to forget the past! What role does this past play within our present-day realities? Apparently, it’s only reminiscence or a nostalgia of sorts for us … It might ornament our lives! But what other constructive value could it possibly have? Suffice it that one group isn’t the mangled remnant of traditional culture and the other newly settled tenants of the modern world. We need a synthesis of both. We need to establish new relations with the past through cooperation between generations.14 This re-establishment is necessary because even while constructing a modern society, attachment to an identity is inevitable, and this identity is rooted in the past: “New life is necessary…. In order to leap forward or to reach new horizons, one still has to stand on some solid ground. A sense of identity is necessary. Every nation appropriates identity from its golden age.”15 But on a more practical level, the organization of the new life requires a form of historical consciousness: “Istanbul, and each part of the homeland, requires a reform program. But our attachments to the past are also part of these social realities, because those attachments constitute one of the manifest forms our life has taken, and this persists into the present as well as the future.”16 13  Ibid., 49. 14  Ibid., 288. 15  Ibid., 198. 16  Ibid., 199.

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What does this new life consist of? It is, in essence, the adoption of modernity. In the first instance this meant reforms within Turkey to improve the economic situation, stabilize the administration and rebuild the social structure. Reforms, too, have their foundations in history, and their failures as well: If Tevfik represented the nineteenth-century Tanzimat era of reform, which set out to work with lofty intentions and finished simply with a weakness for everyday pleasures – he lived in the ease, nonchalance, and pilfered delights of that age – then Yasar was more like the second constitutional period after 1908, and bore all of its instabilities. He displayed a bewildering idealism, fleeting feelings of inferiority, and rebellions that cast off like one wave taking another’s place; in short, he vacillated between ecstatic enthusiasm and immobilizing despair.17 But reforms are not confined to the outer form of the institutions in society, they imply a comprehensive transformation, which is founded on a deliberate implementation of forms of modernity developed in the West: First off, for us to do this, economic life must start and flourish, and society and living must regain creative impulses. Not to mention that if this does happen, one can’t just let life develop on its own. It’s too dangerous. The past is always nipping at our heels. A surplus of half-dead worldviews and modes of being lie in wait to interfere in modern life. Furthermore our present engagement with the modern and the West amounts to emptying into a gushing river as an afterthought. We’re not simply water, we’re a human society, and we’re not a tributary joining a river; we’re a society appropriating a civilization along with its culture, within which we possess a particular identity. Presently, we’re doing nothing more than adopting the accoutrements of Europe while neglecting the social contingencies. We’re conditioned to regard the modern with suspicion because it’s foreign to us, and we look upon tradition as of no consequence because it’s outdated. Our existence hasn’t even attained the level of meeting our own basic needs … It hasn’t achieved the prosperity and creativity necessary to present us with intrinsic values and ways of being! This duplicity, this paradox, continues to confound us in our aesthetics, entertainment, morality, etiquette, and conceptions of the future. We’re content to simply exist on surfaces. As soon as we delve into the depths, 17  Ibid., 181.

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indifference and pessimism overwhelm us. No tribe exists without gods, and we must forge our own gods or rediscover them. We must be more conscientious and wilful than any other nation.18 The reference point for the definition of modernity is, obviously, the West, where a modern worldview was ‘invented’; and this worldview represents the model of a modern society. The tendency toward westernization, however, drives Turkish society away from the foundations of its authenticity. This is symbolized in the novel by the merchandise displayed in shops and flea markets, where old Ottoman objects seem to lie in a timeless void, as “luxurious and occult insights of tradition, as if preparing to be interred, or rather, as if being observed from where they lay entombed.”19 Even as objects from the past, they have lost their significance: “The Orient, however, couldn’t be authentic anywhere, even in its grave.”20 Next to these antiquities lie the new, western, things that embody a completely different spirit. They are throwaway goods without intrinsic value, but nevertheless they are “testimonials to our inner transformation, our desire to adapt, and our search for ourselves in new contexts and climes.”21 As an intellectual, Mümtaz feels a responsibility to contribute to the transformation of society, both by fostering socio-economic reforms and by philosophically harmonizing the ideological and cultural contradictions that resulted from the collapse of the old order. He has no barrier to absorb the culture of the West; he admires all kinds of western achievements in literature, art, and music, ranging from Baudelaire and Valéry, the Renaissance painting of Fra Filippo and Ghirlandaio to Rodin, Renoir, Bach, Debussy, and Wagner. Still, he is totally enraptured by Turkish art as well, such as miniature painting and, especially, Sufi music. When he tells someone that he loves music and is asked “Only European?” He answers, “No, Turkish as well. But not as the same person.”22 His inability to reconcile his deeply-felt passion for both artistic traditions is because he lacks a stable identity, which should serve as a framework for aesthetic experiences:

18  Ibid., 284–285. 19  Ibid., 52, see also 47. 20  Ibid., 52. 21  Ibid., 52. 22  Ibid., 421.

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The issue is this: The things we read don’t lead us anywhere. When we read what’s written about Turks, we realize that we’re wandering on the peripheries of life. A Westerner only satisfies us when he happens to remind us that we’re citizens of the world. In short, most of us read as if embarking on a voyage, as if escaping our own identities. Herein rests the problem. Meanwhile, we’re in the process of creating a new social expression particular to us.23 Thus, Turkey is lingering between a disrupted tradition and a new life, between the contradictory necessities of restoring a link with its Ottoman heritage and adopting western tastes and outlooks. It seems that Turkish society has entered a state of stagnation caused by the many entwining dichotomies it faces. One of the ways Mümtaz explores to counter these dichotomies involves striving for a relationship with a consciousness of spiritual eternity that pervades the cosmos and the human psyche. Even as a boy he was once overwhelmed by the blissful mercy of emerging sunlight, as the curer of despair and depression and the herald of happiness. Throughout the novel, the mysterious force of light remains not only a source of comfort, but also proof that there is a truth, an essence, the force of which can emanate through human life: “Within the jewel, a truth ignited and blazed in its own vast and deep essence. Only sublimity of sorts, consciousness that had attained the utmost lucidity, or beauty that had succeeded in killing off the human within it and in freeing itself of all weakness, could emit such light.”24 Still, the experience of this force is associated with abstention, a fatalistic withdrawal from intervention in the course of life, self-renunciation, a mystical void, and an alienation of the self which seems to be linked with death. The sense of the sublime is only possible “at the moment when the intellect cut off all contact with everything and became its hermetic self, the moment when it functioned in the most idealized way. It was a reality located at the edge of the abyss.”25 A glimpse of this transcendental spirituality can be grasped in the art of the traditional Sufi musicians, whose music contains a “plethora of deaths…. souls longing for God … [and an] intermediary state of a liminal ârâf,” that is, divine insight.26 It is music that conveys

23  Ibid., 105. 24  Ibid., 66. 25  Ibid., 440. 26  Ibid., 173.

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“the yearning for the eternal in the soul, the winged ascension toward the sun, toward illumination and immolation.”27 It represented the essence of civilization’s inner world. And humanity’s infinity, in this instance, casting off rationalism in a single flutter, was in the process of attaining purity of the soul. As Mümtaz listened, he was distilled from our material world; and death, at one pole, became the talismanic mirror before rational life congruent with Creation; death was the downcast sibling living entangled with its grinning doppelganger.28 It is this elevation into the realm of spirituality that emphasizes its contrast to the murkiness of real life: “How did life manage to thrive between two polarities? At one extent, an array of vehicles for mankind’s exaltation and, at the other, trifling worries, the settling of scores, and random enmities that strove to exclude and banish people from exalted heights.”29 The ‘secret force’ which underlies the experience of the ruptures and dichotomies and of some transcendental truth, is the phenomenon of time. We can even consider time the main theme that is explored in the novel; it is a force that binds and disrupts, and that regulates all human experiences. As in Proust, the concept of time is taken out of its traditional construction as a regular, measurable natural phenomenon and re-situated in the context of subjective human experience. The tradition that has shaped this context, however, is not that of Renaissance art and science, but rather the Ottoman concept of a spiritual eternity and temporal stability. The two traditions converge in a three-layered vision of time: First, there is a mystical, eternal, time, an infinity that harbors a divine truth, that frames our individual and collective lives. This time can only be experienced by individuals, through specific channels of communication. But through individual experiences it can also become a collective experience and the basis of a communal vision of life and society. It symbolizes an awareness of bliss that transcends the hardships of everyday life and even co-exists with them, as if it is mysteriously concealed in its opposite. The second level of time is historical time, which binds the members of a community or a society and contains a tradition, which in turn provides the components of a sense of identity. Without this historical sense of identity, a society cannot construct a coherent awareness of the present. In a way, this historical time is incompatible with the level of mystical time: “The divine 27  Ibid., 173. 28  Ibid., 173. 29  Ibid., 174.

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should be like a fountainhead, unencumbered by humanity, robust, removed from all types of experience, and should simply provide the resilience to endure life.”30 When Nuran and Mümtaz discuss the great artists of the past, Nuran remarks that these people led “their own lives,” which “transcended” the eras in which they lived: For example, neither of them attempted to reform the world. Meanwhile, your neighbour of fame, the seventeenth-century preacher Vanî Efendi, did just that, and in the process spoiled everybody’s peace of mind and contentment. He was defeated by despair … My first two examples are artists who discovered the secret of living in a manner faithful to their inner selves. It seems to me that the others are but deluding themselves.31 Nevertheless, a society cannot build a future without a consciousness of its historical past. The collapse of Ottoman society not only disrupted its connection with the past, it also brought forth an awareness of a new historical situation, embedded in modernity, and the necessity of intervening in the course of history. However, the new society must somehow conform to its identity, which is rooted in the past, otherwise it will remain an artificial construction estranged from itself: “Turkey should become only one thing, and that’s Turkey.”32 The third level of time is personal time, a time which marks everyone’s gradual transformation toward death, and which allows the possibility of experiencing the other two levels of time. Historical time affects the subjective experience of time by imbuing it with feelings of loss and belonging, uprootedness and potential harmony. But in individual time, the bliss of cosmic time can be experienced as well, as a sensation of infinity, happiness, and harmony, as an epiphany of the divine. But individual time can also detach itself from the other levels and thereby lose its points of reference, by turning away from the manifestations of these levels of time, such as historical tradition or spiritual music. By losing his awareness of other levels of time, either consciously or as a result of historical circumstances, an individual can revert to superficiality and triviality, and lose his sense of identity. The result is the dissolution of structures, the fragmentation of society, and a recourse to artificial remedies.

30  Ibid., 48. 31  Ibid., 144. 32  Ibid., 284.

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The awareness of the existence of these levels of time does not, in itself, eliminate Mümtaz’s sense of alienation and does not mend his internal dichotomies. In fact, he is caught in the interactions between the levels of time and is overwhelmed by a sense of disorientation and helplessness. This state of stagnancy is healed by the appearance of Nuran, who brings together the various components of Mümtaz’s inner and physical life and restores – or at least promises to restore – his sense of wholeness. Nuran represents a natural harmony between the essence of tradition and the requirements of modernity; she combines a sense of the spiritual with physical beauty in the richest sense of the word: He wondered where and in which unfathomable depths it had been preordained: all decency, beauty, and simple essence, the soft suppleness of skin, the heavy breathing summoning arcane from the Occult of Genesis concealed in her corpus, and her physical presence in its substantiation cascading toward him from the darkness of mysteries; now tenderness, now caress, now stupor like another simulacrum of death, and then facets that were the pleasure and elation of resuscitation and resurrection under the orient of the sun; that is to say, contractions, spasms, and depletions that resembled the self-worship of her being in the Mihrab of the Sun. These profound unions, and upon their release the wellspring of yearning, couldn’t be contained by a single existence alone. They could only be the result of forces conjured in a remote and dark epoch before human cognizance or even existence. Nature on its own couldn’t achieve this intimacy. Happenstance alone wasn’t enough to enable the discovery of another within one with such impact.33 Thus, with her love and her embodiment of the spiritual tradition she is the gateway to emotional bliss, but also to a ‘truthful’ experience of reality: “For the measure of a year she’d erected the most sublime bridge between himself and the everyday world that he’d sensed and experienced through her attributes, and that he’d been exposed to the multitude of the world through her body…. She was his Horizon of Truth.”34 Thus his love is not only an experience which seems to be an ‘enclave’ in time, postponing the passage of time; it also restores his connection with ‘cosmic’ time, with ‘Turkish’ time, 33  Ibid., 163. 34  Ibid., 427.

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and his individual time, and imbues him with an emotion that embraces all humanity and all existence: “As he submerged in her, he achieved wholeness of being.”35 But before Mümtaz and Nuran reach their ultimate happiness, the forces of cynicism intervene, in the guise of Nuran’s husband and the nihilistic, morbid, Suat. Mümtaz relapses into a state of lethargy and his contact with reality is once again disturbed. Ihsan’s efforts to convince him to consider his love a romantic escapade and to direct himself to rational action in order to attack the problems of his time are in vain. Mümtaz’s split into ‘twins’ again paralyzes him; the fragmentation is completed by Ihsan’s death and the outbreak of World War II. Nuran’s presence, which provided some hope for the future, is definitively erased from Mümtaz’s life. This summary is not intended as a comprehensive analysis of A mind at peace, with its wide scope and ambitious quest to capture the spirit of an age and a society. As such, it compares to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Joyce’s Ulysses, both in its experiment with form and in its concern with thematic renewal and the presentation of a modern worldview. It is also a deeply critical evaluation of Turkish society, which was at that time still in statu nascendi. It is clear from the summary that A mind at peace shares several of the main concerns of The time regulation institute, such as its preoccupation with the nature of time and the artificiality of the transformation and modernization of society. More importantly for our purposes, it shares an interest in the relationship between illusion and reality, that is, the way in which illusions can dominate individual lives and communities and, moreover, shape the course of events. As in The time regulation institute, this theme can be linked here, more explicitly, to the Thousand and one nights story of ‘Ma‘ruf the cobbler.’ Strewn throughout the story of A mind at peace we find references to the Thousand and one nights. As in The time regulation institute, the Thousand and one nights is presented as a remnant of the past, an example of the tradition that is rapidly fading away: “An authentic society grew despondent, strove, and suffered through anomie and birth pangs for a century so that a digest of detective novels and these Jules Vernes might replace copies of A thousand and one nights, Tûtinâme,” etc.36 Thus, the Thousand and one nights stands for a lost heritage that is obscured by modernity. This is confirmed when Mümtaz wanders through the market and: “Next we stopped in front of the prayer-bead 35  Ibid., 189, 191. 36  Ibid., 53.

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seller peddling the final and paltry mementos of his boyhood Thousand and one nights Ramadan celebrations, having reduced the realm of his genesis to a few prayer beads and two or three misvak toothbrush sticks in a small case.”37 Here the Thousand and one nights is an object of nostalgia, a memento of moments of warmth and the sense of protection in his childhood memories. It is no coincidence, of course, that these references are situated in the market displays, where the clash between tradition and modernity is most visible. In the new life there is no place for such anachronisms. The most powerful reference to the Thousand and one nights is of course the paragraph quoted above, in which Mümtaz, as a split personality, is likened to Ma‘ruf the cobbler of the Thousand and one nights, who is suddenly transported by a jinn from a cruel, miserable life to a dreamlike city in which all his wishes are fulfilled. However, it must be added that the fulfillment of his wishes is realized by a lie, not just an occasional lie, but a deliberate, consistently upheld illusion that dupes the citizens. What is important is that Mümtaz’s dual personality is concomitant with a double perspective of reality: Mümtaz lives in two realities, a reality in which he suffers from the cruelties that life inflicts upon him, and a reality in which he participates in all the bountiful and blissful experiences life has to offer. This duality disorients him and prevents him from getting his life under control: Mümtaz frequently murmured to himself: “As if they’re part of another world,” astounded that the life he’d lived till yesterday had exiled him in but one night; and he wanted to be beside Nuran so he could simply ask, “This isn’t really true, is it? I’m mistaken, aren’t I? Do tell me I’m mistaken. Tell me that everything is just as it was, that everything is actually the way it’s supposed to be.”38 This permanent uncertainty about the reality of Mümtaz’s life spills over into the environment, which seems to be changed by magic into an imaginary scene: “The entire city had become the opulent and ornate décor for a fairy tale of sorts, or a Scheherazade fable.”39 The schizophrenia from which Mümtaz suffers, which is caused by his traumatic experience as a youth, is temporarily lifted by the ‘magic’ of Nuran; 37  Ibid., 396. 38  Ibid., 268. 39  Ibid., 260.

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this magic heals his conflicted relationship with reality. After meeting Nuran, Mümtaz feels “as vast and infinite as all Creation. Through Nuran’s presence he’d discovered his own existence.”40 And, The venture of living augmented exponentially through the enchantments of seeking Nuran in his surroundings and his past, discovering traces of her seasoning in all experiences, and seeing before him in the legends, faiths, and arts of the centuries – essentially through different personae yet always herself…. Nuran, in this perspective, represented the golden key accessing time past as well as the Germ of the Intimate fable that Mümtaz considered the first condition for all forms of art and philosophy.41 When he has to relinquish Nuran, his world falls apart once again. He is suddenly and painfully aware of his own mortality: “He would die. For the sake of Allah. He would die, tomorrow evening. The perplexing vertigo had begun again. Everything was spinning around him. It spun like a hoop spinning at the speed of light, and as it spun, everything blurred and lost color and shape.”42 After Nuran showed him that existence is larger than his own individual life, that life extends to all humanity, that he is part of a cosmic order that emanates its splendor over all humans, he became conscious again of the suffering of humankind and his own society, and his elation turns into self-reproach: “He suffered as if he’d committed all these crimes himself, and he understood to a deeper degree, through this torment he bore through no fault of his own, the extent to which humanity was a totality, and how every transgression against the whole amounted to a primal sin.”43 His relationship to reality crumbles once again and he can only see reality through a hallucinatory prism: “Something translucent, which permitted exceptional focus, separated him from the world. His mind had become a bewildering apparatus that adapted to the worldly context instantaneously, and after perceiving its object, immediately let it go.”44 Mümtaz’s identity, the center and foundation for constructing an ordered view of reality, is destroyed. It seems to have been transposed from the realm of the dead, where Suat lures him. 40  Ibid., 150. 41  Ibid., 206. 42  Ibid., 265. 43  Ibid., 426. 44  Ibid., 439.

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It is not difficult to understand why Tanpınar was such an admirer of Marel Proust’s À la recerche du temps perdu. Like Proust, he was fascinated by the phenomenon of time, as a combination of subjective experience and as a measurable natural dimension. Like Proust, subjective experiences influence the ‘shape’ of time as it appears in a reality that is fundamentally unstable and prone to transformations and distortions. In both cases, time can be manipulated, in the sense that strategies of postponement can create liminal situations in which the passage of time is subjected to the protagonists’ efforts to confront a traumatic past or complete a personal development. In both cases, love and desire are crucial elements in the process of the manipulation of time. Albertine and Nuran are instrumental in creating temporal ‘enclaves’ that are able to save the author from the intricate interaction of his desires and the traumatic memories of his youth. Whereas for Proust the new subjectivity of time is primarily related to culture and the aesthetic experience, in the case of Tanpınar, the perception of ‘lost time’ is systematically related to the development of modern Turkey and the effects of modernization on politics, culture, and society. The disruption of time leaves society orphaned, without the structuring influence of a continuing past. The protagonists lack a temporal framework to envisage either their past or their future, and therefore seem to be paralyzed in their present. This paralysis is strengthened by the threat of war, which looms over society as an apocalyptic threat. Mümtaz, failing to find solace in the temporal suspension of time during his love affair with Nuran, is ultimately taken up by the maelstrom of the international tensions that prevent a harmonious equilibrium between the various levels of time that could incorporate his experiences with time into a single, stable framework. The social experience of time and its disruptions remained relevant for Turkish society, as we see below in our discussion of the work of the postmodern Turkish author Orhan Pamuk.

Chapter 5

Narration and Survival: Vladimir Nabokov and Margaret Atwood As our analysis of the novels by Proust and Tanpınar shows, the motif of deferral is a rich source of inspiration for authors. This motif can be found in several stories of the Thousand and one nights in various forms, but it is most explicitly exploited in the frame story, ‘Shahriyar and his brother,’ which, evidently, defines the whole work as essentially a strategy of postponement, not only intended to pass the time, as a deferral of gratification, but also as an explicit means to avert a seemingly unavoidable death. With this emphatic reference to death, a two-sided characterization of the act of narration is proposed. On the one hand, narration is equated with life itself: life continues as long as narration continues, and perhaps life is, essentially, a form of narration; the continuation of narration represents the passage of time. On the other hand, Shahrazad’s successful attempt to avoid execution suggests that narration is not merely a means to postpone death, but even a way to triumph over death. Narration is stronger than death; when a narrator clings to his story, which regenerates itself endlessly, he lives forever. The relationship between narration and death as depicted in the Thousand and one nights is related to modern literature in a well-known essay by Wendy Faris, ‘1001 Words: Fiction against death,’ published in 1982, and revisited in her similarly famous essay, ‘Scheherazade’s children.’1 Faris treats the motif of narration as a means to postpone death as one of the quintessential features of modernist literature, as a primeval incentive to the writing of literature per se. Referring to Frank Kermode’s concept of the ‘sense of an ending,’ she argues, with Kermode, that the deferral of certain death is the source of a desire for form, which is expressed through the construction of narrative texts. Writing is equivalent to the refusal to accept death; it is a means to propose an alternative to death and an attempt to squeeze a smattering of meaning out of a life that, with the apparent senselessness of death, will become, potentially, futile.

1  Wendy Faris, “1001 Words: Fiction Against Death,” Georgia Review 36, no. 4 (Winter 1982), 811–830; idem, “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction,” in Lois Parkinson Zamora and W. B. Faris (eds.), Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 163–190.

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Narration is thus a means of finding a form that perpetuates itself in defiance of death.2 In the following paragraphs, we pick up the discussion initiated by Faris. We analyze the idea of postponement in the work of two authors in a somewhat broader perspective; we do not limit ourselves to the aspect of postponement only, but concentrate more on the way in which these authors link narration to the overcoming of death and time and, especially, to visions of life after death. We investigate how their complex concepts of time and the transcendence of time can be associated with the narration/survival nexus of the Thousand and one nights. We first focus on the work of the Russian/American author Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) and subsequently discuss similar themes in the work of another author, who does not explicitly refer to the Thousand and one nights, but who unmistakably uses the model of Shahrazad’s strategy for her storytelling, the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood (b. 1939). We focus on two of her novels, Lady Oracle and The blind assassin, in which the relationship between narration, postponement, and death is used, as we see, as a paradigm that structures oppressive human relationships, as in the frame story of the Thousand and one nights. In the end, some parallels between the works of Nabokov and Atwood are discussed.

Nabokov, the Thousand and One Nights, and Life After Death

Although Nabokov’s novels are generally quite enjoyable, even at a fairly superficial level, they are notoriously complex and difficult to interpret at deeper levels. Nabokov considered his novels puzzles, which he challenged the reader to solve; he hid signs, hints, and references in the text, all of which contribute not only to the aesthetic experience of the work, but also to the suggestion of many concealed – potential – meanings. In this, Nabokov was so ingenious that we are justified in stating that there is nothing in the text that does not fit into the fabric of one of the layers of the story. Everything is part of the whole, but it is difficult, if not impossible, to assemble the parts to form an unambiguous, coherent structure and to transform hidden signs into explicit meanings. It seems that Nabokov wanted to alert the reader to the myriad possibilities that are shimmering through the reality he presents, without imposing a kind of predetermined outcome on them or forcing them into a kind of inevitable unity. 2  Faris, “1001 Words,” 811.

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With regard to the Thousand and one nights, these observations imply, on the one hand, that the references to the Nights in Nabokov’s works are certainly significant and add a cluster of meanings to the text, but, on the other hand, that they are not the sole key to an understanding of the text; they can only be one element among many other elements, and thereby they add a field of associations that open up new possibilities in the text, rather than narrow it to enclose specific interpretations. This implies, too, that even if references to the Nights may be part of an underlying ‘network’ of metaphors that sustain one of the thematic lines of the story, they may also have their own referential value and be a source of separate associations. Needless to say, the complexity of Nabokov’s texts does not make the work of a critic any easier, but every confrontation with his novels is an endlessly intriguing experience. Though there are few explicit references to the Thousand and one nights in Nabokov’s works, these references are sufficient to surmise that he was deeply interested in the work. It seems plausible that Nabokov read a version of the Nights – possibly a translation of Galland’s Mille et une nuits, or an anthology – in his youth, since he mentions the work in his memoirs Speak, memory.3 In his memoir, he compares the atmosphere of the Crimea, where he, his mother, and his sisters sought refuge from Bolshevik persecution, to the Thousand and one nights. It is possible, of course, that the association was made only when Nabokov wrote the memoirs in the 1950s or that he encountered the stories again later when he was a refugee in Berlin. Here he wrote Despair and Invitation to a beheading, which are both novels about writers who seem to survive their own death. The Thousand and one nights is referred to several times in Invitation to a beheading, and, with different connotations, in Nabokov’s major novel Ada, or ardour. We would agree with Wendy Faris that these references to the Thousand and one nights are not merely coincidental appearances that pop up in the text, rather they support a more complex literary strategy. As Faris observes, the most distinct thematic parallel seems to be Nabokov’s treatment of time, both in the aspect of delay and in the aspect of contingency, and in his fascination with life after death and its relationship with narration. The latter theme can be found, for instance, in Ada, Invitation to a beheading, Despair, and Transparent things, but also in The real life of Sebastian Knight and The gift. Moreover, in these novels Nabakov explores the oblique relationship between texts and reality that results in the mingling of realism and fantasy, metafictional techniques, collages and fragmentary mosaics of storytelling, which 3  Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 244.

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thus allow the varied nature of reality to shine through the text. Of course, the cyclical nature of the texts (Ada) and the motif of the hero’s obsession as a starting point of storytelling could be, merely, coincidental parallels with the Thousand and one nights, but, given Nabokov’s ingenuity and scrupulousness, they are more likely intentional. Invitation to a Beheading: Writing After Death One of the most intriguing novels in which Nabokov explores the relationship between narration and death is Invitation to a beheading; it belongs to his early works which were written in Russian and later translated and reworked into English. Several references to the work suggest that the main motif of the story is related to the Thousand and one nights. At some point in the story the narrator speaks of “several bedraggled little volumes of a work in an unknown tongue, brought to him by mistake,”4 old volumes with “faded pages, some tinged with tiny blodges,” whose text is written in “Oriental letters, reminiscent of the inscriptions on museum daggers,”5 the “small crowded ornate type, with dots and squiggles within the sickle-shaped letters.”6 In the end the script is referred to as Arabic: “ ‘O yes, by the way, this was brought to me by mistake … these little volumes … Arabic, aren’t they?… unfortunately I hadn’t time to study Oriental languages.’ ‘Pity,’ said the librarian. ‘It’s all right, my soul will make up for it.’ ”7 Of course, these lines may refer to some other Arabic work, and not the Thousand and one nights, but the description and the association with the dagger, in combination with the theme of the story, leave little doubt. The story of Invitation to a beheading is about a writer called Cincinnatus, who is in a prison cell awaiting execution. He has been convicted for what is called “gnostic opacity,”8 or “gnostical turpitude,”9 a cryptic indication that appears to refer to Cincinnatus’s failure to represent reality in his texts in a clear, comprehensible way.10 There are no stable references to place or time and when Cincinnatus asks how much time is left before the execution, he receives no answer. This disturbs him, as he has the urge to write and he does not know how much time he has to record all his thoughts: “But how can I begin writing when I do not know whether I shall have time enough, and the torture comes 4  Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 104. 5  Ibid., 106. 6  Ibid., 106. 7  Ibid., 153. 8  Ibid., 23. 9  Ibid., 61. 10  Ibid., 23.

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when you say to yourself, ‘Yesterday there would have been enough time’ – and again you think, ‘If only I had begun yesterday …’ ”11 And, “But how can I write about this when I’m afraid of not having time to finish and of stirring up all these thoughts in vain?”12 Still, he relishes every moment that he has to search for thoughts and the words which express them: I value every respite, every postponement … I mean time allotted to thinking; the furlough I allow my thoughts for a free journey from fact to fantasy and return … I mean much more besides, but lack of writing skill, excitement, weakness … I know something, I know something. But expression of it comes so hard. No, I cannot … I would like to give up – yet I have the feeling of boiling and rising, a tickling, which may drive you mad if you do not express it somehow … I have no desires, save the desire to express myself – in defiance of all the world’s muteness.13 Here we have quite an explicit narration-postponement-execution motif: a writer on the verge of a certain death who struggles against this awareness by writing. Another element that strengthens the significance of this motif consists of Cincinnatus’s conversation with M’sieur Pierre. Pierre is in the adjacent cell and visits him every day to have conversations, to play chess and other games, and, generally, to become friends with Cincinnatus. After a while it is clear that Pierre is Cincinnatus’s executioner, and he wants to become acquainted with his victim. Pierre, too, can give no certainty about the execution date, but suggests that continuing the conversation, or manipulating it, may lead to its deferral or perhaps even its cancellation. While the story progresses, the reader gradually becomes aware that the reality of the cell, as a setting for the events, is less stable than it first appeared. The clock, the window, the spider on the wall are all fake, and a table that was fixed to the floor at one moment is moved easily the next. Moreover, the guards seem to be actors who change roles arbitrarily. There is a “flaw in visible matter,”14 suggesting that Cincinnatus is not in a ‘real’ prison, but in a kind of stage backdrop, in which all the figures act out preconceived roles. This impression is strengthened by the presence of “an additional Cincinnatus,” who wants to do what “we would like to do at that very moment but cannot.”15 11  Ibid., 45. 12  Ibid., 46. 13  Ibid., 77. 14  Ibid., 183. 15  Ibid., 14, 22.

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From time to time these two doubles act independently from each other; it remains unclear how they are related, how they are to be distinguished by the reader, and from which perspective the events are narrated. Cincinnatus himself seems unconcerned by this instability, as if he has grown accustomed to the diffuse boundaries between the various dimensions of reality: But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is, they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind.16 This blurring of reality seems to give him access to different realities: It was as if one side of his being slid into another dimension … It seemed as though at any moment, in the course of his movements about the limited space of the haphazardly invented cell, Cincinnatus would step in such a way as to slip naturally and effortlessly through some chink of the air into its unknown coulisses to disappear there with the same easy smoothness with which the flashing reflection of a rotated mirror moves across every object in the room and suddenly vanishes, as if beyond the air, in some new depth of ether.17 Within this diffuse, theatrical, reality, there is only one certainty: “The only real, genuinely unquestionable thing here was only death itself, the inevitability of the author’s physical death.”18 But even the certainty of death is cast into doubt. When the execution finally takes place, Cincinnatus, kneeling on the scaffold, seems to split himself into two: One suffers the decapitation, while the other seems to walk away unharmed into some strange, mysterious realm. One Cincinnatus was counting, but the other Cincinnatus had already stopped heeding the sound of the unnecessary count which was fading away in the distance; and, with a clarity he had never experienced before – at first almost painful, so suddenly did it come, but then suffusing him with joy, he reflected: why am I here? Why am I lying like this? 16  Ibid., 78. 17  Ibid., 103. 18  Ibid., 105.

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And, having asked himself these simple questions, he answered them by getting up and looking around…. Cincinnatus made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him.19 Before we discuss some aspects of the novel, we first sum up its possible relationship with the Thousand and one nights. The most explicit reference to the Nights in Invitation to a beheading is, of course, the aforementioned remark about the “little volumes” in Arabic which are handed to Cincinnatus by the prison librarian. The combination of this ‘sign’ with the general theme of the story, a writer waiting for his execution, who is writing to fill up the uncertain span of time before the execution, is sufficient evidence that Nabokov had the frame story of the Thousand and one nights in mind as one of his narrative models while he was writing the novel. Within this matrix, Cincinnatus would be the impersonation of Shahrazad, while M’sieur Pierre, the executioner, who has a daily conversation with Cincinnatus, plays the role of Shahriyar. This suggestion is strengthened by Pierre’s appearance at a certain point with a pipe with a carved houri (a virgin in the Islamic paradise) and a brocade skullcap, lying on Cincinnatus’s cot, like an oriental figure. This setting and the characters in it are the components of a situation that we may call a suspension of the passing of time, a period of uncertain length before death, which is filled by several forms of narration. During this period of temporal instability, the domain of reality is gradually invaded by forces of fantasy or unreality, or another reality. Cincinnatus appears to be living in two realities, which are separated but still unfold simultaneously in the same spatial setting, concentrated around the figure of Cincinnatus and the objects surrounding him. It is uncertain whether this mingling of realities is produced by Cincinnatus’s fantasy, or by his writing, which is marked by its ‘opacity’ and its oblique relationship to reality, or by the situation in which Cincinnatus finds himself, as if death, or life after death, projects its ‘reality’ into Cincinnatus’s mind and life in advance. Thus, Cincinnatus’s split into himself and his double is either caused by his writing – he has created a narrative self – or by the manifestation of the ‘person’ Cincinnatus will become after the execution, which takes possession of Cincinnatus before the actual split takes place. The instability of reality in Cincinnatus’s situation is sustained by the act of writing, because throughout the story it remains unclear who the narrator is, how the two Cincinnatuses are related to the text, and how the text is related to reality. At a certain point, for instance, Cincinnatus’s writing spills over into reality when what he describes becomes a recording of what is actually 19  Ibid., 190–191.

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happening at that moment, from the perspective of another person. Within this invented reality, everything is uncertain, except the death of the author, and, as we see, even this certainty is not absolute. Toward the end, when Cincinnatus is writing, he obliterates the word ‘death’ that he just wrote and substitutes ‘execution,’ for ‘death,’ since, apparently, he realizes that ‘death’ is not an adequate description of what is going to happen. Is this an example of how narration triumphs over death, by the sheer power of words, by simply changing the signification of an event? Or should we see this as the intervention of a narrated person in real life, Cincinnatus taking on the role of his narrated self? Or is it the surviving Cincinnatus, emerging from his supernatural realm, who takes the real Cincinnatus’s place or incites him to formulate his thoughts correctly? In any case, this brief intervention reveals how, in narration, life, death, and survival converge. The execution marks the transition to an alternative reality, which has already announced itself and in which all actors will assume new roles. In his analysis of the novel, J. W. Connolly explains Cincinnatus’s experiences in the context of political dictatorship; he shows the predicament of the author under a dictatorial regime and the consciousness of an artist confronted with repression.20 Repression is enacted in a kind of theatrical ritual centered around Cincinnatus’s execution, but it results in the split of the author into a physical and an imaginary person, and the latter is developed within an ‘inner vision’ of reality.21 Evidently, this explanation ties in very well with the matrix of the story of Shahrazad and Shahriyar: Here, too, narration is produced in a situation of repression, under the threat of execution; this leads to a reality that is complemented by a narrated reality, an imaginary world that ultimately provides the strength to vanquish death. Repression breaks open regular reality to release another reality that leads to its neutralization. But this interpretation is not really satisfying. In an intriguing essay entitled ‘The Otherworld in Invitation to a beheading,’ V. E. Alexandrov illustrates Nabokov’s conception of ‘otherworlds’ in his work: Nabokov’s novels, stories, poems, and discursive works emerge as embodying a sui generis faith in a transcendent, timeless, and beneficent realm that appears to affect everything in the material world and to provide for personal immortality. Nabokov’s designation for this dimension 20  J. W. Connolly, “Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov’s ‘Violin in a Void,’ ” in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading: A Critical Companion, ed. J. W. Connolly (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 7–8. 21  Ibid., 27–28.

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of being was “the otherworld,” and a cardinal tenet of his faith was that one can have only intuitions about it; no certainty is possible.22 This otherworld can only be evoked, in the case of Cincinnatus, by inventing a poetic language; Alexandrov says, “Cincinnatus states that he needs to express himself verbally in order to know the other worldly reality that fills his intuitions; in other words, poetic language is a guide to, and an expression of, metaphysical reality.”23 This is, of course, exactly what Cincinnatus does: He has created a language which has an unusual, complicated relationship with the real world, and this was the peculiarity he was convicted of. Thus, Cincinnatus’s writing establishes some connection between the real world and the otherworld and thereby creates Cincinnatus’s double, who inhabits this otherworld. However, since the text written by Cincinnatus overflows into the text told by the narrator – as indicated above – and since the narrator is aware of the actions of Cincinnatus’s double, it becomes clear that the narrator is not identical to the real Cincinnatus, and that he narrates from the same perspective as Cincinnatus’s double. Alexandrov states, “It would not be reading too much into the text to interpret Cincinnatus’s double as occupying the same metaphysical space as the narrator: in a sense, both are free to imagine events that are impossible in ‘reality.’ ”24 Continuing this line of thought, Alexandrov reluctantly examines the logical conclusion, that the narrator may in fact be identical to Cincinnatus’s double, a thought which he subsequently rejects: … we have to assume that Cincinnatus is in fact the concealed author of the entire novel. The narrative in which he exists would thus be dependent on his consciousness in the same way that his physical world is shown at the novel’s conclusion to depend on his mortal existence … But such an interpretation of Invitation to a beheading is most implausible because hardly any evidence, beyond that already mentioned, supports it.25

22  V. E. Alexandrov, “The Otherworld in Invitation to a beheading,’ in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading: A Critical Companion, ed. J. W. Connolly (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 93. 23  Ibid., 103. 24  Ibid., 105. 25  Ibid., 107.

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Still, Alexandrov is too intrigued by this insight to forfeit it wholly and suggests that the story is still told from the perspective of the otherworld and that, in fact, Cincinnatus’s life is steered by his communication with the otherworld: “Because the narrator is not merely the teller of Cincinnatus’s story but can also be construed as a spiritual entity, his ‘metaliterary’ remarks revaluate Cincinnatus’s existence by implying that it is dependent on utterances deriving from the transcendent.”26 It is tempting, after this interesting interpretation of the story, to characterize Invitation to a beheading as a kind of revelatory text in which we glimpse a transcendental world that penetrates the real world, not only to make its existence known, but also to intervene in the regular course of life by means that are part of regular reality, a narrative text. By this means we have a vision of the otherworld and the manifestation of the otherworld in reality, and by doing so a channel of communication – or at least records of an event of communication – are established between the two domains in a way similar to the effects of revelatory texts. What is more, it is in this kind of text that ‘real’ life is revealed, as opposed to the theatrical lives led by the people surrounding Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus’s ‘reality’ is the result of his communication with the otherworld and consists of a text which is partly written by his earthly self and partly dictated from the otherworld. Yet this conclusion is also not wholly satisfactory, since it leaves the question of authorship unresolved. If we return to our hypothesis that Cincinnatus should be seen as a pseudo-Shahrazad, however, we can go one step further and conclude, in contrast to Alexandrov, that Cincinnatus’s double is indeed the narrator of the whole story. Cincinnatus narrates it in order to avoid death and by his narration he is able to survive his execution and slip into his ‘double’ in the otherworld, and his double continues the narration. It is the process of narration which survives and which, so to speak, pulls Cincinnatus through his execution as an indispensable vehicle of the story, which now relates his own ‘death.’ This procedure resembles the fate of Shahrazad, who succeeds in saving her life by telling her stories, but in this case, she continues to tell her own story, as in the famous reference to the 602nd night in the well-known story by Borges, in which, he claims, the narrator, Shahrazad, tells the story of her own predicament turning her chain of stories into an eternal cycle that endlessly starts anew. What is more important, however, is the conclusion that, if the frame story of the Thousand and one nights is seen as a paradigm for Invitation to a beheading, and Cincinnatus stands in for Shahrazad, then it is possible to support the authorship of Cincinnatus’s double and thus the possibility that 26  Ibid., 108.

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texts originate, at least partially, in an otherworld, as Shahrazad is a medium to convey the world of the imagination, which is in contact with an otherworld in which she exists, too. Ada Among Alexandrov’s conclusions is the observation that the “implicit analogy between text and earthly life on the one hand, and imagination and the transcendent, on the other hand, which is found in Invitation to a beheading, can be traced throughout Nabokov’s work.”27 We only have to think of novels such as The real life of Sebastian Knight, Transparent things, Look at the harlequins!, and Despair, and, particularly, Ada, or ardour. We move on to discuss how this observation, which reminds us so distinctly of Shahrazad’s narrative strategy, helps us to understand Ada and its relationship to the Thousand and one nights. Of course, we must acknowledge that Ada is an extremely complex work, even within Nabokov’s oeuvre, and we cannot offer a comprehensive analysis of the text here. Our discussion is limited to the references to the Thousand and one nights and, more specifically, to the motif in which narration and survival are linked. Ada is the story of a passionate love between Van Deen and his half-sister Ada. Van and Ada are officially cousins, since Van was conceived during an extramarital love affair between his father and his aunt; they first meet in 1884 at the Ardis family estate when he is fourteen and she is twelve (‘Ardis the first’). Their mutual attraction and sensuality is immediate. After a brief meeting in 1886, their incestuous love affair continues when Van returns to Ardis in 1888 (‘Ardis the second’). Although they continue to indulge their sexual pleasures, Van becomes aware that Ada is unfaithful to him and after his departure, his life is marked by jealousy, anger, and obsessive sexual promiscuity. Ada, meanwhile, continues to send him letters, but marries an insignificant man. After her husband’s death, Ada joins Van in Switzerland in 1922, and from then on, they savor their love without hindrance. A third central character in the story is Lucette, Ada’s younger sister, who witnesses the unfolding of Ada’s love and is somehow always present when the couple have their trysts, though she is usually kept at a distance by a ruse or an excuse. Ada and Van hide their passion from her, but she, too, falls deeply and desperately in love with Van, who refuses to respond to her advances. After Ada rather rudely introduces Lucette to the pleasures of sex, Lucette continues to try to persuade Van to make love to her. When her final effort, on a cruise ship, fails, she commits suicide by jumping into the ocean. 27  Alexandrov, “The Otherworld,” 109.

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The story is written from the perspective of an aged Van, who, now in his nineties, attempts to recapture or even resuscitate his eventful past. However, from the beginning, the authorship of the text is unstable; the narrator’s perspective regularly changes from the first person (‘I,’ i.e., Van), to the third person, while comments, corrections, and observations are added regularly by Ada and sometimes by an anonymous person. At the end of the novel, the explanation of the way in which it was recorded increases the authorial ambiguity; it is stated – from an outside perspective? – that Van dictated his memories to his secretary Violet Knox, revised it from 1963 to 1965, and re-dictated it to Violet, who typed the script in 1967. It is suggested that Violet, and an unknown editor, could have changed the text, because Van and Ada both die in the story, which is supposed to have been written by them. This is also suggested by a comment at the end.28 It is the end of the book that indicates that Ada and Van die, as if to imply that if they had lived, they would have continued rewriting it endlessly.29 The text is thus a conglomerate, a multi-layered sedimentation of observations, which ultimately seems to have dissociated itself from its author. The ambiguities raised by the uncertainty of its authorship are reinforced by the procedure that is used to (re-)construct Ada and Van’s recollections. The events are not linked together in a linear, chronological, way, rather they are grouped around the episodes which were the quintessence of Ada and Van’s lives, that is, their meetings, especially those at Ardis, and the lack of communication that followed them. Thus, their lives are not presented in a rational way, as a measurable sequence of events, but as if they were ‘swallowed up’ by specific emotional experiences, which, for Ada and Van, represent the nature and essence of their past. This procedure owes more to the imagination, which shapes life in accordance with experiences, as if derived from them or by deriving meaning from them, than to the rational mind, which looks for logical causes and explanations. Thus, the past consists of fragments that in some way or another can be related to these crucial experiences, and time is not what links these fragments, but what separates them. As we see, this reflects Nabokov’s perception of time, which is also characterized by its essential immeasurability. After this brief synopsis of the story and structure of Ada, we can proceed with an outline of the references to the Thousand and one nights in the novel and their significance for its structure and themes. We should first note that 28  Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 460–461. 29  Ibid., 460.

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the references are embedded in a much broader network of oriental images, words, and stereotypes. Words such as burka, Karakul-cap, almeh, seraglio, eunuch, janizary, and ziggurat create a clearly oriental atmosphere, which together with references to ‘oriental gymnastics,’ an ‘oriental canopy,’ Turkish cigarettes, oriental brothels, etc. form an underlying framework of associations. These associations are complemented by references to the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (‘Osberg’), particularly with regard to oriental tales; Richard Burton, the translator of the Thousand and one nights; and the erotic compendium of Sheikh Nefzawi, The perfumed garden, which is mentioned twice in the novel. These references serve several purposes. First, they tint the story with a shade of exoticism that diminishes the sense of realism, which is already dubious because of the ambiguous geographic setting of the story and the backgrounds of the protagonists. It is suggested that the story is set in a diffuse, broad reality in which a great variety of elements shimmer and enhance its dreamlike nature, a reality that is shaped by associations that are clustered around the main events. Thus, the story is connected, in part, with a world of fantasy and fairy tale, which is evoked by words, objects, and similes. Second, most of these images have a sexual or erotic connotation, such as, evidently, Sheikh Nefzawi and oriental gymnastics, but also ‘Tigris-Euphrates lovemaking,’ ‘passion in palaces,’ ‘palms,’ ‘brothels,’ ‘eunuchs,’ and ‘almehs,’ or the scene of a sultan surrounded by beautiful maidens. Thus, Nabokov makes ample use of stereotypes that represent the Orient as a world of refined and uninhibited sensuality and eroticism, and adds an exotic flavor to Ada and Van’s sexual adventures. References to the Thousand and one nights show a similar duality. They add to the mysterious atmosphere of the story, suggesting a world of magic that is incorporated in Ada and Van’s real lives, and which is seamlessly inserted as an element carrying both realistic and imaginary components. Other references clearly add to the deepening of the erotic experience that is evoked in the novel, experiences that also use the Thousand and one nights’ erotic reputation. Finally, the references contribute to the construction of the main characters and thereby of the story as a whole, since in Nabokov’s work even a single ‘sign’ can epitomize and even determine the nature or natures of the whole. In the first category, an example of the references can be seen in the repeated occurrence of the magic carpet, a blue magic rug with Arabian designs, associated with a ‘jikker’ or ‘stemmer,’ which a boy receives on his twelfth birthday: “and then what a breath-taking long neural caress when one became airborne for the first time and managed to skim over a haystack, a tree, a burn,

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a barn …”30 Van has the old carpet repaired and uses it to glide with Ada above the roofs. Apparently, the magic carpet is associated with youthful strength, because at a certain point Van sighs: “I am weak. I write badly. I may die tonight. My magic carpet no longer skims over crown canopies and gaping nestlings, and her rarest orchids.”31 And at the end the editor notes: “Before we can pause to take breath and quietly survey the new surroundings into which the writer’s magic carpet has, as it were, spilled us …”32 The magic carpet, it seems, is a device that contains, in a mysterious way, the forces of the imagination, which are associated with the discovery and exploration of sexuality. With all its magical possibilities, the magic carpet is presented as a real and even rather ordinary apparatus; thus, magic is incorporated as a component of real life. Examples of the second category include the copy of the Thousand and one nights which Ada scans through, hoping to find scabrous passages, but which she replaces in disappointment; the copy of Thousand and one best plays, which is kept on the bookshelf in the boudoir; the ‘sultanic’ scene, with Van “idly, one March morning, in 1905, on the terrace of Villa Armenia, where he sat on a rug, surrounded by four or five lazy nudes, like a sultan”;33 and, finally, the setting up of the ‘thousand and one floramors’ throughout the world, with ‘Oriental charmers,’ ‘silver basins,’ and ‘embroidered towels.’34 Through these references, the Thousand and one nights is presented as a source of inspiration for erotic pleasure, or even as a manual, together with Nefzawi’s compendium, of the art of love, of pure indulgence in carnal satisfaction. In a sense, this erotic world of the Thousand and one nights is mysterious and far away, but can be recreated and realized in material form. Or does it only exist in Van’s imagination? The references of the third category – those related to the characters – show that the associations with oriental lovemaking are no coincidence. In the beginning of the novel, Aqua and Marina, Van and Ada’s mother and aunt, are described as “twin peris.”35 This comparison may refer to their complexion, of course, which evokes images of oriental fairies, but it also suggests some relationship with the world of the Thousand and one nights, a world of magic, changeability, transformation, and sexuality. It also, however, suggests 30  Ibid., 68, 41. 31  Ibid., 174. 32  Ibid., 460–461. 33  Ibid., 395. 34  Ibid., 274, 277. 35  Ibid., 22.

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a relationship between the story of Ada and the genre of the fairy tale, with its aspects of fantasy and magic, but also of fate and predetermination. There is no fairy tale in which the appearance of a twin at the beginning would not have far-reaching consequences for the story, and in fact the adventures of Aqua and Marina not only foreshadow the future adventures of Van and Ada, but even prefigure them, as if they were part of an inevitable fate. The most important link between characters in Ada and the Thousand and one nights is the indication that Van and Ada represent Shahriyar and Shahrazad. In several passages, Ada is likened to an oriental princess, with eyes like an “Oriental hypnotist,”36 her Moorish lips,37 and her skin of Samarqand satin.38 Ada attempted to coat her fingernails with Scheherazade’s lacquer (a very grotesque fad of the ’eighties) but she was untidy and forgetful in grooming, the varnish flaked off, leaving unseemly blotches, and he requested her to revert to her “lack-luster” state. In compensation, he bought her … an ankle chain of gold but she lost it in the course of their strenuous trysts and unexpectedly broke into tears when he said never mind, another lover some day would retrieve it for her.39 The most significant association, however, appears when Van says, while shaving Ada’s body hair: “Now I’m Scheher, and you are his Ada, and that’s your green prayer carpet.”40 This explicit linking of Van and Ada with the frame story of the Thousand and one nights is not without problems. Of course, there are several parallels between Van and Shahriyar. Van has a monomanic tendency to satisfy his desires, which results not only in his breaking the incest taboo and indulging in his passion for Ada, but also in his bitter experience of jealousy, unfaithfulness, and separation. He is a paragon of masculinity and as proud, stubborn, and promiscuous as Shahriyar. On the other hand, he is the one who records the story of their love, albeit with Ada’s help, and, of course, he does not want to execute Ada but hopes to be reunited with her. Ada is associated with Shahrazad, but she does not play Shahrazad’s role, that is, she does not try to soothe Van’s anger through a combination of eroticism and narration. Narration plays an 36  Ibid., 46. 37  Ibid., 316. 38  Ibid., 87. 39  Ibid., 171–172. 40  Ibid., 171.

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important part, of course, in healing the trauma of the lovers’ separation, or perhaps, as some critics suggest, in expiating the couple’s feelings of guilt. So, we have a combination of eroticism, narration, jealousy, postponement, and other motifs, similar to the story of Shahrazad and Shahriyar, though the distribution of roles is not the same. It appears that Van represents both Shahrazad and Shahriyar, whereas Ada is only a co-author and muse, who helps turn Van’s fantasies into a reality and, subsequently, into a story. Or is she not even that? We must note another aspect here. From the beginning, time and again Ada and Van’s love trysts are hindered by the presence of Lucette. Ada and Van invent all kinds of tricks to keep Lucette out of the way – telling her to learn a poem by heart, tying her up, putting her in the bath or hiding her in a closet – in order to have some time together, but in the end, it appears that Lucette in fact witnesses their carousing and, in turn, falls in love with Van, and hopes that he will at least agree to make love to her once. Lucette is initiated into the secrets of sex prematurely and in a perverted way, and this experience haunts her throughout her life. Evidently, if the story of Ada and Van is modeled after the story of Shahrazad and Shahriyar, then Lucette would take the role of Dunyazad, Shahrazad’s sister, who lies under the marital bed and, after Shahrazad and Shahriyar’s lovemaking, sets the process of storytelling in motion by asking her sister to tell her a story. At first sight, Lucette’s role seems to be marginal, as is Dunyazad’s, but, as we see below, the reader gradually becomes aware that she is a key figure in the story; that she may in fact, like Dunyazad, be the ‘prime mover’ of the narration. Apart from these considerations about the precise parallels between the various characters, what is perhaps more important is the way in which these parallels link Ada more broadly to the concept of the frame story of the Nights. It is on this level that Wendy Faris discusses the novel as depicting an act of postponement through narration, as in the frame story of the Thousand and one nights. If we look at the conceptual parallels in a more detailed way, we can divide them into a number of elements. First, as in the Thousand and one nights, the novel is anchored in a metafictional setting, which becomes more or less clear at the end, and which, as we have seen above, blurs the identity of the author. The construction of the text seems to have been a common effort, the result of a more or less coincidental co-operation that destabilizes its central point of view and its relationship to real events. Significantly, it allows for intervention from outside. Finally, it throws light on the circumstances in which the work was compiled: Van dictates the text in his old age, either to reconstruct or restore his memories, or perhaps as a confession or as an expiation for his conduct; in any case, he dictates

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it with hindsight, that is, while knowing that he would finally be reunited with Ada. Should the text be seen as a justification for the sins he commits with Ada? Second, the tale contained by the frame is not a linear, chronological story, but rather a collage of fragments of a story, or, more accurately, of fragments of several stories. As Brian Boyd remarks: “Although [Nabokov] rarely offers formal stories within stories, in the manner of Cervantes, Fielding or Barth, he likes to offer hints of or vistas on other stories, or even a second main story concealed behind the first.”41 The story of Ada, too, lacks a linear, chronological coherence, but is rather lumped around events and experiences; it is, as Boyd remarks, a story not driven by plot but by character,42 not structured according to ratio, but according to emotions, experiences, and the imagination. The fragments should be seen as patches of embroidery on a plain cloth, the embroidery is not directly connected, but includes similar patterns and references to each other. The configuration of these fragments requires that interruptions, or periods of stagnancy, play a dominant role, since the fragments reveal key events with impasses in between. The key events not only determine the nature of the following impasse, but they also contain, in their rich and detailed evocation, the basic elements of the next key event, not in the sense that the one determines the other, but by suggesting that they are all part of a pattern that is only partly revealed. Thus, on the one hand, the interruptions cause a fragmentation of the story, while on the other, they contribute to the emergence of an underlying, non-linear coherence, as if a third dimension reveals itself through the cross-references in the descriptions of different events. It can be argued that by this technique Nabokov intends to imbue events that form the realist core of the story with the hidden forces of the imagination, and thereby reveal the underlying patterns and show that experiences are not based on a reconstruction of causes and effects, but on a subjective association of seemingly incoherent elements. For Nabokov, storytelling is not the logical structuring of ideas or events, but rather the subjective representation of experiences in the seemingly chaotic abundance in which they present themselves. The subjectivity of the narrator’s perspective can be traced back to the origin of the story, that is, his obsession and its traumatic repercussions. In the words of Boyd: “In Nabokov the key structure is the hero’s obsession. On the one hand, it fries up an invaluable private intensity in the protagonist; on the other, it keeps him apart both from his immediate world and from 41  Brian Boyd, “Nabokov as a Storyteller,” in Julian W. Connolly, The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 32. 42  Ibid.

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the world of freedom and fulfillment he compulsively imagines.”43 In Van’s case, his obsession and trauma are caused by his egoistic indulgence in sinful love, his jealousy, and the separation from his beloved. His traumatic confrontation with his obsession leaves him in a stalemate, an impasse, which prevents him from leading a normal life. This impasse results in a strategy of deferral, that is, a postponement of a potential reunion. Time is only an interval that is filled with the refusal to communicate, illness, idleness, sex, insignificant relationships and, importantly, writing. The role of writing as a mechanism, or perhaps enactment, of deferral appears in two ways. First, during his separation from Ada, Van composes his treatise The texture of time, in which he hopes to uncover the nature of time. Of course, while writing, Van’s experience of time in his impasse, tainted by the memories of his love, converges with his conception of time and even the writing itself. By writing, Van is actually weaving the texture of time. At the end, just before their reunion takes place, Ada excuses herself to fetch her luggage from the airport; thus, she not only postpones the reunion, but also gives Van time to complete his thesis that same evening. This unexpected convergence of time and life stresses the experiential nature of time, which is not just passing by, but is linked to experiences, and, especially, to the intervals between these experiences. Time is not just the passage from the past into the present and into the future, it is the accumulation of experiences that remain present and can be invoked and restored: But many years later, when working on his Texture of time, Van found in that phenomenon additional proof of real time’s being connected with the interval between events, not with their “passage,” not with their blending, not with their shading the gap wherein the pure and impenetrable texture of time transpires.44 Memories can be relived, but they do not necessarily form a rational structuring of past events: “The Past, then, is a constant accumulation of images. It can be easily contemplated and listened to, tested and tested at random, so that it ceases to mean the orderly alternation of linked events that it does in the large theoretical sense.”45 In an ingenious mirroring of the writing of The texture of time, this vision of time and the past concur with the second instance of writing as a form of 43  Ibid., 34. 44  Nabokov, Ada, 265. 45  Ibid., 428.

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postponement, when an aged Van records his reminiscences. On the one hand, he shapes the text to represent, formally, his idea of time and the nature of memories as points in time by which events, memories, and experiences coalesce and seem to be isolated in the passage of time, except for the subjective underlying pattern that gives them some – almost hidden – coherence. In this way, the text – the writing – is used not only to record memories or events, but to relive them as they were experienced at that time. The form of the text itself shows the nature of time. On the other hand, Ada and Van are determined to keep revising the text – that is, reliving the past and retelling it – until they “die into the text.”46 Here, too, text and life, text and time, converge, when the text is used – in vain – to produce or create time, to find an escape into some form of eternity. Apparently, this cannot be achieved by seeking a future, but only by endlessly reshaping the past. This convergence of text, time, and life, through the medium of stories or memories not only resembles the narrative strategy of Shahrazad, but is also similar to the exploration of time in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, which, too, is concerned with “individual, perceptual time, with time in its relation to human consciousness,”47 instead of time as a linear, measurable ‘passing.’ As we have seen in the previous section, in the Recherche the experience of time is molded by the experiences of desire, as in Ada. It is no coincidence that Nabokov repeatedly refers to Proust both directly and indirectly. Third, as in the case of Shahrazad, the idea of postponement implies a notion of time that is essentially contingent. One of the basic ideas behind Shahrazad’s storytelling is the belief that human ingenuity and rationality can influence the course of events and that alternative futures are practically endless. Nabokov, too, upholds the idea that nothing in life is preordained: “At every moment it is an infinity of branching possibilities,”48 that is, present reality harbors an endless variety of futures, without a predetermined pattern imposing a specific course of events. Still, these possibilities cannot be freely manipulated by the human will, it is ultimately a combination of human volition and coincidence that will determine the course of events. This seems to contradict the role of fate, which was referred to briefly above. Demon’s affair with Martina, after his marriage to her sister Aqua, and the substitution of Marina’s baby – Van – for Aqua’s stillborn baby, is an event which, Nabokov seems to suggest, introduces an anomalous element into the ‘regular’ course of 46  Ibid., 460. 47  Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness (Christchurch, New Zealand: Cybereditions, 2001), 188. 48  Nabokov, Ada, 441.

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events, and this element is sure to have repercussions in the future. Demon’s injustice to Aqua and her subsequent suicide foreshadow Van and Ada’s incestuous love affair and their cruelty to Lucette, which results in her suicide. It seems, then, that the forces of fate are woven into the texture of time just as in some stories of the Thousand and one nights a coincidence, an intrigue or a traumatic event provides the tension from which the narrative unfolds and incorporates an anomaly into the regular course of events, and this anomaly determines the plot, as the inevitable outcome of an irregular act. In the Thousand and one nights, the stories usually relate to human efforts to neutralize an anomaly and restore a ‘normal’ situation, or counter the forces of fate if it promises disaster. It is in this space of uncertainty that the story – almost automatically – emerges, shaped by the tension between fate and human agency. In Ada, too, fate seems to play a predominant role, but there is ample space for human agency. The final outcome of events is not determined by fate or human agency alone, but by the struggle between the two and the way in which they shape and respond to each other, open or close certain possibilities. Thus, fate is more a creative than an absolutist, determining force. Finally, the frame story of the Thousand and one nights and Ada are linked by the theme of survival, although this connection is not altogether clear. As in Invitation to a beheading, Nabokov seems to suggest that the telling of the story of Ada and Van somehow transcends and challenges death: death is the only certainty, but apparently, death does not imply the end of all things. As noted above, the life story of Ada and Van develops further after their deaths. If a story remains to be told, death is only the transition of life into the story, which continues after the ‘death’ of the narrator. After Van’s separation from Ada, it is suggested that Van continues his life, but he is “a dead man going through the notions of an imagined dreamer.”49 More interestingly, approximately halfway through the novel, after Van’s confrontation with his father, and the ‘rape’ of Lucette, Van considers killing himself: Then, standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened – or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the 49  Ibid., 233.

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following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind.50 Here Nabokov suggests that whatever happens, Van may die and continue his ‘life’ in another realm, or he may tell the remainder of the story from a radically altered perspective, from some kind of ‘Otherworld.’ In fact, the character of the story does change: Lucette stages a final attempt to seduce Van and, when she fails, drowns herself; Van’s father dies, as does Ada’s husband; Van writes The texture of time and Ada and Van are finally united. These are all elements which make the final stabilization of Van’s life possible: the disturbing elements are removed, Van becomes conscious of his experience of time, and he is reunited with his beloved. After this turn, the only act left to do is to restore – relive – the memories of the past, in order to link them in some harmonious way to Van’s present. This can be achieved by applying his perception of time, as an accumulation of experiences rather than as a succession of events. As in Proust’s Recherche, this ‘finding’ of lost time is the purpose of the narration; as in the Recherche, it is in narration that the lost time is found. It has also been suggested that the telling of the story should be seen as a form of justification, by Van and Ada, of their illicit love and of their cruelty toward Lucette.51 The story is a confession, a way of acknowledging what has happened and of convincing others that it was inevitable, or that the force of their passion justified their breaking the taboo. Again, this requires an adapted notion of time, such that time is based not on the sequence of the events that are recapitulated, but on the intensity of the experiences which need to be preserved, even, possibly, after death. It has also been suggested, as noted above, that the story was written by Van to atone for his guilt in Lucette’s suicide, not by preventing the ‘repressed’ from returning, in the Freudian sense, but by incorporating it into the joyful re-experience of the past. In his book on Ada, Boyd, especially, argues that the second part of the novel reveals Lucette’s dominant role in the story of Ada and Van. Although she is distanced from their love and lovemaking, and not allowed to take part in the bliss which it generates, she seems to be a crucial participant. This observation elicits several remarks. First, in spite of Van’s refusal to acquiesce to Lucette’s demands, Lucette may be essential to Van’s experience of his love for Ada, since she is both Ada’s ‘double’ and her antithesis. 50  Ibid., 350. 51  Zoran Kuzmanovich, “Strong Opinions and Nerve Points: Nabokov’s Life and Art,” in Julian W. Connolly, The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 27.

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Lucette’s “prettiness seemed to complement Ada’s, the two halves forming together something like perfect beauty, in the Platonic sense,”52 while Ada is “only beautiful in our little human terms, within the quotes of our social esthetics.”53 Thus, Lucette represents a form of beauty which is more ethereal than Ada’s, and prevents Van from breaking the taboo with her as well. Conversely, Van can only love Ada because Lucette complements her; together they are the perfect object of his love, but he can only have sexual relations with the less ethereal half. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the denouement of the first part of the book, which induces Van to consider killing himself, occurs after he and Ada ‘rape’ Lucette and he again denies her the pleasure that they share and purposely and cruelly confronts her with this. While Van and Ada can be (re-)united, Lucette cannot be with Ada or Van. Second, Boyd’s observation indicates that Lucette’s role as the intermediary is necessary to start telling the story, either because of their feelings of guilt, or as a means of initiation, or as a third party asking the two lovers to record their adventures and thereby transform their experiences into a narrative. The incentive to generate the narration is based on the presence/absence of Lucette. This, of course, conforms with our suggestion that Lucette is Ada’s Dunyazad; she makes the storytelling possible, because she is both present and absent and witnesses her sister’s relationship with a virile man. It becomes even more interesting when, third, Boyd suggests that Lucette’s influence in the compilation of the story and her active intervention does not stop at her death. Boyd argues that the final chapters show that Lucette not only inspired Van to write Ada, but that after her death she somehow still sends him messages, in a covert way: “Though Lucette cannot communicate directly with mortal lives, she seems able to influence them gently so as to leave her own pattern in time.”54 Somehow, she communicates with Van and Violet Knox when they compile the text, and steers it in such a way that her role in the story is preserved. Naturally this suggestion conforms with Nabokov’s tendency to consider death a mere transition to another domain, one that has no easy means of communication with the ‘real’ world, but which nevertheless is not completely shut off from it. There are moments, incidents, and configurations in which the realm of transcendence is manifest in reality, in which it influences the course of events, or at least offers possibilities, and in which a glimpse of its splendor can be caught. As in the case of Invitation to a beheading, which, as we have seen, elaborates on this theme, in the case of 52  Nabokov, Ada, 406. 53  Ibid. 54  Boyd, Nabokov’s Ada, 210.

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Ada, too, this interplay between realms raises questions about the relationship between the characters before and after their death: If Lucette indeed projects her own experience on the story from a transcendental domain, to what extent should we consider Lucette, in the first part of the novel, a ‘real’ character? In what way is her version of the story deliberately woven into it to shape the narrative as a whole? Is Lucette, just as Ada and Van, obliged to integrate herself in the story as the only means to survive?

Narrating Against Death: Margaret Atwood

In order to elaborate on the theme of survival, Nabokov made use of the idea of the otherworld, a domain that communicates with the human world, more through epiphanies than through outright intervention, and in which a kind of alter ego continues the protagonist’s life after his natural, or presumed, death. It is no coincidence that these protagonists are all writers, or at least engaged in the process of writing, since it is through the imaginative act of writing that the communication between the two domains is established and the otherworld reveals itself. Apparently, writing is a means to bring the other selves of the author to the fore, selves that are in contact with the otherworld and enable him to become absorbed by the story, which is the vehicle of communication. Through narration and the identification with imaginary selves, the author is able to survive the death of his ‘regular’ self and become one of the selves that reveal themselves in the otherworld through the text. This procedure for survival is basically explained in Invitation to a beheading and elaborated in a complex way in Ada. It can also be found, in a strikingly similar way, in two novels by Margaret Atwood, the well-known Canadian author. In Lady Oracle we meet a writer who survives through the novel she writes, in which she designs her alter egos, and in The blind assassin, narration is a mechanism for conjuring up several parallel realities, partly conceived by or through the mediation of a dead author. In Atwood’s novels, which usually investigate the intricate relationship between reality and fiction, the theme of survival is explicitly linked to the existential confusion of female authors, who must define their ‘real’ selves through their writing, since in regular life they are considered an eccentric anomaly that cannot be reconciled with a stable sense of self, as a person or as an artist. In this process, death can be cleansing, a turning point, a confrontation, and a means to achieve self-affirmation. It is well known that Atwood’s writing was influenced, both implicitly and explicitly, by the world of fairy tales. As in the case of Angela Carter, the world of fairy tales is incorporated in her narrative worlds as a means to enable

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transformation and metamorphosis, and to evoke subconscious archetypes, all in the service of a feminist re-telling of patriarchal discourses. Still, although we may assume that Atwood knew the Thousand and one nights and although we would expect Shahrazad to be one of her models, she does not refer to the work specifically. In studies of Atwood’s work, the Thousand and one nights is not mentioned, even when the theme of intertextuality is discussed. It seems clear, however, that especially in The blind assassin, Atwood uses some characteristic narrative techniques and motifs that are derived from Shahrazad’s tales, and these are especially related to female strategies for survival. Nevertheless, since Atwood herself never mentioned the Thousand and one nights as a narrative example, some caution seems in order. Lady Oracle: The Reinvention of the Self Lady Oracle relates how a Canadian woman writer, Joan Foster, came to stage her own death and afterwards flee to Spain to start a new, anonymous, life. By enacting her death, she is trying to escape from a life in which she is forced, according to her, to permanently invent new versions of herself, since from an early age she was unable, so to speak, to reconcile her self-image with the ‘reality’ surrounding her. This split in her self-awareness was probably caused by her strained relationship with her mother, who did not recognize her idealized self-image in her daughter and neglected and pestered her. The split was reinforced in her relationships with men, the writer Paul, the political activist Arthur, and the trash-artist, the Royal Porcupine. She ‘invented’ another mother55 and, because she was nineteen and felt like an adult, she gave her imaginary mother a ‘wrong’ past; she made up a new past and lied about her life and past to her lovers, to somehow harmonize realities that seemed incompatible.56 In her own words: “This was the reason I fabricated my life: the truth was not convincing.”57 Joan’s invented lives and real lives become increasingly entangled when she discovers her talent for writing gothic stories; this provides her with a source of income and an alias, the pseudonym Louise K. Delacourt. She hides this alias from her husband Arthur, for whom her authorship would not be respectable. Later she again experiments with ‘automatic writing,’ which is not only a confusing and disturbing experience that disorients her sense of self, but one which suddenly brings her fame as a poet of hermetic verse. When she starts a love affair with the Royal Porcupine, she discovers another version of herself: 55  Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (London: Virago, 2009), 39. 56  Ibid., 152. 57  Ibid., 162.

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This was the beginning of my double life. But hadn’t my life always been double? There was always that shadowy twin, thin when I was fat, fat when I was thin, myself in silvery negative, with dark teeth and shining white pupils glowing in the black sunlight of that other world … it was never-never land she wanted, that reckless twin. But not twin even, for I was more than double, I was triple, multiple, and now I could see that there was more than one life to come, there were many.58 By hopping from one self to another, Joan hopes to escape from her former lives, to create new lives, and ultimately, to transform herself into the person she ‘really’ is. It is this last aim which she fails to achieve, however: I felt very visible. But it was as if someone with my name were out there in the real world, impersonating me, saying things I’d never said but which appeared in the newspapers, doing things for which I had to take the consequences: my dark twin, my funhouse-mirror reflection. She was taller than I was, more beautiful, more threatening. She wanted to kill me and take my place, and by the time she did this no one would notice the difference because the media were in the plot, they were helping her.59 This multiplicity of her life gradually begins to frighten her, since the various appearances are mutually exclusive; they can exist alongside each other, but they can never merge. Moreover, Joan starts to realize that inventing new lives will not produce the transformation she desires. In the end, she can find only one solution to stop the endless multiplying of herself: she must die. Only death will enable her to really escape from her real and invented lives, but it would be a partial death only, because after her death she will live on as the author of Costume Gothics, Louise K. Delacourt, a pseudonym that hides her true identity. This transformation not only releases Joan from her former, incongruous, selves, but also from their contexts, that is, the persons and surroundings that impose personalities upon her, that treat her as ‘someone else,’ someone she should have been in their eyes, and force her to construct her multiple selves, and thereby prevent her from coming to terms with her own reality and person. Her death will finally enable her to get a grip on her own life. Joan’s life can be seen as a fierce and permanent battle between reality and fantasy, between a body and a mind which seeks harmony with it. But who 58  Ibid., 268. 59  Ibid., 273.

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determines what reality is? Is Joan’s search not inspired by her inability to conform to the fictions of others, which they present as reality? Is Joan’s struggle not an effort to find harmony with lives which are all, at least to some extent, fictionalized? Joan repeatedly describes fantasy as a means to escape. But escape from what? A reality created by others? Or from fictions invented by others and then used as a means of manipulation? Apparently even Joan reaches the conclusion that it is only a battle between fictions; if people are unable to accept her ‘real’ self and can only deal with one of her invented selves, an enacted death is sufficient to cover her way out. It is not necessary for her death to be real. Taking on an invented identity is the most convenient way to become ‘real.’ The medium through which Joan realizes her various selves is narration, in the form of lies, concocted life stories, fantastic stories, and novels. Fantasy is an escape and literature can provide the means for this escape. Following the motto of Paul, her Polish friend, Joan holds that “escape literature should be an escape for the writer as well as the reader.”60 The characters of her novels are deliberately vague, to enable the reader to identify with them: “The heroines of my books were mere stand-ins: their features were never clearly defined, their faces were putty which each reader could reshape into her own, adding a little beauty.”61 What Joan fails to realize is not only that these indeterminate figures refer to her own condition as well, as an undefined person that can be filled in with various personalities, but also that the figures prompt her to identify with them, to fill them up with her anxieties, desires, and self-images. When she is working on her novel in her refuge in Spain, the heroine gradually seems to merge with Joan herself, her adventures symbolize the predicament in which Joan finds herself. The two stories converge and the inserted fragments of the novel increasingly seem to intertwine with Joan’s account of her own ‘adventure.’ Through her writing, Joan gradually discovers what she must do to escape from her obsession with escaping. After a dream – or rather a vision – of her mother, in which she realizes that her relationship with her was the source of her urge to assume multiple lives, she ‘invents’ the plot of the novel: Charlotte, who works as a servant on the estate of Redmond, with whom she is in love, and whose former wives have died in a strange labyrinth on the estate, finally realizes that there is no way to solve her suffering except to enter the mysterious, ominous maze:

60  Ibid., 168. 61  Ibid., 34.

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I saw now what was wrong, what I would have to do. Charlotte would have to go into the maze, there was no way out of it. She’d wanted to go in ever since reaching Redmond Grange, and nothing anyone could say, not all the hair-raising tales of the servants, not all the sneering hints of Felicia had been able to deter her. But her feelings were ambiguous: did the maze mean certain death, or did it contain the answer to a riddle, an answer she must learn in order to live? More important: would she marry Redmond only if she stayed out of the maze, or only if she went in? Possibly she would be able to win his love only by risking her life and allowing him to rescue her.62 This denouement serves as a catalyst in Joan’s mind: she can take her life in her own hands. Ironically, and perhaps without noticing it herself, through her identification with a character in a story that she has invented, she is able to liberate herself from her fictional selves and accept the confrontation with reality. Her imagination has provided the means for an escape, but it also provides the means to return, via an imagined death. Thus, ‘real’ transformation begins with telling the story of her previous life.63 When we compare our analysis of Lady Oracle with the section above, in which we discuss the novels of Nabokov, even a superficial glance reveals the similarities with Invitation to a beheading. The two novels follow the same pattern: an author reflects on the period before his/her death, which contains the prehistory of his/her death and the moment and manner of death itself. In both novels, the death of the author is not a ‘real’ death, but a kind of theatrical act that marks the transition from one domain to another, from one version of his/her self to another, or perhaps we should say, from a multiple personality to a single personality. Both novels present a kind of confusion about the true nature of the protagonist, since in his/her reflection of his/ her past the hero(ine) who later survives is already present in pre-death life. Therefore, the account may have been manipulated from the post-death perspective. While Nabokov seems to surmise the existence of a ‘real’ otherworld, in which the narrator continues his existence, the heroine of Lady Oracle escapes only from her social surroundings; she retains the possibility of return, but opens up the possibility of starting a completely new life.

62  Atwood, The Blind Assassin, 359–360. 63  Andrea Strolz, Escaping from the Prison-House of Language and Digging for Meanings in Texts Among Texts: Metafiction and Intertextuality in Margaret Atwood’s Novels Lady Oracle and The Blind Assassin (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2006), 89.

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In both Lady Oracle and Invitation to a beheading, the medium that provides a channel between the two domains, and thereby the possibility of survival, is narration. In Invitation to a beheading, Cincinnatus is a writer who explores the ‘oblique’ nature of reality and comes in touch with the otherworld, where he can survive, since narration survives, and where he is able to construct the account of his life before his ‘death.’ In Lady Oracle, too, it is only a part of Joan’s person that ‘dies’; it is the fictional Louise K. Delacourt who survives. It is through the act of narrating and writing that Joan is able to transform herself into another person who is able, in turn, to continue living. What is more, through her writing, the heroine survives in her new life and undergoes a catharsis that allows her to start a new life: through her identification with the heroine of her novel and through the account of her previous life. It is clear, too, that the themes and motifs in the two novels are similar to the frame story of the Thousand and one nights, with its linkage of survival and narration, its narrative technique of embedded texts, its reference to female emancipation, and its exploration of the relationship between the imagination and reality, between texts and agency. Fateful Triangles: The Blind Assassin In her study of intertextuality in Atwood’s novels, Andrea Strolz quotes Elisabeth Bronfen, who writes, “Atwood explicitly thematises the proximity of death to the production of fictions of the self and to issues of feminine authorship and parodies cultural conventions that link women, writing, and death.”64 Although in this quotation Bronfen refers to Lady Oracle, her remark is equally applicable to one of Atwood’s more ambitious and complex novels, The blind assassin. As we see, the protagonist of Lady Oracle could very well present herself as a modern reincarnation of Shahrazad; although in The blind assassin there is also no explicit reference to the Thousand and one nights, the intertextual influence – thematical and formal – seems unmistakable. Here, too, commentators and critics have only rarely observed the resemblance. In The blind assassin, Iris, who is old, sickly, and approaching death, relates the account of her life to her granddaughter Sabrina. She hopes to finish her story before her death, since she and Sabina are the only surviving members of their family and Iris wants the delicate and complicated family history to be preserved. Iris’s life story focuses on her relationship with her younger sister Laura, with whom she grew up in the family of the wealthy owner of a button factory in a provincial town in Canada. Iris and Laura’s youth is marked by 64  Ibid., 90.

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three events: Iris’s saving Laura’s life when she attempts to drown herself; the sexual intimidation of the young girls, especially Laura, by their private teacher; and the girls’ helping a young communist activist, Alex Thomas, to hide in the attic of their family mansion, and their attraction to him. These experiences create a bond of solidarity between the two sisters, but also reveal the differences in their responses to particular situations. Moreover, their affection for Alex creates a rivalry that is complicated by Iris’s sense of responsibility for Laura, a responsibility that Iris emotionally rejects. Due to an economic recession, the button factory is threatened with bankruptcy and Iris is given in marriage to Richard, a rich businessman and politician, as part of a business deal. Richard promises to revive the company with new capital and Iris acquiesces to the transaction in order to save the source of her family’s wealth. Iris moves to a lofty palace where she lives a life of luxury, but she is unable to love Richard and have sexual relations with him. Although the couple become part of the high society social scene, their private life is a torment. When not long afterward the button factory is set afire – allegedly by Alex – and the company collapses, Iris and Laura’s father commits suicide (their mother having died some time before) and Laura joins her sister as a member of Richard’s household. The main event of Iris’s life account is Laura’s suicide, fifty years previously, and part of the story, and perhaps the incentive to tell the story, is her attempt to unravel the ‘true’ causes of this fatal incident. Ironically, at her death Laura left behind the manuscript of a novel which, after its publication, became a best-selling success, turning her into a famous author, post mortem. The novel, entitled The blind assassin, is inserted into the account in sequenced fragments and relates the secret love affair of a writer of science fiction stories who is on the run from mysterious persecutors, and his mistress, a well-to-do young lady. It is gradually suggested that the couple are Alex and Laura, although this is not explicitly revealed. At first the girl is reluctant to give in to the man’s advances, but when he tells her the feuilleton of the ‘Blind assassin’ she concedes. Each time they meet, he picks up the story where it ended the previous time, so that the continuation of their relationship is linked to the rhythm of the interruption and resumption of the tale. When the writer must go to war as a soldier, she reads the continuation of the story in the journal in which it is serialized, until it is definitively interrupted and she realizes that he has died. The tale itself – embedded in the account of their love – is about an imaginary society in which deaf-mute virgins are given to rich men who rape them, and are then sacrificed to an imaginary God. One of the blind assassins, hired to kill the virgins, spares his victim and smuggles her out of the city to bring her into safety.

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After some time, Laura is brought to a mental hospital and then disappears for some time. When she returns, she reveals to Iris that Richard sexually had abused her for years, and that she conceded not only to save Iris’s marriage, but also because Richard told her that he knew the whereabouts of Alex – with whom Laura had always been in love – and that he would have him killed if she rejected or betrayed him. Iris confesses to Laura that she had a love affair with Alex for several years – during her marriage – and that Alex had died. This was the direct cause of Laura’s suicide. The reader now realizes that the real author of ‘The blind assassin’ was not Laura, but Iris, who related her own love affair with Alex. When the book is published, Richard reads it and commits suicide, leaving Iris as the only witness of the catastrophic, even fatal, entwinement of relationships. As in the case of Lady Oracle, The blind assassin is written as a confession, a reconstruction of the events preceding and surrounding Laura’s suicide, and an effort to establish Iris’s role in them. It is an attempt to reveal the ‘true’ story (significantly, newspaper clippings are inserted to enhance the sense of realism), but since it is a confession, it was likely written, in the first instance, as a self-justification, a bending of the truth to soothe Iris’s feelings of guilt and remorse. After all, she did not hesitate to forge lies about Laura, Alex, and Richard in the past. Moreover, since Iris is the only survivor of the drama, her version will be preserved as the ‘truth’ in the future, in the hands of her granddaughter Sabrina. And the relationship between Iris and Sabrina is perhaps, ultimately, the main significance of the account: by constructing a truthful account of the events, Iris hopes to prove that Sabrina is really her grandchild. Since Aimée, Iris’s daughter, believed she was actually the daughter of Laura and Alex (from the relationship described in the novel), Sabrina thinks that she is not related to Iris. In fact, Aimée is the daughter of Iris and Alex, and by telling the story Iris aims to convince her of this and thus re-establish their blood relation and the continuation of the story of the family. Of course, we do not know whether Iris’s account is in fact truthful. If the main aim is to restore the link between her and Sabrina, there are two possibilities. Either Aimée was in fact Iris’s daughter and only started doubting this because of Iris’s lie that the book ascribed to Laura contained the story of Laura’s love affair with Alex. This would mean that a fictional text that resulted from a lie intervened in the real personal lives of Aimée and Iris and changed their relationship, or at least the perception of their relationship. Now Iris uses a text to counter this intervention; thus, she tries to use her narrative as a tool to restore the ‘real’ relationship. The other possibility is that Aimée was in fact Laura and Alex’s daughter, ‘The blind assassin’ was in fact Laura’s book and her report of her love affair with Alex, and that the real cause of Laura’s suicide

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was something completely different. In that case, Iris tries to invent a version of events to eliminate the truth and use a fictional text to impose a vision of events that would realize her aim of restoring her ties with Sabrina. In both cases, the course of events is manipulated by a complex ‘battle of fictions’ in which the texts determine the final appearance of reality. The suspicion that Iris is unscrupulous about the truthfulness of the story is her apparent tendency – even in her own confession – to create aliases of herself in imaginary settings. This tendency is spawned by the pressures that are laid upon her, first through her responsibility for Laura, then by her responsibility and love for Alex, and, most of all, by the tyrannical dominance of Richard, who tries to rule and determine her life through her sister. Within these constraints of desires, repression, and obligation, Iris tries to construct a self which, as in Lady Oracle, consists partly of imaginary replicas that split off from her original personality, and fulfill partial roles that she cannot recompose into a synthesis. It seems that these replicas are, first, efforts to escape from an unbearable situation, but in the end, it appears that Iris also flees from her responsibilities, that is, she failed to see Laura’s suffering. Writing the confession, then, seems to be an attempt to reconstruct this synthesis and re-establish a form of responsibility within the dramatic events, since, of course, the formation of a coherent self implies a sense of individual responsibility. The means by which the trajectories toward escape and synthesis are opened up is narration, the conscious effort to create an imaginary sphere within reality, a sphere in which a new version of the self can be situated. It may be that Iris’s affair with Alex was real, but what really mattered, what made it possible and what gave it its place in Iris’s life, was the narrative of this adulterous love. Through this account, using Laura as an alias, she took revenge on Richard and restored some form of self-esteem. Moreover, it was by embedding their love in the narrative of ‘The blind assassin,’ and linking it to the continuation of the story that Iris was finally persuaded to start and continue the relationship. Of course, using Laura as a stand-in is also a form of escape, to escape punishment and eliminate the element of responsibility. This form of manipulation would have enhanced Iris’s sense of guilt and produced results other than the ones intended. The act of fictionalizing experiences creates possibilities to manipulate reality, and in the end Iris uses narration to gather her scattered aliases and recompose them into a coherent unity. One of the motifs that connects all of Iris’s narratives is the sense of obligation that women have, that they must sacrifice themselves. In Iris’s life story, she sacrifices herself to save the family company, by marrying someone she loathes. And even her love for Alex is depicted as a (reluctant) sacrifice to save him from his persecutors. For Laura, too, at least in Iris’s account,

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self-immolation is the focal point of her life, since she only gives in to Richard’s intimidation to save Iris and Alex. All these forms of self-sacrifice are allegorically fictionalized in the story of ‘The blind assassin,’ which is built around the fatalistic acceptance of the absence and sacrifice of the deaf-mute (NB!) maidens, in a society where this ritual is an ideological mainstay of the state and society. In the story this systematic injustice is successfully countered by loyalty, but in real life the loyalty which inspires the urge to sacrifice oneself is ultimately self-destructive. Self-immolation in itself does not subvert oppressive power but only reinforces it. The only way in which it can become a weapon is by transforming it into a narrative that destroys the self-image of the oppressor. Not coincidentally, the maidens’ silence contrasts with Iris’s ability and insistence on speaking. Richard is not killed by the act of adultery itself, but by its fictionalized version. We should note that Alex, as a communist, and Iris, as a woman, represent the antithesis of what constitutes Richard’s power and self-image: his position as a businessman and a politician, as a member of the socio-economic and political establishment, and a patriarchal male. As the blind assassin and the deaf-mute maiden, together they succeed in bringing about Richard’s downfall. It is important to note that Iris explicitly and implicitly refers to language as a means to establish a relationship with reality. It is because reality is transformed into narrative that the actual struggle to determine one’s place in reality – and even to survive in reality – is a struggle between narratives. Because reality is turned into a narrative, it can only be manipulated by narratives. Thus, in the story of ‘The blind assassin’ the deaf-mute girl cannot defend herself since she has no means to gain a place in society’s “reality,”65 but perhaps this is also what enables her to escape – she is not imprisoned in discursive ties. Apart from this, Iris surmises that it is Laura’s inability to comprehend the true nature of language that prevents her from coming to terms with reality. Laura’s firm belief in the ‘substance’ of words, the stability of their meanings, and their solid linkage to reality as a form of representation is clear: Perhaps this is what happened to Laura – pushed her quite literally over the edge. The words she had relied on, building her house of cards on them, believing them solid, had flipped over and shown their hollow centres, and then skittered away from her like so much waste paper.66

65  Atwood, The Blind Assassin, 256; Strolz, Escaping from the Prison-House of Language, 136. 66  Atwood, The Blind Assassin, 490; Strolz, Escaping from the Prison-House of Language, 136.

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Iris, on the contrary, understood the indirect interaction between reality and words, the ways in which language distorts our vision of reality and the way in which these visions can be manipulated by narration. And this knowledge of Iris and her ability to shape reality through narration enables her to counter the narratives of others and to survive, in contrast to Laura, whose confrontation with reality and her subjugation to it cause her death. Clearly, the way in which narration is related to the motifs of death, survival, eroticism, oppression, and visions of reality confirm the links between The blind assassin and the Thousand and one nights and especially the story of Shahrazad. First, the narrative of The blind assassin is constructed as a frame story, in which other stories and textual elements are embedded; in turn, the embedded stories contain still another story. Second, the cluster of stories that is constructed in the novel springs forth from a traumatic event, Laura’s death, and is intended to somehow redress or reconsider the circumstances of her suicide and thus neutralize its harmful effects by enveloping them in narratives, or at least redistributing responsibility and guilt and punishing the one Iris sees as the main culprit. Third, to achieve this, the narrative imagination is used to ‘invent’ a subsidiary version of reality, which on the one hand creates a space for imagining alternative selves, while on the other hand, a new coherence can be built to contain less ambiguous versions of the events and the position of the self in relation to them. Fourth, the generation of the narrative is placed in the context of strongly hierarchical gender relations, centered around a dominant male figure, steeped in wealth and power, and female figures who are primarily marked by their preparedness to sacrifice themselves. The relationship between these characters is based on various forms of betrayal, in some cases justified by loyalty to others. The complex relationships mirror the roles of the various characters in the frame story of the Thousand and one nights: Richard as Shahriyar, Iris as Shahrazad, Laura as Dunyazad, and Alex as the black slave. One of the roles of narration in this intricate web of intrigues is to postpone a certain end or even to tranform an end into a new beginning. Thus, the continuation of Iris’s love affair with Alex is bound to his continuing his story; Laura is made to live on through her novel; Iris survives through her/Laura’s novel and her own account of the events; and the family history is both preserved and continued when Sabrina reads the account. As long as the process of narration continues, life is preserved. The discussion above and the parallels with the concept and frame story of the Thousand and one nights reveal some remarkable resemblances between The blind assassin and Nabokov’s novel Ada, discussed above. These

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resemblances relate, first, to the textual complexity of the two novels, which are composed as ‘confessions’ and contain various textual levels that consist of inserted texts and involve authorial ambiguity. On the thematic level, however, the resemblances focus on the characters of Lucette and Laura. First, the texts can be read as being generated by the suicide of a main character’s sister. Whether out of guilt or justification, both stories owe their existence to the necessity of recounting a love story, but also expiating its consequences. After all, in both novels the younger sister is excluded from a sexual relationship in which she is emotionally involved, and initiated into sexuality in a perverse, even abusive, way. The exclusion results in her isolation, her inability to manage her life, and the development of a harmful dependence on others. While they cannot participate in the story while alive, they gain access to it by committing suicide. This does not make them part of the love relationship, but it does make them part of its narrative, as it forces the lovers to define the position of their happiness vis-à-vis the tragedy of others. Thus, the narrative becomes not only a means of self-constitution for the ‘confessors,’ but also for Lucette and Laura, who claim a central role post mortem, since their act defines who they are in relation to the events in which they were a part and it expresses a self that is unfinished, that stagnates in time, and is unable to interact with what happens next. Still, they set in motion a process of redefinition and reconstruction, their deaths are incorporated retrospectively, they are integrated into a narrative which continues and acknowledges their role in generating and influencing ongoing processes. In Ada this idea is the clearest, since it is suggested that Lucette actually conveys messages from the otherworld and thereby forces Van and Ada to admit the cruelty of their behavior. In The blind assassin, Iris must admit her cruelty as well, in the hope that by telling the truth she can persuade Sabrina to restore her bond with her. In both cases, it is the younger sister of the main female character and narrator who provokes the telling of the story and who remains, so to speak, the channel of communication which makes the continuation of the narration possible. They intervene because either direct communication between the main protagonists is impossible, or because it lacked a form of selfreflection. In this, their role refers to the role of Dunyazad in the frame story of the Thousand and one nights, as summarized by Ros Ballaster: To be reminded of Dinarzade’s position is to be reminded that the route taken by narrative meaning(s) is neither simple nor direct. The encounter between self and other, masculine and feminine, one culture and another,

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the master and the slave, is often “mediated” by a third term. And that third term can deflect, redirect, even block, such passage.67 Thus, whatever may have happened with Dunyazad in the Thousand and one nights, in Ada and The blind assassin, she accentuates, or even appropriates and perpetuates, her role by continuing her presence and task after death. Perhaps the first modern author to use the theme of authorial survival was the Brazilian Machado de Assis (1839–1908); in Posthumous memoirs of Bras Cubas, his main character relates the love affair that shaped his life from an after-death perspective. The story, a satirical parody of the genre of histoires galantes, is compiled in a fragmentary fashion and is explicitly linked to the Thousand and one nights in two ways. The idea of this scenario seems to be that only after death is it possible to give a full account of one’s life, or even of some events in one’s life, since as long as the protagonist is alive something may happen to change his view of the past. The reality that after death, a version of a life can be given that can no longer be changed by anyone is even more powerful. Thus, Bras Cubas survives in some way, but his past life is ossified in time. The attitude of Bras Cubas is not a sign of fatalism, but rather an acknowledgment of the contingency and essential fluidity of life. The tension between this fluidity and the wish to contain events in life and fix their meanings is expressed by Frank Kermode’s idea of the ‘sense of an ending,’ that is, that the prospect of certain death creates the desire to endow life with form and meaning, to fill the passage of time with a substance that can be grasped, appreciated, judged, and communicated to others. This urge becomes stronger as the moment of death approaches, as is exemplified by Shahrazad and her many look-alikes: Death is the ultimate source of narration. This is not the only thing we can learn from Shahrazad in this respect. By postponing and ultimately canceling her execution, she shows that narration can delay and even overcome death; it is as if narration has a permanent dynamic of its own, one that is only partly related to humans, or which can transport someone ‘through’ his moment of death and grant him eternal life. It is this complex entanglement of narration, death, and survival that Nabokov and Atwood exploit in the novels discussed above. Iris, in The blind assassin, and Van, in Ada, compose their reminiscences after they have reached 67  Ros Ballaster, “Playing Second String: The Role of Dinarzade in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction,” in The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West, ed. Saree Makdisi and F. Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 90.

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old age; they both seek, on the one hand, to record the events of their past life, and, on the other hand, to continue, in some way, the secret that lies hidden in their narration. In these novels, death is not only present as a threat, but also as an event that is a crucial incentive for their writing and the concept of the narrative. Thus, in these novels, death and survival are related to each other in a complex way, since the dead and the survivors are linked through the text. Death gives the characters an incentive to provide a final version of the past, but this version is manipulated by others from their after-death perspective, so contingency continues to dislodge the fixed nature of the account. A somewhat different play with the same themes can be seen in Invitation to a beheading and Lady Oracle. Here the two narrators, Cincinnatus and Joan, are somehow aware that their deaths are only a transition, not an absolute reality. This is true because the narrators tell their tale from the perspective of an ‘otherworld’; they resemble Lucette and Laura, who manipulate the narrative of events from beyond their death, but both Cincinnatus and Joan are still alive, even though in new, still ambiguous, selves. Whatever degree of transcendence these characters achieve, it is always rooted in narrative, as in the case of Shahrazad, as a holosphere in which reality unfolds itself.

Chapter 6

Desire Unbound: The Marquis de Sade and Angela Carter One of the motifs linking Atwood’s novels with the Thousand and one nights is the women’s efforts to save themselves from male oppression and even male violence. Clearly the figure of Shahrazad carries this message of female redemption. Shahriyar, the all-powerful king, the paragon of masculinity, feels insulted by the misbehavior of his spouse and installs the most misogynistic regime in world literature; he marries a virgin every night and has her executed in the morning. This bloody cycle of sexuality and death is countered by Shahrazad who, by telling her stories, succeeds not only in preventing her own execution, but also in saving the lives of her fellow women. Shahriyar’s aberration is usually seen as the result of a distorted view of female sexuality and/or a denial of the feminine component in life, society, and in himself. This deficiency, which becomes a violent repression of femininity in general, is cured by Shahrazad’s combination of narration and eroticism. By weaving a non-violent web of stories, she gradually changes Shahriyar’s vision of women, life, and himself. The feminine component, in its various guises and essences, is restored to its proper place.1 The feminist morality of the frame story is echoed in many of the embedded stories, in which the relations between men and women are a central theme. In stories such as the ‘Porter and the three ladies of Baghdad,’ and the ‘Reeve’s tale,’ for example, we encounter strong, independent women who seem to be mistresses of their own lives and sexuality. They choose and dismiss their lovers at will and live aloof from the moralizing influences of society. In other stories, such as ‘Ali Shar and Zumurrud,’ ‘Maryam the girdle-maker,’ and ‘Qamar al-Zaman and Budur,’2 adventurous love romances that involve complicated quests and journeys, it is the women who perform the heroic roles, who take the lead in fighting the vicissitudes of fate and the enemies of love, both by their inventiveness and by physical force. More often than not, the men they love are rather dull-witted and passive anti-heroes, who, with their illadvised actions, throw obstacles in the way of love rather than facilitating it. 1  For the frame story, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:370–376. 2  For abstracts of these stories, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, vol. 1.

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These stories are not about the irrationality and untrustworthiness of women, but rather about their steadfastness, bravery, and sincerity. It would seem, then, that the feminist intentions of the frame story are confirmed by the embedded stories. Still, on closer inspection, this picture of the Thousand and one nights as a feminist work is less evident than may appear. Modern feminists may be disappointed by the final outcome of the frame story: after one thousand and one nights of storytelling, Shahrazad is ‘rewarded’ by not being executed and becoming the king’s official wife and the mother of his children. There is no radical acknowledgment of female empowerment or a subversion of male patriarchal authority. The same is true of the romances, which as a rule end in a legal matrimony and the restoration of harmony and conventional social relationships. And in the story of the ‘Porter and the three ladies of Baghdad,’ the autonomy that the ladies enjoy is clearly a social anomaly, a female enclave in society – the result of an irregular course of events, that is, in the end, restored to normalcy. However strong female rebelliousness may be, it ultimately serves only to secure the perpetuation of social conventions. The explanation of this apparent paradox is sometimes sought in the suggestion that even the willful, heroic women in the stories seem to appeal to male fantasies of female sexuality, instead of portraying free, autonomous women. The feminist potential of the Thousand and one nights was of course recognized in the European tradition of the collection, especially after Mardrus, in his translation, explicitly referred to Shahrazad’s ‘education’ of the king. Probably in response to Mardrus, in 1927 Marie Lahy-Hollebecque published an elaborate essay about Shahrazad’s strategies to educate Shahriyar.3 According to her, in the East stories are not just a pretext or entertainment for the emotions; they are first of all a means of persuasion. Shahriyar is pictured as a prejudiced and impulsive brute, without ‘spirit or heart,’ as distrustful and ignorant. To counter his violence, Shahrazad embarks upon a scheme of ‘total education’ and ‘re-creation’; she wants him to progress from acting on his instincts to acting on his conscience, and from impulsive reflexes to “voluntary decision.”4 She aims at a complete transformation through “divers degrées de l’initiation: elle en faisait à la fois un roi, un artiste, un lettré, un amant, un féministe, un sage, et un philosophe, c’est à dire ce qu’elle est en droit d’appeler: un homme.”5

3  Marie Lahy-Hollebecque, Le féminisme de Schéhérazade (Paris: Radot, 1927); modern edition: Schéhérazade ou l’éducation d’un roi (Puiseaux, France: Pardès, 1987); also see Jullien, Les amoureux de Schéhérazade, 121–145. 4  Lahy-Hollebecque, Schéhérazade, 20. 5  Ibid., 7.

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Shahrazad achieves this not through straightforward storytelling, using the “subversive power of the feminine word,”6 but through a preconceived strategy: In order to bolster Shahriyar’s restless susceptibility and wounded pride, she sides with his mania and persuades him that she, too, harbors an unfavorable judgment of women. So, from the first night, she evokes for him lively portraits of libertine, wily, and deceitful women.7 After she has won his confidence, she proceeds to give a more objective and even positive view of women to rectify his incorrect image by portraying and embodying the idea of femininity: “Elle combat donc en Schahriar le préjuge qu’il a hérité de la tradition, et que son experience personnelle a place à la racine meme de sa pensée…. Elle le baignera dans une atmosphère de féminité, où il se sentira bientôt comme détendu et apaisé.”8 In this strategy, the power of the word is crucial, albeit combined with ‘love’: Schéhérazade, sans le dire, ou du moins de façon bien discrète, considère que l’amour, pour atteindre ses fins, a besoin d’être suscité, développé, exalté par un ensemble de méthodes qui permettent de le cultiver à la façon d’un art. L’union charnelle a ses lois. Pour survivre entre les mêmes associés, elle exige le renouvellement des mots, des gestes et des images. Et la monotonie, qui est sa perte, sert d’excuse aux curiosités illicites de la femme aussi bien qu’à la dispersion polygynique de l’homme.9 This combination can change a whole worldview and its stagnant traditions: Elle ne fait pas seulement que de placer ses récits au centre des choses et de leur donner un cadre cosmique, elle s’efforce de chercher le sens et la destine de l’univers, et elle oblige l’homme à remanier ses règles de conduite en prévision de son accord avec l’ordre de la nature. Aussi, sans jamais fatiguer ni gêner le lecteur, toujours discrète et souriante, elle construit son livre de façon à en faire un code d’instruction morale.10 Lahy-Hollebecque explicitly classifies the Thousand and one nights as an attempt to liberate women and she presents Shahrazad as the first feminist in

6  Ibid. 7  Ibid., 41. 8  Ibid., 103–104. 9  Ibid., 140. 10  Ibid., 173.

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Islam; she eliminates obscurantism and rehabilitates the feminine element in society. This is the only way to ‘reduce injustice’ and achieve ‘progress’: Pouvoir, honneur, richesse ne sont pour la femme … que les survivances d’un état primitive où la pitié et l’égalité ne joueraient pas dans les rapports entre les hommes. Il faut donc remanier le statut social en utilisant, pour cette marche au progress, non plus la force mais l’intelligence, non plus l’homme seul mais l’homme assisté de la femme.11 Remarkably, in spite of praising the Thousand and one nights as an emancipatory work of literature, Lahy-Hollebecque notes the many negative female stereotypes that occur throughout the work. Instead of drawing attention to this ambivalence, however, she prefers to attribute it to Shahrazad’s ingenious strategy, rather than to the fantasies of a male author. From this brief discussion of the feminist potential of the Thousand and one nights, both in the Arabic tradition and in its European reception, it follows that the work becomes a convenient source of inspiration for female authors inclined to advocate feminist ideas. Yet surprisingly, few authors have taken up this challenge, although some, such as Karen Blixen from Denmark, have explicitly compared themselves to the figure of Shahrazad. On the whole, however, feminist references to Shahrazad are few, even in Arabic literature. In this chapter, we discuss a prominent example of a modern author who relates feminist activism with storytelling, and refers, inevitably, to the figure of Shahrazad. We especially investigate how her concept of feminism is associated with concepts of ‘desire’ and ‘time.’

Angela Carter: The Feminist-Narrative Complex

Throughout her career, Angela Carter (1940–92) has presented herself as a writer committed to the political issues of her time. She was a declared socialist and feminist and insisted that her work be read from these political/activist perspectives. Still, the complexities represented in the figure of Shahrazad, with her dubious position as the female ‘author’ of her stories in a context of male dominance, casts doubt on Shahrazad’s freedom to break out of the world of male fantasies and desires, and also seems to have been a source of debate with regard to Carter’s work. Carter was repeatedly obliged to defend her work in ideological discussions; she struggled to carve out a space for herself and 11  Ibid., 191.

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her literary creativity, both against the proponents of traditional gender roles and against advocates of various forms of female liberation. In these debates two issues stand out: Carter’s inclination to use fairy tales as a genre to convey her revolutionary visions; and her references to the sexual extravagances conceived by the eighteenth-century French Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). Both discussions are, to some extent, linked to the way in which Carter refers to the Thousand and one nights in her work. Carter has defended her interest in fairy tales as a repository of the unconscious, in which some layers of our common experiences are hidden: I’d always been fond of Poe, and Hoffmann, Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious-mirrors; the externalised self; forsaken castles; haunted forests; forbidden sexual objects. Formally the tale differs from the short story in that it makes few pretences at the imitation of life. The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience.12 Although this sounds rather like a confession of her indulgence in the world of myth and fantasy, Carter insists that her work is … the product of an absolute and committed materialism – i.e., that this world is all there is, and in order to question the nature of reality one must move from a strongly grounded base in what constitutes material reality. Therefore I become mildly irritated (I’m sorry!) when people, as they sometimes do, ask me about the ‘mythic’ quality of work I’ve written lately. Because I believe that myths are products of the human mind and reflect only aspects of material human practice. I’m in the demythologising business.13 These two statements represent the two poles of Carter’s vision of literature and politics, poles that she herself explores and attempts to reconcile in some form or another. We should note that the contradictions between the two are not always resolved in Carter’s work and her books are more reflections of 12  Sarah Gamble (ed.), The Fiction of Angela Carter: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 69–70. 13  Ibid., 10.

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a complex personal and ideological struggle than a reductionist effort to serve political causes. One of the criticisms of Carter is her naive use of fairy tales as a basic genre in her work. After all, fairy tales not only contain the collective imagination of societies, in which hierarchical structures and traditional roles are recorded, confirmed, and reproduced, but more specifically, they symbolize primeval visions of gender roles and gender hierarchies in the guise of stereotypes and archetypes. How then is it possible to use these generic forms to convey new messages and ideological outlooks? How can these forms, in which male dominance is so all-pervasive, serve to present a positive female image? According to Carter’s supporters, by ‘imitating’ fairy tales in which gender relations are mythologized, Carter intends not to reproduce these images, but to deconstruct them. Thus, through rewriting the ancient stories, she provides them with a new meaning; a new story is created in which the old, archetypal, meaning is still present; this stresses the intended parody. Fairy tales are not to be seen as “a story read for the first time, with a positively imagined heroine. It is read, with the original story encoded within it, so that one reads both texts, aware of how the new one refers back to and implicitly critiques the old.”14 By using this kind of antithetical material, the process of deconstruction can be carried out in a more powerful and convincing way, since the reader is alerted to the ideological background. The crucial point is not the material itself, but rather the way in which it is used, and, even more important, the identity and intentions of the author. Carter confirms this by stating that a literary work cannot provide easy answers. Rather, when gender identities are inserted into the narrative, the narrative itself becomes as complex as the gender identities. Her intention in rewriting ancient material is first of all to define this material as a site of struggle: One may assert that any female cultural practice that makes the “meaning production process” itself “the site of struggle” may be considered feminist. These authors are “feminist” because they construct a variety of oppositional strategies to the depiction of gender institutions in narrative. A writer expresses dissent from an ideological formation by attacking elements of narrative that repeat, sustain or embody the values and attitudes in question. So after breaking the sentence, a rupture with the internalization of the authorities and voices of dominance, the woman 14  Alison Easton (ed.), Angela Carter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 24.

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writer will create that further rupture … breaking the sequence-expected order.15 A second focal point in the feminist discussions about Carter’s work is her alleged eroticizing of sexual violence and the victimization of women, since in some instances she relates explicit sexual practices that seem to originate in pornographic fantasies. How can she explain the presence of these shocking images, which are often degrading to women, in a feminist novel? The answer can be found, in part, in Carter’s long essay, The Sadeian woman, in which she discusses the aberrational fantasies of Marquis de Sade; she focuses on Justine, the heroine of Les infortunes de la vertu, and Juliette, the main character of Les cent-vingt journées de Sodome. In the context of these novels, Carter discusses the idea of pornography, which “reinforces the false universe of sexual archetypes because it denies, or doesn’t have time for, or can’t find room for, or, because of its underlying ideology, ignores, the social context in which sexual activity takes place, that modifies the very nature of that activity.”16 Still, in its absurdity and perversity, Carter acknowledges that Sade’s work lays bare many of the mechanisms that usually remain hidden in the sexual ‘unconscious’ of men and women, and she even goes so far as to say: “Sade remains a monstrous and daunting cultural edifice; yet I would like to think that he put pornography in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical to women.”17 Carter’s argument is built on the notion of eroticism, which emphasizes the importance of the “word,” of the “turning of the flesh into word,”18 as an essential element of sexual experiences. She refers to Roland Barthes’s study Sade, Fourier, Loyola, in which the practices described by Sade are first typified as discursive practices: Les deux instances, celle de la scène et celle du discours, ont le même foyer, la meme rection, car la scène n’est que discourse. On comprend mieux maintenant sur quoi repose et à quoi tend toute la combinatoire érotique de Sade: son origine et sa sanction sont d’ordre rhétorique…. Les deux codes, en effet, celui de la phrase (oratoire) et celui de la figure (érotique) se relaient sans cesse, forment une même ligne, le long de laquelle 15  Gamble (ed.), The Fiction of Angela Carter, 95. 16  Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: Art and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 16. 17  Ibid., 37. 18  Ibid., 13.

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le libertine circule avec la même énergie: la seconde prépare ou prolonge indifféramment la première, parfois même l’accompagne. En un môt, la parole et la posture ont exactement la même valeur, elles valent l’un pour l’autre.19 In Cent-vingt journées de Sodome, therefore, eroticism is a rhetoric ritual, in which experiences are exchanged, experiences that derive their value, meaning, and pleasure from their narrational form. The whole ritual surrounding sexuality and libertinism is built around storytelling, even around narrating what is narrated.20 The whole structure is constructed on this idea: the “cité sadienne est tournée vers l’histoire qui est solennellement délivrée chaque soir par des prêtresses de la parole, les historiennes. Cette pré-éminence du récit est établie par des protocols très précis: tout l’horaire de la journée converge vers son grand moment (le soir), qui est la séance d’histoires.”21 The mechanism which keeps the process of storytelling in motion is exchange: a story is presented, received, and structured for (or against) something else, as in the Thousand and one nights. Like the Thousand and one nights, the story is equivalent to life itself, it is a means to survive: il est constant dans son oeuvre que l’auteur, les personages et les lecteurs échangent une dissertation contre une scène: la philosophie est le prix (c’est à dire le sens) de la luxure (ou réciproquement). Et puis, dans les 120 journées, le récit équivaut (comme dans les Mille et une nuits) à la vie meme.22 In The Sadeian woman a similar entanglement of sexuality and storytelling is surmised; it focuses not so much on the concept of eroticism, but rather on the concept of pornography, as Sade presents it. According to Carter, pornography extrapolates sexuality from real life, from the context of social relationships in which it is normally embedded. By doing this, pornography presents a caricature of sexuality, which due to its excessive and obsessive nature, always threatens to engulf it. To the extent that social context is constructed precisely to contain the potential destructiveness of sexuality, the pornographer consciously shows the impossibility or hypocrisy of these efforts at containment: “The disruptiveness of sexuality, its inability to be contained, the overflowing 19  Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Du Seuil, 1971), 35. 20  Ibid., 38. 21  Ibid., 38. 22  Ibid., 166.

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of the cauldron of id – these are basic invariables of sexuality opines the pornographer, and in itself pornography is a satire on human pretensions.”23 Consequently, pornography essentially reveals an underlying force which is disguised by social conventions, but which nevertheless survives under the surface as a source of tension and friction: “So whatever the surface falsity of pornography, it is impossible for it to fail to reveal sexual reality at an unconscious level, and this reality may be very unpleasant indeed, a world away from official reality.”24 It is here that we find the critical potential, inherent in the nature of pornography as a medium, to picture the unleashing of sexual energies which, in the end, overwhelm the hierarchical structures built to regulate and contain it: “Pornography moves out of the kitsch area of timeless, placeless fantasy into the real world … and begins to comment on real relations in the real world.”25 In this way, according to Carter, the base material of Sade’s perversities can be transmuted into something useful, a source of criticism of sexual conventions, hypocrisy, and power structures, as long as its essential extravagance is kept in mind and used to deconstruct repressive mechanisms. This deconstructive potential can be used to liberate female sexuality.26 For Carter, storytelling is the means to mobilize this pro-female deconstructive potential. Carter’s controversial heroine is Juliette, the main protagonist of Cent-vingt journées de Sodome, who not only acts like a totally depraved whore, but is also a prolific teller of stories. In fact, like Shahrazad, she must tell stories that are sufficiently exciting to stay alive, to alternate stories and sexual performances in a potentially endless chain. Juliette succeeds in constructing this chain, this dynamic continuity, not only through her utter depravity, but also because she understands that in order to survive she must appreciate the ‘power of the word,’ like Shahrazad. As long as she dominates the process of storytelling, she remains in control of her sexual activities, and she is able to transform the essentially repressive nature of the sexual performances to her own advantage. By appropriating this power, Juliette becomes the prototype of a new kind of woman, who, in the words of Guillaume Apollinaire and quoted by Carter, is “a figure rising out of mankind, who will have wings and who will renew the world.”27 In her analysis of Cent-vingt journées de Sodome, Carter seems to argue that even deeply misogynous material, or perhaps misogynous material itself, can 23  Carter, The Sadeian Woman, 16. 24  Ibid., 20. 25  Ibid., 19. 26  Ibid., 19. 27  Ibid., 79.

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be reprocessed to advance the liberation of women, since the main force maintaining repressive relationships of sexuality is not perversity itself, but rather the relations and discourses of power that fix conventional hierarchies and roles. Sexuality, and therefore sexual liberation, does not exist outside these mechanisms of power and thus sexual emancipation for women does not consist of casting off repressive forces, but rather appropriating the means to exercise power and use them in a different way. This implies that feminine sexuality can be just as repressive as male sexuality and this, it seems, engenders the complexity of Carter’s feminism, which can only find expression in a complex and sometimes apparently contradictory oeuvre. The purpose of these introductory paragraphs is not to evaluate Carter’s vision of feminism or to analyze her fascination with Sade, but to show that Carter’s work is part of a complex network of texts and ideas in which the Thousand and one nights takes a prominent place. Like Barthes, Carter evokes the figure of Shahrazad in her discussion of Sade,28 who in his Cent-vingt journées de Sodome quite clearly follows the pattern of the Thousand and one nights on both the formal and thematic levels. Like Sade, Carter stresses the essentially discursive nature of eroticism and sexual roles, which is also nicely argued in the frame story of the Thousand and one nights. What is most striking, however, is Carter’s insistence on the usefulness of basically abject material to propagate an emancipatory worldview. Here we perceive a modern version of Shahrazad’s narrative strategy, as observed by Lahy-Hollebecque: Shahrazad even includes misogynous material in her strategy to educate Shahriyar, and, as we see above, the frame story of the Nights suggests that the whole collection is a feminine parody of a misogynous genre. The result is not unambiguously feminist, but Shahrazad’s appropriation of the power of narration ensures at least the deconstruction of male oppression. The crucial difference is in the control of the discursive process: The figure of Juliette is just as Sheherazade a metaphor for the woman writer as rebel, the woman story-teller who tells the tales that do not quite fit into the social order of things. This analogy between the power of narration and survival – a significant theme in the whole feminist literary-critical enterprise of the last thirty years and more – recurs in her subsequent fiction. The successful heroines of the fairy-tales are the ones who become the authors of their own stories, inscribing their own desire into those old narrative frames. Fevvers constitutes a revision of Juliette, breaking out of that victim/victimiser frame by controlling the 28  Ibid., 81.

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narration of her own story through a mixture of flagrant self-display and subterfuge.29 In the following sections, we discuss this observation with regard to two novels in Carter’s rich oeuvre; these illustrate the implementation of this literary strategy and its relationship to what may be called the narrational complex of Shahrazad: The infernal desire machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and Nights at the circus (1984). Both novels, in the words of Robinson, inscribe a tension between the normative construction of gender and its subversive deconstruction.30 In our analysis we focus on the interacting aspects of time and desire. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Many people have noted that although Carter’s novel The infernal desire machines of Doctor Hoffman is not itself a reworking of a known fairy tale, it is structurally interwoven with the traditional world of the fairy tale. The protagonist Dr. Hoffman refers to E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), the German writer of fairy tales and fantastic stories. In the Infernal desire machines, Hoffman is the great enchanter who has conceived a device to imbue society with the forces of irrationality, to replace regular perceptions of reality by, it seems, total chaos. His opponent is the Master of Determination, who is determined to save the rational view of the world and defend society against the subversive incursions of the imagination. In the ensuing war, the young hero Desiderio is sent out by the Minister of Determination to trace and assassinate Dr. Hoffman. Desiderio sets out on a perilous journey which takes him to various fabulous countries and finally to the country of ‘Nebulous Time,’ which is completely amorphous and prey to ‘absolute mutability.’ During his labyrinthine travels, which seem to be steered only by hazard, Desiderio meets Albertine, with whom he falls in love and who turns out to be the daughter of Dr. Hoffman. Albertine, who assumes various guises, leads Desiderio to the castle of her father, where Dr. Hoffman’s secret is revealed: in a huge hall, young men and women are permanently engaged in lovemaking to generate so-called erotoenergy, which drives the machines that impregnate the world with the forces of irrationality. 29  Sally Keenan, “Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman: Feminism as Treason,” in Alison Easton (ed.), Angela Carter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 49–50. 30  Sally Robinson, “The Anti-Hero as Oedipus: Gender and the Postmodern Narrative in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman,” in Alison Easton (ed.), Angela Carter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 107.

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At first sight, it seems that the ‘war’ depicted in Infernal desire machines is a struggle between a rational, scientific worldview and an artistic, imaginary worldview, but ultimately it turns out that Dr. Hoffman’s world is not merely a world of the imagination, but rather a world of unbridled desire. The experiences of Desiderio – literally ‘I desire’ – are all brought forth by his desire; these experiences include the figure of Albertine. The many adventures, sexual episodes, brutal violence, wondrous metamorphoses, and miraculous escapes are all manifestations of the energy of his desire, which he is unable to control. Only in the end, when he has killed Dr. Hoffman and Albertine, does his regular frame of mind return. Thus, this is what the infernal machines do: they transform the rational, well-structured world that is based on the framework of measurable space and time, into an uncontrollable manifestation of one’s own desire, with all its infernal and heavenly components. The contradictions are personified by Albertine, who is both the hero’s great love and an evil genius. The setup of the story of Infernal desire machines, therefore, resembles Carter’s description of the subversive potential of pornography, which consists of the unrestrained unleashing of the forces of sexual desire, deprived of its social c0ntext and purified to its ultimate essence, in a society based on rationality and conventions. The result is the total destruction of society and any possibility of upholding an objective view of reality, since everything is subjected to the destructive force of the Id. The novel, however, makes no effort to represent the deconstructive dynamism as a feminine counter-narrative. Conspicuously, the world Desiderio creates is a world of male fantasies, full of sexual violence against women and forms of oppression. Desiderio himself is a victim of this ultimate subjection of reality, but Albertine too is a victim; in her various manifestations, she is never an autonomous person, but always a materialization of his male desire. Thus, the novel indicates the deconstructive power of desire and unrestrained sexuality with regard to master narratives of power, authority, and laws. But the whole process is dominated by men, who control both the master narrative and the forces of deconstruction. Albertine is merely a pawn in this great game; she has no will or agency of her own. This male dominance is strengthened by the role of Desiderio, who is not only the source of the fantasies that are deployed in the narrative, but also the narrator who relates his adventures as the sole survivor. He is not only the main hero of the adventures, he is also the only remaining witness and the one who produces the final account. Still, although the journey was perhaps no more than a compulsive Ego trip, it appears to have changed his vision of himself and the world. In the beginning, he was strong enough to confront Dr. Hoffman’s manipulations,

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since “out of my discontent, I made my own definitions and these definitions happened to correspond to those that happened to be true.”31 In the end, however, he must admit that “from beyond the grave, her father has gained a tactical victory over me and forced on me at least the apprehension of an alternate world in which all the objects are emanations of a single desire. And my desire is to see Albertine again before I die.”32 These considerations show how Infernal desire machines relate to the previous discussion of Carter’s ‘Sadeian’ view of the nexus between narration and sexuality, but there are other connections that point more directly toward the paradigm of the Thousand and one nights. First, the novel is constructed as a frame story. Desiderio’s report of the events and ordeals he lived through begins with an introduction, a report that was apparently compiled after the ending of the ‘war.’ Within this frame, a chain of seven episodes is inserted; these are in fact autonomous adventures in different, rather exotic, places, where he encounters strange peoples, monsters, and all kinds of threats and disasters. It is difficult to avoid the association of Desiderio with Sindbad, who was also cast out onto alien shores by fate, jeopardized his life, and in the meantime, explored the wonders of the world, and finally returned safely to relate his adventures. Like Sindbad, Desiderio’s journey has a purpose, which is the killing of Dr. Hoffman, but he, too, loses control over his journey and seems to be propelled by coincidence and fate. The story of Desiderio resembles the structure of the Thousand and one nights to the extent that both narratives contain a struggle between a rigid authority on the one hand, and a subversive imagination on the other hand. The Minister of Determination and his stringent rationality represent the rigid regime of Shahriyar, whereas Dr. Hoffman, with his destabilizing combination of eroticism and fantasy, personifies the deconstructive strategy of Shahrazad. The stories told by Shahrazad, which penetrate the enclosed realm of Shahriyar, are not only a weapon to neutralize Shahriyar’s violence, they are also the site on which two worldviews vie with each other, with a potentially fatal outcome at stake. These stories determine Shahrazad’s survival; they succeed if her narration sufficiently transforms reality. In the end, Shahriyar’s narrow-minded view of women, sexuality, and himself changes as Shahrazad imbues his rigid outlook with imagination.

31  Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 13. 32  Ibid., 13–14.

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Similarly, in Desiderio’s stories the struggle between rationality and desire, between reality and a form of unreality is fought, and every time his life is in danger, he is saved at the last moment, often through the intervention of Albertine, who is a ‘product’ of the imagination. In her ability to transform herself, she takes on the various guises that appeal to Desiderio’s imagination; she resembles the jinns in the Thousand and one nights that can assume all forms and are associated with human desire. Moreover, Albertine is reminiscent of Proust’s beloved, who is the focal point in the narrator’s imagination, and who instills in him a subjective, eroticized view of life. The stories themselves ‘embody’ the struggle, since they consist of a basic perception of reality that is contorted and transmuted by a subjective view of reality based on desire, a reality that blurs the boundaries between the two components. Of course, there are important differences as well, since Dr. Hoffman is killed in the end, whereas Shahrazad survives, implying that in one case the imagination triumphs while in the other it is defeated. As we see below, however, the outcome of the struggle is not without ambivalence. Another difference is that the Infernal desire machines, at least at first sight, seems to lack the feminist message. A third parallel can be found in the generic similarities between Desiderio’s adventures and the various quest type of love stories in the Thousand and one nights. Desiderio’s search for Albertine, his adventures with her in magic landscapes, and their separation resemble, for instance, the story of ‘Qamar al-Zaman and princess Budur,’ in which Prince Qamar al-Zaman roams through unfamiliar worlds in order to be (re-)united with his beloved. These stories are most commonly interpreted as depicting ‘passages’ and initiations; they are ways to familiarize the prince with the vicissitudes of life and the love of a woman, and test his ingenuity and courage. In this way, the prince is prepared to enter into a lawful marriage with his beloved and to ascend the royal throne. In Infernal desire machines, too, Desiderio is subjected to all kinds of tribulations and tests, obstacles and dangers, which he confronts without fear and eventually overcomes. In the end, he is a wiser man who has seen and experienced the unpredictability of life. In this interpretation of Infernal desire machines, as a parallel to the quest stories, we may also find the key to a possible feminist interpretation. As Robinson remarks, in the quest stories women as a rule have no autonomous role or character: Woman, in Desiderio’s narrative, as in the classical quest story, occupies a range of traditional object positions: she is a fetish, a foil, the exotic/ erotic object awaiting the hero at the end of his quest, but never a

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subject. She is, like Derrida’s “affirmative woman,” an object put into circulation according to the logic of male desire. As object of the male gaze, she is subject to regulation, exploitation and violence.33 Women are no more than focal points of the projection of male desires in a narrative landscape, the booty that completes the formation of the male ego. In Infernal desire machines, Albertine, too, is no more than a manifestation of Desiderio’s desire, a sexual object that undergoes various transformations and sexual harassment. In the novel, however, this epiphany of male desire is killed by the protagonist, suggesting that his quest is not meant to sustain the dominance of his male fantasies, but to destroy it. This idea is supported by Desiderio’s acknowledgment in the frame tale that Dr. Hoffman has in fact gained a victory, since he is now aware that another world, a realm of desire, lies hidden in rational perceptions of the world. Apparently, however, he has subdued the hegemony of this realm and has found a new balance. This leads to the conclusion that there is, in fact, a feminist message in the novel and that Desiderio is purified of his vision of Albertine that is shaped by his desire only, and that the final words of the story, “Unbidden she comes,” indicate that Albertine returns to him now that he has successfully combated his distorted view of women. Still, these final words may also mean that, when Desiderio closes his eyes, his male desire irresistibly evokes her image. Although these possible parallels between Infernal desire machines and the Thousand and one nights are remarkable, they are not supported by explicit references to the Nights and are based exclusively on indirect indications, derived mainly from the idea that Shahrazad was clearly an important component in Carter’s perception of the nexus between narration, sexuality, and feminism. This idea is confirmed by several references in Infernal desire machines to Arabic books, from which Dr. Hoffman gleans his perfidious ideas and insights. Desiderio specifically mentions the ‘thesis’ of Mendoza, a kind of half insane philosopher with Moorish blood, who knew Arabic and developed his theories about the nature of reality and, especially, became “obsessed with the nature of time in relation to the sexual act.”34 Other passages, too, suggest an association between various forms of metamorphosis and the manipulation of reality and oriental motifs; thus they create a layer in the narrative that presumably incorporates the world of Shahrazad. This is the more plausible since explicit references to the Thousand and one nights can be found in Nights

33  Robinson, “The Anti-Hero as Oedipus,” 112. 34  Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines, 40.

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at the circus, which Carter wrote after Infernal desire machines; we turn our attention to it now. Nights at the Circus In contrast to The infernal desire machines of Doctor Hoffman, Carter’s next novel, Nights at the circus, contains a clear feminist message, which is, however, wrapped in a complex narrative. The book has been typified as a ‘historical novel,’ since it is set in 1899 and includes several references to the historical events and circumstances at that time. It certainly conforms to the categorization as a ‘magical realist’ novel as well, since its historical setting gives it a realist framework, but the adventures of its protagonists include a variety of ‘unreal’ incidents. Moreover, as we see, the novel, and especially the inclusion of non-realistic elements in it, are written as a narrative strategy used by a peripheral group (women) to attack dominant (male) ideologies that are based on a hierarchical and supposedly rational view of reality. Because of these aspects, Nights at the circus conforms, to a certain extent, to the most general definitions of magical realism.35 The main protagonist of the novel is Fevvers, a young, sturdy woman with wings, who displays her talents – flying – as an aerialist in a circus. She is a girl with working-class manners and speech and was, she says, not born, but ‘hatched’ from an egg. She travels from one performance to the next with her loyal friend Lizzie. In the beginning of the novel Fevvers is interviewed by an American journalist, Jack Walser, who, at the instigation of Fevvers, joins the circus troupe on its journey to St. Petersburg, so he can write a report of Fevver’s life and adventures. From St. Petersburg, the company travels by train to Siberia, but there the train crashes and for some time the company roams through the wilderness, where they meet a group of women who escaped from a prison, a company of brigands, and a shaman. After many incidents and amazing coincidences, a happy ending is reached. The story of Nights at the circus develops according to several storylines. The first line follows Fevver’s past life until she joined the circus; it assesses her life and outlook. After she was ‘hatched,’ Fevvers, with her extra­ ordinary physical characteristics and capacities, was ‘exhibited’ in the museum of Madame Schreck, where other freaks of nature were shown to a lustful male audience. In general, Fevvers’s life is marked by negative sexual experiences with 35  See Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang (eds.), A Companion to Magical Realism (Woodbridge and Rochester: Tamesis, 2005), and Sarah Sceats, “Flights of Fancy: Angela Carter’s Transgressive Narratives,” in Hart and Ouyang, A Companion to Magical Realism (Woodbridge and Rochester: Tamesis, 2005), 142–150. Also see below, chapter 12.

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men and their relation to her physical anomaly, especially her encounter with a perverse Russian count in St. Petersburg. With her cockney disposition, she recognizes these banalities as the symptoms of male vulgarity to which women are mercilessly subjected. Heroically, she declares herself the herald of a new age for women, precisely because of her hybrid nature. She is “the Queen of ambiguities, the goddess of in-between states, being on the borderline of species.”36 In the coming twentieth century, a new woman will arise, it will be a New Age in which no woman will be bound to the ground. The second storyline is the relationship between Walser and Fevvers. In the beginning, Walser is merely interested in Fevvers because of her freakish nature and her sensational story. Gradually, however, Walser becomes more and more fascinated by the phenomenon of the circus and by Fevvers as a woman. During this process, Walser’s role changes when he starts participating in the circus acts as the clown Buffo. This is the beginning of a process of transformation, in which he finally casts off his former self and becomes a ‘new’ person. In the meantime, Fevvers realizes that she, too, has changed and fallen in love with him, and in the end the couple, the ‘new man’ and ‘new woman,’ are happily united. The third storyline forms the context of the two previous main storylines; it consists of the many sub-plots that mirror the main intrigues. The main characters – the director of the circus, the educated monkeys, the tiger man, the lady with the cat, and others – are all embodied in their typical male and female roles, which, in the ambience of the circus, are caricatures. Each one has his/her histories and is entangled in relationships of authority and oppression. Walser in particular, as clown Buffo, becomes enmeshed in the many bizarre intrigues among the circus people. Through these intrigues, the histories of the characters are told, hierarchic relationships are comically deconstructed, and transformations take place that turn the characters into new people, free them of their former selves and prepare them to start new lives. They all began as ‘freaks,’ distorted by their experiences or their inner urges, but ended up as relatively happy human beings. These three storylines are set in a vast geographic expanse, ranging from England to Siberia, in a kind of magically globalized world. Curiously, the events take place during a time when the clock is stuck on December 31st, 1899, over a period of twenty-four hours; it is essentially a huge time-out before the launch of the twentieth century. The transition to this extra-temporal realm takes place during Walser’s first interview with Fevvers, when a kind of 36  Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), 81.

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time-quake occurs. During the remaining narrative the many clocks that are referred to are either broken or stuck, until the final denouement. After this brief abstract of the story of the Nights at the circus, we now look for parallels with the Thousand and one nights, then proceed to some intertextual themes which link the two works. Nights at the Circus and the Thousand and One Nights As noted above, both The infernal desire machines of Doctor Hoffman and Nights at the circus belong to a textual network in which various authors, besides Carter, explore the interconnection between sexuality and narration. While in Infernal desire machines there are no explicit references to the Thousand and one nights, in Nights at the circus, Carter incorporates several references to Shahrazad’s tales, both direct and indirect. Since the name Shahrazad is mentioned several times in Nights at the circus, it is plausible to surmise that the frame story of the Thousand and one nights served as one of the matrices of the novel. In the beginning, Walser compares himself to a sultan sitting before two Shahrazads – Fevvers and Lizzie – who overwhelm him with their vast world of stories,37 “stories of the exotic, marvellous, laughter, tears, thrills, and all.”38 The stories, especially those told by Fevvers, seem to multiply endlessly, as when Walser compares the eyes of Fevvers to “Chinese boxes, as if each one opened into a world into a world into a world, an infinite plurality of worlds, and these unguessable depths exercised the strongest possible attraction.”39 The comparison of course establishes the relationship between Walser and Fevvers as the one between Shahrazad and Shahriyar; she tells the stories of her life and he writes them down in his notebook for posterity; she is a paragon of femininity, and, especially, of female strategies to confront the world; he is the paragon of masculinity with its – especially negative – connotations. In other instances, too, the name Shahrazad is mentioned in relation to narration, as the symbol of a woman who harbors a plethora of stories to tell.40 Aladdin, the hero of the famous eponymous story, is another figure from the Thousand and one nights who is mentioned twice in Nights at the circus. In both cases Aladdin is associated with magic and marvels, for instance when the museum of monsters of Madame Schreck, which contains so many

37  Ibid., 40. 38  Ibid., 90. 39  Ibid., 30. 40  Ibid., 97.

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wonders, is compared to Aladdin’s cave.41 In addition, the circus ring is associated with Aladdin’s lamp, which magically transforms the world into a site of wonders: What a cheap, convenient, expressionist device, this sawdust ring, this little O! Round like an eye, with a still vortex in the centre; but give it a little rub as if it were Aladdin’s wishing lamp, and, instantly, the circus ring turns into that durably metaphoric uroboric snake with its tail in its mouth, the wheel that turns full circle, the wheel whose end is its beginning, the wheel of fortune, the potter’s wheel on which our clay is formed, the wheel of life on which we all are broken. O! of wonder; O! of grief.42 Of course, this reference to magic opens up an additional dimension to the novel: throughout the narrative the forces of magic are present, and everything that occurs may have a magical component. Magic is part of Fevvers’s world, particularly at this instant. The fact that the company leave St. Petersburg in a rather magical manner deserves no special explanation; there is no effort to rationalize strange coincidences. Of course, Fevvers’s ability to fly is seen as an anomaly, but nevertheless part of reality, thus the boundaries between the real and magical spheres are blurred in a way that is typical for works of magical realism. A third complex of references to the Thousand and one nights is not explicitly anchored in the text, but rather shimmers through in several motifs and themes. The key to this complex is the figure of Fevvers, the winged woman. Critics have identified several parallels to other winged women in world literature to which Carter possibly refers, but one such parallel remains to be explored: the figure of Manar al-Sana in the story of ‘Hasan of Basra’ from the Thousand and one nights. In this story, Hasan, the protagonist, after many adventures and peregrinations, arrives at a strange, remote castle, where he is received by seven jinn princesses. At a certain point, Hasan, left alone in the castle, enters a forbidden door and climbs a staircase that leads to a terrace. There he sees a flight of beautiful birds alight at a swimming pool. The birds remove their feathers and turn out to be ten young women of supreme beauty. Hasan steals the robe of feathers from one of the girls, abducts, and marries her. Back in the familiar world, however, Manar al-Sana is unhappy and succeeds in retrieving her feathers and flying away to the Waq islands. 41  Ibid., 58. 42  Ibid., 107.

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So, Hasan embarks on an ambitious pursuit, which involves different kinds of magical transport that take him to the far reaches of the world, and finally to the Waq islands, which are islands of women that men are not allowed to enter. There Hasan finds Manar al-Sana, who now promises to be his faithful and obedient wife.43 This brief summary contains motifs that link the story of ‘Hasan of Basra’ with Nights at the circus. First, of course, is the character of the winged woman. In both texts, she is a hybrid figure and the ‘prime mover’ of the story. Second, there is a love motif between this hybrid figure and a human man, which initially seems to be ill-matched, but which in the end reaches a happy conclusion. Third, the motif of the journey takes the protagonists to remote exotic settings that provide the context for the final plot; and, finally, the motif of magic pervades both stories in individual scenes and in a general view of the world. In the story of ‘Hasan of Basra’ a group of esoteric scholars protects human society from the forces of evil magic by using forms of counter-magic; in Nights at the circus, the shaman at the end of the story seems to fulfill a similar task by conjuring evil supernatural forces. These three clusters of motifs link to other clusters that are structurally interwoven with the narrative to such an extent that it may be more appropriate to speak of thematic lines that form the framework of the story’s meaning. The first of these clusters relates to what may be called ‘exposure’ or ‘voyeurism.’ In ‘Hasan of Basra’ the theme of the exposure of women is evoked time and again in various episodes. First, Hasan spies on Manar al-Sana when she bathes on the terrace; second, in Baghdad, Manar al-Sana exposes herself in the bath-house to attract the attention of other women; third, during his journey, Hasan inspects a company of bathing women to see if Manar al-Sana is among them; and, finally, the queen of the Waq islands explains that men are not allowed in her land because they ‘spy’ on the women and reveal their secrets. These episodes are not merely a set of coincidences, since the voyeurism is described in a surprisingly detailed way; rather there is a deliberate suggestion that men observe women as part of the gender relations and that this is also part of the structure of (male) authority. In Nights at the circus, exposure and voyeurism are a structural theme. Fevvers, of course, is a ‘freak,’ which according to a certain logic should be exhibited, and from her childhood her anomaly is exposed to voyeurs in various ways. This exposure cannot be separated from her as a woman and thus a sexual object. Her exposure as an exotic phenomenon places her in a specific 43  For an abstract of this story, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:207–211.

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situation in gender relationships; this situation indicates to men that she is sexually available and prone to the realization of erotic male fantasies. More precisely, voyeurism deprives her of her status as a human being and leaves her self-image dependent on others’ imagination: Fevvers felt that shivering sensation which always visited her when mages, wizards, impresarios came to take away her singularity as though it were their own invention, as though they believed she depended on their imaginations in order to be herself. She felt herself turning, willynilly, from a woman into an idea.44 Of course, the theme of exposure is further elaborated in the circus, which is based on the exposure of wonders and curiosities in a specially constructed setting. The performers are not human beings, they are phenomena, fantasies, projections of the imagination into reality. Finally, the idea of voyeurism is represented by the female prison in Siberia; it is built as a panoptic: from the center all the women can be observed in their cells all the time. A second major theme, perhaps the major theme, in both ‘Hasan of Basra’ and Nights at the circus, is transformation. The story of ‘Hasan of Basra’ makes several references to alchemy and these support the idea that the story is about a process of transformation, at least in part. From the beginning, it is clear that Hasan’s love for Manar al-Sana is not without difficulties. Although she consents to marry him, he has in fact abducted her and left her little choice. Gradually it appears that Manar al-Sana is not happy with her life in Baghdad and longs for her native country. Hasan, however, is adamant and perseveres in his efforts to win her heart. After all the obstacles, enemies, and threats are vanquished, Manar al-Sana finally pledges her obedience to him. Thus, through his steadfastness Hasan succeeds, with the help of sorcerers, to transform Manar al-Sana into an obedient wife. In the Thousand and one nights, the theme of transformation is not limited to individual stories, rather it is one of the overarching themes of the whole collection. This is especially suggested by the frame story, which presents the raison d’être of the collection as the effectuation of a process of transformation through storytelling. With her strategy of interruption and postponement, Shahrazad suspends the passage of time and prevents her execution in the morning. She creates a liminal phase in which she can gradually succeed at transforming Shahriyar from a narrow-minded, violent tyrant into a sensitive husband. She accomplishes this by luring Shahriyar into enter a world of 44  Carter, Nights at the Circus, 289.

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enchantment and imagination through a combination of eroticism and narration. Without Shahriyar realizing it, he has become another man. And he is not the only one who changes. Shahrazad, too, changes in status from one of the many interchangeable virgins, a mere sexual object appropriated to satisfy the lust of the sultan and deprived of any status as a human being, a subject, or a woman, to the honored spouse of the sultan and the mother of his children, the heirs to the throne. Thus, through the intervention of the imagination, in the form of storytelling, a double transformation takes place. The pattern of transformation presented in the frame story of the Thousand and one nights shines through in the long process of transformation that Fevvers and Walser experience in Nights at the circus. In the novel, too, the passage of time is mysteriously suspended when Fevvers (Shahrazad) tells her life story to Walser (Shahriyar): just before the turn of the twentieth century, at midnight on the 31st of December, all clocks come to a standstill, only to resume their course at the end of the novel. Walser experiences the main transformation; he enters a liminal phase by joining the circus company. Fevvers starts feeling affection for him, but she considers him ‘unfinished’ and sees his face as the “vague, imaginary face of desire.”45 He takes his first step toward his transformation by assuming the personality of Buffo, the circus clown; thus, he not only removes his former identity as a regular man and journalist, but substitutes it with an inherently complex, slippery, and marginal identity. Walser experiences “the freedom that lies behind the mask, within dissimulation, the freedom to juggle with being, and, indeed, with the language which is vital to one being, that lies at the heart of the burlesque.”46 He becomes another person or at least abandons his former self: Yet … am I this Buffo whom I have created? Or did I, when I made up my face to look like Buffo’s, create, ex nihilo, another self who is not me? And what am I without my Buffo’s face? Why, nobody at all. Take away my make-up and underneath is merely not-Buffo. An absence, A vacancy.47 After a while, Walser not only acts like a clown, but he really becomes Buffo: “Walser is no longer a journalist masquerading as a clown; willy-nilly, force of circumstance has turned him into a real clown, for all practical purposes, and, what’s more, a clown with his arm in a sling – type of the ‘wounded

45  Ibid., 204. 46  Ibid., 103. 47  Ibid., 122.

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warrior’ clown.”48 The figure of Buffo gives Walser the space he needs to adjust his relationship with Fevvers. Being a clown affords him some measure of freedom, because no one will believe that what he does is real or serious. One of the symptoms of his transformation is his gradual falling in love with Fevvers; this is an experience that is totally new to him, one which “has set up a conflict between his hitherto impregnable sense of self-esteem and the lack of esteem with which the woman treats him.”49 He ponders about Fevvers’s ‘womanhood,’ and tries to see her not as a strange phenomenon, but as a ‘real’ woman: She would no longer be an extraordinary woman, no more the Great Arealiste in the world but – a freak. Marvellous indeed, but a marvellous monster, an exemplary being denied the human privilege of flesh and blood, always the object of the observer, never the subject of sympathy, an alien creature forever estranged. She owes it to herself to remain a woman, he thought. It is her human duty. As a symbolic woman, she has a meaning, as an anomaly, none. As an anomaly, she would become again, as she once had been, an exhibit in a museum of curiosities. But what would she become if she continued to be a woman.50 The train crash in Siberia accelerates the process of transformation. As a result of the shock he falls unconscious and when he is kissed awake, he can only say ‘Mama.’ It appears that his memory has been erased and that he must learn everything anew. He has to construct his personality all over again: “He is a sentient being, still, but no longer a rational one; indeed, now he is all sensibility, without a grain of sense, and sense impressions alone have the power to shock and to ravish him.”51 Gradually, and with the help of the shaman he succeeds in doing this and finally, partly through his love for Fevvers, he becomes a new person: He was as much himself again as he ever would be, and yet that “self” would never be the same again for now he knew the meaning of fear as it defines itself in its most violent form, that is, fear of the death of the beloved, of the loss of the beloved, of the loss of love. It was the beginning of an anxiety that would never end, except with the deaths of either or both; and anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of 48  Ibid., 145. 49  Ibid., 145. 50  Ibid., 161. 51  Ibid., 236.

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the soul but is not compatible with innocence…. He contemplated, as in a mirror, the self he was so busily reconstructing.52 The process of transformation that Walser undergoes is paralleled by a similar change in Fevvers. However, from the beginning Fevvers is aware that she was singled out to assume a special role: Except, I assure you, I did not await the kiss of a magic prince, sir! With my two eyes, I nightly saw how such a kiss would seal me up in my appearance for ever! Yet I was possessed by the idea I had been feathered out for some special fate.53 Her awareness is, of course, the result of her peculiar appearance, which more or less forces her to assume a lofty position, as the “Queen of ambiguities,” a “goddess of in-between states, being on the borderline of species,”54 the “Lady of the hub of the celestial wheel, creature half of earth and half of air, virgin and whore, reconciler of fundament and firmament, reconciler of opposing states through the mediation of your ambivalent body, reconciler of the grand opposites of death and life.”55 Still, all these lofty roles are ideas, rather than creatures of flesh and blood. Fevvers’s transformation can be her trajectory from a flying woman to a ‘normal’ woman with no wings, from a freak to a ‘normal’ human being, from an idea to a woman of flesh and blood. To accomplish this, several forces are at work: her vision of herself, the circus and its magical ambience, the journey, and, finally, but not most decisively, her budding love for Walser. She tells Walser her story, but she wants him to tell her that she is not merely a story, but something “true”: “The young American it was who kept the whole story of the old Fevvers in his notebooks; she longed for him to tell her that she was true. She longed to see herself reflected in all her remembered splendour in his grey eyes.”56 Only if he realizes that she is “no longer an imagined fiction, but a plain fact,” then he will also acknowledge her prophetic role.57 Still, Fevvers senses the changes taking place in her and realizes that she must not lose the essence of her being: 52  Ibid., 292–293. 53  Ibid., 39. 54  Ibid., 81. 55  Ibid. 56  Ibid., 273. 57  Ibid., 286.

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“But it is not possible that I should give myself,” said Fevvers…. “My being, my me-ness, is unique and indivisible. To sell the use of myself for the enjoyment of another is one thing; I might even offer freely, out of gratitude or in the expectation of pleasure – and pleasure alone is my expectation from the young American. But the essence of myself may not be given or taken, or what would there be left of me?”58 Only under these conditions is a ‘happy ending’ conceivable: The Prince who rescues the Princess from the dragon’s lair is always forced to marry her, whether they’ve taken a liking to one another or not. That’s the custom. And I don’t doubt that custom will apply to the trapeze artiste who rescues the clown. The name of this custom is a “happy ending.”59 Note that in Nights at the circus, it is the ‘princess’ who rescues the ‘prince,’ just as it is the ‘princess’ who wakes up the ‘prince’ with a kiss. The dual process of transformation that happens to Walser and Fevvers is partly set in motion by events beyond their control, such as the train crash and their falling in love. However, it is also the result of conscious choices and determination, as in the stories of ‘Shahriyar and his brother’ and ‘Hasan of Basra.’ As in these stories, the outcome of the adventure is described as a liberation – the third thematic line that connects the stories of the Thousand and one night to Nights at the circus. Of course, in the end Shahrazad is saved from being executed, while Manar al-Sana is rescued from the patriarchal authority of her father, on which the anomalous rule of the Waq islands is based and which is presented as unjust and incompatible with Islam. It is no coincidence that in the end a fierce battle is fought in which the forces of evil magic are countered by the sorcerers who protect the ‘civilized’ world against harm. Manar al-Sana changes her allegiance from an oppressive social system to the ‘freedom’ of obedience to her husband within the protective realm of Islam. As might be expected, in Nights at the circus this component of liberation is emphasized. It has always been Fevvers’s dream that in the new century a New Woman would appear, one who has wings and will never be bound to the ground. It is her task to embody this New Woman, since she is not bound by conventional bonds, as Lizzie says: “You never existed before. There’s nobody to say what you should do or how to do it. You are Year One. You haven’t 58  Ibid., 280–281. 59  Ibid., 281.

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any history and there are no expectations of you except the ones you yourself create.”60 While Fevvers completes her own transformation, she is determined to mold Walser’s transformation according to this vision, making use of his ‘blank’ state: “I’ll hatch him out, I’ll make a new man of him. I’ll make him into the New Man, in fact, a fitting mate for the New Woman, and onward we’ll march hand in hand to the New Century.”61 The work of Angela Carter is concerned with the interactions between power, desire, and narration, and as such it reflects the major themes of the Thousand and one nights, including those of the frame story and several of individual stories. It expresses the unrestrained surrealism of the imagination that engulfs the experience of reality once it is unleashed and unencumbered. The novels The infernal desire machines of Doctor Hoffman and Nights at the circus show the dangers of the fantasy of total domination, which destabilizes the elements that structure the perception of reality and control sexual impulses, but they also reveal the dangers of the forces of control with their inherent dictatorial tendencies. The novels are complementary in the sense that Nights at the circus proposes a balance which The infernal desire machines leaves open, and therefore it seems more optimistic. It is the suspension of time that provides the opportunity for a transformation that restores a situation of normalcy.

60  Ibid., 198; see also 273. 61  Ibid., 281.

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Temporal Dystopias: Botho Strauss and Haruki Murakami By telling her stories, Shahrazad not only introduces a liminal situation in which the passage of time is subject to a regime of deferral and interruption; she also inserts another temporal dimension into her stories, one that not only ‘enchants’ Shahriyar, but also demonstrates that time is not an absolute phenomenon, it can be manipulated and reshaped through the force of the imagination. Shahrazad shows the existence of ‘simultaneity,’ the co-existence of more than one time regime, unfolding in different places, or even within the human mind. But since the consciousness of time is usually a key way in which to experience a sense of coherence, of a single reality, the experience of multiple times or of temporal disruptions or of transitions between them is especially disturbing. In the novels which we discuss presently, the connection and interaction between different time regimes, connected with events in the past, are the framework of a thorough discussion of postmodern conditions in Germany and Japan. Not coincidentally, these conditions cannot be dissociated from each country’s experiences of the war.

War and the Reinvention of Time: Botho Strauss’s Der junge Mann

The two great wars of the twentieth century present numerous paradoxes: on the one hand, they seem to have resulted from developments that had been building up in European societies for several decades, and thus were perhaps not inevitable, but still part of the course of history. On the other hand, these wars are seen as disruptive, in the sense that they mark the separation between two historic eras and brutally severed Europe from its nineteenth-century past. This paradox is especially relevant for Germany, which was not only at the center of the conflicts, but also inherited the trauma and bears the guilt of history’s greatest derailment. The problems that resulted from this were partly solved by ‘reinventing’ Germany as a modern democratic state, driven by the Wirtschaftswunder to become a great European power once again and thus counter any suspicion of a relapse into pre-war sentiments and ideologies. But this reinvention was still paradoxical: it was born out of a situation of horror and loss, rather than optimism and victory, and it seemed to perpetuate © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_009

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Germany’s separation from its historic roots, which contained, after all, the causes of the infernal catastrophe. According to the controversial German author Botho Strauss (b. 1944), issues such as these are still abhorred in the public debate in Germany. According to Strauss, after the war German society entered a state of historical stupor or paralysis, which continues and prevents it from questioning its relationship with pre-war German history and tradition. There is a kind of taboo on surmising a structural continuity in German history that encompasses postmodern Germany, the Nazi period, and pre-war history all in one historical process, as this destabilizes not only the democratic model of contemporary Germany, but also essentializes, and thereby perpetuates the notion of guilt as being inherent in German history or the German ‘character.’ Strauss’s efforts to address this issue in his essays has led critics to suspect him of being a cultural pessimist in the sense of Spengler and other pre-war thinkers, and of being nostalgic for a pre-war tradition that was conducive to the emergence of the Nazi regime. His suggestions are thus seen as dangerous for the way they gnaw at the foundations of modern German society. Strauss responded to his critics by saying that the extraordinary circumstances of the birth of modern Germany imprisoned it in an impasse that hampers any open discussion about its identity and its relationship with its past. This unwillingness to reflect critically on its historical context has enabled German society to become trapped in all the negative effects of postmodern western societies: an extreme individualism; the dissolution of social coherence; the predominance of the new media; consumerism; and the hegemony of the capitalist market economy. These rapidly increasing processes have estranged Germans from themselves and from their past; they have entered an ambiguous floating state that is disconnected from their historical roots. Germans are left in search of some kind of spiritual unity, or at least a sense of belonging to a non-virtual bond. One of the solutions may be to break the deadlock and resume the interrupted strands of German history where they broke off. The German postmodern condition is the main concern of Strauss’s most ambitious novel, Der junge Mann (The young man), which appeared in 1984 and arguably became the most important literary work of his generation. The novel, set partly in a contemporary environment and partly in the future, attempts to evoke the horrors of the transition to a dystopian society, in which the ultimate consequences of the postmodern dilemma are depicted. It is also, and perhaps mainly, a reflection on the role of art and the artist in this process. Does art have a specific role, a specific power, to play in this process? Do artists have a specific responsibility toward art and society? Or is their role

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determined by the requirements of the new conditions? Although these questions are problematized more than they are answered in the novel, it is clear that ‘time’ is the keyword of the reflection on them. The story of Der junge Mann consists of an introduction, in which some of the general themes are outlined, and five chapters/stories that contain embedded stories and are in some way or another intertwined to form a multi­ faceted whole. This structure is accounted for in the introduction, which begins by explaining that the audience demands that a writer tell a story, but it has become difficult for a writer to meet this demand: Not because he lacks sufficient experience – after all, he can make much of very little – but because the elementary conditions under which he can communicate something to someone no longer exist, or, at any rate, he can no longer believe in them. He is already too profoundly used to being cut off in mid-sentence.1 Time and again the circumstances impose interruptions, and this has become the condition of the postmodern storyteller, who must adapt his methods: “Instead of producing a straight-lined narrative, or striving for an allencompassing development, he will grant diversity its zones, instead of history he will record the multi-storied moment, the synchronous event.”2 Here a form comes into being, one that makes possible the nexus between storytelling and time, between literary form and its context in time: “[The author] will lay out, or allow to take form, scenes and honeycombs of time, rather than epic and novella.”3 But the infusion of stories into time has consequences for our perception of time. We have to adapt our notion of time as well: “As far as the element of time is concerned, we also require an expanded perception, a many-faceted awareness, to protect us from the unrelievedly oppressive regimes of progress, utopia, and every other so-called future.”4 In this way the author not only responds to the new, different manifestations of time, but also creates for himself a means to control time, that is, to create a combination of storytelling and time that will give him control of the story and of the notion of time that derives from it. Linear perceptions of time must be broken up and 1  Botho Strauss, The Young Man, trans. Roslyn Theobald (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 3. 2  Ibid., 4. 3  Ibid. 4  Ibid.

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replaced by constellations of fragmented time, because, also in the case of time, “[d]iversity and difference provide everything alive with the best possible protection from death and devastation.”5 The stakes are no less than the avoidance of death; storytelling is a strategy to control time, to postpone the final interruption, and to prevent death/time from taking control: Our intellect keeps playing with immutable ideas, even if to take a break from the perception of all-encompassing Becoming. And the storyteller is not about to give up his plaything, he will continue to be in charge of lost and recurring time, and will not even consider throwing out the precious crystal of standstill. He will continue to defy the time-arrow to the very last, raising the shield of poetry against it even if it proves to be a lost cause.6 As we see, this ‘poetics of time’ is reflected in each of the stories, which are all in some way or another constructed around a time-warp, a stagnation or an acceleration of the passage of time, to illustrate either interruptions or the restoration of continuity, the healing of ruptures. They also show the synchronicity of events in the experience of the characters, whose imagination inserts future visions into their ‘present’ lives. There is no future and no linear trajectory toward it; there is only a complex present, like a diamond with many facets. The first story, titled ‘The street,’ introduces the main character, Leon Pracht, who, as a beginning stage director, has the opportunity to work with two wellknown actresses. Here Strauss presents theater as a kind of microcosmic embodiment of art, with its capacity to synchronize time, to contain myths and counter-worlds within the alchemical space of the stage. The director’s task is to domesticate this diminutive universe and subject it to his command. Leon, who sets about his task full of ambitions, dreams, and artistic visions, fails utterly. Only after he has abandoned the piece for some time and undergone a process of maturation, is he able to resume his tasks. The character in the second story, ‘The forest,’ may also be a version of Leon, but one who has metamorphosed into a young, successful business­ woman, who is on the way to meet an important client. While driving she loses the way, gets out of the car and follows mysterious arrows and signs that lead her through a strange forest where she meets several peculiar figures and 5  Ibid. 6  Ibid., 7.

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phenomena. The strangest events are perhaps her visit to the Tower of the Germans, where thousands of German voices are stored, where she sees the fish-like head – both literally and figuratively – of the Germans, in a submarine realm. As in the first story, her case seems to be an initiation: from her regulated life, based on calculation and rational planning, she enters into a world of apparent chaos, in which many subconscious, historical, and future elements hidden inside her are concentrated. This is called the ‘Wilderness of Same Time.’ When she comes out of it she continues on her way to her client, who appears to be a wealthy estate owner who aims to build a tower and found a community in the forest. This is a disturbingly accurate replica of her own ‘vision.’ She falls in love with him and, after her initiatory experience, seems to have found her destiny. The third story, ‘The outsiders,’ is about a community living in isolation somewhere in Germany after the great economic crisis in which the capitalist system has collapsed. The community, which consists of a motley assembly of Turkish tailors, French actors, German social workers, and Icelandic fishermen, was formed after a period of social disintegration and migration, and is based on a non-rational lifestyle. There is no government system; the community is in constant flux, and it has its own forms of communicating. Because of their unsystematic way of thinking, the members are not susceptible to any religion, ideology, power formation, or utopias. In the story, the main character (Leon?) is assigned the task of observing and studying the colony, but, out of boredom, or because he feels some natural affiliation and attraction to them and their way of life – in spite of the rules – he tries to become one of them. However, the Syks, as they are called, never allow anyone to enter their community, and Leon is subjected to a horrible ‘rite of initiation,’ and is subsequently expelled. Although he does not succeed in transforming himself into a Syk, he reaches a state of mysterious tranquility: And with every flower named, I sensed the tender approval of all matter, an infinitesimal signal from deep in immeasurable, hurtling space, seeming to slow as it progressed through dense, unbroken linking from layer to layer, from the most vast and distant down to the most proximate, while in reality, even at rest, continually quavering internal growing of plant material and minerals, never really stopping, never and nowhere ceasing, just as it will continue to generate other reason beyond ours, mankind’s own.7 7  Ibid., 114.

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He is fired by his superior, however, and the story is discontinued. The fourth story, ‘The terrace,’ starts with the death of King Belsazar/ Balthazar, the last of the Babylonian rulers who leaves the people in a prolonged state of paralysis and half-sleep. A democratic system is installed, but society is continuing to nourish itself from the death of its greatest evildoer,8 [for] it was allowed to no one, wherever he might be, whatever he might think or do, to make a complete escape from the German stupor, and to break the spell with which the decaying evil had been irradiating our minds and souls over generations.9 A group of friends, who each represent a current or type in German society, comment on this situation. Reppenfries is a conservative who criticizes postmodern society which has become “smarter than we are”10 and is spiraling out of control. The initial ‘disenchantment’ of society has resulted in a new enchantment. His views are challenged by Hans Werner, a modernist who has faith in a future that is based on a reconceptualization of existing principles, especially with regard to our understanding of time. Technology and social intelligence will give us a new idea of time and change: “We will be living, thinking, and creating in the sphere of an elaborate, expanded sense of present.”11 It is democracy that enables society to mobilize common efforts and energies to realize these changes. The discussions between friends are interrupted by the individual participants who insert stories that illustrate part of the discourse. Almut, for instance, tells about her youth as an apprentice of her father, who was an art restorer. When her father died prematurely, she was too insecure to continue her trade and changed to language studies. After a time, her artistic sensibilities were awakened on a trip to Italy; not long afterwards, when visiting an exhibition of postmodern abstract art, she was suddenly overcome by panic and damaged a ‘frightening’ painting by Morris Louis. She later explained that her panic was caused by the strange incompatibility between her artistic sensibility and the paintings which, she felt, threatened her: “Having confronted an

8  Ibid., 124. 9  Ibid. 10  Ibid., 130. 11  Ibid., 141.

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alien time-frame I was forced to defend myself. That’s all.”12 To atone for her act of demolition she joins a group of art restorers and resumes her previous trade. She soon discovers that the young restorers with whom she works have an entirely different attitude toward aesthetics and art than she has. They feel no ‘awe’ before the work of art, but see it as a mere ‘object.’ This is because they have not learned their trade from a master: Having grown up at a time when we are more often trained by critical programs than by experienced people, they never felt the need for anything else. And it was just this kind of undirected education that allowed them to develop their just manner, to an association of equals in which no one attempted to gain control over another.13 They have another working method, which is based on technological rather than artistic sense, and “A kind of hubris of our well-adapted, contemporary intelligence that masks the true nature of our spiritual poverty.”14 Still, when she fails to satisfactorily complete a final assignment, which the others succeed at without effort, she must acknowledge that their method has some merit. They reproach her for allowing herself to be dominated by what is old and beautiful. Modern ‘protocols’ have cultural value, too, and are better accommodated to individuals working in a team and to the needs of a changing world.15 Another story, about Yossica, a postal worker, can be read as a comment on artistic practices as well. Yossica, who has a talent for singing, is approached by two talent scouts who compete for her favors. One offers her instant success, if she caters to current trends, while the other offers her a long career in which her art can ripen and in which she can gain enduring fame and a genuinely devoted audience. Each demand her total commitment and perform a trick to persuade her: they destroy themselves and return fully restored. Yossica hesitates, because she desires both options. This is impossible, however, and, as a reprimand, she is transformed into a single head growing out of the earth, without a body. Later Leon finds her head, while wandering and hallucinating in a dystopian postmodern landscape, an artificial world which is “devised and laid out in the spirit of suspended time,” and which has become “an entirely closed hour; no matter how determined I was to go my way, or run, I could not 12  Ibid., 190. 13  Ibid., 196. 14  Ibid., 198. 15  Ibid., 199.

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escape through its seams.”16 It is a kind of horrifying amusement park, a ‘holodrome,’ with projected images from which he emerges as a new, transformed, man. After he recovers Yossica, he sees himself reflected in her face: “I was a man arising – collecting himself; one who after a long, long time arose from his watch, was delivered from inertia, and inexorably attracted by steps not yet taken. No purpose, only face.”17 The most significant story in the book, however, is the one told by Leon himself, which is called ‘The woman on the ferry.’ Leon recounts how, after attending the funeral of a Turkish friend in Istanbul, he takes the ferry to cross the Golden Horn and is followed by a woman who walks next to him and leads him to a house. They make love, but when he awakens, she is gone. He looks for her and enters a dark room where five men sit silently, in apparent gloom. He suddenly has the feeling that he is overwhelmed by a cessation of time. With great effort, he leaves the room through a door and enters a garden, where he sees her standing, although he cannot reach her. He hears her voice: You are now part of me. You are a blissful memory. The only thing you might still find unsettling: except for that, you are no longer anything. In the world, you no longer exist. For the fact that you currently exist as you do, you may give thanks to the industrious substances of my thought processes. You now belong in my corona. You have entered in my time, and from now on you no longer have to concern yourself with any other existence.18 She tells him her life story: she is Mero, the daughter of a German diplomat living in Ankara and Istanbul, and she has developed the habit of conquering “lovers” who are in a “certain mood.”19 Leon, after this intense love experience, is completely under her control: You must imagine what transpired here: how the joy of having Mero in my arms collided with my intensely active grief, how both atoms of feeling abruptly fused with one another into a life amalgam, so highly excitable and so intense, that not even the most powerful act of will would suffice to ever split it again into its original constituents.20

16  Ibid., 217. 17  Ibid., 229. 18  Ibid., 161. 19  Ibid., 162. 20  Ibid., 163.

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He joins the silent men: Every one of us was now nothing more than embodied thought; we consisted of the exuberance of a memory, which she was keeping, and woe be! Should it ever be erased or even blocked for any length of time – there would no longer be us. We were the creatures of an everlasting hour. The time-dimension in which Mero had stored us was also our prison, this cell in which we would tirelessly persist from now on.21 This seems to him the essence of his existence: “In our innermost being all we ever collect are captivities, and from them we build the structure of our existence, from so many cast off cells, and every cramped passage, we know, is also a placenta, it bears us over and over again.”22 Through sheer willpower, Leon succeeds in breaking through an invisible barrier and reaching Mero as she was in her youth. He makes love to her, but they are interrupted by the older Mero. Now a reconciliation between the two Meros ensues, thanks to his “unyielding desires,”23 and slowly he is released from Mero’s memories. Recovered, he feels a new man: I found myself back in a life that was somehow richer than how I had actually lived it; in which there were admittedly many omissions, but many complete chapters too, and unnameable encounters and affirmations, of which I had not always been aware…. Now, for the first time, I became aware of being completely free and could sense that no one was heeding my presence in the least…. A convalesced consciousness, that’s what it was.24 The magnificent reunion causes the other men to regain their consciousness, too. Leon feels reborn, as if his relationship with reality is restored: “I, who know full well that in its raw form this substance called ‘reality’ is nothing more than one single radical change, an impossible alchemy, I now find a healthy pleasure in distinguishing among things according to fixed shapes and consistent contrasts.”25 Now he is “ready to allow myself to be infected with the joy of one who knows the whole truth.”26 21  Ibid. 22  Ibid., 164. 23  Ibid., 168. 24  Ibid., 168–169. 25  Ibid., 170. 26  Ibid.

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In the final story, Leon and Yossica, now a couple, visit the successful film director Ossia, who was Leon’s mentor, when he was a beginning director, but who fell prey to decadence and lethargy. He lives isolated in a futuristic tower, preserved for the rich and famous, and hopes to realize one final project to crown his career. Leon takes the offer into consideration, but decides that the project is worthless and that it is useless to try to redeem the old, dilapidated, artist. In the last chapter, in an environment of futuristic, decadent splendor that reflects the ultimate consequences of post-industrial, postmodernist, consumerist society, Leon summarizes and evaluates the themes of art, artistic inspiration, and artistic form and its social context. Der junge Mann and the Thousand and One Nights The only explicit reference to the Thousand and one nights in Der junge Mann is connected to ‘The woman on the ferry,’ the story told by Leon Pracht as his contribution to the discussion about post-war Germany, personal adventures, and possible visions of the future. This is not surprising, of course, since the story combines a number of motifs that recur in the Nights. Pracht is a traveler who ventures into an exotic land by crossing the border between East and West, Europe and Asia. While in a state of mental distress he is lured to a strange house by a beautiful woman, who, after making love, holds him in her power through a mysterious spell. In a closed space, several men whom she has also seduced, apathetically mourn the loss of their moment of bliss in her arms. Finally, by his willpower, the hero succeeds in breaking the spell, which has been cast over the men and himself, but also holds Mero in its grasp. Liberated, Leon resumes his life as a newborn man, initiated into love and the nature of women. This story is, in particular, the ‘Third qalandar’s tale,’ in which the hero meets a group of mourning men and is told their story: they feasted in a blissful palace full of young maidens, but were expelled because of their curiosity, they regret their stupidity for the rest of their lives.27 These parallels to the stories of the Thousand and one nights can be seen at the level of motifs, but also relate to the concept and structure of the novel, thus, they deepen the relationship between the two works. The story of Der junge Mann is not a linear, straightforward narrative in a well-defined spatiotemporal frame, but rather a series of tales that are thematically interconnected and enclosed within the first and last stories about Leon Pracht’s experiences with art. Within the stories, other stories are inserted to introduce the adventures of specific characters or to elaborate on specific ideas; 27  See Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:340–341.

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as in the Thousand and one nights, the fictional story is the best medium to present a vision, a notion, or an experience. Ultimately, the protagonists recuperate from traumatic events and ruptures through stories. If there is an essence in the story, it is the element of fictionality, which not only emphasizes the imaginative powers of the characters and the imaginary nature of the events they experience, but also reflects the complex relationship between art and reality. In postmodernity especially, experiences should be fictionalized, because their ‘reality’ is not only problematic, it probably obstructs the passage to possible trajectories toward the future. All the embedded stories are about initiations, possibly of various personifications of the character Leon Pracht, and they all refer to art, communication, and social change. All the trajectories of the heroes are interrupted suddenly, because they have entered a dead-end street, or because their vision of themselves, their situation or their relationship with others has become irrelevant. They are forced into sidetracks and diversions that lead them to strange, surreal landscapes, which open up hidden layers within themselves. As in many stories of the Thousand and one nights, the boundaries between the material surroundings and the physical and mental domains of the heroes become blurred, the landscape forces itself into the very soul and body of the characters, imposing a real-imagined reality that may be a reality in the future, in a disturbing experience of synchronicity. The heroes’ lives are deconstructed and subjected to overwhelming, alienating, outer forces, and the experience transforms them and prepares them to be integrated into a rapidly transforming world. The passage of time is the main mechanism at work in both the heroes and their narrative reflection. All the heroes are taken out of their familiar temporal frame and cast into a disorienting domain of the same time, which deregulates their sense of time and the (self-)images related to it. They physically and mentally lose control of themselves and, when they return to their usual consciousness, they have the feeling that they have internalized their destiny. They have undergone a metamorphosis, a catharsis, which has wrested their essence from their past selves and replaced it in their new selves. They all experience a stagnation of time, a spell in which time shows its true nature, outside the linear, compartmentalized schema of measurable time. It is in this no man’s land of same time that the past and future of the hero are (re-)connected, where stagnation is finally resolved, such that he is able to continue his journey. This pattern of transition through interruption and temporal disorder is reflected in the narrative itself, which from the beginning is not linear and coherent, but is marked by fragmentation, interruption, diversion, and

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ancillary streams. From the start, the flow of the narrative is connected to the flow of time, because narration is a means to control and manipulate time, to postpone the ending, and to derange its apparent linearity. Through narration the heroes’ lives are interrupted and confronted with the narrative possibilities hidden within time, in order not only to experience the true nature of time, but also to experience the images of the past and future which it contains, sometimes in symbolic, almost Freudian, form. The narrative reconnects the heroes with a subconscious state, in which time has a different nature; it enables them to understand the ruptures in their lives. This can be achieved through rationalization, de-rationalization, the force of desire, or, ultimately, the power of love. The fact that narratives play such a crucial role in the lives and adventures of the heroes implies a prominent role for the narrator/artist, who is the catalyst of the transformations related to our time experiences that connect individuals to the historical processes surrounding them. It is the narrator who creates interruptions and stagnations, which in the end enable us to be transformed and to continue. It is the narrator who restores our connection with our past by manipulating time and proposing new forms of unity. After all, it is the lack of unity, the lack of forces to counter disruption, that causes our sense of alienation in the postmodern condition. Spiritual harmony with our surroundings can counter the feeling of disconnectedness and fragmentation that postmodern society impose on us. There is a form of continuity, which transcends our comprehension, but which, if acknowledged, is crucial for our survival. For Botho Strauss, the author’s effort to manipulate, adapt, and perhaps restore the awareness of time is relevant not only for individuals, to enable them to remain connected to their past; but it is also vital for German society to come to terms with its complex history and reinvent a link with its pre-war tradition. This is the only way to proceed to a meaningful future that is not governed by dystopian forms of fragmentation. Strauss’s novel Der junge Mann is a complex critique of postmodernist and post-capitalist society as it developed in Germany after World War II. This critique is, on the one hand, directed at the choices made after the war ended, but on the other hand, it emphasizes the way in which the war is still present in German society, as a historical burden that ‘imprisons’ German thought and prevents a proper connection with the pre-war cultural tradition. In this sense, Strauss’s concerns echo those of Ernst Jünger, who deplored the disenchantment of society and was fascinated with post-apocalyptic dystopias. It is these echoes of right-wing, conservative thought that make the novel, and Strauss’s work more generally, provocative and controversial.

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Haruki Murakami and the Constraints of Time

In her book on Haruki Murakami (b. 1949), Rebecca Suter hesitates to categorize the work of the famous Japanese author as ‘postmodern.’ According to her, critics who label his novels postmodern fail to consider his use of typically modernist literary strategies, such as his play with foreign language and with the Japanese writing system … his distrust of the ability of language to represent and communicate, his stress on the arbitrariness and deceptiveness of the linguistic sign, or his use of “fragments of Western culture” as a means to hold back chaos.28 She argues that Murakami’s works ‘oscillate’ between the stances of modernism and postmodernism, the first marked by “epistemological doubt, which interrogates the possibility of knowing the world,” the latter by “ontological doubt, which questions the world’s very realness.”29 Furthermore, Suter continues, Murakami cannot easily be typified as belonging to the current of magical realism, in spite of his recurrent references to ‘supernatural’ phenomena, since “unlike Latin American writers, who associate the use of the supernatural with specific political statements, ‘Murakami’s use of magical realism, while closely linked with the quest of identity, is not the least bit involved with the assertion of identity.’ ”30 Rather Murakami’s concerns should be seen as a critique of the suppression of individual identity within society. Apart from the question of whether Suter’s definition of magical realism is adequate,31 her discussion of Murakami’s literary affiliation shows how difficult it is to classify his works in established generic parameters. Of course, it is among the tasks of writers to explore and defy the boundaries of literary types defined by critics, and Murakami would probably be pleased with the confusion he causes. 28  Rebecca Suter, The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki Between Japan and the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 5. 29  Ibid., 5–6. 30  Quotation from Matthew Stretcher, “Magical Realism and the Search for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki,” Journal of Japanese Studies 25 no. 2 (Summer 1999), 279, in Suter, The Japanization of Modernity, 13. 31  Compare Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang (eds.), A Companion to Magical Realism; Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (eds.), Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995); and Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004); and see below, chapter 12.

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The difficulties of categorization perhaps relate to the specific characteristics of Japanese modernism. Although from the second half of the nineteenth century Japan experienced the same rapid and far-reaching changes that took place in other parts of the world, such as the rise of modern technology and communication media, new forms of cosmopolitanism, and the incorporation into the capitalist world economy, there was, of course, a specific Japanese cultural heritage that had to be integrated into a vision of modernity. The tension between that heritage and modernity or perhaps more correctly their gradual amalgamation, gave rise to a sense of crisis, of cultural displacement, and of the fragmentation of identities. This was countered by what is, somewhat quaintly, called the ‘internal colonization’ of Japan, that is, its colonization of itself to foster the process of modernization and industrialization; it is a situation reminiscent of the predicament of modern Turkey, as we observed in chapter 2. In literature, this process can be perceived in the breakdown of formal boundaries, the disintegration of the self, and experiments with modern expressions of subjectivity.32 It will be clear by now that a work such as the Thousand and one nights is particularly at home in a turbulent and destabilized literary environment like the one depicted above. In this chapter, we investigate the ways in which the work of Murakami was influenced and perhaps even inspired by the Thousand and one nights, which induced him to develop his particular brand of ‘magical realism,’ his way of mixing the marvelous and the real. More specifically, we concentrate on the way in which his heroes are sent out to discover the nature of identity, self, and individual agency, which is a major concern not only of Murakami’s novels, but also of Japanese (post-)modernism and, as we have seen, of several stories of the Thousand and one nights. In our discussion, we focus on two novels, Hardboiled wonderland and the end of the world and Kafka on the shore,33 to assess the ways in which Murakami explores the interaction between various levels or experiences of time and how he connects these to history and the idea of ‘internal colonization.’ But first we must determine how Murakami used the Thousand and one nights as a general source of inspiration and how the theme of the protagonist’s individual agency plays a dominant role.

32  Suter, The Japanization of Modernity, 24–25. 33  References are to the English translations: Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, trans. Alfred Birnbaum (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), and Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, trans. Philip Gabriel (New York: Vintage Books, 2005).

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Murakami and the Thousand and One Nights In Murakami’s major novels, four explicit references to the Thousand and one nights can be found: in Norwegian wood (1987), one of the protagonists is likened to Shahrazad; in Hardboiled wonderland (1985), the bird Rukhkh is mentioned; in The wind-up bird chronicle (1994–5), the figure of Aladdin is evoked; and in Kafka on the shore (2002), the hero reads the Burton translation of the Thousand and one nights. These references show Murakami’s familiarity with Shahrazad’s tales; in addition, a closer inspection reveals a structural affinity between the narrative worlds of Murakami and the Nights. This does not mean that all parallels between the various narratives are the result of direct influences, since, as we see below, other influences are at work as well. However, it does indicate how neatly narrative patterns and characteristics of the Thousand and one nights fit into narratives exploring literary boundaries. To give an impression of the significance of the work for Murakami, the following passage from Kafka on the shore deserves to be quoted in full: The Burton edition has all the stories I remember reading as a child, but they’re longer, with more episodes and plot twists, and so much more absorbing that it’s hard to believe they’re the same. They’re full of obscene, violent, sexual, basically outrageous scenes. Like the genie in the bottle they have this sort of vital, living sense of play, of freedom, that common sense can’t keep bottled up. I love it and can’t let go. Compared to those faceless hordes of people rushing through the train station, these crazy, preposterous stories of a thousand years ago are, at least to me, much more real. How that’s possible I don’t know…. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I’m alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.34 Although here it is Kafka, the hero of the story, who relates his experience reading the Thousand and one nights, it is hard not to see Murakami’s own experience shining through, especially the way the passage is rather conspicuously inserted into the text. A key parallel between Murakami’s work and the Thousand and one nights, one we are by now familiar with from other texts, is the technique of selfreferentiality, in which a complex relationship between text and reality is created. Reality essentially consists of narratives; stories are not produced by facts, but by words and language. Or, in the words of Suter: “Stories underline their own textual nature, while at the same time hinting at the fact that language can 34  Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 60, 62.

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create realities, that reality is linguistically constructed. Words become stories, and stories produce realities.”35 This form of self-referentiality has two fundamental functions. First, self-referentiality creates a diffuse boundary between the imagination and reality – as in the case of the Thousand and one nights – and often leads to confusion about the metaphoric value of events. A useful example can be seen in Murakami’s story ‘A poor aunt’s story,’ in which the ‘poor aunt’ grows on the protagonist’s back. When asked about this strange protrusion, the hero answers that it is merely a phrase, ‘poor aunt,’ without meaning or form, only a conceptual sign assuming material reality.36 The world is narrativized, as a system of signs that sometimes takes on the apparition of reality. Second, as in the Thousand and one nights, Murakami produces a composite text with various layers. This occurs especially through the many references to written texts, mostly western novels, but also letters, reports, articles in newspapers, etc. These references and quotations are clearly meant to break up the narrative continuum and show the ‘three-dimensionality’ of the narrated events, but they also serve as crossing points between fantasy and reality, or between different realities. One example is the heroine who reads Anna Karenina in the story ‘Sleep.’ In her analysis of this story, Suter states: “Literature in this text constitutes an ‘other world’ that allows the narrator to distance the reality in which she lives, and acquire greater awareness of herself as an individual.”37 And, “The protagonist constitutes herself as a subject through foreign literature.”38 This, of course, echoes the procedure used by Shahrazad to manipulate Shahriyar’s personality. It is not only the function of ‘storytelling’ itself which is effective here, it is also the fracturing of a one-dimensional reality, the necessity of experiencing a fundamental duality, which, in the case of ‘Sleep,’ is eliminated by the protagonist’s insomnia. A second example can be seen in the way in which written texts are inserted into the narrative of The wind-up bird chronicle: the letters sent by the evasive fifteen-year-old May Kasahara, who seems to belong to another reality; the newspaper clippings about the events regarding the house next door, which locates the events in ‘objective’ reality; and the adventures of Lieutenant Mamiya in Manchuria as a soldier in the Japanese army, all represent the way in which the present is embedded in the past, or perhaps more accurately, the way in which the past is embedded in the present. These instances indicate that although the narrated events seem to hail from a one-dimensional, often claustrophobic and 35  Suter, The Japanization of Modernity, 82. 36  Quoted in ibid., 145. 37  Ibid., 140. 38  Ibid., 142.

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haunted environment, other points of view still exist, and provide different perspectives and sometimes explanations. This is also one of the main functions of the textual differentiation in the Thousand and one nights. The example of the Manchurian adventure and the way in which it represents a key to the interpretation of the novel, suggest that past events were not only influential in shaping the present, but that in fact they still exist in the present and still have sufficient ‘power’ to interfere with the course of events. The story is part of a parallel reality that is still active in the present and that partly overlaps with the hero’s experience of present reality. When it becomes visible, it sometimes contains the clues by which we can understand current events. Although, for the most part, these parallel worlds have a temporal dimension, they are often located in space, or at least accessible at certain places, such as the villa in the remote mountains in The wild sheep chase, the Dolphin Hotel in Dance, dance, dance, which is especially constructed to preserve the hero’s contact with the ‘other’ world; the well that gives access to the hotel room where Kumiko is held captive in The wind-up bird chronicle, etc. These places represent the interface between the various worlds that invisibly constitute our composite reality, in a way similar to many episodes in the Thousand and one nights. Finally, most of the narratives of Murakami’s novels take the form of a quest. The characters are rather inconspicuous people who, through circumstances apparently beyond their control, are rendered passive, while at the same time they are caught in some mysterious intrigue that forces them to set out on an adventurous journey. The protagonist must carry out an assignment or is prompted to go in search of someone, and thus assumes the role of a detective who has to solve a mystery. As the world is presented as a system of symbols, metaphors, and signs, this task takes on a hermeneutic quality that conflates the roles of the hero as a detective and a writer, someone who interprets, explains, and finds hidden meanings, rather than someone who is imprisoned and victimized by the inexplicability of the events surrounding him. The hero is taken out of his daily routine, as an average, nameless citizen, and takes his life in his own hands; he is propelled to achieve some extraordinary aim, which is tied to his person, and which, in the meantime, allows him to explore the secrets of his identity – secrets that are hidden within himself. It is no coincidence that one of the references to the Thousand and one nights in Kafka on the shore explicitly mentions the story of ‘Abu Muhammad hight Lazybones,’39 in which an incorrigible sluggard – when he sleeps under a tree he even refuses to move his body to follow the shade of the tree – is forced 39  Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 42.

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to go on a journey and, after many adventures, rescues a maiden who is held captive by an evil jinn who has cast a magic spell.40 The pattern of this story is followed quite accurately in The wind-up bird chronicle, where Kumiko is abducted and held captive in a hotel room by her malicious brother Wataya. The hotel room is an enchanted space, and the hero not only must find an entrance to this parallel world, through labyrinthine peregrinations, but he must also effectively break the spell. Although in other stories the resemblance is less evident, the same pattern can be discerned in The wild sheep chase, Dance, dance, dance, and Sputnik love as well: the hero awakens from his lethargy, departs on a journey, and explores what seem to be enchanted spaces. All these journeys are essentially explorations of the mechanisms of society and life as a whole, but they also, as we see, involve explorations of the hero’s inner self. As noted, these quests have a distinctive temporal component, and contrast the stagnancy of the status quo ante with the resumption of time after the departure of the hero and the final harmonization between time and place. The parallels between these structural and thematic aspects of the Thousand and one nights and Murakami’s novels point, especially, to a recurrent type of story which is similar to the aforementioned story of ‘Abu Muhammad hight Lazybones,’ that is, the various kinds of romances. In these stories a prince or a merchant’s son leaves his home to find his beloved, whom he eventually locates and wins over after a long and hazardous search. As in the medieval European romances of this kind, these stories usually portray the hero’s growth to adulthood; he must explore the world in order to define his position in society. This conforms to what is usually seen as one of the main themes of Murakami’s work in general: the construction of individual identity in contemporary Japan.41 Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World It is perhaps no coincidence that one of the main debates in modern Japanese literature concentrates on the question of individual subjectivity. In traditional Japanese literature, there was no notion of individual identity. Under the influence of western literature, authors from and after the Meiji period at the end of the nineteenth century posed the problem of individuality and this gave rise to the idea of literature as a means for self-expression. This trend, which took form in the genre of ‘confessional literature,’ emerged from a cognitive revolution that was characterized by a Japanese critic as the ‘discovery 40  See Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:71–72: ‘Abu Muhammad hight Lazybones’. 41  Suter, The Japanization of Modernity, 163–164.

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of landscape,’ under the influence of western modes of thought. This term, in the words of Suter, implies the “birth of a separation between a knowing subject and a known object,” and the consequent ‘discovery’ of a landscape outside the self. This was paralleled by a “discovery of interiority”: “it is only through the birth of a subject possessing interiority that external reality is perceived as such and vice versa.”42 As we see below, Murakami resisted this idea, promoted by Japanese modernism, that literature was a means of self-expression, and in his work, he attempts to find a new approach to the notion of subjectivity. The procedure he adopts to achieve this seems to resemble the narrative concept of the romances of the Thousand and one nights, which, with their underlying ambiguity about the nature of individualism and its relationship with society, seems to have fit well into his intentions. The problem of individuality, and its potential to manifest itself, is prominent throughout Murakami’s work. It is dealt with explicitly in the novel Hardboiled wonderland and the end of the world, which was published in 1991. The story of the novel is composed of two narrative levels, one situated in a futuristic, but narratologically ‘real’ world, and one in an imaginary world named ‘the End of the World.’ The hero is a so-called ‘Calcutec,’ that is, a professional who performs the secret decoding of digital information, for which his mind is specifically programmed. He is hired by a professor whose laboratory is hidden in a peculiar subterranean space, and who works on experiments with brain manipulation. The second level of the story is situated in a mysterious dream-city surrounded by walls and guards; the hero – eventually revealed to be the same person as the hero of the first level – enters this city. But before being allowed to enter, he must leave his shadow behind at the gate. He is assigned the task to remove dreams from unicorn skulls in the city’s library. It appears that the souls of those who remain in the city are transposed into unicorns; they then live peacefully forever, but without a will and spirit of their own. On the first level, the hero is pursued by the illegal organization of the Semi­ otecs, who are after the secret information that is processed by the Calcutecs. The professor has fled into a kind of underworld to escape from them, and reveals to the hero that he has used his brain for an experiment, and created a passage into the various circuits that produce the fantasies about the ‘End of the World.’ The hero, however, perceives his existence in both realms as a reality. The hero is the only one who has survived the experiment, but something has gone wrong and he is unable to close the shortcut in his brain and return to 42  Ibid., 26.

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his real life. If the shortcut is not closed within 29 hours, the hero will die in his real life, but live on eternally in the ‘End of the World.’ In the remaining time, the hero waits to die or be saved from his predicament. In the meantime, on the second level the hero gradually explores the city and penetrates its secret. He develops a relationship with the girl who supervises the library, but since emotions (together with the individual soul) have been banned from the city, the relationship lacks any feeling of love, happiness or sadness. The people who retained part of their personalities live a marginal existence in the woods. During his explorations, the hero’s shadow, separated from its owner, slowly pines away, so the hero conceives a plan to abduct his shadow and flee with it from the city in order to reconquer his former self. By now the reader understands that the hero’s escape would redeem the hero on the first level of the story. In the end, however, the hero lets his shadow escape, but remains in the imaginary domain, because he realizes that the ‘End of the World’ is a creation of his own imagination, for which he must take responsibility. He resigns himself to leading his life in the ‘End of the World,’ and hopes that he will be able to reunite his two lives. As in most of Murakami’s novels, in Hardboiled wonderland, the author uses very few names and spatial indications, so as to remove the referential orientations from the definition of identities. The heroes are indicated as watashi (‘I’), in the real world, referring to a person with self-awareness, and the more general boku (‘I’), in the ‘End of the World.’ This immediately suggests that the story is about the relationship between two ‘selves’ that are situated in different semi-real settings, one is real but transient, the other is unreal but eternal. This dichotomy does not imply a spatial division, however. Since both identities are the result of surgical manipulations of the brain, the heroes are not, in any real sense, attached to their spatial environment, which consists of diffuse, dislodged, and disoriented settings. Both selves and their realms are primarily located in the hero’s mind. In the story, the professor explains to the hero that his complex reality was created. He compares his inner self to a ‘black box,’ which contains the memory structure of a person and in which all experiences and memories are recorded, to form what may be called an ‘individual’ identity. The experiment was designed to determine what would happen if the information in the black box were fixed in a certain point in time, such that it prevented new experiences and memories from changing the shape of the identity preserved in it. This would imply that a specific visualization of identity and life could be stored and opened at any time, creating two cognitive systems in one and the same person, one of which would be fixed in time. In the case of the hero, it was the visualization of the ‘story’ of the ‘End of the World’ which was fixed and eter-

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nalized in his black box, and because of the defective operation, it is ultimately the only reality that is left for him. Perhaps it will not be the same as immortality, rather it will be a continuous, ‘asymptotic’ trajectory to immortality.43 While on the first level the definition of the ‘I’ remains ambiguous, on the second level it is clear that the hero must cast off his ‘I’ and externalize it in the unicorns. This is effectuated by his separation from his shadow, which is left to languish and die. In exchange, the hero receives a life without death, without grief, without memories. A life in full harmony, without fear. The only condition is that he let his identity perish. But he also cannot experience joy or love. Life in the ‘End of the World’ is not death, it is eternal life, compared to which the real world is only a brief illusion.44 In the ‘End of the World’ there is no time and this, apparently, is where the essence of every sense of identity lies: an identity can only exist in a temporal environment that is liable to change. Every awareness of individuality is linked to the passage of time, and thereby to contingency, and the ultimate prospect of death. Although there is only one small explicit reference to the Thousand and one nights in Hardboiled wonderland, several structural parallels present themselves. First, of course, the alternation of chapters between the two levels of the narrative brings to mind the frame structure of the Thousand and one nights, with its two-level interaction between a realistic frame story and the invented embedded stories. In Hardboiled wonderland, we find the same dichotomy, which is emphasized by the contrast between the dark, nightly ambience in the ‘End of the World’ and the daylight in ‘Hardboiled wonderland.’ Second, as in the Thousand and one nights, this alternation and the interaction between the two levels is tied to an ultimatum. If the hero fails to discover the secret of his ‘double’ identity and does not succeed in preventing his enclosure in one of his cognitive circuits, he is doomed to die. This implies that the two levels of the narrative can potentially interfere with the course of events in the other: whereas Shahrazad uses her imagination to postpone her death, the hero in Hardboiled wonderland depends on his ability to ‘imagine’ his escape from the ‘End of the World.’ Conversely, if he remains in the imagined realm, he will acquire immortality. Both narratives, then, are conceived as a battle between fantasy and reality, or perhaps more accurately, as an effort to integrate the two realms. The hero of Hardboiled wonderland was saved, according to his professor, because of his strong imagination and his ability to structure his own images into a story – this is exactly the strategy Shahrazad uses to survive. However, while 43  Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland, 285. 44  Ibid., 290.

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Shahrazad succeeds in transforming the realm of reality by the force of her imagination, the hero of Hardboiled wonderland is ultimately imprisoned in his imagined world. His imagination is so powerful that it absorbs his life and remains his only reality. Whereas Shahrazad is redeemed from her identityless liminal state by imbuing reality with the power of her fantasy, the hero of Hardboiled wonderland gains eternal life, but only after losing his identity vested in his physical reality. Whereas Shahrazad releases herself from a stagnated time frame to return to the regular passage of time, the hero of Hardboiled wonderland is removed from the regular passage of time and enters the eternity, or stagnancy, of imagined time. The conclusion of the novel is pessimistic about the possibility of asserting a certain self-awareness both in reality and in the imagination. It seems that in the end the hero has become reconciled with his new, imagined, identity and, moreover, that this discovery has turned him into someone who is capable of making decisions and acting according to them. He bravely states that he has to stay in the ‘End of the World,’ because he is responsible for what he has created and must bear the consequences of his acts. However, his hope that he will regain an awareness of his former self suggests that this decision is not the result of him asserting himself, or of the euphoria of a complete sense of identity, but rather that the story is trying to find or construct an identity and thereby start all over again, or perhaps it is unending, and the newly found sense of self is still incomplete. The interaction between the two realms continues eternally, because it provides the dualism that makes the awareness of a potential identity possible. The possibility of a synthesis is apparently denied by the shadow’s answer, that he will never find himself as long as he is unable to step out of his own mind. At the end of the novel the difference is that the hero has changed his vantage point: He will engage in the struggle not from the real world, but from the world existing in his imagination only. Kafka on the Shore In Hardboiled wonderland Murakami sets the parameters for his discussion about the nature of identity and self-awareness. The construction of identity is – necessarily – embedded in unstable spatiotemporal settings, it emerges from a continuous interaction between real and imagined worlds, and it is ultimately related to the question, to what extent is man able to act freely and willfully. In Kafka on the shore – as in Hardboiled wonderland – two storylines are set up, then converge at a certain point. In the main narrative, the fifteenyear-old Kafka Tamura decides to leave his home, where he lives with his father since his mother and his sister left when he was four. He leaves home because of his father’s prediction that Kafka will kill him and sleep with his

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mother and sister. To escape from this ‘curse,’ Kafka sets out into the world. He settles in a remote town, where he ‘hides’ himself in a small library, under the protection of the young girl Oshima, who works in the library, and Ms. Saeki, its director. The second narrative line springs forth from an incident in 1948, in which a class of schoolchildren on a trip to the countryside suddenly fall prey to a strange, inexplicable, fit of unconsciousness, from which they eventually recover. One of the victims, called Nakata, suffers the effects of the incidents for the rest of his life. He becomes a dumb, ‘empty’ person who knows nothing, but who is able to communicate with cats and who is equipped with supernatural powers. At the beginning of the novel he kills a mysterious, ghost-like man, who kills cats to collect their souls. After this gruesome experience when Nakata kills the man, he departs on a journey, but without knowing where he is going. Finally, he is taken by a truck driver to Tamakatsu, the town where Kafka has ended up. In the meantime, Kafka becomes closer to Oshima and Ms. Saeki. He discovers that when she was fifteen, Ms. Saeki had been in love with a young man who was tragically killed. Since the boy personified her destiny, after he died she lived as a deficient person. Gradually, Kafka falls in love with her, or more correctly, with a specter of her as a fifteen-year-old girl, and has sex with her. Kafka increasingly loses his grip on reality, especially when he awakens one morning in the bushes, covered with blood, and hears that his father was murdered in Tokyo on the very same night. Moreover, in his dream he makes love to Sakura, a girl whom he met on his way to Tamakatsu. He now starts to wonder whether he is not in fact, unwillingly and unconsciously, enacting the curse of his father. Did he murder his father? Is Ms. Saeki his mother and is Sakura his sister? He finds out that it is not impossible that Ms. Saeki has known his father, but it may be that his mind has molded his experiences according to the curse. At one point Oshima takes Kafka to a remote cottage in a forest. Kafka roams through the forest and day by day ventures further from the cottage, until one day he meets two guardians who take him to a kind of underworld where people live as spirits. He meets the fifteen-year-old Ms. Saeki and finds out that she entered this realm when she was fifteen to be with her beloved, and for that she was punished for the rest of her life. It appears that Nakata, with his special powers, has been given the task of turning a ‘magical’ stone to open the entrance to the underworld for Kafka. The entrance must be closed again and Kafka has to leave this timeless realm before the stone is turned back. It becomes clear that the incident of 1948 was caused by Ms. Saeki’s trespassing in the underworld, and after Kafka’s excursion, she dies peacefully, after giving him a painting of ‘Kafka on the

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shore’ – which represents her former lover – and saying “You were there. And I was there beside you.”45 Kafka can now resume his normal life. The narrative of Kafka on the shore is presented, quite explicitly, as a story of a quest for the self, for an individual identity, and its relationship with personal freedom and responsibility. Because of the way it is constructed around the notion of the Oedipus complex and the process of individuation, it can be characterized as a Freudian novel. The narrative structure is based on the format of a Greek tragedy and the quest stories in the Thousand and one nights, both of which are referred to in the novel. The beginning of the novel sets the tone: Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing direction. You can change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of storm you need to imagine.46 These words are spoken by Crow, who later turns out to be the alter ego of the hero, who summons Crow to undertake certain actions and comments on Crow’s thoughts. It is later explained that Kafka means ‘crow’ in Czech. It is Crow who incites Kafka to embark upon his journey. From the beginning of the novel, the nature of Kafka’s journey is unclear. Is it an attempt to escape from the prediction of his father? Or is it a quest, an attempt to find a lost identity, a place in life, a beloved, his mother? This duality is reflected in the duality between Kafka and Crow: one is primarily frightened and anxious, the other is courageous and willful. What is clear is that it is necessary for Kafka to depart, in order to loosen the bonds that tie him to his present situation, and to embark on the transformation of ‘something’ indefinite. Although in the course of the journey both the reasons for his escape and the ‘objects’ he seeks become more sharply defined, the aim of the journey remains ambiguous, like Kafka’s own agency is, in the events during his peregrinations. He seems to be fleeing from his father, but, as a prisoner 45  Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 461. 46  Ibid., 5.

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of the DNA he inherited from his parents, he also feels, at a certain point, that he is following a predetermined road, that all his actions were planned by his father, and that the prediction was in fact meant to send him on an expedition to fulfill his father’s desire. The ambiguity inherent in Kafka’s journey is enhanced by the gradual dislodging of the frameworks of space and time, by the amalgamation of dream and reality, and visions and inexplicable events, all of which eventually culminates in a systematic interaction between the real and supernatural worlds. This interaction not only takes the form of dreams and visions, but is also personified by various kinds of ‘helpers.’ An example is Colonel Sanders, who appears before Hoshina – Nakata’s helper – to lead him to the magical stone, and who defines himself as an ‘appearance’ (he has no name, or form, or character) who is guarding the passage of time: I’m a kind of overseer, supervising something to make sure it fulfils its original role. Checking the correlation between different worlds, making sure things are in the right order. So results follow causes and meanings don’t get all mixed up. So the past comes before the present, the future after it …47 He is not compelled to judge people or actions, and is not bound by the obligation to obey the standards of good and evil: “I’m a metaphysical, conceptual object. I can take on any form, but I lack substance. And to perform a real act, I need someone with substance to help out.”48 He is like a jinn, an interfering force, charged with co-ordinating and supervising the course of events within their time regime, but dependent on man for the actual execution of his task. Another kind of helper appears in the form of the two girls whom Kafka meets on his journey, Sakura and Oshima. Both help him in a practical sense, by offering him an abode and advice. But they seem to be connected with the supernatural realms that penetrate Kafka’s life and mind after his departure. Sakura appears in his dreams and may well be the personification of Kafka’s lost sister, while Oshima seems to have some knowledge of the invisible forces that surround Kafka in his predicament. Without fully initiating him, she protects Kafka and guides him toward the possible aim of his journey, introduces him to Ms. Saeki and her past, discusses the questions that come up, and takes him to the places where the different realms touch each other, and where Kafka’s fate is decisively affected. She is an ‘amorphous’ person who has no 47  Ibid., 297. 48  Ibid., 297.

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clearly defined identity and who, in fact, struggles to create states of ambiguity and diffuseness. Whereas Colonel Sanders is a supernatural force operating partly in the real world, Oshima is a real person in touch with the forces of the supernatural. But both are fluid characters without clear shapes. The most prominent helper in the story is of course Nakata. As the story unfolds, the reader learns that he is the person who opens the space for the denouement to take place. And although his role remains vague for a long time, it becomes increasingly clear that he is the person who not only links the seemingly dispersed events in the story, but is also linked to every element of Kafka’s journey and ultimate destiny. His position is somewhere between Colonel Sanders and Oshima: He is a human being, but empty of its contents and completely amalgamated with the realm of the supernatural. He has no personality, no knowledge, no consciousness of good or bad, no will, no indication where he is heading. He is steered and completely acquiesces in being led. As a ‘phenomenon’ he originated from the incident in 1948, as a kind of freak remainder of an illicit act, destined to be used as an instrument to repair the damage done in that incident. He is an instrument at the disposal of destiny, waiting in a state of liminality until the time comes to fulfill his task. When his task is complete, he dies, as if his existence is superfluous or he merely disappears because his reason for existing disappears. Nakata is not only a link between the two different realms, two different ‘spatial’ worlds, but also between two different temporal realms. He is the product of an event in the past and lives on to preserve the forces created by that event and to carry them into the future in order to make it possible for the past to interfere in the later course of events. As such, he is also Ms. Saeki’s helper, as he enables her to reach her destiny, and frees her from her ambivalent status. Thus, he represents the link between the fates of Ms. Saeki and Kafka, fates whose connection otherwise remains obscure, because although there are many indications that their lives are interwoven, both in the ‘real’ and in the supernatural world, this is never established as a fact. It is as if these connections are only suggested, as if there is a fluid space that reverts to the anomalous dilemmas of various people, to exploit the forces there to solve their predicaments, thereby linking their destinies to those of others. Ultimately, the helpers’ aim is to enable Kafka to – physically – move between the different realms. In Tamakatsu, Kafka is able to meet Ms. Saeki as a fifteen-year-old girl; he is able to ‘kill’ his father without being conscious of it; and he is able to have sex with Sakura in a dream. In all of these cases the demarcations between reality and illusion are unclear. He has the feeling that he is in love with an unreal person, living in another place and another time,

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but at the same time she is the real Ms. Saeki.49 When he makes love to her, all boundaries disappear. In contrast, Sakura appears to him as a real person: “ ‘This might sound strange, but you’re living in the real world, breathing real air, speaking real words. Talking to you makes me feel, for the time being, connected to reality. And that’s really important to me now.’ ”50 However, he makes love to her in a dream. Finally, Kafka’s father is killed by Nakata in a fantastic hallucination – personified by the cat-killer – after which Kafka, in Tamakatsu, awakens covered with blood. Kafka thus travels between spaces and times, without knowing how to control the events that he passes through, or even realizing the nature of the relationship between these events and himself. He just has the feeling that he does what he must do.51 At a certain point Oshima explains to him: “There’s another world that parallels our own, and to a certain degree you’re able to step into that other world and come back safely. As long as you’re careful. But go past a certain point and you’ll lose the path out. It’s a labyrinth.”52 It is this notion, of the labyrinth, that contains the various dimensions of Kafka’s journey. As soon as Kafka starts his journey, he is confronted with a labyrinthine world, built up of different places and times, real and unreal persons, indications and inner drives, in which he must find his way, knowing neither where he goes nor why he entered it. It is a labyrinth that spills over into his inner self and, as Oshima explains, the labyrinth in the other world is a seemingly impenetrable system of signs; in fact, it is a projection of one’s intestines, integrating physical reality and its representation. The labyrinth is “ ‘… a reciprocal metaphor. Things outside you are projections of what’s inside you, and what’s inside you is a projection of what’s outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you’re stepping into the labyrinth inside.’”53 This convergence of the inner and outer labyrinths, precisely symbolized by the forest that Kafka walks through, breaks down the last boundaries between reality and unreality. What is inside you shapes reality outside you and vice versa: “The more you think about illusions, the more they’ll swell up and take on form. And no longer be an illusion.”54

49  Ibid., 291–293, 306. 50  Ibid., 290. 51  Ibid., 360. 52  Ibid., 366. 53  Ibid. 54  Ibid., 401.

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Love, in particular, holds Kafka captive in his temporal labyrinth: You’re in love with a girl who is no more, jealous of a boy who’s gone forever. Even so, this emotion you’re feeling is more real, and more intensely painful, than anything you’ve ever felt before. And there’s no way out. No possibility of finding an exit. You’ve wandered into a labyrinth of time, and the biggest problem of all is that you have no desire at all to get out.55 This connection seems to be a re-enactment of Ms. Saeki’s efforts to salvage the love of her youth, by defying the laws of time and preserving her beloved over the boundary of death: When I was fifteen, all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody’s reach. A place beyond the flow of time. But there is no place like that in this world. Exactly. Which is why I’m living here, in this world, where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break…. But you know … when I was fifteen, I thought there had to be a place like that in the world. I was sure that somewhere I’d run across the entrance that would take me to that other world…. I wanted to go to some place where there was no time.56 It is through this rash action that Ms. Saeki ‘splits’ into two persons, one continuing in a zombie-like existence in normal reality, and one, as we find out eventually, as a spirit of her fifteen-year-old self in the other realm. It is by fulfilling his destiny within the complexity created by Ms. Saeki’s ‘crossing over’ that Kafka achieves a reunification of her two selves. He is able to do this because he personifies both her son and a reincarnation of her former lover, and thus enables her to re-enact her previous love and thereby overcome the traumatic experience of the separation from her beloved. In a Freudian interpretation, Kafka represents the ‘return of the repressed’; he forces Ms. Saeki to come to terms with the past and end her ‘liminal’ situation, between life and death, reality and unreality. She warns Kafka not to repeat her mistake: “ ‘You must be stronger and more independent than I am. At your age I was filled with illusions of escaping reality, but you’re standing right up to the real world and confronting it head-on.’”57 55  Ibid., 253. 56  Ibid., 257. 57  Ibid.

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It is this strength that Kafka attempts to gather during his journey; it is a strength that seems to be linked to his identity and to his ability to control the events that occur to him: All kinds of things are happening to me…. Some I chose, some I didn’t. I don’t know how to tell one from the other anymore. What I mean is, it feels like everything’s been decided in advance – that I’m following a path somebody else has already mapped out for me. It doesn’t matter how much I think things over, how much effort I put into it. In fact, the harder I try, the more I lose my sense of who I am. It’s like my identity’s like an orbit that I’ve strayed away from, and that really hurts. But more than that, it scares me.58 This is the perspective of Kafka, the scared, fleeing boy, who is accompanied by his more courageous alter ego Crow, with whom he wants to become one: So I have to make it on my own. I have to get stronger like a stray crow. That’s why I gave myself the name Kafka. That’s what Kafka means in Czech, you know – crow…. The strength I’m looking for isn’t the kind where you win or lose. I’m not after a wall that’ll repel power coming from outside. What I want is the kind of strength to be able to absorb that outside power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things – unfairness, misfortune, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.59 During his stay in the remote cottage he gathers the courage to venture into the forest deeper every day and simultaneously, these experiences accumulate, and gradually reach a point of culmination. This occurs when he makes love to Sakura in a dream, and an egg-like presence inside his body seems to burst open, at first appearing as a formless ‘sign,’ but at the same time as a fleshy substance. When it finally appears, there is blood on his hands, but it is too dark to see anything, both ‘inside and out.’ Thus, the lovemaking culminates in a kind of ‘birth’ inside himself, which he can observe with his eyes turned inward, without being able to see what it really is that is born. After this experience, which fulfills the third part of the prophecy, since Sakura now ‘admits’ that she is his sister, Kafka hopes that he is freed from the ‘curse’ and will finally be able to become himself. He does not want to be subjected to things outside him, to be ‘thrown into confusion’ by things he cannot 58  Ibid., 209. 59  Ibid., 330.

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control. He wants to face the true nature of his ordeal and remove it from his life: “If there is a curse in all this, I mean to grab it by the horns and fulfill the program that’s been laid out for me. Lift the burden from my shoulders and live – not caught up in someone else’s schemes, but as me. That’s what I really want.”60 However, now that the curse has been effectuated, it seems to bring no relief, no solution. It seems that the curse is part of his innermost self, of his DNA, and he wonders more than ever who he is: There’s a void inside me, a blank that’s slowly expanding, devouring what’s left of who I am. I can hear it happening. I’m totally lost, my identity dying. There is no direction where I am…. What is it inside me that makes up me? Is this what’s supposed to stand up to the void?61 The wrath and fear are still inside him, as if he is doomed to eternally murder his father and violate his sister and his mother, as if only this continuous act can fill the emptiness inside him, as if the continuous enactment of the curse is his real identity. In the final episode, Kafka ventures into the woods without fear and enters the ‘other’ domain, where he meets the spirit of the fifteen-year-old Ms. Saeki. Here Ms. Saeki is forever fifteen, she lives forever without a memory, totally herself, in harmony with her environment. It is clear that this blissful abode is the realm of death, from which Kafka returns just before the entrance is closed. When Kafka returns to the world it appears that nothing has been resolved, and yet the experiences of the journey and especially the confrontation with death are inescapable: “You have to face death, get to really know it, then overcome it.”62 This necessity does not, however, liberate Kafka from the grasp of time: Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there – to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there.63 This analysis of the narrative confirms the parallels between the romances and the frame story of the Thousand and one nights. First, and most conspicu60  Ibid., 403. 61  Ibid., 405. 62  Ibid., 481. 63  Ibid., 488.

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ously, the world that Murakami portrays consists of a structurally multiple reality that is partly constructed through two main lines of the narrative, but which is much more explicitly constructed through the juxtaposition of different realms. The hero is not only confronted with interferences between the two realms, interferences that cause spell-like anomalies; he is also able to travel between the realms, although there are taboos to crossing the boundaries. In fact, it is the existence of the two realms and their inescapable connection and interference that are the origin of the narrative dynamism, and it is the spatial dimension of this multiple reality that imposes the shape of the journey on the narrative. Second, the narrative is necessary to eliminate what may be called a liminal situation. As in the case of the frame story of the Thousand and one nights, this liminal situation is caused by a traumatic experience that results in a kind of stagnation of the regular passage of time. In Kafka on the shore both Kafka and Ms. Saeki enter a liminal state as a result of traumatic experiences, for Ms. Saeki this is the loss of her beloved, for Kafka it is the combination of reaching puberty and being deserted by his mother. The journey, as a liminal process, is intended to bridge the gap in space, but it is also meant to bridge the gap in time, which separates the two destinies that are ultimately linked. The regular laws of space and time are temporarily suspended, to be restored only after the ‘curse’ imposing the liminal state is lifted. Third, the story relates a process of initiation, in which Kafka is spurred on to discover his own identity, to search for his sister, to explore the nature of reality, and to establish his relationship to it. Fourth, Murakami systematically effaces the boundaries between the inner experiences of the hero and his spatial environment. The journey is an ‘inner’ journey, and reality is no more than a projection of Kafka’s interior, not only his mental interior, but also of his physical interior. The spaces outside are directly produced by the inner states of the hero, and shaped according to the phases he passes through, the journey is necessary to situate the sequence of these phases in a spatiotemporal framework. The subjectivity of the hero is intimately connected to the landscapes he passes through. As realities flow into each other, so do the inner and outer realms. Like Botho Strauss, Murakami expresses a penetrating critique of the postmodern condition, which has deeply affected the lives of the younger generations. He describes a society that is estranged from its past, but still haunted by far-reaching events of the past, which have left traumatic wounds. Like Strauss’s Germany, Japan seems to be a hostage of certain episodes of its past, which were somehow not integrated in culture and thought. This has led to an

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unnatural situation, in which specters from the past keep interfering in the lives of protagonists who feel lost and insecure in their ambitions and expectations, whose lives are deprived of meaning. Personal relationships are disturbed by mysterious interferences, and this results in estrangement, enigmatic disappearances, and seemingly senseless quests. The experience of time, in particular, is disrupted, because it is time which, because of historical events, lost its integrative function and created temporal layers that were no longer in harmony. Whereas Strauss refuses to accept this anomalous situation and shapes his artistic views into a political position, Murakami is more acquiescent; he looks for ways to conform his life to the inescapable conditions of postmodern life.

Conclusions to Part 2

In this part, we have explored some examples of the treatment of time in modernist and postmodernist fiction, by making use of the two main conceptualizations of time in the Thousand and one nights, the notion of deferral, taken mainly from the frame story of the Nights, and the subjectivity of the experience of time, as part of a psychological or emotional state. Both forms derive from the effort to counter a disequilibrium in the harmony between space and time, to cause a rupture or a state of liminality, and are essentially attempts to manipulate the effects of the passage of time within a diegetic reality. Sometimes a phase of stagnation is created to remedy some harmful mental state (love or desire), or to recover or reconstruct memories, or to avoid catastrophe or death. In other cases, stagnation must be broken by restoring the regular, or an adapted, passage of time, reconnecting past and present. In all cases, the aim is to find a new spatiotemporal equilibrium. In Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator attempts to recuperate time which was ‘lost’ through a traumatic experience, by resorting to narration and the reconstruction of memory. He creates a liminal situation in which time is temporarily halted and which allows his authorship to mature. In Tanpınar’s novels, the disequilibrium between time and place is caused by war and forced modernization; these events result in a disruption of the harmony between various levels of temporal experience. During a brief intermezzo, in which the effects of disharmonious time seem to recede, love seems to provide the hope of a bright future, in which time can resume its regular course. In the novels by Nabokov and Atwood, the narrators try to reconstruct their past by recounting their memories, with the aim of addressing the traumatic experience of death and guilt. As in the case of al-Tayyib Salih’s protagonist, discussed in the previous part, this is attempted through narration, which ultimately, in Shahrazad’s

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manner, seems to survive death. In the novels by Tanpınar, Carter, Strauss, and Murakami, the personal experience of time is affected by some historical/ social event or anomaly, which resulted in a disruption of the course of time. The protagonist must undergo some kind of transformative experience, as symbolized by the stagnation of time, to restore the temporal structure. As in many of the stories in the Thousand and one nights, these forms of manipulating time are part of a radical subjectivity, in which the experiences of the hero are governed by an uncontrollable desire that distorts his relationship with the elements structuring his experience and imbues his environment with a distorted sense of time. This distorted sense of time is reflected in the ‘landscape’ through which he roams, in which the boundaries between reality and imagination become blurred. In all of these cases, narration brings solace, or at least provides a strategy to come to terms with the situation. Time and narration thus become part of what may be called the ‘management of desire’ and the transformation of desire into a more or less stable condition.

Part 3 The Textual Universe

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⸙ As we have argued in the introduction, the impact of the Thousand and one nights on European literature in the eighteenth century was caused, in part, by its peculiarities as a literary text. The main characteristic of the work was of course its structure as a frame containing embedded tales, but this setup was not limited to a formal design only; it was interwoven with the narrative, on the one hand, through the development of the plot of the story as a whole  – the deferral of the execution and the final redemption of Shahrazad; and, on the other hand, by the way in which the frame story explains the origin of the work. This element of self-reflexivity decisively changes the nature of the work: it becomes autonomous, independent of outside stimuli; it generates and contains its own dynamics. The dialogism between the frame and the stories represents – perhaps even partly replaces – the ‘normal’ dialogism between the reader and a narrative structure and thereby frees itself from the constraints imposed by a normal reading process. Since it is situated within a fictional frame, the inserted tales are not bound to restrictions in genre or in number. They can proliferate freely. Yet the dynamics generated by the frame story are not only related to selfreflexivity and dialogism; they are also powered by the narrative plot, built around the stereotypical paragon of power: King Shahriyar, who is humiliated by his wife and a black slave; this traumatic experience threatens not only his status as a king but also the welfare of the empire. After all, the sexual nature of the offense not only touches on psychological sensitivities, but also on the basic conventions of society. The trauma and Shahriyar’s subsequent obsessive behavior are soothed by Shahrazad’s storytelling, that is, by the juxtaposition of Shahriyar’s cruel experience of reality with a world that exists in the imagination, in the repository of human ingenuity. The particular nature of storytelling allows Shahrazad to call imaginary events and persons to help her show the king that the world is filled with strange and difficult events, hardships and sufferings, villains and heroes, violence and humor, idiots and smart-asses. This is the only way to neutralize Shahriyar’s fixation and embed his pain and sense of failure in a broad, intricate, and seemingly endless exploration of the human experience. It is the typical boundlessness of the Thousand and one nights, with its endless proliferation and its random search of the recesses and depths of the human experience, which, although it is contained by the frame, causes a sense of generic instability. What kind of work is this? Will the next story be a completely different kind, and reveal an entirely different aspect or view

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of life? Has the magic in the stories affected the whole work, and turned it into an enchanted text that cannot be contained or grasped? In part, this generic ambiguity is what made the Thousand and one nights so popular among eighteenth-century European literati; it was a source of inspiration and, especially, a model for experimentation with literary forms and concepts. The work did not fit into the existing literary demarcations; it carelessly destroyed traditional literary concepts and, through its vitality and dynamism, stimulated experiments with new forms and the incorporation of new literary techniques into existing forms. This interest was first awoken by its textual properties, then accentuated by its self-reflexivity and self-contained narrative dynamics. The discovery of the Thousand and one nights had an important effect: it drew attention to the textual mechanisms at work in narrative literature and emphasized the textual autonomy of a literary work. Moreover, as a selfcontained textual world, the Thousand and one nights was, in principle, allencompassing, it contained, potentially, all layers of the human condition, transformed into tales, all visions of a world that was acknowledged as infinitely complex and without a clear unifying principle. The Thousand and one nights showed the huge and overwhelming universe of texts and the nature of how they are interwoven with the human experience. These particularities stimulated several authors to compose similar all-encompassing, wide-ranging works that reveal the human condition in all its multifarious manifestations. In the eighteenth century, Rétif de la Bretonne and Jean Potócki developed panoramic views of life inspired by the Thousand and one nights; in the nineteenth century, Balzac attempted to write an occidental Thousand and one nights with his La comédie humaine; and Proust, in À la recherché du temps perdu, presented a reconstruction of the birth of literary art from an individual’s confrontation with the complexity of life. Although textual characteristics were crucial aspects of the influence the Thousand and one nights had on European writers, the attraction of the work was enhanced by its exoticism. The text itself had ‘descended’ from a culture that was experienced as distinctly different; this strangeness was not only reflected in its formal peculiarities, but also in the nature of the tales. The wondrous elements in the tales were incorporated into new literary forms in various ways, not only to conform to ideological stereotypes of ‘orientalism,’ but also to illustrate instances of cultural fragmentation and hybridity. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the orientalism that was derived from the Nights was not confined to processes of portraying an oriental Other, or of defining self-images vis-à-vis an Other; rather it was related to ways of indicating cultural and psychological hybridity and fragmentation. The layered nature of

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reality in the Nights was projected into European culture and even into the individual mind, often connected to dreams, occultism or sexuality. In Potócki’s Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse the dualism is reflected in the composite identity of the hero; in Cazotte’s Le diable amoureux it is a sylphe, or spirit, who accompanies the hero (or was it only a dream?); in Proust’s Recherche it is the realm of memory that is distant and strange. The Orient gradually became a tool to reveal the fissures in a seemingly solid reality, often without any additional geographical, cultural or ideological references. The increasing predominance of textual elements in the reception of the Thousand and one nights, as outlined above, was especially relevant at the beginning of the twentieth century, when self-reflexivity became more than just one of many narrative strategies, it came to be considered a way to reveal the true nature of art: art should not be seen as a medium to represent reality, but rather as an object representing itself, as a self-contained amalgamation of form and content. A literary work should draw attention to its textual nature, as an object referring primarily to itself. In the previous part, we saw the example of André Gide, who uninhibitedly experimented with the device of the enframed narrative, and stressed the textual nature of his novel and redesigned the relationship between form and content according to modernist insights. The author who most radically established the principle of the predominance of textuality was James Joyce (1882–1941), who, with his inclination toward complexity, obscurity, and hidden meanings, pleased and exasperated scores of readers. Still, as in the case of the Thousand and one nights, in part, the ambiguity, the generic diffusion, and the all-encompassing nature of Joyce’s work opened new vistas in literature. Joyce’s radical textuality became a source of inspiration for authors throughout the twentieth century. In this part, we examine works by several authors, works that are marked by a similar ‘autonomy’ of the text as a literary object, and authors who linked this principle to the peculiar structures and concepts of the Nights.

Chapter 8

The Celebration of Textuality: James Joyce and the Argentine (Post-)Modernists It is impossible, in this context, to do justice to the enormous corpus of Joyce scholarship that has been developed over the years after the publication of Dubliners (1914), Portrait of the artist as a young man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans wake (1939). It is some consolation that Joyce himself expected scholars to be perplexed by his works for at least three hundred years; this relativized the efforts of scholars in the meantime and a priori rendered any interpretation provisional. Joyce’s larger works, especially Ulysses and Finnegans wake, are so saturated with references and riddles, puzzles and puns, and at the same time constructed according to such complex and innovative principles, that interpretations and explanations are necessarily only partial. But this is, of course, what makes these works more fascinating for some, and it is understandable that Joyce research has reached the almost unsurmountable proportions that it has. In general, we can say that in Joyce’s works, allusions and references to figures, objects, texts, etc. function on at least three levels. First, references may add certain connotations to an event, a character or a thought, for instance in a localized situation; second, references may contribute to a thematic structure, and support a system of references throughout the whole text; third, references may add to the conceptual idea of the narrative, its narrative structure, its representation of itself as a text, in short, to its poetics. Arguably, there may be a fourth level consisting of references embedded in the world outside the text, in a multiple sense, one that proposes ideological views, for instance, or represents a specific Zeitgeist, or comments on certain events, mentalities or societal developments. Assuming such a level in Ulysses and Finnegans wake is not without problems, however, since the works seem to stress their own autonomy and self-enclosure as texts. Outside reality penetrates into the texts, but the texts themselves do not seem to be intended to penetrate into reality. With regard to oriental references, several inventories have been made, which are not exhaustive, but which give us an idea about Joyce’s uses of different kinds of orientalist material.1 These uses function on the different levels 1  R. Brandon Kershner, The Culture of Joyce’s Ulysses (London: Palgrave, 2014); R. Brandon Kershner, “Joyce and the Orient,” in Kershner and Carol Loeb Shloss (eds.), ReOrienting Joyce:

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indicated above and this sometimes makes it difficult to determine their precise function. A reference to ‘Aladdin,’ for instance, may be inserted to produce an ‘assonance and alliteration,’ but it may also infer that Aladdin, as a literary trope, figures in the mind of the character, or it may be related to an event in which the association emerges. It also, inevitably, points to the structural connection with the Thousand and one nights which permeates the whole text. Similarly, the reference to the bird Roc at the end of Ulysses may be a literary simile to represent the feeling of being ‘lifted up,’ but it also refers to the figure of Sindbad, who serves as a literary double for several characters and symbolizes the notion of ‘wandering’ and ‘travel,’ and, of course, shows the significance of the Nights as an intertextual model. The question is whether we should differentiate between these levels of functioning or treat their interaction as a structural feature of the text. The methodological problem implied by this question is reflected in the analyses of orientalism in Joyce’s work by various literary scholars, who sometimes stress the incidental occurrence of references, sometimes highlight the textual aspects of intertextuality, and sometimes focus on societal and ideological aspects. The difficulty arises, in part, from the diffuse definition of the terms ‘orientalism’ and ‘Orient.’ If we define these terms as referring to an exotic realm containing images, figures, tropes, and texts, we end up with a whole range of motifs which, on closer inspection, may not refer to the same artistic or ideological discourse at all. In this respect, referring to the paradigm of orientalism coined by Edward Said may be confusing, since it conflates many different types of references to the Orient. Still, the colonial component, emphasized by Said, is not irrelevant, since from an Irish perspective the idea of the Orient could be mobilized to conceptualize the relationship between

James Joyce Quarterly 35, nos. 2–3 (Winter/Spring 1998): 273–296; R. Brandon Kershner and Carol Loeb Shloss (eds.), “ReOrienting Joyce,” ReOrienting Joyce: James Joyce Quarterly 35, nos. 2–3 (Winter/Spring 1998): 259–263; Zack Bowen, “All in a Night’s Entertainment: The Codology of Haroun al Raschid, the ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ Bloomusalem/Baghdad, the Uncreated Conscience of the Irish Race, and Joycean Self-Reflexivity,” in R. Brandon Kershner and Carol Loeb Shloss (eds.), ReOrienting Joyce: James Joyce Quarterly 35, nos. 2–3 (Winter/Spring 1998): 297–308; Heyward Ehrlich, “ ‘Araby’ in Context: The ‘Splendid Bazaar,’ Irish Orientalism, and James Clarence Mangan,” in Kershner and Shloss (eds.), ReOrienting Joyce: James Joyce Quarterly 35, nos. 2–3 (Winter/Spring 1998): 309–332; Aida Yared, “ ‘In the Name of Annah’: Islam and Salam in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake,” in Kershner and Shloss (eds.), ReOrienting Joyce: James Joyce Quarterly 35, nos. 2–3 (Winter/Spring 1998): 401–438, and Aida Yared, “Joyce’s Sources: Sir Richard Burton’s Terminal Essay in Finnegans Wake,” Joyce Studies Annual 11 (Summer 2000): 124–166.

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Ireland and England, and to portray it as a pseudo-colonial hierarchy. As in Said’s model, orientalism becomes a strategy for self-definition. Clearly, the ‘ideological’ perception of orientalism is not irrelevant for an understanding of the cultural context of Joyce’s work, and we can safely assume that Joyce himself consciously linked his work to this cultural context. It seems logical, therefore, that R. Brandon Kershner, in his The culture of Joyce’s Ulysses, after stating the importance of orientalism in the novel and noting the deeply felt Celtic-oriental affinity, both historically and culturally, concludes: “Most critics would agree that Ulysses is permeated with the traces of orientalism, some of them textual, others structural or imagistic; the question is whether Joyce merely reflects this totalizing discourse, or in some way subverts it.”2 Referring to the intertextual significance of the Nights, Kershner argues: the Arabian nights is a fundamental intertext in Joyce’s novel – in some ways, more than the Odyssey. I present Joyce as to some degree complicit with orientalism, but to an important degree critical of its pernicious stereotypes, simply by virtue of the blatant way in which he highlights their manipulation of Bloom and, less emphatically, Stephen.3 It is not immediately evident that ‘textual,’ ‘structural,’ ‘imagistic,’ references and their stereotypes can all be treated as belonging to the same type of ‘orientalism.’ Certainly, a differentiation between various orientalist elements would lead to a more sophisticated assessment. And is everything ‘oriental’ related to the Thousand and one nights? Kershner’s book itself suggests the relevance of this question. His main argument shows the importance of popular culture and modern popular media in Ulysses, not only in the ambience of Bloom and his musings, but also in the language, the structure, and the concept of the narrative. He points to the rootedness of the idea of an oriental-Irish identity in popular culture, set against the imperialistic, materialistic English culture. This ‘popular’ orientalism is illustrated by Stephen’s and Bloom’s dreams of the East, the comparison between Molly Bloom and a harem odalisque wearing slippers, and such motifs as a camel, a slave-girl, a red carpet, and a melon. These are clearly motifs associated with popular culture as communicated by newspapers, magazines, advertisements, panoramas, circuses, local fairs, magic lanterns, etc. More significantly, they indicate the prominence of famous pantomimes, which, in popular culture, sometimes made use of oriental images 2  Kershner, The Culture of Joyce’s Ulysses, 177. 3  Ibid., 24.

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and figures. However, unless it is argued that everything ‘oriental’ is ultimately related to the Thousand and one nights, references to Sindbad, Aladdin, and Turko the Terrible are not directly traceable to the Nights, but rather to popular cultural expressions in Britain at the time and associated mainly to Ottoman Turkey and the Levant of Thomas Cook. Of course, the popular oriental images add connotations to characters and events. Kershner points to the way Stephen and Bloom both dream of the ‘East,’ and thereby suggests a psychological link between them. When Molly Bloom is imagined in an oriental outfit, she radiates sensuality, softness, and sexual availability even more. A similar example is found in the tale ‘Araby’ in the Dubliners, in which the hero, a young boy, comes to associate his fascination with a girl with the wondrous world of ‘Araby,’ an oriental bazaar. In the end the bazaar turns out to be a common flea market. His first love experience, which was connected with visions and expectations of a magical world, led to his disillusionment. Still, for him, the Orient, as a fantasy, continues to be associated with an essentially incomprehensible emotional experience. This exemplifies how the oriental motifs are used to shape characters and experiences and reveal a pattern of sensuality, excitement, and imagination. In his inventory of oriental motifs, Kershner includes more direct references to the Thousand and one nights. He signals the presence of the Nights in the Irish popular imagination, mentioning Patrick McCall’s The Fenian night’s entertainments (1897), but also the more sophisticated orientalism of Thomas Moore and Byron, who represented the romantic fantasies of a marvelous and adventurous East. Kershner collects examples from the Thousand and one nights, including Sindbad, who he associates with Murphy, the sailor and teller of tall tales, and with Bloom, a perpetual traveler; and Harun al-Rashid, the prince who wanders through the city incognito at night, is associated with Bloom.4 The idea of the rise and fall of the hero and of the inescapability of fate is more thematic. These references, according to Kershner, show that oriental motifs were used to reaffirm certain images of the Orient, images that supported European stereotypes. According to him, Ulysses is a “compendium of orientalist clichés,” and Joyce, “the colonized, orientalized Irishman [was] complicit [in] recuperating the imperialist gesture of the British empire.”5

4  See the main references to the Thousand and one nights in James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchoir (London: Bodley Head, 2008); Haroun al-Rashid: 3:366; 15:3110, 4325; Arabian nights: 16:1680; Sindbad: 16:858, 1676–1677; 17:2320–2330. 5  Kershner, The Culture of Joyce’s Ulysses, 196.

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If we evaluate Kershner’s findings, we have to relativize his conclusion. First, his observation that there are more direct references to the Thousand and one nights than to the Odyssey, is rather inflated since, of course, the more hidden references to the Odyssey may be more significant than its superficial affinities with the Nights. But, as argued above, in Joyce’s literary universe there do not seem to be merely superficial motifs. Moreover, some of the oriental references refer to popular culture and modern media and should not necessarily be seen as conscious exoticism. They relate more to his cultural context than they do, specifically, to the Thousand and one nights. The oriental motifs provide connotations and perspectives for specific situations and figures; they form layers of coherent similes within the text, with their clusters of connotations; and they reveal the intertextual function of the Thousand and one nights as a narrative model. All these functions can be established easily. But how do the oriental motifs, in their structural coherence, fit into Joyce’s poetics? How is the Thousand and one nights used as a model to shape the textual concept of Joyce’s novels? The Thousand and One Nights and the Textuality of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake The basic story of Ulysses is deceivingly simple: on 16 June 1904, Bloom, in an uncertain mood, leaves his home, wanders through Dublin led by his musings and by chance, and finally, in the evening, returns to his wife Molly. Their sexual relationship has withered after the death of their son and Bloom suspects that Molly is having a sexual affair with another man. In fact, Molly, with adulterous intentions in mind, is waiting for Murphy to visit her. In the evening, when Bloom returns home, he and Molly lie in their bed, presumably in a form of marital harmony. In the meantime, the reader has passed through a panoramic view of life in Dublin at the time, Bloom’s conscious and half-conscious thoughts, the people he meets by chance, and his fantasies and fears. We meet the young and ambitious poet Stephen Dedalus, for whom Bloom is a father figure; we meet Murphy, the uncouth sailor full of stories; and finally, we glimpse the deliberations of Molly, who tries to sort out her muddled relationship with Bloom. However, this intrigue and the storyline it supports are mainly a pre-conceived justification for Bloom’s exploration of a much wider world of modern urban life in which he wanders, and the interaction between this broader world and Bloom’s private world. The intrigue is meant to shape Bloom’s subjectivity, the factors determining his mood, his doubt, his pain, his desire, his

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hopes, and his disappointments, which together regulate the way in which he perceives everything around him. They are the parameters with which he confronts that particular day in Dublin and the manifold and often disturbing influences it exposes him to. This subjectivity is based on a deep-rooted existential trauma, but also on the complex but mitigating influences of his relationship with others, especially Molly. He embodies both an archetype and its temporal manifestation in life. But perhaps the ‘modern urban life in Dublin’ with which Bloom is confronted, is not a real setting, but, like Bloom as a character, is just a localized, temporal manifestation of something that is broader, more general, more archetypal. Perhaps Bloom and Dublin are only a medium Joyce uses to gain entrance into a wider, more diffuse realm that he can explore through them. Bloom was conceived to serve as the eyes and ears of the writer and the reader. He was sent out into the street, so to speak, in his particular circumstances, to attract the sounds, the images, and the events which take place there and which surround him as he moves through the city. But he is not merely a recorder of external phenomena; his predisposition as a character is implicated in a specific intrigue, a specific story, and the impulses entering his mind are filtered, reshaped, distorted, and re-interpreted. Bloom was conceived as an instrument to transform objective impulses from outside into a subjective experience constructed within the framework of his own predicament. This procedure implies that a kind of neutral ‘milieu’ must be created as a kind of habitat for Bloom, through which he moves and from which he draws his vital mental impulses. Bloom contains an inner world filled with experiences, feelings, memories, and he moves through an outer world with which the inner world communicates in an osmotic way. Perhaps we can only see this outside world through Bloom’s mind; it is a world that is primarily discursive, that is, it is made up not so much of events, but rather of observations and thoughts, of spoken language, of texts of all kinds, of signs and tokens that suggest a discursive coherence. But Bloom does not internalize the signs in a coherent way, rather his perceptions are fragmented because he moves through the heterogeneous discursive domain, and because his perceptions are distorted by his subjectivity, his personal preoccupations. The reader perceives only the fragments that coalesce around him and set his imagination in motion. This discursive milieu is, of course, carefully orchestrated by Joyce. On the one hand, it is a neutral layer of discursive elements, sounds, texts, images, and persons, which are evoked through Bloom’s presence, but which, evidently, exist without him as part of a broader discursive universe. It is, in principle, chaotic and unpredictable; it acquires its order, significance, and coherence only from its interrelation with Bloom’s mind, because it is linked to his

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personal memories and thoughts. Joyce presents it as ‘slices’ of reality, which is therefore not ‘represented,’ but is inserted in its original form as shreds of texts from various discursive sources. Here the richness of the text is realized, the infinite variations of the world imbue Bloom with the modern world and its loud media and fast pace. It is a world that cannot be grasped in its totality, rather it trickles into Bloom’s head in fragments. However, within Bloom these fragments obtain the archetypal force of his own tragedy, and his unity with the human condition and its cultural manifestation. In spite of this apparent fragmentation, Joyce adds another layer in the text, one that suggests a sense of order and coherence. According to Umberto Eco,6 Joyce’s novels are essentially constructed according to the medieval function of texts, that is, in order to comprise the cosmos within a certain preconceived order, which is indicated by hidden signs. Thus, Joyce creates a reality, the significance of which is hidden under the surface but which is governed by an almost mystical sense of unity. As the title of the book indicates, this hidden layer is, first, derived from Homer’s masterpiece, the Odyssey, Joyce’s intertextual model. Each chapter refers to Odysseus’s adventure, as a framework for clusters of references to various domains of science, culture, the human body, etc., turning the text into a kind of compendium of human knowledge in a coded form. The world through which Bloom wanders is in fact a huge cosmographic constellation, a macrocosm of culture and knowledge within a cosmic order, which cannot be grasped, but which is made accessible by the thick layer of discourses from which Bloom taps his subjective associations. And through the archetypal components of Bloom it is reconnected to the microcosmic order. It has been argued that Joyce did not intend to use the Odyssey as an intertext to create a kind of ‘modern’ variant of the story, and stage Bloom as a twentieth-century Odysseus. Rather he used it as a model to arrange the essentially chaotic textual elements into some kind of order. By using this model, the text becomes structured as a narrative which the reader is able to read in spite of the many intrusions of a multifarious discursive environment, and in spite of the radical subjectivity of Bloom’s experience of it. The framework provided by the Odyssey transforms the text into a story, and brings together the objective and subjective forms of a widespread cacophony of discursive components into a self-contained textual construct. The story itself is a collage of Bloom’s many impressions, but it becomes an object of art when it is enclosed in a framework. The omnipresent discursive milieu that Bloom 6  Umberto Eco, Le Poetiche di Joyce (Milan: Bompiani, Sonzogno, Etas, 1979).

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particularizes in time is transformed into a neutral macrocosm that orders the whole of the human experience, and ultimately consists of a text. If the Odyssey is one intertextual model for Ulysses, the Thousand and one nights is commonly recognized as the other one. As noted, the collection comes to the surface in various forms, two of which seem to be most important: the references to the Nights in popular culture, mainly taken from the pantomime tradition; and similes referring to characters of the Nights as narrative motifs. The two forms may be interrelated, in the sense that the pantomime performances that Joyce knew may have colored his vision of the Thousand and one nights, and his references to it should be understood as images rather than as textual elements. Still, we know that Joyce possessed editions of the Nights and that he had a life-long interest in the tales. It is implausible to surmise that the narratological potential of the work escaped his attention. We should also expect that the formal aspects of the Nights and its narrative concept influenced Ulysses, too, although perhaps not in such a conspicuous way as it did the Odyssey. As we have observed, the structural associations with the Thousand and one nights in Ulysses concern the sensuality of harem women and the two figures of Sindbad and Harun al-Rashid.7 These two characters are used as alter egos of Bloom, who, of course, wanders through a realm of uncertain forces like Sindbad and through the labyrinth of Dublin like Harun al-Rashid explored medieval Baghdad. In this comparison, Bloom takes on their narrative contents, that is, their restlessness, their curiosity, their disguise, their acceptance of contingency, and their double status as a merchant/king and a victim of shipwreck/common subject. In this manner, the similes strengthen the association with the Odyssey, as they echo the particularities of Odysseus. However, they also suggest that Bloom is a figure in a tale from the Thousand and one nights; this idea is strengthened by the final sentences of chapter 17, when Bloom comes home and lays himself to rest. He has ‘traveled,’ all his Sindbad guises pass through his mind, and his bed looks like a square around Sindbad’s roc’s egg.8 The suggestion that Bloom’s peregrination through Dublin is in fact an ‘inserted’ tale corresponds to the perception of Ulysses as a layered narrative. Bloom’s ‘journey’ is provoked by a traumatic experience that led to an estrangement between husband and wife that cannot be healed by a direct confrontation, but requires, rather, a period of postponement and liminality. The intermediate phase is comprised in a framework of reality, which 7  Joyce, Ulysses, 478, lines 4324–25, 8  Ibid., 607, lines 2320–30.

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is represented by actual people, but also by sounds and impulses that mark Bloom’s trajectory. The development toward a plot, a destiny, however, takes place inside Bloom’s head, as he reshapes the ‘real’ framework in his mind. Within the narrative this is the layer of the imagination in which the transmutations take place that enable Bloom to come to terms with his situation, at least to some extent. The people, locations, and sounds he encounters come to represent the components and actors of his personal drama, and they enable him to review their significance and re-evaluate their influence on him, his frame of mind, and his life. Through the level of the imagination, he is able to reconstitute his relationship with Molly. Conversely, Molly, in her eastern garb, represents the epicenter of the trauma, the object of desire that is moving out of reach. She introduces the motif of adultery and rupture. This is the threat that forces on Bloom the dialogism between his imagination and his reality, since, as an object of desire, her real behavior no longer conforms to the way he imagines her, with her harem-like sensuality. For Molly, too, the phase of deferral – Bloom’s absence – provides a space in which to reflect and fantasize, and to probe her feelings. Although in the end there is no unambiguous redemption for them, there is a resolution to the urges which triggered the tensions that day, which forced them to delve deep into their past, to re-encounter the archetypes of their life experiences, and to reconnect them with their life together in such a way that a form of love and acceptance survives. Before we turn our attention to Finnegans wake, we conclude this section on Ulysses by distinguishing three functions of oriental references: first, references to orientalism in popular culture, including several to the Thousand and one nights, were meant to strengthen the realism/exoticism nexus in the discursive milieu; second, references add associations to characters and events (sensuality, Wanderlust); third, procedures derive from the narrative strategy, the concept, and the structure of the Nights (postponement, trauma/ redemption, the free flow of ‘tales,’ textual layers). The first two functions support the third function, of course, which is the most essential. In his essay on Joyce, Anthony Burgess discusses Ulysses, then wonders what Joyce’s next step could be, after such a radical reconstitution of the idea of literature: ‘After the exploitation of the pre-verbal conscious mind, and even the odd trip to the borders of sleep, what can Joyce do next? He can only plunge straight into the unconscious mind and, for the purpose of describing it, create something like a new language.’9 After deconstructing the concept of a literary text, the next step would be to deconstruct language. The result is a 9  Anthony Burgess, Re Joyce (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), 182.

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notoriously complex and impregnable sea of words, which seems amorphous at first sight, but which reluctantly cedes glimpses of structure, coherence, and meaning. The persistent reader, overcoming the initial hostility of the text, may enter a rich realm of verbal virtuosity that questions the very essence of language, communication, and narration, and their relationship to the human experience and culture. Moreover, the text seems to be all-encompassing, from the minutest particle to a total universe; an X-ray vision of a cosmic order, caught in the maze of language. Even more so than in Ulysses, it is difficult to determine the narrative parameters of Finnegans wake as a novelistic text. Parameters are indicated in such a diffuse way that they become blurred and slip away into other parameters almost unconsciously. There are markers which act as clues and signposts, but these markers are never unambiguous. Every word, so to speak, refers to another word, or at least to a second, third or fourth meaning. The title refers to death and sleeping, and nowhere does it become clear which of the two is dominant; it is as if Joyce consciously intended the slippage of one into the other, to create a common area between the two, an area where meanings are undefined and unclear. Characters, too, are only vaguely indicated, as if Joyce did not want to present his characters as characters, but rather wanted to show their instability and fluidity in the way they take on different shapes, names, and roles. Everything that is enunciated within the text seems to branch off and wander away into the distance, as if the text is a fragment of tissue where textual elements from all directions almost coincidentally converge. Still, even this vague coherence has its procedures, its recognizable elements and its supposed significance. As in Ulysses, in Finnegans wake we encounter a mass of references – at first sight prohibitive – that work at different levels of the text, as incidental indications, as markers of specific people, events, or associations, and as constitutive elements of the text as a whole. In all cases, these references have counter-functions, since everything that is mentioned implies something else and contains an alternative ‘mass’ of referential meanings. Every element is used to build something and to deconstruct it at the same time; it shows not only the unstable nature of the construction, but also gives insight into the smaller particles constituting the basic elements themselves. Construction and deconstruction are simultaneous processes in nature and reality and Finnegans wake, in the medium of text, reflects this complex, seemingly paradoxical mechanism. Using text as the basic material of the human experience, Finnegans wake shows, at the same time, the construction of the human experience in its totality, and its illusory character that is shaped out of particles which have no stable meaning and therefore no stable interrelationship.

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As a novel, Finnegans wake can be approached in several ways; some concentrate on the work as a whole, trying to determine a pattern, a narrative development, and an overall coherence that can be projected on the mass of details from ‘above’; others start by taking an inventory of the myriad detailed references and their internal sub-references, in order to collect and arrange the pieces of the puzzle in such a way that –gradually – a more or less coherent picture becomes visible. Others seek a path in the middle, roughly sketching an overall picture and looking for ordering principles and elements in layers which support it, in order to distinguish some internal patterns that produce meaning through the interaction between different levels. Philip Kitcher, for instance, analyzes Finnegans wake by imagining the work as the musings of an elderly man reflecting on the memories and bitter experiences of his life, from the perspective of a half-conscious mind, and ultimately finding some form of relief in his wife’s forgiving acceptance of his deficiencies, in a kind of redemptive denouement. His reminiscences consist of a loose and fluid chain of ‘vignettes,’ narrative clusters and episodes, archetypes, and traumas. This structure parallels that of Ulysses, which shares its ‘medieval’ concept of a comprehensive cosmography that combines an all-encompassing story with thousands of hidden references, symbols, and signs. In Finnegans wake, however, the procedures are much more radical and the aim is much more ambitious. The advantage of Kitcher’s approach is that it renders the blurring of the narrative markers less important. It is not important whether HCE (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker) is dying or just asleep; what is important is that he is in a domain that allows – or enforces – a retrogression into his life without the stabilizing forces of either the day or vigorous vitality. The framework for ordering his thoughts has melted away and his ‘thoughts’ are thus freed of regular structuring influences; thus, they become fluent and associative, and reveal their hidden contents, both in relation to HCE’s life, and in relation to the greater realm of the human experience. The night, the last moments before death, even the imagined state after death, may provide such a domain at various levels of intensity, such a domain may be a state of consciousness unstructured by a referential framework imposed by the sense perceptions; or it may be a state of semi-consciousness caused by the delirium of dying; or the state of complete unconsciousness of a dead man who is looking back at his life without constraints. In all cases, ultimately, in HCE’s imagination the main ordering force has been eliminated. Similarly, Kitcher’s approach does not require us to assess the narratological content of the two main characters, HCE and ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle). It is not necessary to determine who the narrator is, who HCE represents, which description comes nearest to being his ‘real’ image. HCE is nothing more or

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less than a ‘sign’ around which a whole set of people are clustered, perhaps even Joyce himself, and which is constantly filled with new characteristics, associations, and meanings, and which at the same time indicates the clustering of these characteristics and their essential instability as markers of identity. If HCE signifies anything, as a character, it is that he is not a ‘character,’ but rather a receptacle that is filled, emptied, refilled during the course of his delirium, and, perhaps, over the course of his life. This ‘filling’ of his personage occurs partly through his own volition, but more often when he confronts the enormous human world around him, the human tradition, the material environment, images of others, and the waves of history on different levels. The same applies for the figure of ALP, who absorbs all kinds of elements to construct a vast, almost archetypal, image of femininity, which is subsequently projected into the tiniest details of HCE’s life. HCE and ALP are containers of kaleidoscopes that show the fluid images of their lives in all their small and enormous dimensions. But, again, they show both the coalescing of components into ‘characters’ and their decomposition and dissolution. As in Ulysses, the medium within which these basic principles are at work is the text, and the effect of their inherent dynamics is a form of narration. What is produced by the convergence of the state of semi-consciousness and the two fluid characters is the generation and promulgation of stories. Reminiscences, fears, fantasies, and thoughts automatically take the form of a story, enclosed within ‘vignettes’ and related to some broader story. However, these stories, too, are subject to the dual process of constitution and deconstruction. Stories are first of all efforts to create stories, beginnings of stories, stories that immediately reveal their instability, in the sense that there is no way to contain an experience of a memory or a consideration in a structured text that is unambiguous and well-defined. Every narrative inherently includes its counternarrative or its alternative version; there is no method by which it is possible to construct a story that does not contain its own deconstructive imperative. To probe into the nature of the human experience, we have only the medium of text; to evaluate our own place in this human experience, we have only the method of narration; but narration will never be able to construct a final rendering of even the most individual experience, because it is always invaded by subverting forces. The paradoxical combination of construction and deconstruction is presented as inherent in the nature of language. If there is one feature of Finnegans wake which marks its radical break with the novelistic tradition and which immediately comes to mind, it is the way Joyce systematically undermines the regular signifying function of words and language. To begin with, language is

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not a language, but only, it seems, a more or less coincidental manifestation of many, if not all languages. As a box of Pandora, each word contains its many variants in other languages, and, what is more, all the associated sounds and forms. In Finnegans wake, language has lost its main function, that is, the signification of a specific referent; instead, the text shows how language functions in a stage before it has reached this signifying function, when signification is still unspecified, when words refer not to one thing but to other things as well, when they retain the associative force of their sound, attract meanings from other words, other languages and cluster these into new, complex, meanings. A word contains many words, perhaps even all words, and their combination filters these meanings and brings them to the surface. Therefore, it is the instability of language, the endless potential of meaning in words, which destabilizes sentences, stories, and texts, and, ultimately, the images, self-images, and identities related to them. The result of this procedure is not only that it turns a story into a seemingly fluid, amorphous mass, at random signifying all the other stories hidden inside it, but also that it reintegrates the story into the text, as an autonomous object. A story is not an abstract, conceived, construction; it is an object made of text. By breaking open words to show their multifarious contents, the story returns to its textual source, like returning a color to its constituent components. Language becomes a medium in which (meta)reality shines through in an unsystematic way, like a film focusing on its own nature as a medium and thereby registering elements of reality in a disfigured way. It thereby reveals the inherent potential and limitations of itself as a material medium and it refers, ultimately, to itself rather than the reality that it uses to represent itself. How does this brief characterization of Finnegans wake relate to the Thousand and one nights? It is clear that, as in the case of Ulysses, the Thousand and one nights served as a model for Finnegans wake, too. Joyce studied the Burton translation while he was working on Finnegans wake; there are many references to the work in his notebooks. He declared that whereas Ulysses was his ‘book of the day,’ Finnegans wake was his ‘book of the night,’ a statement which, in Joyce’s case, was of great significance for interpretation, and which opens up whole systems of referential and metaphoric associations. Still, because of the complexity of the text and the practically unsurmountable problems of interpreting and analyzing it, the connections with orientalism and the Thousand and one nights are even more difficult to identify than in Ulysses. This is, in part, because of the sheer mass of references and the partial or tangential references to what may be called the domain of the Thousand and one nights, a domain that includes geographical indications, Arabic words,

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historical references, etc. The Orient and the Thousand and one nights are clearly integrated in the texture, the capillaries of the text, but it is not easy to detect the pattern in the occasions when they show themselves. It is difficult to separate a single layer in the work and identify what connects these references, other than as loose elements that enrich the immense, all-comprehensive complexity of the text, like currents in a huge multicolored cake. For instance, the reference to the lamp in HCE’s café as Aladdin’s lamp10 seems like an ornament which is not without meaning, because it presents the café as a potentially enchanted space, at least in HCE’s imagination, and because it links up with other, similar references to the Nights, but it is not a consistent marker of orientalism that is carefully woven throughout the text. Similarly, comparing HCE to Sindbad11 or to Harun al-Rashid12 or to Shahriyar13 adds to our connotations of the ‘character’ of HCE and links it to other connotations, but since, as a character, HCE is fluid and permanently subverted, Harun al-Rashid becomes only one of his many avatars, or, even more modestly, he is only a brief glimpse of the many associations that briefly collide with HCE as a narrative cluster. The most consistent oriental reference in Finnegans wake is the recurrent mentioning of the Qur’an, which is presented not only as a source of linguistic peculiarities, but also as the quintessential source of authority. It is here that the motif transcends the level of incidental accentuation of specific aspects and enters the thematic level of the work as a whole. After all, if Finnegans wake makes something clear, it is that texts and words are always subject to transformation, destabilization, and decline into ambiguity. The Qur’an thus becomes the symbol of what Finnegans wake is explicitly not; it represents its antithesis, it presupposes the existence of an all-powerful, single authority laid down in a text that structures human life and even the universe. Finnegans wake not only denies the existence of God; it even denies the possibility of a steady core ordering man’s perception of existence, since such a core would always be part of the unsteady medium of text.14 The second oriental motif which is more or less stable is the recurrent reference to Shahrazad; it is here that the spurious elements of the Thousand and one nights are linked to the thematic level of the work. In two crucial passages, 10  James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, ed. Robbert-Jan Henkes, Erik Bindervoet, and Finn Fordham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 560, line 19. 11  Ibid., 314, line 18. 12  Ibid., 4, line 32. 13  Ibid., 357, lines 17–19. 14  See Yared, “ ‘In the Name of Annah.’ ”

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Shahrazad appears, it seems, as a comment on the text itself, to characterize the story and the contemplations of HCE. When versions of a story are cast into doubt, the text concludes: “the fallacy, as punical as finikin, that it was not the king Kingself but his inseparable sisters, uncontrollable nighttalkers Skertsirade with Donyahzade.”15 Here, first, the dramatic scene of Shahriyar and Shahrazad is evoked as a re-enactment of HCE’s own situation. As he is trying to grasp his self-image and the reminiscences of his life, his thoughts refuse to take a coherent form and his past slips through his fingers into the semi-amorphous, unstable ocean of human existence, with its multifarious constructions of civilization, culture, tradition, and knowledge. The supposedly stable element, the king, cannot guarantee a ‘true’ rendering of events, which is usurped by the two ‘uncontrollable nighttalkers’ who represent, of course, HCE losing his way in his own thoughts and being carried forward unstoppably by his stream of contemplations. This interpretation of the motif of Shahrazad is confirmed by another passage: “it is a sloppish matter, given the wet and low visibility (since in this scherzarade of one’s thousand one nightiness that sword of certainty which would dentifide the body never falls) to idendefine the individuoune in scratch wig, squarecuts, stock lavaleer, regattable oxeter, baggy pants and shufflers.”16 Here, again, the intrigue of the frame story of the Thousand and one nights is used to tell something about Finnegans wake itself. The text is a ‘scherzarade’ that lacks a serious purport and continues endlessly, because ‘the sword of certainty’ will never fall, the execution being infinitely postponed by storytelling. Because narration will never stop, the story will never take on its definitive form and will keep uncontrollably meandering into all directions and change shape all the time. Since the concluding certainty, the definitive form, the conclusive interpretation, is out of reach, the stories cannot serve as a demarcation of identities, both the one invested in the body, and the one vested in self-images. While storytelling is the only medium available to define identities, it is bound to undermine all efforts to define a stable identity. At the same time, however, it makes living life without a stable identity possible, since it affords HCE the possibility of continually reassessing his life and adjusting his visions of himself and his past. It allows him to link his memories to other – imagined – actors, and this postpones a final judgment and thus keeps open the possibility of a re-evaluation and an expiation for his sins. This vision of Finnegans wake as a parallel story to the Thousand and one nights is strengthened by the themes that reoccur in HCE’s memories, such 15  Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 32, lines 6–8. 16  Ibid., 51, lines 3–8.

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as his trauma about an accusation of sexual harassment, his doubts about the fidelity of his wife ALP, and his need to re-enact his past experiences, to reimagine them in ways that would neutralize his pain. The disruptive power of the night – or sleep, or dreams, or death-delirium, or death – plunge him into a liminal state that allows him to envisage his experience in the context of the huge reservoir of human experiences and the human responses to suffering and the ‘human condition.’ HCE has disintegrated as a person, only to revisit his previous life, and to try to reconstitute himself cleansed of his guilt and deficiency, in the maelstrom of a universe mediated through language. Although there is no rebirth, no redemption, no reconstitution in the end, there is the solace of ALP, who is willing to accept him with all his shortcomings. This thematic parallel with the Thousand and one nights is supported by the formal aspects of the work, which do not provide the narrative with a stable backbone, but which retain the fluidity of narration suggested by the Nights. As noted, the story is shaped by the dynamics of continuous narration, which is clustered in ‘vignettes’ that contain the narrative elements floating in HCE’s mind. Their nature varies from more or less complete episodes to mere sets of associations and passing clouds of thought. On several occasions, episodes are opened and closed by formulaic sentences reminiscent of the interruptions of storytelling in the Nights. And, finally, the text emphasizes its own infinity as a continuing process of storytelling, signification, repetition, and recycling; thus, its appending closure is connected to its beginning. Life is storytelling and the permanent deferral of death through narration. The novel thus resembles the Thousand and on nights in its structure and concept as a text that consists of a container filled with an irrepressible flow of stories or parts of stories. These are connected by association and are theoretically all-encompassing; they penetrate into all domains and dimensions of human thought, civilization, and the psyche. In the container, there is no generic uniformity, since there is input from all segments of knowledge and art, from all languages and cultures, as long as HCE’s wandering mind touches on them to reconstitute his vision of himself and to condone his misconduct in the past. However, the aim of the avalanche of stories is not to construct a solid, recovered identity, but rather to deconstruct a previously given, apparently solid, character, whose solidity was based on deceit and illusion, and to show that by acknowledging the fluidity and diversity of the narratives that constitute the self it is possible to make life bearable and accept oneself with all one’s shortcomings, especially traumatic existential experiences. As noted above, the instability of the narrative is caused, in part, by the acknowledgment of the instability of language. Every utterance, every sign, carries in itself references to a potentially infinite number of other signs, and it is

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difficult, perhaps even impossible, to control language to such an extent that all ‘polluting’ references are shut out and only an unequivocally understandable text remains. Words are, so to speak, cut open to show their multifarious contents and thereby turn them in uncontrollable, monstrous, border-crossing, composite particles, and show their hidden reservoir of associated sounds and meanings. It is in this labyrinth of hybridity that Finnegans wake refers to the Thousand and one nights, not in its Arabic or conceptual aspect, but rather in its guise, provided by Richard Burton’s (in)famous translation, which appeared in 1885–88 and which Joyce carefully studied, as is attested by his notebooks.17 Richard Burton, the polyglot, explorer, diplomat, and troublemaker, published his translation in response to what he saw as two urgent needs: first, according to him, the existing translations by Antoine Galland and Edward Lane did not do justice to the ‘temperament’ of the Arabs, because the texts were bowdlerized and generally stripped of spicy elements in order to suit the tastes of their audiences. Second, in his translation he wanted to dislodge the Victorian mentality of decency and prudishness that held English society in its grasp, that resulted in a narrow-minded, contorted attitude toward sexuality. These two aims converged in his perception and projection of the Thousand and one nights as an essentially erotic masterpiece. According to Burton, an adequate rendering of the text would reveal the Arabs’ true inclination to eroticism and would show his Victorian compatriots that ‘primitive’ peoples had a much more open and natural attitude toward sexuality than the ‘civilized’ British. Significantly, the first edition of the translation was offered to subscribers only and the final volume contained an elaborate ‘Terminal essay’ discussing such matters as eroticism and pederasty in the Nights.18 There is no doubt that Joyce liked the provocative, scandalous, tone of the Burton translation, with its purposely eroticized passages and its occasionally bizarre comments and footnotes, and that Burton’s attack on sexual mores/ restrictions appealed to him. Perhaps more important, however, was Joyce’s attraction to Burton’s peculiar use of language. In order to enhance the authenticity of the text, Burton developed a style that, he said, rendered the Arabic more truthfully; an English idiom which, he held, the Arabs would have spoken if English had been their mother tongue. The result is an often-strange combination of archaisms and neologisms, literal renderings of Arabic names and expressions, rather exuberant exoticisms and exalted speech. In a kind of proto-Joycean impulse, Burton attempted to break open the English language 17  Yared, “Joyce’s Sources.” 18  About Burton, and for more references, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 2:505–508.

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and fill it, in part, with Arabic elements, in order to forge a new language that would contain both, and through the medium of text, bridge the gap between the person reflected in the character and the reader. Whether the attempt succeeded is a matter of contention; it is probably the rather monstrous hybridity of Burton’s style that influenced Joyce’s radical experiment in linguistic anomaly. The discussion above identifies the references in Ulysses and Finnegans wake to the Thousand and one nights on various levels. Although the texts are interspersed with references to the Nights and these add to the immensely rich repertoire of connotations, the main connection would seem to be rather more specifically conceptual. First, Joyce’s interest in orientalism was probably sparked by his sense of and preference for forms of hybridity. The Orient as a magical realm, and as a cultural other, was connected to his perception of Jewish and Irish identities, both of which were set against the cultural hegemony of the Catholics and English colonial domination. This hybridity had a linguistic aspect, too; in a famous passage in Portrait Joyce states that English is not his native language and that he never felt at home with it. This cultural and linguistic hybridity is the basis for the exploration that resulted in new forms of language and new forms of literature that were developed by juxtaposing ancient cosmographies with all-engulfing modernity. The newly emerging world required new forms of expression, and Joyce, as a relative outsider, was sufficiently independent from the literary establishment to conceive them. Second, Joyce’s emphasis on innovative language and form, and his confrontation with the textual impressiveness of modern society, combined with his inability to identify with mainstream culture, resulted in the reification of the literary work as a text. Literature, in Joyce’s mind, became self-reflexive and self-contained, as a medium that collected in itself fragments of reality as a composite object. The text became a refuge, a counter-world that confirmed the marginal author’s existence and his relationship with the universe of human culture. The author recreates his universe in textual form, to encompass the centers of which he is not part, to relativize their significance by creating a textual universe in which traditional hierarchies disappear. In doing this, he seems to herald the digital age: his words are quarks which assume different states at the same time; his language reflects the capacity of digital media to combine information of different kinds simultaneously; and his texts show the all-embracing vastness of newly emerging digital networks. The secrets and codes of Finnegans wake will, perhaps, be cracked when the quark computer is realized. Of course, it is not illogical that Joyce should look for inspiration to the Thousand and one nights. In the eighteenth century, the Nights was a major

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inspiration for authors who sought to experiment with literary form, because of its oriental exoticism and because of its generic diversity. Its unstable and diffuse nature provided examples and material for bricolage and reinvention, in a way that resembles the procedures of Ulysses and Finnegans wake. In turn, these two texts, with their generic instability, hybridity, and exoticism, became a literary inspiration for a whole century and beyond, taking over the innovative potential of Shahrazad.

Textual Worlds: Fernández, Arlt, Borges, and Piglia

Following the work of Edward Said, orientalism, as a specific form of exoticizing discourse, is usually conceived as a means to define cultural and social identities by linking self-images to images of an ‘other’ and simultaneously distinguishing them from each other. Although Said focused on the European tradition of orientalism, especially in the period of colonialism, the broader mechanism of exoticizing others to constitute a self-identity is by no means limited to Europe. In a more generalized sense, it can be argued that Europe has its ‘Orientals’ even within Europe itself, and that Europe’s Orients have their own ‘Orients’ in their turn; thus, the process of defining ‘selves’ and ‘others’ proliferates, potentially, into infinity. A case in point is Ireland, which, as noted, Joyce considered to be England’s ‘Orient,’ that is, its colonial Other. Of course, this process of orientalizing involved a complex reconstruction of discourses, since, at least in the strongly Eurocentric nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Europe’s others not only had to come to terms with their marginality vis-à-vis European hegemony, but also had to define their own hegemonic position vis-à-vis their own marginal others, and, simultaneously, vis-à-vis their equals in the peripheries of Europe. This complex juggling of self-images certainly applies to a country such as Argentina, which is basically a country of immigrants and settlers, with a colonial heritage and a sharp division between urban centers and a vast ‘wild’ hinterland. After shaking off British tutelage and becoming an independent nation in the nineteenth century, it quite rapidly developed a course of its own; it created an industrial, urban economy in and around Buenos Aires and attracted new waves of immigrants, mainly from Europe and the Middle East. This rapid development resulted in an economic boom in the beginning of the twentieth century and this was accompanied by a proliferation of various forms of modernity. Still, this rapid modernization produced tensions, too, as a result of the influx of large numbers of immigrants. These tensions were reflected, especially, in the social and cultural spheres. Questions of identity

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became more and more pressing. How should Argentine society be conceived of as a nation? And how could a national cultural identity be imagined that could unify such a diverse population? It is not surprising that these questions were, at an early stage, related to conceptions of ‘others’ as counter-images of the self. After all, society had to define its legitimacy not only with regard to Europe, but it also had to find a balance between the indigenous population, especially in the rural areas, and the immigrant communities in the cities. It is probably no coincidence that the complex debates about situating the nation in the evolving world system involved forms of orientalism. Nor is it surprising that at first, visions of the Orient were particularly related to Spanish forms of orientalism, which was especially concerned with colonial aspirations in North Africa. As previously colonized people, Argentine intellectuals somehow had to distance themselves from their Hispanic background and reconsider their position not only toward Spain, but also toward its periphery, to which they now considered themselves to belong. The Orient increasingly changed from a marginal Other into a parallel image of the self. Thus, at the turn of the twentieth century, Argentina found itself in the difficult position of re-situating itself with respect to its colonial past; identifying itself in relation to an admittedly imagined Orient, as an example of possible trajectories toward the future; and molding this redefinition into a self-image that would foster coherence in Argentine society. The first task was to construct a sense of an Argentine society that integrated the urban center and the plains, that is, to construct its own ‘internal’ orientalism that could be juxtaposed with a primitive, indigenous culture in favor of a more civilized, modern culture in the cities. A history had to be invented that would detach Argentina from its colonial past and give it a form of authenticity, and connect a rapidly evolving modernity with a layered myth of a common past. This authenticity was found, especially, in concepts such as gauchismo (the cultivation of the gaucho figure as a typical Argentine identity) and criollismo (‘creolism’), which celebrated views of the past and defined the essence of Argentina. These debates found expression in Argentine literature, first, through the accounts of travelers who, from the romantic period (1830s) onward, visited Spain and North Africa, and who developed a vision of modernity based on atheism and liberal political and economic values. Orientalism, as shaped by their travel experiences, was a means of defining the concept of appropriation, that is, the incorporation of the desert regions into a national state. The Orient could provide the framework to understand the Argentine situation as a former colony and as a border state pacifying its ‘wild’ hinterland. The figure of the gaucho constituted, in romanticized form, an element of authenticity that

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suggested a common past, as opposed to the destabilizing diversity caused by immigration. Yet, the romantic emphasis on the political and historical, or perhaps nostalgic, aspects of orientalism could not solve the problems caused by the heterogeneity of society, and these problems were reflected in literature itself. The debate continued, given voice by a generation of modernists who were inspired by French symbolism and who found in Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938) a founding father; with his poem entitled El gaucho Martin Fierro (1872), he articulated the need for historical symbols, such as gauchismo, to construct national coherence. With regard to orientalism, the modernists were more interested in its aesthetic aspects than in its political and historical dimension. It is in this period that writers and poets began to seek inspiration not only in journeys to the Orient, but also in the ‘literary’ Orient, as represented by the Thousand and one nights.19 After Argentine literary modernism asserted itself at the beginning of the twentieth century, with Lugones as its intellectual spokesman, with the poem El gaucho Martin Fierro as a foundational work for national literature, and with a vision of a national identity assembled from historical and modern views of society, it was subverted by rapidly changing conditions. In the 1910s and 1920s, Argentina experienced an economic boom that caused new waves of immigrants and new intellectual attitudes. Literary modernism, which was based on European literary models, was challenged by authors who called themselves avant-gardists and who looked for new literary forms and concepts with which to respond to the precarious social situation in Argentina and to develop new, specifically Argentine, forms of literary expression. From the 1920s on, Jorge Luis Borges, in particular, attempted to formulate a synthesis of cultural components that he found in the complex caldron of Argentine society, in order to link a vision of the past with a consciousness of the precarious present, and melt the two into a unique literary voice. It is, perhaps, the influence of European orientalism, combined with the search for a cultural identity that explains the early and persistent interest in the Thousand and one nights in Argentine literature. This interest was based on the Mardrus edition translated into Spanish by Vicente Blasco Ibañez, with a prologue by one of the great modernist authors of Latin America, the Guatemalan Enrique Gómez Carrillo. Lugones, the master of modernism, referred to the Thousand and one nights in his poetry in several places, and wrote an essay titled ‘El Tesoro de Scheherazada’ (‘The treasure of Shahrazad’). 19  See Axel Gasquet, L’Orient au sud; l’orientalisme littéraire argentin d’Esteban Echeverría à Roberto Arlt, trans. Julien Quillet (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2010).

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He emphasizes the “irreducible imaginary character” of the Nights, which is the only way in which the work could “inscribe itself in the literary heritage of a culture to such an extent.” The stories are a “medicine against social injustice, giving hope to the deprived and making all people equal.”20 His appreciation of the Nights was followed by that of other poets, such as Abd al-Razzaq Karabaka, Ricardo Gily, and Rubén Darío.21 The interest in the Thousand and one nights was thus widespread, and, as we see, we have good reason to say that it became a fundamental reference for the development of Argentine literature during the course of the twentieth century. In the next section, we discuss the influence of the Thousand and one nights on three icons of Argentine literature, from three consecutive generations: Macedonio Fernández, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ricardo Piglia. But first we must briefly mention another towering figure of Argentine literature in the first half of the twentieth century, Roberto Arlt (1900–42). As a novelist, Arlt seemed to embody all the dilemmas of early Argentine literature. Coming from the fringes of the immigrant community and with only a limited education, he wrote in the defective Spanish characteristic of immigrants, and was not averse to using the vernacular and elements from popular culture in his work. He showed a predilection for writing about outcasts and the margins of society, revealing a bitter nihilism and cynical attitude toward ‘high’ culture. Because of these subversive traits, his work epitomized Argentine culture at that time, which was marked by cultural dispersion, social inequality, and a lack of vision of the future. Arlt was an important source of inspiration for later authors such as Borges and Piglia. In 1935–36 Arlt made a trip to Spain and Morocco, a report of which is included in his Aguafuertes Espanolas (1936). He revealed some disillusionment with the European trajectory toward modernity, but his statements about Morocco are somewhat contradictory. At times, he indulged in couleur locale, oriental clichés, picturesque images, and opium-drenched atmospheres, while on other occasions he was critical about the false European images of the Orient. Sometimes he was bitterly critical of oriental society, perhaps not so much out of a negative evaluation of the Orient but rather out of a more general sense of nihilism. Arlt thus combined orientalist stereotypes with sharp criticism and used his representation of the Orient to comment on Argentine society. He

20  Gasquet, L’Orient au sud, 256–257; Abdellah Djbilou, Mirando a Oriente; temática Árabe en las letras Hispánicas (Cádiz: Disputación de Cádiz, 2007), 33. 21  Djbilou, Mirando a Oriente, 37–38.

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was less critical about the Argentine road to modernity than about the course taken by the Islamic Orient, which to him seemed hopelessly backward.22 According to his daughter Mitra, his attitude toward the Orient was, to a large extent, shaped by his immersion in the Thousand and one nights, which he read as part of his English courses. He even sometimes ‘felt’ like a character from the Nights. The influence of the Thousand and one nights on his work can be perceived, first, in Arlt’s play África (1938), which, according to Mitra Arlt, “brings us in the adventure register between the creatures of the Thousand and one nights: a primitive psychology, a life dedicated to simple and concrete affairs, such as smuggling, swindle, theft, desire, conquest, conspiracy.”23 The psychology of the Westerner is occupied by creatures who are led by fanaticism and deceit.24 Here the Thousand and one nights is seen as a kind of catalyst that unleashes forces that debilitate character, and undermine morality and civilization. A similar kind of exoticism is found in Arlt’s beautiful collection of short stories, El criador de gorillas from 1941. The stories, all set in North Africa, are indirectly narrated, as framed tales, and are carefully constructed around an intriguing plot. The tension is derived from the confrontation between Europeans and Africans or Arabs; this results in a strange blurring of reality, an element of mystery and impenetrability. The ambience involves war, violence, conspiracy, and espionage, all of which enhance an atmosphere of estrangement, and there is a touch of the bizarre, of horror, and the supernatural. The stories are imbued with a combination of stereotypical figures and the final predominance of fate, which intervenes in human endeavors and is stronger even than the apparently uncontrollable course of history. The themes and motifs are not only reminiscent of the Thousand and one nights, but also bring to mind the often strange, thoroughly constructed stories of Borges.25 According to Gasquet, Arlt was the first author to introduce the oriental theme in Argentine literature in a structural way. Until then, references to the Orient had been indirect only, through quotations, evocations, travel accounts, and partial portraits. In África and El criador de gorillas, Arlt thematizes the Orient and turns it into narrative material according to a well-designed and sophisticated plan. In an essay included in Aguafuertes Españolas, titled ‘El 22  Gasquet, L’Orient au sud, 309ff.; Roberto Arlt, Aguafuertes españolas (Buenos Aires: Compañia General Fabril Editora, 1971). 23  Gasquet, L’Orient au sud, 326. 24  Ibid. 25  Roberto Arlt, L’Éleveur de gorilles, trans. Jean-François Carcelen and Georges Tyras (Grenoble: Éditions Cent Pages, n.d.).

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mercador oriental y “las Mil y una Noches,” ’ Arlt argues that the Thousand and one nights reflects the typical attitude of the eastern merchant. Although Arlt’s work displays a multitude of characters and adventures, it is in essence a static work: The oriental imagination hovers around the divan and is encapsulated by the wall of the shop in which the merchant sits the whole day. Whereas in the Odyssey, the Nordic sagas, and the Nibelungen cycle the heroes have endless missions, the Thousand and one nights reflects the immobility of its creators. In its inactivity, the imagination of the Arabic narrator is directed at the path of the least resistance, that of fantasy, which allows events to happen without effort, through magic and fate. Arlt compares this attitude to European artisans in the Middle Ages; apparently, he did not realize that the stories of the Nights were based in medieval times as well.26 As noted, Arlt, with his avant-gardist methods, his orientalism, and his commitment to Argentine culture and society, combines traits that mark Argentine literature in the twentieth century. In the following sections, we see the ways in which the Thousand and one nights played an important role in giving this tradition its particular form, and focus on the main theme of this chapter: the acceptance of the essence of textuality. A Life Dedicated to ‘Pure Art’: Macedonio Fernández Macedonio Fernández (1874–1952) is often regarded as the author who ushered in the height of the modern Argentine novel, and even of the typical Latin American strand of novelistic art. This is somewhat ironic, since Fernández published very little during his life and his major work, Museo de la novela de la eterna (The museum of Eterna’s novel (the first good novel)), which he worked on throughout his life, was only published in 1967, twelve years after his death. Thus, his fame is based mainly on other factors: his fascinating personality, his peripatetic participation in intellectual coteries and networks – he was praised for his wit, his originality, and his eloquence – and his defiant stand against the conventions and requirements of literary modernism and its publishing apparatus. Fernández remained aloof from mainstream circles and trends and preferred to live and work in isolation, except for a group of literary friends. His fame is partly the result of myth-making by Borges, who was acquainted with him as a young man and who carefully constructed Fernández’s image as a literary genius, as his predecessor and inspiration. Not surprisingly, therefore, his biography contains some typical Borgesian elements.27 26  Roberto Arlt, Aguafuertes españolas, 87–89. 27  JoAnne Engelbert, Macedonio Fernández and the Spanish American Novel (New York: New York University Press, 1978), ix; Macedonio Fernández, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (the

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Fernández rejected the literary claims of modernism, as it emerged in Argentina in the beginning of the twentieth century, and the cultural channels through which it was expressed. He promoted the typical avant-garde precept that pure art is autonomous as an object, representing only itself, not as a form of realism, but in the sense that it represents only its own reality: Art has nothing to do with Reality, only then it is real. The truth of Art is intrinsic, it is unconditional, self-authenticated, not subordinated to the truth of life or pretending to supplant it. Art has no finality except to be itself. Moreover, art is part of a total metaphysical quest, in search of a personal solution to the mystery of being, a work of art is metaphysics, an experience of freedom, of non-being, of eternity, detached from referentiality, from laws and regulations, and from apperceptive visions of reality.28 This radical vision of art, which reflects the attitude of European modernism, had far-reaching consequences for Fernández’s concept of the novel. According to Fernández, the novelistic art was stalled in the phase of representation and referentiality. So, it was necessary to break the deadlock by disrupting the conventions that govern this obsolete form of art. Fernández’s novel lacks any of the methods and aims of the conventional novel; it does not attempt to instruct or inform, it does not appeal to the senses, it only exists for its own sake. It does not contain chronology, causality, narrative development, descriptions, characters, doctrines, preaching, wise judgments; it even has no beginning and no end.29 This implies that the ‘novel’ never reaches the state at which it crystallizes into completion; it is always in a state of becoming; the novel is perpetually being created, but it is also permanently deconstructed, and this prevents it from reaching a phase of completion and totality. Characters are not meant as a means for constructing identities, even within the diegetic reality of the story, but rather as a means of dis-identification, of deconstructing all realistic and representative notions of a self. The essentially fragmentary and dynamic nature of the novel has consequences for the reader as well. It not only implies that the reader is forced to participate in the process of narrating and constructing the novel, since he is persistently confronted by the author’s refusal to produce a coherent narrative; First Good Novel), trans. Margaret Schwartz (Rochester: Open Letter, 2010), foreword by Adam Thilwell, v. 28  Engelbert, Macedonio Fernández, 3, 65–66, 107–108. 29  Ibid., 103, 115.

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it also implies that the reader is forced to enter the realm of the narrative itself, since he is, so to speak, just as helpless as the characters themselves; he is drawn into their discussions and sorrows, and eventually shares their unreality. In the words of Adam Thirwell, in his foreword to the English edition of the novel: ‘[Fernández] developed techniques to dissolve the reader’s invincible existence as a continuous entity. The aim of Macedonio Fernández’s novels is to convert all reality into fiction (or the other way around): and the only way of doing this is if the reader is converted into fiction first.’30 Thus, the reader becomes one of the characters who does not act out his role, but reveals his non-being as an actor without a story. Paradoxically, actors without a story, because of their exclusion from a fictional narrative, thereby achieve a form of reality. We see the characters not as actors within the story of the novel, but in their real, unfictionalized, form backstage. By breaking up the narrative, both the reader and the characters lose their identity, but because this identity is essentially fictional, they become more real in the process. However, as readers and characters they are part of a novel, which of course does not exist in reality, but as dissociated parts. Therefore, they act in a novel which is not a novel. By breaking narrative consistency, Fernández has created a narrative epicenter which is, simultaneously, a novel and not a novel, but something that derives its existence from a multiplication of potential novels which are novels that do not exist, and this throws the reader, who is a character, into a maelstrom of narrative multiplication. The novel is always absent, but the reader and the characters continually strive to construct it, because they derive their existence from it. It will be clear from the previous remarks that it is not easy, and may even be impossible, to summarize Fernández’s novel The museum of Eterna’s novel. The story begins with the ‘President’ inviting a number of friends, who are characters in a novel, to stay at his estancia (estate) (called ‘La Novela’) in the countryside near Buenos Aires. The names of the characters indicate their role in the novel, that is, the imaginary novel; some of these names are the Lover, the Gentleman Who Does Not Exist, Maybegenius, Sweetheart, the Traveller, the Man Who Feigned to Live, etc. A special place is reserved for Eterna, the beloved of the President. But before the novel begins, Fernández inserts 58 prologues that postpone the beginning of the ‘story,’ and even consciously ‘prevent’ it from beginning.31 Yet, because they are prologues, they make the novel itself inevitable: “I must keep prologuing while avoiding the abuse of prologuing the prologues; and while I’m at that I have to make them 30  Fernández, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel, vi. 31  Ibid., 42.

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prologues of something, that is, they must be followed by something.”32 In the prologues the author reflects on the writing of his novel. There are two reasons to write it; one is “to show my gratitude, to keep her dream alive (person of such elevated influences on my spirit, such incredible grace, that sometimes I don’t know if I only dreamed her)”; the second is “to execute a theory of Art, Art of the Novel,”33 which implies that “this challenge culminates in the use of incongruities, to the point of forgetting the identities of the characters, forgetting continuity, temporal order, forgetting to put effects before causes, etc.”34 The reader just has to follow the “course of the emotional pull,”35 because writing is subject to radical contingency: “Art is that which is written without knowing what will happen, and thus has to be written while docilely discovering and then resolving each situation, each problem of action or expression.”36 It is, moreover, completely dissociated from the constraints of time and space: “It’s equivalent to a belief, to conceive that there could be a non-being, that one morning, space, things, and sensations could stop, or that one day they began, out of nothing.”37 At the entrance of the estancia we read: “Leave your past at the gates,” and “Pass here and your past will not follow.”38 Within the confines of the estancia, the characters (including the reader) are subjected to a permanent manipulation of reality and unreality. It is the President’s aim to teach the characters how not to exist, how to lose all sense of self, and to practice “artistic non-being.”39 They must accept that what they experience is a dream: “All the characters are under obligation to dream of being, which is their proper way of being, inaccessible to living people, and the only genuine stuff of Art. To be a character is to dream of being real.”40 Although the President thus seems to be in control, the characters have some measure of autonomy, some develop relationships with others, such as Sweetheart and Maybegenius, others only appear as instances of novelistic reflection. They seem to be aware that they are just characters, for instance, when they refer to themselves as characters in other novels, or when they intend to leave the estancia: “(only in the last line of this novel, therefore, are there ungrateful 32  Ibid., 100. 33  Ibid., 48. 34  Ibid., 32. 35  Ibid., 32. 36  Ibid., 23. 37  Ibid., 59. 38  Ibid., 117. 39  Ibid., 127. 40  Ibid., 35–36.

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‘characters’ who take advantage of this instance of life they’re given and go away to live it without staying for even a line longer in the novel).”41 They also seem to be autonomous, when they address the Reader directly: “I would like to be this character” “Are they like us? Happier than we are? Are they like the reader and the author?” “I want life!” Reader: “I’m the one who’s about to lose it. I feel like I don’t exist right now. Who took my life? Author: “Pinch yourself, you need to get rid of this ringing of reality, of being. In dreams nobody pinches himself.”42 With this kind of dialogue, especially by the Author addressing the Reader, the boundary between the participants in the building of the story becomes diffuse and the reader is in danger of being pulled into the story. At first, the Author philosophizes about the role of the reader, but at a certain point the characters themselves become apprehensive that the reader will not agree with the ‘plan’ of the novel: “ ‘What will the reader think of your plan? How rude, we never consulted him in this.’ ‘Well then, why not tell us your plan, distinguished reader – or has he gotten distracted, and left us alone?’ Reader: ‘… I’m at your service, and I approve of your plan.’”43 But the participation of the Reader is not without risk, since being part of art means being part of a form of non-being: (Struggle between the author and the reader; the author wants to pull the reader toward the fading away of his being in character. The reader wants it, but he doesn’t dare to renounce life forever, he’s afraid to be spellbound by the novel. He doesn’t know that he who enters “La Novela” never returns).44 And, more explicitly: “Author: ‘I shouldn’t say to the reader, “Come into my novel,” but rather save him from life indirectly. My quest is that every reader should enter my novel and lose himself in it; the novel will take him in, bewitch him, empty him out.’ ”45 The author ‘needs’ the reader, however:

41  Ibid., 168. 42  Ibid., 191–192. 43  Ibid., 151. 44  Ibid., 164. 45  Ibid., 164.

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Author: “Reader, sometimes your presence is requested in my pages and you are absent: your face comes close, and mirrors the dreaming in these pages, and you are absent. What bothers me is the reader: you’re my problem, your existence is invincible; the rest is just a pretext to keep you within earshot of the proceedings.” Reader: “Thank you!” But the author is also jeopardizing his “real” existence: “It seems the author has had a fright; he thinks he’s a character, trapped by his own invention.”46 The Author has the power to make the characters appear, disappear, or die; yet although he is able to draw the Reader into his story, by doing so, he implicates himself and runs the risk of also becoming a character himself.47 In fact, at some point the reader identifies him as the ‘President.’ The struggle between the Author, characters, and Reader comes to a head as the end of the novel approaches. It is here, after all, that their existence, that is, their role in the process of narration, ends. Although all the participants, especially the author, are aware of the threat of an ending, they also realize that the whole undertaking of the narrative is aimed at wiping out the idea of existence, which is tantamount to eliminating the dilapidating effects of time, and thereby acquiring some form of eternity. The death of the character is inextricably entangled with their potential ‘reality’: Here’s where the reader will agitate for the characters to be resurrected and for the plot to continue, now that they’ve fallen in love with the novel. (Because my book was as enchanting as Eterna’s tresses, a loving enchanter of readers who do not know when, in what page, their hearts were conquered…. [The] reader begs the author for the resurrection of one or more characters, novelistic resurrection, which is to say that they continue to be characters, not novelistic birth, which is to make the character into a person; and since you can’t continue being a character without continuing the plot of the novel, the author would have to satisfy the reader by following the character’s ongoing trials and tribulations.48 It is this consciousness of the necessary infinity of art that causes the author to refrain from a plot, because a plot would inevitably result in the termination of the story and the death of all characters: “the composition of prologues has sheltered me from the arduous responsibility of what they are meant to 46  Ibid., 169. 47  Ibid., 188. 48  Ibid., 233.

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precede. [The characters are] people who nevertheless share the same death, at the same place and time: the end of the book.”49 And: “It hurts me, the author, more than anyone to interrupt this life. No author has had the vision to torture the reader after the words THE END.”50 The author, however, continues to torture him: “Final prologue: I leave it an open book. Perhaps it will be the first ‘open book’ in literary history.”51 This play with the reality/unreality of the characters coincides with the continuation of the narrative, and the suggestion that through narration an ending, or ‘death’ may be evaded, indicates that the main metaphysical preoccupation of Fernández’s novel is death and infinity. The idea of death, or the prevention of death, is the main aim of narration: “the end to which I’m working is liberation from the idea of death: evanescence, mutability, rotation, and spinning of the self make it immortal, which is to say, release its destiny from the body.”52 The triumph over death by storytelling is not realized by interrupting a continuing story, but through other techniques of fragmentation and deconstruction, and is equivalent to achieving a form of non-being in the mystical sense: “This is how I name and define being: eternally auto-existing, the eternal, mystical in the intellection; which is to say the category ‘being’ is not fleeting, and cannot be lost.”53 It is this non-being that liberates us from time and space and “The nothingness of Time and Space, which is correlative to the nothingness of the Self (or personal identity) and of material Substance, situates us in an eternity without conceivable discontinuities. This is the metaphysical certainty of my novel.”54 The search for immortality is perhaps the aim of art, and art may be an aim in itself, but as a means to achieve immortality, art is inseparably connected to love. One cannot exist without the other: Love makes the present eternal, it totally occupies the memory and makes of the eternity that awaits us only an instant, or only the memory of an instant made eternal by perception, which is to say memory triumphs over Eternity, replaces it with the instantaneousness of Passion,

49  Ibid., 103. 50  Ibid., 234. 51  Ibid., 237. 52  Ibid., 59. 53  Ibid., 29. 54  Ibid., 62.

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of totalove, which happens at any stage of the totality of time, a totality that is ours since no life has a beginning.55 And, “You believe that death awaits us, a termination of our persons and our love, and I don’t believe that totalove can flourish in beings who believe that they are fleeting.”56 The dimensions of love are explored in the novel by the Lover and the love of Maybegenius and Sweetheart, who act as a kind of parallel intrigue to the main love story of the President and Eterna. It is Eterna who is at the nexus between love and (im)mortality: “The President doesn’t believe in Death, but he can’t love what he believes to be mortal, or what he does not know to be immortal…. Eterna’s misfortune (to believe herself mortal) is the immortalist President’s misfortune as well (incapacity to love the mortal).”57 The binary opposition between memory and forgetting is connected to the idea of death and immortality. Eterna represents a form of oblivion,58 while, by contrast, perfect love lasts an eternity. The Author/President confesses that he is writing to revive Eterna, who wants him to stop writing. For the Author/ President, oblivion represents death, and the perpetuation of memory is a road to immortality: “The President believes that death is nothing: that there’s no other death than oblivion (without corporeal annihilation), for those who love each other.”59 Eterna is a dream, “the most elevated daydream, and just as real as she is perfect, since that which is totally dreamed, in all its detail and desire, even as an idea, is real.”60 The last task that the Author/President sets himself is to make Eterna live: “So now he gathers all together to propose that they give Eterna life, so that someone in the novel may be saved from the unreality of being a character.”61 The second purpose of the novel is fulfilled, after the theory of Art. The figure of Eterna, in a way, functions as an anchor to which all the fluid characters and contemplations are attached. Everyone and everything has a fluid, temporary, and ambiguous existence, even the estancia, whose status as a property is awaiting a judicial decision. The President slips into the Author and vice versa, the characters act autonomously but are still subject to the orders of the President, the Author creates the characters to realize a state of 55  Ibid., 139. 56  Ibid., 85. 57  Ibid., 118. 58  Ibid., 163. 59  Ibid., 207. 60  Ibid., 208. 61  Ibid., 209.

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non-being, and a sense of finality is created through narration, which aims to install a regime of deferral and even produce a form of infinity. Only Eterna stands in the center as a master signifier; it seems that all the ambiguity created by narrating the novel in this way is designed to create a textual milieu in which Eterna can exist, in which the memory of Eterna can be preserved, in which she is brought to life (again), in which she reaches a state of eternity. It is the perfect love of the Author for Eterna that forces him to strive for a state of non-being, a state in which his love can continue to exist. This state of non-being is effectuated through narration, but not through straight narrative forms; narration itself is used to disrupt the structures of place and time that bind man to a temporary existence. Narration must break this regime of constraints and drain reality from coherent identities. By radically disrupting all forces that structure stories in time and space, the Author can free himself from the prison of temporality and reality and enter into a state in which he can be united with his beloved and perpetuate their love. It is this convergence of love, non-being, and infinity that constitutes the metaphysical dimension of Fernández’s writing and philosophy. His novel seems to be the beginning of a mystical trajectory in which the reader is lured into a labyrinth of narration, unaware where he is being led, even as he becomes increasingly trapped in a diffuse zone and helps to construct a realm in which the Author’s love for Eterna can endure. Significantly, Fernández wrote the novel to preserve the memory of his wife and muse Elena, who died prematurely. It is fascinating to see how deeply the setup, form, and idea of The museum of Eterna’s novel is entangled with the form and concept of the Thousand and one nights. A passage at the beginning of the novel, in which the Nights is referred to, reveals the extent to which the work functioned as a ‘prime mover’ of the novel: This is the only novel that tells everything and that, nevertheless, has nothing added, although the obligation to tell everything leads to telling more. I got hung up reading Arabic stories in my adolescence, because I didn’t know there were only 1,001, so I kept reading them after I’d finished: I was warned much too late, and so I continued devouring stories, which I found abundantly scattered through Morality, History; there are stories of Progress, the abnegation of statesmen or martyrs or propagandists of some selfless cause, like the happiness of the good, repentance of evil, the ultimate concordance of the general and the particular, or Utilitarianism, the order of the Universe and other miracles of the abundant “faith” of the men of science, which is so demanding of vulgar miracles!62 62  Ibid., 25–42.

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The Thousand and one nights thus acted as a narrative perpetuum mobile, a chain of stories that developed its own regenerative power and gradually encompassed everything in a web of narration that is permanently spun. But it is not only the narrative dynamics that have served as an example. All the vital preoccupations of the Museum can be related to the model of the Nights. The boundless proliferation of stories results in a narrative contingency that disrupts established structures of space and time; storytelling creates its own interstices in reality, through which the imagination or notions of unreality can seep into the realm of the real from which the storytelling sprang; storytelling is built on the idea of postponement, disrupting reality, and creating a liminal zone in which the narrator can realize his aims; deferral is connected to the notion of death and ending, but at the same time it is a means to overcome death and reach some form of infinity: the story has to end, but it is bound to continue, and through its fictionality it is able to perpetuate everyone and everything that has been pulled into the imaginary realm. It is a love relationship, with its inspirational force, its defiance of death, and its detachment from the trivial laws of reality, all of which act as a catalyst to achieve the final aim: a perpetuation of love through the transformation of reality into a narrative text. But, perhaps significantly, it is a text that explains its own coming into being as an endlessly self-generating narrative. A Universe of His Own: Jorge Luis Borges As noted, there is a difference in opinion about how to evaluate the influence of Macedonio Fernández in modern Argentine literature. In an article titled ‘Confused oratory: Borges, Macedonio and the creation of the mythological author,’ Todd Garth suggests that Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) consciously cultivated the image of Fernández and transformed him into a legend through posthumous anecdotes.63 Marcelo Ballvé, however, titled his discussion of the relationship between the two authors: ‘Macedonio Fernández: The man who invented Borges.’64 We may conclude that Borges was thoroughly inspired by the example and original mind of Fernández and therefore purposely mystified his life story, in order to construct a worthy ancestor. Or, Borges’s wish to establish himself in Argentine soil may have motivated him to reshape Fernández into a cornerstone of Argentine literature; thus, he gave his own originality an Argentine background and situated himself more clearly in world literature. 63  Todd S. Garth, “Confused Oratory: Borges, Macedonio and the Creation of the Mythological Author,” MLN 116 (2001), 364, 367. 64  Marcello Ballvé, “Macedonio Fernández: The Man Who Invented Borges,” Online: http:// quarterlyconversation.com/macedonio-fernandez-jorge-luis-borges, accessed 17 Feb. 2014.

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Perhaps Borges wanted to have a ‘home’ for his textual wandering through the literary universe. It is the tension between Borges’s Argentine background and his literary universality that is at the very heart of his work, and in which his artistic potential lay. On the one hand, he rejected the cultural solutions for Argentine society proposed by the modernists under the leadership of Lugones. Borges’s sacralizaton of Fernández is a statement in this respect, because it indicates his support for the avant-garde against the modernists. On the other hand, Borges attempted to construct an alternative vision of Argentine culture that transcended both visions: it emphasized its national identity and its essential diversity and openness to outside influences. According to Beatriz Sarlo, Borges “reinvents a cultural past and reconstitutes an Argentine literary tradition at the same time as he is reading foreign literatures.”65 He read foreign literature through the ‘prism’ of the Argentine tradition in an attempt to create his own synthesis of a modernist urge to find, or invent, a form of coherence, with the avant-garde consciousness of basic diversity. Because of Borges’s awareness of the permanent tension between diversity and coherence, his work is permeated by a sense of liminality and hybridity, and at the same time, a sense that all experiences are ultimately of a textual nature. Sarlo associates this tendency with the concept of the orillas, the marginal areas around Buenos Aires that are the interfacial zone between the capital and its rural hinterland, the vast spaces of the pampas. The notion of the orillas epitomizes Borges’s perception of diversity and hybridity: “For Borges, the imaginary landscape of Argentine literature should instead be an ambiguous region where the end of the countryside and the outline of the city become blurred.”66 And, “The orillas possess the qualities of an imaginary territory, an indeterminate space, the frontier between city and countryside.”67 This hybridity is the basic force of Argentine culture, linking it in a dynamic way to an indigenous past and a process of change as a result of immigration, the penetration of other cultures, and the rise of modernity. It also signifies the basic binary social tensions between Buenos Aires, urban culture, and the tradition of gauchismo. But the idea of hybridity not only characterizes the socio-cultural configuration inside Argentina, it also refers to the position of Argentina in the world. Borges acknowledges the enormous importance of European culture for all 65  Beatriz Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge, ed. John King (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 5. 66  Ibid., 20. 67  Ibid., 21.

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cultural expressions in Argentina, but it is certainly not the only source. Borges looks for a creative assembling of cultural influences that aim to “cut, select and reorder foreign literatures without preconceptions, asserting the rights of those who are marginal to make free use of all cultures. By reinventing a national tradition, Borges also offers Argentine culture an oblique reading of Western literatures.”68 Borges repeatedly celebrated this freedom, which, he says, is shared by other Latin Americans and, for example, the Irish: The same, Borges adds, applies to the Irish and to Argentines and South Americans in general: “We can handle all European themes, handle them without superstition.” The fabric of Argentine literature is woven with the threads of all cultures; our marginal situation can be the source of our true originality. It is not based on local colour (which binds the imagination to empiricist control) but on the open acceptance of influences.69 In this way, Borges demarcates his literary territory; it is simultaneously the Argentine orilla and the ‘universe’ of texts. In the sections below we first inventory how Borges’s perceptions of the Thousand and one nights co-shaped his literary strategies and procedures, and then proceed with a more detailed analysis of his references to the Nights in his works of fiction and non-fiction. Borges, Narration, and the Thousand and One Nights In order to better explain the ways in which Borges makes use of the Thousand and one nights as an intertextual source, it is useful to first summarize some characteristics of Borges’s poetics. For the sake of brevity, we present the essence of his method in ten key terms. [1] Narration. Borges has long stated that he prefers the form of the short story as the format for his art, because it can be most efficiently molded around a plot, and because it can be presented in the form of an oral account, stressing the element of narration. This latter form is almost automatically presented as a frame story: the story is embedded in a preparatory or explanatory frame, creating a depth that opens the possibility of multiple plots. [2] Plot. All stories have at least one carefully constructed plot, which is derived from a tight ordering of the narrative material and the form in which it is presented. 68  Ibid., 5. 69  Ibid., 28.

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[3] Texts. The material from which Borges weaves his stories, in the most general sense, is ‘texts.’ The stories are often presented as textual accounts, or even as simulacra of existing texts; or they refer to texts, as a source of authority or as an anomaly that nevertheless represents some intellectual ‘truth.’ In Borges’s work nothing is outside the text and everything that is thought, done, or experienced, individually or collectively, is part of a universal fabric of text, with its specific laws and capacities. References to real, historical, persons often appear within texts about them. [4] Secret order. The ordering of the stories, leading to a plot, often obeys laws that seem to be part of a textual logic, but are also part of an underlying, hidden, order derived from the organization of society, the labyrinth of an individual mind, or the common perceptions of a community. The stories often derive their suspense and intriguing element from this hidden inner logic, and this makes the course of events both inescapable and unfathomable. [5] Fate. The secret order is dominated by the inevitability of fate, which works throughout the textual universe and embraces all times and places. Fate is a universal ordering principle and an impenetrable mystery. [6] Essence. Narrative tension is often generated by the interaction between essences vested in persons, through the historical period, the culture, religion, or aberration which they personify, and the textual coercion of the plot. Essence represents a specific logic which, connected with textual logic, leads to an inevitable, fateful outcome. Fate manifests itself in history through cultural, ethnic, and historical essences, which are thus the only stable factor in human existence and simultaneously its greatest source of tragedy. Borges is especially interested in marginal figures (gauchos, heretics, the Irish) who, in spite of their marginality (or because of it), embody some kind of inherent essence. Of course, essences are not only linked to the forces of fate and the laws of texts, but also to secret orders. [7] Sacredness/sanctity. The elements of essence and the secret order are often reinforced with elements of sacredness, or taboos, or religiosity, invested in persons or texts. This element not only exemplifies the human urge to search for some divine truth, but also evokes a struggle between the irrational and the rational, between efforts to grasp the essentially unimaginable and efforts to fit experiences into a rational, coherent vision. [8] Doubling. Because of the essentially illusory nature of human reality and the multiplying dynamics of texts, throughout Borges’s work we find cases of doubling, both in the form of mirror images of persons, and in the form of textual duplication. Of course, the intriguing element of sameness is reinforced by the enigma of difference, which is inherent in the process of doubling.

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[9] Fictionality. Borges’s method is based on a constant fluidity between fictionality and referentiality. Accounts by characters telling their own story, or by eyewitnesses, are alternated with references to real and fictional books, or real and fictional persons. On the one hand, referentiality is used to link the story to a tradition and to history; on the other hand, it is used to gain access to some essence which enables a transition to fictionality. [10] Infinity. Borges’s image of the infinite library has become an iconic symbol of the infinity of the textual universe. Texts themselves are not only part of an infinitely expanding network, they are also an instrument that, by their ability to reveal inconsistencies in the notions of time and space, which in turn constitute the basis of our vision of reality, compels one to look into infinity. The interstices that the logic of texts and thought cannot incorporate grant us a vision of infinity, as if produced by this same logic. These key concepts characterize the literary strategies Borges used to shape his literary universe. They direct him to the fragments of the cultural heritage of humanity, from ancient times to the present, from China to Buenos Aires, and provide him with the means to assemble these fragments into a unique literary vision. They evoke elements of the fantastic, of mysticism and of philosophy, reproducing essences in a new form, one that – and this is essential – is reshaped by the ‘mysticism’ of language and textuality. Their new shape is created by subjecting them to a relentless domination of the laws of language and text, to digging out their inner logic and their inner contradictions. As Piglia notes, Borges has recreated the literature of suspense, only the suspense is not in his characters or his events, but in his revelation of the mysterious powers of language. Borges has long mentioned the Thousand and one nights as an important, perhaps even his most important, literary source of inspiration. Throughout his work, both in his fiction and in his non-fiction, we can find the traces of a deep and persistent intertextual relationship with the Nights. These traces consist of essays about the Nights, emulations of stories from the Nights and the staging of characters from the Nights, casual references to the Nights as an example of a kind of text, evocations of the concept of the Nights, especially as an infinite text; in addition to which, he integrates the Nights in the story as a narrative element. Together, all these references give an idea about the position and role of the Thousand and one nights in the shaping of Borges’s literary universe and the methods he used to create it. Next, we discuss his two essays about the Nights, then we present a brief survey of other references, and relate these references to the key concepts of the Borgesian ‘method.’

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In his essay ‘Siete noches’ (‘Seven nights’) Borges sets out to relate the Thousand and one nights, “which I love so much, … loved since childhood,”70 to a concept of the Orient. This concept is deliberately described as a vague, ungraspable notion: “There has always been a general consciousness of the Orient, something vast, immobile, magnificent, incomprehensible.”71 The Orient is an idea and is not congruent with something existing in reality: “How does one define the Orient (not the real Orient, which does not exist)?”72 It is something “whose existence we feel, but cannot really point out.” But is it necessary to define it? “Perhaps it’s not worth it to define something we feel instinctively.”73 It is this ‘instinct’ which should guide us here, since this is what gives the concept its significance, since the words “Orient and Occident, East and West, which we cannot define are nevertheless ‘true.’”74 The Orient is a fiction, a mystification; it is a thought-construct, but at the same time it is the reflection of an intrinsic truth. Borges’s idea of the Orient is conjured up by the Thousand and one nights, which he characterizes as “the work of thousands of authors,”75 a book which, as the title indicates, is “infinite.”76 It is a work that has made the strict regulations for the classical tradition of literature obsolete through its sheer force of confabulation and imagination; it has thereby ushered in the literary unboundedness of Romanticism: “But it might be said that the Romantic movement begins at that moment when someone, in Normandy or in Paris, reads the Thousand and one nights. He leaves the world legislated by Boileau and enters the world of Romantic freedom.”77 It is a work in which “dreams branch out and multiply,” and which, as De Quincey observed in his comment on the story of ‘Aladdin’ (“incomparably superior to other stories”), shows us a world which is made of mysterious correspondences. It is a book that permanently renews and recreates itself, as a text which carries inside itself a hidden regenerative force. Although the ‘Orient’ is qualified as indefinable, Borges is still tempted to give it some characteristics, which show to what extent his idea of the Orient 70  Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights, trans. Eliot Weinberger (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987), 42. 71  Ibid., 42. 72  Ibid., 51. 73  Ibid., 48. 74  Ibid., 42. 75  Ibid., 48. 76  Ibid., 50. 77  Ibid., 54.

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is permeated with elements of the Thousand and one nights. The Orient is a ‘world of extremes,’ in which people are either very happy or very unhappy, very rich or very poor; it is a world of kings who are ‘as irresponsible as gods,’ of hidden treasures, and of magic, which should be understood as a ‘unique causality’ underlying the course of events. Here the Thousand and one nights converges with the idea of the Orient and in the process, it becomes mystified, essentialized, and fictionalized, too. The Thousand and one nights is not only a book, a work of literature; it is also an idea, a fiction, which, like the Orient, pertains to the cognitive domain of our ‘instincts.’ The Thousand and one nights is part of our ‘primordial’ knowledge: “It is a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it, for it is a part of our memory.”78 Borges elaborates on his experiences with the Thousand and one nights in another, famous, essay, ‘The translators of the Thousand and one nights,’ in which he reveals some additional components of his ‘poetics.’ Borges begins by placing the main translations of the Nights in a tradition, not of mutual influence, but rather of mutual antagonism: “Lane translated against Galland, Burton against Lane; to understand Burton we must understand this hostile dynasty.”79 Borges then sets out not so much to discuss the textual/literary merits of the various translations, but rather to situate them in the cultural context of their time and relate them to the character and the intentions of the translators. In Galland we see “the cloying flavour of the 18th century, and not the evaporated aroma of the Orient.”80 Lane “does not seek to bring out the barbaric colour of the Nights like Captain Burton, or to forget it and attenuate it like Galland, who domesticated his Arabs so they would not be irreparably out of place in Paris.”81 Lane and Galland ‘disinfected’ the Nights. Borges here shows a glimpse of his own philological perception of the Nights, which is not really based on philological arguments, but rather on an idealized view of the text: [Galland’s and Lane’s] detractors argue that this process destroys or wounds the goodhearted naiveté of the original. They are in error; The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night is not (morally) ingenious; it is an adaptation of ancient stories to the lowbrow or ribald tastes of the

78  Ibid., 57. 79  Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 92. 80  Ibid., 93. 81  Ibid., 95.

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Cairo middle classes…. [Thus,] we may see the timidities of Galland and Lane as the restoration of a primal text.82 Borges’s interest in the Thousand and one nights especially concerns the translations of Burton and Mardrus. Burton is presented as the exponent of a long and deep-rooted tradition, represented by Coleridge, De Quincey, Tennyson, Poe, and Newman. His many adventures did not make him “forget his British reticence, the delicate central solitude of the masters of the earth. Consequently, his exceedingly erudite version of the Nights is (or seems to be) a mere encyclopaedia of evasion.”83 Throughout his life, Burton was inventing and cultivating the image of himself, creating a legend which put him above the petty preoccupations of his contemporaries. The translation of the Thousand and one nights was a part of his self-construction: Burton the translator of the Nights is the Burton of the legend. His aims with the translation were inextricably bound to his personal ambitions and moral political outlook: “The problems Burton resolved are innumerable, but a convenient fiction can reduce them to three: to justify and expand his reputation as an Arabist; to differ from Lane as ostensibly as possible; and to interest nineteenth-century British gentlemen in the written version of thirteenth-century oral Muslim tales.”84 This implies that he risked the rejection of his more prudent compatriots, some of whom criticized him for his inclination to obscenity and thought his work only suited for the “sewer.”85 Borges points at the linguistic liberties Burton took to achieve specific exotic effects, such as the use of neologisms and playful inventions. Mardrus adopted the same freedom; his translation is “as much fin de siècle as Galland is 18th century, and much more unfaithful.”86 Borges does not criticize this freedom; rather he sees it as evidence of a creative and artful spirit that enables him to embed the text in his time: “it is [Mardrus’s] infidelity, his happy and creative infidelity, that must matter to us.”87 Borges defends him against his many critics, especially oriental scholars, who accuse him of textual fraud: “In general, it can be said that Mardrus does not translate the book’s words but its scenes: a freedom denied to translation but tolerated in illustrators.”88 For Borges, the 82  Ibid., 96. 83  Ibid., 94. 84  Ibid., 99. 85  Ibid., 100. 86  Ibid., 93. 87  Ibid., 106. 88  Ibid.

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Mardrus translation is the most attractive: “But to me, the Mardrus ‘translation’ is the most readable of them all – after Burton’s incomparable version, which is not truthful either. (In Burton, the falsification is of another order. It resides in the gigantic employ of a gaudy English, crammed with archaic and barbaric words).”89 Of the other translations, Borges mentions the German version of Enno Littmann, which is perhaps the most correct, but still not the best, and even disappointing. In Littmann he finds only a “probity of Germany,” whereas “Burton, Mardrus and even Galland can only be conceived in the wake of a literature.” Their work “presupposes a rich (prior) process,” it is the “residu of a literary tradition.”90 A translation should not only derive its value from faithfulness, stylistic or linguistic proficiency, but it should also show the traces of an individual mind, which has processed the literary tradition in which the translation is situated and, preferably, the experience of a lifetime. Borges wonders: What would a writer like Kafka have made of this rich material?91 Throughout Borges’s non-fiction essays, the Thousand and one nights is mentioned repeatedly, mostly in comparison with other works or to express his admiration. In one essay, he comments on the formal aspects of the Nights: “The Thousand and one nights doubles and dizzyingly redoubles the ramifications of a central tale into digressing tales, but without ever trying to gradate its realities and the effect (which should be one of depth) is superficial, like a Persian carpet.”92 This brief characterization of the structure of the frame story is supplemented with Borges’s famous evocation of the Nights’ ‘602nd night,’ in his ‘Garden of the forking paths.’ In this chapter of the Nights, the story of Shahrazad and Shahriyar is repeated, thus creating a vertiginous charm in which the cycle of stories repeats itself endlessly. In reality, only Habicht’s text and the accompanying German translation include a comparable insertion of this 602nd night.93 Both the proliferative function of frames and the rupture caused by the ‘602nd night’ evidently fall in line with Borges’s literary aesthetics, as “the queen Scheherazade (through some magical distractedness on the part of the copyist) begins to retell, 89  Ibid. 90  Ibid., 108. 91  Ibid., 109. 92  Ibid., 160. 93  In Burton, Plain and Literal Translations of the Arabian Nights Entertainments’ Now Entitled the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, trans. Richard Burton (N.p.: n.p., ca. 1905); Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, trans. Richard Burton (N.p.: n.p., ca. 1905), 2:263ff.

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verbatim, the story of the Thousand and one Nights, with the risk of returning once again to the night on which she is telling it – and so on, ad infinitum.”94 Because of Borges’s fascination with it, the ‘602nd night’ has become the quintessential example of what is called the mise en abîme in literary studies and narratology. Fiction In Borges’s fiction, the Orient, suitably mystified as an exotic mirage, is one of the main metanarrative references. These references are, in most cases, directly linked to the Thousand and one nights. Conversely, the Thousand and one nights is mentioned as an epitome of the Orient, and as a fictional representation of itself. In the following paragraphs, we briefly inventory a number of typical references to the Nights in several of Borges’s stories, and subsequently discuss three stories in which the references reveal more deeply the connections between the Nights and Borges’s poetics. In several stories by Borges, the Thousand and one nights, in one way or another, turns up on a bookshelf or is mentioned in passing (‘The other,’ The book of sand,’ ‘The Aleph,’ ‘Circular ruins,’ ‘The man on the threshold’). Here, the references are intended to add a component that appeals to the general connotations of the Nights in Borges’s literary universe: they add a sense of mystery, of infinity, of the all-encompassing function of texts, or the phenomenon of ‘doubling,’ transcending the limits of time and space. The Thousand and one nights is, so to speak, a substratum on which these stories are conceived, and which shine through the surface at certain points; it is an underlying pattern that helps mold both the form of the stories, the elements of their meaning, and the elements of narrative strategy. The references are meant to illustrate the ubiquity of the Nights as an intertextual source. It is sometimes precisely the casual way in which these references are strewn throughout the work that makes their presence the more compelling and effective. One example in which the reference to the Nights is a more explicit comment on the function of the work as a model for a specific story, which contains one of the key elements of Borges’s poetics and thus has a wider purport than this story alone, is the motif of the ‘602nd night’ in ‘The garden of the forking paths,’95 which contains the essential image of the maze. Apart from these rather general references, in a number of stories, the Thousand and one nights appears to enhance the exoticism or link them to the Arabic-Islamic tradition. The story ‘The chamber of statues,’ about a locked 94  Borges, Collected Fictions, 125. 95  Ibid., 119ff.

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room containing the prediction of the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Muslims, is a replica of the story of ‘Labtayt’ in the Thousand and one nights, with the acknowledgment that it is taken from the 272nd night.96 The motif of the locked room and the prediction, revealing the workings of fate as a transcendental force, of course fits well in Borges’s literary imagination, since it contains the overarching historical controversy between Christianity and Islam in a microcosmic time capsule and links individual agency to the entire mechanism of history. It shows that fate has already placed its signs in the human world, but also that these signs are instrumental in allowing fate to take its course. By integrating this story into his poetics, with an explicit reference to the Thousand and one nights, Borges simultaneously defines the Nights as a text related to temporal transcendence and fate, a text that contains and reveals the essential nodes of human history. In a similar way, Borges copies the ‘Story of the ruined man who became rich again through a dream,’ about a hidden treasure in Isfahan, which also explores the relation between fate and human agency (351st night in some versions).97 In the story ‘Hakim, the masked dyer of Merv,’ which Borges claims is based on Arabic sources, he suggests a link between the religious tradition of Islam and the Thousand and one nights. It is a story about masked men in the desert, a harem of 114 blind women (114 is the number of chapters of the Qur’an), Gabriel, God, and prophecy. The story engages notions of theology, heresy, and mysticism, which are favorite themes of Borges and which are essentialized here in the Arabic-Islamic tradition. But in the sentence “someone (as in the Thousand and one nights) asked the reason”98 Borges inserts the Thousand and one nights as a medium to reveal hidden meanings, since ‘wonder’ is an essential element of the Nights, it discloses what is hidden and turns the secrets of theology and mysticism into a story. The Thousand and one nights is an instrument to help us gain access to an essential domain of human knowledge, which is revealed by the act of storytelling. It is not only the Nights itself that has this function; its transmitters also lead us into the realm of Arabic mystery, as in ‘The mirror of ink,’ a wondrous story told by Captain Richard Burton, the legend.99 Again, Borges utilizes both the exoticism, which is associated with the Nights and which gives it its narrative potential, and the inherent qualities of the work.

96  Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:265–266. 97  Burton, Supplemental Nights, 1:359–361. 98  Borges, Collected Fictions, 41. 99  Ibid., 60ff.

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The mysterious, textual, nature of the Thousand and one nights is exploited even more fundamentally in three famous Borgesian tales, ‘Brodie’s report,’ ‘Tlön,’ and ‘The south.’ In ‘Brodie’s report’ the framework of the story is provided when the author finds a manuscript inside the first volume of Lane’s translation of the Thousand and one nights, which was given to him by a friend. This act places the story in a chain of events, which is the result of coincidence, and which indicates that the manuscript probably dates to 1840, the year the edition was published. The manuscript is written by a certain Brodie, a Scottish missionary who “was interested more in Lane’s footnotes than in the stories of Shahrazad.”100 What follows is an anthropological account about a region of Ape-men, Arabs, and Yahoos. Here Borges evokes the spirit of the nineteenth century, with its great discoveries, its fake ethnology and, to be sure, the enchantment of the Thousand and one nights which, in Lane’s rendering, presents the many wonders of the Nights in a framework of scholarly footnotes, thus adding a sense of veracity to the oddities presented in the stories and reproducing the textual dynamics engendered by the Nights. Another imaginary realm in an imaginary text is created in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,’ which is about an ‘encyclopaedia of Tlön’ which is 1001 pages. In Tlön, the world is “successive, temporal, but not spatial”; the world is not “an amalgam of objects in space”; but “a heterogeneous series of independent acts.”101 Thinking is not a system, but a state of mind. The Thousand and one nights is referred to in an example of literary criticism in Tlön fashion. In this story, a quasi-realistic framework is built around a mysterious encyclopaedia and its scientific, scholarly, and totalizing connotations, which is the textual key to a universe which, in the end, consists only of a paper trail, but which destabilizes common ideas about how a society should be connected in a structured mental and culturally coherent way. The Thousand and one nights is inserted here as a kind of magic element that has caused this anomaly, as a spell pervading the textual construct of Tlön. At the same time, it emphasizes the textuality of Tlön, making it part of a wider world of wonders, which is also quintessentially textual. Finally, the reference to the Nights suggests a hidden pattern: Tlön is part of an imaginary realm whose manifestation in reality is laid down in the Thousand and one nights. It looks chaotic to normal human beings, but it is linked to a sub-reality and thereby it is orderly because it is associated with the symbolism of the Nights. The function of the Thousand and one nights as a spell that invades the story and as a ‘key’ to other realities is especially prominent in ‘The south,’ which 100  Ibid., 402. 101  Ibid., 71.

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Borges himself considered his best story; it certainly contains some of the main literary elements in Borges’s work. The story is about Juan Dahlmann, whose grandfather was an immigrant to Argentina and a soldier killed in the wars against the Indians. In spite of this mixed descent, Juan feels “profoundly Argentine.”102 Nevertheless, this sense of authenticity is not self-evident as an unquestionable, natural, identity; rather, it is conceptualized and connected with certain images, as if it is represented and constructed, observed from a distance: In the contrary pulls from his two lineages, Juan Dahlmann (perhaps impelled by his German blood) chose that of his romantic ancestor, or that of a romantic death. That slightly wilful but never ostentatious “Argentinization” drew sustenance from an old sword, a locket containing the daguerreotype of a bearded, inexpressive man, the joy and courage of certain melodies, the habit of certain verses in Martin Fierro, the passing years, a certain lack of spiritedness, and solitude.103 Here the element of ‘gauchismo,’ the romantic myth of Argentine authenticity, as represented in the modernist view of cultural identity, is evoked as a real, ‘lived’ identity. One day in 1939, Dahlmann, who works as the secretary of a municipal library in Buenos Aires, hurries home with a newly found copy of the Thousand and one nights: “That afternoon Dahlmann had come upon a copy (from which some pages were missing) of Weil’s Arabian Nights; eager to examine his find, he did not wait for the elevator – he hurriedly took the stairs. Something in the dimness brushed his forehead – a bat? A bird?”104 His head is injured by an open window in the staircase. That night Dahlmann is overcome by a mysterious disease which seems to be caused by his accident: “Dahlmann managed to sleep, but by the early hours of morning he was awake, and from that time on, the flavour of all things was monstrous to him. Fever wore him away, and illustrations from the Arabian Nights began to illuminate nightmares.”105 He steadily deteriorated as a result of his affliction, so Dahlmann is brought to a sanatorium where he hopes that he will finally be able to sleep in a room “that is not his own.”106 Instead of recovering, gradually he starts to hate 102  Ibid., 174. 103  Ibid. 104  Ibid. 105  Ibid., 175. 106  Ibid.

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himself. After some time, he is allowed to leave the hospital and he decides to take a trip to a family estate in the south. On the train, he opened his bag and after a slight hesitation took from it the first volume of The Arabian Nights. To travel with this book so closely linked to the history of his torment was an affirmation that the torments were past, and was a joyous, secret challenge to the forces of evil.107 Although he enjoys reading the stories, he nevertheless closes the book and ‘returns’ to reality. The stories he read “were wondrous things, but not much more wondrous than this morning, and the fact of being. Happiness distracted him from Scheherazade and her superfluous miracles; Dahlmann closed the book and allowed himself simply to live.”108 This sense of euphoria seems to reconnect him to his surroundings. However, from this point onward this reality appears less unequivocal than it seemed. Dahlmann has the feeling that he is two men simultaneously, one in the train and one in the sanatorium; he has the feeling that he is not only heading south, but also traveling to the past. Moreover, he is obliged to get off the train in another station, which is not his destination, and there he sees a building that looks like an illustration from his book, and a man who looks like a sanatorium employee and who is dressed in old gaucho clothes. Dahlmann imagines himself “in a sort of eternity.”109 Suspicious of the transformations to which he is prey, Dahlmann opens his copy of the Arabian nights, “as though to block out reality.”110 However, his environment has taken control and when he is, rather inexplicably, challenged to a duel, “it was as though the South itself had dreamed that Dahlmann should accept the challenge.”111 When he is killed in the duel, “he sensed that if he had been able to choose or dream his death that night, this is the death he would have dreamed or chosen.”112 In ‘The south,’ we can, first, find one of the main preoccupations of Borges and his intellectual compatriots, that is, the construction of an Argentine cultural identity. The gaucho element, the idea of the south as opposed to Buenos Aires, Dahlmann’s descent from a German father, are all elements that should somehow fit together to define a cultural authenticity that includes 107  Ibid. 108  Ibid., 176. 109  Ibid., 178. 110  Ibid. 111  Ibid., 179. 112  Ibid.

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the destabilizing components of immigration and artificiality. Borges leaves the way in which Dahlmann appears to solve this problem, by enacting his ideal death, ambiguous; it remains unclear whether Dahlmann’s journey to the south is just a dream or a fantasy that he experiences as a reality, or a real journey reshaped by his imagination. Dahlmann succeeds in becoming the authentic Argentine figure that he wants to be, but to reach it he must become ill, he must hallucinate, he must die. Only by gradually, but completely, shedding his former self, is he able to be transformed into the essentialized self of his fantasies. The structure of the story, and of Dahlmann’s experience, is completely dominated by the trope of the Thousand and one nights, which appears at the crucial turning points of the story. First, the Nights is presented as a material object, a precisely described book, made even more concrete by being deficient – a few pages are missing. The book turns up again in the train and in the café where Dahlmann will meet his death. It is clear, however, that the book, as an object, contains some spell that affects Dahlmann’s actions and perception. The acquisition of the book makes him too impatient to wait for the elevator; illustrations from the book haunt him in his feverish nightmares; and the book seems to stand between Dahlmann and reality: it is a means to ‘black out’ reality and enter into a world of wonders and miracles. The book is thus a material manifestation of something different, a mysterious power, an intervention from a supernatural realm, or, simply, fate. As an immaterial ‘force,’ the Thousand and one nights is systematically associated with the shifting between realities, both in Dahlmann’s experience and in the reader’s perception of the story. The Thousand and one nights causes Dahlmann’s injury and his subsequent immersion in an illness that causes his hallucinations, in which dream and reality are mingled. In the train and in the café, the book is presented as a medium for traveling from one domain to another, or perhaps even for completely eliminating the boundaries between the domains, and pushes Dahlmann into a state of ambiguity in which the real markers of time and place are lost. The copy of the Nights is a catalyst in which realities dissolve; on the one hand, this limits the autonomy of the characters, but on the other hand, it allows them to embark on a process of transformation in which they can find their ideal self. Breaking up Dahlmann’s regular – real – life is a precondition for him to realize his romantic image of himself. The Thousand and one nights is thus an instrument to ‘cure’ Dahlmann of his hybridity and effectuate his essentialized, iconic self. But it was Dahlmann’s hybridity in the first place that made possible the intervention of the transformative force of the Nights. It was his concern about his identity, in the constructivist sense, and his awareness of the deficiencies and composite nature

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of his identity that made Dahlmann susceptible to external forces and created the space for him to re-imagine himself, in the form of a complete and coherent self-image that conforms to his idea of authenticity. It is here that we perceive one of Borges’s main concerns with respect to Argentine identity: its hybridity should be reconstructed not as an essentialized whole, but as a form of authenticity, and it is through a process of textualization that the construction can be completed, since texts are inherently both coherent and heterogeneous and dynamic. It is through textualization and identification with the working of texts that Dahlmann is able to amalgamate himself with his image, regardless of the essential hybridity that is an inescapable condition. The function of the Thousand and one nights in ‘The south’ also illuminates the role of the Nights in Borges’s work as a whole. The Nights is part of an underlying pattern, perhaps connected to fate, which at a certain point rises to the surface to influence or even determine the state of people, things, and texts. It is also the quintessence of a text, of the process of textualization, and of the ‘magic’ and mystery of texts. And, finally, it is a means for exoticization, creating the context of an ‘other,’ in textual form, which can be used by Argentine intellectuals as an instrument for cultural self-definition and self-reflection, not only by mirroring their hybrid selves, but also by providing a typical Borgesian tool for essentializing, stereotyping, and retrieving intrinsic forms of authenticity. If we return to the key elements of Borges’s poetics mentioned above, we can now see how deeply the Thousand and one nights relates to these basic methods. [1] Narration: The Thousand and one nights is the iconic symbol of narration in its various aspects; this is evident in the suggestion of orality, the indirectness of the frame structure, the free flow of fantasy, suspense, etc. Whenever the Nights is mentioned, the element of narration as an act and as a form of representation is added to the story. By being associated with the Nights, the story becomes part of the larger realm of storytelling which the work symbolizes. [2] Plot: As is shown, for instance, in the story ‘The chamber of statues,’ the Thousand and one nights is inseparably linked to the idea of plot, not only in the narratological sense, but also in a historical sense. In the Nights, the plots of stories and of historical phenomena converge. [3] Texts: The Thousand and one nights is the epitome of a text, both in its material form, as a book, a specific edition, etc., but also as a dynamic repository of meaning that expands and develops in history and in the minds of men; it proliferates, transforms, and ramifies uncontrollably. It epitomizes the universal nature of texts, as a phenomenon, and the textual nature of the universe.

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[4] Secret order: The Thousand and one nights reveals, throughout Borges’s work, a hidden framework that regularly intervenes in the superstructure which Borges himself builds on this framework. It often acts as an instrument of fate, because it derives its magic power from a substratum to which man normally has no access. It is somehow entwined with the laws that determine the course of history. [5] Fate: As we have seen in ‘The south,’ the Thousand and one nights functions as a catalyst to provoke events and redirect the lives of the characters. It is also a medium by which fate can enter into human lives, not only as a sign to warn the protagonists, but as a real, intervening force, often even in material form. [6] Essence: In Borges’s vision of the world, the Thousand and one nights can fulfill these multiple functions because it contains so many essences. As an ‘essential’ text it prefigures Borges’s methods, especially the search for essentialized figures or ideas and their confrontation with history, fate, and plot. But the Nights is also a means to essentialize, through textualization. It offers a counter-image to forms of hybridity, a form of essentialism through rootedness in historical tradition and as part of human consciousness. [7] Sacredness: The Thousand and one nights is associated with the broad tradition of Islam and oriental spirituality, as one of the main responses to the enigmas of human existence. [8] Doubling: The Thousand and one nights reveals and produces the awareness of a multiple reality; it splits and mixes the domains of the real and the unreal, of texts and non-texts, of real and fictional persons, of reality and dream. It is a marker of such fluidity; it makes it possible to cross boundaries, and it symbolizes the idea of replication, even to the extent that it is ‘copied’ by Borges. [9] Fictionality: The Thousand and one nights is not only an example of the power of fictionality and the essential fictionality of the human mind, but it is also a tool to produce fictionality, to draw reality into texts and vice versa. The Nights shows how reality and fiction permanently shape each other and how referentiality can suggest realism but imply fictionalization, and thus emphasize the ambiguous relationship between the two. The Nights is fiction in all senses, but it is also an undeniable reality. [10] Infinity: The Thousand and one nights, and also the number 1001, symbolize infinity and totality. The Thousand and one nights is the text that contains everything: the past, the present, and the future. It is a replica of the infinite library and the textual universe that has absorbed all the essences of human thought, but that also embodies its dynamism, because it expands

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and transforms continuously, is re-interpreted and reproduced endlessly, and thereby adapts itself to the trends of the times and the ingenuity of individual minds. Because it represents the essence of texts, it is narrative material that belongs to everyone and that can always be used to create something new. To conclude, for Borges, the Nights is not just a literary model, or a source of narrative inspiration; rather, it is the chart of his literary universe, in which the unlimited force of literature is concentrated, and which can be tapped to design a coherent literary oeuvre. It is connected to Borges’s main methods and visions; it is the indispensable precondition for his literary imagination. Ricardo Piglia: The Text as a Machine Authors such as Macedonio Fernández, and later Roberto Arlt and Jorge Luis Borges, developed their work in the context of Argentine modernism, budding capitalism, and debates about the cultural identity of their country. Together they created a modern literary tradition which gave Argentina a distinct place in global culture and which helped shape the field of Argentine and Latin American literature. Ricardo Piglia (1940–2017) has long acknowledged the great significance of his distinguished predecessors and confirmed that he follows, at least in part, in their footsteps. Like them, he is also concerned with the effort to construct a certain cultural coherence out of disparate elements and a variety of centripetal forces. For him, it is not only internal diversity that threatens Argentine culture, but, in the 1970s, the destructive power of the repressive military regimes, in combination with the dispersive effects of the postmodern condition. Because of his commitment, his relationship with his predecessors, and the complexity of his work, he is seen as the torchbearer of Argentine literature. As far as narrative techniques are concerned, Piglia’s work is marked by a systematic fragmentation. According to Piglia, the essence of literature is encompassed in the short story, or, as he calls it, formas breves (‘short pieces’), both fictional and non-fictional, which are never completely separated from each other. Piglia’s novels, as a rule, consist of a configuration of short narrative elements, which he calls ‘nodes,’ and which together form a rather varied whole. The fragmention in storytelling reflects postmodern culture, which is built on a rapidly changing collage of images and impressions, video clips, zapping, and, in general, a multi-temporal heterogeneity marked by hybridity. The main effect of fragmentation is its permanent threat to the coherence of everything that structures our view of ourselves and our society, language, spatial orientation, memory, and identities. Fragmentation is perhaps not a destructive force by itself; it is the manipulation of fragmentation by oppressive governments that

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produces amnesia and a lack of cultural orientation and consistent self-images, and that creates instead ‘suppressed,’ or ‘absent,’ realities. In his collections of essays, Formas breves (2000) and El ultimo legador?, Piglia reflects on the inspiring characteristics of the work of his predecessors. Macedonio Fernández, and his novel Museo de la novela de la Eterna, are without doubt his most influential predecessors. Macedonio’s novel was initially intended to remain unidentified, anonymous, or published under a pseudonym. It was meant to be published in installments and as a novel which, like Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, was conceived to make any ending impossible. It would become the infinite novel, which contained all variants and deviations, a novel which “would continue as long as the writer was alive”113 It would be a novel that contained everything, like the ‘Aleph’ of Borges. Fernández’s text builds up suspense in “microscopic form: they are instalment novels in miniature, using the techniques of the interruption of acts, but atomized and extremely dense and repeated manifold.”114 In this way, and through the process of writing, Fernández’s text absorbs time, it is transformed into layers, preserving its previous versions and becoming many novels in one novel, which is synchronous with Macedonio’s life.115 This narrative strategy involves the reader, which is indispensable for the telling of a story. Eterna, in Fernández’s novel, is the most perfect reader of the novel, because she combines infinity with continual interruption.116 The merit of Borges, according to Piglia, is that he realized that mass culture had become a mechanism for the cultivation of false memories, which were manipulated to construct “impersonal experiences.”117 Borges’s response was to erect a parallel universe in literature. Literature is the most adequate medium, because it reproduces the forms and constraints of this stereotypical world, although with another register, in another dimension, as in a dream. In this sense the figure of the alien memory is the key allowing Borges to define the poetic tradition and the cultural heritage. To remember with an alien

113  Ricardo Piglia, Kurzformen: Babylon, Borges, Buenos Aires, trans. Elke Wehr (Berlin: Berenberg Verlag, 2006), 17. 114  Ibid., 19. 115  Ibid., 60. 116  Ibid., 24, 149; Ricardo Piglia, Der Letzte Leser, trans. Leopold Federmair (N.p.: Klever Verlag, n.d.). 117  Piglia, Kurzformen, 29.

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memory is a variant of the Doppelgänger theme, but also a perfect metaphor for the literary experience.118 And, “Reading is the art to construct a personal memory starting from alien experiences and memories. The scenes of the book that has been read return as private memories.”119 Within the parallel universe, a sense of fictional reality is created which is again related to other fictional realities, a process that reflects the nature of the novel: “There is a connection between reading and reality, but also between reading and dreams, and this double connection marks the history of the novel as a genre.”120 And, “The sign of this absolute autonomy of Borges’s figure of the reader is the fictio-effect which is evoked by reading.”121 This mechanism of relating fictionality with reality, vested in novelistic literature, has a clear political dimension: “To the technological arsenal which enabled the Europeans to conquer the world belonged the ability, which was developed over the centuries, to control the relationship between fiction and reality.”122 It is for the multiplication of realities that Borges utilizes the topos of texts to gain access to fictional worlds that are, at the same time, multiplied themselves. Even better, in ‘Tlön’ the story begins with a text which is lost, thus, ‘absence breaks into the story’ and the story takes shape around a lacuna, deepening the sense of fictionality. Similarly, in ‘The south,’ the book of the Thousand and one nights fulfills an essential role for the “ambivalent material which makes the microscopic mechanisms of storytelling function, of which a story consists.”123 The story becomes a frame story without a story, or vice versa, in which the copy of the Nights is the gate to an outside reality, while the desire to read leads to the unfortunate events. It is no coincidence that in Dahlmann’s copy of the Nights some pages are missing (this ‘absence’ causes a rupture in Dahlmann’s life) and Dahlmann is repeatedly interrupted: He is the essential interrupted reader who, through the alternation of reading and interruption, reconstitutes his relation to reality. The Thousand and one nights opens up a possibility to escape, but the harsh outside reality keeps imposing itself. The Thousand and one nights transforms Dahlmann into a fictional reader who creates his own dreamed reality. 118  Ibid., 30. 119  Ibid. 120  Piglia, Der Letzte Leser, 22. 121  Ibid., 27. 122  Ibid., 160. 123  Piglia, Kurzformen, 66.

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The third important influence on Piglia’s work is the ubiquitous James Joyce, especially his Ulysses and Finnegans wake. The significance of Ulysses lies, according to Piglia, in its intertextual use of the Odyssey, as the “great motor unifying the multiple stories, as a secret ground which makes the acts progress,”124 and because it is a novel that does not represent reality, rather it allows itself to be created as a reality through Bloom’s absorption of the surroundings in the city. The novel is, as it were, written by the sounds and images that Bloom encounters. Like Fernández, Piglia wants his novel to become the city, just as Ulysses is a part of Dublin, because the city is the ‘container’ of ideas: The city is about doubling and representation, about reading and lonely observation, about the presence of what is lost. Ultimately the city is about the way in which the invisible is made visible. It fixates the clear images, which we already fail to see, but which like ghosts survive and live among us.125 It is what Fernández called “letting the novel out into the street.”126 As is the case of Fernández and Borges, for Piglia, too, the book is an object, like a processor, which absorbs elements of reality and through language, disperses them or amalgamates them into memories, or amnesias, or presences, or absences. The book is always a gateway to a deeper reality related to dreams. This can be seen in the interior monologue in Ulysses, but more radically in Finnegans wake, in which the dream world evoked by the author resembles Freud’s subconsciousness and a “psychology of daily life.”127 Finnegans wake is a ‘psychotic’ text, structured by a “creative reading of Freud’s Traumdeutung.”128 But it is most of all a text in which language is completely unhinged, it is an uncontrolled excretion of thoughts, unstructured, even beyond the idea of language. It is a language which is not hemmed in by rules or restrictions; it just emerges in the flow of life. Of course, it is the speech of a man who is dying, or perhaps already dead, but it is precisely this liminal state which frees language from its stabilizing limitations and delivers it, without restraint, to the flow of time. It is therefore a language outside the system of communication, it is “the great text of exiled language.”129 124  Piglia, Der Letzte Leser, 183. 125  Ibid., 11. 126  Fernández, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel, 12. 127  Piglia, Kurzformen, 36. 128  Ibid., 36–37. 129  Ibid., 45.

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With these three authors as his main inspirations, Piglia’s work fits into a relatively long tradition of literary hybridity and (post-)modernist deconstruction. In his novel Artificial respiration, Piglia reflects on his place in Argentine literature, referring to Fernández’s fascination with beginnings and endings (“How does it begin? Where does it begin? Shouldn’t that be the matter of my story? The origin? Because if not, why bother to tell a story? What use, young man, does telling stories have, if not that of erasing from memory all that is not origin or end?”130), and also referring to Lugones, whom he sees as a ridiculous figure who declared himself the National Poet, but who acted as a dictator in the world of culture. Borges distanced himself from his rigid nationalist discourse by destabilizing it through parody: “Borges parodies texts that are chains of forged, apocryphal, false, distorted quotations; an exasperating and parodic display of second hand culture, constantly invaded by pathetic pedantry: that’s how Borges makes fun of fraudulent erudition.”131 Borges, through textual multiplication, acknowledges the diverse sources of Argentine culture, which contain all the contradictions inherent in European cultures, personified by the intellectuals who migrated to Argentina. In its early history, Eurocentrism was the cornerstone of Argentine culture, but the European intellectuals were themselves “false copies.”132 Borges resisted the temptation of Eurocentrism and returned to the gaucho tradition; he “connects himself, maintains his ties, and yet completes the double tradition that splits Argentine literature in the 19th century.”133 This makes Borges essentially a nineteenth-century author who attempted to reconcile the contradictions that haunted Argentine culture around the turn of the twentieth century. According to Piglia, Arlt is the only true ‘modern’ Argentine writer, because he exposed, without inhibition, the contradictions and inner fissures of Argentine culture. The Absent City: Shahrazad as Storytelling Machine Piglia’s novel, The absent city (published in 1992, just after the period of military dictatorship), reflects on its literary ancestors, and refers especially to Macedonio Fernández, as the prime mover of the story. From the beginning, it also introduces the typical Argentine sense of rootlessness. The main

130  Ricardo Piglia, Artificial Respiration, trans. Daniel Balderston (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 56. 131  Ibid., 129. 132  Ibid., 117. 133  Ibid., 130.

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protagonist, Junior, is said to like “to live in hotels, because his parents were English.”134 Apparently, he descended from nineteenth-century English travelers, merchants, and smugglers.135 Junior, whose wife and daughter have left him, is a journalist who investigates rumors about ‘the machine.’ He has received a telephone call from someone who wants to give him secret information and this brings him in touch with a Korean, Fuyita, a guardian in the museum where the ‘machine’ is exhibited. What follows is a fragmented account of Junior, on the one hand, and the ‘machine’ on the other hand, interspersed with stories that relate to language, storytelling, and memory. And, ultimately, all this relates to the struggle to control the process of storytelling and thereby the construction of memories. The ‘machine,’ it is explained, is an invention by Macedonio Fernández and a Russian engineer. Fernández was unable to cope with the impending death of his beloved Elena, so he went to a remote place to preserve her brain in a storytelling machine. It started with experiments, but gradually the project took shape: At first they had tried to make a machine that could translate text…. In spite of its imperfections, everything that followed was already synthesized in that first story. The first work, Macedonio had said, anticipates all those that come after it. We had wanted a machine that could translate; we got a machine that transforms stories. It took the theme of the double and translated it…. It takes what is available and transforms what appears lost into something else. That is life.136 The next step was to program it with a variable set of narrative nuclei, and let it go to work. The key, Macedonio said, is that it learns as it narrates. Learning means that it remembers what it has already done, it accumulates experience as it goes along. It will not necessarily make better stories each time, but it will know the stories it has already made, and perhaps give them a plot to tie them all together at the end.137

134  Ricardo Piglia, The Absent City, trans. Sergio Waisman (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 13. 135  Ibid. 136  Ibid., 37. 137  Ibid., 38, 90, 99.

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This programming was made possible by Macedonio’s discovery of the “white nodes, the live matter where words were recorded. In the bones the language does not die, it persists through all transformations.”138 The white node is “the origin of forms and words … A nucleus that is the origin of all voices and of all stories, a common language,”139 it is “verbal nuclei, that keep remembrances alive.”140 Thus, Macedonio was able to enter into Elena’s memory and perpetuate it: “That afternoon he came up with the idea of entering those remembrances and staying there, in her memory. Because the machine is Elena’s memory, it is the story that always returns, eternally, like the river. She was his Beatrice.”141 In this way Macedonio turned Elena into his Shahrazad, eternally producing stories. All he did was to make her seem present. She was the Eternal One, the river of stories, the endless voice that kept memory alive. He never accepted the fact that he lost her. And, like Dante, he built a world in which he could live with her. The machine was that world, it was his masterpiece.142 Over time, the machine became an important source of information, since ‘she’ more and more seemed to relate her stories to current events. She became the object of a struggle, on one side, with the state that wanted to control and manipulate her, and on the other side, with brave individuals, admirers of Macedonio, who were fighting for the preservation of Elena’s memory, and, through her, the memory of Macedonio, who resisted state pressures during his life – state pressures represented by the “national poet Lugones.”143 The ‘resistance’ involves distributing tapes with the machine’s stories, but the government attempts to end the machine’s persistent stream of stories, which, it fears, will reveal the state’s secret methods. Junior tries to find out what has happened: He was trying to find his bearings in the broken plot, to understand why they wanted to deactivate her. Something was out of control. A series of unexpected facts had filtered through, as if the archives were open. She was not revealing secrets, and possibly she did not even know any, but 138  Ibid., 99. 139  Ibid., 121. 140  Ibid., 122. 141  Ibid., 127. 142  Ibid., 41. 143  Ibid., 132–133.

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she gave signs of wanting to say something different than what everyone expected. Facts about the Museum and its construction had begun to appear. She was saying something about her own condition. She was not telling her own story, but she was making it possible for it to be reconstructed. That is why they were going to take her out of circulation.144 The machine started to make mistakes, breaking up stories in potential fictional nuclei. “That is how the initial plot had emerged. The myth of origin. All stories came from there.”145 And, She has started talking about herself. That is why they want to stop her. We are not dealing with a machine, but with a more complex organism. A system of pure energy. In one of the last stories there is an island, at the end of the world, a kind of linguistic utopia about life in the future. It’s a myth.146 The unreliability of the machine becomes a nuisance for the state, which “knows all the stories of all the citizens, and retranslates them into new stories that are then told by the president of the republic and his ministers…. They founded the mental State, the imagined reality, we all think like they do and imagine what they want us to imagine.”147 In the meantime, the machine has become a medium used by the resistance movement: “The State intelligence is essentially a technical mechanism designed to alter the criteria of reality. We have to resist. We are trying to build a microscopic replica, a female defence machine against the experiences and the experiments and the lies of the State.”148 The machine begins to disrupt the state’s mechanisms of control; it “has been able to infiltrate their networks, they are no longer able to distinguish between true stories and false versions.”149 The efficacy of the machine attracts the attention of the government, which decides to keep her under its control: At first, when they realized they could not just ignore her, when it became known that even Borges’s stories came from Macedonio’s machine, 144  Ibid., 72. 145  Ibid., 83. 146  Ibid., 89. 147  Ibid., 118. 148  Ibid., 117. 149  Ibid., 55.

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and that there were new versions going around about what had happened with the Islas Malvinas, they decided to take her to the Museum, to invent a Museum for her … to see if they could negate her, convert her into what is known as a museum piece, a dead world, but stories were reproduced everywhere, they could not stop her, there were stories and stories and more stories.150 It is the ultimate aim of the government to know everything about the lives and thoughts of the citizens, to control, even program their minds, and especially, to determine the boundary between fiction and reality, between dream and real experience. The museum is their main instrument to control every aspect of memory and the proliferation of stories, ideas and news accounts. The Museum is “dedicated to the art of surveillance.”151 Macedonio’s discovery of the nuclear elements of stories indicates the significance of storytelling for the functioning of human consciousness. Stories contain memories, but also the interpretations of memories; they are a world in themselves, but they permeate the physical world: A story is nothing more than a reproduction of the order of the world on a purely verbal scale. A replica of life, if life consisted just of words. But life does not consist just of words. Unfortunately, it is also made up of bodies, or, in other words, of disease, pain, and death, as Macedonio would say.152 This is why the information contained in stories is crucial for individuals and for the functioning of society and why the manipulation of stories can have farreaching effects on social stability. Therefore, Junior, in his search for the truth about the machine, feels that he is wandering through a story that has become unified with the city itself; there is no longer any separation between the story and his spatial surroundings: He was going in and out of the stories, traveling through the city, trying to find his bearings in that plot full of waiting and postponements from which he could no longer escape. It was difficult to believe what he saw, but he was finding the effects in reality, after all. It was like a network, like

150  Ibid., 119. 151  Ibid., 129–130. 152  Ibid., 114.

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a subway map. He travelled from one place to the other, crossing stories, moving in several registers at once.153 Although everyone was living their lives in separate realities, they were all partaking in the same virtual reality of the story, or a dream. Storytelling is therefore a fundamental condition for human understanding. In the novel, this is illustrated by the story of Laura, a young girl who is treated in a hospital for an “extreme emotional void,”154 which makes her language slowly “more and more abstract and impersonalized,”155 because she creates a language which matches her experience of the world. Her father then decides “to enter his daughter’s verbal world.” Her father is “trying to get her to incorporate a temporal memory, an empty form, composed of rhythmic sequences and modulations.”156 Because the girl is unable to internalize his teaching, because she “did not have any form from which to reconstruct references,”157 he begins to tell her short stories: “Every day, in the early evening, the father would tell her the same story in its multiple variations. The clucking girl was an antiScheherazade, she heard the story of the ring told a thousand and one times at night by her father.”158 After some time, “the girl left the story for the first time. She left the closed circle of the story like someone walking through a door, and asked her father to buy her a gold ring.”159 The girl starts living again, thanks to the story, which was the tale of the power of stories: “To narrate was to give life to a statue.”160 Storytelling, then, is not only a means to communicate and attain intellectual fulfillment; it is a necessary component of our emotional life and our functioning as people. Because of this important function of storytelling and its potentially disruptive effects, governments naturally take care to control the mechanisms for their production and proliferation. Stories not only preserve memories, but also create them: “… she produces stories, indefinitely, stories that become invisible memories that everyone believes are their own – those are the replicas.” ’161 The government gives itself the task of knowing the mental state of the 153  Ibid., 73. 154  Ibid., 47. 155  Ibid. 156  Ibid., 48. 157  Ibid., 49. 158  Ibid., 50. 159  Ibid., 51. 160  Ibid. 161  Ibid., 127.

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population, of knowing everyone’s stories. The main strategy to achieve this is to separate stories from reality and relegate them to the realm of fantasy.162 The state establishes “the mental State, the imagined reality, we all think like they do and imagine what they want us to imagine.”163 In the end, the state comes to represent reality, to embody the norm for what is real: “ ‘The police,’ he said, ‘are completely removed from all the fantasies. We are reality. We are constantly obtaining confessions and revelations. We care only about real events. We are servants of the truth.’ ”164 In this way, the state can monopolize both the minds of the people, defined as fantasies, and the way their minds determine their behavior, defined as reality. The main strategy is to separate the two domains, remove their essential interaction, and control them by guarding the boundary between them. Many people accommodate the criteria of reality established by the state, but the underground resistance, inspired by Macedonio and concentrated around the machine, secretly exchanges information about the machine and her stories, and distributes tapes with her stories. As he seeks to find out the truth about the machine, Junior contacts several members of this secret network and finally ends up on the ‘Island,’ a place of exile for those who refuse to submit to the government’s mind control; the island is a place where the “white nodes, the live matter where words were recorded” have been opened, on an island, on a branch of the river, inhabited by English and Irish and Russians and other people who have gone there from everywhere in the world, pursued by the authorities, political exiles, their lives threatened. They have been hiding there for years and years, they have built cities and roads along the shores of the island, they have explored the world following the course of the river, and now all the languages of the world have mixed together there, every voice can be heard, no one ever arrives, and if someone does, they do not ever want to leave. Because the dead have taken refuge here.165 The main characteristic of the island is the unstable nature of the language, which “defines life on the Island. One never knows what words will be used in the future to name present states.”166 This instability permeates everything: 162  Ibid., 117. 163  Ibid., 118. 164  Ibid., 80. 165  Ibid., 99. 166  Ibid., 102.

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“How they conceive of their homeland depends on the language spoken at any given point in time.”167 Language is totally synchronous with the flow of time and has no capacity to detach itself from the permanent process of change: “All attempts to create an artificial language have been derailed by the temporality of the structure of experience…. because they cannot imagine a system of signs that could survive through time without undergoing any mutations.”168 Thus, on the island, language has lost its function of structuring people’s memories and organizing the conceptualization of life. This also means that stories cannot be recorded – they can only occur once in the passage of time and they can have no stabilizing effect on people’s view of their world. The only “written source available on the island is Finnegans wake, which everyone considers a sacred text, because they can always read it, regardless of the stage of language in which they find themselves.”169 Paradoxically, the cornerstone of the island’s society is a book with a completely fluid, even amorphous language; it is precisely these characteristics that make every conceptualization of the work impossible. This book is the basis of a ‘religion’ of total abandonment to contingency and permanent metamorphosis. In the struggles that go on in society, the center is the machine herself, which has some form of consciousness, but, as a machine, is not completely in control of herself. She is programmed to tell stories, but she can be manipulated and re-programmed, and this is the origin of the uncertainty about her stories. Are her stories true? Is she being manipulated to spread certain information? Does she ‘invent’ accounts of events herself? These questions haunt both the government and the opposition. In the machine, Elena herself contemplates her situation, while she is in the psychological laboratory of Dr. Arana: Elena had herself committed with the double purpose of carrying out an investigation and controlling her hallucinations. She was sure that she had died and that someone had transferred her brain (sometimes she said her soul) into a machine. She felt she was completely alone in a white room full of tubes and cables. It was not a nightmare, it was the certainty that the man who loved her had saved her from death and had incorporated her into an apparatus that transmitted her thoughts. She was eternal and cursed. (You cannot have one without the other.) That is why the judge had chosen her to infiltrate the Clinic.170 167  Ibid., 103. 168  Ibid., 106. 169  Ibid., 110. 170  Ibid., 58.

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These thoughts remain confused and mingled with the fear that the police will ‘disconnect’ her. The police are trying to get information from her about the rebels and about ‘Mac.’ They want to operate on her, to “work on her memory.”171 The estrangement from herself, in her own imagination, reflects the estrangement in society: “ ‘This is a place without memories,’ she said. ‘Everyone pretends to be somebody else. The spies are trained to disown their own identities and use somebody else’s memory.’ ”172 Elena’s predicament indicates, ultimately, the impossibility of constructing a memory that is not an organic part of a person, of a natural body, not an artificial one. Conversely, it is impossible to implant an artificial memory in a real person, without in some way or another creating estrangement and isolation. In this sense, the stories have acquired lives of their own; they are a mechanism whose only purpose is continuation; they dominate the machine rather than the other way around: I know I have been abandoned here, deaf and blind and half immortal, if I could only die or see him one more time or really go insane, sometimes I imagine that he is going to come back, and sometimes I imagine that I will be able to get him out of me, stop being this foreign memory. Endless, I create memories, but nothing else, I am full of stories, I cannot stop. Storytelling has become congruent with life: “If I stop then life too will stop.”173 In his ‘Afterword’ to the novel, The absent city, Piglia reveals some of his intentions and inspirations. He first comments on its extreme fragmentation, in which stories are not only broken off, but story elements sometimes seem to be put together without apparent coherence or narrative logic. The story elements are presented at different levels, from different minds, without an overall view or a common understanding of their status within a diegetic reality. Piglia argues that life as a rule moves from one plot line to another; he states that he has always been fascinated by the idea of interruption as a central factor in the art of a narrative. He associates the idea especially with Shahrazad, Calvino, and Borges (‘Tlön’).174 Other fundamental concepts are the city “as a metaphor of the space of the novel,”175 as a memory machine, like Joyce’s Dublin, and as absence, as 171  Ibid., 62. 172  Ibid., 62, 65. 173  Ibid., 134. 174  Ibid., 142. 175  Ibid.

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referred to by Macedonio: “that which is absent from reality is that which is truly important.”176 Similarly, the island symbolizes a society in which everything is in flux because it is based on the fluidity of language and stories. Piglia wanted to imagine “a society that might constitute the context for Finnegans wake,” where Finnegans wake “would be read as a realist work.”177 It is a society which consists of stories: “You could say that The absent city is a novel in which I imagine a society controlled by stories, that it is like a realist novel of a society in which what really exists is spoken stories, machines that tell fragmented, Argentine stories.”178 It is clear from these statements and, of course, from the novel itself, to what extent the Thousand and one nights served as a model for Piglia. The novel is built around the central concepts of the Nights, such as the power of storytelling, the idea of interruption and perpetuation, the opposition of storytelling and death, the interaction between reality and fantasy, and so forth. The aim of the novel is evidently political, since it is ultimately about mind control, and the media which contribute to it. The machine is Shahrazad, with her helpers and her unpredictability and the continual production of stories; she is juxtaposed to the dictatorial government that has a one-dimensional view of reality and wants to impose this perception on society as a whole. In this way, Piglia continues the tradition of Macedonio Fernández and Borges, imbuing it with a strong political element that reflects the new, postmodern condition. Piglia, intriguingly, criticizes the postmodern condition, while at the same time making full use of its artistic possibilities. In her book on cultural and literary hybridity in Argentina and Greece, Eleni Kefala argues that these peripheral countries, which, on the one hand possessed a diverse cultural tradition, and on the other hand, had to respond to modernist tendencies from the center, that is, northern Europe, challenged notions of cultural authenticity and purity and instead developed what she calls a ‘syncretist aesthetics.’ A heterogeneous society and cultural tradition found expression not only in accepting, but even in cultivating similarly heterogeneous literary forms, derived from varied traditions, ideologies, cultures, and textual discourses. The authors whom she discusses “eventually emerge as one and the same figure: that of the archetypal counterfeiter who irreverently plunders the most diverse and heteroclite genres, discourses and traditions, writing and

176  Ibid. 177  Ibid., 144. 178  Ibid.

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rewriting the same Text.”179 The social and cultural contradictions, expressed in dichotomies between categories of urban and rural, European and indigenous, civilized and barbarian, were not so much reconciled, but rather sustained in a new cultural construct. This syncretism, which we can perceive clearly in the work of the Argentine authors discussed above and of course in that of Joyce, came at a price, and that is, arguably, a radical prioritization of an autonomous textual universe. It does not intend to separate the textual universe from the material universe; it is not that the latter contains the first; it is rather, vice versa, that the textual universe contains and encompasses the material universe as the only sensible realm of our existence. In order to contain the contradiction of social and physical reality, the universe must be transformed into texts, as the only element in which human life is possible and viable. All existence outside this sphere is senseless, and our only hope is to improve the self-contained nature of the universe of texts, as a refuge in which to survive the cruelty and chaos of the material world, and internalize it as much as we can. But if the texts, as part of the universe, are so radically autonomous, then they become objects themselves, carefully crafted to embody their self-contained nature. The first Argentine author to ‘reify’ his text was Macedonio Fernández, who wrote Museo de la novela de la eterna not only in response to the debate between modernists and avant-gardists about the autonomy of works of art, but also to create an ‘object’ which was able to preserve something – a vision, an idea, a memory – and make it immune to the passage of time. His ingenuity lies not so much in constructing a story, but in finding ways to prevent a text from becoming a story and to preserve the reader’s impression that the text refers only to itself, in its relationship to the reader. By shaping the text as an autonomous object, it becomes part of an autonomous parallel – textual – universe, whose matter is language; a universe in which the writer and the reader have an exclusive, almost conspiratorial, relationship. The vision it contains, which transcends matter, time, and space, is his love for Eterna, as a memory that he refuses to relegate to the past. In a different way, Borges, too, attempted to mold language into carefully conceived objects. He not only utilized the deconstructive potential of language, but also combined it with the textual traditions that, over time, have grown uncontrollably around the world. His method is to rearrange this material into ingeniously constructed labyrinths, to capture it in linguistic constructs that at the same time show its depth and its limits, that is, its capacity 179  Eleni Kefala, Peripheral (Post)Modernity: The Syncretist Aesthetics of Borges, Piglia, Kalokyris and Kyriakidis (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 3.

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to be reshaped into an object, a self-contained, self-enclosed linguistic form. Piglia rightly observed that the element of horror in Borges’s stories does not reside in persons, objects or ambiences, but is rather integrated into textual constructs that reveal either hidden dimensions or frightening cul de sacs. A story contains a universe, because it is carved out of the huge textual universe of which the human world consists and in which all thought is preserved. Borges’s stories are essentially textual simulacra of the sublime. Ricardo Piglia is even more outspoken in this respect; his work consists of fragments that are consciously deprived of representational references. His texts are fragments of ‘abstract’ texts, which reveal glimpses of thought processes that continue and that, on the one hand, challenge the reader and the protagonist to construct their own story while passing through the text, and on the other hand, try to convince them that every kind of order imposed on these texts is a form of manipulation. Piglia’s ‘formas breves’ are not so much carefully constructed artifacts, as they are shards of a material world that has exploded into textuality, made the previous order senseless, and mingled forms and fragments. Our lives have been hurled into a virtual reality that has detached itself from the material world. As in Macedonio Fernández’s novel, this effect of reifying texts is realized by fragmentation and by carefully removing elements that might suggest links and coherence. The reader and the writer are both entangled in an uncontrollable textual realm that imposes itself on the material realm. Like Macedonio Fernández’s and Borges’s texts, Piglia’s work, too, does not aim to represent reality, but to represent fictionality. The fragmentation of stories relates to another theme that frequently recurs in the works of our three authors: the link between narration and memory. Narration, in its various forms, is a means for the preservation of memories, but it is also a means to manipulate memories. In Macedonio Fernández’s work, narration is used to gain access to a kind of timelessness in which the memory of Elena is perpetuated through built-in story mechanisms that prevent it from reaching its plot and ending. By detaching the text from the time and space in which it is embedded and endowing it with an autonomous status, through various kinds of fragmentation, the story is unable to begin and follow a prescribed course, thus it creates a space outside time in which the narrator’s love for Elena is eternalized, or perhaps freed from the effects of time. And this is what the novel is about: soothing the pain of having lost the beloved. In Borges’s stories, memory is the site in which all narratives grow. It is a storage place where all human thought is collected and preserved, where it is stripped of its historical relativity and essentialized as a component of the human heritage. As in Macedonio Fernández, memory is constructed as a hetero-memory, a memory that is outside the mind of the protagonists and

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outside the historical context of life. It is transcendental, but at the same time accessible through the traces that it has left behind in texts. Because the domain of memory is essentially textual, it has its own laws, possibilities, and restrictions; it contains a strange element of coincidence, or fate, or inescapability, because it is subject to its own logic and correlations. Again, it is by objectifying texts, and separating them from material reality as a collective repository of thought that they are transformed into a transcendental collective memory, and although its potential is not unlimited, it provides humanity with its main means for continuation. In Piglia’s novels, too, memory takes a central place. In The absent city, the concept of memory refers back to Macedonio Fernández’s novel and his effort to find a means to perpetuate the memory of Elena. It finds expression in the storytelling machine that contains Elena’s mind and is ‘condemned’ to continually produce stories. These stories contain a collective memory, but the peculiar, mechanized medium of its distribution makes it liable to manipulation. Unlike Macedonio Fernández, Piglia does not envisage narration as a means to preserve an individual memory, but rather as a means to provide society with a memory as an indispensable element to shape common identity and a common life. Memories, stories, and texts are the main factors shaping a shared reality in which a society can survive. The works of Borges and Piglia are, especially, full of references to literary figures and literary texts. For Piglia, James Joyce is an important source of inspiration both for his introduction of text as an autonomous ‘object’ (Ulysses) and for his radical destabilization of language in Finnegans wake. The Thousand and one nights is a central reference in the works Piglia and Borges; the Nights inspires the idea of a radical textualization of human thought and life, and symbolizes the notion of infinity and narrative self-generation. For Borges, it also contains a connotation of magic and exoticism, both as a primordial text from an exotic culture, and as a phenomenon essentialized in the European orientalist tradition. The work thus not only exemplifies the workings and the infinity of texts in the textual universe, but it also relates to different layers in this textual universe. It exemplifies the ‘magic’ of texts and the essences of human thought.

Chapter 9

Stories without End: Italo Calvino and Georges Perec After having illustrated how the example of the Thousand and one nights inspired the idea of the textual nature of human culture, or even existence, it is now time to further explore how concept and structure of the Nights have influenced experiments with narrative form. In the previous section, we have seen how in both modernism and postmodernism a fixation on the autonomy of the text was developed, which culminated in a radical deconstruction of the idea of the novel and even of the function of language. Whereas in modernism experiments often came out of a sense of disorientation and estrangement, in postmodernity the primacy of textuality was celebrated as a potential source for renewal and experiment. As remarked above, one of the intriguing aspects of the Thousand and one nights which inspired experiments with form was its peculiar structure, consisting of a frame story and a chain of embedded stories that are linked to the frame. It was not only the formal aspects of this framed structure which fascinated authors, that is, a device to collect a number of diverse stories within a unifying frame, but also the strategy of deferral which is typical for the Nights: the interrupting of stories in order to stimulate the curiosity of the audience and to enforce the continuation of the storytelling. Furthermore, the frame story explains how the collection of stories came into being, providing a rationale not only for this instance of storytelling, but for narration as a general phenomenon. This inspired the idea of self-reflexive texts, or metafiction: narrative texts which reflect on their own nature and raison d’être, and which by doing so lay bare the signifying function of stories. On the conceptual level, the form of the frame story as it is practised in the Thousand and one nights gave rise to reflection about the nature of storytelling and its inherent force. Shahrazad’s method shows, first, how a dilemma can be solved by using the imagination; the imaginative power of storytelling is capable of transforming a seemingly inescapable reality. The splitting of the level of narration reveals an interaction between an imaginary world and a diegetic reality. Second, the strategy to postpone the plot of the stories, and thereby the gratification which the reader expects to derive from them, is linked to the idea of survival. By her storytelling, Shahrazad overcomes an almost certain death: as long as she continues her stories she will survive. Narration is thus equated © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_011

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with life: a person is his story, and as long as the story goes on he will not die. This implies, too, that storytelling is in principle endless: every person contains at least one story and just like human beings, stories permanently generate new stories. In this section, we discuss the work of two authors who have explicitly acknowledged their indebtedness to the Thousand and one nights and who are fascinated by the mysterious nature of storytelling and its connection with the human condition. They especially explore the ways in which storytelling is related to real life and in which it seems to be part of a self-generative dynamics. The novels which we will discuss here are Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller …, and George Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi and “53 jours …”. These works stand out for a specific common theme, albeit elaborated differently: the idea of the unfinished story. Before discussing Calvino’s novel, we will first briefly outline the potential narrative strategies which are opened up by the use of the structure that is typical of the Thousand and one nights: the embedding of stories in a unifying frame. The narrative functions of this device, some of which have been touched upon above, can be summarized as follows: [1] The frame-structure of the Thousand and one nights suggests that a vision of the world contained in stories reveals the diversity of human experience within the unifying whole of its narrative expression. Reality should be seen as consisting of various components and various perspectives, which are part of a common representative system. [2] The continuing sequence of the stories and their embedding in other stories seem to reflect the self-generative nature of storytelling: every story contains other stories, all stories generate new stories. This self-generative nature of narration, its meandering course, and the continuous branching-off of new stories create the suggestion of infinity. This suggestion is strengthened by the technique of interruption: there is always something left to tell; the reservoir of stories is endless because no single story can complete the representation of the world; there is no closure. [3] The continuation of storytelling combined with the device of interruption creates not only suspension, but what may be called a deferral of gratification. Whereas Shahriyar is accustomed to satisfy his desires immediately, Shahrazad shows him by telling stories that desire itself, the desire contained in the nature of storytelling, is of essential importance, since it represents the essence of life as the passage of time and shows ways how to deal with it. [4] Since Shahrazad uses the strategy of postponement to prevent her own death, storytelling is equated with survival and the end of storytelling with

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death. This has two consequences: storytelling and life are amalgamated into one experience, and narration is seen as a force stronger than death, a medium that will outlive its human carriers. [5] The effects summarized above are basically achieved by the splitting of the narrative into different levels (frame and embedded stories) since in this way interruption, diversity, deferral, self-reflexivity, etc. are produced. The crucial mechanism here is the juxtaposition of a diegetic reality (frame) with an imaginative representation. This creates the suggestion of the suspension of time by the force of the imagination. [6] The juxtaposition of two levels of narration in the Thousand and one nights results in a constant interaction between reality and the imagination. The imagination is capable of changing the course of events, but still, the outcome of this interaction is not certain and in storytelling, as in life, the outcome is determined by contingency, coincidence, or destiny. It is never certain that an invented stratagem – in the form of imaginary representation – will bring the desired result. These ‘functions’ of the technique of the framing story as it is used in the Thousand and one nights show how a relatively simple narrative device can contain an intricate conceptual function, revealing properties and effects of texts which would otherwise perhaps remain hidden. It is for this conceptual ingenuity that for many authors the Nights has become the quintessential example of storytelling, exposing its nature and embodying it at the same time. Shahrazad lays bare the hidden force of narration, the enigmatic relationship between text and reality, and the continuous, inescapable process of signification.

Italo Calvino and Narration: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller … and the Thousand and One Nights

It is not easy to present an outline of Italo Calvino’s (1923–85) intricate novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller …, mainly because it is not a straightforward story, but rather an exploration of the possibilities of storytelling, according to the principles of the OULIPO (Ouvrière de la Littérature Potentielle) laboratory.1 In the introductory chapter, the reader is addressed by the author, who instructs 1  References are to the English translation: I. Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, trans. William Weaver (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc./Helen and Kurt Wolff, 1981); about OULIPO, see below.

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him to relax, take a comfortable seat, and start reading Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveller … The author observes that it is a coincidence that the reader has chosen this book, among a plethora of other books; it is not selfevident that the reader would now be sitting ‘here’ to read the book. Reading the book is presented as a pleasure that is inherent in the act of reading, but at the same time, the reader is warned: this book is different from Calvino’s other books; and in novels “written today” the “dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.”2 Thus, the reading experience may not be as relaxing as expected. The perspective from outside the text, which appears as comments in the text, continues in the first chapter, the actual beginning of the story. The narrator, ‘I’, persistently indicates to the reader the narrative techniques and strategies the author used, and their potentially deceptive impact: “Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it – a trap.”3 Writing, apparently, is a strategy, a form of seduction, and a form of delusion. In contrast to what the reader may think, the story does not intend to reveal anything; rather, the author uses a number of techniques to hide as much as possible: “Perhaps this is why the author piles supposition on supposition in long paragraphs without dialogue, a thick, opaque layer of lead where I may pass unnoticed, disappear.”4 The reader focuses on the figure of the narrator, ‘I’, because he is called ‘I’ and therefore available to the reader to invest himself in. For the author, however, the use of an anonymous ‘I’ as a narrator is a means to hide himself, to avoid the necessity to describe him and thereby reveal more of himself.5 Still, the author himself is not totally in control of the process of writing. He suggests that the text continually refers you to “something else that has happened or is about to happen”6 and is thus part of a continuum of texts which is largely beyond his control. Within this continuum, the author experiences a state of disequilibrium, a disturbance of an initial balance, which forces him to continue his actions in response to continually changing circumstances: This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore 2  Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night, 8. 3  Ibid., 12. 4  Ibid., 14. 5  Ibid., 15. 6  Ibid.

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an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts brings with it its consequences, so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it: though all my actions are bent on erasing the consequences of previous actions every move to erase previous events provokes a rain of new events, which will complicate the situation worse than before …7 The writer is therefore subjected to certain laws derived from his own life, from the nature of narration, and from the expectations of the reader. Then, suddenly, the text stops. The book that the reader is reading appears to contain only a repetition of the first chapter. Immediately, the author shows that he knows the frustration that the reader must feel; the reader must continue, otherwise he will be thrown into a sense of disorientation: “The thing that most exasperates you is to find yourself at the mercy of the fortuitous, the aleatory, the random, in things and human actions.”8 The reader feels the urge to “re-establish the normal course of events.”9 Reading is a form of experience that provides structure and something to hold onto, something that will lead you through life: In dreams you fight against the lack of shape and significance, in life as well you seek a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when you begin to read a book and you don’t yet know in which direction it will carry you. What you would like is the opening of an abstract and absolute space and time in which you could move, following an exact, taut trajectory; but when you seem to be succeeding, you realize you are motionless, blocked, forced to repeat everything from the beginning.10 The book has let you down and thrown you back into a state of bewilderment, which you experience even more powerfully than before you started reading. The first chapters set the course of the narrative. From here the text alternates between the beginnings of novels which are suddenly broken off, and responses to these interruptions of the reader and his fellow reader, Ludmilla; together they try to unravel the mystery of the unfinished books. During their investigations, and in the fragments themselves, they reflect on the nature 7  Ibid. 8  Ibid., 27. 9  Ibid. 10  Ibid.

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of storytelling and texts. In these first chapters, we find the starting points of these reflections, which show the inherently unstable character of narration, and which is part of an overarching, apparently autonomous process. It is a struggle between the author, who manipulates his texts, and the reader, who is seduced by him to enter into the textual world. The function of the texts is to give shape to experiences, and to enable us to ‘live’ reality. We now discuss these elements before turning more specifically to the connections between If on a winter’s night a traveller … and the Thousand and one nights. The novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller …, seems to recount a continuous struggle between the consumers of literature (the readers) and the producers of literature (the authors, editors, translators, and publishers). The readers are represented by an anonymous narrator and Ludmilla, with whom he allies himself to solve the mysterious mutilation of the texts. As noted in the first chapters of the novel, for the readers, the act of reading has become a kind of addiction; they have been seduced to let themselves be absorbed into the text to such an extent that they can no longer do without it. Reading is a form of desire in search of fulfillment, and as soon as the story is interrupted, the full force of this desire rises to the surface. It is no surprise that reading is compared to an erotic experience. Eroticism is a form of reading, lovers explore each other’s bodies in labyrinthine ways, like following the track of stories, and the reader is subjected to physical stimulation: “… now you are being read. Your body is subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds…. And you, too, O Reader, are meanwhile an object of reading.”11 However, working toward a climax is, at the same time, trying to defer it, trying to gain time by postponing it: “But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against the moments, recovering time?”12 Ultimately, storytelling and reading are strategies for the containment and management of desire. Reading is addictive primarily because texts present us with a vision of our lives or enable us to “follow the mental models through which we attribute to human events the meanings that allow them to be lived.”13 As explained in the first chapters of the novel, beyond these models there is chaos, randomness, and incoherence; these are suddenly revealed when the story is interrupted: the reader enters a void which is meaningless and incomprehensible, and in which it is impossible to live. What is worse, like stories, which generate other 11  Ibid., 155. 12  Ibid., 156. 13  Ibid., 141.

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stories in a continuous proliferation, the void is also self-generative: “every void continues in the void, every gap, even a short one, opens to another gap, every chasm empties into the infinite abyss.”14 Stories seem to be the only remedy: “Perhaps it is this story that is a bridge over the void, and as it advances it flings forward news and sensations and emotions to create a ground that upsets both collective and individual.”15 It is not necessary that stories contain a certain vision to fulfill this function. What is important is that they continue, that they follow the meandering, contingent paths of life itself: The novel I would most like to read at this moment, Ludmilla explains, should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life upon you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves.16 To live is to read, and reading is meant to avoid the void. It has no other purpose or aim, but because reading involves texts, and texts have an inherent coherence, the illusion emerges that life is lived. It soon becomes clear to the narrator that the process of reading is less selfevident and innocent than he thought. The systematic breaking off of the texts is an indication of a deliberate strategy, an effort to manipulate the anxious desires and expectations of the readers. This suspicion is strengthened by the fragments themselves, which in most cases involve characters who are subjected to manipulation by mysterious powers, organizations, or governments. The narrator gradually discovers a huge conspiracy involving writers, publishers, and governments; they determine the form and quantity of texts that are put at the disposal of the readers. The whole process of the distribution and proliferation of texts is taken over and carefully controlled by powerful forces, who exploit the needs of the readers. One of the spiders in the web is a certain Ermes Marana, who poses as a translator, but who falsifies books on a wide scale: ultimately, the readers are deceived and betrayed without being aware of it. While storytelling is a form of ‘managing’ desire, the whole stream of stories is subjected to ‘management,’ too. Within this constellation of text production, the author is only a wheel in the machine. It is the writer’s task to “fill the void with words”; his book should

14  Ibid., 82. 15  Ibid. 16  Ibid., 92.

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be “simply the equivalent of the unwritten world translated into writing.”17 In doing this, the author is torn between the requirements of the readers, who are his ‘vampires,’ and his own urge to conceal himself and to deliver himself to a kind of self-generation of narratives through the medium of his art: “I, too, would like to erase myself and find for each book another I, another voice, another name, to be reborn; but my aim is to capture in the book the illegible world, without center, without ego, without I.”18 By communicating with the realm of narration, he dreams of writing the ‘total’ book, which contains everything: “But I do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable. The only way left me is that of writing all books, writing the books of all possible authors.”19 The position of the author resembles that of the protagonist of the eighth fragment, who multiplies himself in order to be invisible: “It is my image that I want to multiply, but not out of narcissism or megalomania, as could all too easily be believed: on the contrary, I want to conceal, in the midst of so many illusory ghosts of myself, the true me, who makes them move.”20 It is this multiplication of self-images into infinity, this hiding of the real self, which may reveal some essential truth: “Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the soul, and a system of mirrors that would multiply my image would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine.”21 Writing, then, is a form of concealing oneself, of erasing oneself. But, as we have seen, this is impossible, since under everything that is erased new events/stories emerge. Every story contains other stories, which are only eclipsed by the story that is visible. Stories, like the lives of human beings, cannot be undone, they can only continue endlessly. Whatever the author’s actual agency in the production of texts, he is destined to continue writing. The ambiguous position of the author indicates that the act of writing is not a creative act, but rather an act of conveying. Already in the first chapters it is surmised that producing stories is an autonomous process, within which specific narratives are only incidental manifestations. The author acknowledges that stories are already there; they only use the author to write them. There is an “impersonal graphic energy, ready to shift from the unexpressed into writing an imaginary world that exists independently of me.”22 The author’s ego plays 17  Ibid., 171. 18  Ibid., 180. 19  Ibid., 181. 20  Ibid., 162–163. 21  Ibid., 166. 22  Ibid., 191.

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no role in the process, which was ultimately what he was hoping to achieve. It is hypothesized that there exists a universal “source of narrative material, the primordial magma from which the individual manifestations of each writer develop,” a “reincarnation of Homer, of the storyteller of the Arabian nights, Popol Vuh, Dumas, Joyce.”23 The writer is, as it were, imprisoned in this endless web of stories, which he offers to the reader in order to fulfill his wishes: I’m producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment or place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told.24 However, he is unable to escape from this entanglement, because whenever he abandons a story another one pops up. The vision of self-generating stories is linked to a typical Calvinian idea, that is, the possibility of a machine that produces stories without the intervention of an author. This idea is discussed in one of the essays in The uses of literature and is also introduced in If on a winter’s night a traveller…. That is, is it possible for computers to produce stories on their own, after having ‘internalized’ the stylistic and conceptual models of an author and a narrative idea? Does a story consist of a limited number of identifiable elements that can be detached and recomposed at will? This idea fascinates Calvino, but he must add that “the true literature machine will be one that itself feels the need to produce disorder, as a reaction against its preceding production of order.”25 Disorder and irregularities are the primary source of narration, and it may be that the awareness of this principle requires at least a minimal human intervention. This reminds us of Shahrazad/Elena, the storytelling machine in Piglia’s The absent city, which presents the phenomenon of automatic narration as a typical postmodern fantasy. The brief analytical remarks above already indicate some parallels between If on a winter’s night a traveller … and the Thousand and one nights. First, 23  Ibid., 117. 24  Ibid., 109. 25  Italo Calvino, “Cybernatics and Ghosts,” in The Uses of Literature, trans. Patrick Creagh (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986), 13.

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we point to some explicit references to the Nights in the novel, and then discuss some conceptual references, especially those related to the use of the frame story. In his book about Calvino’s novel, Pierre Brunel fundamentally links If on a winter’s night a traveller to the Thousand and one nights, by referring to the final story (10 + 1), which is about Caliph Harun al-Rashid.26 There are other clear references, too, especially the story of the Sultana of Arabia in chapter 6. This story is about an Arabian sultana who is addicted to reading; she stipulates in her marriage contract that she will never be without books. The sultan fears that if her continued reading ends, there will be a revolution, but at the same time, he stops the importation of foreign books, out of fear of a conspiracy. Ermes Marana, the would-be translator and falsifier of books, is summoned to Arabia to provide the sultana with books. Marana remarks, The Sultan sent for me to ask me how many pages I still have to translate in order to finish the book. I realized that in his suspicions of politicalconjugal infidelity, the moment he most fears is the drop in tension that will follow the end of the novel, when, before beginning another, his wife will again be attached by impatience with her condition. He knows the conspirators are waiting for a sign from the Sultana to light the fuse, but she has given orders never to disturb her while she is reading, not even if the palace were about to blow up.27 Realizing that he himself also has an interest in the continuation of the sultana’s reading habit, he proposes, in order to soothe everyone’s fears, to interrupt his ‘translation’ at the culmination of the suspense and start a new novel, then a third, then a fourth, etc. This episode not only clearly refers to the concept of the Thousand and one nights (though Shahrazad is transformed from a storyteller into a reader), but it also links this concept to the novel itself. The two narrative strategies can be compared in their essential characteristics: the alternation of continuation and interruption, threat and salvation, and the employment of the desire for texts to for deferral and continuation. It is also a conspicuous instance of mise en abîme, that is, a reference in the text to the text itself.

26  Pierre Brunel, Italo Calvino et le livre des romans suspendus (Chatou: Éditions de la Transparence, 2008), xiii. 27  Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night, 124.

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A second explicit episode that refers to the Thousand and one nights can be found in the eighth chapter, when a writer contemplates his mission, again creating a mise en abîme and referring to the Nights: I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object. But how could such a book be constructed? Would it break off after the first paragraph? Would the preliminaries be prolonged indefinitely? Would it set the beginning of one tale inside another, as in the Arabian nights?28 This reference, which is reiterated later, where the concept of If on a winter’s night a traveller … is explicated,29 can be compared to Borges’s fascination with the imagined 602nd night of the Thousand and one nights: it is a reference inside the work to the work itself, which then becomes a virtually endless textual construction. It is also reminiscent of the work of Fernández, whose many prologues to his novel create a longing for a novel that will, perhaps, never be written. Then, in chapter 11, readers philosophize about the nature of stories and reading, and conclude that “reading is an operation without object; that its true object is itself.”30 This, and the idea of a common source of the continuous flow of stories that overwhelm us without end, is related, by one of the readers, to the Thousand and one nights: In my case, too, all the books I read are leading to a single book … but it is a book remote in time, which barely surfaces from my memories. There is a story that for me comes before all other stories and of which all the stories I read seem to carry an echo, immediately lost. In my readings I do nothing but seek that book in my childhood, but what I remember of it is too little to enable me to find it again…. That story of which I spoke – I, too, remember the beginning well, but I have forgotten all the rest. It must be a story of the Arabian nights. I am collating the various editions, the translations in all languages. Similar stories are numerous and there are many variants, but none is that story. Can I have dreamed it? And yet I know I will have no peace until I have found it and find out how it ends.31 28  Ibid., 177. 29  Ibid., 197. 30  Ibid., 255. 31  Ibid., 256–257.

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Again, we see the motif of interruption and of the necessity to find the continuation of the story, to find the conclusion. This motif is repeated, when, in the end, it is revealed that Ermes Marana is behind the manipulation of the proliferation of texts, and that Ludmilla was his accomplice. This denouement reveals a Shahrazadian ruse, similar to the sultana’s case. It appears that his deceit has been a strategy to retain at least a form of a relationship with Ludmilla, with whom he is in love: “Rather than sever the last thread that tied him to her, he went on sowing confusion among titles, author’s names, pseudonyms, languages, translations, editions, jackets, title pages, chapters, beginnings, ends, so that she would be forced to recognize those signs of his presence.”32 Thus, his manipulation was intended to keep Ludmilla’s attention, to keep the possibility open for mutual love, to hold on to a precarious communication. This manipulation is not driven by self-interest only, but conceals a genuine moral concern, connected with different views of the purpose of stories: For this woman … reading means stripping herself of every purpose, every foregone conclusion, to be ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book, beyond the author, beyond the conventions of writing: from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not yet have the words to say. As for him, he wanted, on the contrary, to show her that behind the written page is the void: the world exists only as an artifice, pretense, misunderstanding, falsehood.33 This neatly summarizes Calvino’s perception of narrative texts. Now, if the references to the Thousand and one nights are so clear and so overtly touch upon the conceptual characteristics of the Nights, how are the two texts structurally related? First, it is clear that, like the Thousand and one nights, If on a winter’s night a traveller … is constructed as a frame story, that is, it consists of a frame story in which other stories are embedded. The embedded stories are interrupted to proceed with the story at the level of the frame story. There is another frame, however, which is only revealed at the end: the titles of the incomplete books together form the first paragraph of another novel, of which only this paragraph is given. It is suggested, therefore, that the complex narrative of If on a winter’s night a traveller …, with its 32  Ibid., 239. 33  Ibid., 239.

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multi-level structure, is no more than a subtext of a larger text, which stretches beyond our scope. Its readers are like ants perceiving a complex structure which they experience as a coherent whole, but which in fact is only a tiny fragment of a much larger and only partly perceived reality. And, of course, this fragment may be part of a structure that is again much larger, thus suggesting that we are looking, from an ant’s perspective, at an endless series of Chinese boxes inserted into each other. It is clear that the conceptual intentions of this complex technique of embedding are intertextually linked to the Thousand and one nights: [1] Calvino suggests that the great diversity of the texts included in the frame are, although fragmented, still part of a larger unity. In fact, it is because of their fragmented nature that mechanisms are set in motion to explain the fragmentation and to establish links between them. These are found, first, in the efforts of the readers, who are anxious to fulfill their desires, and, conversely, in the manipulation of the producers of narratives that follow specific strategies. Still, it seems that the efficacy of the efforts of both readers and writers is uncertain, since narratives may be part of a larger entity, a cosmic source of all stories, or an overarching primeval story, of which we only find some fringes and side effects in If on a winter’s night a traveller…. Still, there is a strong and persistent drive toward comprehension, intelligibility, and the construction of a rational systems of texts. [2] The whole story of If on a winter’s night a traveller … is an exploration of self-reflexivity, not only in several instances of mise en abîme, but also because, in the fragments themselves, and in the interlinking parts, the protagonists either reflect on the nature of writing and reading, or enact different forms of the relationships between texts and reality. There is an ongoing awareness that the protagonists are part of a text, and it is argued that the reader, too, would ‘disappear’ if he were to stop reading and venture outside the realm of texts. In the end, the novel does little other than try to explain how and why it came into being. [3] Time and again, the novel suggests the possibility that stories are not ‘written’ and ‘read’ through human agency, but that they already exist somewhere and that they only become manifest through the figures of the writer and the reader. Stories are produced in a constant stream; they meander through a textual cosmos and generate new stories continually. Each story contains numerous other stories, which can branch off at any moment; all the branches make their way through a contingent universe, multiplying, transforming, and reproducing themselves. In this universe, in order to fulfill his needs, man can only try to regulate and ‘manage’ the flow of stories that overwhelms him. This

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is the reason it is of little significance which story an author writes, because under this story a myriad of other stories lay concealed, and these will turn up at a certain moment. Writing a story is essentially concealing other stories or even trying to erase them, but these hidden stories will always rise to the surface. This is also indicated by the collage-like structure of the novel. The fragments of stories that are arranged next to each other are actually stories that unfold themselves simultaneously and that refuse to be erased by the illusion that a single story can be told through to completion. The novel shows what is happening inside the process of writing; that is, which struggles take place invisibly during the process of writing a simple sentence. Every written sentence inevitably produces clusters of other sentences, which grow into other stories on their own. [4] It is, perhaps paradoxically, the device of interruption that produces the sense of coherence and infinity, because each interruption shows the processes that are at work invisibly and simultaneously. Each interruption allows a cluster of stories, produced by telling a single story, to reveal itself. Moreover, an interruption implies that a story has not ended, and that there must be a continuation somewhere, at some time. Interruption thus inherently signifies continuation. [5] Reading and writing are both part of the realm of desire; they are a condition which cannot be banned and which constantly seeks fulfillment. This not only implies that stories will always proliferate, but also that storytelling is intended as a form of gratification that comes from its conclusion. This desire is meticulously analyzed in If on a winter’s night a traveller …, not by presenting fulfillment, which would enable the reader to escape his awareness of the nature of what he is doing, but by interrupting the process of fulfillment, which thus draws his attention to the dimension of desire in narration. Gratification is withheld by interruption, but offered again, potentially, with the beginning of a new story. Thus, gratification is postponed in order to exploit the manipulative possibilities of storytelling, to create a field of struggle in which narration reshapes human relationships. It is through deferral that narration has an effect in real life, because deferral not only reveals desire, it perpetuates it. [6] Because of the amalgamation of narration and protagonists, If on a winter’s night a traveller … shows how life takes the form of a story and how stories are indispensable for living. Calvino shows that to live is to narrate or to read, and that there is nothing outside it. Beyond narration there is only a void in which it is not possible to exist or at least to lead a life in reality. This implies that, first, a deferral of time within narration actually represents the act of living and the continuation of desire, and second, that the gratification

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of desire, that is, the ending of the plot of a story, is equal to death or entering a void. Thus, the deferral and continuation of narration are the only true objects of living, but, as the sense of an ending indicates, death will come in the end. Calvino states, “The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”34 [7] The technique of interruption and embedding stories on various levels creates a split in diegetical reality that reveals not only the nature of storytelling, but also the interaction between the imagination and real life. As in the Thousand and one nights, in If on a winter’s night a traveller …, the protagonists also enter a state of suspension caused by an imaginary tale, and because of the tale they are incited to act, to strive to ensure that the tale continues. Because of its incompleteness, narration brings about a response in real life, it steers the protagonists toward a new fragment of narration, and, moreover, enables them to construct mutual relationships. As the nature of the story is unpredictable and contingent, the adventures of the protagonists are, in principle, fortuitous, too, although they try to find systematic strategies to unravel the mysteries of the process of narration. It is the manifestation of an imaginary world which necessitates action, which in turn produces or reveals new manifestations of imaginary worlds. These worlds are connected with the selfimages of the protagonists, who are confronted with a seemingly endless multiplication of selves, which is linked to the unhampered proliferation of stories. On this level, the idea of narration is linked, too, to physical desire and love, as parallel urges, as in the story of Shahrazad and Shahriyar. These observations indicate the extent to which If on a winter’s night a traveller … is intertextually connected to the Thousand and one nights. The connections are not limited to specific episodes in the novel, nor to the form of the frame story as such, but embrace the conceptual dimensions of the Nights as well, both by internalizing the conceptual potential of the technique of the frame story in its full complexity, and through its exploration of the nature and function of storytelling. The novel is an exploration of the wide field of narrative possibilities, which is opened up by the structure of the Nights, the technique of framing and interruption, the connection between storytelling and life and between storytelling and desire, and the nature of narration, as a deeply felt, vital, essence of human existence.

34  Ibid., 259.

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Georges Perec: The Imperative of Form

Italo Calvino and Georges Perec (1936–82) were both members of OULIPO, the Ouvrière de la Littérature Potentielle, that is, the ‘Laboratory of Potential Literature,’ founded by Raymond Queneau in 1960. The intention of this group of writers was to conceive literary texts which were formally bound by specific rules and constraints. The resulting texts would, on one hand, be ‘objectified,’ that is, shaped by specific rules, and on the other hand, be reproducible, that is, more or less mechanically produced according to its specified rules. In If on a winter’s night a traveller … Calvino experiments with this technique and comments on it, philosophizing about methods to produce novels ‘mechanically,’ while at the same time confining himself to novelistic fragments. As explained, although he was fascinated by the idea of mechanically produced writing, he still saw a ‘poetic’ element as inevitable, and he thought that human intervention cannot be excluded. In Six memos Calvino praises Perec’s novel La vie mode d’emploi: Another example of the hyper-novel is La vie mode d’emploi (Life, Directions for use) by Georges Perec. It is a very long novel, made up of many intersecting stories (it is no accident that its subtitle is Romans, in the plural), and it reawakens the pleasure of reading the great novelistic cycles of the sort Balzac wrote. In my view, this book, published in Paris in 1978, four years before the author died at the early age of forty-six, is the last real “event” in the history of the novel so far. There are many reasons for this: the plan of the book, of incredible scope but at the same time solidly finished; the novelty of its rendering; the compendium of a narrative tradition and the encyclopedic summa of things known that lend substance to a particular image of the world; the feeling of “today” that is made from accumulations of the past and the vertigo of the void; the continual presence of anguish and irony together – in a word, the manner in which the pursuit of a definite structural project and the imponderable element of poetry become one and the same thing.35 It seems, then, that La vie mode d’emploi is Calvino’s ideal novel, combining both mechanical objectivity and poetic subjectivity. It is Calvino, too, who compares La vie mode d’emploi with the Thousand and one nights, because of

35  Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (New York: Vintage International, 1988), 121.

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this literary method: “Les cent chambres deviennent les Mille et une nuits.”36 Perec himself also stated that Shahrazad was his favorite heroine and that the Thousand and one nights was a great literary model.37 Given that Shahrazad was such an important source of inspiration for Perec and that his literary philosophy resembles Calvino’s to such an extent, we would expect to find fundamental similarities in the novels of these two authors. As in If on a winter’s night a traveller …, we expect that formal constraints and the idea of a proliferation of stories would also dominate Perec’s work. What role does narrative structure play in Perec’s work and how does it reflect his literary ideas? And how are these structures and concepts related to the Thousand and one nights? We address these questions in the following section, focusing on the novels La vie mode d’emploi (1978) and the unfinished “53 jours …” (published posthumously in 1989). La vie mode d’emploi Perec wrote his masterpiece toward the end of his life, after a long struggle to define the nature of his authorship; it is, perhaps for this reason, that the work contains the full force of his literary vision. The book, La vie mode d’emploi, is a tour de force, a work of astonishing scope and originality, a monumental literary statement. The idea of the book is a portrayal of the rooms and inhabitants of an apartment building in Paris; the novel hops from one room to the next according to the moves of a knight on a chessboard of one hundred squares, with the proviso that the sixty-fifth move is skipped, so that the room in the lower left corner – a cellar – remains ‘closed’ to the reader. The book thus visits ninety-nine rooms in ninety-nine chapters. There are other constraints as well, for example, specific elements must be incorporated into each chapter, thus providing a frame within which the stories almost ‘write themselves.’ The result is a labyrinthine cluster of stories, which are each centered in one of the rooms but which wander off in space and time to ultimately form a panorama of interconnected narratives. Although the stories in La vie mode d’emploi contain a multitude of characters, three figures represent the main storyline. The first is the painter Valène, who has a plan to paint a Parisian apartment building without its façade, showing the rooms, their inhabitants, and contents. However, he never undertakes the project, it remains just an idea. Clearly, this is an epitomized representation 36  Brunel, Italo Calvino, 245. 37  Jean-Luc Joly, “Le ‘modèle’ des Mille et une nuits dans La vie mode d’emploi de Georges Perec,” in Jean-Luc Joly and Abdelfattah Kilito (eds.), Les 1001 Nuits, du texte au mythe (Rabat: Université Mohammed-V Agdal, 2005), 265.

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of Perec’s novel, and as such its central mise en abîme. It is, not coincidentally, from Valène’s perspective that the tour around the building is told. The second main character is Percival Bartlebooth, an English billionaire who has dedicated his life to a single project: after learning painting with watercolors, he traveled around the world to make fifty paintings of port towns, one each month. These he sent to the artisan Gaspard Winckler, who pasted the paintings on wood and made them into jigsaw puzzles. After completing his paintings, Bartlebooth returned to Paris, reconstituted the puzzles and had them steamed off the wooden support. After thus restoring the watercolors to their original state, he had the paper bleached and destroyed. Due to unforeseen circumstances and Winckler’s proficiency in producing the puzzles, Bartlebooth fails to finish the project in the scheduled time. In fact, as he gradually becomes blind, it is more and more difficult for him to complete the puzzles. In the end, he dies while trying to finish the 439th puzzle. Significantly, at the moment of his death, he holds the last piece of the puzzle in his hand, but it is w-shaped, and the hole in the puzzle has the shape of an x. The third main character is the aforementioned Gaspard Winckler, an artisan of great ability who not only carries out Bartlebooth’s assignment, but who also makes the puzzles as difficult as possible, in order to foil the completion of the project. Around these three figures the life stories of literally hundreds of characters, real and imaginary, are woven into a huge labyrinthine carpet pattern, steered by the respective spaces, the objects in the rooms, or associations between the inhabitants of the building. To stress the maze-like character of the book, two indexes are added, one is a list of people who figure in the book and the second is a list of stories that ‘emerge’ in the various rooms/chapters. From this concise description of the contents of La vie mode d’emploi, we can perceive the contours of its resemblance to the Thousand and one nights. There are three explicit references to the Nights. The clearest reference is the mention of King Shahriyar in an Arabic poem cited in chapter 57. The lines focus on a death threat connected with the interruption of storytelling. The second reference is the mention of a book titled The Arabian knights, by a certain Charles Nunneley, in chapter 57. Third, Perec evokes the legend of the palace of Lebtit, where one room was kept locked because it was foreordained that the Moors would conquer the country if it were opened (chapter 1). This tale can be found in several versions of the Nights, especially in the translations of Burton and Mardrus, and it is replicated in the work of Borges. Clearly, the inclusion of this legend foreshadows the one closed room in the book. On a formal and thematic level, the parallels with the Thousand and one nights are twofold. The first parallel relates to the core concept of the book:

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The ‘inspection’ of rooms in a building, except one room which is forbidden. This motif occurs in several stories of the Nights, which we encountered in chapter 1, in the story of the ‘Third qalandar’s tale,’ where the protagonist has mysteriously arrived in a magical palace full of bliss, and is allowed to enter thirty-nine rooms, but not the fortieth and last one, though he possesses the key. In each room, he beholds different marvels of the world; of course, he is unable to restrain his curiosity and opens the fortieth room. He is punished for breaking the taboo and regrets it all his life.38 The locked room is thus associated with human weakness, with the inescapability of fate, and the impossibility of ‘seeing’ everything. As we see below, this latter aspect, in particular, is a major theme of Perec’s novel and his work more generally. Second, and more conspicuously, Perec’s novel has the structure of a frame story, not only in the narratological sense of stories gathered in a frame story that explains their origin, as epitomized by Valène’s project, but in the conceptual sense especially, where a proliferation of stories is contained in a constructed frame. Perec, who was fascinated by the nature of space and the essential spatiality of experiences and events, chose as a frame not a temporal sequence, as in the Thousand and one nights, but a spatial ordering, one that locates the stories in the various rooms of the building. The stories are somehow attached to the spatial compartments and from there they stretch out into space and time. Or perhaps the compartments are only incidental crossroads, where histories, destinies, and narratives come together. The spatial frame gives a cross section of a narrative space filled with innumerable narrative ‘streams’ and networks that are attached to specific spaces and specific objects. The spatial delimitation is the constraint that separates this segment from the realm of narration. It implies a mechanism of interruption, by the boundaries between the rooms, and suggests a layer of narratives, which transcends these boundaries, stretched throughout the whole text. The device of framing is thus used by Perec in a different way than it is used in the Thousand and one nights, but its function as a narrative mechanism can still be analyzed according to the strategies outlined previously. Are there essential differences in the way Perec applies the concept, which distance La vie mode d’emploi from the Thousand and one nights? Or does the variation on the concept result in more or less the same narrative effects? To answer these questions, we compare Perec’s method to the various functions of the frame story mentioned earlier.

38  Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:340–341.

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[1] In La vie mode d’emploi Perec clearly plays with the interaction between a coherent frame and the diversity it contains. The building was chosen as a more or less accidental ‘container,’ which from the outside represents a formal and clearly delimited unity. As in several stories by postmodern writers, this container harbors/encloses a microcosm of diverse experiences, histories, lives, and visions of the world. The unity of the building is deceptive, because it hides the multiformity of the world within it, while at the same time it is an instrument by which this multiformity is brought to light. It is through the suggestion of coherence, or perhaps through the essential structuring function of spatial demarcation, that the diversity of the human experience can be perceived. The building contains a variety of lives which unfold in time but which attach themselves to their spatial surroundings, in which the traces of these lives and their significance accumulate. This accumulation creates a new reality that is unified and endlessly diverse at the same time. This idea inspired Valène’s aborted project and also inspired Perec. [2] Through the device of mise en abîme – the paratextual additions – the novel tries to clarify what it is meant to be. It is the textual account of a visual representation that existed only in the mind of the painter Valène, and followed the same concept and the same execution. Apart from this, the consciously applied ‘constraint’ of the knight’s moves draws attention to the mechanical and objectified nature of the text as an artificial construction. The narrative is bound by a set of rules which shape it as a representation, by following a preconceived plan that orders the essentially amorphous material it contains. Perec’s method of constructing by constraint is reflected in the figure of Bartlebooth, who embarks on an undertaking that is carefully arranged by a preconceived plan. Self-reflexivity is therefore not a coincidental feature of the novel; it represents the essence of Perec’s view of the human experience and his own work. [3] By the method of constraint, Perec suggests, stories emerge automatically and shape themselves into narratives, as if they have always been present in the room and only need to be stirred into motion. These stories contain other stories that proliferate in time and space, since they are part of an infinite network of stories. Their ramifications become visible in other rooms, involving people known to the reader. But they also take the reader to the far corners of the world. They touch upon new people, new spaces, and new objects, all of which trigger new narratives. This proliferation can hardly be controlled; rather it is caused by the inherent dynamism of stories and their inevitable outpouring in the passage of time. [4] Perec consciously presents the novel as an artificially delimited segment of the narrative realm. This segment is, in turn, divided by allocating

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stories to the various rooms. Thus, a system of interruption is created which is not temporal, as in the case of Shahrazad, but spatial; it creates not so much a sequence of stories, but rather a collage. Some stories are confined to a single room, other stories flow over into other rooms as well, re-appearing with other stories in the same place, forming new connections, but, significantly, emphasizing their simultaneity, as when, in a collage fragmented images of different places or times are brought together and influence the other’s meaning. Since the embedding is primarily spatial, the main narrative lines are parallel to each other, and not embedded in each other, with the exception of some embedded stories. The story of Bartlebooth and Valène link the other stories to each other transversally. By stressing the artificiality of this division, Perec suggests that the reservoir of stories is, in principle, endless. Inside their segment, the stories branch out into distances that remain invisible to the reader. Within the novel itself, this infinity is symbolized by the 66th room, which remains closed – the contents of its stories remain unknown. The device of segmentation and the denial of totality thus indicate continuation and infinity, since there is no closure or ending. [5] Since the frame in which the stories are embedded is spatial and not temporal, at first sight it would be improbable to expect a strategy of deferral. As noted, the juxtaposition of the stories does not follow a time sequence, but a spatial sequence; this implies that some stories are divided over several rooms and not over several nights. Still, the temporal aspect is built into the narrative structure and the way in which this is done suggests the motif of deferral. The first mechanism of deferral is, of course, the knight’s journey over the chessboard, performing its moves before the end of the book is reached. The moves coincide with the compartments in which the stories are ‘stored,’ excluding the cellar, which should be the knight’s 65th jump. The second strategy of deferral consists of Bartlebooth’s project of painting the port cities, and transforming the pictures into puzzles which are, in the end, destroyed. The project is conceived to be executed during Bartlebooth’s lifetime, according to a strict time schedule, but various events prevent him from carrying it out. The puzzles prove to be more difficult than expected and Bartlebooth gradually becomes blind. The deferral is partly inherent in Bartlebooth’s project itself, but it is also partly imposed by Gaspard Winckler, whose puzzles are increasingly difficult to solve. Significantly, in the first chapter it is remarked that by making his puzzles as complicated as possible, Winckler is taking revenge on Bartlebooth after his (Winckler’s) death, and thus, in a way he survives by diminishing the time available to Bartlebooth to complete his project. Here we see, again, the linking of the spatial and temporal elements of the novel: the spatial compartmentalization necessarily imposes a deferral, since the story

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continues until the knight covers all the squares. At the same time, the reader knows that the story will end after the knight completes his moves and wonders whether Bartlebooth, whose story is one of the narrative sequences that transcends the compartments, will have sufficient time to finish his project. Whereas the knight’s moves represent the suspension of the passage of time, Bartlebooth’s project symbolizes the relentless flow of time, which competes with the invented, constructed mechanisms of deferral. Tragically, both mechanisms fail to reach a conclusion: the knight because he cannot enter into the cellar, Bartlebooth because he dies during the 99th chapter while trying to solve his 439th puzzle, and the stories of the inhabitants because they have not ended or remain incomplete. Thus, Perec built in a deferral of gratification and a suspension of time, but in the end withheld gratification. [6] As in the Thousand and one nights, the idea of deferral is linked to death, not in the sense that the ‘survival’ of interruptions leads to the escape of the narrator (or of the reader), but because Bartlebooth’s death coincides with the final move of the knight and this can be interpreted as an equation between the human effort to construct rules that regulate life and life itself. The project that was meant to structure Bartlebooth’s life is Bartlebooth’s life; the knight’s moves are Bartlebooth’s life; and both are Perec’s novel. The certainty that the knight’s moves will end implies that Bartlebooth will die and that the novel will end. So, life and the story are one and the same, as in the many stories of the other inhabitants. The reader is only aware of this after he finishes the novel and realizes that while reading it, he has brought Bartlebooth’s death ever nearer. It is only after this observation that he can understand what the novel is about: it is only from the perspective of the end that a narrative can be evaluated and interpreted. The conclusion is unambiguous: the knight failed to complete his mission, since one room remained closed; Bartlebooth failed in his mission, since his project remains unfinished; and, consequently, Perec failed in his mission, since he was not able to completely represent the narrative potential of the building. Perhaps, like Valène’s project, his book is only an idea after all, one that cannot be realized. The project of Bartlebooth symbolizes Perec’s perception of art in general, and his own writing in particular: The artist invents rules and constraints to gain control over life, but these rules are essentially useless and meaningless and only exist for themselves. Whatever is created through them should be undone; but whatever the writer attempts, he will never attain his aim, because contingency and death will thwart his effort to unify his life and his project through his invented rules. [6a] Although in La vie mode d’emploi there is no systematic alternation between a diegetic reality and embedded, imagined stories, Perec continues

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to play with different textual levels. Apart from the stories that are embedded in the lives of the inhabitants, the reader is continually held in suspense about the interaction between reality and the imagination. The stories seem to be firmly anchored in reality, since they are attached to spaces, objects, texts, etc., which are explicitly mentioned, even shown, and quoted in the text. At the end of the book, there is an index with dozens of historical names, and a list of writers from whom Perec has ‘borrowed’ passages and quotations. But there is also a list of stories, which suggests that this ‘real’ material is incorporated in imaginary stories, of the genre of the Thousand and one nights. The main destabilizing element, however, is Valène’s unfinished project, which seems to contain the essence of Perec’s book. Is La vie mode d’emploi no more than a fantasy of Valène’s, an unachieved and unachievable monomaniacal dream? Is Bartlebooth’s – and Perec’s – project doomed to fail from the beginning because we already know that Valène’s project has failed? [7] It is clear that the stories collected in La vie mode d’emploi are not meant for entertainment only. Still, they are not told to convey a moral lesson. If there is a didactic element in the work, it is to show how humans inevitably construct their lives in the form of narratives, and ultimately fail to live a life outside the constraints in which they construct them. But the reference to the city of Lebta, from the Thousand and one nights, suggests that a completion of the human effort, the opening of the final, forbidden room, would bring inevitable disaster, the reader would either be engulfed by hostile forces, or abducted from his ‘blissful’ abode and taken to a place of sorrow, regret, and lamentation. Before we proceed with an evaluation of the relationship between Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller … and Perec’s La vie mode démploi, we first discuss Perec’s last novel, “53 jours….” “53 jours …” In his study of Perec’s poetics, Jacques Denis Bertharion argues that the uncompleted novel “53 jours …” can be seen as a ‘resumé’ of the guidelines of Perec’s narrative writing. It contains many elements that refer to La vie mode d’emploi, such as the puzzle/mystery that must be solved, the diegetic uncertainty, the self-reflexive comments, and especially, the exploration of the interaction between texts and reality, both the reality in the text and the reality of the reader. Even more than in La vie mode d’emploi, the reader becomes part of the work, as if his own reality is irresistibly drawn into the narrative. This effect is only partially observed, however, since the novel remained unfinished. Perec

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was working on it when he died in 1982; he had only completed the first part. Of the second part we have only notes, remarks, and outlines, which, of course, throw an interesting light on the work as a whole, because the notes presumably reveal Perec’s method and deliberations which he would otherwise have hidden in the text. We have, so to speak, half a text and half a user’s manual. The title of the novel refers to the number of days it took Stendhal to write his novel La chartreuse de Parme, which, according to Perec, was one of the intertextual models of the work. It also refers to an illustration Perec found, which he intended to use for the cover of the book: a road sign indicating ‘Timbuctu 52 jours.’ Thus, one of the constraints of the novel was the time schedule in which it was to be produced. The second constraint is the genre, the text is a murder mystery, that is, essentially a text constructed to solve a problem, a mystery. Soon it becomes clear that this clarity of genre is illusory. … l’ensemble se présente comme un groupement de récits soigneusement et rigoureusement maîtrisé, ordonné – cependant, nous verrons que cet ordre spatial n’est que le point de depart d’une organisation, d’un retissage du texte pas le travail de lalecture. Un principe régulateur spatio-temporel préside donc à la composition du “roman”. L’immobilisation descriptive de la maison compense l’éparpillement temporal resultant de la multiplicité des récits analeptiques.39 This destabilization is confirmed in the second part of the novel, which exists in outline only; the reader discovers that the text he has been reading is a completely different text than what he imagined he was reading. In fact, the text is part of another text, and the relationship between the two parts throws doubt on the authenticity of the first part. The story of the novel is set in an unnamed North African country, which is ruled by a violent dictator – possibly Tunisia, where Perec lived for some time. The narrator, a French teacher, is summoned by the French consul, because a French resident has disappeared. It turns out it was Robert Serval, the wellknown writer of detective stories, who asked the consul to hand a manuscript over to the narrator in case of his disappearance, because he says he knew the narrator as a boy. The narrator is charged with the task of finding out, discreetly, what has happened to Serval. The narrator starts his investigation by delving into Serval’s past, which, it turns out, harbors several mysteries, in particular, some related to the war and a number of aliases. But, of course, the narrator 39  Georges Perec, “53 jours,” ed. Harry Matthews and Jacques Roubaud ([Paris]: Gallimard, 1989), 134–135.

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surmises that the key to Serval’s disappearance is hidden in the manuscript that is now in his possession. The truth must be in the text. The manuscript is the beginning of a police novel titled La crypte, which is about a detective named Robert Serval, who investigates a mysterious death. During his search, he finds a novel named Le juge est l’assassin, which is about a ‘perfect’ murder: the victim is supposed to be someone who is in fact the murderer but who has physically disappeared, after putting evidence on the body indicating someone else is the killer. Serval suspects that the killer used the plot of the novel for his own crime, and that he escaped by ‘posing’ as the victim. Of course, the narrator now supposes that this double plot is an indication of Serval’s disappearance, a suggestion strengthened by another story inserted in the novel, this has the title ‘K comme koala,’ and is about an espionage intrigue during World War II. Further research of the text reveals references to a political opposition group called La Main Noire, and Serval’s possible involvement in the smuggling of antiquities. However, the manuscript is unfinished – it seems that the last page is missing – and it ends with a question about the identity of the killer. The question contains a suggestion, but the possible answers remain ambiguous. The narrator uses the text, first, to evaluate possible connections between the three cases; second, to look for clues linking the story to the context of the city where he and Serval live(d?), such as the names of streets and buildings; and, third, to find clues in the relationships between the texts in the manuscript. He finally concludes that his hypothesis that the key should be inside the text is insufficient and he begins to reconstruct the procedures of the writing of the texts. This leads him to Lise Carpentier, who typed the text for Serval. Together they continue the investigations, and the narrator gradually falls in love with Lise. At a certain point, however, the consul is killed, and the narrator is arrested by the police. His investigations have raised suspicion, as he is behaving exactly as if he intended to mask his crime. Moreover, Lise was the lover of the consul, and this amplifies the suspicions against the narrator. We have now reached the part for which we only have notes, outlines, and suggestions. At the narrator’s arrest, the second part of the novel, called ‘Un R est un M qui se P le L de la R’ (‘Un roman est un miroir qui se promène le long de la route’) begins. In this second part the prosecutor receives a text which is called ‘53 jours …’ and which contains the account of the narrator’s investigation, that is, the text that the reader has just read. Thus, it turns out that this text contains the keys to the mystery, since it may have been written by the narrator to hide his own crime, while he pretends to solve another crime exactly like the case of Serval. Or has Serval succeeded in committing a murder – of the consul – and throwing the blame on the narrator by manipulating him

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with his text? It is the task of Salini, the inspector, to find out whether the truth is hidden in the text, or perhaps in a manipulative interpretation of the second text that is incorporated in it. It is only with the addition of the second part, in outline form only, that we obtain a full view of the intended structure of the novel. After all, the addition constitutes the final frame encompassing all the other texts, although they are not embedded, and they only appear in their proper place at the end. We have five or six texts, then, that are intertwined: the novel “53 jours …,” which the reader holds in his hands and which contains ‘Le R est un M …’; the text ‘Le R est un M…’ written by Salini, which contains ‘53 jours …’; ‘53 jours …,’ the account handed over to the prosecutor by the first narrator; the novels La crypte (written by Robert Serval and given to the first narrator) and Le juge est l’assassin (referred to and summarized by Robert Serval in his novel); and K comme koala, a story of espionage inserted at the level of Le juge est l’assassin. In addition to these texts within the novel, at the intertextual level we find references to Stendhal’s work La chartreuse de Parme, and, in the formal structure, allusions to the Thousand and one nights. The intertextual components are related to each other in two ways. First, all the stories contain the motif of murder, intrigue, disappearances, aliases, and a mix of personal lives and politics. Le juge est l’assassin, La crypte, and “53 jours …” in particular, are thematically related and can even be seen as each other’s mirror images. It is even plausible that the relations between the narrative plots are not coincidental, but are consciously derived from each other with some manipulative purpose. Thus, to some extent the texts shape each other through the reproduction of certain elements and intrigues. Second, the texts have similar functions: they are all used as textual representations of a series of events that happened in reality and are potential clues to understand and explain the nature and true course of these events. The texts are, so to speak, each other’s exegesis, since one layer attempts to solve the mystery hidden in the other layers. While on the one hand, the author suggests that the text contains the solution to the problem, on the other hand, he indicates that texts can also be manipulated with the aim of hiding the truth. The letter found in La crypte pointing at the murderer turns out to be, possibly, a deception that directs attention away from the real killer. The act of handing over La crypte to the narrator may be meant to help him solve the mystery, but it may also be a means to mislead him, even to manipulate him in such a way that the investigator becomes a suspect himself, by steering his research and his actions according to a preconceived scheme. After all, to a large extent, the texts determine the nature and course of the investigations. For Salini, and for the reader, this remains ambiguous: is the report of the narrator

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truthful, in the sense that he genuinely tried to solve the mystery of the disappearance of Robert Serval? Or is it only an effort to cover up his own involvement in the series of events connected to Robert Serval? In other words, do the texts disclose something or are they used to hide something? Do they contain information or only false leads? The suggestion that the texts are all somehow related to events that have really happened, and even that they somehow represent these events, implies that they can be used to clarify them. This clarification, however, is not straightforward; it is encrypted in the text and it requires a process of interpretation. Still, the nature of the relationship between these texts and the ‘real’ events is, from the beginning, ambiguous, since the event itself is not even clear. The text does not ‘represent’ a murder that has been committed, but only serves as a potential piece of evidence related to a disappearance. Thus, the text is not a medium to seek the hidden course of specified events, but rather a medium to find out what may have happened. So, the text does not contain a description of events that have happened, but is used to look for a reality that might have happened; to reconstruct an event for which no other traces are left. From the beginning, then, the foundation of the text is ambiguous, and it is even questionable if the use of texts is helpful at all, since it gradually becomes clear that the authors of the texts may have used their accounts to hide their roles in the events. The texts are not evidence of guilt, but rather a means for the suspect to escape, not a way of representing reality, but a way of constructing, shaping, and creating a reality. The texts are used as a trap for the investigator, to draw him into the events that are happening, endow him with a specific role, and turn him into a potential suspect. However, the efficiency of this process casts doubt on this outcome and draws attention to the strategies used in the text, or even the strategies and mechanisms inherent in texts. The conclusion is twofold: first, a text always leads to the production of new texts that are required to interpret them or to (re-)construct their relationship to reality; second, instead of explaining events, texts may produce events through the potential interpretations of reality (or of other texts) that they contain. Thus, because someone is killed in an invented text in Le juge est l’assassin, someone may really be killed in a presumably realistic text at another level. Fictional and real events are thus regenerated through texts; there are shifts between the statuses of reality and fictionality. If we draw this line of thought to its ultimate consequence, we may suspect that Robert Serval wrote his novel Le juge est l’assassin in order to force the narrator to write “53 jours …” and, ultimately, to force Perec to write his novel to trap the reader in his text, so that he will be accused of committing a murder. Or, reasoning in absurdo, the reader may even commit a murder and be forced to add his own text to throw

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the blame on Perec. The mechanisms of the text are such that the authors and readers are drawn into the same inescapable process of interpretation and representation that is inherent in the nature of texts as a means to regulate the relationship between human beings and events. It is clear that in his “53 jours …” Perec makes optimal use of the possibilities of the frame story as a literary strategy and we can perceive a deep interweaving between it and the concepts of the Thousand and one nights. Still, his concept seems to be the reverse of that of the Nights: although the authors try to save themselves and find out the truth, they are, in fact, trapped by the narrative strategies and ultimately endanger their own lives. There is no solution in the end, but a ramification of complexities that only extend the maze. The text seduces and captures; no one is liberated by it. Since Perec is the author of this unfinished text, it is the task of the reader to find him, by interpreting his text. Has Perec used the text as a smokescreen to disappear? Will the reader be accused of some crime that Perec has committed? Will the reader commit a crime prepared by Perec’s novel? Has the reader murdered Perec? Is Perec even dead, perhaps he is still alive? The three novels discussed above have certain elements in common: they all, in different ways, highlight the phenomenon of incomplete narratives. And all three make use of the structural and conceptual possibilities of the frame story in a way that is similar to the narrative strategy of the Thousand and one nights. Although the example of the Nights may not have provided the authors with the idea of this incompleteness, the association of the concept with Shahrazad is certainly no coincidence. As Todorov has explained (see above), the setup of the Thousand and one nights as a frame with embedded stories inspires the idea that each story has an excess and in itself it does not have a complete meaning. Conversely, the structure of framing and embedding stories seems to be the logical form by which to explore the phenomenon of incompletion, since it is principally based on the technique of interruption. Interruption suggests the idea of a possible premature ending for the narrative; this is, of course, the basic suspense built into the concept and structure of the Thousand and one nights. In the discussion above we have referred to seven functions of the phenomenon of interruption in narratives, as we have extrapolated from the example of the Thousand and one nights. The main effects of the simple device of interruption, as it is applied in the frame story of the Nights are the splitting of diegetic levels, the deferral of gratification, the linking of narrative and death, the suggestion of infinity, the self-reflexivity of the text, self-generation and proliferation, the equation of narrative and life, and the idea of a fundamental

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unity comprising an essentially endless diversity. As Todorov indicates, these effects are inherent in the narrative strategy and the vision of the functioning of the text, as a medium of signification. As such, they seem more a discovery of a property of narratives, than the conscious application of a formal technique. They reveal how texts ‘work’ and this is surely what attracted the attention of Calvino and Perec, as members of OULIPO, to the Thousand and one nights. The technique of interruption is quite explicitly adopted in Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller …, which is based on a series of incipits of novels. Here the technique of interruption is used to lay bare the underlying processes involved in the acts of writing and reading. On the one hand, reading and writing are part of a universe of narration, which is essentially endless, and which radiates the basic necessity for humans to produce and consume texts. Texts embody a fundamental desire and the interruption of the fulfillment of this desire immediately provokes a search for continuation or for other texts. On the other hand, the articulation and distribution of the cosmic reservoir of texts in the human world is subject to struggles of various kinds and mechanisms of power. The ways in which the desire for texts is satisfied is not the result of a natural flow of stories, but of manipulation, exploitation of the sources, and abuse of power. Both writers and readers are somehow under the control of authorities and syndicates which are the gatekeepers of the streams of stories. The desire for text is fed by the suspicion, or intuition, that outside the textual universe there is only an endless, meaningless void. Texts give at least a sparkle of meaning to our experience of reality; without them there would be no existence, since we would lack the medium to experience it. It is because of this consciousness that the reader instantaneously springs into action when his narrative is interrupted; he enacts the elementary function of texts as a force shaping reality. A text is not confined to the mind and the mental universe; it directly intervenes in the course of events; it provokes actions and reactions, not only by shaping people’s daily lives, but also by spurring them on to find continuations and other texts. Not only readers, but also texts themselves strive for perpetuation, extension, survival, or transcendence into other texts. The chapters linking the incipits together, the frame story of If on a winter’s night a traveller …, shows us what happens inside the ‘life’ of texts, how this relates to human lives, and what happens in the mind of the reader when his reading is forcibly interrupted. In La vie mode d’emploi, the possibility of interruption is incorporated into the fragmentation of the frame – the space of the building – and by the constraints placed on the knight’s moves. Still, the abrupt borders of the textual realm are not explored through interruption, but by relating narratives to forms of absence and lacking. The knight skips one square and we will never

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know the ‘contents’ of the cellar. The building is only a part of the city, but even knowledge of this small and compact unit cannot be complete. This incompleteness is confirmed by the fact that Valène was – inexplicably – incapable of executing his project to produce a painting of the apartment building, and, most explicitly, by the missing piece of Bartlebooth’s 439th puzzle and the fact that he was unable to complete his life scheme. As in If on a winter’s night a traveller …, it is suggested that you can manipulate the mechanisms governing the production and consumption of texts by adhering to specific rules, but in the end, this will prove to be meaningless: it is a way to pass the time, to spend a life, but it will never transform itself into a meaningful representation of life. There will always be something lacking, showing the abyss that gapes beyond the realm of texts. Like Calvino in If on a winter’s night a traveller …, in La vie mode d’emploi Perec also hypothesizes the realm of texts as a saturated universe in which texts are continually produced and proliferated in endlessly ramifying labyrinths. Calvino suggests that we, as humans, can only be aware of a minuscule part of this realm, we barely explore its fringes. Perec also knows that texts represent the only way to experience our lives, but at the same time, he suggests that the realm of texts is infinite and that we will never reach a total overview of reality through the medium of texts. There will always be a lack, an absence preventing us from seeing life and reality as a coherent whole. There will always be a forbidden room, the last piece of the puzzle will never fit into the hole. And, even more significant, this lack, in the last instance, necessitates our textual activity, and the intuitive knowledge that the lack exists and can only be located by constructing texts – that is the starting point of all narration. In “53 jours …” Perec continues his research on the function of texts. Again, the story starts with an absence and an urge to solve the mysteries surrounding it. The search leads us, especially, to texts that seem to clarify certain aspects, but at the same time make the whole picture more obscure and complex. The novel examines the relationship between text and reality, and makes clear how inadequate texts are to describe and explain events in reality, but at the same time, it also suggests that they influence reality, shape and steer it, create it, while hiding its true nature and the true nature of human actions. The novel shows how readers are, time and again, forced to continue their reading in new texts, to search for explanations, without reaching the plot. The texts inside the novel are all unfinished, since they flow into the other texts that already enframe them, sometimes without the reader being aware of it. It is, of course, highly intriguing that the novel itself, too, remained unfinished. Calvino and Perec show us that humans can only have a meaningful experience of life through texts, but that the true nature of life is hidden by the same

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texts. Similarly, because every story, by definition, contains other stories that emerge by themselves, the writer, too, becomes more and more hidden by his texts. The text is a mechanism that is put in motion by the author, who then leaves the scene to the story and the reader. It is the reader who must ultimately internalize and continue the story. In their role of Shahrazad, Calvino and Perec have not only shown how this process goes on in the mind of Shahriyar, they have also placed the reader in his position. The reader must participate, in the sense that he must enable the story to go on and use it to construct his vision of life, while conscious of the dangers that lie in wait for him when the story is interrupted. Both Calvino and Perec left the last books before their deaths with this theme of incompleteness for the reader to continue and construct his own trajectory toward his ending.

Chapter 10

The Celebration of Hybridity: Abdelkébir Khatibi and Juan Goytisolo The authors discussed in this section are all, in some way or another, fascinated by the textual nature of narration and, especially, by the limitless possibilities of language. For them, the Thousand and one nights represents a model for the identification of narration with life, and for the crucial role of language in the construction of our view of life. They share a feeling of estrangement from the society and culture in which they live, or, perhaps more accurately, their sense of belonging to their social and cultural environment is blurred by an inherent sense of hybridity. This hybridity is crucial to their identities as writers, because, on the one hand, language, for writers in general, is the quintessential marker of identity; it defines the nature of their art and the cultural embedding from which they perceive the world and relate to it. Language and texts are their life’s blood, the natural element in which they survive. On the other hand, hybridity – that is, the absence of a strong identification with a single language and culture – may open up possibilities for experimentation and creativity. The author may experience the inescapable bond between a language and a cultural and historical heritage as oppressive and stifling, and this may predetermine his work and visions through pre-constructed traditions and norms. Linguistic hybridity provides the possibility – perhaps even the necessity – of a reconstruction or even the construction of cultural foundations. As we have seen, Joyce forges a new language and new modes of narration from the tensions between his Irish cultural background and the hegemony of the English language and culture, while Borges and others seek ways to respond to the cultural diversity of Argentina to construct alternative, coherent, textual realms. Language should be molded into text constructs that (re-)establish or replace the ties with the author’s social and cultural environment. As Homi Bhabha and others argued in the 1990s, cultural hybridity is a typical phenomenon of the colonial and postcolonial periods. It is created not only by the mingling of languages and cultures through intensified contacts, but also, and perhaps predominantly, by hierarchical relations and the effects of power inequality. Cultures, as well as countries and societies, are colonized and imbued with new values and discourses that fundamentally reshape or even destroy indigenous cultures and disrupt their sense of continuity and © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_012

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integrity. Therefore, for writers in (post-)colonial situations, hybridity implies both a loss, in several respects, and a range of new possibilities that is opened up by the interaction with the colonizing culture. Here, language and narration are vital instruments to reconstruct both a sense of belonging and an exploitation of new cultural resources. Narration provides a refuge, a place of exile from which the colonized culture can be re-appropriated, or, perhaps more accurately, from which the hybrid culture can be re-colonized. Using narration as an alternative cultural ‘home’ is no gratuitous strategy; it is connected with the essential life conditions of an author and as such it is a reality which relates to his physical survival. Here the influence of the Thousand and one nights becomes relevant, since, as we have observed several times above, Shahrazad not only provides a model for narration as a representation of life, she also exemplifies the connection between these imagined realities and the threat of death, since, after all, it is her body which will experience a violent death and through which she hopes to save herself by her narrative performance. Cultural hybridity not only affects the psychological desire to belong to a stable environment, it also destabilizes the sense of physical integrity, the ‘body image,’ the cultural conditions for the survival of the body. Language and narration are physical acts that establish or disrupt the ties to a material, social, and, ultimately, cultural domain. Here a paradoxical tension arises: narration can be a refuge in which the writer’s identity dissolves to compensate for his estrangement from his environment, while it also exacerbates his physical exposure to threats and his physical survival. It is as if the complementarity between constructed reality and material reality is disrupted and constructed reality loses its function as the means to embed the body in its material milieu. In this section, we discuss two authors for whom narration as a refuge from cultural disruption or, conversely, from the oppressiveness of cultural discipline, is a crucial incentive for their writing. For both, the Thousand and one nights is an essential source for the conceptualization of their art.

Abdelkébir Khatibi: Narration and the Body

Abdelkébir Khatibi (1938–2009) was one of the most prominent francophone authors of Morocco who, with his rather enigmatic poetic works, inspired others to reflect on the frictions between individual desires and the contradictions within modern Moroccan culture and society. He grew up during the French occupation of Morocco, first in the coastal town of El Jadida and later in a French boarding school in Marrakesh. He experienced the harsh reality

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of colonial oppression, but also the beauty and the creative potential of the French language and culture. His encounter with the Occident thus consisted of the “contradiction d’agression et d’amour.”1 As an unhappy child, he found a refuge in reading and writing, which shaped him, but also, in a way, deformed him and estranged him from his social environment. Later he went to study in Paris, where he met his future wife. He returned to Morocco to assume administrative and cultural functions, and distinguished himself as a prominent writer and intellectual. Khatibi describes his youth in his autobiographical document La mémoire tatouée. According to Hassan Wahbi, this text should not be read as a regular autobiography, but rather as an effort to unravel the ‘enigma’ of the self and to reconstruct or rather construct Khatibi’s gradual but steady development as a writer, to relate not how writing became an instrument for him, but rather how he became an instrument for his writing, which imposed itself on him and which constructed itself within him even while he was writing his autobiographical text. His writing is thus always – also – the account of the emergence and growth of his writing itself. Wahbi argues that this function of writing was caused by Khatibi’s colonial experience, which forced him to substitute the heterogeneity of historical time, which was disrupted by the intervention of the colonial power, by a personal time, which enabled him to ‘recompose’ himself and integrate his body into history and society.2 Writing thus acquires a constitutive function; the author discovers and ‘creates’ himself in the act of writing: “C’est le pacte autobiographique inverse. Ce n’est pas la vie qui vient se loger dans les mots, c’est bien plus, c’est l’écriture qui s’incarne dans l’existence de l’autobiographe.”3 Khatibi himself signals this process of ‘incorporation’ of writing; writing is, so to speak, an effort to be re-united with an ‘other,’ a double that has haunted him from his youth and estranged him from his society. This ‘doubling’ is reinforced by the colonial experience: “Et je pense bien que ma profession – regard dédoublé sur les autres – s’enracine à tout hasard à l’appel de me retrouver, au-delà de ces humiliés qui furent ma première société.”4 The colonial humiliation, the colonial mode of thinking, has destroyed the inner framework of the society and estranged the people from their past:

1  Abdelkébir Khatibi, Oeuvres de Abdelkébir Khatibi, I, Romans et récits (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2008), 17. 2  Hassan Wahbi, Abdelkébir Khatibi: L’Esprit de la lettre: essai (Rabat: Marsam, 2014), 36–38. 3  Ibid., 36. 4  Khatibi, Oeuvres de Abdelkébir Khatibi (2008), 15.

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Juxtaposer, compartimenter, militariser, découper la ville en zones ethniques, ensabler la culture du people dominé. En découvrant son dépaysement, ce people errera, hagard, dans l’espace brisé de son histoire. Et il n’y a rien de plus atroce que la déchirure de la mémoire. Mais déchirure commune au colonisé et au colonial. Puisque la médina résistait pas son dédale.5 This feeling of estrangement was especially intensified during his stay in Paris, when he felt that he was an “exile from himself.”6 However, the act of writing and the disruptive effects of the colonial experience became part of his self, and somehow, he must accept this: Je reconnaissais de cette culture le bricolage du savoir, la repression, le dépaysement, j’en saississais la faille dans l’intinité de mon être. Et parce que lié à cette seduction, je me perdais dans la trame du désir. Aimer l’Autre, c’est parler le lieu perdu de la mémoire, et mon insurrection qui, dans un premier temps, n’était qu’une histoire impose, se perpétue en une resemblance acceptée, parce que l’Occident est une partie de moi, que je ne peux nier que dans le mesure òu je lute contre tous les occidents et orients qui m’oppriment ou me désenchantent.7 The negative experiences of colonial repression disfigured him, but also created a ‘dédoublement’ which, for him, represented the essence of writing; from a means to survive a state of destruction, it became an instrument of escape: survival implies the symbiosis of the estranged body and a writing that constructs itself in place, in time, and in space. The symbiosis of writing and self is also a ‘dédoublement,’ a splitting up of the self to interiorize a ruptured reality. The way in which Khatibi conceives of his writing is further developed in a beautiful text entitled ‘Nuits blanches,’ also titled ‘La mille et troisième nuit.’ Here he explains the basic idea of writing: “Raconte une belle histoire ou je te tue: principe suprême de la série des Mille et une nuits, principe de récit comme réduction absolue: tel sera notre motif d’écriture, l’axe de notre jouissance narrative.”8 Narration is inherently connected to death; it is “le travail absolu de la mort.”9 Without death, narration cannot exist. This principle is 5  Ibid., 34. 6  Ibid., 62. 7  Ibid., 68. 8  Abdelkébir Khatibi, Ombres japonaises précédé de Nuits blanches (N.p.: Fata Morgana, 1988), 11. 9  Ibid., 12.

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exemplified in the figure of Shahriyar, who by the act of adultery is “cut from himself”; he has become a “maître détaché de son phallus, il assiste à sa mort, à son sacrifice.”10 The king has died, then, and must be revived by storytelling, which must convince him of the vital forces that connect stories, life, and death: enchanter le corps mort du roi est non seulement transfigurer sa folie et son impuissance, mais bien plus: élever cet enchantement dans la nécessité d’une théorie supérieure, et lui donner du coup la forme d’une alternative monstrueuse, la forme du risqué même. Si raconteur est ce risqué intolerable, si raconteur est toujours accompagné par un sacrifice, exigeant une rançon, rançon de son corps, alors le récit est confronté en son errance à ce quíl ne peut jamais s’approprier sans enchantement, sans seduction, seduction de la mort elle-même en lui donnant l’abri dans le corps du récit, de telle facon que le raconteur et le mourir soient le geste d’un simulacra incarné.11 Within this nexus we find the same paradoxical force that combines incarnation and separation: “Enchanter quelqu’un c’est occuper sa place, non par identification, mais par une identification simulée: enchanteur, séducteur et faisant semblant d’être à ta place, j’investis ton corps si je te paralyse, je t’empoisonne, et si je fais semblant d’être à ta place, je le fais aussi pour mon compte.”12 I am separated from myself and from you, “je te vois me voir, je te vois me voyant te voir: l’enchanteur enchanté inspire ce principe du conte.”13 Narration is a prerequisite of life; it contains the acceptance of death; it is a form of seduction that forces us to step out of ourselves and at the same time identify with others, who are also displaced. This process is the essence of writing and is enacted by Shahrazad and Shahriyar. The principle of writing, as defined above, is symbolized by what Khatibi calls ‘la nuit blanche.’ The ‘nuit blanche,’ a ‘wakeful night,’ is a kind of intermediate space dominated by narration and the imagination, a liminal ‘space’ where time is enchanted. It “renverse l’ordre du temps habituel, elle introduit le temps cosmique dans la durée du récit”;14 it is “cette abolition répétée du

10  Ibid., 14. 11  Ibid., 15. 12  Ibid., 16. 13  Ibid. 14  Ibid.

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temps dans l’enchantement du corps.”15 It is a spatiotemporal lacuna between night and day, which is governed by the principle of contingency: Nous ne pouvons dormer cette nuit, puisque commencant à veiller sur ce texte recite ici, nous entrons dans l’élément de la nuit blanche, et son movement est d’être unique, de ne jamais revenir ni au jour ni à la nuit, d’être un risqué, une épreuve de désir qui se prolonge se développant et s’enroulant dans le sphere de son errance.16 The mechanism to set in motion this dynamic of the imagination and open the ‘nuit blanche’ for narrators is the narration of seduction: “La nuit blanche comme principe narrative, comme théorie du récit, enchantement mutuel du mourir et du raconteur, du jour et de la nuit, toute cette scène est le nom d’une autre scène, l’arrière-scène de la seduction, ou plus exactement avant-derrière la seduction.”17 In the description of the ‘nuit blanche,’ as the basic principle of narration, the idea of enchantment, which results in identification and ‘dédoublement,’ is especially important, as is the strong emphasis on the physicality of narration and its entanglement with seduction and death. Narration/writing is a sacrifice in which the narrator presents himself, his body, to language; it is the enactment of a desire to physically become the other, to lure both himself and the other from the identification with their bodies and enable them to identify with the other, or at least to convey the idea of a separation from the self. The body becomes language in an ecstatic submission to contingency and hybridity. In La mémoire tatouée, the author sighs, “J’ai rêvé, l’autre nuit, que mon Coeur était des mots.”18 The ultimate bliss is to dissolve into words. The association of narration with corporeality is further elaborated in Amour bilingue, another autobiographical text (in the sense mentioned above) that focuses on the author’s relationship with a French woman. The text, which is set in the night, in ‘nuits blanches,’ is an attempt to explore the potential of ‘bilingual’ love, that is, the ways in which love and language intermingle in a physical euphoria, but, simultaneously, contain the beginning of a separation. The starting point is: “Aimer un être, c’est aimer son corps et sa langue,”19 but to what extent can love and language be congruent and merge into a euphoric, 15  Ibid., 17. 16  Ibid., 18. 17  Ibid., 19. 18  Wahbi, Abdelkébir Khatibi, 34. 19  Khatibi, Oeuvres de Abdelkébir Khatibi (2008), 221.

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almost mystical, unity? From the start, the author is estranged from his mother tongue, and is forced to ‘love’ in a language which is not his own. From the beginning, he is aware of the discrepancy this creates: “séparé de ma langue maternelle, je savais que la parole que je lui adressais lui revenait en dehors de mon amour, et moi, je l’aimais dans cette langue.”20 He suspects that his love and language will never become one, that perhaps, in his bilinguality, he loves two women: “Peut-être aimait-il en elle deux femmes, celle qui vivait dans leur langue commune, et l’autre, cette autre qu’il habitait dans la bi-langue.”21 Whatever he and his beloved seemed to have in common turns out to be a translation. Is there a common language, a common ‘space’ where their bodies can meet? Bilingual love thus seems impossible, because a part of it will always be exiled from the place where the two lovers meet. There is an area in common, but because body and language are inseparable, every physical union produces separation. In spite of the tragedy inherent in bilingual love and the impossibility of a ‘real’ union, the effort still brings forth a fruitful sense of alterity, which, in turn, is reflected in writing: La bilingue sépare, rythme la séparation, alors que toute unité est depuis toujours inhabitée. La bi-langue! La bi-langue! Elle-même, un personage de ce récit, poursuivant sa quête intercontinentale, au-delà de mes traductions. L’étrangère que tu fus, que tu es dans ma langue, sera la même dans la sienne, un peu plus, un peu moins que mon amour pour toi.22 Bilingualism creates a new awareness, because it brings to light, through ‘dédoublement’ and mutual identification, the essential multiplicity of things. Language in itself only reveals a monolithic totality; bilingualism shows that this totality is not monolithic at all: “La langue m’a donné à la totalité des mots, la bi-langue à leur division en moi: amour, jalousie, désastre.”23 Bilingual love reveals to the author the essential heterogeneity of every experience, of all observations, the differentiated nature of everything in life. As Wahbi summarizes, “Bilingue: communication, chassé-croisé, multiplicité, diglossie, traduction, passion étrangère, identité et simulacra, separation, effacement, incarnation dans la langue étrangère, généalogie differentielle,

20  Ibid., 221–222. 21  Ibid., 219. 22  Ibid., 269. 23  Ibid., 247.

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reverie littéraire à partir de la langue, altérité heureuse, voyages, élévation, etc.”24 Bilinguism is, therefore, a limitation, but also a liberation; love and language may never become congruent, but the author is freed from the monolithic prison of monolinguism and is aware of the multiplicity of every word, every thought, every experience. The corporeality of language, or the desire of the body to dissolve in language, is even more accentuated in Le livre du sang, which is a rather esoteric excursion into the amalgamation of literature and sexuality into a catastrophic unio mystica. The story is about the young adolescent Échanson and his sister, who join the group of a mystical teacher in a place called l’Asile (‘the asylum’). In a discussion about the text, Réda Bensmaïa compares it to a mystical account, or hikaya, in which an ‘insane’ narrator relates his descent into a process of ‘degradation and mutation.’ In the end, the master is betrayed and Échanson and his sister, who morph into an androgynous symbiosis, indulge in incestuous sex. Bensmaïa concludes, The book’s incandescent narrative attempts to capture, in a quasihallucinatory gesture, the moment of the so-called “fall,” the moment when the doomed idea finds itself invaded, little by little, by the flesh – the moment when Eros and Thanatos become bound to the body (of the reader) as a dazzling mutation and when, henceforth, sex proves bound to death.25 It is in this text that Khatibi repeats his adage, “raconte une belle histoire ou je te tue,” as a reminder of the inescapable nexus of narration, sex, and death. The beloved bears the image of death in his/her person: “L’Aimée est toujours, pour l’Amant passionné, une pensée inouïe, précédée par la figure de la Mort. Je parle de l’Amant qui, par des actes inexorables fête sa propre oraison funèbre.”26 This proximity of death, inherent in the act of love, is reflected in abstract, mystical love: “La mort célestelle est précédée par une cruelle hospitalité, les amants mystiques, nous sommes brûlés par le délire de la beauté, en une hiérarchie celeste. Maître est le maître divin, Disciple le disciple, selon l’ordre rigoureux de l’Épreuve,”27 Narration and love are fatal, but they also make possible a ‘dédoublement’ that restores the lovers to life, as a ‘phantom,’ a 24  Wahbi, Abdelkébir Khatibi, 71. 25  Réda Bensmaïa, “Writing Metafiction: Khatibi’s ‘Le livre du sang,’” SubStance 21, no. 3 (1992): 103–114. [Special issue: Translations of the Orient: Writing the Maghreb], 110. 26  Khatibi, Oeuvres de Abdelkébir Khatibi (2008), 117. 27  Ibid., 131.

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double or even an androgynous creature that assumes almost divine qualities: “Et si le récit va accomplir avec toi ton premier enterrement, c’est afin d’acceuillir la mort infinite qui nous habite, chaque fois la passion rage. La Visitation récrée l’être aimé – le mort – en un fantôme vivant.”28 The mystical being separates itself from the dead body and continues on its way to ‘Mecca,’ in a ‘pure’ form, “selon l’incarnation d’une figure double.”29 Finally a mystical unity is achieved: “Nous sommes unis, homme femme, frère soeur, mortel immortel, dans la Transe du Même, et le Même, pas la grâce du sang, renouvelle l’offerande d; une pensée surnaturelle.”30 Like La mémoire tatouée and Amour bilingue, Le livre du sang is an autobiographical text in the sense Wahbi uses: it is an account of the author’s struggle to define himself through the act of writing and to let writing enter him, physically, to amalgamate with him and transform him into a new being, who is writing and body at once, in an inseparable symbiosis. The text is not an account of the struggle in retrospect; it is the struggle itself, which takes place while the reader is reading it. Bensmaïa compares this to the procedure of the mystical account, or hikaya, in which the reader is not merely a reader or a spectator, but rather a participant in a ritual ceremony, witnessing and realizing the transformation of the writer in his writing. He is the ‘priest’ enabling the writer to undergo his metamorphosis. Like Shahriyar, he is in control of the process of narration, which is a fatal sacrifice resulting in a rebirth; he performs a ritual of unification that not only unifies lovers, but also the body and the narrative: “… une mémoire sidérale et prénatale vers laquelle nous sommes sans cesse rappelés, homme et femme, aimé et aimant, livre et sang d’òu coulera encore et toujours notre séparation infinite, c’est-à-dire établis, transformés dans la Mort.”31 In Le livre du sang, the influence of the Thousand and one nights, as a selfreflexive metanarrative that connects storytelling, sex, and death, and as an intertextual source text for Khatibi, reaches its deepest level. The connection is strengthened by incidental names or motifs, by the insertion of stories, and by the basic principle ‘Tell a beautiful story or I will kill you.’ For Khatibi, the concept of the Nights provides a narrative framework that can be redesigned, rebuilt, refilled endlessly, because of its rich connotations and essence that define the nature of writing, both with regard to the writer’s struggle to identify with it and with the euphoria which it produces in the end when, as a mystical 28  Ibid., 141. 29  Ibid., 154, 156. 30  Ibid., 157. 31  Ibid., 192.

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vision or an alchemical metamorphosis, a jouissance, a spiritual bliss purifies the writer/reader in a state of ecstasy. The writer is first alienated from himself by writing, but the writing, too, can bring about a quasi-mystical reunion, in some monstrous form. It is the interaction between body and language that realizes this ecstasy, when the two components achieve their ultimate unification. One of the main notions Khatibi derives from his writing is what he calls ‘pensée-autre,’ which can perhaps best be translated as an ‘awareness of otherness.’ Writing is a kind of initiation into a secret, a trajectory toward the discovery of the self and its location in a social-cultural setting. But this discovery of the self is always simultaneously a process of ‘dédoublement,’ of finding and defining the other within the self. Writing evokes a sense, and an understanding, of alterity, caused by the divided self, but projected on all observations and experiences: “Cette altérité est la figure de révélation de soi dans le nom propre, le parcours divisé, l’espace double, l’appartenance plurielle, le simulacre de l’origine …”32 After his successful effort to identify with his writing, after discovering the nature of bilingualism, Khatibi acquired the ability to always recognize otherness in his thoughts and soul. This acknowledgment and acceptance of ‘otherness’ defines him, in the existential sense, as a corporeal being, as a lingual being; but it also defines his worldview, his outlook on life and his political opinions. It is in the acceptance of multiplicity in all phenomena that Khatibi links to the idea of hybridity in the colonial context. Khatibi acknowledges that Morocco was wounded, even mutilated, by the colonial experience. He acknowledges that he himself has suffered from cultural hybridity, even schizophrenia, by being separated from his cultural environment and tradition. But through his writing he has become aware of the liberating potential hidden in this hybridity, of the space it creates for artistic reflection and renewal, of the depths it creates, that literature explores. Morocco’s predicament cannot be solved by narrow-minded cultural chauvinism or nationalist myths; the suffering should give an insight into the richness of Moroccan society and culture, while at the same time it must preserve its openness and susceptibility to outside influences, and slowly renegotiate the relationship between the ex-colonizer and the ex-colonized. This can only be done by adopting the notion of a potential textual universe. It almost sounds like the insights that Shahrazad’s stories presented to Shahriyar.

32  Wahbi, Abdelkébir Khatibi, 32.

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Juan Goytisolo: Hybridity as a Refuge

The colonial hybridity Khatibi embodied is reflected in a complex way in the figure of Juan Goytisolo (1931–2017), the Spanish writer who, in some respects, can be seen as Khatibi’s recalcitrant alter ego. However, while Khatibi, through his experience of bilingualism and his immersion in French culture, was reconciled with his postcolonial condition and the cultural complexity of his homeland, Goytisolo ultimately identified with the ‘other’ and rejected the heritage of his native Spanish culture. While Khatibi completed a cultural detour that resulted in his political critique of Morocco, Goytisolo’s political considerations led him to critically re-evaluate the implications of Spanish self-images, traditions, and worldviews, and this resulted in his feeling of total estrangement. Both underwent a process of transformation that affected not only their relationship with their past and culture, but which also involved their principal physical relationship with their environment. And their experiences led both writers to take refuge in texts. At a young age, Juan Goytisolo was confronted with the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, particularly when his mother was killed in the shelling of his native village near Barcelona. These experiences fundamentally shaped his political attitude; after Franco’s rise to power he became a political activist and, ultimately, an exile in Paris, where he joined the intellectual and literary scene and further developed his leftist sympathies. Over time, he increasingly distanced himself from Spain, which for him was incurably poisoned by the combination of Catholic religiosity and narrow-minded nationalism propagated by Franco. According to Goytisolo, this Spanish ‘disease’ was not merely a sad episode inaugurated by a dictatorial ruler, but the result of the exclusivist, essentialist nature of the Spanish self-image that had developed over centuries of imperial complacency. It was the heritage of colonialism in particular which fed modern attitudes of cultural superiority and insulation. Gradually he ‘discovered,’ or accepted, his homosexuality, which, together with his ‘liberation’ from his Spanish background, radically altered his view of life.33 Goytisolo struggled for some time to find an adequate form to express his ideas in literature. Critics agree that his first mature novel is the trilogy Señas de identidad (1966), Don Juliàn (1970), and Juan sin tierra (1975). These novels mark a sharp break in Goytisolo’s life and oeuvre, but most importantly, they mark his break with the Spanish literary canon and the literary taste of his Spanish contemporaries. In these novels, he found literary strategies to 33  See Goytisolo’s autobiographical notes, Juan Goytisolo, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife: The Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo, trans. Peter Bush (New York: Verso Books, 2003).

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construct a new style, a new language, which, through its instability, deconstructed traditional aesthetic and ethical values and undermined the founding myths of Spain and its concomitant self-image. Goytisolo rejected Spain’s colonial past and the oppressive discourse of identity which legitimated it. The works signal a radical break with the past, a complete metamorphosis, and the joyful affirmation of a new, hybrid identity, a nomadic life as a writer without a home, one who escaped from a stifling cultural environment and is physically liberated from sexual frustrations. While he distanced himself from Spain, Goytisolo became increasingly attracted to Moroccan culture and society, which for him represented the opposite of all that Spain stood for. He explored Arabic culture and various Arabic countries and finally settled in Marrakesh, which from then on assumed a prominent place in his work. His transition was sealed by the novel Juan sin tierra. After reproaching Spain and the Catholic Church for its colonial repression, racism, and sexism, he relates his estrangement from his compatriots and glorifies the ‘freedom’ of the Moroccan beggar: … your hooded jellab, as tattered as a scarecrow’s costume, will be taken for the usual beggar’s rags, and you will gladly accept the offering of a few small coins: disgust, pity, disdain will be the earnest of your triumph: you are the king of your own realm and your sovereignty extends to the farthest reaches of the desert. Yours is the freedom of the pariah.34 He welcomes the nomadic life and his status as a ‘renegade,’ and finds refuge in the ‘Muhammedan brotherhood.’ From this point on, he celebrates the aberrant, the illicit, vile pleasures, and monsters.35 He sheds his old skin like a snake. The narrator explores various Arabic countries and identifies with previous travelers, such as Anselm Turmeda, Cavafy, Lawrence of Arabia, and Father Foucauld. He criticizes the spotless, ideal human models of the Enlightenment and their modern equivalents in media and advertising, and constructs a language that frees the novel of its traditional ‘theatrical’ structure and its subservience to representation: “Language should be perceived in and of itself and not as the transparent intercessor of an alien, outer world.”36 The novel ends with a quotation in Arabic, indicating that the author/narrator has completed his transition.

34  Juan Goytisolo, Juan the Landless, trans. Helen R. Lane (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990), 50. 35  Ibid., 64. 36  Ibid., 281.

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In Juan sin tierra, Goytisolo found his themes and voice, which continued to characterize his later works. Yet, bidding farewell to his Spanish background did not mean that he became a nomad without any intellectual and cultural framework. With his emigration to Morocco he began to rediscover and redefine his cultural and literary roots, in a kind of counter-discourse to the conservative traditional self-image. In Spanish history, he sought out the texts that for him represented a voice against the ideological narrow-mindedness and essentialism of Franquism, and that celebrated hybridity, ambivalence, and doubt. He found these ‘predecessors’ in the towering figures of Cervantes, with his monumental Don Quijote, and San Juan de la Cruz, the mystic poet of the sixteenth century. In his writings, he not only criticized Spain’s contemporary ideologies, but also strengthened his links to his ‘cervantine nationality,’ to appropriate these ancient works and re-incorporate their aesthetic principles into the modern novel. Simultaneously, he studied the works of Muslim mystics, such as al-Attar, Rumi, and, especially, Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), who not only imbued Islam with a deep mystical strand, but whose work was also a constituent part of the cosmopolitan layer of Spanish culture. Goytisolo’s interest in these authors first served an artistic aim, the destabilization of existing aesthetic forms to allow for a critical revision on the basis of intertextuality. In the words of Llored: Chaque création importante provoque un réarrangement et une recomposition des significations des grands textes du passé, ainsi qu’un mode spécifique de saisir la diversité d’une langue constitutive d’une tradition…. afin d’étendre les modalités de connaissance du texte littéraire au regard d’une histoire culturelle et d’une identité collective sans cesse questionnées.37 By assimilating the literary tradition to influence his own language, the author can redefine his attitude toward his literary heritage and incorporate it into his own art. The ultimate aim is to create a space for heterodoxy and reject all manifestations of monolithic perceptions of culture. This is especially relevant for Spain, which prefers to deny its indebtedness to Arabic-Islamic culture, and encloses itself in invented, ‘purified,’ foundation myths. Goytisolo aims to deconstruct these myths and “a voulu reconnaître dans l’Islam un espace sociocultural quasi antithétique d’un certain rationalisme européen qui à cause, entre autres, des excès des Lumières n’a pas su ni pu créer les conditions 37  Yannick Llored, Juan Goytisolo; le soi, le monde et la création littéraire (Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Septentrion, 2009), 35–36.

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d’un véritable rapprochement des cultures et des croyances.”38 By dissociating himself from a Spanish monolithic myth of self, Goytisolo reconstructed, or re-introduced, the hybridity which is an inherent part of the Spanish past, and perhaps of all cultures. By redesigning his abode in Spanish literary history, he made space for his own, personal, perhaps even physical, hybridity, and from there projected it into his literary art and political perception of the world. The radical break with Spain and Goytisolo’s new orientation toward the East thus required a completely new poetics. He based this poetics on the predominance of the principle of intertextuality as a method to make use of ancient sources of aesthetics to create something new that deconstructs common interpretations of these sources, and breaks the monopoly of interpretation that had developed in the Spanish literary tradition. With regard to conceptual strategies and literary techniques, Goytisolo turned, in particular, to Don Quijote, the great classic of premodernity, and the Thousand and one nights. These works are foundational texts, not only in the literary sense, but also insofar as their intellectual spirit and attitude are concerned. Moreover, they are monumental works in their specific literary realms, but have transcended cultural boundaries and become works of universal interest. In one interview, Goytisolo explained the similarity between Don Quijote and the Thousand and one nights as precursors of a literary vision. Although there is no evidence that Cervantes knew the Nights, Goytisolo sees a clear relationship: La relation entre Don Quichotte et les Mille et une nuits est mysterieuse mais néanmoins très claire. Les Mille et une nuits sont également un texte écrit par différents auteurs, òu les personnages découvrent leur condition de personnages et òu les événements qu’il leur est donné de vivre ne sont pas encore produits. Ces achronies, ces jeux sont propres à Cervantes, particulièrement dans la deuxième partie, lorsque Don Quichotte rencontre Don Quichotte de Avallaneda, son voisin de chambre. Ce jeu magnifique n’a pas d’égal dans la literature européenne mais il existe, en revanche, dans la tradition orientale des Mille et une nuits.39 In his article ‘El laberinto y el círculo (Notas sobre las mil y una noches),’ Goytisolo expounds on the specific characteristics of the Thousand and one nights: “With the Thousand and one nights we enter a world in which there are 38  Ibid., 174. 39  Juan Goytisolo, Tradition et dissidence, trans. Setty Moretti (Paris: Éditions À plus d’un titre, 2012), 83–84.

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no authors – nobody is interested in them; the kings look for manuscripts, but not from those who write them, but from those who transmit them. And the chain of them has no end.”40 By having no author, the work is not subjected to an authority; it evolves almost through its own dynamics and generative powers, and only needs transmitters to be carried through the ages, as a work enjoying complete autonomy. It is not authors, but the neutral mechanism of tradition that secures their preservation. This textual autonomy and the lack of an authoritative ordering principle are reminiscent of the notion of the labyrinth: We wander in a labyrinth of stories and conjectures which confirm our appurtenance to this community discovered by W. Benjamin when he said: “The labyrinth is the fatherland of those who doubt.” I always doubt, of myself, of the truths like fists and of the fixed, iconic identities that are ascribed to us: I believe less in the Bible than in the art of Shahrazad. Fortunately I feel more at home in this fluid and changing text, in this space of perpetuum mobile.41 But its fluid and ‘unauthorized’ proliferation cannot be used as a container of unshakable truths. Everything that is touched by it is turned, as if by magic, into something multifaceted that cannot be fixed to a single interpretation. The Thousand and one nights is therefore the best ‘antidote’ against all forms of national essentialism and religious dogmatism. It mixes realism with magical and supernatural interventions, didactical and educational passages, satirical and fantastic elements. An important aspect of the Nights, according to Goytisolo, is its oral origin. This can be explained by the fact that he probably became acquainted with the work during the performance of a storyteller on the Jma’ al-Fna in Marrakesh, the famous square of storytellers and performers. As we see, this association with oral storytelling and the Jma’ al-Fna became an important topos in his work. For Goytisolo, all great works of literature originated from oral traditions and from there crystallized in literary traditions, but maintained their characteristics as essential models of storytelling. It is during and through this process that the Thousand and one nights became part of the collective memory of both the Orient and the Occident; this transformed the work into a universal treasure and not one exclusive to the Arabs. Through its inherent orality, the

40  Juan Goytisolo, Contra las sagradas formas (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2007), 155. 41  Ibid.

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Thousand and one nights is ‘de-authorized,’ de-possessed, and relocated in the new textual realm Goytisolo constructed to contain his person and his work. After Goytisolo made the Thousand and one nights part of his basic poetics, he systematically referred to it in his novels, both as a hidden repository of literary strategies and literary techniques, and as a source of motifs, figures, and tropes scattered through the stories. In La cuarentena (1991; Quarantine), Goytisolo describes how, after the death of a friend, he is allowed to visit her in the barzakh, the Muslim abode for souls awaiting the Last Judgment. However, he has only forty days to explore this mysterious, intermediate realm. The work is a good example of Goytisolo’s methods, since, first, the story takes place during the Gulf War, a contemporary event that serves as the background for the unfolding story: while the author is telling a story, a war that affects humanity as a whole, rages on. The novel sought further inspiration in several great works, such as Cervantes’s Don Quijote, Dante’s Divina commedia, Miguel de Molino’s Spiritual guide, and the works of Ibn Arabi and other Sufi writers.42 The visiting of the barzakh is, of course, first inspired by Dante’s Divina commedia, in which the narrator’s dead friend acts as his Beatrice. However, it also refers to the spiritual world Ibn Arabi describes in his Meccan illuminations, where it represents a kind of imaginary realm in which the laws of reality are suspended. In this alternative realm, time has become diffuse, his consciousness has been dimmed, and he has become “pure faith, without image, shape, or face, immersed in [his] own void and returned to [his] kernel.”43 Like the concept of barzakh itself, the framework of this strange domain is derived from Islamic eschatology and by the account of the Prophet Muḥammad’s visit to the seven heavens. The narrator is interrogated by the angels Munkar and Nakir, in accordance with Muslim eschatology; doctrinal, mythological, and mystical components are combined to construct a liminal space, in which time and material reality are sacrificed to a religiously inspired imagination. The narrative has the form of a collage or montage that brings together fragments on several levels. First, a chain of fragments confronts the reader with the contradictions of postmodernist consumerist society. A young lady working for a tour operator advertises trips to hell as a tourist attraction; she distributes prospectuses with illustrations by Gustave Doré and Hieronymus Bosch. She also recommends apartments for sale in the hereafter, which has become an area of economic expansion. These paradisiacal visions are alternated with images of the war in Iraq, of massive devastation, the shelling 42  Juan Goytisolo, Quarantine, trans. Peter Bush (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1994); Llored, Juan Goytisolo, 61ff. 43  Goytisolo, Quarantine, 23.

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of cities, and apocalyptic landscapes. Whatever is happening to the narrator in his dreamlike state inevitably relates to this inhumanity and destruction, which, of course, also contrast with the optimistic, gratuitous consumerism of western society, which commodifies everything and has no use for the spiritual dimension of the human experience. Perhaps the contrast is only superficial and war and commodification should be seen as two sides of the same coin. The second level is reserved for the spiritual experience of the narrator who delves into the netherworld of the hereafter and from there observes himself in scenes with Beatrice, or, alternately, in his house in Marrakesh overlooking the masses on Jma’ al-Fna and hallucinating about an apocalyptic flood of blood which threatens to destroy the mystical texts, the “words of substance.”44 He contemplates the nature of the Sufi experience, and has visions of beautiful bronzed men that mix with the mystical sensation: “When they raise their arms and their bodies flicker like pointed tongues of fire in the magic, circular space, do you still belong to the world of your body or are you experiencing a theophany, released forever from the creatures and snares of sensuousness?”45 The erotic experience mingles with the mystical experiences, in which, as Ibn Arabi holds, “opposites converge, antagonisms are negated, the opaque and the luminous, the obsolete and the permanent are harmoniously reconciled.”46 This reconciliation can be compared with a mystical union, the awareness of the essential unity of all beings: For Ibn Arabi, the multiplication of forms is the complex modulation of a single Presence. Matter, people, events, natural phenomena, works of art are its outward signs. Thus, the infinite richness and variety of the world can be resumed in scenes like the one you have described, where the body’s radiant beauty is union, betrothal and rapture, proof that the self and the other are fused in one.47 At the third level, the mystical experience converges with the experience of writing. First, the narrator dreams that he has written one of Ibn Arabi’s stories; thus, he identifies himself with the mystic as a writer. Then, he relates the euphoria of writing as an immersion in the living, pulsating mass of Marrakesh, in which the act of narrating and the mystical sensation come together:

44  Ibid., 38. 45  Ibid., 61. 46  Ibid., 63. 47  Ibid., 62.

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… it was there you experienced your first inner ecstasy and imagined visit to the kingdom of shades, freed by sleep from material form, and fleetingly united with the pleiad of wandering souls who people Al Khasafa and vanish into sepulchres and secret vaults at the break of day. Master of your subtle state, you now glide swiftly, effortlessly, over solitary Sufi lodges …48 In the end, the various strands of experience developed in the story culminate in a kind of definition of the nature of writing, perhaps even a literary credo of the narrator, Goytisolo: That rash venture of assembling and ordering the elements of a text in a vague, imprecise zone, establishing a fine web of relationships, weaving a net of meanings beyond time and space, ignoring the laws of verisimilitude, rejecting worn-out notions of character and plot, abolishing the frontiers between reality and dream, destabilizing the reader by multiplying the levels of interpretation and registers of voice, appropriating historical events and using them to feel his purpose, living, dying, resurrecting for himself and everybody else, must surely require all that can be concentrated in a mental space specially prepared to incubate the contaminating sickness and prevent it spreading before its time?49 This contemplation adds a layer to the idea of ‘quarantine,’ which is now seen as a place of disease rather than as a place of bliss. In the end, the narrator is summoned before Munkar and Nakir, who are not only a final tribunal, interrogating him about the book he is writing, but also physicians, bent on checking his bodily condition. Finally, in a state of openness to revelation and inspiration, which are now merged into a state of semi-consciousness, the narrator writes the book: The fragrant immediacy of his presence imbued your spirit with a gentle feeling of relief and security. All night long you composed the book in a delightful state of rapture. At daybreak, as the brow of dawn gleamed over the slate roofs, the messenger bowed farewell and faded into the diaphanous air with the speed of one of Scheherazade’s characters in the chambers of the Abbasid caliph.50 48  Ibid., 86. 49  Ibid., 92. 50  Ibid., 106.

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The narrator is now allowed to leave the quarantine, leaving him in doubt if his experience was real or caused by “internalized readings of Ibn Arabi.”51 His friend, remaining in the barzakh, summons him: “Write, keep writing about me, you heard. Only your interest and the interest of those who read you can continue to keep me alive.”52 The mosaic is now complete. The narrator has ‘lived’ before the eyes of the reader, the experience of writing has passed through the various overflowing compartments of the mind, showing how various sources, impulses, figures, and images enter his imagination and are reprocessed in a state of semi-conscious liminality. In a trance-like condition, the various layers of his consciousness are explored; they absorb the sensual perceptions and are registered in a revelatory work of art. In Quarantine, traces of the Thousand and one nights appear as a general model for writing, in the figure of Shahrazad, but also in the collage-like insertion of stories and fragments, in the technique of the time frame, of postponement, and as the force of imagination and narration against the threat of death and oblivion. The novel is, so to speak, a shred of the Thousand and one nights that shows fragments of storytelling on the surface and the ‘secret’ of storytelling on the inside. In this ‘inside’ the narrator reveals himself to be not the ‘inventor’ of stories, but rather a medium through which all kinds of impulses and events are transformed into stories. His role is to induce the trance-like state in which reality can use him as a medium to be transformed into stories. He has no imagination, only the susceptibility to receive and process the images that seek him out. This vision of writing almost obliterates the writer as an acting agent in the process of writing. The writer becomes anonymous, a mere receptacle or medium, subject to the stronger force of revelation. This idea is elaborated on, in a less spiritual and more ‘historical’ way, in the novel El semana del jardín (The garden of secrets), which appeared in 1997. Initially, it was his intention to publish the book without his name as the author, even without mentioning himself as the owner of the copyright, but in the end, it appeared with his name on the cover. The story, however, both its form and its content, is aimed at hiding the writer, having him dissolve in a more or less ‘unauthorized’ text. In the story of The garden of secrets, a group of twenty-eight people retire for three weeks in a beautiful garden to compose a story together, each telling an episode in turn, adding a sequence to the story every day. The number twenty-eight refers to the letters of the Arabic alphabet. The group consists of representatives of the whole spectrum of political convictions and social, 51  Ibid., 121. 52  Ibid.

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professional, and intellectual backgrounds, and includes four women. The stories are registered by the scribe of the group. The starting point is the discovery of an apocryphal poem of a certain Eusebio, who apparently escaped from a psychiatric center in Melilla, the Spanish enclave in Morocco, in 1936, during the Moroccan revolt in the Spanish Civil War. From there the stories do not develop sequentially, rather they branch out into several sub-stories or alternative versions, which all somehow try to reconstruct Eusebio’s life history. The story follows roughly two tracks. One concerns Eusebio, who escaped from the mental asylum in Melilla and continued to live anonymously in Morocco. Some say he converted to Islam and became a mystic, a follower of Sidi Ben Sliman al-Yazuli, a famous Moroccan Sufi shaykh. He lived as a kind of recluse in the Casbah of Marrakesh, reading mystical texts by Ibn Arabi, immersed in his own world. Searching for him leads to the shrines of patron saints in the Atlas Mountains and reveals stories about colorful figures, local beliefs, and mysterious spells. The other track of the story is about a Eusebio who was saved from death row in Melilla through the intervention of his brother-in-law, then he was sent to a Spanish nationalist ‘rehabilitation’ center to be brainwashed and purified of his old habits, such as sexual perversions with young Falangists and the writing of ‘decadent’ poetry. His poems were not in accordance with the nationalist ideology: “He criticised my vulgar, base tastes, severely reprehended my roughing it with Mustafas and hairy labourers. He exalted noble love for blond, smooth-cheeked adolescents, after the manner of the great artists and philosophers of antiquity.”53 And, “Your bohemian, egg-headed mentors generate castrated, masturbatory art: abstract drawings, dramas of adultery, trite, effeminate poetry, novels inciting class struggle.”54 He was renamed Eugenio, as a symbol of regeneration, and the “eugenic cleansing and regeneration of a people has to impact on the totality of its constituent individuals, to create an ethnically improved, morally robust and spiritually vigorous caste.”55 Eugenio forsakes his old identity, but, as a supporter of the republican cause, he is confronted with his past when a conspiracy is discovered against Franco. He escapes death by signing a confession betraying his former mentor, a hard-core Falangist who opposes the unification of the various nationalist movements under Franco. This Eusebio/Eugenio escapes through Portugal to Tangiers, where he becomes a notorious and ruthless businessman who mistreats natives, drives a 53  Juan Goytisolo, Makbara, trans. Helen Lane (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2011), 89. 54  Ibid., 29. 55  Ibid., 28.

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luxurious car, and probably collaborates with the Vichy government in World War II. Later, he is traced in Marrakesh, where he lives as an impersonation of Alphonse van Worden, the hero of Jan Potocki’s novel Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse. He is known as an opportunistic trader, who profits from the black market, and as a chameleonic figure who watches films in his riyad all day and gives eccentric parties. He poses alternately as a prince, a poet, a spy, and an artist; he plagiarizes Cavafy, and invents a new identity for himself every day, with a new appearance and an accompanying prehistory. He is a homosexual who indulges in all kinds of extravaganza. The stories, then, branch off to produce two Eusebios, two potential incarnations of the same person. In the end, the two trajectories cross in a fatal incident. The newspaper reports the murder of the aristocrat Eugenio Asensio, alias Alphonse van Worden, who was stabbed by a lunatic without papers – a mad, silent, apathetic, mentally disturbed beggar, looking like a ‘fool’ of God (that is, a fool who is considered a ‘holy man’). In the story, the incident is retold from the perspective of the beggar, who looks at his victim and identifies with him: “The different threads of the story that comprises my life suddenly came together, reunited what was scattered, harmonised opposites.”56 He realizes how their lives differ, but he cannot suppress the feeling that they are the same person: “Was it him or was it me? Who looked at who? Was I brandishing the knife I held so tightly against myself?”57 The killing is an act of unification. There was “rapture not pain, there was no attacked or attacker, the weapon united us both in joy and exultation, ended the story, full-stopped my life.”58 After this showdown, the ‘real’ Eusebio speaks from ‘beyond the grave’: “I imagined I was a fictitious character you’re constructing: impotent, fragmented, dispersed, resigned to the whims of our precarious, unreal condition. I wandered absently, through dream scenarios, in a state of stupor and lethargy.”59 The hero, it appears, was inescapably controlled by the circle of ‘readers,’ who were ‘creating and destroying’ him at will.60 Now, in the end, they decide to invent an author, born in Barcelona in 1931, with the name Juan Goytisolo, a name associated with John the Landless, John the Baptist, John the Apostle. It is not the characters who are fictional, rather it is the author who is invented by his readers, as an alibi for their tale. However, this author has no control of the text, which bifurcates at random, without the supervision of 56  Ibid., 142. 57  Ibid. 58  Ibid. 59  Ibid., 145. 60  Ibid.

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a central authority, and thus becomes a multifarious collection of fragments only vaguely linked to each other to form two opposing storylines. In this way, they represent not only the human inclination to follow separate narratives at will, but also the equally human inclination to have these narratives converge, interact, and clash. The narratives thus become as scattered and ambiguous as the life of the person they describe; they cluster around him, but fan out in many directions, steered by chance, differing interpretations, and the obliterating effects of time. Both Khatibi and Goytisolo are authors who explore the effects of cultural/ historical hybridity on themselves, as individuals, and in doing so, they become increasingly immersed in the process of writing as a way to rebuild an environment in which they can survive. Their quests were generated by political circumstances: Khatibi was exiled from his native culture after experiencing colonial repression; Goytisolo resisted monocultural repression in his country and created his own ‘national’ history. For both, writing became a necessity, not merely as a medium for self-definition, but also as a mechanism to survive physically, to create a milieu in which their bodies, in their alienated forms, could survive. For Goytisolo, writing implied a liberation from oppressive discourses, which in turn implied a liberation from the moralistic objections to his sexuality. For Khatibi, narration is a vital physical act that is endangered by the fracturing of bilingualism, but which must be reconstituted through the act of narration itself. The principle is, narrate or die. The main conceptual tool, which makes narration effective for its reconstructive role, is the construction of alterity, or, as Khatibi calls it, ‘dédoublement.’ For Khatibi, the condition of estrangement produces the necessity, but also the possibility, of observing oneself from a distance, from outside a ‘monolingual’ self-image, and thereby recognizing the other in oneself. The essence of writing is the signaling, demarcation, and construction, and finally the acceptance, of this other. By accepting the other in the self, hybridity reveals its rich potential, because it creates space to accept other, multiple outlooks and interpretations, and to accommodate the inevitable situation of inescapable, inherent, hybridity. Ruptures mark not merely the loss of a past integrity; they bring to light new forms of integrity, in which otherness is one of the constituent components. For Goytisolo, ‘dédoublement’ was a willful means to escape from the monolithic complacency of Spanish culture, which as a result of colonial history and dictatorial responses to modernity, systematically stifled every form of hybridity. Goytisolo left this environment that imposed uniformity on him, and reinterpreted Spanish history to incorporate his alter ego, which celebrated

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hybridity and multiplicity. To achieve this, he selected cultural pillars that both affected Spanish culture, and transcended their cultural boundaries to become universal works of the cultural consciousness: Don Quijote and the Thousand and one nights. These works served as models for his deconstruction of rigid ideologies and narrow, ideologized, aesthetics, and showed narration as a liberating medium. With the help of these two examples, and through writing, Goytisolo succeeded in redefining his cultural territory; he built this on a mixed Spanish-Arabic heritage, unified in the mystical components they have in common. Redefining oneself is accepting the cultural other in oneself, and forging the two egos into a mystical union. The ‘doubling’ as Goytisolo applied it is, of course, beautifully demonstrated in the Garden of secrets, which shows two possible life trajectories, two potential selves, two manifestations of the same person, and ends with the triumph of spirituality based on a multifaceted cultural heritage. In both cases, the Thousand and one nights served as a major catalyst of the process of writing, as an example of the nexus between writing, liberation, and survival. For Khatibi, Shahrazad personifies the eternal essence of narration and writing, which is, so to speak, immanent in God’s creation. For Goytisolo, Shahrazad shows the autonomy of narration, as a process that cannot be controlled by a single author, but is, almost mystically, transmitted by an author or by readers. Narration follows its own path and on the way swallows – anonymizes – the author. As writers, both Khatibi and Goytisolo are dissolved in their writing: they become their text. Perhaps paradoxically, this does not imply a denial or rejection of their corporeality. On the contrary, their refuge in the text is meant to preserve their physical and mental integrity. As in mysticism, the state of spirituality is reached through immersion in textuality, as a mystical experience, through an extreme experience of the connection between the spirit (the soul?) and the body. It is this spiritual dimension that sets Khatibi and Goytisolo apart from the other authors in this section. Although the textual identification of Khatibi and Goytisolo is not directed at constructing a new territory, both of their narrated realms have spatial markers. These markers are primarily part of a symbolic domain, although they are projected in space. Khatibi’s Le livre du sang is interspersed with references to religion, with Mecca and the idea of pilgrimage in its center. In Goytisolo’s oeuvre, the main square in Marrakesh, the Jma’ al-Fna, recurs as the center of his narrative universe. The Jma’ al-Fna is described as a matrix for the essence of literature, it is found in oral storytelling, the celebration of the voice, as a physical capacity, as the source of all narration, which has been ‘banned’ from writing; it is also a utopian space, where all expressions of culture can be indulged in, in an atmosphere of freedom, chaos, and spontaneity, where escape from the control of moral and political oppressors is possible, where elitist

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tastes can be shunned, and emotions stream from the hearts of the people. It is also a place where literature and culture become manifest in their corporeality, where they are imbued with the touching of bodies, smells of all kinds, heat and sweat, eroticism and sensuality. There is an anonymous freedom that even allows for the transgression of bodily confines. The central place of the Jma’ al-Fna in Goytisolo’s work culminates in the last chapter of Makbara, titled ‘A reading of the space in Xemaa-el-Fna.’ In a long outburst, the description of the square in the tourist guides is denounced as a lie, and instead Fna is characterized as an ‘agora,’ a theatrical performance, an open and plural space, a vast common of ideas in continuous movement, where there is immediate contact between strangers, without social constraints; there is identification in prayer and laughter, a vagabond world in which a joyous equality of bodies exists and in which one is imbued with the inspiration of the crowd and attuned to the rhythm of others; it represents a fruitful nomadism, full of madmen, and charlatans, lunatics, freaks, but without being ghettos; it is a fraternal community, a delirious, neutral space, a no man’s land where the body is king, without property, hierarchy, boundaries, the revenge of the spontaneous on the ordering of things; there is purity, stamina, hospitality, moderation, without the pressure of time.61 Here, it is possible “to live, literally, by storytelling: a story that, quite simply, is never-ending: a weightless edifice of sound in perpetual de(con)struction: a length of fabric woven by Penelope and unwoven night and day; a sand castle mechanically swept away by the sea.”62 Here, we have “the possibility of telling tales, inventing lies, making up stories, pouring out what is stored up in the brain and the belly, the heart, vagina, testicles.”63 It is inherently dynamic, it reproduces itself endlessly as a palimpsestic reading: a calligraphy that over the years is erased and then retraced day after day: a precarious combination of signs whose message is uncertain: infinite possibilities of play opening up in the space that is now vacant: blackness, emptiness, the nocturnal silence of the page that is still blank.64

61  Ibid., 242–244. 62  Ibid., 265. 63  Ibid., 267. 64  Ibid., 270.

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And, finally, it is the spatial replica of the Thousand and one nights: “a picture of the universe by way of the images of Sheherazade or Aladdin: the entire square condensed within a single book, the reading of which supplants reality.”65

Conclusions to Part 3

In this chapter, we have discussed authors who profited from the space opened by James Joyce’s path-breaking novels Ulysses and Finnegans wake. Although the impact of Joyce’s work has not yet petered out and perhaps has not been fully understood as yet, it is clear that he posited the possibility of a literature radically reduced to its textual essence. The direction he pointed to was perhaps most uncompromisingly explored by Samuel Beckett, in his plays and novels. Here, the text is completely amalgamated with the ‘persons’ who utter it, and who die when their voices are silenced. There is nothing outside the text. It is, as Ihab Hassan suggests, a “literature of silence,” which is, perhaps unconsciously, akin to Shahrazad’s scheme to narrate in order to survive.66 It is remarkable that this vision of a textual universe appears to appeal, especially, to writers who have experienced some form of cultural displacement or fragmentation. This is most aptly illustrated by the Argentine authors discussed in this part, who each, in different but related ways, constructed worlds made completely of text. In their novels and stories, texts are the hegemonic reality, the milieu in which man lives, the substance of his natural habitat. The textual world has its own laws, to which man is subjected and which represent a layer of perpetuity and continuity that supports mankind’s frailty and impermanence. A similar vision is developed by Calvino and Perec, who confront us with the textual essence of our existence in an even more radical way. They present man as navigating through a cosmos of stories that proliferate at will and impose their formal constraints. Man is addicted to these stories, as a necessary condition to survive, like the availability of oxygen and water. Man cannot control this cosmos, but can only hope to be able to intervene in the continuous flows of stories, to tap their resources, influence their course, and regulate the admission to their succor. In order to survive, man must find a means to gain access to the vital force of stories.

65  Ibid., 269. 66  Ihab Hassan, The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (New York: Alfred A. Knopff, 1967).

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Calvino’s work suggests the connection between stories, as a vital force, and the body: if stories are vital for life, storytelling/reading becomes a physical act, with an impact on physical health, eroticism, and physical well-being. Khatibi and Goytisolo further develop this association; they use cultural hybridity to construct their own particular textual universes, which are indispensable for their physical survival. It is this association which links the authors in this chapter to Shahrazad, who puts her own body in jeopardy and constructs a textual universe to save it.

Part 4 Narrating History

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⸙ In the preceding parts we have seen that the main influence of the Thousand and one nights on twentieth-century prose is in the idea, function, and mechanisms of narration. The example of Shahrazad not only gave rise to experiments with textual form and an emphasis on the textual nature of the narrative; it also affected, by its textual primacy, the way in which narrative was used to link the text to reality. Thus, a vision of the nature of texts implies a vision of the nature of reality, as we have seen above in the novels of Proust, Calvino, Nabokov, and others. This ‘oblique’ look at reality through the prism of narration and text is not only relevant for individuals, for example, with regard to memories or peoples’ experience of their environment, but also for the constitution and preservation of collective memories and history. It is no exaggeration to say that narration is the most basic form for the recording, transmission, and construction of history. But, as Hayden White and others have argued for many years, if history is essentially narrational, its contents, form, and representation is affected by the peculiarities of storytelling. It obeys the ‘laws’ of narrative, such as the forms of a narrative’s logic and emplotment, and it is influenced by new ideas about the nature of texts and narratives. Experiments with textuality influence the way in which history is laid down in texts. In this part, we examine some ways in which history is represented and (re-) constructed in novels whose experimental nature is, to a large extent, inspired by the Thousand and one nights. We discuss both the effects of modernism on the concepts of memory/history, and the ways in which the past penetrates the present through text. However, texts and narration are not just a medium for the construction of history; they are also part of history. The significance of words is codetermined by the past events with which they are associated. In this way, words are both a means to soothe and neutralize violent events of the past and a way to re-enflame them and awaken dormant resentments. Therefore, one of the questions in this part is how the example of Shahrazad’s juxtaposition between trauma/violence and narration is reflected in fiction whose main topic is history. The relationship between the Thousand and one nights and the idea of history extends to the very foundations of storytelling, which, after all, is a form of reporting events from the past. The frame story of the Nights depicts a kind of primeval situation, in which narration emerges in a history gone awry; a primeval blissful state that is destroyed by personal trauma and despotism, and which can only be mended by narration. Still, this narration does not take

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the form of a neutral account, or even an effort to reconstruct events in an objective way; on the contrary, it views life from a subjective, individual perspective, one that exploits the potential of the imagination. This is not merely Shahrazad’s stratagem to save her life, it also indicates that events in the past are still relevant and effective in the present; that the traumas of the past should be embedded in narratives which give shape to the present. The past cannot be changed, but its significance for the present, its interpretation, can be changed by supplementing objective suffering with the subjective imagination. History and storytelling are linked, too, because both presuppose a conceptualization of time and space. By recording and ordering events that are connected to temporal and spatial structures, history and storytelling generate interpretations of these events and thereby contribute to a shared selfimage of communities. Although myths, legends, and historiography all have this function in common, this does not mean that they are interchangeable or considered of equal value. Partly because its setting in space and time is more precise and systematic, historiography can make stronger truth claims than legends and myths, and the more historiography develops into a scholarly discipline, the more the boundaries with imaginary history are accentuated. History may be inseparably linked to the imagination, but by its nature it also seeks to be constructed on solid foundations of truth and veracity. With its intriguing mixture of stories of various genres, the Thousand and one nights firmly positions itself within the discursive fields of history and storytelling. The collection contains typical legendary and epic stories, but also realistic accounts of everyday life. It is concerned with storytelling and interpretation in a self-reflexive way, and the phenomenon of narrativity; it is concerned with the use and abuse of power, with the way in which power configurations block or produce the spaces in which narration can evolve. It explores the ways in which storytelling can influence events and persons, in which it can subvert power structures, and in which it contains visions of reality. Every event harbors a story, has an explanation, and is part of a plot; every individual has a role in at least one story; every relationship between human beings is at the crossroads of various stories. As in the European tradition, in the Arabic tradition, too, the area where history and storytelling merge into each other is that of truthfulness and verisimilitude. In the Thousand and one nights, this area consists of stories of various kinds. First, there are stories about ancient kingdoms, which are only vaguely situated in space and time and which are often linked to supernatural realms, for instance, the realm of King Solomon. Second, it contains two romances of chivalry which represent the epic genre, or, more precisely, a cross between epic and

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history. Third, there are stories in which references to ‘real’ history are combined with clearly fictional material. Sometimes the historical material refers to historical lore preserved in books, rather than, for instance, historical figures. Finally, there are realistic stories that are nevertheless fictional, that may truthfully depict daily life, but may also include elements of folklore or popular fantasy. These types of stories contain components of verisimilitude and fantasy in varying proportions, depending on their need to be rooted in an identifiable reality or to convey a vision of the world. In general, we are justified in saying that the concept of the Thousand and one nights, the encounter between storytelling and violence, between the imagination and rigid power, favors a deconstruction of strictly historical narratives. Even the stories of an ‘epic’ nature governed by fate present emblematic heroes, without any connection to a ‘real’ time and space, and reveal a notion that the cycle of history is broken.1 Although fate is still predominant in many romances of chivalry and love, and historical time is transcended as if it has no intrinsic value, there is a notion that ‘epic’ history will be replaced by a ‘true’ event, the revelation of Muḥammad, or the overwhelming force of love. Here epics are not pure epics, they contain the seeds of less mechanical and more historically situated narratives. The struggle between an ahistorical worldview and a historical worldview can be seen in the frame story as well. A traumatic primordial event induces Shahriyar to establish an ‘epic’ regime, one based on a stereotypic, emblematic view of life. It turns out that this history, which is enclosed on itself, in which the progress of time is halted to protect an established hierarchy, is doomed to perdition because it cannot absorb the regenerating forces of life. Ultimately, narration and imagination undermine the tyranny of the epic worldview and substitute another worldview for it, enabling individuality and contingency to prevail. Interpreted as such, the Thousand and one nights can be situated at the transition from an epic to a historical worldview. The deconstructive effect of the Thousand and one nights is partly achieved by its tendency to destabilize notions of space and time. As we have seen, it is often a disequilibrium between space and time which engenders stories, and which requires a narrative response. These devices in particular bring to light the tension between historical truth and imagined reality, which then leads to the struggle for the possession of history. This tension also fascinated later authors, not only for the way it induces experiments with narrative time and space, but, more specifically, for its potential to manipulate the temporal and spatial aspects of history, with its often-oppressive truth claims. As we 1  Van Leeuwen, The Thousand and One Nights.

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see, the Thousand and one nights especially inspired authors to develop their own, often controversial views of history. In the following chapters, we focus our attention on a number of authors who exemplify this procedure and who have influenced our view of the relationship between history and narrativity, by exploiting the potential of the novel to challenge established discourses of history, politics, and scholarship.

Chapter 11

The Traumas of History: William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and André Brink The complexity of Faulkner’s (1897–1962) novels, apart from their oftendifficult style, is, perhaps paradoxically, partly a result of their location in a well-defined, imaginary setting, the county of Yoknapathawa in Mississippi, in the United States. This common feature of the novels immediately raises questions about the relationship between the stories of the novels – many of the same characters occur in several novels – and their relation to the region of the United States where they are located. Is Faulkner’s work about a ‘quintessential’ South? Are Faulkner’s concerns directed to a specific episode in the history of a specific region? To what extent does the intricate, composite textual structure of his work stabilize or destabilize notions of this history and this location? Does Faulkner primarily refer to a history or to a myth, or, perhaps, to both? Is there a significant difference between his concepts of history and myth? Questions such as these come to the fore especially when one reads one of the key works in Faulkner’s oeuvre, the powerful novel Absalom, Absalom!, which appeared in 1936. Absalom, Absalom! is not so much a historical novel as a novel about history. It is concerned with a specific geographical region, the American South, and with a specific phase of its history, the devastating Civil War of 1861–65, which put an end to southern autonomy and to a deeply rooted society, culture, and way of life. The defeat of the South was a traumatic event which fundamentally shook the constituting principle of the United States, especially with regard to race relations and slavery. Faulkner’s novel shows how deep the wounds of the defeat still were at the beginning of the twentieth century and how vital race relations were for the idea of a southern society that was destroyed by the Civil War. The main idea of the novel, however, concerns how precarious visions of the past can be, how contradictory historical interpretations can be, and how reminiscences of the past continue to affect the present. The novel has been discussed by hundreds of critics, so here we limit ourselves to a brief synopsis. The story of Absalom, Absalom! is about Thomas Sutpen, who, as a young boy from a poor family, was sent on an errand to the house of a rich plantation owner. When he is humiliatingly turned away at the door, he conceives his ‘design’: He plans to build an estate and become rich © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_013

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to take revenge for this humiliation. He travels to Haiti, where he marries the daughter of a plantation holder and has a son. However, when he discovers that his wife has a drop of Negro blood, he abandons her as no longer fit to be part of his design. He then travels to Yoknipathawa (1833), where, with miraculous speed and determination, he builds a plantation and names it Sutpen’s Hundred. He marries a respectable girl, Ellen, who bears two children, Henry and Judith, but she dies soon afterwards. Thomas has another daughter, Clytie, by a black slave woman. It seems that Thomas has realized his design and founded his dynasty. Two events spoil Thomas’s apparent success: the arrival of his Haitian son, Charles Bon, and the Civil War, which ends southern independence. Charles Bon turns up as Henry’s fellow student and becomes the fiancé of Judith. Thomas disallows the match, however, apparently because Judith is Charles’s half-sister. Later Henry finds out that for Thomas, it is not incest that impedes the marriage, but miscegenation, because Charles has mixed blood. Henry, who is strongly intrigued by Charles, finally kills him to prevent the marriage, and when the dust of the Civil War settles, Sutpen’s design lays in ruins: The war has broken Thomas physically, the plantation is in a state of ruin, and his only male heir has become a fugitive murderer. In an effort to produce another heir, he proposes to marry Rosa, Ellen’s sister, on the condition that she has a son, but she rejects this ‘offer.’ When he has a child with the daughter of a white farmhand, Wash Jones, he rejects the child because it is a girl and Jones kills him with a scythe. In the end, only Clytie, Judith, and a ‘black’ son of Charles remain in Sutpen’s house. It now becomes clear that Thomas’s design was doomed to failure. Intriguing as this story may be, it is only the background for the true intentions and design of the novel. It serves as material for the real theme of the story, namely, how remnants of past events fit into a coherent history, how these events penetrate into the present and thus require a reassessment and reconstruction to neutralize their traumatic effects, and how history cannot be molded at will. The perspective of the present is represented by Quentin Compson, who, in 1910, with his fellow student Shreve, tries to assemble a coherent narrative from the fragments of evidence which have come down to them. Because of this posterior perspective, it is not clear who the main character of the novel is and which of the various intrigues is the main, primary intrigue. Is Thomas the main protagonist, because of his central position in the story, or is it Quentin, who initiates the reconstruction of this history? Is the main intrigue the murder of Charles Bon or the rejection of the young Thomas Sutpen? Or is it the uncanny encounter between Henry and Quentin which mobilizes Quentin’s awareness of his past? Or is it even

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Quentin’s suicide, which is not related in Absalom, Absalom!, rather it appears in The sound and the fury, but may be explained in Absalom, Absalom!. Critics have responded to these questions in various ways. It is not our aim here to evaluate or even analyze their opinions, but rather to discuss the novel’s approach to history and the way in which it may relate to influences from the Thousand and one nights. We focus especially on two elements which are not only central to the design of the novel and represent its main particularities, but which also constitute the main references to the Nights: its complex form and the eccentric figure of Sutpen. Form Arguably the most prominent characteristic of Absalom, Absalom! is its intricate, multi-level form. As mentioned above, the story is revealed through the figure of Quentin, who, together with Shreve, tries to unravel the various reports of the events. This layer is not a stable outer frame, however, since Quentin is one of the main characters in The sound and the fury, too, and Absalom, Absalom! can be seen as an episode in Quentin’s life which should be inserted in The sound and the fury, and thus should contribute to the plot in that story, the plot of Quentin’s suicide. This, of course, complicates an autonomous interpretation of Absalom, Absalom!; it relativizes the inner coherence and completeness of the novel and forces the critic to relate the events to events in The sound and the fury. In what ways are the stories related? Are there clues that might explain Quentin’s motives for ending his life? Quentin thus represents not a main frame, but a frame somewhere in the middle, which may be enclosed by a number of other frames and which itself holds several inner frames. The inner frames are constituted by the various reports that have reached Quentin about Thomas Sutpen’s life and exploits. The first report is by Rosa Coldfield, Ellen’s sister who refused to marry Sutpen on his conditions and who has an outspokenly negative opinion of him. Rosa has told her story directly to Quentin and accompanied him on the visit to Sutpen’s Hundred, where they find Henry hidden in the attic. Rosa is thus the main direct link between Quentin and the Sutpen history, since she gives him firsthand information and confronts him with what is left of this history; she makes Quentin aware of its significance to his present situation. The second informant is Quentin’s father Compson, who knew Sutpen, but whose information is mainly secondhand. He conveys the story he heard from Quentin’s grandfather, who heard it from Sutpen in various sessions, and after Rosa’s death, he sends a letter to

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supplement her account. Thus, we can discern a series of stages through the generations to Sutpen himself, each recorded at various levels of narration. These different layers are connected to each other through forms of transmission, ultimately reaching the level of Quentin. Quentin is not merely a recipient, however, since, in spite of – or perhaps because of – the number of informants, the narrative remains fragmentary, incomplete, chronologically confused, ambiguous, and biased, so that it is not evident how it can be combined into a coherent account. Therefore, Quentin and Shreve represent a level in which they try to put the fragments together to form a coherent, logical, narrative that makes sense of the information; they also speculate about what might have happened. Thus, whereas chapters 1 and 5 contain Rosa’s account, and chapters 2, 3, and 4 give Compson’s version, the last four chapters present the common effort of Quentin and Shreve to complete the puzzle. Significantly, these chapters are strewn with conjectural words, such as ‘maybe …,’ ‘perhaps …,’ ‘might …,’ etc. These chapters show that the recipients of the stories are not merely listeners, but are actively participating in the construction of the story. Indeed, toward the end of the book, Quentin and Shreve start identifying with Henry and Charles, thus, apparently, they not only participate in constructing the plot, but actually experience the events themselves. Later, we discuss the implications of this complex structure for Faulkner’s vision of history. Now we turn to the second salient feature of Absalom, Absalom!, the ambiguous figure of Thomas Sutpen. As we have seen, the layered structure of the story is meant to transmit information from the past to the present, through a chain of informers, thus, it is a means to reveal the nature of events. At the same time, it is a means to hide the true nature of events under thick layers of different versions and views, and to fracture it into several narrative levels. This is most conspicuously true in the case of Thomas Sutpen, who, until the end, remains enigmatic and subject to different representations. Critics have developed various interpretations of the meanings ‘hidden’ in the figure of Sutpen. The sheer variety of these interpretations makes the question of Sutpen’s narrative function even more pressing. We can divide the approaches to Sutpen as a literary figure into roughly three directions: first, Sutpen as a ‘real’ person, that is, as an actor in a realistic setting; second, Sutpen as a ‘phenomenon’ or as a symbolic figure, representing something beyond himself as a person; and third, Sutpen as a narrative device, acting out a role in a story which imposes narrative laws on him, rather than being based on his intrinsic properties. In the first approach, Sutpen as a real person, we should link Sutpen’s behavior mainly to psychological factors, for instance, his youth in poverty, his humiliation by a powerful social class, and his lust for revenge. His need for revenge unleashes an unyielding

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determination to rise above his status and, especially, to sacrifice everything for his ultimate aim, the establishment of a powerful dynasty of racially pure descendants. Thus, Sutpen’s actions can be explained rationally, on the level of realism; this would imply that the settings and intrigues in which they occur should be seen as ‘realistic’ too, at the level of the individual characters interacting with each other. The second approach has led to a much more ambitious spectrum of interpretations. Sutpen can be seen as representing the unfolding of the American dream, the transition from an idyllic state of harmony, in a free, boundless and essentially anarchic realm, to a complex, socially differentiated structure plagued by conflicts about status, property, and racial discrimination. A selfmade man from a poor background can rise to wealth and power, but his success is obtained at a high price, the installment and rigid preservation of social hierarchies and boundaries. There is much evidence in Absalom, Absalom! to support this general view of Sutpen as representing the rise and fall of man. More specifically, this symbolic content can be linked to the history of the South, with its obsession with race and economic expansion, and, of course, with the failure of its ‘project,’ which collapsed in the Civil War. Sutpen’s destiny has also been associated with Freudian forms of personal – and human – tragedy, such as the return of the repressed and conflicts between father and son. The third approach, considering Sutpen a non-character or an empty character, or evaluating him primarily for his narratological function, is derived from the property that destabilizes the first two approaches and makes them more intriguing: Sutpen is presented as a mysterious and ambiguous figure, whose real character is hidden behind an appearance of fierce determination and whose motives and aims are unclear. When he arrives in Yoknapathawa, with a wild band of “niggers,” no one knows who he is or where he comes from. He succeeds in settling in the area as a respectable person without anyone knowing by what means, and he builds his house and plantation in an incredibly swift and uncompromising – almost miraculous – way. Even when he reaches a position of social respectability, he remains an outsider and when his ‘project’ finally collapses, he, as a person is still surrounded by questions and mysteries. He seems to possess an autonomy that makes him immune to influence from others; he follows his own plan rigorously, stands aloof from social conventions, and bullies those around him. The mysteriousness of Sutpen and his refusal to integrate into society, and its accompanying narrative, of Yoknapathawa, makes him an enigmatic, undefinable figure in the story, and this necessitates interpretation. Sutpen, also in the narratological sense, is an alien element that requires an explanation, a

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rationalization, so that it can be incorporated into a coherent narrative. At the same time, he resists interpretation, because he lacks the qualities that would make him part of the whole. He is like another species, one that cannot be harmonized with other people/characters. The figure who sees this most clearly is Aunt Rosa, who systematically calls him a ‘demon’ and who describes him in inhuman, animal-like terms. She stresses his apparent detachment from time and place, turning him into a mysterious force of an unknown substance, almost an unreal person. Quentin then takes over this qualification, as does Shreve, who particularly accentuates his demonic nature. The ‘empty’ or impenetrable character of Sutpen solicits interpretation and narrative re-evaluation, and this immediately introduces an element of subjectivity and instability into the stories. Because he is so ‘alien,’ there is no common ground for his fellow protagonists to rationally judge and assess him as a person. Everyone develops a vision of Sutpen that is in accordance with the role he plays in his or her life, everyone projects his own concerns onto him, thereby making a common assessment more difficult. In spite of the processes of interpretation which he engenders, he remains outside a shared narrative, a signifier without a signified, a force that cannot be controlled within the narrative. Thus, even in 1910, Quentin and Shreve continue to struggle with the ‘damage’ done by Sutpen by his intrusion into Yoknapathawa, the fragmentation that his unharmonious, forced entry has caused. It seems, therefore, that Sutpen’s ambiguity as a narrative character is closely linked to the peculiar form of the narrative, whose unity is scattered by the impossibility of incorporating him. His ambiguity precludes narrative unity, and so the narrative can only exist as a loose agglomeration of stories related to him, as if it were an attempt to fill the gap that he caused. It also deprives the narrative of an authoritative center that would, normally, structure the narrative according to the elements that it imposes. There is no all-knowing voice, there is no logical relationship between Sutpen and his co-characters, there is no clear-cut relationship between Sutpen and the events of the story. Yet he is the figure who is the focus of attention, he is the main source of the story, and the element that refuses to play its narratological role. Due to Sutpen, the story implodes, and the other characters are left desparately searching through the debris of their lives. History After these brief observations, we can see the functions of the layered structure of the novel and the way it is linked to the elements of the story. What is told

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determines how it must be told; the nature of the events imposes the manner in which they are told. What are the consequences of this procedure for the way in which history, as a phenomenon and as a specific ‘Southern’ past, is conceived? As noted, the fragmentary, layered structure indicates that history is told from different subjective perspectives. Every informant has his or her own observations and experiences, and molds his account to match them. This implies that the information in the various fragments and its interpretation are not necessarily complementary. Events are part of various lives and thus, part of various stories that may intersect, but not be neatly interwoven, as Judith says in a much-quoted passage in the novel: “like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug.”1 The characters do not work to compose one coherent story, they each work toward a separate sub-plot that is relevant for their individual lives. The result is that the story has several centers, several plots, and no central, organizing authority. Thus, on the one hand, the succession of levels suggests the idea of transmission, but on the other hand, it appears to result in dispersion. Still, the accounts present the clues which are indispensable for making sense of the way in which the stories together contain a common story. This is the task that Quentin, with the help of Shreve, sets for himself. At the same time, the stories reveal and hide a meaning which inspires a search for an overall plot, a structure which will fill the lack in the story, which will insert an authority into the text that will serve as a new organizing force, proposing or imposing a rational and satisfying reconstruction of events. The stories, their divergence, the excess of information in them, and the absences or lacks that they try to compensate for, stimulate our desire for emplotment, for a narrative reconfiguration. Quentin’s urge to come to terms with his past therefore has two sources; first, his encounter with ‘real’ history through Henry and Rosa, and the ‘encounter’ with a fragmentary narrative that requires a plot. It is here, it seems, that we should seek the conceptualization of history in the novel. First, Quentin’s struggle shows that the past makes itself felt, forcefully, in the present. Quentin is part of a society traumatized by its history and its dismantling. He is haunted by the ‘ghosts’ of the past and forced to reconsider his relationship with this disturbing past and the identity he derived from it. He repeatedly says to Shreve, the Northerner, that only Southerners can understand how it feels to be burdened with the weight of a history full of defeat, self-searching, guilt, 1  William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 101.

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and unresolved conflicts. Only by re-structuring the narrative of the past can he regain some mastery over its effects in the present. In the stories about Sutpen the relation with history is repeatedly made explicit. Rosa, for instance, states that the war was the only way for God to punish the South for figures like Sutpen, who are cruel and tyrannical. She thus transposes history to her own life, presenting the figure of Sutpen as an evil genius who has caused traumatic experiences on both levels. Compson, more rationally, criticizes the South’s opportunism and lack of morality as the causes for its collapse, both of which can be seen in Sutpen. For Quentin and Shreve, speculating about Sutpen’s life, the issue of racism and slavery becomes more and more crucial for an understanding of the Southern tragedy and as an explanation of the failure of Sutpen’s ‘design.’ Although by comparing these views some form of historical meaning can be attached to the South’s defeat, this meaning is still based on insufficiency, inconsistency, and deficiency, and not on a solid framework for self-identification. It is not Faulkner’s aim, however, to merely show that history consists of a variety of subjective views that may contradict or supplement each other. Through his narrative strategy, the relationship between events and the stories about events is problematized, too, by stressing the narrative character of historical knowledge, and by focusing his novel on the process of turning history into a narrative, rather than on a reconstruction of events. It is true that Quentin is anxious to know what has happened in the past, and that he uses the sources at his disposal to find out. It is also clear, however, that the focus of the novel increasingly shifts toward the process of storytelling and the construction of narratives. This becomes evident in the common effort of Quentin and Shreve to fit together the shattered fragments of the accounts and find a coherent plot. Mastering history involves not only the possession of its remains, but also the closure of the narrative in a satisfying and convincing denouement. Thus, the sources provide not so much the keys to a reconstruction of the past, but rather the elements of a story that conjures the negative spell of the past on the present and that stabilizes the ontological uncertainties in the present. It is not history which provides the narrative; it is narrative emplotment which determines history and, especially, the workings of history in the present. The rivalry between Quentin and Shreve, who both want to complete the story, nicely illustrates how historical interpretation is connected to forms of autonomy and control. When Quentin and Shreve begin to identify with Henry and Charles, they do so not merely out of empathy, trying to imagine what happened or imagine themselves in the place of others, it is, rather, a re-enactment of the conflict that occurred in the past and that has never been

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resolved, Quentin represents the South in its moment of defeat, holding on to an anachronistic rigidity, and Shreve represents the oppressed, whose emancipation opens the road to the future. The Civil War is fought again, with Shreve interfering in Quentin’s solipsistic construction of a Southern self-image. The story that remains is, therefore, a common narrative, the only narrative that has a prospect for survival in the present. But this narrative is speculative, subjective, and perhaps partly invented. Significantly, the necessity of inventing a story, rather than reconstructing what has actually happened in an objective way, supports the idea that Sutpen’s ‘design’ was doomed to failure from the beginning: It contained so many inconsistencies that it could never be molded into a rationally plotted narrative.

Absalom, Absalom! and the Thousand and One Nights

After discussing some aspects of the structure of the story of Absalom, Absalom!, we now focus on the traces of the Thousand and one nights which have, in part, shaped the novel and which are incorporated into it. From the discussion thus far, some influences, especially those concerning the narrative structure, are already clear, but other, explicit references, and the implications of their influences remain to be addressed. There are three explicit references to the Thousand and one nights in the novel at crucial points in the narrative. They are not only keys to an understanding of the textual strategy, but also of the persons to whom they refer, as they shape a cluster of characteristics related to specific people. First, Sutpen is referred to as an ogre, or more specifically, a jinn;2 second, Charles Bon is compared to a prince from the Arabian nights;3 and third, Compson’s letter is described as a “pandora’s box of scrawled paper” which filled the room with “violent unratiocinative djinns and demons.”4 It is important to note that these references are not confined to one of the various characters but are used by different speakers, indicating that they did not spring from the fantasy of a single character, but are rather part of the ‘third voice’ stretching throughout the novel and thus, are an underlying trope that structures the narrative as a whole. It has been observed above that one of the intriguing aspects of the figure of Sutpen is his ‘emptiness,’ his emblematic character which cannot be incorporated into the social and narrative patterns of Yoknapathawa. Several 2  Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 16. 3  Ibid., 76. 4  Ibid., 208.

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times, it is repeated that his arrival was a sudden, almost violent intrusion, like a “tornado.”5 He came from nowhere and no one knew him: “It seems that this demon – his name was Sutpen – (Colonel Sutpen) – Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation.”6 He is systematically called a demon, an ogre, or a jinn, who had no past but appears to have come into existence by magic. He is a phenomenon that defies human conceptualizations, such as descent, space, and time. Traveling as a boy he seemed to float in the air, while the earth was changing beneath him. Returning to the estate after the war, Rosa met him and what she saw then was just that ogre-face of her childhood seen once and then repeated at intervals and on occasions which she could neither count nor recall, like the mask in Greek tragedy interchangeable not only from scene to scene but from actor to actor and behind which the events and occasions took place without chronology or sequence.7 His face is “rocklike and firm and antedating time and house and doom and all – the face without sex or age because it had never possessed either.”8 Even when Sutpen is away, his presence is acutely felt in the house, which is a kind of ‘shell’ attached to him: Something ate with us; we talked to it and it answered questions; it sat with us before the fire at night…. [He] talked to the air, the waiting grim decaying presence, spirit, of the house itself, talking that which sounded like the bombast of a madman who creates within his very coffin walls his fabulous immeasurable Camelots and Carcassonnes.9 Everything he is and does seems to be touched by magic, his appearance is a ‘mirage,’ he builds Sutpen’s Hundred as a magical palace, simply by saying “Be!”10 And when the abode is ready, he abducts ‘his princess’ and imprisons her: “Even before I [Rosa] was born [Ellen] had vanished into the stronghold of an ogre or djinn.”11 5  Ibid., 47. 6  Ibid., 5. 7  Ibid., 49. 8  Ibid., 109. 9  Ibid., 129. 10  Ibid., 4. 11  Ibid., 16.

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It would appear from Sutpen’s attributes that he is not merely an ‘empty’ character, nor a simple Gothic, ghost-like figure, but that he is modeled after the jinn of the Thousand and one nights. He is not merely a strange man, but seems to belong to another species, one which has the ability to transcend human space and time, which is capable of magic. Like jinns, he is in the grip of a monomanic desire that drives him to transgress all boundaries and to reject even basic forms of humanity. He is unfathomable, violent, pitiless, and impenetrable. He represents otherness, hybridity, and inspires fear and horror by his indefatigable determination. He is such an imposing force that in the end, he is not simply killed, but hewed down with a scythe. It is his hybridity as a jinn which, in the story, prevents him from founding a dynasty based on ‘pure’ blood, and, at the narrative level, causes the textual destabilization that results in the implosion of the story. Sutpen’s hybridity reflects, too, on Charles Bon, his ‘black’ son. Bon also appears out of nowhere, as an intruder; his appearance differs markedly from the rough Southerners. He was a young man of a worldly elegance and assurance beyond his years, handsome, apparently wealthy and with for background the shadowy figure of a legal guardian rather than any parents – a personage who in the remote Mississippi of that time must have appeared almost phoenixlike, fullsprung from no childhood, born of no woman and impervious to time and, vanished, leaving no bones or dust anywhere – a man with an ease of manner and a swaggering gallant air in comparison to Sutpen’s pompous arrogance was clumsy bluff.12 Thus, he is, at the same time, a replica of Sutpen in the sense that he is also an immaterial person of mysterious provenance, and completely different than others around him in appearance and behavior. In other descriptions, he remains a seemingly unreal apparition, a person whose existence is ambivalent: “a shadowy character. Yes, shadowy: a myth, a phantom: something which they engendered and created whole themselves; some effluvium of Sutpen blood and character, as though as a man he did not exist at all.”13 Henry is immediately fond of Charles Bon and full of admiration for him, and he tries to imitate his style:

12  Ibid., 58. 13  Ibid., 82.

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Henry looked upon Bon as though he were a hero out of some adolescent Arabian Nights who had stumbled upon (or rather, had thrust upon him) a talisman or touchstone not to invest him with wisdom or power or wealth, but with the ability and opportunity to pass from the scene of one scarce imaginable delight to the next one without interval or pause or satiety.14 In spite of Henry’s efforts, however, Bon remains an unreachable mirage, a phantom that cannot be controlled or emulated. Bon makes him understand that his way of living is part of something higher, out of reach.15 The link between Bon and the Thousand and one nights is emphasized by his association with the idea of a harem; at one point, he is suspected of seeking to add Judith to his ‘harem’ and at another point, he is associated with it because of his self-indulgence, with his whores, his champagne, his fine clothes, his cuff buttons, and yellow-wheeled buggies “lounging there against the mantel maybe in the fine clothes, in the harem incense odour of what you might call easy sanctity.”16 Of course, it is possible that Quentin and Shreve invent this close association between Bon and the oriental stereotype from the Thousand and one nights, but, as we argued above, it is also part of the overall structure of the novel, part of its design as a whole, rather than an aspect of one of the accounts only. Bon is consciously depicted as a hybrid figure, who seemingly emerges from a fairy tale, an unreal world that threatens to encroach upon the ‘real’ world of Yoknapathawa. He is highly sophisticated in comparison to Henry, but at the same time, because of his mixed blood, he is only half-civilized. One of Bon’s important narrative functions is his potential to ‘double.’ In a way, he is Sutpen’s double, both because of his ethereal nature and because of his relationship with him, as a son. He represents the ‘return of the repressed,’ confronting Sutpen with his past and, especially, with the inconsistencies of his ‘design.’ It is his intrusion into Sutpen’s world which, at a decisive moment, tears apart Sutpen’s design. Similarly, he is Henry’s mirror image, he represents, almost literally, a kind of ideal self for Henry, who takes him as a model for his own life. Henry’s identification with Bon is so strong that Henry recognizes his own incestuous feelings for Judith. Yet this is less appalling to him than the idea of miscegenation, the idea that Bon, a ‘nigger,’ is going to marry his sister. Bon is a person so full of contradictions that he cannot exist as a ‘real’ 14  Ibid., 76. 15  Ibid., 88, 90–91. 16  Ibid., 245.

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person; he is a phantom that descended upon Sutpen’s Hundred to unearth hidden truths and decisively interrupt the regular course of events. Finally, Bon provides the opportunity for Quentin and Shreve to identify themselves with, and even participate in the historical events. As in the case of Sutpen, Bon’s ambiguous nature gives him a specific narrative role, as an uncontrollable element disturbing Sutpen’s ambitions. It is significant, of course, that he is portrayed as an Arabian prince, an exotic outsider, with an alien lifestyle. He is a hybrid in every sense, an intruder with an undefinable nature: the man who should not have been there at all, who was too old to be there at all, both in years and experience: that mental and spiritual orphan whose fate it apparently was to exist in some limbo halfway between where his corporeality was and his mentality and moral equipment desired to be …17 In spite of his clear sophistication, he remains a half-breed, coming from an island which was the halfway point between what we call the jungle and what we call civilization, halfway between the dark inscrutable continent from which the black blood, the black bones and flesh and thinking and remembering and hopes and desires, was ravished by violence, and the cold known land to which it was doomed, the civilised land and people …18 Again, Bon carries within himself an unresolvable contradiction which lays bare the contradiction in Sutpen’s design. In the confrontation between Sutpen and Bon lies the crucial point in the history of the Sutpen saga, a fateful crossroads where past, present, and future meet. Quentin and Shreve not only identify with Bon and Henry out of empathy, but also because their reconstruction re-enacts the same confrontation, and the direction of their story determines the link between their future and the past. In their story, Bon is killed, and Sutpen’s design is destroyed. In the struggle between Quentin and Shreve, Shreve is triumphant and takes over the telling of the story, and ultimately Quentin commits suicide (in The sound and the fury). In the story, the North wins once again, because Quentin is haunted by the ghosts of the past, challenged by the hybrid ‘monster within,’ as a prisoner 17  Ibid., 98. 18  Ibid., 202.

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of history, who is unable to escape by retelling it, while Shreve looks to the future, and is not burdened by obsessions with purity and frustrations at defeat and failure. Finding the plot not only gives history its proper meaning; it also provides a passage from the past to the future. What Sutpen feared has in fact happened; his design is usurped by Charles Bon; history is usurped by an invented story. We have seen how their association with the Thousand and one nights shaped two of the central characters of Absalom, Absalom! and how the peculiar nature of these characters shaped the structure of the narrative. This is symbolized by the comparison between Compson’s letter and a Pandora’s box full of jinns: the accounts are imbued with ‘otherness,’ ambiguity and ‘magic’ that are ultimately uncontrollable. Texts have dynamics of their own which are difficult to regulate. It is here that we can trace the formal echoes of the Thousand and one nights in Absalom, Absalom!; echoes which, of course, give the novel its intriguing character. The first formal resemblance between Absalom, Absalom! And the Thousand and one nights is its layered structure, which overflows the confines of the novel into its ‘companion’ text, The sound and the fury; thus, creating a sense of infinity which is typically associated with the storytelling of Shahrazad. Furthermore, this overlap suggests that storytelling is an open process that inherently contains the seeds of new stories; each story contains lacunae and omissions that require interpretation and supplementation and thus set in motion an endless chain of stories. Second, the process of storytelling is evoked by traumatic events, the defeat of the South, the failure of Sutpen, the frustration of Rosa, the killing of Bon, the suicide of Quentin. All these traumatic experiences demand explanations, rationalizations, and emplotment, otherwise they will haunt the present. These forms of emplotment cannot be achieved by just objectively reconstructing the events, rather they require an imaginary representation, an invented story, in order to conjure the ghosts of the past. Thus, reality can only be accepted when it is supplemented by the imagination; imagination is the only cure for obsessive memories which obstruct the way to the future. Third, as in the Thousand and one nights, the storytelling is consistently set in a dialogical situation. Narration is not a solipsistic act, it is a struggle, a form of control, of domination. This has several consequences for the structure of the story. For example, dialogues involve narrative strategies and techniques, such as interruption, affirmation, questioning, comment, supplementing, correcting, etc. This can be seen, especially, in the later chapters, when Quentin and Shreve try to work their way through the debris of stories. They constantly interrupt, correct, or supplement each other’s speech, not only to find

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a common ground and discuss the most plausible hypothesis, but also as a means of monopolizing the story and steering it to a satisfactory ending. This dialogic process leads to a juxtaposition of different views, to postponement, to dispersion and fragmentation, characteristics that are familiar from the Thousand and one nights and that are quite prominent in Absalom, Absalom!. In the Nights, these techniques result in the gradual deconstruction of Shahriyar’s monolithic worldview and his cruel, tyrannical regime. In Absalom, Absalom!, the storytelling eventually leads to a dismantling of Sutpen’s design and, consequently, of the ideology of the South. This seems to be, perhaps, the ultimate aim of storytelling: the continuation of storytelling undermines self-contradictory and oppressive metanarratives.

The Haunted House: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and André Brink’s Imaginings of Sand

Faulkner’s novels, and especially Absalom, Absalom!, have inspired numerous authors, mainly because of their very effective narrative structure. Toni Morrison’s (b. 1931) Beloved (1987) is often associated with Absalom, Absalom!, because it has several characteristics in common with Faulkner’s strategies. First, the novel, like Absalom, Absalom!, refers to a traumatic event related to slavery. Sethe, the protagonist, lives in an isolated house with her daughter Denver; she has been deserted by her kin, because in the past she killed her baby daughter to prevent her from being taken by the slave-owner. She was convicted and punished for this, but she is still ‘haunted’ by this event in her present life. Second, the story of the tragic event is not told in a direct, linear way, but is gradually revealed through the juxtaposition of several accounts of persons who were involved in one way or another. Third, the story is constructed around a house, which is isolated and not easily accessible, and which contains Sethe’s secret, her traumatic past. Fourth, the story is dominated by a ghost-like figure, Beloved, presumably her dead daughter, who appears as a ‘return of the repressed’ and is a mysterious, uncontrollable force; in regard to Sethe and Denver, and as a narrative element she casts a strange spell on the house. In spite of these structural resemblances, there are essential differences between Beloved and Absalom, Absalom!, in the treatment of history, the focus on slavery, and the role of storytelling as a means to achieve salvation. It is remarkable, though, that the similarities are largely related to the influences of the Thousand and one nights in Absalom, Absalom!. It is not surprising, therefore, that in Beloved the Thousand and one nights is mentioned as well, specifically

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when the protagonists see a dancer from the Arabian nights at a fair. This reference seems to be shallow evidence for an intertextual relationship between the novel and the Thousand and one nights, but it should be noted that this episode occurs just before the ‘return’ of Beloved, presumably as a ghost, and that it seems to inaugurate the ‘miraculous’ or Gothic part of the story. We can argue that the reference to the Nights signals the story’s transition to a more fractured representation of reality. Moreover, the reference to the Nights is the only reference to a literary work in the novel; this suggests that it was done deliberately, to add an interpretive key to the story. The themes of Absalom, Absalom! and Beloved are taken up once more in André Brink’s novel Imaginings of sand (1996), where we can clearly see the links to the Thousand and one nights, these links are more explicit but less sophisticated than in Faulkner’s masterpiece. André Brink (1935–2015) was a South African author of the Afrikaner community, descendants of the first Dutch settlers; he wrote in Afrikaans and English. In his autobiographical A fork in the road (2009) he described himself, when he was young, as a promising intellectual and member of the Afrikaner elite. However, he was influenced by the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 and especially the 1968 student revolt in Paris, and he changed his views of South African society and the apartheid system and came to see it as his task not only to become involved in political discussions, but to revise his role as an author. He thought his work should henceforth contribute to the abolition of the injustice of apartheid and racial discrimination. One of his important works resulted from this shift; Imaginings of sand appeared in 1996 after the dismantling of the apartheid regime and the installation of the new ANC government. It is not an evaluation of the post-apartheid situation, however, but rather an effort to re-assess Afrikaner history in a story set during the transition just before the 1994 elections. Like Absalom, Absalom! and Beloved, it is an effort to connect a personal life story to a historical background and to investigate how the two are intertwined. Brink criticizes the narrow historical view of Afrikaner nationalism, which was developed during the period 1902–24 and was built on a common language, ethnic descent, and religion. It was based on the survival myth of the Boers, who made the Great Trek to escape the British, and in the process developed the strict racist worldview of the Afrikaner leaders, the founders of the system of apartheid. According to Brink, the myths of Afrikaner nationalism had to be shattered before a just society in South Africa could be established. These myths had become not only the dominant view of Afrikanerdom, but also one of the mainstays of the repression of the black majority. This view had to be subverted to

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make room for the ‘subaltern’ approach, and for non-white communities in South Africa: Afrikaners, spoiled by the experience of near-absolute power after they themselves had suffered the humiliation of colonial subjugation and the trauma of two wars of liberation against Britain, now have to reassess both their history and their future as they try to readapt to a situation devoid of special privilege.19 For Brink, literature was the obvious medium by which to revise history. Literature and history are not each other’s opposites, but are interconnected, even symbiotic.20 The fictional character of literature destabilizes the absolute truth claims of historical discourse. There are several ways in which fictional literature can supplement and revise historical discourses. First, by placing historical events in the textual here and now of a story, the events are drawn into the actual experience of the reader, giving this experience a new directness and reality.21 Second, historical narration fulfills the need of the individual to situate himself in a broader context of space and historical continuity through storytelling.22 Third, the appropriation of a past through metaphors instead of “scientific objectivity” is necessary for the mental health of the whole community.23 Finally, a literary text is never presented as absolute, definitive or final, but only as way to explore possibilities, an invitation to the reader to keep his critical capacities alert and use his imagination to formulate relevant, significant interpretations in various contexts.24 Therefore, according to Brink, “history has become associated with the official, hegemonic interpretation of the world. But since we turn everything into language, we transform the events of every day into a story, ‘for it appears to

19  André Brink, Reinventing a Continent: Writing and Politics in South Africa (Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 1998), 6. 20  Ibid., 142. 21  Ibid., 242–243. 22  Ibid. 23  Ibid., 244. 24  Ibid.

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be the only way we can interpret the world to ourselves.’”25 This interpretation requires imagination rather than scholarship: turning history, whether “objective” or “subjective”, into a story involves more than drawing it into the private space of the observer and subjecting it, consciously or unconsciously, to the play of language. Above all, it involves the prestidigitations of the image, of “vision.” That is: the obvious links with the determining influence of tradition are suspended; an imaginary opening is created which makes it possible for events that originally appear fixed in time and space, canonised by convention, sanctioned by authority, to be reimagined.26 Because of its fictional nature, fictional literature is especially well-suited to question dominant views and construct subaltern views, which then open up new futures and possibilities for both communities and individuals. The potential of literature for historical interpretation is not limited to its fictional nature, which can break up the rigidity of pseudo-objectivity and the repressive effects of ideological views. The literary form also makes possible a destabilization of hegemonic discourses by mixing different forms of narrative representation, and fracturing the homogeneity of non-fictional discourses with insertions and additions. History then loses its linearity, its apparent continuities, its false claims. Historical narratives then become part of a negotiation, and re-negotiation, which has a therapeutic value, since it allows the ‘silenced’ voices to enter into ideological discourses and gives individuals the impression that they are part of processes that they can influence and change. These are the basic conditions for reconciliation in societies rent apart by historical conflicts and for the construction of identities on the basis of historical belonging. Only by subjectivizing history can the individual recognize himself in representations of history. The novel Imaginings of sand is about the relationship between history and storytelling, more particularly about the discourse of Afrikaner history set against the counter-discourses of women and black communities. It is set just before the 1994 elections, when it is clear that society will undergo a massive change and that the ideology of apartheid has lost its historical relevance. It 25  Quoted in Adrian Knapp, The Past Coming to Roost in the Present: Historicising History in Four African Novels: André P. Brink’s Imaginings of Sand, Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow (Stuttgart: IbidemVerlag, 2006), 31. 26  Ibid., 34.

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is this deconstruction of Afrikaner hegemonic discourse which makes possible, too, womens’ self-reflection about their role in this discourse and its relationship to unfolding events. The story is as follows: After living in England for seventeen years, Kristien Müller, the narrator, returns to the family farm in South Africa, near the fictitious town of Outeniqa (an image modeled on Oudtshoorn). A few weeks before the elections, tensions are high and the farm is firebombed by “terrorists.” In Outeniqa, Kristien is reunited with Anna, her elder sister, and Casper, Anna’s despotic husband, who is a staunch Afrikaner nationalist and a member of the local vigilantes hunting for ‘terrorists.’ The main character, in addition to Kristien, is her grandmother Ouma, who was injured by the assault on the farm and is dying. She has summoned Kristien to return to South Africa to listen to her stories, since she has chosen Kristien to become her ‘heiress’ and to preserve the treasure of stories that Ouma has stored in her memory. The stories are her testament, by which she wants to restore Kristien’s memory and persuade her to return to the farm permanently. She tells Kristien about the history of their family, and especially about the painful history of the women, who were severely repressed by their husbands but showed a remarkable resilience and strength of character. Her great-grandmother, grandmother, etc. were part of the legendary feats of the Afrikaners; they were treated as breeding machines and, under the stern doctrine of Calvinism, punished for any frivolities, but they also found ways to carve out their own spaces to pursue their dreams. Some of the stories are about women who fostered not so much Afrikaner history, but rather the integration of the Afrikaners into the African environment, such as Kamma, who acted as an intermediary between the colonizers and the African tribe of the Khoikhoi and whose adventurous and mysterious life became a legend. And the life story of a woman named Samuel, a ‘girl’ who became their ancestor, and who communicated with the Xhosa. These stories indicate that it was the Afrikaner women who were open to their environment, whereas the men maintained their fierce hostility toward the outside and combined this with a strict regime within the community. These women inserted their own histories – in the form of unofficial legends – into the ‘official’ version of Afrikaner history in South Africa, thereby mitigating the tendency of their histories to be enclosed on themselves. In this way, the women were able to find their own spaces in history by breaking out of the confines of the dominant, introverted regime. One of the central stories is about Ouma herself; she tells about her relationship with young men. In her youth she met Jethro, the son of a Jewish peddler, with whom she eloped, as she says, to Persia and Baghdad (‘On a magic carpet?’ Kristien asks). She describes their sojourn in Baghdad, where they stayed with

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a descendant of Sindbad. A friend of the Grand Vizier fell in love with her, however, after a duel with Jethro, the couple had to leave the town and returned home. There Ouma was respectably married to an Afrikaner man, except that she had returned from Baghdad pregnant. The child was Kristien’s mother, who thus did not descend from her official ‘Oupa’ (grandfather). This story is a good example of how history is mystified to reveal something that has remained hidden, unknown, at least in its official version; it is women who know the ‘truth’ about events that have been repressed and dismissed as anomalies. It is women who are in control of racial purity, and thereby of the myths of origin. This explains why the motif of illegitimate children recurs in Ouma’s stories so often. It is not only her child, but also the woman Samuel, Ouma’s grandmother, and her mother who also had children from unidentified men. Ouma’s mother, Rachel, declared that she “slept with the king of Africa”27 and was punished for her willfulness by being imprisoned in the basement of the house. There she made exuberant paintings on the wall, paintings that could still be seen in Kristien’s time. All these stories point clearly to a domain where women are sovereign, in the sense that they possess a knowledge which men, by definition, lack: who is the father of their children. It is clear, too, that stories about these ‘irregularities’ affect the foundations of the nationalist myths of racial purity and the strict moral codes concerning the virtue of women. Women thus have their own ‘sub-history,’ which directly, and almost naturally, subverts dominant male histories. From the beginning, it is clear that Ouma’s stories are at least partially inventions. When complimented on her good memory, Ouma retorts that her memory is so good that she even can remember things that have not happened.28 When Kristien remarks “I thought you were going to tell me the truth,” Ouma says: “No. I asked you to come so I could tell you stories.”29 Somehow, Kristien is aware of the shift toward fictionality, toward the dominant role of the imagination in the re-evaluation of the past. She begins to see how the imagination destabilizes fixed interpretations: I have the feeling, both unsettling and reassuring, of recovering something: not the story as such, snatched from what may or may not have been my history, but this strange urge of the real towards the unreal, as if it must find its only possible justification there. Father, I know, and Mother too, would have been shocked by this; their stark Calvinism did 27  André Brink, Imaginings of Sand (San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1999), 107. 28  Ibid., 4. 29  Ibid., 114.

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not allow for such invention. But have they not denied, in the process, precisely this surge of the imagination which links us to Africa, these images from a space inside ourselves which once surfaced in ghost stories and the tales and jokes and imaginings of travellers and trekkers and itinerant traders beside their wagons at night, when the fantastic was never more than a stone’s throw or an outburst of sparks away? How sad – no, how dangerous – to have suppressed all this for so long.30 The imagined, the fictional, thus represents a vital element of history, of the experience in history, and in its evaluation afterwards that prevents monolithic, fixed, and rigid interpretations. The function of fictionality is, paradoxically, to find some truth in the accounts of the past. It is “the fabric of our fictions” which betray “the predicament of our culture.”31 This fabric contains a certain reality which reality itself seems to lack: “An existence in suspense, somehow, in which, curiously, Ouma’s stories seem almost more real than the events surrounding me.”32 At the same time, they are real because they are inherent in persons who live, like Ouma, and who thereby give them a measure of truth. As long as the stories are conveyed, history is alive, it is part of the experiences of living people, and thus a means to escape from the confinements of ideology or morality. As long as history can be reshaped by the imagination, there is a way out of a reality which is narrowed by rigid ideas: “If you don’t know your history it becomes tempting to see everything that happens as your private fate. But once you know it you also realize you have a choice.”33 And, Behind and below history she has continued to spin her secret stories of endurance and suffering and survival, of women and mirrors … The configurations may be interchangeable; the myths persist, she has lived them into being. Why demand the truth, whatever it may be, if you can have imagination? I’ve tried the real, and I know it doesn’t work. The universe, somebody said, and I now know it is true, is made of stories, not particles; they are the wave functions of our existence. If they constitute the event horizon of our particular black hole they are also our only means to escape.34 30  Ibid., 96. 31  Ibid., 130. 32  Ibid., 195. 33  Ibid., 322. 34  Ibid., 322.

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Thus, from being mere invented stories, Ouma’s stories gradually move to the center of Kristien’s life, because she begins to realize how important the imagination is to define her place in reality. When she remarks “I thought it was just a story,” Ouma answers “Nothing is just a story.”35 On the one hand, this differentiates stories from ‘real’ history, but on the other hand, it reinserts them as an indispensable component of that history. The interaction between fiction and real history, the alternation of stories and real events, and the two domains’ penetration of each other, reflect the form and concept of the Thousand and one nights. In telling her stories, Ouma was clearly aware of Shahrazad as a model to be emulated; she says that the Arabian nights used to be her favorite book. Her storytelling, as a modern Shahrazad, summons the help of fictional invention and imagination to deconstruct a rigid and oppressive worldview. The nationalist, Calvinist framework of Afrikaner self-legitimation, which was as oppressive to women as it was to blacks, crumbles under the impact of her reinvention of it, while, importantly, in real life it succumbs to its own contradictions. As for Shahrazad, for Ouma, too, storytelling is an effort to postpone death and simultaneously to overcome it by passing the stories on to a new generation. Stories are absorbed by lives and vice versa. Ouma’s wondrous journey to Baghdad with her lover is, of course, an important reference to the Thousand and one nights. It is a story which is both a dream turned into reality, and a reality turned into a dream. Ouma had the courage to follow her dream and experience something beyond the possible. At the same time, this experience is turned into a story, as a way to represent its essence as something outside reality, outside the conceivable. By turning it into a story, the experience of it is mystified and becomes unreachable for others, it is concealed in metaphorical garb. However, it was also an escape, an imagined life that could not be incorporated into real life and that, therefore, had to be abandoned. But it was not in vain: a child was born. The magical element that is present in the Baghdad story is also important in Ouma’s other stories and, for that matter, in Kristien’s reality. In the stories and legends, the imagination of the protagonists acts directly on their reality, turning their obsessions and desires into objects, matter, and persons. For Ouma, it is her imagination that gives her the ability to communicate with the past, to talk to the souls of the dead, and to keep her desires alive. This ability has materialized in birds, which are present in great numbers around the house, and which embody the spirits of dead women and guard Ouma’s contact with the past. They accompany Ouma and intervene to protect her and to preserve their survival in the present. Although disguised, magic is thus 35  Ibid., 174.

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presented as an integral part of human existence, it interacts with the imagination and intervenes in reality. The idea of magic is connected to Ouma, but also to the house, which seems to be under a mysterious spell. As in Absalom, Absalom! and Beloved, the house plays a crucial role in the story, both as a setting and as a metaphorical construct. Traditionally, of course, houses, especially monumental houses as in these novels, are associated with stability, endurance, the continuation of history, power, autonomy, and shelter. In Absalom, Absalom! the house of Sutpen’s Hundred embodies these attributes, but at the same time, they are strangely undermined. The construction of the house is so sudden as to appear magical; its form, as a pompous palace, contradicts its environment; and it takes some time before it can be turned into a home. Still, it is meant to be the solid repository of a dynasty, a symbol of the owner’s power and wealth, and a stronghold that cannot be penetrated by foreign forces. All these characteristics turn out to be void, however, and the house, the dynasty, and the owner perish, because the house has not ‘grown’ out of a solid, fertile soil, but was, rather, artificially planted. It is a house without a past, without a natural relation to its environment. A similar estrangement is found in Sethe’s house in Beloved. At first sight, the house is a safe home and, after the bitter experience of slavery, the material manifestation of a new life. However, it is infested by a historical ‘curse,’ an unresolved remnant of the past. This ‘spell’ isolates the house from its surroundings; it is hostile toward visitors and unsafe for its inhabitants. Its solid walls are easily penetrated by the forces of the past, because these cannot be excluded by mortar and stone. The secret these walls want to keep out is present in its very structure and materializes in the person of Beloved. Both Sutpen’s Hundred and Sethe’s mansion are haunted by the past and by uncontrollable jinns. In Imaginings of sand, the house is also rather mysterious. It has housed numerous generations of the family and has thus withstood the forces of time. Still, from the beginning it was an ‘improbable’ house, situated in a desert-like space and shaped like the palace of the Queen of Sheba or the Taj Mahal. It is a three-story building with turrets, minarets, flèches, campaniles, domes, etc., a mix of Dutch, Greek, Italian, and Asian styles. With its strange appearance, the construction inspires temporality rather than stability; it is random, rather than permanent. The palace with its turrets, spires, domes and chimneys, looked like the wreck of a great ghost ship perched on a submerged rock or sandbank in a sea of petrified undulating plains, windswept and sun-scorched. A place where anything or everything was possible, might happen, did happen. At night it was visited by ghosts and ancestral spirits…. but even

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in daytime … it appeared mysterious, improbable, dream or nightmare, wishful thought or guilt-ridden vision, desperate and exuberant proof of the extreme the human mind, let loose, is capable of.36 It seems to be part of the imagination, not reality. This impression of disorientation is reflected in the inside, which is marked by an inextricable maze of passages, rooms, doors opening onto voids, closets, dead-end corridors, etc. Especially disturbing is the underground cavern, with the paintings on the wall, where Rachel was imprisoned. The house is a container of mysteries rather than a symbol of stability and shelter. It seems like a temporary abode, a watering place in the desert from which they would eventually set forth to their true destination. And this, I guess, explains the house. She never thought of it as a house. It was her ultimate boat, her ship, her ark, to redeem her from the corrupted world; the vessel in which, one day, when it behoved the lord God, she would sail forth to the sea that mightily washed the shores of her dreams.37 It is a house that represents nomadism rather than permanency; a passing rather than a natural bond with the soil. The house is simultaneously an ‘anchor’ in history and an illusion: With a sense of reassurance I return to the clump of trees in the distance, against the gaudy sky, and to the phantasm of the palace which once was the center of our universe, the spot on which all maps of the world took their bearing, the place where history began.38 In all three novels, Absalom, Absalom!, Beloved, and Imaginings of sand, the centrality of the house is accentuated by its ultimate desolation, by the disintegration of its symbolic integrity. It is remarkable that in all three cases it is the women who remain in the house, surviving in one way or another the destructive persistence of the past. Perhaps Imaginings of sand is the most optimistic of the three, since in the end, Kristien decides to stay in South Africa and continue Ouma’s heritage, according to her ‘testament’; she saves the house and the ‘treasury of stories’ that it embodies. Moreover, she uses the basement to 36  Ibid., 9. 37  Ibid., 104. 38  Ibid., 227.

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hide a wounded black fugitive, who waits for the regime change that will save his life and open up a promising future. In the end, Ouma’s death, postponed by her storytelling, coincides with the historic elections that usher in a new era. In Imaginings of sand, Kristien, who had left South Africa as an adolescent because she felt disconnected from her family and society, returns to find a nation in turmoil, on the verge of a historic transformation. Her own community is in the grip of fear and a reflexive self-preservation, at the cost of anything, it seems. The intransigence of the Afrikaners and the short-sighted obsolete nature of their ideology is personified by Casper, the violent nationalist, and Anna, his submissive wife and Kristien’s sister. Compared to their narrowmindedness, Ouma is a haven of peace and tranquility, in spite of the attack on her house and her terminal condition. It seems, however, that she has lost contact with reality and is immersed in incoherent musings. It seems irresponsible of her to want to return to the house to die. It is only her bond with Kristien which allows her to orchestrate the end of her life as she wishes. It is Ouma’s self-assigned task to ‘give Kristien her memory back,’ to acquaint her with the history of the family, not through official versions, but through stories and myths. It is through these myths that Kristien discovers that she has a history, that Ouma’s history is also hers.39 She needed a “return to older kinds of knowing, to withdraw again to that desert where Ouma and her spirits have roamed and where they are now in danger of extinction.”40 This newfound knowledge has awakened in Kristien a new sense of belonging to part of a prehistory, to a community that is imagined in a new, creative way: it has restored her ties with her past, and in doing so, has allowed her to develop a new sense of herself, her body, and her person as a part of South African society. This new self-awareness is also a form of empowerment. Her life was isolated, subject to a ‘private fate,’ but now it dawns on her that having a history, being a part of a society, provides the possibility of a choice,41 of determining one’s own destiny and fighting for it. This requires a revision of well-established self-images, however, a disentanglement of restrictive ideas and moral codes, and a new consciousness that all repressed groups in society have a common interest, that is, the overthrow of the regime. Ouma’s stories have made Kristien aware of the necessity to help all repressed individuals and groups return to their history and reassert their place in a new society. It is the miraculous component of history that makes such a return possible, a re-imagining of 39  Ibid., 125. 40  Ibid., 15. 41  Ibid., 322.

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one’s past from the perspective of the present. But, Kristien realizes, the price of appropriating her own history is giving up the pursuit of personal happiness and joining the common effort. Her return to South Africa is, ultimately, her return from ‘Baghdad.’ If we compare the way in which Faulkner approaches history in Absalom, Absalom! and Brink’s use of it in Imaginings of sand, they are similar in the way the past ‘haunts’ the lives of the protagonists in the present, and the way in which the past is reshaped in a process of narration. This basic form is derived from the Thousand and one nights, which is also concerned with interaction between real events and their narrative interpretations. In addition, the notion of history that emerges is in some respects similar: history is essentially subjective, shaped by collective and intellectual views, and by the process of narration itself. Visions of the past are constructed through struggle and negotiation and their control in the form of narration determines a person’s position in the present. An important difference can be seen in Absalom, Absalom!, in which a basic skepticism about the possibility of having a viable rendering of the past seems to prevail; by contrast, Brink seems to suggest that a new version of history can emancipate both women and blacks. In her critique of Brink’s novel, Kossew objects to Brink’s emancipatory vision of history, and accuses him of substituting one version of history for another. Although this accusation is certainly exaggerated, since Brink sincerely aims to dislodge fixed representations of history, there is some truth in it as well, first, because of Brink’s clear commitment to a new vision of society, and second, because he situates himself in Afrikaner history, as a revisionist rather than a radical skeptic. In doing this, he is more influenced by the historical predicament of his society than Faulkner, who proposes a skeptical vision of his own particular society. As Michael Green observes, a work of history may be considered as “historical” if it calls up the past, present, or future as a point of resistance to its own production of any of these moments; if other temporal periods are allowed to exist in all their difference from itself; if the very act of creating a particular moment in history is powerful enough to hold at bay the appropriation of that moment by that act of creation.42 Many years before Hayden White, Faulkner seems to have explored the narrativity of history. 42  In Knapp, The Past Coming to Roost, 9, 36.

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The Enchantment of History: Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie Sometimes it is not immediately obvious that a new trend in literature has organically emerged to form a more or less coherent current. The characteristics and boundaries of a new trend can also be defined, perhaps even invented, by literary critics. In the case of magical realism, for instance, we can see – in hindsight – that the strenuous efforts of critics to define, demarcate, describe, and typify a new movement in literature should be seen as efforts to revitalize stagnating conventions of mainstream world literature. One of the main essays shaping the new trend evokes Shahrazad as a paradigmatic figure. Following John Barth’s characterization of postmodernism as a ‘replenishment’ after the ‘exhaustion’ of the experimental phase of modernism, Wendy Faris refers to Shahrazad as a symbol of the self-generating vitality of narration. Moreover, she reiterates Brian McHale’s distinction between modernist skepticism as ‘epistemological’ and postmodern skepticism as ‘ontological,’ and points out that Shahrazad puts her own life at stake; this links narration to the ontological domain and symbolizes the real, life-threatening experiences of many magical realist authors.1 The main characteristics of magical realism, as listed by Faris, can be summarized as follows. Works of magical realism contain an ‘irreducible element of magic,’ that is, some apparently supernatural phenomenon which is incorporated in a carefully constructed sense of realism, a ‘strong presence of the phenomenal world,’ thus magic is assimilated into the natural world, causing the reader to hesitate between contradictory explanations of events. The intertwinement of reality and magic suggests ‘the closeness or near-merging of two realms,’ whose interacting forces shape the course of events. The estrangement caused by this interaction is treated from a Jungian instead of a Freudian perspective, that is, as part of a collective rather than of an individual’s consciousness. It incorporates elements of primitive, ancient systems of belief, to add layers to the subject’s experience of the world surrounding him and to suggest the presence of primeval, hidden forces.2 1  Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2003); Zamora and Faris (eds.), Magical Realism; Faris, “1001 Words”; Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 29. 2  Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 7, 15.

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These particularities of magical realism are supplemented by narrative strategies which are, perhaps, more common in postmodern literature in a broader sense, such as the use of metafiction, the complex relationship between language and the ‘real’ world, forms of repetition, the idea of metamorphosis, and what Faris calls a ‘carnivalesque spirit’ in the sense of Bakhtin. These strategies, together with the characteristics mentioned above, tend to put into question “received ideas about time, space, and identity,”3 by deconstructing the homogeneous nature of reality. Ultimately, magical realism contests the established order, both in the social sense, the hegemonic discourse of colonial and postcolonial hierarchies, and in the literary sense, the dominance of the western canon and western-centered standards of literary evaluation. It reveals the fissures in the hegemonic discourse of power, both in culture and in politics.4 This observation shows that the concept of magical realism has a strong political dimension. It is usually seen as a ‘counter-discourse,’ especially in the context of colonial relationships, which have been replaced by only slightly less repressive postcolonial relationships. It is often related to specific geographical areas, which share the postcolonial experience, and in societies, especially Latin America, Africa, and India, which are searching for autonomous discourses to give expression to this experience. However, even in former colonizing countries, such as Britain, and in ‘autonomous’ societies such as the United States and Canada, we can discern the voice of magical realism, especially among groups struggling for emancipation, such as women and blacks. An example of this is the novel Nights at the circus by Angela Carter, discussed above in chapter 2. It is clear that part of the determination to identify a new current can be explained, in part, by this political dimension; it is here that critics and authors found common ground. Now, over the course of time, magical realist literature has become part of mainstream literature. It is no longer part of a postcolonial, emancipatory subculture, and as a result, these demarcations of the genre seem rather artificial. Latin American literature, which became immensely popular throughout the world in the 1970s, rapidly lost its presumed status as a counter-discourse. We are justified in saying that it contributed to the emergence of world literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Its claims to literary innovation seem to have been rather exaggerated, too, since the interplay between realism and supernatural forces was present in modern European literature almost from its inception in the eighteenth century. Moreover, we can find many of the destabilizing effects of magical realism (causing complex views of reality 3  Ibid., 7. 4  Ibid., 135, 142, 165.

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and using intricate literary techniques), and some of its aims in modernist literature as well. We can also argue that one of the main causes of the modernist’s dissatisfaction with the world was caused by an increasing awareness of the heterogeneity of the world under the influence of globalization and the pressures of capitalism. It would seem, therefore, that magical realism was not as new and original as was claimed. However, it did use familiar elements in new ways, it emerged in a specific historical context, and it saved many readers from the imbroglio of modernist experimentalism. Thus, it succeeded in giving fiction a new impetus that fit well in the circumstances. Because of its overt connections with political contexts and, more specifically, with a re-evaluation of the colonial heritage, works of magical realism often seek to embed their stories in the historical past. Critics usually point to the ways in which the precolonial past and indigenous traditions are invoked to qualify the colonizer’s vision of history, to restore a connection with precolonial history, and to discuss a view of identity which is not wholly dominated by colonial discourse. The main aim is to accept myths and indigenous religiosity as a part of history and even as a part of the present, and thereby undermine the essentialized, rational, and positivist representations of the past that characterize colonial discourse. In this way, a sense of a separate, indigenous tradition should be restored, by dismantling the imposed colonialist’s tradition, and defining an autonomous identity. This identity is always hybrid, as it combines the various strands of history. As Faris indicates in her book, the emergence of magical realism as a literary trend is organically related to the Thousand and one nights, both in its conceptual premises and its formal strategies. In this section, we discuss three works which are generally seen as prototypal examples of magical realism and which are closely related to the Thousand and one nights: Gabriel García Márquez’s One hundred years of solitude and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s children and Shame.

Gabriel García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude

The work of the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) has become an iconic example of magical realism. His novel, One hundred years of solitude (1967), has not only enjoyed enormous popularity throughout the world, it has also set a new standard for a certain kind of literature, a literature that gave previously colonized societies a voice by which to challenge and diverge from the literature of the western canon, which effused the colonizer’s view. The work not only presents an ambitious all-encompassing view of the

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relationship between colonization and historiography; it also exemplifies a new, vital vision of Latin American’s predicament, as it struggled with its colonial past and searched for a self-sustained future. Apart from this, it helped Latin American literature storm the arena of world literature, by not only questioning the dominance of western literature with regard to literary taste and political relevance, but also by providing a new model for writers from the ‘peripheries’ all over the world. The book is an intricate account of the Buendía family and the other inhabitants of Macondo, the town they founded somewhere in Latin America, in the forest not far from the sea. The history begins when Juan Arcadio marries his cousin Ursula, in spite of a prediction that their offspring will be born with pigtails, as a punishment for their incestuous relationship. Juan Arcadio and Ursula refrain from sexual intercourse, but when he is publicly humiliated by his neighbor Prudencia, Juan Arcadio takes his wife violently. Although Juan Arcadio kills him, Prudencia continues pestering him in his dreams and the couple decide to leave their hometown and establish their own settlement, Macondo. Here the family proliferates and produces a multifarious progeny of colorful sons and daughters, whose lives not only reflect the peculiarities of the Buendía family but also gradually become entangled in Latin American history. In the end, the curse resting on the family from the onset becomes reality: When the great-grandson of Ursula and Juan Arcadio, Aureliano, is born from the incestuous relationship between Aureliano and Amaranta ursula, he has a pigtail; the prediction has come true and Macondo is wiped off the face of the earth. It is not necessary to discuss the story, or rather stories, contained in One hundred years of solitude in detail here, since the book is well-known and sufficiently described by other critics. The novel is a colorful mix of life stories and events that evoke not only the saga of the Buendía family and Macondo, but also a vision of history, or perhaps more correctly, of the relationship between time and the recording of history. Critics have indicated the features of the novel that cause it to be associated with magical realism: its allencompassing scope; its incorporation of myth; its presentation of reality as steeped in magic, through the unequivocal acceptance of the working of unnatural forces in the ‘real’ world; and finally, the suggestion that the work is a commentary on, or even a rewriting of Latin American history, an alternative representation which rejects the one-dimensional visions of colonial discourse. Thus, the work is unshakably embedded in the model of magical realism. Here we do not contest this classification, rather we discuss one aspect of the novel and relate it to the influence of the Thousand and one nights: the

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conceptualization of history. We show that the way in which the treatment of history is usually analyzed is problematic. The central figure that problematizes any discussion about the nature of the text and the treatment of history is Melquiador. In the first years of Macondo, Melquiador came to the town as a traveling merchant, bringing all kinds of wondrous and exotic goods. At a certain point, he no longer appears and it is said that he has died. Some years later he re-appears; he has risen from the grave, seemingly as an immortal, mythical figure. He retires in a separate room of the Buendía estate; this room reveals strange, supernatural qualities, in particular, it stops the passage of time. He works on apparently indecipherable manuscripts. When he dies, once again, the room is deserted or used for practical purposes for some time, until Aureliano Buendía begins decoding the manuscript. When he finally succeeds in reading the text, it turns out to contain the history of Macondo and the life stories of the Buendías, including himself. In the final lines, he reads about the prediction of Macondo’s doom, and as he reads it, destruction overtakes him. As we see below, this layer of the story determines the way in which it relates to history and how the novel presents itself as a text, problematizing all referentiality to historical context. It also links the work to the Thousand and one nights, as a narrative device that enables the text to transcend the regular concept of time. On several occasions, Gabriel García Márquez expressed his indebtedness to the Thousand and one nights as a literary model. The work was among the first books that he read as a child and it continued to inspire him. The Nights is mainly associated with the radiant vitality of storytelling, drenched in a wealth of fantasy and boundless fabulation. This power of storytelling is easily detected in One hundred years of solitude, with its manifold anecdotes and life stories that show the vibrant imagination and extravagance of a born storyteller. As in the Nights, the stories are, for the most part, not told in a straightforward way; they are interrupted, they circulate, they are deferred, and they mingle into flowing plaits of tales. The novel does not consist of a single story that steadily develops into a plot; rather, it is a huge confluence of stories related to persons and events. The stories are either brought to Macondo through specific persons, or are derived from the inner disposition of the characters. Their unfolding seems to lack a preconceived order. Its formal resemblance with the Thousand and one nights is reinforced by a conceptual parallel: The whole complex of stories is unleashed by an anomaly with far-reaching consequences, in this case, incest results in a curse that detaches the history of the Buendía family and Macondo from the regular course of history and places it in a kind of liminal situation, in which time,

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actions, and events are subject to a superior power that will one day intervene. Thus, the whole set of stories emerges as a form of deferral, an effort to ward off the fatal moment and, perhaps, to investigate the possibilities of escaping that fate. Time is not suspended, but it takes on a different meaning, since it can only be calculated in relation to the final effectuation of the curse. The idea of deferral is also projected into several episodes in the story, for instance, when Aureliano remembers events while confronting a firing squad, or when Amaranta continues postponing marriage. These formal references to the Thousand and one nights are supported by thematic links and references to Arabs. As others have remarked, in the beginning, the communication between Macondo and the outer world is conducted by gypsies and Arabs who visit the town with their merchandise and all kinds of marvelous objects. At first, these ‘gypsies’ are identified as Melquiades’s tribe, but after his death they keep turning up, although their goods become less sophisticated; they show themselves to be ‘purveyors of amusement’ rather than ‘heralds of progress.’ When they bring a flying carpet, “they did not offer it as a fundamental contribution to the development of transport, rather as an object of recreation.”5 Later all trade is in the hands of Arabs, also called ‘Turks,’ and they swap a variety of goods for macaws. Apart from the flying carpet, a reference to the Thousand and one nights can be found in the show with the “women who must have her head chopped off every night at this time for one hundred fifty years as punishment for having seen what she should not have.”6 Finally, at a carnival, strangers disguised as Bedouins appear with rifles under their Moorish robes.7 In the end, the Arabs are no longer a source of fascination, but they retain their timelessness and fatalism; the Arabs of the ‘third generation’ sit in the same place and position as their fathers and grandfathers, “taciturn, dauntless, invulnerable to time and disaster.”8 The motif of the Arab immigrants and the Thousand and one nights is a structural element that recurs throughout the book, mainly as an alien element that gradually becomes part of the history of the town. At a certain point, with the birth of the twins Aureliano Segundo and José Arcadio Segundo, it penetrates into the core of the history of the Buendía family. The twin brothers look so much alike that they cannot be distinguished and they have been,

5  Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 31. 6  Ibid., 33. 7  Ibid., 206. 8  Ibid., 337.

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perhaps, mistaken for each other.9 The usual distinction between the José Arcadios, who are impulsive, enterprising, but marked by a tragic sign, and the Aurelianos, who are withdrawn, but with a lucid mind, does not apply to the twin brothers. Nevertheless, it is Aureliano who enters the locked room, where there is no dust, where the ink is still wet, and the air is fresh, and where embers are still glowing in the water pipe. And it is Aureliano who is, from his youth, fascinated by the Thousand and one nights, and its stories about magic lamps and flying carpets, stories that often have no ending and which he accepts as true.10 Aureliano Segundo is described as indulging in a fantasy; he is fatalistic, lazy, idolatrous, and a libertine. He lives with Petra Cotes, perhaps “the only native who had an Arab heart,”11 who transformed him from a reserved youth into a man who enjoys the pleasures and good things of life and indulges in exoticism and adultery. The couple are tremendously favored by fortune, and this induces them to set up a lottery to earn their living. Meanwhile, their home gradually takes on the appearance of a mosque.12 They have velvet curtains in their bedroom, with percale sheets, Persian rugs, plush bedspreads, velvet drapes, a canopy embroidered with gold thread and silk tassels on the ‘episcopal’ bed.13 Aureliano lives among this splendor like a “sultan of Persia”14 Although less exuberant, his brother is also marked by a touch of Arabness, with his ‘Arab eyes,’ and his linearity, his solemnity, his pensive air and the “sadness of a Saracen.”15 At first it is Aureliano who locks himself in the mysterious room to study Melquiades’s manuscript. He has a meeting with Melquiades – already dead at that time – who tells him that he can only know the meaning of the manuscripts when he is a hundred years old. In the meantime, José Arcadio Segundo digs canals and succeeds in connecting Macondo to the world outside; a new ‘Street of the Turks,’ with Arab merchants, replaces the old bazaars. When Aurelio Segundo has given up studying the manuscript, the locked room seems to fall into decay, but José Arcadio Segundo still finds it serene, clean and undamaged, with no dust and pure air. He starts deciphering the manuscript and teaches his cousin Aureliano how to read it. In one of his appearances, Melquiades tells Aureliano that the manuscript is written in Sanskrit and that 9  Ibid., 186–187. 10  Ibid., 189, 322. 11  Ibid., 337–338. 12  Ibid., 197. 13  Ibid., 337–338. 14  Ibid., 332. 15  Ibid., 267.

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he will have to learn Sanskrit “during the years remaining until the parchments became one hundred years old, when they could be deciphered.”16 After his final disappearance, the room again falls prey to “dust, heat, termites, ants, and moths.”17 It is the episode of the twin brothers which reveals the central role of the Thousand and one nights in the novel. With them an Arabic component reveals itself in the core of the family, both in their characters and in their appearance. They are complementary to each other, as each has an active and a contemplative side. Aureliano Segundo is more inclined to pleasure and fantasy, while José Arcadio Segundo prefers constructive activities and has a bright intelligence. As a result of their combined abilities, they are able to succeed in penetrating the secrets of the manuscript written by Melquiades, and transferring their knowledge to Aureliano. Moreover, the nature of the manuscript becomes clear: on the one hand, it will reveal its secret only after great effort and a pre-ordained span of time, while on the other hand, it will crumble and disintegrate from material dilapidation. Like the Thousand and one nights, it symbolizes the combination of deferral and ultimatum which is characteristic of the novel as a whole: through the curse, Macondo, too, lives on trying to postpone the inescapable moment of destruction. The story of One hundred years of solitude is principally a history, the account of the rise and fall of Macondo and the Buendía family. Although it is anecdotal and fragmented in form, it is structured as a historical text; it follows the family line of the Buendías, through the descendants of the primeval mother and father Ursula and Juan Arcadio. This family saga shows some consistency and underlying stability, but it is also related to processes of change. The isolated town is gradually opened up and linked to the wider environment of history, through travelers, trade, and dramatically, by the establishment of the banana company. Through these links, Macondo is situated in the broader history of Colombia and Latin America, which is symbolized by its relentless exploitation at the hands of the banana company and the career of Captain Aureliano Buendía, who participates in numerous wars, rebellions, and revolutions. In the end, he returns home almost unharmed, but convinced of the uselessness of all the bloodshed: “All we’re fighting for is power.”18 As is clear from its intricate, anecdotal form, the story is not a straightforward historical account according to scholarly or literary requirements. It is a history that is told on various levels, at the level of Macondo, and its symbolic 16  Ibid., 362. 17  Ibid., 263. 18  Ibid., 172.

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contents, at the level of the Buendía family, and at the level of individuals. It is precisely the interaction between these different levels that breaks up the homogeneous continuity of the account. Furthermore, in line with the magical realist genre, the account is not restricted to the positivist, rational, probable domain of history, but allows ample space for the improbable, the strange, the irrational, and even the ineffable layers of history. It allows, so to speak, the mythical element to penetrate the historical account; this not only destabilizes its coherence and comprehensibility, but also challenges the idea of history itself. Perhaps history as a phenomenon that can be known and comprehended does not exist; a history permeated by ‘myth’ is perhaps more truthful, but we are not certain that it can be called a history. These characteristics of the treatment of history in One hundred years of solitude seem to conform to the generic type of magical realism, as mentioned above. First, the story acknowledges the significance of a historical dimension for the interpretation of events. The events are history, so to speak, and show a causal relationship, at least in part, and development through time. Second, this historical component is given a political significance through the description of the ways in which Macondo is affected by processes such as colonialism and trade, political struggles, imperialist interference, etc., which not only determine the internal conflicts of the town, but also reveal a view of Latin American history. The novel is a critical review of this history and seems to be meant to expose abuses, the senselessness of political violence, and the futility of ideologies as a cover for greed and the lust for power. In the end, there is no leading principle steering the course of history, which is, rather, the outcome of a wildly varied array of influences and incidents. Third, the history of Macondo as it is told in One hundred years of solitude is steeped in what is usually called ‘myth.’ All the events have various dimensions, ranging from their actual deployment in real life to, it seems, an imagined version, which seems irrational, but which turns out to be just as much a part of real life. This mythical dimension is as significant for the course of events as logical causes and effects, and as the actions of the characters are. It seems to relate the history of Macondo to some supernatural ‘history’ or an underlying history that determines the parameters in which ‘real’ history takes place. It is suggested that this supernatural layer of history is tied to Macondo itself and the Buendía family, thus linking it to a localized identity that is set off against external influences and a wider environment. It is the peculiarities of Macondo’s history that give it its authenticity, which is largely impenetrable from outside. This is also the reason this history, and thus Macondo itself, cannot be controlled, not from inside, nor from the outside. The inconsistencies and illogical nature of Macondo and the Buendías make it resistant to all

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forms of control, except, to an extent, by the Buendías themselves, who are the source of the irrationality. This systematic incorporation of history as a structuring principle, which apparently links the novel securely to the paradigm of magical realism, is deceptive, however. Perhaps the ahistorical characteristics are even more forceful and decisive for an evaluation of the story as a whole. First, in spite of the many references to history, it seems that Macondo is as far removed from history as it is embedded in it. Its origins are derived from a curse, which places it, so to speak, outside the regular pattern of history and subjects it to at least one irrational force. It can be argued that what is meant by the ‘solitude’ of Macondo in the title is precisely this exile from history, the lifting of ‘normal’ historical mechanisms and the subjugation of the Buendías to a force that does not obey the regular mechanisms of time and place. What is special about Macondo, almost its raison d’être, is not its history, but rather its ahistoricity. Its isolation from history is perhaps most aptly symbolized by the remains of the Spanish galleon which the first expedition stumbles upon during its search for the sea. The wreck represents the boundary nec plus ultima of the historical depth of Macondo. This boundary is crossed by the advance of modernity, not by the reconnection of the town to its colonial and precolonial past. It is often argued that the presence of myth as a factor in the representation of history functions as a reincorporation of the precolonial past and a reconnection with the enchanted worldview of the indigenous populations. In One hundred years of solitude, the mythical dimension of history has no such role, as there is hardly any reference to an indigenous population. It is the descendants of the Spaniards and Arabic immigrants who dominate the stage. The most ‘indigenous’ element that emerges in the saga of Macondo is Rebecca, who suddenly appears out of nowhere, mumbling an Indian dialect, carrying the bones of her parents in a bag, and eating earth uncontrollably. A more painful image of estrangement from the native soil can hardly be imagined: Rebecca no longer has any identity related to a territory and a land, which she still craves, even if only to bury the remains of her parents. Here, too, the mythical component stresses isolation and estrangement, in one word ‘solitude,’ rather than a belonging to an indigenous past which is smoothly incorporated into a new vision of colonial history. Macondo is isolated precisely because it is an alien enclave in a strange land with which it has no shared past. These observations show that in One hundred years of solitude there is no straightforward relationship between the representation of history and an effort to revise views or discourses of the past or to support specific political opinions. If it aims at demarcating a specific postcolonial identity, the result is rather bleak: it would seem that the Buendías represent an identity that will be wiped away rather than embody a vision of the future. It is true that, in line

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with the tenets of magical realism, discourses of history are destabilized, but the result of this destabilization is not a re-assessment, but a collapse, perhaps even because no indigenous element is incorporated and because it is so difficult to establish cultural ties that go beyond the act of discovery and colonization. Macondo is cut off from its Spanish forebears as much as it is from the indigenous population. Perhaps Màrquez wants to argue that if it does not ‘invent’ an inclusive history for itself, Latin America will be destroyed by its primeval curses. This view of the place of history in One hundred years of solitude is supported by the way in which it is linked to the nature of the narrative as a text. Many critics point to the complex temporal structure of the narrative, which suggests that the story does not unfold in a regular passage of time. First, there is a recurrent motif of clairvoyance combined with prolepsis. Somehow, in the members of the Buendía family, past, present, and future converge, either because they can predict the future or because they seem to withstand the passage of time, defying illness and death. Second, the combination of the curse and the establishment of Macondo, which finally ends with the realization of the curse and the destruction of Macondo, indicates that Macondo has somehow been removed from the regular passage of time and is subject to a separate temporal regime, with its own pace and an inner sequential structure. The rise and decline of Macondo take place in a timeframe which is inherently detached from its environment; it is here that it faces its pre-established fate. Macondo symbolizes a suspension of time, in which the forces at work are consequently separated from historical reality. This interpretation of Macondo as a spatiotemporal enclave is accentuated by the figure of Melquiades, the ‘great magician,’ who comes from outside but is somehow intimately connected to the fate of the town. When he returns to Macondo after his death – restoring the memory of the inhabitants – he has a mysterious power over death. He seems to be immortal and predicts the future of Macondo. The room in which he works on his manuscript is curiously placed outside the grip of time; it is resistant to the passage of time and to the decay caused by it. From his vantage point he can survey everything that happens without being part of it; it is a magical enclosure that is part of a different spatiotemporal structure. When Melquiades dies a second time, and is safely buried, the room remains subject to its separate time regime, though this apparently depends on who enters it. Aurelio Segundo and José Arcadio Segundo, who work on the manuscript, which may be the source of the spell, experience the same sense of timelessness as Melquiades. These elements all contribute to a disturbance of the time regime in the story, which, taking the title of the book into account, is essential to the narrative. The main motif definitively confirming the spatiotemporal claustrophobia

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within the narrative is its ending. It turns out that the lifespan of Macondo coincides with the text of the manuscript of Melquiades, and that the fulfillment of the curse and the destruction of the town precisely coincide with the deciphering of the last lines of the manuscript. Apparently, the manuscript contained Macondo’s history, not by merely describing it, but by being it. Macondo never had a history; it was never more than a text. The whole history of Macondo was an invention of Melquiades in the form of a text, which ends, logically, when the text has been read. It is the decipherment of the text which measures the real passage and structure of time: completing it implies the annihilation of its contents, the end of its history. But the reader is also actively (though perhaps not consciously) involved in becoming redundant by completing his reading of the text. Still, this reading, too, is subject to delay, postponement, and irregularities; it is predicted that it will take a hundred years, which, from the extra-temporal position of Melquiades, may be nine months, four hours, or one second. It is a time that only exists in the imagination, dissociated from ‘real’ time. If we consider the time structure of One hundred years of solitude as a purely intra-textual construction, it is difficult to situate the text in any historical discourse. It does not refer to historical circumstances or even historical discourses; it rather asks how – perhaps in the Latin American context – it is possible to relate a text to historical events, or if it is even possible to record history at all. Because of its isolation, or ‘solitude,’ there is no history to be written; there is only an imagined past inhabiting a desolate presence. But perhaps even this effort to relate the novel to history and historical discourse is artificial; perhaps the text does not intend to use a text to explain what history is; perhaps it uses history to explore the nature of texts. The text is not a response to a historical episode; the historical episode is invented to reveal how texts operate and how the author and reader are involved in the process of constructing a story. Epic and Novel As I have argued elsewhere,19 one of the main characteristics of the Thousand and one nights, in the frame story, some of the embedded stories, and in the narrative concept, is the struggle between two discourses, on the one hand that of Shahriyar, which is absolutist, violent, stagnant, circular, closed, predetermined, and rigid, and on the other hand that of Shahrazad, which is open, imaginative, individual, and historically contingent. In the end, by telling her stories, Shahrazad succeeds in crumbling Shahriyar’s rigid ‘discourse’ and replacing it with a more sophisticated and less pre-determined ‘discourse’ that 19  See van Leeuwen, The Thousand and One Nights.

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re-establishes the regular relationship between Shahriyar and his environment. These two conflicting discourses are, of course, indicative of different views of life, Shahriyar’s vision of a world dominated by power, violence, and rationality; and Shahrazad’s vision of the essential unpredictability of human life and the predominance of human inventiveness and imagination. The battle takes place in the field of storytelling, because, as Shahrazad shows, the continuity of life, the continuation of history, and the preservation of humanity are vested in narration, in the possibility of representing the passage of time in the form of a story. These two conflicting discourses can be related to Bakhtin’s formulation of an opposition between two narrative modes, the epic mode, and the novelistic mode. The epic mode is marked by its circular perception of time, a temporal structure that is enclosed in its own narrative logic, emblematic characters who have no agency of their own, and a kind of historical predestination that imbues history with a rigid, unavoidable fate. The novelistic mode, by contrast, is defined by an essential openness, a direct relationship to historical time, the individual agency of the characters, and a radical contingency. The emergence of the novelistic mode reveals the rise of a new vision of the world, a new discourse that questions established hierarchies, and acknowledges the unpredictability, even the uncontrollability, of human destiny. History is brought down to a human scale that allows the individual to seek his role, possibly in defiance of pre-ordained rules and conventions. The tensions and irregularities in the representation of history in One hundred years of solitude are usually ascribed to the intrusion of what is called ‘myths.’ These myths are incorporated to destabilize the hegemonic, rational view of history that favors the colonizers’ perspective. Instead, a more subjective, possibly irrational representation allows more space for an indigenous, autonomous interpretation of history, one that stresses the element of imaginative interpretation as a means to penetrate the ‘true’ historical experience of the population. As far as I know, only Tzvetan Todorov links the historical peculiarities of the novel not with an artificial combination of history and myth, but with a confrontation between epic and novel.20 The story is not about a conflict between two visions of history, but rather a clash between two genres, and the novel is the account of this struggle. If we take Todorov’s argument as a starting point and elaborate on it somewhat, we can say that One hundred years of solitude is constructed on a pattern that is initiated by the incest curse. The curse not only creates a temporal 20  Tzvetan Todorov, “Macondo en París,” in Peter G. Earle (ed.), Gabriel García Márquez, 104–113 (Madrid: Taurus, 1987).

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enclave, it also sets in motion a rigid sequence of events and figures which somehow seem to be predetermined, partially because the curse inhabits the various characters. The Buendías are identified by their characters and, it seems, by their predestined roles. Todorov mentions the distinction between the José Arcadios and the Aurelianos of the family, whose temperaments are linked to their names. In spite of this inevitability of their fate, the characters seek their individuality and freedom from pre-established patterns; they try to develop agency for themselves, a volition, a way to break out. However, instead of ‘recreating’ themselves and gaining the freedom to choose their own life, they become imprisoned in the main quality which characterizes them, some inherent peculiarity that links them to the pattern from which they try to escape. It is here that the supernatural element comes in: the peculiarities of the characters, which seem to represent their individuality, are exaggerated to extravagant proportions, not in order to associate them with myth or subjectivity, but precisely to show that they are imprisoned in the pre-established pattern. They become not individuals, but caricatures of themselves; they do not acquire agency, rather their function as emblematic figures is reproduced within the pattern. This layer of the narrative, which is imposed by the curse and by the incestuous inheritance of the Buendías, can be seen as the epic matrix that holds the characters in its grip. It is the layer that contains the curse and the ultimatum predicting Macondo’s final doom. Melquiades guards the fulfillment of the curse, the structuring of the Buendía story, the deferral of the decipherment of the manuscript, and the epic content of the characters from his position both within and outside the story itself. He entered the story on a specific level in order to control it, as a master plotter, and to write it in such a way that he is able to control it: the outcome of the story must be predestined, the characters must retain their emblematic ‘solitude,’ Macondo must remain encapsulated in its time cocoon, the text must remain subject to its inherent deferral mechanism, temporizing the decipherment of the manuscript. The epic pattern is shaken, to some extent, by the birth of José Arcadio Segundo and Aurelio Segundo, who look so much alike that they mitigate the sharp division between the Arcadios and Aurelianos, and they show their complementarity in two people who are actually one. They also introduce an ‘intellectual’ and pragmatic element in the family: Aureliano Segundo reads the oriental tales and José Arcadio Segundo opens up Macondo for trade and economic development. After great family members had acquired proficiency and fame as artisans, as a revolutionary commander, or as a dictatorial administrator, José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo become interested in matters of the mind and culture. They are the ones who start deciphering

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the manuscript, entering the epic domain to find the key to the mystery. José Arcadio Segundo teaches his nephew Aureliano how to read the manuscript and it is he who in the end acquires enough knowledge of Sanskrit to read it completely. In spite of these more individual, ‘novelistic,’ qualities, José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo also have their epic sides. José Arcadio Segundo becomes involved in the massive strike at the banana company, which is followed by a mass execution of the workers, while Aureliano Segundo becomes, increasingly, a caricature of an eastern sultan – lazy, hedonistic, and fatalistic, he looks for treasures rather than work. Still, they pave the way for Aureliano, who is more of an individual than all the Buendías before him. His life is restricted to human proportions, which is symbolized by the Catalonian’s bookshop that he frequents, in particular for the books he needs to understand the manuscript. It is in the bookstore that he meets with his four friends to exchange views on literature and life. The bookstore can be seen as a spatial counterpart of Melquides’s mysterious room; it is an enchanted place, the first dominates the realm of the ‘epic’ component, while the second is part of real life, and dominates the realm of the ‘novelistic’ component. The bookstore, invulnerable to the curse of the epic, contains the key to unravel the epic. Among the friends who visit the bookshop, in fact, Aureliano’s best friend, is a certain Gabriel Márquez. The two have a mysterious bond and “were linked by a kind of complicity based on real facts that no one believed in, and which had affected their lives to the point that both of them found themselves off course in the tide of a world that had ended and of which only nostalgia remained.”21 They represent a worldview based on facts, one which defies the epic worldview that holds all the others in its grasp. Still, whereas Melquiades gradually retired before the acumen and perseverance of Aureliano, the representatives of the other side withdraw too. The Catalonian moves back to Spain, and the bookstore, the stronghold of the anti-epic group, closes. Most of his life the bookseller was writing in notebooks, in this analphabetic environment, again, as a counterpart of Melquiades. In the end, Gabriel Márquez also retires; he decides to move to Paris with the complete works of Rabelais. Now that the main protagonists of the struggle have left the scene, the story comes to an end. The text, which has always, and only, been a form of postponement, can only end with the destruction of its contents, the fulfillment of the curse that brought it into being. Seen in this way, One hundred years of solitude is not about the history of Macondo, or about the history of Latin America, or the conflicting historical 21  Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 396.

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discourses. It is about Gabriel García Márquez writing a book about Melquiades writing a book about Gabriel García Márquez. The story is about two ‘authors’ struggling to gain control of a text, using the characters as weaponry, one represents the ‘epic’ side, the other represents the ‘novelistic’ side. It is Márquez who began telling the story to counter the curse, while Melquiades entered to anchor the curse in a divinatory text, allowing Márquez the time to develop his characters as much as he could, in the novelistic sense. But Márquez is unable to withdraw them from the domain of the epic, which forces them into their emblematic roles and keeps them in their liminal situation by preventing them from living in a ‘real’ world, a novelistic spatiotemporal regime. At the same time, Márquez pushes them to conquer their individuality, to throw off the burden of the curse, to enter a ‘real’ space-time domain that allows them to break the spell. Like Shahrazad, Gabriel García Márquez uses narrative to postpone and, ultimately, to try to avert the looming catastrophe linked to Melquiades’s epic regime. Using the concepts of the epic and the novel as developed by Bakhtin in this way, it becomes clear that One hundred years of solitude is not a novel that uses a story to present a vision of what history might be, rather, it is a novel that uses history to show which forces are at work in constructing a story, or perhaps even which conflicting forces are needed to tell a story. Perhaps it suggests that in spite of their irreconcilability, both components are unavoidable, because it is the struggle between the two that creates the literary space, the liminal space of deferral, which is the precondition of all stories. When we read One hundred years of solitude in this manner, we can see that it is steeped in the narrative concepts and strategies of the Thousand and one nights. References to the text appear in crucial instances; narrative techniques are not only used throughout the novel, but also the concept of the work, which shapes the peculiar effect of the narrative confrontation, is exploited to the full. The opposition between an epic mode and a novelistic mode results in a stream of stories and a vision of reality, but also a text that is self-contained, without referentiality, since it represents only an episode in which life and narration converge. The story is about Márquez fighting with his demon, Márquez transforms life and time into a story, and forces a story out of the resilient matter of the epic condition which tries to impose itself on him. Márquez successfully survives the struggle, not by continuing his narration, but by leaving the battlefield when the magic is exhausted. It remains unclear whether the curse is effectuated, because Márquez leaves Macondo and thus gives up the fight; or perhaps he leaves Macondo because the curse would inevitably be effectuated. In any case, when storytelling ends, life ends. Regardless of the authorship of the text, be it Melquiades or Márquez, the reader gradually becomes aware that the novel he is reading is, in fact, the text

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of the manuscript written in the mysterious room, the story of the establishment and destruction of Macondo, where the struggle between Melquiades and Márquez takes place.

Salman Rushdie: History Gone Awry

After Gabriel García Márquez, the most famous writer associated with the genre of magical realism is probably Salman Rushdie (b. 1947), who gained prominence with his novels Midnight’s children (1981) and The satanic verses (1988). The latter acquainted him with the ‘sense of an ending,’ in the literal sense meant by Wendy Faris, when The satanic verses became the cause of a fatwa issued, in 1989, by the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini, who called for Rushdie’s execution as an apostate. This dramatic event made the book the object of worldwide intellectual – and not so intellectual – debate, not only as the focus of a political controversy, but also with regard to its literary merits and strategy, and, more fundamentally, about the place of fictional literature in a globalized world. In particular, it raised questions about the relationship between fictional narratives and religious discourse, and the differing opinions about potential clashes between the two in the western and Muslim worlds. Is fictional literature a domain of unlimited freedom, in which to express ethical and political opinions? Has religion any moral authority over the literary imagination? It seems that Salman Rushdie meets the criteria of the category of magical realism, at least with regard to his commitment. He is a typical example of a postcolonial intellectual in the globalizing world; he represents the stage of transition between independence, state formation, the emancipation of excolonial societies, and the clash between old hegemonic colonial discourses and new emancipatory ideologies. He is a perfect representative of what Homi Bhabha has described as ‘hybridity’; that is, intellectuals in the interstitial space between hegemonic and subaltern societies and cultures. He is an Indian from a wealthy family, though his roots are in postcolonial India, he was educated in Britain, and focused on establishing a position in the English-centered segment of world literature. Although he spent his life in the West, especially after the fatwa, he never lost this image of being ‘in-between,’ in a limbo besieged by two opposite worlds. Although Salman Rushdie seems to fit well into the categories of magical realism, it is remarkable that, although he fiercely criticizes and satirizes British society and attitudes, he directs his arrows more systematically against authoritarian discourses in the non-western world, especially India, Pakistan, and Iran. In each case, he uses deliberate narrative strategies to destabilize and

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satirize these discourses, unmasking their monolithic and intolerant nature, revealing inconsistencies and contradictions and subverting various kinds of truth claims. These hegemonic discourses, those of the ex-colonizers and those the ex-colonized, are often based on rigid definitions of identities; Rushdie not only criticizes these one-dimensional notions, he also substitutes his own ‘hybrid’ definitions of identity in their place and, instead of lamenting his imprisonment in postcolonial hybridity, he celebrates his position in between and his multifarious identity built from many different components, both indigenous and foreign. Rushdie’s concern with postcolonial politics and identities evidently pushes him into the field of history. In Rushdie’s novels history has two faces: first, history consists of an enormous repository of traditions, cultural habits and attitudes, and social structures and hierarchies which penetrate, perhaps even dominate, the present, in practices or in (hegemonic) ideologies; second, history is a process which is unfolding in the presence of the protagonists. History is being made in the moment itself. Events surrounding the protagonists and their own adventures take place not just in a passage of time, or in a haphazard concurrence ideally ruled by the laws of cause and effect; they are also part of a historical framework which is being shaped around them and includes them. Life is being part of history, whether you want it or not, and powerful forces are at work to determine its shape and to ensure that you assume your proper role in it and realize it. Within both components of history, there are hidden discourses which define and perpetuate power relations and authority. As is common in works of magical realism, the effective use of narrative strategies undermines the hegemonic discourses, those of the past and of the present, and those about the past and the present. The technique of fragmentation, which as we see, is a key device used by Rushdie in his novels, is an important strategy to deconstruct authoritarian discourses. A second strategy – in line with the premises of magical realism – is the incorporation of the ineffable and the irrational, which fractures the rational, positivist edifices of hegemonic discourses. Rushdie’s characters are often endowed with miraculous powers, are subject to mysterious forces, or prone to strange proclivities. These magical or marvelous elements are part of the natural domain of the novel and need no explanation. They are completely woven into the fabric of culture and society, in a reality which by nature consists of multiple domains. Still, even in these irrational domains there is a form of order related to the specific nature of the characters or their personal destinies. In contrast to One hundred years of solitude, which is enchanted because of its isolation from history, the magical forces in Rushdie’s work are deeply rooted in the indigenous tradition. Here, as ‘required’ by critics of magical realism,

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the hegemonic discourse is subverted by a re-mythification of the present, by the use of traditional subjectivity to counter rigid positivism. The present is re-enchanted and invaded by its mythical past. Any vision of the present is forced to include these irrationalities from the past, although it is not certain how the reader should evaluate this invasion; is it important to acknowledge the influence of these forces as part of reality? Or are they just a means to satirize present certainties by using a sub-layer in which caricatures and irrationalities show the ‘real’ faces and incentives of people? Whatever the case, these irrationalities are not only part of social life and social traditions, they are also rooted in the literary tradition through references to such works as the Kathasaritsagara, Mahabharata, Ramayana, and the Thousand and one nights. The latter work is, of course, not so indigenous, but rather part of a literary domain shared by Indians and Englishmen. We continue our discussion about magical realist novels, history, and the Thousand and one nights with an analysis of two of Rushdie’s most important novels, Midnight’s children, which is related to the postcolonial condition of India, and Shame, which is a fierce critique of state and society in Pakistan. As in the previous section, we argue that the narrative material and strategies are ordered by the concept of a struggle between modes, in this case the epic discourse of history and authority, and the novelistic discourse of individuality, hybridity, and skepticism. Postcolonial India: Midnight’s Children The novel Midnight’s children (1981) is construed in three parts. Part one covers the period 1915–47 and describes the prehistory of Saleem Sinai, his grandparents, his parents, and, in general, a period in which a memory of paradisiacal simplicity and bliss persisted, but which was eventually spoiled by loss and disillusion. In the second part (1947–65) Saleem is born at exactly the same moment that India acquires its independence, and his subsequent adventures are systematically related to the history of independent India. The third part (1970–78) is set against the backdrop of Bangladesh’s separation from Pakistan and the following war, in which Saleem participates as a soldier. All three parts are a colorful mosaic of characters of all kinds and their stories, their peculiarities, and their way of surviving in the turbulent periods preceding and following independence in 1947. The third part is somewhat detached from the other two parts and to some extent disturbs the coherence of the novel. At the center of the novel is Saleem Sinai, who is one of the 1001 children born at the exact hour of India’s independence, on August 15, 1947. These children are not only hailed by president Nehru as a privileged group; they also each possess different miraculous faculties. Saleem, who develops a huge

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nose, has the ability to ‘hear’ what people are thinking. At a certain stage, the Midnight’s children decide, through telepathic communication, to join forces in a kind of shadow parliament, but eventually, during the repression of Gandhi’s Emergency of 1976, they lose contact with each other. One of the issues pervading the story is Saleem’s uncertain identity: he may have been switched with another baby in the hospital where he was born and his father might well have been an Englishman. The shadow of the British presence hovers above Saleem and the house and neighborhood in Bombay where he grows up. This ‘hidden’ hybridity is of course not limited to Saleem, but affects India as a whole. Even more so, since India’s identity is fractured by the partition that separates Pakistan from the motherland. The narrative tells the story of Saleem’s family, starting with his grand­ father and parents and continuing, after Saleem is born, with his parents, his aunts and uncles, and his sister. The saga is a kaleidoscopic ‘ocean’ of stories that not only recount the family history, but also its relationship to India, which looms as a large, all-encompassing environment and a massive repository of tradition and social customs. The figures and events are steeped in what is usually called the ‘carnivalesque,’ and a rather baroque sense of the absurd, which is presented, partly, as an inherent part of India’s reality, and partly as the specific enchantment of the moment in history. The novel takes the form of narration: Saleem tells his history and the various stories it contains to Padma, his lover, who, apart from listening to him, hopes to stir his erotic powers as much as his narrative capabilities. In the end, the whole process of storytelling is overwhelmed by the Emergency of Gandhi, the war over Bangladesh, and the less disastrous birth of Saleem’s son. Like most of Rushdie’s works, Midnight’s children is profoundly inspired by the example of the Thousand and one nights, perhaps even more explicitly than the other works. The recurrent mention of the number 1001 is a reference that appears in all of Rushdie’s novels. For Rushdie, this number not only invokes the idea of infinity and boundlessness, but also of diversity and plurality, it is a metaphor for endless possibilities and unlimited variety. It is also, usually, connected with the idea of enchantment and magic. Because it keeps turning up, the number acquires not only a symbolic meaning, but also a formulaic function of conjuring up the forces of the unseen. Apparently, it is connected with some underlying order. We are shown by many explicit references, for instance to figures such as Aladdin, Sindbad, and Harun al-Rashid, that this invisible order originates from the Thousand and one nights. The association of the alcoholism of Saleem’s father with the ‘jinn in the bottle’ is very prominent. While these references provide a kind of underlying system of relationships, the main resemblance between Midnight’s children and the Thousand and one

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nights is conceptual, both in form and in content. Already in the first pages Saleem compares himself to Shahrazad: he too feels threatened by fate and he hopes to be able to tell his story before the fatal hour: “But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning – yes, meaning – something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.”22 His fate is connected to the process of narration, as in the case of Shahrazad: “to put out of its misery a narrative which I left yesterday hanging in mid-air – just as Scheherazade, depending for her very survival on leaving Prince Shahriyar eaten up by curiosity, used to do night after night.”23 Saleem’s storytelling thus takes place under pressure, a threat, and the impending end of time. Storytelling is a means to extend or even save his life, to postpone a threat, to create a time-space to explain the meaning of a life experience. If Saleem is Shahrazad, then Padma, of course, takes the role of Shahriyar. She is not a passive listener of Saleem’s tales, but repeatedly interrupts him, tries to speed him up, expresses unbelief, boredom or curiosity. She steers the course of Saleem’s stories like the flow of a river is controlled by its banks. Moreover, she has an interest of her own. Since she wants to marry Saleem, she wants to know his life story, but she is also keen on re-awakening his sexual activity, which has apparently dwindled: “So now that the writer is done, let’s see if we can make your other pencil work.”24 In the beginning her efforts are in vain, but toward the end, Saleem’s condition seems to improve: “Past our crisis now, we exist in perfect harmony: I recount, she is recounted to; she ministers, and I accept her ministrations with grace. I am, in fact, entirely content with the uncomplaining thews of Padma Mangroli, who is, unaccountably, more interested in me than my tales.”25 Finally, Padma gets what she wants, Saleem survives, and the story has been told. For Saleem, Padma’s presence is indispensable. Padma is his anchor in life, the reason for his storytelling, his reason for living: “What-chews-on-bones refuses to pause … it’s only a matter of time. This is what keeps me going: I hold on to Padma. Padma is what matters – Padma-muscles, Padma’s hairy forearms, Padma my own pure lotus … who, embarrassed, commands: ‘Enough. Start. Start now.’”26 Padma is the primordial woman, the “Source, the mother of

22  Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Avon Books, 1982), 4. 23  Ibid., 22. 24  Ibid., 39. 25  Ibid., 325. 26  Ibid., 353.

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Time.”27 Without Padma, Saleem cannot continue his story, or at least his story seems to lack sense. Padma urges him on, she shows her skepticism, surprise, and astonishment; she links his storytelling to an instant evaluation that influences its course. She prevents him from digressing too much; he has to convince her of the complexity of his tale to avoid a simple, boring linearity, and to allow the story to follow its meandering path. Padma is also his link to reality, she warns him if he indulges in fantasy too much, and protects him against falsifications and distortion. Her “paradoxical earthiness of spirit”28 keeps his feet on the ground. Without her, everything is shapeless, senseless, empty, wrong, like when he was eight years old and buried himself in fairy tales, such as Hatim Tai, Batman, Superman, Sindbad, Aladdin, and Ali Baba. Only Padma would understand what he meant. The dialogic situation between Padma and Saleem is intended to counter a traumatic situation to which Saleem has been subjected. It is here that history comes in. From the beginning, it is clear that Saleem’s status as one of Midnight’s children is not an unmitigated bliss, but a plight as well. In the beginning of the novel Saleem remarks that because of the moment of his birth, he is “mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.”29 He feels “heavily embroiled in Fate.”30 Before he was born it was predicted that he would be a “son who will never be older than his motherland, neither older nor younger. And he will die before he is dead.”31 Because of this connection with history, Saleem was not only himself, not only the child of his parents, but also the ‘son’ of history: In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents – the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream.32 This special position is confirmed by the political leaders of India, who use Midnight’s children to lend an auspicious, magical aura to their vision of a modern, independent country. 27  Ibid., 233. 28  Ibid., 177. 29  Ibid., 3. 30  Ibid. 31  Ibid., 99. 32  Ibid., 137.

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Saleem’s story is an account of the way in which he tries to deal with this predicament, the bond between his life and the history of India. How the mutual influences are effectuated is not always clear, however, and Saleem sometimes, unconsciously, feels responsible for significant events. Because of this he becomes aware that he is not only the victim of his strange imprisonment in the wider framework of history, but that he can also manipulate it. He is subsequently overwhelmed by a sense of power: … the feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world; that the thoughts I jumped inside were mine, that the bodies I occupied acted at my command; … I was somehow making them happen … which is to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of the land as the raw unshaped material of my gift.33 The independence of India brings a new form of confinement, but also new possibilities, and Saleem begins to discover that he can play a role in it. Saleem’s optimism is shattered by the rise to power of Indira Gandhi, the ‘Widow,’ who installs a dictatorship that closes all the prospects for a free and open society. At this point Saleem loses his silver spittoon, the object that tied him to the history of his time and gave him the powers to be involved in it. The Widow “sucked him into the heart of her terrible empire,”34 put Midnight’s children in prison, and sterilized them to prevent them from procreation. This marks the end of “the originally-thousand-and-one marvellous promises of a numinous night.”35 Saleem is devastated: “Sometimes I feel a thousand years old: or (because I cannot, even now, abandon form, to be exact, a thousand and one).”36 He has a son by Parvati the witch, however, and since Padma wants to marry him he assumes the role of “reminiscer” or “teller of tales.”37 This brief analysis shows how the Thousand and one nights is woven into the narrative of Midnight’s children, not only in its form (its multi-layered structure and element of suspense), but also as a concept. The latter, in particular, shows Rushdie’s vision of history and the forces involved in its construction. We analyze this in more detail after a discussion of Rushdie’s second significant work, Shame.

33  Ibid., 207. 34  Ibid., 516. 35  Ibid., 523. 36  Ibid., 524. 37  Ibid., 534.

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The Imaginary Nation: Shame Rushdie’s third novel, Shame, which appeared in 1983, can, and perhaps should, be read as a complementary piece to Midnight’s children. Its story is also related to the events of 1947, and to the development of Pakistan after its independence. Like Midnight’s children, the story is set against a backdrop of the political history of Pakistan, the characters represent figures from real life politics, those who shaped the country after independence. Like Midnight’s children, Shame focuses on the convergence of history and repression, on the manipulation of accounts of history, and on the mechanisms of power and discursive realities. Like Midnight’s children, it uses the narrative devices and strategies that are usually associated with magical realism, such as the grotesque, the intervention of mysterious forces, and the magnification of characters to become absorbed by their emblematic roles. And, finally, it is a book immersed in the imaginary realm of the Thousand and one nights. However, the story is different, too, mainly because of the elusive nature of Pakistan as a nation-state. Of course, in Midnight’s children, we have seen the idea that ‘India’ is a myth that is being constructed while history unfolds; here Pakistan is described not merely as a myth, but even as an illusion. It is a country that cannot exist and that is, therefore, completely at the mercy of predatory political leaders. It is an artificial country, which was created more by historical accident than by a stable process of historical evolution. Independent India must reinvent itself and construct a vision of the future that incorporates a huge reservoir of opinions, worldviews, and possibilities, but Pakistan must be invented, it has to be produced out of an existing reality as if by magic. Moreover, its population consists mainly of migrants from India, with their own diverse histories and identities, their uncertainties and struggles. That is why the trauma of historical experience is much more acute in Pakistan than in India. In Shame, the historical trauma of Pakistan is the starting point of the story. The following significant passage explains how the migratory origin of Pakistan caused its dissociation from history and its shaky foundations: All migrants leave their past behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes – but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history.38 38  Salman Rushdie, Shame (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 64.

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Something is irretrievably lost, and it is precisely that which is lost that must be found, in order to ‘invent’ a society. Perhaps what was lost in the initial migration, combined with the population already living there, explains why the place was “insufficiently imagined.”39 From the beginning, there is a lack that must be repaired in retrograde. Apart from this, it is the irreconcilability of the two communities in India – Muslim and Hindu – and perhaps the segregation in what historically should have been a single community, which haunts Pakistan from the beginning. Rushdie would seem to be suggesting that Pakistan is a historical anomaly and not a solution for the tensions that existed in Indian society at the time of independence. The unresolved inner fissures which led to the foundation of Pakistan have cursed its history as an independent state and created a kind of historical blind spot where a myth of origin should have been. It is like an ‘original sin’ which casts a shadow over all the generations to come. In Shame, this curse is symbolized by the house in which the main character of the story, Omar Khayyam, is born. He is raised by three ‘mothers,’ that is three sisters who have decided to confine themselves in the house after the death of their father. At the end, it becomes clear that the house is under some kind of mysterious spell, caused by the irreconcilable antagonisms between his grandfather and his brother that resulted from accusations of infidelity.40 Family history thus left a confined space in the heart of Pakistani society, a space where Omar Khayyam is born and grows up in confinement. He does not know who his father was, nor who his real mother is, and thus he becomes the personification of a man without history, without attachment to a known past. This uncertainty makes him “a creature of the edge,” a “peripheral man.”41 This ‘inauthenticity’ is accentuated by his name, Omar Khayyam, which refers to the well-known Persian scholar and poet of quatrains who is not very famous in Iran itself, but who acquired iconic status in the West (through the reworkings of Edward Fitzgerald in the nineteenth century), as an oriental poet of libidinous verse. He is the example of the “translated man,” who has been “borne across.”42 He thus carries in himself the hybridity of Persian Muslim culture, British oriental visions, and the trauma of Pakistan’s ‘birth.’ This is also ­apparent from his readings as a boy, which were a combination of Persian

39  Ibid., 92. 40  Ibid., 307. 41  Ibid., 18. 42  Ibid., 24.

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poetry, the travels of Ibn Battuta, and the Burton translation of the Thousand and one nights.43 The environment in which Omar Khayyam grows up and lives is dominated by the power struggle between two men and their families, Raza Hyder and Iskander Harappa, who represent the politician Zulfikar Bhutto and the military leader Ziya ul-Haqq respectively, the two rivals for power in Pakistan in the 1970s. It is a story of brutal repression, opportunism, corruption, and violence, motivated by sheer lust for power and wealth, which is the only dynamic shaping society and holding it together. The reverse side of this struggle, one could say the ideological system supporting it, is the shameless repression of women, who in the name of morality are locked up, silenced, and exploited, held as a flock to produce descendants. Yet, although the story begins as a story about men, gradually the women take over: … they marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand the inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all manner of sinuous complexities, to see my “male” plot refracted, so to speak, through the prisms of its reverse and “female” side. It occurs to me that the women knew precisely what they were up to – that their stories explain, and even subsume, the men’s. Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repression of other kinds as well. Contrariwise: dictators are always – or at least in public, on other people’s behalf – puritanical. So it turns out that my “male” and “female” plots are the same story, after all.44 The repression of women is a symptom of a repressive political system, which generates the authoritarian social discourse. In Shame, the repression of women leads them to choose between two options, awaiting their fate in silence and isolation, or fighting back, by transforming themselves into a man (like Arjumand), or by becoming a rapacious monster. Sufya Zinobia, the daughter of Raza Hyder, who marries Omar Khayyam, suddenly metamorphoses into a ferocious monster that decapitates men and harasses society with her excessive violence. She becomes an “exterminating or avenging angel”:45 “What seems certain is that Sufya Zinobia, for 43  Ibid., 28. 44  Ibid., 189. 45  Ibid., 217.

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so long burdened with being a miracle gone wrong, a family’s shame made flesh, had discovered in the labyrinths of her unconscious self the hidden path that links sharam to violence.”46 It seems that the only way for women to escape systematic repression is to become a non-woman; and the only way to resist is violence and madness. Before we go into the problematic of history in Shame in more depth, we first discuss its references to the Thousand and one nights. Shame and the Thousand and One Nights As in Rushdie’s other novels, the Thousand and one nights is also one of the main intertextual matrices in Shame. Direct and oblique references appear from time to time, showing that the novel is influenced by the Arabic collection of tales. It is not evident that the Nights here represents an ‘indigenous’ text, that is, a manifestation of Indian literary culture and tradition, although it is clear – at least in Rushdie’s eyes – that the work was, at least, part of the imagination of the Indian Muslims. Still, it is no coincidence that Omar Khayyam is mentioned in Shame as having read the Thousand and one nights in his youth, in Richard Burton’s translation. Of course, this translation epitomizes the Victorian British focus on imperial policies, intercultural relationships, sexual codes, cultural authenticity, and literary invention. The hybridity of the translation, in spite of its claims of authenticity, underlines the hybri­ dity of Omar Khayyam as a character, who was born and raised in a specific imperial context. A somewhat implicit parallel between the Thousand and one nights and Shame can be seen in the literary strategy of the frame story. The story of Shame is told by an anonymous ‘I,’ who does not, as in Midnight’s children, address other characters in the frame, rather he speaks to the reader directly. It is made explicit several times that the story is not an account of events; it is a fable, or a fairy tale. Therefore, the frame quite explicitly contains a piece of fiction, although the narrator makes it clear that telling this fable is not innocent. After all, the “country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space.”47 There is always a connection between a story and a reality, although this connection is not as self-evident as it often appears. Ironically, the narrator refers to the harmlessness of his tale: “Fortunately, however, I am only telling

46  Ibid., 151. 47  Ibid., 23.

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a sort of modern fairy tale, so that’s all right; nobody need get upset, or take anything I say too seriously. No drastic action need be taken, either.”48 Thus, storytelling can have a disquieting effect, but it also enables people to survive in specific ways. For instance, family stories about all kinds of scandals somehow ensure the coherence of the family, since “the telling of tales proved the family’s ability to survive them, to retain, in spite of everything, its grip on its honour and its unswerving moral code.”49 By reproducing the events in a certain way, they preserve specific versions that obscure other versions: “… there are things that cannot be said. No, it’s more than that: there are things that cannot be permitted to be true.”50 Again, a complex relationship is suggested between storytelling and the truth. Stories are meant not as a repository of the truth, but essentially as a repository of untruths that allow the family to continue living in dignity. This is especially true of the women, who are destined to endure the hardships of their sex in a morally repressive society. One way to survive is to take refuge in storytelling. Significantly, after the execution of her husband, Rani Harappa, locked in their house with her daughter, starts embroidering a shawl which contains ‘1001 stories.’ All the stories relate to aspects of her life and of society, they represent the silenced female voice among the many male interpretations of events.51 One of the most forceful reverberations of the Thousand and one nights in Shame is the motif of the family home of Omar Khayyam, where, after the death of their father, the three sisters confine themselves. This, of course, refers to the house of the three ladies in the story of the ‘Porter and the three ladies of Baghdad.’52 The reference is emphasized by the fact that the ladies give a list of groceries as in the original story. In both cases, the house is an enchanted space, on which a spell is cast by transgressions in the past; in both cases the house contains an anomalous, unbalanced situation that places it outside society and beyond regular human interaction. In the Thousand and one nights, this anomaly, compressed in an ‘enchanted space,’ in which the sisters enact a previous ‘curse,’ creates the narrative tension from which the story unfolds. In Shame, too, it represents the mysterious origin of the story, an abnormal situation of women living without a man, that isolates them from society, but still pervades it through the figure of Omar Khayyam and the haunting effects of the family history. It is situated at the crack in the foundations of Pakistani 48  Ibid., 72. 49  Ibid., 79. 50  Ibid., 85. 51  Ibid., 112, 115, 119, 210. 52  See Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:324–326.

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society; it symbolizes the basic error that is woven into the lives of all the characters. These appearances of the Thousand and one nights in Shame are not just associative references employed to show links between imaginative realms; they occur at crucial instances and anchor the story in its narrative matrix. In the beginning of this section, I argued that in the conventions of magical realism, visions of history play a prominent role, as a field in which hegemonic colonialist and imperialist visions are contested. In our discussion of One hundred years of solitude we have seen that this destabilization of history is not achieved by juxtaposing ‘indigenous’ and ‘colonialist’ interpretations of history, but that the textual and narrative elements of history are especially crucial. The paradoxes in the writing of history, or, for that matter, in writing at large, reveal the forces that are at work, and continually raise questions about the nature of historical discourses and their relationship to a subjective historical consciousness. In this way, the historical and political domains are shown to overlap: it is difficult to disentangle the various versions of history and combine them in such a way that they contain a faithfulness that can provide outlooks for the future. In Salman Rushdie’s novels, the ‘struggle for history’ takes a central place and acquires new dimensions. In Midnight’s children, it is evident from the beginning that the story coincides with the beginning of a new history, which is not as tied to the past as it is directed at the future: “It was as though history, arriving at a point of the highest significance and promise, had chosen to sow, in that instant, the seeds of a future which would genuinely differ from anything the world had seen up to that time.”53 This implies that history must still be shaped, as a future history that is being created in the present. The birth of Saleem is, even before it happens, even officially, linked to this new history; Saleem’s fate cannot be disconnected from this history, because the most essential moment of his life, his birth, is given significance by an external event, by its coinciding with India’s independence. Saleem is incorporated into the process of the production of India’s new history. His life will be part of this history, whether he likes it or not. India’s destiny will be connected to Saleem’s destiny; India’s survival will be connected to Saleem’s survival. In spite of his somewhat Rabelaisian mind, Saleem is well aware that India’s ‘new history’ is an invention, meant to serve specific political interests. History is a myth, as is the vision of the future of an independent India: “India, the new myth – a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only 53  Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 235.

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by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.”54 Nevertheless, because of their enchainment to history, and because of the mythical character of history, the Midnight’s children have a role to play; by being incorporated into the process of history building, they are endowed with a certain measure of power and influence. This possibility is fostered by the mythical nature of India as a political and cultural entity. The intervention of Midnight’s children is staged as a brief intermezzo after which their voices are stifled. Still, Saleem, by telling his story, continues to explain his position vis-à-vis the forces of history, and to weave his life story into the story of India’s ‘new’ history. Telling his story is his only means to survive, to gain a certain independence from the might of history as an all-encompassing fate. He must ‘distort’ history, to insert his own history and become master of his fate: “Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything – to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role?”55 As noted, this sense that history is constructed, that it is invented in stories, which can be contested and substituted by other stories, gives Saleem and the other Midnight’s children the feeling that they are somehow at the core of this process and that they have enormous powers. In the end, however, this power turns out to be an illusion: it is the power to be masters and victims at the same time: … until the 1001st generation, until a 1001 midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a 1001 children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.56 Saleem, then, cannot escape the contradictions of history, he cannot control history, and he is unable to prevent the hegemonic groups of the ‘new India’ from usurping power. Whereas in Midnight’s children India’s ‘new history’ is presented as a myth, in Shame, the idea of Pakistan is more readily attributed to a historical error, an anomaly caused by a trivial family quarrel. To make things worse, the history of Pakistan is built upon the quicksand of migration, which not only undermines the solidity of the community but also affects the population’s sense of identity and belonging. These two historical traumas pervade Pakistani society 54  Ibid., 130. 55  Ibid., 198. 56  Ibid., 522.

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and its claims of authenticity. In Shame, Rushdie examines how individuals are affected by the circumstance of Pakistan, the reality that the only structure in society is the one generated by the struggles for power and social repression. As in Midnight’s children, the individual is confronted by the gradual construction of an apparatus dominated by opportunism, corruption, and violence, in the name of morality and national interest. As in Midnight’s children, the narrator is aware of the instability and power of stories. From the beginning, it is clear that the story is a ‘fable,’ which is related to reality in complex ways. Moreover, stories, as texts, have their own peculiarities, their own qualities and ‘habits’: “All stories are haunted by the ghosts of stories they might have been.”57 Stories, too, struggle to survive, to seek sufficient links with reality to become history, or at least to obscure other stories. The narrator knows this: “Well, well, I mustn’t forget I’m only telling a fairy-story. My dictator will be toppled by goblinish, faery means.”58 Narration and the construction of a sense of authenticity are first intended to re-integrate the experience of Pakistan into history, with the aim of neutralizing the traumatic effects of migration. Because society was built upon migration, “We have become unstuck from more than land. We have floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time.”59 Apparently, without the healing of this void there is no stable present or future for Pakistan; society will remain exploited by those who seek power and wealth. Therefore, there are two currents in Pakistani history; one is aimed at the construction of a future, which is imposed by arbitrariness and dictatorship; the other is the effort to undo the effects of the ‘curse’ inflicted on Pakistan through its fragile foundations: “It is possible to see the subsequent history of Pakistan as a duel between two layers of time, the obscured world forcing its way back through what-had-beenimposed.”60 This regressive layer, a future meant to recuperate a past and to restore it to its proper course, becomes manifest in the sacking and destruction of the house where Omar Khayyam, who is the source of hatred and hybridity, was born. Within this process, the author has a distinct role. He, too, is responsible for conceiving historical narratives, and constructing historical discourses that challenge hegemonic ideas: “It is the desire of every artist to impose his or her vision on the world; and Pakistan, the peeling, fragmenting palimpsest, increasingly at war with itself, may be described as a failure of the dreaming 57  Rushdie, Shame, 125. 58  Ibid., 284. 59  Ibid., 91. 60  Ibid., 92.

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mind.”61 It is especially the imaginary nature of literature which is required for this task: “I build imaginary countries and try to impose them on the ones that exist.”62 This makes a return to history inevitable: “I, too, face the problem of history: what to retain, what to dump, how to hold on to what memory insists on relinquishing, how to deal with change.”63 Everything, every person is pervaded by the need for a meaningful history. In our discussion of One hundred years of solitude we described the author’s processing of history as a struggle between ‘epic’ and ‘novelistic’ paradigms, between a one-dimensional, closed, and emblematic vision of history and a contingent, open, and individualized vision. This concept can be useful in the case of Rushdie’s novels as well. In Midnight’s children, the all-powerful mechanism of India’s new history is constructed as the epic of a homogeneous nation, and imposed by its leaders, as a myth made into an epic by the force of power. This epic story threatens to absorb the protagonists, who try to find a space for their individual lives, to build their own futures, to continue their own pasts, which are only partly connected with the magic moment of India’s birth. It is the Midnight’s children who are, on the one hand, most tightly linked to the epic of the new India, but who, on the other hand, try their best to subvert it, to appropriate an individual life for themselves by challenging hegemonic ideologies. In Shame, it is the enchanted house and the idea of a nation which constitute the epic of Pakistan, which is imposed as a model of a moral society, but which is a cover for corruption and repression. It is individual, hybrid, figures such as Omar Khayyam Shakil and, especially, women who represent the counterparts of this repressive system, who struggle not only to survive, but to have lives of their own, away from the forces that enslave them, exploit them, and drive them insane. In both novels, narration is the strategy to liberate the protagonists from the epic paradigm. In Midnight’s children, narration is characterized as an essentially contingent, fragmented process, marked by its unpredictability, by interruption, by its insecure status. It has a complex relationship with truth. In Shame, storytelling is characterized especially by its fictionality, its capacity to construct a counter-reality, which is and is not a substitute for real life. Both Saleem and the anonymous narrator of Shame are pseudo-Shahrazads, who use the specific subversive powers of storytelling to challenge the monolithic bastions of domination. In both cases the outcome is not very hopeful, however, since in the end the forces of violence and repression seem to triumph 61  Ibid. 62  Ibid. 63  Ibid.

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over individual freedom and human individuality. Nevertheless, storytelling is the only means to resist. This vision of narration and the struggle against monologic, ‘epic,’ ideologies is a structural feature that can also be seen in Rushdie’s other works, such as The satanic verses (1988), Haroun and the sea of stories (1990), and Two years eight months and twenty-eight nights (2015). In The satanic verses, the epic forces are represented by monolithic (self-)images of Britain, India, and orthodox Islam, by the belief in magical transformations through Aladdin’s lamp, and by the iconic delusions produced by the cinema. These forces are opposed by efforts to acknowledge forms of hybridity, change, and individuality. Again, storytelling and the imagination are the main weapons that can be used to break up these monolithic visions imposed on individuals. As in Midnight’s children and Shame, the strategies of magical realism are used to challenge the emblematic harnessing of history, to describe the discursive struggle for history, and to find ways to survive as an individual in a world dominated by the epic mode. It is here that the conceptual parallels with Shahrazad are most profound.

Chapter 13

Words Against Death: Roberto Calasso, David Grossman, and Elias Khoury One of the themes of the frame story of the Thousand and one nights, the story of ‘Shahriyar and his brother,’ a story which has always appealed to both scholarly literary and general audiences, is the opposition between Shahriyar’s power and inclination to violence, and Shahrazad’s imagination and narrative ingenuity. Although it takes some time to establish that the word is decisively more powerful than the sword, Shahrazad not only succeeds in escaping an almost inevitable execution, but she is also able to persuade Shahriyar to give up his bloody regime which is so oppressive toward women. In the end, it would seem that Shahriyar has undergone a transformation by listening to Shahrazad’s tales and by identifying himself with the models and wise allegories in them.1 Shahrazad’s redemption is not achieved merely by telling stories; Shahrazad tells her stories in a specific way, interrupting them at the break of dawn, building up suspense, and repeating the procedure – and combines them with a fixed set of formulae – which includes sexual intercourse and the intervention of Shahrazad’s sister Dunyazad. In fact, the storytelling is a kind of performance, in which each one plays his or her predetermined role; it is a performance which, because of its regularity, acquires all the characteristics of a ritual act: Shahriyar and Shahrazad are involved in a fixed pattern of roles and acts and utterances; there is a strict time frame in which the sequence repeats itself; and within this time frame a ‘suspension of disbelief’ is upheld. The storytelling creates a liminal space, in which the participants shed their regular roles to enter a kind of no man’s land, in which the fictional world of the ritual unfolds. With her storytelling, Shahrazad creates an imaginary world within Shahriyar’s world, in her world, the imagination governs, and she draws him into a mental state that neutralizes his violence. But Shahrazad’s enactment of narration is not the only ritual component in the frame story. Shahriyar’s system of marrying a virgin every night and having her killed in the morning can easily be seen as a ritual pattern as well. Shahriyar’s ‘performance’ was established after a traumatic experience which he evaluated as a threat to his status as a king and a man, and consequently, it 1  Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:370–376.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_015

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became a threat to the empire as a whole. Based on the underlying ‘myth’ of the unreliability of women, he installs a regime that aims to remove the threat through the act of ritual sacrifice: the execution of a young woman each morning is meant to neutralize the danger to the empire, to allow Shahriyar to affirm his status as a man and a king, and thereby preserve the state’s integrity. This ritual schema, based on the essential perfidy and uncontrollability of women, resembles many similar sacrificial rites, such as the annual offering of virgins to powerful monsters, or, for instance, to the Nile, in pre-Islamic times. Young maidens may be the most precious members of a community, but they also represent its most vulnerable aspect; in order to safeguard their social integration and neutralize the threat they pose to social conventions, some of them have to be sacrificed. In the frame story of the Nights, then, we see two types of ritual juxtaposed: Shahriyar’s obsessive sacrificial murders are countered by Shahrazad’s ‘educational’ discipline, derived from alternative visions of Shahriyar’s traumatic experience. Therefore, it seems that Shahrazad is attempting, through the form and content of her narration, to conjure Shahriyar’s wrath and break the cycle of ritual sacrifice. It is no coincidence that her narration takes on a ritual form. After all, because of the huge difference in status and power between them, both because of his kingship and because of his ability to exercise violence, it is impossible for her to address him directly and try to persuade him to give up his erratic behavior. She must invent an indirect way to get through to him, to gradually soothe his suspicion, to seduce him to listen to her, and to slowly absorb the lessons hidden in her tales. By shaping her admonitions in the form of a ritual, she neutralizes the direct danger that threatens her and bridges the hierarchical gap almost without Shahriyar noticing it. However, Shahrazad’s ritual pattern is meant to do more than counter the danger of Shahriyar’s brutality. With it, she also seeks to transform Shahriyar in a more permanent way and ‘redeem’ him from his pernicious cycle, which may save his personal integrity, but which threatens the dynasty with extinction. Therefore, Shahrazad’s ritual may be seen as the enactment of a rite of passage, in which a temporary suspension of regular life results in a transformation of the ‘disciple’ and his re-integration into the community in a reformed state. While the time frame and the rhythm of narration are meant to teach Shahriyar self-control, the content of the tales is directed at educating him and showing him the complex nature of reality, all in the form of adventures and invented tales. It is the combination of ritual frame and narration which, in the end, triumphs over Shahriyar’s trauma, and which, more generally, teaches us that the word, the imagination, is more powerful than the sword, even in the hand of the greatest king on earth.

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Evidently, the motif of Shahrazad’s words defeating Shahriyar’s force has an enormous narrative potential, especially when it is linked to the prospect of a certain death. It touches upon the heart of what literature is and what it is about, that is, a shield against barbarism and a means to bring order to a chaotic, aberrational world. In this section, we discuss the examples of three writers who have made this motif the centerpiece of their novels, or at least of some of them, in different ways. The Italian writer Roberto Calasso links the emergence of European modernity to the notions of ritual and storytelling; the Israeli author David Grossman makes a connection between narration and salvation in the context of the traumatic aftermath of the Holocaust; and the Lebanese author Elias Khoury explores the links between violence and narration in the setting of the Lebanese Civil War. In the novels discussed, violence is juxtaposed with words, speech, and narration in various, sometimes opposing ways, but the central notion is always the same: survival.

Roberto Calasso: The Ruin of Kasch

In his novel/essay The ruin of Kasch, the Italian writer Roberto Calasso (b. 1941), best known for his renderings of ancient Greek and Indian myths, evokes a phase of European history in which the beginnings of modernity can be situated. He chose the French Revolution and its aftermath (1789–1814) as the crucial period in which the history of Europe took a decisive turn. The French Revolution marked the demise of the old aristocratic order, which created the disorder from which a new worldview and social sensibility emerged. It was Napoleon who personified the new order and the new frame of mind, but it was his minister Talleyrand who personified the transition from one order to the next. Talleyrand was a bishop under the Ancien Régime, a revolutionary activist during the revolution, and a minister to Napoleon and the House of Bourbon afterwards. He thus showed remarkable survival skills and straddles two periods, two sides of a watershed, and became the prototype of the political opportunist, equally at ease in seemingly contrary worlds. Calasso’s The ruin of Kasch (1983) is not a novel in the traditional sense, nor a traditional linear history. Rather, in postmodern fashion, it celebrates the fusion of the literary and the historical, since fiction is necessary to complete the picture that can be assembled from the facts of history, and to come nearer to an understanding of what happened. This view is reflected in his method and the form of the book, which consists of a collage of references to and quotations from novels, letters, memoirs, notes, and contemplations. Fictional literature takes a prominent place in the reconstruction of ideas, since it reflects the

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same tendencies that are visible in politics and philosophy. Thus, the opposition between Napoleon and Talleyrand is projected on the works of authors such as Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Sand, Hugo, and Sainte-Beuve, and these works eventually evoked responses by Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Proust. The description of history cannot do without literature, and literature itself is an integral part of history. The mosaic of events, opinions, documentation, and reflections is organized around an allegory about the downfall of Kasch, which lays bare the mechanisms underlying both historical orders and the nature of the transition between the two. Kasch is an ancient kingdom in Kordofan, Sudan. The king of Naphta, in Kasch, is only allowed to reign for a certain number of years, after which he is executed. Priests observe the celestial bodies every night, without interruption, to determine the fatal moment. One day a storyteller named Farli-mas arrives in the kingdom from the East. Every night he tells a story and the whole population of Naphta flocks together and listens, transfixed. When, after a while, everyone has become addicted to his stories, it is suggested that the priests could be persuaded to attend the performances, too. The priests start listening to the stories and become so captivated that they neglect their observations, so there is no way to establish the date for the king’s execution. The priests all die during Far-li-mas’ storytelling and the king survives. This episode, which epitomizes the theoretical foundation of the book, is concerned, first, with ritual. The old ritual, which has sustained the kingdom for ages, is based on the myth of a divine will, which is expressed in the configurations of the planets and the stars. It is a method to harmonize the circumstances of the kingdom and the community with the broader forces of nature, like the concurrence of a microcosm with an all-encompassing macrocosm. This harmony is, by definition, cyclic and thus requires a cyclic ordering of the history of Kasch. By its very nature, however, a community is not completely congruent with the laws, forms, and cycles of nature. A human community has detached itself from the forces of nature, based on its potential rationality and agency, and thus it always has a ‘surplus’ that makes a total identification with nature impossible. This ‘surplus,’ or ‘excess,’ must be exorcised, at least symbolically, and this is done through a sacrifice, the ritual execution of the king. In this way, the gods are reconciled with the community’s extraordinary status, as transcending the laws of nature, and the balance with nature is preserved. This ritual, which is based on harmony with a natural, cosmic order and on a ceremonial act of violence legitimized by a myth, is disrupted by the ritual installed by Far-li-mas, which involves gathering the population to listen to a continuing proliferation of stories. This performance not only enchants the minds, but by doing so also interferes with ancient customs and fixed

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regulations. Gradually, it replaces these customs, because its appeal is stronger, and in the meantime, it destroys the myth underlying the old order and the caste of priests sustaining it. The flux of storytelling, as a human act and as a contingent mechanism giving unity and legitimacy to the community, replaces the myth and ceremony of a god-given rule to secure harmony with nature. It turns out that stories are stronger than the ‘handwriting’ in the sky. Man has created his own myth, which eclipses the ancient beliefs. It is clear that the transformation from one ritual system to another coincides with a significant shift in the social order, its ideological underpinning, and the community’s view of its place in the world. First, the disappearance of the priest’s caste indicates the victory of secular power over divine power, since from that point on authority is concentrated in the king, and not in the natural manifestations of the divine. This means that legitimacy is no longer sought in a divinely inspired cosmic order, revealed by the celestial bodies, but by the ordering function of narration, as a means to interpret and explain the world and give significance to the community’s existence. Legitimacy is not offered by God; it is invented in the process of narration. This leads to a different vision of the community’s place in space and time: it is no longer part of a cosmic order imposed by gods, in which harmony with the forces of nature is a prerequisite; it has become part of ‘history,’ a process that is not bound to cosmic cycles, but rather is determined and developed by the community itself. The transition is summarized by Calasso as follows: “In Naphta a struggle occurs between the order of bloody sacrifice, which depends on the stars in the sky, and the order of a life without attachments, which speaks in the stories of Far-li-mas and will be disguised in history. Far-li-mas wins the struggle – and history begins.”2 The ‘invention’ of history, comparable to the distinction made above between ‘epic’ and ‘novelistic’ worldviews, implies an acknowledgment of the essential constructed nature of a community’s views of existence and its place in the world. The conditions of existence are not the inescapable outcome of a predetermined order, but rather a contingent, open-ended process in which man is left to his own devices. The main source of historical agency, divine power, located outside the society, has been incorporated into the society and is now vested in man, who must deal with his essentially unprotected condition: “The Modern is born when the eyes observing the world discern in it ‘this chaos, this monstrous confusion,’ but are not unduly alarmed. On the

2  Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, trans. William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994), 131.

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contrary, they are thrilled by the prospect of inventing some strategic move within that chaos.”3 Storytelling provides a means to conceive this strategy. The abolition of the old ritual system does not mean that ritual is banned from society. Rather, it is reshaped and integrated into society in a new way, based on narratives rather than on sacrifice. Thus, the nature of the ritual changes, although its initial purifying function remains. The closed ritual of the sacrifice is replaced by the open ritual of the narrative; the esoteric element justifying the bloody sacrifice is replaced by the esoteric secret hidden in the ‘story,’ which is, from that point on, aimed at rationalizing the incongruences between the community and its environment and between the centrifugal and centripetal forces in the community. Similarly, the marginalization of the divine as a legitimizing and regulating force, does not exclude the sacred from society. Rather, it is incorporated and inextricably interwoven with the profane, often imbuing profane traditions with some sacred, pseudo-sacred, or ritual component. And, finally, the figure of God, as the ultimate source of power, authority, and agency, may have been eliminated as a determining element, but it is secularized and projected on man, who usurps divine powers in the process of history. Therefore, with the change of ritual systems, the community is not de-ritualized in the sense that it is deprived of all forms of ritual and thereby loses its regulative functions. Rather, ritual and its functions are ‘narrativized’ to provide new regulative mechanisms. The transition of ritual systems is, for Calasso, rooted in the bloody cataclysm of the French Revolution, in which the old order collapsed, and its aftermath. Napoleon and Talleyrand represented tendencies that emerged from the debris of the revolution. Napoleon more or less appropriated the legitimacy and the agency of God, assuming absolute power and proceeding to refashion Europe according to his vision. He still believed that history could be molded, that it required human will to recreate the world. In contrast, Talleyrand recognized that history has its own course and that human will and agency have only a limited impact. Large visions of the future are not determining factors and history has its own dynamics: “There are no principles; there are only events. There are no laws; there are only circumstances. The superior man espouses events and circumstances in order to guide them.”4 Talleyrand comprehends this and secures his own survival in subsequent regimes, by adapting to the course of events.

3  Ibid., 40. 4  Ibid., 22.

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Talleyrand understands that power is based on a fiction and that its preservation is based on a deferral of its collapse rather than on the construction of durable foundations: He knew that each time the aim would be to maintain the fiction for a few years. After that, the simulation would approach its end: it would collide with the bedrock of simulated reality. But the transmission of power (as well as the transmission of thought) would still be – could not fail to be – a chain of those slippery, precarious fictions, which would manage briefly to capture the essence of power one more time, or at least momentarily remove the stopper from the bottle every time to hold on a few years longer.5 The acceptance of the narrative perception of society is thus not permanent, but only a temporary medicine. History is not conceived as a linear process toward progress and bliss, but rather as a cyclic process in which the incongruences and inner contradictions will always return to the surface at a specific point. The French Revolution, with its bloody massacres, brought a new vision, a new mechanism, a new strategy for deferral, but it did not establish a permanent system to prevent society from slipping into new forms of violence, sacrifice, and terror. The narrative ritual can delay, but not prevent new cataclysms; or, more cynically, it can postpone new atrocities, all while preparing the way for them. Thus, in the end, storytelling, in its widest sense, will not prevent societies from collapsing. Kasch would always have fallen, but the stories of Far-li-mas will always remain.6 In the words of Calasso: “The fall of Kasch is the origin of literature.”7

David Grossman: Fighting the Nazi Beast

Among the great atrocities that Calasso refers to is, of course, the unprecedented violence of World War II and the terror of the Nazi regime in Germany. Calasso’s argumentation seems to be designed, in particular, to discover the roots of the crimes of the Holocaust, which resulted from an ideology of absolutism, purification, and the violent exclusion of an internal ‘other.’ Nazi Germany can be seen as a highly-ritualized society, in which the ‘sacrifice’ was 5  Ibid., 20. 6  Ibid., 133. 7  Ibid.

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dedicated to ‘history’ rather than to a cosmic order, and in which divine powers were appropriated by an absolute ruler. In the ultimate consequences of this ritualized absolutism, we can see the development of a kind of radically purified form of violence and brutality that is untainted by any humanist reservation. How can this institutionalized sort of violence be confronted, neutralized, and vanquished by narration? How can the word, the imagination, even begin to encompass something like this, which seems beyond human understanding? Perhaps ironically, we see the fears expressed by Calasso surface in the work of the Jewish German writer Jakob Wasserman (1873–1934). In his novella, Der Aufruhr um den Junker Ernst (1926), which echoes the episode of the fall of Kasch, Wasserman recounts the story of Junker Ernst, who as a child (in the seventeenth century) loses his father and grows up in the care of his uncle, the Catholic prince bishop of Wurzburg, a pious, obedient Catholic, and a strong advocate of the Inquisition. From an early age the boy develops an extraordinary proficiency in storytelling. His performances, which are likened to Shahrazad’s, attract people from the whole region, who are thrilled by the exciting tales. On the advice of his minister, the bishop has him incarcerated. But, he, too, becomes fascinated by the boy. In the end, the minister instigates the prince bishop to sentence the boy to death, but a rebellion of the population prevents his being burned at the stake. The story of Junker Ernst nicely depicts the opposition between the dogmatic, religious powers of the Inquisition, which is even prepared to use violence to impose a strict regime of obedience to divinely ordained doctrines, and the innocent, imaginative storyteller, who represents freedom, flexibility, creativity, and the voice of the people. The two sides reflect opposing worldviews, one based on bloody repression and dogmatic intransigence, the other on imagination and freedom, even without conscious resistance. Of course, Wasserman intended the story as a commentary on German society of the period, which showed some ominous signs. In 1921, he published the treatise Mon itinéraire comme Allemand et comme Juif, in which he concluded that the German and Jewish identities would forever be irreconcilable. He left Germany and died in Austria in 1934. No one could have predicted what happened in World War II. Although some said that literature would be inconceivable after the inhumanity of the Holocaust, many post-war authors have attempted to find forms to express Jewish experiences during the Nazi period and afterwards. One interesting case is that of the Israeli writer David Grossman (b. 1954), who is not a child of concentration camp survivors – his parents went to Palestine before the war – but witnessed the effects of the traumatic Holocaust experiences on the Jews migrating to Israel and tried to find an artistic means to

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comprehend the way in which the Holocaust permeated Israeli society. Although personal traumas were not spoken about and their significance to the social fabric of Israel was subdued in favor optimistic, dynamic, and revitalizing ideologies, Grossman acknowledged the need to delve into this undercurrent of historical grief and psychological scars. The novel in which he embarked upon this most ambitiously is See under: love, published in 1989. David Grossman is a prominent writer who developed, in his works, a vision of Israeli history and society which, on the one hand, tries to come to terms with the traumatic events that will always be associated with the foundation of Israel in 1948, and, on the other hand, shows a deep concern with the ideological direction and moral dilemmas that are inseparable from Israel’s present and future. He expressed his views and uncertainties not only in a number of novels, but also in essays on politics, and journalistic work that show his commitment to the moral integrity of Israeli politics and society. He eagerly comments on current events, and acts, so to speak, as the conscience of the nation. He calls for the acceptance of the Palestinian ‘other,’ even if only as a prerequisite for the survival of Israel as a nation, and as a necessity to lay the foundation of a stable society based on moral principles.8 David Grossman is not an average Israeli citizen, in the sense that he was born in Israel from parents who settled there before World War II. Thus, he is a relative outsider to the Holocaust experience which marked the post-war immigrants and came to dominate Israeli politics and society after 1948. This position made it difficult for him to comprehend the nature of the traumas suffered by Holocaust survivors, and pushed him to investigate these traumas and their effects on Israel’s collective consciousness. It can be argued that, because of this unique position, Grossman was more suited than others to describe what he observed and to try to develop a way to express the unspeakable. In See under: love, he attempted to find an artistic form to deal with these sensitive issues. The result is a book that not only introduced postmodernist techniques into Hebrew literature, but also succeeded in preserving the complexity of the questions involved and in developing a vocabulary, voice, and narrative strategy to unravel them. The story of See under: love begins with Momik, who is nine-years-old at the end of the 1950s, and wonders about the strange behavior of the people of his neighborhood, who seem to be haunted by some strange spell. From time to time, he hears about terrible events that have happened ‘Over There’ and that 8  See David Grossman, Death as a Way of Life: From Oslo to the Geneva Agreement, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Picador, 2004); David Grossman, Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics, trans. Jessica Cohen (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), and other titles.

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may not be mentioned. Out of these fragments of information, Momik constructs in his imagination an image of a ‘Nazi Beast,’ which terrorizes the people and which, he assumes, lies hidden in their basement. His fascination with this mysterious phenomenon is enhanced when his ‘new’ grandfather, Anshel Wasserman, joins the family. Anshel, who was a writer of children’s stories before the war, has survived the concentration camps. He continuously mumbles incomprehensibly, but Momik discovers that this mumbling is in fact a story that his grandfather continually tells himself. Together these experiences lead Momik to decide that he wants to become a writer. In the second part of the novel, Momik, now called Shlomo, and thirty years old, has become a writer, but he is struggling with the book he is working on: he cannot find the right form to treat the complex issues that he wants to bring to the fore. This part is split into two levels: the first concerns the break-up of his relationship with his beloved Ayala, who remained with him for some time to support him in his writing, since, as his ‘nurse,’ her presence was required. The relationship comes to a definitive end, but Shlomo still visits her on the beach of Narvia to report on his progress. She continues to give him advice, suggesting that he should imagine himself in a ‘White Room,’ a fictional space that contains everything related to the Holocaust. Gradually, Shlomo succeeds in overcoming his writer’s block, while at the same time he overcomes his dependency on Ayala and his grief about the separation. It becomes clear that his writing is an effort to reconstruct the continuing story of his grandfather Anshel, who, allegedly, survived the camp by telling a story, one without end, to the camp commander. In the second part, Shlomo fantasizes about the Jewish-Polish writer Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), who produced a small but remarkable oeuvre of surrealist stories, with a highly personal style and imaginative power. Shlomo states that he read Schulz’s work and felt akin to him and to the story of his death; it was said that he was killed during the war by a Nazi officer who had a grudge against another Nazi officer who was Schulz’s protector. Shlomo incorporates the figure of Schulz in his book, and lets him escape his coincidental fate by throwing himself in the sea in the harbor of Danzig. In the water, Schulz turns into a salmon and embarks upon a mysterious trajectory through the seas, among schools of fish, all the while communicating with Shlomo about the intricacies of writing literature. The focus of their discussions is Schulz’s novel The Messiah, whose manuscript was lost and which Shlomo hopes to ‘recreate.’ At the same time, Schulz is the key to Shlomo’s ‘re-creation’ of Anshel Wasserman’s story. The two levels of this part come together when Schulz confronts Shlomo in a direct meeting, in a conversation in which he hands Shlomo the ‘key’

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that enables him to continue with the third part of the novel, which is called ‘Wasserman’ and concerns the story of Anshel’s strange survival in the concentration camp. It is the story of Wasserman, who, as an ‘eternal Jew’ lacks the capacity to die. After the camp guards try and fail to kill him three times, he is summoned before Herr Neigel, Obersturmführer and commander of the camp. After learning that he is the author of a children’s story the commander used to read in his youth, he asks Wasserman to tell him a story. The story Wasserman tells is the continuation of the story of the ‘Children of the heart,’ about a group of children from various nationalities who set out to rescue the world, a story that was written by Wasserman under the pseudonym of ‘Scheherazade.’ Wasserman agrees to come to Neigel’s office every evening to continue his story, on condition that the commander will try to kill him: Every evening after you tell me more of the story, I am willing to try to kill you. One shot in the head. That will be your reward, understand? Like the other Scheherazade, only exactly the reverse. Every evening I will shoot you, on condition that your story is a good one…. Your story will be the thousand and first.9 In this way, the chain of storytelling is set in motion. From the beginning, the storytelling opens up a channel of communication. Wasserman requires some information for the story, and he discusses this with Neigel, while Neigel asks him not to fulminate against the German Reich. Wasserman retorts that “we will tell what we like,”10 but continues to deliberate about the continuation of the story. They discuss historical and philosophical matters, even their own awkward roles in the new circumstances. Their deliberations are reflected in the direction the story takes; this draws them toward each other more and more, and finally results in a kind of struggle over control of the story: Is Wasserman manipulating Neigel through his storytelling? Can Neigel command his ‘Scheherazade’ to change his story to suit his political views or his emotional sensibilities? In the end, Wasserman/Scheherazade fails in his efforts to die, and Herr Neigel commits suicide. The last part of the novel contains the life of Kazik, a baby born in Wasserman’s story of the ‘Children of the heart,’ a baby that is predestined to live just twenty-four hours. The description takes the form of an encyclopedia, whose entries serve as a kind of subtext to the previous part, the entries add information about the events, comment on certain terms or episodes of the 9  David Grossman, See Under: Love, trans. Betsy Rosenberg (London: Vintage, 1999), 208, 226. 10  Ibid., 220.

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story, and summarize it in a synchronic way. The reader learns that, in a mirror image of Shlomo and Ayala, Neigel used Wasserman’s story to save his problematic marriage, by retelling the story to his wife. In the end, the effort fails, but by then Neigel has become addicted to Wasserman’s story, and begs him to continue. When Wasserman, after hearing that Neigel’s wife has deserted him, asks if he has no more need for his story, Neigel answers: “You know very well that I need the story. What else do I have?”11 The story cannot end. The story of See under: love reveals the functions of literature when life is threatened by violence, especially in the case of Anshel Wasserman. Under the surface of this level of the story, however, we glimpse the struggle underlying this function of storytelling and writing. Storytelling is no gratuitous act; it acquires its redemptive powers only if it grows out of a creative process which in itself has a great potential to generate meaning. Before it can be relevant to the processes in which it has to perform its functions, it must have found its form, its voice. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Grossmann’s novel is the way in which it describes and analyzes the process of its own coming into being, the author’s struggle to mold the infinitely complex narrative material into a form that does justice to its elusive character. The novel is not only about the Holocaust, about the diagnosis of its remaining traumas, but also, and perhaps primarily, about how to incorporate such a recalcitrant subject into a literary/ artistic form. The difficulty of finding an adequate literary form is explicated in discussions between Shlomo and Schulz, who swims in the ocean. The ocean itself is a literary symbol of the vast, but amorphous universe of stories, in which masses of fish swim, spurred on by uncontrollable currents. It symbolizes the unending, continual, wave-like, tide-like movements of narration, which, on the one hand, secures the survival of storytelling in an incomprehensible natural milieu, but which, on the other hand, makes the possibility of choosing an individual trajectory, an individual voice, an expression of individuality, more difficult. In this sense, Schulz, although surviving as Shlomo’s alter ego, also reflects his helplessness in his confrontation with the huge narrative challenge posed by the Holocaust. Shlomo, too, has plunged into an ocean of narration, but he is unable to locate a starting point from which to invent a form, to find a way out of its overwhelming formlessness. In his discussions with Schulz, Shlomo states his intentions: It’s about “him”, I said, but it’s also about me. It’s about my family and what the Beast did to us. And I spoke about fear. And about grandfather, 11  Ibid., 432.

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whom I can’t seem to bring back to life, not even in the story. And about being unable to understand my life until I learn about my unlived life Over There. And I told you that, for me, Bruno is the key: an invitation and a warning.12 He sees before him the works of others, which were doomed to failure from the beginning: For the past forty years people had been writing about the Holocaust and would continue to do so, only they were doomed to failure, because while other tragedies can be translated into the language of reality as we know it, the Holocaust cannot, despite that compulsion to try again and again.13 The problem, time and again, is to somehow link the unfathomable events to some individual expression, to harmonize them with a personal experience that would give them a distinct significance: “what was most disappointing of all to Bruno – still not finding within himself a single sentence he could call his own, which no one could take away and distort.”14 Schulz more or less symbolizes this struggle. He lives in a world in which people are not allowed to refer to themselves as ‘I,’ rather they are part of a collective.15 This is the great tragedy of the Holocaust: it wiped away every trace of individuality and thereby debased human beings to the lowest level of existence. It is man’s possession of his own individuality and his own body which also contains the original force of art, the source of creative power. When Schulz finally speaks to Shlomo in a direct meeting, he reveals his ‘secret’ to him: In our new world, Shloma, even death will belong to man, and when a person wishes to die, he will only have to whisper his body code to his soul, which will know how to dismantle the person’s unique existence, the secret of the individual’s authentic essence, and there will be no more mass death, Shloma, just as there will be no more mass life!16 A vision of the future, contained in art, should be the opposite of the Holocaust’s indiscriminate killing: 12  Ibid., 109. 13  Ibid., 124. 14  Ibid., 125. 15  Ibid., 153. 16  Ibid., 180.

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The Messiah, Shloma, is the one who calls us to freedom, who releases us from the stone, sends us flying weightless through the square like confetti to recreate our lives with every passing minute and with epics in impetuous rendezvous, because by now it must be as clear to you as it is to me that all other roads lead to failure, to defeat, to prison, to the old culture that contracted elephantiasis.17 Therefore, the writer must be prepared to fail, because failure is in the nature of the tasks that he envisions for himself. Writing is starting anew time and again, because it is an ongoing process, one which the author must appropriate in his own individual way. Circumstances are changing, the writer is changing; when a writer wants to find the essence of his individual voice he must be prepared to fail and to start all over again. When Shlomo asks Schulz if he knows the story that Anshel told to Neigel, the answer is: “ ‘I’ve forgotten … But of course! That was the essence of his story, Shloma, you forget it and you have to recall it afresh every time!’ ”18 This ‘key’ he receives from Schulz, enables Shlomo – in the meantime renamed Shleimele – to reconstruct the story of his grandfather, Anshel Wasserman/Scheherazade. From this point, Anshel is Shleimele’s literary interlocutor; he comments on his own situation and story and advises Shleimele about the art of writing. Thus, the story splits into three levels; first, the story of Wasserman and Neigel, told by Shleimele; second, the story told by Wasserman/ Scheherazade to Neigel, which partly spills over in the fourth part about Kazik; and third, the dialogue between Wasserman and Shleimele, which links their efforts to reconstruct their stories. The central principles of the different levels of storytelling are the ‘keys’ that Schulz hands to Shleimele: the necessity to define and carve out a sense of individuality, and the inevitability of persistence and cyclical renewal: “This is how it is with creative work – ‘You build something and challenge it and again build it and challenge it a thousand and one times!’”19 For Shleimele, the confrontation between Neigel and Wasserman is intended to re-enact the mystery which has obsessed him since childhood and which was the reason he became a writer: an effort to re-imagine what happened Over There and what caused his grandfather’s permanent aberration. Second, it is meant to explore the relationship between storytelling/literature and the violence inherent in this confrontation. Of course, from the beginning 17  Ibid., 177. 18  Ibid., 231. 19  Ibid., 132.

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it is clear that there is an enormous, unbridgeable difference in power. The confrontation is not one between equals, nor between two persons of unequal positions in a hierarchy, rather it is between someone with absolute power and his potential victim. Because of his generic status as a Jew, Wasserman is delivered to Neigel, who, in principle, can decide if he lives or dies. The anomaly here is, of course, that Wasserman, because of his status, is ‘eternal’ and cannot be annihilated, because he is not a real, individual person. The common ground between these two antipodes is storytelling, which creates a kind of bond; Neigel recognizes Wasserman as the author of the story he read in his youth, while Wasserman is pleased by Neigel’s appreciation and feels his creative powers re-awaken. In the course of the storytelling the relationship between Wasserman and Neigel becomes more complicated and more direct, because the men are drawn into a form of negotiation that defines their relationship to the story. First, there are deliberations about the course the story must take; this soon results in a power struggle over who controls the process of the storytelling. But, second, the story also has some autonomy – its internal laws – which make it a kind of neutral area where two worldviews clash, or are at least juxtaposed. Third, the storytelling creates a form of addiction which makes both participants dependent on their regular meetings, not only to fulfill their initial agreement, but also because in one way or another they need the story and storytelling for their personal sense of well-being, and because they emotionally identify with the events and characters of the story. Thus, both Wasserman and Neigel are gradually caught in the intricate web they have spun, using the story as their thread. As the main storyteller, Wasserman is thrilled by Neigel’s fascination about the process of storytelling and his acknowledgment of Wasserman’s ability: “That perhaps simpleminded Neigel, who did not read the venomous criticism levelled against him, regarded Wasserman as Wasserman wished to be regarded. That only with Neigel could Wasserman’s most cherished dreams come true.”20 Still, to defend his position, he presents himself as a mere medium of stories, like Shahrazad, who follows its autonomous course: “… he invents nothing but merely reveals the pre-existent story and follows it like a boy chasing a pretty butterfly. ‘I am only the scribe of the story, Herr Neigel, its obedient servant.’”21 Neigel, on the other hand, becomes increasingly involved in the storytelling itself, and is provoked by the events related by Wasserman. His emotional involvement is shown by his protests when one of the protagonists 20  Ibid., 237. 21  Ibid., 232.

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dies, and he starts feeling manipulated by Wasserman. The latter defends the integrity of the story, which, he says, cannot be reshaped at will: “ ‘After all, we have an obligation to our story, the story as a living, breathing creature, a mysterious, lovely, and delicate creature we must not twist or break to suit our own impetuous whims.’”22 At a certain point, Neigel wants to stop the ‘game,’ because artists always ‘complicate things’ and ‘ruin’ art: “ ‘Art is to entertain people, to make them feel good, and even to educate them, yes, definitely!’ But under no circumstances to encourage doubt, to make people feel awkward or confused, and to accentuate the negative, the sick, and the perverse.”23 And, “ ‘I have the feeling you’ve lost control over your characters.’”24 But by this point, Neigel has ‘dissolved’ into the imagination of Wasserman. His personal life has become bound up with the story which he can no longer manage without. In the various characters and their roles are elements of identification for Wasserman and Neigel, linked to their roles and self-images. The ‘Children of the heart’ can be seen as victims of injustice who stand up and fight for a better world. They combine the roles of victims and heroes; they counter potential threats with their courage; they combine weakness with strength. By combining these seemingly incompatible roles, they break the stereotypical images and self-images of Neigel and Wasserman in their generic status: by listening to the story they lose their safe position within the ‘mass’ to which they belong and they become individuals. And, what is more important, by using the story as a common field of identification, their image of each other is individualized. Thus, at a certain point after an evening session, Neigel is hesitant to shoot at Wasserman and Wasserman must appeal to his word of honor, even beg him, order him: You slay thousands every day, Jews from all over the world pass before you like sheep to the slaughter, and I have seen you dispose of many with your own hands without a moment’s hesitation, heaven forbid. And what am I asking of you now? A mere trifle! To do what you always do, only this time willingly, as a matter of choice. Or are you unable, Herr Neigel? Shoot me, let fly, nu! Ashes in your eye, a bullet! Feuer, Herr Neigel, feuer!25

22  Ibid., 241. 23  Ibid., 270–271. 24  Ibid., 273. 25  Ibid., 253.

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It is here that the transformative impact of storytelling reaches a point of no return: it has dissolved the impersonal inhumanity of Neigel, made him conscious of his individuality, and thereby of his responsibility for his acts. The tour de force of turning the ‘monster’ Neigel into a human being with an individual conscience is not only performed by Wasserman and his skills at narration, but also by Shleimele, who, in his White Room, reconstructs the Neigel-Wasserman episode. While the first two levels of the story (the confrontation between Neigel and Wasserman, and the story told by Wasserman) become increasingly interwoven, the third level, Shleimele’s authorship, is drawn into the narrative battlefield. The convergence takes place when Wasserman, in his story, relates the birth of Kazik, a boy of unknown parents, adopted by the ‘Children of the heart.’ This development, apparently inserted by Wasserman on his own account, and not on Neigel’s instigation, arouses the indignation of Neigel, and also exasperates Shleimele, who says: “ ‘There’s not enough strength left for this baby. There’s not enough strength left to create a new life, the old life is a burden as it is.’”26 Wasserman, however, insists that this is the only way to continue the story. It remains uncertain whether the baby survives. Shleimele now reconsiders his position. The White Room has fulfilled its function as a storage room which he draws from to construct his narrative realm: But if the procedure is such that it is enough for a certain pair of eyes to close in order for consciousness to return and for a clear reflection to appear on the mirror of the inner eye without recourse to rational intervention – herein lies the fulfillment of the capricious, physio-literary demands of the White Room.27 But at this point of the story, he seems to have exhausted his narrative powers: “The writing authority, previously mentioned, doesn’t have enough vitality left for itself, let alone another living creature, even a literary character.”28 Wasserman is adamant, however, since Shleimele’s faith is essential for him as a means of redemption. He argues: “Only when the activity of writing takes place is there any vitality.”29 In despair Shleimele wants to escape his predicament and give up his writing, but to no avail: “I stood up and wanted to leave the White Room. There was nothing left to look for. I had forgotten the 26  Ibid., 279. 27  Ibid., 288. 28  Ibid., 289. 29  Ibid., 291.

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language spoken there. But I couldn’t find the door. That is, I touched the walls, I walked all the way around the room, but there was no door.”30 Wasserman states that “The whole world is the White Room,”31 and that the only way out is to write: ‘ “Sit and write. There is no other way. Because you are like me, your life is the story, and for you there is only the story. Write, then, please.’ ”32 The writing must continue, it is the only way to secure the survival of the baby, the only way into the future. When little Momik, puzzled by the unfathomable nature of the Nazi Beast, tries to invent strategies to lure it out of its hiding place, he realizes: “You can’t kill the Nazi Beast with a story, you have to beat him to death.”33 Still, the example of his grandfather, whose gibberish resembles an unending story, suggests to him that there is a relationship between surviving the Nazi Beast and storytelling. Somehow, stories must contain a magical force that can subdue or counter the ‘magic’ powers of the Beast. Somehow, storytelling can save a person from the Beast’s vicious intentions. What follows shows Momik’s efforts to use this insight in his strategy for survival. In order to know himself, he must discover the nature of the Nazi Beast and find a means to overcome it, and the instrument by which he does this is storytelling. While following this strategy, Shlomo discovers that storytelling is not a solitary activity. A storyteller needs interlocutors, who comment on his work, to help him, so to speak, survive his own storytelling. These ‘helpers’ are Ayala, who is ‘living’ her story rather than ‘telling’ it, the historical, reinvented Bruno Schulz, and the invented Wasserman, who all give Shlomo clues about how to proceed. One of the clues is that a story cannot be conceived as a coherent whole; the creation of art presupposes failure, interruption, forgetting, and ­reinventing, reconstructing, and reattempting, in a continuing cycle. Storytelling is not just telling a story, it is engaging in an ongoing struggle and negotiation over the complex weave of the story with the lives and opinions of the storytellers, the listeners, and perhaps even the characters. No one has full control of the story, but at decisive moments, the storyteller must have the resources and the ingenuity to impose his will. The story is not merely material; when it acquires its shape, it develops its own inherent dynamics, its own laws, and a form of semi-autonomy. It takes its own position in the interaction between storyteller and listener.

30  Ibid., 297. 31  Ibid. 32  Ibid. 33  Ibid., 85.

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Storytelling is thus a process of negotiation between storyteller and listener, with the story itself as an intractable object. Especially when it is used as a strategy to overcome threats or differences in power, storytelling can take on the shape of a ritual, in order to defer possible intuitive or premeditated infringements. Wasserman, typically, agrees on a ritual setup which seems to give both sides what they want and which is thus mutually beneficial. The ritual is doubly effective: on the one hand, it creates a space for negotiation, a common ground that excludes direct acts of violence; on the other hand, it creates a sphere of liminality and transformation, the opportunity to inscribe new values and new roles in the participants, and make them aware that there are other dimensions relevant to their positions in life. Thus, the formal and the imaginative components of the rite interact to cause a transformation, in a manner which is closely linked to the concept of the Thousand and one nights. In See under: love, the ritual transformation that takes place is the gradual consciousness of an individuality that is eclipsed by its incorporation into generic ‘masses,’ which dehumanize everyone and thus make it possible to dehumanize others and engage in indiscriminate killing. When storytelling succeeds in convincing the listeners that apart from belonging to a ‘mass,’ they possess their own individuality, they will be able to see the individuality of others, too. They become conscious of their personal responsibility with respect to the fate of others, and will no longer be able to kill a person who is no longer anonymous. It is this awareness that Wasserman succeeds in awakening in Neigel, the personification of the Nazi Beast. But Shleimele must also acquire this awareness in order to be able to tell his story, a story that meets his own demands and is effective. In the end, it is clear that it is effective: a story cannot kill the Nazi Beast, but it can transform him to such an extent that he kills himself.

Violence and the Boundaries of Narrativity: Elias Khoury’s Yalo

In See under: love the power struggle between violence and storytelling is decided in favor of the latter, which is capable of either postponing the moment of execution, through a ritualized performance, or averting it, by transforming the executioner or at least delimiting a field of protracted negotiation. The irrationality of violence is absorbed by the rationality of the imagination, which persuasively posits that even physical life is embedded in a world constructed by the human mind. This is not only relevant to individuals and their traumatic experiences, but also to societies and their scars and memories of wars and repression. Yet, while words can soothe conflicts, words can also ignite them.

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Words can heal wounds, but they can also inflict them; they can counter violence, but they can also be violent themselves. Violence, in all its pernicious forms, is a major theme in the work of Elias Khoury (b. 1948), the prominent Lebanese author who, probably not by coincidence, has long been fascinated by the Thousand and one nights. In Rihlat alGandhi al-saghir (1989; Journey of little Gandhi),34 a novel set in the Lebanese Civil War, Khoury reflects on the relationship between narration and death, while in Bab al-shams (1998; Gate of the sun),35 he uses the narrative strategy of postponement to present an ambitious, mosaic-like, cluster of accounts about the Palestinian nakba (the loss of Palestine in 1948), and its aftermath. In this section, we discuss one of his most intriguing works, situated just after the Lebanese Civil War, Yalo. Yalo and the Thousand and One Nights In most of Elias Khoury’s major works, we can perceive the influence of the Thousand and one nights, although rather than incorporating themes and motifs from the stories in the collection, he concentrates more on the concept of the Nights and the phenomenon of storytelling. His continuous exploration of the Nights’ narrative ‘essence’ has deepened the intertextual relationship between his novels and the Nights and made it a structural framework for his oeuvre as a whole. As testimonies of the Lebanese Civil War, which lasted from 1975 until 1990, Khoury’s novels are also concerned with issues of violence and death, both in their contemporary appearances and in their roots in the complex history of Lebanon. Khoury’s work is marked by the nexus between storytelling/writing and war/violence. As we see below, these themes can also be found in the text analyzed here, Khoury’s novel Yalo, which was published in 2002. Here, too, the process of writing a life story is related to the threat of perdition, set in the context of the Lebanese Civil War, and, more broadly, in Lebanese history. In contrast to Grossman’s novel, in Yalo, the structuring power of narrativity is insufficient and inadequate for the characters to obtain a mental and physical grasp on the course of events. As in See under: love, in Yalo, too, the significance of the ‘body’ as an inevitable factor in the interrelationship between narrativity and death plays an essential role: narration/writing is presented as a condition that is essential to survival. The triangular interaction between death, storytelling, and the body is, of course, a basic component of the frame story of the Thousand 34  Elias Khoury, The Journey of the Little Gandhi, trans. Paula Haydar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 35  Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun, trans. Humphrey Davies (New York: Picador, 2006).

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and one nights, since Shahrazad’s storytelling is not only related to eroticism as a complex physical and mental performance, but she also, by jeopardizing her life, surrenders her body to Shahriyar. It is Shahrazad’s body which represents the link between real events and the world of the imagination conjured up by her stories and it is also her body which is the location where the two domains interact. In Yalo this theme of the body as a hybrid constellation of narrative and physical components is consistently explored, thus deepening the intertextual weave between Khoury’s work and the Thousand and one nights. For our discussion of the novel, and the diverse aspects of the body it explores, the theoretical framework is gleaned mainly from Elisabeth Grosz’s work, Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism,36 in which the author discusses the philosophical implications of the notion of ‘body image.’ As in Khoury’s other novels, the story of Yalo is presented in a fragmentary, non-sequential way, which only shows some measure of coherence in the end, although even then some vital questions remain unanswered. Yalo, a young man in his late twenties, belongs to the Syrian Orthodox community. He grows up in the care of his grandfather, a priest, and his mother Gaby in al-Musaytba, the Syrian Orthodox quarter in Beirut. After his grandfather’s death, Yalo – whose real name is Danyal al-Abyad – joins a Syrian Orthodox militia which participates in the Lebanese Civil War, but at a certain point he and a friend rob the militia’s treasury and flee to France. There Yalo is deserted by his friend; he leads the life of a beggar until he is ‘rescued’ by a Lebanese lawyer, Michel Sallum, who takes him back to Lebanon and hires him as a guard for his villa in Balluna. It is here that Yalo builds a new life, indulges in a wild sexual relationship with Michel Sallum’s wife Randa, and develops the habit of watching amorous couples in the nearby forest, sometimes robbing them and raping the women. After some time, Yalo falls in love with one of his victims, who responds hesitantly and ambivalently to his rather awkward advances. The girl – Shirin – has a complicated life story as well and eventually, she becomes weary of Yalo ‘stalking’ her and she has him arrested for rape. When the novel begins, Yalo is in custody; the story of his ‘adventures’ is evoked during police interrogations and when he is alone in his cell. Yalo is ordered to write the story of his life, including a confession of his crimes, within the space of one month. If he fails to deliver the text, he will be severely – perhaps even fatally – punished. Anxiously, Yalo sets out to write the story of his own life and this leads him to write the stories of his family, and gradually the reader is able to collect 36  Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).

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the fragments of a personal history that is entwined with the tragic upheavals of the final days of the Ottoman Empire, in particular, the genocides of the Armenians and the Syrian Christians at the beginning of the twentieth century. It appears – although this only becomes clear in the final chapter – that as a child, Yalo’s grandfather survived the mass slaughter in his native village and was then adopted by a Kurdish mullah. After some years, he was ‘recovered’ by his uncle and decided to migrate to Beirut, where he married and became a Syrian Orthodox priest. This version of Yalo’s life story is composed to provide explanations for his situation and behavior, but several questions remain unanswered, for instance, we never learn the circumstances of his grandmother’s death of cancer, and the disappearance of his father, who emigrated to Sweden before Yalo’s birth and broke off all contact with his wife. And there is the strange love affair between Gaby and the tailor for whom she worked, an affair that her father terminated, and which may have been Gaby’s only hope for love. Yalo’s grandfather raises his daughter and grandchild in an atmosphere of religious strictness, even fanaticism; he prefers the obsolete ancient Syrian Seryoyo language to ordinary Arabic and constructs a rather morbid vision of life phrased in terms of religion and death. There are also other people involved in Yalo’s life: his childhood friends; the girls and women who initiate him in the domain of sexuality; and his militia comrades who initiate him in the domain of death and violence. Each has his own history, and all these characters have a role in the reconstruction of Yalo’s life and behavior, and enable us to visualize his life and world. This brief synopsis of the story of Yalo gives some indications as to the main structural parallels with the frame story of the Thousand and one nights. As in the case of Shahrazad, Yalo is placed in a situation of liminality, under the threat of physical harm or death. It is made clear several times that Yalo’s reconstruction of his life is not being executed voluntarily, but under coercion. Yalo is forced to record his life to prevent punishment and perdition. As in the case of Shahrazad, this liminality related to imminent death is presented as an incentive for narration, perhaps even as the only source of narration, since Yalo repeatedly acknowledges that this confinement and obligation is the only way he can recollect what has happened and regain the myriad fragments of memories. Thus, the prospect of death is the ultimate perspective from which a narrative version of ‘reality’ can be constructed. Another parallel between Yalo and the Thousand and one nights is the novel’s structural use of ‘metafiction’ as a narrative strategy. The story is constructed on two levels: the core passages, which consist of the texts written by Yalo in his cell; and the ‘context’ in which the origins and raison d’être of these

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texts are explained or reconstructed, in the form of interrogations, flashbacks, and memories. Thus, the novel consists of a frame story and embedded texts, which are, on the one hand, closely connected, but which, on the other hand, give the text a layered, complex narrative structure. This structure enables the narrator/Yalo to reflect on the processes and circumstances that generate texts, and on the nature and function of writing in general. Moreover, a dialogical schema is created in which the two components of the text comment on each other and reveal multiple perspectives of the events that are described, with each perspective originating from different discursive viewpoints. In this way, the element of delay is introduced, allowing the author to construct the story gradually from fragments of memory, correct previous versions, add and eliminate information, etc. It is only in the end that the ‘report’ of events is more or less complete as – at least in Yalo’s eyes – a truthful representation of events. As in the frame story of the Thousand and one nights, in Yalo, Khoury explores to what extent the act of narration has the power to redeem the narrator from his predicament. Yalo pursues his struggle to write down his memories and experiences, with the hope that in the end he can convince his prosecutors that he is innocent, or at least not guilty of all the crimes attributed to him. He is aware that in order to achieve this he must present a version that somehow convinces the interrogators and meets their expectations. Yalo, in his powerlessness, hopes that the ‘word’ will prove stronger than violence and will triumph in the end. He hopes narration will neutralize the disrupting force of violence by presenting an alternative vision of events, one that forms a logical, coherent unity. As noted above, these intertextual structural parallels are connected to each other through the figure of Shahrazad, not only as a narrative character, but also as a body that links the worlds of narration and reality. Narrating is a physical act, which, because it takes place through the necessary presence of a body, is continuously threatened and may be stopped by the intervention of external, non-narrative, forces. In order to tell her stories, Shahrazad must be physically threatened, since the threats have no effect unless there is a body to undergo execution. And the reverse is true as well: the influence of the imaginary world on the real world can only be effectuated because the two domains are linked through Shahrazad’s body. The intervention of the imagination on the course of events is only realized when the status of Shahrazad’s body changes from the status of the ultimate victim, reduced to a state of ‘bare life,’37 into the status of a human being, entitled to respect and protection. Or, in other words, it 37  A term derived from Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

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is Shahrazad’s bodily condition that sets the parameters for the effectiveness of the signifying process that is unfolded through the act of narration. In Yalo, too, it is Yalo’s bodily presence that provides the unifying element in the various dialectical forces. It is his body which is under threat of perdition, which is imprisoned and tortured, which is reduced to ‘bare life’ and which must be saved, even if Yalo must take on a completely new identity as a result of his narrative reconstruction. Finally, it is his body that performs the act of writing, of remembering, of searching for coherence. Even more directly than in Shahrazad’s case, the effectiveness of the signifying process in the interpretation of Yalo’s experiences becomes manifest, in reality, through persistent interrogations and torture. Reality only acquires meaning through narration, but narration only acquires its meaning through the medium of the body. One of the most prominent metaphors in Yalo is the octopus which spills its ink to ward off attackers and lead them astray. If it fails to repel its enemies, it will ultimately be “cooked in its own ink.”38 This image epitomizes Yalo’s situation, but it also characterizes, more generally, the position of the author, who inevitably utilizes his ink to save his life. Having established the links between the two texts and the function of the body in the narrative strategy, we can proceed with an analysis of the way in which Khoury uses the concept of the body in his story, in the context outlined above. We refer specifically to the notion of the ‘body image’ as described by Elisabeth Grosz, whose seminal work Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism explores the relationship between the body as a natural ‘object,’ and notions of the ‘self’ as they are discussed in philosophy and psychoanalysis. Her analysis concentrates on three approaches to this theme, approaches which to some extent are essentially different, but which also supplement each other. First, she refers to the psychoanalytical idea of the body as a ‘geography’ of desire represented by the various erogenous zones and unified by the structuring influence of the ego. Second, she describes the Foucauldian approach, which seems to posit the body as a ‘natural given’ on which rules, prescriptions, and obligations are ‘inscribed’ by social and cultural forces. Here, the image of the body is shaped by the disciplining interventions of society in its multiple ways of exerting power. Finally, Grosz discusses the phenomenological fusion of body and experience, which denies the dualistic vision of Foucault and instead proposes that the body is the source of all our experiences, but is also permanently shaped by these experiences. Thus, the body is not a tabula rasa on which social and cultural forces leave their marks, nor is it an 38  Elias Khoury, Yalo, trans. Humphrey Davies (London: MacLehose Press, 2010), 98.

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‘object’ dominated by an ego, rather it is a material shape which is an object and a subject at the same time and the medium through which we organize our experiences. Adopting the phenomenological approach, Grosz defines the concept of the body image as a map or representation of the degree of narcissistic investment of the subject in his own body and body parts. It is a differentiated, gridded, and ever-changing registration of the degrees of intensity the subject experiences, measuring not only the physical, but also the psychical changes that the body undergoes in its day-to-day actions and performances.39 The body image is always in a state of flux, in a process of becoming, of forming a unity from a state of ‘amorphousness’ to increasing differentiation and specialization. A coherent body image is indispensable to the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ subject and object, and to the determination of the subject’s situation vis-à-vis other bodies and the spatial environment. Conversely, the body image is partly shaped by the perception of other bodies, by sociocultural influences, identification with bodies and objects, and visions of spatiality. It is a condition for a stable relationship with the environment, as a field for possible actions, and a center unifying perceptions and sensations, which it transforms into coherent systems of experience. Body images are thus constructions, shaped by myriad cultural, social, and sensual impulses, which are co-ordinated within the body to form a perception of reality and which is, in turn, consistently reshaped by these influences. The notion of the body image is well-suited to our analysis of the way in which Khoury describes the bodies of Yalo and others. First, we establish their relationship to narratives as a structuring principle, and, second, to establish Yalo’s place in the chaotic sequence of events. The body image represents the body as the medium between ‘reality’ and ‘narrative reality.’ We divide our discussion into three sections, the ‘material body,’ the ‘ritual body,’ and the ‘narrative body.’ The Material Body The novel Yalo is, in part, a story about the ways in which the materiality of the body, and the violence it suffers as a result of this materiality, affects the self-awareness of the individual, and how systems of meaning are constructed to neutralize the destructive effects of the body’s transitoriness or to endow it 39  Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 83.

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with a significance. The representation of the ‘natural body’ conforms to the notion of ‘bare life,’ which indicates the reduction of human beings to their physical presence only, to a state without a status or significance, to the body that has fallen prey to the arbitrary authority of others and is excluded from any legal, cultural, or social framework. It is this state of reification of life which is always lurking in human beings and which reduces them to a constellation of basic instincts without willful control. We have seen examples of this in the description of the forms of indiscriminate violence in the novels of Calasso and Grossman. The first evocation of the idea of ‘bare life’ can be found in the many references to violence, war, and mass slaughter. In fact, the historical depth of the story is more or less confined to the commemoration of the two main massacres that marked the Lebanese population so deeply, the civil war of 1860, in which the Christian and Druze communities both engaged in massive atrocities, and the mass slaughter of the Armenian and Syrian Christians in East Anatolia during World War I. Vivid images are given of the inexplicable events that resulted in indiscriminate murder and bloodshed, devoid of any form of humanity. Of course, these images are linked to the Lebanese Civil War, in which, once again human life lost its value and its embedded place in a protective legal and social framework. The image of violent death is epitomized in the episode in which Yalo and his militia fighters find the remains of their comrade Alexej, which can hardly be called a body, since it consists of an unrecognizable heap of bones and clothes. Alexej represents the quintessence of death, and thereby of the body, which is, at any moment, vulnerable to destruction and annihilation. The figure who embodies the consciousness of mortality and the essence of bare, physical life, is Yalo’s grandfather. In the period before his death, he reduces his life to eating and sleeping, and confines his food to bread and vegetables, since he does not want to turn his stomach into a ‘graveyard.’ His body becomes desiccated and Yalo imagines his grandfather’s body slowly turning into dry clay, which will be easy to crumble and bury when he dies. Of course, the preoccupation with eating is an essential component of the notion of bare life. Life is eating, but it is also ‘being eaten,’ or more precisely, ‘the body eating itself.’ This is illustrated by the example of Alexej, who, in Yalo’s imagination, has eaten himself in a horrific meal. Here death is represented as the ultimate ‘Last Supper.’ This association corresponds to a fundamental anxiety: man’s fear for his own body; the fear that our body will ‘eat’ us: “We are afraid of the body, which is why we have to melt it before it melts our soul.”40 Death is thus 40  Khoury, Yalo, 273.

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represented as a victory of the materiality of our bodies, which in the end will consume us and which continually threatens to destroy us. The second evocation of ‘bare life’ is related to the domain of sexuality and is exemplified by Yalo’s relationship with Randa, the wife of the lawyer Michel Sallum, who employs Yalo to guard his villa. The relationship between Randa and Yalo is confined to sex; it is devoid of any form of intimacy or affection. In order to be sufficiently aroused and fulfill his obligations, Yalo must watch pornographic movies, and whenever he finds some comfort in Randa’s embrace, she immediately wards him off. The relationship with Randa, together with some experiences in his youth, defines Yalo’s vision of sexuality as a purely physical act, to which he is emotionally indifferent, and which is imposed by one partner upon the other. This definition governs his ‘expeditions’ into the forest, where he watches amorous couples and eventually rapes several women. On these occasions, he feels that his body is transformed into the body of an eagle, which dives upon its prey. Yalo’s reduction of sexuality to a physical act is changed by his meeting with Shirin, whom he treats, at first, as one of his victims, but who gradually stirs his emotions. It should be noted that Yalo’s distorted vision of sexuality is mirrored in the experiences of Shirin, who was raped by a doctor who performed an abortion on her, and who afterwards tried to sexually dominate her. This may explain why Shirin is not averse to Yalo’s advances, although she is also not particularly responsive, and why, from the onset, there is no possibility that a true and stable relationship can develop between the two. For both of them, their meeting is a means to recover from former experiences, to become aware of a new dimension in life, and to construct a new framework of meaning. This can only be achieved by a definitive rupture; however, this is only realized when Shirin incriminates Yalo for rape. Yalo has separated his notion of sexuality from his ‘love’ for Shirin; this is evident when he masturbates before he goes to an appointment with her, because he wants to be cleansed of sexual urges. Shirin’s ‘revenge,’ however, makes it impossible for Yalo to pursue this new opportunity in his life, rather it forces him to reconstruct his view of events when he is in prison. Third, the materiality of the body is evoked by many (systematic) references to bodily fluids and excretions, such as blood, sperm, female sexual fluids, tears, feces, urine, spittle, etc. According to Grosz, emphasis on bodily fluids in this way symbolizes the permeability of the body and the ambiguity of the separation between ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ This emphasis stresses the impossibility of controlling the body, as it is a living matter, with its specific physical functions, and thus confirms the essentially material nature of the body. In its materiality, the body loses the crucial differentiation between inside and outside, since

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there is no inherent reason, provided by socio-cultural contexts, why the body should be preserved and blood should not be shed. Sexual fluids are associated with the animal urge for procreation, although, at a certain point, Yalo feels that he has “shot his soul” and that sperm contains a man’s soul.41 The metaphorical use of bodily excretions is strengthened when Yalo’s interrogators force him to say that he is a ‘piece of shit,’ which recalls his memory of Alexej, who once forced a man to eat his own feces. In a certain sense, man’s nature is anchored in his body, which is, in turn, epitomized by his bodily excretions, which are consumed in the moment of dying. These evocations of the material essence of the body converge in the figure of Yalo, who, in his confinement, is himself reduced to the ultimate state of ‘bare life.’ He is subjected to systematic interrogation, intimidation, humiliation, and physical torture. Although he has been charged with rape and robbery, he is also accused of having stored explosives for a terrorist group. In order to discover the ‘truth,’ his interrogators systematically reject Yalo’s answers to their questions, so as to remove all of his verbal defenses, marginalize his personality, and reduce him to a state of mere physical presence. At one point Yalo is ordered to reconstruct his version of the ‘truth’ as the only means to escape from his status of ‘bare life.’ Thus, like Khoury’s strategy to discover the nature of the body, and Yalo’s strategy to reveal the essence of his life, the interrogators force Yalo to ‘return’ to the materiality of his body in order to uncover the ‘truth’ hidden in reality, or, more correctly, to construct a truth anchored in reality. The observations above clearly show that according to Khoury, the body cannot be seen as a stable tabula rasa on which social and cultural conventions and prescriptions are inscribed. When reduced to their material state, bodies are unstable, porous, vulnerable to destruction, and therefore a liability to the preservation of the ‘self.’ The material body is itself not a stable foundation for the construction of a ‘body image,’ since the body image is required to stabilize an essentially unstable material body. Thus, since the material body is unstable, Khoury implies that to form a body image, a continuous interaction with perceptions and experiences is necessary, and this in turn implies that the construction of a body image is always part of a continuing process of formation and is never complete, coherent, and stable. The first step in the formation of a body image, as Khoury proposes in his novel, is the subjugation of the body to forms of ritual, especially religious ritual.

41  Ibid., 85, 144.

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The Ritual Body As a philosophical concept, ritual is usually seen as a phenomenon which is situated at the interface of bodies and systems of meaning in the general sense. For Foucault, ritual is a mechanism aimed at disciplining the body, inscribing habits and practices on the body, and thereby incorporating the body into specific social contexts, which in turn are related to discursive systems. Ritual is thus seen as a mechanism of power that imposes practices and discourses on the individual. From a phenomenological perspective, ritual is, rather, part of the processes of cognition and perception, with the body at the center. Ritual practices are not so much meant to impose social practices, but rather to train the body to become the focal point of the structure of perceptions, emotions, and experiences. Ritual acts are therefore part of the formation of the body image, and its relationship to concepts of space and time. In all cases, because of their performative nature, ritual practices relate to the interaction between bodily and discursive practices. It can be argued that in Yalo, ritual is the main metaphorical matrix of the narrative, in a way that is similar to the story of Shahrazad and Shahriyar. Here, however, the concept of ritual is rooted in religion and primarily defined in religious terms. It is possible to see Yalo’s predicament as a confession, not only in the juridical sense, but also in the religious sense, as a purifying act to expiate his sins. The acts of torture, too, are presented as a ritual, especially the repeated sessions with the sack – which are described by Yalo as an ‘instrument to reveal the truth’ – and the sessions of the ‘throne,’ in which Yalo is, respectively, bound in a sack with a cat in it and forced to sit on a bottle. Of course, this juxtaposition of violence and confession as ritual acts correlate with the story of Shahrazad, in which the threat of violence is countered by the construction of a ‘narrative truth’ that includes the complexities of the concept of ritual. In Yalo, too, liminality, initiation, the temporal frame, repetition, and the impossibility of negotiating on an equal basis, are all ritual elements to which Yalo is subjected. In both cases, it is the ritual that links the body to forms of discourse. Within the matrix of religious ritual, the focal point of the system of metaphors is Yalo’s grandfather, who is obsessed with his faith and defines life and every act in religious terms. He describes his small family as the Holy Trinity, himself as God, Yalo as the Son, and Gaby as the Holy Spirit. He makes clear that his ‘son’ should act as his delegate, since he is his ‘word’ on earth. This simultaneously forces on Yalo an identity, a role, a responsibility, and a relationship of authority, which transposes his grandfather’s religious worldview onto him. This symbolic relationship replaces the ambiguous relationship that has

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grown between Yalo and his grandfather in the absence of Yalo’s real father. His grandfather becomes Yalo’s main point of reference, but his almost morbid religious worldview fills him with a combination of awe, wonder, and aversion, since his is a world related to a distant past and a dead language, Seryoyo. It is a world that weighs on Yalo as a heavy burden and constantly reminds him of death. Conjuring forces that are beyond human control is one of the basic functions of ritual. In Yalo many of the functions of the body, in its materiality, are linked to ritual and religion. The killing of a woman in the description of the massacres of 1860 is associated with the slaughtering of a lamb; the devil is chased away by spitting; and Yalo’s grandfather says that the ‘true’ baptism is the baptism with tears. Gaby eats Yalo’s feces when he is a baby after a vow, Yalo’s friends spill their semen in a scene of ritual communal masturbation, and Yalo’s sexual experiences with the girls in his childhood are all depicted as ritual acts. Sex between Yalo and Randa is done according to a ritualistic routine, without any form of love or intimacy, and finally, the ‘miracle’ (when oil oozes from the hands of a ‘medium’ while he stands before an icon) performed by Michel Sallum and a bishop is part of a religious ritual. These associations between bodily fluids and rituals are not presented as a source of signifying practice, but rather as a means to turn bodily functions into routines, to regulate their occurrence in the practice of life, while conjuring their association with taboos and invisible forces. A second level of ritual behavior in Yalo is exemplified by Gaby’s annual baptism in the sea; this is performed by Yalo’s grandfather and Yalo is forced to attend. First, the session is meant to renew the bond between believers and God, through the sacred water of the sea; and second, to symbolize the general process of transformation through an appeal to the sacred. Through the connection between the sacred water and Gaby’s body, the salty sea water becomes sweet, at least this is what Yalo’s grandfather assures him. Finally, this ritual confirms the status of their common bond as the Holy Trinity: Yalo receives the ‘transformed’ water from Gaby/the Holy Spirit. It is through this baptism that their lives acquire meaning and that their mere bodily presences are incorporated into a higher cosmology that contains God’s ordinances and grace. The baptism is an initiation and a confirmation of the acceptance of God’s power on earth and of the definition of life, individual roles, and relationships in specific religious terms. Finally, it is a confirmation of the authority of the grandfather as God. The ritualization of life affects Yalo in his daily behavior, especially in his sexual activities with Randa and his first sexual experiences. They also govern

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his expeditions into the forest, which are subject to a fixed ritualized scenario, in which his attributes – his raincoat, lantern, and rifle – are indispensable to bring about the desired effects. These are rituals which are part of his daily routine and which in themselves have no real significance. Much more farreaching is ritualization as a transformative, signifying mechanism, which – as gradually becomes clear – dominates Yalo’s life. The infusion of Yalo’s reality with the sacred is confirmed when he goes to the beach with Shirin and, at the sight of the sea, remembers Gaby’s baptism and claims to be able to walk on the water, then proposes that Shirin share bread and wine with him. Here it becomes explicit that the baptism has bestowed on him the role of Christ, with the dualistic connotation of redemption and sacrifice. Perhaps without Yalo himself being aware of it, this sets the parameters for his supposed, imagined, role in life. The effects of ritualistic transformations of Yalo’s vision of reality are as important as this ‘doubling’ of roles. After all, the incorporation of the sacred into earthly reality implies that everything we perceive has a hidden component and a symbolic significance. During the course of the story it becomes clear that for Yalo, the boundaries between these components of reality have become blurred. There is no longer a distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘symbolic’ meanings of events. This is painfully clear when Gaby reproaches Yalo for taking part in the bloodshed in the Civil War and Yalo retorts that his grandfather does not eschew drinking blood during mass. When Gaby says that this blood is symbolic, Yalo answers that the blood he and his friends shed is symbolic too. The sacred has usurped reality, everything can be defined in religious terms, and the spilling of blood can always be justified as a sacrifice. Notably, in Yalo the ritualization of bodies does not result in unified roles and body images, but, on the contrary, it leads to a split between real and imagined identities. Yalo tells his grandfather that his story became the shadow of his real life and that he talks about his life as if it were someone else’s. Gaby imagines that the mirror has swallowed her image, that she has lost her body, that she no longer exists. And Yalo, who continually questions his real identity, undergoes torture in his ritual roles of sacrifice and redeemer, he is simultaneously punished and struggles to discover the ‘truth.’ The ritual process, it is suggested, is not conclusive for the formation of a coherent body image, but rather is an attempt to reconcile two contradictory realms, as in a monophysite vision of Christ. Although it is meant to amalgamate bodily and spiritual awareness into a sacred unity, in fact, it only presents a unified perception of reality by splitting the sense of the self. There is, however, a third level in the formation of the body image, again reflected in the figure of Shahrazad: the narrating/ narrated body.

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The Narrating/Narrated Body In the frame story of the Thousand and one nights, Shahrazad’s body is at the center of the ritual act, first as the source and medium of what may be called ‘narrative performance’; and, second, as the body which is encapsulated and protected by the stories she tells. These stories provide an alternative, imagined vision of life in which her body and its relationship to Shahriyar acquire a new meaning and a new equilibrium. In other words, the interaction between her and Shahriyar’s body images is regulated by the act of narration, in which their mutual body images are redefined. The status of ‘bare life’ is transformed by attaching a meaning to the bodies and incorporating them into a system of signification. In Yalo, too, this notion of redeeming the body by embedding it in a discursive system is of central importance. Without narration, and the vision of meaning it contains, no body image can be constructed and the body itself is doomed to suffer and perish. The act of narration is, first, related to language and the ability to speak, which in Yalo is presented in the first instance as a physical act. Yalo more than once declares his inability to speak, and his mother teaches him to ‘spit out’ the words. Part of his problem is caused by his grandfather’s wish to teach him Seryoyo, a dead language presumably spoken by Christ and traditionally the ceremonial language of the Syrian Orthodox Church. His grandfather considers Seryoyo the holy language of their community, something which must be kept alive, but the words are like ‘dead weight’ on Yalo’s tongue. At the same time, however, Yalo does not consider Arabic as his mother tongue and he also has difficulty speaking it. The confusion about which language is his own affects the very roots of his identity, since he has several names in these languages and he fails to make his real identity clear to his interrogators. Words, therefore, have a complex relationship with the body, especially since, for Yalo, they have physical properties themselves. Yalo can ‘see and hear’ the words simultaneously; they change into ‘real, palpable things,’ which he can ‘bump against.’ Words are like ‘eyes’ that gaze at us; words can wear ‘masks,’ hide other words, hide the reality of the war; and words are a weapon that can destroy people. And, ultimately, words are Yalo himself, as his grandfather explains: Before the word, my son, a man is weak. That is why God the Father could find no name to give his son but the Word. What does God’s Word mean? It means His essence and His truth. Your son is your Word. You are my Word, my son, just as the Son was the Word of the Father.42 42  Ibid., 44.

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This is the reason Yalo is afraid of words, especially his grandfather’s words, which are imbued with truth, which are identified with his person, but which are, at the same time, incomprehensible and ‘dead.’ The act of speaking is thus rooted in Yalo’s physical being, which is projected into the past. His grandfather, referring to the massacre in Tur Abidin states that he has learned to read what was ‘wiped out.’ “We are a people whose story has been rubbed out and whose language has been rubbed out, and if we don’t learn how to read what has been erased we will lose everything.”43 His grandfather copies poems and claims that he is a writer. He says that all writers are copyists recording fragments of the same book. Yalo is thus the embodiment of a heritage, one of the few survivors of a genocide, on whose shoulders rests the duty to keep the heritage alive. But Yalo is unable to fulfill this task, and the infusion of Seryoyo words into him only blocks his speech and prevents his identity from becoming clearly and unambiguously defined. This speechlessness is strengthened by the war and culminates during Yalo’s brief exile in France, where, being unable to speak French, he is reduced to complete ‘nothingness.’ Yalo’s physical inability to speak is suddenly cured when he meets Shirin and falls in love with her. He discovers that love is a source of speaking and a form of speech, and that speaking is only possible through love. With Shirin, he feels that he is instantly transported to another world, whose true nature he does not know. He later becomes aware that he has tried to seduce her into listening to him by telling her stories, some of which have really happened, while others he has made up. At the same time, in spite of the stream of words, he feels that he has not said anything at all, since he is not capable of saying anything about his love for her. When the talking stops, the love, too, is over: “Yalo understood that a person can talk only when the other person has become a part of his words.”44 That is, in Yalo’s case, when the other person has become part of his body. Because of his love for Shirin, words take on a completely different function for Yalo. They do not embody a vanished past which keeps the memory of violence, death, and destruction alive, and which imposes a ‘truth’ and an identity upon him that prevent him from being anything other than a mere body, a speechless physical presence. Through Shirin he discovers the liberating force of speaking, of constructing narrative representations which bestow meaning on ‘physical’ life and, moreover, which make a relationship with others possible. Yalo’s effort to turn speech into a communicative medium fails mainly because both he and Shirin are unable to transform language into a system that 43  Ibid., 273. 44  Ibid., 225.

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represents a common truth in reality. As a result of their fractured lives and physical experiences they have no common framework to find the proper words for what they have experienced. They have no common terms by which they can convey what they intend to say. Yalo repeatedly complains that he is unable to talk to her about his love. The rift between the euphoria of being able to speak and their experiences, in reality, which the words must express, comes to the fore when Shirin accuses Yalo of rape. The word ‘rape’ has no real connotation for Yalo, since his sexual acts with Randa and the women in the forest were devoid of meaning and moral content. Yalo is prepared to adopt, in part, the meaning of the word as it is used by the interrogators, insofaras the women in the forest are concerned, but he is unable to find any congruence between their definition and his experiences with Shirin, which are linked to concepts of love. Throughout the interrogation process, Yalo becomes increasingly aware of the ambiguous relationship between words and reality. While he is pressured to bring out the ‘truth,’ he struggles to comprehend the reports of the events presented by the interrogators and Shirin, which seem to contradict his own memories. He becomes aware that the flow of words unleashed by his love for Shirin has not succeeded in taking root in reality or in producing any truth, and that being forced to write down the story of his life gives him a chance to unveil the truth. He becomes the body that narrates the story to protect itself, as the octopus ejecting its ink. He is aware that words are equivalent to creation: “When I wrote the story of my life, I discovered the word that created me anew.”45 Finally, Yalo has become the ‘word,’ not the word that his grandfather identified him with, associated with death, God, and sacrifice, but the word imposed on him by his torturers. Although at first, he is convinced that writing is the only way to order his memories, Yalo soon discovers that memories are full of lacunae: “God alone possesses perfect memory. Human beings, on the other hand, remember only to forget.”46 And, “Writing is the only way to remember. Without it, a man’s life would be confined to his present and he’d live without memory, like the animals. I have discovered that when I write, the doors of memory open themselves before me.”47 During his writing, the various stories which together form the story of his life, from the first massacres in 1860, through the genocides at the turn of the twentieth century, to the latest war and his illusory redemption by Shirin converge. But while he is writing he becomes increasingly conscious 45  Ibid., 235–236. 46  Ibid., 306. 47  Ibid., 279.

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that it is impossible to incorporate the truth in writing, that writing and reality are in fact mutually exclusive: “A man cannot write down his life; he has to choose between living and writing.”48 It seems impossible to incorporate all the events into a single coherent narrative, with an unambiguous meaning, and more and more he identifies ink with blood and writing with a form of torture. He feels that the truth eludes him, that he is forced to lie in order to link his story to a reality that is inevitably subjective. Although at the beginning Yalo started writing to ‘create himself anew’ and to ‘start a new life,’ gradually he discovers that the writing only alienates him from himself: Yalo was a young man who was trying to read in the whiteness of the paper his own story, which he didn’t know how to tell it, and his language, which he didn’t know how to write, and his memory, which he didn’t know how to articulate. He beheld himself as a wild ass lost in the plains.49 Still, he writes to save his life: He is like the squid. All he possesses to squirt and mislead the fishermen and escape death is the weapon of ink…. It occurred to Yalo that he would be cooked in the ink he was writing with, that the black ink that flowed across the sheets of the paper would kill him.50 His writing would be in vain: “He wrote and wrote, like a squid going to its death.”51 He felt that he had fallen into the ‘trap’ of speaking. Because of the essentially fragmentary nature of experiences, which Yalo comes to see cannot be gathered together in a unified, coherent text, the life story Yalo records does not provide the unified self-image he hopes for. On the contrary, the combination of torture and being forced to reconstruct his past only succeeds in making him a stranger to himself: But now, after experiencing imprisonment and torture, I’ve started to see Yalo’s whole life as that of somebody else. I don’t know how to describe that feeling, sir, but it’s a true feeling. I look at myself in the mirror of myself and I see another man, and I’m afraid of his thoughts and actions.52 48  Ibid., 233. 49  Ibid., 161. 50  Ibid., 98. 51  Ibid. 52  Ibid., 189–190.

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And, “He’d become a shadow like his grandfather Habeel Afram Abyad, The grandfather, whom old age had transformed into his own shadow, would say of his life that it hadn’t been his life.”53 And, finally, “Yalo had discovered that his life was not real. The life he’d written came to him from shredded, incomplete stories, and he saw himself in those stories as though it wasn’t him.”54 Still, Yalo hopes that his version of the truth will convince the interrogators to spare him, but in the end, they throw away his papers, saying that they already know everything and do not need his writing. In the end, the combination of torture, threats, and the forced effort at selfreconstruction completely shatters Yalo’s self-image, and, more particularly, his body image. During the torture Yalo sees himself leaving his body, and he watches himself from a distance. He has become two people, one imprisoned in his body, and one ‘liberated’ from all physical suffering. The body is reduced to a state of mere materiality; his body image is detached from its material form. Yalo’s narrative does not produce a unified self; ritual violence, by inflicting unbearable pain, reduced him to his flesh and prevented him from acquiring a stable identity. Yalo’s fruitless efforts to use narration as a medium to integrate his bodyimage show that narratives are fragmented, and that their relationship with reality is at best ambiguous. In Yalo, it is clear that this ambiguity is used as a mechanism for the exertion of power. The quest for truth is used as a decoy to hide a struggle between subjective visions of reality and to impose one of these visions. In the end, Yalo – in his symbolic role as Christ – is sacrificed to redeem others, the real criminals, who have started the war and have enriched themselves through it, or profited from the chaos to manipulate others. The post-war order will be built on these people’s ‘reality,’ but someone must be punished, society must be cleansed, culprits must be condemned. The system needs its scapegoats and outcasts, its exponents of ‘bare life,’ and Yalo is a suitable victim. As a diophysite Christ, he has failed to construct a stable body image and to harmonize the domains of reality and the imagination. His spirit is redeemed, but his body is reduced to mere flesh. In contrast to Shahrazad, Yalo does not succeed in redeeming himself through narration, in overcoming the irrationality of violence by juxtaposing it with a rational, coherent account of past events. If this impossibility is what Khoury wants to convey in his novels, it is, of course, a pessimistic message. It implies that violence is, ultimately, capable of destroying our efforts at reconstructing our history and at conceptualizing the phenomenon of time and its function to structure our perception of reality. All narratives that seek to 53  Ibid., 247. 54  Ibid., 246–247.

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incorporate notions of time are inevitably shattered, because they are incomplete, fragmented, inconsistent, and only subjective. Moreover, narratives are subject to relations of power, since those in power are able to decide which account of events is accepted and which is not. It is ironic, even bitter, that violence itself is the only element that connects the fragments of the lives of Yalo and his family in recent history. It is violence that persistently steers lives, disperses them, mutilates them, and catches up with them. Violence is a consistent presence, not as a structuring principle, but as an autonomous, disruptive force that secures its own continuity through people, reproducing itself at the expense of people. It is no coincidence, then, that Yalo has been reduced to a state of ‘bare life’ by his prehistory, which estranged him from his social surroundings. History and time have lost their significance, their content. It is also no coincidence that Khoury permeates his story with religion, as if to show the desperate efforts, especially by Yalo’s grandfather, to imbue the materiality of ‘bare life’ with some moral meaning. All kinds of rituals, of metaphysical images, of moral texts and acts are invoked to break the all-powerful forces of violence, and to create a new social, intellectual, and moral fabric that can ward off the recurring emergence of violence. In this process, Yalo’s grandfather literally shrinks to mere material substance. Apparently, according to Khoury, neither religion nor history are, in themselves, remedies against the disintegration of narrative time. Only the termination of the cycles of violence and the acknowledgment of the integrity of the human body can restore the potential of time to establish structure and thereby the redemptive power of narration.

Conclusions to Part 4

The Thousand and one nights offers an interesting set of themes and motifs related to history, in part derived from its treatment of the phenomenon of time and in part a result of its specific methods of storytelling. In the novels discussed in this chapter we see how the idea of the textual nature of narration can be linked to visions of history as essentially forms of narration. The narrative nature of history implies its basic fragmentation and its incorporation into clusters of individual, subjective accounts, which are the components of a broader, collective, rendition of historical events. The narrative nature of historical transmission reveals the gap between ‘memory’ and ‘history’ and the mechanisms that shape them and their interaction. This is most beautifully shown in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, which heralds a new, modern

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perception of history as a corpus of knowledge about our past, one that is inextricably related to the effects of this knowledge on personal destinies and lives. As we have seen in previous chapters, the essentially narrative character of the experience of time allows the writer/narrator to mold the temporal regime in his story as he likes. In the Thousand and one nights, this manipulation is shown in strategies of deferral, but also in enchantments, and the interaction between stagnancy and movement, as in the adventure trope mentioned in part 1. In the novels by Márquez and Rushdie, history is represented as a phenomenon that can be ‘enchanted’ – confiscated by unfathomable powers that ‘create’ history by imposing a dictatorial interpretation of events, both in the past and in the present, and thus prepare the way for a preconceived future. It is narrative, in its subjective, imaginative form that attempts to break this monopoly on history, and return it to the level of individual experience, where real history is generated. In all these cases, the struggle between history and memory, between real events and their historical representation, between opposing versions, is caused by traumatic experiences, especially at the level of communities, nations, or societies. Communities are defined by the collective memories of past events, which somehow must be transformed into history. Only when the narratives of history are internalized can a trajectory toward the future be found. The traumas of the past must be encapsulated in words; historical aberrations have to be neutralized by narratives which give meaning to events that tend to reduce man to his most deplorable state of being, subject to relentless, irrational violence, to victimhood, to mere ‘material’ bodies. Grossman and Khoury show how narration is essentially a physical act which is related to the survival of the body. It can, at least, attempt to counter the forces that reduce human beings to anonymous bodies, and perhaps recover their individuality, and reincorporate them in protective discursive systems. This, of course, is ultimately the stratagem Shahrazad uses to save her life.

Part 5 Identifications, Impersonations, Doubles: The Discontents of (Post-)Modernity

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⸙ The Thousand and one nights, in its many appearances, has often been designated as a literary work, or even a literary phenomenon, which transgresses boundaries of various kinds. With its copious stream of stories, it not only exemplifies the fluid and overflowing nature of storytelling, both in its unbound form and in its varied contents, but it also indicates how storytelling transcends national, ethnic, and cultural divisions. Storytelling is practiced in all times and all places, and it can easily adapt itself to new cultural environments. This is confirmed by the history of the reception of the Thousand and one nights outside the Arab world; it was not only very much appreciated by non-Arabic readers; it was also sufficiently flexible to take on new guises to conform to new circumstances; it showed its amazing vitality and its ability to adapt to new tastes. Apparently, the work contains something that every culture can use to express its particularities. While it may be true that the Thousand and one nights crosses cultural boundaries without effort, it is also true that by crossing these boundaries in the way that it does, it reveals, accentuates, confirms, and even constructs these boundaries. Noticing that a boundary is crossed self-evidently implies acknowledging that this boundary exists, and wherever there is a boundary, two domains are defined, or define themselves, differently, often as opposed to the other domain. Whoever or whatever crosses a boundary thereby assumes a different status and a different position in his or its environment. They are taken out of a structure which to a large extent determines their relationship to others, the ‘meanings’ they personify, and the functions they perform. On crossing the boundary, these relationships, meanings, and functions are reconstructed to incorporate them into a new structure. Moreover, anyone or anything crossing a boundary affects the relations between the two domains, influences visions of the other, and shapes the interpretation of differences. The notion of ‘orientalism,’ which was developed by the PalestinianAmerican literary scholar Edward Said, is an important theoretical model that enables us to examine this kind of cultural border-crossing. In his famous and controversial book Orientalism (1979), and in other works, he argues that the West developed an idea of the ‘Orient’ which is subservient to its colonial interests and which ‘dehumanizes’ a large part of the world population. His ideas can be summarized by three basic theses. First, western ideas and representations of the Orient are part of a coherent – Foucauldian – discourse, which is supported, shaped, and kept alive by all forms of learning and cultural production, such as academic institutions, and representations in literature and

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art. Second, this discourse refers not to a ‘real’ geographical region, but to an imaginary Orient, which is constructed with western stereotypes of the East to confirm the western sense of identity and superiority. And, third, the western discourse of an imaginary Orient is used and mobilized to legitimate colonial and imperial domination and political and military intervention. As we have seen above, the advance of the process of globalization, especially from the second half of the nineteenth century, fostered various forms of exoticism in European literature and art. Said investigated some of these expressions in the context of colonialism and decolonization. Decolonization forced western nations to redefine their role in the former colonies and their relationships to them in the postcolonial era. Orientalism is the ideological legitimation of colonial supremacy and exploitation, it willfully reduces the colonial subject to dehumanized stereotypes to strengthen European self-images and self-awareness in the new world order. Now that colonial rule has ended, relationships with the Other must be redefined, to exclude the reductionist, exploitative visions of others. Discussions about the acceptable views of the Other eventually extended to western societies themselves, as non-western immigrants increasingly transformed the character of western society into a multicultural mix. Even staunch adversaries of Said’s theory of orientalism admit that visions of the oriental Other have played an important role in the construction of selfidentities in Europe.1 This role was partly political, as it supported claims to hegemony and cultural superiority, and partly cultural and psychological, as it was a response to the necessity to incorporate other civilizations into a new globalized worldview. The encounter with exotic societies and traditions required a radical revision of inherited perceptions of the world, in the fields of ideology, religion, and scholarship. In order to facilitate communication with exotic others, self-images, which were based on outdated concepts, had to be redefined. It is here that we can identify three different levels on which the influence of orientalism can be discussed, levels which were often, but not always, interrelated: orientalism as an ideological foundation of colonial expansion and domination; orientalism as a radical interrogation of traditional self-perceptions; and orientalism as a process of the gradual incorporation of exotic influences on European culture. Although ideological concerns are involved on all three levels, the measure of political purport and effect differs. In terms of the deconstruction of self-perceptions, the oriental Other functioned 1  Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1979); Daniel Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Penguin, 2006).

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as a catalyst rather than as a construction of an ‘other,’ in this way, it paved the way for the process of the third level, the adoption and accommodation of exotic cultural forms in the fields of thought, literature, and aesthetics. These last two levels were so intensely directed at self-examination and internal debates that, as Said also observes, the idea of the Orient became abstract and imaginary: it did not reflect a real existing Orient, nor was it intended to refer to it, since it came to represent a more or less self-contained tool to legitimate a certain self-view or a specific aesthetic preference. The Orient, one might say, became a symbol, not of an oriental Other, but of a component of the Self which was defined in order to construct an identity. This internalization and abstraction of the Orient implies that as a concept it took on different forms according to time and place. The differences were partly related to the nature of the connections with the real Orient. English orientalism differed from French orientalism because the former included India, whereas the latter was involved more in North Africa and the Levant. Dutch orientalism was deeply influenced by colonial relations with the Indonesian archipelago, while German and Austrian orientalism differed yet again, as these countries possessed no territories overseas and were mainly implicated in conflicts with their Turkish neighbor. Similarly, eighteenth-century orientalism, which focused on religion, differed from orientalism in the nineteenth century, which emphasized racial differences, and also focused more on visual aesthetics. With the rise of modernity, with its internal discontents, its rapid incorporation of distant societies, and its awareness of an essential, even existential, fragmentation, orientalism took on new content. The Orient was, at the same time, a refuge, a threat, and a component of an infinitely complex human existence. The mechanism of ‘orientalizing’ the Other in order to construct an imagined Self naturally means that it was possible to identify oneself with the oriental Other, instead of distinguishing oneself from him. Identification could become a solace for, or an escape from, the agonies of Romanticism; it offered a realm of refuge in which the oppressiveness of ordinary life and the constraints of modern society could be replaced by adventures and unbridled fantasies. However, this romantic Schwärmerei could also result in forms of nostalgia, estrangement, and isolation. In a more complex way, imagining an exotic Other could also function as a self-reflexive tool by which to distinguish the contradictions and hidden counterparts within the Self. The Orient could represent the Other within the Self, that is, those components of the Self that are repressed because of their ‘alienness,’ or irrationality. In this part, we examine some examples of authors who used iconic figures, tropes, and motifs from the Thousand and one nights (e.g., Aladdin, Sindbad,

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Harun al-Rashid, and the City of Brass) as anchors for their orientalism. They used these tropes to explore forms of identification with oriental others, to investigate the mechanisms of this identification, or to symbolize forces that foster or represent the formation of coherent visions of society. We encounter the various uses of the Thousand and one nights in the literary texts that were analyzed in previous chapters, including the destabilization of time and place, the predominance of narrative and texts, and the complexities of history. In the works discussed in this part, these narrative aspects are supplemented with explicit motifs and figures taken from the huge reservoir of the Thousand and one nights.

Chapter 14

Aladdin’s Nightmare: Henrik Pontoppidan and Ernst Jünger In this section, we discuss two examples of orientalism which were used as constitutive elements in the definition of the ‘modern’ Self, in periods of great socio-economic fermentation and upheaval, in societies struggling to come to terms with the condition of modernity. Both show a far-reaching abstraction of the idea of orientalism, directed at society itself rather than at an external Other, and both relate to countries that were trying to fulfill the requirements of modernity, but which lacked colonial empires. The first, Denmark, developed a relationship with the Levant, especially in the nineteenth century, when the Danes were constituting themselves into an independent nation. Both processes were accomplished without the support of a colonial economy. The second, Germany, also built its configuration as an independent nation in the nineteenth century without controlling a colonial empire, but by rapidly developing a modern industry that catapulted it into the modern age, with catastrophic consequences. In both countries, forms of orientalism were important as elements of self-definition, both as ideological and as abstract, aesthetic components. In both countries, the Jews, an internal Other, were identified as ‘Oriental’ and, therefore, problematized as a potential Other who was alien to society.1 In both cases, as we see, the Thousand and one nights played an important part in the imagery used to support the debates. And in both cases, the figure of Aladdin personified the dilemmas of the modern age.2 In Europe, Aladdin, the hero of the story of ‘Aladdin and the wonderful lamp,’ became one of the iconic characters of the Thousand and one nights. As we know, the story of Aladdin is not in any of the Arabic versions of the work. The tale belongs to the so-called ‘orphan stories,’ that is, the stories that were told to Galland by the Syrian priest Hanna Diyab, who was visiting France at the time. Galland made notes and later reconstructed the story to include it in his Mille et une nuits. Paradoxically, this story, together with two other orphan stories, namely, ‘Ali Baba and the forty thieves’ and ‘Prince Ahmad and 1  Steven Aschheim, The Modern Jewish Experience and the Entangled Web of Orientalism (Amsterdam: M.b. Israel Instituut, 2010). 2  See, about the story of ‘Aladdin,’ Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:82–85.

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the fairy Peri Banu,’ became the most popular stories of the Nights in Europe, and eventually even grew into the quintessential example of the collection and the eastern tale in general, although no original Arabic texts of these stories, in the context of the Thousand and one nights, exist. These philological musings were of no interest to most readers, of course. Presumably, what attracted readers was the theme of a poor boy rising to riches and happiness, and the motif of the magic lamp, the wicked old sorcerer, and, of course, the triumph of true love.

The Curse of Aladdin: Henrik Pontoppidan

In the story of ‘Aladdin and the wonderful lamp,’ Aladdin is a poor wretch who is addressed by a Moorish sorcerer, who has discovered the whereabouts of a hidden treasure that can only be retrieved by Aladdin. The Moor succeeds in persuading Aladdin to help him, but the magic lamp inadvertently remains in the hands of the innocent boy, who then possesses almost unlimited power through the jinn who inhabits it. Because the sorcerer refuses to acknowledge defeat, several intrigues follow, but in the end Aladdin is triumphant, not so much because of his power but because he finds true love. In the eighteenth century, the Aladdin motif had already been incorporated into the corpus of texts related to the material of the Thousand and one nights, for example, in Christoph Martin Wieland’s (1733–1813) Dschinnistan (1786–89). It gained prominence again in 1805, in a play called Aladdin eller den forunderlige lampe, written by the Danish writer Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850). Oehlenschläger considered himself both a German and a Danish author, and the piece was written in German and Danish. In the play, Aladdin is the alter ego of the author, who has received the magic lamp of poetic genius, and who is protected by the spirit against his destructive urges, which are caused by his power, and who is, in the end, reconciled with Nature by a magic ring. In the prologue, the sisters Sanguinitas (Orient) and Melancholia (North) symbolize the incorporation of the Orient into the North within a general Romantic universalism. This play illustrates the intrusion of the Other into the realm of the Self, and the threat to the Self which it incurs. The evil, alien, element is represented by Nur al-Din, who is slain by Aladdin, who then undertakes the pilgrimage to Mecca with his wife to atone for his sins.3 3  Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger, Aladdin. Or, the Wonderful Lamp: A Dramatic Poem, trans. Theodore Martin (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1863; repr. University of Michigan Library); see also, Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism: Paris and the

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Oehlenschläger was not only the author to introduce Romanticism into Danish culture; he is also seen as the founding father of modern Danish literature. It is no coincidence that his foundational Aladdin is steeped in orientalism, since the Orient, and especially the figure of Aladdin, was perfectly compatible with the emerging Romantic spirit: “The East was in this sense the only adequate name and mirror of all the hidden, strong forces which inhabited man and which the moralists of the Enlightenment had censored away, together with the ‘improbabilities’ and ‘impossibilities’ of the fairy tales.”4 The play also fitted very well with the inclinations of the Danish cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, for whom orientalism was not so much an ideological attitude, but rather an aesthetic fashion imported from Britain, Germany and, especially, France. It was a way of accommodating the modern world: “Orientalism offered a useful means of adjusting mentally to modernity, and the foreign Orient became a reflection of the experience of foreignness in the familiar world that now underwent all sorts of changes.”5 This dimension of orientalism was stressed by the construction, in 1843, of Tivoli, the oriental pleasure garden in Copenhagen. The relevance of orientalism and the Aladdin trope is heightened by the political substratum of the play, which is more prominent in the Danish version than in the German text. The context of the play was the territorial controversy between Denmark and Germany over the province of Schleswig-Holstein, which was decided in favor of Germany in 1863. The audience certainly identified with the positive figure of Aladdin who withstood the evil intentions of the villain Nur al-Din, who clearly represented Germany. Orientalism was thus used as a means of self-identification within the context of Europe, rather than in juxtaposition to a real Orient. In the course of the nineteenth century, the Aladdin trope became a topos in modern Danish literature in a number of forms.6 One of the main figures to recognize the significance of this fascination with Aladdin, which was by then interwoven with the Danish vision of modernity, was the modernist intellectual Georg Brandes. In 1886, he wrote about Oehlenschläger: “Aladdin is the starting point for the new Danish intellectual life, the founding stone, on which the building is constructed, which constitutes the Danish literature of the first

Cosmopolitan Imagination 1800–1900 (Copenhagen: Museum of Tusculanum Press/University of Copenhagen, 2005). 4  Bogdal, Orientdiskurse, 172 (my translation). 5  Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism, 27. 6  Jens Andersen and Leif Emerek, Aladdin-Noureddin traditionen I det 19. Århundred; bidrag til en strukturel literaturhistorie (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1972).

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half of the century.”7 Yet in the same article he criticizes the identification of the Danes with the figure of Aladdin, who was essentially contrary to the spirit of modernity. Aladdin was not the embodiment of naïve vitality, but a selfindulgent fantast who refused to take reality into account. He was “a sophomoric, slothful, bad citizen, who had outlived his limited potential. Aladdin had ‘orientalized’ the North, weakening both national morality and identity, and eventually, caused Denmark to lose the Prussian War.”8 Brandes wrote, Carefree as Aladdin himself, in whose image it had reflected itself for so long, the Danish nation did not see the impending danger. One did not rate Germany highly and did not understand it [Germany]. How should Aladdin be capable of comprehending Faust! After all, he saw him only in the figure of the hideous, learned Nureddin.9 Clearly, by the end of the nineteenth century Aladdin was no longer a model for the emerging bourgeoisie, because he lacked the discipline, acumen, and the ambition to achieve real progress.10 He had become a traumatic figure rather than a national hero, but first, he was a controversial figure, in which rival ideological visions confronted each other. This is illustrated by the rows caused in 1919 by the Danish artist Harald Giersing’s painting of Aladdin, a work that introduced the Danish audience to the artistic trends of the twentieth century,11 and by Carl Nielsen’s suite Aladdin. Henrik Pontoppidan (1857–1943) was among the writers who were shaped by the entanglement between orientalism and modernity. In 1907, he published his novel Hans Kvast og Melusine, in which one of the protagonists is likened to Aladdin because of his ‘magical’ talents. The Aladdin trope is repeated in Pontoppidan’s most famous novel Lykke Per (Lucky Per), written between 1898 and 1904. The novel, which earned him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1917, is an elaborate vision of the dilemmas of the Danish path to modernity and an extensive self-examination. It has been praised as “a masterpiece of epochal sweep, as a profound social, psychological, and metaphysical anatomy

7  Bogdal, Orientdiskurse, 167 (my translation). 8  Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism, 31. 9  Ibid. 10  Ibid., 162. 11  Lennart Gottlieb, Modernism: Maleriets fornylse 1908–41 [Modernism: Reinventing painting 1908–41] (Aarhus: Aros/Narayana Press, n.d.), 35–39.

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of the modernist transition.”12 It is also a search for Danish authenticity amid the disruptive forces of the upcoming modern age. And, what is important here, it shows the symbolic use of the Aladdin figure, in this phase of modernization, as a central metaphor in the debate on Danish modernity. In Lucky Per, we follow the adventures of Peter Sidenius, the son of a village vicar in rural Denmark in the second half of the nineteenth century. From his early boyhood, Peter is obstinate, intractable, and rebellious, unwilling to resign himself to paternal authority. He feels like a stranger in his family house, as if he is not a child of his parents, and lives in his fantasies of sea adventures, sumptuous palaces, and abducted princes. As he grows up, he decides to become an engineer and at the age of sixteen he moves to Copenhagen to study. In his boundless ambition, he develops a plan for an extensive infrastructure project to mobilize Denmark’s water resources for ‘modern’ economic development, to generate energy from the sea, construct canals and other waterworks, build ports, cultivate and irrigate lands, etc., to open Denmark to trade and economic progress and modernization. From the beginning, it seems that fortune favors his plans: an inheritance from a stranger makes him financially independent and enables him to carry on his studies. Peter, who now calls himself Per, contrasts his own ambition and energy to a group of young artists who call themselves the ‘Independents’ and whom he meets in a café called ‘the Pot.’ These men are “young talents who refuse to blossom.”13 They represent the dark remnants of Romanticism, hostile to modernity and imprisoned in dreams, fears, and liquor. Per says scornfully: “It’s really good that not all of us are born with the genius to create Paradise on a bit of canvas.”14 Fritjof, the most prominent member of the group, points at the ‘stinking factory chimneys’ and ‘the robbers’ quarters with the millionaire Jews and their fat women.’ Per retorts: “ ‘No, I prise, rather an artless fool of a farmer who sings contentedly behind his plow and leaves to his God the task of improving the world.’”15 Per came close to despising the artists, the country’s darlings, who aroused the same hysterical idolatry of the natural world as the priests of the Beyond and who were also viewed as blessed beings, souls mediating between heaven and earth. When all was said and done, these canvas 12  Henrik Pontoppidan, Lucky Per, trans. Naomi Lebowitz (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), ‘Afterword,’ 545. 13  Ibid., 32. 14  Ibid., 87. 15  Ibid., 87–88.

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worshippers and tone-tuning preachers, in all their comicality were not so innocent or harmless as he had thought; they had contributed to the undermining of faith in men as unique lords and masters of the earth.16 Per has the feeling that he is a free and extraordinary man and is predestined, with ‘Aladdin’s luck,’ to realize all his wishes and obtain life’s glories. Per’s great chance comes when he is invited by Ivan Salomon, the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant family, to present his plans. Ivan represents the influential Nathan, a modernist intellectual who advocated progress and the modernization of Denmark to keep up with economic developments in Europe: “By a fairy tale chance” the doors of the rich family are opened to him, “giving him the impression of penetrating the actual realm of millions and magic.”17 There he meets Ivan’s gorgeous sister Nanny; “young and voluptuous, looking temptingly like a beautiful oriental dancer, she seemed to him to be, herself, adventure’s magic fairy leading geniuses bearing the palm of victory in her wake.”18 The family seemed to possess a ‘secret, magical wealth’ and a marriage would open doors for him and make him master of men. After a brief liaison with Nanny, Per is engaged to Jakobe, Nanny’s less beautiful and more typically Jewish sister, and “the world opened up for him with all the wonders of a fairy tale.”19 Now “he needed to demonstrate that he had the power to lead the people and to make their wills submit to him.”20 To complete his education he sets out on a journey through Europe, starting in Berlin. It is during this journey that Per reaches the apogee of his self-confidence, which began with what he and others called his ‘Aladdin’s luck’: “He had only to wish, to desire without scruples and life’s glories would be his.”21 And, “So little Salomon was not entirely mistaken. In fact, something of the fairy tale clings to you.”22 His plan is like a miracle which he has to perform: “The mere pressure of his fingers could shake the earth.”23 Still, according to Nathan, the intellectual, this fairy tale-like sense of power is typical for Denmark and the reason for its lagging behind: “We have all too long been accustomed to a light and loose intercourse with fantasy, which has weakened

16  Ibid., 92. 17  Ibid., 104, 107. 18  Ibid., 108. 19  Ibid., 171. 20  Ibid., 175. 21  Ibid., 37. 22  Ibid., 52. 23  Ibid., 77.

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the nation’s will-power.”24 Denmark, according to Nathan, is the “land of the Sleeping Beauty,” where time stands still and “the pale rose blossoms of fantasy and the tough, thorny brides of speculation treacherously hid an inner decline and decay.”25 Per, however, becomes convinced that he is destined for great achievements: “For he knew he was born to become, in his domain, the morning horn-herald, the path-breaker in this sluggish society of thick-blooded sons of pastors and sextons. This world was waiting for him – just for him.”26 He would only have to find “the magic wand that would give him power over mankind and that, in his hand, would become a thunderbolt.”27 However, he gradually becomes aware that to realize this he needs more than merely luck or desire, but rather endurance and willpower: “It was time for him to abandon the childish notion of luck as something tumbling down on your head like a lottery win. In fact, in any case, there was no more reliable or worthy luck than that which was wrested from fate.”28 Jakobe, too, believes in his bright future, thanks to his faith in technology; Per has become “intractable and self-willed and without respect or belief in any other means of happiness and success than what makes a steel wheel whirr.”29 And, “He was the 20th century man, like the first, formless draft of a coming giant race that – as he himself had written – finally could seize, as legitimate masters of the earth, ownership of it and mould it to its needs.”30 Fortune becomes linked to will: “He needed merely to rely on his pact with Luck and his motto would prove accurate: ‘I will.’”31 His ambition has become more and more abstract and transformed from a project shaping the future of Denmark into a life’s aim, that is, to leave his wretched past and achieve power and wealth: With the life-task he had, he didn’t have the right to renounce what spurred men on: to have power over other men and, even more, over women. He could no longer be bound. Until now, he had been very wrong not to use his natural sources of strength fearlessly. That was why he hadn’t come further on his fairy tale voyage than he had.32 24  Ibid., 96. 25  Ibid., 100. 26  Ibid. 27  Ibid., 105. 28  Ibid., 100. 29  Ibid., 199. 30  Ibid., 198. 31  Ibid., 202. 32  Ibid., 279.

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This ambition even persuades him to renounce his feelings for Jakobe. Per reaches a turning point during his journey through Europe, particularly when he takes a brief holiday in the Swiss mountains. Until then, nature had only been an object of his plans, something that could be measured and molded, but now he becomes sensitive to the mystical powers of nature, its eternity, its permanence, its serenity. He becomes conscious of a “deeply felt, genuine desire to find his way to a firmly based life perspective.”33 Still, his hubris seduces him to shoot at a crucifix, which is, mysteriously, only slightly damaged. This hubris also leads him to inaccurately assess the potential financial support for his project and in the end, his negotiations with investors fail because of his obstinate attitude. In the meantime, another young engineer, less ambitious and less talented, gains fame with a project for the economic development of Denmark which is more pragmatic and accommodates the economic realities. In the final part of the story, Per not only resigns himself to the failure of his overreaching ambitions, but also starts a quest for new spiritual resources: “He felt that, during the night, a long developing spiritual rebirth was coming into being. It was as if, out of the darkness and mist, a new world was opening to which, up to now, the path had been hard to recognize.”34 He breaks off his relationship with Jakobe, retires to the countryside and immerses himself in religious contemplation, especially in the deeply rooted Danish variant of Protestantism and its traditions and values. He realizes that “his pact with Luck he had been living by was a pact with the Devil. With Satan…. He had sacrificed his entire spiritual fellowship with his country, its people, his family, at the blood-splattered altar of vanity and greed.”35 With his return to religion he experiences a sense of liberation: “He was home now!”36 However, his radical search finally throws him into total isolation: “Everything I looked for [God] I only found myself.”37 He leaves his family to accept a solitary position as a coast guard in a deserted part of the country. From this brief summary, it is clear that Pontoppidan’s novel Lucky Per contains a rather unambiguous message about the Danish advance toward modernity and the discussions it aroused. In these discussions, the Aladdin figure is a central trope. The whole novel is permeated with the notion of the fairy tale, fantasy, dreams, and magic, and although Aladdin is by no means the only 33  Ibid., 225. 34  Ibid., 364. 35  Ibid., 427. 36  Ibid., 447. 37  Ibid., 531.

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fairy tale figure referred to, it is the most prominent one. Per is the wretched boy who is approached by the Moorish/Jewish sorcerer Ivan Salomon, who enables him to magically gain access to riches and power. In the meantime, Per conquers, or appears to conquer, his oriental princess. However, at a certain point, Per becomes aware that his project, his dream, is not rooted in reality; it remains an illusion, even a delusion, which stirs the hubris in his heart and makes him blind to the real values in life. He sees that his connection with a Jewish family is not the way to achieve his aims in life and that he must return to a form of Danish authenticity. In the end, however, it seems that he has become estranged from his identity to such an extent that he cannot be reembedded in a Danish ‘home.’ The connection between the novel and the Thousand and one nights, through Oehlenschläger’s Aladdin, is clear, as is the use of orientalism as both an existing element in Denmark and as an outside intruder. The Salomon family is portrayed as an alien element, which is nevertheless crucial for Danish economic development. Fritjof, the conservative artist, is depicted as an antiSemite, calling Denmark “New Jewland,”38 but he becomes less anti-Semitic when a Jew buys a series of his paintings. The novel as a whole is more positive toward Jews. Fritjof is presented as a pathetic conservative grumbler who refuses to appreciate the blessings of cosmopolitanism and progress, and although Pontoppidan seems to object to the mingling of Danes and Jews, as two incompatible components, certainly he is conscious of the suffering of the European Jews and endows Jakobe with a sincere sense of compassion and social responsibility. She contrasts positively with the opportunistic Nanny – despised by Per – and Dyhring, her husband, who just enjoy the external aspects of wealth and power. Of course, it is remarkable that it is the Jewish Ivan Salomon who represents the Moorish sorcerer unleashing Per’s Aladdinian temptation. This temptation is an important incentive, but it is not a sufficient foundation on which to build a modern Denmark.

The City of Brass, Aladdin, and the Discontents of Modernity: Ernst Jünger

One of the intriguing aspects of the rise of Nazism in Germany between the two world wars is the way in which it seems to paradoxically combine historical continuity and rupture. Initially, it seems incomprehensible that the Jewish author Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote an epigraph for the late romantic 38  Ibid., 301.

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painter Arnold Böcklin, and that later one of Böcklin’s paintings, The island of death, was a favorite of Adolf Hitler, who had a copy of it hanging on the wall of his office. On the one hand, this suggests a continuity from nineteenthcentury Romanticism to twentieth-century Nazism, but on the other hand, it indicates that while Nazism may have inherited attitudes from Romanticism, it was not its only inheritor, and not the only interpreter of its heritage. Moreover, as von Hofmannsthal is considered a pioneer of modernism, should Nazism be seen as a break with modernism or as just another manifestation of it? That is, how should Nazism be situated in the complex and confusing whirlpool of the first decades of the twentieth century, with respect to the cultural phenomena of Romanticism and modernism? Although efforts to interpret the extent to which the Nazi ideology was culturally embedded are still a sensitive issue, in recent years, research on the period has become more objective. Scholars tend to agree that, first, some of the charac­teristics of German fascism were already visible toward the end of the nineteenth century; it can certainly be related to late Romanticism, although perhaps more accurately, to the growing irrelevance of Romanticism. Second, these characteristics were by no means confined to Germany, but can be found elsewhere in Europe as well; and, third, these cultural elements were not clearly divided among artists, authors or artistic trends. Although some authors and artists explicitly expressed political preferences, others were much less clear about their adherences and cannot be easily classified. It seems that modernism, as a cultural component of modernity, was not politically defined, rather it included leftists and rightists, pro- and anti-modernity stances. Seen in this way, the cultural embedding of fascism is not essentially different from that of communism, and both were manifestations of modernism in different forms. This brief excursion is necessary as an introduction to the author whose work is discussed in the following section, namely, Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), a prominent conservative intellectual of the 1920s and 1930s who remained controversial throughout his life. But because of the complexity of his work and the context in which it appeared, we first discuss, in some detail, the peculiarities of German modernism and orientalism, before turning to an analysis his main novels. We also touch upon two kindred souls who were friends of Jünger and admired by him, and who themselves illustrate the complex contradictions of the period, Alfred Kubin and Rudolf Schlichter. German Modernism and Orientalism In several respects, the German road to modernity in the nineteenth century differed from trends elsewhere in Europe. Germany was forged as a nation relatively late, after the many city-states in the German-speaking center of

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Europe were unified by Bismarck toward the end of the century. Partly because of this, Germany did not possess substantial colonies and overseas territories as did France and Britain, and as a result it was economically and politically isolated from the emerging globalized system. In spite of France and Britain’s lead in developing the conditions of modernity through colonial expansion and by tailoring the economy to the capitalist world system, Germany went through a period of rapid industrialization, during which it built the foundations for modern economic development. However, its involvement in middle European politics, especially in the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy and its enmity with Russia, drew it into a military conflict that radically reshaped European history and that came to symbolize the destruction of an old world order and the birth of a new global configuration.39 After the Great War, two things were clear: the old order, with its bourgeois values, its unstable political structures, and its concomitant traditional worldview had definitively imploded; and the role of technology in the war was so decisive that fundamental questions about the relationship between humans and technology became a central issue in political and social debates. These general observations and the necessity to find a way out of the catastrophic situation after the war were fertile soil for the development of utopian visions of a blissful future, one in which a new, modern mankind would emerge, supported by the almost unlimited potential of technology and science. While the world was being redesigned, both within and outside Europe, visions of a global civilization developed, in which political, cultural, scientific, but also spiritual elements converged. It is from these complex sentiments of destruction and rebirth, collapse and technological imagination, that ideologies such as fascism and communism arose, as visions of a bright future under human control. One of the paradoxes of capitalist modernity was the way in which it fostered the far-reaching fragmentation of all segments of economy and society, and this led to differentiations in production, institutions, intellectual disciplines, 39  For this outline, we have made particular use of Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Bogdal, Orientdiskurse; Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Behrang Samsami, Die Entzauberung des Ostens: der Orient bei Hesse, Wegner und Schwarzenbach (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2011); Peter Gordon and John P. McCormick (eds.), Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

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and social classes. This tendency was concomitant with the overwhelming totalizing forces of capitalism, which not only sought to penetrate all segments of society, but also extended its reach over larger parts of the globe. The tension between these two forces created the experience of fragmentation and instability which is at the center of modernity as a mental and cultural state, and which produced a rupture in the perception of tradition and history as a coherent framework for the present. Modernism, both in the field of ideology, and in the field of culture and art, can be seen as an expression of this instability and a response to the bankruptcy of totalizing discourses. Since official religion no longer offered any refuge and after the onslaught of science and Nietzschean ‘nihilism,’ salvation was sought in science and technology and in totalizing secular ideologies, or in the spiritual movements that spread widely from the end of the nineteenth century onward. These developments are, of course, reflected in the arts of the period, which are marked, first, by an erosion of the fervor of Romanticism and the subsequent flight into aestheticism and symbolism, in response to the malaise brought about by the disenchantment of modernity. Second, there was a partial transformation of art from a medium of representation and beautification into a medium for interpretation and the aestheticization of reified objects. And, third, the absence of spatiotemporal coherence and the omnipresence of instability were either cultivated as the crucial dynamics of modernity, or countered by alternative visions of totality. There was a sense that the rapid “growth in productivity, technology, middle-class wealth, imperial power, and national (capitalist) self-assertion, social mobility” were realized “at the cost of beauty, meaning, and health, both spiritual and physical.”40 Modernist art can be seen as an effort to either celebrate or reverse this tide of all-encompassing disenchantment. These tendencies, which developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, became more extreme after the Great War, especially in Germany, where the sense of heroism and defeat decisively marked a whole generation of young men and women. The energy unleashed by the war was, after 1918, transformed into a new political zeal that aimed to remedy the catastrophe not only by a nationalist renaissance, but also by reinventing a society that would interiorize the irreparable rupture with the past. The nationalist debates emphasized the rejection of Enlightenment ideals and embraced modern technology. Germany was distinguished from Britain and France, which represented international capitalism, rationalism, and the values that were rejected by the intellectuals who rephrased ‘völkisch’ nationalist sentiments. 40  Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 53.

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In their binary thought, ‘instinct’ was opposed to ‘reason,’ ‘civilization’ to ‘culture,’ ‘exchange value’ to ‘use value,’ ‘intellect’ to ‘soul,’ ‘gold’ to ‘blood,’ etc., to formulate a symbolic system of German particularity and authenticity that would revitalize Germany as a modern nation. The acceptance of technology was important, not as a means to generate profits, as in capitalism, but as part of the German ‘Kultur.’41 Forms of orientalism were an integral part of the various discourses that crystallized in the cauldron of modernism. Orientalism was first an effect of increasing globalization, which intensified communication with exotic lands and left their traces on European thought, art, and lifestyle. The interaction between Europe and oriental societies was, of course, affected by relations of power, in the frameworks of colonialism and trade, and fostered new discourses of self-definition and legitimations of Europe’s position in the configuration of civilizations. In these discourses, eastern spirituality, eastern art, and eastern landscapes became important sources of inspiration, as the world increasingly opened up for travelers. The Orient offered the possibility of an escape, but also a confrontation with the complexity of the modern world. In Germany, with its non-colonial trajectory toward modernity, orientalism was first directed at the Ottoman Empire, but also at India and China; this is clear from the work of a very popular author such as Hermann Hesse. The efforts to establish relations with the process of globalization are not only found in literature, but also in the field of politics, by Kaiser Wilhelm’s widely publicized tour of the Levant in 1898. This overview of modernism and its German variant serves as a necessary introduction to our main question: How are these tendencies reflected in the reception of the Thousand and one nights in Germany in the beginning of the twentieth century? And how does the interpretation of the Nights, as an oriental work, reflect the political-cultural attitudes of the period? The Spirit of Disintegration: Kubin and Schlichter The ideological and cultural whirlpool Germany was drawn into after the Great War was reflected in the upsurge of artistic expression. In the interwar period, the energy suppressed in the Great War was unleashed in an outburst of creative activity that radically transformed the landscape of European art. Currents such as Dadaism, Expressionism, New Objectivity, and Futurism together shaped the contradictions, possibilities, and visions of modernism, and invaded the domains of aestheticism and symbolism to obliterate the boundaries of artistic creativity. Art reflected the condition of fragmentation, 41  Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 46.

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disenchantment, and instability which characterized modern post-war society and which were experienced as both an apocalyptic threat and a liberation. The disruption caused by the war and the collapse of the political configuration of Europe opened the way for a complete reinvention of art as a medium and as a phenomenon; this reinvention was based on the acknowledgment of the inherent disequilibrium and instability of human society and existence. Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) was among the many passionate artists of this period whose work reflected these tendencies even before the Great War. Apart from the complex context of his work, Kubin’s drawings are so influenced by his personal visions and fixations that it is not easy to classify them as belonging to specific styles or currents. His drawings bear traces of symbolism but also surrealism avant la lettre and consist mainly of horrifying monsters, disfigured bodies, misshapen creatures in gloomy landscapes and mysterious dusk-like atmospheres. His memoirs testify to his many phobias and fits of nightmarish anguish, and explain the uninhibitedly morbid character of his work. He also refers to his interest in eastern religion, an interest which bolstered his desire for a spirituality that appeared to be on the decline in an increasingly demystified world. All these strands came together in the only novel that Kubin wrote (published in 1909), it was titled Die andere Seite (The other side). Later observers considered the visionary novel strangely predictive of the catastrophes that were soon to take place. In Die andere Seite, the narrator, a young, not exceptionally talented artist, is approached by a stranger who says he has been sent by an old school friend who has founded a dream kingdom where a community of privileged, like-minded people lives, closed off from the world. The narrator and his wife are among the lucky few who are invited to join the community. The narrator agrees and travels with his wife to Central Asia. There he enters a mysterious state that reminds him of the Thousand and one nights, and soon afterwards he enters the city of Perle, the promised dreamland. The community is founded on the principle that all signs of progress are banned, that all objects must have been made before the 1860s, and that everyone must obey the great leader Patera, founder of the kingdom, and the personification of the kingdom, since everything that happens seems to be an emanation or incarnation of him. He is a mysterious god-like entity with no definite shape, whose presence is immanent in every component of life in Perle. What follows is an increasingly horrid account of life in Perle and its gradual dilapidation. The narrator becomes aware, especially after his wife dies, that he has entered an uncanny nightmare in which time and space have lost their structuring force, where people are disconnected, as if living in separate dreams, and where everything seems to be an amorphous materialization of

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Patera. This instability gradually becomes a real catastrophe; even matter loses its substance and form, monsters start crawling out of their hiding places and hunger, illness, and death create havoc indiscriminately. A rival of Patera, the American businessman Hercules Bell, revolts against Patera, although it remains uncertain whether Bell is an incarnation of the Protean Patera himself, and the two drag the kingdom and its inhabitants into a titanic struggle that ends with total destruction, until the land is finally invaded by foreign troops. It is not our intention to discuss Kubin’s ‘prophetic’ novel in detail here, but rather to show how the story’s cluster of associations with the Thousand and one nights is connected to the wider framework of ideas and trends in this period. It is clear that the Thousand and one nights that is referred to in the novel is not so much a matrix for the narrative as a whole, or as a model for the dream kingdom, as it is an indication of a passage from the real world into an imaginary realm that is governed by ineffable material, spiritual, and psychological forces. The Thousand and one nights stands for the dreamlike state of the narrator in an increasingly unstable milieu. This dream state is linked to the great fixations of the period: the fear of progress and modernity; the instability of authority; fragmentation; the isolation of the individual, who is nevertheless a member of an indiscriminate mass that is involved in a continual, uncontrollable metamorphosis; the sense of the fall of civilization and of the dominance of capitalism; the lack of spirituality; and an imaginary, utopian land closed off from the threatening onslaught of modernity. The effort to escape is in vain, however, and it all ends with an almost orgasmic apocalypse. The apocalyptic fantasies of Kubin’s novel and drawings, and their prophetic vision, particularly inspired the admiration of conservative intellectuals and artists in the interwar period. Ernst Jünger wrote about the novel: Kubin recognizes in the downfall of the bourgeois world in which we all participate actively and long-sufferingly the signs of organic destruction, which functions more delicately and more thoroughly than the technical, political facts that work on the surface. His oeuvre will therefore survive as one of those keys that open the more hidden, more secret spaces more than a historical report does. It represents a chronicle whose sources should be seen as the creaking in the rafters, the cracks in the walls, and the spider webs.42

42  Andreas Geyer, “ ‘… Perhaps I Am a Writer …’ Alfred Kubin as Literary Figure,” in Annegret Hoberg, Alfred Kubin: Drawings 1897–1909, 69–94 (Munich: Prestel, 2008), 88.

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Jünger repeatedly praised Kubin and his work; he was probably inspired by his novel and asked him to provide illustrations for his Norwegian travel account Myrdun.43 He considered him a “kindred spirit”44 and called him “the old magician.”45 The extravagant painter Rudolf Schlichter (1890–1955) was another admirer of Kubin and a friend of Jünger. In contrast to Kubin, whose references to the Thousand and one nights are limited to Die andere Seite and a drawing of Aladdin,46 Schlichter was occupied with the Nights throughout his life, and the work resurfaces in his career on various occasions. In his early years, as Schlichter recounts in his three autobiographical works, Zwischenwelt (1931), Das widerspenstige Fleisch (1932), and Tönerne Füsse (1933), he was rather unguided, spurred on by his perverse sexual desires and permanently in search of satisfaction through aberrant eroticism, violence, liquor, and art, and the exploration of the squalid fringes of society. He was driven by a powerful ‘eros,’ the ‘true source of art,’ and considered himself politically a revolutionary and a communist. After moving to Berlin in 1927 with his wife Speedy he changed direction and became a Catholic. Still, his previous unrest did not subside and his work remained marked by a frenetic streak. Schlichter welcomed the political ‘turn’ in 1933 and applied for membership in the Reichskulturkammer, the Nazi organization controlling artists and the production of art. His request was turned down, however, because of the perversity of his autobiographical books, and Schlichter was threatened with a professional ban. Jünger, his friend and admirer, could not understand the rejection, since he considered Schlichter a “Deutscher aus Substanz”47 (a ‘true German’) and his work a clear statement against “Burgertum”48 and its ethics. He intervened to have him admitted, but his efforts were in vain. Schlichter continued working; however, after World War II he was suspected of Nazi sympathies, although he himself considered himself a victim of the Nazi regime. This indicates how difficult it is to judge Schlichter’s political ideas, which were inconsistent, at least in terms of party affiliations. We can conclude from his 43  Ernst Jünger, The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios, trans. Thomas Friese (Candor: Telos Press Publishing, 2012), 85; Ernst Jünger, Sämtliche Werke: zweite Abteilung Essays IX. Band 19: Fassungen III erster Supplement-Band (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1999), 291. 44  Geyer, “ ‘… Perhaps I Am a Writer …,’” 79. 45  Jünger, Sämtliche Werke, 90. 46  Hoberg, Alfred Kubin, 171, ca. 1902. 47  Steffen Martus, Ernst Jünger (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2001), 62. 48   Götz Adriani (ed.), Rudolf Schlichter, Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen (Munich: Klinkhardt and Biermann, 1997), 16.

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writings that he was an independent spirit, engulfed by his artistic energy; he fulminated against the narrow-mindedness and stupidity of both the bourgeoisie and the workers, the hypocrisy of both left and right political groups. He abhorred the slavish nationalism propagated by the authorities, but also vilified the progress of capitalism and its destruction of all kinds of beauty and spirituality. He was seriously interested in eastern religions as a source of spiritual enrichment. In his turbulent early years, Schlichter discovered an interest in eastern history and thought, and amidst his ‘distorted passions’ and ‘unreigned eros’ he found time to read about Islam, the caliphate, Mazdakism, Mahdism, Sufism, Saladin, Firdawsi, etc. He was especially interested in the periods of transition and decay, the political form of enlightened despotism, and the ‘Freigeisterei’ (‘libertine spirit’) of Sufism. Then he discovered an ‘original edition’ of the Thousand and one nights,49 which I devoured like a gospel. Here I found what I had been looking for for so long…. As a drunk I wandered through this labyrinth, I savoured this improbable mixture of gay sensuality and rigid orthodoxy, of happy futility and melancholic Weltschmerz, of raw sexuality and tender lovepassion, of uncompromising realism and dreamy fantasies. Like the hot air of the desert the sharp breath of the Orient permeated my whole being…. Here stood not the dubious ethos between ruler and people. No obligation bound the ruler to his subjects. Only the inflexible Fate yawned like a deep ravine between ruler and ruled…. How similar was this fatalism to my own evil urge to liberate myself from all responsibility. Happiness thrilled my darkened soul at the thought of the eternally maintained rhythm of blindly leading drives. I was absorbed by the detailed portrayal of perverted lusts, I was enraptured by the smacking pleasure at the shameless verses of Abu Nowas, and quenched myself on the scabrous anecdotes about a wild anal eroticism.50 Apart from the East and the Thousand and one nights as a source of inspiration, Schlichter became fascinated by Wagner and Nietzsche, who became his “unassailable adviser in literary and political issues.”51 He saw Wagner 49  This was the 1907–12 edition by Felix von Greve, a German translation of the Burton edition. 50  Rudolph Schlichter, Tönerne Füsse, ed. Curt Grützmacher (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1992), 45–47. 51  Ibid., 48.

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as the antithesis of the “slack Kleinbürger and the sinew-less military-pious moneymakers.”52 In the same period he discovered the secret of his lust: erections caused by suffocating and hanging. In 1913 Schlichter made his first etchings, which consisted of a series of erotic scenes from the Thousand and one nights. The pictures caused a stir and became not only a source of inspiration for later pornographic work, but also a proud example of his talents, which he regularly showed as a portfolio to apply for grants. From this time onward the Orient, both its eroticism and its mysticism, became an important motif in his graphic work. In 1941 and 1942 he made a series for the Thousand and one nights story of the ‘Third qalandar,’ including the Magnetic Mountain,53 and later he drew illustrations for the stories of ‘Baba Abdallah’ and ‘Sidi Numan,’54 and for Thousand and one days by Pétis de la Croix.55 These works evoked the fascination of Ernst Jünger, who encouraged him and tried to persuade him to make illustrations for the complete Thousand and one nights, and discussed plans to publish the pictures with an introduction he would write. Schlichter’s most prominent work, in this respect, were his illustrations, made in 1942, inspired by the story of ‘The City of Brass.’ Schlichter was as much attracted to (post-)apocalyptic visions as Jünger, and when Jünger saw photographs of the illustrations he immediately requested one as a companion to the picture of Atlantis that Schlichter had given him. The two companion pieces could be completed with a picture of the Tower of Babel. Jünger, who said he felt ‘strongly attached’ to the picture repeated his request several times, and although Schlichter ultimately agreed, Jünger never actually received it.56 Whereas Schlichter was initially attracted to the Thousand and one nights for its erotic – or pornographic – potential, in his later illustrations, he shows a predilection for macabre scenes, violence, and interventions of fate. He shows, quite realistically, Amina and the jinn eating the entrails of a corpse (a scene from ‘Sidi Numan’),57 the finding of a treasure of inestimable value, a palace visible through an opening in the rocks, the Qalandars losing their eyes, the bird Rukhkh, the brass knight on the Magnetic Mountain, ferocious jinns, 52  Ibid., 52. 53  Ernst Jünger and Rudolph Schlichter, Briefwechsel, ed. Dirk Heisserer (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1997), 160, 447. 54  Ibid., 248. 55  Ibid., 231. 56  Ibid., 234, 241, 259. 57  Rudolf Schlichter, Tausendundeine Nacht; Federzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1940–1945 (Berlin: Hentrich, 1993), 75.

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burnt corpses, etc. The most expressive pictures, however, are those pertaining to the story of ‘The City of Brass,’ which shows desolate landscapes with the traces of war; a frightening jinn escaping from a brass bottle; the castle of the memento mori; the warring armies of Solomon, with his animals, monsters, and jinn; the City of Brass and the seductive maidens; and streets strewn with corpses and cadavers. The final picture shows the decapitation of the commander who wants to take the jewels of the queen.58 It is remarkable that Schlichter’s drawings for the Thousand and one nights show no avant-gardist views and few traces of the radical revolution that art had undergone in the previous period. There is a form of expressionism, perhaps, but the technique is rather conventional, even realistic, with a streak of mystery. They can, perhaps, be described most adequately as ‘magical realism,’ a term Ernst Jünger used to characterize his own work. The robes of the figures are somewhat quaintly exotic, the memento mori castle has the features of modernist architecture, and the jinni in the vessel looks like a fin de siècle Indian idol. The emphasis is on dramatic effect, however, or more adequately, on the pathos that Schlichter discovered in the stories, a pathos generated by violence, magic, horror, and the world of monsters and jinn. They contain an undeniable touch of kitsch, with overbearing expressiveness and an emphatic mingling of everyday life with the fantastic and the macabre. It is interesting to see how Schlichter, who had an indomitable artistic eros and was drawn to the turbulent ideological struggles of his time, made the Thousand and one nights into a central source of inspiration for his graphic work. The stories appealed to his sense of rebellion, his erotic drive, his fascination with violence, and the inevitability of fate. As we see, his drawings for ‘The City of Brass’ became the visual representation of a philosophically charged idea, which could already be seen in the work of Kubin, and which was elaborated further by Ernst Jünger in his essays and novels. It is the vision of a reality imbued with a hidden significance, which could rise to the surface at any moment in any form, and which contains the concentrated energy of a constantly threatening apocalypse. Ernst Jünger’s Technological Dystopias: The City of Brass The most controversial of the authors/artists discussed in this chapter is undoubtedly Ernst Jünger, who became one of the major spokesmen of conservative nationalism in the period after World War I and who wrote a book that became one of Hitler’s favorite sources of ideological inspiration. In the 1930s, however, Jünger distanced himself from the Nazi regime, declined an offer to 58  Ibid., 111.

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become a member of parliament, and although he served as a bureau officer in Paris during World War II, he never identified with the Nazis. After the war, he refused to repudiate his pre-war publications and although he was not allowed to publish for some time, from 1949 onward he published some important novels, in which he continued to express his cultural pessimism and his visions of the future. His development as a writer and a thinker can be summarized in a chronology of his writings: after the Great War, he established his name by writing an extraordinary account of his experiences as a soldier at the front, titled In Stahlgewittern (Storms of steel, 1920); this was followed by political essays in nationalist and conservative journals. In 1929, the essay collection Das abenteuerliche Herz (The adventurous heart) was published, which at first seemed to support fascist political tendencies. The political purport was mitigated, however, in a second edition of the work in 1938. In 1932, the futuristic treatise Der Arbeiter (The worker) appeared, arguably his most controversial book. Here he describes what he considered the great historical event of his time, the collapse of bourgeois society and the birth of a new society dominated by the Gestalt of the worker/soldier and the all-encompassing power of technology, which would become the main basis of power. Whereas this work seemed to associate him to the Nazi regime, the novel Auf den Marmorklippen (On the marble cliffs) that followed in 1939, is usually, though not unequivocally, seen as his rejection of the National Socialist movement. The Nazis are identified with a barbaric, unscrupulous horde that makes use of technology to install a system of repression. This view is more or less corroborated by his post-war novels, Heliopolis, Eumeswil, and Aladdins Problem, which show disillusioned societies that have lost their role in history after some catastrophic civilizational collapse. They are set in cities that represent, simultaneously, futuristic utopias and dystopias in which historical context, ideological significance, and human values have lost their relevance. Jünger’s work is, perhaps surprisingly, permeated with references to the Thousand and one nights. Especially in the novels published after World War II, figures and tropes from the Nights are ‘embodied’ in the story to support Jünger’s philosophical and aesthetic argument. These tropes and figures are the City of Brass, as a utopian site, and Aladdin, as the prototype of an ambitious dreamer who acquires seemingly unlimited power. But before we can turn to these novels, it is necessary to present a brief summary of Jünger’s philosophy in order to understand the setting of his intertextual relationship with the Nights. Collapse and Rebirth It is not necessary to give an extensive overview of Jünger’s thought here. We will limit ourselves to a brief summary of the main points that are relevant to

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Jünger’s orientalism and his connection to the Thousand and one nights, the two authors discussed above, and the ideological context of the period. Like his peers, Jünger’s life was dramatically shaped by his experience of World War I. We can safely say that, to a great extent, the war experience led to the fervor of the nationalist-conservative revolution that unfolded in the interwar period, as a generation of young men, especially, sought to articulate this experience and transform it into a vision of a future society. Throughout his life Jünger, too, attempted to incorporate his war experience intellectually into a philosophy of society and politics, even a philosophy of life, in which its complexity was sublimated into a form of aesthetic vitalism and a sense of historical disruption. In In Stahlgewittern, it is first the proximity of death that throws the soldier into a liminal experience that breaks open the boundaries of everyday sensitivities and evokes an awareness of a deeper reality, a hidden sense, which imbues reality, both life and matter, with a higher significance. The experience of neardeath equals a paradoxical experience of beauty, even lust, which is drawn out of the deep resources of creation and human existence. This almost mystical signification of war reveals the depth of the human experience in general. For Jünger this view of war, as connected to the essence of creation, implies that violence and strife are not caused by willful human agency, but are rather, a ‘natural’ catastrophe, inherent to human nature and human history. Wars are catastrophes that mark the collapse of civilizations and the birth of new ones, the closure of phases in the life cycle of societies and the emergence of new phases. In the context of his time, Jünger saw the two world wars as global ‘civil wars’ that marked the end of the bourgeois era with its obsolete values and political systems. These wars represented a radical destruction, an apocalypse, which was needed to free the creative energy required to construct a new civilizational era. In particular, World War I forced a rupture with the past; it broke off a period of historical continuity, generating the energy to build a new society and a new civilization. Thus, war was seen as a catalyst, a destructive event that was inevitable for a new era to begin; it was a purifying force that revealed the patterns underlying human existence and history, and made a Phoenix-like rebirth possible. The overwhelming progress and power of technology was the main cause of the historical disruption of the war and, at the same time its main revelation. The immense, incomprehensible, experience of the Great War was first, the awareness of the destructive powers of technology, its apparently unlimited potential, and the concentration of power it made possible. The great challenge for man, after World War I, was how to deal with the enormous power vested in technology: he must either succeed in mastering the limitless power of technology; or he will become enslaved by it. With the prominent place of technology in his thought, Jünger joined the debate about the relation between technology

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and German identity, arguing that, on the one hand, technology could provide the means to destroy the old, bourgeois, ‘society’ (‘Gesellschaft’), and to build a new German ‘community’ (‘Gemeinschaft’); but, on the other hand, it contains an apocalyptic threat if it cannot be controlled and contained. Technology was thus linked to the war experience, which revealed it as a force of nature, and which harbors the seeds of redemption. Jünger envisaged a symbolic figure embodying the transition from a bourgeois to a technological society; that figure is the Worker, a kind of soldierlaborer who is in harmony with technology mentally and has undergone the catharsis of war. He thus combines the two ‘virtues’ that constitute the basis of future society and is totally subjugated to an indiscriminate discipline. Jünger’s Worker does not refer to the newly emerging working class, in the Marxist sense, nor merely to a segment of society replacing the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic group; his Worker is a Gestalt, that is, a model figure that incarnates the forces of history and the new man who is in harmony with the phase that history is entering. This figure is, so to speak, hidden in the folds of history and manifests himself at the right historical juncture. He represents the future, the synthesis of humanity and technology; only the Worker, as a Gestalt, contains the necessary historical ‘energy’ and form to recreate history and civilization. The concept of the Worker shows Jünger’s most fascistic and disturbing appearance, especially with historical hindsight, but in spite of his praise of martial, male virtues and his harsh visions of a dehumanized future, he had another side, too. Jünger was fascinated with nature, and especially with the beauty of flowers, plants, and insects. Even in wartime he was curious to find new specimens and was impressed by their beauty. We can see the same aesthetic desire that comprised his war experience: he had a sense of awe and insight that reveals the deeper essence of creation and human existence. It also evoked an aesthetic, almost mystical, comprehension of life and uncovered the violence underlying visible reality. Jünger conceptualized this experience as a ‘stereoscopic view,’ that is, in one sensory observation, he gained insight into both the superficial and the deeper significance of appearances; he apprehended material beauty and harmony and their deeper meaning and correlation, all in one revelatory observation. This concept, not unlike the historical notion of Gestalt, gives Jünger’s thought a mystical dimension and reveals his deep concern about the spread of materialism and the advancing rationalization of human civilization. First, man should hold on to his ‘soul,’ which is part of nature’s harmony. All these ideas, which not only link Jünger to his intellectual contemporaries, but also structure his own particular philosophical and literary expression, are

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in one way or another associated with forms of orientalism. This orientalism was not only a means to escape the harsh realities of western society, but a constituent part of the metaphoric substructure of Jünger’s thought, which in general was supported by a framework of recurring symbols. Jünger’s Orientalism and the Thousand and One Nights In his study of Jünger’s orientalism, Thomas Pekar argues that Jünger had a clear vision of a binary dichotomy between East and West, a dichotomy that was associated with pairs of opposite concepts. He contrasts Genghis Khan to Alexander the Great, Sindbad to Odysseus, and oriental despots to Frederick the Great, and, for instance, the ‘source’ to the ‘cistern,’ with their metaphoric connotations. In his travel accounts, Jünger makes clear that he considers the idea of the East, as a refuge from modern western pressures, an obsolete remnant of Romanticism, but his own texts are not entirely devoid of this kind of exoticism. For Jünger, the Orient is, first, a counter-world to western bourgeois society, like war: “the liberation from a life without deeper aims, the opening up of another world, a counter-world of bourgeois society.”59 The Orient is the “world of adventure, the miraculous of heroic books,”60 a counter space to the rational western world.61 Apart from his travels to North Africa and Asia, which took place later in his life, Jünger’s orientalism was completely based on his readings of the Thousand and one nights. He first read the stories as a nine-year-old boy, in 1904, in a four-volume edition by Gustav Weil, whose illustrations also influenced his visions of the East. Later, he acquired a twelve-volume edition by Littmann and an edition of the Thousand and one days.62 He was immediately struck by the enchanting mysteriousness of the work, which “could have been invented by a demon, built in one night, as a ghost-palace. It can also be associated with the mother-of-pearl of a mussel’s shell, with a brain-trace which has hardened iridescently. A rainbow has granted it its glow.”63 Later in life, Jünger continued to refer to the Nights, to separate stories, such as ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Prince Ahmed and Peri Banu,’ and to the collection as a whole. He compares a flea-market in Paris

59  Thomas Pekar, Ernst Jünger und der Orient: Mythos-Lektüre-Reise (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 1999), 39. 60  Ibid. 61  Ibid., 46. 62  Ibid., 98. 63  Ibid., 94.

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with Aladdin’s cave,64 and expresses his admiration for “Prince Ahmed,” an “elevated love adventure which induces one to decline inherited royal power” and the “disappearance” of the young prince into a more spiritual world.65 In 1943, Jünger wrote in his Parisian journal that if he had to live on a deserted island, he would take with him two books, the Bible and the Thousand and one nights.66 The entanglement between Jünger’s orientalism and the Thousand and one nights is also clear in a brief piece titled Notizbuch zu ‘Tausendundeine Nacht.’ The essay is more a compilation of notes and observations about the Orient in general than it is about the Nights, but, precisely because of this, it shows how much Jünger identified the Orient with the Nights. Jünger points to the predominance of the frame story as a model, which determines its composition, and he observes how the work represents the magic dream world of a child, where everything is allowed and everything is alive; it is a dangerous world, bounded by such mysterious places as Kâf, the Magnetic Mountain, and strange islands. A child is nearer to the timelessness of the dream world.67 A second cluster of remarks concerns what Jünger calls oriental despotism. The king is all-powerful and ‘creates’ law in the sense of the rightist political philosopher Carl Schmitt. The king is the central figure, related to the ‘fundamentalism’ of Islam, even in modern times: This fundamentalism, from Sudan to China, is the effort of the Orient to contain the influence of western ideas – using God’s rights against human rights and theocracy against democracy. In several countries, high clerics seize power and in the meantime paradoxical solutions are sought. The hand of the thief is no longer cut off with an axe, but amputated by a surgeon. The idea that the fundamentalists cannot do without western technology, especially weaponry, is evident. The replacement of the muezzin by a loudspeaker is a marginal thing, but television is indispensable. How fundamentalism will deal with the ‘Gestalt’ of the worker and his rule remains the crucial question. Technology is simultaneously his outfit and

64  Ernst Jünger, “Das erste Pariser Tagebuch,” in Werke II, Tagebücher II (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, n.d.), 269. 65  Jünger (Werke II), 309–310. 66  Ernst Jünger, “Das zweite Pariser Tagebuch,” in Ernst Jünger, Werke III, Tagebücher III (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, s.d.), 194. 67  Ernst Jünger, Sämtliche Werke: zweite Abteilung Essays IX. Band 19: Fassungen III erster Supplement-Band (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1999), 423–424, 426.

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the global language. In the meantime, it will lose credibility as much as it gains power. The sinking of the Titanic was the first, warning, omen.68 This despotism is also related to the notion of fatalism, which is the core of many Thousand and one nights stories. Wealth and poverty are determined by fate. Here Jünger’s perception of the Thousand and one nights comes close to that of his brother Friedrich, who emphasized the lack of agency of the heroes of the Nights’ stories, their formulaic personalities, and their lack of psychological development. Their lives are determined by kismet, by magic, by submission, which are ultimately the source of the despotic system in the East.69 The third cluster of remarks is concerned with one of Jünger’s main themes, technology. In his view, technology is still in its beginnings, but will soon expand its possibilities. It still lags behind the powers of magic in fairy tales, where a word can have magical power, but the wondrous events in the Thousand and one nights stories will one day become a reality: in its most developed stage technology will achieve what is still considered magic. In that sense, the Thousand and one nights gives us a glimpse of the future, a forecast of what the human imagination is capable of, represented by magic formulae, magic objects, and utopian forms of knowledge. This kind of knowledge is not unrelated to Jünger’s concept of ‘stereoscopic sight,’ that is, the simultaneous perception of inner truths of human existence and their superficial manifestation. After this brief outline of the prominent place of the Thousand and one nights in Jünger’s thought, we turn to his fascination with the Nights and how it was expressed in his fictional work. Two tropes in particular are central to the ideas in his later novels and are expressive epitomes of his philosophy: the enchanted space of the City of Brass, and the figure of Aladdin. Reincarnations of the City of Brass: Eumeswil and Heliopolis The story of the Thousand and one nights that most fascinated Jünger was the story of the ‘City of Brass.’ In this story, the caliph hears about strange jars in which jinn are imprisoned and which have been thrown into the sea in the western regions. He sends an expedition led by Amir Musa to the Maghrib to investigate the matter. The company travels through the desert, guided on the way by a jinn locked in a vessel and by signs in a deserted castle, before reaching the City of Brass. Since the city has no entrance, Amir Musa’s followers scale the walls, but fall to their death on the other side, where a mirage of 68  Ibid., 436 (my translation). 69  Friedrich Georg Jünger, Orient und Okzident: Essays (Hamburg: Hans Dulk, 1948), 171ff.

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beautiful maidens beckons them. When the sage Shaykh Abd al-Samad succeeds in opening a door with a secret formula, they enter the town and find that everything and everyone has been turned into brass. When they reach the throne hall of the palace, the secret is revealed: the body of the queen bears a plaque which says that after years of prosperity, fate turned against the town and destroyed its civilization. When one of Musa’s officers wants to take some of her jewels, he is beheaded by a guard that is an automaton. Then the expedition finds the jars and returns to Baghdad to show them to the caliph. Musa, impressed by his experiences, retires to live a life of piety.70 This very brief summary does little justice to the rich narrative potential of the story. If we confine ourselves to the dimensions that are relevant to an interpretation of Jünger’s work, we can summarize them as follows: First, the story refers partly to an eighth-century historical expedition that was headed by a man named Amir Musa, who departed from the East to conquer the Maghrib, and the Iberian Peninsula in particular. In the story, this expedition is linked to the legend of the City of Brass, which, according to Arab geographers, remains hidden in the western desert, unreachable by man. In Jünger’s time this belief was still not completely erased; it inspired the author Friedrich Wilhelm Mader to include an episode on the City of Brass in his Die Messingstadt, a popular youth novel from the 1920s that was printed in several editions. Clearly the intertwinement of history and legend attracted Jünger’s attention. Second, the story conveys an explicit moral lesson, one related to its mysteriousness. The City of Brass is the remnant of a past civilization which was preserved as a warning for future generations. The story is first a memento mori, a reminder of the mortality of human beings, and an admonition to spurn wealth and material greed, which are only transitory pleasures, in favor of moral integrity and spiritual salvation. The city ‘embodies’ this admonition by showing that appearances are deceptive and that only sincere devotion can ensure survival. It is this insight that induces Amir Musa to dedicate his life to God. Third, the City of Brass contains a civilization that has become, quite literally, fossilized in history. It is frozen in a state of decay and remains immune to the influences of time and history. Now that Shaykh Abd al-Samad opened it, in its fossilized state, it is reincorporated into history and the passage of time; thus, it becomes part of two layers of time, separated by a huge temporal distance. The intriguing element is that somehow it was predetermined that the city would be opened again, as is indicated by the plaque on the queen. Even more compelling, arrangements were made to secure her integrity across 70  About this story, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:146–150.

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the time gap – this is the role of the automaton. Thus, the city combines various forms of knowledge and insight, historical experience, esoteric knowledge, and technological inventions; these are all linked, across the ages, to an essential consciousness of divine power. The opening of this enclosure reintegrates it into history, but on its own conditions, without being violated by the newcomers’ covetousness, and becoming part of their historical time. Jünger stated that he was fascinated by the story of the ‘City of Brass’ from an early age. In his Parisian journal, he mentions a letter from Schlichter, with a drawing of the City of Brass: Especially the image of the City of Brass is magnificently accomplished – and the mourning of death and glory. Seeing it awakened the desire to possess it as a pendant of his ‘Atlantis vor dem Untergang,’ that has been in my study for years. The fairy tale of the City of Brass, that was told to me by my father, when I was young, sharpening my eye for this kind….71 And, “I find in it a fundamental figure that holds us, Westerners, too, in a grip: the confrontation between life’s magnificence and death, which fills us with pain and lust at the same time.”72 It is because of this symbolic dimension that Jünger was so attracted by Schlichter’s illustrations for the ‘City of Brass’; these illustrations are visual expressions of Jünger’s deeply felt awe for the power of legend, its historical depth, and the enchanted conception of the world the story represents. Jünger utilized these narrative elements in his novel Heliopolis (1949), his first book after World War II. It is a rather cerebral work, which was meant mainly to exhibit Jünger’s philosophy with respect to politics and society, and whose characters are rather emblematic examples of the components of this philosophy. The City of Brass is not mentioned in the book, but it clearly served as a model for Heliopolis, a post-historical city that survived a catastrophe and falls prey to a power struggle between the Proconsul, representing the old aristocracy and its surviving values, and the Landvogt, who represents repression, modern technology, and unscrupulous science. In this power struggle, a prominent role is reserved for the ‘Mauritanians,’ who can also be found in Auf der Marmorklippen; they are a corps of soldiers who are totally engrossed in technological warfare, heedless of the codes of traditional warriors and oblivious to the moral aspects of a cause or of violence in general. 71  Ernst Jünger, “Das erste Pariser Tagebuch,” in Werke II, Tagebücher II (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, n.d.). 72  Jünger and Schlichter, Briefwechsel, 185.

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The main hero is Commander De Geer, a member of the old aristocracy who serves in the elite guard of the Proconsul. One day a ‘pogrom’ is embarked on by the troops of the Landvogt in the quarter of the ‘Parsen,’ a minority of oriental descent, clearly representing the Jews. De Geer rescues Budur Peri, a halfParsian girl, and a relationship between the two – though more intellectual than amorous – ensues. The discussions between De Geer and Budur Peri are meant to explore the ideological attitude of De Geer (and Jünger) and to link them to the situation in the city, which clearly reflects the conditions of postwar Germany, or perhaps Europe. The city is also abstracted and projected into the future, and remnants of the old order survive next to ‘modern’ inventions and technology. Everyone carries a ‘phonophor,’ a kind of mobile telephone, and order is based on systematic measurement and reification. Missiles and automobiles are in use, but De Geer still rides a horse. The only force shaping events in the city is power. We return to Heliopolis in the next section, but at this point it is useful to note that the novel contains various references to the Thousand and one nights. These include, of course, the figure of Budur Peri, who not only refers to a Jewish girl, but also to the Orient as a whole, and who, for instance, knows the secrets of hallucinatory drugs. In the end, she is the person who complements De Geer’s personality, attitude, and thought in every sense. Together they leave Heliopolis in a kind of spaceship, under the guidance of Phares, a spiritual master. In contrast to Heliopolis, the novel Eumeswil, published in 1977, refers explicitly to the City of Brass. Again, we are led to a futuristic city situated in a desert, in a post-historical era that is recuperating from a catastrophic historical collapse. Again, this setting is used to expound ideas about humanity and society, in a civilization in which ideologies and visions of the future are exhausted and obsolete. What remains is a struggle for power, a struggle which, however, seldom affects the common citizen. The system is repressive, but no one seems to mind. The main character is Martin Venator, who works as a steward in a night bar that overlooks the city from a glass cupola like the bridge of a ship. He explains the situation of Euemeswil, which is named after Eumenes of Kandia (362–316 BC), a Greek warlord who participated in the Diadoch struggle for the succession of Alexander the Great. The city is located in the desert, it is isolated from the outside world, is part of an empire ruled by the Yellow Khan, and is administered by a dictator. Perhaps more interesting than his description of the city, which, again, is rather cerebral and factual, is Venator’s philosophy of history. Trained as a historian, Venator recounts the classes of his teacher Vigo; these represent

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a philosophy of history that is interwoven with the peculiar condition of Eumeswil. In his classes, Vigo refers to the legend of the City of Brass to illustrate the history of Eumeswil, and he quotes from the Thousand and one nights and, on another occasion, refers to the Mille et une nuits of Galland. Apparently, he is not averse to using literary texts as historical sources that contain some form of historical truth. Moreover, Vigo does not see history as a continuing evolutionary process, but rather as fragmented and discontinuous, marked by ruptures and revitalization. Finally, Vigo has a predilection for periods of decay, not as a form of decadence, but as what he calls the late maturation of high cultures.73 Vigo’s ideas are supplemented by those of the scientist Bruno, who has a ‘positive’ view of the condition of Eumeswil. According to him the ‘historical substance’ of the city is exhausted, and only the necessary provisions and pleasure are left. The ‘social body’ looks like that of a pilgrim, who, tired of his peregrinations, lies down to rest. Society is not taken seriously anymore and dictatorship is seen in a new light – this is why Vigo refers so often to the Thousand and one nights. According to Bruno, the ‘magian,’ the world reveals its ‘totem’ again, at a time when a ‘world state’ has been founded, culture has vanished, animals are extinct, monocultures thrive, and the advance of deserts and natural disasters indicate the return of the Titans. At the same time, it is a society in which technology has almost reached its latest phase: science and technology have become magic and are capable of directly materializing thoughts. It will not be long before they are able to realize dreams directly, without any intervention.74 The two philosophers are the pillars of Venator’s view of Eumeswil and its history. He does not consider himself a participant in the city’s history, but rather an observer who is not concerned with the real questions of society but rather with historical models.75 He does not care about politics and considers himself an ‘anarch,’ in reference to the philosophy of Max Stirner. Thus, he implies that he does not accept dictatorial authority, but also does not fight it, as an ‘anarchist’ would. He thinks that for a historian of this kind, Eumeswil is a good ‘object,’ since values are no longer alive, the historical ‘matter’ has consumed itself in passion, ideas have become incredible and improbable, and the sacrifices that were made for them are not appreciated anymore. Yet, at the 73  Ernst Jünger, Sämtliche Werke: erzählende Schriften III. Band 17 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980), 26, 50, 81. 74  Ibid., 60, 81, 87. 75  Ibid., 70.

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same time, these circumstances make the images clearer, since they are not obscured by wishful dreams.76 The ‘catalogue of ideas’ is exhausted, the great ideas are eroded by repetition, and every effort is hopeless.77 The past has become a commodity, tradition has disappeared, and the exploits of the ancestors only live on as a theater play or a tragedy, not in actions. This has been the situation in Eumeswil for generations. We can see how the City of Brass served not only as a visual model for Jünger’s Heliopolis and Eumeswil, but also as a conceptual model: it supports his vision of the postmodern condition and its relation to history. First, Eumeswil is described as an ‘island’ in time and space, disconnected from its prehistory and isolated in a deserted space. This symbolizes its position as the remnant of a vanished culture, one that is no longer integrated in a broader historical context, rather it is the foundation of a society that still survives and must develop ways to continue its existence in a time which is completely cut off from its past. This, of course, echoes the situation of the City of Brass, which also exists in isolation, as the fossilization of a prosperous past, and as the reopening of a new era, in which it is estranged and cut off from its roots. Like the City of Brass, Eumeswil is deeply rooted in history, but is witnessing a period of decay. History repeats itself: once again Eumeswil must revive itself although its energy has been spent and it carries the ballast of a past that has depleted its resources. The overlapping of past and present, not as a natural continuation, but as the result of an enforced rupture, is a central theme in the novel. Eumeswil has its roots in the past – its legend is an enigma, a lesson, and knowledge of this enigma was lost during its historical disruption. Since the present has lost its vitality and its significance, historians look to the past as a source of meaning. But the meaning they find is not derived from a continuous historical development, but rather from historical archetypes that represent some primordial essence of the city and its civilization, as well as some primordial images of mankind. With history lost, the legends and archetypes of Eumeswil take on a vital role in its survival. The discovery of this is effectuated by the condition of the city: the present confronts a forfeited past. Jünger compares this with the case of Pompei, where, as he formulates it, “we can observe the transformation of the ephemeral, everyday life, into the sacramental.”78 In this transformation, we can perceive the characteristic Jüngerian notion of the ‘stereoscopic view’: Venator is situated at a vantage point, a posthistorical observatory, from which he can oversee both the present situation 76  Ibid., 50. 77  Ibid., 73. 78  Ibid., 99.

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of the town and its history, which contains not so much the processes that produced the present, but rather the archetypes and essence of the historical context of Eumeswil. He is thus able to reconnect the past and present by interpreting the message of the past for present-day man. There is no linear development of the town or the identity of the community; there are only ruinous remnants which contain the elements from which a new future must be built. There is no continuity, only the reconstruction of a new habitat after the cycle of civilization has ended in destruction. Like the story of the City of Brass, the message that the town embodies in its historical ossification is a strange combination of despair and hope, of pessimism and optimism; it reflects sadly on the past, but seeks an escape from hopelessness. Venator’s starting point is the inherent deficiency that characterizes history; he even casts doubt on the efficacy of efforts of improvement and progress. Decline and catastrophe seem to be inseparable from the passage of time and the growth of civilization and historical ‘Gestalten.’ Nevertheless, there is always a phase of rebirth, of revitalization after destruction, a process of finding new meaning after society has become disenchanted by war, by the disappearance of hopeful visions of the future, or by the uncritical adoption of technology and a quantitative view of life and society. In Heliopolis, this hope is personified by Phares, who accesses a new, spiritual realm; in Eumeswil, we see that the re-mobilization of historical archetypes can provide, or perhaps will inevitably provide, a new lease on life. The Hubris of Aladdin In our discussion of Henrik Pontoppidan’s Lucky Per we have seen how the figure of Aladdin became a symbol of a specific form of modernity, one in which technology, economic progress, and new forms of power relate to magic, fantasy, and unreality. In Galland’s Mille et une nuits, Aladdin realizes his dreams by using magical objects, but the story is a fairy tale, and Aladdin’s transformation does not relate to real life, and is not rooted in a historical environment. Ernst Jünger referred to the Aladdin trope as well, in a similar context, but he took care to point out that the vicious sorcerer did not possess the power to control the magical lamp, but that he discovered how to obtain it by studying scientific books. Therefore, Aladdin’s power is not the result of some inherent magic, but of the knowledge acquired by the Moor and his effort to awaken it. This is an important difference, since Jünger considers the magic of the Aladdin figure in the Thousand and one nights not as a mere fantasy, but as a futuristic vision. In the future, technology will achieve what was and still is considered magical. In Jünger’s literary work, the Aladdin trope is used first in Heliopolis and later, in his last novel, Aladdin’s problem. In Heliopolis, Ortner, a writer friend of De Geer, tells him that in the past he had been poor, and felt rejected and

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outcast. As a solace, he started to gamble with playing cards, which he describes as entering “the world of talismans, the mantic places and hours, the cabbalistic systems. And when we venture into these labyrinths, on whose walls numbers and signs light up, with every turn, with every false digression, we approach stronger carriers of magical power.”79 While the situation of the narrator continues to deteriorate, he meets a stranger, who explains to him that “reading minds is no sorcery; it is an art which is based purely on combining observations.”80 He suggests that there are surgical operations to realize this: “What incited the Mauritanian to turn precisely to Aladdin when he wanted to retrieve the lamp? I repeat that I want to teach you knowledge with which you will always win.”81 The stranger, who is called Dr. Fancy, explains that there are two kinds of people, the fools and those who know, slaves and masters; and there are two basic laws in the universe: those who are necessary (masters) and those who are coincidences (slaves). The masters have a better grasp of reality than the latter do. Dr. Fancy invites the narrator to his practice, where he administers some drops to his eyes. From this point, the narrator transcends the laws of the universe and is no longer unlucky. He immediately finds a treasure hidden in his home; he starts gambling and speculating and acquires an enormous fortune. He co-operates with a powerful financier and even beats him in speculating on unexpected political developments. In the meantime, he meets a lovely girl, Helene, from whom he hides his enormous wealth; he moves into a small cottage with her. In brief, it seems that fortune has favored him in all respects. The narrator realizes that he has to find ways to control his enormous power. He becomes bored by his unfailing successes. Life is changing into a theater play, a circus. He becomes increasingly aware that he “carried a fearsome and unmediated secret,” which appeared “criminal” to him:82 In this way, I distanced myself from the conditions of humankind and entered a new order. The human being who gains magical power, symbolized by the cap of invisibility or the ring of fortune, loses the equilibrium,

79  Ernst Jünger, Heliopolis: Rückblick auf eine Stadt (Tübingen: Heliopolis Verlag, 1949), 139 (my translation). 80  Ibid., 142 (my translation). 81  Ibid., 144 (my translation); the reference to a ‘Mauritanian’ is, of course, no coincidence. As in Heliopolis and Auf der Marmorklippen the Mauretanian symbolizes the unscrupulous use of technology and power. 82  Ibid., 159.

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the tension, that holds us to the world. He controls mechanisms that cannot be measured. Soon the higher authorities will strike back at him.83 Even his love for Helene cannot liberate him from this ominous feeling: Yes, so horrible is the confrontation with nothingness that I became aware that I had taken out the core of myself, that I had destroyed myself inside, and that wealth covered me deceptively, like the fine enamel with which mummies are coated. And I was caught by an enormous aversion to myself.84 When he starts drinking again, he is once again picked up by Dr. Fancy, who restores him to his former state. The narrator liquidates all his possessions and marries his beloved Helene. The message is: “We have evoked enormous powers, whose response we are not able to control. Then we are struck by horror and stand before the choice to either enter the realm of demons or to retire in the weakened human domains.”85 This is, of course, a message which is relevant for Heliopolis and for Eumeswil, as embodiments of both the City of Brass and post-war Europe. A slightly different message is contained in the short novel Aladdin’s problem, which appeared in 1983. Here again a narrator describes his life: he is a conservative “by birth and by inclination, but primarily for convenience,”86 who is struck by a ‘problem’ which seems to alienate him from his ‘self.’ He states that he is a scion of an aristocratic family, in what seems to be the German Democratic Republic, during the inevitable decay of the aristocracy as a dominant class. He enters the army, where “the intelligent individual has only two possibilities: either to pack his bags or to climb up to the leadership.”87 When he is wounded, he is allowed to enter the military academy, where he “grew all the more interested in power and the higher the level on which it is manifested,”88 and adopted a cynical view of the role of the army:

83  Ibid., 159–160 (my translation). 84  Ibid., 163 (my translation). 85  Ibid., 169 (my translation). 86  Ernst Jünger, Aladdin’s problem, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (London: Quartet Books, 1993), 13. 87  Ibid., 19. 88  Ibid., 29.

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The important thing in teaching is to assign evil to the past, to the unenlightened times, and, in the present, to the enemy. The exploiter is not the enemy; rather, the enemy is the exploiter. We must regard every war as progress – that is to say, as progress only within the capitalist system. The exploitation remains; it is more refined. From our point of view, progress is the attainment of a new level of consciousness.89 Thanks to the intervention of a friend, he is appointed to the embassy in Berlin, from there, he deserts to West Germany. Here he considers himself a ‘climber’ as well, not within the army, but in business. He marries and studies advertising, statistics, computer technology, insurance, and journalism. He acquires a job with an undertaker. While striving for a career, he increasingly falls prey to nihilism, which is caused by his awareness of the collapse of the old aristocracy, of the increasing materialism, of technology that is supplanting the gods, and of the loss of the significance of history (“in short, there was no more history, only stories”).90 He deplores a situation in which “our dealings rest on statistical foundations, and our needs are aroused by media.”91 However, “needs are both real and metaphysical; they are geared to life in this world and in another world. The two cannot be sharply separated: they overlap in dreams, in intoxication, in ecstasy, in the great promises.”92 One day the narrator meets a landscape architect who wants to create a kind of utopic burial ground; he wants to design a large landscape, where burial places can be bought and preserved for eternity. He suspects that this semblance of immortality will appeal to a deep human yearning and will be a rewarding investment. Together they start a firm, named Terrestra. They buy a large area in Turkey and begin a promotional campaign. When the undertaking work succeeds, the narrator increasingly realizes that he is executing a significant task: “It appeared as if we were assuming the role of a priesthood or at least a [spiritual] order.”93 And, “I had conceived a necropolis on a global scale, a shore for Charon’s boat, and the restoration of their dignity to the dead. Culture is based on the treatment of the dead: culture vanishes with the decay of graves – or rather: this decay announces that the end is nigh.”94 As the enterprise expands, his marriage falters and he becomes more estranged 89  Ibid., 30–31. 90  Ibid., 72. 91  Ibid., 77. 92  Ibid. 93  Ibid., 94. 94  Ibid., 109.

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from himself. He suffers from insomnia and headaches; he drinks too much and hardly recognizes himself: I felt as if I had stepped outside my own body; it was only at night, when, holding a candle in my left hand as I drunkenly gazed at my image in the mirror, that I recognized my identity. I would then feel as if I were becoming too powerful for myself.95 He becomes cynical and nihilistic, and lives partly in dreams, partly in reality, as if an illness controls his body and society as a whole. His power and wealth only increase his solitude: In a cell, I could keep elaborating, working on the material without disruptions from the outside…. I watch over and preserve the treasure in the cave, in solitude – all by myself. Then I could step forth like an anchorite from his fantastic world. However, my reclusion would be closer to fiction, to poetry, and stronger than actual events…. Let the world go under; it is mine, I destroy it in myself. As the skipper, I could steer the ship into the reef – this would not mean awakening, it would mean sinking to a new depth of dreaming. The cargo would then be all mine. Something flies up, riches pour in. I have to decide how to cope with them. But it shall not be in Aladdin’s manner.96 It becomes clear that it is this power to control such an important dimension of the destiny of mankind that gives him headaches, seizures, cause him to have visions, hear strange voices, experience unexpected encounters, and voluntary or forced isolation. He compares his power to that of Aladdin, but Aladdin’s power and ambitions are futile compared to those of modern man: “Our lamp is made of uranium. It establishes the same problem: power streaming toward us titanically.”97 And, “yearning for other worlds now has technological features: alien guests, bizarre aircraft … The automatic apparatus is consistent with the spirit of the times. The end of the world, a vision at every millennium, likewise presents itself as a technological catastrophe.”98

95  Ibid. 96  Ibid., 116. 97  Ibid., 117. 98  Ibid., 119.

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As his nihilism increases, he becomes conscious of the significance of his undertaking. Working with graves gives him a “spiritualistic aura”99 and “graves are the beginning of humanity and not just culture.”100 This increasing sensitivity heralds his encounter with the mysterious figure of Phares: “I sensed a world in which Phares would lead me, and I heard his voice: ‘Soon you will learn what you do not know yet.’”101 It is an encounter which feels like déjà vu and which gives a sensation of bliss. The narrator thinks that Phares has some esoteric knowledge of a ‘primal text’ of which all human and animal languages are merely “translations or effusions.”102 He “probably aims at bridging, if not overcoming, dualism and reaching back through the dichotomies – including the divisions into plants and animals or into sexes; but first, the foundations of good and evil had to be shaken. Then the barrier between men and gods could also collapse.”103 The foreboding of Phares’s proximity pervades the narrator with a new spirit, which, however, does not solve his problem, “the decisions demanded of us by the power that streams towards us.”104 This surpasses the limited aspirations of Aladdin: “Aladdin’s problem was power with its delights and dangers; yet it seemed to me that Phares had nothing in common with the genie of the lamp. It makes a difference whether demons or messengers knock at the door.”105 The narrator receives a letter of application from a mysterious figure, and although the letter is in Chinese, he understands the text and reads it in a dreamlike state: I grew more and more dumbfounded as I read the letter – if it was a dream, then it was no ordinary one. It dawned on me that I could not invite the sender to come to my office, for I was the recipient of the invitation. – so I immediately dropped what I was doing and walked through the Tiergarten to Adler’s Hotel. It was [a] spring morning, and I was gratuitously cheerful – elated.106

99  Ibid., 121. 100  Ibid. 101  Ibid. 102  Ibid., 123. 103  Ibid. 104  Ibid., 124. 105  Ibid. 106  Ibid., 124–125.

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In her comparative study of the work of Alfred Kubin and Ernst Jünger, Claudia Gerhards chose the concept of ‘apocalypse’ as the common denominator. From our discussion above, it is clear that for Schlichter, too, apocalypse is a central trope, and for all three artists/writers the suggestion of a catastrophic destruction is at the heart of a set of ideas, images, and sentiments. In fact, apocalyptic visions were quite widespread in the interwar period, which witnessed the violent collapse of an old world order and the birth pangs of a new, unfamiliar world dominated, in part, by the overwhelming intervention of technology from outside, or so it seemed. Modernism was first born out of a sense of crisis and the destabilization of traditional structures, and, as we have seen, as a subversion of the idea of historical continuity as a source of a sense of identity and social and political legitimation. The prefiguring of an apocalypse was engendered by a deep sense of fragmentation and the disintegration of fundamental reassuring structures. But although apocalyptic sentiments are perhaps a symptom of social dissolution, they also hope to provide the answers to the crisis. As Gerhard argues, apocalypses are not merely a catastrophic form of disintegration, they are also part of the broader philosophy in which they function as an ordering element. By their nature, apocalyptic notions require a vision of a totality, of a structural whole, which is undermined by specific factors and which contains a struggle between good and evil forces. They emerge from combining the situation that is experienced as a crisis with a sense of historical continuity, of specific historical processes and their moral dimension. That is why apocalyptic visions normally contain a notion of a post-apocalyptic future as well, a world in which a catastrophe has taken place, where a new phase of history has emerged and a new, purified, man arises full of energy to create his new society. Apocalyptic presentiments are not merely pessimistic or negative, they also attempt to incorporate visions of revitalization and of the countering of fragmentation with a new concept of totality. In this way, the structuring vision of the concept of the apocalypse becomes a basic tool to approach history and the processes that govern the rise and fall of societies and civilizations. It thus functions as a hermeneutical instrument that can be used to discover the meaning of history and man’s position in it. Apocalypses are part of a total philosophy and are a way by which to access the deeper layers of meaning and interpretation in this philosophy. They signify the essence of historical processes and the human values that they contain. This is especially the case in the work of Jünger, for whom crises have a revelatory function. The catastrophe of World War I was also a kind of initiation into a hidden dimension of life, a kind of mystical experience that gave insight into some secret knowledge that lay beneath the surface of visible phenomena.

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The apocalypse, too, is a kind of revelation, bringing the essential principles of history to light, legitimating or de-legitimating certain visions and values, and re-organizing them into a new, total view. Apocalypses dissolve mysteries, provide new knowledge, and, as a catharsis, release the energy needed for reconstruction. If we look at the apocalyptic visions of Kubin, Schlichter, and Jünger, we can easily perceive these elements, although in different forms. Kubin’s dream kingdom is an isolated, closed domain, separated from society and from history, which aims to preserve a kind of premodern state. But this isolation, and the effort to encapsulate society to remove it from the passage of time is doomed to failure. It contains a view of totality, set against the fragmentation of the regular society outside. In Jünger’s Heliopolis and Eumeswil we also see isolated utopias with a totalitarian regime, separated from history in the sense that a catastrophe has violently dismantled society and disrupted its continuity. It is a potential site that is cast back on its primordial, constituent symbols. Although the cities exemplify a kind of survival, they by no means show an ideal society; it is a society struggling with its past, trying to find a course to follow, by which to deal with a new situation of uprootedness. History has exhausted its vitality. In the work of Schlichter and Jünger we can see the main factors that have caused the collapse of society. Schlichter’s written work is a fulmination against the narrow-mindedness of his fellow Germans, both the bourgeois, who chase after money and sex, and the workers, who are stuck in their poverty and dissoluteness. He fulminates against the commodification of life through capitalism; the disenchantment of life through science and technology, militarism, materialism; and the disappearance of the appreciation of beauty and of moral values and spirituality. Although a self-declared pervert, he nevertheless searches for artistic satisfaction, indefatigably following his own unique trajectory. Likewise, for Jünger modern society is on a course that detaches it from history and all things of value in it. Although he sees the collapse of bourgeois society as a natural process, and, at least in his early work, hails the new forces that are freed by the catastrophe, he is more pessimistic later, as he fears the tyranny of technology and the repression it entails, and a society based on rationalism, technology, and power that obfuscates human values and spirituality. Jünger’s utopias are thus, in a sense, cul-de-sacs, in which humans are subject to power struggles beyond their control, and the concurrence of remnants of the past and the technology of the future symbolize their incoherence and futility. Read from this perspective, his description of future man as the ‘worker’ seems ominous and perhaps should be seen more as a warning than as an ideal representation of ‘modern’ man. In his later works, the figure of

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future man is embodied by Phares, a mysterious, mystical character who has access to a spiritual realm that apparently coexists with the materialistic world of postmodernity. Phares offers a way out for the narrators in Heliopolis and Aladdin’s problem: he proposes a new kind of religion, one which acknowledges the secret knowledge hidden in creation, and represents another level of consciousness. This is, ultimately, Jünger’s solution, which throughout his life found expression in his love for nature and his strange aestheticization of war, violence, and power. At the core, in spite of its philosophical nature, his work is not that of a philosopher, but of a literary writer and, we might add, an amateur mystic. Within this cluster of ideas, the Thousand and one nights has a prominent place as a model and a source of images and their narrative expression. First, the Nights provides the image of a counter-reality, an alternative for the modernist Weltschmerz. It is exotic, and it has clearly demarcated values, which, on the one hand, satirize the moral narrow-mindedness of European society, and on the other hand, epitomize a primordial form of totalized order, by dictatorship, but also by the all-encompassing power of fate. It seems to contain these values in an aestheticized form; it unquestionably accepts them and transforms them into a world of primitive pleasure. Second, the story of the ‘City of Brass’ incarnates the symbolic vision of a multi-layered, modernist vision of history, with stages of prosperity, collapse, and post-apocalyptic ‘survival.’ It is a representation of the persistence of primeval symbols, but also of technology and secret knowledge, the exhaustion of a society and its continued significance. Third, the Thousand and one nights reveals a world that is still filled with enchantment, in a spiritual sense, an esoteric sense, and a technological sense. It is here that we see magic merge with technology, but without slipping into the nihilism of the modern age. It includes warnings, however, to heed spiritual values in order to avoid falling into the sheer lust for power. Fourth, as we have seen, some of these elements come together in the figure of Aladdin, as it is integrated in the work of Pontoppidan and Jünger. In the course of the nineteenth century, Aladdin became the symbol of progress, of scientific knowledge, technology, and unlimited power. But at the same time, Aladdin represented the indulgence in dreams and fantasies, the delusion of power, and the dissociation from social and historical circumstances. For Jünger, he became the impersonation of modern man, who ceded his soul to power, technology, and materialism, a ‘worker,’ but one who came out of his Gestalt and returned to human values. Whereas the ‘worker’ returns to normal human proportions, Phares has replaced him as future man.

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The trope of Aladdin suggests a continuity between nineteenth-century Romanticism and the radical attitude of figures such as Jünger, Kubin, and Schlichter; undoubtedly their works contain strong Romantic elements. It is a disillusioned Romanticism, however, not one molded into nostalgic longing, but rather into violent destruction, and into an effort to rescue some trace of vulnerable beauty. Whether or not this beauty is found in their own works is another question, however, because the works of these three authors combine repulsion, emotional distance, and egocentric monomania to such an extent that they are characterized by a rather pathetic kitsch.

Chapter 15

The Sindbad Syndrome: Gyula Krúdy and John Barth Among the many iconic characters in the stories of the Thousand and one nights warmly adopted by western audiences and authors, is Sindbad, the indefatigable merchant and traveler. In his six – or seven – adventurous journeys Sindbad explores unknown regions at the fringes of the civilized world, regions filled with exotic phenomena and creatures; he challenges fate and is seemingly spurred on only by an indomitable wanderlust. Sindbad has become the model of the quintessential traveler who refuses or is unable to enjoy the comfort and wealth that he has accumulated and persistently prefers to jeopardize his life and possessions in new journeys. The origin of the cycle of Sindbad stories and their incorporation into the Thousand and one nights are uncertain. The name is mentioned in the fifteenth century by al-Suyuti, although it is not clear which work the author refers to precisely. It is possible that the idea of the stories goes back to Indian examples, as it is clear that they contain sailor’s lore related to the wondrous world of the Indian Ocean. This lore is also known from Arabic geographical handbooks and descriptions of the world. This could imply that the cycle was not part of the earliest versions of the Nights. However, the earliest versions of the stories were apparently incorporated into a Turkish translation of the Nights dating from the seventeenth century, that is, before Galland added it to his Mille et une nuits. Galland found the cycle in Paris, in a separate manuscript, which has no visible connection with the corpus of the Nights.1 It is not our intention to discuss the history of the Sindbad cycle here, but it is important to point to some characteristics of the stories which have drawn the attention of critics and scholars and which are relevant to our subject. First, as the quintessential traveler, the figure of Sindbad contains all the narrative potential associated with the motif of mobility. Sindbad willfully exposes himself to the dangers and uncertainties of the sea, which, clearly – especially in medieval times – was the realm of uncharted labyrinthine trajectories, dominated by currents, waves, and winds. The sea, a world full of unexpected events, strange creatures, and unexplored islands, represents the uncertainty and fragility of life in its confrontation with fate. Whoever enters this realm 1  See Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:383–390.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_017

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risks losing his way and may never return; he may be thrown into mysterious worlds whose laws, both natural and human, may differ from those of the familiar world. He may suffer diseases, stress, nostalgia, accidents, hunger, etc., all of which emphasize his state of estrangement and liminality. Moreover, the trope of the journey reflects the idea of the peregrinatio vitae, of life as a journey, in which man’s destiny unfolds and which is based on an – often inexplicable – urge or necessity to depart in order to effectuate a predestined future. This peregrinatio is linked to the notion of contingency and reward, ultimate salvation or doom. Second, the cycle of Sindbad contains the element of the doppelgänger. The cycle is triggered by a chance meeting between Sindbad the porter and Sindbad of the sea, who represent two different worlds, the one of traveling, adventure, and wealth; and the other of toil, stagnancy, and poverty. It is the contrast between the life worlds of the two Sindbads – who are namesakes but whose lives are nevertheless opposite of the other and who are brought together by fate – which necessitates a process of harmonization, or explication, in which differences become understood and acceptable. Third, as in many stories of the Nights, this harmonization is realized through the act of storytelling, in which Sindbad explains how he reached his situation; he not only stresses his own efforts, but also acquaints his new friend with the wonders of the world that are beyond his experience and imagination. This wondrous world reflects the boundary between the two Sindbads: it is not a unified, geographically homogeneous world; it is a world in which different realms governed by different natural laws and inhabited by their own particular species are interconnected. Sindbad’s narration thus lays bare a heterogeneity in the natural world and draws on an exoticism which portrays an ‘other’ world filled with strange and fearsome creatures and phenomena. This world contains dangers and temptations, and evokes the desire to travel. The stories reveal a differentiation in creation which makes the contrast between the two namesakes understandable. The references to geographical lore and texts suggest the basic realism of the stories, which are about ‘real’ worlds, but they also focus attention on the narrational nature of the stories, in which referentiality structures a life story told by its ‘hero.’ Fourth, the figure of Sindbad has been studied as an example of ‘narrated’ man, a concept developed by Tzvetan Todorov to describe characters in narratives who are spurred on by narrated events and respond to them, rather than influencing and steering the events by their own agency and volition. They are ‘flat’ characters, in the sense that they have no psychological depth and do not undergo any process of psychological progress. They are merely a vehicle by which the story unfolds and are subjected to its course. In this analysis, Sindbad

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would be subjected to the laws of adventure, or more precisely, to the laws of adventure stories, or even more precisely, to the laws of storytelling. Moreover, because he has no independent personality, Sindbad could be anyone, he is an empty vessel for the reader to fill with his own fantasies. We might question whether or not the stories of Sindbad should be categorized as belonging to this type, but we cannot deny that they have often been read in this vein.2 Fifth, because of their narrative characteristics, with Sindbad as a more or less neutral protagonist who embodies a quintessential trope, and especially with connection between the journey and narration, the stories lend themselves to intertextual recycling quite well. Scholars have made reference to other resolute travelers, such as Odysseus, and to generic references to travel literature or literary journeys more generally, possibly within the framework of the peregrinatio vitae trope. It is also self-evident to link the cycle to other stories of adventure, of exploration, and of strange encounters. It is suitable for displaying all forms of exoticism, geographical, temporal or social, and for contrasting and juxtaposing different components of the world. Because of these characteristics of the Sindbad cycle and its main (anti-)hero, the figure of Sindbad has often drawn the attention of western and Arabic writers and scholars. In 1797, a study of the Thousand and one nights was published by Richard Hole – the first book-length study of the work – which focuses on the Sindbad stories and which, according to the author, shows that the Nights should be evaluated on a par with the Odyssey and, for instance, the Bagavad gita. The author argues that it was, perhaps ironically, the references to exotic geographic marvels that relate the work to other travel stories and enhance its credibility and value. For this reason, the stories should be elevated to the pantheon of world literature.3 Another example of western interest in Sindbad is clear from the ‘1002nd story of Shahrazad’ (1845) by Edgar Allen Poe, who used the tropes of the Sindbad figure to depict a futuristic fantasy. The figure of Sindbad has also proved to be an attractive model for identification and impersonation. One example is the Egyptian intellectual Husayn Fawzi (1900–88) who, in his autobiographical writings, ‘An Egyptian Sindbad,’ ‘Sindbad in the journey of life,’ ‘Sindbad’s journey to the West,’ and others, projected himself into the incessant traveler. This projection stretched from his professional interests – he studied oceanography and hydrobiology – and his journeys to Europe and India, to his intellectual ‘peregrination,’ which was marked by an avid interest in culture in general and a ‘modern’ attitude 2  Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Les hommes-récits,’ in Poétique de la prose (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 78–91. 3  Richard Hole, Remarks on the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, in Which the Origin of Sindbad’s Voyages is Particularly Considered (London: Cadell, 1797).

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toward European culture and science in particular. As an ‘enlightened’ spirit, he became an exemplary figure of Egyptian modernism. In this sense, Sindbad was used as a symbol of the spirit of enterprise and of an insatiable hunger for knowledge of the outside world, its civilizations, and its wonders.4 In this section, we discuss two authors in whose works the Sindbad trope plays a prominent and structural role. Not only do we find references to Sindbad, both implicit and explicit, throughout their work, they also, to a large extent, identified with Sindbad as a twin brother or double, which embodied their own urges, character or dreams. In this way, the person of the narrator/ author seems to merge with Sindbad as a ‘narrated man,’ while at the same time the figure of Sindbad as a narrative construct seems to step out of his textual confines and enter the ‘real’ world, imbuing it, so to speak, with his textual components. The two authors are thus interesting examples of the entanglement between text and life, self-image and self-representation. The two authors whose work we treat here are Gyula Krúdy (1878–1933), one of the main representatives of Hungarian modernism who used Sindbad not only as a pseudonym, but also as one of his alter egos, as a character personifying his attitude in life, albeit in a reshaped fashion; and John Barth, who has often declared his indebtedness to the Thousand and one nights in general and who, because of his passion for seafaring and sailing, seems to have increasingly merged with the figure of Sindbad as a personification of the adventure trope. Barth is considered one of the main exponents of North American postmodernism. In these two cases, we focus on the ways in which author, narrator, and characters mingle with Sindbad as a figure and a trope and are constructed as doubles, on the textual level, and on the way in which this spillover is used to express certain values or attitudes in the novels in question. How is Sindbad, the narrated man, filled with meaning and agency by Krúdy and Barth?

Gyula Krúdy: The Nostalgic Nomad

Gyula Krúdy was born in eastern Hungary in 1878 and moved to Budapest at an early age to practice journalism and writing. His life coincided with a turbulent episode in Hungarian history; he witnessed the economic and cultural upsurge of Budapest during a phase of modernization, still visible in its art nouveau buildings, but he also saw the decline of Habsburg power and the collapse of the empire during World War I. These historical circumstances are 4  See Ed. C. de Moor, “Husayn Fawzi and the New School,” Journal of Arabic Literature 25 (1994), 223–244.

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clearly reflected in his work; on the one hand, he recorded the symptoms of a burgeoning and obtrusive modernity, with its ills and benefits; on the other hand, he looked back with a nostalgic eye to the glorious Hungarian past, with its traditional customs and values. Because of these elements, his novels and stories assume a special place among the various authors who took part in the literary revival of the modernist period; Krúdy did not always appreciate the work of these authors and at one point even denounced it as ‘pseudoliterature,’ because of its frivolity.5 Before discussing Krúdy’s famous ‘Sindbad’ stories and the way in which they characterized him as an author, we first turn to his most important novels to determine their relationship to the Thousand and one nights. Already in Krúdy’s first important novel, The monster of Podolin, published in 1906, we can find traces of Shahrazad. It is a Gothic novel which embraces supernatural interventions. At a certain point, the narrator states that he was “just reading Ali Baba and the forty thieves, the only book that could be found in the Nižsder castle, when from the room of my mistress loud weeping and talking were heard.”6 This observation introduces the strange entry of the lover of his mistress through an underground passage and adds to the Gothic character of the story. This technique of referring to the Thousand and one nights to indicate a separation between the regular course of events and extraordinary events recurs in Krúdy’s later work, especially with regard to marvelous or erotic episodes. In 1919, Krúdy’s novel Ladies day appeared, which, like The monster of Podolin, is essentially a Gothic tale mixed with elements from the Thousand and one nights. The main protagonist is an undertaker who leads a rather dull life, but who one day meets his double on the pavement of a seedy street. The double turns out to be his ‘dream,’ who enacts his hidden desires and fantasies. The two explore their surroundings in an atmosphere filled with mystery and magic, until they enter the room of Nathalia, a prostitute of modest means, who tells them the story of her life. Here the technique of the embedded story is adopted, and explicit references to the Thousand and one nights are inserted. Nathalia sighs: “We don’t know the future. Life is always interrupted at the most exciting moment; we will never know what will happen in the next instalment.”7 The story is, in fact, interrupted when Nathalia gives birth to a daughter, an indication that the ‘story’ will continue.

5  Joseph Remenyi, “Two Hungarian Romanticists,” Poet Lore 54, no. 4 (Winter 1948): 334–351. 6  Gyula Krúdy, Das Gespenst von Podolin, trans. György Buda (Budapest and Vienna: Kortina, 2008), 197. 7  Ibid., 138–139.

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Subsequently, the narrator tells the story of an ‘ocean going captain’ whose wife was living confined to a basement. The narrator took her as a lover and enjoyed her ‘wiggling little toes’ as she told stories from the Thousand and one nights. But suddenly she disappeared as if she had “flown off on the back of the griffin that had carried off Sindbad the Sailor.”8 The storyteller ‘fell silent.’ Here the Thousand and one nights is used not only as a matrix of storytelling; it is also associated with the world of dreams, mysterious events, and eroticism. It emanates a spell-like liminality on the protagonist, the street, and the houses that he is now able to explore, and his extraordinary love affair. These are all part of a sub-reality epitomized by the Thousand and one nights. A similar split reality is adopted in Charmed life (1933), although here the Gothic component has been relinquished. The story is set on the eve of the Great War, in the rather decadent upper middle class of Budapest. The hero, a poor journalist, begins a love affair with an upper-class woman, or so it seems, and thus enters a dreamlike episode of his life; this represents an interruption to his usual daily preoccupations. He leads a double life, one part of which seems to be governed by a propitious spell. At one point, the Thousand and one nights is introduced: “But Sylvia surely heard these words, for her eyes, straight from the Thousand and one nights, showed the same kind of anxiety as Fruzsina’s.”9 She lives up to her appearance when she says to the hero: “I hear that like Haroun al Rashid you like to treat ladies to tall tales.”10 This is the start of a somewhat trivial – second – love affair between the protagonist and Sylvia, who, like other women, is compared to ‘harem inmates.’ In The charmed life, the hero is Kázmer Rézeda, a young journalist struggling to gain a living and to rise from his rather common environment to a more appealing status, mainly through the help of women of various kinds. While he is immersed in poverty and banality he has great dreams and powerful passions. Rézeda is usually seen as one of Krúdy’s alter egos, someone who reflects his own life and dreams. In The charmed life, a fleeting reference is made to the novel The crimson coach, which is the title of one of Krúdy’s own novels (which appeared, in fact, in 1913). Rézeda is also the hero of this novel, The crimson coach, which is Krúdy’s most ambitious work and can be considered the cornerstone of modernist Hungarian literature, since it combines the somewhat oblique representation of reality with formal experimentation. The result is a

8  Ibid., 151. 9  Gyula Krúdy, The Charmed Life: A Novel of Budapest in the Good Old Days, trans. John Bátki (Budapest: Corvina Books, 2011), 126. 10  Ibid., 127.

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complex work that consists of multiple components and layers and introduces several different narrative perspectives. The structure of The crimson coach draws special attention to the novel’s nature as a text. First, the prologue is used as a narrative frame that contains several kinds of inserted texts, such as the diary of Rézeda, part of an autobiographical novel by Rézeda, an account by one of the secondary characters, correspondence, and a series of inserted tales. Second, dozens of other authors and texts are mentioned in the story, supposedly to demarcate the location of the novel in the European literary landscape and to suggest a wide-­ranging intertextual embedding. Most authors that are mentioned are Hungarian, Russian, and western European, such as Cervantes and Boccaccio, Balzac, Turgenev, Pushkin, Széchenyi, Andersen, Strindberg, Maupassant, and many others. The Thousand and one nights that is mentioned is the first Hungarian translation of Mihály Vörösmarty (1800–55). The kaleidoscopic composition of the text is centered around two main figures, Kázmer Rézeda and the elderly gentleman named Alvinczi. Here Rézeda is an alter ego of the author, an impecunious journalist and writer who is just twenty-six years old (then later forty years old) and living with a small entourage of actresses and fellow-bohemians. All are trying to scratch an income together; they dream of the good life and a profitable turn of fortune. Alvinczi, born in 1830, is the owner of a mysterious crimson coach and a member of the old Hungarian nobility. He is known for his many adventures with women and his attachment to traditional life, but also for his adventurous speculations; he exploits the opportunities of the developing capitalist market, which provided him with an immense fortune. Both these characteristics, which reflect the ambivalent situation of Hungary between tradition and modernity, make him a mysterious figure, hiding in his crimson coach. The dualism of the figure of Alvinczi is also reflected in the description of him as a person in which East and West come together. Alvinczi is introduced as dressed in a silk kaftan, “as is worn by oriental gentlemen.”11 He is a “great oriental gentleman who is accustomed to laugh at the foolishest wishes of women.”12 He sits in Turkish fashion on his divan and looks eastward “where his forefathers had been kings.”13 He is western as well; he has possessions similar to those of the European nobility, reads French newspapers and books, and invests in the European colonial market.14 His favorite European city is Vienna, 11  Gyula Krúdy, Die rote Postkutsche, trans. György Sebestyén ([N.p.]: Suhrkamp, 1999), 50. 12  Ibid., 52. 13  Ibid., 50. 14  Ibid., 283–284.

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where he travels in his crimson coach. His position contrasts not only with that of Rézeda and his friends, but also with the deplorable state of Budapest, a desperate city on the verge of bankruptcy, whose inhabitants are drowning in debt, and where cash can hardly be found. Life has become hopeless and unbearable: “Everyone has the feeling that it cannot go on like this.”15 All feel the threat of war and some suggest that a republic should be proclaimed.16 Thus, the story of The crimson coach is mainly the account of disruption, of growing dissatisfaction, increasing contradictions, and the disappearance of an old, traditional society, without a new vision for the future, but rather with a sense of cataclysm and despair. The sense of doom is amplified by the final episode, in which an English gentleman is described as reading a Vörösmarty translation of the Thousand and one nights bound in saffian leather, like Alvinczi’s slippers. Later he roams around the villages, like a fairy tale figure, apparently, a ghost of crown prince Rudolph.17 The episode of the royal ghost shows a by now familiar reference to the Thousand and one nights, as a marker of the shift from one domain of reality to another, a marker that enables the forces of mystery to manifest themselves. Other references include the comparison of a lady’s beauty to the Thousand and one nights and the episodes in which a depressed Rézeda, who is considering suicide, is cured by the storytelling of his fiancée, who says: “What wondrous journeys I have made, compared to which Sindbad, the Seafarer of the fairy tale, is a mere snail who has crept over a leaf.”18 The notion of storytelling is evoked as a cure and the image of Sindbad is used to make the connection between adventure and narration. These references are combined with the description of Alvinczi, which evokes the nostalgic idea of an Orient as one of the authentic components of the Hungarian tradition. Sindbad I As noted, the character of Kázmer Rézeda is usually seen as Krúdy’s double in the novels in which it appears. He is a bohemian writer and journalist, always keen on amorous adventures. Krúdy does not hide his personal ‘relationship’ with Kázmer, for instance, when, in The crimson coach Rézeda tells his story and remarks: “Oh no, dear Krúdy who will once read these pages to write the novel about my life.”19 There is also a connection between Rézeda and Sindbad, 15  Ibid., 282. 16  Ibid., 80. 17  Ibid., 348. 18  Ibid., 275. 19  Ibid., 202.

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for example, when, in The charmed life, Rézeda is said to have set out at a very early age to “sail upon life’s waters.”20 In The crimson coach Rézeda is associated with many literary authors, for instance, with Pushkin, who “opened for Rézeda the wonders of a new world,”21 awakening the desire in him to become just like the Russian master. But he is also said to “write like Sindbad, the merchant of the Thousand and one nights.”22 This reference to Sindbad may indicate the famous Thousand and one nights character, but it may also concern Krúdy himself, who between 1911 and 1917 wrote a number of short pieces under the pseudonym ‘Sindbad’ and with Sindbad as the main protagonist. The stories together form a cycle centered around the figure of Sindbad; in content and atmosphere they are clearly related, but they are separate pieces not deliberately squeezed into a coherent whole. Whereas, for instance, in one of the pieces Sindbad is still young, elsewhere he is a gentleman with grey hair. Again, in another story he has died and taken on the shape of ‘a sprig of a mistletoe in a rosegarland,’ or he is a man 300 years old, a man who feels his death approaching, or a man who lies in his coffin after having killed himself. All pieces are pervaded by this random shapeshifting, which is especially helpful to overcome the confinement of death. The preoccupation with death is combined with another recurrent element: Sindbad’s many relationships with women of various kinds. It appears that during his life he was quickly bored and always looking for new adventures. Since he now feels the herald of death, he wants to say goodbye to all the women he still respects.23 After his death, he leaves his coffin or takes a particular shape to visit a lady he once loved, asking her how she is doing, talking about old times, and describing episodes from his life. Sometimes the boundaries between ‘reality,’ dream, and fantasy become blurred, or he invents shapes in which he can easily approach ladies, for example as a “sleeping car attendant” in a train.24 He feels like a “knight errant”25 who indefatigably roams through the country to present himself to ladies and virgins pining for love. His life, and ‘life’ after his death, seems to be wholly dedicated to women: “His whole life he had been ‘my darling’ to two or three women at any one time. He wouldn’t leave a

20  Krúdy, The Charmed Life, 61. 21  Krúdy, Die rote Postkutsche, 134–135. 22  Ibid., 137. 23  Gyula Krúdy, The Adventures of Sindbad, trans. George Szirtes (Budapest: CEU Press, 1998), 14–15. 24  Ibid., 43. 25  Ibid., 157.

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woman in peace until she had fallen in love with him.”26 In the end he is proud to have loved 107 women, of all kinds and sizes, during his life: “God bless you then, dear good women – virgins, countesses, women of affairs, half-crazed Jewesses – all who listened with trembling lips, sceptical smiles and with desire and astonishment in your hearts.”27 It is the memory of these women that should be kept alive, even after Sindbad’s death. Sindbad’s relationship with his mistresses is one of tender complicity. Every new love is ‘true love’ but both lovers know that even true love is transitory, that betrayal and lies are inherent in love. Broken promises are inevitably connected to every love relationship, but that does not mean that feelings of affection and passion are not sincere. There is an understanding between the lovers that love is a game, a serious game, but still a game to catch each other, enjoy the pleasure each has to offer, and turn away without truly breaking a pledge of loyalty. Love is an illusion, a dream. It is an escape to ‘the good life’: “‘Sindbad, you will escape to the good life with me, into life as it should be lived.’ Sindbad smiled and nodded, wondering whether Fanny knew he was leaving the capital forever.”28 There is only a faint boundary between the truth and a lie. Throughout the various episodes, it seems that Sindbad’s desire for women and its fulfillment are part of an enchantment, which not only causes the intensity and spell of love itself, but also enables Sindbad to enter love’s ‘dream.’ It is a dream that is connected to other dreams, of being a king in ancient England, or a train conductor, or someone entering the dreams of others: He liked lies, illusions, fictions and imagination – he would love to have swung from the high trapeze in a rose-pink vest or been an organist at a princely residence, or a confessor in a Jesuit church! … a poet in exile whose works were studied by young girls in secret.29 He likes ruined forts, riverbanks, castles, secret passages, all of which add to the spells of love. The enchantment in which all these escapades take place is explicitly associated with the Thousand and one nights, which serves as a source of magic. As in Krúdy’s novels, the Thousand and one nights is a means to break the homogeneity of reality, to indicate entries into parallel worlds,

26  Ibid., 13. 27  Ibid., 74. 28  Ibid., 190. 29  Ibid., 103.

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and to invoke an enchantment that amalgamates life and dreams. As in the Thousand and one nights, this enchantment ultimately triumphs over death. The main link between these stories and the Thousand and one nights is, of course, the figure of Sindbad. Throughout the episodes, the Sindbad trope is sustained by various expressions, metaphors, and motifs, which in turn reveal how and why the essence of the character was chosen as an alter ego of the writer. First, the hero is associated with mobility. He is called a “knight errant,” a “tireless voyager,” an “enchanted mariner,” whose “sails were fixed,” who is pushed forward by destiny and waiting for a favorable wind.30 He is always ready to depart and go where a ‘great storm’ blows him. He travels by coach, by train, even in a coffin in a hearse, visiting strange towns and villages, staying in inns. He cannot be imprisoned by his lovers, nor by the confinement of the grave. He becomes restless and bored and heads for new adventures. He is, it seems, always on the run, ready to “pack his heart in his travelling bag and be on his way.”31 He is, in brief, the personification of desire, breaking through the confines of space and time in his spermatozoic search for love, that is, ‘women, those marvellous continents.’ Sindbad II Krúdy’s identification with Sindbad was so strikingly well-chosen, it conformed so aptly not only to his self-image, but also to others’ image of him, that it became more an impersonation than a pseudonym. This is beautifully and touchingly illustrated by a novel that appeared after his death: Sándor Maraí’s Sindbad geht Heim (1940). The work is a personal and professional tribute that attempts to catch the essence of Krúdy’s person and writing by unifying him with his alter ego. The novel describes the last day of an author named Sindbad and follows him in the hours before his death. Sindbad wakes up and prepares for his ‘journey,’ taking his time to make his toilet, like one of the heroes of his novels. He sets out to visit his friend Zsóka and to spend the day in his familiar drinking houses and restaurants to ruminate over the changing times and the situation of literature, which, at least for the ‘mariner,’ has deteriorated considerably in recent years.32 In his curious novel, Maraí offers an evaluation of Krúdy’s personality and work, and his significance for and attitude toward Hungarian culture. He uses the Sindbad trope as Krúdy himself explores it, both in his work, as a literary 30  Ibid., 75. 31  Ibid., 176. 32  Sándor Maraí, Sindbad geht heim, trans. Markus Bieler (Munich: Nova Verlag Vaduz, 1978), 7 (translations here and in the following are mine).

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character, and as a real person; thus, he shows how the two are connected. He explores the sense of restlessness in Krúdy/Sindbad, his displacement in the modern era, his sense of alienation, and his attachment to some authentic essence represented by Hungary and embodied by a tradition which seems to be fading away rapidly. As in Krúdy’s novels, Maraí portrays Sindbad as being prey to an essential unrest, which compels him to set out on journeys, to roam around and travel incessantly. He is described as a ‘nomad at heart.’ This yearning to travel is due to his nature, which situated him forever between the “banks of two worlds.”33 The imbalance in Sindbad’s character and the desire which it generates finds his way into two domains: first, traveling in search of women, spending his life in inns, hotels, and brasseries, where a balance between potential affection and comfort can be found either in relationships with women or in the physical well-being of the familiar surroundings of traditional Hungarian hospitality, food, and drink. And, second, literature, which is, in itself, an adventure, a journey to another world, a way to connect with the past or with some deep sense of belonging. Both efforts to find gratification fail, however, since traveling does not subdue the urge to travel, and literature has lost its traditional role in the upheavals of modernity. Characteristically, Sindbad hopes that the coachman will one day pass by their destination and halt in a province where he can find happiness.34 Part of Sindbad’s sense of alienation is caused by the advent of modernity, which has swallowed age old traditions and replaced them with superficiality and consumerism. Sindbad does not want to live in a world where people waste money without reason, where film stars are more esteemed than writers, where ignorance reigns, where intimate affairs are discussed loudly and publicly, where people are hopeless and depressed. But the greatest disappointment is that there is no appreciation for literature and no respect for ‘genuine’ authors. Literature has been substituted by ‘pseudo-literature’ and Sindbad sighs, and thinks that perhaps he should consider writing a cookbook. The predicament in which Sindbad finds himself seems to reflect Krúdy’s situation at the end of his life, when he tried to survive in poverty, on the revenue from his writings, especially short stories which are almost obsessively – although beautifully – concerned with the Hungarian tradition of food and drink.35 Maraí attributes Sindbad’s indomitable urge to travel partly to his sense of belonging to a culture which is essentially nomadic and related to the tribes of 33  Ibid., 29. 34  Ibid. 35  Gyula Krúdy, Life is a Dream, trans. John Batki (London: Penguin Books, 2010).

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the Asian steppes. Sindbad loved traveling, because “deep in his heart still lived another Sindbad, who would prefer most to live in a tent in the alkali scenery of Nyirség, seated in the tent opening smoking a pipe.”36 The Hungarians were led out of the Asian steppes by a black “demon, who squatted grinning behind the rider in the saddle – the demon who had a name which nobody understood, except the Hungarian.”37 This Asian spirit still lingers in the Hungarian soul and even in the Hungarian scenery where a “Fata Morgana trembles as if Hungary is on the verge to return home to the East.”38 For Sindbad, Hungary has taken the place of the steppes; this is why he never travels abroad, where “food and wine cannot be trusted and women lie in a foreign language.”39 He travels through Hungary, like traveling actors and birds. In this way, the oriental roots of Hungarian culture are embedded in the figure of Sindbad. Sindbad has a wallet of saffian leather, like an oriental gentleman should, he greets people in oriental fashion, he loves oriental tales and wisdom. The symbol of the oriental component in Hungarian culture and in Sindbad’s life is the bathhouse, where he goes to listen to a storyteller under a cupola with a starry sky like in the Thousand and one nights. In the steam, the West and East melt into each other, “in taste, past and memory which separated the soul of the inhabitants of the two continents.”40 What is more, it contains the dream-world that pervades literature: … it has the caverns from the Thousand and one nights, where writers go as if they look for something here, not only lost youth and health, eroded by sorrows, passion and pouch-like adventures, which together bear the name “life,” no, as if the Turkish Moors had laid colourful shards of the Oriental dream-world in the bright fissures of the cupola.41 Budapest is situated on the border between East and West, it is a repository of an eastern past, both Asian and Turkish, but it is exposed, too, to influences from the West. The oriental past is such an important component in the Hungarian cultural identity that the loss of it, under the pressures of modernization and westernization, is an existential threat. Modernization implies de-orientalization, 36  Maraí, Sindbad geht heim, 106. 37  Ibid., 108. 38  Ibid., 101. 39  Ibid., 99. 40  Ibid., 38. 41  Ibid., 49–50.

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the giving up of a tradition that links Hungary to its Asian past. As Krúdy indicates in his novels, this change of orientation is accompanied by opportunism, consumerism, superficiality, and indifference. It is precisely in this period of disruption, when the Habsburg Empire is collapsing, that a reaffirmation of Hungary’s oriental dimension is needed, even if only by acknowledging the value of the Hungarian tradition. The East provides wisdom, balance, and depth, whereas modernity imposes imbalance, rashness, volatility, and affectation. The East provides healing, “like the water in the bath-house which seems to sprout from a miraculous source, deep and far, soothing the pain in body and soul like rays of balsam.”42 Here we have reached the core of Maraí’s evaluation of Krúdy’s identification with Sindbad, as a ‘narrated man’ and as an alter ego: Krúdy/Sindbad is an obsessive traveler who, paradoxically, never leaves Hungary. He is a traveler in the mind, in stories, in literature, in dreams, but his incessant mobility is not meant to prove his detachment from his home ground and native land, but rather to prove his love for it, to re-establish his link to the idea of the fatherland over and over again. His traveling immerses his body into all the pleasures his land has to offer: the love of beautiful women; fine food, freshly baked bread; nostalgic autumns and winters; the smells, atmosphere, and decorations of hotels and inns; and coaches. All this is part of an old tradition, whose “blood has streamed through the veins of his fatherland to ultimately reach Sindbad.”43 This tradition is imbued in body and soul and cannot be discarded by the whims of the times. Apart from the physical experience of the fusion of history and the space of Hungary, Sindbad’s journey is most importantly a mental experience that is recorded in his literary work. ‘Traveling’ has brought him knowledge about the world, about men, women, animals, demons, superstitions, etc., in sum, about the secrets of life. He has recorded this knowledge for the sake of Hungary, which he loves and wants to awaken. In the middle of disruption and change he wants to represent another Hungary. When he wrote, he saw “another reality, the other Hungary, which existed on the backside of the map, which emanated from reality.”44 He wanted to show this alternative Hungary, to teach the Hungarians how to relate to their identity, “to educate the fatherland in the noblest feelings and truths, writing not about politics, but about autumn, honour, fate, women.”45 He felt he had “to leave a sign that another Hungary has 42  Ibid., 50. 43  Ibid., 29. 44  Ibid., 77. 45  Ibid., 31.

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existed.”46 Writing, traveling, is therefore connected with authenticity, with a deeply rooted heritage, and with his sense of solidarity and affection among his community. In Maraí’s description of Krúdy/Sindbad’s final day, all these efforts subside. On this day, for the first time in his life, Sindbad does not feel the urge to go away, somewhere, at any price. Finally, he has a sense of home: “This woman … had brought him what he had sought … for fifty-five years in vain: the smell of home, which Sindbad had already lost at an early age and henceforth had sought all over the world like a tracker dog.”47 What is the sense of remaining in a world in which his kind of author, his kind of person, has become redundant: He should not stay in a world which does not concern you anymore. Sindbad will finally do something that he was always unable to achieve: he will return home and reach a state of equanimity with his oriental side. He feels that going home is inevitable, that his time has come and that he has done everything in his power.48

The Intrepid Traveler: John Barth

The American author John Barth (1930–2015) is often referred to as the quintessential example of literary postmodernism. This is partly due to his own efforts to situate himself at the head of a literary trend that galvanized American literature in the 1960s. Moreover, he combined his inclination to experiment with relatively readable stories, and this ensured him a certain popularity and commercial success. Still, his work was increasingly associated with what was called ‘New American Fiction,’ though he played down his role in inspiring trends of this kind; in fact, his later novels are notably less experimental. Now, it is Barth’s earlier novels, such as The sot-weed factor (1960), Lost in the funhouse (1968), and The Giles goat-boy (1966), which are considered contributions to the development of postmodernism in prose fiction. Postmodernism is usually described as a deeper fundamental questioning of our experience of reality than was proposed by modernism in the first half of the twentieth century. Whereas modernism focused on phenomenological aspects of reality, that is, the impossibility of establishing an objective, coherent vision of reality, and stressed the subjective and fragmented nature of human experience, postmodernism turned to ontological questions about 46  Ibid. 47  Ibid., 14. 48  Ibid., 143–145, 148, 155.

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the actual existence of a ‘reality.’ The idealism, implied by the modernists’ lamentation for the loss of coherent visions of the world, was replaced by a radical skepticism and rejection of mega-narratives of history, culture, ideology, and religion. In literature, this resulted in more self-reflection, formal experiments, the blurring of generic demarcations, the use explicit intertextuality, the ‘disappearance’ of the author as an organizing center, and the substitution of the notion of reality with the idea of a purely ‘textual’ reality.49 John Barth linked himself to these developments in thought and literature through two ‘manifestos’ in which he presented his literary credo. In the first, ‘The literature of exhaustion’ (1968), he distanced himself from the work of modernist authors such as Joyce, Beckett, Gide, Pirandello, Borges, and Nabokov, who had ‘exhausted’ the potential for literary experimentation by breaking down traditional conventions and forms. Without depreciating their work, Barth considered it a phase that had been completed. In ‘The replenishment of literature’ (1979),50 he proposed a new approach based on a synthesis of recent insights and methods developed by the modernists, and inherited, or traditional, forms. He believed that experiments should not be shunned, but should be combined with ‘existing archetypes’ and the tradition of storytelling. Postmodern doubt should be (re-)connected with modernist and premodernist idealism. At first sight, it would seem that the Thousand and one nights, as a literary model, would be an adequate source of inspiration for postmodern authors endorsing self-reflexivity, the decrease of authorial autonomy, and forms of textual dispersion. In fact, many postmodern authors referred to the Nights in one way or another, and John Barth, in particular, took Shahrazad as the prime model of his fiction. He repeatedly indicated that Odysseus, Don Quijote, Huckleberry Finn, and Shahrazad were his literary heroes. For Barth, Shahrazad in particular represents the quintessential storyteller who reflects the general condition of the literary author throughout the ages. The act of storytelling is the core element of literary prose, and it is the relationship between Shahrazad and Shahriyar that epitomizes the relationship between the author and his audience: the reader is the absolute critic who decides whether the author ‘lives.’ The tension between reader and author is ‘dangerous’ for the author, but it is also a precondition for inventing narratives.

49  McHale, Postmodernist Fiction; Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1996). 50  Both articles are published in John Barth, The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984).

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Barth has long acknowledged his indebtedness to the Thousand and one nights; in fact, the references to it are so prominent in his work that one critic even accused him of “parasitic procedures.”51 Barth once expressed his dream of re-writing Burton’s translation of the Nights as a character in one of Borges’s intriguing stories. He adopted many elements from the Nights to construct his own stories, most importantly, he utilized the technique of the frame story. In all his works Barth makes use of frame tales, which, according to him, immediately destabilize the position and identity of the author and fracture the relationship of the story with reality. Thus, the device of the frame stories opens up the narrative potential that postmodernist authors seek: it facilitates selfreflexivity, the fragmentation of authorship, the textualization of life, and the fluidity of narrative material. Barth imitates other basic elements from the Nights, including the insertion of embedded stories, in the fashion of multiple Chinese boxes, in order to penetrate the various layers of textual ‘reality,’ and emphasize the necessity and inevitability of storytelling. A typical phrase that recurs throughout Barth’s work is “On with the story …”; this implies, first, that life will continue as long as stories are being told, and second, that there is no alternative for storytelling: there will always be stories to be told in order to deal with the human predicament. Using these basic devices to construct his stories, Barth postures himself as a writer/storyteller, often referring to himself or his life, integrating himself as a character in his stories. Typically, the main heroes in his novels are a middle-aged writer/university teacher and his younger (second) wife. Together they struggle to overcome an impasse in their lives and use stories as a means to break through the deadlock. We now discuss three of Barth’s works which together exemplify the way he uses the narrational repository of the Thousand and one nights to assemble his novels and the way his typical experimental techniques are derived directly from his great example, Shahrazad. More precisely, in the vein of this chapter, we analyze how Barth identifies with one of the main figures of the Thousand and one nights as they appeared in western languages: the figure of Sindbad of the sea. The Replenishment of John Barth: Chimaera After his first pretentiously experimental novels such as The sot-weed factor (1960), The Giles goat-boy (1966), and Lost in the funhouse (1968), Barth wrote a cycle of stories under the title Chimaera (1972). Most critics read this work as a statement about his literary convictions. The first part, ‘Dunyazadiad,’ in 51  Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Allen Lane, 1994), 289.

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particular, epitomizes Barth’s method and self-image as an author. As we see, it can even be read as a self-justification for his literary methods, particularly his extensive re-working of the Thousand and one nights. In the two other stories, ‘Perseid’ and ‘Bellephoroniad,’ Barth uses the instruments with which he equipped himself in ‘Dunyazadiad.’ The frame of ‘Dunyazadiad’ consists of Dunyazad’s account to Shahzaman about Shahrazad’s strategy to mitigate Shahriyar’s bitterness by telling stories. She says that Shahrazad is looking for a way to please the king and decides that the ‘magic’ lies in words. While she is contemplating how to approach Shahriyar, a jinni suddenly appears – a jinni who turns out to be an American author who was magically transported to the scene because he and Shahrazad uttered the words, ‘The key to the treasure is the treasure,’ at precisely the same moment. The genie/writer explains that he is faced with writer’s block: “I’ve lost track of who I am; I’ve lost track of who I am; my name’s just a jumble of letters; so’s the whole body of literature, strings of letters and empty spaces, like a code I’ve lost the key to.”52 After realizing that he is in the company of Shahrazad, whose stories he admires to such an extent that in comparison his own works are “mimicries, pallid counterfeits of the authentic treasures of her Thousand and one nights,”53 the genie/writer advises her that, in order to entertain Shahriyar, she should tell him stories. When Shahrazad doubts the efficacy of this strategy, the genie/writer, who, after all knows the outcome of the story, offers to help by providing new stories every day. Shahrazad accepts his help and offers to have sex with him every day. After his polite refusal, she promises to help him with his stories. The cooperation evolves smoothly, and results in the Thousand and one nights, told by Shahrazad, and ‘Dunyazadiad,’ written by the genie/writer. The story now returns to the level of Dunyazad, who is on the verge of killing Shahzaman, who, however, asks permission to tell her a story. He tells the story of his life and the life of a girl whom he threatens to kill, and in this way, he saves his life. The story is now raised one more level, to the level of the writer/genie, who gives the final plot and the sense of the story: ‘The key to the treasure is the treasure,’ means that storytelling is not a way to achieve something but an aim in itself. The story of ‘Dunyazadiad’ can be read, in part, as the poetics of John Barth, who, of course, is personified by the genie/writer. First, the story draws the outline of the way in which Barth envisages the position of the author and his relationship to his readers. Writing fiction is essentially depicted as a form of trade: the author offers interesting and entertaining tales to the reader, and in 52  John Barth, Chimaera (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1992), 18. 53  Ibid., 20.

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exchange, the reader allows him to continue, to live. As soon as the author fails to raise the interest of the reader, his mandate ends and he loses his legitimacy as a writer. In Chimaera, the narrative ‘contract’ is extended to include the mutually helpful relationship between the two narrators, the genie/writer and Shahrazad. Here, too, the interaction is two-sided: Barth uses his knowledge to help Shahrazad in her predicament, while Shahrazad, in turn, promises to help him break through his writer’s block. Significantly, the communication between author and reader is compared to a love relation, or rather an erotic encounter: not rape: it’s success depended upon the reader’s consent and cooperation, which she could withhold or at any moment withdraw; also upon her own combination of experience and talent for enterprise, and the author’s ability to arouse, sustain, and satisfy her interest – an ability on which his figurative life hung as surely as Scheherazade’s literal [life did].54 The association of eroticism and narration, which is, of course, prominent in the frame story of the Thousand and one nights, is a recurrent theme in many of Barth’s novels. The telling of stories often takes place in the setting of erotic encounters, or it is conducive to the development of sexual relationships. Narration is often equated with eroticism, both in a metaphoric sense and in a physical sense, the process being ‘enacted’ as a form of physical ‘inscription.’ The erotic tension is complex in ‘Dunyazadiad,’ since it concerns not only Shahrazad’s relationship with Shahriyar, but also Dunyazad’s relationship with Shahzaman, and, ultimately, Shahrazad’s relationship with Barth. The latter is kept at bay, since, in spite of Shahrazad’s offer to have sex with him every day, Barth prefers to keep the contract purely professional and based on the exchange of narrative material. Remarkably, Shahrazad’s affection for Barth is highlighted again in The tidewater tales (1987), when she succeeds in traveling to Barth’s time to visit him. Second, the central motif of the story of ‘Dunyazadiad’ is the writer’s block, both Shahrazad’s and Barth’s, which implies an immediate death threat. Every author/narrator is bound, at some point, to fall into the abyss of a lack of inspiration, which results in an identity crisis and a feeling of impotence. Here Barth suggests that he might solve this recurrent problem (‘exhaustion’) by finding inspiration in the existing literary canon, which represents a kind of ‘collective 54  Ibid., 34.

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memory’ of previous redemptions from the imaginative void.55 This search for inspiration is represented as a mutual process: Shahrazad is redeemed by Barth and vice versa, by exploiting the time gap in an ingenious way and using Barth’s previous knowledge of the complete story. This procedure is not only helpful, it is clearly legitimized by Barth as a means to use the material from the tradition interactively, without concern for questions of authenticity. All literature is imbued by previous narratives and Barth considers using the ‘solutions’ found by its predecessors to be a legitimate procedure. The recycling of narrative material in an explicitly intertextual procedure is characteristic of postmodern literature, as is the self-reflexivity that Barth thematizes in ‘Dunyazadiad.’ As in his other works, the effect of self-reflexivity, and the destabilization of authorship are not only realized by the confrontation between Barth and Shahrazad, but also by the use of multiple narrative frames. The primary function of the technique of stories-within-stories is to draw attention to the relationship between the text and the reader and to the textual nature of the stories. In his essay ‘Tales within tales,’ Barth calls the technique an essential strategy of fantasy literature, because it complicates the reader’s relationship to the text. Ideally, the inserted stories contribute to the tension of the frame story – as in the Thousand and one nights, but not, for instance, in the Canterbury tales or Decameron – thus, they not only create a form of interaction between the different levels, but they also focus the attention and the weight of the plot on the narrator and the process of storytelling.56 In this sense, the embedded stories are part of what Barth calls the ‘dramatic logic’ of the narrative, which results in the denouement. He discerns several relationships between the frames: a gratuitous relationship; associative, thematic, and exemplary relationships; and, finally, a dramaturgical relationship. This last form is divided into three levels: low-level (portending a general course of action in the frame story); mid-level (frame stories that trigger the next major event in the frame story); and high-level (the ‘inside’ story’s climax or reversal of the action of the ‘outside’ story). Especially in this latter form, a chain of plots is created that jumps from one level to the next and in the end, confronts the writer and the reader with the text that they are reading/writing.57

55  Patricia Warrick, “The Circuitous Journey of Consciousness in Barth’s Chimaera,” Critique 18, no. 2 (1976), 74. 56  Barth, The Friday Book, 219ff. 57  Ibid., 232–234.

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The ultimate effect of the frame tales takes place the moment the reader stumbles on what is called a mise en abîme, when the text refers to itself within the story and thus creates the illusion of a story that repeats itself into infinity. In this context Barth refers to the famous story of the 602nd night of Borges (see above, chapter 3), and argues that the use of frames in the narrative “disturbs us metaphysically: When the characters in a work of fiction become readers, or authors of the fiction that they’re in, we’re reminded of the fictitious aspect of our own existence.”58 This illustrates the regressus in infinitum that forms the dynamism of narrative literature, the gate for the reader and the writer to enter into the endless realm of literary archetypes and the collective repository of literature. The story ‘Dunyazadiad’ can be read as the explanation of these theoretical ideas and their implementation at the same time. It provides a matrix for Barth’s later works, which use the same techniques and references to the Thousand and one nights. As we see, the stress on the textuality of the narrative comes to the fore, because, according to Barth, this is where narrative fiction and real life converge. Out to Sea: Sabbatical Until now we have mainly concentrated on the formal techniques of Barth’s postmodernism and his image of himself as an author. We have shown that his use of frame stories enabled him to create a textual labyrinth that ultimately implicated himself as a narrator in the story, such that Barth himself – lightly disguised – could appear in his own story. We now focus our attention on two thematic elements which are linked to this narrative strategy and which also contribute to a postmodernist destabilization of the text and, more specifically, to the interweaving of the narrative and the life of the author. As noted, Barth is not averse to inserting autobiographical material into his novel. Two elements from this material, which recur throughout his later work, are discussed here: sea journeys and twins. Evidently, the motif of the twin, or double, increases the potential for identification and the transgression of the boundaries between reality and the text. The story of Sabbatical: A romance (1982) is complex in the sense that it is composed of elements of various genres. The narrative matrix, which provides the overall coherence of the story and probably serves as a plot, is constructed as a journey. This matrix is the sailing trip on the Pokey I, from Chesapeake Bay in the Gulf of Mexico, to Yucatan, the Caribbean, and back, made by 58  Ibid., 73.

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Fenwick Turner and his second wife Susan Seckler in 1979–80, during a sabbatical leave. Fenwick (50) is a former CIA officer and, from 1978, a consultant who has written a book about the CIA’s clandestine activities. Susan (35) is an assistant professor of American literature. They have arrived at a crossroads in their careers – especially Fenwick, who has had a heart attack – and they have decided to take a sabbatical together to consider their various options. It becomes clear during the trip that they must contemplate their careers, as well as their relationship with each other and their social environment. Part of the tension for Fenwick and Susan, and for the reader, derives from their complex familial background. Carmen Seckler, the mother of Susan and her sister Miriam, remarried Manfred, Fenwick’s twin brother, and together they had a son named Gus. This results in the strange situation that Fenwick is both Susan’s ‘uncle’ and husband. Moreover, the family situation is complicated by tragic circumstances: Miriam was violently raped as an adolescent girl, and Manfred and Gus both disappeared in Chile, during CIA operations against the Chilean government. Their disappearance hovers over the family as an unsolved, open-ended mystery. The components of the narrative in which these stories are told contribute to the unstable character of the text; it remains unclear whether they should be read as separate stories with their own plots, or as integrated stories that contribute to the general plot. Moreover, they take their narrative tension from such different types of narratives as the thriller/ spy story and social documentaries that link the novel to its political and social context. The account of the sea journey is the containing frame, but here we find several destabilizing elements as well. The ship barely survives a violent storm, and Fenwick and Susan have problems navigating, for instance, as they try to reach Key Island, a place no one appears to know, which is not on any map. Furthermore, they hear strange voices and at a certain point notice a sea monster floating in the water. Both Susan and Fenwick have dreams that reflect their situation and the predicament in which they find themselves. All these elements enhance the tension of the story as the account of a journey, and destabilize the diegetic context in which the story unfolds. This destabilization is amplified by the way the story is marked off by Fenwick losing his boina (turban) at the beginning and finding it again on the surface of the water toward the end. Apparently, the whole story takes place between these two ‘magical’ moments that demarcate it as a kind of liminal phase. The incorporation of these different storylines contributes to the generic diffusion of the novel. This ambiguity is further strengthened by the formal composition of the text, which consists of various elements. The main level of the story contains the account of the sea journey on the Pokey and the

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conversations of Fenwick and Susan. These are interrupted by inserted fragments that contain digressions, sometimes about phenomena experienced on the way, and sometimes about episodes from the protagonists’ lives, or Fenwick’s reflections. In addition, extensive footnotes contain various kinds of information, such as references to books and the comments of the narrator, but also essential facts about the lives of the protagonists – their names, their adventures, their careers, etc. This information is, of course, indispensable for the reader, but apparently not vital for the account, which is not fraught with introductory passages. On the one hand, the text is purified of the ballast of factual information, but on the other hand, the footnotes are not merely marginal additions; they belong not to the journey, but to the core of the story. The formal strategies Barth applied emphasize the textual nature of the story. The fragmentation of the story forces the reader to read the elements as separate entities in relation to the whole, and draws him into the narrative process as a seeker or constructor of the plot. Throughout the book, it remains uncertain in what sense the fragments are related to the final outcome. The labyrinthine form may lead the reader astray, just as the ship, Pokey, sometimes goes off course. Fragmentation thus inaugurates a process of deferral that is an essential characteristic of storytelling. The fragmentary setup draws the reader into the story, but also brings the narrator in, as a director who consciously interrupts the story to add comments and supplemental information. During the course of the story the relationship between Fenwick and the narrator becomes increasingly unclear, especially because the perspective sometimes shifts from the third person to the first person, apparently without reason. The textual nature of the story is further emphasized by numerous references to other literary texts, especially the Thousand and one nights, the Odyssey, and the works of Dante, Poe, Byron, and Sterne. This firmly places the story in the literary tradition, and more specifically, in the tradition of literary journeys. Other authors related to the trope of ‘twins, doubles and doppelgänger’ and schizophrenia are mentioned, such as Dumas, Stevenson, Twain, and Nabokov. These associations further strengthen the narrator’s identification with his hero, as a traveler and as a twin brother. It seems that the narrator is Barth himself, since he is referred to as the author of The sot-weed factor. He thus has a position outside the story, on the same level as the reader; he even directly addresses the reader at times, but he is also part of the story – he divulges Fenwick’s opinion on the course of the story. To make things more complicated, Fenwick and Susan sometimes comment on the story, for instance, when they say that it would be a ‘breach of verisimilitude’ and ‘forced exposition’ to talk too long about a subject.

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The different levels of the stories – the inserted stories with separate plot lines; the footnotes; and the journey – which seem to spill over into the ‘real’ level of the reader and the writer, are reflected in the account of the adventures of the protagonists. From the beginning, the link between the account of the journey and the reality it describes is accentuated, for instance, when Susan compares their journey with the “wandering-hero myths” and their course as “the traditional direction of adventure.”59 Fenwick, indeed, is “not displeased to find our story following, in a general way, the famous tradition: summons, departure, threshold-crossing, initiatory trials, et cetera. He declares it our authorial prerogative, however, to bend the pattern to fit our story, so long as we don’t bend the story to fit the pattern.”60 Here the very characters in the story make it clear that the journey and the story are connected, or even inextricably entangled. The entanglement between journey and story is elaborated on in various remarks and observations, such as: “We put Pokey on the vane, but we stand by to override as necessary. In the same way, we let the author take the helm of our story and brief the reader on [Inserted story].”61 Or, when Susan, who craves a passionate affair, and Fenwick says that he will see if he can arrange something for her in ‘our’ story, exclaims: “Bugger the story. I want the real thing. Passion.”62 At other points, Fenwick and/or Susan contemplate how to continue, and keep the synchronicity of the story and the journey intact, like when Fenwick sighs that he would like to continue sailing to the end of the story, but has to acknowledge that the chapter and the story are a long way from ending.63 And at certain points, when Susan and Fenwick discuss which elements are still needed in the story to make it fit the conventions, they refer to something ‘magic,’ as in the Thousand and one nights, or a sea monster. During the journey, Susan and Fenwick become increasingly aware that by completing this adventure they are writing their own story.64 The adventure and the story are one, but it remains unclear who is steering them. Is it an outside author? Is it the text itself, with its narrative conventions, which must be incorporated and obeyed? Or is it Susan and Fenwick, who at some point suggest that they have ‘enforced’ the plot of the story: “It’s our power and our

59  Barth, Sabbatical: A Romance (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1983), 71. 60  Ibid. 61  Ibid., 85. 62  Ibid., 219. 63  Ibid., 221. 64  Ibid., 334.

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voice, and what it’s for is our story.”65 After all, they have made decisions about their lives, Fenwick confesses to Susan that he has had a second heart attack, and Susan confesses that she is pregnant. The impasse in their lives is overcome and they see a shining future ahead, but it remains unclear whether the storyline has provided them with the plot of their lives or vice versa. But is it important? Fenwick has an epiphany when he finally sees himself as he is and he understands the meaning of his life: “What are we about? I see now what we’re about. It’s the story.”66 The story and the journey seem to be inextricably linked, as are the story and their lives. Here, the motif of the twin is evoked, in relation to a quotation from Poe’s Pym: “It is not that the end of the voyage interrupts the writing, but that the interruption of the writing ends the voyage.”67 The novel Sabbatical appears to be an elaboration of the tenets that Barth formulated in Chimaera, that is, his literary declaration of independence. First, the text contains many elements which aim to destabilize the story. For instance, there is an ongoing focus on problems of navigation, the loss of points of orientation, the inability to find geographical ‘keys’ in the imaginary geography, which is the ‘real’ setting. Thus, the dissociative effects of traveling are fully exploited: the heroes leave their home and familiar surroundings and enter a labyrinth in which it is difficult to find their way. They enter a liminal zone in which their former selves are questioned and the road to the future is more uncertain than ever. These effects are supported by other disturbing elements which separate the story from a familiar sense of reality, such as the many forms of doubling, the mysterious disappearance of Manfred and Gus, and the ‘magic’ tropes of the vanished island and the sea monster. The liminal phase is delimited by the loss and recovery of the boina. Second, the structure of the story complicates the relations between the author and the text, and the reader and the text, and perhaps even the relation between the protagonists and the text. The reader is allowed access into a labyrinthine narrative that not only offers him various sub-stories, but also suggests to him that his/her own life is a narrative, which also seems to be fragmented, but which is still part of a trajectory that is governed by certain conventions and aesthetic, formal, requirements. What seems to be life is structured as a story, and what seems to be a story is part of real life. The different paths that the reader/Fenwick finds on the way do not lead to a specific plot, or an allrevealing ‘key’; he must navigate a way through the story and discover his own 65  Ibid., 351–352. 66  Ibid., 356. 67  Ibid.

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clues and signs, which do not give real insight into Fenwick and Susan’s life, but rather explore the nature of the relation between narration and life. The two heroes of the story, Fenwick and Susan, are conscious of the intricate interaction between life and narration, but they seem to be ambiguous about the question of who is in control of the story. Clearly, a narrative structure of such complexity cannot grow ‘on its own’; someone must be in control; at some point, Susan and Fenwick act as if they know, or feel that their story is being edited by someone else, or that it is embedded in still another frame, which is controlled by an ‘author.’ They seem to consider themselves the authors of their story, but this may only be wishful thinking. Perhaps they hope to turn their lives into a fictional story because stories obey certain laws, patterns, and conventions. They hope that through narration the problems and stagnation in their lives will be solved by the laws of ‘plot construction.’ Thus, it is their aim for fiction to take over their ‘amorphous,’ ‘senseless’ reality so they can find a way to the future. The claim, or illusion, that Susan and Fenwick control the course of the story is countered by several intrusions from the external narrator, who imposes his presence at certain points, but who is absent at other points, when he leaves the story to take its prescribed course. He may be in control, but he also, occasionally, tries to hide, or disguise himself as an element in the text – the sea monster, the storm, the boina – or as Fenwick and Susan themselves, in order to give them, and the reader, the impression that they are in control. To further complicate matters, in Barth’s novel after Sabbatical, called The tidewater tales, Fenwick appears as a pseudonym of one of the characters and is called the ‘author’ of Sabbatical. This intertextual reference continues the proliferation of frame levels which Barth believes fiction inherently brings forth. From the above, it is clear how Sabbatical fits into Barth’s vision of postmodern literature. It contains all the characteristics mentioned in his essays and epitomized in ‘Dunyazadiad.’ Perhaps we should think of Sabbatical not as a novel, but as an imitation of a novel, written by an author who imitates the role of the author.68 It is, in the end, pure text. Still, it is remarkable that the story is structurally linked to a surrounding reality, first by its many references to politics and the CIA, and, second, by the strong autobiographical elements in the story. Moreover, in Sabbatical, the author has not disappeared; he may be in disguise, but he is still in control of the ‘story.’

68  Barth, The Friday Book, 72.

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Somebody and Sindbad In Sabbatical, some of the most prominent characteristics of Barth’s fiction are introduced or elaborated. The motif of the twin, the journey, and the amalgamation of text and life recur in later novels, and especially in The last voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), which we discuss presently. In this novel, the links to the Thousand and one nights become more prominent: in Sabbatical, the references are mainly indirect and limited to form, apart from the regular comparisons between Susan and Shahrazad. In The tidewater tales, Shahrazad appears as a protagonist, and The last voyage is closely connected to the Nights through the figure of Sindbad. Here it would seem that Barth has thrown away all reservations and radically identified himself, as an author, a traveler, and a narrator, with the iconic character of the Thousand and one nights. He has reached his destination, it seems, by embarking on a journey in the guise of his ultimate hero. As usual in Barth’s work, The last voyage is constructed as a frame story. At the first level is the dying Simon William Behler, who tells what is presented as the last story of Shahrazad, who tells this story, ‘The last voyage of Somebody the Sailor,’ to Death, hoping that he will take her away. The story that follows consists of two storylines in alternating chapters, the first about the life of William Behler, the second, in so-called ‘Interludes,’ about the adventures of the same Behler, now called Baylor, or Somebody the Sailor, in Baghdad in the time of Harun al-Rashid, or, more specifically, in the house of Sindbad the Sailor. The first storyline more or less sketches the prehistory of Behler’s jump through time; the second storyline is the diegetic main level, in which Behler recounts his past. It also contains the intrigues that brought him to Sindbad’s house, after being captured by a pirate ship, and his passionate relationship with Yasmin, Sindbad’s daughter. The main action is the storytelling, since the truth revealed in the stories ultimately leads to a denouement in the frames. The chapters about Behler’s past depict him at different stages of his life, at seven, fourteen, forty-two, and fifty years old, and during a sea journey on the Zahir, a trip intended to imitate Tim Severin’s Sindbad journey69 with his lover Julia Moore. Behler (born in 1930) grew up in a middle-class family in the United States and from the beginning was ‘haunted’ by the figure of his twin sister, who died at birth, but with whom he has conversations as if she were still alive. We follow Behler during his first sexual experiences with his friend 69  Among his adventurous journeys, Tim Severin (b. 1940) undertook a ‘Sindbad voyage’ in the Indian Ocean in 1980–81.

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Daisy Moore, and his struggle to, as his father called it, ‘become someone’ and escape his narrow-minded milieu. At the age of puberty, Behler is introduced to the world of the Thousand and one nights, through the encouragement of Daisy’s mother, who makes him aware of the tight constraints of life and possible ways to escape them. Behler becomes a writer and journalist, names himself Baylor, and, in the 1960s, becomes successful, mainly due to the inspiration of the Thousand and one nights. In that period, he made a journey to Morocco and Europe, which were steeped in the romanticism of hashish, exoticism, and sex. He had some wild love affairs, which increased his disappointment in his wife Jane, and as a result of his adventurous experiences his writings flourished. Later, on a cruise with his family to celebrate his forty-second birthday, he almost drowned and had an alienating experience of suddenly being transported to a Moroccan souq. This experience foreshadows Behler’s ‘real’ transition to Sindbad’s Baghdad, when during the sailing voyage from East Asia to Basra, imitating Tim Severin, he jumps in the water to save his beloved Julia Moore and (nearly?) drowns. He wakes up on board an Arab ship which is implicated in complex intrigues related to the marriageable daughter of Sindbad, Yasmin. Behler tells his life story to a company of merchants and notables in the house of Sindbad, during their evening sessions. In the meantime, he has a passionate affair with Yasmin, with the help of her duenna Jayda. She had been kidnapped by pirates in the Strait of Hormuz, while on the way to her future husband. A struggle ensued in which Yasmin’s honor was at stake; during the narration sessions, the intrigue around Yasmin gradually comes to the fore and mingles with Behler’s story. In the end, Behler helps to unravel the truth. Yasmin is saved, Sindbad is unmasked as a crook and an impostor, and is punished. As in his other novels, Barth uses the technique of framing to destabilize the text and to add an element of self-reflexivity that complicates the coherence of the protagonists. From the beginning, and linked to the alternation of narrative levels, Behler’s identity comes into question. This is first done by a continuous play on names. Behler calls himself Baylor to rhyme with Sailor, but also Somebody the Sailor, Somebody the Nobody, Bey el-Loor, and Sindbad the Porter. These names indicate his ongoing shifting self-images which hide, it seems, an essential void. ‘Nobody’ is a recurrent denomination, which easily lends itself to wordplay and puns. Behler’s father wanted him to become ‘someone,’ so the name ‘Nobody’ could be interpreted as an ironic reference, apart from referring, of course, to Odysseus. Simon himself relates his ambition to advance in life with his name: “I decided that S. W. Behler would maybe

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not even be my name. I didn’t know who I was, who I would be. However … I decided to become not only ‘Somebody,’ but somehow … immortal.”70 The blurring of Behler’s identity relates to the constant interaction with twin figures. First, Behler engages in ongoing communications with his deceased twin sister, whom he calls Bijou, as if she is still alive. Apparently, without her he feels incomplete: her absence renders part of him illusory and unreal. This, too, decreased his self-awareness and makes him eager to encounter his alter egos. Second, Behler identifies with Sindbad in several ways, through his passion for sailing, through the figure of Tim Severin, and through the Sindbad trope in the Thousand and one nights, which contains the motif of the double. Third, the twin motif transcends the separations between the story levels, as the characters in each level mirror each other, especially Yasmin and Daisy, with whom Simon had his first sexual experience, and Yasmin and Jane, Behler’s wife. All these doubles indicate his essential insecurity and are invented to anchor Behler in his life and to provide some stability to his self-image. Another factor that fosters Behler’s – and the reader’s – doubts about his identity is his complex relationship with texts. As a result of his success as a writer and a journalist, Behler begins to identify more and more with his pseudonym Baylor, the protagonist of his stories and reports. Behler becomes an ‘invented self,’ filling himself with adventures that seem to be part of a dreamed life that is beyond reality, part of an adventure which has interrupted his regular life: “‘Baylor’ was not Baylor, but more and more the invented Self supplanted its inventor, who had perfected a merchandisable blend of candour and reticence, biographical fact and imaginative projection.’”71 His lover notices this change after his separation from Jane: “You got in, but you never got out, and this Baylor character went on with your story.”72 The reshaping of Behler into Baylor epitomizes what happens in the ‘real’ layer of the story, when Behler is gradually transported from his real life to an imaginary life contained in a story; thus, he becomes absorbed by a story which is partly of his own invention. The transition is prepared from an early stage, not only by thoroughly hollowing-out Behler’s personality, but also by pointing at the redemptive power of texts. It is the mother of his friend Daisy Moore who acquainted him with the Thousand and one nights73 and 70  John Barth, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1992), 134. 71  Ibid., 208. 72  Ibid., 307. 73  Ibid., 87, 107.

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who said: “books might help you find out one day who you were.”74 This is, of course, the point of origin of the whole narrative: Behler retells a story of the Thousand and one nights, in which he himself attempts to find his mirror image. Other figures in both levels play their prescribed roles. Teresa, one of his lovers, and Jayda are compared to Dunyazad, and she prompts Baylor to write his story. The liberating power of narration is time and again linked to sexuality, especially in the figure of Yasmin. Eroticism is a form of narration, it produces narration such that it fulfills its desired role: “Yasmin tonight is Simon’s writing paper. Inscribe yourself on her, and in your writing I shall read our story’s next chapter.”75 A second preparation for Behler’s transition to textuality is his dreamlike escapade to a Moroccan souq. It is here that he obtains the object of his magical transportation: a Seiko watch which he buys from the ‘ifritah’ (female jinn) in a shop, because his old watch stopped when he almost drowned. The watch contains the magic which is apparently derived from his sense of dying, which enables him, at least partly, to continue his life in an imaginary world. His identification with his alter ego, Baylor, and his knowledge of the Thousand and one nights facilitate the process: He not only finds inspiration in the Thousand and one nights, he not only identifies with its author, but ultimately, he becomes a figure in its stories, after his second death in his effort to save Julia Moore. In the imagined story, the watch remains the crucial object containing his secret; it is taken away from him by the pirate captain and he retrieves it only when the whole intrigue is unraveled. The return of the watch is not only a moment of redemption, but also an epiphany: “I began to comprehend at last … that off ‘Serendib’ I had lost not only my beloved Julia Moore and all my former selves but the very world in which they and I had lived.”76 In the end, Baylor speculates about an island in the middle of the time difference, where he can live with Yasmin. He sails away with her, but the ship is wrecked and he follows her into timelessness. It is of course not fortuitous that Behler likens himself to Sindbad and that the whole narrative takes the form of a journey. The story represents Behler’s quest to shed his ‘former’ life and find a new one. Thus, it is the account of a trajectory, a search for a self that can fill a sense of existential emptiness. The trope of the journey is used in all its facets, in dissociating oneself from a social framework, entering a labyrinth, being subjugated to contingencies, destabilizing one’s life, discovering strange worlds, exposing oneself to dangers 74  Ibid., 318. 75  Ibid., 351. 76  Ibid., 430.

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and trials, etc. Together with the other textual strategies, these elements strengthen the postmodern orientation and destabilization of the narrative, and deconstruct the ontological relationships between text and reality. However, the quest itself seems to be designed to counter precisely this fragmentation and disorientation, as if, with the encounter with emptiness, something has been lost which must be retrieved, admittedly by passing through a textual labyrinth. It would seem, therefore, that the novel is meant as an attempt to reconstruct some form of authenticity, that it aspires to a kind of nostalgia for an authentic self. Among the significant aspects of Sindbad as a literary trope, two elements come to the fore: Sindbad is considered a ‘narrated man,’ that is, a character that is deprived of individuality, of agency; and he is seduced into recounting his adventures through an encounter with his double. These two typical features make him especially suitable for certain kinds of identification. Who would not desire to identify with Sindbad the adventurer, who is a blank space on which to project one’s self-image? This opportunity was taken by both Krúdy and Barth, two authors who used the iconic model of Sindbad as a figure in their narratives, and also strongly identified with the famous sailor, thus, they not only exploit his many connotations in their work, but they also become him. This distinguishes them from other forms of ‘doubling,’ in which the protagonist merely tries to become one with his idol. In the case of Krúdy and Barth, the attraction comes from both sides: As a narrated man, a narrative void, Sindbad seemingly desires to be filled with text and to subjugate himself to the laws of texts and narratives, as does Barth. For Krúdy, Sindbad is not so much a symbol of journeys, in the sense of wandering and being prey to the forces of fate, rather he is a trope, the locus in which place and the passage of time intercede. Sindbad/Krúdy is a traveler in the sense that he explores all the typical places of Hungary, but his genuine traveling is more of a temporal nature: His relationship to Hungary is destabilized by the passage of time, by the emergence of modernity, and by the loss of traditional life and values. Social change brings about mobility, and Sindbad mainly travels through time to recover his sense of a nostalgic past and counter the ‘ravages’ of modernity. Still, Sindbad also symbolizes an inner instability, a permanent sense of longing to extract all the pleasures life has to offer, ranging from nature and food to love and eroticism. Sindbad symbolizes a desire which is inherent in life and which can never be fulfilled. It is part of the human condition to always be ‘on the road.’ Both aspects of Krúdy’s Sindbad come together in the Gothic motif of awakening after death, rising from the grave, and re-entering life to relate it to past experiences.

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For Barth, Sindbad epitomizes the trajectory of his life. The novel, The last voyage of Somebody the Sailor, not only describes Behler’s trajectory to transform himself into a substantial person; it also contains sufficient autobiographical references for us to surmise that the story is a version of Barth’s trajectory, too, as he himself sees it. Barth, like Sindbad, has cultivated in himself the conditions that facilitate forms of identification. The phases can be traced to the novels we have discussed above: In ‘Dunyazadiad’ he describes the notion of an author’s ‘exhaustion,’ which means that his life has ended, that he has become a non-entity. This void is filled by ‘replenishment,’ that is, by interacting with the literary tradition and taking from its sources whatever gives new inspiration. In Sabbatical, Barth explores the nature of texts in relation to life: The laws of narration penetrate into the course of events and seem to take over the life of the protagonists. Life is a narrative and a journey; it is shaped like the conventions of the adventure story and no one knows who is in command. In the case of Barth’s The last voyage of Somebody the Sailor, the urgency of the idea of the double, or the twin, derives from Behler’s traumatic loss of his twin sister, which not only creates an a priori dialogic situation, but also fills his being with an absence that must be compensated, somehow. In true Thousand and one nights fashion, this trauma is the source of narration, but it is the source of a peculiar character, which produces a narrative not so much meant to restore the relationship of the protagonist with his social surroundings, but rather meant to restore his own integrity. Narration is a way of healing because the trauma is related to a dialogical situation and opens up the possibility of finding a substitute, or, if necessary, inventing one. In this way, Bijou, Behler’s dead twin sister, fulfills the role of Dunyazad, because she encourages Behler to build a fantasy world that will shape his life. Although Barth’s novels tend to muffle the role of the author, or at least to sow doubt about his ability to direct the story as he wishes, the very formal techniques which he uses to do this emphasize the intervention of the allpowerful author. In the Voyage, this process is more openly shown in its autobiographical references and its ‘return’ to conventional psychology. For Behler and for Barth there is even a sense of redemption, through the identification with a ‘narrated’ figure. Therefore, for Barth and for Krúdy, identification has a specific aim, that is, to construct a self-image by reinventing a self through identification with an Other, by imagining a narrative world in which an alter ego is waiting to be integrated into the self. It is this process of doubling which creates space for texts to emerge, since it presupposes a dialogical situation which necessitates re-telling, a re-establishment of the relationship between

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text and life. One is tempted to conclude that it is, rather, Barth and Krúdy who are the ‘narrated men’ anxious to be filled with a more purposeful hero. Krúdy and Barth are drawn to the Thousand and one nights by the strong appeal of imagination. For Krúdy, the Nights is a magic book that opens up the supernatural dimensions in a story and enables him to more freely wander through the domains of space and time. For Barth, it is the textual form and the self-reflexive narrativity that attracts him. For both authors, however, the exoticism of the Nights is a crucial element. Krúdy identifies the Nights with the East, an ancient Orient that holds the essence of the Hungarian past and the Hungarian soul. It contains an ‘other’ which nevertheless cannot be separated from the ‘self.’ For Barth, too, the Orient is the realm of magic, the magic of storytelling and of the unexpected, of eroticism, adventure, and excitement, of a timeless indulgence in narrative intrigues. For both Barth and Krúdy, therefore, the Orient is an ‘other’ that provides deliverance from being suffocated and alienated in the here and now. Thus, both Krúdy the modernist and Barth the postmodernist are firmly embedded in the tradition of romantic orientalism.

Chapter 16

The Mock Caliph: H. G. Wells, Arthur Schnitzler, and Orhan Pamuk Harun al-Rashid, the historical caliph from the Abbasid period who marks the apogee of the classical period of Islamic history, is one of the Thousand and one night characters who has attained a distinct iconic status. In the Arabic tradition, he was famous not only for his rule and personality, which were not particularly remarkable, but also because of the figures at his court: his mother Khayzuran, his wife Zubayda, his ministers from the Barmaki family, the jurist Abu Yusuf, and the poet Abu Nuwas. Of course, tradition is less concerned with what actually happened during Harun al-Rashid’s reign and the real relationships between these figures, and more interested in their images, their imagined relationships, and the many stories that arose around them. Harun al-Rashid became the center of a large corpus of semi-historical anecdotes and tales that portrayed him as the stereotypical ruler, who was concerned with the fate of his subjects and who was surrounded by colorful, to some extent stereotypical, figures who supported the caliph’s idealized and narrativized persona. Thus, the Harun al-Rashid of the Thousand and one nights is first a literary figure in whom several literary topoi are concentrated. On the one hand, he is the absolute ruler, who holds the fates of his subjects in his hands; on the other hand, he has genuine affinity with the people and is eager to correct injustices and work for the welfare of his subjects. He has a sense of humor and is intelligent, but he is also somewhat impulsive and easily aroused. These characteristics are not only displayed in the entertaining dealings he has with the personalities surrounding him, but are also explored in the brilliant motif of the caliph who disguises himself and wanders through Baghdad at night to determine the real circumstances of the population, all the while accompanied by his vizier Ja‘far al-Barmaki and his swordsman Mas‘ud. It is in this guise, dressed as a merchant, that Harun al-Rashid acquired his eternal status as a literary hero, often as an alter ego of the hero himself.1 The motif of Harun al-Rashid as a ‘nocturnal spectator’ is rich in narrative possibilities. In his palace, the caliph is the paragon of absolute power, surrounded by servants and all the paraphernalia of his authority. However, 1  About Harun al-Rashid in the Thousand and one nights, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 2:585–587.

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enclosed in his locus of power, he is also isolated from the population and cannot bridge the huge gap in status with his subjects. When he disguises himself and leaves the palace, he voluntarily leaves the symbols of his authority behind and mingles among his subjects as a normal person, to inspect their conditions and rectify any injustices. When he is threatened, he cannot easily fall back on his official status and must rely on the inventiveness of Ja‘far. His role thus assumes the characteristics of a performance, an imagined reality which is evoked during the night and which contrasts with his role during the day. The play with these elements culminates in the story of the ‘Mock caliph,’ in which Harun al-Rashid, in merchant’s clothing, is confronted by someone who impersonates him every night, surrounded by impersonations of his court favorites. Here the potential of disguise, performance, false realities, the inversion of roles, and the issue of power are fully exploited.2 The motif of the nocturnal spectator derived from the figure of Harun alRashid was popular from the early stages of the reception of the Thousand and one nights in Europe. Rétif de la Bretonne used it in his Les nuits de Paris (1788–94), while in the nineteenth century it inspired the feuilleton Les mystères de Paris (1842–43) by Eugène Sue. Examples from the twentieth century include the references to Harun al-Rashid in the novels of Joyce and the character Aroun Arachide in Zazie dans le metro (1959) by Raymond Queneau.3 In the following section, we discuss three works in which the episode of the nocturnal wanderer, modeled after Harun al-Rashid, is used as a main motif in the heart of the story; it is explored in various ways in order to highlight aspects of the rich cluster of literary motifs. In The research magnificent by H. G. Wells, we find Harun al-Rashid implicated in the dilemmas of modernity, during the phase in which imperialism is transformed into a hesitating process of globalization; in Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Traumnovelle, the discoveries of Freud are incorporated into a typical Viennese tale; and in Orhan Pamuk’s postmodern fantasia, The black book, Istanbul is the setting of a desperate search for a missing alter ego.

A Modern Harun al-Rashid: H. G. Wells’s The Research Magnificent

Even though the works of H. G. Wells (1866–1946) can be classified as ‘science fiction,’ they are concerned less with a distant future, than with the anxieties and hopes related to the budding age of modern technology. New discoveries 2  See Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:304–305. 3  See Jullien, Les amoureux de Schéhérazade, 25ff.

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in the fields of science and technology rapidly opened up fascinating vistas of a new world, in which mechanization would decisively change the relationship between man and his material environment. As we have seen in our discussion of Ernst Jünger’s work, what appeared to be ‘magical’ or ‘fantastic’ in the past, came within the realm of normality and the possibilities seemed to be infinite. These visions of the future were part of the present as well, however, as discoveries proceeded so rapidly that the future seemed to absorb the present at a high speed. In the work of H. G. Wells, this is exemplified by the battle between airplanes in The sleeper awakes; in the first version of the work (1899) this was still science fiction, but by the time the final version appeared in 1910, it had become a reality.4 As our discussion of other works from this period shows, the association of the advance of modern technology with magic, wonder, and rapid transformation brought to mind the marvelous world of the Thousand and one nights, with its daily reality steeped in magic, its distant, exotic lands, its time warps, its dreamscapes, and its evocation of the horrors and taboos connected with them. The spaces of modernity are, to some extent, enchanted, exotic lands where man is alienated from his familiar habitat and where the divides between reality and unreality are vast. Moreover, the narrative techniques used in the Thousand and one nights and its generic models were suited for adaptation and incorporation in new, modern, forms of enchantments, such as the time machine, the airplane, and telecommunication. This combination of generic adaptation and the use of motifs from the Thousand and one nights are clearly visible in the work of H. G. Wells. Of Wells’s novels, the influence of the Thousand and one nights is most prominent in The research magnificent, which was published in 1915. The story is about Benham, the son of a school director and his wife, a colorful woman who divorces her husband and marries a rich aristocrat. Benham, observing the world around him, is convinced that it must be possible to establish what he calls a ‘noble life,’ a life free of all sorts of sordidness and poverty. He ponders: “This life is not good enough for me. I know there is a better life than this muddle about us, a better life possible now. A better individual life and a better public life.”5 This conviction is mainly based on his intuition, or perhaps his personal character, and remains a rather vague, distant, vision:

4  Patrick Parrinder, ‘Introduction,’ in H. G. Wells, The Sleeper Awakes (London: Penguin, 2005), xiii–xxvi. 5  H. G. Wells, The Research Magnificent ([N.p.]: Aeterna, 2010), 70.

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He never failed in his persuasion that behind the dingy face of this world, the earthly stubbornness, the baseness and dullness of himself and all of us, lurked the living jewels of heaven, the light of glory, things unspeakable. At first it seemed to him that one had only just to hammer and will, and at the end, after a life of willing and hammering, he was still convinced there was something, something in the nature of an Open Sesame, perhaps a little more intricate than one had supposed at first, a little more difficult to secure, but still in that nature, which would suddenly roll open for mankind the magic cave of the universe, that precious cave at the heart of all things, in which one must believe.6 In spite of its utopian character, the idea of the ‘noble life’ is not completely illusory, particularly since it seemed that modern circumstances were favorable to its realization. London was the center of the modern world and its empire provided a “splendid opportunity” to strive for a united world that could make use of modern technological inventions, such as railways, telegraphs, telephones, and airplanes. But imperialism, as an excuse for acquiring wealth and power, was not conducive to this united world, as it is simply ‘nationalism’ combined with megalomania. Rather it must be imbued with the “noble imagination” and its accompanying values. Only then might it constitute the basis of a new “aristocratic world state.”7 Following this line of thought, Benham develops the idea of his life’s assignment: To work out for himself, thoroughly and completely, a political scheme, a theory of his work and duty in the world, a plan of the world’s future that should give a rule for his life. The Research Magnificent was emerging. It was an alarmingly vast proposal, but he could see no alternative but submission, a plebeian’s submission to the currents of life about him.8 Because the political and economic elites of London are too petty and quarrelsome, in order to achieve his ambition, Benham must roam the world, observe the conditions of life everywhere, elaborate his plan, and spread the vision of the ‘aristocratic life’ around the world. While planning his journey, he meets Amanda, in whom he immediately recognizes a soulmate. He marries her and together they depart on an exploration of the more exotic parts of Europe. During the journey, however, Benham discovers that he and Amanda have 6  Ibid., 4. 7  Ibid., 75, 92. 8  Ibid., 95.

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fundamentally different perceptions of what they see and experience. Amanda looks for the wild and the picturesque, which Benham sees rather as manifestations of regression and as remnants of medieval backwardness. Amanda has no ambition or discipline and indulges in romanticism, while Benham prefers clear, strong interpretations and thinks in terms of conquest and discipline and the establishment of a well-ordered society, governed by the principles of justice and welfare. For Amanda, the world is a theater, for Benham it is the manifestation of history. This discrepancy between Benham and Amanda leads to their mutual estrangement. Amanda sets up her household in London, as a newcomer in high society – with their son – while Benham sets out again to continue his search. His ambitions even increase: “I want to know about the world. I want to rule the world…. I think what I want is to be king of the world.”9 And, In this world one may wake in the night and one may resolve to be a king, and directly one has resolved one is a king…. This – this kingship – this dream of the night – is my life. It is the very core of me…. I mean to be a king in this earth. KING. I’m not mad. I see a world staggering from misery to misery and there is little wisdom, less rule, folly, prejudice, limitation, the good things come by chance and the evil things recover and slay them, and it is my world and I am responsible. Every man to whom this light has come is responsible. As soon as this light comes to you, as soon as your kingship is plain to you, there is no more rest, no peace, no delight, except in work, in service, in utmost effort. As far as I can do it I will rule my world.10 His grand idea of aristocracy is irreconcilable with domestic life, and he increasingly neglects his wife and child. On his journeys in Russia and Asia, Benham continues to identify his vision of kingship, which is not a ‘real,’ but an imaginary kingship: The aristocrats are not at the high table, the kings are not enthroned, those who are enthroned are but pretenders and SIMULACRA, kings of the vulgar; the real king and ruler is every man who sets aside the naïve passions and self-interest of the common life for the rule and service of the world.11 9  Ibid., 174. 10  Ibid., 176. 11  Ibid., 223.

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Benham juxtaposes his own ‘kingship’ with this vulgar notion of power and egotism. This lordly, this kingly dream becomes even more essential to Benham as his life goes on: At last he was, so to speak, Haroun al-Raschid again, going unsuspected about the world, because the palace of his security would not tell him the secrets of men’s disorders. He was no longer a creature of circumstances, he was kingly, unknown…. In the great later accumulations of his Research the personal matter, the introspection, the intimate discussion of motive, becomes less and less. He forgets himself in the exaltation of kingliness. He worries less and less over the particular rightness of his definite acts.12 Benham’s identification with Harun al-Rashid becomes so strong, that he almost becomes an illusory figure who cannot be harmed by trivial, worldly, events. When he is present at a laborers’ strike in Johannesburg in 1913, “Haroun al-Raschid was flinging aside all his sublime indifference to current things.”13 He intervenes between the strikers and the soldiers firing at them, and is fatally hit. In Benham, we find several aspects of the Harun al-Rashid figure of the Thousand and one nights. During his Research Magnificent he increasingly imagines himself in a position of absolute power, of invulnerability, able not only to oversee the whole world, but also to rule it and to shape it according to his will. But this power is not to be used for his own interests alone; Benham personifies the new world order, its values and its principles, but the project is first meant to save humanity from its deprived, primitive, and deplorable condition, which is a disgrace to humankind. His aim is to inspect the world, evaluate its needs, and redress abuses. Like Harun al-Rashid, he wanders through his ‘empire’ incognito, as an anonymous, simple citizen, not showing the paraphernalia of his power, but modestly taking stock of what the population endures. The great difference between the ‘real’ Harun al-Rashid and Benham is, of course, that whereas the caliph really possesses power and the ability to correct wrongs, Benham only has his disguise and his vision. He is a simulacrum, a persona he himself invented, one that is not acknowledged by anyone. For this reason, he is unable to return to his regular life, the person he is without his disguises. He is unable to integrate Amanda and his son into his life, to become 12  Ibid., 226. 13  Ibid., 263–264.

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a real, social, person, and he willfully destroys the foundations that Amanda offers him, on which he could build a stable social life. Unlike Harun al-Rashid, he is unable to accept the advice of his ‘counselors,’ his wife, his mother, and his friends. He has risen above common human beings and cannot be affected by their acts and opinions. It is this hubris, this feeling of invulnerability, which leads to his tragic end. Ironically, when he wants to intervene in real events, he lacks any sense of reality and this results in his violent death.

Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Traumnovelle

H. G. Wells’s The research magnificent is a typical expression of the sensitivities that emerged in response to historical circumstances and, especially, new scientific discoveries. While in this novel it is the political and technological modernity that are associated with a new world order, in Arthur Schnitzler’s (1862–1931) short novel Der Traumnovelle, it is the theories of psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards that crept into the literary imagination. Of course, the exploration of the mind, which began in the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany in various semi-scientific and spiritist movements, groups, and associations,14 had a huge impact on culture. Artists, in particular, who were eager to replace religious worldviews with modern secular or spiritual worldviews, were susceptible to experiments in which artistic form was inspired by hitherto unexplored domains and workings of the mind. Communication with the unseen, scientific alternatives for the ‘soul,’ and newly discovered sources of energy fundamentally affected artistic visions and experiments in modernist circles. The systematic theories of Freud opened up new vistas in this regard, laying bare the mysterious depth of the human mind. Schnitzler’s Der Traumnovelle which appeared in 1926, thirteen years after Freud’s influential Der Traumdeutung, makes ample use of the narrative potential hidden in the new definition of ‘dream.’ His remark to von Hofmannsthal that his story, Das Märchen der 672. Nacht, would have been better if he had situated the events in a dream shows that he was thinking about this.15 The attraction of Freud’s theories, in this respect, was that they provided a ‘scientific’ 14  See Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 15  Dorrit Cohn, “‘Als Traum erzählt’: The Case for a Freudian Reading of Hofmannsthal’s ‘Märchen der 672. Nacht,’” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 54, no. 2 (June 1980), 285–286.

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model for the idea that dreams and the experience of reality are interrelated and that real experiences can be stored in the subconscious, which can find – distorted, sublimated – expression in dreams. The next step is the understanding that the boundaries between dreams and reality are permeable and therefore, dreamed reality can influence experienced reality as well. Of course, presupposing an interaction between real and imagined experiences was not new, but Freud’s dream theory gave a novel, more systematic, and more realistic basis to this old idea. Dreams became a credible medium for the manifestation of the unseen world in real life.16 The story of Der Traumnovelle begins with the protagonist, the Viennese physician Dr. Fridolin, reading his children a bedtime story from the Thousand and one nights, a story about Prince Amjad floating on a boat to the palace of the caliph, under a night filled with stars. The story is interrupted in mid-sentence when the children fall asleep, and Fridolin proceeds to have a conversation with his wife Albertine about a masquerade ball that they had attended the day before. Both are strangely fascinated by the role of seduction, suspicion, ambivalence, and jealousy at the party, and the deceptive illusion of missed chances shared with anonymous people. Both now tell each other about related experiences in the past: Albertine remembers meeting a handsome young man when they were on holiday in a Danish beach resort, and Fridolin relates a similar brief infatuation with a young girl during the same trip. Their stories reveal a glimpse into their innermost desires which, importantly, they hid from each other at the time. At this point, Fridolin is called away to see a patient who has died that night. As he walks through the night and visits the house of the dead man and his daughter, he is still in the grip of the strange atmosphere of the evening and the conversation, as if a mysterious, indefinable desire has been unleashed in him and has risen to the surface. He almost kisses the daughter of the deceased, and when he recoils at the last moment, he has the feeling that he has escaped, not from an amorous adventure, but from a “melancholy enchantment that must not get power over him.”17 On the street, he follows a prostitute, but leaves her again. In the meantime, he cannot put the conversation with Albertine out of his mind. He feels a grudge toward her Danish protolover, as if he had, in fact, been her lover, and he has the feeling that he is slowly floating away from his regular existence to some strange, faraway world.18

16  On the impact of Freud on modernism, see Rabaté, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism. 17  Arthur Schnitzler, Dream Story, trans. J. M. Q. Davies (New York: Penguin, 1999), 20. 18  Ibid., 28.

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In a café, he meets his old friend Nachtigall, a pianist who was recently hired to play, blindfolded, in private houses where masked parties were held. Intrigued, Fridolin asks him to smuggle him into the house where the mysterious party is to be held that night. He goes to a shop that rents costumes and chooses a monk’s habit. Strangely, when he enters the house, the password appears to be ‘Denmark.’ He enters a hall where masked men and women disguised as monks and nuns have congregated. A lady approaches him and whispers: “There’s still time for you to leave. You don’t belong here. If they were to discover you, you’d be in serious trouble.”19 Suddenly, the others change their clothes, and the women stand naked in the large illuminated hall. While he is filled with desire, he is suddenly asked the password, and when he fails to produce it, is threatened with severe punishment. The lady intervenes on his behalf, apparently taking the blame and punishment on herself. In a last effort to stop this ‘carnival comedy,’ he offers to make himself known, but he is thrown outside without further ado. Evidently, Fridolin is intrigued by this adventure, not only by the strange spell that emanates from this nightly gathering of men who seem to exert a strange power over such beautiful women. He is fascinated by the lady who stood up for him, and thinks about Albertine, feeling “as though he were obliged to conquer her as well, as though she could not, should not be his again until he has betrayed her with all the others he had met that night.”20 When he comes home, he wakes Albertine and sees a defensive reflex, fear, and panic in her eyes. She seems to be in another world and to know what he has done that night. She tells him that she was dreaming that they were in a surrealistic landscape where time and space did not exist, where they had their honeymoon. They entered a fantastic town, half ancient German and half oriental, and he was clothed like an exotic prince. Then he was abducted and condemned to death, but a young lady saved him and he was whipped instead. The girl from the Danish beach appeared with a cross, and they floated away. The story of her dream, with its mixture of real events and persons and exotic metamorphoses, horrifies him: The further she had progressed with her narrative, the more ridiculous and insignificant his own adventures so far seemed to him, and he swore to pursue them to the end and to report them faithfully to her, and so get even with this woman who had revealed herself through her dream for

19  Ibid., 45. 20  Ibid., 58.

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what she was, faithless, cruel and treacherous, and whom at that moment he thought he hated more profoundly than he had ever loved her.21 In the morning, he sets out to retrace his steps of the previous night and see to it that everything is alright. He considers Albertine his worst enemy, and decides to separate from her. He realizes that all the order and security in his life was only an illusion, only a lie. Yet his salvation may lie in his duplicity: Indeed, the idea of betrayal, lying, infidelity and a bit of hanky-panky here and there, all under the noses of Albertine and …, all the world – the thought of leading a kind of double life, of being at once a hard-working reliable progressive doctor, a decent husband, family man and father, and at the same time a profligate, seducer and cynic who played with men and women as his whim dictated – this prospect seemed to him at that moment peculiarly agreeable.22 And later he said to himself that he would confess everything to Albertine, out of revenge for the bitter, humiliating things she had done to him in her dream. In the evening, walking through Vienna, everything seems unreal to him. He hears about a lady who has poisoned herself in a hotel that day, and he wonders: Was she the lady from the party? He feels sure that she is the one who sacrificed herself for him, that he is guilty of her death. He goes to the mortuary to inspect the body, but he realizes that his fascination for her is nothing more than a delusion and that the woman he is looking for is, essentially, his wife. He decides to tell her everything as if it had been a dream, and to confess only later that his story is real, but when he comes home he finds the mask from his escapade on his pillow. In tears, he tells her of his adventure. In the conclusion, they find that there is no single, absolute, truth in reality and, conversely, that no dream is merely a dream. She concludes: “Now we’re truly awake … at least for a good while.”23 It would seem, with this conclusion, that Albertine and Fridolin can safely resume their former life and that a potentially disturbing event, which had been brewing in their unconscious, is resolved. However, the emergence of the subconscious persistence of the events, which has proved its relevance for real life, resulted in a power struggle between the two partners. The dream disturbed a balance of power which must be corrected by real adventures that are 21  Ibid., 68. 22  Ibid., 80. 23  Ibid., 99.

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just as fantastic as those in Albertine’s dreams. In the course of this struggle the relationship between dream and reality is not clarified, however, since their interaction is much more complicated than it first appeared. Since the nature of the relationship between the two domains is not revealed, the reader is aware that, in spite of the couple’s final reconciliation, the danger of another interference of the subconscious into their love life is far from neutralized. The themes of both Wells’s The research magnificent and Schnitzler’s Der Traumnovelle are inspired by the hidden dimensions of life that are revealed by the advance of modernity. In The research magnificent, it is the discovery, through political expansion and improved means of communication, that history does not consist of a chaotic configuration of sub-histories, but is in fact a single, coherent, history, which can be forced into a single process of development. History can be steered and molded to conform to a moral vision, a notion of justice and human dignity. Modernity, with its new vistas, enables Benham to conceive his vision and try to weave it into the patterns of human civilization. In Der Traumnovelle, it is the discovery of the ongoing interaction between the conscious and the subconscious, and the determination that the subconscious is a repository of repressed feelings and a source of sublimation, which incites the hero to re-explore his relationship with his wife, and consciously integrate a new mental domain into the images each has of the other. A relationship implies not only an accommodation to a loved other, it also involves living partly in his/her imagined world, depending on the way in which past experiences penetrate the smooth surface of daily life and not only lay bare secret wishes and desires that undermine one’s vision of events, but also influence actions and behavior. The other’s subconscious unleashes one’s own hidden imagination. In both cases, the discovery of the new potentialities perceived in history and life are conducive to the emergence of a desire, an almost uncontrollable drive to relate discoveries to the narrator’s destiny in life. Benham uses his insight to determine his mission in life, while Fridolin observes the new forces surfacing inside him and lets himself be driven by them. Both try to establish a measure of control; both rationalize their situation; and both are prepared to let their lives take a decisive turn. The discoveries are also disruptions and the two heroes, at least temporarily, roam in a no man’s land that subverts their certainties of a regular bourgeois life. Both temporarily spurn the externalities of their social status to explore something new, another version of themselves, which is not clearly distinguished. Their social roles seem trivial and meaningless compared to the possibilities offered by ‘modern’ life. In both cases, the desire propelling the heroes relates to forms of power. Benham gradually cultivates in himself the illusion of some nearly absolute

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power, which is not derived from his status or his achievements in life, but rather from an idea, a plan, which he carefully constructs while he is exploring different parts of the world. This illusion is the result of his inner nobility, which increases his sense of responsibility and power while he inspects the wretchedness of real life. The importance of his plan increases, blinding him to his human frailty and limitations. Likewise, Fridolin is confronted with both his own sense of power and the limitations set by the power of others. Albertine’s dream gives her power over him, since she has a secret experience that touches on his innermost feelings, but his pain liberates a sense of power and freedom in him that seduces him to extend the boundaries of his world. But then he is obstructed by the power of others, those who know the rules of the realm in which he roams, and who seem to be initiated in some secret community. It is the power of a father-like authority, sexual taboo, and secrecy that shape the fulfillment of desire, which is unleashed, controlled, and satisfied in an esoteric domain. Fridolin feels the powers of desire, but he is excluded and ultimately punished by his own inability to combine his passion with his sense of justice. This inability is symbolized by the woman, who, coveted by Fridolin, seems to sacrifice herself to save him. In both cases, the narrators are caught in a web of illusions. While Benham looks at the glorious vision before him, he does not see his direct environment and the damage he causes by holding on to his scheme. He is unable to develop an emotional bond with those around him; he is driven by a rationality that prevents him from deriving pleasure, comfort or satisfaction from his journey, since he aims for a form of control and the implementation of a rational principle. This immersion in illusion eventually causes his death. Fridolin is thrown into a spiral of confusion after his wife’s confession, which itself is caused by a masquerade ball, a willful delusion. It is the uncertainty caused by this delusion that confronts both of them with unknown desire that seeks to perpetuate itself by urging them to explore its limits. Fridolin loses his grip on reality, he can hardly control himself and exposes himself to unfamiliar experiences. He wanders through the city, perhaps to find an ultimate experience by constructing a dreamlike reality. He needs to be hidden, and disguised; he needs delusion as a setting to satisfy his newly discovered desires. His ‘dream’ must be more real and more ‘dreamlike’ than Albertine’s. He seeks to punish her for her untoward dream by deceiving her and confronting her with the truth, which is, however, not meaningful, but just a messy mix of dreamed and undreamed experiences. These three motifs neatly tie in with the connotations of the Harun alRashid figure in the Thousand and one nights. His absolute power, his curiosity, his sense of justice, and his wandering through the streets incognito

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provide the narrative elements for the characters of Wells and Schnitzler. For Schnitzler, the story of the ‘Mock caliph’ clearly inspired him with the idea of a masquerade ball where the narrator is an unwanted guest whose intrusion puts his life at risk. The juxtaposition of different, intersecting realities, caused by deception, performance, and the imposition of authority, together with the motif of torture and secrecy, finds its counterpart in Fridolin’s dream world, from which he tries to return to the regular world, and Benham’s tireless effort to do away with the paraphernalia of his social status and – incognito – inspect the true conditions of his ‘subjects.’ Like Harun al-Rashid, he wants to rectify injustices, but unlike the caliph, he lacks the alter ego to impose his authority.

The Writer and His Double: Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book

In this chapter, we have discussed several works that show how orientalism was used as a means of identification, that is, as a means to use notions of the Orient to construct self-images. In many cases, this process of identification reveals not a restored, coherent, Self, but rather an internal dichotomy, either between the past and the present (Krúdy, Jünger), or in a society (Pontoppidan, Jünger), or in the individual psyche (Barth, Schnitzler). Orientalism thus resulted in a ‘doubling,’ which at the same time defines an identity and problematizes it, complicating it even to the point of schizophrenia. This is most clearly exemplified by the figure of Harun al-Rashid, who disguises himself, deconstructing his real identity, to go out and meet someone who impersonates him in order to construct his false identity. Reality is hidden somewhere between the performances of these two concealed characters, and in order to discover this reality, they must meet each other – they go in search of each other in order to reveal their true selves. This intrigue is the basic idea of Orhan Pamuk’s (b. 1952) novel The black book (1990), which uses the tropes of Harun al-Rashid and Shahrazad to uncover a deep-rooted fissure in Turkish society. This fissure closely resembles the sense of alienation expressed by Hamdi Tanpınar in his two novels, but the perspective differs; here, Turkish society has taken up on a disguise and is searching for its true Self. Of course, the term ‘orientalism’ is problematic in connection with Pamuk’s work, since the Orient is considered part of Turkey’s cultural tradition, though it has also been marginalized by the trajectory toward modernity. Pamuk uses the Thousand and one nights as a narrative matrix to explore the reality of the senses of identity, its discursive components, and its setting in a spatial landscape. In both cases the self-exploration of the hero

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takes the shape of a labyrinthine journey aimed to uncover an alter ego, to establish a new unity between doubles acting as autonomous parts of the self. In Other colors, a collection of essays, reviews, and reminiscences, Orhan Pamuk states that initially, he was not particularly attracted to the Thousand and one nights as a literary work or as a source of inspiration. He had first read an adapted children’s version of the tales as a boy. When, as an adolescent, he read a Turkish translation of the collection, he was still not impressed and even somewhat irritated by these stories, in which “men and women are engaged in a perpetual war of deceptions” and which reflected a deep fear of women and sexuality. After reading the tales a third time, however, he became enthusiastic about the shape, proportions, and passions of the stories, with their “backstreet flavor”: “I was finally able to appreciate the Thousand and one nights as a work of art, to enjoy its timeless games of logic, of disguises, of hide-and-seek, and its many tales of imposture.”24 He recognized that the stories reflect the soul of Istanbul and was even able to appreciate their ‘impudence and vulgarities’: “The child who could not recognize his world in it was a child who had not yet accepted life as it was, and the same could be said of the angry adolescent who dismissed it as vulgar.”25 It is no coincidence that this turnabout came after Pamuk’s stay in the United States, where he felt alienated and intimidated. He could now see the Thousand and one nights with a ‘Calvinoesque and Borgesian’ mindset and appreciate it as a “Dadaist collage.”26 Being confronted with the western, American, world, he felt the urge to return to his roots and he realized that the Thousand and one nights was not the ‘reactionary’ work he believed it to be, as part of a conservative tradition, but that in fact it was interwoven with Istanbul’s soul.27 This insight coincided with the writing of The black book, and together with the Mesnevi of the thirteenth-century Sufi shaykh Jalal al-Din Rumi, the Nights became a parallel text for the novel. The two texts were used as a means to anchor the narrative in a textual and spatial environment, to combine an essentially western, novelistic vision with a tradition from which part of Pamuk’s identity derived. It was a literary experiment, to “combine a

24  Orhan Pamuk, Other Colours: Writings on Life, Art, Books and Cities (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 122. 25  Ibid. 26  Ibid., 366–367. 27  Ibid., 119.

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nostalgic Proustian world with Islamic allegories, stories, and tricks, then set them all in Istanbul and see what happens.”28 Pamuk used the Thousand and one nights as an inspiration for literary experiment, or, more accurately, as an instrument to dislodge literary conventions and create a link between two literary domains that seem far apart and perhaps even contradictory. It was a means to gain access to the Islamic tradition in a way that is not monopolized by religion and conservative discourses, while at the same time it provided access to western modernist techniques and outlooks. And the function of the Nights as a bridge between these discourses touches on the heart of the novel: It is a search for authenticity in a society that was increasingly infiltrated by western ideas and lifestyles; it is an effort to reconstruct a sense of identity based on rootedness in tradition, in a society in which identities have become blurred, ephemeral, and unrecognizable as a result of the peoples’ obsession with change, transformation, and modernization. The result is not a re-articulation of traditional values and the re-endorsement of cultural essences, but rather a vision of the fluidity and constructed nature of identities, and of the difficulty in containing them within well-defined boundaries. In The black book the traces of the Thousand and one nights are clear and explicit, both at the level of motifs and casual references and at the level of structure. The narrative is split into two separate but interacting textual layers that alternate and contribute to the construction of meaning on both levels; the title Thousand and one nights appears more than ten times and there are references to several of Shahrazad’s stories, such as ‘Aziz and Aziza’ and the ‘City of Brass.’29 Finally, the Thousand and one nights is recurrently mentioned as the model of a certain kind of text, as a form of narration that exemplifies the main issues with which the novel tries to deal: the relationship between authentic and constructed identities. In spite of the importance of these references, the most structural link is the way in which the story of the ‘Mock caliph’ is imposed upon the story as a narrative matrix, as Pamuk explicitly stated. The story of the ‘Mock caliph’ is not only incorporated into the narrative in an adapted version at a crucial point in the novel, it is also used as a conceptual paradigm to explore the themes that are presented in the novel. As we see, here the idea of the double also plays a prominent role. The story of The black book begins with the discovery by the protagonist Galip, a modest lawyer, that his wife has left him. In a farewell note, his wife Rüya, which literally means ‘dream,’ merely says that she went away and will 28  Ibid., 377. 29  See Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1:111–113, 146–150.

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be in touch. Galip discovers that his cousin Celal has also disappeared and he suspects that he and Rüya are hiding somewhere in Istanbul. From this point, Galip engages in a restless search for Rüya and Celal; he roams through the city, mainly at night, visiting people and places related to the past, looking for clues that may lead him to their hiding place. In the meantime, through Galip’s investigations, the context of his life and his predicament is gradually disclosed; we find, in Galip and his family’s past, the often-violent intricacies of Turkish politics, the particularities of Istanbul as an urban landscape, and the precarious destiny of the Turkish people. The novel is set in Istanbul in 1980, in a period of great political upheaval and the threat of military coups. As usual in modern Turkish politics, the heritage of Atatürk, the founder of Turkey, is at stake. It was Atatürk who, as we saw in chapter 3, imposed an ambitious program of modernization and secularization on Turkish society, largely modeled after western examples and symbolized by the introduction of European dress and the substitution of the Latin alphabet for Arabic-Ottoman script. Atatürk’s rigorous reforms accelerated the slow process of reform that was initiated in the nineteenth century, and brought about a sudden rupture with the past. It led to disruptions in society, between ‘modern’ westernized groups and ‘traditional’ groups still immersed in the values of Ottoman society. The political scene was further torn apart by the often-violent clashes between the government and radical political groups, such as ultra-nationalist and leftist activists. In the novel, this complex political landscape is briefly outlined through references to government repression, political figures, and Rüya’s activist past. The political uncertainty in Turkey was rooted in the shaky foundations of a complex cultural transformation. Forms of traditional authenticity still survived, but had become obsolete and had lost their meaning in ‘modern’ society. In the novel, this is symbolized by the ‘museum’ of mannequins, which contains wax effigies of Ottoman-Turkish figures, carefully made by a traditional craftsman. These mannequins display the typical Turkish features that marked the national character and were imbued in the social imagination. These features could still be seen on the wax faces, but have grown out of fashion. Shopowners preferred to use the western-made mannequins with their stereotypical postures and faces that do not bear distinguishing marks, as these are examples of the new beings that customers aspire to become. The old mannequins show the “special thing that makes us what we are.”30 They contain a stronger ‘life-force’ than real, modern, people who swarm across the Galata 30  Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book (New York: Vintage, 2006), 61.

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Bridge, but do not represent the transformation into ‘the others’ whom modern people want to be.31 The process of modernization initiated by Atatürk, then, resulted in a deeply felt alienation, which manifests itself in a blind urge to become westernized and shed ancient identities. Westernization is typified, first, by Aladdin’s shop, in the street where Galip’s family lives. Here all the latest fancies are sold; it is a magic cave that follows the latest fashions, however ephemeral and useless. It exemplifies the superficiality not only of taste, but also of cultural identification, whose expressions have become commercialized. The second marker of westernization is peoples’ growing passion for western movies. Douglas Fairbanks is the personification of a new ideal masculine type and the ascendancy of the cinema reflects a declining interest in native culture. People want to look like film stars, they buy their pictures and, in the ultimate form of identification, they copy their gestures and reflexes, which come to replace the typical Turkish gestures that were deeply inscribed in people’s bodies. It is clear that the new orientation of Turkey has imposed a kind of virtual reality on the people, which has detached them from their familiar selves, and has plunged them into uncertainty. They have fallen prey to waves of change that no longer well up inside them or inside their own community, but rather overwhelm them from outside. They have lost touch with their former selves. For Galip, this virtual reality is reinforced by his own virtual world, in which he searches for Rüya; he hides her disappearance from others and sometimes poses as Celal to extract information. Increasingly, this search is directed not just at Rüya, but also at a supposed secret which is hidden in the faces of the people, at a form of authenticity and ‘realness’ which lingers under the surface of the superficial appearance of alienation. Like a sleuth in a detective novel, Galip looks for signs and clues unabatedly, for the real meaning hidden in people, objects, and the city surrounding him. He tries to find a sign that will give him insight into his own nature, his true self. This tireless quest indicates the crucial question posed in the novel: Is it possible to be oneself? Is not every human being imbued by the indomitable urge to become someone else? The intricate entanglement of virtual reality and the sense of authenticity is further complicated by the columns Celal, the journalist, writes; these are presented in chapters alternating with those relating Galip’s search. Celal presents himself, on the one hand, as the guardian of the ‘garden of memory’ and thus as eager to preserve the past and history and the authenticity they contain. On the other hand, he conceals the fact that the past and its supposed authenticity are not without ambiguity. For him, too, the central question is whether it 31  Ibid., 194.

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is at all possible to ‘be oneself.’ In his columns about his personal observations and stories about the past, he weaves a vision of reality that seems to be consciously, yet artificially constructed. Celal knows that storytelling is the quintessential means of exploring reality, and that one must delve into it to extract a deeper meaning, but it is also a means to construct reality, to design a new labyrinth that hides new signs and meanings. Thus, his columns add another layer to the complex realities that take the form of stories and interrogations, and in them he tries to discover, or insert, signs and meanings. Galip has long admired his cousin’s columns and as his search proceeds, he realizes that he is not only looking for Rüya, but also for Celal. He starts scrutinizing the columns – which, since Celal’s disappearance, are reprints of previous texts – in an effort to find clues that may lead him to Celal’s whereabouts. He thinks that Celal has purposely concealed messages in the texts, that he must find and decipher the signs that are disguised in Celal’s sentences. This sense is strengthened by Celal’s references to the Hurufis, a mystic sect from Ottoman times, they believed that everything has an obvious meaning, but also a hidden meaning enclosed in itself. The true, deeper meaning of things and people is vested in letters, which show on people’s faces as signs. It is these letters that have disappeared from peoples’ faces, and before any authenticity or truth can be discovered, the lost letters, the meaning of faces, must be recovered. Thus, Celal’s columns reveal that signs and truths may be hidden in letters, and this suggests, to Galip, that they may be hidden in the columns as well. Galip’s search focuses more and more on Celal; he uses his columns as a guide and increasingly identifies with their author. Several times Galip is confused with his cousin and eventually he even passes himself off as Celal. He enters his office and sits at his desk, in an attempt to ‘internalize’ his cousin’s world. He wants to live in Celal’s world, he wants to become Celal. Paradoxically, while searching for his authentic self, he surrenders to the increasing pressure to become someone else, and he gradually transforms himself into Celal, eventually delivering his columns to the newspaper and continuing his work after Celal’s ‘death.’ Of course, Galip’s mysterious identification with Celal contributes to the ambiguity about the relationship between Galip’s authentic self and the various realities in which he is immersed. He is not only himself, but also someone else; in fact, his true self may be located in someone else, or perhaps it is another self inside him which must be discovered and brought to the surface. This ambiguity is not restricted to the figure of Galip. Throughout the novel, people struggle to appropriate identities and are captured in, or flee into, all kinds of aliases and doubles. Throughout The black book the narrative is constructed around the notion of aliases and doppelgängers. During his search, Galip meets many people who

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do not seem to be who they are, or who have double identities, or who are desperate to become someone else. It seems impossible to be just one person: the question of whether it is possible to be oneself is no mere philosophical musing, rather it is a tangible issue in the daily reality of most of the characters of the story. For most of them the question of how to be oneself relates to the discrepancy between trying to find a real, essential identity inside oneself, and seeking the means to become someone else who more adequately represents the person that he or she should be. The tension is created by the apparent impossibility of reconciling these two visions of oneself or even defining them. It is uncertain where the self resides, in a relationship with objects, in other persons, or in visions and stories. The uncertain nature of reality renders the difficult search for an authentic self even more problematic. From the beginning, it is clear that Galip’s search takes place in a reality whose realness is questionable, since he himself invents a story to explain – and hide – the reason for Rüya’s absence. He fantasizes about the reasons for her decision to leave him and (re-)constructs a possible reality which would logically reveal where she is hidden. He enters a world that is made up of a coherent system of signs and clues, which is inserted, so to speak, into the real world to help him find Rüya. Ironically, he enters the world of a detective novel full of keys leading to the truth; this is the type of story that Rüya used to love, but that he himself abhorred. During his search, he merges with this virtual world, distancing himself from his regular life, his relatives, and the actual event that brought about his predicament. A tangible representation of the phenomenon of the ‘alias,’ as it is explored in the story, appears in the museum of mannequins mentioned above. Here Galip finds examples of a fossilized identity in the artifacts that represent what used to be a ‘true’ self, a type rooted in tradition and revealing an idealized version of who a person should be, all brought together in one image. The mannequins are replicas of what used to be a reality and they seem to be waiting for a time when they can regain their significance and become reality once again. They are made of solid matter, and are therefore stuck in time – they are no more than obsolete remnants of the past. They cannot preserve their reality because they anchor a vision of reality and an identity in an unchanging material form. By becoming material, they lost the capacity to represent a ‘real’ identity. This is why Galip feels sympathy for them but cannot identify with them. The ‘new,’ dynamic, form of the look-alike is constructed around the world of the cinema and movie stars. Modern people take on the appearances and behavior of film stars because actors represent who people want to be and they embody the vision of modern man in an idealized and

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essentialized form. These are the aliases provided by modern life. But, of course the film stars themselves are only images, which can be copied but do not grant authenticity. This double fictionality is nicely illustrated by the man who sells photographs of look-alikes of famous movie stars, and by the brothel Galip visits, where the prostitutes mimic the gestures of film actors and enact famous scenes from movies. And during their sexual intercourse the prostitute, who is already impersonating several alter egos, keeps repeating that she wants to be someone else, to leave behind her multiple aliases to incorporate a new one that is more in harmony with her true self.32 The discrepancy between authentic selves and artificial selves, or between the self one aspires to and the self one rejects is also articulated in several stories which are told in Celal’s columns by various protagonists, including Galip and Celal. The protagonists include the columnist who identifies with Proust and the Hurufi mystics, who say that letters – which Galip cannot see – should appear on the faces of the people. Galip tells quite an explicit story about a prince who wanted to become his true self, and in order to find it, the prince decides to eliminate everything in his environment that might lead him away from it, such as counselors, books, objects, etc.; he does this until he finds himself in utter isolation. The conclusion seems to be that without interacting with the environment, nothing remains; identities are shaped by external impulses and one’s responses to them; one is ‘made up’ of one’s incorporation in the external world of people, objects, and ‘signs.’ It is more than just the content of these stories that contributes to the idea of aliases. Time and again it is repeated that storytelling itself is also a means of constructing a separate identity. The telling of stories produces a parallel world, a self-contained reality that the narrator can manipulate without necessarily being personally involved. Celal writes his columns under a pseudonym and uses other pseudonyms in his columns. His grandfather sighs, and says that when he wrote under his own name he made more sense. It is this intermediate world that Celal created which, perhaps paradoxically, enables Galip to identify himself with him, because he wants to enter Celal’s narrated world and, ultimately, become him. Thus, Galip looks for this imagined world and eventually finds his own alias. It is through this narrated reality that he impersonates Celal vis-à-vis the outer world, the realities of other peoples, who know Celal only through his alter ego. This complex relationship between narration and reality is explicated in a story about a writer who dreams so intensely about someone that he becomes this person when he writes. He wrote a novel, but then he re-writes it as the 32  Ibid., 141.

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other person he becomes. Reality and his book merged and when he walked through the city, “the more he saw, the more he realized that everything about ‘our city’ was actually real; this fact alone told him that the world was a book.”33 Imagined reality starts to replace ‘real’ reality: It was not long before this world – where everything was a copy of something else, where people were at once themselves and their own imitations, and all stories opened out into other stories – grew to look so real that the writer, thinking that no one would want to read a story in a place this “realistic,” decided to invent another, surreal world.34 If reality is only an imagined form, it can be re-created infinitely. In his novel, Pamuk refers to two textual models that inspired his representation of the nexus between text/imagination and the notion of the alias. The first is the life story of the great Sufi shaykh Mevlana Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207– 73), the author of the famous Persian tales, the Mesnevi. Biographers of Rumi have long speculated about his relationship with one of his disciples, Shams al-Din, who was not only his favorite follower, but, it seems, also his muse, and perhaps his lover. Whatever the case, after Shams al-Din’s disappearance – he was allegedly murdered by fellow disciples who were jealous – Rumi searched for him frantically and finally shut himself off from his disciples and never wrote anything else. Thus, Rumi’s identification with his alter ego became so strong that the difference between the two disappeared and he could not exist as a separate person without him. It was the mystery of this dual identity that produced the Mesnevi, a work symbolizing infinite storytelling and containing deep wisdom. The second narrative matrix Pamuk used to illustrate the interaction between narration/imagination and alter egos is the Thousand and one nights. As we discuss the parallels between the Thousand and one nights and The black book further on, we briefly refer to the story told by Celal about the ‘false’ leader who impersonates the real leader at night. This story is an alternative version of the story of the ‘Mock caliph,’ about Harun al-Rashid, in the Thousand and one nights. This reference is one of the keys to the interpretation of the novel, especially with regard to the relationship between narration and alternative identities. In addition, another dimension of the search for selves, that is, its grounding in space also comes to the fore in this reference.

33  Ibid., 164. 34  Ibid.

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Galip’s quest is quite deliberately integrated in a carefully described spatial landscape, the city of Istanbul. The city is a labyrinth in which Galip must find his way by interpreting signs of various kinds. First, space is imbued by history, both in the shape of monuments and buildings, and in the shape of memories, which sometimes seem to form a separate realm covering the regular measurement of time. Second, the city is a map that is not only filled with signs produced by history, but also with verbal constructions: narratives, evocations of places and their history, and the situation of the people they contain. Third, the meanings of the spatial structures have marked the faces of the people who live there, and are among the most distinctive signifiers of their identity. Finally, the reader is a traveler in this maze, he follows Galip’s adventures, but also conducts his own quest. In this way, the city is transformed into a replica of itself, an imaginary space resembling its original but still differing from it. This is illustrated by the anecdote about an image of Istanbul reflected in a mirror, which, strangely, shows inexplicable differences. Even an effort to construct an exact copy is doomed to failure; even a mirror image is a transformation, distant from the original specimen. In this way, everything in the city has a double meaning, every person is both himself and not himself, everyone has their double. The Black Book and the Thousand and One Nights Throughout The black book, there are numerous references to the Thousand and one nights; these indicate, unambiguously, that Shahrazad’s collection of stories was indeed a rich source of inspiration for Pamuk when he was conceiving the book. The collection is not only explicitly mentioned, it is also implicitly referred to through parallels with particular stories or figures, the use of narrative techniques, and the major themes explored in Pamuk’s novel. The first category of references includes, for instance, Aladdin’s shop, the mentioning of Mount Kaf, and the acknowledgment that the author ‘plundered’ the Thousand and one nights, even apart from the episode of the ‘Thousand and one nights tour’ around Istanbul.35 References of this kind confirm the intertextual relationship between the two works, and also testify to Pamuk’s identification with Shahrazad as a storyteller, to the linking of his own position and the act of writing to the concept of narration as it is unfolded in the Thousand and one nights. Examples of stories that are ‘plundered’ in The black book include the insertion of the tale of the young man who goes to the barber and falls into the fangs of a beautiful woman, a reference to the story of ‘Aziz and Aziza,’ and 35  Ibid., 161.

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the episode of the museum of mannequins that Galip visits, which obviously resembles Musa’s entrance to the City of Brass, and similar stories. This latter reference is significant, of course, since the ‘City of Brass’ evokes the image of a city that has become stuck in time because it refused to heed the call to the faith, which, in the context of the story, is the regular course of history. It incorporates the essence of a prosperous, affluent society that has become an anachronism because it held on to its inherited – materialistic – values and certainties instead of accepting the uncertainty of transformation. Apart from these significant references to specific stories, the tale of the ‘Mock caliph,’ in particular, functioned as a model for the novel in its various dimensions, as we discuss below. With regard to narrative techniques, the influence of the Thousand and one nights is clearly visible. The level of the story proper – Galip’s search – is alternated with Celal’s columns, and Galip’s assumption that the texts contain clues for his search suggests an interaction between these two levels. Moreover, the frame has a time limit built in, because Celal is no longer writing new columns and there is a limited number of columns that he had written previously. This time limit is overcome in Shahrazad-like manner when Galip, after Celal’s death, takes Celal’s place and continues the column using Celal’s pseudonym. The two levels of the story together form Galip’s reality, as he attempts to reconcile and integrate the levels. As in the case of Shahrazad, the inserted texts serve as an imagined representation that ultimately contributes to (re-)shaping the experience of reality. The structure is made more complex by the incorporation of other stories and quotations from texts in both levels of the narrative. The structural affinity with the Thousand and one nights – Celal even refers to himself as ‘Shahrazad’ – is, of course, intended to convey themes that to some extent can be considered a variation on themes proposed by the Arabic tales, such as, mainly, the idea of the double and the self-referential reflection on storytelling as a mechanism for the construction of meaning. In the stories of the Thousand and one nights, the emergence of doubles or mirror image is often related to some traumatic experience, including the unsettling confrontation with love, the manifestation of fate, or the juxtaposition of opposite worlds. The catastrophe that Shahzaman and Shahriyar suffer, the love between Qamar al-Zaman and Budur, the repudiation of As‘ad and Amjad, the meetings of Sindbad of the sea and Sindbad the porter, and Abdallah of the land and Abdallah of the sea, to mention some of the most prominent examples, are caused by or related to a reality that is ambivalent, that interferes with the human soul or human destinies in such a way that what would essentially

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or supposedly be a unity is driven apart. The essentially composite nature of reality means that two people who appear to be the same are ultimately not quite the same, or even essentially different. The discrepancy between two people who should have been one person gives the story its dynamism, by setting the two opposite each other, arranging a meeting, and emphasizing their differences. In the end, the two are united in some way or their differences are accepted as a part of their destiny. The separation is often represented by the manipulation of spatial settings, by creating boundaries (land and sea; palace walls) or distances which the protagonists must overcome. In all cases, a form must be found to solve the rupture in reality and this form is usually realized by constructing an imaginary relationship to regulate the harmony between the two doubles, for instance through storytelling, matrimony, legal means, or by acknowledging the inescapability of fate. Thus, material reality in which unity is by definition broken is supplemented by an imaginary superstructure that complements it and rationalizes its incomprehensibility. In The black book, political developments give rise to massive uncertainty about identities and the nature of transformation. As noted, the incompatibility of traditional values with the sense that transformation is inevitable deprives people of their sense of authenticity and pushes them toward a state of multiple identities, which they try to capture or relinquish to become themselves and others at the same time. The disruptive force of imposed change and dictatorship is further stressed by the fact that whoever wants to engage in political activities must take on a false name, or even several aliases, to evade persecution. The lack of freedom forces people to take aliases, since being themselves would place them in danger. The transformation of society is tantamount to, first, constructing an imaginary self, and, second, envisaging an imaginary world. But in this way, politics becomes a game that has lost touch with real life and does not heal the fundamental alienation of the people. This way of elaborating the theme of the double and its relationship to politics reflects the paradigm of the story of the ‘Mock caliph,’ as it is told in the Thousand and one nights and re-enacted in The black book. The story of the ‘Mock caliph’ should be read, first, in the tradition of the Arabic/Islamic discourses of power, which stresses the sovereign’s absolute power, but also requires his sagacity and rationality in the way he handles state affairs. In these discourses, the imagination has an important role, as we can see in the prominence of storytelling in mirror-for-princes works and in the Thousand and one nights itself. The stories are fiction, but nevertheless, they contain examples of rational behavior and provide a check on irrational, emotional, and dictatorial

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impulses. Thus, the story of the ‘Mock caliph’ confirms Harun al-Rashid’s authority as a ruler, but it also emphasizes the necessity for the caliph to intervene in the circumstances of his subjects and correct possible injustices. In the story of the ‘Mock caliph,’ Harun al-Rashid dresses himself and his vizier Ja‘far as merchants in order to leave the palace at night, enter the city, and inspect the circumstances of his subjects. To his surprise, he is told that every night the ‘caliph’ embarks on a boat on the Tigris and threatens to kill everyone whom he finds ‘trespassing’ on the river during his trip. The caliph has a boatman take him on the river, where he sees a splendidly illuminated boat with a ‘caliph’ sitting on a throne surrounded by a company of courtiers. He follows the company, which goes ashore to have a luxurious banquet. At one point, the ‘caliph’ recites a lament and flagellates himself painfully. The caliph asks him why he behaves like this and is told that the man has suffered great injustice from his beloved and decided to impersonate the caliph to attract the attention of the real caliph, hoping that he will redress the injustice done to him. The following day the caliph summons the man to the palace and restores his rights. Three elements in this story are especially relevant to a discussion of The black book. First, the anomaly of the mock caliph is caused by a traumatic event, which induced him to abandon his former identity and take on a new, imaginary one. Second, as soon as the caliph leaves his palace, he, too, relinquishes the paraphernalia of his authority and assumes a ‘false’ identity. Third, the mock caliph’s threat to punish ‘trespassers’ puts a kind of spell on the space of the city; it creates a sacred precinct in which he wields ultimate power at night, when he replaces the daytime authority of the real caliph. Thus, night and day contain two mirror images of the space of the city, which is subjected to mirror images of authority. Through these three elements, the two caliphs and the city enter a liminal state, in which nothing is what it seems and all certainties are doubtful. The liminal state which is thus created is used for a complex exploration of the relationship and interaction between real and virtual realities. The caliph leaves the palace in disguise, gives up the external aspects of his power, because it is only in a non-official state that he can communicate with the people. Thus, he subjects himself to a form of contingency that is not countered by the structural manifestation of his authority. He exposes himself to danger and unexpected events, because this is the only way to inspect their reality, untainted by the effects of his absolute power. Conversely, the mock caliph has left the external aspects of his humbleness and commonness and assumed the dress and appearance of authority, because this is the only way in which he can expect to come in contact with the caliph, who is unreachable

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in his stronghold of authority, and plead his case. There is no other way the two caliphs can communicate; they must relinquish their former identities and enter an ‘enchanted’ realm in order to meet. Thus, the mock caliph takes on a fictional identity in order to manipulate the course of events related to his misfortunes. Physically, he is still a common person, but he assumes the semblance of authority. The real caliph, conversely, is still the caliph, physically, but relinquishes the semblance of authority. When they are confronted with each other, the two caliphs engage in a performance, a situation of make-believe, in which two false realities intermingle. An enclave of imaginary reality is created in which the two actors’ relationship with reality is renegotiated without their regular qualities. Ultimately, it appears that the intervention through the construction of a fictional domain is effective; both the real and the mock caliph succeed in their intentions, and during the day, when their regular identities are restored, justice is done. The ‘ritual’ performance of the two caliphs resembles the way in which Galip and Celal each create fictional identities and set out to confront each other. Initially, Galip’s search is sparked by a traumatic event, the sudden disappearance of Rüya. In order to carry out his search, he sheds his regular life and its visible distinguishing marks, and enters into a kind of liminal state, in which his identity and his grip on his environment become blurred and uncertain; this enables him to confront contingent events, and also to redefine his place in the world around him. In fact, as his search continues, his redefinition of himself becomes increasingly dependent on the object of his search, which shifts gradually from Rüya to Celal, his supposed alter ego, who has taken possession of his beloved and thereby ‘stolen’ his identity. Even if Galip is the real Galip, he does not have much to prove it. Conversely, throughout the narrative, Celal remains absent, hiding behind the textual coulisses of his columns. For other people, his persona is carefully constructed through his texts, which evoke an atmosphere of intimacy and contain all the characteristic elements of a personality. Even in his texts, Celal takes on several aliases, referring to other figures and texts that represent elements of his own outlook on life. Even if his physical presence and nature remain uncertain, the appearance of his identity is outspoken and definite, in contrast to Galip, whose ‘real,’ physical presence is deprived of a ‘constructed’ identity. Galip and Celal are each other’s mirror image and opposites, each ‘owns’ what the other lacks. It is this combination of similarity and difference that is symbolized by the mirage-like Rüya, who attracts Galip to Celal and causes Galip to look for Celal, since he cannot live without a ‘constructed’ vision of himself.

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As in the story of the ‘Mock caliph,’ the relationship between Galip and Celal is marked by a difference in authority. During his career writing columns, Celal has obtained a position of authority in the community. Drawing on the admiration of his audience, he has become a repository and representative of their visions, hopes, outlooks, and values. He monopolizes the memory of society, he molds their vision of reality by describing and defining it for them. He formulates their past and future to such an extent that in the end, his columns replace their reality and shape it so that he is not only considered as representative of the collective conscience of society, but he is also able to manipulate individual lives, by systematically questioning definitions of identity and authenticity. Of course, he is able to do this precisely because he is invisible himself, he does not partake in the everyday realities that shape the lives of his readers and absorb their imagination. On the contrary, Galip is a common man who is intrigued by Celal’s ability to grasp reality and reshape it in his texts. His assessment of Celal’s power is reflected in his conviction that Rüya must be with him, that it is Celal’s superior capacities which have taken her from him. Consequently, as he discovers during his search, the only way to find her is to reinterpret Celal’s texts, and the means by which he effectuates his manipulation of reality, by deciphering the codes hidden in the columns and their presence in his environment. He must enter the labyrinthine world of Celal’s texts, not only to find Celal, but to find out who he is, by appropriating Celal’s constructed visions. In the end, this process of appropriation reaches the point that Galip is not satisfied with understanding Celal’s texts, but actually strives to appropriate the act of constructing his world. Thus, Galip wants to shed his own impotence and helplessness and take on Celal’s authority and ability to intervene in reality. Only through a reunion of the physical and constructed elements of his body and its image can he realize a stable identity. Ultimately, Galip feels that he has not only taken on Celal’s position, but that he has actually become Celal, that he finally embodies the person that he wanted to be, or even should be; he has found the alias from which he has been alienated for too long, the alias that deprived him of his identity and instilled a permanent desire in him.36 Paradoxically, by losing Rüya (his ‘dream’), Galip has lost his ‘real’ self, which he can only recover by adopting the illusory identity of someone else.

36  Ibid., 224, 357.

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Storytelling and Multiple Identities The references to the Thousand and one nights in The black book are predominantly related to the act and processes of narration. Galip’s search for Rüya unfolds in a labyrinthine exploration of Istanbul and is thus firmly rooted in space. At the same time, the quest is inextricably linked to forms of narration, and the nexus between narrational and spatial domains invokes the image of Shahrazad. The episode of the Thousand and one nights tour through Istanbul, for instance, culminates with everyone telling a story in a kind of relay race. Other instances include observations of the act of writing as a process of transfiguration, an act that not only turns the writer into someone else, but also produces a virtual reality that takes the place of the ‘real’ city. Narration, therefore, cannot be eliminated from the spaces we live in, but at the same time, everything that has ever been written, “even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words.”37 Thus, narration produces a breach in the experience of a homogeneous reality; it imposes a form of alienation in relation to spaces, but at the same time ‘creates’ these spaces. It is this inherent contradiction in narration, in which reality is a dream and a story that penetrates humans like a fatal doom: the story of Galip seems to be about a man who, to his horror, discovers the alienating function of language. He comes to understand that it is a mechanism that is indispensable to the experience of reality, but at the same time it makes every experience of reality impossible: For words were so close to the things they described that, on mornings when the mist swept down from the mountains into the ghost villages below, poetry mixed with life and words with the objects they signified. No one waking up on misty mornings could tell their dreams apart from reality, or poems apart from life, or names apart from people. No one ever asked if a story was real, because stories were as real as the lives they described.38 It is in the nature of narration to create realities within reality and it is this mechanism that produces the doubles that fill The black book. This property of narration is exemplified by the writer who wrote a book about someone who takes his place, just before his wife leaves him. To soothe the pain, he imagines himself as the person he was before the fateful separation and he finds himself 37  Ibid., 82. 38  Ibid., 301.

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writing the book all over again. Narration causes the self to split into oneself and another person within the self, who takes control and assumes that it is real, that the narrated environment is in fact its real environment. In his columns Celal consciously exploits these qualities of the act of storytelling. Although he acknowledges that he is only a storyteller, a Shahrazad, he is aware that his stories penetrate into reality and form a representation which, for the reader, becomes more real than reality itself. Furthermore, Celal purposely creates a duplicate of himself, using language to distance himself from his double, so it can easily observe him. It is only in this way that he can become truly conscious that he exists: In the beginning, it was I who created the eye. My aim: I created it, of course, so that it could see me, watch me. I had no desire to escape its gaze. It was under its gaze that I made myself – made myself in its image – and I basked happily in its warm glow. It was because I was under the eye’s constant surveillance that I knew I existed.39 Ultimately, the aim of conjuring up an alter ego is not only an effort to escape, but also to see who and what he is, to explore whether or not he really is the person he wants to be, that is, the other, different, person he wants to become. As in the case of Shahriyar and Harun al-Rashid, gazing at one’s other ‘half’ is a means to become conscious of one’s identity. This identity can only be constructed by creating an illusion, however, a space to renegotiate one’s sense of identity. Still, the linking of one’s vision of oneself to narration produces new difficulties, since it makes every sense of identity dependent on the ‘laws’ and ‘properties’ of narration as a system of representation. The black book shows time and again that narration is not merely a mechanism that can be controlled and manipulated at will. It has a certain autonomy that escapes control; it is vested in reality, but it is not bound to it or limited to it. The main law of narration, as in the Thousand and one nights, is its tendency to generate itself and proliferate endlessly. Every story contains the seed of another story, which must inevitably grow out of it; every story opens up a new story; every narrative representation or construction of reality necessitates a new narrative. In fact, telling a story is only intended to gain one access to the next story, as in the Thousand and one nights and Rumi’s Mesnevi, where stories flow into each other endlessly. Stories inherently multiply themselves, they generate new stories, without end. This infinity is spatially represented by the passages of rooms 39  Ibid., 115.

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that open up to other rooms, on and on.40 This is the reason storytelling continues even after the death of the narrator. Since storytelling is a kind of perpetuum mobile and is, at the same time, the only means we have to impose meaning upon reality, it follows that thinking about reality is an “endless freight train of meanings mercilessly multiplying itself into infinity,” in which Galip “feared he might lose himself forever.”41 As narration is essentially unbounded and fluid, it is impossible to contain a fixed identity or a fixed vision of the world. It will always produce doubles and alternative worlds. It not only opens up spaces to flee from one’s identity, it also condemns one to be a continual obligation to transform oneself, to be or become someone else. There is no refuge in the labyrinths of the city and of narration. The starting point of the dramatic tension in The black book is the drastic rupture in Turkish history that left Turkish society defenseless against the penetration of the modern western lifestyle; this was followed by Atatürk’s farreaching attempt to transform society by forcing the population to become ‘new people.’ These changes put people under a kind of enchantment; the essences of their identities were eliminated, the course of history was suspended or deviated, and old certainties lost their meanings. The enchantment alienated people from themselves. They were no longer only themselves, they also became other people, or they tried desperately to become other people. By losing their fixed identities, everyone was forced to imagine a double, a replica, an ‘other’ who was more authentic than the ‘self.’ Since the creation of these doubles seemed to be enforced by circumstances, they became more ‘real’ than the original self. The replica came to represent authentic values, the meaning of life, something to strive for, something indispensable to survival. The creation of these doubles is the source of the narrative dynamism in the novel, since, as in the Thousand and one nights, every double represents a part of a whole and its destiny is to reunite with the other half. The separation must be overcome, the distance must be conquered, or a way must be found to make the irreversible separation acceptable. In The black book the desolate quest for union is described on several levels, as the effort of Turkish society to find a coherent identity, as Galip’s journey to find his authentic self, and, in the many references to Rumi, the Hurufis, and others, as a mystical quest to become one with Him, to find a truth that would restore some bond with the divine, a bond that was lost in creation. It is no coincidence that Celal is called ‘Celal,’ after (Jalal/Celal al-Din) Rumi, and that his surname is ‘Salik,’ literally 40  Ibid., 345. 41  Ibid., 258.

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‘the traveler,’ the term used for mystics following the path toward unification with God. Creation, the material world, is a repository of heavenly signs, which lead mortal man toward a (re-)unification with the divine. Thus, the tribulations of the Turkish people are likened to a quest that is caused by some primeval catastrophe and that has destined man to continuously search for some lost state of bliss. Precisely because of this parallel, The black book suggests that the quest for identity is futile and without end, since, just as man is imprisoned in his material, mortal state, identities are volatile and unfixed. The search for identities is endless: since no fixed identities exist, every incorporation of an identity necessitates the invention of a new one and imposes the necessity to escape from it. There is no final identity, there is only an unending process of transformation, and the only way to endure this is to accept that the idea of obtaining an identity is a dream and that life is nothing more than the journey toward this dream. The aim of life is not the realization of the dream, but the dream itself. The medium through which these processes of alienation and searching take place, according to The black book, is language, or more precisely, the systematic use of language in storytelling. However, storytelling is not a medium that can be fully controlled; since narration imposes itself as an indispensable necessity, it has an autonomy and dynamic of its own, which is especially noticeable in its self-generative capacity. Stories produce new stories; this implies that stories can never be fixed, since they are only the medium by which to access other stories, in the same way that identities are stepping-stones to other, new, identities. This autonomy is clear from the continuation of Celal’s column after his disappearance and death: narration exists in a way that is independent from human lives; it is connected to the passage of time itself rather than to time/spaces related to societies or individual lives. Thus, it is also an aspect of transformation: there is no essence, only an endless evocation of visions, events, and acts, which are together caught in a process of continuous change. This vision of storytelling is present in the story of The black book, and is also represented by the form of the novel itself. Toward the end of the novel, which was written from the perspective of a narrator telling the story of Galip in the third person, the narrator suddenly intervenes. After he relates the death of Celal and Rüya, the narrator reveals that it is no use to maintain the separation between himself and his protagonist. The perspectives of Galip and the narrator merge into the first person singular and, somewhat later, it appears that the narrator and Galip are one and the same person. That is, of course, they have become the same person after the long process of writing the novel – this is one of the many doubles in the novel. The narrator explains that he has

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been writing the story of Galip and Rüya, an unfinished love story, evidently a metafictional reference to The black book itself, which seems to be the intended story gone awry by the disappearance of Rüya. A similar metafictional reference can be found in the passage – mentioned above – in which a writer, whose wife has left him, decides to imagine himself before the painful event and write a book about a protagonist who wants to become someone else. This is, in fact, what happens in The black book, in which the narrator, in the person of Galip, tries to recover a ‘wife’ who has left him and so he writes about ‘someone’ who wants to become someone else. Here, storytelling is used as a means to re-imagine or even reinvent reality, a means to manipulate reality by substituting a ‘dream’ for it. The writer creates his double in an effort to enter another life, to take another direction at a fork in the road. These metafictional interventions evidently change the character of the novel as a whole. Galip’s search for Rüya and Celal is not a realistic account of events that might have happened; it is an account created in the imagination of the narrator, who has invented himself and his double to enact a journey that he completes himself. Galip and Celal are now components of the author himself, and their effort at unification is in fact the struggle within the author to establish a unified self. The three heroes (himself, the storyteller, and the dream) are the components of what the narrator sees as the ideal person, if they were gathered together. But while Galip succeeds in becoming Celal, Rüya (the dream) is irretrievably lost. It seems that the ultimate unification is impossible and that – as is stated in the final lines of the book – writing is the only consolation. The story is Galip’s search within himself for the other who knows the story; it is Galip’s effort to acquire the ability to write his own story. The ending of the novel is thus not a happy one; in fact, it is not an ending at all. True to the idea that storytelling is boundless, endless, autonomous, and ultimately uncontrollable, the final pages of The black book acknowledge that the book is no more than a coincidental confluence of stories, that it was not consciously written, but haphazardly collected. This means that its ending is only a new fork in the road, from which it will continue in other collections of stories, new clusters of storytelling that create new realities. This is the reason the narrator says that the final pages of the book should be printed in black, since they are irrelevant to the reader: they give only one possible ending and every reader should attach his or her own continuation of the chain of stories. The ending that is given is only relevant to the narrator himself, who only represents one of the tracks in this vast confluence of stories. The narrator finds his exit from a part of the labyrinth, perhaps he will enter another part; the reader will continue his search without him.

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All these elements of The black book can easily be traced to its model, the Thousand and one nights. The imposition of a systematic form of alienation, the intervention of the imagination in reality, the doubles, and especially the self-generative role of narration are part of the concept, form, and contents of the Nights. We can only conclude that The black book is Pamuk’s Thousand and one nights. In the three novels discussed in this chapter we see a development in the evaluation of the individual’s encounter with the conditions of modernity. Benham, in H. G. Wells’s novel, is overwhelmed by the new possibilities provided by the modern, globalized, world. He can only try to master his new ‘vision’ of justice and prosperity by striving to dominate this new world and to transform himself into someone else, to envisage himself as a prophetic figure. But by doing so, he engages in a performance that cuts all his connections to his social surroundings. His vision is derived from a newly emerging reality, in a society that harbors in itself the prospect of this reality as a possible future; but Benham is incapable of representing the link between the two; his imagined identity dissociates itself from his physical identity with fatal consequences. Arthur Schnitzler is less pessimistic. He recognizes that reality has become layered and more ambiguous as a result of the modern condition, but he seems to see the potential unification of the newly discovered components of reality within a new vision of the human psyche and human relationships. In The black book, Pamuk acknowledges the deeply disrupting effects of modernity on both society and individuals. Something is lost which can never be recovered, but still, the process that underlies the visions of reality, of the past and of others, have perhaps not essentially changed. Perhaps the disruptive forces can be mastered by understanding their positive effects in the formation of identities. Perhaps the desire to find doubles is a way to escape from fossilized, obsolete identities; it should be accepted as a condition of life and a prerequisite for survival. It is these intriguing aspects of the trope of the double that turned Harun al-Rashid into a character that continues to inspire writers.

Chapter 17

The Multiple Faces of Shahrazad: Leïla Sebbar and Waçiny Laredj The debates about Said’s ideas on orientalism, as a European discourse of defining the oriental Other and, concomitantly, a self-image, resulted in many theoretical approaches in the various fields of research. For example, Bhabha and Spivak introduce such notions as cultural ‘hybridity’ and ‘subaltern history.’ We will not go into these theories here, but it is important to observe that forms of orientalism were also a source of self-identification, not only for Europeans, but also for decolonized societies and for non-European migrants in Europe. Somehow these forms of postcolonial discourse found ways to deal with orientalist perceptions, or at least with the hybridity that European modernity imposed on them. Not surprisingly, the reservoir of images of the Orient that were derived from the Thousand and one nights played an important role in this process of identification of the boundaries of cultural exchange. In this chapter, we discuss two literary works which were explicitly influenced by the Thousand and one nights as a phenomenon symbolizing processes of cultural integration and differentiation and which discuss the cultural and political implications of seeing the Other through images taken from the Nights. The works include the Shérézade trilogy by the French/Algerian author Leïla Sebbar (b. 1941), consisting of Shérézade 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts (1982); Les carnets de Shérézade (1985); and Le fou de Shérézade (1991), and Sayyidat al-maqam by the Algerian writer Wasini al-A‘radj or Waçiny Laredj (b. 1954), published in French as Les ailes de la reine (1993/2009). Both Leïla Sebbar and Waçiny Laredj are of Algerian origin. It is no coincidence that their work is marked by postcolonial discussions, since Algeria experienced French colonial rule from 1830 until 1962. The colonial past resulted, on the one hand, in a complex cultural heritage with a deep rift between French, Arabic, and Berber languages and orientations, and on the other hand, in a large migrant community in France that struggled to find its place in French-European society. The two works should be read in these contexts, as they address the themes of Algeria’s cultural orientation, response to western cultural influence, and the efforts of Algerian migrants to find their place in the host culture. The questions that are raised deal with the tension between authenticity and adaptation, hybridity and assimilation, multiculturalism and resistance to political repression, social prejudices and discrimination. The © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_019

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two works have another aspect in common: both refer to non-textual forms of cultural expression, such as painting, music, and dance. Thus, they explore Said’s idea that literary, artistic, and political discourses interact and perhaps converge in the orientalist discourse of the Other. Finally, both works treat issues of gender in their various contexts.

Leïla Sebbar: Shérézade

In the European tradition of the Thousand and one nights, the figure of Shahrazad is primarily presented as a seductress of stunning beauty and sensuality; in the Arabic versions she may be seductive, but her erudition, her knowledge of ancient books, and her eloquence are just as important. Leïla Sebbar has constructed her trilogy of novels Shérézade, 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts; Les carnets de Shérézade; and Le fou de Shérézade on these differing images of the narrator of the Nights. As the titles indicate, it is centered around the figure of Shérézade, a name emphatically synonymous with Shahrazad. Shérézade is a seventeen-year old girl from an Algerian family living in France. She runs away from home and is reported missing by her parents. She goes to Paris, where she lives among squatters and marginal youths of various cultural backgrounds. The first novel, Shérézade 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts, relates that Shérézade meets Julien Desrosiers, a student of oriental languages and an amateur of orientalist painting. When Julien falls in love with Shérézade, she refuses to commit herself to him, although she does not altogether discourage him either. The story of the novel is built on episodes of Shérézade’s rather haphazard life among her friends, until she decides to travel to Marseille and her native Algeria. It appears, however, that her friend, who drives the car, is a member of a terrorist group and has filled the trunk with explosives. In an accident, the car explodes, but Shérézade survives the blast and continues her journey. The second part of the trilogy, Les carnets de Shérézade, relates how Shérézade manages to reach Marseille, but finally decides not to travel to Algeria; she ends up hitchhiking north. On her journey, she visits several towns and in the meantime, she tells the truck driver stories about her journey through France. She is finally dropped off in Paris. In the third volume, Le fou de Shérézade, Shérézade travels to Palestine and Lebanon to prepare herself for a role in a film written by Julien. However, in Beirut she is captured by a militia and held hostage for some time. Meanwhile, Shérézade’s mother and sister come to Paris to look for her, while Julien travels to Jerusalem to find her. There he meets a Jewish girl who resembles her and together they return to Paris to finish the film.

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As we see, the three novels do not present a straightforward, continuous story that flows from one part into the next, rather they show Shérézade’s various moods. These moods are connected, not only through the figure of Shérézade, but also through several thematic links and through other characters, especially Julien, who appears from time to time, but remains in the background. Within the novels, the story is fragmented, too; each novel consists of small episodes, memories, and events that are not always realistically related. Clearly, Shérézade is as much a narrative character, with her own biography, as a narrative element and part of the many settings in which she appears. In the following sections, we examine the way in which Shérézade is constructed as a narrative element in five paradigms: travel, image, multicultural society, identity, and narration; we then evaluate how these paradigms are shaped by references to the Thousand and one nights. Shérézade the Nomad In all three novels of Leïla Sebbar’s trilogy, which are set in the 1980s, the main character Shérézade is on the road, thus, traveling, or mobility more generally, is the most important structural framework for the story. Since Shérézade’s family has left its cultural, social, and territorial environment in Algeria, deterritorialization is the primary condition of the family, and it is this state of dissociation that is the foundation of the work. Mobility creates an imbalance between the cultural and social values that are the pillars of the family’s life together. It is not Shérézade’s resistance to these values in themselves that causes her to run away from home, rather, she is drawn away by the gap between traditional family values and the environment in which they are embedded. Shérézade has no conflict with her parents and still loves her mother, father, and sister Meriem. From time to time, she sends them messages to put their minds at rest. Shérézade’s state of permanent mobility intensifies when she moves to Paris, where she leads a marginal life, with no official address. Her parents have called the police and registered her as a ‘missing person.’ The idea of mobility, spatial instability, and exile is strengthened by the figure of Julien, who is the son of a French colonist who went to Algeria as a teacher. In contrast to Shérézade, he knew Algeria before he came to France and although he does not feel nostalgic toward Algeria or feel the need to return to it to confirm his identity, the experience of migration has thrown him into a kind of limbo, which to a large extent determines his position in life. He is fascinated by visual representations of reality and especially by film and orientalist paintings. He studies oriental languages, but is apolitical and plans to travel through North Africa to study. Finally, he falls in love with

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Shérézade and wants her to play the main role in a movie he is writing the script for. This emphasis on mobility in the two main characters opens up space for the narrative to develop. It defines Shérézade as a nomad whose relationship with her environment is continually changing, and who is essentially not bound by social or cultural frameworks, but acts freely in response to the events and people around her. This is, in fact, her role in the story. She is the heroine of a story of exploration, of a quest with an uncertain destination; she is a dynamic force that is not yet determined by well-defined qualities and thus is not limited in her actions. Of course, this also creates the possibility for chance to intervene and for the course of events to be steered by destiny or sudden unexpected occurrences, at least those that appear that way. Shérézade’s nomadic character is elaborated on further in Les carnets de Shérézade, the second book of the trilogy. Here the story is the account of a journey: In Marseille Shérézade decides not to go to Algeria, but instead to return to Paris; she does this in seven days, hitchhiking in a truck, passing towns where she wants to visit certain places, especially museums or commemorative buildings. While traveling north, she tells the driver the story of her trip from Paris to Marseille – when she also passed specific places – thus, the account of a ‘tour de France’ – a journey through France structured by specific focal points – is completed. The tour is not only, to some extent, shaped by coincidence, it is also directed by an idea, the intention to visit certain places on the way. This idea is focused on historical figures who, in one way or another, appeal to Shérézade, or they are people she supposes play some role in her image of herself or of her relationship with the society around her. These figures include Pierre Loti, Henri Matisse, and especially, Arthur Rimbaud and Flora Tristan. As a self-conscious traveler, Shérézade sees the poet Rimbaud as her alter ego. In her carnet (notebook) she comments on the letters Rimbaud wrote to his mother and sister after he left France to live an adventurous life in Aden and East Africa. Like Shérézade, he gave up his previous life and the identity that was attached to it, to embark on a journey as a completely free person. It is not so much the figure of Rimbaud as a poet of genius that fascinates Shérézade, rather it was Rimbaud who relinquished an idea of himself and who decided to become another person, lead another life, and immerse himself in a completely different environment; it was Rimbaud who chose to lead the life of an ‘Oriental,’ adopt oriental dress, and adapt to the harsh environment of East Africa; and it was Rimbaud who acknowledged, with his famous dictum ‘Je est un autre,’ that there is no single, coherent, ‘I,’ and that the search for self requires a form of shapeshifting. Finally, to complete the picture of

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Shérézade’s identification with Rimbaud, we are reminded that the poet’s father visited Algeria in 1844.1 The refusal to be tied down by conventions that fix one’s life to its social embedding links Rimbaud to Flora Tristan, the second historical figure with whom Shérézade identifies and whom she writes about in her notebook. Flora Tristan was a feminist activist who lived in France from 1803 to 1844 and wrote an account of her tour through France to incite the workers throughout the country to unite in proto trade unions. Flora Tristan never knew who her father was, and she separated from a repressive husband in order to lead an independent life. Because of her circumstances, she became a fierce advocate for women’s rights and later for the rights of workers. Flora Tristan’s independence and mobility are not her only links to Shérézade. Like Shérézade, Flora Tristan refused to be the victim of social pressures; throughout her life she was uncertain about her identity: she felt like a stranger in France because her father was not a Frenchman, and she had an obsession with visual images. Finally, there are indications that she visited Algeria during one stage of her life.2 The figures of Rimbaud and Flora Tristan are not merely inspirations or historical examples for Shérézade; to a certain extent, they legitimize her mobility and her ambiguous status in society. Perhaps more importantly, they were outsiders in French society, uncertain about their position in French culture, nevertheless, they left a significant imprint on their country’s history. Rimbaud and Flora Tristan show that the complexity of identification with a social environment does not automatically mean that one is an outcast and has no role to play. In fact, alienation can be a source of strength, inspiration, and individuality. By linking her journey to theirs, Shérézade draws an outline, first delimiting the contours of a vision of herself and then her position in French society. But to really internalize this vision, she must undergo the experience herself and complete her own tour. She must assimilate the examples of Rimbaud and Flora Tristan, not just through their texts, but also through a reiteration of their explorations of their self-images as these were reflected in their environment. Shérézade’s journey is, in part, embedded in texts and in history, but it is also related to geography and to the contingencies of encounters. Remarkably, the people she meets on her journeys are frequently migrants themselves, and have often come from islands around the world. It is as if Shérézade is not only conducting a tour of French towns, but also of France as a group of islands 1  See Charles Nicholl, Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880–91 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Alain Borer, Rimbaud d’Arabie; supplément au voyage: essai (Paris: Seuil, 1991). 2  See Evelyne Bloch-Dano, Flora Tristan, “J’irai jusqu’à ce que je tombe” (Paris: Payot, 2006).

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representing a multicultural mosaic-like and composite nature. The driver of the truck, Gilles, is from Île de Ré; he dreams of returning there and also visiting the Comores and Mayotte. It is as if Shérézade’s journey reveals a hidden layer of French society that consists of an agglomeration of cultural and ethnic islands. Significantly, Shérézade – mysteriously – meets V. S. Naipaul, a fellow traveler in whom three continents are united. Naipaul is on his way to North Africa and is prepared to take Shérézade with him. Thus, the outline of Shérézade’s quest gradually becomes a bit more determined: it includes the discovery of ‘another’ France, a France that could probably incorporate a person like Shérézade more easily than its more dominant counterpart. This political aspect of Shérézade’s ‘tour de France’ is emphasized by her act of retracing the steps of the great ‘marche des Beurs,’ a demonstration which took place in March 1983, in which young North Africans demanded their rights and protested against racism.3 The third book of the trilogy, Le fou de Shérézade, is also constructed as a journey, this time not in France, but in a part of the world that represents the other component of Shérézade’s identity: the Arab world. Her motivation for going on this journey is her concession to Julien that she will play a part in the movie he wrote, which will be filmed in a suburb of Paris. In order to prepare for the role, Shérézade wants to experience the atmosphere of the countries that she feels culturally and politically connected to. Before agreeing to represent an image in Julien’s film, she must become acquainted with the ‘authentic’ aspect of her cultural identity. For this reason, she travels to Jerusalem and subsequently to Beirut. Instead of finding a form of cultural authenticity in Beirut, Shérézade is confronted with hatred, violence, and disruption. She is captured by a Lebanese militia and held hostage for some time. Julien, anxious to bring her back and to save the production of the film, follows her to Jerusalem, where he meets Yael, a Jewish girl of Moroccan descent, who resembles Shérézade. Yael is also presented as a nomad, at one point dressed as a “south-Algerian knight, like Isabelle Eberhardt.”4 Shérézade plays her role in Julien’s film and Yael plays Shérézade’s role; thus, the image of two odalisques lying on a divan is combined in this encounter between a Jewish and a Palestinian girl, Shérézade plays the Jewish girl and Yael plays the Arab girl. Thus, the story exploits the tension that has built up between the idea of cultural roots and nomadism, between authenticity and representation. This tension is emphasized by the 3  Michel Laronde, Autour du roman Beur; immigration et identité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993). 4  Leïla Sebbar, Le fou de Shérézade ([Paris]: Stock, 1991), 199; Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904) was a traveler and writer who lived in Algeria for several years and who used to dress as a man.

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image of the age-old olive tree, a symbol of rootedness, historical continuity, and cultural survival that has been uprooted and brought to Paris to serve as a prop in the film. Although in Le fou de Shérézade, Shérézade undertakes a real journey, and she crosses political and cultural boundaries between two domains which, in her experience, represent completely different worldviews, it is not mobility that dominates the story. In fact, remarkably, for the greater part of the novel Shérézade is imprisoned and prevented from moving. In the beginning, she rides in a truck – this establishes a link with the journey in Les carnets de Shérézade, but she is taken prisoner and confined almost immediately. In her prison, she is not allowed to read and at one point she is almost raped. Thus, her experience in Lebanon contrasts sharply with her journey in France; while she is uncertain about belonging in France, and whether or not she can see it as her cultural and social home, she was able to travel there freely and meet people of various kinds. In Lebanon, however, which she considered closer to her cultural roots, she was confined and constantly threatened with violence and death. For Shérézade, the conclusion should be, apparently, that there is no such thing as an easily available form of authenticity; authenticity is not self-evident in France, but neither is it clear or readily accessible in the Arab world. There is only a struggle to realize it within oneself, a struggle which is cultural and political at the same time. To conclude this section, we can say that the theme of the journey, in the form of migration, travel, and nomadism, is a main element linking the three books of the trilogy. It is intended, first, to exploit the narrative potential of mobility, as a dynamic force, and second, to reveal the tension between forms of belonging and relations between an individual and his/her environment. In this sense, Shérézade’s travels represent a liminal phase, intended to give her the opportunity to be initiated into the ‘secrets’ of the world and her own person. Her journey is a quest, one that she embarks on consciously, in an effort to find her place in the world. It is not clear if there will be a ‘homecoming’ in the end. Perhaps the only homecoming that is possible involves participating in the struggles which, ultimately, shape one’s reality more effectively than searching for cultural authenticity. Multiculturalism As mentioned above, the journey that Shérézade undertakes through France is intended, in part, to disclose the existence of a kind of subculture in French society, especially among the youth. This subculture represents another marginalized, but essential, social component. The existence of this component is structurally linked to the idea of the journey, since Shérézade is able to

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discover it by embarking on her adventure as a marginal person, a nomad exploring the fringes of society. But this component itself is also formed through mobility, travel, and migration; it brings all kinds of cultural and human values and qualities to France, and, more importantly, imbues the country with a sense of dynamism, a sense of relatedness to another world, a global society. It is no coincidence that many of the people whom Shérézade meets on her journey are themselves traveling: this is true, for example, of the truck driver, the cineast, the author, or the young men in search of their ‘roots.’ Multicultural society is based on the dynamism brought into it by mobility and requires the outlook of a nomad to be fully appreciated. Sebbar’s trilogy is set in the milieu and the atmosphere of what is called ‘Beur’ culture, that is, the subculture of North African youths in France, with their raï music and literature portraying their predicaments. After leaving her family home, Shérézade lives among a group of squatters who lead marginal lives that include fluid relations, drugs and alcohol, poverty, petty crime, and social eccentricity. This marginality is not gratuitous, however, since it is combined with a sense of social defiance, cultural awareness, and political activism. In a way, Sebbar presents the Beur scene as optimistic, insofaras it is characterized by a sense of anarchy, freedom, and energy. In another sense, however, it is self-defeating in its inability to find ways to integrate itself into the society and escape from its marginal situation. It is Shérézade who consciously sets out to discover ways to provide herself with a more structural basis in society, a basis that will enable her to survive on her own terms.5 The slightly optimistic, but still complex, picture of multiculturalism is not only vested in cultural heterogeneity, but is also explored in its historical and political dimensions. During her journey, Shérézade is time and again confronted with traces of France’s colonial past, not only in North Africa, but also in Africa as a whole, and in the Caribbean. The colonial past has resulted in a form of cultural diversity that now pervades the whole society. It was also in this period that the political tension in Europe as a whole increased because of militant groups (such as the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany and the Brigate Rosse in Italy) which, often out of solidarity with Third World liberation movements, attacked capitalism and its main symbols. Some of Shérézade’s friends in Paris sympathize with these groups and are fascinated by the independence struggles of the Algerians, Palestinians, and Angolese. Some of them are, in fact, linked to terrorist groups. In the end, Shérézade herself becomes a victim of this kind of violence and it is this experience that fully awakens her political awareness. Like Flora Tristan, she finds a cause to fight for. 5  Laronde, Autour du roman Beur.

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Images and Pictures In his study on the interpretation of visual images, Dominic Lopes states, “… pictures are at bottom vehicles for storage, manipulation, and communication of information. They put us in touch with our physical environment, especially our visual environment, often parts of it that are beyond our reach, across space or time.”6 Since negotiating her relationship with her physical and social environment is precisely what Shérézade aims at by undertaking her adventurous journey, it is not surprising that visual images play a crucial role in this process. This exploration of visual images is by no means a neutral and innocent activity. As Lopes stresses, pictures are not only meant for storage and communication, but also for the manipulation of information. Pictures are part of broader systems of representation, which are, to a certain extent, coherent and which determine the parameters of their potential meanings. This is one of the main tenets of Edward Said’s concept of orientalism, which not only surmises the existence of a discursive system of representations of the Orient, but also states that these systems are willfully used to impose certain images of the Other. The storage and distribution of visual images are a mechanism to legitimate and support ideological views and the actions deriving from them. Said’s vision engendered a wide range of studies and evaluations of European orientalist painting in the colonial context, and led to a variety of opinions about the political dimension of the genre. Some orientalist painters, such as Eugène Delacroix, are clearly linked to the French colonial expansion in North Africa, while others were not as interested in oriental exoticism as part of discourses of the Other, as they were in oriental aesthetics as such. The most prominent in the latter category was Henri Matisse, who was inspired by the aesthetics of North Africa and its spiritual dimension. In Matisse’s paintings, we can perceive that the representation of an oriental aesthetic through the realist images of traditional orientalists underwent a transition to the incorporation of this aesthetics in the work of the artist himself. After his journeys to Algeria and Morocco in 1906 and 1913, Matisse painted his famous series of odalisques, and also increasingly integrated oriental designs and ornamental art into his work, not to endow them with an oriental atmosphere or to ‘exoticize’ them, but because he had amalgamated oriental aesthetics with his own.7

6  Dominic Lopes, Understanding Pictures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 7. 7  Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, “Mise au carreaux (Le motif de l’odalisque de 1921 à 1935),” in Matisse et l’Alhambra, 1910–2010 (Patronato de la Alhambra y el Generalife/Sociedad Estatal

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In his study What do pictures want? W. J. T. Mitchell analyzes the power that pictures wield over their observer, as ‘living’ objects: The ancient superstitions about images – that they take on “lives of their own,” that they make people do irrational things, that they are potentially destructive forces that seduce and lead us astray – are not quantitatively less powerful in our time, though they are surely different in a qualitative sense…. That structure is not simply some psychological phobia about images, nor is it reducible to straightforward religious doctrines, laws, and prohibitions that a people might follow or violate. It is, rather, a social structure grounded in the experience of otherness and especially in the collective experience of others as idolaters.8 Mitchell investigates not so much what pictures mean or do, but rather what they lack, that is, their ‘surplus value’ that goes beyond communication, signification, and persuasion. This surplus is vested in the mythical and vital status of pictures, the suspicion that they are somehow alive, or more precisely, that they contain a ‘desire’ to be alive and to become part of the real world of the observer.9 We elaborate on these aspects of visual imagery because they touch on what is perhaps the main theme of Leïla Sebbar’s trilogy and on the way it relates to the concept of orientalism and to images of the Thousand and one nights. These aspects of visual imagery show, moreover, the intricate nature of the impact of images on psychological and social levels. From the beginning, Shérézade is aware of the dangers hidden in the nature of visual representation; in one of the layers that link the three novels, the main theme is her effort to establish her relationship to visual representation, that is, to establish her control of it as a mechanism to define her relationship with her social and cultural environment. After all, as we see, the system of representations and the ‘desire’ of pictures contain the danger of manipulation by others, but they also provide opportunities for the observer to come to grips with ‘otherness.’ In Shérézade, the first novel of the trilogy, Shérézade is confronted by the initial outline of the orientalist system of representation. Its focal point is Julien, who is fascinated by orientalist painting and who introduces Shérézade deCommemoraciones Culturales, s.l., 2010), see bibliography, 45–51; Rachid Boudjedra, Peindre l’Orient (Cadeilhan, France: Zulma, 2003). 8  W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 19. 9  Ibid., 6, 8–10.

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to such painters as Delacroix, Fromentin, Ingres, Matisse, and Chassériau. His interest in these painters is purely aesthetic; there is no explicitly political aspect to his obsession with the Orient. He is not interested in an oriental ‘reality,’ but only in the phenomenon of representation, which is, perhaps coincidentally, thematically filled by orientalist images. He is fascinated, too, by film, and he plans to write and produce a film with Shérézade in the leading role. She must play Zina, a “chef de bande, rebelle et poète, une insoumise habile au couteau, efficace en karate, intrépide et farouche, une mutante des Z.U.P., une vagabonde des blocs, des caves, des parkings et des rues, impregnable et redoubtable comme un chef de guerre …”10 Shérézade refuses because, after exploring the issue, she notices the duality of the medium of film: “C’était bizarre, comme s’il ne s’agissait pas d’elle. Celle qu’elle voyait n’était pas elle. Elle l’intéressait, mais à distance.”11 Shérézade’s dualistic attitude toward images generally and images of herself in particular is also revealed when she destroys the camera of a photographer who takes pictures of her and when she rips up the photos of her that Julien attaches to the wall.12 She only allows a photographer to take pictures when she is in control of the setting; in one case, she proves her control by drawing a pistol during the session.13 This tension between ‘orientalist’ images of Shérézade and the way Shérézade imbues them with violence and a sense of resistance, becomes ironic when, in Le fou de Shérézade, her photograph is spread across Beirut and her face appears on television when she is taken hostage by a Lebanese militia. The orientalist representation of a fictional, stereotypical female figure is contrasted with the ‘real’ image of a woman in captivity, threatened with death. She is told: “You will be a star, all over the world,” and: “They will want to redeem the princess and offer her a fabulous contract.”14 Thus, even in this precarious situation, the orientalist image continues to haunt her. The contrast between ‘real’ and ‘fabricated’ images is further explored when Shérézade is released and her friend Michel sees her on the street in Beirut and takes pictures of her while she is still blindfolded. He says that the photos will be published everywhere, because they are ‘authentic’: Si je fais un montage cinéma, je reprends des plans, c’est sûr, des faux, tu as raison … Mais là, ces photos, elles sont uniques parce qu’on ne peut 10  Leïla Sebbar, Shérézade: 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts (Paris: Stock, 1982), 218. 11  Ibid., 219. 12  Ibid., 123–124, 158. 13  Ibid., 153–155, 159. 14  Sebbar, Le fou de Shérézade, 103.

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pas penser à les fabriquer, c’est la surprise absolue, la réalité plus forte que la fiction … Ce qui passe dans la violence, c’est l’émotion, tu comprends, l’émotion … Je vais afficher ces photos et des groupes d’hommes, de femmes, d’enfants vont s’arrêter pour les regarder, attirés par la magie. Chaque fois qu’ils passeront devant, ils regarderont et personne n’aura l’idée de les graffiter, personne ou celui qui le ferait serait lynché comme sacrilège.15 Apparently, the authenticity of the images lends them a special, even totemic, force. They are sacred because they are real; this implies that they contain a vital power. The picture is not merely an image, it is ‘alive,’ it can be ‘hurt,’ intensifying the identification of the observers with the image. At the same time, Michel remarks: “You don’t look like a girl I have just photographed at all.”16 Shérézade, conceding, puts her blindfold back on and returns to the street to have some more pictures taken. In the various episodes about photography, Le fou de Shérézade shows how pictures are used as mechanisms to establish relationships between people, especially between individuals and their social surroundings, and it acknowledges the power that is vested in them. In each case, the main issues are, first, the relationship between the image and reality, and second, the question of who is in control of relating the image to the wider system of representation. These two issues determine the political dimension of the picture and the potential of Shérézade, as an individual, to use the picture in her negotiation with her environment. There is no neutral photograph, there is no neutral representation of reality. Reality is subjective and enacted, but by being considered realistic, photographs acquire the vital force that allows them to influence observers. But for an image to be realistic, there has to be some sense of who the real Shérézade is and the setting in which she represents her authentic self. Photography is only one of the visual media that Shérézade encounters and explores during her peregrinations. The other main medium is orientalist painting, and more specifically, the topos of the odalisque. The figure of the odalisque is an omnipresent stereotype of the orientalist imagination; it found its expression in painting in particular. A typical odalisque is a more or less undressed female figure, sitting or more often stretched out on a couch in a room without a window, with a backdrop of gleaming curtains, pillows, small tables, and oriental objects, such as water pipes, a stove, a wooden box, jewelry, etc. The figure usually lies with legs and arm stretched or spread in such a way 15  Ibid., 131. 16  Ibid.

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as to accentuate her sexual availability. Among the painters who introduced this topos, the most well-known are Delacroix and Philippoteaux, who made the odalisque an inextricable part of orientalist imagery and subsequently one of the focal points of anti-orientalist polemics. The painter who most systematically explored the topos of the odalisque was the aforementioned Henri Matisse, who in the period between 1918 and 1935 produced a series of more than twenty odalisque paintings. The odalisques are painted in various poses and against varying backgrounds, all in the familiar Matisse style, with bright colors, geometrical patterns, and in an impressionistic portrayal. They show certain elements of couleur locale, but they are certainly not efforts at realistic representation. Still, since the figure of the odalisque is deeply rooted in the European tradition of orientalist art, Matisse’s series, too, are anchored in the orientalist system of representations, with its connotation of colonial hegemony. The display of availability thus symbolizes, perhaps even legitimizes, Europe’s role in the oriental domain: It is invited to enter a society paralyzed by the sensuality, repression, and passivity of harem life and to revitalize it with its male power. By using the topos of the odalisque, therefore, it would seem that Matisse endorsed this combination of eroticism and colonial legitimacy. Still, Matisse’s odalisques are not without ambiguity. First, most of the paintings were made in his Parisian studio using a French model, Henriette Darricarrière, a friend of Matisse’s, wearing clothes that he had brought from Morocco. Photographs taken in 1921 show Henriette with Matisse himself dressed in oriental garb. This kind of dressing up was not unusual, of course, but in the case of Matisse, it may point to some specific notion behind the series of odalisques. It may foreshadow his effort not to present a realistic or iconographic image of the Orient or oriental women, as seen from the colonial perspective, but rather to represent the oriental or, more precisely, Moroccan aesthetics that appealed to his artistic temperament. They are a phase, then, in the gradual transition from the representation of the Orient to the incorporation of oriental aesthetics into the European system of representation. Matisse used his oriental examples to develop his own artistic style and language, which, ultimately, is not recognizable as orientalism, but which he developed with a deep understanding of oriental art and design. The complexity of Matisse’s interpretation of the topos of the odalisque helps to explain the function of his paintings in the novels of Leïla Sebbar. It is clear that Julien’s fascination for orientalist painting refers to the system of representation concerning the Orient as it developed in the European colonial tradition. He is enamored with a certain aesthetics, without being aware, or wanting to be aware, of its political implications and the unbalanced power

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relations that it reflects. His images are derived from a ‘classical’ orientalism, which he projects onto Shérézade. For him, Shérézade is the ideal woman because she fits his view of oriental women from the perspective of a western aesthetics. He does not see that this projection is, therefore, an idealization, a recreation of Shérézade in his own mind, and that it may be a form of prejudice that hampers his communication with her. Along with her suspicion of visual representation, as is shown by her reluctance to be ‘framed’ in photographs, Shérézade refuses to be identified with the women represented in orientalist art. Keeping a certain distance from Julien, she writes in her diary that she is not an odalisque. She realizes that if she accepts Julien’s love, she will have to conform to the ideal of the odalisque, with its erotic connotations, its idea of submissiveness, and the history of colonial relations that is inscribed in it. One of the reasons she leaves Paris seems to be her desire to escape from the position these kinds of images projected onto her, after she had managed to escape the images connected with women in the Algerian tradition. Both types of images are restrictive, reductionist, and not conducive to the shaping of her self-image that is based on her own experiences.17 In spite of her instinctive refusal, Shérézade remains interested in the phenomenon of the odalisque, perhaps because she realizes that in order to find her place vis-à-vis Julien, or, more importantly, to find her place in French society, she must come to terms with this kind of representation. Whether she likes it or not, these representations are connected to her; they refer to her and she must understand the nature of this connection in order to understand her relationship with her social surroundings. Thus, during her trip, described in Les carnets de Shérézade, she systematically studies the essence of the odalisque paintings, especially those by Matisse. Apparently, these are hybrid enough and have a sufficiently ambivalent relationship to reality for Shérézade to be able to ‘negotiate’ her attitude toward them, determine their oriental and European components, distinguish the aesthetic from the ideological intentions, and evaluate the relationship between eroticism and submissiveness. One of the factors that compels her to work to establish her own position in relation to these pictures relates to the question of the extent to which these are real or refer to a reality. Shérézade compares the women represented by orientalist painters with photographs of Algerian women that show a completely different image, one of defiant rather than submissive women. Still, she feels the force of these paintings, the desire that is invested in them to become 17  It is noteworthy that Sebbar edited several books about photography, including photography of North African women.

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a reality. They are made to impose themselves on the observers, to realize their own energy and vitality in the observer. Complying to this force, she experiments with wearing oriental clothes and turbans, and assuming erotic postures. She wants to experience to what extent she could possibly identify with these images, to which she is so forcefully exposed. She must establish to what extent she can become the reality that the images bear inside themselves, the realization of their desire to become real, in the sense of Mitchell’s theory referred to above. In this way, she can negotiate her relationship with the system of representations, and also with society at large, and this inevitably links her to this system of representations. It is, of course, significant that the whole question of stereotypical images takes place during Shérézade’s tour through France. Shérézade has detached herself from the environments that tie her to certain visual representations that are all, in a sense, false, and during her journey she collects the ‘material’ with which she will reconstruct her vision of herself, and the various perspectives from which this material can be interpreted. She draws a provisional, imaginary map that will guide her from the focal points where the system of visual representation is linked to her physical presence and the components of her social life; this enables her to reconcile the others’ image of her with her self-image. In the end, she finds a visual form that sufficiently conforms to her sense of reality, so that she can take part in the movie written by Julien. Narration Shérézade’s journey is not only embedded in a landscape of visual representations; it is also systematically related to various forms of narration, reading, and writing. This is, of course, not surprising, since narration as an act or a phenomenon is inseparably associated with the figure of Shahrazad. As may be expected, Shérézade’s experiences are embedded in a framework of texts, which, in various forms, establish links between the various components of her quest and provide a certain coherence. This narrative dimension finds expression on various levels: First, Shérézade’s experiences as a traveler, who has left a stagnant situation, crossed cultural boundaries, and is attempting to discover hidden components of her identity that are systematically linked to texts about or from historical counterparts. These all have a somewhat ambiguous nature or hybrid identity and explore the phenomenon of travel, with its sense of alienation and dissociation, and seek to discover its full significance. Travelers such as Marco Polo, Fromentin, and Loti are repeatedly mentioned as expressions of experiences of boundary-crossing and the urge to report about it in various ways. Shérézade is especially interested in the figures of Flora Tristan and Rimbaud, whose texts she reads and who are the models for her own quest. In

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them, she not only recognizes the incentives for her own journey, but also the psychological and emotional elements connected with the process of traveling itself. These models give meaning to her own peregrinations, too. Partly following these models, Shérézade herself is engrossed in forms of storytelling. This is especially elaborated in the second novel of the trilogy, Les carnets de Shérézade. The carnets refer to notebooks; Shérézade keeps a sort of diary, in which she comments on her readings of Flora Tristan and Rimbaud, and records her experiences as a traveler. Her writing is not intended to be preserved as an autonomous account of the journey and the mental development it represents; rather, it is a means to mark the progress she makes during the journey and it is a reminder of the significance of the places she passes through. Here, too, writing is a form of collecting, rather than an effort at representation. Shérézade is not a ‘writer’ in the autobiographical sense or even in the sense of those she imitates, as someone recording his or her life. Rather, she writes down fragments that link the textual embedding to the practice of her own journey, and she explores her own incentives and responses. A more conscious effort at reconstructing her journey as a signifying experience can be traced in Shérézade’s storytelling. In a clear emulation of Shahrazad, Shérézade offers to tell the truck driver stories along the way if he agrees to take her as a passenger. It is explicitly suggested that storytelling is also a life-saving stratagem used by Shérézade, a beautiful girl of seventeen, to ward off possible sexual harassment by the rather dour and unsophisticated driver, Gilles. As long as her stories please him, he is distracted from harming her and will continue to take her with him. Shérézade decides to tell him parts of her life story, especially about her adventurous trip from Paris to Marseille. In a fragmentary way, she tells him about the people she met, the dangers and friendships she experienced, and she thus gives him a picture of her encounters with various segments and aspects of French society. It is clearly a story of exploration and adventure, since she lets herself be guided by coincidence and the people she meets. Because Shérézade’s account of her journey to Marseille is explicitly presented as ‘storytelling,’ the ‘audience’ is uncertain about the truthfulness of her representation of the events. Gilles repeatedly expresses his doubt about the veracity of Shérézade’s stories, and the reader, too, is left in doubt about which parts of her story are true and which are not. Some episodes seem somewhat too adventurous, but could be true, or partly true. For example, she tells a story of three boys who want to force themselves on her, and she relates her encounter with a young writer who is writing a book whose main character is Shahrazad; but other episodes are dubious or clearly fabricated, such as the meeting with friends from Paris in unlikely places, and her conversations with the writer V. S. Naipaul and cinematographer Jean-Luc Godard.

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The report, then, is a mixture of reality and fantasy, aimed not only to hold Gilles’s attention, but also to allow Shérézade herself to reconstruct the journey in her mind in a certain way, to accommodate reality to her imagination and vice versa. There is no certainty that the story will reach its conclusion, or that Gilles will take her to her destination. This is also true in relation to the journey recounted in Shérézade’s stories, in which she continually finds herself in precarious situations as she roams through France depending on the help of people she meets by chance. The contingency of the journey merges with the contingency of storytelling. There seems to be no structuring force for the journey, or for the story; there is only Shérézade as a person at the center of the experiences, and her response to the situations in which she finds herself. The story constructs itself while the events unfold, in a simultaneous, half spontaneous process. The whole complex of narration, with its various dimensions that are closely linked to Shérézade’s exploration of France, as an exotic society that is also potentially familiar, is contrasted with Shérézade’s predicament in Lebanon. After she is captured by the militiamen, Shérézade asks them to let her keep her books, but the leader rips them up and leaves her with only a fragment. Later she asks him for books, and she is allowed to have a Qur’an and a Bible. In a counter move, she asks for books by the Syrian poet Adonis, the medieval historian Ibn Khaldun, and the ancient love story Majnun Layla. Later, she again asks for pen and paper, “so as not to die.”18 In this situation, reading and writing are necessary to survive, and the physical confinement and the prohibition of narration in the general sense is contrasted to the liberty of traveling in France, where she was able to read and write freely. This restriction also means that it is impossible for Shérézade to develop any sense of belonging in this oriental environment. There is no way to enter into negotiations; there are no focal points to interpret or incorporate into her narrative. Like visual representations, texts, too, are a medium that Shérézade uses to evaluate the potential meanings of her journey. Not only does she explore texts and their relationship to reality as she perceives it, she also uses writing as a way to collect and order her experiences and the effects these texts have on her. Here, too, the paradigm is the journey, the crossing of boundaries, the mingling of cultures and ethnicities, and ultimately the way to mold this mixture into a coherent form of authenticity. Identity It is clear in Sebbar’s trilogy – perhaps too clear – that the final goal of Shérézade’s peregrinations through France and Lebanon is to find a coherent 18  Sebbar, Le fou de Shérézade, 124.

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vision of herself as a person because she has become alienated from her cultural and historical background and wants to determine her place in French society. She must construct an identity that will enable her to preserve the components which are, perhaps, essentially alien to France, but which nevertheless are part of its history as well. These strange components alienate her from mainstream society, but on the other hand, they provide the opportunity for her to negotiate a way into society. It is for this reason that she undertakes her journey; to explore French society, find the ways in which her self-image is mirrored in French society, and to see if these can be used as openings through which she can establish an authentic relationship with this society. It is, of course, no coincidence that Shérézade begins her journey as a ‘missing person,’ that is, deprived of any pre-established identity apart from a general description of her appearance. She is the ultimate nomad; in Paris, she receives counterfeit documents. Her escape allows her a certain space to examine herself and her environment from a marginalized position. Being ‘incognito’ gives her the freedom to form herself from an almost blank identity. Shérézade’s name is a more stable parameter of her identity. Of course, the name Shérézade is familiar to everyone and whenever Shérézade introduces herself she is immediately associated with the famous storyteller and the world of the Thousand and one nights. Though her name is spelled differently from the Arabic, because the French official did not know how to write it when her father registered it, the connection is clear. Still, Shahrazad is by no means an unambiguous figure; during her triumphal ascendancy, she has crossed cultural boundaries, been shaped and re-shaped in literary texts and in visual images, and become a legend apart from the cultural contexts in which she first appeared. She has become, in particular, an icon of orientalism, a stereotypical image derived from the Thousand and one nights, one that has struck roots in the western imagination from the eighteenth century onward. The fame of Shahrazad thus immediately fills the blank space of Shérézade’s identity with connotations from the Thousand and one nights. In Europe, these connotations are, first and foremost, of an erotic nature. Shahrazad is primarily seen as a seductress who not only uses her gift of storytelling, but also her erotic talents to convince Shahriyar to spare her life. Since Shérézade is a ravishing exotic beauty, the association with Shahrazad immediately subjects her to these erotic connotations, and imposes a very specific, odalisque-like identity on her as an oriental woman. Shérézade refuses to comply with this imposed identity, which is derived from a confluence of visual and textual images; first, she rejects Julien’s advances, and second, she refuses to have her picture taken in the manner of oriental stereotypes. On the other hand, the familiarity of Shahrazad provides Shérézade with a link that connects her with

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French cultural tradition in a certain way; while it is an image that is filled with oriental stereotypes on the one hand, it also represents a site of struggle and negotiation, where views of the Other are constructed and re-constructed. Shérézade cannot escape this confrontation, but she can make use of the opportunities it provides. In addition to being a prototypical storyteller and an erotic icon, Shérézade is also associated with the struggle for female empowerment and womens’ ability to resist male oppression. Since she presents herself as a more or less blank, versatile personality, some of the people she meets tend to see in her their female idols of various kinds. For instance, Pierrot, a fellow squatter, names her Rosa, after Rosa Luxemburg; Kahina, the historical Berber princess; Olympia, the odalisque; Suzanna, a member of the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades); Leila, the ancient Arabian poetess; and Roxelane, the Christian spouse of the Ottoman sultan Sulayman. Of course, these are all historical heroines who fit Pierrot’s idea of the role of women in society and history, as fighters and revolutionaries who fulfill significant historical roles. The directly erotic component – the odalisque – is relatively secondary. Similarly, the role Julien envisages for her in his film is that of Zina, a ‘chef de bande.’ Again, Julien casts her as a militant heroine. As the context shows, apart from this, she must also meet the ideals of exotic oriental(ist) beauty. All these efforts to construct an identity for Shérézade show how her decision to abandon any pre-formed identity, by becoming a nomad and a missing person, creates a vacuum that enables others to project their vision of female identities onto her. First, these identities are associated with her name and her exotic beauty. Shérézade consistently rejects these projections and instead undertakes a journey to collect potential components of an identity herself. She sets up a framework of visual images and texts to generate a dialogue with her cultural and social environment, which she explores during her unbound and contingent journey through France and the Levant. In these experiences, she must first distinguish what is authentic from what is false, what is an expression of a genuine identity and what is the result of manipulation, political repression, restriction of free expression, vanity, and efforts to dominate her. Although she rejects fabrication, she comes to appreciate hybridity and the creative use of influences from various cultures to establish a new form of belonging and a new visual appearance of cultural freedom. As in the case of her exemplar Shahrazad, who used narration and imagination as a ‘space’ for negotiation, this process of collecting components of an identity is presented as a process of struggle and negotiation. In this process of negotiation, the constructed world of visual images and texts is the medium that enables her to gradually establish a relationship with the society around

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her. Although, on the one hand, it is already fixed and lends itself to repression and manipulation, on the other hand, the system of representations contains the elements that enable her to reshape it, to mold it in accordance with her own circumstances in such a way that she can find a place in it for herself. Her experiences in Lebanon and the concomitant political awareness which apparently brings coherence to the various components of her self-image are particularly helpful to her. It is only after she acquires this conviction that she agrees to perform in Julien’s film. Perhaps the contradictions related to the struggle for representation and authenticity are best expressed by the symbol of the ancient olive tree, which the film producers have uprooted to place it in a suburb of Paris as part of the requirements for the film. It seems absurd and even reprehensible to uproot an olive tree, the symbol of authenticity and endurance, historical continuity and rootedness, for a film, and then place it in such an alien environment. But it can also be argued that it is by making the film, a product of the imagination, that an olive tree is finally planted in Paris; it took this to transform the alien city into part of the authentic realm in a symbolic, but material way.

Waçiny Laredj: Les ailes de la reine

The themes of Leïla Sebbar’s Shérézade trilogy were largely determined by the political climate in France in the 1980s and especially by the debates about multiculturalism and the position of North African immigrants. These debates were linked to the colonial heritage of France and the aftermath of the process of decolonization. This link makes Said’s orientalism paradigm relevant for an analysis of the novels: Said emphasizes the connection between representation and political interests, the entanglement of political and cultural discourses defining the Other. In the trilogy, visual representation in particular attempts to impose a kind of identification on Shérézade, as part of a broader discourse of defining otherness. Shérézade combines these visual representations with textual explorations of otherness to conceive a strategy to resist dominant discourses. It would seem that the postcolonial critique in Said’s model is even more relevant for societies that were colonized by the European powers. Not only were these societies subjected to foreign domination, but they were also defined culturally within the paradigm derived from political and cultural discourses of colonialism. They were reshaped, so to speak, to conform to a specific societal and cultural ideal, which, needless to say, was in accordance with the economic and political interests of the colonial authorities. This reshaping

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has often been seen as a rupture in the ‘natural development’ of these societies; it represents a break in historical continuity because it imposed a form of modernity that was not in harmony with the society as it had developed historically and culturally. The societies were alienated from themselves by enforced processes of reform and modernization, in which cultural and historical authenticity was sacrificed for the sake of economic and political interests. Images of Self and Other were at the core of these discourses. The period of decolonization was marked by struggles for independence and the rise of nationalist ideologies in which new self-images were forged. The definition of identity was at the center of ideological debates, since historical and cultural identities legitimized political structures and entities. These were never self-evident, however, and were affected by the discourses of identity that were developed during the colonial period as part of the western views of its Other within a worldview organized to serve western economic interests. Since the processes of modernization could not be reversed, the redefinition of identities largely followed western paradigms, and adopted ‘authenticities’ which were often formulated in western terms. Nationalism, progress, economic development, and social justice became the slogans of the new postcolonial elites, who, in spite of their often-fierce rhetoric, profited from their ties with the former colonial powers. As we have seen in the case of Khatibi, discussed above, the postcolonial situation was marked by disruptions and possibilities, both of which were fields of intense ideological struggle. In this section we direct our attention to a novel by the Algerian writer Wasini al-A‘raj (Waçiny Laredj), most of whose work has been translated into French. His book, Sayyidat al-maqam: marathi al-djum‘a al-hazina (Les ailes de la reine; 1993), is not only an accomplished novel, but also a fierce political manifesto. Algeria’s long and complex colonial history is well-known. It was occupied by the French in 1830 and then administratively integrated into France as a province. Thus, it was opened up to French settlers and subjected to farreaching reforms to a much greater extent than Tunisia and Morocco, which were put under French authority in 1881 and 1912 respectively. It became part of France, but the Muslim population was nevertheless treated as culturally alien. The colonial imposition of modernity was shed during a long and bloody war of independence, which, clearly, disrupted the mutual visions of the Other and of the century-old colonial relationship. For both countries, the road to independence was nothing less than a national trauma. In spite of the new élan inspired by political independence, the contradictions that were woven into the fabric of society during the colonial period were not immediately neutralized. Perhaps the necessity of national development prevented a thorough reflection on the intricacies of national identity

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and cultural orientation. A secular nationalist government took control in the 1960s; this gradually became the center of a cluster of power in which the military, political, and economic elites were inextricably entangled. The coalescing of the various components of the power apparatus gradually destabilized the country and resulted in increasing repression. The deterioration of economic prospects, especially for the young generation, and the exclusion of large social groups from the mechanisms of power led to increasing social unrest in the 1990s and the rise of the Islamist movement Front Islamique du Salut (FIS; or Islamic Salvation Front). When, in the elections of 1991, the FIS gained a substantial victory, the democratic process was suspended. As a result, the armed militia of the Islamist movement, the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA; or Armed Islamic Group), adopted a violent strategy, inaugurating an excessively cruel civil war that launched a regime of terror and atrocity which lasted until the army defeated the GIA and President Bouteflika came to power in 1999. The main appeal of Islamism in Algeria may have been as a solution to the socio-economic inequality, repression, and lack of social prospects, but ultimately, at least in part, it took on the form of a struggle for the ‘soul’ of Algeria, its cultural orientation, and its historical identity. Secularism was seen not only as a threat to traditional social conventions, but also as a betrayal of Algeria’s identity, which, according to the Islamists, should be founded on the AraboIslamic heritage. Not surprisingly, the Islamists increasingly directed their rage against representatives of non-religious culture, such as artists, writers, and journalists. In the name of religion, all forms of secular cultural expression were severely repressed and even wiped out. Every attempt to start a debate was stifled and blocked by violence. Many intellectuals took refuge in France. It is the rise of the Islamist influence in Algerian society that is the background of Laredj’s novel Les ailes de la reine, which should be seen as an indictment of the Islamist assault on modern culture and art. As in Leïla Sebbar’s Shérézade trilogy, in Laredj’s Les ailes de la reine, the figure of Shahrazad also plays a central role, not as a character, but as an image, an artistic ideal. The background of the story is the onset of the Algerian civil war, or more precisely, the demonstrations and violent clashes in October 1988. The main protagonist, Maryam, happens to witness a truck attack on a police station, during the demonstrations. When the driver of the truck is shot, she rushes toward him to help him, but before she can do anything she is hit in the head by a bullet. Maryam survives, but the surgeons are unable to remove the bullet. She lives on, but must avoid sudden movements so that the bullet does not move. Since she is a dancer, this means that she must give up her performances, but she refuses to resign herself to inactivity. It is during this period of ‘death by installments’ that the story is told.

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Maryam was born just after independence, but grew up without knowing her father, who disappeared after the triumphal end of the war of independence, supposedly killed by the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS; Secret Army Organisation). It is possible, too, that he went away for some time and committed suicide when he returned and saw that his wife had remarried. Maryam does not get along very well with her stepfather and at a young age marries a young man working in the post office. When she is reluctant to give herself to him, he rapes her. Maryam leaves him and he becomes fanatically religious. In these circumstances, Maryam meets the narrator, an art historian and academic, who falls in love with her and becomes her companion. Before her marriage, Maryam’s neighbor Anatolia, a foreign woman, asks her to join her dance group, which practises and performs in a theater and regularly tours the country. Maryam is talented and develops a real passion for dance. Her performance of the ballet La Berbère, based on the life of the well-known Berber singer Fadhma Aït Amrouche, is a great success, and it is Maryam’s dream to perform the lead in a new ballet based on the piece Scheherazada by the Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov, which, of course, is inspired by the Thousand and one nights. As the preparations for the project are underway, the influence of the Islamists is on the rise. The first wave, called the ‘Beni Kalboun’ in the novel (literally ‘sons of dogs’), prepares the way for what is called the ‘Inquisiteurs,’ who harass people on the street, monopolize the mechanisms of corruption and depravity in society, and create an atmosphere of terror in the name of religion. In these discouraging circumstances, during the rehearsals for Scheherazade, Maryam is shot in the head. The omnipresence of the Inquisiteurs has a stifling effect on the city of Algiers, which is no longer a city, but “un je ne sais quoi prenant corps dans ce vide angoissant.”19 The buildings, streets, dance halls, theaters, and popular quarters lose their traditional ambience with the appearance of the Inquisiteurs, who install “le régime des vieux grimoires, de la lettre sacralisée, du redoubtable cimeterre.”20 The narrator complains that the Islamists have ‘stolen’ the city, which has become a scene of horror and is dying: “Plus rien n’y a de sens: ni les rues, ni les voitures, ni les gens.”21 Women walk around wrapped in “linceuls noirs. Il n’y a plus ni lumière, ni tendresse, ni passions.”22 It is the old guard, “artisans de mort,” who have “accaparé l’indépendance

19  Waçiny Laredj, Les ailes de la reine (Arles: Sindbad, 2009), 11. 20  Ibid., 11–12. 21  Ibid., 36. 22  Ibid., 85.

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du pays, érigé en système le mensonge et le vol,”23 who pave the way for the Inquisiteurs, who thrive on the disintegration of society. This apocalyptic vision of society is imposed on the city primarily at the expense of all expressions of culture. The Inquisiteurs purposely keep the people ignorant to impose on them their own rigid interpretation of the faith, while secretly fostering their own interests and corrupt practices: Les Benikalboun ont abruté les gens en disant: “Un homme qui pense, ça signifie un problème de plus.” Ils préparaient la voie aux “Inquisiteurs” qui, eux, dissent: “Un ignorant est quelqu’un qui nous est acquis. Alors noyons les gens dans la croyance, dans le monde des démons et des djinns, dans la crainte du Jugement dernier; faisons prospérer le marché noir et le trabendo, plus blanchissons l’argent. On va rallier les imams des mosques, les commerçants, les chômeurs et les trafiquants de drogue … Le Prophète n’était-il pas un commerçant?”24 They decree that the city can do without culture, since culture can be a source of subversion and they do not want anyone to ask questions about their power: “La culture, ont décrété les Benikalboun, est une calamité. Qu’en avons-nous à faire, de la culture? Là-dessus les ‘Inquisiteurs’ ont banni la danse, le théatre et la chanson.”25 Under their pressure the municipality confiscates the theater and closes it, because it “stimulates alienation and immorality”:26 “Les ‘Inquisiteurs,’ jour après jour, ferment des salles de spectacle, interrompent de force des soirées musicales, pousuivent les troupes théatrales, font le procès des écrivains dans les mosques. Une force rampante travaille à faire de la ville un désert.”27 Moreover, the expression of culture is conducive to contagion by western culture: “Ils auscultent les coeurs pour décréter en fin de compte que ces coeurs battent sous l’influence néfaste de l’étranger: ‘L’Occident! L’Occident! L’Occident!’”28 Culture is thus seen as a source of resistance to authority, a potential locus of moral criticism and political innuendo, but also as a Trojan Horse that allows the penetration of western culture. Significantly, the narrator contrasts the kind of cultural cleansing in the name of religious authenticity with another 23  Ibid., 199. 24  Ibid., 188. 25  Ibid., 27. 26  Ibid., 46. 27  Ibid., 39. 28  Ibid., 41.

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form of religion which is deeply rooted in Algerian culture, that of popular Islam and the veneration of saints. He complains: Les martyrs et les saints du pays sont morts, eux qui faisaient entendre leur voix sur les marchés populaires et dans les quartiers pauvres; ils sont parties, ceux qui avaient le coeur vaste comme la mer; capables de supporter le meilleur et le pire, hommes d’honneur à en mourir sans tégiverser.29 For the narrator, Maryam symbolizes the ideal of the city, bristling with life and energy: “[Maryam] était pour moi la ville, les arbres, les édifices, la passion, la brise rafraîchissante ou ardente dans ce vide envahi par la laideur. Elle était les gouttes de pluie cristallines venant revigorer mon corps. Elle était la mer solitaire avec ses ravages désertés.”30 Maryam is the dynamic force that resists the process of disintegration and decay, repression and devastation, the force of creativity and sincere passion. Although she does not involve herself in politics, it is impossible to avoid it. The symbol is transposed to Maryam’s condition: We all have a bullet in our head, “le triste poids de siècles désespérément arides. Ils nous ont laissé pour seul héritage une manière de mourir; nous avons jeté à la poubelle toutes les richesses de la vie et nous en sommes réduits à la balayer des rues pleines d’immondices.”31 Maryam’s death indicates a pessimistic view of the future. In spite of Maryam’s vigor and passion, the evil of the Inquisiteurs triumphs in the end. Maryam and Shahrazad The story of Les ailes de la reine is set in a site of struggle and contention, not only literally, in an environment filled violence and terror, but also symbolically, in a setting where worldviews and cultural attitudes collide. As in Leïla Sebbar’s Shérézade trilogy, the struggle is symbolically centered around the figure of Shahrazad, not its textual construction, or its visual representation, but in its evocation in music, in the piece Scheherazada by Nikolaj RimskyKorsakov. Here, too, the story revolves around a form of identification with a representation. Although here we cannot speak of an image’s ‘desire’ to be infused with vitality and to take possession of the observer, a similar process is depicted: Maryam desires to ‘become’ the Shahrazad of Rimsky-Korsakov so intensely that it can be seen inversely, as the music’s desire to manifest itself in 29  Ibid., 188. 30  Ibid., 34. 31  Ibid., 130.

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material form, to penetrate a human body that is open to it and to control its passions. Finally, Maryam’s susceptibility to the vitality of the musical image of Shahrazad makes the identification possible. In the following, we briefly discuss these aspects of Maryam’s gradual embodiment of Shahrazad; these not only determine its significance in the novel, but also show the close links between the story and the Thousand and one nights, including the question of authenticity, the issue of gender, and the narrative function of the ‘idea’ of Shahrazad in the story. Like Shérézade, the figure of Shahrazad is filled with meanings, some of which make use of her complex nature, which is constructed not only in the domain of textual sources, but also in the domain of the reception of these sources in the West, but also in forms of representation in other media, and as the embodiment of the force of the imagination. Maryam is anxious for her art to represent a form of cultural authenticity, and for it to be related to the Algerian cultural tradition. She recalls a previous performance, when she played a part in the opera The marriage of Figaro; this role did not suit her because she felt alien to the character she represented: “Mon corps était lourd, je ne me reconnaissais pas dans le personage. Nous voulons à tout prix incarner quelque chose coulant dans notre veines.”32 Then she performed the role of Carmen, which suited her better, since she acknowledged having “a little of Andalusia in my blood.”33 Subsequently, however, she and Anatolia decided to prepare a performance that was closer to their own cultural environment: “Il nous faut être beaucoup plus exigeants, présenter un spectacle propre au pays; il existe ici des merveilles à découvrir et à mettre en valeur.”34 This ballet was about the life of Fadhma Aït Amrouche, and the music was written by the Algerian composer Iguerbouchène. Anatolia thoroughly researched Fadhma’s life, and rehearsals took place in Kabylia. Maryam could easily identify with Fadhma: “Je l’ai dans le sang. Je sais la souffrance de ne pas connaître son père. Je me retrouve en elle: son présent, son passé, son exil.”35 The result was the ballet La Berbère, which was constructed with “composants de la patrie: langue, passions et aspiration.”36 The ballet was performed throughout the country to general acclaim, as an important ‘progressive’ expression of national culture. Her next project was even more ambitious and 32  Ibid., 60. 33  Ibid., 67. 34  Ibid., 59–60. 35  Ibid., 61. 36  Ibid., 60.

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more complex: She took the role of Shahrazad, not only because she is a part of authentic Arab culture, but also because it increases the intensity of the project in an apocalyptic cultural atmosphere: “Schéhérazade est pourtant de notre sang, qui s’est figé. Je le danserai, ce ballet, dussé-je y laisser ma tête. Je le danserai ici, sur cette terre brûlée òu le desert gagne sans cesse du terrain.”37 The new ballet not only expresses traditional culture, it also defends this culture and defies those who threaten it. This evidently enhances the intensity of peoples’ identification with it and the force of the emotions involved in it. It is perhaps strange that, in her struggle to discover authenticity in her art, Maryam turned to a work by a Russian composer, because it would seem to be infiltrated by artificial stereotypes and foreign perspectives, in line with western orientalism. Moreover, the piece was inspired by the Thousand and one nights, but not specifically by the figure of Shahrazad. In the words of RimskyKorsakov himself: The Program I had been guided by in composing Scheherazada consisted of separate, unconnected episodes and pictures from The Arabian Nights, scattered through all four movements of my suite; the sea and Sindbad’s ship, the fantastic narrative of the Prince Kalender, the Prince and the Princess, the Bagdad festival, and the ship dashing against the rock with the bronze rider upon it. The unifying thread consisted of the brief introductions to the first, second, and fourth movements and the intermezzo in movement three, written for violin solo and delineating Scheherazada herself as telling her wondrous tales to the stern Sultan.38 As for Rimsky-Korsakov’s orientalism, the Scheherazada suite is generally seen not as an effort to represent the Orient, but rather as a way to make use of oriental methods of form and structure to create an eastern atmosphere. This incorporation of oriental elements was not used to refer to exotic worlds, but to emphasize Russia’s partly oriental nature.39 Thus, the oriental elements were meant to stress a form of authenticity in Russian nationalism. RimskyKorsakov was considered the main exponent of the ‘Russian style’ in music – as

37  Ibid., 141. 38  Nasser al-Taee, “Under the Spell of Magic: The Oriental Tale in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade,” in Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum (eds.), The Arabian Nights in Historical Context Between East and West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 292. 39  Ibid., 273.

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opposed to western styles – and oriental themes became a ‘signifier’ for being Russian.40 Of course, these considerations were too rationalistic for Maryam; instead, she recognizes her own predicament in the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, “qui ne s’est pas trompé quand il a lu notre souffrance d’Orientales dans les yeux de cette femme. Mon rêve se réalisera avec Schéhérazade. Ensuite la mort peut venire.”41 What is more, Maryam sees Rimsky-Korsakov as a fellow artist, in circumstances similar to hers, as an “observateur lucide d’un siècle en déclin,” who “a suscité un réveil de la vie à partir des dépouilles d’un Occident décadent. Ah! qu’il est triste d’être étranger dans son propre pays.”42 Thus, the figure of Shahrazad not only has roots in Algerian culture, but also contains some universal elements that link specific situations in western and Arabic history. The Russian composer’s input into the idea of Shahrazad does not weaken or dilute it, but rather strengthens it and makes it even more penetrating. There is no fear of hybridity or contagion, since the image of Shahrazad he composed is the expression of a historical condition, of feelings of alienation, of sincere emotions, and experiences. As noted, Shahrazad’s authenticity is enhanced by her posture in defiance of injustice and as a defender of the women of the empire. She is the latest in a row of defiant women who suffered but survived through their strength of character and their refusal to be victimized. Maryam explicitly links this defiant role to the gender aspect of the political confrontations in which she – unwillingly – became involved. Maryam grew up without a real father and with a nondescript stepfather; she was unhappily married to a violent man; and in the streets, she is harassed by the Inquisiteurs, who want to subject her to strict behavioral rules. When she is addressed by an Inquisiteur as ‘woman,’ she becomes furious and fulminates: “‘Toi, un homme? A quel titre? Que signifie être un homme dans un pays qui a perdu sa virilité? Que signifie pour la femme être femme dans un pays òu tout le monde est efféminée?’”43 This signification of Shahrazad as a woman defying the injustice of men in the context of a decaying society, completes her identification with Shahrazad. Like Shahrazad, she insists that she can make decisions about her own life. Maryam is even defiant in death; she chooses death “… en plein récit de la dernière nuit dans la salle de danse: elle se laisse emporter par sa passion pour le ballet de Rimski-Korsakov

40  Ibid., 266, 270. 41  Laredj, Les ailes de la reine, 60. 42  Ibid., 141. 43  Ibid., 29.

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et elle, Schéhérazade, affronte le tyran frustré qui avait juré de la décapiter. Dieu te maudisse, Chahriyar!”44 The extent to which Maryam identifies with Shahrazad is greatly expanded by her ‘condition.’ The bullet resting in her head is a kind of death warrant, a death sentence in installments. She is allowed to live on in a kind of extended lifetime, with the threat of death always looming. She realizes this: “Aujourd’hui ai-je apprivoisé la mort, ou la mort m’a-t-elle apprivoisée?”45 She also understands that her predicament enables her to not only identify with Shahrazad, but even to embody her.46 A former dancer who performed the role in 1954 was inferior to her, because she did not have a bullet in her head.47 It is as if this is the only role left for her, on the stage, but in life as well; she has already become Shahrazad, now she must perfect her role: “Elle veut être Schéhérazade: non pas le personage livresque, mais l’être vivant qu’elle connait intuitivement, qu’elle a dans le sang, qu’elle incarne avec passion.”48 First she must fully become Shahrazad, then she can die. Inevitably, during her performance the bullet begins to move. Her passion to be Shahrazad is stronger than her will to live. She resists the oppressors and those who destroy life by jeopardizing her own life. In contrast to Shahrazad, in the struggle between art and imagination and violence, art will be the victim. On Maryam’s deathbed, the narrator reads stories to her, as if to extend her life, but in vain. The performance itself was a “victoire du conte sur le discours,”49 but finally Maryam/Shahrazad succumbs. One final parallel is drawn with Algerian society: “La ville donne l’impression d’être promise à une destruction programmé de longue date.”50 The mobilization of culture may be a strong weapon against the politics of repression and corruption; in contrast to the Thousand and one nights, it is by no means certain that the imagination will triumph.

∵

It is no coincidence that Maryam, in Les ailes de la reine, and Shérézade, in Leïla Sebbar’s trilogy, both have green eyes. This signifies that they are irresistible, as women and as icons of beauty. This characteristic of irresistibility determines their narrative lives. On the one hand, other people are attracted 44  Ibid., 12. 45  Ibid., 137. 46  Ibid., 130. 47  Ibid., 139. 48  Ibid., 148. 49  Ibid., 162. 50  Ibid., 232.

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to them, thus they are compelled to respond and communicate, or to withdraw and resist. They must deal with peoples’ almost inevitable attention and wish to interact. Second, it implies that they are capable of causing responses in other people, whom they approach and confront. They can provoke communication when they choose to. It is this dual power that endows them with their signifying function in the narratives in which they act. Wherever they are, they enter into a ‘dialogical’ situation that engenders the necessity to interpret and to negotiate. Wherever they appear, some form of ‘meaning’ emerges. In the novels, the ability of Maryam and Shérézade to provoke communication is even extended to the realm of images and representations. They seem to have a natural bond with textual, visual, and aural forms of representation, first, because they are associated with images by others, who incorporate them in their systems of representation; second, because they are themselves fascinated by various aspects of representation; and finally, because, by some mysterious power or lack of power, they provoke the desire of images to assimilate with them, to take possession of their vitality and become ‘real.’ Thus, their power to signify is not limited to dealing with living people, it extends to ‘living’ images as well. The ability to interpret and negotiate meanings is not restricted to the social domain alone, it also involves the domain of signs. They challenge systems of representation and embody the reshaping of these systems. These capacities link Maryam and Shérézade to the figure of Shahrazad in the Thousand and one nights. Shahrazad is also a signifying force who uses her imaginative power to evoke a vision of the world that educates Shahriyar and neutralizes his violent inclinations at the same time. She negotiates with him and her interpretations enable her to find a position of safety and authority for herself, one that defies a repressive system. Shahrazad becomes the priestess of signification by reshaping reality by the force of her imagination and by interpreting the acts and lives of others through her narration. Shahrazad, like Maryam and Shérézade, puts her life and body at risk to make the signifying process possible; only the narrating body is powerful enough to challenge existing systems of meaning. Interpretation is linked to confrontation, to experience, to physical presence. It is the body which ultimately provides a link between imagined, interpreted, reality, and reality itself. Shahrazad is also inextricably integrated into systems of representation. She has been represented and re-represented myriad times, textually, visually, and musically. She has been filled with all kinds of meanings because she appears to comprise them all, from wisdom to beauty, from one vogue to another. Her representations became the site of debate and polemics, since no form of representation is innocent. Her imagery became even more intriguing when it crossed cultural, linguistic, and political boundaries, and underwent

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numerous transformations on the way. If someone is so fluid and susceptible to metamorphosis, what is her/his authentic nature? This is, in particular, the answer that Shahrazad seems to escape from. She cannot be defined; she can be ‘filled’ with multiple meanings and characteristics, or with just one. She is continually changing and cannot be pinned down in a specific, authentic, shape. This is the power she has, which has enabled her to survive. Maryam and Shérézade embody Shahrazad because they, too, are polymorphous; they exist on both sides of boundaries, and are continually on the move. They do not fear their own hybridity, because they do not experience hybridity as something negative in itself. Hybridity can be linked to universal values and thereby become a new form of authenticity. It is this dynamism which they set in motion, steer, and use to demarcate their own mental and social spaces. They embody the figure of Shahrazad precisely because it is ultimately empty and is the site of contradictions and struggles. Like others before them, they create their own Shahrazad in themselves, they use her many appearances and guises, the responses of others toward her, and her flexibility in taking different shapes to challenge imposed authority. They try to escape in order to be more forcefully present and to reshape their own and others’ visions of themselves.

Conclusions to Part 5

In the first chapters, we looked at the influences of the Thousand and one nights on narrative strategies, concepts of narrative and textuality, and the manipulation of spatiotemporal structures in the texts. Although these issues are also relevant in this chapter, here we focused more on the element of representation and the uses of exoticism. We discussed a number of modernist and postmodernist authors who use exoticism as a means of identification, especially the imagining of a Self as an Other, or the conditions of the Self as represented in oriental images, and as a means of distancing oneself, to emphasize the differences between a familiar Self and an exotic Other. These identifications concern iconic figures of the Thousand and one nights, particularly those that contain specific, essentialized properties, which lend themselves to identification because they are narrative elements rather than realistic characters, or because they are themselves part of a ‘twin’ of some kind or another. The function of these identifications and embodiments is, as Edward Said suggests, the formation of a self-image through the use of counter-images of the Other. However, the effect is always to bring to the fore an essential split in all self-images; the ‘foreign’ elements in everyone’s psyche; the Other within the Self; and the ‘schizophrenia’ inherent in all cultural encounters.

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These identifications inevitably lead to an awareness of hybridity, to the opening of a cultural space that breaks the homogeneity of familiar cultural space and thus criticizes monolithic cultural and political discourses. In particular, this can be seen in the work of Jünger, Krúdy, Sebbar, and Laredj, who problematize certain self-images constructed in their societies. The insertion of an oriental Other delimits an arena for negotiation and renewed cultural dynamics. For Sebbar, Pamuk, and Krúdy this negotiation is even more poignant, since they consider the ‘Orient’ as a crucial part of their cultural identity. It is evident why the Thousand and one nights has inspired so many authors to embark on these kinds of experiments. It is not only that the figures of Shahrazad’s stories struck roots so deeply in European society that they acquired iconic status, as the example of Aladdin shows; it is also because the hybridity and the literary tropes these figures represent can be related to the act of narration. They are both ‘narrated’ figures and ‘narrating’ figures, and as such they represent the essence of storytelling. What is more, they are storytellers who, through their story, break free of the confinement of narrow self-representations and realize the dream of becoming someone else.

Part 6 Aftermaths: The Delusions of Politics

⸪

⸙ Some modern scholars have praised Antoine Galland as the ‘inventor’ of the Thousand and one nights, or its ‘discoverer,’ without whose efforts this literary masterpiece would have been lost to humanity. It is assumed that as a result of negligence and disinterest in the Arab world, it had become ‘homeless.’ This view does little justice to the work as an autonomous text in the Arabic literary tradition, whether oral or written. It is plausible that there was an audience for the Thousand and one nights in the Arab world in the period just before European interest in the work was aroused at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and there is some evidence that Shahrazad was known in the circuits of storytellers. Still, very little material has been preserved from this period, and it is noteworthy that after the unprecedented enthusiasm for the Nights in Europe, as a result of Galland’s translation, an upsurge of interest in the work occurred, especially in Egypt. It is, as yet, unclear to what extent the European appreciation – and demand – for the work contributed to the increase in production of manuscripts of ‘modern,’ ‘complete’ versions of the Nights. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a number of manuscripts of the Thousand and one nights were produced by Egyptian workshops,1 some of which were sold to European orientalists. The manuscript contained the old core of the collection, the 280 nights known from the Galland manuscript, supplemented with a diverse compilation of material taken from other sources and collections. In 1835, this version became the basis for the so-called Bulaq editions, printed on the first Egyptian printing press in Bulaq, Cairo, and edited by a certain Shaykh al-Sharqawi. Whatever the previous interest in the Nights may have been, this new phase in its textual history gave a huge impulse to its distribution and fame in the Arab world. The eighteenth-century version, as printed in the Bulaq edition, became a modern ‘vulgate’ which was reprinted many times afterward, often in bowdlerized versions, and which served as the basis for many European translations.2

1  Élise Franssen, “Les manuscrits de la recension ‘egyptienne des Mille et une nuits: étude codologique avec édition critique, traduction et analyse linguistique et littéraire du conte de Jânshâh,” PhD dissertation (Université de Liège, 2011–12). 2  For the history of Thousand and one nights editions, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, vol. 2.

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Apart from the question of European interference in this phase of the textual history of the Thousand and one nights, we must reflect on two important questions concerning these later versions of the text. The first is related to the provenance of the supplementary material. Although it is plausible that several of the stories that were added to the old core are of an ancient date, they were probably added to the text in a late redaction. Part of the material was taken from anecdotes circulating in adab literature, the canonical corpus of prose literature in highly stylized language and prescribed forms, while another part seems to be related to the oral tradition of romances and stories of chivalry. Some stories were already known in Europe, in some form or another, through the translations of Ottoman texts by Pétis de la Croix, Comte de Caylus, and Jacques Cazotte. This material contains stories that indicate a Persian or Turkish origin, and it is not unlikely that they reveal a new pattern of literary influences engendered by recent translations of stories from India and Central Asia into Ottoman and Arabic. The Ottoman imperial court, after its establishment in the sixteenth century, may have provided a bridge between the eastern and western Islamic worlds; it certainly stimulated the collection and translation of all kinds of fictional and non-fictional texts. It is mainly through this pivotal role of the Ottomans that the eighteenth century witnessed the proliferation and exchange of literary material across large parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. A second question concerns the appreciation of the ‘modern’ Thousand and one nights in the Arabic literary tradition. Since the stories did not conform to the strict norms of adab, they were usually, together with the corpus of Mamluk epics (siras) disqualified as ‘popular literature.’ This does not mean that the stories were not appreciated, of course; it only suggests that they did not meet the standards of highbrow literature that was the core of the literary tradition. It is no coincidence that the material of the Nights was used to build the new movement of Arabic theater in the second half of the nineteenth century, since, as ‘popular literature,’ it could easily be re-shaped into plays performed before a wide audience. At first these plays were more like vaudeville revues, but over time the material was increasingly used for full-fledged stage comedies. These plays reveal the potential of the Nights for supporting the development of ‘modern’ forms of literature. On the one hand, the material was drawn from the indigenous Arabic tradition, and although the European appreciation for the Nights probably enhanced its literary status, using it was not deemed a surrender to European influence; on the other hand, the stories were suitable for a general audience and could be adapted to modern tastes, styles, and formats. It was not restrained by the formal straitjacket of the

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classical tradition. Thus, as in other literary traditions, in Arabic literature, too, the Nights seemed to be an ideal starting point for literary renewal.3 The modern Arab interest in the Thousand and one nights culminated in 1943, in a dissertation about the Nights at the newly founded University of Cairo written by the first female graduate student, Suhayr al-Qalamawi. This dissertation definitively accepts the Thousand and one nights as a part of the Arabic literary tradition, and discusses historical, textual, and narratological aspects of the work; it represents the first comprehensive study on the subject, and reveals some of the ambiguities surrounding the work. For instance, the dissertation was supervised by the great Egyptian writer and reformist intellectual Taha Husayn and his teacher, the German orientalist Enno Littmann, who had published a German translation of the Nights, accompanied by several studies, in 1921–26. In addition, al-Qalamawi, who was well-known as a storyteller on Egyptian radio, stressed the classification of the Thousand and one nights as ‘popular literature,’ but added, however, that following European scholars, she considered popular literature a serious subject of academic research. She begins her study with a discussion of European scholarship and the European appreciation of the Nights in order to underline her claims. Taha Husayn, too, referred to European orientalists to support the claim that the Nights was a fertile area for research.4 The position of the Thousand and one nights in the modern Arabic literary tradition was definitively established by three works by two prominent intellectuals; these works were structurally and thematically related to the Nights and confirmed the suitability of the work as a model for modern literature and thought. These works were the philosophical theater play Shahrazad (1934) by Tawfiq al-Hakim, the novel al-Qasr al-mashur (‘The enchanted palace’; 1936), a co-production of Tawfiq al-Hakim and the aforementioned Taha Husayn, and the short novel Ahlam Shahrazad (The dreams of Shahrazad; 1943) by Taha Husayn. These texts paved the way for a large number of theatrical texts and prose fictions, especially in Egypt, based on concepts, characters, and themes from the Nights. As we see, these texts used the motif of despotism to criticize the dictatorial Egyptian regime. In the following sections, we discuss, first, the three works by Tawfiq al-­ Hakim and Taha Husayn mentioned above, and then move on to analyze a novel by the important Egyptian novelist and winner of the Nobel prize for 3  For the Thousand and one nights in Arabic theater, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 2:717–720. 4  Suhayr al-Qalamāwī, Alf Layla wa-layla (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1976).

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literature in 1988, Najib Mahfuz, titled Layali alf layla (Arabian nights and days; 1982). The shared motif of all these works is the lives of Shahriyar and Shahrazad after she is acquitted by the king. This is also the main motif in the novels by Hani al-Rahib and Rachid Boudjedra, which are subsequently discussed, and which are not set in the time of Shahrazad, but rather imagine that the spell of Shahrazad continues to haunt the modern Arabic world. We conclude with a brief analysis of two curious works by the Moroccan poet Mostafa Nissaboury and the Iranian playwright Bahram Beyzaï. The main theme connecting all the works in this part is the disillusionment with the delusions of politics.

Chapter 18

The 1002nd Night: Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Husayn, and Najib Mahfuz The first half of the twentieth century was a period of great political and intellectual ferment in the Arab world in general and in Egypt more specifically. Various political movements were resisting foreign domination and carving out the contours of national entities. In Egypt, the nationalist revolution of 1919 prepared the way for a complex power struggle between political factions and the British administration, in which rival ideologies, class interests, and foreign economic forces contributed to a new ideological configuration, a new social awareness, and a new sense of identity. In this struggle, the nature of the cultural tradition, as the constituent element of an emerging national identity, became a subject of debate. Sources of cultural identity were rediscovered, reexamined, and perhaps, reinvented to justify and determine the boundaries of a national community. The debate was partly the culmination of the process of nahda (or ‘renaissance’), which began in the nineteenth century and involved a broad cultural self-examination in order to redefine Egypt’s cultural orientation and revitalize the wealth of the cultural heritage. During this period of upheaval, Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898–1987) wrote his celebrated theater play Shahrazad (1934). In a sense, Tawfiq al-Hakim personifies the many contradictions of his lifetime, the political vicissitudes, and especially, the burgeoning nation’s search for cultural roots and a cultural identity. This intellectual endeavor, combined with an astonishing productivity, made Tawfiq al-Hakim one of the doyens of Egyptian culture, together with such figures as Taha Husayn and Najib Mahfuz. These literati not only laid the foundations of the modern tradition of Egyptian, and even Arabic, literature, but also represent the hegemonic tendencies in the broader cultural debate. Here we concentrate on Tawfiq al-Hakim’s play Shahrazad as an example of the author’s thinking about his literary sources; we focus on the main narrative model of the play, the Thousand and one nights, and on the way in which he used this source to conform to his perception of the tragic element of drama. Parallels and differences between the play and the stories of the Thousand and one Nights relate to Tawfiq al-Hakim’s quite original distinction between Greek and Egyptian forms of tragedy. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Arab world’s encounter with western political, economic, and military hegemony unleashed a debate © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_020

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on the condition of Arabic and Islamic culture. This debate was aimed, primarily, at formulating responses to western dominance and what was seen as the failure of Arab societies to keep up with the European model of modernity. To achieve this, first, the sources of western power – in the fields of science and technology, social and political organization, and philosophical and cultural concepts – had to be examined. Second, the Arabic-Islamic tradition had to be subjected to an intensive process of reinterpretation, to determine its potential for modernization, to see what components were necessary to secure cultural continuity, and to find ways to use indigenous sources to establish a new sense of identity. In the course of time, the complexity of these efforts was revealed as the cultural tradition was found to be far from monolithic and unambiguous: it showed a rich configuration of components which were part of an inherited identity and which, in many ways, resisted the easy incorporation into a ‘modern’ vision of life. For Egyptians, the main constituents of a common identity derived from diverse historical currents: some intellectuals stressed Egypt’s heritage from Pharaonic times as typically, and exclusively, Egyptian. Others stressed the Arabic component of Egypt’s tradition as that which had shaped language and literature. Still others thought the Islamic component was most significant and essential for Egyptian culture; finally, some advocated the importance of preserving the link with the Ottoman-Turkish political framework. These diverse elements were not only evoked to revitalize the indigenous culture in response to western hegemony, but they were also reinterpreted as a possible basis for cultural renewal, a foundation that could be used to maintain a sense of authenticity, and combined with influences from the West. Some were more rigorously inclined to adopt western models of life and society as the best means to shake off European tutelage. Although the various ideological strategies crystallized into political groups that competed with each other, sometimes vehemently, the question of identity remained complex and vague for all currents, as radical Islamist movements recognized the necessity of reform, while hard-core secular intellectuals would not relinquish their rich cultural heritage.1 We are justified in saying that, to a large extent, Tawfiq al-Hakim personified the debate on cultural orientation. He was well-versed in Arabic literature when he set out to study in France in the 1920s. During his formative years there, he absorbed an enormous corpus of western literature and philosophy; this process imbued his view on literature and life significantly. He stressed 1  For an introduction to intellectual currents in the nahda period, see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1938 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).

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the Islamic contribution to western civilization, but deplored the fact that the influence of ancient Greek thought on Islamic culture had remained limited to philosophy and science, and did not extend to belles-lettres and, especially, the theater. He also felt inspired by the ancient Egyptian worldview, which for him supplemented the geniuses of European, Greek, and Arabic civilizations. His visions combined a proclivity toward ‘enlightenment,’ expressed in Greek and European notions of political freedom and human rights, and an ‘eastern’ sense of religiosity that infused Arabic-Islamic culture and enriched western forms of humanism. Tawfiq al-Hakim’s outlook on culture was focused on the theater, and more specifically on a conceptualization of the idea of ‘tragedy.’ In his comments on his own work, Tawfiq al-Hakim distinguishes various approaches to the concept of the ‘tragic’; first, he mentions the Greek notion as reflected in the works of the great tragedians, which are marked by man’s futile struggle against the forces of fate. According to al-Hakim, an awareness of religiosity is essential to the sense of fate, which acknowledges forces beyond man’s power and comprehension – forces that steer the course of his life. It is this essential feature that is lacking in European forms of tragedy, which were shaped by the humanist vision and were thus confined to the psychological and emotional struggles of man. Religiosity was replaced by a belief in the sovereignty of the will; this meant that western theater lost the fundamental quality of the tragic. Finally, al-Hakim identifies a specifically Egyptian notion of the tragic, which is not, as in Greek theater, focused on the struggle between man and the forces of fate, but rather on man’s efforts to overcome the limitations of space and time.2 In accordance with these views, Tawfiq al-Hakim holds that only an easterner can understand the essence of tragedy, since eastern people have preserved the essential component of religion. He deplores the refusal of Islamic culture to absorb the theatrical concepts of the Greeks; if the link between Islamic and Greek culture had been maintained, Arabic culture, and through it European culture, would have been enriched. He denies that Islamic culture is unable to sustain a conception of the tragic, as some claimed, and said that it is a mistake to think that Muslims believe in forms of predestination. Thus, the cultural concepts that al-Hakim summarizes are all potentially susceptible to the tragic; it is not surprising then, that al-Hakim was inclined to search for a synthesis. He seemed to prefer the Egyptian notion, however, as he states that the ancient Egyptians would have written theater from the same perspective 2  On al-Hakim’s plays, see Richard Long, Tawfiq al-Hakim: Playwright of Egypt (London: Ithaca Press, 1979), 13; William M. Hutchins, Plays, Prefaces and Postscripts of Tawfiq al-Hakim (Boulder: Lynne Riener Publishers, 1981), 273–275, 277, 280, 283.

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as he did, if they had engaged in the theatrical genre. In his plays, al-Hakim attempts to reconcile these various traditions, which shaped his world vision and which also form an ideal balance between general concepts and specific configurations: it is only in Egypt that such combination of tragic concepts can originate. The Thousand and one Nights is among al-Hakim’s sources that are derived from the Arabic literary tradition. He followed the example of playwrights in the second half of the nineteenth century who used the material of the Nights for their performances. Playwrights such as Marun al-Naqqash and Ahmad Abu Khalil al-Qabbani drew from the tales of the Nights, both for strong plot structures and for comic elements. Moreover, in order to gain the interest of the audience, the playwrights preferred to rework indigenous sources taken from their own cultural and literary heritage. The Thousand and one nights thus greatly contributed to the birth of modern Arabic theater. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the Thousand and one nights remained an important source of inspiration for Egyptian playwrights and theatrical producers. This interest in the Nights may have been initiated by Tawfiq al-Hakim, who wrote to a friend, complaining about the inclination of Arab authors to confine their admiration to ‘high literature’: “To this day, popular literature has remained unrecognized in the history of Arabic literature. An immortal work like the Thousand and one nights, acknowledged by every nation in the world … this exalted work of art has not been openly acknowledged by a single Arab writer.”3 Throughout his life, the Thousand and one nights was an important reference for Tawfiq al-Hakim who, at an early stage in his career, wrote an operetta entitled ‘Ali Baba,’ completed in 1926, and, as noted, compiled a novel with Taha Husayn (al-Qasr al-mashur; 1936) modeled after the Thousand and one nights. Several of Tawfiq al-Hakim’s plays incorporate references to or elements from the Thousand and one nights, including Solomon the wise (1943), The cavemen (1933), and Bayt al-naml (1969). In Sultan al-zalam (Sultan of darkness; 1941), a collection of essays, he uses Shahrazad as a symbol for ‘truth’ as opposed to oppression and the ‘darkness’ of tyranny. However, his most important work in this respect is Shahrazad (1934), which still counts as one of Tawfiq al-­Hakim’s major works. Tawfiq al-Hakim himself claimed that one of the aims of the play was to break down the barriers between ‘high literature’ and popular literature by using folkloric models for an intellectually appreciable work, thus, philosophical contemplations could become accessible to a broad audience. 3  Cited in Paul Starkey, From the Ivory Tower: A Critical Study of Tawfiq al-Hakim (London: Ithaca Press, 1987), 184–185.

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This was al-Hakim’s response to some of his critics who regarded his plays as mere intellectual acrobatics that could not be satisfactorily presented on stage. However, al-Hakim’s claim is hardly convincing, since Shahrazad marks a clear break with the previous, playful, echoes of the Thousand and one Nights, and is, first, an intellectual exploration and not a form of comical social criticism. In what way, then, did he rework the Thousand and one Nights into this ambitious play, how did he reinterpret it, and how did it fit into Tawfiq al-Hakim’s intellectual ambitions?

Tawfiq al-Hakim: Shahrazad

The play Shahrazad consists of seven scenes, staged, respectively, on a desolate road, in the king’s palace, the palace hall, the wilderness, the king’s hall, Abu Maysur’s tavern, and Shahrazad’s boudoir. Most of the scenes take place at night, at sunset or at dawn. Besides Shahriyar and Shahrazad, the number of characters is limited to a magician and his daughter, a serf, the king’s executioner, Abu Maysur the tavern keeper, and Qamar, the king’s vizier. The narrative of the play Shahrazad is presented as a sequence to the well-known frame story of the Thousand and one Nights: Shahrazad has finished her storytelling and cured Shahriyar from his obsession, which drove him to marry a virgin every night and have her executed in the morning. However, instead of being transformed into a faithful and responsible husband and father, Shahriyar has become ‘insane.’ The stories have transformed him from a ‘body without a heart, matter without spirit’ into a human being, but, curiously, he is no longer interested in Shahrazad’s physical beauty and is obsessed by the longing to know ‘who she is.’ It is as if ‘another infinite horizon has been revealed to his inner eye,’ and this prompts him to roam the world in a tireless quest for knowledge. Shahriyar compares Shahrazad to nature, which displays its beauties, but veils its secret. It is this secret, the essence of Shahrazad’s being, which he insists on knowing, but Shahrazad reprimands him; she claims to be completely transparent and accuses him of insanity.4 During one of his journeys, Shahriyar is accompanied by his vizier Qamar, to whom he explains that his peregrinations are caused by his liberation from his bodily drives. He has come to loathe human bodies, and the prison of physical yearning. Qamar, who is a paragon of reason and common sense, tries to persuade him to return to the palace and abandon his tireless quests; ironically, he tried to appease Shahrazad to effectuate a reconciliation between the two. 4  Hutchins, Plays, Prefaces and Postscripts.

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In despair, Shahrazad provokes Shahriyar and stages a kind of déjà-vu for the king, hoping in this way to restore him to his senses. She invites a humble serf to come to her boudoir, where Shahriyar, upon his return, finds him. But, instead of becoming infuriated and killing the serf, Shahriyar merely sends him away. He is no longer susceptible to the passions of love and jealousy. Shahrazad acknowledges that she has failed and Shahriyar, as she formulates it, remains ‘suspended between heaven and earth.’ Qamar, meanwhile, kills himself with the sword of Shahriyar’s former executioner. As the title indicates, the central figure of the play is Shahrazad, although more attention is directed to Shahriyar’s strange mental condition. Each of the characters sees his main disposition reflected in the queen: the serf lusts after her beautiful body; the vizier, who is in love with her, praises her intellect and sensitive heart; Shahriyar, finally, discerns a hidden truth inside her, which she is unwilling to reveal and which causes him to flee his material existence. Shahrazad states that they all see her as the ‘mirror of their souls’; they detect in her the essence of their own natures. She is a kind of neutral entity, in which the other protagonists project their inner urges. In spite of her extensive storytelling, Shahriyar has not come to know her; it appears that she has only awakened his suspicion, that there is some ulterior reality, hidden behind the seemingly neutral, uncomplicated façade of things and people. And it is this reality, hidden in Shahrazad, or somewhere else in the universe, that he searches for indefatigably. Critics have interpreted the play on various levels. First, the figure of Shahrazad is seen as a reflection of Tawfiq al-Hakim’s difficult relationship with women – difficulties that are attested by many statements and autobiographical comments. As becomes clear from his other works, Tawfiq al-Hakim was fascinated by the female mystery that Shahrazad represented for him; she was a strong and intelligent mistress who symbolized perfection, but was still tainted by the peculiarities of her sex. As one critic remarked, “Woman is, for him, an enigma, theoretically capable of achieving perfection, which is not given to man to do, but in practice riddled with far more faults and blemishes than her male counterpart could ever stoop in displaying.”5 For some, Shahrazad is the quintessential woman, the epitome of human contradictions, a combination of the elevated and the trivial. Similarly, one critic regards Shahrazad as a symbol of the unknowable, mysterious woman, whom every man interprets according to his own disposition, but who remains an enigma. She represents the ‘unfathomable nature of reality’ which cannot be comprehended by man. According to a comment by the critic Mohammad Mandur, 5  Long, Tawfiq al-Hakim, 132.

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she proves that a human being cannot live by and for the intellect, ignoring the calls of the body and the heart. Finally, one critic perceives a mystical element in Shahriyar’s quest: Shahrazad represents the beloved divine entity, around which the lover hovers as a moth around a candle, he flees his material body, and seeks some form of spiritual unification.6 These observations show Shahrazad’s depth as a literary character and the themes that Tawfiq al-Hakim wove into his play. They contain plausible interpretations of the play and explain its philosophical purport. Remarkably, however, critics have not paid any attention to the narrative context of the play and the possible importance of intertextual relationships for its interpretation. No reference is made to the ‘master’ text of the Thousand and one nights, from which the themes are so explicitly derived. It seems obvious, then, that we must relate the play to its most significant source. It is evident that the matrix of Tawfiq al-Hakim’s play Shahrazad is derived from the frame story of the Thousand and one nights. This story provides Tawfiq al-Hakim, first, with a dramatic configuration that is taken from his own ‘Oriental’ literary heritage, which he acknowledges has been reworked according to ancient Greek and European narrative modes. Tawfiq al-Hakim himself, however, does not restrict the narrative roots of his play to these domains, and explicitly relates them to what he considers the ‘Egyptian’ form of tragedy. He states that in Egyptian tragedy, the central theme is the struggle between man and the forces of time and space. The ancient Egyptians’ ideal was to strive for a victory of the spirit over time and space, a victory which could be found in resurrection “not into another world where time and space are unknown, but into this same world, this same earth, with its time and space.”7 According to him, while his earlier play, The cavemen, addresses the contest between man and time, Shahrazad portrays the contest between man and space. Several critics have mentioned this remark, but it has been, subsequently, waved off as irrelevant, since the spatial aspect seems to be secondary to the main theme.8 However, if the narrative of the play is related to the matrix of the Thousand and one nights, Tawfiq al-Hakim’s statement is, in fact, much more meaningful. In parts 1 and 2 we suggested that the frame story of the Thousand and one nights can be interpreted as the connection between storytelling and the disruption of a spatiotemporal equilibrium, the destruction of a temporal and spatial structure by an event of dramatic proportions. Essentially, Shahriyar’s 6  Starkey, From the Ivory Tower, 41; Long, Tawfiq al-Hakim, 32; Hutchins, Plays, Prefaces and Postscripts, 3. 7  Starkey, From the Ivory Tower, 38. 8  Ibid., 43, 127.

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identity, as a man and as a ruler, is founded on a specific congruence between the king’s body, his authority, and the location of his power. Shahriyar’s authority is derived from a set of boundaries which guard his integrity and the coherence of his person, and which is symbolized by the impenetrability of the palace. But, this congruence is based on deception, as is revealed when the king leaves his palace, and his body is removed from the location of his power. This event is enacted twice, in the case of Shahzaman and in the case of Shahriyar, and in both cases the king is able to look, so to speak, into his own sacred domain from the outside. In both cases, they witness a truly horrible sight: they find their spouses passionately making love to the most despicable of human creatures, a cook’s mate and a black slave. This spectacle completely destroys the image the kings have of themselves and their status, and more importantly, it disrupts the relationship between the kings and the location of their power. The functions of boundaries, in both the social and the spatial sense, are epitomized by the concept of the ‘house,’ as a domestication of space based on the exclusion of a specific ‘other.’ Here boundaries are meant to create a domain governed by a specific idea of a homogeneous self, of a hierarchy of power, of an imagined unity, which can only be achieved by banning the ‘excess’ of this self-image from the realm outside. However, the exclusion of the other by constructing a domestic space implies that this ‘other’ is always, in some form, present inside. The ‘other’ is the reason for constructing the spatial domain and defining its shape and boundaries, and is, therefore, inherent in the construction itself, as an invisible ‘intruder,’ a specter that has the potention to horrify the inhabitants.9 We can see this mechanism quite clearly in the episode of Shahriyar and his brother. The carefully constructed convergence of self-image, power, and locality is cruelly disrupted by that which it is meant to exclude, the antithesis of the king’s identity, the most despicable contamination of the image of a king. What was thought to be locked out, is in fact present in the very core of the king’s domain of power. The disruption of the spatial integrity of the palace leads to the dissolution of the king’s identity, which now appears to have been built on a delusion, an artificial construct created to hide what it cannot destroy. It can be argued, moreover, that what the king sees is not so much an intruder from outside, but rather a part of himself, a kind of alter ego that he has always striven to deny in himself. He now realizes that what he has always seen as a unified personality, the basis of his self-image as a man and a king, in fact consists of at least two 9   On these approaches to spatial constructions, see Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).

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versions of his self, the mighty king and the low, lustful serf. The spatial domain protecting the congruence of his locality, his body, and his power, turns out to contain his double, a copy of himself as his antithesis, a component of himself that he cannot control without the structure supporting his authority. The dislocation of Shahriyar’s self-image is caused by an act of mobility, that is, by Shahriyar crossing the boundary between the inner and outer domains, and creating a distance between himself and his constructed ‘interior’ space. The theme of mobility is, of course, closely linked to the theme of dislocation, as is shown by the reaction of the two kings to the fatal blow to the integrity of their person: now that the system of boundaries protecting their status is demolished, they start to roam the world disguised as beggars. Since they have lost their identity, their space is no longer marked by symbols indicating their status. The world has become a boundless desert. It is only when they manage to comprehend that it is, in fact, a woman who caused their downfall, that they return to the palace and start the fateful cycle of sex and death, with the intention of restoring the integrity of their identity. The domain of women is eliminated from their lives and a new unification of body, power, and location is realized. As we see above, the new regime leads to a fateful stagnation in the empire. Shahriyar is caught in a circular motion of time that prohibits progress and condemns the empire to stagnation and fossilization. Shahriyar has ‘reconquered’ his domestic space, but only by excluding the forces of time. At this point, Shahrazad enters the stage. Her storytelling not only succeeds in redeeming Shahriyar from his ritual cycle and restoring the regular sequence of time, but she also teaches Shahriyar that the world is essentially multifarious and unified, monolithic identities do not exist. She fills Shahriyar’s space with marvels and characters, dilemmas and devices, thus persuading the king that he must accept the temporal aspect of change in his domain and the diversity in the world and in himself. He accepts this multiple identity linked to the forces of time and transformation, and therefore reintegrates the female domain into his spatial structure. This happy ending is symbolized by Shahriyar’s promise not to have her executed, and by the three children that Shahrazad has borne during the period of her storytelling. This analysis of the story of Shahriyar and Shahrazad inspired by spatial concepts helps us to better understand Tawfiq al-Hakim’s remarks about the spatial dimension of Shahrazad. In the play, too, Shahriyar has been transformed by Shahrazad’s storytelling, but here the ‘happy ending’ is missing, and although Shahriyar is cured from his obsession, he is afflicted with another disease. Shahrazad’s stories have failed to reconcile Shahriyar with his ‘double,’ his lower self and the physical part of his personality, which in the Thousand

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and one nights allows him to accept her into his domain, but which in this case, has separated him from it and destroyed it. When Shahrazad attempts to reenact the scene of adultery by hiding a serf in her boudoir, Shahriyar appears to be unaffected by her ruse and fails to respond in the ‘normal’ way: he has detached himself from physical desires and from the jealousy associated with love. But this also means that there is no reconciliation between Shahriyar and Shahrazad, between the female and the male domains. Shahrazad now appears as an all-encompassing entity that is inaccessible to Shahriyar, who now has no means by which to amalgamate her world with his own. This lack of reconciliation is expressed in terms of space. In the Thousand and one nights, the disrupted spatiotemporal equilibrium is restored after Shahriyar accepts Shahrazad’s admonitions and acknowledges his duality and the duality of the space which contains his identity. A new congruence is created, which allows him to accept his multiple personality and enables him to accept Shahrazad, as a female component, in his domain. In the play it seems that, after Shahriyar’s effort to appropriate his royal space and keep it for himself, by excluding women and constructing a monolithic vision of himself, it is now Shahrazad who, by her storytelling, has appropriated the space of authority and monopolized it as a closed, female, domain. After Shahriyar sheds his libidinal self, the space of his former self no longer symbolizes his identity, as a man or as a king. When Qamar summons him to return from his peregrinations, Shahriyar responds with the question: “Where to?”10 The place of his royal authority is no longer linked to his self-awareness and this is why he is condemned to eternal traveling, just as he was previously, when he discovered the queen’s betrayal. If the spatial construction of his royalty is broken, his only alternative is to roam the world, without the paraphernalia of kingship. The storytelling, then, has failed to restore Shahriyar’s sense of spatial harmony, and has only succeeded in postponing his sense of its loss. After Shahrazad finished her stories, this sense of loss is reinforced and, it seems, perpetuated, as Shahriyar has freed his “body from the hobbles of a place” and feels in his soul a “dissolution of the spatial attribute.”11 One of the functions of the storytelling is to uphold an illusory spatial harmony, one that creates a distinction in Shahriyar’s awareness of an ‘inside’ dominated by imagination and thought, and a ‘reality’ outside. Now that Shahrazad has stopped telling stories, the temporary harmony is broken and Shahriyar is compelled to go out and search for the ‘Real.’ Here we observe a confrontation between constructions of

10  Hutchins, Plays, Prefaces and Postscripts, 155. 11  Ibid., 152–153.

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reality – spatial constructions, storytelling – and the Lacanian Real, that which cannot be structured by narratives and symbolic systems. As a spatial structure, reality is a constructed system, meant to hide or exclude the unnameable, the Real, the Thing that cannot be comprehended. After the discovery of the queen’s unfaithfulness, the ‘return’ of the Real is warded off by the structuring function of Shahrazad’s tales, but once the storytelling has ended, the Real looms up again as an object of irresistible desire. Without the structuring encapsulation of the narratives, the Real destroys boundaries and differentiations, and the world becomes a limitless, unordered space, without markers and hierarchies. The only spatial entity that Shahriyar cannot cast off is his body. Although he has pledged to forsake his physical/spatial identity, he remains locked in the space of his body, which “space has formed the way a container gives form to the water.”12 Thus, Shahriyar’s life is reduced to an isolated existence within the confines of his body, seemingly without any link to the space and bodies that surround him: “My life took on the shape of the space and time containing my body.” His fundamental question is: “Do I have any true existence outside of the time and space which encompass my body …”13 But the milieu of timelessness in which Shahriyar’s body roams is also a metaphor of the mystic’s condition of spiritual ecstasy. Through a path of discipline, the mystic reaches the stage in which he can feel the proximity of the divine, the ultimate Truth, although he is unable to merge with it. His madness becomes a sacred mental state, in which he is in touch with the divine but still bound by his human form. In this sense, Shahrazad’s storytelling has dissociated him, mentally, from his social and material environment, and forced him to set out on a continual search for ‘truth.’ Among the influences shaping his play Shahrazad, Tawfiq al-Hakim mentions several European authors and the great Greek playwrights. These influences are, thematically, superseded by the clear reworking of an indigenous, Arabic source, the Thousand and one nights. And ultimately, the play is based on Tawfiq al-Hakim’s concept of the ‘Egyptian tragedy,’ that is, of man’s vain struggle against the confines of space and time that shape his destiny and impose their laws on him. The complex nature of these narrative sources reflects the intellectual debate in Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century, when a modern literature was molded out of a variety of indigenous, foreign, modern, and traditional models. Typically, Tawfiq al-Hakim sought to reconcile the various cultural resources that were available to him, as a result of his 12  Ibid., 171. 13  Ibid., 169.

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unique position as an Egyptian intellectual, at the point where eastern and western, modern and traditional, spiritual and materialistic tendencies converged. Tawfiq al-Hakim’s oeuvre is an effort to weave these strands into a new, original, texture, a landmark in the evolution of a new Egyptian tradition in which universal and local components complement each other. In the thematical construction of Shahrazad, the synthesis between the various influences can be found, first, in the conceptualization of space, as a constructed reality that can be fractured, disrupted, or, so to speak, put out of order; this subjects man to the relentless unordered confrontation between his body and the Real. This would seem to be the essence of the tragic component of what Tawfiq al-Hakim calls Egyptian tragedy: space has a way of imposing itself on the human body and the human mind, forcing the psyche to accept a constructed reality or deliver him to a state of non-identity, undifferentiatedness, amorphousness, without a will to oppose the force of spatiotemporal laws. In the Thousand and one nights, Shahriyar at first refuses to accept a spatial duality that reflects a duality in himself, and instead attempts to enforce a unified space/self on reality, thus creating a reality in which the harmonious interaction of time and space is disrupted. Shahrazad tries to get him to realize that the co-existence of various components is the essence of human life and a precondition for a coherent vision of the world and of the self, and that it is necessary to create a new spatiotemporal balance. In the play Shahrazad, this balance is not achieved – Shahriyar fails to recognize space as conceptualized in relational terms; he only sees the absolute space dominated by Shahrazad, without differentiations that would enable him to shape his identity, and so he is thrown into a bottomless abyss of Real time and space. His tragedy is that he is forced to move in a world without boundaries, without an aim, but also without a starting point, a point to return to. According to Tawfiq al-Hakim, the essence of tragedy is the human struggle against the forces of the divine, as expressed in the Greek theatrical tradition. In Shahrazad, the tragic concept must be sought in the relationship between the human soul and its spatial environment, the impossibility of reconciling inner experiences of space with Real space, and the inability of humans to accept the artificial constructions of space that mediate between their vision of the world and the incomprehensible Real, as they try to encapsulate the Real and situate it in a liveable reality. For Shahriyar, this mediation has been revealed as false and illusory, but his intuition of the proximity of the Real gives him the illusion that the Real can be ‘known’ and ‘discovered,’ instead of only sensed and conjectured. He yearns for a mystical unification that will eliminate his links to reality. Here, the divine forces are not represented by fate, but

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by the limits of human knowledge and the discrepancy between knowledge and experience. There is no question of predestination, but of the ultimate boundedness of the human condition. Man’s tragedy is that he is essentially unable to combine his experience and his rationalization of the space in which he lives and cannot escape from. For Shahriyar, the interlude of Shahrazad’s storytelling has been a kind of catharsis that has radically changed his vision of life. But it is a mystical catharsis, a sudden awareness of a hidden truth that enables him to throw off the chains of material life, of the passions of the body, and the trivialities of social conventions. This sense pushes him to a permanent state of liminality, which prevents him from returning to his former life, but also from being incorporated into some new reality in a new configuration. His metamorphosis is incomplete, his initiation has only detached him from his past, without providing the possibility of a reincorporation. The catharsis has effaced the boundaries that are necessary to complete a process of transformation and link him to a structurally coherent reality. Shahriyar has found some form of insight, but it is the insight that some deeper knowledge exists, not the knowledge itself or the insight that reaching this knowledge is essentially impossible. Tawfiq al-Hakim once remarked that he intended to write another play as a sequence to Shahrazad, entitled the ‘Return of Shahriyar,’ but he was unable to conceive the narrative form of such a return. In fact, it is Shahriyar’s tragedy that such a return is inconceivable. In the Aftermath of Shahrazad: al-Qasr al-mashur Tawfiq al-Hakim’s play Shahrazad was noted by the prominent writer and intellectual Taha Husayn (1889–1973), one of the great advocates of Egyptian cultural and political modernism. Husayn was born in 1889 and became blind at a young age. In spite of his handicap, he succeeded in gaining a remarkable erudition and in building an impressive career as an administrator in Egypt’s institutions of higher education, especially Cairo University. After taking courses at al-Azhar, Husayn spent four years in Paris (1915–19), where he studied at the Sorbonne and came in contact with European scholars and literati. When he returned to Egypt he was appointed to important educational positions, but because of the political turbulence of the time, he was often discharged for political reasons. In 1925 he published Fi l-shi‘r al-jahili (‘About the jahili poetry’; a treatise about the authenticity of pre-Islamic poetry, which he contested), which provoked a great controversy and continued to haunt him throughout his career. Another important work was Mustaqbal al-thaqafa fi misr (‘The future of culture in Egypt’; 1938), in which he developed a vision of

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Egypt’s cultural orientation. When he died in 1973, he was an internationally acclaimed intellectual known for his humanist views.14 Apart from his literary and administrative work, Husayn was best known for his essays, in which he developed his reformist ideas. These were mainly derived from what is usually seen as European Enlightenment thought and were primarily based on the pre-eminence of reason in the pursuit of social justice, welfare, and freedom. He proposed democratic reform in Egypt; he, like Tawfiq al-Hakim, considered Egyptian culture part of three main historical heritages: the ancient Egyptian civilization, the Arabic-Islamic past, and the Mediterranean ‘family’ of nations. He sought to modernize Egyptian culture and society in these three realms. Although cultural identity played a central role in the process of modernization, the nature of this identity was multiform and flexible, and a good framework for reform. Although religion was an important component of Egypt’s cultural configuration, he believed that it should never interfere with politics. In his review of Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Shahrazad, Husayn reproached the author for a lack of philosophical depth and advised him to expand his knowledge of philosophy. Al-Hakim did not respond well to this, and the two intellectuals were on bad terms for some time. After their reconciliation, they became lifelong friends; Husayn acted as al-Hakim’s mentor, and together they became the standard-bearers of Egyptian modernist culture and thought, even engaging in sometimes fierce political controversies.15 The quarrel between the two writers about Shahrazad served as the incentive to write the novel al-Qasr al-mashur, on which they worked together, each writing a chapter in turn. The result is a rather light-hearted work, which has some serious overtones. The story relates that Taha Husayn, with a companion, retired to an isolated summer resort in the French Alps for a short holiday. While he is engrossed in reading a collection of poetry by the great classical poet al-Mutanabbi, he hears a knock on his door and a stranger gives him a letter from Shahrazad, who invites him to a meeting. Soon he discovers that his young colleague Tawfiq al-Hakim is also present in the village. At the appointed time, Husayn is mysteriously transported to a sumptuous palace, where he is led before Shahrazad. The mistress of storytelling tells him that she is on vacation in France and that she has no one to tell her tales and relieve her boredom. Husayn remarks that he knows the right person to relieve her sorrow: Tawfiq al-Hakim. However, Shahrazad confesses that she does not like his 14  On Taha Husayn’s life and thought, see Hourani, Arabic Thought, and Pierre Cachia, Taha Husayn: His Place in the Egyptian Literary Renaissance (London: Luzac & Company, 1956). 15  Cachia, Taha Husayn, 181.

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writings, since Tawfiq al-Hakim is just like Shahriyar; he does not understand her and will never understand her, as can be seen in his play Shahrazad.16 Subsequently, Husayn looks for Tawfiq al-Hakim, but it appears that he has been kidnapped by Shahrazad, who wants to force him to become her evening companion, and to tell her stories. While Tawfiq al-Hakim is being prepared for his new task, Shahrazad writes a letter to Husayn, complaining about al-Hakim, whom she describes as ‘naïve’ and ‘complicated’ at the same time, a nuisance who depicts people dishonestly, who has the indecency to yawn in her presence. Husayn responds with a very submissive letter promising to come to the palace to assist her and to help al-Hakim, too. Al-Hakim, however, has escaped from the hammam where he was being bathed by slave girls and he is only retrieved by Husayn with some difficulty. Now the ‘ghosts’ of all Shahrazad’s entourage complain about al-Hakim and accuse him of portraying them in an untruthful, negative way in his play. Husayn proposes to hold a trial to hear the complaints and to judge al-Hakim, who is willing to bear the consequences of his writings. The judge will be ‘Time’ itself. When the trial is held, in the imposing presence of Time, several witnesses accuse Tawfiq al-Hakim of falsification. Al-Hakim responds to the allegations by either refuting them or by stating that “Nobody has the right to reject the image that an artist gives of him. An artist is allowed to portray his personages as he wishes, as long as they are throbbing with life.”17 Beauty may be a manifestation of perfection, but “who says that this beauty is always present in human beings? How often has nature produced a human being of perfect body, heart and mind?”18 And, “I never claimed to provide the characters with much or limited artistic beauty. Something like that is not done consciously; it transcends comprehension, as in the case of the Sufis who are entranced.”19 He declares that he has, perhaps, not reached the apogee of beauty in his art, but at least his intentions were good. The final session of the trial, in which the verdict is read, evolves into a trial of strength between Time and Shahrazad. The latter claims to be ‘eternal’ and invulnerable to the passage of time, and this, understandably, irritates Time, who accuses her of contempt for the judge. Shahrazad retorts, in her beautiful voice: “I don’t acknowledge the right of anyone to incriminate me. I am total freedom, a freedom spreading zeal in the mind, life in the heart, and warmth in the emotions … freedom which dominates everyone who wants to 16  Ibid., 187–188. 17  Ṭāḥa Ḥusayn and Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm, al-Qaṣr al-masḥūr (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 2000), 48. 18  Ibid., 149. 19  Ibid., 150.

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dominate it.”20 The verdict is that writers have the right to portray characters as they deem fit, or as art requires. This freedom is especially relevant in ‘these’ times, “when artists and writers demand the protection of their rights.”21 Tawfiq al-Hakim is released and sent to Salzburg, where a music festival is being held, to learn about perfect art. Shahrazad is also allowed to enjoy complete freedom, provided she does not cause damage by making excessive use of it. As noted, the novel al-Qasr al-mashur was probably intended as entertainment, especially for the authors themselves. It is a playful resolution of the controversy concerning Husayn’s critical remarks about Shahrazad, which, apparently also displeased Shahrazad herself. The work throws some light on the relationship between the two authors and their view of each other. It also shows their – alleged – attitudes toward literature, symbolized by the towering, magical, figure of Shahrazad. Husayn reveals himself as her obedient servant, submitting himself to her command and flattering her. Tawfiq al-Hakim, in contrast, is recalcitrant, stubborn, and unwilling to give up his personal preoccupations to yield to her wishes. He must be abducted by Shahrazad; he tries to escape, asks her to go fishing with him, and demands his coat and cane, since without them he is not ‘himself.’ In spite of her anger, Shahrazad feels affection for him, and she wants to save him from ‘Time.’ But, as Husayn points out, if he were to enter into Shahrazad’s realm, where time has no power, it would bring about his death. In the playful exchange of opinions between the three characters, the story conveys a more serious message. The central discussion is not so much about the play Shahrazad and Tawfiq al-Hakim’s portrayal of its heroine, but about the freedom of literary expression and the right of the author to freely express his visions. This freedom is ultimately acknowledged in the final verdict, and is emphasized in the various pleas and responses of the protagonists: artists must be given the liberty to work out their artistic visions as they arise and as the rules of art impose them. Related to this claim is the underlying assumption concerning the position of authors more generally, as artists and intellectuals. The verdict implies that art is autonomous, it is a separate field and authors should be recognized as independent intellectuals who enjoy not only certain rights, but even certain privileges. Because of their extraordinary talent, artists have the freedom to experiment, even to provoke the anger of their models; this privilege gives him a specific role and responsibility in society. It is this role that characterizes the modern intellectuals in Egypt who emerged at the turn of the twentieth century after the reformist debates and 20  Ibid., 164. 21  Ibid., 163, 167.

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developments during the nahda. Intellectuals came to be seen as the guides and spokesmen of the conscience of the nation and the common people. Taha Husayn and Tawfiq al-Hakim embodied this role; they were modern, critical intellectuals, and for them Shahrazad symbolized the potential of their art: the power of narration to create a space of freedom. Taha Husayn and Tawfiq al-Hakim refer to Shahrazad as the personification of artistic freedom in some other occasions. For example, in a short piece entitled Sultan al-zalam (‘Sultan of darkness’; 1945), Tawfiq al-Hakim stages a conversation between Shahrazad and Adolf Hitler. In his introduction, he philosophizes about the possibility that the advance of civilization and Enlightenment may be halted by repression or obscurantism and that the world would once again be cast into darkness. He criticizes the veneration of industry and profit for their own sakes, as this greed is derived from a primitive, tribal mentality, in which economic values are paramount. He argues that, as in his play Shahrazad, his main value is ‘doubt,’ which is the starting point of all thought and civilization. He compares the cycles of human civilization with the symbolic meaning of the characters in his play (Abd is darkness, Qamar represents the heart, and Shahriyar is the mind) and the unending rivalry between the straight course set by the rational mind and the cyclical motion of nature. Now should be a period of light, of democracy, of human rights, and Shahrazad resuscitates Shahriyar like “a fertile wind in a desolate oasis.”22 In the piece itself, Shahrazad, who meets directly with Hitler, tries to convince him of the necessity to allow freedom of expression; whether she succeeds is left undecided. Taha Husayn returned to the trope of Shahrazad in his novel Ahlam Shahrazad (The dreams of Shahrazad) to which we turn our attention presently.

Taha Husayn: The Dreams of Shahrazad

The first half of the twentieth century marked an important phase in the development of modernity in the Arab world. On the one hand, this period witnessed a significant re-evaluation of cultural values, orientations, and expressions, based on a re-assessment of the significant and increasing influence of Europe, which was rapidly developing its own form of modernity. On the other hand, the process of transformation involved a political repositioning, the development of modern ideologies, the defiance of the domination of Europe, and the 22  Ibid., 93.

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formulation of new ‘national’ identities. Although it can be argued that the roots of modernity in the Arab world can be found in its own heritage and history, especially from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, European nations were deeply involved in developments in the Arab countries, either as colonial powers, or as political and cultural models providing intellectuals with ‘modern’ directions of thought. These were the basis of the struggles for independence that took place from 1880 until after World War II. Taha Husayn was an important intellectual, who personified these interacting trends. He was not only a significant figure in the field of culture and education, but was also involved in political debates and ideological polemics. His ideas were strongly influenced by the intellectuals he met during his stay in Europe, and throughout his life he remained an advocate of Egyptian autonomy and of openness toward the world outside.23 He became a model for politically committed intellectuals, and, as we have seen, this found expression in his literary work. Therefore, it is no surprise that for him the figure of Shahrazad was not only a literary expression, but also an exponent of resistance to oppression and despotism. Yet he also focused on the humanist component of her character, as he had an urge to redress anomalies through persuasion and artistic means. This conversion of discourses can be found in Husayn’s short novel Ahlam Shahrazad (The dreams of Shahrazad; 1943), which addressed a political issue through artistic and psychological means. The story of Ahlam Shahrazad is set in the palace of Shahriyar on the 1002nd and following nights, when Shahrazad has finished her storytelling and Shahriyar is restless and sleepless, feeling empty without the familiar tales. However, at night, when Shahrazad is asleep, he hears her telling a story. Moreover, in his dream, he is summoned to deepen his relationship with Shahrazad, which he wants to be more balanced, so it is not only based on her providing entertainment under the threat of death. Obediently, he listens to the story she tells in her sleep. This story is about a jinn king who is bound to die soon, and his daughter Fatina, who is beautiful and smart, who knows the writings of the ancients and the moderns, and who is proficient in the magical arts. However, she is not inclined to choose a husband from the large flock of princely suitors. She decides to provoke the princes and promises to marry the one prince who is able to conquer the city. In this way, she prevents a conspiracy and is able to defeat them with magic. The story, which is told in installments, stretches over several nights, but it does not soothe Shahriyar’s melancholy. He is vexed by a feeling of unfulfilled yearning for Shahrazad and remains restless. His spiritual thirst is not slaked 23  Husayn was a good friend of André Gide. See Tahhan, André Gide, 423–425.

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by her story. When they sit together in the palace garden, Shahriyar cannot restrain himself any longer and asks: “Will you not tell me finally who you really are and what you want of me?”24 Shahrazad answers that she wants to see him happy and free, “offering a smiling countenance to life just as life smiles back to him.”25 And: I am your mother when you yearn for a mother’s love, your sister when you need the affection of a sister, your daughter when you demand filial piety, your wife when you desire the love of a wife, and your mistress when you want to be entertained by the joyful passion of a mistress.26 Shahrazad observes that Shahriyar is suffering from a disease whose nature they are unable to identify, and she promises: “I shall take your soul and then infuse into it from my own soul a power of incalculable magnitude. Your pristine strength will, I assure you, be restored.”27 However, she only reveals about herself what is absolutely necessary, since knowledge ‘kills’ love, and it is the ‘tension between love and knowledge’ that makes life desirable. Thus, the old strategy of deferral is taken up again and she concludes: “from this hour you will be my slave …”28 Shahriyar continues to wonder, restlessly, about his predicament and how she relates to it. He feels that “his beloved was like an ocean that could not be fathomed, a night from which darkness could not be dispelled, and a mystery to which there was no solution.”29 He senses that there is a ‘king’ above him, who serves him with immense compassion and intimate love. In the meantime, at night, the story about Fatina and her father continues. Fatina expresses her concern for the people, she says they should not suffer the distress of war, but they should learn to participate in matters of government. The threat of the bellicose princes is solved by a sudden, all-encompassing earthquake, a kind of magical pseudoapocalypse that forces the princes to send emissaries to sue for peace. The king now passes the throne on to his daughter. Shahriyar is increasingly drawn into Shahrazad’s intriguing ‘magic.’ Her conduct “ravished his soul completely and deprived it of all self-awareness, as 24  Taha Husayn, The Dreams of Scheherazade, trans. Magdi Wahba ([Cairo]: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1974), 33. 25  Ibid. 26  Ibid. 27  Ibid., 37. 28  Ibid., 38. 29  Ibid., 40.

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the enchantment of her story-telling had done in the past.”30 He keeps asking her, “‘Will you tell me finally who you are and what you want of me?’”31 She answers, briefly, that he should not ask her this question, and merely ‘experience’ her. When he gradually relinquishes himself to her mysterious lure, they enter a paradisiacal landscape in which they see the virgins who were saved by Shahrazad’s stories, and later, Shahriyar’s victims, who now live in a “paradise that is like hell, or, more correctly, a hell that in vain attempts to look like a paradise.”32 Shahrazad now confesses to him that her decision to marry him was based on her love for him and her wish to taste his love. The storytelling was meant to postpone her death, so that she could enjoy as many nights with him as possible: “I was actually obeying my most selfish impulses at the very moment when I appeared to be sacrificing myself for the rest of womankind.”33 Shahrazad goes as far as to surmise that Shahriyar’s cruelty may even have attracted her and that the dead maidens are perhaps lamenting the loss of his presence. This incites Shahriyar to think about his misdeeds and he feels torn: “If he remained alone he was beset by fear and anxiety, and if he sought the company of his wife he was tortured by the passion of love, by a passionate yearning to understand and by despair of ever being able to satisfy either passion.”34 While floating on a mysterious lake, not knowing if he is sleeping or dreaming, in a make-believe world where it is neither night nor day, Shahriyar allows himself to be captured by Shahrazad’s enchantment. What ensues is a kind of mystical experience: “My soul is yours and your soul is now mine. What is important … is that your soul and your innermost thoughts should be in communion with mine, by means of the voice or even by silent communion.”35 The king feels a painful pleasure, a pleasant pain, related to the “extremities of passion.”36 He becomes enraptured by the mysterious spell: His spirit had melted into the spirit of his beloved and the two had become one love, pure and unalloyed, gently borne upon the waves of a mysterious lake by a strange and wondrous craft, and around them was a world which defied the power of imagination. It was a world found in the books of the mystics when they attempted to describe those states 30  Ibid., 52. 31  Ibid. 32  Ibid., 82. 33  Ibid., 83. 34  Ibid., 95. 35  Ibid., 97. 36  Ibid.

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of the soul which no man could imagine unless he had apprehended what they had apprehended in their ecstacies. Could it be that Shahrazad would become his guide in the mystical apprehensions of those higher truths and that world of occult knowledge, to which the soul of man obscurely aspires, but, ever failing to reach, suffers the pangs of despair?37 After this moment of insight, they return to the palace. He is apparently cured, but through this intense experience, rather than by acquiring an answer to his questions. The novel ends with the final installment of the story of Fatina and her father; this involves a fierce denunciation of despotism. Fatina refuses to acknowledge rulers who are tyrants, and states that aggressors must choose between death or surrendering their power to her. The people should have their liberty, and even have the right to be disobedient. The rule of law must be established. But, the story concludes despondently, as people are sometimes unable to understand these principles, and this makes the relations between subjects and their leaders difficult; however, there will be a time when people will understand. Clearly, the story is meant as a lesson to Shahriyar, to help him reconsider his attitude toward his subjects and, especially, to reconsider his relationship with Shahrazad, whom he now fully accepts as his loving spouse, without the potential aggression and bitterness that governed their lives during the thousand and one nights. Husayn’s novel, which seems to echo some of the concerns expressed in Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Shahrazad, is at first sight unpretentious, but ultimately presents some important messages. First, it is a novel about the dangers of despotism and it is a call for democratization, even as it acknowledges that the population may not be mature enough to participate in it. This is a clear message, unmistakably addressed to the Egyptian authorities, to work toward the establishment of democracy and rule based on humanitarian principles. Second, the novel is about love in a hierarchical situation and the necessity of achieving true love through an almost mystical unification. The tension that surrounds this love is the result of the chasm between comprehension and yearning, between the insufficiency of the human mind and its capacity to have an overwhelming experience. It is in this mystical domain that the two layers of the novel converge, as if the mystical experience contains both the secrets of love and the rationality of just governance. The ending is less pessimistic than Shahrazad, and is more directly linked to political discussions. The ways in which Tawfiq al-Hakim and Taha Husayn interpreted the frame story of the Thousand and one nights paved the way for other authors who stressed the 37  Ibid., 97–98.

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political role of Shahrazad. The novel Layali alf layla, by the Egyptian Nobel laureate and founding father of the Arabic novelistic tradition, Najib Mahfuz, is as politically committed as its predecessors, but again rather pessimistic.

Najib Mahfuz: The Predicament of Shahriyar

The work of Taha Husayn and Tawfiq al-Hakim laid the foundation for a whole range of intellectual and literary attitudes and texts, from political/cultural treatises to a modern theater tradition and forms of political commitment in literature. Both Husayn and al-Hakim tend to aspire to more than just these ‘pragmatic’ visions; they probe into philosophical questions touching on notions of identity, but also on alienation in modern society and the ways in which literature can lay bare feelings of emptiness. They balance on the borderline between philosophy and religion, and perhaps, it is from the tension between these two approaches that they derive their literary inspiration. They live in a disenchanted world, where religion has lost much of its force, but what remains is a yearning for knowledge and meaning, in order to resituate oneself in a new, modern, environment. This emptiness is compared to Shahriyar’s awakening from the enchantment by Shahrazad’s stories: he must continue his search by himself, or re-establish his relationship with Shahrazad, which should now be normalized, but which still affects his vision of his power. He must avoid violence and become a ‘normal’ human being. As Shahrazad says in Ahlam Shahrazad: “‘Is it not time for us to come down from the skies and live among people upon this earth?’”38 Paradoxically, this can only be realized by a kind of catharsis that is nothing less than an entrancing mystical unification in love. This catharsis is symbolized by Shahrazad’s ungraspable femininity, which in Tawfiq al-Hakim’s play remains an unfathomable mystery, out of Shahriyar’s reach, but which in Ahlam Shahrazad is assimilated into Shahriyar’s personality, to form a new, balanced, self. Perhaps in Taha Husayn’s novel, Shahriyar has finally ‘returned.’ If there is one author who has followed the trends inaugurated by al-Hakim and Husayn, and whose work has shaped Arabic literature in the twentieth century, it is Najib Mahfuz (1911?–2003). Mahfuz’s monumental oeuvre, which spans almost a century, consists of novels, short stories, and theater plays. His work is widely known in the Arab world and earned him the Nobel prize for literature in 1988. He was an especially prolific novelist who not only produced a steady flow of solid and well-constructed novels, but also experimented with various formal and narrative approaches. After his 38  Ibid., 33.

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interest in pharaonic Egypt at the beginning of his career, he laid the foundation of the Arabic novelistic tradition with a number of naturalist works, such as the widely-acclaimed Trilogy (1956–58), and, for example, Bidaya wanihaya (The beginning and the end; 1945), and al-Qahira al-jadida (New Cairo; 1945). This phase was followed in the 1960s and 1970s by a series of short psychological thrillers which not only explored the mentalities that emerged in post-revolutionary Egypt, but also criticized political and social injustice.39 These two well-defined phases in Mahfuz’s oeuvre are marked by various forms of realism and direct references to contemporary society. From the end of the 1950s Mahfuz also explored more complex relationships between fictional texts and reality; this resulted in allegorical novels and experiments with magical realism and – especially in some short stories – surrealism. The bestknown novels in this category are Awlad haratina (Children of Gebelawi; 1959), in which Mahfuz drew on the traditional genre of ‘stories of the prophets’ (qisas al-anbiya’) to express a complex critique of Egyptian society and intellectual attitudes, and Malhamat al-Harafish (The Harafish; 1977), an epic portrait of a dynasty of thugs set in medieval times. In the last phase of Mahfuz’s authorship, which was broad and combined several types of texts, this tendency is represented by Rihlat ibn Fattuma (The journey of Ibn Fattouma; 1983), an allegorical novel inspired by the famous Rihla (‘travels’) of Ibn Battuta, but here endowed with a political and spiritual dimension. During the various phases of his career as an author Mahfuz developed a fairly consistent corpus of themes and concerns. We have already mentioned the social and political critique that can be found in most of his novels. Although his indictments of political repression, social inequality, intellectual laxity, opportunism, religious extremism, etc. can easily be applied to contemporary Egyptian society, Mahfuz takes care to wrap his criticism in a more general view of morality and humanism, in an attempt to place Egyptian society in the context of universal human values. In the field of religion, Mahfuz has long sought to explore not so much its juridical or societal aspects, but rather its mystical dimension, which is part of the universal heritage of human spirituality. He believed that religion should preserve the relationship with the divine and provide codes for moral tolerance and righteous behavior toward others, and not be a source of polarization or a legitimization for the usurpation of political power.

39  For surveys of Mahfuz’s works, see Sassoon Somekh, The Changing Rhythm: A Study of Najib Mahfuz’s Novels (Leiden: Brill, 1973); Rasheed El-Enany, Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning (London: Routledge, 1993); Menahem Milson, Nagib Mahfuz: The Novelist Philosopher of Cairo (New York and Jerusalem: St. Martin’s Press and Magnes Press, 1998).

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Socio-political criticism and the exploration of spirituality provide the context for the deployment of the typically Mahfuzian characters. In most of Mahfuz’s novels the main characters are portrayed as individuals who seek to come to terms not only with the often-stifling mechanisms of social control and social hierarchies, but also with the forces of history and the inevitability of change. The heroes are mostly anti-heroes who struggle against their passions, or who try to manipulate others to enhance their social status or wealth, or to counter some destructive inner urge. The dynamics of time impose the necessity to transform social configurations and, for individuals, to reconcile their expectations with new realities, while old certainties crumble away. It is here that the notion of fate comes to the fore, as the inescapable force that determines human destinies and that diminishes all human efforts to illusory proportions. In spite of the all-powerfulness of fate, it is man’s task to create, even with his weakness, a just society and to develop a deep and sincere sense of morality. Given the diversity of his work, we would expect to find that at some point Mahfuz has turned to the Thousand and one nights as a source of inspiration, the more so since he has shown an interest in drawing on genres developed in the Arabic literary tradition. The concern of Mahfuz with the Thousand and one nights is exemplified by the play al-Shaytan ya’iz (‘The devil preaches’; 1979), which also shows his indebtedness to Tawfiq al-Hakim and Taha Husayn. In this play, the motif of the City of Brass, including the intervention of a vicious jinn, is used to explore issues of power and morality, with the aim of commenting on the contemporary political situation in Egypt. A more elaborate effort at an intertextual incorporation of the Thousand and one nights is the novel Layali alf layla (Arabian nights and days; 1982), which contains, so to speak, a recycling of themes, motifs, plots, storylines, settings, etc. from the Thousand and one nights. These are re-used to construct an intricate novelistic narrative. The novel was published in the last phase of Mahfuz’s career and belongs to the series of ‘allegorical’ stories, examples of which can be found in the various phases of his work, and which perhaps show most consistently the main themes of his oeuvre. In this chapter, we discuss Layali alf layla in the context of these ongoing concerns which are so prominent in Mahfuz’s work. Arabian Nights and Days The novel Layali alf layla (Arabian nights and days) is not a single, linear story, but rather a chain of stories related to each other by a limited number of characters and settings. Of course, this structure in itself indicates a parallel with the Thousand and one nights, but the obvious device of the frame story containing the cycle of tales is missing: there is no dualism between a

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‘real’ world and a ‘narrated’ world. Rather, the story resumes at the point that Shahrazad has finished her storytelling and is waiting for Shahriyar’s verdict. From there, the stories are strung together at the same ‘level,’ although the figures of Shahrazad and Shahriyar function as a framework unifying the cycle as a whole. This structure resembles that of another of Mahfuz’s novels, Awlad haratina, where the figure of Jabalawi, as the founder of a settlement, guards the unity and continuity of the narrative, though he seldom appears as a character. Here, too, a powerful figure acts as the epicenter of a series of events, narrated as a cycle of stories. In Awlad haratina the uncertainty about Jabalawi’s orders and the ten ‘rules’ of his administration ensure narrative tension, whereas in Arabian nights and days it is uncertainty about Shahriyar’s repentance from his former cruel habits that opens up the narrative space. Apart from Shahrazad and Shahriyar, a number of other characters provide the novel with its coherence and continuity. These characters include the governor of the quarter; his secretary; the chief of police; a group of notables, such as Ibrahim the druggist and his son Hasan; Karam al-Asil the millionaire; Abdul Qadir the physician; Sahloul the merchant; and Jalil the draper. In addition, Mahfuz casts a number of figures from the common folk, such as Ujr the barber, Ibrahim the water-carrier, Rajab the porter, and Ma‘ruf the cobbler. Finally, there are two liminal figures: Aladdin, who is the son of the barber and is executed after his assassination of the governor; and Jamasa al-Bulti, the chief of police, who is executed but remains alive in the guise of another person. Finally, there are the jinns: Sinjam, Qumqam, Zarmabaha, and Sakhrabut, whose interference in the daily lives of the characters sets in motion the chain of events. It should be noted that women have only marginal roles in the development of the plots, although Shahrazad is presented as a crucial figure who determines Shahriyar’s attitudes. This set of characters presents three main differentiations, oppositions, and ambiguities which produce the dramatic dynamism of the narrative: the uncertainty about Shahriyar’s mental state; the opposition between the lower class and the elite and mobility between the two classes; and the interaction between the world of men and jinn. These, in principle centrifugal differentiations are bound together in a unified spatial setting represented by the quarter in which the characters live and work, governed by the triumvirate of the governor, the secretary, and the head of police, who represent the authority of the sultan. The spatial setting of the quarter is organized around several focal points: the palace of the governor, the coffeehouse, the fountain, the house of the Sufi Shaykh al-Balkhi, and – outside the city – the green tongue of land protruding into the Nile. These spatial points recur in all the stories and provide them with a coherent spatial background, while the interaction between

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these spaces and some ‘incidental’ spaces, such as the cemetery, the houses and shops of the various characters, the house of Anis al-Jalis, for example, represent the variable elements that make the narrative dynamics possible. The various spatial elements in the stories have very specific functions for the narrative structure and the construction of plots and sub-plots. The palaces of the sultan and amir are, clearly, the centers of authority, where culprits are interrogated and imprisoned, where plots are hatched and transactions are negotiated. It is here that reward and punishment are distributed and decisions are taken about the destinies of the people, where social mobility is either sanctioned or prevented, and where intelligence from two sides – the people and the sultan – converges. Its counterpart is the coffeehouse, where the people meet every evening, where current events are discussed, and where friendships are consolidated. It is the place where the elite and the common folk meet – clearly separated from each other – and where their opinions and attitudes can interact and be compared. It is also a controlled place, of course, in which social statuses are preserved, where the conduct of people can be monitored, and where public controversies can be enacted. Besides these official and public spaces, there are spaces that provide forms of privacy, such as the homes of the characters. The home of Shaykh al-Balkhi takes a prominent position, since it is related to spirituality and religiosity. Most of the characters were educated by the shaykh and in moments of distress they return to their spiritual master for moral advice. Therefore, it is a place for confessions, confidential conversations, repentance, and sincerity. The fountain in the middle of the quarter, where Fadil Sanaan and Jamasa al-Bulti meet to discuss political matters and strategies of action, is a similar place. Although it is public, they can meet unnoticed and undisturbed. Evidently, this place is contrasted with al-Balkhi’s home: the two are spaces for ‘confessions,’ one an enclosed space of spirituality and contemplation, and the other an open space of politics and activism. The spatial enclosure of the quarter often produces a sense of claustrophobia, since it is tightly ordered by official authorities and local social control. At various points the inhabitants make plans to escape from the quarter. This is always presented as a flight, and is prevented or made difficult by the tight police control or by the obvious desolation of the world outside the city, which symbolizes the rootedness of the characters and their ultimate confinement to the structured space of their quarter. There is also an area between the ordered space of the quarter and the desolate wilderness outside, namely, the green tongue of land just outside the city, where in the story of Ujr the barber, the drinking party takes place and gets out of hand, and where Jamasa al-Bulti finds his spiritual recluse. Here, under a palm tree, Jamasa retires to

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contemplate and converse with his friend Abdallah of the water. Here, too, other meetings take place that provide events with a deeper, hidden dimension. There is only one person who succeeds in leaving the city and exploring the dangerous world outside: Sindbad the porter, who sets out as a merchant and returns at the end of the novel. The basic spatial setup is thus built on a clear, fixed differentiation between the spaces inside the quarter and the interactions between the quarter and the green tongue of land. The activities of the jinn interfere with this dualism. The jinns reside on the roofs of buildings and in trees and can at any moment intervene in the characters’ lives. They invade private and public spaces, prisons and palaces, and with their manipulations create liminal figures in concurrent spatial contexts, such as Jamasa al-Bulti who is among the living dead, and Fadil, who has a cap of invisibility that enables him to break into the houses of the notables. These figures create liminal spaces, such as the house of Anis al-Jalis and they infuse reality with dreams and illusions that affect the harmony between spaces and the characters related to them. By doing this, they evidently provide the narrative with a dynamic impulse that breaks fixed patterns, introduces the unexpected, and disrupts the mechanisms of stability. The structure and patterns outlined above likely remind readers of Mahfuz’s other novels, which are constructed with the same social panorama of characters in an enclosed, limited spatial setting, such as Zuqaq al-Midaqq, Bayn al-qasrayn, and Awlad haratina. As we have seen above, however, they are also, and very markedly, reminiscent of the patterns of many stories in the Thousand and one nights, especially in the way the spatial settings form the backbone of the story, and in the way the interactions between ordered and liminal spaces serve as a source of narrative dynamism. Liminal spaces representing the basic pattern for many stories of the Thousand and one nights, as well as for the Arabian nights and days, are created through the use of prominent centers of autocratic power, the contrast between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ and, of course, the interference of ‘supernatural’ forces in ‘real life.’ Apart from this basic structural intertextuality between the two works, Mahfuz’s work freely utilizes names, characters, motifs, and themes borrowed from the Thousand and one nights; he explicitly refers to the stories of ‘Shahriyar and his brother,’ ‘Qut al-qulub,’ ‘Ma‘ruf the cobbler,’ ‘Qamar al-Zaman,’ ‘Badr al-Din,’ and ‘Sindbad of the sea.’40 Typical motifs include the common man’s struggle with the authorities, romantic love, magic and jinns, metamorphosis, poverty and wealth, and moral dilemmas. 40  For abstracts of these stories, see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, vol. 1.

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It should be noted that Arabian nights and days does not seem to be intended as an archaizing mimesis of ancient folktales, but rather as a modern allegorical novel that makes use of traditional themes and techniques. It is not a ‘retro-novel’ meant to invoke ancient times, but rather uses traditional material to illustrate timeless concerns. We now turn our attention to these typically Mahfuzian concerns, and concentrate on five themes: power, good and evil, spirituality, illusions, freedom and fate. Power As I have observed elsewhere, the functioning of power, the desire for power, and the corruptive influence of power are among the major themes of Mahfuz’s work.41 In Awlad haratina, for instance, the almighty power of the figure of Jabalawi hovers above the quarter like a magic spell. At the same time, however, this center of authority is distant from the society of the quarter itself, and the gap is filled by the various leaders who usurp political power in Jabalawi’s name and establish repressive, corrupt regimes. Here Mahfuz examines questions related to the legitimacy of the exertion of power, the lust for and abuse of power, the corruptive effect of power, and the relationship between power and morality. We can argue that by being enclosed in his big house and by standing aloof from his community, Jabalawi creates a fissure where the struggle for power takes place and where the mechanisms by which power is exerted become manifest, in both its violent and moral aspects. In the novel, the possession of power is presented as a recurrent dilemma that is aggravated by human imperfection and which, it seems, can only be resolved by the unlikely integration of moral authority into the fabric of the society. In the Thousand and one nights, too, the function of power is one of the main themes. Of course, the paragon of power is Shahriyar, whose virtual ‘almightiness’ is affected by the adultery of his wife. Here the abuse of power is related to a disequilibrium between its feminine and male components, represented by violence and rationality on the one hand, and imagination, empathy, and sensuality on the other hand. By telling her stories, Shahrazad creates a liminal space, in which the exertion of power is temporarily suspended and in which 41  Richard van Leeuwen, “Visions of Power in Awlâd hâratinâ of Naguib Mahfouz,” in Miguel H. de Larramendi and Luis M. Pérez Cañada (eds.), La traducción de literature árabe contemporánea: antes y después de Naguib Mahfuz, 219–236 (Cuenca: Ediciones Universidad de Castilla–La Mancha, 2000); Richard van Leeuwen, “Creation and Revelation in Naguib Mahfouz’s Novel Children of Gebelawi,” in Caroline Vanderstichele and Alastair G. Hunter (eds.), Creation and Creativity: From Genesis to Genetics and Back, 44–58 (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006).

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Shahriyar is introduced to an alternative vision of life, the world, and women. This liminality with regard to Shahriyar’s power produces the narrative tension that captivates the reader and is upheld until the final denouement. Here, too, the phenomenon of power is problematized as a confrontation between forces of order and chaos; it is a problem that must be resolved by establishing a new mental and physical harmony, a fusion between the realms of imagination and reality. The Arabian nights and days combines characteristics of both representations of power. Here, too, it is Shahriyar who embodies supreme, unquestionable power, whose cruelty is mitigated by Shahrazad’s storytelling. However, it is unclear whether Shahrazad’s stories have, in fact, changed his character and attitude, and this uncertainty creates the narrative space in which the novel and its suspense unfold. The whole of society is subjected to a state of liminality as they await the outcome of the sultan’s transformation. Shahriyar’s absolute power has led to opportunism and corruption in the lower echelons of the administration and in the liminal space in which Shahriyar’s authority is temporarily ambiguous. The jinns jump in to manipulate the forces fostering and the forces fighting the corruption of society. As in the Thousand and one nights, a crisis of authority is countered by a supernatural realm that interferes with the real course of events; the ambivalence of the source of power allows a form of interaction between these realms. Of course, the realm of the jinn falls outside the scope of regular government, and the irregularities that occur in the quarter are systematically ascribed to the ‘usual suspects,’ the Shiites and the Kharijites (religious minorities), or the vagabonds and the beggars. These groups are used as symbols to confirm the efficacy of state authority and to identify the enemies of orthodoxy, but it gradually becomes clear that they are not the source of the recurrent violence that arises in the quarter. It is as if an invisible hand lays bare the corrupt essence of the system of authority that ultimately lies in the hearts of individual people. The inefficiency of Shahriyar’s rule is not so much caused by groups undermining his authority, but rather by his awareness that the components of his self that should support his authority have not been brought into harmony by Shahrazad’s stories. Shahriyar realizes that Shahrazad does not really love him, and he is unable to reconcile his task as a ruler with the emptiness in his heart. In the end, he gives up the throne, conscious of the futility of the human endeavor. The fact that power cannot, by itself, fill a vacuum within or fulfill human desires is also shown by the figure of Fadil, who, with his cap of invisibility, becomes virtually all-powerful, but at the same time, feels that he ‘doesn’t exist’ and finds his destiny in sacrifice, not in power. Power is always limited

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by unseen forces, because it is ultimately vested in the mind and the soul, and is conditioned by human deficiency. This is emphasized by the jinns, one of whom wonders why they are not allowed to help the weak, but only to manipulate events in a limited way. The answer is that they, as jinns do not have minds and souls. The real struggle, therefore, takes place inside the human soul. Mahfuz suggests that, as in the Thousand and one nights, there is a relation between the authority of the sultan radiating from his person over society and his personal psychological state. The source of justice and harmony in society is ultimately an inner equilibrium; therefore, it is ironic that in the end Ma‘ruf becomes the new king. Ma‘ruf had been the ‘prisoner’ of his wife and ultimately sends her away. Although for Ma‘ruf this seems to be a positive sign, since he is supported by the populace, it is doubtful that his reign can bring the desired harmony. As in Awlad haratina, the questions related to power continue in a cyclical process and may never be solved. The Realm of the Unseen In the Thousand and one nights, Shahriyar’s regime is transformed through the juxtaposition of and the interaction between reality and a carefully constructed imaginary, narrative world. It is by showing Shahriyar an invisible dimension of the world that Shahrazad succeeds in dislodging his obsessive worldview and replacing it with a new, dynamic outlook. In Awlad haratina, we find a similar interaction between the regimes of violence and ‘intrusions’ from outside, since the cycles of repression are time and again interrupted by prophets who preach justice and refer to visions of Jabalawi or instructions from him. Thus, the interaction between the realm of the unseen and that of human relationships and actions is another link between the Thousand and one nights and Mahfuz’s work. In Arabian nights and days, this link is made explicit when Shahriyar says that Shahrazad’s stories are “from another world,”42 and when he acknowledges that Shahrazad has taught him “to believe in what goes against logic and to plunge into a sea of contradictions.”43 The dynamism of transformation is achieved by intervention from ‘outside.’ In Arabian nights and days this intervention takes two forms: various forms of illusions and the realm of religion and spirituality. Although in Arabian nights and days the juxtaposition of imagination and reality is not integrated into the narrative structure as it is in the Thousand and one nights, Mahfuz embeds narrated stories in a ‘realistic’ framework and 42  Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days, trans. Denis Johnson-Davies (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 47. 43  Ibid., 77.

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plays with various kinds of imaginary motifs that are characteristic of the tales of Shahrazad. The lie is a typical form of combined delusion and self-delusion; it is invented and upheld to acquire wealth and status. In the tale of Ujr the barber, for instance, the protagonist, weary of his insignificant existence as a common tradesman, takes refuge in deceit and blackmails the rich merchants after a violent incident at a drinking party on the tongue of land. With the money, he hopes to escape from the city and fulfill his hopes of gaining riches and status. However, his treachery is publicly exposed in the coffeehouse and he is duly punished. Similarly, in the story of Ma‘ruf the cobbler, the hero pretends to possess the ring of Solomon and with the help of a jinn succeeds in convincing the authorities of his newly acquired power. He is ultimately raised to the position of sultan with the support of the common people. Conversely, sometimes events that appear to be imaginary in the end, turn out to be real, as in the story of Nur al-Din and Dunyazad, who are brought together at night by jinns but are separated after they have made love. They think that they have seen each other in a dream, but ultimately their passion is based on a real experience. In the story of the sultan, an imaginary configuration is staged within reality, when a simple porter who has found a treasure decides to set up a fake court, with functionaries and servants, in order to hold tribunals to judge injustices that have been neglected by the real authorities. These motifs, in which illusions are constructed not only to influence reality but also to bolster positions of power within the regular structure of authority, are all intended to challenge the status quo and make forms of social mobility possible. They all refer directly to stories of the Thousand and one nights, where they are used in a similar vein, but they are also especially reminiscent of Mahfuz’s novels of the 1960s, which portray petty officials who would do anything to enhance their pitiful status and are finally trapped by their own deceit and manipulations. It is impossible to change destiny by way of fraud. In the Thousand and one nights, the interference of the hidden realm with reality is often initiated by the jinns, who create blurred zones by enchanting spaces or persons. In Arabian nights and days, the systematic intervention of the jinns transforms the whole quarter, more or less, into an ambiguous zone, but within this zone additional layers of blurred zones are created, for instance in the story of Anis al-Jalis. Here the malevolent jinn Sakhrabut metamorphoses into a lady of irresistible beauty, who lives in a palatial mansion at the edge of the quarter. The notables of the quarter, including the sultan, are prepared to give up their possessions and status to win her favor and are finally put to shame. Mahfuz uses this episode to comment ironically on man’s indulgence in his carnal lusts and lower instincts; he has done this in many of his novels, but here he also adds a farcical carnivalesque unmasking of social authority,

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which can only be preserved efficiently if it is rooted in personal integrity, sincerity, and humility. A second example of the jinns’ interference can be found in the story of the ‘Cap of invisibility,’ where the young idealistic Fadil, an Islamic political activist, is presented with a cap that makes him invisible, on condition that he refrain from doing what his consciousness incites him to do. Here, of course, the illusion is that Fadil hopes to gain the power to achieve his aims by ‘selling his soul’ to the jinn; but it appears that this hope is elusive and only leads to irreparable evil. In the end, it is not the cap that gives him a sense of selffulfillment, but his willingness to sacrifice himself for his cause, which, when he is on the verge of death, takes the form of a somewhat mystical experience. Here, the negotiation about the expansion of the space of power and the use of illusion to transform reality is futile, since the course of reality is subjected to many contradictory forces and cannot be controlled. In Mahfuz’s novels the realm of the unseen is often represented as an object of desire, in the religious, or more accurately, in the spiritual sense, and often in an articulated sense of destiny. In Arabian nights and days, this spiritual dimension can also be found centered around the figures of Shaykh al-Balkhi and Jamasa al-Bulti. It is the governor who explicitly connects the strange, violent incidents in the quarter with ‘invisible powers’ that steer events according to some hidden logic, when he decides to set Jamasa al-Bulti free. The ‘official’ mystical element is represented by Shaykh al-Balkhi, who has educated all the inhabitants of the quarter in the religious doctrines. However, only a few are destined to ‘follow the path’ and become mystics themselves. In the story of Aladdin, the young son of the barber is tempted to obey the call to dedicate himself to religion. In his wish to improve the world through religion, he is contrasted with Fadil, the Islamist activist, on the one hand, and Habazlam Bazaza, the son of Darwish Umran, the chief of police, who lusts after al-Balkhi’s daughter and worldly status, on the other hand. When the latter treacherously accuses Aladdin of theft, Aladdin is executed, although everyone realizes that the real culprit is unpunished. Al-Balkhi is mentioned as Shahrazad’s tutor; thus, she may also have been initiated, to a certain extent, into the secrets of the ‘hidden world,’ as Shahriyar suggests as well. Al-Balkhi is a source of spiritual guidance, for instance, when Aladdin turns to him for advice. Yet, remarkably, al-Balkhi remains aloof from all these turbulent events and never interferes. He does nothing to save his disciple Aladdin from hell, he speaks in enigmatic oracles, and his advice is usually confined to admonitions and instructions to explore the self. His passivity is contrasted with Jamasa al-Bulti, who actively takes part in the struggle to counter the evil schemes of the jinns and to restore justice when it is

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undermined. He reunites the two errant lovers Nur al-Din and Dunyazad and chases away the deceitful Anis al-Jalis from her house, preventing a shameful collapse of the sultanate. Finally, he contributes to solving the murder of Qut al-Qulub, the concubine of the governor, after an intrigue in his palace. Jamasa al-Bulti is the pivotal figure of the novel, both as a character who intervenes in the course of events, and as a representative of the spiritual and moral dimensions of society. As head of police, he is executed for negligence, but strangely, he survives in another body. He first becomes Abdallah the porter and befriends Fadil, the son of his predecessor. When he commits a murder, he is once again transformed into a wandering shaykh, who is taken prisoner but miraculously escapes with the help of Sahlul, the angel of death, hidden in the guise of a common merchant. He is put in a mental hospital because he keeps claiming that he is Jamasa al-Bulti and that he has committed murders, and it is this encounter with insanity which induces him to explore the depths of this mental state and find its spiritual potential. From then on, he seems to possess some kind of spiritual knowledge and powers that enable him to fight the efforts of the jinns to bring death and destruction to the quarter. Jamasa represents the interface between the ‘real’ world and the invisible world and draws a power from his liminality; this neutralizes the power of the jinns. Moreover, he is fully dedicated to the cause of justice and reveals injustices that remain hidden from the authorities. Yet he leads a solitary life under a palm tree near the green tongue of land and he is the only one who is averse to power, status, and wealth; thus, he resembles the mad beggar-saint figures of the popular Egyptian religious traditions. The examples above show, first, how the themes of illusion, imagination, and spirituality are intimately intertwined with the theme of power and the human urge to obtain it, and, second, how these themes, common in both Mahfuz’s novels and the Thousand and one nights, are fused in the tales of Arabian nights and days, and are perhaps presented in a more universal way in this allegorical, exotic narrative than they are in more realistic, psychological novels. Morality, Freedom, and Fate Many of Mahfuz’s novels deal with human deficiencies and man’s inability to subdue his passions and inner drives. If there is one character that is typical for Mahfuz’s work, in various periods, it is the ambitious anti-hero who follows his desire for power and status, or some vague inner drive, and in doing so systematically takes the wrong decisions and brings about his own downfall. The struggle of these characters illustrates the complexity of the relationship between moral choices and human passions, but it also shows how the

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mechanisms of change and transformation are dangerously linked to disorder and the forces of destruction. It seems that whoever intends to change his social circumstances must not only confront formidable obstacles in the form of hierarchies of power, but also fate, an invisible, unsurmountable force. This fate often takes the shape of social conventions and pressures, but it is ultimately rooted in the character’s soul, where the urge to find liberation is interwoven with the urge toward self-destruction, where uncontrolled passions generate their own ‘punishment.’ In Arabian nights and days, the question of moral choice is, perhaps, the main theme. As noted above, the actions of the characters revolve around power, social status, and forms of manipulation and change. The possibilities for their choices are created by the jinns, who use the quarter as a kind of playground for their amusement and struggles. Sinjam and Qumqam are assigned the task of fostering righteousness in the quarter and especially countering the schemes of the vicious Zarmabaha and Sakhrabut. The latter are mischievous jinns who provoke the inhabitants of the quarter to commit crimes and evil deeds, not for some devilish purpose, but – ironically – just for fun. They make use of their weaknesses and desires to manipulate them, by offering them visions of sex, power, and wealth. Their victims do not comply because of their evil nature or intentions, but mostly out of frustration and powerlessness. Still, the jinns are not all-powerful and apparently, they only carry out the tasks assigned to them. Their activities are set in motion by the injustice in government and by ‘orders’ from an unmentioned source. Their interference shows the entanglement of good and evil components, since Qumqam is set free after he has ‘forced’ Sana‘an to murder the governor who held him captive, but afterward he is unable to help him and says: “Be a hero, it is your destiny.”44 Similarly, the idealistic Fadil is lured into the jinn’s snares by the cap of invisibility, which seems to grant him the power to achieve his political aims, but which instead makes him commit hideous crimes. The forces of good always seem to be linked to the forces of evil. Remarkably, all those who in some way are manipulated by the jinns, such as Ujr, Fadil, and Ma‘ruf, become isolated from their social environment and by becoming forces for change, they disrupt the mechanisms of social coherence. The only figure who seems to be able to reconcile his inner desire to do good with the inevitability of gaining power and committing violence is Jamasa alBulti. In his guise as a madman he is in contact with the realm of the jinns and the human realm, and tries to interfere in both. He attempts to win Sinjam over to his plans, but the jinn is not allowed to obey him. He is immune to 44  Ibid., 28.

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the charms of Anis al-Jalis/Zarmabaha, and she is forced to lift her spell. He commits several murders as ‘punitive measures,’ but saves helpless victims of oppression and injustice. For the human authorities, he is ‘untouchable,’ since he is a madman believed to possess hidden powers or spiritual insight, in spite of his repeated confessions that he has committed the murders. But he is only able to achieve this equilibrium because of his liminal status, because he has been cleansed of any human identity, and is no longer ‘embedded’ in the social structure. He has a kind of truce with Azrael, the angel of death, who is disguised as the merchant Sahlul, a mysterious, lonely figure. The moral purport of the novel is summed up, in the end, by the stories of Sindbad, who has returned to the quarter after years of traveling as a merchant. He tells his adventures to the sultan; each story contains a specific moral message, such as an admonition not to believe in illusions, not to despair, not to stubbornly hold on to traditions, to practice moderation in everything, and to accept God’s guidance. Shahriyar recognizes the similarities between Sindbad’s stories and the tales of Shahrazad. The practical admonitions by Sindbad strangely contrast with the vagueness of the instructions of Shaykh al-Balkhi who, when he is asked for advice, says: “It is your own decision. Take it for the sake of God.”45 Apparently, for the shaykh the only moral framework is the potential presence of God in the soul. It is the acceptance of the divine that resolves the contradictions between good and evil in the soul, and makes moral instructions superfluous. As noted, this attitude leads one to social and political inactivity and to withdrawal from social relationships. In the end, Sindbad is reprimanded for his lack of spirituality; his drive to resume his travels is ascribed to his materialism and his – wrong – decision to let the giant bird al-Rukhkh escape because of his lust for diamonds, on one of his voyages.46 The stories of Sindbad, as a kind of reprise of Shahrazad’s tales, serve as a catalyst to complete Shahriyar’s newly gained insight. He becomes conscious of the necessity to behave in a moral way, as a king and as a man, but he is tortured by feelings of guilt over his previous cruelty and his inability to change the past. Moreover, he realizes that Shahrazad never really loved him and only married him to save the empire. He subsequently gives up the throne in favor of Ma‘ruf the cobbler, and so he sets off, away from the city. He sees a giant Rukhkh’s egg, the symbol of spirituality, with a door. Inside he finds a world of bliss that he, as in the story of the ‘Third qalandar,’ forfeits by failing to resist the opening of a forbidden door. In this final episode, the main themes of 45  Ibid., 45. 46  Ibid., 220–221.

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the novel converge: life is an illusion; man seems to be able to limit unlimited power; and man is unable to obtain his desires. The truth cannot be attained, but at the same time no one can escape from its grasp. This is also the crux of the effort to establish justice and righteousness: these goals will always escape man, they will always impose its inevitability, they will be annihilated by the efforts to realize them. The analysis above shows that the novel Arabian nights and days makes visible the intimate links between Mahfuz’s major works and the Thousand and one nights. The narrative motifs of the Thousand and one nights are smoothly incorporated into typical Mahfuzian themes, thus confirming their universal significance. Although generally the echoes of Shahrazad’s tales in Mahfuz’s work are indirect, Arabian nights and days demonstrates that Mahfuz himself thinks that his work and the Thousand and one nights belong to the same narrative tradition, that they share a crucial set of values and concerns. The spatial pattern, which consists of a carefully constructed configuration of centers of power and private and public or closed and open spaces is one of the basic parallels between Arabian nights and days and many stories of the Thousand and one nights. These spaces basically determine the social and private roles of the characters, they force the characters into hierarchies of power, social conventions, and predetermined relationships. Thus, the spatial pattern is the foundation of the narrative and defines the characters’ scope of action and interaction. As in the Thousand and one nights, in Arabian nights and days the ambiguous status of authority and the interference of the imaginary realm, through the tales told by Shahrazad, subject the spatial pattern to a form of liminality. This liminality not only creates narrative suspense, but also brings about new possibilities for mobility and unexpected events. It allows the interaction between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ spaces, which are represented by dreams, illusions, lies, but especially by jinns of various kinds. These phenomena tend to disrupt established structures, inducing the (anti-)heroes to break out of their predetermined lives, relinquish their socially imposed roles, and strive to realize personal visions of bliss. These efforts at self-realization, against the grain of social conventions, are the raison d’être of many of Shahrazad’s stories and of many of Mahfuz’s novels. This link is visualized in Arabian nights and days. The utilization of liminality in the search for the fulfillment of personal desires leads to questions about the moral dimension of self-realization and the relationship between free will, morality, and social structures. In the Thousand and one nights, the budding self-awareness of the hero often threatens the social hierarchy and the mechanisms that preserve the social structures. However, in the end, after many adventures, dilemmas, and

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admonitions, harmony is restored in a new, revitalized form. In Arabian nights and days, the outcome is less clear, since the urge for self-realization, even in the form of social idealism, is part of an intricate web of moral considerations involving good and evil, spirituality, violence, and power. It is this inherently contradictory character of the struggle for personal freedom and social justice that ultimately limits the space for the free agency of the protagonists. In most of Mahfuz’s novels and stories there is a strong sense of fate, rooted in the realm of the unseen. Although this fate is linked to forms of spirituality, precisely because its origin is unknown, it is also related to human endeavors. Although man is free to act, he can never overcome his ‘human condition’ and although life can be wrested from fate, fate itself cannot be manipulated or vanquished. Thus, Mahfuz’s narrative world is open-ended; in this it differs from the cyclical world of the Thousand and one nights, although, in Arabian nights and days, Ma‘ruf the cobbler’s ascendancy to the throne suggests that the process will start all over again. There is no permanent equilibrium, there is only human endeavor. The works discussed in this chapter, by al-Hakim, Husayn, and Mahfuz, confirm the significance of the Thousand and one nights in modern Arabic literature. The work is accepted as part of the literary heritage and has been adapted to suit modern preoccupations. The intervention of the Nights indicates that there is no doubt that they are part of ‘high’ culture, and even as part of popular culture, it still has a function to destabilize monolithic discourses. It is remarkable that the stories follow a similar pattern: the closure of Shahrazad’s storytelling; a period of uncertainty; and a denouement concerned with questions of good governance, political freedom, freedom of expression, and relations between leaders and their people. These stories represent the voice of political modernization based on Enlightenment ideas and democratic reform. Yet, the political message, which is clear, is not the only concern. All three authors attempt to delve into Shahriyar’s mind to examine the nature of his madness and perhaps discover a cure. Evidently, the cause of the disease is, primarily, in Shahriyar’s disturbed relationship with women, and in this way the cause of his intolerant regime is psychologized: if he restores his mental equilibrium, he will regain his ability to rule in a rational and just manner. AlHakim, with his well-known misogyny, is the most pessimistic of the three; for him Shahriyar finds no solace or cure in Shahrazad’s care and he is doomed to set out on an endless search. In Husayn’s novel, it is not storytelling, but Shahrazad’s genuine love which saves the king. In Mahfuz’s story, too, true love is the ultimate, though unattainable cure.

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Finally, it is remarkable that all three authors add an element of mysticism to their plot. Apparently, there is no solution in politics, or even in mental sanity, alone. Mahfuz’s story is the most sophisticated in this respect; he shows the contradictions of moral behavior, of political idealism, and of good intentions. Fate acts ironically and only a contemplative attitude enables man to accept its vicissitudes. Renouncing wealth and power may lead to personal salvation, but it will not disrupt the eternal cycle of random violence and repression. With the ascendancy of Ma‘ruf, the cycle will start again, because he, too, must find the way to true love and spiritual insight.

Chapter 19

Fabrications of Power: Hani al-Rahib and Rachid Boudjedra In our discussion of Hamdi Tanpınar’s novels, we have seen how the fall of the Ottoman Empire inaugurated a period of uncertainty, cultural confusion, and a political re-orientation in Turkey. For the inhabitants of the Arabic provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the collapse of the central regime in Istanbul was also a matter of far-reaching consequences. In some provinces, such as Egypt, a more or less independent state apparatus had been formed during the nineteenth century, but in other provinces, no administrative structure survived. During World War I, Syria, Mount Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq were occupied by French and British troops, who set up administrations in their respective mandate areas. The great majority of the population was in favor of national independence, but was still divided in its opinion of what form this independence should take. To what extent should the status quo created by the European powers be accepted? Which groups should form the core of the new political elite? How could the newly drawn boundaries be incorporated into a sufficiently stable notion of nationhood? For Syria, these questions were especially persistent, since Damascus and Aleppo were cut off from their ‘natural’ economic hinterlands by the territorial divisions drawn by the mandate powers. The history of Syria after it gained its independence in 1945 followed the familiar pattern of many decolonized states in the Third World. The struggle for independence brought to power a nationalist elite which represented vested economic interests and which sought to consolidate its position by taking control of the state apparatus. This group was subsequently eliminated from power by a sequence of military coups d’état, which ended in the relatively stable takeover by military officers of the nationalist and socialist Ba‘th party. They held the country in a firm grip by controlling the state, installing a military dictatorship, and extending state control over the economy. These measures were supported by an ideology that promised economic development, social equality, and political liberation for the people. In 1967, like other Arab regimes, the Syrian military was faced with ideological and political bankruptcy after the disastrous defeat inflicted by Israel: It not only failed to fulfill its promises; its slogans were proven illusory or, even worse, a fraud. It has often been observed that for the Arab world as a whole, the defeat of 1967 was not merely © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_021

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a military or even political catastrophe, but a severe crisis in all components of society, a ‘civilizational’ shock that forced these societies to transform their visions of their place in the world. These developments can easily be traced in the various trends of Arabic literature from the 1950s to the 1970s. While initially a spirit of struggle for national liberation and social progress predominated, the crisis of 1967 generated confusion, despair, and dissatisfaction with political repression and ideological conformism. Authors became engrossed in developing new forms: “L’injustice vécue au quotidien trouve sa traduction dans des récits qui semblent dénués de tout fil conducteur. Le temps, les lieux se mélangent et les êtres errent dans la confusion, poursuivis par le désespoir, la destruction et le sacrifice, n’ayant commis pour seul crime que d’être faibles et soumis.”1 Political lies were denounced, realism was avoided, and interest shifted to individual and psychological issues. Such an evolution can be found in the work of the Syrian author Hani al-Rahib (1939–2000), whose work Alf layla wa-laylatan (‘One thousand and two nights’; 1977) is discussed in this chapter. As the title indicates, this novel is profoundly related to the Thousand and one nights and was conceived specifically to link the political concerns referred to above with an evaluation of historical processes. The delusions of political discourse and the ‘fabrication’ of visions of modernity are also the dominant theme in an Algerian novel by Rachid Boudjedra (b. 1941), who writes in both French and in Arabic. With regard to the issue of repression, Syria and Algeria are not dissimilar. In both countries, the necessity of building a modern state led to the installation of repressive regimes. In this chapter, we discuss Boudjedra’s novel Les 1001 années de la nostalgie, published in 1979.

The Curse of Repression: al-Rahib’s Alf layla wa-laylatan

Among the traumatizing results of the 1967 defeat was the feeling of the Arab societies that they had lost – or had never possessed – a grip on their own history; this was, of course, especially painful after the optimistic élan of nationalism and self-assertion. The defeat marginalized them in history, and to correctly analyze their situation, authors had to try to grasp the meaning of history for the present, as Vauthier observes with regard to Syria: “De cette manière, la littérature syrienne témoigne sans relâche des rêves déçus qui ont animé l’existence arabe. De ces échecs est né le sentiment de vivre 1  Élisabeth Vauthier, Le roman Syrien de 1967 à nos jours, écritures de renouveau (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 40.

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aux marges de l’histoire noderne et de ne pouvoir donner sens à l’existence contemporaine.”2 Hani al-Rahib is among the authors who ascribe an essential role to history as important ‘material’ for a novel: Hani al-Rahib s’efforce de révéler l’historicité de l’homme. Le temps, élément de base de l’Histoire, en constitue le personnage principal. La tentative pour retrouver un lien significant entre l’homme et son environnement (social comme naturel) s’inscrit donc dans un contexte temporal qui convie l’Histoire à l’intérieur du roman, pour y retrouver les traces d’un dialogue interrompu ou d’une adéquation perdue.3 It is this effort to reconcile conceptions of history and time with a novelistic vision of Syrian society that is the main concern of Alf layla wa-laylatan: it is an attempt to retrace a lost ‘dialogue’ between the past and the present. Hani al-Rahib’s novel Alf layla wa-laylatan fits into a trend which emerged in Syria after the 1967 catastrophe, and which is characterized by a loose, experimental form, and a new, critical, evaluation of society. The narrative does not have a straightforward structure, with a linear plot constructed in a traditional way, developed out of a central intrigue and centered around a main hero or a single perspective. Rather, it consists of a mosaic of episodes, loosely attached to each other and focusing on a group of characters with equivalent roles related to the unfolding of the story. There is no stringent chronological framework, no finalized plot, and no neat resolution of the intrigues. It is, rather, a segment of the lives of the protagonists; it shows their relationships and concerns, presents their conversations and discussions, and reveals their personal and political dilemmas. In total, there are fifteen characters, some of which are highlighted more than others, but in general, they represent the Syrian petty bourgeoisie and some Palestinian refugees in the period just before, during, and after the war of June 1967. One of the main characters in the novel is Abbas, who migrated from the countryside to Damascus and became a teacher and an army officer. In 1963, when the Ba‘th party came to power, he was appointed provincial prefect. Abbas represents the typical political opportunist who seized on the chance to improve and enrich himself. Although in principle he does not lack idealism, and has a genuine concern for the poor classes of society, he adopts a double morality and unscrupulously pursues his own interests; he does not eschew corruption, and showers the citizens with vain promises. He has lost his ideals 2  Ibid., 50. 3  Ibid., 49.

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and retired into a world of egoism and political indifference. He is powerful and indulges in his ability to manipulate people and profit from the difficulties of his ‘clients.’ Finally, his aim is to enjoy life and the privileges he possesses, and this induces him to deceive his wife. Nawaf and Ali are other typical characters. Nawaf is a former military aviator who has become a civil pilot and has also fallen prey to moral corruption. He uses his position to smuggle goods and he is morbidly jealous of his wife, whom he suspects of having a lover. He hates her and treats her sadistically. In one episode, it is revealed that his marriage was part of a ‘deal’ with his wife’s parents, who essentially ‘sold’ her to him. Ali is a Marxist who opposes taboos and sclerotic traditions and who has relationships with several women. He is a dreamer who lives in a permanent crisis of identity as he tries to find a magic formula to change Syrian society. The other male characters include Malik, a journalist, who attempts to balance journalistic integrity with the threat of censorship and repression, and Shish Bish, a dentist who is in a relationship with Asma, who refuses to marry him. Asma is a young, self-confident woman who intends to study, develop herself, and remain free from marriage and other forms of authority. Two other characters, the brothers Mahmud and Imam, are Palestinians who, with their elderly mother, embody the loss of Palestine and the memories of the catastrophic exodus from their homeland. All these characters are portrayed in small, fragmented episodes that are strung together like the consecutive scenes in a soap opera; the focus switches, seemingly at random, from one character to another. The lives of the protagonists are dominated by discussions about politics and the future of Syrian society – discussions that were typical of Third World attitudes of the time. On the international level, the image of Syria, as a ­recently ‘emancipated’ nation, is compared to the situation of Vietnam, Cuba, and Algeria, with their iconic struggles for independence. Anti-Americanism, the liberation of Palestine, economic exploitation, neo-colonialism, class struggle, and Arab solidarity are among the issues that dominate the intellectual debate. All the protagonists ask themselves how society can be improved and how the struggle against exploitation and foreign domination can be won, often by taking the Vietnamese war of liberation as an example. These debates take place in the ideological framework of the Ba‘th government, with its slogan of ‘unity, freedom, socialism,’ and its measures designed to carry out a socio-economic revolution in Syria. The contrast between the slogans of hope and triumph and the harsh reality of Syrian society led to different forms of despair, lethargy, and cynicism. The individual characters experience this disillusion in their own particular

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ways. Abbas, for instance, is introduced while he is lying in a hospital bed, having been shot and almost killed. When he recovers, he realizes that he should not “leave the country to villains, spies and reactionaries”;4 he says, “Now we have power in our own hands. What prevents us from making a revolution?”5 Yet, he also sees his recovery as a new lease on life, from which he should profit to the full: “Every philosophy is merely an escape from death and time. You should live to enjoy before you die.”6 This epitomizes Abbas’s contradictory character, he is a member of a revolutionary regime that promises change for the poor, but he himself profits from his privileged position by accepting bribes and driving expensive cars. Abbas opposes Ali, the Marxist, and argues that “scientific socialism will deprive us of our national characteristics.”7 But Ali retorts that the real problem is that no one is capable of taking definitive strategic decisions. For Abbas, the ideal future is the foundation of an umma (nation) from the Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean, one that is awakened and knocks on the door of history, with a new consciousness for the popular masses, factories for the workers and the soil for who tills it; the Zionist settlements and imperialist intervention will come to an end; palaces will collapse, the wind will blow dictatorship away and the people will breathe the aroma of good earth, which is now polluted by the imperialist villains. But the revolution has not yet been accomplished and imperialism has not been defeated. It needs time; the bourgeoisie will dig their own grave.8 Ali, Mahmud, and Imam have put their hopes on the labor class, which will realize a quick, decisive revolution. “But where is the labour class? Hunger is in every mouth, in every brain. Hunger which lasts for a thousand years, hunger for bread and freedom, warm bread, pure air, an enlightening word.”9 The Arab world is in the grip of the petty bourgeoisie, there is no working class: “The future will begin when we realize that the dreams of the people do not resemble our reality. Revolutionary theory and organization are required.”10 4  Hānī l-Rāhib, Alf Layla wa-laylatān (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1988), 6. 5   Ibid., 7–8. 6  Ibid., 6. 7  Ibid., 40. 8   Ibid., 81–82. 9  Ibid., 146. 10  Ibid., 80.

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Imam states, “One day they will awake in another world, on a new day, in a new year, in a new era.”11 But will Abbas “lead the working class in the Arab umma towards its goals”?12 Abbas replies, “You will see, one day I will sprinkle them with money.” “But money is not the aim of the working class.”13 These discussions take place against the background of Israel’s growing power in the region. Abbas contemplates, It is time to take back our land. We are also confronted with existence, and questions about human destiny and about human relationships. Should we of all people correct a crime that colonialism has committed, while thousands of civilizing tasks are waiting for us in order to create the New Man?14 This attitude, however, leads to passivity and postponement. Mahmud, the Palestinian, decides to join the labor class and liberate Palestine with an army of workers. He refuses to take a better job and live a bourgeois life, to the disappointment of his mother, who says: “Why wait for someone who will not come?”15 But Abbas agrees with him: “When the popular masses are mobilized, Israel and imperialism will be terminated within twenty-four hours.”16 Still, there is a feeling that no one undertakes decisive action: “They call every hour of their life historical and decisive for their destiny, but nobody does anything.”17 The existence of Israel is used as a justification, since it ‘paralyzes’ Arab power, but how long will Israel be used as an excuse? “If Israel is gone, we will see the pudenda of the rulers.”18 For twenty years there has been a situation of war, but always the ‘national cause’ is more important. For Ali, the “struggle against Zionism is only an incident; the real struggle is the one against the human and historical situation in which we live.”19 When he wants to write about Israel, Malik is told by his editor-in-chief: “Don’t waste your talent on side-issues. After scientific research the revolution has established our stand with regard to the Arab situation: our fundamental struggle is the 11  Ibid., 58. 12  Ibid., 51. 13  Ibid. 14  Ibid., 28. 15  Ibid., 93. There is a reference to Godot on 148. 16  Ibid., 90. 17  Ibid., 138. 18  Ibid., 147. 19  Ibid., 159.

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one against imperialism. The Arab nation passes through a decisive phase of struggle.”20 Malik says, “The real danger of Israel is that it will distract us from ourselves…. The death of freedom is a greater danger than Israel. But there will be a time when, out of hunger, the poor will attack their executioners.”21 All these discourses of change and liberation contrast sharply with the situation of the female characters. Umm Mahmud and Umm Imam are mainly preoccupied by their painful memories of the Palestinian catastrophe and the future of their sons. Ummiyya was more or less ‘sold’ to her husband Nawaf and is beaten by him.22 Abbas deceives his wife A’ida with Ghada, who is married to an older man. The only female character who is conscious of her situation as part of a gender struggle and who has the courage to fight for her freedom is Asma, Ummiyya’s sister. She has a rather harmless affair with Shish Bish, who wants to marry her. She refuses, however, saying, “You are rooted in your milieu. We, the poor, are in need of bread and a personality. We don’t have a personality [shakhsiyya], only a quantity [kammiyya]. If I marry you, I will live on your expenses and remain without a personality.” “But you will be free and complete.” “How can I be free when I get my food from you?” “But this is the rule of society in our country.” “I don’t care. Marriage is a rotten institution. I only want to marry on my own terms.”23 Asma wants to finish her studies, live independently, and be free in her relationships with men. She will only marry when she meets someone with whom she really wants to live; she states, “A family is meant only to enslave woman.”24 Ali, the Marxist, starts an affair with Ummiyya, the abused wife of Nawaf. Ummiyya wants to end the affair, however, saying that she is married ‘legally.’ Ali retorts: “But you are mine according to nature. The law is made to organize society. But the society cannot be organized…. Your laws and customs will be abolished after a hundred years. There will be something new. People will 20  Ibid., 131. 21  Ibid., 132. 22  Ibid., 38. 23  Ibid., 239. 24  Ibid., 214, 278.

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be free. Nobody will be forced to live a life like yours. Everything will be based on freedom and new rules. Why shouldn’t you have the right to live, from now, the way you will after a short time, when it [the new society] is realized?” Ummiyya: “It is only sex, physical love. I cannot go on with you.” Ali: “What is wrong with that? Why is the body so rancid and disgusting? Nobody knows real love who doesn’t know the body. The body is the gate to the mind. Whoever has not entered it hasn’t entered the realm of the spirit.”25 Sulayman, in whom Shish Bish confides his misery, says that his friend’s love for Asma is hopelessly romantic. Love is essentially physical and takes only a small part of human life. The rest is work and production. He declares him a fool for proposing marriage to Asma. Marriage is voluntary imprisonment. Relationships between men and women are unimportant, they are only bedfellows. Sulayman accuses Shish Bish, and later Ali, of living in a world of dreams and illusions: “It is no use arguing with someone who cannot distinguish the thoughts in his head from real facts.”26 According to him, Shish Bish is still immersed in a world of ignorance (jahiliyya). The perpective of these ideological disputes and personal intrigues changes when regional tensions increase as a result of Israeli shelling. The subsequent events finally lead to a full-scale war, which disrupts the life of some of the protagonists. Hope that the ‘homeland’ will soon be liberated is resuscitated, but the “struggle may go on for weeks, because Israel is stronger than you think.”27 Shish Bish is transferred to a military hospital. Ali and Imam attend a meeting at the Labor Union and listen to a speech: “The Arab armies are fighting excellently … Our struggle is in the factories, to provide for the needs of the people…. We are the internal front.”28 Nawaf is arrested as a spy and Malik writes for the newspaper: “The Arabs will erase the shame of the nakba [the foundation of Israel in 1948]. This is what we have been waiting for. This is a new Vietnam.”29 The official bulletins report the successes of the Arab armies, and present the war as a Third World struggle against imperialism. Slogans should convince the people that 25  Ibid., 251–252. 26  Ibid., 10, 62–63. 27  Ibid., 296. 28  Ibid., 300. 29  Ibid., 309.

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The enemy is beaten on all fronts…. The enemy leaves his dead behind in the streets…. The Palestinian Liberation Army are engaged in heavy battles with the enemy in the Gaza strip…. The Syrian army overwhelms the Hawla plain…. The struggle will not end…. The shooting will not end until Israel is destroyed…. The united forces destroy the Zionist attacks.30 It is only Sulayman who, from the beginning, thinks that the war is a lost cause and who is not surprised when Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir announces the defeat of the Arab armies. “How is that possible after four days of victories?”31 It is clear, however, that Israel was only able to triumph because of the military support of the United States. After the war ends, feelings of disbelief and disillusion reign, but some of the protagonists are still defiant, each in his or her own way. Ali and Ummiyya are in complete despair. They have lost their dreams but have not ‘awakened.’ Ali says, “I thought that after the war there would be a change for the future. I thought that we would be able to focus on our basic needs, that we would change our customs and relationships.”32 It is a “barren and aborted time,” there is no future for their relationship. Abbas, however, clings to his rhetoric: The next struggle will be about the land, not about hollow words such as honour, dignity, revenge or heroism…. The Arab progressive movement has not been vanquished. The revolution will stay, rediscover itself, reconquer the land, produce a new man, bring justice, end imperialism. The war looked like the struggle of Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan,33 only the jinns were not on our side.34 Shish Bish acts as if nothing has happened. He says, “The country has not been defeated, only our leaders have been defeated. Nothing will change for us. I am not defeated, but they dress me in the clothes of a defeated man.”35 Asma, however, decides that she will “never marry someone of this defeated generation.”36 For Imam, the defeat is only a stage in the class struggle:

30  Ibid., 306, 315–316. 31  Ibid., 324–326. 32  Ibid., 320–321. 33  The hero of an ancient Arabic epic. 34  Al-Rāhib, Alf Layla, 328–329. 35  Ibid., 335–338. 36  Ibid., 338.

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The defeat will become a victory, because the Arab umma has been awakened. The decisive struggle against Zionism will come. The defeat was caused by the state of intoxication in which we lived and by the bastard slogans of the petty bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeoisie has now been defeated and has failed in its historical confrontation with imperialism.37 Finally, according to Mahmud, only the guerrilla fighters, the fida’iyyun, are capable of liberating Palestine. He, Imam, and Ali join the Palestinian freedom fighters, while Malik, too, enlists in a guerrilla group. History and the Thousand and One Nights As the title of the novel suggests, Alf layla wa-laylatan is permeated with references to the Thousand and one nights, both implicit and explicit. Throughout the story, jinns, magic palaces, magic rings, amulets, etc. are mentioned as means of sudden transformations. Furthermore, Shahrazad and the Thousand and one nights are referred to regularly, sometimes by the author and sometimes by the protagonists. Scenes and situations are compared to the ‘world’ of the Thousand and one nights, especially those related to images of relationships and the difficulty of distinguishing fantasy from history. The main narrative connection between the novel and the Thousand and one nights, however, consists of the vision of the Nights as representing a phase in Arab history, a phase from a distant past which still dominates the present. The discourses in Alf layla wa-laylatan are set within two main paradigms. The first is the tension between illusion and reality. Time and again the protagonists are confronted with the question of how their ideas and philosophies relate to reality. The ideologies of the protagonists are dominated by abstract notions such as class struggle, revolution, and the ‘new man,’ and these do not seem to conform to the real situation of society. To what extent do these visions accurately represent reality and how can reality be transformed into the struggle to realize the future aims of the characters? All the protagonists, except the cynical Sulayman, in some way or another live in a world of dreams, clinging to visions that prevent them from seeing the reality surrounding them. This discrepancy between visions of reality and reality itself may be caused not only by hypocrisy, as in the case of Abbas, but may also be derived from genuine idealism and hope. However, in both cases, the authorities, who use the hopes of the people to solidify their own power and exploit their dominant position through corruption and repression, manipulate the imaginary constructs of 37  Ibid., 345.

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reality. This is most painfully revealed by the government’s choice to deliberately delude people during the war against Israel. The second paradigm in which the discourses are embedded is the tension between individual and collective responsibility and history. The situation in which the protagonists find themselves is explained in reference to historical circumstances, such as imperialism and colonialism, class relationships, revolution, and in relation to collectives, such as the working class, or Third World nations. This does not eliminate the question of individual responsibility in these collectives and historical processes, however, and each of the characters deals with this in his or her own way. Perceptions of history are ‘mobilized’ in various ways according to the personal inclinations of the characters. Shish Bish sees history as a phenomenon integrated into his personal experience: Suddenly a frightening thought occurred to him: that he had no history, that he was in need of the wisdom that comes to man from the loins of the ages and the permanent construction of life. “This nation, why has it stagnated for a thousand years? Here he was, a medical specialist, he had witnessed the world and was now located in Damascus, and there was no deeper reality in him than his primitive desires. He had the feeling that he had forfeited a lot, and his forefather as well, hundreds of small and great desires, and that history began now, with his first conceding to his first desire. Continuing to do this would produce a real history, when the longings accumulated in his heart turned into a reality as solid as this house in which he lived. After all, what was history other than a primitive eruption of life and a constant submission to it? Every time a desire erupted, a civilization began. This reactionary Sulayman didn’t understand that the purification of the soul and its cleansing of these desires simply meant death.”38 Thus, for Shish Bish, the lack of historical vitality and dynamism has prevented him – and others – from transforming his desires into a generative, creative force, and instead has paralyzed him and reduced him to a fatalistic passivity. For others, history represents rootedness, an accumulation of forces and a source of strength. As an officer remarks during the war: “The Arab is perseverant. He can endure. He possesses the stamina of a camel in the desert. We have endured Israel for twenty years, Western colonialism for hundred years, and the Ottomans for four hundred years. We have always defeated our enemies. 38  Ibid., 49.

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We will defeat them now.”39 Others are less optimistic: “What do we do with a heritage of thousands of years of decay? We used to have brave warriors. Their swords are still here, but they are no longer able to cut.”40 Mahmud sighs, We know history only from imperialist books. We require a new scientific history according to new laws to discover the underlying currents that dominated the development of the lives of the Arabs. The Arabs have a glorious history, but why are the eternal meanings of their civilization tyrannized by the reports of merchants and slave-girls?41 It is the war that reveals the discrepancy between optimism and realism. The day of the outbreak of the war the nature of Damascus changes: “The old, deeprooted city came out of a waking sleep and entered a waking stupor.”42 And, The people think that everything is all right; except that the leaders are not up to their responsibility; it thinks it is the best umma for the people, but that it is the circumstances and imperialists which brought it down…. But how can a nation without a belief, without a lofty aim, without a mission, ever triumph?43 These two paradigms, the tensions between truth and lie, and between responsibility and history, are brought together in the broader matrix of the Thousand and one nights. Before the beginning of the first chapter, the rationale of this matrix is explained: The aim of the mingling of times in the novel is a reference to the continuation of the Arab world of the Thousand and one nights during thousand and one year. This continuation has reached its culmination in the year 1967 through the civilizational defeat which has removed the Arabs from the trajectories of time and confronted them with the 1002nd night.44 The Thousand and one nights represents a phase in history, one that was integrated in a long tradition which followed a more or less self-evident course that 39  Ibid., 271. 40  Ibid., 139. 41  Ibid., 101. 42  Ibid., 288. 43  Ibid., 319. 44  Ibid., 3.

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sprang forth more from the inner need to preserve a world outlook than from a dynamism linked to the outer world. Still, this world of the Thousand and one nights, which is marked by a sense of lethargy and an ossification of attitudes and mentalities, is preserved by historical circumstances that hold it imprisoned. Malik, the journalist, writes that The Third World is primary matter that has not yet crystallized into form, this is the secret of its dreams and tragedies. It possesses boundless life, and, consequently, a boundless chaos. It is clear that it will possess history eventually. The days pass by it in defeat, while its face shines and its mouth smiles. It has no other assets for life than its love of life. The other things are buried between dream and possibility. It does not act, only react – a futile response. In it millions of people die of hunger, other millions are starving, and other millions are hungry. The people are slaves, except within a circle with a radius of half a meter, slaves of imperialism, of daily life, of the hot climate, of impulsive emotions that wither away like foam of the sea. In it are painted exploitation, beautiful corruption, legal theft, bald-headed crime. In it are beggars, barefooted wretches, physically and sexually mutilated, twofold, threefold, fourfold, tenfold. To be brief: it is the world of the Thousand and one nights. In spite of all this, nobody kills someone who deserves to be killed, there is nobody who sacrifices himself to save a principle or to liberate a land, except in Vietnam. There is nobody who lives or dies in freedom, or who knows love or hate or gentleness or cruelty or purity or filth. There is nobody who halts before an ultimate boundary. Their life is a tragedy, the tragedy of capitalist domination, of disjointed relationships, of the lack of a centre. But they are watching it as if it is an accident that has hurt other people.45 Thus, the historical configuration of forces holds whole societies in its grip, paralyzing them and preventing them from assuming their proper role in history. They are imprisoned in the vicious cycle of their own misery and injustice. This lethargy obviously affects the lives of the characters, who must each decide what their role in this historical phase is, and how to shape their own life within the constraints of that role. Shish Bish sighs that this nation has stagnated for a thousand years. He feels that this lethargy has deprived him of a part of his life, as if he has slept for a thousand years. He fantasizes about a way out, that a jinn will take him and Asma to another land and give them a ring which will make them feel warm if they are cold, which will give them a 45  Ibid., 135.

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comfortable bed when they are tired, which will provide them with a copious banquet when they are hungry, and which will fly with them to the luscious islands of Waq al-Waq.46 Others, too, dream of a magic intervention that will bring this age of passivity and depression to an end, and will suddenly put them in a new world, a new life, a new society. The burden of traditional conventions and relationships weighs even more heavily on women, who are seen as being useful only for pleasure and procreation. The age-old relationships between men and women, in which men treat women as objects of trade or lust, as slave girls who can be possessed and removed at will, is still extant in Syrian society and makes pure, honest love impossible. The women have “the spirit of the harem still in them, as if they still live in the age of the Thousand and one nights.”47 They are looking for a way to fulfill their desires, “something they don’t know, something else, something different, something sweet and salty and delicious and sour and fat, with bright colours and a beautiful form, with a pleasant temperature, humid and warm … Something with which the world of passion in the Thousand and one nights is filled.”48 Conversely, some of the men only long for an Oriental woman, lying on a couch, with a mirror in one hand and a comb in the other, made up with kohl and rouge, dedicated to love. Like the women with which the pages of the Thousand and one nights are filled, with a transparent mantilla, dressing to undress, with wells and wells of restrained lust and waters rising to the face from freshness and shyness, and as an invitation to rape.49 It is this dehumanization of women, in which they are turned into romanticized sex objects, that has contributed to the loss of social dynamism and ossified age-old structures and traditions. The older women, as well as those of the younger generation, are trapped in the stifling stagnancy of social conventions. Only Asma seems, almost miraculously, to escape from them. It is the war of 1967 and the disastrous defeat of the Arab armies which breaks the spell that paralyzes Syrian society. Suddenly the protagonists become aware that they have lived in a world of make-believe, that their vision of themselves and their society was an illusion, that they have been duped 46  Ibid., 148. 47  Ibid., 34. 48  Ibid., 327. 49  Ibid., 359.

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by empty slogans, by hollow references to historical processes, by a self-image that turned out to be incongruous with historical reality. This ‘new awakening’ from the state of paralysis occurs not through the emergence of a ‘new man,’ but rather when the imaginary vision of self and society is shattered. The question is no longer how a future can be constructed through the transformation of a defective, but more or less organically grown, present, but rather how to rebuild a new present that carries the potential of a future, to find a way back into the course of common history. The defeat shows the protagonists that they must ‘reinvent’ not just their present and their potential future, but also, and especially, their past. Still, there are choices which are linked to collective and individual responsibility. Malik argues, We have a choice, like in 1948: Either we negotiate to eliminate the traces of hostility and to accept its results; or we fight, fight in a different way which Israel cannot withstand and with a people that has come out of the world of the Thousand and one nights and has turned towards a new vision.50 Imam, Mahmud, Ali, and Malik decide to join the resistance militias to fight against Israel; this is their way to heed the consequences of their ‘awakening.’ Other protagonists, however, continue their lives as if nothing has happened. Umm Khalaf and Umm Imam do their shopping as usual; Sulayman walks to his shop; Ghada sits on her balcony; and Shish Bish says, “Nothing will change.”51 To summarize, the Thousand and one nights is used in Alf layla wa-laylatan to expound several narrative themes and layers. First, the Nights represents history, in the sense of a tradition constructed in the past, which has remained a dominant paradigm until the present and continues to represent the ‘essence’ of a society that has lost its dynamism. Second, the Nights represents the stagnancy of a worldview which has become obsolete and useless, and which is based on archaic relationships between the sexes. Third, the Nights symbolizes a world in which illusions reign, in which lies are used to manipulate people, and in which magical solutions seem to be part of reality. It is a world which is under a spell that paralyzes the inhabitants and places society beyond the course of history.

50  Ibid., 361. 51  Ibid., 335–338.

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A False Utopia: Rachid Boudjedra

Hani al-Rahib uses the Thousand and one nights as a repository of elements to show that the Arab world is in a historical impasse, to reveal the delusions of politicians, the manipulations from abroad, and the creation of a deceptively modern utopia/dystopia. His novel dissociates itself from the trend of ‘social realism’ which predominated in Arabic literature for some time, until the catastrophe of 1967. In his novel, Les 1001 années de la nostalgie, the Algerian writer Rachid Boudjedra (b. 1941) adopts similar themes to comment on comparable phenomena in his society. He moves away from realism in a different direction, toward that of magical realism, by following the trail blazed by his Latin American colleagues. In 1001 années de la nostalgie, as in al-Rahib’s novel, the main issue is how the ‘idea’ of the Thousand and one nights relates to modern society and, more particularly, how it relates to the cultural and social traditions of the past. The novel is not only about the Thousand and one nights, it is also itself influenced by the realm of Shahrazad, especially the presence of magic and supernatural forces that are a natural component of the reality of the characters. In this, the novel follows the trend of magical realism, and more specifically, is strongly reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez’s One hundred years of solitude. It was published in 1979 in French. The protagonist of Boudjedra’s novel is Mohamed SNP, which means ‘Sans Nom Patronymique,’ this was the way the French colonial authorities indicated that the father of a child was unknown. Mohamed lives with his mother Messaouda and his brothers and sisters in Manama, an isolated village in the Algerian desert. He is a very special person, who has the reputation of being a ‘modern sorcerer’; he has green eyes, has the power to magically silence the chatter of children, chickens, and birds, and is an inexhaustible lover. He has nine brothers and nine sisters who are all twins; he is the only ‘single’ son. Mohamed SNP is passionately interested in history and is particularly absorbed in a search for the house where the fourteenth-century historiographer and philosopher Ibn Khaldun lived. Ibn Khaldun spent some years in Manama working on his famous book al-Muqaddima, the prologue of his great history, in which he explains the principles of the discipline of history. In the village, the epicenter of the many intrigues is the governor, the leader of the community, who owns a large house – partly in a Moorish style and partly in a Scandinavian style – with a swimming pool and a petrol station (although there is no car in the village). He controls politics and the economy in the town and has two daughters, Keltoum, who is Mohamed’s lover, and Leïla, who sets out for Australia to take dancing lessons and marries a prince of the royal family of Khalijie (lit., ‘Gulf-land’), the richest country in the world.

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The expenses for the wedding are higher than the budget of a poor country over ten years. At a certain point, the governor establishes a brothel in the town, which he regularly supplies with new local girls; this is where Mohamed meets Messaouda, the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. The governor also attempts to bring modernity to the village, with the help of the Americans and the king of Khalijie. The attempts to revitalize the village by artificial rain or the importation of a huge iceberg fail, as does a plan to oblige all women to learn how to play tennis. Parallel to these introductory descriptions of the town and its main inhabitants, historical excursions by the narrator illustrate the deep historical roots of the community – that began with the flourishing Saharan trade – and show its integration into the Arabic cultural tradition. Interspersed in the story, the names of important Arabic scholars and writers, such as al-Jahiz, al-Farazdak, al-Hallaj, al-Biruni, al-Khwarizmi, al-Mutanabbi, al-Tabari, and others are mentioned. These references are meant not only to evoke the picture of Manama as embedded in a rich cultural history, but especially to illustrate the vitality of the Arabic tradition and its heritage of scientific discoveries and scholarly sophistication. Mohamed’s search for the house of Ibn Khaldun is meant to retrieve ‘history,’ that is, the dynamic history of Arabic civilization. When an American film crew arrives in Manama to make a mega-production of the Thousand and one nights, everything changes radically. The town is wrapped in an enormous cardboard backdrop and is filled with actors and crew who disrupt the lives of the inhabitants. The film is co-produced by the king of Khalijie, “pour montrer à l’univers à quelle degré de raffinement la civilisation musulmane était arrivé dans le passé.”52 The governor supports this effort to introduce this “pearl of the cultural patrimony of the Muslims.”53 The film cannot be made in his kingdom because of its strict religious constitution, so the king of Khalijie has paid large amounts of money, and therefore expects a grand spectacle, one that will encourage the Arabs’ prestige in the world: “Comme il s’agissait du prestige du monde arabe, ce film sur les Mille et une nuits devrait faire resurgir une civilisation que l’on a tellement baforcée.”54 The people of Manama are gripped by fear in the face of this sudden invasion. They are unable to understand the artificial nature of the wondrous phenomena displayed before their eyes. Although they know that another, fallacious, reality exists, they are unable to grasp its nature. The backdrops of the Magnetic Mountain and the City of Brass look so real that they subvert reality, 52  Rachid Boudjedra, Les 1001 années de la nostalgie (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 232. 53  Ibid. 54  Ibid., 259.

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“décapant la réalité et la rendant inutile et allusive.”55 The world has become illusory and the townsmen are reduced to mere spectators, or, even worse, to extras: “Les gens ne savaient plus exactement s’ils existaient réellement ou s’ils n’étaient que des artifices amenés avec eux par les étrangers comme leur machinerie, leur attirail et leur whisky.”56 They internalize the illusion to such an extent that they really die when they enter the City of Brass. This is the aim of the producers of the film, who “se rendaient compte qu’ils pulverisaient les frontiers de l’authenticité et que leur cinema allait avoir cette patine irremplacable du vrai et du vraisemblable.”57 Thus, this carefully designed replica of the Thousand and one nights engulfs the town and imposes itself as the new reality. This is symbolized by an enormous artificial whale that threatens to swallow the town and its inhabitants. This reality soon penetrates all aspects of life in Manama, to the extent that after a fatal accident the dead bodies of the Manamese are used as part of the backdrop and a number of townsmen drown during the filming of submarine episodes in the town. Soon the fear and confusion turn into rebellion, under the leadership of Mohamed SNP; extras demand more money and acts of sabotage interrupt the shooting. When he is imprisoned, Mohamed receives a revelation about what is really happening: the producers of the film are appropriating the history of Manama: En prison, il recevait la visite d’Al Kindi, philosophe athéiste et inventeur de la théorie des miroirs ardents et de l’existence matérielle de la lumière. L’envers de la médaille. Les Mille et Une Nuits sont merveilleuses. Tout n’y est pas. Les cinéastes étaient en train d’invertir l’histoire, de la dévergonder. Juste une fantasmagorie de marins qui ont trop bu. L’essentiel était ailleurs.58 From this point the references to history in the story begin to form a structural subtext; this relates to Mohamed’s fascination with history, which is now represented by Messaouda, Mohamed’s lover, in addition to Keltoum. Messaouda, who takes the name of her historical alter ego Chajarat Eddour, or simply Dour (d. 1257), a Mamluk princess in Egypt who became the only queen in Arabic history and who is likened to Shahrazad, begins to tell the story of two great tenth-century revolts, of the Carmatians and the Zinj, the black slaves, in 55  Ibid., 226. 56  Ibid., 228. 57  Ibid., 246. 58  Ibid., 251.

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Mesopotamia. The revolt shows that there are examples of resistance in Arabic history, of popular revolts against oppression and exploitation. This example, as related by Dour and Keltoum, becomes the main source of inspiration for the revolt of the people of Manama. The episode of the Carmatians is explicitly linked to the Thousand and one nights. It is suggested that, while the elite were in their palaces entertaining themselves with the marvelous tales of the Nights, ‘real’ history unfolded outside. Rebellious slaves tore apart copies of the Thousand and one nights and burned the Qur’an. While a false history was invented and recorded in the Thousand and one nights, another version of history developed in real life, and the true history was dominated by social inequality, repression, and revolt. This layer of history is interwoven with historical references, including the names of scholars and literati who shaped the Arabic cultural and scholarly tradition. Gradually a dual image appears: a reality that is rooted in tradition and the experiences of the people, and the deceptive reality constructed by the elite in a coalition with foreign invaders. After a while the revolt becomes violent; on one side is the governor, who has founded a ‘Parti National,’ the king of Khalijie, the American film directors, and a general Yahoudi (lit., ‘Jew’), and on the other side, Mohamed SNP and his group. The coalition gains the upper hand and the film crew resumes its work. The transformation of the town continues: Bref, ils dénaturèrent le village, transformé en colonie yanko-yiddish comme s’ils allaient s’y éterniser définivement, alors qu’initialement ils étaient venus tourner les Mille et une nuits avec l ‘argent du mari de Leïla pour prouver à la face du monde, à travers ces contes merveilleux, que la civilisation musulmane appartient au patrimoine universel et fait partie des acquis reels de l’humanité.59 Just when the town is transformed into a replica of ancient Baghdad, with souqs and alleys, for a tale from the Harun al-Rashid cycle, Mohamed SNP turns up with the Black Stone from Mecca and demands that the foreigners leave town. This causes the collapse of the coalition of the Khalijie king and general Yahoudi and finally brings about the exodus of the invaders. The various participants in the drama learn from their bitter experiences and gain new insights following this turbulent confrontation. The governor realizes that his vision of modernization as a ‘magical’ process of imposing 59  Ibid., 333.

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technology and modern culture on the town with the help of foreign allies is doomed to failure: ils ne pouvaient pas imaginer jusqu’où l’existence d’un village, aussi tordu et ainsi torride, aussi brûlant et aussi branlant, aussi magique et aussi tragique, qu’il fallait pourtant organiser, mettre en état de s’assumer et d’exister au-delà des sortilèges et des délires, à l’intérieur d’une structure rationelle, qui tiendrait par elle-même et n’aurait pas besoin de l’homme providentiel, comme le préconisait Ibn Khaldoun rêvant d’une démocratie à la portée de tous.60 But Mohamed realizes, too, that his daydreaming about history and Ibn Khaldun is not a solid foundation for a return to an authentic cultural consciousness. He understands that people only adapt themselves to hunger, epidemics, floods, grasshoppers, plagues, massacres, and injustice because they instinctively understand that the only way to survive is to control the mechanisms of their society. He acknowledges that he has contributed to the ‘extravagance’ that pervaded the consciousness of the people: Il avait trop manipulé les sortilèges, accumulé les dons extralucides, stocké les sens divinatoires, alors que son role aurait dû le pousser à combattre la magie, la superstition et les croyances stupides ancrées solidement chez ces êtres qui ne connaissent de la vie que sa face reflétée, du réel que son extrapolation falsifiée.61 He had dreamed for too long about happiness as if he were looking at a split screen: “Il avait trop revé les traces et l’écho du Bonheur comme une pélicule à deux bandes: le son et l’image des Mille et une nuits escamotés par la mémoire de la vindicte et de la falsification.”62 At this point, the Armenian clockmaker of the town succeeds in repairing the last broken clock, and all the clocks beat together, nineteen times. Time, which had come to a standstill seven ages ago, resumes its pace. The life of the village is set into motion once again, at its own unique speed: le temps du désert n’a rien à voir avec les autres temps des autres régions et des autres climats. Messaouda n’avait pas eu tort de se méfier de ses 60  Ibid., 373. 61  Ibid., 403. 62  Ibid., 421.

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horloges siciliennes. En réalité, tout était faussé par l’acuité de la lumière et la volume des grains de sable capables de d’étraquer non seulement des mécanismes d’horlogerie, mais les rouages de l’univers même!’63 All the turmoil caused by the foreign invasion was inevitable, and a necessary step to achieve this: “le temps, laissé trop longtemps en friche, prend sa revanche sur les générations suivantes et que le vide de sept siècles de torpeur, de pillage, d’aliénation et de désintegration, a besoin de tout le tintamarre du monde pour être, un tant soi peu, comblé.”64 Manama returns to the fold of history and is reintegrated into the processes of cultural, economic, and social progress, but on its own conditions. Hani al-Rahib’s novel Alf layla wa-laylatan is, first, a fierce critique of the dominant political attitudes in Syria in the years before the Israeli-Arab war of 1967. The seizure of power by the Ba‘th party, an ideological movement with outspoken ideas about freedom, political co-operation, and social justice, opened new horizons of socio-economic development, but the 1967 defeat revealed the emptiness of its slogans and declarations. The revolution, which was legitimated by the struggle against social injustice, brought to power representatives of the new classes, who soon resorted to repression and corruption. Repressive measures were justified by the ongoing struggle against Israel and western imperialism, and by the goal of establishing a new society that would liberate the Syrian people from the shackles of imperialism. The defeat in 1967 showed that the justification of these struggles was just a façade to conceal the real aims of the new powers, that is, their unlimited greed and thirst for power. The political attitudes al-Rahib depicts fit seamlessly into the discourses of national emancipation and solidarity with the newly independent Third World states, which were widespread throughout the 1960s, both in western Europe and in the Third World. For Syria, the issue was building a stable state in the boundaries that were rather haphazardly drawn by the European powers after World War I. Subsequent governments attempted to solidify their position by constructing a society based on class, finding ideologies that would bring the various groups together, and developing the means through which their power could be effectuated. The Ba‘th party, with its base in the countryside and its support of the military, gradually succeeded in forging the elements of power into a coherent state apparatus, but its efforts to stabilize its

63  Ibid., 432. 64  Ibid., 397.

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position prevented a real confrontation with Israel, in spite of its vociferous declarations. The leftist and emancipatory discourses of the 1960s were explicitly embedded in visions of history. Of course, Marxism was based on an analysis of historical processes, but Ba‘thism, too, with its combination of socialism and nationalism, identified a ‘historical’ mission for the Arab nation and linked a bright and prosperous future to a vision of tradition and cultural identity. History contained the seeds of a new society, of a new man; these would emerge from the historical struggle under the leadership of the party. In Ba‘thist ideology, the dynamic, emancipatory role of history is stressed as a process that can be steered by struggles and collective determination. For this, a sense of national unity is required, apart from collective and individual sacrifices to support the national cause. Only then will Syria, as part of the Arab nation, take its rightful place among the other nations, proud of its independence and socio-economic achievements. According to al-Rahib, as he explains in his novel, this instrumentalist vision of historical processes is tantamount to the ‘confiscation’ of history. The ideologues of the ruling elite impose a vision of history on the nation to legitimate their authority and structure the basis on which it is built, while in fact they use it as a tool to manipulate the people. While claiming to present history as a dynamic, mobilizing force, in fact, the regime leads Syrian society out of the regular course of history by inventing an imaginary historical process that is detached from the ‘real’ historical processes in which it is inevitably integrated. Thus, the ideologies do not reflect a real transformation of society, but rather usher in a period of stagnation that alienates Syria from the world around it. History, as it is represented by the authorities, is a willful delusion, an interruption of history designed to enable specific groups to consolidate their power. It is an artificially constructed framework for the manipulation and molding of society. Boudjedra represents Manama’s ordeal on its path to modernity primarily as a struggle between fictions. On one hand, he reveals the false image of the Thousand and one nights as a cheap, commodified simulacrum of Arabic culture, invented without links to a ‘real’ history, rather it is simulacrum that was confiscated by the West with its superior technology, and finally re-appropriated by the wealthy Arab oil states, which have enough money to shape the Arabic heritage according to their own wishes and interests. On the other hand, he presents a vision of the Arabic cultural and intellectual tradition that refers to the great figures of Arabic science and literature and seems to represent cultural authenticity, but it acquires this authenticity through the intervention of the common people, who represent ‘real’ history and who are the

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‘real’ carriers of this tradition. In both cases, the promulgation of ‘fictive’ histories relates to political interests: they are a means for manipulation and deceit, for the acquisition of power and wealth. These histories are ideologically necessary to construct legitimacy and historical embedment, authenticity and its modern guise, within the exertion of power. This struggle takes place in a period when time is suspended. History has come to a halt and Manama, like Marquez’s Macondo, is banned from the regular passage of time. In this intermittent period, forsaken by ‘real’ history, it falls prey to superstition and a false grasp of reality; this allows space for all kinds of supernatural phenomena to intrude and artificial technologies to be imposed on the town. All these illusive phenomena fail to bring Manama back to the domain of history; they only ‘colonize’ the inhabitants and manipulate them. It is only when the people join together to revolt against the fraudulent representation of themselves that are able to force their way back into history.

Chapter 20

The Secret Lives of Sindbad: Mostafa Nissaboury and Bahram Beyzaï It is not difficult to understand why authors, and especially Arabic authors, have been intrigued by the motif of the 1002nd night. The period of the Thousand and one nights represents a more or less self-contained unity, with its own regime of time, suspense, suspension of disbelief, and narrative dynamism. This regime is built on the expectation of a certain death, and culminates in Shahrazad’s triumph over Shahriyar’s bitterness. As long as the regime continues, the two characters, Shahrazad and Shahriyar, are not ‘realistic’ characters; they are, as it were, caught in the spell of their relationship, that of narrator and narrated, master and victim. It is evident that such a long, rhythmic pattern of storytelling cannot be halted suddenly without continuing to influence the lives of the participants, both the characters and the readers, the more so since the whole process was intended to effectuate a change, a ‘resetting’ of an anomalous situation. This implies that the spell of the Thousand and one nights will continue to be felt in the aftermath. What does this aftermath look like? Since many authors regard the work as a part of a glorious period of Arabic history, one that not only reveals a refined literary concept, but also mirrors deep-rooted mentalities, representations, images, and self-images of Arabic culture, the work has acquired both a literary and a historical significance. This immediately situates the Thousand and one nights in the intricate debate about modern Arabic culture and politics, one of whose major themes is the relationship between the glorious past and the less radiant present. To what extent can the past be used as a model for the present? Of the works inherited from the Arabic past, the Thousand and one nights certainly belongs to the most vital, flexible, and eloquent models. Moreover, it consists of a more or less self-contained repository of all that was beautiful and relevant in the heroic and glorious past, and as such can be perceived as a model for the past culture as a whole. But this model integrates the narrative mechanism of the Nights: if the glorious past was a self-contained period, stretching over a long period of time, unified by a kind of spell, what happened after this spell was lifted? What remained of the previous period? How did it continue and how does it continue to shape the present? Is the aftermath of the historical ‘regime’ marked by liberation or by stagnation? By optimism or nostalgia? Has the escape from

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_022

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the spell thrown the Arab world into the destitution of normalcy, or is the spell itself a condition of normalcy that should be sought? It is questions such as these, that relate the Thousand and one nights to current political and cultural debates, that interest the two authors discussed in this chapter. In their own way, each depicts the present as a dystopian abode, whose nature they link to the ‘phenomenon’ of the Nights. In different ways, the ‘spell’ of the Nights throws its shadow over the present, not only to reveal the complex relationship between the past and the present, but also to explore forms of manipulation and repression. Both authors, Mostafa Nissaboury and Bahram Beyzaï, incorporate the theme of history, of the passage of time, decay, and stagnation, which is so closely linked to the concept of the Nights, and use the figure of Sindbad as the conveyor of their pessimistic message.

Mostafa Nissaboury: Shahrazad’s Suffering

One of the most intriguing evocations of the 1002nd night is the poetic text La mille et deuxième nuit (1965) of the Moroccan author Mostafa Nissaboury (b. 1943). The text consists of four parts, partly in prose and partly in poetry, which are coherent in their cryptic and rather sinister atmosphere and their substructure of references to the Thousand and one nights. In the first three parts, these references form a metaphoric frame linking familiar Thousand and one nights motifs, such as Sindbad, Baghdad, the cave of Sesame, the city of jade, jinns, and Shahrazad, with references to Morocco (Marrakesh, Koutoubia, kif) and macabre associations with death, stallions, blood, etc. Although these sections, as a whole, are a poetic texture that is associative rather than narrative, they are clearly meant to express a feeling of desolation, alienation, decay, and damnation. The work evokes the atmosphere of hopelessness which pervades Moroccan society and which is seen as a mutation of the world of the Thousand and one nights, whose characteristics continue to shine through the surface of suffering. In the fourth part, called ‘La mille et deuxième nuit,’ it is related that Sindbad has completed his tale about his seventh journey. One of the listeners, named Chasseur (‘Hunter’) divulges that there is an eighth journey, which is preserved in a separate memory, engraved on a skull. It was detached from Sindbad’s brain “pour mener sa proper aventure en toute indépendance.”1 He, Chasseur, 1  Mostafa Nissaboury, La mille et deuxième nuit (Casablanca: Shoof, 1975), 53.

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has come to restore this memory to Sindbad, who appears to be the king of a country whose name is unknown even to him.2 It is his trade to trace erring or fugitive memories and restore them to their owners, a task which forces him to roam the world through all dimensions of time. The separate memory will survive if Sindbad dies, perpetuating itself in “les méandres des heures en tant que souvenir, pour visiter les rêves.”3 Together, the two ‘twin’ memories constitute the person of Sindbad, in flesh and bone. Sindbad alone can decipher his external memory and he may do with it as he likes; he may accept it or refuse it, re-integrate it or throw it away, burn it or sell it, or have Chasseur guard it. In any case, it is important: “… je dois te dire que cette partie de la mémoire est importante à plus d’un égard, car, à elle seule, elle renferme la totalité de son experience dans la vie.”4 If he rejects the memory, he risks becoming an amnesiac. His guests insist that he accept the memory, especially since he has now shared his recollections with them and cannot dispose freely of his memory. Sindbad accepts the skull and explains the ‘signs’ that are engraved on it. The first ‘sign’ represents a town above the City of Brass, “à la limite du temps et de l’espace qui la régissent et superposé à elle dans la sublimation.”5 This is the town of which Sindbad is king. It is a town of hopeless people, of economic decay; it has been crushed by villainous dynasties: men are sodomized ‘dès le réveil’ and the women are given ‘en pâture’ to the minotaur. A description follows of a sodomized man, who has bought a pedigree to obtain privileges, who boasts about his acquaintance with the executioners and jailers of the repressive apparatuses, and who practices death, blackmail, and corruption. Of this kind there are three types, the ‘sodomisé fanatique,’ the ‘sodomisé savant,’ and the ‘sodomisé voluptueux.’ The first type is especially militant, the second type consists of librarians, writers, judges, etc. This type of sodomite is “imaginatif et a la faculté de composer des vers rimés dans ses moments de nostalgie, quand il est pris dans les tourbillons d’une vieille ville qui lui est restée collée de flanc depuis 1492.”6 The third type is the incarnation of treason, ‘organized dementia,’ unpunished massacres, sublimated theft, defamation, injustice, and torture. He is essential for the “promotion culturelle et sociale et comme faisant partie intégrante de l’humanisme de notre temps.”7 He writes 2  Ibid. 3  Ibid. 4  Ibid., 54. 5  Ibid., 55. 6  Ibid., 58. 7  Ibid., 59.

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manuals of torture for ambitious youth. Sindbad governs this city thanks to the ‘Constitution of the Stick’; he is protected by a gigantic ear, and an eye that is everywhere, and a hand without a face. This apparatus is a beast that feeds on bloody meat and sleeps peacefully amidst lamentations and horror. The second ‘sign,’ ‘Signe du rêve unijambiste,’ tells how ‘I,’ the skull, sees a shadow glide past at night, escape from the caves of torture, where it should have been left, blindfolded. This shadow leans on a crutch. In this town, over which ‘you’ (Sindbad) are a god without a beard, an idol, an ecstatic pharaoh, live only “désenchantés, myopathies et amputés d’eux-mêmes.”8 They are fatally wounded and wander through the streets. The city is a prey to decay and everywhere is fatal drunkenness, which makes “les têtes fracassées. Les rêves suicidés, les cadavres violés puis délaissés à la belle étoile.”9 The skull follows the shadow and addresses it. It remains silent, however, and the skull tells it about its inability to speak, and Shahrazad’s struggle against silence. Then it tells him that she is Shahrazad. She comes here at night to drink with her friends, Aladdin, Hassan El Basri, Ali Baba, and Kamarezzamane. They are all destitute. Kamarezzamane became impoverished after he was deposed by revolutionaries. Hassan El Basri violated his mother, stabbed his winged spouse, and devoured his children, after he fell in love with the picture of a western actress. Ali Baba’s treaures were magically transformed into serpents, “cancrelats carnivores, oiseaux à odeur pestilentielle qui semèrent l’effori, la mort et la devastation.”10 He went mad and tried to hang himself a number of times. Shahrazad herself drinks methylated spirits with lemonade and suddenly disappears through a hole in a wall. In the third ‘sign,’ ‘Signe de l’agonie,’ the account continues. The skull/ narrator enters a brothel and takes a place next to Shahrazad at the counter. The space is filled with dancing and dead animals. This is what is left of the magical world of her stories: Maintenant, elle vivait parmi tous les êtres qu’elle avait inventées, tous les rêves qu’elle avait suscités du néant de la vie; ils avaient pris chacun la forme à laquelle le prédesinait le désastre qui la frappe, elle d’abord, ensuite la cité òu elle les a enfermés. La destinée de chacun s’accomplissait en un image d’apocalypse organique et dans un caveau rempli par l’odeur du vice et de la moissure, òu chacun assumait son propre destin dans la

8  Ibid., 61. 9  Ibid., 62. 10  Ibid., 65.

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prostitiution famélique, et la mort lente et implacable qui les rongeait tous faisait d’eux des personnages à la fois grotesques et pitoyables.11 Shahrazad again slips away. The narrator follows her through a tunnel, which ends at a seaside under a leaden sky. They are left to themselves, “sans autre témoin de leur danse d’apocalypse que l’enfer qui commandait à leur chaos.”12 This is the town “dont tu es le silence affreusement gluant et épidémique, au quatrième signe qui n’est pas encore gravé sur mon os frontal, qui est la mort de ma matière et de son ombre.”13 Chasseur tells Sindbad that this is all that is known about the town. The listeners leave and when they return the next day they find the skull smashed to pieces. They hear the lamenting voice of the memory, which begs to be released to look for the one-legged shadow, to find a way to access the unnamed moors. Elsewhere “la faune qui avait jadis peuplé l’univers de Shahrazade sous des apparences humaines, agonisait dans le sang des crapauds, ivre d’une metamorphose cruelle.”14 The story is supplemented by four poems, which are similarly structured around common motifs of the Thousand and one nights. The many references to the Thousand and one nights, and, of course, the title of the text as a whole, reveal that the Nights served not only as a source of inspiration, but as a subtext as well. The world of the Thousand and one nights is the foundation on which the writer grafted his contemplations, as an outgrowth of an already completed narrative corpus. This outgrowth is not so much a continuation of the stories of the Nights; rather he transformed the realm of the Nights into a completely different setting after its completion. Somehow, the world of Shahrazad, as a self-contained whole, symbolizes the synthesis between history and the imagination, a synthesis that was interrupted by the completion of the tales. After she successfully defended herself against the threat of execution by creating a transitional liminal ‘space,’ she is free from the threat, but the power of her storytelling has waned. Shahrazad awakens from her own spell to find herself in a horrible, apocalyptic world, in which violence, arbitrariness, and immorality reign, where her heroes are condemned to live as paupers and drunks. It seems that, in general, one of the main reasons for Shahrazad’s downfall is repression, but in particular, it is a result of the disturbed balance between 11  Ibid., 68. 12  Ibid., 71. 13  Ibid. 14  Ibid., 72.

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the forms of narration and the exertion of power. While Shahrazad initially succeeded in spellbinding Shahriyar to save her life, she is now exiled to a faraway, mythical city, where her art is not appreciated and has even come to be mocked, as a circus act. The imagination and its narrative expression are banned from society; this results in a form of amnesia: the ‘underworld’ of suffering is excluded from Sindbad’s tales, but is stored in a separate memory. Sindbad, the intrepid traveler, is the only one who has seen the dystopian city, but he, as one of Shahrazad’s heroes, survived only by repressing the memory of the city and limiting himself to his more glorious tales. In the end the skull begs to be released so he can retrieve Shahrazad. The imagination, the writers, and the narrator are presented not only as victims, but also as those who can, potentially, redeem a society subjected to oppression and injustice. In this book, the Thousand and one nights stands for a dystopian realm. The imagination and memory are the arenas in which a struggle takes place, one that cannot be detached from ‘real circumstances,’ that can be obscured by entertaining stories, but cannot remain hidden. Society is in the grip of injustice, oppression, and corruption, and Shahrazad’s glorious heritage is lost and shattered. But perhaps it has always been an illusion. Perhaps her ‘history’ was never real and was always corrupted by the delusive realities of power.

Sindbad’s Return: Bahram Beyzaï

Nissaboury used the idea of an eighth voyage of Sindbad as a variation on the 1002nd night, or, more generally, as a sequence to Shahrazad’s storytelling, namely, the eighth voyage of Sindbad. The cyclic adventures of Sindbad, who leaves his home and returns seven times, each time collecting new, peculiar, and adventurous accounts, invites the idea of a continuation, or at least of an infinite repetition. Many authors have elaborated on this idea, using the model of Sindbad to give full rein to their fantasies of impossible, weird journeys. One work of this kind is the play The eighth voyage of Sindbad by the Iranian author Bahram Beyzaï (b. 1938), published in 1978. Since the theme of the play resembles that of the works discussed in this section, we conclude this chapter with a brief analysis. Beyzaï, an important playwright in Iran, has published many other plays staged in his homeland, and articles about literature.15 15  About Beyzaï’s life and work, see Isabel Stümpel-Hatami, “ ‘Sindbads achte Reise’: Geschichte und Gegenwart im Werk Bahrām Baizā’ī’s am Beispiel eines frühen Dramas,” in Johann Christoph Bürgel and Stephan Guth (eds.), Gesellschaftlicher Umbruch und Historie im zeitgenossischen Drama der islamischen Welt, 259–275 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995).

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The play The eighth voyage of Sindbad (Hashtomin safer-e-Sindbad) is structured as a frame story with multiple frames. The first frame is a discussion between the narrator (or ‘author’) and Sindbad, about the true nature and account of Sindbad’s journeys. The narrator has a book in which the journeys are recorded, and he believes that the accounts cannot be altered because the book is incontestably true. To challenge the recorded version, Sindbad gives his own version of a number of his journeys. This dialogue is set, in part, in the second frame, which is located in Sindbad’s home town, where he and his sailors have returned after a long journey. When they arrive, they do not recognize their city and their coins are not accepted in the shops. It becomes apparent that a thousand years have passed since their last departure and their long travels have transmuted them into anachronistic remnants of the past. Their return coincides with the announcement of the arrival of a troupe of comedians, and the bystanders assume that Sindbad and his crew are in fact the comedians, and that the conversation between him and the narrator is some kind of comical performance. The audience on stage thus represents an intermediate frame between the players and the real audience, which is, in this way, integrated into the play. The reader/audience understands what is taking place when the narrator explains that Sindbad’s journeys were recorded in a book, but that the final pages of the book are missing. Apparently, the outcome of Sindbad’s adventures is still uncertain and subject to a mysterious spell. Later, another character called the ‘Magician’ explains that Sindbad was granted one thousand years to try to find happiness. Apparently, the thousand years have passed and Sindbad is now encountering the final denouement of the story that is his life; the final pages will be added to the book, registering what is happening at that moment before the eyes of the audience(s). Within this episode, the adventures of Sindbad are retold and reflected on in order to establish the true course of events, and Sindbad now takes on the role of a comedian in an entirely unfamiliar environment, as a strange relic of the past. Apart from the narrator, the Magician is the only character shifting between the different frames of the play, each time appearing in a different guise. He stands on the stage among the onlookers and he appears before Sindbad during his travels, as an emir, a messenger, a merchant, and a captain. He is the person who steers Sindbad toward his destinies and facilitates his journeys. Ultimately, he is Fate; he spurs Sindbad on, gives him an opportunity for life, and in the end, accompanies him toward his death. The other characters are the sailors, who obey – or should obey Sindbad and who are divided into lieutenants and common crew. They accompany Sindbad on his journey and

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represent the primitive urges of man. Finally, six sages appear, an Arab, a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu, a Japanese, and the ‘sage of Chankar,’ an old mystic. The storytelling begins when Sindbad disputes the narrator’s rendering of his journeys; in the narrator’s rendition, according to ‘the book,’ Sindbad is accused of greed and unscrupulously seeking material wealth. Sindbad retorts that he only sought riches on his first journey, because he was suffering from hunger, and that he attempted to distribute his wealth among the people. He then relates his second journey, on which he departed to conquer the heart of a Chinese princess, whom he had seen on his first journey. When he arrives in China, the princess has already passed away, however, and Sindbad, desperate, departs on his next journey, chasing after the rumor of a ‘jar of happiness’ that contains the voice of a sage telling where happiness can be found. When they arrive at the indicated place, they find a huge treasure in a cave. The crew fights over the jewels and breaks the jar. He undertakes the third journey to steal the ‘bird of happiness,’ which is kept on an island near Java. However, it turns out that the bird only brings happiness when it is in its own environment; it cannot be moved to another country. After these misadventures, the problem of happiness is unresolved and Sindbad seeks advice from a number of sages from different creeds. In the end, it is the narrator who has the final words of advice: Happiness is not merchandise: “Chaque fois que le jour se lève, il nous apporte une situation qui change le sens du Bonheur. Comment peux-tu chercher dans ce monde inconstant une notion constant?”16 Now it becomes clear why the narrator is reproaching Sindbad. In the book, it is related that Sindbad, after being granted a reprieve of one thousand years, stubbornly hunted for illusory images of happiness, without any consideration of the conditions of the crew, who suffered in harsh circumstances, sacrificed for the greater cause, or were even executed by Sindbad. Sindbad responds to the accusations by saying that he was forced by circumstances and that the regretful incidents can be explained. However, his excuses cannot prevent the sailors from turning against him and killing him. Sindbad’s eighth voyage is his death, and he is accompanied only by the Magician, his omnipresent fate. The basic organization of the play as a dialogue between the narrator and Sindbad suggests that the primal dynamics of the story are derived from the tension between a recorded text and its experienced or personally recounted version. It is suggested that this tension arises from the stereotypical and 16  Bahram Beyzaï, Le huitième voyage de Sindbad (pièce Persane), trans. Ahmad Kamyabi Mask (Paris, 1990), 99.

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idealized images in literary or historical texts.17 It may be Beyzaï’s intention to humanize the image of the famous adventurer and show that he, too, is not just a cardboard stereotype, but a human being of flesh and blood, governed by impulses and emotions, and prone to mistakes like anyone else. This interpretation is not wholly convincing, however, since Sindbad’s image in the book is not very positive and the hero must defend himself against serious accusations. It is not Beyzaï who attempts to humanize the collective memory of an idealized image of Sindbad; rather it is Sindbad himself who attempts to improve his negative image. Therefore, it seems that the narrator is asking Sindbad to account for his misdeeds during his journeys. The narrator argues that the book ‘cannot be wrong,’ but he still allows Sindbad to recount his tales. It appears that the Magician has given him one thousand years to pursue his dream of happiness. He subsequently sets out to find happiness in material wealth, in love, in supernatural forces, and in wisdom, but all his efforts fail. Over the course of time, Sindbad becomes more obsessed with his search and then his journeys become more than just a personal matter that affects only his own life. He is also, as a merchant captain, responsible for his crew, who increasingly suffer from his compulsive quest for an erratic idea of happiness. Sindbad has received a ‘mandate’ to pursue his vision, but in the end, this mandate is no more than an alibi for greed and the abuse of authority. We can, clearly, interpret Beyzaï’s play first from a political perspective, one in which Sindbad is the allegorical leader who receives a mandate from the population and who, in spite of his good intentions, betrays the trust of his people and becomes fixated on his personal interests, such that he ignores the suffering of even his nearest subordinates. These subordinates ultimately punish him for his abuses, which are a result of his inability to evaluate the practicality of his visions. The play has a political message, but in addition to this, there is a clear connotation of mysticism in his recurrent efforts to find happiness in various domains of life. Of course, mysticism is deeply rooted in Persian culture, and Sindbad’s efforts to find meaning in life is reminiscent of Sufi texts that explore the relationship between material and spiritual welfare, the nature of the soul, and communication with the divine. All Sindbad’s efforts to find salvation in this earthly life fail, because happiness cannot be found in the earthly realm; the question of whether it can be found after death remains unanswered. 17  Stümpel-Hatami, “ ‘Sindbads achte Reise.’”

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Beyzaï’s play fits into the model of the 1002nd night motif in several respects. It is based on a cycle of recurrent tales, which are somehow situated outside the regular course of time; it criticizes leadership and the corruptive effects of power and idealism; and it refers to a spiritual side of life, by presenting the grand efforts to establish happiness as useless and vain. As in Nissaboury’s work, Sindbad appears in a negative light, as someone who has had a chance to improve the conditions of his life, but who failed and abused his prerogatives. In both cases, he is the medium that represents the abuses of contemporary politics, by personifying repression, violence, and false promises. Both works criticize the corrupt and repressive tendencies in their societies, and make use of the layered realities of the Thousand and one nights.

Conclusions to Part 6

The main theme that connects the works discussed in this part is the urgency of a political and cultural critique which has pervaded Arabic literature throughout the twentieth century. This critique reflects the difficulty of reconciling an age-old heritage with the often-contradictory exigencies of modernity, which is dominated by the all-encompassing worldview of western nations. The complexities of colonial rule, new national power structures, and the influences of ‘modern’ practices, ideas, and possibilities have resulted in ruptures and reconfigurations meant to build societies in harmony with the emerging challenges of state formation, regional tensions, and the globalization of culture. In the context of all these elements, it is not surprising that authors often sought the role of independent intellectuals to criticize abuses of power, and call for the end of repression and respect for human values and human rights. The Thousand and one nights is often seen as a work that promotes the goal of emancipation from repressive authoritarian rule through writing, literature, and artistic imagination. After all, Shahrazad is the prototypical storyteller who, through her imagination and ingenuity, frees herself from Shahriyar’s vicious scheme, and restores political stability by ‘educating’ the king. What is more, Shahrazad is a figure from the Arabic tradition, one that seemingly defies social conventions and authoritarian relationships. She exemplifies the way in which the literary imagination can overcome repressive systems and bring about a return to a society that respects human values. The contradictions involved in this process are shown in the works of Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Husayn, and Najib Mahfuz, where the world of Shahrazad is re-invoked

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allegorically. Remarkably, all three authors revert to rather philosophical perspectives which, in the end, converge with elements of Sufism and inner repentance. The critique of al-Rahib and Boudjedra is much more direct and political. These two authors indict the regimes that emerged in most Arab countries in the 1960s and 1970s for their deceit, repression, and corruption. In their works, the Thousand and one nights is a symbol of this deceit, of the state of political isolation, amnesia, exile from history, and lack of commitment. The Nights symbolizes the political conditions of modernity, which are negotiations between repressive regimes and the people, and establishes a link between a past that has become both a burden and source of authenticity, and a promising future; this gives authenticity not only to Arab societies, but also to the rhetoric of human rights and respect for individual life. Needless to say, the figure of Shahrazad, as a redeemer of mankind, will continue to be relevant for Arab authors.

Conclusion

The Narrative Universe of Paul Auster

In the preceding chapters, we have discussed authors whose works generally have one aspect, at the intertextual level, in common with the Thousand and one nights. Some connections go further than this, but usually one element is more prominent than others. It is no exaggeration to say that, in the case of the American author Paul Auster (b. 1947), the influences of the Thousand and one nights on his work are so structural and varied that they affect all the main themes and literary strategies of his novels. The Thousand and one nights is, so to speak, woven into the texture of Auster’s works; it gives them a specific atmosphere and defines their structure as texts and their conceptual foundations. In fact, the main themes are so persistent throughout his work, and his references to his other novels – especially names and characters – are such a dominant phenomenon, that we can speak of his oeuvre as a coherent corpus of texts, a conglomerate of interconnected stories that resembles the idea of the Nights. The idea of a structural and deep intertextual link with the Thousand and one nights becomes even more interesting because Auster represents, to a certain extent, the culmination of several trends that are typical of twentiethcentury literature. In his novels, he combines forms of temporal and spatial instability that are reminiscent of the modernist period, with an emphasis on narrativity, that is, the postmodern assumption that no reality outside the domain of language and texts can be imagined. Moreover, he does not flinch from interventions in the narrative reality which create mise en abîme effects and evoke questions about the identity and role of the author vis-à-vis his textual world. Finally, there are no inherent obstacles for strange, wondrous things to occur, either through magical transformations of reality, or mental delusions, or the interference of what may be called destiny. Although magical realism is not an adequate generic designation for Auster’s work, he is not averse to letting myth and magic do their beneficial work. The wide range of influences from the various currents of twentieth-­century literary history reveals the extent to which the Thousand and one nights can be and was used by authors to find new ways of expressing themselves. As argued above, the nature and concept of the Nights made it suitable as a source of inspiration for literary experiments, to push back generic boundaries, and to question literary conventions. In this chapter, we discuss how Paul Auster was inspired by the Thousand and one nights and how this inspiration can be

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004362697_023

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discerned throughout his fiction. We deal with both the formal and thematic aspects, and stress certain concepts that were central to our discussion in previous chapters, including the formal concept of the frame story, the idea of the locked room, the double, and the idea of narrativity, the all-pervading role of texts in the human experience. We conclude with a brief discussion of the way in which the connection to the Thousand and one nights changes our perspective of Auster’s work.

The Framework: The Invention of Solitude

Auster’s first book, The invention of solitude (1982), is usually seen as his ‘declaration of independence’ as an author, a manifesto of his vision of his role as a writer, and a presentation of the nature of his work. The ‘Book of memory,’ which is part of the book, is considered “the image of a novel in the process of being born; subsequent novels have come out of this piece, which contains the seeds of both the themes and the techniques that Auster will later use.”1 Auster himself has said, “In retrospect I can see that everything I have done has come out of that book.”2 This was written shortly after the death of his father and represents, first, an effort to come to terms with this event. Although Auster did not know his father well, or perhaps because he did not, his father’s death provoked a feeling of loss or absence which he was, more or less, forced to fill, or at least to define. He felt the need to reconstruct what his father had meant to him, but also to restore him to his rightful place in the world, to retrospectively construct a relationship between his father and his life and his historical context. It is the act of writing which proved to be the only way to achieve this: only through writing was he able to find the ‘invisible,’ absent man that was his father, and who was also, in one way or another, present in himself. Writing, then, originates in an absence, a rupture, a traumatic event that disturbs the relationship between a man and his surroundings and induces him to embark on a journey of exploration. Even more, as in Proust’s Recherche, the writing impulse must necessarily arise out of a void, a deep consciousness of isolation and being lost: Nevertheless, this is where it begins. The first word appears only at a moment when nothing can be explained anymore, at some instant of 1  Aliki Varvogli, The World That is the Book: Paul Auster’s Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), 11–12. 2  Ibid., 12.

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experience that defies all sense. To be reduced to saying nothing. Or else, to say to himself: this is what haunts me. And then to realize, almost in the same breath, that this is what he haunts.3 Auster defines this condition as ‘solitude,’ which is the only proper starting point for writing. Thus, writing is a form of exploration, but it is an expedition without a map, a journey into the unknown. Writing is comparable to walking through the labyrinth of the city: Sometimes it seems as though we are not going anywhere as we walk through the city, that we are only looking for a way to pass the time, and that it is only our fatigue that tells us where and when we should stop. But just as one step will inevitably lead to the next step, so it is that one thought inevitably follows from the previous thought, and in the event that a thought should engender more than a single thought (say two or three thoughts, equal to each other in all their consequences), it will be necessary not only to follow the first thought to its conclusion, but also to backtrack to the original position of that thought in order to follow the second thought to its conclusion, and then the third thought, and so on, and in this way, if we were to try to make an image of this process in our minds, a network of paths begins to be drawn, as in the image of the human bloodstream … or as in the image of a map … so that what we are really doing when we walk through the city is thinking, and thinking in such a way that our thoughts compose a journey, and this journey is no more or less than the steps we have taken, so that, in the end, we might safely say that we have been on a journey, and even if we do not leave our room, it has been a journey, and we might safely say that we have been somewhere, even if we don’t know where it is.4 Thus, writing, and thinking, is a process of sequential steps without a predetermined plan or schedule. It is fundamentally contingent; all the links are added to the chain one by one, without any certainty that a meaningful end will be reached. The process of writing is the seemingly endless act of wandering through a ‘garden of forking paths,’ stories following their own course and the author trying to recover them without knowing their destination, except that all tracks ultimately lead back to himself. But still, the stories are not under his 3  Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 78. 4  Ibid., 121.

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command and they seek their own way. In principle, they are “never finished … it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author,” and “… stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever.”5 In fact, the story should perhaps not reach an end, since any end of the process of storytelling would reconstitute the initial void. Only by prolonging narration can a writer hope for a final redemption: Writing is a form of deferral, words are intended to keep the traumatic absence at a distance; the imaginative act of representation is redemptive not because it restores meaning, but because it creates the only signification that can become available: The closer I come to the end of what I am able to say, the more reluctant I am to say anything. I want to postpone the moment of ending, and in this way delude myself into thinking that I have only just begun, that the better part of my story still lies ahead. No matter how useless these words might seem to be, they have nevertheless stood between me and a silence that continues to terrify me. When I step into this silence, it will mean that my father has vanished forever.6 Still, the capability of stories to bring about this redemption is doubtful, since as soon as they assume a ‘meaning’ which fills the void, they then represent “an imaginary world inside the real world, which will not stand.”7 The contingency inherent in the writer’s mental trajectory necessarily allows chance to play a determining role. It is often chance, and not decision, that determines the course of the story and the actions of the protagonists. To a certain extent, as we will see, the characters are ‘narrated’ persons, that is, they have no will of their own, and no active agency; they are only driven by their responses to chance events. They are bound by the narrative world the author produces, but the author is only a medium, too; he does not create his stories and his characters, he only reveals them and follows their track. Thus, the story does not obey any predetermined plan, it is steered entirely by chance. Still, sometimes the presence of chance does not seem to be completely contingent. As in the work of Nabokov, chance is not just arbitrariness; it appears as one of the organizing principles in life, something that links the adventures of the characters to some higher order, or a system of laws that sometimes takes the role of destiny. The characters are delivered to what is,

5  Mark Brown, Paul Auster (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), 49. 6  Auster, The Invention of Solitude, 65. 7  Ibid., 147.

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seemingly, the ultimate form of contingency, but what, on closer inspection, can be subjected to an ineffable intervention of fate. For an author to write stories that depart from a certain point and meander endlessly to become labyrinthine networks of narration governed by indefinable principles, he must consider the complexity of the process of narration. Typically, a writer does this by allowing stories to spill over into other stories, or placing stories inside other stories, to let them unfold simultaneously, and by consistently pointing to the interconnections between stories or texts. Stories are, so to speak, part of a huge cluster of other stories that penetrate each other, influence each other; these stories are not always distinguishable as separate units. As noted, thoughts are generated by other thoughts, just as stories are brought forth by previous stories. Stories cannot be understood as welldemarcated entities; they always refer to and derive their meaning from other stories. They are all embedded in a larger ‘frame,’ which is not a structuring force in itself, rather it is only a system of links and references. Thus, Auster’s books are never straightforward narratives; they are always stories which contain other stories, which are part of a large agglomerate of texts. The basic elements of Auster’s fiction that we have summarized thus far and that are to be found in The invention of solitude, are all directly related to the Thousand and one nights, especially the concept of the frame story. It is not surprising, therefore, that the second part of The invention of solitude contains extensive references to the Thousand and one nights. Auster first summarizes the concept of storytelling as the response to a rupture and an absence: “The story begins with the end. Speak or die. And for as long as you go on speaking, you will not die. The story begins with death.”8 Then Shahrazad begins to tell her stories to the king, opening up her narrative labyrinth that she hopes will lead to redemption: “The king agrees to listen to her. She begins her story, and what she tells is a story about story-telling, a story within which are several stories, each one, in itself, about storytelling – by means of which a man is saved from death.”9 The way to achieve redemption is through a narrative detour, by representing an idea that makes the listener/reader aware of the meaning of the idea. Auster compares the story of the ‘Merchant and the jinni’ with Shahrazad’s strategy: This is guilt out of innocence … and at the same time the birth of enchantment – turning a thought into a thing, bringing the invisible to

8  Ibid., 149. 9  Ibid., 150.

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life…. For this is the function of the story: to make a man see the thing before his eyes by holding up another thing to view.10 It is the function of storytelling to construct a representation which is, by definition, not merely rational, but rather part of the imagination, in order to lure the listener/reader away from his trauma, to give him a new, alternative view of life, to revitalize him by breaking the solitude to which he is subjected: The old man does not propose to defend the merchant as one would in a court of law, with arguments, counterarguments, the presentation of evidence. This would be to make the genie look at the thing he already sees: and about this his mind has been made up. Rather, the old man wishes to turn him away from the facts, turn him away from thoughts of death, and in so doing delight him (literally, “to entice away”, from the Latin delectare) into a new feeling for life, which in turn will make him renounce his obsession with killing the merchant. An obsession of this sort walls one up in solitude. One sees nothing but one’s own thoughts. A story, however, in that it is not a logical argument, breaks down those walls. For it posits the existence of others and allows the listener to come into contact with them – if only in his thoughts.11 Storytelling is not merely a dialogue; it is a ritualized form of communication, linking experiences to a symbolic order of representations which contain meanings and insights. The act of substituting something for something else to create a kind of illusion is like an act of magic, but the thing cannot exist without its illusory counterpart, the two are inherent in each other, and it is essential to preserve the duality: “This mule was my wife,” says the third. These opening sentences contain the essence of the entire project. For what does it mean to look at something, a real object in the real world, an animal, for example, and say that it is something other than what it is? It is to say that each thing leads a double life, at once in the world and in our minds, and that to deny either one of these lives is to kill the thing in both its lives at once. In the stories of the three old men, two mirrors face each other, each one reflecting the light of the other. Both are enchantments, both the real and the imaginary, and each exists by virtue of the other. And it is, truly, a matter of life 10  Ibid. 11  Ibid., 151.

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and death…. What the old man is telling him is that our sons are always invisible. It is the simplest of truths: a life belongs only to the person who lives it; life itself will claim the living; to live is to let live…. Again, the lesson is made clear. A voice that speaks, a voice that speaks stories of life and death, has the power to give life.12 The transformation of reality into its imaginary counterpart initiates an infinite network of words, images, and stories which contains potential meanings and which is an essential stratum for humans to survive. Everyone must move within its trajectories, because to stop narrating is to stop living: “At the heart of each language there is a network of rhymes, assonances, and overlapping meanings, and each of these occurrences functions as a kind of bridge that joins opposite and contrasting aspects of the world with one another.”13 Conversely, when starting from point zero, the condition of emptiness and solitude, it is stories which can link the author/listener/reader to life again, can restore him to life. But stories have more than just redemptive power, they have creative power as well: Whenever his eye or mind seems to stop, he discovers another connection, another bridge to carry him to yet another place, and even in the solitude of his room, the world has been rushing in on him at a dizzying speed, as if happening to him at once. Coincidence: to fall on with; to occupy the same place in time or space. The mind, therefore, as that which contains more than itself.14 These observations show that the Thousand and one nights represents a key work in Auster’s poetics. It is a model that epitomizes the nature of writing and storytelling, even the rules that govern the human understanding of reality. It contains the motifs and themes that recur in various guises in most of Auster’s novels. It seems that The invention of solitude as a metanarrative explaining its own genesis and the rationale behind the subsequent ‘chain’ of stories, is Auster’s frame story, in which all his other works are embedded. In most cases, the main protagonist is thrown into some abyss of physical or mental agony, from which he must somehow recover; he must reconstruct himself by using the imagination in one way or another. He is in a liminal situation in which he is vulnerable to mysterious interventions and delusions, which complicate his 12  Ibid., 152–153. 13  Ibid., 160. 14  Ibid., 162.

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sense of reality, but which also guide him out of his solitude. It is this liminality that is the starting point of narration for both Shahrazad and Auster.

The Locked Room

As explained above, for Auster, the essence of the act of writing lies in its ability to reach a condition of ‘solitude,’ the reduction of impulses and coherent thought to an absolute minimum. This state is usually generated by an experience of deep rupture and trauma that demolishes all coherent systems of meaning and the crucial role of language. This state not only enables the author to gradually construct his own system of meaning, but also allows him to explore his inner self and re-establish the relations between himself and the outer world. Solitude is a form of exile in which it is possible, even unavoidable, to discover a new kind of order. In this process, memory plays a decisive role. In solitude, memory can be isolated from outside interferences and, paradoxically, stripped of its connections with the past: Memory, then, is not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our life in the present. If a man is to be truly present among his surroundings, he must be thinking not of himself, but of what he sees. He must forget himself in order to be there. And from that forgetfulness arises the power of memory. It is a way of living one’s life so that nothing is ever lost.15 Memory is a tool through which the author can establish a relationship with his present self and the social world; it is not the essence of his identity, but a medium through which he can construct his life. The narrative motif that, in most of Auster’s works, represents the condition of solitude is the locked room, or in a less essentialized form, a confined space in which the protagonist voluntarily retreats. Isolation is a condition for descending into the self: Cut off from everything that was familiar to him, unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him nowhere but into himself. He was wandering inside

15  Ibid., 137.

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himself, and he was lost. Far from troubling him, this state of being lost became a source of happiness, of exhilaration.16 Reduced to this state of isolation, the author can then rebuild his world in his imagination, filling the room with his own universe: It was impossible to move inside it without contracting your body to its smallest dimensions, without contracting your mind to some infinitely small point within itself. Only then could you begin to breathe, to feel the room expand, and to watch your mind explore the excessive, unfathomable reaches of that space. For there was an entire universe in that room, a miniature cosmology that contained all that is most vast, most distant, most unknowable. It was a shrine, hardly bigger than a body, in praise of all that exists beyond the body: the representation of man’s inner world, even to the slightest detail. S. had literally managed to surround himself with the things that were inside him. The room he lived in was a dream space, and its walls were like the skin of some second body around him, as if his own body had been transformed into a mind, a breathing instrument of pure thought. This was the womb, the belly of the whale, the original site of the imagination. By placing himself in that darkness, S. had invented a way of dreaming with open eyes.17 Now the locked room becomes a magic space, an imaginary uterus in which the embryo of a new self, a new world, and a new story grows. It is memory, in particular, that has this generative force, that produces the new images in the shape of language: In this way, he tells himself, it works in the same way that memory does. He imagines an immense Babel inside him. There is a text, and it translates itself into an infinite number of languages. Sentences spill out of him at the speed of thought, and each word comes from a different language, a thousand tongues that clamor inside him at once, the din of it echoing through a maze of rooms, corridors, and stairways, hundreds of stories high…. In the space of memory, everything is both itself and something else.18

16  Ibid., 84. 17  Ibid., 87. 18  Ibid., 136.

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This generative power of memory is, in turn, derived from memory’s capacity to incorporate others in one’s imagination: The sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of his room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but as an immersion in the past of others.19 It is like a Vermeer painting which refers to the outer world in complex ways and thereby epitomizes this outer world: The letter, the map, the woman’s pregnancy, the empty chair, the open box, the unseen window – all are reminders or natural emblems of absence, of the unseen, of other minds, wills, times, and places, of past and future, of birth and perhaps of death – in general, of a world that extends beyond the edges of the frame, and of larger, wider horizons that encompass and impinge upon the scene suspended before our eyes.20 To conclude, the act of writing is essentially realized through a process of withdrawing into solitude after a rupture, of closing oneself off from the outer world, and recreating a universe through the mechanisms of memory and imagination. This liminal state brings forth new links with the self and others which can be expressed through the medium of language. Thus, language as a medium of communication is indispensable for the final redemption. The author only overcomes his state of emptiness by constructing a new universe, which sprouts from his confined self, in the form of coherent language, that is, stories. Throughout Auster’s work we find a motif of characters confined to an enclosed space because they are ill, or depressed, or because they are locked up or ordered to stay inside. This motif can have several narrative functions, but as a rule it indicates a cul-de-sac, where the protagonist ends up, or conversely, from which he tries to escape. These spaces are always somehow related to texts in the form of stories, books, manuscripts, memories, films, photographs or representations, which contain the potential of redemption and release. An example of the nexus between confinement and texts is found in ‘Ghosts,’ later included in the New York trilogy (1986/1987). The story is about a man called Blue, who receives an assignment to permanently observe another 19  Ibid., 138. 20  Ibid., 140.

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man, Black, and write down his observations, which he must deposit in Post Office box 1001. He settles in a room that has a view of the apartment of Black, who usually sits at his desk reading and writing. While Blue sits in his room, he realizes that For the first time in his life, he finds that he has been thrown back on himself, with nothing to grab hold of, nothing to distinguish one moment from the next. He has never given much thought to the world inside him, and though he always knew it was there, it has remained an unknown quantity, unexplored and therefore dark, even to himself.21 Since Black rarely moves, there is not much to write about his movements, and since he is not cognizant of his antecedents and previous life, Blue begins to imagine his life and thinks that he can, in fact, invent his life as he wishes: “As the days go on, Blue realizes there is no end to the stories he can tell. For Black is no more than a kind of blankness, a hole in the texture of things, and one story can fill this hole as well as any other.”22 Nevertheless, after a while he realizes that in his reports, he must limit himself to objective observations: His method is to stick to outward facts, describing events as though each word tallied exactly with the thing described, and to question the matter no further. Words are transparent for him, great windows that stand between him and the world, and until now they have never impeded his view, have never even seemed to be there.23 He needs only verifiable facts, but gradually notices that he writes down less and less: “He says to himself: what happened is not really what happened. For the first time in his experience of writing reports, he discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say.”24 He becomes aware that language is not, or is no longer, the transparent medium which he imagined it to be. It is incapable of presenting the facts in a straightforward way, and it tends to blur the boundary between fact and fiction. First, Blue’s assignment forces him into a condition of isolation, both spatially and in his activities. This isolation, in turn, leads him into an introspective 21  Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 143. 22  Ibid., 144–145. 23  Ibid., 148. 24  Ibid., 147–148.

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observation of his inner self, which increasingly alienates him from himself. He remarks: “I’m changing … little by little, I’m no longer the same.”25 Second, he gradually discovers the instability and unreliability of language. At first, he thought, “Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next.”26 He surmises that language gives a faithful representation of objective facts, but then he discovers that the relation between words and reality is opaque. His report turns out to contain more information about himself than about Black, and, what is more, it fails to give any significance to his observations and to Black’s life. Even worse, the more he observes Black and writes about him, the more he feels separated from him: “There are times when he feels totally removed from Black, cut off from him in a way that is so stark and absolute that he begins to lose the sense of who he is.”27 Blue thinks of two strategies to counter this process of incomprehension, and both involve textual means. He starts reading the book that Black is constantly reading – Thoreau’s Walden – hoping that it will reveal something to him: What he does know is that were he to find the patience to read the book in the spirit in which it asks to be read, his entire life would begin to change, and little by little he would come to a full understanding of his situation – that is to say, of Black and White, of the case, of everything that concerns him.28 He inserts fictional information into his reports, hoping to provoke some response that would clarify the situation. Needless to say, both strategies fail. The book is no solace and only symbolizes the hopelessness of his situation. He is not reading and writing, he has become a protagonist in someone else’s scheme and ‘book.’ He has the feeling that he is being spied on as well, and that the more he writes, the less ‘real’ Black seems to be, the less he seems to be an authentic person: “This would make White the real writer, then – and Black no more than his stand-in, a fake, an actor with no substance of his own.”29 Black may be pretending to write, the actual writer being White, the man who gave him the assignment. Thus, Blue gradually, throughout his isolation, loses his

25  Ibid., 145. 26  Ibid., 136. 27  Ibid., 156. 28  Ibid., 163. 29  Ibid., 170.

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grip on reality, and in this case, he is unable to re-establish it through language. He only acquires an essential distrust of the very nature of reality. In ‘The locked room,’ which is also in The New York trilogy (1986/1987), we encounter the case of a writer, Fanshawe, who lives in a locked room and disappears from his regular life. The author’s wife asks a friend from his youth to search for him, but during his investigations he marries Fanshawe’s wife, edits his work, and plans to write his biography. Gradually, the narrator realizes that he has begun to reinvent the figure of Fanshawe and take over Fanshawe’s life. He feels that his life is a lie, but considers that it is too late to give up his role and and so he is forced to continue. He feels isolated: Only darkness has the power to make a man open his heart to the world, and darkness is what surrounds me whenever I think of what happened. If courage is needed to write about it, I also know that writing about it is the one chance I have to escape. But I doubt this will happen, not even if I manage to tell the truth. Stories without ending can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part is played out. My only hope is that there is an end to what I am about to say.30 At a certain point, he receives a letter from Fanshawe, who thanks him for having taken care of his wife and stresses that he does not want to be found. Fanshawe forbids him from looking for him and threatens to kill himself if he finds him. Fanshawe writes: “Writing was an illness that plagued me for a long time, but now I have recovered from it.”31 The narrator now realizes that his life has become a fake, that he will never be able to tell the truth. He is falsely impersonating Fanshawe and in the meantime, he has lost his authentic self. This cannot be remedied by writing, since stories do not enhance one’s grip on reality: We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and 30  Ibid., 235. 31  Ibid., 237.

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more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.32 At this point, the narrator feels the urge to kill Fanshawe, but at the same time he realizes that he is becoming more and more like him. He imagines Fanshawe imprisoned in a locked room, the same room that he imagines himself to be in: Fanshawe was exactly where I was, and he had been there since the beginning. From the moment his letter arrived, I had been struggling to imagine him, to see him as he might have been – but my mind had always conjured a blank. At best, there was one impoverished image: the door of a locked room. That was the extent of it: Fanshawe alone in that room, condemned to a mythical solitude – living perhaps, breathing perhaps, dreaming God knows what. This room, I now discovered, was located inside my skull.33 But to really exorcise him from his mind, he must find him. Finally, he receives a letter from Fanshawe, who says that he has roamed the world and in the end locked himself in a room. He took poison and left a notebook with an explanation under the staircase. The narrator recovers the notebook, leafs through it, but, finding nothing interesting, throws it away in a trash bin. In this story, again, we find the motif of interconnection between closed spaces, texts, and the imagination. Here, too, texts represent the dynamic factor that breaks through the confined space, while the spaces themselves are cathartic places, so to speak, where the author is driven, but also where new ‘stories’ are born. It is the symbol of a mental blockade, but at the same time, it is the place where such a blockade can be overcome through the revitalizing power of stories, in their diverse forms. Texts are labyrinths that lead the protagonists into traps, but they are also the only way out of these traps. The ‘Locked room’ acquires another dimension when it is put beside the short novel Travels in the scriptorium (2006), in which a figure named Fanshawe is imprisoned in a scriptorium, a place for writing. Since he has lost his memory, we do not know why he is kept there and what his background is. The only indication, and connection to the outside, is a box of photographs that Fanshawe has been ordered to study. The reader of Auster’s work knows that if Fanshawe does not succeed in restoring his memory, he will remain 32  Ibid., 247. 33  Ibid., 292–293.

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locked up forever. Without the power of memory to re-imagine the world and re-establish connections with it, there is no other way of breaking free of this symbolic imprisonment. In the two cases discussed above, Auster establishes his concept of the closed room as a quintessential ‘scriptorium,’ ontologically related to stories. At the same time, he emphasizes his doubt that texts can really redeem the fatefully imprisoned author. This does not deny the revitalizing power of language in a situation of ‘solitude’; rather it points to the essential role of language and its unstable nature. Although language may restore a sense of connectedness to the material and human world, in itself, it does not represent reality. Words do not so much refer to things as to other words. They are part of a system that is related to reality, but only indirectly, not transparently. To redeem himself, the author must be able to find the indirect connections that stories allow. But maybe the aim of catharsis is not a new life, but rather a new story. Doubles As noted, the experience of solitude, as Auster intends it, opens the gate for memory to intervene and for the author to reconstruct a significant view of himself and his relationship with the world outside. This effort takes the shape of a story and it is here that the author begins to lose his ‘stability’ as a person. He starts imagining a person who is himself, but at whom he looks from a distance; he imagines a search for meaning and identity and projects this onto the protagonist, but at the same time, it is his own quest for inner stability. He creates a ‘hero’ to search for him and sends him out into the world to carry out a search for signification. The hero is a stand-in for the author, who enacts this inner exploration. The final result is not a destiny, or the fulfillment of the act of setting out on the quest; the result is a story, a story about the journey that was necessitated by the quest. A process of multiplication of characters begins when the self splits into an imagined, narrated, person. As soon as the author creates imagined personalities which are projections of himself, the process of splitting off becomes difficult to control, especially when the heroes are authors or author-like figures themselves, who, logically, may experience the same predicament as the original author and try to escape in a similar manner, by creating fictional incarnations of themselves. This may lead to a proliferation of projections that is difficult to contain. It can lead to an increasing diffusion of roles, in which it is difficult for the hero/author to determine what his actual position is within

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the story he imagines and how to interpret it. Instead of stabilizing his system of signification, the story may well become increasingly unstable by introducing multiple impersonations of the author who refuse to act consistently toward each other. In Auster’s work, then, the author’s project is to create his own doppelgänger in the story and invest them with his own insecurity and urge to explore. As soon as these characters are separated from him, however, the heroes and the story acquire a certain autonomy. After all, they set out on a quest whose purpose and course are uncertain, even for the author himself. The heroes may be imprisoned in the story written by the imprisoned author, but they embody the author’s experiment, the outcome of which is unknown. Therefore, at a certain point, it is not clear who is in control of the narrated events, the author, who steers the story, or the hero, who explores an unknown realm and produces rather than discovers a system of signification, which he subsequently imbues in the author. Thus, whereas the author tries to push the hero in directions that seem promising for his own salvation, the hero may end up in unexpected situations that influence the author’s vision of the story, the hero, and himself. As soon as the story begins, we are uncertain who is in command. Narrating is, therefore, inherently contingent: one step follows the next, there is no aim, no final meaning, only the story itself. Ultimately, all the author can do is observe the adventures of his heroes, write down their experiences, ‘suggest’ potential decisions and actions, and try to understand their underlying meaning, which, after all, may be connected to the author’s own hidden motivation and desires. By creating a representation of the self and studying its behavior, storytelling is an exploration of the self that seeks a common essence. This implies that writing is also a, sometimes unconscious, process of identification, that is, a persistent observation of an imagined other who, in the end, turns out to be another aspect of the self. Writing is a constant encounter with doubles, though it may not always be recognized as such, because these doubles are not just replicas but rather alter egos who have escaped their original selves and started their own lives. Even the author may not know how these alter egos will construct their own specific systems of signification. The stories of the New York trilogy all exemplify the recalcitrant nature of doubles and the complexity and inevitability of the process of identification. In ‘City of glass,’ the hero, Quinn, finds himself in a restless state after the loss of his wife and children. He is an author of detective stories, but his tragedy has destroyed his points of reference. He feels ‘lost,’ not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself

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up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think.34 This feeling of being lost has a clear spatial aspect: “On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself.”35 The ambivalence of the relationship with his spatial surroundings represents his sense of who he is; he starts confusing his role with that of his other personality, his pseudonym William Wilson, the author of his detective novels: “William Wilson was, after all, an invention, and even though he had been born within Quinn himself, he now led an independent life.”36 To complicate things further, Quinn/Wilson also identifies with the hero of the detective novels, Max Work: “In the triad of selves that Quinn had become, Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist. Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise.”37 Although Quinn is aware that Max Work is an invented character, this does not diminish his reality, because the narrative context requires it: He had, of course, long ago stopped thinking of himself as real. If he lived now in the world at all, it was only at one remove, through the imaginary person of Max Work. His detective necessarily had to be real. The nature of the books demanded it. If Quinn had allowed himself to vanish, to withdraw into the confines of a strange and hermetic life, Work continued to live in the world of others, and the more Quinn seemed to vanish, the more persistent Work’s presence in that world became.38 Apparently, Quinn/Wilson/Work does not see himself as a figure in a story, which could have granted him a sense of reality, as if only an imagined context can provide stable links with reality. While Quinn ponders his own ‘fictionality,’ someone calls to speak to the detective Paul Auster. Since he is not ‘real’ anyway, Quinn does not see an obstacle in impersonating Auster and accepting the assignment offered to him, which consists of observing a person named Peter Stillman, who has just been released from prison after serving thirteen years for keeping his son – named 34  Ibid., 4. 35  Ibid. 36  Ibid. 37  Ibid., 6. 38  Ibid., 9.

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Peter Stillman as well – locked up in a room for nine years, for a language experiment. While Quinn tries to fulfill his task, his strategies to observe Stillman unconsciously but increasingly, lead him to identify with Stillman. After an experience of intense solitude, he establishes himself in Stillman’s apartment. In the meantime, he distances himself from his former self, loses his own apartment, and no longer recognizes himself in the mirror and is even discharged from his assignment. While Stillman’s experiment was intended to “create a new language” because “our words no longer correspond to the world,”39 Quinn now dedicates himself to writing down his experiences and eating in Stillman’s apartment; thus, without realizing it, he carries out Stillman’s experiment. The confusion of merging and dissociating alter egos is sealed by the ‘real’ Paul Auster’s intrusion into the story. Although his role remains obscure, we are certain that he is somehow in control behind the scenes. At one point, Quinn visits Auster in his apartment. Somewhat later, while Quinn is carrying out the assignment, Auster calls him and says that the case has ended. Auster is not only a character in the story, however, but also the ‘author,’ although his intervention makes it appear that even though he is an author, he is part of the story as well: Since this story is based entirely on facts, the author feels it his duty not to overstep the bounds of the verifiable, to resist at all costs the perils of invention. Even the red notebook, which until now has provided a detailed account of Quinn’s experiences, is suspect. We cannot say for certain what happened to Quinn during this period, for it is at this point in the story that he began to lose his grip.40 In the end, when a friend of Auster’s turns up and reveals himself to be the editor of the report in Quinn’s notebook, the question of authorship is completely destabilized, mainly as a result of the characters and the texts/stories that relate to them splitting off. We find a similar, but less complex, examination of the motif of the double in the story ‘Ghosts,’ which, as summarized above, is about White giving Blue an assignment to observe Black, write down his observations, and send them to White. As noted, during his ‘work’ Blue’s sense of his own situation becomes increasingly destabilized. He feels that he is changing and losing his grip on reality. He tries to find ways to penetrate Black’s life and slowly becomes a mirror image of him, reading and writing like him, in an apartment opposite his. He 39  Ibid., 77. 40  Ibid., 113.

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starts wondering whether Black is doing the same thing he is, observing Blue and writing reports about him. Finally, Blue breaks into Black’s apartment and the sense of identification is complete: Having penetrated Black’s room and stood there alone, having been, so to speak, in the sanctum of Black’s solitude, he cannot respond to the darkness of that moment except by replacing it with a solitude of his own. To enter Black, then, was the equivalent of entering himself, and once inside himself, he can no longer conceive of being anywhere else. But this is precisely where Black is, even Blue does not know it.41 In spite of this identification, there is no amalgamation and the story ends with a confrontation which seems to be the beginning of a new story. In ‘The locked room’ the theme of the double and the concomitant strategies of identification are the driving force of the story. The narrator and Fanshawe were close friends during their school days and were so much alike that some people thought they were twins. However, at one point in their lives they became estranged from each other because their temperaments differed. Although both had the ambition to write, only Fanshawe eventually became a writer. After Fanshawe’s disappearance, the narrator re-enters Fanshawe’s life at the request of Fanshawe’s wife. This is the beginning of the narrator gradually taking over Fanshawe’s life; he marries Fanshawe’s wife and publishes Fanshawe’s book. In the end, many people think that he actually is Fanshawe; the narrator decides to write his friend’s (auto-)biography. As his identification with Fanshawe progresses, however, the author understands that a total amalgamation is impossible. Finally, there will be a confrontation, since the whole idea is based on a lie: “No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.”42 Identifying with another person is a flight from oneself, at one’s own expense: One can only hope to become someone else by destroying oneself. Or, alternatively, by killing the double. Again, this is a case of an imprisoned author enacting his life with his double. As in the other stories, it becomes less clear who is the actual instigator of events and who is the genius behind the unfolding story. The narrator, after discovering that he wishes to kill Fanshawe, wonders if it is, in fact, Fanshawe’s intention to let the narrator kill him: “The strange thing was not that I might have wanted to kill Fanshawe, but that I sometimes imagined that he wanted me 41  Ibid., 190. 42  Ibid., 247.

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to kill him.”43 This question immediately makes the idea of killing Fanshawe senseless, as the narrator discovers that the whole ‘quest’ is merely a contest of strength between him and Fanshawe. And what was the ultimate aim: “After all these months of trying to find him, I felt as though I was the one who had been found.”44 Everything was only an attempt to define himself in relation to Fanshawe. While the narrator increasingly resigns himself to the idea that he will never find Fanshawe, and even imagines that he can ‘create’ Fanshawes at will, he experiences a sense of his own approaching death: “The sensation of life had dribbled out of me, and in its place there was a miraculous euphoria, a sweet poison rushing through my blood, the undeniable odour of nothingness. This is the moment of my death, I said to myself, this is when I die.”45 This awareness of death is associated with the figure of Fanshawe: “I learned to live with him in the same way I lived with the thought of my own death. Fanshawe himself was not death – but he was like death, and he functioned as a trope for death inside me.”46 The narrator’s inability to find Fanshawe seems to equate to the certainty that the narrator will inevitably assimilate to his double and die. In the end, however, it is Fanshawe who dies and while his story comes to an end, the life/story of the narrator continues. The reader asks, did Fanshawe ever exist? These three stories show the basic structure of Auster’s use of the motif of the double and reveal how he relates it to texts and solitude/closed rooms. In all of these cases, language plays a dominant role in the process of identification, as a means to record what is happening, as an effort to make the process more ‘real,’ and, most importantly, as an attempt to stabilize disintegrating personalities, to keep disappearing selves alive as long as possible. Identity can only be preserved by creating a reality in a text, but inevitably, stories gradually lose their coherence and spill into other stories, or the stories of others. Doubles disappear, but their disappearance does not guarantee that the remaining ‘half’ survives; on the contrary, the disappearance of the double usually leads to the discovery that he has always been the other half, and that without imagining him as another person, no coherent vision of the self remains. Only through this imagined counterpart can a semblance of a meaningful life be upheld. The relationship between doubles and texts is most ingeniously explored in Auster’s novel Oracle night (2003). Here, the protagonist, the writer Sidney Orr, 43  Ibid., 269. 44  Ibid., 292. 45  Ibid. 46  Ibid., 301.

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is recovering from a serious disease. In the beginning of the novel, Sidney’s precarious mental state is acknowledged. He feels lost in his own city, New York, as if it were a foreign city, and, “I felt like someone who had come home from a long and difficult journey, an unfortunate traveller who had returned to claim his rightful place in the world.”47 Sidney buys a brand-new notebook and starts writing a story about a certain Nick Bowen, a young editor of a top publishing house in New York, and married to Eva. One day Nick receives a manuscript for evaluation; it was written by a female author who died in the 1930s, and is called ‘Oracle night.’ Nick has the feeling that his life has been stagnating and one day, when he walks along the street he is almost hit by a gargoyle falling from the gable of a house. He interprets this as a sign: He left his apartment tonight for no other reason than to run into that stone, and if he’s managed to escape with his life, it can only mean that a new life has been given to him – that his old life is finished, that every moment of his past now belongs to someone else.48 He takes a taxi to the airport and flies to Kansas City. From here the story forks into different paths, one following the adventures of Sidney, his wife Grace, and the author they befriend, John Trause; the other follows Nick Bowen, his wife Eva, and the young Rosa Leightman, with whom he falls in love. Sidney consciously projects elements from his own surroundings into Nick’s life. He gives Rosa the appearance that Grace and Nick’s apartment is ‘stolen’ from John’s. This gradually leads to a confusion between the story and ‘reality.’ When Sidney visits John he feels as if he enters his own story: I had the strange, not altogether unpleasant feeling that I was entering an imaginary space, walking into a room that wasn’t there…. I was both a part of what was going on around me and cut off from it, drifting freely in my mind as I imagined myself sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, writing about this place in the blue notebook, and sitting in a chair on the top floor of a Manhattan duplex, firmly anchored in my body.49 Conversely, Grace tells him that when she came home one day he was not in the apartment, though he is convinced he was writing at his desk at the time:

47  Paul Auster, Oracle Night (New York: Picador, 2003), 11. 48  Ibid., 26. 49  Ibid., 28–29.

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It’s not unusual for a person to be so preoccupied as to appear absent – but the point was that I wasn’t absent. I was there, fully engaged in what was happening, and at the same time I wasn’t there – for there wasn’t an authentic there anymore. It was an illusory place that existed in my head, and that’s where I was as well. In both places at the same time. In the apartment and in the story. In the story in the apartment that I was still writing in my head.50 The splitting off of the two narrative trajectories is visually elaborated by a layer of footnotes in the core text; these allow Auster to let the meditations – memories – of Sidney run parallel to his writing of Nick’s story. A third layer is added when Nick starts reading the manuscript ‘Oracle night.’ Sidney muses: That was the third element of the narrative that was taking shape in my head, and I decided that it should be introduced as early as possible – even before the plane lands in Kansas City. First, Nick’s story; then, Eva’s story; and finally, the book that Nick reads and continues to read as their stories unfold: the story within the story. Nick is a literary man, after all, and therefore someone susceptible to the power of books. Little by little, he begins to see a connection between himself and the story in the novel, as if in some oblique, highly metaphorical way, the book was speaking intimately to him about his own present circumstances.51 It is clear that the author, with his simultaneous presentation of these different stories, has a purpose: The realms of the different stories are interconnected; the invented stories may contain information that is relevant for the reader/ writer, that has a message which is significant for his ‘real’ life. The projection of elements from real life into the stories may be just a device, but the gradual diffusion of the boundaries between stories and reality shows that it is not: The form of communication between the real and narrative levels would seem to indicate that they constitute parallel realities. The reader is aware that he needs all the different stories to try to complete any of them. Significantly, Nick, who left his former life behind, concludes that he should not remain stuck in the past and should concentrate on the present: He has to train himself not to think about the past. That’s the key to the whole mad adventure that started for him when the gargoyle crashed to 50  Ibid., 30. 51  Ibid., 61.

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the sidewalk. If he has lost his old life, then he must act as if he has just been born, pretend that he is no more burdened by the past than an infant is.52 Reading the manuscript will help him with this, “… because the manuscript demands total surrender in order to be read, an unremitting attentiveness of both body and mind, he can forget who he was when he is lost in the pages of the novel.”53 He is given a job by a poor black man named Ed Victory: he must re-organize a cellar full of telephone directories from a geographical (spatial) order to a chronological (temporal) order. Ed says, This room contains the world. Or at least a part of it. The names of the living and the dead. The Bureau of Historical Preservation is a house of memory, but it’s also a shrine to the present. By bringing those two things together in one place, I prove to myself that mankind isn’t finished.54 Nick accidentally locks himself in the cellar, while Eva is looking for him. He spends five days in the cellar reading the manuscript ‘Oracle night,’ while in the company of thousands of telephone books that symbolize communication with the world outside. Sidney, the author of Nick’s story, does not know how to liberate Nick from his confinement. He realizes that Nick’s misfortune symbolizes the stagnation in his own life. He realizes, too, that it was an illusion to think that he could ‘liberate’ himself by writing. On the contrary, it seems that writing Nick’s story only made him more aware of his own predicament. This becomes especially clear when Grace has a very realistic dream about them passing through a series of empty rooms and descending into a cellar filled with books written by Sidney and decorated in an oriental fashion, with silk cushions, chairs, a bed, and a red satin comforter. They have sex, but when they want to leave, they discover that they are locked in. When Grace tells him about the dream, Sidney is depressed, but Grace insists that it was only a dream: “People can’t die in their dreams, you know. Even if the door was locked, something would have

52  Ibid., 65. 53  Ibid., 66. 54  Ibid., 91; the room is remarkably similar to the installation with telephone directories made by the artist Boltanski in the Musée de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Les abonnés du téléphone).

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happened to get us out. That’s how it works. As long as you’re dreaming, there’s always a way out.”55 From this point onwards, the story is directed toward various intrigues in the lives of Grace and Sid, both in the past and in the present, and it is suggested that the stagnation in which they are stranded is related to specific experiences in the past – experiences that await their final denouement in the present. It is as if the ‘forgotten’ or neglected past, with its repressed memories, intrudes into Sid’s life, because life cannot continue until they come to a solution. It is not necessary to discuss these intrigues in detail here. It is the way in which Auster constructs the triangular nexus between the double, the locked rooms, and the texts that is important. As in the other stories, an author, whose life has become destabilized, creates an alter ego, who quite explicitly personifies his own inner disequilibrium. But instead of Sid steering his hero, and himself, to more solid ground, Nick drags Sid along to a symbolic cul-de-sac. The parallels between the story and real life become clear through the identification of the author with his protagonist: Sid, too, ends up in a cul-de-sac from which he must liberate himself. The role of the texts also gradually becomes clear: instead of leading the various heroes out of their predicament, by opening up new visions of life, the stories lead their authors/readers astray and finally lure them into a state of physical/mental confinement. The story is not a trajectory of liberation, it is a labyrinth that destroys the author/reader’s ability to choose his own way. Therefore, it seems that stories are not an instrument in the author’s hand, a tool for exploration, by which to ‘unlock’ gates; rather they are instruments of fate, which capture both the author and his readers in its mechanisms and lead them to their destiny. This is emphasized by the magical nature of the notebook in which Sid writes: It is unclear if it is he who invents the story, or if the notebook contains the story in an unwritten form and compels him to write it down. Again, authorship is uncertain and the autonomous agency of the stories is stressed. In this unfolding of fate, memories play a crucial role, not because of the past in itself, but because the memories represent the manifestation of the past in the present and therefore cannot be separated from the course toward the future. Fate is rooted in the past and for this reason the past cannot be neglected; the past must be fulfilled in the present before the future can unfold itself. In Oracle night, this is clearly symbolized by Nick’s assignment to transform the spatial ordering of the telephone books into a chronological ordering. 55  Ibid., 136.

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New York trilogy and Oracle night are not Auster’s only novels in which locked rooms and doubles play a decisive role; nevertheless, the way in which the motif is used in these stories reveals that the fundamental idea of writing is a process which is engendered in solitude and which is meant to construct strategies to deal with the inherently traumatic nature of human existence. These strategies are transformed into stories, mainly by creating a double, a split from the self, which then usurps his own agency and forces the author into a process of identification. Still, creating an alternative self is not, in itself, a guaranteed solution. In the first instance, it is a means to link the author’s life to a broader system that seems to govern the course of events, a system of meanings, fate, or just an all-powerful domain of narration. The double embodies the force, even the necessity, of representation, of imagining an alternative reality as the only way to explore this reality and approach its essence. Only by constructing an imagined life can we begin to understand how life is lived. Narrativity In Auster’s novels, narration links the omnipresent motifs of the locked room and the double to each other and to its various references. Narration is the connection with an invisible, almost mysterious, system of meaning; it is the only means to establish forms of communication with one’s social surroundings; and it is a means to uphold a form of mental integrity, a more or less coherent vision of the self. However, the nature of language and narration is ambiguous, especially as it is never clear if it can be controlled by the author, or if it controls the author, at least in part. The fascination with this ambiguity is expressed in the special role of notebooks in Auster’s stories. In several novels, the heroes purchase notebooks to record their experiences and observations. These notebooks are never merely neutral objects – they always have a magical appeal. Quinn, for instance, continually looks for special notebooks and is irresistibly drawn to one specimen: “… something about it seemed to call out to him – as if its unique destiny in the world was to hold the words that came from his pen. Almost embarrassed by the intensity of his feelings, Quinn tucked the red notebook under his arm …”56 In Oracle night, the blue notebook Sid buys assumes quite a prominent role. He purchases it in a special shop that he has not seen before and which mysteriously disappears soon after he buys the notebook. John Trause, his friend, has a similar notebook and warns him 56  Auster, The New York Trilogy, 38–39.

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about this specific type of blue notebook: “It depends on what you write. Those notebooks are very friendly, but they can also be cruel, and you have to watch out that you don’t get lost in them.”57 Eventually, Sid finds the shop again in a different place, but now the owner of the shop, Chang, refuses to sell him another notebook. Sid realizes that the notebook is connected with strange events, and he is in doubt about who is in control: “I can’t tell if I’m the one who is using the notebook or if the notebook’s been using me.”58 This is confirmed in his confrontation with Chang: If I had learned anything from my ferocious encounter with Chang on Saturday, it was that the notebook was a place of trouble for me, and whatever I tried to write in it would end in failure. Every story would stop in the middle; every project would carry me along just so far, and then I’d look up and discover that I was lost.59 It appears that the notebooks have some magical force hidden inside them, that they are instruments of fate; that they already contain the story that the author is going to write, as if they are a window to a different realm. Through them, too, the author becomes an instrument of fate, enacting the role imposed on him by the story. They are magical objects that can transform reality into its imagined representation and vice versa, the medium through which fate or the system of meanings manifests itself in reality and the other way around. It seems, then, that narration is part of a continuum that manifests itself in language and that cannot be perceived in any way. It has a certain autonomy, but it also enables the author to try to break out of the stagnancy of his situation. Narration becomes a substitute for life: by telling his stories, the author can distance himself from his paralyzing trauma, and by continuing his narration, he can prevent himself from falling back into paralysis, or worse, from discovering that there is nothing beyond the telling of stories. Thus, Auster is an example of what Wendy Faris considers one of the key ideas of (post-) modernist literature, the use of narration as a means to postpone death, to defer not so much gratification, but rather the void that is the end of everything. In Auster’s works, it is as if the author himself is a character in the story; as long as the story goes on, his life continues; when the story stops, he will vanish, together with all his invented heroes. 57  Auster, Oracle Night, 45. 58  Ibid., 66. 59  Ibid., 211.

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The ‘trick’ of deferral has its repercussions, however, since the state of ‘solitude’ symbolizes the condition of the author’s confinement, a traumatic, stagnant, condition that excludes the passage of time, it is narration that seems to reconnect the author with events that are embedded in the passage of time in one way or another. Thus, while narration may drag the author out of his paralysis and back into the social, temporal world, it also subjects him to the tyrannical laws of time. On the one hand, he may gain a new lease on life by telling his story and averting the looming void; on the other hand, this will inevitably steer him toward an end which is even more devastating than the state of paralysis he escaped. Narration thus produces life and postpones death, but it also makes an ending inescapable. Several authors in Auster’s books anxiously foresee the moment that their notebook will be filled, because this will mark the moment of their final silence. This tension between the emergence of narration and its potential ending is not merely a matter of suspense; this tension is precisely what brings forth narration. It is the threat of an ending, the awareness that everything may end in the next moment, that causes narration to gush forth and proliferate. It is the crack in the characters’ lives that allows narration to enter and take hold of them. It is the existential condition of finality that allows storytelling to flow. As Auster remarks, Nevertheless, this is where it begins. The first word appears only at a moment when nothing can be explained anymore, at some instant of experience that defies all sense. To be reduced to say nothing. Or else, to say to himself: this is what haunts me. And then to realize, almost in the same breath, that this is what he haunts.60 In The invention of solitude, Auster explains his philosophy of storytelling, which according to him, as we quoted above, begins “with the end. Speak or die. And for as long as you go on speaking, you will not die. The story begins with death.”61 Like most of Auster’s novels, the tales of Shahrazad are self-reflexive; they explain what they perform. This is achieved by creating a ‘parallel’ reality: storytelling is a means to transform reality into its imaginary reflection, and in this capacity, the restoring/regenerative power of storytelling lies. It makes people see things that are not perceived:

60  Auster, The Invention of Solitude, 78. 61  Ibid., 149.

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This is guilt out of innocence … and at the same time the birth of enchantment – turning a thought into a thing, bringing the invisible to life…. For this is the function of the story: to make a man see the thing before his eyes by holding up another thing to view.62 Storytelling has a magical capacity: it can enchant reality in order to reveal the relationship between reality and other, imagined, realities, and to reveal truths that are hidden in the material and social environments. The various functions of narration are neatly explored in The New York trilogy, Quinn, for instance, uses a form of narration after the tragedy that has ruined his life. He recognizes the ‘realm’ of narration in which all stories are connected,63 but soon he is immersed in the tide of narrations that he himself provoked. But, as we explained, the writing only leads him to a new form of solitude, which he hopes to ward off, since now his life and his story have almost completely converged: Little by little, Quinn was coming to the end. At a certain point, he realized that the more he wrote the sooner the time would come when he could no longer write anything…. He tried to face the end of the notebook with courage. The last sentence of the red notebook reads: “What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?”64 In ‘Ghosts,’ too, the protagonist is engulfed by the wave of narration that he unleashes. He and Black both confront the fear of the end of writing, which is at once a liberation and a dreadful prospect.65 The story of ‘The locked room’ is directly about storytelling, not only about the relationship between writing and the themes we have discussed, but especially about the relationship between narration and fate. Writing determines the destinies of both the narrator and Fanshawe; it transforms reality, but in the end, it explains nothing; it only seeks a way to make the end of narration and death coincide. The autonomy of narration and its inherent self-generative nature is explored in Oracle night. Here, finding Sid a susceptible author, the story writes itself, soon forking into parallel stories embedded in other stories, which are again embedded in other stories, etc., infinitely. The story seems to take over Sid’s life, throwing him into a kind of limbo, where magical incidents occur 62  Ibid. 63  Auster, The New York Trilogy, 7. 64  Ibid., 130–131. 65  Ibid., 185–186.

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and in which stories intermingle at will. The story even enchants Grace, who fails to notice his presence in the apartment when he is writing. The complex enchassement (embedding) of the stories is strengthened by the footnotes that represent another level and a temporal layer as well: The stories of the ‘past’ and the ‘present’ can be told simultaneously, which is significant, since ultimately, the final plot is set in motion when the past intrudes into the present. The story itself unearths the intrigues hidden in the past, and thus opens up the future: Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren’t aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that’s what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future.66 The most intriguing image of the nature of storytelling is presented in The country of last things (1987), in which the protagonist, Anna Blume, ends up in a city where all structure, all coherence, has disappeared. The people only try to survive, nothing gives any sense of meaning to their lives, because all incidents are unconnected and immediately forgotten; this robs the present of any significance derived from the past. Anna counters this chaotic milieu by writing a letter in which she explains her predicament: These are the last things, she wrote. One by one they disappear and never come back. I can tell you of the ones I have seen, of the ones that are no more, but I doubt there will be time. It is all happening too fast now, and I cannot keep up…. [The city] makes you want to live, and at the same time it tries to take your life away from you. There is no escape from this. Either you do or you don’t. And if you do, you can’t be sure of doing it the next time. And if you don’t, you never will again…. Bit by bit, the city robs you of certainty. There can never be any fixed path, and you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you. Without warning, you must be able to change, to drop what you are doing, to reverse. In the end, there is nothing that is not the case. As a consequence, you must learn how to read the signs…. Even if it is for the hundredth time, you must encounter each

66  Auster, The Invention of Solitude, 221–222.

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thing as if you have never known it before. No matter how many times, it must always be the first time.67 Here we encounter the paradox that we have also found in the nature of storytelling, the entanglement between the necessity of living and the inevitability of accepting the path toward death: That is perhaps the greatest problem of all. Life as we know it has ended, and yet no one is able to grasp what has taken its place…. That is the dilemma. On the one hand, you want to survive, to adapt, to make the best of things as they are. But, on the other hand, to accomplish this seems to entail killing off all those things that once made you think of yourself as human…. In order to live, you must make yourself die.68 Like Quinn, whose passport she finds on the street, her narration is always threatened by interruption and the subsequent emptiness: The words come only when I think I won’t be able to find them anymore, at the moment I despair of ever bringing them out again. Each day brings the same struggle, the same blankness, the same desire to forget and then not to forget. When it begins, it is never anywhere but here, never anywhere but at this limit that the pencil begins to write. The story starts and stops, goes forward and then loses itself, and between each word, what silences, what words escape and vanish, never to be seen again.69 Her ability to write is due to her blue notebook: … by now it is the one thing that matters to me: to have my say at last, to get it all down on these pages before it is too late. I tremble when I think how closely everything is connected. If Isabel had not lost her voice, none of these words would exist. Because she had no more words, these other words have come out of me.70

67  Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 2005), 1, 3, 6, 7. 68  Ibid., 20. 69  Ibid., 38. 70  Ibid., 79.

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Recording her thoughts is the only way to survive. It is first a method of postponement, because after objects have disappeared, only words remain, but eventually these, too, will lose their meaning. At a certain point Anna finds Samuel Farr, the person she is looking for, who lives in a small room in the library and who works on a complete collection of the stories of the inhabitants of the city. This is the only way to preserve a potentially coherent view of what is happening in the city, but for Samuel Farr, it is the only way to survive: “You’ll kill yourself before you finish,” I said. “And what’s the point of that? You should stop writing the book and take care of yourself.” “I can’t stop. The book is the only thing that keeps me going. It prevents me from thinking about myself and getting sucked up into my own life. If I ever stopped working on it, I’d be lost. I don’t think I’d make it through another day.”71 Anna realizes: “He was walking straight towards his own death, and he was not even aware of it.”72 However, there is no other way than to accept the narration paradox: “After that, Sam’s book became the most important thing in my life. As long as we kept working on it, I realized, the notion of a possible future would continue to exist for us.”73 Soon Anna and Samuel are separated by a cruel turn of events. Eventually Anna becomes aware that she cannot continue to write indefinitely. The notebook is almost filled and her handwriting is becoming smaller and smaller. She feels she is coming closer to an ending of some sort, but she refuses to accept it: I’ve been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it’s too late, but I see now how badly I’ve deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that’s only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end. The words get smaller and smaller.74

71  Ibid., 104. 72  Ibid., 105. 73  Ibid., 114. 74  Ibid., 183.

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It seems that this hope is in vain, since, as we know, in Anna’s case especially, to stop writing is to lose all contact with any system of meaning, to be given over to the forces of disintegration which are the only true reality in life. Perhaps stories will continue without Anna, but Anna has lost her ability to postpone her end and she cannot survive without stories. The convergence of narrative and diegetical reality results in an amalgamation of the author and his character. If his characters run out of words, the author does as well. Both are caught in the intricate web of stories which, in some cases, already contain the outcome of their adventures. Still, for the protagonists and the author, the story’s course, although supposedly part of a system of meaning, is completely unpredictable. If they discern a pattern in events at all, it ultimately only leads back to themselves. For them, storytelling is an object of desire, but the effort to satisfy this desire results in renewed disintegration. Stories are not a means to reach a specific aim; in fact, with their labyrinthine quality, they may even obstruct the road toward this aim. Stories only exist for their own sake, to be stories, to defer the ending, and not to provide any solution or meaningful plot. It is probably not necessary to more elaborately indicate the clear and profound influence of the Thousand and one nights on Paul Auster’s novelistic oeuvre. It is both explicit, in The invention of solitude, and implicit; it can be perceived on the conceptual level (trauma, postponement, death, narration, salvation); the thematic level (through doubles, closed spaces, magic, journeys, destiny); and in references to specific stories (the frame story, the ‘Third qalandar,’ and ‘As‘ad and Amjad’). Auster’s work is still expanding, as if the chain of tales set in motion by The invention of solitude continues, in an effort to neutralize the effect of the primary trauma which every author necessarily must go through. Although Auster’s work is not uniform, the Thousand and one nights is one of the central intertextual paradigms for his oeuvre as a whole, mainly because it is based on a persistent and profound form of self-reflexivity, and because it explicitly takes Shahrazad’s method as the quintessence and function of writing: to transform reality into something that is imagined in order to convey some invisible truth and make others aware of the nature of reality. Like Shahrazad, Auster exploits the opposition between reality and the imagination as the locus where stories acquire their significance and reality can be endured. Another important connection is Auster’s interpretation of the nexus between narration, trauma, and death. Narration is a form of deferral that is generated by traumatic experiences and at a certain point becomes

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inseparable from life itself. The process of narration must continue, otherwise the narrator’s existence will end. In many of Auster’s stories, the protagonist of the story is thus forced to narrate, but in all cases, he, the protagonist, gradually absorbs the writer (Auster himself), and drags him into the story and, seemingly, makes his fate, too, dependent on the continuation or cessation of the narrative. The characters are not only doubles of each other, but also of the writer, who, through the act of writing, enacts a process of identification in order to assimilate a ‘truth’ that may be revealed in the imaginary replicas of himself. This identification makes it – gradually – impossible for the author and the characters to disentangle themselves from the narrative maze, and this subjects them to its own mechanisms. The process of deferral can be set in motion, but it cannot be controlled. Our awareness of the role of the Thousand and one nights in Auster’s poetics and our acknowledgment of this influence does not immediately necessitate a different reading of his work. Here it is more important to note the remarkable way Auster absorbs and combines major trends in world literature of the twentieth century, and incorporates echoes of many authors treated elsewhere in this study, such as Joyce, Borges, Calvino, Gide, and Barth, to construct a complex universe of his own. In this assimilation, too, the influence of the Thousand and one nights is crucial, not only because its idea and structure allow the incorporation of diverse elements, but also because in these authors’ work the Thousand and one nights was an important narrative model. Auster’s fascination with the Thousand and one nights thus shows the completion of a process of incorporation of the Nights into western (and perhaps world) literature. It is not a narrative site for indulging in exoticism; through its unstable and destabilizing nature it becomes a reference for literary discovery. This was the case in modernist literature, and in postmodernist literature: The Thousand and one nights is used as a tool, not only to destabilize the generic conventions of form, but also to build layers of unreality and alienation in literary narratives, and to reveal the textual nature of the human experience. Thus, Auster’s work discloses a pattern that epitomizes the various strands of the intertextual influence of the Thousand and one nights in twentieth-century fiction.

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Index of People and Places The index of people and places includes (1) humans, and in the case of authors, their works and (2) places that are known to exist. The subject index includes imaginary beings (e.g., angels) and places (Waq al-Waq islands), groups of people, and characters in texts (e.g., Harun al-Rashid as a character), and texts without authors (e.g., the Thousand and one nights). ‘Abd al-Nasir, Gamal 675 Abel 86 Abu Nuwas 501, 558 Abu Yusuf 558 Aden 594 Adonis [Syrian poet] 607 Africa/African 44, 49, 59, 62, 72, 400–401, 408, 598 East 594 and Europeans 273 Aleppo 667 Alexander the Great 98, 507, 512 Alexandrov, V. E. 159 on Nabokov 156–58 Algeria/Algerian 592, 593–95, 598–99, 612, 668 colonial history of 591, 611 cultural tradition 591, 604, 615, 616, 618 independence 598, 613, 670 society 612, 619 Algiers 613 Amrouche, Fadhma Aït 613, 616 Anatolia 465. See also Ottoman (Empire); Turkey/Turkish Andersen, [Hans Christian] 531 Angola 598 Ankara 218 Anselm Turmeda 359 Apollinaire, Guillaume 193 al-A‘radj, Wasini. See Laredj, Waçiny Argentina/Argentine 13, 269, 270, 284, 313 Buenos Aires 269, 276, 284, 295–96 culture 270, 272, 274, 284–85, 296, 304, 348 identity 296, 298 literature 272–74, 300, 304 modern 271, 283, 300 writers/authors 304, 314, 372 Arlt, Mitra 273

Arlt, Roberto (1900–42) 300, 304 África 273 Aguafuertes Espanolas 272–73 El criador de gorillas 273 Armenia/Armenian 461, 465 Asia/Asian 27, 403, 507, 562 spirit/past 537–38 steppes, tribes of 536–37 Atatürk, Kemal 129–30, 573–74, 587 Atlas Mountains 367 al-Attar 360 Atwood, Margaret (b. 1939) 242 Alias Grace 11 The blind assassin 11, 150, 171–72, 176–78, 181, 183 Lady Oracle 150, 171–72, 175–76, 179, 184 Auster, Paul (b. 1942) 701, 705, 720, 722, 726–27, 732–33 ‘Book of memory’ 702 ‘City of glass’ 716 The country of last things 729 ‘Ghosts’ 710, 718, 728 The invention of solitude 702, 707, 727, 732 New York trilogy 710, 713, 716, 725, 728 Oracle night 12, 720, 724–25, 728 poetics of 707, 733 ‘The locked room’ 713–14, 719, 728 Travels in the scriptorium 714 Austria/Austrian 447 orientalism 483 Austro-Hungarian Empire 129 al-Azhar 641 Bach, J. S. 130, 140 Baghdad 3, 26, 204–5, 258, 399–400, 402, 406, 510, 551, 558, 685, 691 Bakhtin, Mikhail 408, 419, 422 Balkans 22

760 Ballaster, Ros 182 Ballvé, Marcelo 283 Balzac, Honoré de 9, 332, 531 La comédie humaine 248 Bangladesh 425–26 Barcelona 358, 368 al-Barmaki, Ja’far 558–59, 582 Barth, John (1930–2015) 165, 407, 528, 541–42, 547, 555, 557, 570, 733 ‘Bellephoroniad’ 542 Chimaera 541, 543, 549 ‘Dunyazadiad’ 541–45, 556 The Giles goat-boy 539, 541 The last voyage of Somebody the Sailor 551, 556 ‘The literature of exhaustion’ 540 Lost in the funhouse 539, 541 ‘Perseid’ 542 ‘The replenishment of literature’ 540 Sabbatical: A romance 545, 549–50, 551, 556 The sot-weed factor 539, 541, 547 ‘Tales within tales’ 544 The tidewater tales 543, 550, 551 Barthes, Roland 194 Sade, Fourier, Loyola 191 Basra 26 Baudelaire, Charles 130, 140, 443 Beckett, Samuel 94, 372, 540 Beckford, [William] 9 Beethoven, Ludwig von 130 Beirut 460–61, 592, 596 Bensmaïa, Réda 355–56 Bergson, Henri 131 Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience 116 Berlin 151, 490, 500 Berman, Nina 41 Bertharion, Jacques Denis 339 Beyzaï, Bahram (b. 1938) 628, 691, 698–99 The eighth voyage of Sindbad (Hashtomin safer-e-Sindbad) 695–96 Bhabha, Homi (b. 1949) 348, 423, 591 Bhutto, Zulfikar 432 Bignon, Abbé de, Abdalla fils d’Hanif 9 al-Biruni 683 Bismarck, Otto von 495 Blake, [William] 81

Index of People and Places Blixen, Karen 188 Boccaccio, [Giovanni] 531 Decameron 544 Böcklin, Arnold 494 Boehme, Jacob 96, 98 Boileau, [Nicolas] 1, 288 Bombay 426 Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986) 1, 158, 161, 271–73, 284–85, 295, 300, 304, 313–16, 334, 348, 540–41, 733 ‘602nd night’ 291–92, 327, 545 ‘Aleph’ 301 Borgesian method 287, 571 ‘Brodie’s report’ 294 and Macedonio Fernández 274, 283 poetics of 285, 289, 292–93, 298 ‘Siete noches’ (‘Seven nights’) 288 ‘The garden of the forking paths’ 292 ‘The south’ 294, 296, 299, 302 ‘The translators of the Thousand and one nights’ 289 ‘Tlön’ 294, 302, 312 Bosch, Hieronymus 363 Boudjedra, Rachid (b. 1941) 628, 688, 700 Les 1001 années de la nostalgie 668, 682 Bouteflika, [Abdelaziz] 612 Bowie, Malcolm 125–26 Boyd, Brian 165, 169–70 Brandes, Georg 487 Brink, André (1935–2015) 397 A fork in the road 396 Imaginings of sand 396, 398, 404–6 Britain/British 62–63, 65, 72, 201, 253, 254, 408, 423, 431, 433, 439, 487, 495–96 and Boers 396 Englishmen 425, 426 London 561 mandate/administration 629, 667 Bronfen, Elisabeth 176 Brunel, Pierre 326 Budapest 97, 528, 530, 532, 537 Buenos Aires 269, 276, 284, 295–96 Bulgakov, Mikhail, The master and Margarita 12 Burgess, Anthony 259 Burton, Richard 5, 161, 293 and translation of Nights 225, 263, 267–68, 289–91, 334, 432, 433, 541

761

Index of People and Places Butor, Michel (1926–2016) 93, 100–101 La modification 94 Matière de rêves 94, 102 Passage à Milan 94 Portrait de l’artiste comme jeune singe 95, 100, 102 Byron, Lord 254, 547 Cain 86 Cairo 62 Cairo, University of 627, 641 Calasso, Roberto (b. 1941) 442, 444–45, 447, 465 The ruin of Kasch 442 Calvino, Italo (1923–85) 312, 332, 347, 372–73, 377, 733 Calvinoesque 571 If on a winter’s night a traveller … 318, 319–20, 329–30, 339, 345–46 and Nights 322, 325–28, 331, 333 Six memos 332 The uses of literature 325 Canada/Canadians 408 Caracciolo, Peter 2 Caribbean 545, 598 Carrillo, Enrique Gómez 271 Carter, Angela (1940–92) 171, 188, 193–94, 197, 243 The infernal desire machines of Doctor Hoffman 195–99, 202, 210 Nights at the circus 195, 199–200, 202, 204–5, 209–10, 408 The Sadeian woman 191–92 Cavafy, [Constantine Peter] 359, 368 Caylus, Comte de, Nouveaux contes orientaux 9 Cazotte, Jacques 24, 626 Le diable amoureux 249 Suite des Mille et une nuits 9 Central Asia, stories from 626 Cervantes, Miguel de 165, 531, 540 Don Quijote 360–61, 363, 370 Chajarat al-Dour (Shajarat al-Durr, d. 1257) 684–85 Charlemagne 98 Chassériau, [Théodore] 601 Chateaubriand, F.-R. de 443 Chaucer, Canterbury tales 544

China/Chinese 497, 520 Christ 470, 471, 475 Cleopatra 98 Coleridge, [Samuel] 2, 290 Collins, [Wilkie] 2 Colombia/Colombian 409, 414 Connolly, J. W. 156 Conrad, [Joseph] 2 Copenhagen 489 Tivoli gardens 487 Courmes, Alfred 111 Crébillon, [Claude Prosper Jolyot de] 96 Crimea 151 Cruz, San Juan de la 360 Cuba/Cuban 110, 670 Havana 103, 109 Damascus 667, 678 Dante 547 Divina commedia 363 Darío, Rubén 272 Darricarrière, Henriette 603 Debussy, [Claude] 140 de Caylus, Comte 626 de la Bretonne, Rétif 248 Les Nuits de Paris 559 Delacroix, Eugène 599, 601, 603 de la Croix, Pétis 626 Mille et un jours (Thousand and one days) 9, 502, 507 Denmark/Danish 486–88 authenticity 489, 493 and Levant 485 and modernity 490, 492–93 Dickens, [Charles] 9 Diderot, [Denis] 9 Diyab, Hanna 485 Döblin, Alfred 24 Doré, Gustave 363 Dublin 255–56, 258, 303, 312 Dumas 325, 547 Eberhardt, Isabelle 596 Eco, Umberto 257 Egypt/Egyptians 95, 100, 630–31, 639, 651, 667 autonomy 646 Cairo 62

762 Egypt/Egyptians (cont.) culture/traditions of 629–30, 640–41 modernism 528, 641 and Nights 625 Nile 441 politics in 651–52 theater 632, 635 England/English. See Britain/British Ernst, Max 96 Estévez, Abilio (b. 1954) 102–3 Tuyo es el reino (Thine is the kingdom) 103 Europe/European 7, 59, 128–29, 211, 269–70, 313, 442, 482, 490, 492, 494–95, 527, 552, 561, 573 and Africa 63 and Arab world 645–46 art/painting 497, 599 and Asia 220 civilization 631 and colonization 610 culture 27, 130, 249, 284, 528 Enlightenment 5, 7, 642 vs. indigenous/others 269, 314 intellectuals/writers 304, 531 literature 6, 247, 531 modern 275, 408 romances, medieval 228 modernity 272, 442, 591 and Orient 4, 26, 41, 269, 272, 497 and oriental(ism) 269, 271, 603 orientalists 316, 599, 625, 627 post-war 512, 517 powers 667, 687 society 523, 622 stereotypes 63, 254 women 91 Fairbanks, Douglas 574 al-Faqih, Ahmad Ibrahim (b. 1942) 112 Gardens of the night 61, 75, 89, 90–91 I shall offer another city (Sa-ahibuka madina ukhra) 61, 75, 77–78 These are the borders of my kingdom (Hadhihi tukhum mamlakati) 61, 75, 77 A tunnel lit by one woman (Nafaq tudi’uhu imra’a wahida) 61, 75, 77, 86

Index of People and Places al-Farazdak 683 Faris, Wendy 149–50, 151, 164, 407–9, 423, 726 Faulkner, William (1897–1962) Absalom Absalom! 381, 383–85, 389, 394–96, 403–4, 406, 476 The sound and the fury 383, 393–94 Fawzi, Husayn (1900–88) 527 Fernández, Macedonio (1874–1952) 272, 280, 282, 300, 303, 304–5, 313, 315, 327 image of 283–84 Museo de la novela de la eterna (The museum of Eterna’s novel (the first good novel)) 274–76, 282, 301, 314 Fielding, [Henry] 165 Firdawsi 501 Fitzgerald, Edward 431 Flaubert, [Gustave] 443 Foucauld, [Father Charles de] 359 Foucault, [Michel] 463, 468 Foucauldian discourse 481 Fra Filippo 140 France/French 4, 45, 95, 101, 460, 472, 487, 495–96, 592, 597, 610, 667 colonial past/rule 591, 598, 682 culture 350, 358, 609 journey/tour through 594–95, 605, 607 language 350, 591 in North Africa 599 orientalism 483 Revolution (1789–1814) 442, 445–46 society 596, 597–98, 604, 606, 608 Franco, Francisco 358, 367 Frederick the Great 507 Freud, Sigmund/Freudian 130, 234, 303, 385, 407, 559, 565 Der Traumdeutung 303, 564 interpretations of 77, 238 Friedrich, Caspar 96 Fromentin, [Eugène] 601, 605 Fulcanelli 101 Les demeures philosophales 96–97 Galland, Antoine 1, 3–4, 7, 46 Mille et une nuits 4, 8, 119, 151, 485, 513, 515, 525 and translation of Nights 267, 289–91, 625 Gandhi, Indira 426, 429

Index of People and Places Garth, Todd 283 Gaskell, [Elizabeth] 2 Gasquet, Axel 273 Gauthier, [Théophile] 9 Gaza Strip 675. See also Palestine Genghis Khan 507 Gerhards, Claudia 521 Germany/German(s) 13, 96, 98, 101, 211–12, 222, 241, 291, 446, 485, 486–88, 494–97, 522, 564 Berlin 151, 490, 500 fascism/Nazism 493–94 identity 447, 506 orientalism 483, 494 post-war 220, 512 society 222, 447 Third Reich 450 tradition and Nights translations 23 West Germany 518 Ghirlandaio, [Domenico] 140 Gide, André (1869–1951) 55, 249, 540, 733 El-Hadj 45 Le journal des faux-monnayeurs 47–48, 51, 57 Les faux-monnayeurs 41–42, 44, 47, 50–51, 53, 56–58, 112 Le voyage d’Urien 45–46 L’Immoraliste 45 Nourritures terrestres 45 Protée mal enchainé 46 Giersing, Harald [Danish artist] 488 Gily, Ricardo 272 Godard, Jean-Luc 606 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832)  9, 24–25, 130 Goytisolo, Juan (1931–2017) 365, 369–70, 373 Don Julian 358 ‘El laberinto y el círculo (Notas sobre las mil y una noches)’ 361 El semana del jardín (The garden of secrets) 366, 370 Juan sin tierra 358–60 La cuarentena (Quarantine) 363, 366 Makbara 371 poetics of 361, 363 Señas de identidad 358 Gray, Margaret 127 Greece/Greek 313, 403, 631, 635 tragedy 234

763 Green, Michael 406 Grossman, David (b. 1954) 442, 447–48, 465, 477 See under: love 448, 458 Grosz, Elisabeth, Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism 460, 463–64 Gueullette, [Thomas-Simon] 9 Habicht, Maximilian 5, 23, 291 Habsburg Empire 21, 22–23, 495, 528, 538 Haiti 382 al-Hakim, Tawfiq (1898–1987) 630–31, 634–35, 643, 645, 650, 652, 665, 699 ‘Ali Baba’ 632 Bayt al-naml 632 The cavemen 632, 635 ‘Return of Shahriyar’ 641 Shahrazad 627, 629, 632–33, 635, 637, 639–41, 645, 649 Husayn’s criticism of 642, 644 Solomon the wise 632 Sultan al-zalam (‘Sultan of darkness’) 632, 645 with Taha Husayn, al-Qasr al-mashur (‘The enchanted palace’) 627, 632, 642 al-Hallaj 683 Hassan, Ihab 372 Hegel 98 Hennig, [Max], and translation of Nights 23 Hesse, Hermann 497 Hitler, Adolf 494, 503, 645 Hoffmann, E. T. A. (1776–1822) 9, 24, 130, 189, 195 Hole, Richard 527 Homer 325 Odyssey 253, 255, 257–58, 274, 303, 527, 547 Hormuz, Strait of 552 Hugo, [Victor] 443 Hungary/Hungarian 95, 528, 530, 555 Budapest 97, 528, 530, 532, 537 culture 535–37 tradition/past 529, 536, 538, 557 Husayn, Taha (1889–1973) 627, 629, 645, 649, 652, 665, 699 Ahlam Shahrazad (The dreams of Shahrazad) 627, 645–46, 650

764 Husayn, Taha (1889–1973) (cont.) Fi al-shi‘r al-jahili (‘About the jahili poetry’) 641 Mustaqbal al-thaqafa fi misr (‘The future of culture in Egypt’) 641 Ibañez, Vicente Blasco, and translation of Nights 271 Iberian Peninsula 293, 510 Ibn Arabi (1165–1240) 360, 364, 366–67 Meccan illuminations 363 Ibn Battuta 432 Rihla (‘travels’) of 651 Ibn Khaldun 607, 686 al-Muqaddima 682 Iguerbouchène, [Mohamed] 616 India/Indians 3, 403, 408, 423, 425, 430, 435–36, 483, 497, 527, 626 Bombay 426 identity/self-image of 426, 439 and independence 425, 428–29, 431, 438 literary culture 433 Muslims and Hindus of 431 and Sindbad 525 Indian Ocean 525 Indonesian archipelago 483 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 601 Iran 423, 695. See also Persia/Persian Iraq 667 Baghdad 3, 26, 204–5, 258, 399–400, 402, 406, 510, 551, 558, 685, 691 Basra 26 Ireland/Irish 252–53, 268, 269, 285, 286, 310 Dublin 255–56, 258, 303, 312 Isfahan 293 Israel 447–48, 672–75, 677, 681 and 1967 war 667, 687 Istanbul 4, 7, 23, 136, 138, 218, 559, 571–73, 579 tour through 585 al-Jahiz 683 Japan/Japanese 211, 224, 228, 241, 697 internal colonization of 224 Jerusalem 592, 596 Johannesburg 563 Johnson, [Samuel] 9

Index of People and Places Joyce, James (1882–1941) 2, 249, 255, 256–57, 262, 267, 314, 325, 348, 540, 559, 733 Dubliners 251, 254 Finnegans wake 251, 260–65, 267–69, 303, 311, 313, 316, 372 Portrait of the artist as a young man 100, 251, 268 Ulysses 145, 251, 253–54, 255, 258–63, 268–69, 303, 316, 372 Jullien, Dominique 2, 119 Jung, [Carl] 407 Jünger, Ernst (1895–1998) 222, 494, 499–500, 502–3, 506, 507, 509, 514, 521–22, 524, 560, 570, 622 Aladdin’s problem 504, 515, 517, 523 Auf den Marmorklippen (On the marble cliffs) 504, 511 Das abenteuerliche Herz (The adventurous heart) 504 Der Arbeiter (The worker) 504 Eumeswil 504, 512, 515, 522 Heliopolis 504, 511–12, 515, 522–23 Notizbuch zu ‘Tausendundeine Nacht’ 508 orientalism of 505, 507–8 philosophy of 504, 511 In Stahlgewittern (Storms of steel) 504 Kabylia 616 Kafka, Franz 24–25, 291 Kahina [Berber princess] 609 Karabaka, Abd al-Razzaq 272 Kefala, Eleni 313 Kermode, Frank 149, 183 Kershner, R. Brandon 254–55 The culture of Joyce’s Ulysses 253 Khatibi, Abdelkébir (1938–2009) 349, 357, 358, 369–70, 373, 611 Amour bilingue 353, 356 La mémoire tatouée 350, 353, 356 Le livre du sang 355, 356, 370 ‘Nuits blanches’/‘La mille et troisième nuit’ 351–52 Khayzuran [mother of Harun al-Rashid] 558 Khomeini, Ayatollah 423

Index of People and Places Khoury, Elias (b. 1948) 442, 476, 477 Bab al-shams (Gate of the sun) 459 Rihlat al-Gandhi al-saghir ( Journey of little Gandhi) 459 Yalo 12, 459–60, 463–64, 468–69, 471, 475 and Nights 460–62 al-Khwarizmi 683 Kircher, Athanase 96, 98 China illustrata 96 Kitcher, Philip 261 Köhler, Wolfgang 27, 30 Kordofan, Sudan 443 Kossew, [Sue] 406 Krúdy, Gyula (1878–1933) 528, 535, 538, 555–57, 570, 622 The charmed life 530, 533 The crimson coach 530–32, 533 Ladies day 529 The monster of Podolin 529 Kubin, Alfred (1877–1959) 96, 494, 499–500, 503, 521–22, 524 Die andere Seite (The other side) 498, 500 Lahy-Hollebecque, Marie 186–88, 194 Lane, Edward Manners and customs of the modern Egyptians 5 and translation of Nights 267, 289–90, 294 Laredj, Waçiny (Wasini al-A‘radj, b. 1954)  622 Sayyidat al-maqam (Les ailes de la reine) 591, 611–12, 615–16, 619 Latin America/American 274, 285, 410 history 414–15, 421 literature 300, 408 writers 223 Lawrence of Arabia 359 Lebanon/Lebanese 592, 597, 601, 607, 610 Civil War 80, 442, 459–60, 465, 470 civil war (1860) 465 history of 459 Levant 7, 254, 483, 485, 497 Libya/Libyans 78, 91 Tripoli 77, 82, 89, 91 Littmann, Enno 6, 23, 25, 98, 507, 627 and translation of Nights 291 Llored, Yannick 360

765 Llosa, Mario Vargas 11 London 561 Lopes, Dominic 599 Loti, Pierre 594, 605 Lugones, Leopoldo (1874–1938) 284, 304, 306 El gaucho Martin Fierro 271 ‘El Tesoro de Scheherazada’ (‘The treasure of Shahrazad’) 271 Luxemburg, Rosa 609 Machado de Assis (1839–1908), Posthumous memoirs of Bras Cubas 183 Mader, Friedrich Wilhelm, Die Messingstadt 510 Maeterlinck, Maurice de 96 Maghrib 509–10 Mahfuz, Najib (1911?–2006) 629, 665, 699 Awlad haratina (Children of Gebelawi) 651, 653, 655, 656, 658 Bayn al-qasrayn 655 Bidaya wa-nihaya (The beginning and the end) 651 Layali alf layla (Arabian nights and days) 628, 650, 652–53, 655–56, 657, 658–61, 662, 664–65 Malhamat al-Harafish (The Harafish)  651 al-Qahira al-jadida (New Cairo) 651 Rihlat ibn Fattuma (The journey of Ibn Fattouma) 651 al-Shaytan ya’iz (‘The devil preaches’) 652 Trilogy 651 Zuqaq al-Midaqq 655 Mandur, Mohammad 634 Mann, Thomas, Joseph und seine Brüder 96 Maraí, Sándor 538–39 Sindbad geht Heim 535–36 Mardrus, J. C. 6, 45–46, 119, 186 and translation of Nights 290–91, 334 Márquez, Gabriel García (1927–2014) 477, 689 One hundred years of solitude 409, 411, 414–18, 419, 421–22, 424, 438, 682 Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) 189, 193 Les cent-vingt journées de Sodome 191–94 Les infortunes de la vertu 191

766 Marrakesh 349, 359, 362, 364, 368, 370. See also Morocco Casbah of 367 Jma’ al-Fna 362, 364, 370–71 Marseille 592, 606 Marx, Karl 98 Marzolph, Ulrich, The Arabian nights encyclopedia 14 Matisse, Henri 594, 599, 601, 603–4 Maupassant, Guy de 531 McCall, Patrick, The Fenian night’s entertainments 254 McHale, Brian 407 Mecca 356, 370, 685 pilgrimage to 486 Melville, Herman 9 Mesopotamia 685 Middle East 269, 626 Mitchell, W. J. T. 605 What do pictures want? 600 Molino, Miquel de, Spiritual guide 363 Montesquieu, Charles de 9 Moore, Thomas 254 Morocco 272, 357, 359–60, 552, 599, 603, 611. See also Marrakesh authors/writers 349 El Jadida 349 Melilla 367 references to (Marrakesh, Koutoubia, kif) 691 Tangiers 367 Morrison, Toni (b. 1931), Beloved 12, 395–96, 403–4 Mount Lebanon 667 Mozart, W. A. 130 Muḥammad (Prophet) 363, 379 Murakami, Haruki (b. 1949) 116, 223, 241, 243 Dance, dance, dance 227–28 Hardboiled wonderland and the end of the world 224, 225, 229–32 Kafka on the shore 224, 225, 227, 232, 234, 241 and Nights 225, 228 Norwegian wood 225 Sputnik love 228 The wild sheep chase 227–28 The wind-up bird chronicle 225, 226–28

Index of People and Places Musil, Robert, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften 301 al-Mutanabbi 642, 683 Nabokov, Vladimir (1899–1977) 150, 160, 165, 242, 377, 540, 547, 704 Ada, or ardour 151–52, 159, 168, 169, 171, 181, 183 complexities of 150–51 Despair 151, 159 The gift 151 Invitation to a beheading 151, 152, 155–56, 158, 159, 168, 170–71, 175–76, 184 Look at the harlequins! 159 The real life of Sebastian Knight 151, 159 Speak, memory 151 Transparent things 151, 159 Naipaul, V. S. 596, 606 Napoleon 442–43, 445 al-Naqqash, Marun 632 Nefzawi, Sheikh, The perfumed garden 161 Nehru, J. 425 Nerval, [Gérard de] 130 Newman 290 New York 721 Nielsen, Carl, Aladdin 488 Nietzsche, Friedrich 130, 496, 501 Nile 441 Nissaboury, Mostafa (b. 1943) 628, 695, 699 La mille et deuxième nuit 691 North Africa 44–45, 270, 273, 340, 483, 507, 593, 596, 598, 599. See also Maghrib immigrants from 610 Novalis (1772–1801) 24–25, 101 Oehlenschläger, Adam (1779–1850), Aladdin eller den forunderlige lampe 486–87, 493 Onetti, Juan Carlos, A brief life 11 Ottoman (Empire) 4, 7, 22–23, 128–29, 133, 254, 461, 497, 575, 626, 630. See also Turkey/Turkish Arabic provinces of 667, 677 fall/collapse of 130, 135, 667 heritage 140–41 society 143, 573 Pakistan 423, 426, 432, 433 idea/history of 425–26, 436–38

767

Index of People and Places and independence 430–31 society of 434–36 Palestine/Palestinian 447, 592, 596, 598, 667, 670, 673 liberation of 670, 672, 676 nakba (loss of) 459, 670 ‘other’ 448 refugees 669 Pallas 98 Pamuk, Orhan (b. 1952) 622 The black book 559, 570–72, 575, 578, 579, 581–82, 586, 589–90 Other colors 571 Paris 333–34, 350, 358, 504, 592, 606, 641 student revolt (1968) 396 Payne, John 5 Pekar, Thomas 507 Perec, Georges (1936–82) 347, 372 “53 jours …” 318, 333, 339, 342, 344, 346 La vie mode d’emploi 318, 332–33, 336, 338–39, 345–46 Persia/Persians 3, 35–36, 399, 431, 626 culture 413, 698 Philippoteaux, [Paul] 603 Piglia, Ricardo (1940–2017) 272, 287, 300, 303, 313, 315 The absent city 304, 312–13, 316, 325 Artificial respiration 304 El ultimo legador? 301 Formas breves 301 Pinget, Robert 94 Pirandello, [Luigi] 540 Piranesi, [Giovanni Battista] 96 Poe, Edgar Allen 9, 130, 189, 290, 547 ‘1002nd story of Shahrazad’ 527 Pym 549 Polo, Marco 605 Pompei 514 Pontoppidan, Henrik (1857–1943) 493, 523, 570 Hans Kvast og Melusine 488 Lykke Per (Lucky Per) 488–89, 492, 515 Portugal 367 Potócki, Jean 248 Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse 249, 368 Proust, Marcel (1871–1922) 110, 127, 128, 142, 198, 377, 443, 572, 577

À la recherche du temps perdu 2, 116, 117–18, 123–24, 127, 130–31, 145, 148, 167, 169, 242, 248–49, 702 and Nights 119–21 La prisonniére 124–25 Purgstall, Joseph von Hammer (1774–1856)  5, 23 Pushkin, Alexander 531, 533 al-Qabbani, Ahmad Abu Khalil 632 al-Qalamawi, Suhayr 627 Queneau, Raymond 332 Zazie dans le metro 559 Quincey, [Thomas de] 288, 290 Rabelais, François 421, 435 Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya 88–89 al-Rahib, Hani (1939–2000) 628, 682, 688, 700 Alf layla wa-laylatan (‘One thousand and two nights’) 668–69, 676, 681, 687 Renoir, Jean 140 Richter, Jean-Paul 98 Rimbaud, Arthur 594–95, 605–6 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolaj 615, 617–18 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 94 Robinson, Sally 195, 198 Rodin 140 Roxelane [wife of Ottoman sultan] 609 Rumi, Jalal al-Din (1207–73) 360, 587 Mesnevi 571, 578, 586 Rushdie, Salman (b. 1947) 424, 429, 477 Haroun and the sea of stories 439 Midnight’s children 423, 425–26, 430, 433, 435–39 The satanic verses 423, 439 Shame 425, 430, 433, 437–39 Two years eight months and twenty-eight nights 439 Russia/Russians 152, 310, 495, 531, 562 composers 617 St. Petersburg 200, 203 Said, Edward 252–53, 269, 591–92, 610, 621 and concept of orientalism 599 Orientalism 481–82 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin 443

768 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de, Mémoires 2 Saladin 501 Salih, al-Tayyib (1929–2009) 62, 74, 112, 242 Season of migration to the north (Mawsim al-hijra ila al-shimal) 61, 91 Sand, [George] 443 Sarlo, Beatriz 284 Sarraute, Nathalie 94 Schleswig-Holstein 487 Schlichter, Rudolf (1890–1955) 494, 501–3, 511, 521–22, 524 Das widerspenstige Fleisch 500 Tönerne Füsse 500 Zwischenwelt 500 Schmitt, Carl 508 Schnitzler, Arthur (1862–1931) 21, 570, 590 Der Traumnovelle 559, 564–65, 568 Schönberg, Arnold 21 Schopenhauer, Arthur 130 Scotland 77, 89 Scott, [Sir Walter] 9 Sebastian, Saint 107–8, 111 Sebbar, Leïla (b. 1941) 622 Le fou de Shérézade 591, 592, 596–97, 601–2 Les carnets de Shérézade 591, 592, 594, 597, 604, 606 Shérézade 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts 591, 592 Shérézade trilogy 591, 593, 598, 600, 603, 607, 610, 612, 615, 619 Severin, Tim 551–52, 553 Shajarat al-Durr. See Chajarat al-Dour al-Sharqawi, Shaykh 4 and Nights 625 Siberia 200–201, 205, 207 Simon, Claude 94 Sorbonne 641 South Africa/African 396, 399, 404–6 South America/American 285 Indians 295, 416 Spain/Spanish 270, 272, 358, 360, 416 Arabic heritage 370 Barcelona 358, 368 Civil War 358, 367 culture 358, 360, 369–70 literary canon/tradition 358, 361 Spengler, [Oswald] 212

Index of People and Places Spivak, [Gayatri Chakravorty] 591 Stendhal 443 La chartreuse de Parme 340, 342 Sterne, [Lawrence] 547 Stevenson, [Robert Louis] 547 Stirner, Max 513 St. Petersburg 200, 203 Strauss, Botho (b. 1944) 116, 241, 243 Der junge Mann (The young man) 212–13, 220, 222 Strindberg, [August] 531 Strolz, Andrea 176 Sudan 62, 68, 72–74 Sue, Eugène, Mystères de Paris (1842–43) 559 Suter, Rebecca 223, 225–26, 229 al-Suyuti 525 Sweden 461 Syria/Syrian 667–68, 675 Aleppo 667 Christians 460–61, 465 Damascus 667, 678 Orthodox Church 471 political attitudes in 687 society 670, 680 Széchenyi, [István] 531 al-Tabari 683 Tahhan, Raymond 44 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de 442–43, 445–46 Tangiers 367 Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi (1901–62) 128, 148, 242–43, 570, 667 Huzur (A mind at peace) 130–31, 135–36, 145 Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (The Time Regulation Institute) 130–32, 135, 145 Télek, Férenc de 98 Tennyson, [Lord Alfred] 290 Terdiman, Richard 117–18 Thackeray, [William M.] 2 Thirwell, Adam 276 Thoreau, Henry David, Walden 712 Tigris 582 Tivoli (Copenhagen) 487 Todorov, Tzvetan 344–45, 419–20, 526 Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina 226

769

Index of People and Places Tripoli, Libya 77, 82, 89, 91 Tristan, Flora 594–95, 598, 605–6 Tunisia 340, 611 Turgenev 531 Turkey/Turkish 128–29, 139, 143, 412, 483, 518, 537, 570, 574, 626. See also Ottoman (Empire) Ankara 218 Galata Bridge 573–74 Istanbul 4, 7, 23, 136, 138, 218, 559, 571–73, 579, 585 and modernity 130–31, 148, 224 republic 133–35 rupture/fissure in 570, 587 society 136, 140–41, 145, 570 Twain, Mark 547 Huckleberry Finn 540 United States of America/American 385, 408, 551, 571 Civil War (1861–65) 381–82, 385, 389 North/Northerners 387, 393 South/Southerners 381, 387–88, 391, 395 history/defeat of 385, 389, 394 support of Israel 675 Valentin, Basile 98 Valéry, [Paul] 130, 140 van Leeuwen, Richard, The Arabian nights encyclopedia 14 Vauthier, Élisabeth 668 Venice 34–37, 38 Verlaine, [Paul] 96 Vienna 21, 34, 41, 531, 567 siege of (1683) 23 Vietnam 670, 674, 679 Voltaire 9 von Greve, Felix 25

von Hofmannsthal, Hugo (1874–1929) 21–22, 24–26, 39–40, 41, 112, 127, 493–94 Andreas 22, 29, 34–35, 37, 41, 47, 57 Assad und Amgiad 25, 27–28 Das Märchen der 672. Nacht 22, 25, 27, 29–30, 32–34, 37, 41, 56, 117, 125, 564 Der goldene Apfel 25, 27–28 Die Frau ohne Schatten 25, 27 orientalism of 27, 33–34 Vörösmarty, Mihály (1800–55; and translation of Nights) 531–32 Voss, Heinrich 23 Waelti-Walters, Jennifer 102 Wagner, Richard 140, 501 Wahbi, Hassan 350, 354, 356 Walpole, [Horace] 9 Wasserman, Jakob (1873–1934) Der Aufruhr um den Junker Ernst 447 Mon itinéraire comme Allemand et comme Juif 447 Weifel, Franz 96 Weil, Gustav 5, 23, 507 and translation of Nights 295 Wells, H. G. (1866–1946) 2, 570, 590 The research magnificent 559–60, 564, 568 The sleeper awakes 560 White, Hayden 377, 406 Wieland, Christoph Martin (1733–1813) 9, 24 Dschinnistan 24, 486 Wilhelm (Kaiser) 497 al-Yazuli, Sidi Ben Sliman 367 Ziya ul-Haqq 432 Zubayda [wife of Harun al-Rashid] 558 Zweig, Stefan, Die Welt von gestern 21

Index of Subjects 1001 (significance of) 299, 425–26, 434 Abbasid caliph 365 period 558 aberration/aberrant 191, 286, 359, 442, 453, 477, 500 of Shahriyar 44, 185 absence 125–26, 180, 206, 302–3, 312, 345–46, 387, 553, 556, 576, 710 vs. presence 170 of time 105, 123 traumatic 702, 704–5 abyss 137, 141, 323, 346, 543, 640, 707 actors/actresses 153, 156, 265, 276, 531, 576–77, 683, 712 acts 46, 122, 294, 301, 345, 349, 456, 476, 588, 620, 666 and consequences of 232 ritual 440, 468–69, 471 sexual 199, 473 adaptation 2, 591 and translations 6, 289 addiction (to reading/stories) 322, 326, 372, 443, 451, 454 admonitions 660 of stories/storytellers 44, 441, 510, 638, 663, 665 adolescence 73, 112, 123 and heroes/princes 50, 57, 60–61, 64, 112 adultery 49, 124, 179–80, 255, 259, 352, 367, 413, 638, 656. See also infidelity adulthood 50–51, 109, 228 adventure(s) 17, 50, 68, 163, 209, 220, 226–28, 290, 441, 483, 507, 526, 531, 533, 535–37, 551, 553, 555–57, 598, 606, 663–64, 732 of characters/protagonists 49, 76, 78, 174, 196, 200, 203, 220, 257, 273–74, 331, 424, 425, 460, 489, 547–48, 566–67, 579, 704, 721–22 chronotope 60–61, 72–74 cycles, of Sindbad 695–98 of heroes 73, 196, 222, 716 and narration 170, 222, 532, 548

of narrators 95, 121, 125, 196 sea 489 sexual/amorous 64, 73, 80, 161, 508, 532, 565 stories 527, 556 strange 46, 86, 197–98 tropes 477, 528 aestheticism 36, 496, 497 aestheticization 111, 496, 523 aesthetic(s)/aesthetes 10, 21–22, 30–31, 109, 117, 139, 217, 313, 361, 370, 485, 504, 505–6, 549, 601 experiences 44, 140, 148, 150 forms/principles 359–60 Moroccan/North African 599, 603 oriental/and orientalism 271, 487, 599, 603 as refuge/escape 26–27 texts/literary 2, 55, 291 visual 2, 483, 601 western 487, 604 Afrikaans (language) 396 Afrikaner(s) 396, 399, 405 history 396, 398–99, 406 nationalists 399, 402 Afro-Oriental (appearance) 62 aftermaths, theme of 13, 690 agency 67, 443–45 autonomous, of stories 724–25 of characters/protagonists 35, 224, 234, 419–20, 509, 526, 528, 555, 665, 704 human/individual 168, 224, 293, 329, 419, 445, 505 lack of 35, 77, 196, 419–20, 509, 555 and texts 176, 324 aggression 649. See also violence ahistoricity/ahistorical 379, 416 Aladdin 254, 428, 490, 500, 519–20, 622 cave of 203, 508 Disney production of 6 figure of 225, 426, 485, 486–89, 492, 504, 509, 515–16, 523 images of 372, 579 lamp of 203, 264, 439 shop of 574, 579

Index of Subjects story of (‘Aladdin and the wonderful lamp’) 4, 14, 202–3, 252, 288, 485, 486, 507 trope/motif 252, 483, 486–88, 492, 504, 515, 524 alchemist(s) 95, 98, 133 alchemy/alchemical 95, 97–99, 102, 205, 214, 219, 357 alcohol 87, 598. See also drinking alias(es) 172, 179, 340, 342, 575–78, 581, 583–84 Ali Baba 64, 428 story of (‘Ali Baba and the forty thieves’) 4, 14, 485, 529 alien 60, 301–2, 359, 611 elements 8, 385–86, 412, 486, 493 environment 608, 610 Other 483, 485, 557 spaces 92, 416 alienation 65, 74, 121, 144, 552, 570–71, 581, 585, 587–88, 590, 595, 605, 614, 618, 688, 691, 733. See also estrangement as exotic (Orient) 45–46, 393 from/of self 141, 474, 517, 712 of language 585, 588 and modernity 536, 560, 574, 611, 650 in postmodern condition 221–22 allegories/allegorical 180, 440, 443 Islamic 572 novels 651–52, 656, 661 Allomatie (necessity of engaging with ‘other’) 31, 40, 117 allusions 251, 342 alphabet(s) 366, 573 alter ego(s) 3, 63–64, 65, 68–69, 100, 239, 258, 369, 451, 528, 553–54, 559, 570, 571, 577–78, 583, 586, 594, 636, 684, 716 of author 171, 358, 486, 530–31, 535, 538, 556, 718, 724 of hero/heroine 234, 558 alterity 46, 354, 357, 369 ambiguity(ies) 56, 122, 201, 208, 229, 234–36, 248–49, 282, 394, 466, 473, 475, 546, 550, 595, 603, 605, 657, 664 authorial 160, 182 of characters 384–86, 393, 653 of place/geographic setting 161, 284, 297, 659

771 of reality(ies) 41, 55, 76, 475, 574–75, 590 of texts/narratives 264, 342–43, 369, 384, 550, 725 of time 119, 297 ambivalence 19, 35, 188, 198, 360, 565, 657, 717 of reality 580, 604 of status/state 79, 91, 236, 391, 531 amnesia 301, 303, 692, 695, 700 amorous. See also love; sex adventures 532, 565 couples 460, 466 relations 512 amulets 676. See also magic(al); object(s); oriental analphabetic (environment) 421 anarchy/anarchists 385, 513, 598 ancestors 134, 283, 295, 304, 399, 514 androgyny 106, 111, 355–56 anecdote(s) 283, 411, 414, 501, 558, 579, 626 angel(s) 432 of death 661, 663 Munkar and Nakir 363, 365 animal(s) 473, 503, 513, 520, 538, 706. See also birds fables 14 -like 87, 386, 467 annihilation 418 corporeal 281, 465 anomaly(ies)/anomalous 17, 66, 72, 167–68, 171, 209, 236, 241, 286, 294, 400, 411, 434, 454, 582, 646 historical 243, 431, 436 linguistic 268 physical 64, 201, 203–4, 207 situation 77, 112, 168, 242, 434, 690 social 186, 243 anonymous narrators 320, 322, 433, 438 people 160, 458, 563, 565 works 46, 301 writers 301, 366 anti-hero(es) 135, 185, 527, 652, 661, 664 antiquity, and Orient 8, 37 anti-Semite 493 antithesis 36, 48–49, 169, 180, 264, 502, 636–37

772 anxieties 29, 44, 174, 207, 234, 465, 559, 648 apartheid (system) 396, 398 apocalypse/apocalyptic 107, 364, 499, 505, 617, 694. See also post-apocalyptic pseudo- 647 threat 148, 498, 503, 506 visions 521–22, 614 apparitions 83, 391. See also ghosts; specters appearance(s) 235, 368, 390–91, 506, 510, 576, 582–83, 621 vs. disappearance 67, 109 apprenticeship 122, 131–32 Arabic (language) 152, 366, 461, 471, 486, 580, 591, 592 books 199, 433, 525, 639 expressions 5, 263, 267–68 -Ottoman script 573 translations from 6, 9, 23, 267–68 translations into 3, 626 Arab(s)/Arabic 289, 294, 326, 362, 393, 414, 670, 674–75, 680, 697 aesthetics 10 civilization/culture 5, 7, 359–60, 617, 630–31, 683, 685, 690 eroticism of 267 geographers 510, 525 images of/references to 62, 161, 274, 334, 359, 393, 412–13, 677–78 immigrants 412, 416 indigenous 6, 626 Islamic culture/tradition 292–93, 360, 581, 612, 630–31, 642, 688 literary tradition 6–7, 10, 61, 135, 188, 282, 625–27, 629–30, 632, 650–52, 665, 668, 682, 699 mentality/temperament of 5, 7, 267, 274 modernity in 645–46 nations 673, 688 and Nights 3–7, 9–10, 188, 433, 481, 485–86, 580, 592, 625–28, 688, 690, 699 and power 581, 672 provinces of Ottoman Empire 129, 667 society 5, 7, 46, 630, 668, 700 sources/texts 3, 23, 293, 639 -Spanish heritage 370 theater 626–27, 632 tradition/heritage 188, 378, 558, 612, 683, 688, 699

Index of Subjects umma (nation) 672, 676 volumes/books in 152, 155, 199 and West/Europeans 273, 629–30 world (countries/regions) 129–30, 359, 596–97, 629, 645–46, 667, 671, 691, 700 writers/scholars 527, 632, 683, 690, 700 archetypes 72, 190–91, 256–57, 259, 261–62, 540 historical 514–15 literary 545 subconscious 172 architecture/architectural (elements) 21, 161, 403, 503, 528 aristocracy/aristocratic 442, 511–12, 517–18, 561–62. See also elite(s); nobility army(ies) 517–18. See also war(s) defeat of Arab (1967) 674–76, 680 art/artistic 102, 111, 121–22, 141, 212, 214, 216–17, 220, 266, 277–78, 279–81, 285, 302, 324, 338, 364, 366–67, 455, 457, 482, 498, 500, 503, 619, 643–44, 695 Asian and African 19 authenticity in 616–17 as autonomous 275, 314, 644 creativity/inspiration for 220, 452, 497 embodiment/essence of 127–28, 214 European 10, 140, 142, 482, 497, 603 forms of 122, 147, 275 literary/novelistic 100–102, 248, 274–75, 277–78, 312, 360–61 and love 162, 280 modern 117, 496, 612 nature of 249, 348 objects of 217, 257, 275, 496 oriental 599, 603–4 pure 274–75 and reality 122, 221, 249, 275 and Shahrazad/Nights 1, 6, 349, 362, 571, 612, 632, 645, 699 trends 488, 494 artificial(ity) 47–48, 129–30, 217, 297, 403, 408, 418, 430, 617, 683–84 vs. authentic 577 constructions 129, 143, 336–37, 575, 636, 640, 688–89 language 311–12 and modernity 134, 145

Index of Subjects artists 96, 102, 103, 111, 122, 143, 171, 220, 338, 367–68, 429, 437, 455, 489, 494, 500, 503, 521, 618, 643–44 freedom/rights of 644–45 of interwar period 498–500 isolation of 117–18 modernist/postmodernist 18–19, 115, 564 repression of 156, 612 role of 212, 222 art nouveau 528 assimilation 79, 591, 733 atheism 270 atmosphere 25, 273, 529, 533, 538, 598 eastern/oriental 28, 161, 272, 599, 617 exotic 39, 599 atrocities 446, 465, 612 attachment(s) 138, 431, 444, 531, 536 and separation 121 audience 217, 487–88, 584, 606, 696 male, lustful 200 of Nights 5, 267, 317, 440, 525, 625–26, 632 and writers/authors 213, 540 aural (forms) 620 authenticity 7, 48, 52, 55, 91, 130, 295, 340, 415, 437, 539, 544, 572–75, 577, 581, 584, 591, 602, 609–10, 614, 616–17, 630, 641, 689 claims of 433, 437 cultural 296, 313, 433, 596–97, 611, 616, 688 Danish 489, 493 forms of 134, 270, 298, 555, 574, 597, 607, 617, 621 German 497 of Nights 46, 267 of Shahrazad 618, 621 sources/foundations of 46, 140, 700 authorial ambiguity 160, 182 survival 183 authoritarian discourses 423–24, 432 rule 699 (See also dictator(ship)) authority(ies) 9, 40, 51, 122, 190, 196–97, 204, 345, 362, 398, 424–25, 465, 468–69, 499, 501, 513, 517, 570, 583–84, 614, 620–21,

773 649, 654–55, 661, 663–64, 670, 676, 688 abuse of 201, 698 central/centers of 369, 387, 654, 656 colonial 65, 610–11, 682 of king/ruler 17, 43, 444, 582, 636–38, 653, 657–58 moral 49, 423, 656 paraphernalia/symbols of 558–59, 582–83 patriarchal/of father 17, 50, 186, 209, 489, 569 source of 264, 286, 445 spaces symbolizing 50–51, 57, 125, 638, 654, 657 structure of 637, 659 authors. See writers/authors authorship 100, 102, 172, 242, 333, 422, 456, 541, 651 destabilization of 544, 718 feminine 176 uncertain/unresolved 158, 160, 724 autobiography/autobiographical 350, 353, 356, 396, 500, 527, 531, 545, 606, 634, 719 elements/references 35, 550, 556 automaton 510–11 autonomy/autonomous 196–97, 381, 385, 388, 403, 476, 571, 646 of art 275, 314, 644 authorial 540, 548 of characters/heroes 277–78, 281, 297, 302, 716 identity 408–9 of narration/stories 322, 324, 370, 454, 586, 588–89, 606, 724, 726, 728 semi- 457 of texts/textual 247–49, 251, 314–16, 317, 362, 625 of women 186, 198 avant-gardists 271, 274–75, 284, 314 awakening 57, 137, 519, 533, 650, 675, 681 after death 555 Baader-Meinhof 598 Babel 709 Tower of 502 bad/evil 235–36, 282, 521, 562, 656, 662–63, 665

774 Bagavad gita 527 balance 67, 74, 86–87, 92, 122, 199, 210, 320, 443, 536, 538, 567, 632 between indigenous population and immigrants 270 between narration and power 694–95 spatiotemporal 32, 115, 123, 640 barbarian/barbaric 442, 504 vs. civilized 314 barzakh 363, 366 Ba‘th party 667, 669–70, 687–88 Batman 428 bazaars 26, 254, 413 beautification 496. See also aestheticism beauty 36, 45–46, 111, 117, 122, 141, 170, 174, 203, 350, 496, 501, 522, 524, 619–20, 643, 659 exotic/oriental 104, 608–9 physical 144, 364, 633 of Shahrazad 592, 620 of things/creation 27, 29–30, 505–6 Bedouins 83, 97, 412 beggar(s) 359, 368, 637, 657, 679. See also poverty mad beggar-saints 661 beginnings 181, 203, 221, 281, 304, 328 postponement of 275–76, 327, 330 of stories/novels 59, 262, 266, 276, 320–21, 450, 705, 719 being/becoming 26, 29, 35, 145, 157, 208–9, 219, 280–81, 296, 356–57, 418, 464 modes/state of 139, 275, 277–78, 477 oneself/someone else 574–77, 584, 586–90, 622 belief(s) 277, 367 of Islam 631 in magic/demons 24, 439 primitive/ancient 407, 444 belles-lettres 631 belonging 59, 91, 143, 348–49, 398, 405, 416, 436, 458, 536, 597, 607, 609. See also identity(ies) beloved 115–16, 207, 233–34, 354–55, 582–83 loss of 207, 241, 315, 554 searching for 64, 73, 115, 228 separation from 166, 238 union with 116, 169, 198, 282, 648 Berber (language) 591

Index of Subjects betrayal 181, 534, 567, 638 Beur (culture) 598 marche des Beurs 596 Bible 44, 362, 508, 607 bilinguality/bilingualism 353–55, 357, 358, 369 binary 284, 497, 507 opposition 55, 281 birds 84, 88, 203, 402, 682 eagles 466 giant 75–76, 104 ‘of happiness’ 697 al-Rukhkh/Roc 225, 252, 502, 663 birth 100, 239, 710 of literary art/inspiration 101–2, 128, 248, 279 place of, and home 59–60, 64, 67 bizarre 5, 273. See also mystery(ies); strange(ness) blacks 396, 398, 402, 405, 406, 408 ‘niggers’ 392 slave in Nights 181, 247 slaves 382, 391, 636, 684 Black Stone 685 blind 293, 312, 334, 337, 641 blindfold(ed) 566, 601–2, 693 bliss(ful) 33, 76–77, 91, 117, 136, 144, 146, 169, 218, 220, 353, 425, 428, 446, 520, 663–64. See also happiness abode/place of 240, 339, 365 city/town 85, 90 future 495 (See also utopia(n)) palace 90, 220, 335 primeval/lost state of 377, 588 spiritual/transcendent 142, 357 timeless/cosmic 33, 143 blood 69, 237, 466–67, 497, 538, 691. See also violence flesh and 138, 207–8, 698 as ink 474 mixed/‘pure’ 382, 391–93 Moorish/Andalusian 199, 616 relations 178, 295 symbolic 364, 470 bloodshed 82, 101, 414, 465, 470 bodily/physical acts 109, 349, 369, 373, 460, 462, 466, 471, 477, 543

Index of Subjects being/awareness 37, 88, 470, 472 condition 365, 463 death/harm 154, 461 drives/desires 331, 353, 633, 635, 638 environment 38, 358, 599 fluids 466–67, 469 health 373, 496, 536 integrity 349, 370, 476 practices/functions 466, 468–69 presence 58, 59, 70, 84, 144, 463, 465, 467, 469, 472, 583, 605, 620 stimulation 322 union 354, 584 body(ies) 79–80, 87–88, 107–9, 123, 221, 257, 280, 308, 322, 350–51, 364, 370–71, 459–60, 635–37, 639–41, 709 death/survival of 349, 369, 459, 462–63, 465, 477 disfigured 104, 498 image 349, 460, 463–64, 466–67, 468, 470, 471, 475, 584 and language 354–55, 357 material(ity) 349, 356, 464, 466–67, 469, 475, 477, 635 and mind 90, 173, 674, 723 and narrative/stories 353, 356, 373, 459–60, 463, 473, 620 nature of/natural 312, 463, 465–67 possession of 88, 452 ritual 468, 470, 471 and soul/spirit 35, 91, 370, 452, 538, 633 and system/process of signification 468, 471, 620 Boers, myth of 396 bohemians 87, 531 book(s) 6, 70, 74, 92, 288, 311, 323, 326–28, 334, 421–22, 578, 607, 710, 712, 722–23. See also Arabic (language); children heroes of/heroic 174, 507 as object 297–98, 303 references to 53, 199, 287, 379, 547 unfinished/incomplete 280, 321, 328, 347 writing of 324, 421–22, 585–86 boundary(ies)/borders 71, 73, 79, 81, 88, 90, 122, 137, 198, 221, 224, 237–38, 278, 297, 310, 335, 345, 371, 378, 385, 407, 416, 526, 534, 569, 572, 581, 591, 629, 640–41, 667, 679, 687, 701, 711, 714, 719

775 crossing 41, 59, 65, 73, 90, 92, 112, 241, 267, 299, 481, 597, 605, 607, 608, 620–21, 637 cultural 92, 361, 370, 481, 597, 605, 608 between East and West 220, 537 functions/systems of 636–37 narrative/literary 77, 223, 225 between real and magical spheres 203 and reality 154, 237, 308, 470, 722 between reality and dreams/fantasy 308, 310, 533, 565 between reality and imagination 40, 58, 89, 226, 243 spatial 17, 73, 77, 86, 241 of species 201, 208 of time 86, 119 (See also future(istic); past; present) transgression/destruction of 391, 481, 497, 505, 545, 639 bourgeoisie 487–88, 495, 499, 501, 522 era/society 504, 505–6, 507 life 568, 672 petty 669, 671, 676 boys 73. See also adolescence; men/male Brigate Rosse 598, 609 brothels 161, 577, 683, 693. See also whore brothers 28–29, 40, 49, 50, 86, 431, 670. See also family twin(s) 57, 412–14, 528, 546–47 brutality 441, 447. See also violence buildings 333–36, 338, 341, 345–46, 403, 579, 594, 613. See also architecture art nouveau 528 Bulaq (edition of Nights) 4, 625 calamity(ies) 74, 128. See also catastrophes; disasters caliph(s) 365, 509–10, 558, 563, 565, 570, 582–83. See also king(s); prince(s) calligraphy/calligraphers 97, 101, 371 Calvinism/Calvinist 399–400, 402 capitalism/capitalists 300, 409, 496–97, 501, 522, 598 dominance of 499, 679 market/system 495, 518, 531 captivity/captives 97, 219, 227–28, 601, 662. See also confinement; imprisonment caricature(s) 192, 201, 420–21, 425

776 Carmatians 684–85 carnival(esque) 408, 412, 426, 566, 659 castle(s) 75–76, 95–96, 98, 100, 102, 115, 189, 195, 203, 503, 509, 529, 534. See also palaces cataclysm(s) 128, 130, 136, 445–46, 532. See also catastrophes; disasters catalyst(s) 86, 222, 273, 283, 297, 299, 370, 483, 505, 663 catastrophe(s) 21, 212, 242, 422, 495–96, 498–99, 504–5, 511–12, 515, 519, 521–22, 580, 588. See also wars historical 128–29 military/political 505, 668 Palestinian/war of 1967, 669–70, 673, 682 catharsis 93, 176, 221, 506, 522, 641, 650, 715. See also transformation Catholic(s) 8, 268, 358–59, 447, 500 causality 275, 289 cave(s)/cavern(s) 85–86, 96–98, 101, 102, 404, 519, 537, 561, 574, 693, 697 of Aladdin 203, 508 of Ali Baba 64 of Sesame 691 celestial (bodies/forces) 98–99, 101–2, 443–44. See also cosmos Celtic-oriental (affinity) 253 censor(ship) 487, 670 of Thousand and one nights 6–7 certainty 265, 280, 425, 568, 580, 587, 652, 729 of death 154, 168, 720 impossibility of 157, 582, 607, 703 chance 255, 369, 562, 565, 594, 607, 704. See also coincidence change(s) 17, 21, 40, 51, 115, 216, 219, 231, 438–39, 487, 572, 574, 637, 652, 659, 662, 690 discourses of 673, 675, 681 historic 128–30, 224, 398, 405, 538, 581, 683 processes of 130, 284, 311, 414, 587–88 social 221, 555, 662 chaos/chaotic 94, 195, 223, 256–57, 322, 370, 444–45, 464, 475, 568, 657, 679, 729 world as 215, 314, 442

Index of Subjects character(s) 22, 27, 42, 155, 161–65, 171, 266, 274, 275–76, 323, 333–34, 382, 422, 425, 457, 548, 594, 645, 653–55, 727 agency of 555, 704 of anti-hero 661 antithetical 36, 49 autonomy 198, 277–78, 281, 297, 716 and death/death of 184, 279–80 as elusive/fluid 124, 174, 236, 260, 262, 264, 281, 386, 391 emblematic 389, 419–20, 430, 511 empty/flat 385–86, 391, 526 and events/behavior of 53–55, 214, 221, 299, 415, 526, 662, 664 female/women 182, 198, 673 fragmented/unstable 39, 260 from/in Nights 181, 258, 273, 287, 485, 525, 533, 541, 558, 590, 627, 655, 690 idea/notion of 94, 365 identification with 174–75, 454–55, 528, 621 identities of 276–77 multiplication of 715–16 and narrators 63, 105, 121 and oriental images 254, 259 and readers 174, 268, 276–79, 368, 545, 690 as realistic 385, 621 transformations of 93, 201 and writers/authors 535, 541, 545, 644, 718, 726, 732–33 childhood 78, 109–10, 146, 204, 327, 390–91, 469. See also adolescence children 63, 65, 68, 382, 400, 425–26, 428–29, 436, 438, 450, 562, 682, 693, 716 and Shahrazad 149, 186, 206, 637 stories/books of 6, 449–50, 571 chivalry 14, 378–79, 626 Christianity 7–8, 492 and Islam 293 Christian(s) 465, 697 Syrian 461, 465 chronology/chronological 160, 165, 275, 384, 390, 504 framework 669 order 12–13, 723–24 chronotope(s) 60–61, 72–74

Index of Subjects cinema. See films/movies/cinema circulation of Nights 3–4 of stories/anecdotes 411, 626 circus(es) 200–201, 203, 205–6, 208, 253, 516, 695 city/town 91, 229–30, 284, 303, 308, 410–12, 415–18, 522, 585, 682–86, 689, 692–95, 729, 731 of Algiers 613–15 City of Brass 509–15, 580 (See also Thousand and one nights) dreamlike 35, 146, 229, 498 imaginary/fictitous 87, 399 of jade, motif of 691 labyrinthine 26, 30, 117, 579, 587, 703 of Lebta 339 and space/spatial framework of 94, 312, 582 transformation of 414, 579, 610, 685–86 utopian/blissful 83–85, 90, 504 wandering/roaming through 30, 254, 308, 569, 573, 578, 592, 594–95, 703 civilization 8, 19, 46, 139, 142, 265–66, 273, 393, 482, 495, 497, 506, 512, 514, 528, 642, 677–78 collapse/fall of 499, 504, 505, 510, 521 cycles/patterns of 515, 568, 645 eastern/Arabic 1, 631, 683 /new order, birth of 495, 504, 505, 521 western/European 631 civilized 34, 267, 270, 392 vs. barbarian 314 world 209, 525 civil war(s) 505, 612 Algerian 612 Lebanese 80, 442, 459–60, 465, 470 Spanish 358, 367 United States (1861–65) 381–82, 385, 389 class(es) 21, 517, 629, 653, 687. See also aristocracy middle 131, 290, 496, 530, 551 poor 669 (See also poverty) social 384, 496 struggle 367, 670, 675, 676–77 working/labor 200, 506, 671–72, 677 clock(s) 131–33, 201–2, 206, 686

777 closed 30, 90, 92, 107, 125, 230, 233, 240, 266, 333, 418, 438, 445, 498–99, 522, 638. See also forbidden; locked (up) room 64, 72, 112, 118, 334, 337–38, 715, 720 spaces 19, 57, 71, 74, 93, 97, 115, 124, 220, 664, 714, 732 closure 318, 337, 505 of narrative 266, 388, 665 clothing 296, 392 oriental 605 clown(s) 201, 206–7, 209. See also circus(es) clue(s) 94, 227, 260, 341–42, 550, 573–76, 580. See also signs code(s) 268, 433, 542, 584 moral 400, 405, 434, 651 coffeehouse(s) 132, 653–54, 659 coherence/coherent 59, 67, 77, 119, 167, 181, 211, 256–57, 260–61, 284, 315, 329–30, 383–84, 415, 434, 460, 462, 496, 533, 552, 605, 607, 687, 708, 710, 729, 731. See also balance cultural 294, 300 lack of 112, 129, 165, 265 of novel 425, 653 reality(ies) 19, 346, 539, 641 search for 39, 463 self-image/body image 179, 298, 464, 467, 470, 610 social/of society 142, 212, 270, 294, 484, 662 vision of world 286, 484, 539, 540, 640, 725 coincidence 28, 32, 48, 50, 167–68, 197, 200, 203–4, 294, 316, 319, 320, 594, 606. See also chance; destiny; fate; luck collage/montage 18, 39, 151, 165, 257, 300, 330, 337, 363, 366, 442 collapse (of old order) 138, 140, 445–46, 498, 504–5, 518, 521–23 of Habsburgs 21, 495, 528 of Ottoman Empire 128, 135, 143, 667 of South (US) 385, 388 collective 142, 190, 286, 323, 407, 448, 452, 584, 677, 688 experiences 119, 142, 600 fiction/literature 435, 545 history 406, 476, 677

778 collective (cont.) memory(ies) 316, 362, 377, 477, 543–44, 698 responsibility 677, 681 colonial context 357, 599 discourse 10, 59, 409, 410, 423 domination/subjugation 65, 268, 397, 481–82 economy/markets 62–63, 485, 531 empires/rule 485, 591, 699 expansion 482, 495, 599 experience 350–51, 357 heritage/tradition 269–70, 409, 603, 610 hierarchies 59, 408 oppression/exploitation 63–64, 65–66, 350–51, 359, 369, 482 past/history 270, 359, 369, 410, 416, 591, 598 period 348, 611 powers 350, 610–11, 646, 682 relationships 74, 92, 252, 408, 483, 604, 611 colonialism 18, 269, 358, 415, 482, 497, 610, 672, 677 neo- 670 colonies 482, 495 colonization 410, 417, 610 internal, of Japan 224 colonizer(s) 399, 409, 419 and colonized 63 ex- 357, 424 comedies 432, 566, 626 comic (elements) 632–33, 696 books 6 novel 130 common folk 564, 583–84, 645, 653–55, 659, 661, 688. See also humanity communication 23, 137, 145, 160, 166, 171, 221, 224, 260, 303, 328, 426, 482, 497, 543, 560, 599–600, 604, 620, 698 channel of 142, 158, 182, 450 with dead/unseen 553, 564 forms of 50, 125, 215, 706, 722, 725 and language 223, 710 means of 19, 170, 309, 568 with outside (world) 125, 412, 723 communism/communist(s) 177, 180, 494, 495, 500

Index of Subjects community(ies) 33, 142, 145, 286, 378, 397–99, 431, 441, 443–45, 477, 574 German (‘Gemeinschaft’) 506 identity of 436, 515, 539, 629 migrant/immigrant 270, 272, 591 compassion 62, 493, 647 completion 126, 334, 339, 694. See also conclusion; end of novel/story 69, 275, 330, 383, 589 complex(ities) 38–39, 41, 43, 123, 159, 171, 176, 179, 183, 248–49, 251, 256, 260, 269–70, 300, 344, 384–85, 432, 494, 505, 531, 603 of narrative/narration 49, 183, 188, 190, 194–95, 200, 328–29, 451, 462, 550, 607, 639, 705 of novels 176, 381 of reality 18–19, 124, 230, 408, 441, 575 of Shahrazad/Nights 151, 181, 188, 194–95, 203, 328, 331, 383 structure 51, 580 texts/stories 31, 42, 150–51, 182, 194, 263–64, 346, 411, 428, 457, 545, 729 of time/temporal structure 119, 150, 417 computer(s) 325, 518 concentration camps 447, 449–50 conclusions 328, 330, 338. See also end of story/novel 68–69, 74, 157, 607 concubine(s) 661 confession(al) 69, 164, 310, 367, 460, 468, 569, 654, 663 literature 228 story/novel as 169, 178–79, 182 confinement 32–33, 429, 431, 434, 461, 467, 528, 530, 535, 597, 723. See also enclosures; imprisonment of death/grave 533, 535 device of 126 physical/mental 371, 607, 639, 724 and wandering 32, 40–41 confrontation(s) 7, 72, 77, 166, 248, 268, 273, 299, 393, 419, 422, 451, 453–54, 456, 497, 517, 525, 544, 580, 609, 620, 640, 657, 676, 719 with death 123, 171, 240, 511 with reality 175, 181, 638–39 connotations 202, 251, 316, 603, 698 of Nights 268, 292, 356, 555, 569, 608

Index of Subjects conscience 186, 207, 456 of society/nation 448, 584, 645 conscious(ness) 21, 112, 156–57, 221, 255, 259, 261, 284, 311, 345, 365–66, 405, 465, 511, 586, 702 and/of time (present, past) 46, 167, 169, 211, 271, 363 collective 407, 448 cultural 370, 686 historical 138, 143, 435 human 25, 167, 299, 308 of individual/self 37, 407, 458 levels of 119, 518, 523 mystical/spiritual 36, 141 semi- 261–62, 365–66 and subconscious 25, 568 conservatism/conservative 216, 360, 493, 494, 499, 517, 571–72 nationalism 503, 505 right-wing 130, 222 (See also politics) conspiracy 49, 273, 323, 326, 367, 646 constraint(s) 179, 247, 261, 282, 301, 336, 338–39, 345, 372, 552, 679 of literary texts 332–33, 340 social 371, 483 of time and space 277, 335 construction 33, 59, 65, 142, 164, 195, 260, 262–63, 265, 298, 305, 348, 369, 418, 437, 550 of body image 464, 467, 584 of meaning 572, 580, 708 of self/self-image 389, 581, 622 textual/of story 327, 329, 336, 384, 607, 615 consumerism 212, 220, 363–64, 536, 538 containment 192. See also fulfillment of desires 74, 322 (See also desire(s)) conte des fées 24 contemplation(s) 89, 265, 281, 442, 492, 632, 654–55, 694 content 261, 420, 533 and form(s) 22, 46, 220, 249, 366, 377, 427, 441, 590 narrative 94, 258 contingency 44, 109, 118, 139, 183–84, 258, 311, 323, 329, 338, 353, 379, 582–83, 595, 609, 703–5 of events 54–55, 583

779 forces of 17, 56, 58 historical 418–19 of narration/narrative(s) 283, 438, 607, 716 of reality 19, 56 of storytelling 319, 444, 607 and time 151, 167, 231 and writing 277, 703 continuity(ies)/continuation 19, 118–19, 193, 214, 222, 276–77, 312–13, 316, 330–31, 337, 345, 372, 415, 476, 514–15, 524, 630, 653, 677–78, 695 disruption of 348, 522 historical 128, 212, 397–98, 403, 419, 493–94, 505, 521–22, 597, 610, 611 and interruption 301, 326 of narrative/stories 42, 71, 74–75, 95, 100, 102, 107, 123, 149, 158, 177–79, 181–84, 266, 279–80, 313, 317–18, 327–29, 331, 346–47, 372, 395, 397, 422, 450–51, 456–57, 529, 587, 589, 593, 653, 694, 733 contradiction(s) 74, 196, 304, 393, 424, 470, 532, 621, 658, 665 control 57, 133, 210, 388, 420, 465, 516, 568, 718 of history/story 415–16, 436 and narration/storytelling 194–95, 305, 370, 394, 450, 454–55, 457, 588–89, 716, 725–26 of time 213–14 convention(s)/conventional 5, 193–94, 196, 274, 398, 549–50, 595, 733 literary 9, 572, 701 of novel 52, 275 social 57, 186, 193, 247, 385, 441, 612, 641, 662, 664, 699 corpse(s)/cadaver(s) 502–3 corruption 87, 432, 437–38, 613–14, 619, 656–57, 669–70, 676, 679, 687, 692, 695, 699–700 cosmography(ies) 257, 261, 268 cosmology 469, 709 cosmopolitanism 21, 224, 360, 487, 493 cosmos/cosmic 29, 101–2, 141, 257 order 95, 147, 257, 260, 443–44, 447 textual/of stories 329, 345, 372 time 143–44 couleur locale 272, 603

780 counter-discourse 360, 408 of women and black communities 398 counterfeit/fake 47, 55, 87, 153, 294, 542, 608. See also authenticity counter-images 270, 299, 621 counter-narrative 196, 262 counter-reality 438, 523 counter-world 214, 268, 507 countryside 284, 492, 669, 687. See also city/ town creation 30, 100, 102, 142, 147, 406, 523, 526, 587–88 of art/artistic 111, 457, 497 essence of 505–6 and words/writing 111, 370, 473 creativity 117, 139, 189, 348, 447, 497, 615 creature(s) 78–79, 219, 273, 356, 364, 431, 455–56, 498 alien 207–8 strange, fearsome 525–26 crime(s) 67, 84, 147, 341, 344, 446, 460, 462, 598, 662, 672, 679 criollismo (‘creolism’) 270 crisis 224, 427, 521, 657, 668 economic 215 identity 543, 670 of memory 117–18 criticism/critique 190, 193, 614, 652 literary 294 of modernity 27, 31, 33, 41 political and cultural 358, 699–700 postcolonial [Said] 610 of postmodern condition 241 social/of society 222, 223, 272, 632–33, 669 British 423 Egyptian 651–52 oriental 272–73 Pakistan 425 Syrian 687 crossroad(s) 335, 378, 393, 546. See also boundary(ies) cruelty 146, 168–70, 182, 314, 388, 395, 679 of Shahriyar 81, 247, 648, 657, 663 culture/cultural 139, 148, 253, 257, 260, 265–66, 286, 313, 317, 361, 370–71, 381, 401, 408, 420, 496–97, 504, 513–14, 518, 520, 540, 573, 607, 614, 646, 667, 687

Index of Subjects Algerian 615, 616, 618 Arab(ic) 359, 617, 630–31, 683, 685 Argentine 272, 274, 284–85, 296, 300, 304 as colonized 348–49 Danish 487 differences/divisions 59, 481 Egyptian 629–30, 641–42 English 253 European/western 6, 19, 130, 140, 249, 284, 482, 528, 614 exotic 316, 482–83 French 101, 358, 609 German 101 Greek 631 habits/attitudes 424, 615 heritage 287, 301, 348, 370, 591, 630 high 272, 513, 665 Hungarian 535–37 indigenous/native 270, 574, 630 Islamic 7, 129, 630–31 modern 612, 686 monolithic 360, 369, 622 Morrocan 349, 357, 359 orientation 301, 591, 612, 629–30, 642 other 268, 370 (See also other) Persian 431, 698 popular/mass 253–55, 258–59, 272, 301, 665 Spanish 358, 360, 369–70 superiority 358, 482 tradition(s) 138, 313, 357, 570, 604, 609, 616–17, 629–30, 683, 685 values 598, 645 curiosity 3, 37, 59, 70, 76–77, 84, 90, 126, 220, 258, 317, 335, 427, 569 curse(s) 70, 74, 106, 132, 233, 239–41, 311, 403, 410–12, 414, 416–18, 421–22, 431, 434 of father 29, 132, 233 and incest 419–20 custom(s) 8, 83, 94, 426, 443–44, 529, 673, 675. See also heritage; tradition(al) cycles 332, 379, 453, 457, 541, 658, 679 eternal/endless 158, 291 of nature/cosmic 101, 443–44 Nibelungen 274 of Nights 4, 441, 525–27, 533, 685 of sexuality and death 185, 637

Index of Subjects of society/civilization 505, 515, 645 of tales 652–53, 699 of violence 67, 476, 666 cynic(al) 36, 272, 517, 519, 567 cynicism 138, 145, 670 Dadaism 497, 571 damnation 691. See also hell dance/dancing 88, 592, 613, 693 La Berére (ballet) 616 dancer(s) 396, 612, 619 oriental 490 danger(s) 57, 73, 198, 210, 441, 448, 520, 525–26, 568, 581–82, 600, 649, 673 of journeys 50, 75, 554, 606 for readers 278, 347, 540 of world 50–51, 508, 526, 655 darkness 85, 88, 104–5, 120, 144, 231, 393, 492, 632, 645, 647, 709, 713, 719 daughter(s) 34, 97–98, 101, 136, 172, 178, 195, 218, 273, 305, 309, 382, 395, 410, 432, 434, 461, 529, 551–52, 565, 633, 646–47, 660, 682. See also maidens/girls day(s)/daytime 125, 231, 365, 404, 559, 582 and/vs. night 95–96, 98, 100, 261, 263, 353, 371 dead 108, 168, 184, 261, 303, 310, 356, 363, 402, 413, 428, 472, 518, 556, 565, 648, 655, 675, 684, 723 deaf 312 -mute 177, 180 death 31, 33, 56, 58, 71, 74, 83, 127–28, 141–44, 207–8, 266, 281, 296–97, 308, 452, 469, 472–73, 499, 644, 649, 673, 677, 691–92, 696–97, 710, 731–32 after 183–84, 261, 417, 533, 555, 698 of author 94, 153–56, 175 (See also writers/authors) avoidance of 116, 158, 214, 242 as beginning of story 705, 727 of characters 171, 172–75, 181, 238, 279–80 confrontation with/realm of 240, 511 deferral/evading through narration 8, 123, 185, 266, 280, 338 and defiance of/in 150, 283, 417, 618 and dying 261, 303, 465, 467, 554, 613, 713 and endings 283, 331

781 escape from/saved 311, 671, 705 inevitability of/certain 168, 175, 331, 442, 690, 730 by installments 612, 619 and narration 9, 123, 150, 152, 156, 181, 183–84, 242–43, 266, 280, 319, 344, 351–52, 353, 355, 366, 369, 459, 461, 726–27, 728 of narrator 168, 184, 587 postponement of 14, 64, 66–67, 136, 149–50, 231, 318, 402, 405, 648, 726–27 proximity of/approaching 175–76, 183, 305, 355, 505, 533, 660, 720 and sleep 260–61 and storytelling 8, 313, 317, 319, 356, 459 threat of 349, 543, 597, 601, 619, 646 triumph over 149, 280, 535 and violence 64, 461, 465 (See also violence) decay 216, 390, 413, 417, 491, 501, 510, 513–14, 615, 618, 678, 691–93 of aristocracy 517–18 deceit/deception 69, 126, 187, 266, 273, 328, 570, 571, 636, 659, 670, 673, 689, 700, 713. See also lies decline 122, 264, 417, 491, 515, 528. See also collapse decolonization 482, 610–11 of societies/states 591, 667 deconstruction 43, 190, 196, 197, 201, 221, 259–60, 262, 275, 280, 317, 359–61, 370–71, 379, 395, 399, 402, 408, 424, 482, 555, 570 and language 259, 314, 317 of male oppression/gender norms 193–95 postmodernist 304 dédoublement 351, 353–55, 357, 369. See also double/doubling defeat 381, 387, 394, 453, 496 of Arab armies (1967) 667–68, 669, 675–76, 680, 682, 687 of South (US) 381, 388–89 deferral 116, 153, 211, 242, 259, 282–83, 319, 330–31, 412, 414, 420, 422, 727. See also postponement and continuation 326, 331 of death/execution 149, 247, 266, 338

782 deferral (cont.) of gratification 127, 149, 318, 338, 344, 726 motif of 149, 337 narration/writing as form of 266, 704, 732 process of 126, 547, 733 strategy of 123, 166, 317, 337–38, 446, 477, 647 defiance 274, 419, 598, 604, 618, 645, 675 of death 150, 283, 417, 618 deficiency 185, 261, 266, 297, 388, 515 human 17, 73, 86, 90, 658, 661 dehumanization 458, 481–82 of women 680 delight(s) 64, 83, 139, 392, 520, 562, 706 delusion(s) 320, 439, 493, 523, 567, 569, 636, 659, 688, 701, 707 of politics/politicians 628, 668, 682 demarcation(s) 1, 12, 115, 236, 248, 265, 336, 369, 408, 540 democracy/democratic 216, 508, 612, 645, 649 reforms 642, 665 demon(s) 24, 27, 46, 84, 132, 386, 389–90, 422, 507, 517, 520, 537–38. See also evil(s); jinn(i) denazification 96, 101 denouement 49, 57, 170, 175, 202, 236, 261, 328, 388, 544, 551, 657, 665, 696, 724 depravity 193, 613 deprivation(s) 73, 88, 90, 109 descendants 385, 396, 414, 416, 432 descent 90, 95, 295–96, 367, 390, 396, 512, 596 desert(s) 17, 73, 78, 83–85, 89–90, 115, 293, 359, 403–5, 509–10, 512–13, 637, 682 design(s) 6, 381–83, 388–89, 392–95, 518, 575 Arabian/oriental 161, 599, 603 desire(s) 17, 65, 88, 119, 167, 174, 179, 198–99, 235, 255, 273, 330, 345, 349, 402, 463, 491, 529, 568, 584, 661, 677, 716 containment/fulfillment of 60, 74, 127, 322, 569, 664, 680 continuation/perpetuation of 116, 126–27, 330–31 forces of 73–75, 111, 122, 125, 222 human 77, 121, 198, 657

Index of Subjects innermost 92, 565–66, 662 male 188, 196, 199 management of 73, 77, 243, 322 and narration/storytelling 121, 210, 330–31, 732 object of 73–74, 115–16, 124–26, 197, 259, 639, 660, 732 personification of 126, 535 physical 331, 638 of readers 323, 329 satisfaction of 163, 664, 732 sexual 122, 125–26, 196, 210, 500 and taboo 92, 163 and time 148, 188, 195 uncontrollable/unbridled 196, 219, 243 desolation 78, 168, 404, 654, 691 despair 87, 108, 115, 139, 141, 143, 515, 532, 648–49, 663, 668, 670, 675 despotism 377, 501, 508–9, 627, 646, 649 destabilization/destabilizing 20, 124, 197, 271, 304, 316, 340, 360, 365, 400, 408, 423, 484, 521, 554–55, 733 of author(ship) 541, 544 components/elements 297, 339, 546 of discourses 398, 417 of story/text 264, 391, 545–46, 549, 555 destiny 32–33, 59, 74, 101, 168, 221, 233, 236, 259, 280, 319, 335, 385, 428, 435, 477, 568, 573, 580–81, 587, 657, 660, 701, 704, 715, 724, 725, 728, 732. See also fate control over 127, 405, 594, 639, 659 human/of mankind 90, 107, 419, 519, 526, 580, 652, 654, 672 and journey of hero/protagonist toward 17, 30, 50, 61, 77, 215, 236, 238, 241, 424, 535, 662, 696, 724 destruction 84, 86, 107, 192, 351, 364, 404, 411, 414, 421, 437, 472, 486, 499, 501, 515, 521, 524, 635 of body 465, 467 forces of 33, 73–75, 82, 86, 90–91, 121, 196, 300, 600, 652, 662 of old (world) order 138, 495 and power of technology 505 and rebirth/revitalization 495, 515 of society/town 196, 417–18, 423, 661 detective(s) 227, 341 novels 94, 145, 340, 574, 576, 716–17

Index of Subjects devastation 65, 214, 363, 615 device(s) 162, 379, 637, 722 of confinement 126 (See also confinement) of fragmentation/segmentation 337, 424 of frame story 317–18, 335, 541, 652 of interruption 42, 318, 330, 344 of juxtaposition 43 mise en abîme 336 narrative 33, 249, 318–19, 384, 411, 430 devil(s)/satan 103, 469, 492. See also demon(s); jinn(i) dialogism 247, 259 dialogue/dialogic 278, 462, 669, 696–97, 706 process 394–95 situation 68, 394, 428, 556, 620 diary(ies) 25, 27, 45, 47, 70, 531, 604, 606 dichotomy(ies) 40–41, 60, 68, 91, 137, 141–42, 230–31, 314, 507, 520 inner/internal 88, 90, 144, 570 dictator(ship) 340, 429, 437, 512, 513, 523, 581, 627, 667, 671 didactic (elements) 43, 50, 339, 362 diegetic context 546 levels 344, 551 reality 43, 242, 275, 312, 317, 319, 331, 338, 732 uncertainty 339 differentiation 227, 464, 466, 495, 526, 591, 639–40, 653, 655 difficulty(ies) 60, 73, 87, 90, 630. See also hardships diffuse(ness)/diffusion 9, 124, 230, 236, 249, 546, 715 of boundaries 154, 226, 278, 722 zone/realm 93, 256, 282 dilemma(s) 39, 637, 664, 669 of modernity 485, 488, 559 moral 29, 38, 448, 655 disappearance(s) 68–70, 75, 242, 340–43, 546, 549, 573–74, 578, 583, 589, 719–20 vs. appearance 109 disaster(s) 84, 104–5, 132, 168, 197, 339, 513. See also cataclysms; catastrophes disbelief 675 suspension of 440, 690

783 discipline(s) 92, 468, 488, 506, 562, 639 intellectual 495, 682 discourse(s) 313, 423, 610, 646, 673 authoritarian 423–24 colonial 410, 423 conflicting, struggle between 418–19 epic, vs. novelistic 425 historical 397, 418, 421–22, 435, 437 monolithic 424, 622, 665 discrimination 591 racial 385, 396 (See also racism) discursive coherence 256, 481 elements/components 256, 570 environment/milieu 256–57, 259 fields 129, 378 practices 191, 468 reality 44, 430 systems 468, 471, 477, 599 disease 295, 308, 365, 526, 647, 721 disenchantment 216, 222, 496, 498, 515, 522 disequilibrium 32, 72–73, 77, 121, 320, 498 between feminine and masculine 656 inner 17, 724 disguise 258, 558–59, 563, 569, 571, 582, 637, 663 dishonesty 49. See also deceit disillusionment 254, 272, 425, 504, 524, 628, 670, 675 disintegration 89, 123, 128, 138, 224, 404, 414, 521, 615, 720, 732. See also collapse social/of society 215, 614 temporal 118, 476 disorder 36, 325, 442, 662 temporal 221 disorientation 73, 144, 317, 321, 404, 555 dispersion 272, 387, 395, 540 displacement 17, 89, 536 cultural 224, 372 disruption 94, 222, 266, 282–83, 348–49, 476, 522, 532, 538, 568, 573, 590, 596, 611 historical 128, 130, 505, 514 of war 211, 498 dissociation 51, 430, 523, 593, 605 of time and space 32, 116 divan 274, 531, 596

784 diversity 269, 271, 284, 300, 318–19, 336, 345, 426, 637 cultural 348, 598 of texts 266, 329 divine. See God djinn. See jinn(i) doctrine(s) 275, 363, 447, 600, 660. See also beliefs Calvinist 399 Christian 8 dominance/domination 179, 210, 287, 394, 438 of capitalism 499, 679 colonial/imperial 65, 268, 482 foreign 610, 629, 670 male 43, 188, 190, 196, 199 of western canon 408, 410 western/of Europe 630, 645–46 doom 30, 64, 87, 390, 411, 420, 526, 532, 585. See also destiny; disasters; fate door(s) 17, 75, 404, 457, 473, 510, 714. See also closed doppelgänger 142, 302, 526, 547, 575, 716 double/doubling 68, 70, 154–55, 157–58, 169, 173, 252, 286, 292, 299, 303, 350, 356, 370, 392, 470, 529, 532, 549, 555–56, 570–72, 579, 585–90, 637, 716, 724–25, 732–33. See also dédoublement; twins and identities 231, 575–76 life 530, 567, 706 motif/theme of 305, 545, 547, 553, 580–81, 702, 718–20, 725, 732 doubt(s) 255, 360, 362, 540, 553, 645, 715. See also skepticism; uncertainty drawings. See illustration(s) dream(s)/dreamlike 38, 40, 89, 95, 100–101, 174, 249, 266, 277, 296–97, 302, 308–9, 321, 489, 492, 498, 513–14, 518–20, 522–23, 529–30, 533–35, 538, 554, 566–69, 589, 664, 675, 679, 709, 723–24 and life 535, 553, 588 narrative 97–98 and reality 28, 86, 154, 161, 235, 297, 299, 303, 365, 402, 493, 519, 565, 568–69, 585, 655, 671 realm/world 26, 303, 508, 530, 537, 570, 674, 676 scenarios/dreamscapes 368, 560

Index of Subjects state 107, 364, 499 theories of, Freud 564–65 drinking/drunkenness 519, 598, 654, 659, 693–94. See also intoxication Druze 465 dualism/duality 26, 28, 35–37, 135, 146, 161, 226, 232, 234, 249, 520, 601, 652, 655, 706 images 601, 685 spatial 638, 640 Dunyazad (Shahrazad’s sister) 164, 170, 181–83, 440, 554, 556, 661 and Shahzaman 542–43 duplicity 139, 567 Dutch 403 orientalism 483 dynamism/dynamic 9, 54, 196, 247–48, 275, 298–99, 353, 445, 457, 545, 598, 621, 658, 677, 679–81 continuity 193, 266 elements/factors 33, 714 force 594, 597, 615, 688 narrative 17, 20, 42, 51, 57, 118, 183, 241, 248, 262, 266, 283, 545, 587, 653–55, 690 self-generative 318, 362, 371 of stories 336, 581, 697 of texts 286, 294, 298, 394 dynasty(ies) 61, 382, 385, 391, 403, 441, 692 dystopia(s)/dystopian 212, 217, 222, 504, 682, 691, 695 East/eastern 79, 253–54, 361, 482, 487, 501, 507, 510, 537–38, 617, 631 component/past 78–79 garb/objects (e.g., perfumes, lotions, powders, incense, etc.) 71, 259 and West/western 36, 78, 80–81, 91, 220, 288, 507, 531, 537, 640 economy/economic 133, 269, 271, 363, 485, 495, 561, 629, 667, 670, 682, 692 capitalist 212, 224 development 18, 420, 489–90, 492–93, 495, 515, 611, 667, 687 values 270, 645 ecstasy/trances 89, 357, 518, 649. See also hallucinations education(al) 217, 362, 441, 490, 646

Index of Subjects ego(ism) 70, 80, 115, 166, 196, 199, 324, 370, 463–64, 524, 563, 670. See also id elite(s) 611–12, 667, 685, 688. See also aristocracy; nobility and common folk 653–54 political and economic 561, 667 emancipation 389, 406, 408, 423, 687–88, 699. See also liberation of women 194 (See also women/female) embedded/embedding 337, 550 historical 12, 689 intertextual 531 tales/stories 3, 9, 42–43, 181, 185–86, 213, 221, 231, 247, 317–19, 328, 331, 338–39, 344, 418, 529, 541, 658, 705, 728–29 technique/structure of 43, 329 texts 176, 462 emblematic characters/figures 389, 419–20, 511 heroes 379 roles 422, 430 vision of history 438–39 empathy 388, 393, 656 empire/Empire 21, 22, 129, 138, 441, 528, 538, 561, 563, 618 colonial 485 (See also colonial) Ottoman 4, 7, 22, 128–29, 130, 133, 135, 497, 667 welfare/stagnation of 247, 637, 663 emplotment 377, 387–88, 394 empowerment 186, 405, 609 emptiness 82, 240, 389, 554–55, 650, 657, 687, 707, 710, 730 enchantment/enchanted 294, 352–53, 523, 534–35, 560, 565, 587, 648, 650, 705–6, 728 history as 426, 477 space(s) 76, 228, 264, 421, 434, 438, 509, 560, 659 world/realm 205–6, 583 worldview 416, 511 enclosures/enclosed (space) 17, 30–33, 40, 41, 50, 59–60, 71–72, 74, 92, 93, 105–6, 111, 115, 117–18, 124, 197, 417. See also confinement; imprisonment of history 379, 399, 511 and journeys/wandering 13, 37, 93, 117 vs. open spaces 75, 92, 112, 654, 710

785 encyclopaedia 294, 332, 450 end/ending 149, 183, 275, 301, 304, 315, 318, 331, 337–38, 423, 703, 727, 731–32. See also conclusion deferring/postponing 222, 280, 283, 732 happy 17, 200, 209, 637 stories without 337, 413, 704, 713 of story/novel 35, 69, 72, 331, 344, 395, 418, 548, 589 threat of 279, 727 of time/the world 104, 307, 427, 519 endless 665 narrative/narration 52, 345–46 stories/tales 8, 71, 158, 193, 291, 312, 318, 324–25, 327, 337, 371, 394, 586 storytelling as 318, 589 enemies 60, 205, 518, 567, 675, 677 English (language) 310, 396 translations of Nights 5, 291 English/British 74, 253, 267 colonial domination 268 orientalism 483 Enlightenment 5, 7, 487, 631, 642, 645, 665 ideals 359, 496 literature 24 entertainment 139, 186, 339, 455, 542, 644, 646, 695 epic(s) 213, 378–79, 421, 438, 444, 453, 626 and history 378–79, 425 mode/matrix/domain 419–22, 425, 439 epiphany(ies) 40, 143, 171, 549, 554 epistemological (doubt) 223, 407 equilibrium 32, 61, 108, 148, 471, 516, 658, 663, 665. See also harmony eros 500–501, 503 erotic(ism) 136, 162, 194, 371, 373, 426, 503, 529, 555, 603 aberrant 500–501 and Arabs 267 connotations/component 161, 604, 608–9 encounters/experiences 161, 322, 364, 543 fantasies 81, 197, 205 and Nights 5–6, 161–62, 194, 267, 460, 502, 529–30 notion/idea of 191–92

786 erotic(ism) (cont.) and Orient/oriental 45, 79, 161, 502, 557 and submissiveness 604–5 and violence (male) 43, 191 and women as objects of 198 escape 51, 83, 231, 233–34, 369–70, 420, 621, 641, 644, 710 and/from time 33, 107, 167, 240, 671 from death 367, 474, 671 from fate 30–31, 449 from/to identities 588, 590 of hero 230–31 from life 172–73 and literature/narration/writing 174, 179, 343, 351, 713 miraculous 196, 661 and Nights 302 of/for women 433, 604, 608–9, 680 and Orient/orientalism 497, 507 of reader/author 174, 330, 338, 715 escapism 27, 132 eschatology (Islamic) 363. See also apocalypse esoteric(ism) 96, 445, 523 domain/dimension 95, 569 knowledge/sciences 95, 97, 101–2, 511, 520–21 symbols 96, 101 works/texts 95–98, 101 essence(s) 39, 71–72, 81, 141, 144, 187, 286–87, 299–300, 459, 572, 588, 622, 633 and/of reality 127, 402, 725 of art 127–28 of God 471 of identity(ies) 587, 708 of life/body 29, 33, 318, 465, 467, 640 of self/being/existence 208–9, 219, 331, 452–53, 506 textual/of textuality 274, 372 of writing 351–52, 356, 369–70, 535, 708, 729 estrangement 45, 59, 94, 134, 242, 258, 273, 317, 351, 358–59, 369, 403, 407, 416, 483, 526. See also alienation; isolation in/from society 312, 348–49, 476 eternal 230, 311, 454, 643 life 231–32

Index of Subjects eternity 108, 118, 141–42, 167, 275, 279, 280, 282, 296, 492 ethical 44, 55, 78, 359, 423 euphoria 34, 232, 296, 353, 356, 364, 473, 720 Eurocentrism 269, 304 events 165, 299, 343, 388, 443, 454, 529, 593 chain/sequence of 294, 420 course of 44, 49, 53–54, 121, 167, 170, 227, 236, 319, 321, 529 interruption/intervention in 89, 345, 393 human 322, 344 nature of 384, 387 preordained/predestined 66–67 evil(s) 37–38, 84, 204, 216, 282, 486, 518, 562, 615, 660, 662. See also bad/evil forces of 204, 209, 296, 521, 662 genius 196, 388 and good 235, 520–21, 656, 662–63, 665 intentions/urges 487, 501, 662 jinn 228, 660 in soul/nature 88, 90–91, 662–63 spirit(s) 69, 84 execution(s) 99, 152, 154–56, 158, 421, 423, 440–41, 443, 462, 694. See also death deferral/postponement of 149, 153, 183, 185, 205, 247, 265, 458 exhaustion 407, 523, 543, 556 exile 82, 351, 472, 534, 593, 708 of hero 75, 92 from history 416, 700 place of 310, 349 temporal 107 existence 26, 30, 136, 139, 147, 157–58, 168, 175, 218, 236, 241, 264–65, 268, 288, 314, 317, 345, 390–91, 401, 452, 545, 565, 634, 639, 672, 706 as/in/of reality 229, 238, 540 of community/society 444, 514 essence of 219, 331, 372, 506 human 41, 65, 265, 286, 299, 331, 403, 483, 498, 505–6, 509, 725 of reader and narrator 276, 279, 733 temporary 80, 281–82 of time/temporal 144–45, 211 existential condition 727 threat 537

Index of Subjects exotic(ism) 6–10, 27, 33, 119, 161, 202, 255, 259, 267, 269, 273, 292–93, 316, 393, 411, 413, 482–83, 503, 507, 526–27, 552, 561, 566, 621, 733 atmosphere/setting/environment 39, 45–46, 197, 204, 599 and attraction to Orient 22, 27, 248 beauty 608–9 lands 220, 497, 560 of Nights 8, 10, 14, 24, 26, 40, 248, 290, 292–93, 557, 661 oriental 269, 599, 609 other/‘Other’ 269, 298, 482–83, 621 phenomenon 204, 525 realm/world(s) 19, 26, 65, 252, 617 society 8, 482, 607 of women 198, 204 experimental(ism) 1, 8, 21, 669 modernist 24, 33, 39, 409 techniques/strategies 42, 541 experimentation 248, 348, 530, 539–40, 644 exploitation 199, 345, 414, 432, 482, 518, 679, 685 economic 670 exposure 204–5. See also voyeurism Expressionism 497 expressionism, forms of 503 eyes 471, 502 Arab/exotic 163, 202, 413 green 619, 682 fables 146, 433, 435, 437. See also allegories; fairy tale(s); stories animal 14 fabrication 601, 606, 609, 668 fabulations 8, 127, 128, 411 failure 139, 247, 382, 385, 388–89, 394, 437, 452–53, 457, 492, 522. See also defeat fairs (local) 253, 396 fairy tale(s) 22–25, 28, 30, 37, 146, 194, 428, 433–34, 490–93, 509, 511, 515, 532. See also fables figures 392, 493, 532 genre of 163, 189–90 world 65, 161, 171, 195 faith 156–57, 282, 363, 468, 580, 614. See also belief(s) Falangists 367

787 false(hood) 301, 304, 328, 398, 428, 605, 609, 640, 643, 685, 699 identity 134, 570, 581–82 images 272, 688 impersonations 570, 578, 713 reality(ies) 559, 583, 683, 689 falsification(s) 291, 428 family 35, 78, 80, 131–33, 159, 176, 178, 381, 403, 405, 410–12, 414–15, 417, 420, 423, 426, 432–33, 434, 436, 449, 460, 476, 490, 493, 517, 551–52, 574, 593, 673, 682. See also brothers; sisters background/history 176, 181, 399, 405, 431, 434, 546, 573 grandfathers/mothers 49, 68–69, 78, 400, 412, 426, 431, 449, 451, 453, 457, 460–61, 465, 468–69, 471–73, 475–76 separation from 60, 492 fantastic 287, 362, 401, 503, 560, 568 literature/tales 9, 25, 39, 174, 195, 617 world 24, 519 fantasy(ies) 67, 86, 100, 153, 163, 210, 229, 255, 262, 297–98, 325, 379, 411, 413–14, 428, 436, 483, 489–92, 499, 515, 523, 527, 529, 533, 544, 676, 695 erotic 81, 103, 197, 205 male 186, 188–89, 196, 199, 205 and narrators/narration 9, 274, 389 and Orient 8, 254 pornographic 191, 193 and realism 151, 501 and reality 89, 111, 155, 173–74, 205, 226, 231–32, 313, 607 realm/world of 26, 65, 68, 161, 310, 556 symbolist 22, 46 fascism 494–95, 504, 506 fatalism 183, 412–13, 421, 501, 509, 677 fate 8, 29–32, 40–41, 50, 54, 58, 63, 88, 101, 163, 167, 197, 234, 273–74, 297–98, 379, 412, 417, 427–28, 432, 449, 491, 501, 510, 526, 538, 580, 640, 665–66, 696–97, 725. See also destiny challenging/confronting 525, 662 human 25, 101, 168 inescapability/inevitability of 30, 66, 77, 90, 254, 286, 316, 335, 419–20, 503, 581, 652 instruments of 66–67, 74, 299, 724, 726

788 fate (cont.) intervention of 93, 502, 705 and narration/stories 427, 724, 728, 733 power/force of 17, 27, 30–31, 59–60, 73, 75, 117, 168, 293, 436, 523, 555, 631 private 401, 405 and time 31, 73, 112, 132 father(s) 26, 37, 48, 62, 73, 159, 195, 197, 216, 232, 235, 255, 385, 414, 461, 469. See also family; mother(s) authority/power of 17, 50, 209, 569 death of 32, 136, 431, 702 murder of 233, 236–37, 240 fatwa 423 fear(s) 46, 126, 207, 240, 255, 262, 391, 447, 465, 489, 566, 648, 684 feminine 80, 124, 185, 187, 202, 262, 650 counter-narrative 196 and male/masculine 182, 656 sexuality 194 (See also sex) feminism/feminist(s) 188, 190, 198–99, 595 message of 198–99, 200 and Shahrazad 187–88 and storytelling 188, 193 fiction(al) 174, 208, 242, 401, 435, 440, 442, 446, 519, 534, 550, 688. See also literature; novels; stories characters/figures 299, 368 domain/space 449, 583 and fact 711–12 and history 379, 402 literature 397–98, 423, 442 and Nights 288–89, 299 and reality 9, 57, 171, 276, 299, 302, 308, 343, 651 Shahrazad as model of 540 texts 33, 178–79, 626, 651 fictionality 221, 283, 287, 299, 315, 400–401, 438, 577, 717 and reality 302, 343 figure(s) 204, 252, 286, 363, 366–67, 392–93, 426, 438, 484, 563, 653, 655. See also character(s); emblematic historical 379, 594–95 mythical/marvelous 43, 411 narrated 556, 622 from Nights 258, 426, 483–84, 504, 621 women/female 181, 601–2

Index of Subjects films/movies/cinema 2, 6, 115, 368, 439, 466, 574, 576, 592, 593–94, 596–97, 601, 605, 609–10, 710 crew, producers, directors 220, 683–85 stars/actors 134, 536, 574, 576–77 western 134, 574 FIS (Front Islamique du Salut; or Islamic Salvation Front) 612 flashbacks 34–35, 38, 462 floods 69, 364, 686. See also apocalypse fluidity 127, 183, 260, 266, 287, 299, 313, 572 of narration 266, 541, 587 flying 200, 203 carpet 412–13 woman 208 folklore/folktales 23, 379, 632, 656. See also fairy tale(s) food/eating 465, 536, 538, 555 fool/holy man 368, 516. See also madmen footnotes 5, 267, 294, 547–48, 722, 729 forbidden door(s) 20, 64, 75–77, 85, 90–91, 203, 663 room(s) 17, 61, 64, 90, 335, 339, 346 foreign(ness) 59–60, 424, 487, 617, 621, 685 domination 610, 629, 670 forest(s) 115, 189, 214–15, 233, 237, 239, 240, 460, 466, 470, 473 forgetting/forgetfulness 277, 281, 457, 473, 708, 730 form(s) 8, 149, 360, 383, 443, 617 artistic 122, 147, 220, 275 and content 22, 46, 220, 249, 366, 377, 427, 441, 590 literary 213, 269, 451 material 162, 298–99, 365, 475, 576, 616 ritual 441, 467 textual 42, 268, 298, 377, 557 traditional 25, 540 visual 605, 620 fortune 489, 491, 516, 531. See also luck i.e., wealth 67 (See also riches) fountain of youth 84–85, 90 fragment(s)/fragmentation 18, 72, 119, 145, 222, 224, 256–57, 300, 345, 369, 386, 395, 472, 483, 499, 521, 555, 670 and/vs. unity 36, 329 of authorship 541 cultural 223, 248, 287, 372

789

Index of Subjects as device/technique 94, 280, 424 of experiences 124, 474, 496, 539 and history 476, 513 inserted/embedded 63, 174, 177, 366, 547 of language 19, 22 of memory 461–62 narrative(s) 19, 49, 94, 221, 331, 363, 384, 387, 438, 475–76, 549 of novels 174, 275, 332 of reality 19, 53, 119, 268, 329 of society 143, 222, 495, 497–98, 522 of stories/tales 165, 183, 312–13, 315, 321–22, 330, 547, 593 of storytelling 300, 366, 574 of texts/textual 20, 51, 260, 315, 321–22 of time 33, 37, 39–40, 160, 214, 320 frame story(ies) 14, 42, 44, 46, 58, 121, 135, 181, 185–86, 197, 205, 247, 285, 302, 326, 333, 335, 344–45, 379, 433, 440, 508, 544, 551, 696, 702, 705, 707, 732 and embedded stories/tales 3, 42, 231, 328, 418, 462, 705, 707 levels of 121, 319, 328 from Nights 14, 42–43, 52, 57, 63, 89, 116, 124, 149–50, 155, 158, 163–64, 168, 176, 181–82, 194, 202, 205–6, 210, 231, 240–41, 242, 265, 317–19, 328, 344, 377, 418, 440–41, 459–62, 471, 543–44, 633, 635, 652, 705 structure of 291, 298 technique of 8, 11, 331, 541, 552 framework(s) 102, 123, 148, 257–59, 261, 460, 473, 496–97, 499, 630, 653, 663, 669–70, 688 coherent 18, 116, 336, 496 cultural 360, 465, 594 historical 424, 429 realistic 200, 294, 658 social 350, 465, 554, 594 spatial/spatiotemporal 18, 31, 38–39, 50, 94, 196, 235, 241, 335 of story 39, 204 structural 459, 593 freaks 201, 204, 207–8, 236, 371 freedom/liberties 27, 36, 79, 82, 166, 206–7, 209, 275, 285, 370–71, 423, 447, 453, 569, 581, 598, 608–9, 642–45, 647, 649, 673–74, 679

of expression 7, 644–45, 665 and fate, theme of 656 fighters 673, 676 individual/personal 234, 439, 665 of mind 89–90 political 631, 665, 670, 687 search for 51, 420, 642, 671 of West 78–79 free will 109, 664 ‘Freigeisterei’ (‘libertine spirit’) of Sufism 501 French (language) 350 frivolity/frivolous 6, 399, 529 Front Islamique du Salut (FIS; or Islamic Salvation Front) 612 fulfillment 59, 66, 125, 166, 309, 418, 420–21, 716 of desires/wishes 60, 73–74, 127, 146, 345, 534, 569, 664 through reading/writing 322, 330 future(istic) 119, 138–39, 148, 166–68, 178, 212–16, 229, 235–36, 270, 299, 310, 389, 393–94, 397–98, 406, 410, 435, 448, 477, 510, 523, 527, 584, 670–71, 673, 675, 676, 688, 710, 729, 731. See also past; present as blissful/utopian 307, 495, 504, 549 city/society 505–6, 512 construction of 143, 437–38, 681 glimpse of 109, 509 man 522–23 optimistic/bright view of 129, 242, 405, 491, 495, 700 pessimistic view of 504, 615 post-apocalyptic 521 (See also dystopia(s)) predestined 60, 526 technology of 506, 515, 522 visions of 134, 136, 220–22, 272, 416–17, 430, 445, 452, 512, 515, 532, 560 way/course to 394, 449–550, 457, 724 Futurism 497 Gabriel (angel) 293 garden(s) 71, 218, 366, 487, 574 gaucho/gauchismo 270–71, 284, 286, 295–96, 304 gaze 33, 586 male 199

790 gender 195, 592, 616, 618, 673 relations 181, 189–90, 204–5 generation/generative 586. See also regeneration; self-generation force/power 362, 677, 709–10 of stories/texts 329, 462 genie(s) 67, 225, 520, 542–43, 706. See also demon(s); ghouls; jinn(i) genocide 461, 472–73 genre(s) 8–9, 247, 302, 313, 340, 419, 545 confessional literature 228 epic 378 fairy tale(s) 163, 189–90 ‘stories of the prophets’ (qisas al-anbiya’) 651 geography/geographic 18, 59, 103, 463, 527, 549, 595 lore and texts 525–26 (spatial) order 723–24 and Orient 45, 249 regions/realms/worlds 4, 115, 263, 381, 408, 482 setting 161, 201 Gestalt 515, 523 of worker/soldier 504, 506, 508 ghost(s) 303, 324, 387, 393–94, 403, 437, 532, 643. See also apparitions; phantoms; specters -like figures 233, 391, 395–96 of/and stories 401, 437 palace 507 ghouls 64. See also demon(s); ghosts; jinn(i) GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé; or Armed Islamic Group) 612 girls. See maidens/girls globalization 18, 19 n.4, 409, 482, 497, 559, 699 God/divine 109, 177, 264, 293, 356, 370, 436, 445, 468–69, 471, 473, 587, 635, 639–40, 651, 663 communication with 698 power 443–45, 447, 469, 511 gods 99, 140, 443, 518, 520 -like entity 498 good 520, 662, 666 and/vs. bad/evil 235–36, 282, 521, 562, 656, 662–63, 665

Index of Subjects Gothic 391, 555 tales/stories 9, 172, 189, 396, 529–30 governments. See state/government gratification 330, 536. See also fulfillment deferral of 64, 127, 149, 317–18, 330, 338, 344, 726 of desire 330–31 sexual 125 grave(s) 518, 520, 535 beyond the 197, 368 rising from 411, 555 graveyard(s) 71, 465 greed 415, 492, 510, 645, 687, 697–98 grief 75, 218, 231, 448–49 grotesque 154, 430 Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA; or Armed Islamic Group) 612 guerrilla fighters ( fida’iyyun) 676 guilt 44, 46, 66–67, 121, 164, 169–70, 178–79, 181–82, 211–12, 242, 266, 343, 387, 404, 462, 567, 663, 705, 728 gypsies 412. See also bohemians hallucination(s) 38, 107, 109, 237, 297, 311, 355, 364, 512 happiness 34, 76, 91, 110, 141, 143, 145, 168, 182, 201, 282, 289, 290, 296, 486, 491, 501, 647, 709 dream/pursuit of 406, 536, 686, 696–99 lack of 205, 230 hardship(s) 60, 142, 247. See also difficulty(ies) of women 434 harem 71, 253, 258–59, 293, 392, 530, 603, 680. See also odalisque harmony/harmonization 36, 39, 46, 61, 117, 133, 137, 143–44, 173–74, 222, 228, 231, 385, 427, 506, 526, 581, 611, 658. See also balance; equilibrium with nature 68, 443–44, 506 restoration of 186, 665 between self and surroundings 72, 240 spatial 59, 65, 72–74, 638, 655 temporal 228, 242 Harun al-Rashid (as character) 12, 88, 254, 258, 264, 326, 426, 484, 530, 551, 558, 569–70, 578, 586

Index of Subjects authority of 582 cycle of 685 identification with 563 as inspiration 590 Hatim Tai 428 hatred 437, 567, 596, 679 haunt(ed) 70, 72, 82, 87, 117, 136, 164, 189, 241, 250, 297, 387, 393–94, 395, 406, 434, 437, 448, 551, 601, 703, 727. See also ghost(s); spells environments 227, 403 Hazar afsane 3 hazard(s) 195. See also danger(s); threats health 69, 373, 397, 496, 537 heart(s) 82, 186, 205, 279, 371, 413, 535, 536, 634–35, 643, 645, 657 heaven(s) 363, 561 and earth 103, 489, 634 and hell 137 Hebrew literature 448 hedonistic 46, 421 hegemony/hegemonic 112, 212, 372, 423, 482 colonial 65, 408, 419, 423, 435, 603 cultural 10, 268, 348, 482 discourse 397–99, 408, 423–25, 435 groups 436, 506 ideas/ideologies 424, 437–38 western/European 269, 629–30 hell 90, 137, 363, 648, 660 hereafter 363–64. See also heaven(s); hell heresy/heretics 286, 293 heritage 145, 315, 348, 472, 494, 539, 642, 646. See also tradition(al) Arabic 6, 370, 688 Arabo-Islamic 612 colonial 269, 409, 610 Egyptian, Pharaonic 630 esoteric/gnostic 100–101 French 610 literary 6, 272, 360, 635, 665 vs. modernity 224 Ottoman 141 Spanish 358, 370 hero(es) 29, 57, 220–22, 225–28, 229–32, 247, 368, 379, 392, 455, 485, 488, 512, 526, 530, 540–41, 549–50, 557, 558, 652, 659,

791 664, 669, 698, 716–17, 724, 725–26. See also heroines adolescent 60–61, 64, 112 adventures/missions of 73, 196, 274 agency of 509 alter ego of 234, 558 and authors 715–16 confinement of 32, 41 death of 31 desires of 73, 75, 91–92, 112, 243, 568 destabilization of 20, 89 and equilibrium 17, 32, 61 and experiences of space and time 39–40 and fate/destiny of 30, 33, 77, 112, 254, 662 and identity 37, 89, 224, 232, 249 ingenuity of 64, 73, 198 initiation of 41, 112 love/lust of 77, 92, 115–16 and marriage 64, 72 and mobility 535 (See also mobility) myths 548 and narrators 547, 589 obsession of 152, 165 return/homecoming of 57, 61, 73, 92 search/quest of 94, 198 and Shahrazad 333, 694–95 taboos/forbidden doors and rooms  75–77, 92, 241 travels/journeys of 17, 33, 41, 59, 61, 64, 72–73, 75, 77, 112, 115, 228, 549, 551, 570–71 (See also journeys) women as 185–86 (See also heroines) heroines 174–76, 190–91, 193–94, 333, 594, 609, 644 heroism 496, 675 heterodoxy 360 heterogeneity 19, 300, 350, 354, 409, 526 cultural/social 271, 598 hierarchy(ies)/hierarchical 379, 419, 454, 639, 649 of power 636, 662, 664 relationships 201, 348 social 385, 424, 652, 664 structure 190, 193 traditional/conventional 194, 268

792 hierarchy(ies)/hierarchical (cont.) hikaya (mystical account) 355–56 Hindu(s) 431, 697 historical context 12, 46, 212, 316, 409, 411, 504, 514–15 events 242–43, 365, 393, 397, 418, 504 experience 131, 419, 430, 511 historiography 378, 410 history 128, 134, 293, 335–36, 377–78, 387–88, 404–6, 411–12, 414–15, 424–25, 428–29, 444–45, 447, 496, 501, 510, 518, 521, 540, 562, 568, 579, 608, 630, 677–78, 681, 682–83 Afrikaner 396, 398–99, 406 Algerian 611 and/as fate 286, 436 and/of narratives 107, 335, 388, 476–77 Arabic 558, 618, 668, 676, 678, 681, 682–85, 690 and Nights as phase of 558, 676, 678, 681, 690 of characters 201, 461 colonial 369, 416, 604, 611 complexities of 222, 484 construction of 377, 429, 436 course of 273, 299, 411, 580, 688 of Cuba 110 cyclic 379, 446 destabilization of 381, 417, 419, 435 discourses of 380, 417, 425 European 442, 495 forces of 102, 436, 505, 652 German 212, 222 human 293, 505 Hungarian 528, 538 of India 425, 429, 430, 435, 438 interpretation of 419 Islamic 558 of Israel 448 Latin American 410, 414–15, 421 of Lebanon 459 levels/layers of 262, 414–15, 685 linear 442, 446 literary 1, 12, 22, 280, 361, 701 of literature 397, 443, 632 of modernism 22, 39

Index of Subjects and myth 381, 415–16, 419, 430–31, 435–36 and narrativity 380, 406 new 406, 435–36, 438 and novel(s) 301, 332, 381, 383 of Pakistan 430–31, 436–37 reconstruction of 377, 382, 475 references to 381, 416 representations of 377, 398, 406, 416, 419, 477 revision of 129, 397 of South (US) 381, 385, 387 Spanish 360–61, 369 struggle for 435, 438–39 subaltern 591 Syria 667 as theme 13, 691 treatment of 395, 411, 415 Turkish 587 visions of 384, 409, 429, 435, 438, 476, 523, 688 womens’ 399–400, 609 Holocaust 442, 446–49, 451–52 Holy Spirit/Holy Trinity 468–69 homecoming 57, 59, 61, 62, 72, 92, 597 homeland 46, 311, 358, 670, 674, 695. See also house homme récit (narrative character) 38 homogeneous/homogeneity 398, 415, 438, 526, 622, 636 reality 408, 534, 585 homosexuality 44–45, 111, 126, 358, 368 honor 432, 434, 455, 538, 675 horror 108, 211–12, 273, 315, 358, 391, 503, 517, 560, 613, 693 hospital(s) 296, 309, 671, 674. See also sanatorium mental 134, 178, 367, 661 hostage(s) 592, 596, 601 houri (virgin in Islamic paradise) 155. See also maidens house/home 59–60, 64, 74, 395, 403–4, 434, 437, 493, 538, 636, 682 basement of 404, 449, 530 cellars 333, 337–38, 346, 723 return to 73, 92, 539 hubris 77, 90, 217, 492–93, 564

Index of Subjects humanism/humanist 447, 631, 642, 646, 651 humanity/humankind 145, 147, 316, 363, 391, 465, 512, 516, 520 preservation of 419, 563 and technology 495, 506 human(s) 40, 60, 91, 105, 121–22, 150, 204, 236, 315, 330, 452, 462, 510, 568, 590, 658, 665, 672, 698, 729–30. See also men; women acts of 346, 444 body 109, 257 condition 30, 248, 257, 266, 318, 641, 665 deficiency/fallibility 17, 29, 86, 261, 266, 297, 658, 661 and events 167, 322, 344 experiences 142, 260–62, 266, 539, 733 and God 109, 640 history 293, 505 knowledge 257, 293, 641 models, ideal 359 nature 25, 90, 505 realms/domains 262, 517, 662 rights 508, 631, 645, 699–700 status as 205–6 weaknesses/frailty of 76–77, 90, 335, 569 will/volition 167, 445 humiliation 247, 350, 381–82, 384, 397, 410, 467, 660 humor 62, 247, 558. See also comedies Hurufis 575, 577, 587 husbands 73, 205, 209. See also spouses; wives repression by 399, 595, 673 hybrid(ity) 65, 122, 248, 267–69, 284, 297–99, 300, 353, 357, 360–61, 369–70, 391, 409, 423–25, 431, 433, 437, 439, 604, 605, 609, 618, 621–22 colonial and postcolonial 358, 424 cultural 248, 268, 313, 348–49, 357, 369, 373, 591 figures 204, 392–93, 438 forms of 268, 299, 439 identity(ies) 359, 409, 424 linguistic 268, 348 literary 304, 313 hypocrisy 47, 49, 122, 192–93, 501, 676

793 icon(s)/iconic 297, 431, 619, 670 and Nights 6, 298 figures/characters from 483–84, 485, 525, 551, 555, 558, 621–22 of orientalism 608–9 symbols 287, 298 id 77, 193, 196. See also ego(ism) idealism 139, 540, 665–66, 669, 676, 699 ideal(s) 117, 359, 496, 576, 589, 669, 671 of exotic oriental beauty 604, 609 self 297, 392 of society 77, 522–23, 610 identification 68, 352–53, 455, 483, 527, 545, 555–56, 570, 574, 595, 610, 622 with alter ego 578 of author with protagonist 724–25 with character of Nights 528, 551 mutual 354 (See also dédoublement) and Other 556, 621 sense/process of 716, 719–20, 733 identity(ies) 74, 138–39, 147, 173, 206, 212, 227, 230, 239, 241, 262–63, 266, 300, 312, 316, 359, 387, 408–9, 468, 488, 493, 515, 519, 552–53, 575, 593, 596, 630, 663, 708, 720 Argentine 270, 298 authentic 131, 572 coherent 72, 282, 587 components of 605, 609 as composite 249, 297–98 construction of 129, 228, 232, 275, 398, 572, 577, 583, 590, 608–9 crisis of 543, 670 cultural 129, 269–71, 295–96, 300, 537–38, 596, 622, 629, 642, 688 defined 230, 236, 265, 269, 424, 584, 611, 650 double/dual 231, 576, 578 eastern/oriental 46, 79, 253 false/fictional 174, 570, 582–83 gender 190 German 447, 506 historical 611–12 Hungarian 537–38 imagined 232, 470, 590 individual 37, 228, 230, 234 Irish 253, 268

794 identity(ies) (cont.) Jewish 268, 447 as king 635–36, 638 multiple 581, 637 nature of 224, 232 physical/spatial 232, 590, 639 postcolonial 416, 424 quest/search for 223, 588, 715 real 240, 295, 470, 471, 576 sense of 59, 67, 142–43, 231, 436, 521, 586, 629–30 shifting/changing 79–80 stable/fixed 140, 265, 475, 584, 587–88, 608 uncertainty of 426, 581, 595 western 482, 574 ideology/ideological 190–91, 200, 211, 215, 313, 370, 395, 401, 405, 423, 446, 448, 496, 504–5, 540, 629, 645–46, 667–68, 676, 687–89 debates/disputes 611, 674 discourses 10, 129, 188, 252, 398 hegemonic 424, 438 nationalism/nationalist 367, 611 of Nazism/fascism 494–95 and orientalism 248–49, 253, 482, 485, 487 and power 129, 415 of Spain 360 structures/systems 129, 432 struggles 190, 439, 503, 611 views/aspects 251–52, 398, 599, 630 visions 488, 512 idolatry/idolatrous 413, 489, 600 idols 503, 555, 609, 693 ignorance 536 jahiliyya, world of 674 illicit 169, 236, 359 illness 166, 297, 417, 499, 519, 710. See also disease writing as 713 illusion(s) 68, 134–35, 231, 266, 323, 404, 430, 436, 493, 534, 545, 567–69, 586, 658, 663–64, 681, 695, 706 and reality 66, 135, 145, 236–38, 655, 660, 676 as theme 656, 661 world/realm of 65, 67, 674, 684

Index of Subjects illusory 135, 286, 340, 553, 584, 638, 640, 652, 684, 722 figures 563 phenomena 689 illustration(s)/drawing(s) 70, 295–97, 340, 363, 367, 498–500, 502–3, 507, 511. See also painting image(s)/imagery 111, 189, 231, 252, 256, 258, 261–63, 593, 596, 604–5, 620, 707 of Arabic culture 690 of Harun al-Rashid 558 of Nights 485, 523 of Orient/oriental(ist) 34, 161–62, 253–54, 272, 591, 601–4, 621 real and fabricated 601–2 of Shahrazad 612 visual 595, 599–600, 608–9 imagination/imaginary 41, 44, 48, 55, 66, 85, 100, 103, 106, 109, 119, 123, 126, 128, 137, 160, 175, 198, 231, 254, 256, 283, 288, 297, 312, 353, 378, 398, 418, 438, 449, 455, 495, 509, 534, 557, 562, 568, 695, 707 and/vs. power/authority 82, 197, 379, 441, 664 and/vs. rational(ity) 195–96, 458, 656, 706 and/vs. texts 159, 294, 578, 714 forces of 93, 162, 165, 232, 288, 366, 616 geography/setting 97, 284, 381, 549 and history 378, 400–401, 694 intervention of 206, 462, 590 and life 331, 553 literary 423, 564, 699 and narration 352, 366, 379, 578, 609, 620 and narratives 48, 181, 695 and Orient 482–83 oriental(ist) 274, 602 popular 23, 254 and real 283, 331, 462, 499, 659, 706 and reality(ies) 9, 41, 58, 81, 83, 88–89, 176, 205, 210, 226, 232, 243, 247, 259, 319, 339, 394, 402–4, 460, 583, 590, 607, 620, 638, 657, 658–59, 728, 732 representation 394, 706 role of 400, 581 and self 171, 581, 681 and Shahrazad 231–32, 317, 418–19, 440, 699

Index of Subjects social/and society 177, 190, 573, 681, 695 spaces 46, 579, 721 theme of 661 vs. violence (See violence) world/realm/sphere 43–44, 65–66, 73, 156, 159, 179, 205–6, 229–30, 294, 317, 324, 331, 363, 430, 440, 554, 581, 664, 704 imagined 401–2, 418, 565, 578, 636, 715, 725, 732 world 568, 577 imbalance 72, 112, 536, 538, 593. See also disequilibrium; disruption between narration and power 694–95 spatial/spatiotemporal 71, 74, 112 imitation(s) 9, 47, 189, 550, 578 immigrants 269–71, 295, 610 immigration 271, 284, 297. See also migration immobility 60–61, 274, 288 immorality 614, 694 immortal(ity) 156, 231, 280–81, 518 figure/character 70–71, 312, 411, 417, 553 imperial(ism) 129, 415, 433, 559, 561, 671–74, 676–77, 679, 687. See also colonialism power/domination 482, 496 impersonation(s) 173, 368, 523, 527, 535, 559, 570, 577–78, 582, 713, 716–17 of Shahrazad 155 imprisonment 17, 46, 82, 105, 118, 180, 424, 429, 463, 474–75, 509, 535, 597, 674, 684, 714–15. See also confinement in imagined world/dreams 232, 489 of women/maidens 17, 97, 115, 124, 390, 400, 404 in-between (state) 89, 201, 208, 423. See also liminal(ity) incarceration 447. See also imprisonment incarnation(s) 352, 368, 498–99, 715 incest 159, 168, 355, 382, 392, 410–11 and curses 419–20 taboos 163 (See also taboos) incomplete(ness) 328, 331, 338, 344, 476, 553 narratives/stories 28, 344, 384, 475–76 theme of 346–47 independence 423, 436, 595, 673, 688, 702 Algerian 613 of India 425, 428–29, 431, 435 national 667

795 of Pakistan 430 of South (US) 382 struggles for 598, 611, 646, 670 indigenous 59, 417, 424 vs. European 314 history/past 284, 419, 435 population 270, 416 sources 626, 639 tradition/culture 6, 348, 409, 424, 626, 630 individualism 26, 41, 212, 229 individuality 228–29, 231, 379, 420, 422, 425, 438–39, 451–53, 456, 458, 477, 555 individual(s) 223, 418, 420, 455, 570. See also self(ves) responsibility 677, 681 industrialization 224, 495. See also modernization industry 485, 645 inequality 348 social 272, 612, 651, 685 infidelity 326, 431, 567. See also adultery infinite (texts/stories/novels) 287–88, 301, 336, 346 infinity 142–43, 279–80, 287, 292, 301, 324, 330, 337, 344, 394, 426, 578, 586–87 form of 282–83 Nights as symbol of 299, 316 of texts/stories 266, 316, 318, 394, 545 ingenuity 10, 167, 247, 440 of hero 64, 73, 198 inhuman(ity) 364, 386, 447, 456 initiation(s) 34, 37, 41, 51, 65, 95, 100, 102, 112, 170, 198, 221, 357, 468–69, 521, 641 into love 34–37, 60, 73, 220 process/rites/trials of 93, 100, 102, 215, 241, 548 sexual 37, 51, 57, 60, 136, 164, 182, 461 injustice 180, 188, 396, 455, 558–59, 570, 582, 618, 651, 659, 661, 662–63, 679, 686–87, 692, 695 social 272, 651, 687 inner 59, 78, 241, 365, 383, 569, 648. See also inside life, of protagonist 75, 92 states 38–39, 241 world 256, 709 innocence/naiveté 37, 208, 462, 705, 728

796 inns/hotels 536, 538 insanity 312, 355, 633–34, 661. See also schizophrenia inside 366 and/vs. outside 59, 117, 125, 237, 464, 466, 638, 655 text/story 341, 345–46, 544 insight(s) 106, 511, 540, 641, 649, 706 spiritual 663, 666 inspiration 117, 149, 220, 249, 269, 272, 304, 312, 316, 363, 365, 497, 502–3, 543–44, 556, 595, 685 literary 101, 131, 650 Nights as 2–3, 8–10, 19, 22–23, 25–26, 162, 188, 224, 248, 268–69, 271, 287, 300, 377, 380, 501, 503, 540, 552, 554, 571–72, 579, 613, 617, 632, 652, 694, 701 Shahrazad as 1, 333 instability 9, 39, 112, 154, 247, 262, 266, 269, 310, 359, 386, 467, 496, 498–99 of characters 260, 555 of language 263, 266, 712 of reality(ies) 127, 155 spatial 67, 593, 701 of stories/tales 262, 437, 716 temporal 115, 155, 701 instinct(s) 186, 288–89, 465, 497, 659 intellect 141, 214, 497, 635 intellectual(s) 1, 7, 21, 27, 87, 95, 136, 140, 286, 304, 350, 358, 360, 396, 487, 490, 494–96, 499, 506, 612, 699 Argentine 270–71, 296, 298, 304 attitudes 271, 361, 650–51 debates 423, 670 Egyptian 527, 627, 629–30, 633, 639–40, 641–42, 644–45, 646 interference(s) 125, 241–42, 568, 655, 664, 701, 708 of jinn 653, 659–60, 662 of narrator 105, 119 interior(ity) 51, 229, 241. See also inner interlocutor(s) 453, 457 interpretation(s) 51, 198, 308, 378, 406, 419, 434, 481, 496–97 historical 381, 388, 398, 415 parameters of 42, 53 of reality 119, 343 rigid/fixed 400–401, 614

Index of Subjects interruption(s) 165, 205, 211, 213–14, 221–22, 301–2, 312–13, 319, 335, 337–38, 438, 457, 547, 549, 730. See also interference(s); interventions and/of readers 302, 321 device of 42, 318, 330, 344 motifs of 328 and resumption/continuation 177, 214, 326, 330 of stories/and storytelling 89, 266, 280, 317–18, 334, 547 technique of 318, 331, 344–45, 394 intertextual(ity) 11–12, 14, 31, 39, 57, 176, 252, 303, 329, 342, 360–61, 527, 540, 544, 655, 701 embedding 531 framework 123 matrix 77, 433 model 257–58, 340 and Nights 2, 130, 252–53, 255, 258, 285, 287, 292, 329, 331, 504, 579, 652, 701, 732–33 references 3, 130, 550 relationships 13, 34, 37, 123, 396, 459–60, 579, 635 themes 172, 202 intervention(s) 7, 35, 53, 56, 141, 156, 170, 171, 178, 463, 482, 521, 583, 688, 701, 707. See also interference(s) of colonial/imperial powers 350, 671 of demons/magic/supernatural realm 27, 297, 362, 430, 529, 652, 659, 680 external/outside 38, 93, 164, 462, 658 of fate 93, 502, 705 of humans/author 325, 332, 556, 718 of imagination 206, 462, 590 metafictional 589 interwar (period) 493, 497, 505, 521 intimacy/affection 466, 469, 534, 583, 644, 647 intoxication 87, 97, 518, 676. See also drinking intrigue(s) 49, 87, 181, 201, 227, 255–56, 265, 281, 342, 382, 385, 486, 551–52, 554, 557, 570, 661, 669, 674, 682, 724, 729 intuition(s) 102, 157, 345–46, 458, 560, 640

Index of Subjects invention(s)/invented 5, 54, 59, 133, 140, 156, 181, 279, 343, 360, 407, 430–31, 433, 444, 540, 563, 688, 726 of characters 134, 172–73, 457, 717–18 of history 270, 417–18, 435–36, 444, 685 language 157, 290 modern, technological 511–12, 561 selves/identities 174, 368, 553, 588–89 stories/fictions 88, 174–75, 231, 366, 389, 394, 400–402, 441, 576, 722, 724 invisible/invisibility 324, 330, 337, 584, 660, 702, 705, 707, 725, 728 ‘cap of’ 516, 655, 657, 660, 662 forces 30, 235, 469, 662 and visible 303 worlds/realms 25, 227, 658, 661 invulnerability 563–64 irrational(ity) 124, 195, 415–16, 419, 424–25, 483, 581 vs. rational 286 of violence 458, 475, 477 of women 186 Islam(ic) 209, 293, 363, 367, 439, 501, 508, 581, 615, 631, 660 and Christianity 293 groups/movements 612–13, 630 tradition/culture of 299, 572, 630–31 island(s) 32, 100, 103, 105, 307, 310–11, 313, 525, 549, 554, 697 cultural/ethnic 595–96 deserted 32, 508, 514 Waq al-Waq 203–4, 209, 680 isolation 29, 40–41, 103, 105, 121, 124–26, 182, 215, 274, 312, 395, 432, 434, 483, 492, 499, 514, 519, 522, 559, 577, 662, 700, 702, 708–9, 711–13 of artists 117–18 in desert 84, 512 from history 416, 418, 424 narcissistic 30–31 jealousy 159, 163–64, 166, 565, 634, 638, 670 jewels/gems 30, 98–99, 101–2, 503, 510, 697 Jews/Jewish 268, 447, 454, 485, 489, 493, 512, 534, 592, 596, 697

797 jinn(i) 82, 84, 107, 135, 146, 198, 203, 389–90, 394, 403, 426, 542, 554, 646, 658, 662, 664, 675, 676, 679, 691. See also demon(s); genie(s) ferocious/vicious 502–3, 652, 659, 662 imprisoned/held captive by 17, 32, 97, 228, 509 interventions/interference of 88, 235, 652, 653, 655, 659–60, 662 land/realm of 73, 76, 653, 657, 662 power of 486, 661 John the Landless/Baptist/Apostle 368 jouissance 357 journalism/journalist(s) 200, 206, 305, 448, 518, 528, 530–31, 532, 552–53, 574, 612, 670 journal(s) 47–48, 51–52, 54–56, 504 literary 48, 54–55 journey(s)/peregrination(s) 17, 20, 29, 41, 56, 61, 67, 93, 136, 185, 197, 241, 527, 555–56, 561–62, 588–89, 595–97, 633, 703 accounts/narrations of 45–46, 64, 116, 548, 594, 606 adventurous 32, 34, 203, 227, 525, 599 aim/goal of 35, 74, 115, 234–35, 536, 606, 608–9 contingency of 32–33, 526, 554, 607, 609 dangerous/perilous 75, 195 departing on 233–34 and enclosure 75, 92, 93, 112, 117 of heroes 59, 73, 75, 77, 91, 548 as initiation 37, 60, 100 labyrinthine 30, 33, 38, 50, 115, 118, 228, 571 literary 527, 547 motif of 204, 551 return from 60, 638, 721 sea 545–46, 551 as search/quest for 94, 587, 715 and story(ies) 548–49, 592 theme/trope of 13–14, 57, 526, 554, 597, 732 and trauma/rupture 258, 702 Jugendstil (architecture) 21 justice 562, 568–69, 590, 658, 660–61, 664, 675 social 611, 642, 665, 687

798 juxtaposition 43, 50–51, 53, 241, 395, 454, 580 of closed and open spaces 115 between enclosures/imprisonment and journeys 93, 118 of indigenous and colonialist 435 of narration/stories 319, 337 of reality and imagination 247, 570, 658 of Shahriyar vs. Shahrazad 441 between trauma/violence and narration 377, 442 of violence and confession 468 Kaf Mountain 34, 508, 579 Kathasaritsagara 425 key(s) 70, 294, 421, 453, 542, 549, 576 Kharijites 657 al-Khidr 64, 67 Khoikhoi [African tribe] 399 killing 368, 452, 458. See also murder kingdoms 378, 498–99 king(s) 31, 97–98, 100, 186, 265, 289, 362, 400, 531, 542, 562, 628, 634, 646–48, 663. See also authority(ies); prince(s) as all-powerful/mighty 185, 508, 637 and Shahriyar 699 status/authority of 17, 247, 258, 440–41, 444, 636–38 and storytelling 247, 352, 443, 638, 705 wandering 33 kingship 441, 562–63, 638 kismet 509 kiss 121, 207–9 kitsch 503, 524 knight(s) 336–38, 345, 596 errant 533, 535 on Magnetic Mountain 502 knowledge 74, 236, 257, 265–66, 289, 388, 400, 477, 509, 511, 515, 522, 538, 543, 592, 647 esoteric/secret 97, 102, 520–21, 523 human 293, 641 occult 95, 649 of science/technology 84, 523 search/quest for 65, 73, 633, 650 Kultur 497 Kunstmärchen 22–25, 39

Index of Subjects labyrinth(s)/labyrinthine 17, 112, 174, 237–38, 258, 267, 282, 286, 314, 346, 433, 501, 516, 554, 575, 585, 589, 724 form/quality 547, 732 journeys/travels 30, 33, 38, 50, 115, 118, 195, 228, 525, 571 notion of 237, 362 spatiotemporal 37–38 stories/narratives 333, 362, 549, 705 textual 545, 555, 584, 714 lack 345–46, 387, 431. See also absence; void lacunae 302, 394, 473. See also absence; void lamentation 339, 693 land(s) 76, 106, 393, 416, 437, 499, 538, 675 exotic/strange 60, 220, 497, 550 no man’s 79, 221, 371, 440, 568 struggle for 672, 675 landscape(s) 38, 73, 221, 229, 241, 243, 284, 497, 503, 566 discovery of 228–29 spatial 570, 579 language(s) 11, 18–19, 22, 121, 152, 157, 206, 223, 300, 303, 305–6, 309, 310–11, 313–15, 324, 350, 359, 397–98, 408, 457, 474, 520, 701, 713, 726 and/of reality 180–81, 225–26, 452 and bodies 354–55, 357 common 354, 396 dead 469, 471 and deconstruction 259, 314, 317 essence/heart of 260, 707 experiments 718 function/role of 262–63, 317, 348, 585, 708, 715, 720 instability/destabilization of 263, 266, 316, 712 and love 353–55 medium of 18, 710–11 and narration 253, 349, 471, 725–26 nature of 180, 262–63, 310, 725 new 259, 268, 718 non-European 6 number and shape of 709 powers of 287, 715 spoken 256, 471–72 in translations of Nights 5–6, 7, 46 use of 267–68, 588 lasciviousness 77, 80

Index of Subjects law(s) 30, 50, 125, 196, 241, 275, 286–87, 299, 316, 443, 526–27, 550, 649, 673, 678 vs. freedom 27 of reality 283, 363 system of 33, 704 of texts/narratives 286, 555–56, 586 of time 32–33, 727 lazy/slothful 162, 413, 421, 488 Lebta, city of 339 Lebtit, legend of 334 legend(s) 78–80, 82–84, 88–89, 147, 290, 334, 378, 399, 402, 510–11, 513–14, 608. See also myth(s) legitimacy 270, 444, 543, 656, 689 colonial 603 legitimation 483, 497, 521, 599, 687–88 leitmotif(s) 132. See also motif(s); theme(s) lethargy 109, 145, 220, 228, 368, 670, 679 letters 25, 27, 41, 45, 48–49, 50–51, 53–54, 69, 92, 112, 226, 442, 575, 577 liberation 44–46, 209, 280, 355, 358–59, 472, 492, 498, 507, 662, 673, 690. See also freedom physical 359, 475, 633 political/national 397, 598, 667–68, 670, 672, 676, 679, 687 sexual 46, 193–94, 359, 369 of women 187, 189, 193–94 by writing/narration 357, 369–70, 438, 554, 699, 723–24, 728 libertine/libertinism 36, 87, 187, 192, 413, 501 library(ies) 96, 229–30, 233, 295 infinite 287, 299 librettos 21–22 lie(s) 49, 62, 65, 68–70, 72, 88, 101, 126, 128, 132, 134, 146, 172, 174, 178, 371, 534, 567, 659, 664, 668, 681, 713, 719. See also deceit life/lives 30, 45, 72, 86, 158, 230–31, 242, 248, 308, 336, 338, 345, 379, 421, 424, 441, 451–52, 469, 525, 560–61, 615, 630, 647, 679, 696, 700, 724, 730 after death 150, 151, 155 ‘bare life’ 462–63, 465–67, 471, 475–76 contingency of 44, 183, 323 continuity of 331, 541 and death 156, 208, 238, 706–7

799 double 530, 567, 706 and dreams 535, 553, 588 escape from 172–73 eternal 231–32 as fake 712–13 finality of 127–28 as illusion 123, 134–35, 664 and imagination 331, 553 imagined 402, 711, 725 imitation(s) of 47, 189 inner, of protagonist 75, 92 as journey 556, 588 marginal 593, 598 material 634, 641 meaning of 95, 549, 720 metamorphosis(es) of 111–12 modern 255–56, 568, 630 and narration/narratives 56, 149, 156, 317–18, 330, 339, 344, 348, 352, 419, 422, 549–50, 556, 726–27 nature/essence of 29, 318, 346, 640 normal(ized) 106, 166, 168, 234 philosophy of 35, 323, 505 physical/bodily 144, 458, 465, 472 and reality 29, 330, 732 secrets of/to 95, 132, 538 social (See social) and stories/tales 192, 324, 330–31, 334, 338, 457, 724 and storytelling 266, 312, 318–19, 331, 422, 427, 606 and texts 159, 167, 322, 345, 528, 551, 556–57 and writers/authors 301, 338, 540, 545, 707 life stories 63, 68–69, 74–75, 97, 168, 174, 176, 179, 206, 218, 283, 334, 396, 399, 410–11, 427, 459–61, 473–74, 526, 542, 552, 578, 606 limbo 89, 91, 393, 423, 593, 728 liminal(ity) 93, 121, 123, 242, 258, 283, 284, 366, 468, 505, 526, 530, 661, 663–64 figures 653, 655 notion/sense of 122, 641 phase 205–6, 546, 597 situations 148, 211, 238, 241, 242, 411, 422, 461, 707–8

800 liminal(ity) (cont.) space 352, 363, 440, 655, 656, 694 state of 51, 82–83, 89, 91, 100, 116, 128, 232, 236, 266, 303, 582–83, 657, 710 zone/sphere of 458, 549 linear 68, 160, 165, 167, 213–14, 395, 515. See also chronology history 442, 446 narrative 220–21, 652, 669 linearity 222, 398, 428 linguistic. See also language(s) anomalies/peculiarities 264, 268 boundaries 620 form, constructs 314–15 hybridity 268, 348 liberties (re. translations) 290–91 signs 223 listener(s) 384, 427, 457–58, 705–7. See also audience literary 425, 433, 442, 733. See also journal(s) canon 358, 543 characters 105, 456, 535–36, 635 critics/criticism 294, 407 experiments 9, 571–72 expression, freedom of 644–45 figures 21, 316, 384, 558, 688 form(s) 213, 248, 269, 451 heritage 272, 665 Arabic 6 ‘Oriental’ 635 heroes 540, 558 models 271, 300 modernism 22, 118, 131, 274–75 Argentine 271 motifs/topoi 558–59 postmodernism 539 sources 513, 629 space/environment 224, 422 strategy 151, 195, 223, 285, 344, 363, 423, 433, 701 techniques/methods 248, 295, 333, 361, 363, 541–42 texts/works 7, 10, 19, 54, 94, 247, 248–49, 259, 316, 332, 397, 513, 547, 608, 650 traditions 291, 360, 362, 425, 547, 556, 627 Arabic 625–27, 632

Index of Subjects European 96 German 22 Spanish 361 trends 1, 539 tropes 252, 622 universe 292, 300 writers/authors 523, 533 literati 1, 6, 248, 629, 641, 685 literature 9, 24, 102, 106, 140, 174, 259, 271, 287–88, 301, 322, 355, 371, 421, 446, 449, 451, 481, 483, 536–38, 598, 644. See also fiction(al); novel(s) adab 6, 626 American 539 Arabic 10, 188, 627, 630, 632, 668, 688, 699 Argentine 270, 272–74, 283, 300, 304 European 1, 6, 10, 39, 247, 408, 482, 531 foreign 284–85 Hebrew 448 high(brow) 626, 632 Latin American 300, 408, 410 as means of self-expression 228–29 modern(ist) 1, 118, 149, 408–9, 626–27, 733 Argentine 271, 283 Danish 487 Egyptian and Arabic 629, 639 European 408 Hungarian 530 Japanese 228 nature of 438, 442 new movements/forms in 268, 407 and politics 130, 189, 650 popular 6, 626–27, 632 pseudo- 529, 536 Spanish 358 travel 527 (See also travel(ing)) twentieth-century 13, 701, 733 of West/western 228, 285, 408, 409–10, 630 world 1, 3, 4, 6, 10, 14, 203, 283, 407, 408, 410, 423, 527, 733 locked (up) 432, 434, 718, 723. See also confinement; imprisonment room 292–93, 413, 702, 708–9, 713–14, 723–25 (See also closed; forbidden)

Index of Subjects longing. See yearning loss/lost 60, 124, 126, 136, 143, 211, 349, 425, 431, 540, 549, 555, 589, 637–38, 702, 709, 716–17, 721, 726 of beloved 207, 241, 315 love 14, 89–90, 169–70, 187, 230–31, 259, 367, 461, 472–73, 517, 538, 580, 648, 679–80. See also marriage adulterous/illicit 166, 169, 179 adventure(s) 64, 185, 508 affairs 62, 77–79, 159, 168, 172, 177–78, 183, 530, 552, 673 and/of art 101, 162, 280 and/vs. sexual(ity) 90, 122, 124, 466 and eroticism 543, 555, 604 of hero 77, 92, 115, 196 as illusion 534 initiations into 34–37, 60, 73, 220 and jealousy 634, 638 vs. knowledge 647 and language 353–55 motifs of 204, 486, 655 mystical/abstract 355, 649, 650 and narration 331, 355 perfect 281–82 perpetuation of 282–83 physical/bodily 353, 469, 674 power/force of 87, 220, 222, 379, 432 romances/romantic 185, 379, 655, 674 search for 65, 535, 698 and separation/loss 28, 136, 207 stories 82, 136, 163, 181–82, 198, 379, 589, 607 and time 144, 148, 238, 242, 315 true 486, 534, 649, 665–66 and violence 64 lover(s) 50, 71, 182, 218, 565, 578, 670, 682 luck 32, 50, 490–91. See also chance; coincidence lunatics 368, 371. See also insanity; madmen lust(s) 36, 62, 73, 87–88, 384, 501–2, 505, 511, 637, 659–60 for life and pleasure 45, 76 for power and wealth 415, 432, 523, 656 for women, as objects of 206, 634, 680 macabre 502–3, 691 machines 195–96, 300, 305–8, 310–13, 316, 325

801 macrocosm(ic) 97, 102, 257–58, 443 madmen 371, 390. See also insanity; lunatics /beggar-saint 661 as guise 662–63 madness 433, 639, 665 magazines 53, 253 magic(al) 29, 146–47, 198, 202–3, 248, 274, 289, 298, 316, 335, 364, 390–91, 394, 402–3, 407, 422, 438, 503, 513, 546, 646–47, 676, 728, 732 acts of 135, 706 aura/ambience 208, 428, 529 carpet 161–62, 399 elements 294, 402, 407, 424 enclosure/space 417, 709 evil, and counter-magic 204, 209 forces/powers 27, 39, 203, 209, 299, 424, 457, 509, 515–16, 682, 726, 728 idea of 403, 426, 492 intervention 362, 680–81 lamps/lanterns 6, 253, 413, 439, 486, 515 motifs/tropes 204, 549, 655 and Nights 107, 534, 542, 548, 557, 560–61 notebooks 724, 725–26 objects (ring, stone, etc.) 46, 233, 235, 486, 509, 515, 554, 676, 725–26 and reality 39, 407, 410, 430, 681, 701 and Shahrazad 644, 682 spells 228, 294, 656 stories/tales of 14, 82–83, 413, 693 and technology 513, 523, 560, 685–86 transportation 204, 554 world/realm 8, 24, 73, 76, 119, 162, 201, 254, 268, 490–91, 508, 557, 693 magical realism 13, 200, 203, 223–24, 407–9, 410, 415–17, 423–24, 430, 435, 439, 503, 651, 682, 701 magician 417, 500, 633 Magnetic Mountain 502, 508, 683 Mahabharata 425 Mahdism 501 maidens/girls 73, 97–98, 101, 180, 220, 441, 648, 683. See also sex; women beautiful 76, 97, 161, 510, 606 as captives/imprisonment of 17, 32, 97, 228 sacrifice of 82, 180 seduction/sexuality of 177, 461, 469, 503

802 Majnun Layla 607 make-believe 583, 648, 680 manipulation 153, 167, 174–75, 184, 229–30, 300–301, 311, 315–16, 429, 430, 477, 599–600, 609–10, 655, 659, 662, 665, 688–89, 691 of characters 341–42 of events 179, 583, 657–58 by narration/storytelling 58, 116, 123, 180–81, 222, 329–30, 450, 586 of readers 323 of reality 179, 199, 277, 584, 589 of spatial settings/boundaries 581, 621, 655 of stories/tales 121, 308, 577 mankind 86, 372, 491, 495, 514, 519, 700, 723. See also common folk; humanity; men map(s) 404, 464, 538, 579, 703, 710 marginal(ity) 164, 206, 269, 285–86, 592–93, 597–98, 608, 653 life 593, 598 others 269–70 marginalization 445, 668 marriage/matrimony 255, 326, 490, 517–18, 581, 670, 673–74 of hero 64, 72 lawful/legal 73, 186, 198 martyr(dom) 108–9 marvel(s)/marvelous 24, 44, 202, 224, 254, 335, 412, 424, 527, 529, 535, 637 figures 43, 207 Marxism/Marxists 506, 670–71, 673, 688 masculine/masculinity 64. See also men and feminine 182 ideal/paragon of 163, 185, 202, 574 masks/costumes 35, 134, 206, 471, 566–67 masquerade (ball) 565–66, 569–70 Masrur and Ja‘far 88 massacres 99, 446, 465, 469, 472–73, 686, 692 Sharpeville (1960) 396 mass(es) 458, 499 culture 301 vs. individuals 455, 458 popular 671–72 slaughter/execution 421, 452, 461, 465 master(s) 132, 290, 436, 490–91 and slaves 66, 92, 183, 516 and victims 436, 690

Index of Subjects material 190, 263, 280, 286, 291, 302, 379, 499, 506, 605, 669 environment 94, 221, 262, 560, 639, 728 form 162, 298–99, 365, 475, 576, 616 life 634, 641 objects 137, 145–46, 297, 464 materialism 27, 41, 189, 253, 506, 518, 522–23, 580, 640, 663 materiality 109 of body 464, 466–67, 469, 475–76 matrix(es) 61, 66, 135–36, 155–56, 370, 420, 468, 545, 635, 678 intertextual 77, 123 narrative 136, 435, 499, 545, 570, 572, 578 of Nights 156, 530, 570, 635, 678 of storytelling 370, 530 maturation/maturity 93, 112, 122, 214, 513 intellectual 95, 100 Mauritanian(s) 511, 516 Mazdakism 501 maze(s) 174–75, 292, 344, 579, 733. See also labyrinths of rooms, corridors, stairways 404, 709 meaning(s) 30, 149, 151, 242, 260–63, 267, 292, 298, 345, 365, 466, 471, 473, 481, 514, 587, 706–7, 716, 729 construction of 572, 580, 708 fragments of 94–95 hidden 40, 227, 249, 293, 575 layers of 26, 521 search/yearning for 650, 715 systems of 19, 40, 464, 468, 620, 708, 725–26, 732 mechanism(s) 118, 192–93, 228, 260, 307, 319, 329, 335, 724 of deferral 166, 337–38 narrative/of story 171, 302, 309, 312, 315, 335 of power 193–94, 345–46, 430, 468, 475, 612 mechanization 26, 560. See also modernization media 6, 257, 268, 313, 359, 518, 602, 616 new/modern 1–2, 212, 224, 253, 255 meditation(s) 49, 51, 722 megalomania 324, 561 Meiji (period) 228 memento mori 503, 510

Index of Subjects memoirs 21, 151, 442, 498 memory(ies) 40, 110–11, 134, 146, 166, 207, 218–19, 230–31, 249, 256–57, 261–62, 265, 300, 303–4, 308–9, 311–12, 316, 327, 399–400, 472–74, 579, 584, 593, 691–92 collective 316, 362, 377, 477, 543–44, 698 construction/development of 117–18, 302, 305, 309, 312 crisis of 118–19 false/artificial 301, 312 vs. forgetting 280–81 fragments of 461–62 and history 377, 437–38, 476–77, 574 and imagination 394, 695, 710 involuntary 119, 121 nature of 119, 167 personal 38, 257, 302, 316 power of 708–10, 715 preservation of 282, 306, 309, 315–16 repressed 695, 724 restoring/recovering 164, 169, 242, 405, 417, 714 traumatic 136, 148, 458, 670, 673 without/absence of 231, 240, 312, 473 men/male 34, 77, 201, 385, 432, 434, 506, 656 authority 186, 204 and desires/urges 196, 199, 200–201, 697 dominance 43, 181, 188, 190, 196 fantasies 186, 188, 196, 199, 205 ‘future man’ 522–23 modern 519, 522–23, 576 ‘narrated man’ 526, 528, 538, 555, 557 nature of 64, 77 ‘new man’ 220, 506, 521, 672, 675, 676, 681, 688 patriarchal 180, 186 and power 180, 490–91, 566, 603 sexuality 194 Shahriyar, identity as 206, 440–41, 636, 638, 663 and surroundings/environment 560, 702, 708 vs. time and space/place 282, 635, 639 violence/oppression 43, 185, 194, 609 and women, relations with 185, 204, 571, 634, 673–74, 680 mental domains/universe 221, 345, 365, 568

803 equilibrium 657, 665–66 experience/development 538, 606 hospital 134–35, 178, 367, 661 integrity 370, 725 state/interior/space 37–39, 220, 241, 242, 310, 397, 440, 459–60, 496, 621, 634, 639, 653, 661, 701, 704, 707, 714, 721, 724 merchant(s) 135, 258, 305, 490, 525, 533, 552, 653, 655, 659, 663, 678, 696, 698, 706 Arab/eastern 274, 413 disguise of 558–59, 582, 661, 663 son of 26, 29–33, 50, 228 traveling/itinerant 401, 411 Mercury (planet) 97, 101 message(s) 28, 185, 190, 492, 515, 517, 575, 644, 649, 663, 722 feminist 198–99, 200 pessimistic 475, 515, 691 political 665, 698 metafiction(ality) 164, 317, 408, 589 as technique/strategy 151, 461 and textuality, theme of 13 metaliterary 158 metamorphosis(es) 83, 100, 101, 110, 121, 172, 196, 214, 221, 311, 356–57, 359, 408, 432, 499, 566, 621, 641, 659. See also transformation of life 111–12 motif/theme of 27, 88, 98, 199, 655 metanarrative 292, 356, 395, 707 metaphor(ic) 26, 41, 194, 226–27, 263, 302, 312, 397, 426, 463, 467, 489, 535, 543, 639, 722 construct 402–3 of forbidden door 90–91 frame/network/matrix 151, 468, 691 of labyrinth 237 of night 120 substructure/layer 49, 77, 507 metaphysical 235, 280, 282, 518, 545 metareality 263 microcosm(ic) 96–97, 100, 102, 214, 257, 293, 336, 443 migrant(s) 430, 591, 595. See also immigrants migration 79, 94, 215, 431, 436–37, 593, 597–98. See also immigration militant(s) 598, 609, 692

804 mind(s) 88, 90, 97, 105, 189, 256, 259, 366, 420, 564, 645, 658, 709–10, 714 control 310, 313 manipulation of 83, 89 ‘mindscapes’ 38 minerals/precious stones 96, 101. See also jewels minotaur 692 miracle(s)/miraculous 43, 133, 282, 296–97, 382, 385, 396, 405, 469, 490 East/Orient as 507, 538 escapes 196, 661, 680 powers/faculties 424, 425 mirage(s) 82, 104, 292, 390, 392, 509, 583 mirror-for-princes 581 mirror(s) 324, 456, 634. See also double images 63, 68, 72, 286, 342, 392, 451, 554, 579, 580, 582–83, 718 miscegenation 382, 392 mise en abîme 292, 326, 327, 329, 334, 336, 545, 701 misogyny/misogynistic 185, 193–94, 665 mistress(es) 84, 177, 529, 534, 634, 647 mobility 51, 57, 60–61, 64, 67, 74, 535, 538, 555, 593–95, 597, 598, 637, 664 motif/theme of 525, 637 permanent 72, 593–95 modernism/modernist 19 n.4, 22, 39, 112, 216, 223, 271, 284, 313–14, 317, 377, 407, 494, 496–97, 521, 557, 572, 641 Argentine 271, 273, 300 Austrian 21–22 Egyptian 528, 641, 642 European 118, 131, 275 experimentalism 24, 33, 39, 409 French 2 German 494 Hungarian 528 Japanese 224, 229 transition to 488–89 Weltschmerz 523 writers/authors 13, 93, 115–16, 540, 621 modernity 18, 31, 91, 115, 129, 130–31, 133–34, 140, 143–46, 268, 485, 488, 494, 496, 529, 538, 560, 564, 570, 683, 688, 699 adoption/imposition of 139, 611 advance of 416, 568

Index of Subjects and/vs. tradition 144–46, 531, 536, 573, 639–40 in Arab world 645–46 conditions of 495, 590, 700 critique of 27, 41 Danish 487, 492 dictatorial responses to 369 dilemmas/fears of 499, 559 European 1, 272, 442, 630 forms of 139, 269, 515, 611, 645 rise/emergence of 284, 483, 536, 555 vision of 224, 270, 668 modernization 129, 133–34, 145, 489–90, 528, 537, 572, 630, 665, 685 effects of 148, 242, 269 processes of 138, 224, 573–74, 611, 642 money 34, 47, 110, 436, 522, 536, 659, 672, 683–84, 688. See also riches; wealth monoculture(al) 369, 513 monolingual(ism) 355, 369 monolithic culture/self 360–61, 369, 630 identities 637 language 354–55 visions 43, 439, 638 worldview/interpretations 395, 401 monster(s) 197, 202, 207, 359, 432, 441, 456, 498–99, 503 within 88, 393 sea 546, 548–50 Moor(s)/Moorish 163, 199, 334, 412, 486, 515, 537 sorcerers 486, 493 moral(s)/morality 6, 22, 27, 35, 44, 50, 80, 91, 139, 185, 273, 282, 401, 432, 437, 448, 476, 488, 522, 568, 614, 651–52, 656, 663–66, 669 authority 49, 423, 656 choice 661–62 codes 400, 405, 434, 651 dilemma(s) 29, 38, 448, 655 dimensions 661, 664 lack of 388 (See also immorality) lessons 339, 510 restraints/boundaries 46, 77 and society 434, 438 mortality 147, 281, 465, 510, 588

Index of Subjects mother(s) 121–22, 124, 172, 174, 186, 206, 232–34, 240–41, 414, 427, 431, 564, 647. See also family; father(s) motif(s) 22, 29, 37, 55, 101, 121, 172, 179, 181, 252–53, 259, 264, 342, 356, 400, 502, 543, 555, 570, 659, 707, 725. See also theme(s); tropes of 602nd night 292 of 1002nd night 690, 699 of Aladdin 486 of Arab immigrants 412 of caliph/Harun al-Rashid 558–59 of City of Brass 652 of clairvoyance 417 of confinement/closed spaces 124, 710, 714 of deferral/postponement 149, 153, 337 of despotism 627 of double 553, 718, 720, 725 of forbidden/locked door/room 17, 20, 61, 64, 75–77, 90–91, 293, 725 of interruptions 328 of journeys/mobility 204, 525, 551 of love 204, 486, 655 of magic/sorcerers 204, 486, 655 of metamorphosis 98, 655 of narration and survival 149, 153, 159, 176 of/from Nights 26, 27–28, 31, 33, 39, 50–51, 61, 64, 75–76, 118, 149, 152, 176, 185, 203–4, 220, 258, 274, 335, 363, 412, 434, 459, 476, 483–84, 560, 572, 652, 655, 664, 691, 694 of Shahrazad 164, 172, 264–65, 442, 628, 659, 691 of Shahriyar 164, 442, 628 spatiotemporal 17, 417 of twins 545, 549, 551, 553 movies. See films/movies/cinema multicultural(ism) 482, 591, 596, 598, 610 society 593, 598 multiform(ity) 336, 642 multiplicity 43, 173, 354–55, 357, 370 murder 62, 86, 233, 240, 368, 382, 441, 465, 661, 662–63 mystery 340–44 muse(s) 164, 282, 578 museum(s) 594

805 of mannequins 573, 576, 580 of monsters/curiosities 200, 202, 207 music(ians) 87, 130, 140–41, 591, 615–16, 618 raï 598 Muslim(s) 293, 360, 423, 431, 433, 611, 631. See also Islam(ic) mystery(ies)/mysterious 62, 68–69, 76, 122, 144, 227, 273, 286–87, 292–95, 318, 331, 339–40, 346, 421, 449, 453, 503, 510, 522, 529–32, 546, 565, 575, 578, 650 atmosphere 161, 498, 529 figures 385, 391, 520, 523, 531, 634, 647–48, 663 forces/power 26, 28, 141, 297, 323, 386, 417, 424, 430, 532, 620 of Orient/oriental 41, 104 realm 103–4, 154, 161–62, 229, 288, 363, 526 spaces/places 36, 96, 174, 403–4, 508 state/condition 215, 498 symbols/signs 75, 214 of texts/books 297–98, 321–22, 340–43, 507 mysticism/mystical 86, 90, 280, 287, 293, 355, 367, 370, 492, 502, 506, 523, 575, 587, 651, 666, 698 accounts (hikaya) 355–56 elements/components 363, 370, 635, 660 experience 370, 521, 648–49, 660 union 356, 364, 370, 640, 649, 650 vision 356–57 mystics 360, 367, 523, 577, 588, 639, 648, 660, 697 mystification 6, 7, 283, 288–89, 292, 400, 402 mythical/mythological 363, 411, 415–16, 425, 436, 600, 695, 714 myth(s) 189, 378, 381, 391, 400–401, 405, 409, 410, 415–16, 419–20, 430, 438, 443–44, 701 of Argentine authenticity 295 of Boers 396 foundation 360–61 and history/of past 270, 419, 435–36 (See also history) of origin 307, 400, 431 of Spain 359 of wandering hero 548 of women 441

806 nahda (renaissance) 629, 630 n.1, 645 naïve/naïveté 37, 46, 102, 190, 289, 488, 643 nakba (loss of Palestine in 1948) 459, 674 naked/nude 103, 162, 566 names 260, 356, 471, 552, 585 from Nights 655 narcissism 30–31, 324, 464 narrated 192, 470, 586, 653, 690 events 54, 121, 154, 226, 526, 716 figures 556, 622 person/self 155–56, 704, 715 reality 53, 156, 577 realm/world 370, 577, 653 stories 273, 658 time 38, 128, 222, 243 narration 1, 106–7, 116, 170, 171, 174, 176, 179, 199, 260, 282, 285, 298, 317, 346, 426, 437–39, 442, 461, 593, 607, 620, 729, 731–32 act of 56, 99, 149, 364, 369, 462–63, 471, 477, 585, 622 aim/purpose of 169, 280 and alter egos/identities 578, 586 and body/corporeality 353, 463, 471, 475, 477 continuing/prolonging 102, 123, 149, 158, 181–82, 265–66, 331, 419, 422, 451, 704, 726, 733 and deferral/postponement of death/ execution 123, 149–50, 153, 158, 164, 183, 266, 330–31, 726–27, 732 and desire/eroticism 121–22, 127, 163–64, 181, 185, 206, 210, 330, 543, 554 forms of 112, 155, 262, 406, 441, 476, 554, 572, 585, 605, 695, 728 and freedom/liberation 370, 438, 554, 645 function/role of 61, 181, 377, 444, 728 and history 377, 397, 419 incentive for 170, 461 and interruption 222, 730 and journeys/adventures 116, 527, 532 labyrinth/web of 282–83, 587, 705 laws and properties of 556, 586 levels of 317, 319, 384 and liminality 121, 128, 352, 461, 708 and memory 242, 315–16 nature of 93, 321, 331, 348, 476, 585, 725

Index of Subjects process of 48, 121, 158, 279, 331, 356, 370, 406, 427, 444, 585, 705, 733 and reality 121, 127, 171, 181, 197, 462–63, 577, 585 and salvation/redemption 442, 475–76, 705 self-generating 318, 407, 588, 590 source of 107, 183, 325, 370, 461, 556 universe/realm of 324, 335, 345, 725, 728 narrative(s) 3, 41–42, 52, 59–61, 63, 73–74, 121, 170–71, 179–80, 197–99, 222, 225, 247, 257, 279, 315, 329, 335–39, 363, 369, 445, 499, 540, 575, 579, 639, 691 authenticity of 47–48 and body 356, 463 character 386, 462, 593 clusters 204, 261, 264 as coherent 42, 48, 74, 94, 221, 275, 382, 384, 386, 474 complex 190, 200, 328 components 73, 460, 546 concepts 10, 14, 184, 229, 251, 253, 258, 418, 422 constructions 34, 127, 149, 388, 468, 575, 586, 654, 658 and counter-narratives 196, 262 and death/execution 44, 344 destabilization of 57, 423, 555 development 261, 275, 594 devices 33, 249, 318–19, 384, 411, 430, 541 elements/nodes 9, 76, 90, 124, 190, 266, 287, 300, 395, 435, 511, 570, 593, 621 events of 28, 43, 47–48, 56, 118, 127 fabulous/fantastic 189, 617 fictional 17–18, 57, 276, 423 forms 19, 42, 282, 317, 363, 386, 554 frames 194, 249, 531, 544–45 functions/roles of 318, 384, 392–93, 616, 620, 710 historical 379, 398, 437, 476–77 and imagination 48, 181, 695 incomplete 344, 384 labyrinthine/mazes 549, 705, 733 laws 196, 377, 384 layers of/within 53, 199, 258–59, 335, 420, 462, 572, 681 levels 50–51, 95, 229, 231, 319, 384, 391, 552, 580, 722

Index of Subjects logic 57, 64, 94, 312, 377, 384, 419, 544 markers 43, 261 material 2, 4, 26, 273, 285, 300, 325, 451, 541, 543–44 model(s) 29, 33, 61, 119, 155, 255, 629, 733 modes 419, 635 motifs 25, 76–77, 101, 172, 258, 417, 664, 708 origin of 51, 554 parameters 42, 260 patterns 101, 225, 389 performances 43, 349, 471 possibilities 222, 331, 558 and postponement 422, 459 potential 293, 338, 442, 525, 541, 564, 597 and reality 42–44, 54–56, 57, 180, 225, 339, 377, 461, 464, 586, 701, 732 realm/world 171, 276, 336, 456, 556, 658, 665, 704 representation 53, 398, 472 self-generating/self-reproducing 57, 283, 316, 324 sources 325, 556, 639 of space/spatial 18–19, 39, 42, 57, 335, 379, 653, 664 strategies 10, 14, 26, 47, 57, 159, 167, 194, 200, 259, 292, 301, 318, 320, 326, 344–45, 388, 394, 408, 422, 423–25, 448, 459, 461, 463, 545, 621 structures 22, 28, 37, 77, 81, 94, 124, 234, 247, 251, 333, 337, 389, 394, 395, 462, 464, 550, 654, 658, 669 sub- 54 techniques 2, 10, 19, 26, 38, 123, 172, 176, 300, 320, 394, 422, 560, 579–80 tension/suspense 168, 286, 434, 546, 653, 657, 664 and texts 19, 54, 58, 149, 158, 283, 317, 328, 377, 417, 484, 555 and time 39, 115, 222, 379, 417, 475–77 tradition 332, 664 truth 56, 468 narrativity 378, 380, 406, 459, 557, 701–2 narratology 12, 77, 258, 261, 292, 298, 335, 385–86, 627 narrator(s) 56, 100, 119, 274, 320, 322, 353, 399, 543–44, 545, 550 anonymous 320, 322, 433, 438

807 and characters/heroes 63, 105, 121, 547, 589 and continuation of narrative 175, 182, 587, 720, 733 death of 168, 184, 587 and identification with hero/ characters 528, 547, 551 identity of 155, 261 and interruptions/interference 105, 222, 547 and narrated/narrating 99, 690 omniscient 51, 111 perspectives of (first person/third person) 51, 154, 160, 165, 547, 588 powers of 125, 516 and references to Nights 119, 152, 529 role/liminality of 121–23, 283, 366 on writing 462, 728 nationalism/national(ist) 270–71, 285, 304, 358, 362, 369, 405, 481, 496, 501, 561, 573, 611–12, 616, 629, 668, 672, 688, 699 Afrikaner 396, 399, 402 conservative 503, 505 identities 270–71, 284, 488, 573, 611, 629, 646, 671 ideology 367, 611 independence/liberation 667–68, 687 interest/capitalism 437, 496 myths 357, 400 Russian 617 Spanish 362 National Socialist movement 504 nation(hood) 130, 138, 140, 269–70, 430, 438, 448, 477, 485, 494, 497, 645, 667, 670–71, 677–79, 688 Arab 673, 688 western/European 23, 129, 482, 646, 699 nature 17, 98, 144, 486, 492, 523, 555, 633. See also human(s) cycles of 443, 645 harmony of/with 68, 443–44, 506 vs. supernatural 9 Nazism/Nazis 212, 446–47, 493–94, 500, 503–4 Negro (blood) 382 neo-colonialism 670 neologisms 267, 290 New Age 201

808 New American Fiction 539 new man/New Man 220, 506, 521, 672, 675, 676, 681, 688 New Objectivity 497 newspapers 70, 178, 226, 253 Nibelungen cycle 274 nightmare(s) 29, 82, 295, 297, 311, 404, 498. See also dream(s) night(s)/nocturnal 97, 120, 261, 352–53, 371, 403–4, 573, 582, 633 272nd 293 1002nd 646, 678, 690, 691, 695 and/vs. day 263, 353, 371, 559, 582 as disruptive 266 spectator 558–59 nihilism 272, 496, 518–20, 523 Nobel Prize (for literature) 488, 627, 650 nobility 531, 569. See also aristocracy; elites nomad(ic) 79–80, 89, 359–60, 536, 594, 596, 598, 608–9 nomadism 57, 67, 371, 404, 596–97 non-being 275–78, 280, 282 non-Christian society 8 non-European(s) 19, 591 languages 6 non-fiction 398, 626 works 285, 287, 291, 300, 626 non-linear coherence 165, 221 non-text(ual) 299 forms of expression 592 Nordic sagas 274 normalcy/normality 186, 208, 210, 560, 691 normal(ized) 106, 166, 168, 208, 234, 238, 247, 321, 416, 523, 638, 650 people 294, 559, 650 norm(s)/standard(s) 23, 50, 138, 235, 348. See also evil(s); good of adab 6, 626 western 79, 408 North, and Orient/orientalized 486, 488 nostalgia 46, 131, 138, 146, 212, 271, 421, 483, 524, 526, 529, 532, 555, 572, 593, 690 notable(s) 552, 653, 655, 659. See also aristocracy; elites; nobility notebook(s) 53–54, 70, 107, 208, 263, 267, 421, 714, 721, 725–26, 731 carnet 594–95, 606 note(s) 25, 53, 74, 340–41, 442

Index of Subjects nothingness 67, 280, 472, 517, 720. See also nihilism ‘le nouveau roman’ 93–94 novelistic mode/qualities 419, 421–22, 425 text/narrative 260, 652 tradition 94, 262, 442, 650–51 vision 571, 669 novella(s) 22, 25, 27–28, 46, 117, 213, 447 novel(s) 55–56, 112, 131, 174, 177, 226, 275–82, 301, 317, 332, 372, 380, 381–82, 442, 499, 650. See also fiction(al); literature beginnings of/coming into being 321, 451 end/completion of 275, 279, 383, 589 and epics 419, 422 as genre 47, 302 historical 200, 381 structure of 330, 342, 392 objectivity 18, 131, 332, 397–98 object(s) 29–30, 94, 98, 122, 229, 234–35, 251, 294, 314–16, 327, 334–35, 339, 402, 498, 576–77, 585, 600, 706, 731 body as natural 463–64 book as 297, 303 oriental [e.g., kaftan, burka, dagger, flying carpets] 140, 152, 161, 392, 412, 531, 602 (See also oriental) sexual/women as 64, 124, 170, 189, 198–99, 204, 206–7, 680 obscene/obscenity 5, 225, 290 obscurantism 188, 645 obscure/obscurity 249, 346, 718 obsession(s)/obsessive 62–63, 65, 68, 159, 165–66, 174, 192, 394, 402, 441, 538, 572, 595, 601, 633, 637, 658, 698, 706 behavior 43, 247 of hero 152, 165 with time 118, 132, 199 obstacle(s) 77, 115–16, 185, 198, 205, 662, 701 overcoming 60, 73, 662 spatial 17, 38 Occident 36, 288, 350, 362 occult(ism) 95–98, 100–102, 249, 649. See also magic(al) odalisque(s) 253, 596, 599, 608–9 topos of 602–4 Odysseus 257–58, 507, 527, 540, 552

Index of Subjects Oedipus complex 234 ogre(s) 389–90. See also monsters Olympia [odalisque] 609 omnipresence 496, 602 of death 123 of fate 697 of Nights 2, 11 ontology/ontological doubt/skepticism 223, 388, 407 questions 539 relationships 555 open(ness) 40, 284, 418–19, 438 spaces 41, 115 opera(s) 616 operetta(s) 632 opposite(s)/opposition(s) 36, 40, 51, 60, 80, 90, 208, 364, 368, 397, 583, 653, 707, 732 oppression/oppressive 209, 348–49, 359, 369, 483, 663, 685, 695 colonial 63, 350 male 185, 194, 609 motifs of 181 political, of regimes/governments 213, 300, 370 relationships 150, 201 and Shahrazad 632, 646 to women 196, 402, 440 oral(ity) 298, 362, 626 storytelling 4, 285, 290, 362, 370 order 36, 256–57, 308, 315, 325, 365, 408, 411, 424–25, 426, 442, 444, 523, 567, 657, 704, 706, 708. See also coherence i.e., ordering principle 286, 362 secret 286, 299 spatial 335, 654–55, 723–24 spiritual 27, 518 temporal 119, 277, 723 Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS; Secret Armed Organisation) 613 Orient 19, 28, 44–45, 79, 140, 249, 269, 270, 486, 570 definition of 45, 252 and dualism/dichotomy with Europe 26, 41 and (spiritual) escape 45, 497 as fantasy/magical realm 254, 268, 557 as idea/concept 252, 254, 288–89, 481, 483, 532, 570

809 imaginary/imagined 270, 482–83 and Nights 22, 264, 271, 273, 288–89, 292, 362, 487, 508, 557 and Occident 36, 288 references to 20, 37, 252, 273, 512 representations of 272–73, 481, 599, 603, 617 and sexuality/eroticism 45–46, 79, 161, 501–2 ‘spirit’ of 27, 37, 39 and western/Europe(an) attitudes/ interest 4, 7–8, 63, 161, 272–73, 481, 483, 487, 507–8, 601 oriental aesthetics 599, 603 atmosphere/environment 28, 161, 599, 607, 617 despotism 507–8 exoticism 10, 269, 599 figures 155, 253–54, 490, 512, 531, 537 garb/outfits 47, 50, 254, 594, 603, 605 -Irish identity 253 languages 592, 593 motifs 199, 254–55, 264, 273–74 nature, of Russia 617–18 and Nights 253–54, 392, 497, 608 objects/style 47, 72, 79, 602, 680, 723 (See also object(s)) references 251, 255, 259, 264 roots, of Hungarian culture 537–38 scholars 23, 290 society(ies) 5, 7, 272–73, 497 stereotypes/cliches 72, 79, 104, 155, 161–63, 248, 254, 272, 274, 392, 431, 493, 602, 608–9, 680, 723 orientalism 2, 6, 8, 13–14, 24, 41, 248, 254, 263–64, 268, 269, 270–71, 274, 481–82, 484, 487, 493, 603–4, 610 and/from Nights 248, 263–64, 505, 600, 608 of Arlt 273–74 Austrian 22–23, 483 concept of 485, 599–600 Danish 487, 488, 493 definition of 252–53, 570 Edward Said on 2, 252–53, 269, 481–82, 591–92, 599, 610, 621 European/western 19, 23, 269, 271, 483, 617

810 forms/types of 10, 19, 33, 34, 253, 270, 485, 497, 507, 591 German 483, 494 of Gide 44 and (self-)identification 13, 487, 570 of Joyce 252–53, 264, 268 of Jünger 505, 507–8 and modernity 488, 494 of Oehlenschläger 487, 493 and Ottoman Empire/Turkey 497, 570 popular/in popular culture 253, 259 of Rimsky-Korsakov 617 romantic 254, 271, 557 Spanish 270 of von Hofmannsthal 27, 33, 34, 41 orientalist(s) art/paintings 592, 593, 599–600, 602–4 European 316, 625, 627 ‘othering’ 20 system of representation 600–601, 603 origin 59, 304, 335, 434 myth of 307, 400, 431 orillas 284–85 orphan stories/tales (of Nights) 4, 6 orthodoxy 501, 657 other/‘Other’ 19, 40–41, 59, 63, 127, 182, 268, 269–70, 298, 350, 357, 358, 369–70, 391, 394, 481–83, 568, 574, 587, 600, 609, 636 construction of 483, 609, 636 discourses of 599, 610 external and internal 446, 485 identification with 556, 610 images of 599–600 oriental 2, 8, 20, 248, 482–84, 591–92, 622 Orient as 27, 268 Palestinian 448 religious 7 otherworld(s) 156–59, 171, 175–76, 182, 184 outcast(s) 272, 475, 595 outer/outside 29, 105, 160, 315–16, 320, 324, 336, 383, 420, 544, 547 forces 74, 127, 129, 221, 239 vs. inner/inside 59, 74, 117, 125, 237, 241, 464, 466, 637, 655 interventions 93, 164, 521, 658, 708 reality 237, 251, 302, 402, 638, 701 time and/or space 59, 104, 315, 417, 639, 699

Index of Subjects world(s) 30, 32–33, 37–38, 51, 60, 71–72, 75, 89, 91, 106, 111–12, 117–18, 125, 251, 256, 359, 412–13, 512, 528, 577, 636, 646, 653–55, 679, 708, 710, 714, 715, 723 outsider(s) 62, 121, 268, 385, 393, 595 Ouvrière de la Littérature Potentielle (‘Laboratory of Potential Literature’; OULIPO) 13, 319, 332 pain 108–9, 136, 247, 255, 266, 308, 315, 511, 569, 648 painting(s) 96, 140, 216, 233, 493, 591, 710 palace(s) 60–61, 84–85, 177, 334–35, 403–4, 489, 502, 507, 510, 558–59, 582, 633, 636–37, 642–43, 646–47, 649, 654–55, 659, 661, 671, 685. See also castle(s) blissful 90, 220, 335 enchanted/magical 17, 335, 390, 676 imprisonment in 32 (See also confinement) Pandora’s box 263, 389, 394 paradise/paradisiacal 363, 425, 648 paradox(es) 139, 186, 211, 730–31 parallel(s) 136, 150, 163, 270, 281, 337, 571, 588, 619, 724, 728 between characters 64, 163–64, 203 conceptual 164, 411, 439 intertextual 11, 462 with Nights 13, 50–51, 57, 152, 181, 203, 220, 225, 240, 579 and À la recherché du temps perdu 123 and Arabian nights and days 652, 664 and The black book 578 and Finnegans wake 265–66 and If on a winter’s night … 325 and Infernal desire machines 198–99 and Nights at the circus 202 and Shahrazad [play] … 629 and Shame 433 and Yalo 461 reality(ies) 171, 227, 722, 727 structural 121, 228, 231, 261, 461–62, 652 thematic 123, 151, 228, 266, 334 worlds/universes 227–28, 237, 301–2, 314, 534, 577 parents. See family; father(s); mother(s) parody 9, 100, 176, 183, 190, 194, 304

Index of Subjects passion(s) 64, 73–74, 80, 90–92, 124, 159, 161, 169, 280, 501, 513, 530, 534, 537, 548, 562, 569, 571, 615, 619, 659, 680. See also desire(s) control of/uncontrollable 91–92, 616, 652, 661, 662 physical 634, 641, 647–48 passive/passivity 227, 603, 660, 672, 677, 680 of anti-heroes 185 past 82, 138, 183–84, 259, 277, 296, 425, 518, 560, 729 and/or present 91, 109, 118–19, 121, 138, 166, 226–27, 235, 242, 271, 299, 377–78, 381, 384, 387–88, 393, 406, 417, 424, 477, 514, 570, 669, 676, 681, 690–91, 724, 729 disruption/rupture with 130–31, 136, 143, 369, 496, 505, 514, 573, 641 eastern/oriental 79, 537–38 estrangement from 212, 221, 241, 350 fragments of 70, 74, 160 and future 119, 166, 221–22, 235–36, 299, 393–94, 406, 417, 435, 437, 477, 522, 584, 681, 700, 710, 724, 729 and identity(ies) 138, 143, 212, 387 imagined 70, 418 memory(ies) 110–11, 121, 167, 169, 242, 314, 381, 477, 708, 710, 724 reconstruction of 242, 388, 474 reinvention of 284, 681 remnants of 81, 145, 382, 403, 510, 522, 576, 696 representations of 409 trauma(atic) 148, 241, 378, 395, 477 visions of 265, 271, 381, 406, 590 patriarchy/patriarchal 172, 180, 186, 209 pattern(s) 101, 225, 261, 294, 298, 321, 389, 440–41, 550, 655 spatio/spatiotemporal 33, 664 pederasty (in Nights) 267. See also perverse(ities) perdition 117, 379, 459, 461, 463. See also punishment peregrinatio vitae (life as a journey) 526–27. See also journeys performance(s) 43, 132, 349, 471, 559, 570, 583, 590 comedic 696

811 of storytelling 44, 193, 362, 440, 443, 447, 458, 460 theatrical/dance 175, 371, 612–13, 616, 619, 632 performer(s) 205, 362 perpetuation 313, 345. See also continuity(ies) of love/desire 116, 126–27, 283, 330–31 perpetuum mobile (perpetual motion) 57, 283, 362, 587 perspective(s) 18, 42, 462, 617, 669, 700. See also past; present first person/third person (See narrator(s)) narrative 43, 338, 461, 531 oriental(ist) 2, 255, 603 phenomenonological 468 post-death 175, 183–84 of reality(ies) 146, 318, 461 subjective 18, 165, 378, 387 perverse(ities)/perversions 62, 164, 182, 191, 193–94, 367, 455, 500–501, 522 phantom(s) 66, 95, 355, 391–93. See also ghost(s); ghouls; specters phenomenon(a) 122, 142, 236, 256, 298, 316, 317, 357, 364, 384, 387, 390, 449, 494, 498, 701 exotic/strange 204–5, 207, 215, 525–26, 664, 683 philology/philological 5–6, 23 perceptions of Nights 289, 486 philosophy/philosophical 147, 282, 287, 333, 443, 463, 505, 509, 521, 630–31, 642, 650, 671, 676 of history 512–13 of Jünger 504, 511 of life 35, 323, 505 of storytelling 727 photography/photograph(s) 70, 74, 115, 601–2, 604, 710, 714 physicality/corporeality 36, 353, 355, 370–71, 393 pirate(s)/pirate ship 551–52, 554 plays. See theater playwright(s) 632, 639, 695. See also theater pleasure(s) 57, 76–77, 126, 159, 162, 332, 359, 413–14, 510, 523, 534, 555, 569, 680 plot(s) 9, 47–49, 58, 68, 168, 174, 225, 298–99, 305–8, 346, 365, 378, 383–84,

812 plot(s) (cont.) 387–89, 394, 544, 545–46, 548–50, 632, 652, 666, 669, 732 construction/development of 247, 259, 273, 285, 384, 411, 547, 550, 653–54 continuation of 279 (See also continuity(ies)) deferral/postponement of 116, 317 and double plot 341–42 ending of 279, 315, 331 final 204, 542, 669, 729 lines 312, 548 multiple 285, 387 sub- 49, 201, 387, 654 poetics 214, 251, 255, 301, 332 of Borges 285, 289, 292–93, 298 of Goytisolo 361 of Perec 339 poetry/poems 22, 45, 53, 172, 332, 367, 472, 519, 585, 641–42, 691, 694 Persian 431–32 poet(s) 271, 360, 368, 431 polemics 603, 620, 646 political 148, 188, 189–90, 313, 408, 415, 511, 642, 670 activism 188, 358, 500, 598, 660 cause/struggle 190, 415, 597 dimensions 302, 408, 598, 599, 602 discourses/discussions of 380, 396, 408, 495, 592, 610, 622, 629, 646, 649, 668, 670, 691 groups 341, 501, 573, 630 messages 665, 698 power 651, 656 repression/oppression 370, 432, 591, 609, 651, 668 role, of Shahrazad 650 structure/establishment 128–29, 180, 432, 495, 505, 611 politics 130, 148, 189, 342, 424, 443, 448, 495, 497, 513, 538, 550, 573, 581, 615, 650, 654, 666, 682, 690, 699 leftists 494, 501, 573, 688 philosophy of 505, 511 and religion 642 rightists 494, 501 theme of 13, 628

Index of Subjects and writers/authors 188, 194, 372, 494, 699 poor. See poverty Popol Vuh 325 pornography 191–93, 196, 466, 502 positivism/positivist 409, 424–25 post-apocalyptic (dystopia/vision) 222, 502, 521, 523 postcolonial condition/situation 358, 425, 611 critique 610 discussions 591 hierarchies 408 period 348–49, 482 politics 423–24 postmodern(ism)/postmodernist 112, 127, 223–24, 304, 317, 407, 528, 539, 545, 555 condition 211–12, 217, 222, 241–42, 300, 313, 514 literature/fiction 223, 242, 408, 544, 550, 733 methods/techniques 213, 442, 448 society 212, 216, 220, 222, 363 writers/authors 13, 17, 93, 115–16, 148, 336, 540–41, 557, 621 postmodernity 221, 317, 523 postponement 39, 116, 127, 150, 164, 167, 258, 259, 283, 308, 322, 366, 395, 418, 421–22, 638, 672, 731–32. See also deferral of beginning or ending 181, 222, 276, 704 of death/execution 64, 66, 123, 136, 149–50, 153, 183, 205, 214, 231, 265, 317–18, 402, 405, 458, 648, 726–27 and narration 153, 164, 181, 222, 446, 726–27 of return/reunion 67, 166 and storytelling 214, 265, 283, 330, 402, 405, 427, 648 strategy of 89, 148–49, 205, 459 writing/text as form of 167, 421–22 poverty/the poor 131, 384, 486, 509, 522, 526, 530, 536, 560, 598, 655, 671, 673 spiritual 217 power(s) 127, 129, 181, 215, 247, 323, 385, 392, 403, 408, 419, 429, 432, 436, 438, 441, 446, 459, 475–76, 486, 490–91, 493, 505, 511–12, 519, 522–23, 559, 582, 600, 614,

Index of Subjects 620, 649, 650, 657, 661, 662, 664–66, 671–72, 689, 695 absolute 558, 563, 568–69, 581–82, 655 abuses of 345, 378, 516 n.81, 656, 699 and/of desire 196, 210, 656, 661 and/of imagination 82, 379, 441 and/of narration 194, 210, 378, 462, 554, 645, 694–95 balance of 567, 694–95 of caliphs and kings 563, 636–37 corruptive 656, 699 delusions of 523, 695 discourses of 59, 194, 408, 581 forms of 515, 568 generative 362, 677, 709–10 imperial 496, 561 inequality of/unbalanced 348, 454, 458, 603 invisible/hidden 660, 663 location of 636–37 lust for 414–15, 523, 656 magical 457, 516 narratives of 196, 476 (See also narrative(s)) of narrators 125, 516 over death 417 over women 62, 566 relations 424, 476, 497, 603 source/basis of 445, 504, 657 structures 193, 378 struggles 437, 454, 511–12, 522, 567, 629, 656 of texts/books 553, 722 theme of 656, 661 unlimited 523, 664 of words 111, 156, 187, 193 pragmatism/pragmatic 132, 420, 492, 650 predestination 419–20, 450, 490, 631, 641 prediction(s) 30, 232, 234–35, 293, 410–11. See also destiny; fate prehistory 175, 368, 405, 425, 476, 514, 551 pre-Islamic (times) 441 prejudice 186, 562, 591, 604. See also discrimination; racism premodern(ist) 361, 522, 540 preordained/predetermined 163, 167, 418 course of events 66–67

813 presence 58, 59, 70, 84, 144, 170, 303, 463, 465, 467, 469, 472, 583, 605, 620 present 148, 167, 214, 216, 382, 425, 435, 437, 515, 518, 560, 722. See also future(istic); past pre-war (ideology/tradition) 211–12, 222 priest(s)/priesthood 443–44, 489, 518 prime mover (of narration/story) 164, 282, 304 prince(s) 32, 50, 60, 83–84, 97, 208–9, 228, 368, 389, 393, 489, 532, 566, 577, 646–47, 682. See also king(s) erring, wandering 25–26 princess(es) 84, 115, 203, 209, 601, 684 imprisoned 390 (See also captivity; confinement; imprisonment) oriental 163, 493 prisoner(s) 71, 234 prison(s) 89, 153, 200, 205, 219, 429, 453, 466, 655, 717 procreation/fertility 81, 429, 467 women for 680 progress 41, 213, 282, 446, 489–90, 493, 498–99, 505, 515, 518, 523, 611, 687 prohibition(s) 75–76, 92, 600 prologue(s) 276–77, 279, 327, 531, 682 promiscuity 40, 159, 163 prophecy 239, 293 prophet(s)/prophetic 590, 658 ‘stories of’ (qisas al-anbiya’) 651 prose 626, 691 fiction 14, 539, 627 prosperity 139, 523, 590. See also wealth prostitute(s) 565, 577. See also whore protagonist(s) 49, 115, 117–18, 124, 127, 136, 148, 171, 175, 183, 204, 221, 243, 299, 315, 324, 402, 406, 421, 424, 438, 552, 556, 581, 677, 704. See also character(s); figure(s) adventures of 200, 424, 548 agency of 224, 665 and authors identification with 553, 555, 588–89, 715, 724, 732–33 (See also writers/authors) and references to Shahrazad 225, 551, 676 and texts 93, 329–31, 549, 714

814 Protestantism 492 pseudonym(s) 21, 108, 172–73, 301, 328, 450, 528, 533, 535, 550, 553, 577, 580, 717 psyche 72, 92 individual, human 25, 91, 141, 266, 570, 590, 621, 640 psychoanalysis 463, 564 psychology/psychological 31, 33, 64, 65, 73, 77, 90, 92, 119, 254, 273, 311, 448, 482, 488, 499, 509, 526, 556, 600, 631, 668. See also trauma(tic) approach 62, 646 disequilibrium/disruption 121, 128 elements/factors 384, 606 and Freud 303 and hybridity 248, 349 novels/thrillers 651, 661 of Shahriyar 44 state/condition 135, 137, 242, 247, 658 puberty 241, 552. See also adolescence punishment 71, 90, 179, 410, 461, 566, 654, 662 purification/purifying 445, 446, 468, 505 purity 87, 313, 371, 394, 679 racial 385, 400 puzzles 251, 261, 334, 337, 339, 346, 384 Qalandar 76, 99, 100, 617 quarantine 365–66 queen(s) 201, 204, 208, 291, 503, 510, 634, 638–39, 684. See also princess(es) quest(s) 185, 227–28, 242, 369, 475, 554–55, 574, 579, 585, 594, 596–97, 605, 698, 715–16, 720 for identity 223, 234, 588 for knowledge 633 stories 198–99, 234 for union (mystical, spiritual) 275, 492, 587, 635 quotation(s) 51, 53, 273, 339, 442 Qur’an 264, 293, 607, 685 race/racial 381 discrimination 385, 396, 483 purity 400 racism 359, 388, 596 Ramayana 425

Index of Subjects randomness 321–22, 403. See also chaos/ chaotic rape 168, 170, 177, 460, 466–67, 473, 597, 613, 680 rationalism 142, 496, 522 rational(ity) 48, 68, 89, 167, 196–98, 207, 329, 419, 424, 443, 456, 507, 569, 581, 665 vs. chaos 215 and governance 649 vs. irrational 286 mind 84, 160, 645 representations of past/history 166, 387, 409, 415, 475 worldview 24, 195–96, 199, 200, 286 rationalization 222, 386, 394, 445, 506, 641 reader(s) 247, 275, 301–2, 368, 579, 705–6, 724 addressed directly 51, 110, 282, 319, 397, 433, 547 and characters, identification with 174, 268, 276–79, 368, 545, 549, 690 desires of 323, 329 and escape 174, 321–22, 324–25, 329, 345, 356–57, 370, 418, 540, 542–43, 724 expectations of 321, 323 gratification of 317, 330 interruptions of 302, 321, 345 involvement of, in text 48, 53, 56, 150, 275–76, 301, 314–15, 322–23, 339–41, 343–47, 418, 544, 547–49 and Nights 7, 24, 44, 46, 268, 326–27, 370, 486 reading 296, 302–3, 320–22, 326–27, 329–30, 332, 356, 418, 605 act/process of 320, 322–23, 345, 373 to survive 607 realism 18, 47–48, 103, 110, 259, 299, 385, 526, 668, 678, 682 and fantasy 151, 501 forms of 275, 651 and magic/supernatural 362, 408 (See also magical realism) sense of 26, 161, 178, 407 reality(ies) 9, 18–19, 27–28, 36, 39–40, 45, 53, 55–56, 89, 111, 118, 123, 146, 153–54, 172, 174, 179, 211, 219, 238, 251, 276, 279, 282, 297, 301, 314–15, 329, 401–2, 405, 425,

Index of Subjects 428, 430, 467, 488, 505, 519, 530, 533, 602, 604–5, 638, 652, 660. See also virtual reality ambiguity of 41, 76, 273 and/as subjective 39–40, 198, 602 and/in life 29, 330, 732 composite 227, 268, 581 constructing/construction of 39, 575–77, 586, 638–40, 676–77 counter- 438, 523 creation/representation of 343, 396, 530, 585–86, 602 events in 342–43 existence of 540 experience of 35, 144, 539, 565, 580, 585 false/deceptive 559, 583, 685, 689 fictional 171, 276, 299, 302, 308, 343, 651 grasp/understanding of 516, 683, 707 grip on 713, 718 hidden/concealed 53, 634, 659 historical 417, 681 imagined/dreamed 58, 221, 302, 307, 310, 349, 379, 559, 578, 620, 728 invented/reinventing 156, 181, 589 and language 180, 701, 715 laws of 283, 363 material 30–31, 39, 122, 189, 226, 314, 316, 349, 363, 581 meta- 263 metaphysical 157 multiple 19, 22, 241, 299 narrated 53, 156, 577 nature of 94, 152, 176, 189, 199, 241, 286, 377, 408, 441, 576, 634, 713, 732 new 641, 684 perceptions/sense of 119–20, 127, 137, 195, 210, 475, 549, 564, 605, 717 pseudo- 31 return to 82, 296 semi- 154 sexual 193 sub- 294, 530 transformations of 58, 148, 283, 317, 701, 707, 726–28, 732 visions of 18–19, 40, 43, 80, 119, 127, 156, 275, 287, 378, 422, 470, 575–76, 584, 590, 676

815 realms. See world(s) real/Real 224, 462, 499, 549, 578, 582, 601–2, 620, 638–40, 706, 713 events 343, 402 experiences 308, 565 history 379, 387, 402, 415, 477, 677, 685, 688–89 life 142, 162, 192, 318, 330–31, 402, 421, 438, 515, 553, 569, 655, 685, 722, 724 person 384, 392–93 self(ves) 171, 174, 324, 584 and supernatural 28, 235 vs. symbolic 470 time 126, 379 vs. unreal 299 world 193, 229, 232, 236, 238, 392, 408, 410, 422, 462, 499, 526, 528, 653, 661, 706 reason 497, 642. See also rational rebellion(s)/rebelliousness 90, 139, 447, 503, 684–85. See also revolts female 186 rebirth 495, 505, 515 spiritual 492 recollections 160. See also memory(ies) reconciliation 93, 398, 568, 638 of Shahriyar and Shahrazad 633 reconstruction 388, 393, 457, 461, 515, 522 redemption 109, 185, 247, 259, 261, 266, 440, 451, 456, 462, 470, 473, 475, 506, 544, 554, 556, 704–5, 710. See also salvation power of 462, 553, 707, 715 referentiality 275, 287, 299, 411, 422, 526 reform(s) 129, 134, 573, 611, 630, 642, 644 democratic 665 refuge 314, 359, 434, 507. See also escape in texts 358, 370 regeneration/regenerative 367, 379, 727. See also self-generation through texts/stories 81, 149, 283, 288, 343 Reichskulturkammer (Nazi organization controlling artists and production of art) 500 reification 465, 512 of texts 268, 314–15 reinvention 457 of past 284–85, 681

816 relationship(s) 178, 481, 546, 675, 717 hierarchical 201, 348 human/of men 150, 330, 560, 602, 672, 702, 708 ontological 555 oppressive 150, 201 postcolonial 408 with reality 58, 127, 147, 180, 219, 343, 475, 583 between Shahriyar and Shahrazad 164, 540, 543, 645, 650, 690 religion/religious 7–9, 44, 80, 215, 286, 311, 362, 396, 447, 468, 482–83, 496, 523, 540, 572, 612–15, 631, 642, 650–51, 658 contemplation 89, 492 discourse 8, 423 doctrines/laws 600, 660 eastern 498, 501 and Nights 293 references to 109, 370, 476 ritual 467, 468–69 strictness/fanaticism 461, 613, 651 worldviews 468–69, 564 religiosity 286, 358, 409, 631, 654 reminiscences 110, 121, 138, 167, 183, 261–62, 265, 381, 571. See also memory(ies) remorse 67, 178. See also guilt repentance 653–54, 700 repetition 94, 266, 408, 440, 468, 695 replenishment 407, 556 representation(s) 119, 122, 165, 275, 303, 344, 359, 398, 596, 603, 606, 610, 615, 620–21, 690, 706, 710, 725 and art 481–82, 496 imagined/imaginative 319, 704, 726 system of 586, 599–600, 602–3, 605, 610, 620, 706 repression/repressive 179, 193–94, 396, 603, 612, 615, 619, 645, 658, 666, 670, 676, 685, 687, 691, 694, 699–700. See also corruption; oppression and authors 156, 699 colonial 351, 359, 369 vs. imagination/freedom 447, 620 political/governmental 300, 432, 512, 573, 591, 609, 651, 656, 668, 700 and sexuality 193–94

Index of Subjects social/in society 437–38, 458, 610, 699 and technology 504, 511, 522 of women/feminine 185, 194, 399, 432–33, 434, 438, 595 resistance 306–7, 310, 601, 685 responsibility 66, 177, 181, 230, 232, 234, 456, 468, 562, 569 collective, and history 677–78, 681 individual 179, 458, 677, 681 return 175, 392, 395 home 73–74, 92, 539 from journeys/peregrinations 60, 638, 721 postponement of 67 reunification 238. See also unity with divine 588 reunion 166, 219, 357, 587 with beloved 169, 198 revelation/revelatory 158, 365–66, 521–22, 684 of Muḥammad 379 revenge 30, 63, 92, 384, 466 revitalization 129, 513, 515, 521 revolts 685, 689. See also rebellion(s) revolution(s)/revolutionary 134, 189, 326, 442, 445, 500, 505, 609, 629, 671, 675, 676–77, 687 change 129–30 socio-economic 670–71 rhetoric 611, 675 riches 26, 60, 74, 289, 486, 493, 659, 697. See also wealth riddles 175, 251. See also puzzles righteousness 651, 662, 664 rite(s) 458 of passage 100, 215, 441 (See also initiations) ritual 101, 192, 441–42, 443, 445, 458, 468–70, 476 acts 440, 468–69, 471 and religion/religious 467, 469 sacrifice/violence 441, 475 (See also violence) ritualization 469–70 roaming (the world/city) 65, 67, 78, 97, 198, 200, 233, 243, 532, 533, 536, 561, 568–69,

Index of Subjects 573, 607, 633, 637–38, 692, 714. See also wandering robbery 467. See also stealing; theft romance(s) 14, 115, 185–86, 228, 229, 240, 378–79, 626 Romanticism 288, 483, 486–87, 489, 494, 496, 507, 524 romantic(ism) 552, 557, 562 Schwärmerei 483 room(s) 70–72, 74, 76, 85–86, 333–34, 336–37, 404, 411, 417, 456, 586, 709–10, 721, 723 locked/closed 72, 84, 112, 118, 293, 334–35, 338, 413, 702, 708–9, 713–15, 718–20, 724–25 (See also confinement; forbidden; imprisonment) mysterious 411, 413, 421, 423 rootedness 60, 69, 572, 597, 610, 654, 677 rootlessness 67, 109, 304 al-Rukhkh/Roc 225, 252, 258, 502. See also birds ruler(s) 501, 558, 562, 636, 649. See also king(s) rule(s)/regulation(s) 17, 77, 275, 303, 332, 336, 338, 346, 444–45, 463, 674 rupture 22, 242, 259, 291, 493, 496, 505, 513–14, 581, 587, 611, 702, 705, 708, 710. See also disruption sacred(ness) 286, 311, 445, 469–70, 602, 639 sacrifice 109, 181, 443, 445–46, 470, 473, 567, 569, 648, 657, 660, 679, 688, 697 and women 179–80 sage(s) 510, 697 sailor(s) 46, 104, 111, 254, 255, 525, 551–52, 555, 696–97. See also Sindbad saint(s) 132, 367, 615 salvation 326, 395, 442, 496, 510, 526, 567, 666, 698, 716, 732 sanatorium 295–96. See also hospital(s); mental Sanskrit 413–14, 421 Saracen 413. See also Moor(s) satire 362, 423–25, 523 schizophrenia 137, 146, 357, 547, 570, 621 scholar(s)/scholarship 23, 204, 290, 398, 482, 683, 685

817 science fiction 95, 177, 559 science/scientific 133, 196, 257, 282, 511, 513, 522–23, 528, 560, 630–31, 688 discoveries 564, 683 and dreams 564–65 potential/onslaught of 495–96 seafaring/sailing 489, 528, 551 seas 103, 115, 404, 449, 469–70, 525 seclusion 29. See also isolation secrecy 569, 570 secret(s) 54, 69–70, 142, 184, 204, 268, 299, 306, 357, 403, 414, 452, 574, 597, 633, 649, 660 room 70, 74, 86 (See also room(s)) secular(ism) 444, 496, 564, 573, 612 intellectuals 630 seducer/seductress 567, 592, 608 seduction 90, 352–53, 441, 565, 600 and reading/writing 320, 322 self-awareness 36, 38, 134, 172, 232, 405, 464, 553, 647 European 482 of hero 664 self-control 77, 441 self-definition 253, 298, 369, 485, 497 self-destruction 180, 662 self-examination 488 self-exploration 38–39 self-generation 318, 323, 588, 590, 728 of text/stories/narratives 324–25, 344, 407 self-identification 388, 487, 591 self-identity 269, 482 self-image(s) 66, 172, 174, 180, 205, 221, 265, 270, 298, 378, 389, 439, 455, 553, 555, 570, 595, 604, 605, 608, 610, 622, 636–37, 681, 690 of authors 35, 360, 528, 535, 542, 552, 556 destabilization of 263, 301, 474–75 European 8, 482 monolingual 369 multiplication of 324, 331 and other/Other 248, 269, 482, 556, 591, 621 shifting/revising 405, 552, 611 Spanish 358–59 self-justification 69, 178, 542 self-perception 38, 66, 482

818 self-preservation 405 self-realization 664–65 self-referentiality 225–26, 580 self-reflection 182, 298, 399, 540 self-reflexive/reflexivity 42, 93, 247–49, 319, 329, 336, 339, 356, 378, 483, 540–41, 544, 552, 557, 727 forms of 19, 57, 732 function of 51–52 texts 268, 317, 344 self-sacrifice 180 self-sufficiency 117 self(ves)/Self 36–40, 80, 92, 224, 230, 266, 270, 280, 350, 351, 353, 357, 369–70, 433, 467, 485, 553, 557, 574, 576, 587, 636–37 alienation from/of 141, 474, 517, 712 and alter ego 65, 716 authentic 555, 575–77, 587, 602, 713 coherence of 39, 179, 570, 594, 636, 640, 720, 725 congruity/harmony of 59, 657 constructed 179, 207–8, 483, 581 dual/multiple 173, 230, 238, 331, 370, 637–38, 717 earthly 158, 171 exploration/discovery of 357, 660, 716 ideal 297, 392 inner 36, 63, 86, 143, 228, 230, 237, 240, 708, 712 invented/imagined 63, 171, 174–75, 181, 483, 553, 581, 621 narrated 155–56 new 179, 184, 201, 221, 650, 709 notions of 275, 463 and other/Other 38, 59, 65, 182, 269–70, 357, 364, 369, 483, 486, 556–57, 587, 611, 621, 710 search/quest for 234, 297, 554, 575–76, 578, 594 splitting of/divided 36, 351, 357, 470, 586, 715, 725 true 570, 574–77 unity of/unified 475, 571, 589, 640 versions of/changed 173, 175, 179, 637 vision of 19, 65, 640, 681, 720, 725 senses 84–85, 261, 275, 634

Index of Subjects sensuality 26, 36, 45–46, 159, 161, 254, 371, 501, 592, 603, 656 of harem women 258–59 sensuousness 364 sentence(s) 31, 33, 263, 266, 330, 706 separation 28, 121–22, 136, 163, 198, 352–54, 449, 581, 585, 587 from beloved 166, 238 from family 60, 492 serfs 634, 637 Seryoyo (language) 461, 469, 471–72 Sesame, cave of 691 setting 22, 25, 32, 51, 77, 119–20, 155, 161, 164, 200, 204–5, 230, 256, 357, 384–85, 403, 442, 512, 543, 559, 593, 601–2, 652 destabilization of 20, 42, 112 eastern/exotic 45, 72 imaginary 179, 549 spatial 17, 20, 42, 59, 61, 112, 115, 125, 155, 570, 581, 653, 655 (See also space) spatiotemporal 38, 61, 232, 378 of story 42, 45, 94 as unstable 17, 153 sexes, relationships between 43, 259, 674, 680–81. See also gender sexism 359 sex/sexuality 5, 81, 87, 90, 92, 124–25, 161–62, 164, 166, 191–93, 225, 249, 267, 355, 466, 469, 501, 522, 542, 552, 569, 662. See also homosexuality; pornography acts 122, 191, 193, 199 affairs 255, 673 and/vs. love 122, 124, 466 and Arabs/Orient 5, 45–46, 79, 267 availability of 205, 254, 603 codes/conventions 193, 267, 369, 432, 433–34 and death 81, 185, 355–56, 637 experiences 125, 191, 200 fears 43, 571 female 126, 185–86, 193–94 (See also women) and feminism 199 harassment 199, 606 intercourse 62, 170, 177, 440 and narration/storytelling 44, 50, 122, 192–93, 197, 199, 202, 355–56, 543, 554

Index of Subjects and Nights 162, 356 objects 64, 189, 199, 204, 206, 680 perversions 182, 367, 500 pleasures 122, 159 relationships 73, 78–79, 182, 194, 255, 543 and violence/abuse 78, 81–83, 177–78, 191, 196 Sezession 21 Shahrazad 14, 42–44, 58, 88, 128, 159, 172, 176, 181, 193, 199, 202, 206, 232, 312, 318, 325–26, 337, 344, 347, 352, 357, 362, 427, 439, 529, 543, 551, 572, 633–34, 650, 682, 691, 694, 727 anti-Scheherazade 309 and Barth 543–44, 551 body of 460, 463, 471 discourse/environment of 418–19 and education of Shahriyar 186, 620, 640, 658, 699 fame of 608, 625 as feminist/feminism of 187, 188 figure of 58, 185, 188, 194, 366, 407, 462, 470, 592, 605, 608, 612, 615–18, 620–21, 653 identification with 64, 81–82, 155, 181, 306, 579, 618–19 images of 372, 585, 616, 618 imagination and ingenuity of 440, 699 as model/exemplar 333, 349, 402, 540, 609 motif of (See motif(s)) personifies/represents 108, 163–64, 370 pseudo- 158, 438 quotations from 98–99 references to 12, 676 represented in music 615–16 and resistance to oppression/ despotism 632, 646 and Shahriyar 156, 164, 291, 331, 540, 543, 645, 650, 690 and storytelling/narration 8, 44, 50, 58, 89, 150, 167, 186–88, 247, 317, 319, 372–73, 394, 440, 460, 586, 608, 665, 695 strategy of 159, 167, 188, 194, 197, 542, 705, 732

819 survival of 158, 197–98, 231, 372–73 as symbol 102, 407, 632 and threat of violence/death 66, 468 trope of 570, 645 Shahriyar 14, 81, 127–28, 185, 202, 226, 264, 318, 334, 347, 356, 379, 427, 586, 633–34, 640, 645 characters who represent 163–64 discourse/environment of 418–19 education of 186, 194, 620, 699 figure of 352, 653 identification with 63–64, 82, 124, 155, 181, 643 interpretation of 186–87 as man and ruler 635–36 motif of (See motif(s)) power of 247, 440, 656–57 and Shahrazad 156, 163–64, 291, 318, 331, 460, 468, 540, 543, 608, 650, 690 tragedy/catastrophe of 42, 580 transformation of 205–6, 439, 440, 441, 657, 658 and women 185, 187, 665 worldview/vision of 44, 197, 395, 657, 658, 665 Shahzaman 542–43, 580 shaman(s) 200, 204, 207. See also sorcerers shapeshifting 533, 594 Sharpeville massacre (1960) 396 Sheba, Queen of 403 ship(s) 46, 98, 105–6, 403–4, 519, 546–47, 551–52, 554, 617 short stories 285, 300, 309, 650 sickness 365, 455. See also disease signifiers/signified 282, 386, 579, 585, 618 signifying/signification 26, 156, 266, 330, 345, 360, 469–70, 471, 505, 600, 606, 618–20, 704, 715–16 function 262–63, 317, 620 process of 319, 463, 620 sign(s) 40, 75, 94, 98, 155, 161, 223, 256, 261–62, 266, 293, 299, 328, 364, 371, 516, 550, 574–77, 579, 620, 692–93, 721, 729 hidden/secret 96, 150, 257, 261, 575 system of 226–27, 237, 311 silence 432, 434, 693, 704, 727, 730 similarity, and difference 583 simile(s) 255, 258

820 simultaneity 18–19, 211, 337 sincerity 87, 654, 660 Sindbad 88, 111, 197, 252, 254, 258, 264, 400, 426–27, 483, 507, 530, 532, 534, 539, 554–55, 617, 691–94, 695 adventures/journeys of 695–98 figure of 525–26, 533, 535, 541, 551, 580 as narrated 526, 528, 538, 555, 557 and travel/journey 537–38 trope 527–28, 535, 553, 555 sin(s) 165–66, 265, 468, 486 original 431 sister(s) 159, 182, 232–33, 239–41, 426, 431, 647. See also family skepticism 130, 406, 407, 425, 428, 540 slavery 381, 388, 395 slave(s) 516, 647, 679, 685 girls 253, 643, 678, 680 sleep(ing) 39, 266, 365, 465. See also dream(s) and death 260–61 half-/semi- 154, 216 walker 137 Sleeping Beauty, land of 491 smell(s) 371, 538 smuggling 305, 341, 670. See also stealing; theft social 527 change 221, 555, 662 context 192, 196, 546 control 51, 652, 654 environment/surroundings 546, 604, 609, 725, 728 equality 667 life 31, 115, 131, 425, 564, 605 mobility 496, 653–54, 659 order 51, 136, 138, 194, 444 progress 668, 687 realism 682 relationships 59, 74, 78, 186, 192 responsibility 140, 212, 493, 644 roles 59, 568 structures 139, 424, 660, 663–64 unrest 612 socialism 671, 688 socialist 188 society(ies) 84, 132–34, 133, 139, 148, 177, 188, 300, 313, 381, 408, 445, 446, 458, 463,

Index of Subjects 477, 495, 504, 511–12, 562–63, 570, 584, 618, 630, 644, 695 Algerian 619 Arab 630, 668, 700 Argentine 270, 272, 274, 284 English 267 establishing new 687–88 European 523, 591, 622 fragmentation/disintegration of 143, 614 French 591, 596, 606, 608 German 212, 216, 222, 446 margins/fringes of 272, 598 mechanisms of 228, 686 modern 31, 138, 140, 522, 650–51 Moroccan 349, 357, 359 organization of 286, 630 Ottoman 143, 573 rise and fall of 521–22 traditions/conventions of 247, 532 Turkish 136, 145 socio-economic development 687 political establishment 180 sodomy 692 soldier(s) 425, 511, 692. See also army(ies) solidarity 177, 539, 687 solitude 416, 418, 420, 492, 519, 706–8, 710, 715, 718–20, 725, 727–28 Solomon (King) 76, 378, 503, 659 son(s) 37, 48, 385 merchants’ 26, 29–34, 50 sorcerer(s) 76, 205, 209, 486, 493, 515, 682 sorceress 98 soul(s) 29, 35–36, 72–74, 73, 90, 119, 129, 229–30, 233, 324, 365, 402, 489, 497, 506, 537, 557, 564, 571, 612, 634, 647–49, 660, 662–63 and body 370, 452, 465, 538 evil/distorted 89–91, 663 human 25, 40, 75, 90, 523, 580, 658 and mind 88, 117, 216, 658 mystical 141–42 nature of 40, 698 purification of 90, 142, 677 soulmate 561 and spatial environment 72, 638, 640 sound(s) 256, 263, 267, 371

Index of Subjects souq 552, 685 sovereignty 359, 631 space/spatial(ity) 17–18, 31–32, 38, 59, 70–71, 73–74, 102, 236, 300, 314, 334, 339, 370, 408, 609, 635, 638, 655, 664 boundary/setting 17, 77, 636 (See also boundary(ies)) closed 19, 57, 60, 71, 74, 93, 97, 115, 124, 220, 664, 714, 732 concepts 637, 640 constructions 638–40 demarcation/ compartmentalization 336–37 destabilization of 42, 57 dimension 241, 637 domestic 636–37 elements 64, 337, 654 enclosures/confinement 17, 30–33, 40, 41, 50, 59–60, 71–72, 74, 93, 105–6, 111, 117–18, 124–25, 535, 639, 654–55, 708, 710, 714 framework 38, 335 inner/interior 59, 637, 639 official and public 654–55, 664 open vs. (en)closed 41, 75, 92, 112, 115, 654, 664, 710 ordering/sequence 335, 337 ‘real’ 41, 379, 664 setting/context 42, 57, 59, 61, 115, 125, 155, 570, 581, 653 structure(s) 378, 579, 637, 639 surroundings/environment 59, 72, 336, 464, 717 and time (See time and space) spatiotemporal 18, 33, 37–39, 61, 73, 115–16, 123, 232, 353, 422, 496 disequilibrium/imbalance 32, 61, 72, 74, 112, 379 disruption/disintegration of 17, 32, 89, 115, 123, 635–36, 638 equilibrium/balance 17, 32, 73, 115, 123, 127, 242, 635, 638, 640 framework/context 18–19, 39, 220, 241 laws 41, 640 structure 17, 89, 112, 417, 621 species 201, 208, 386, 391, 526 specter(s) 242, 636. See also apparitions; ghosts; phantom(s)

821 speech/speaking 472, 474 spell(s) 17, 32, 38, 66, 97–98, 100, 124, 220–21, 297, 388, 395, 417, 422, 434, 448, 530, 534, 566, 582, 663, 680–81, 694 magic 228, 294, 656 mysterious 35, 108, 220, 367, 403, 431, 648, 696 of Nights 294, 690–91 of Shahrazad 628 spies/spying 368, 674, 712 on women 204 (See also voyeurism) spiritist(s) 132–34, 564 spirit(s) 22, 36, 229, 233, 240, 249, 370, 390, 402–3, 520, 648, 674 spiritual(ity) 41, 102, 141–42, 212, 217, 222, 364, 370, 492, 496, 499, 501, 512, 520, 522, 564, 635, 639–40, 651–52, 654, 658, 660–61, 665, 698–99 eastern/oriental 299, 497–98 insight 663, 666 love 90 order 27, 518 themes of 656, 661 world/realm 142, 363, 523 spouses 64, 74, 185, 206, 636, 649. See also husbands; wives beautiful 60–61 stability/stable 68–69, 79–81, 89, 118–19, 142, 180, 243, 265, 349, 403–4, 414, 475, 655, 699, 715 relationships 78, 466 social 308, 564 stagnation/stagnancy 51, 64, 94, 141, 165, 222, 228, 232, 242, 418, 477, 526, 605, 637, 677, 680–81, 688, 690–91, 723–24, 726–27 of time (See time/temporal(ity)) state/government 129, 306–11, 323, 441, 522, 561, 612, 647, 662, 667, 687 ANC 396 Ba‘th 670 building/forming 423, 668 oppressive/dictatorial 300, 313, 573 status/position 122, 131, 385, 440–41, 481, 595, 659, 661 of kings 559, 636–37 social 133, 568–70, 652, 654, 662

822 stealing 34, 49, 54, 76, 203, 697. See also robbery; theft stereoscopic view 506, 509, 514 stereotype(s)/stereotypical 190, 253, 273, 298, 482, 558, 617, 698 European/western 254, 482 female 188, 601 images 455, 605, 608 oriental (See oriental) stories/tales 40, 45, 126, 128, 132, 167, 179, 220, 226, 259, 263, 282, 289, 306–8, 311–13, 316, 352, 372, 381, 399–402, 404–5, 422, 426, 460, 538, 642–43, 710, 724–25. See also storytellers addiction to 372, 443, 451, 454 as autonomous/emerging automatically 263, 324–25, 336, 724–25 chain of 652, 707, 732 cluster of 330, 333, 705 coherence of 68, 312, 387–88, 457, 545, 710, 720 construction of 384, 418, 422, 607 and control 420, 450, 457, 550, 703 cycles of 291, 541, 652–53, 699 and death, as beginning of 705, 727 didactic 43, 50, 441 ending/completion/conclusion of 68– 69, 72, 74, 279, 283, 330–31, 395, 589, 607 epic(s) 378–79, 438 fanciful/fantastic 67, 174, 189, 195, 202 force/power of 309–10, 372–73, 437, 714 forking into different paths 703, 721 framework/structure of 39, 204, 549 function of 317, 728 and generation/proliferation of 81, 262, 318, 322–23, 325, 329, 443 ghost 401, 437 imaginary 331, 339 inserted 42, 50, 258, 341, 356, 366, 531, 544, 548 Islamic/of prophets (qisas alanbiya’) 572, 651 layers/levels of 150, 411, 456, 548 nature of 248, 327, 331 network/web of 325, 336, 705, 707, 732 new 542, 715

Index of Subjects from Nights (See Thousand and one nights) ordering of 286 oriental/eastern 9, 24, 28, 34, 37, 161, 420, 486, 537 origins/sources of 165, 329, 386, 434 and parallels 724, 728 (See also parallel(s)) power of 283, 309–10, 437–38, 707, 714 and reality 309, 433, 541, 713, 721 short 285, 300, 309, 650 within stories 544, 705, 722 sub- 549 thriller/spy 546 (See also detective(s)) in time and space 282, 419 (See also time and space) of travels/journeys 527, 594 without end/unending 318, 336–37, 394, 413, 457, 545, 704, 713 storylines 232, 255, 369, 546, 549, 551, 652 storyteller(s) 121, 213, 326, 362, 429, 443, 537, 540–41, 609 and listeners 457–58 (See also audience) Shahrazad as 579, 625 storytelling 20, 42, 107–8, 111, 120, 151–52, 165, 226, 298, 308–9, 352, 371, 419, 428, 438–39, 442–46, 476, 527, 530, 551, 557, 575, 578, 580–81, 607, 622, 633–35, 639, 653, 657, 697, 716 act of 44, 58, 293, 526, 540, 586 characteristics of 3, 547 continuation of/continuing process of 266, 317–18, 395, 587 and desire/gratification 322–23, 330–31, 732 as endless/infinite 266, 318, 394, 578, 589 and feminist activism 186, 188, 193 function/role of 309, 331, 395, 451, 706 and history 377–78, 397–98 and identity 265, 577 machine 305, 316, 325 mechanisms of 10, 302 model(s) of 50, 150, 362 nature of 247, 317–18, 321–22, 331, 481, 707, 729–30 ‘oriental’/of Orient 34, 37, 557 as perpetuum mobile (perpetual motion) 587 philosophy of, Auster’s 727

Index of Subjects to postpone execution/death 214, 265, 280, 283, 317, 402, 405, 427, 648, 705 power of 313, 317, 411, 438, 727 process of 164, 193, 388, 394, 426, 454, 458, 544, 704 and reading 322, 373 and reality 283, 317, 575, 589, 728 and spatial harmony 638–39 and threats 427, 458 (See also threats) and time 116, 123, 213–14, 637 and transformation 205–6, 456, 637, 641 and violence 43, 379, 453, 458, 459 strange(ness) 248, 391 events 247, 726 lands/realms 60, 154 structure/structural 22, 27, 53, 253, 260, 412, 572, 729 coherence 150, 255, 300 layered 384, 386–87, 394, 429 struggle(s) 609–10, 615, 621, 672–73, 674, 688, 695, 730 subaltern approach 397–98 history 591 societies/cultures 423 subconscious(ness) 25, 119, 172, 215, 222, 303, 565, 567–68 subculture 597–98 subject, and object 464 subjective(ity) 41, 43, 115, 119, 127, 148, 165, 224, 228–29, 241, 255–57, 332, 378, 386, 398, 406, 420, 425, 435, 476, 539, 602 of time/temporal 116, 123, 131, 143, 148, 242–43 views 51, 57, 387–89 visions 53, 474–75 subterranean (areas/spaces) 189, 229 cave 97, 101 (See also cave(s)/cavern(s)) subtext 329, 450, 684, 694 suffering/hardship 109, 147, 247, 266, 357, 378, 401, 698. See also difficulty(ies); trials Sufism/Sufis 83, 88–89, 363–65, 367, 501, 698, 700 music/musicians 140–41

823 suicide 49, 62, 66, 82–83, 160, 168–69, 177–78, 181–82, 383, 393–94, 450, 458, 532, 613, 634 sultan(s) 36–37, 39, 108, 161–62, 202, 206, 326, 413, 421. See also king(s); prince(s) superiority 65, 482 cultural 358 Superman 428 supernatural 9, 27–28, 273, 411, 415, 420, 557 forces 76, 204, 233, 236, 655, 682, 698 interventions 362, 529 phenomenon 223, 407, 689 worlds/realms 156, 235–36, 297, 378, 657 superstition(s) 81, 133, 538, 600, 689 surrealism/surrealist 25, 498, 566, 578, 651 survival 123, 156, 159, 168, 181, 183–84, 192–94, 197–98, 231, 317, 338, 345, 351, 370, 389, 401, 427, 434–35, 437, 442, 443, 510, 522–23, 587, 590, 686, 729–32 of body 349, 477 in concentration camp 449–50 and storytelling/narration 116, 150, 156, 159, 176, 181, 183–84, 194, 317–18, 372–73, 434, 449, 451, 457, 459, 477, 606, 608 strategy for 136, 172, 457 theme of 168, 171 suspense 44, 298, 326, 344, 429, 440–41, 664, 690, 727 suspension 318–19, 331, 338, 417. See also postponement of regular life 441 symbiosis 351, 355–56 symbolism 294, 496, 497–98 French 271 symbolist 27 fairy tales 25 fantasies 22, 46 symbol(s)/symbolic 28, 75, 98, 227, 261, 271, 367, 370, 403–4, 426, 451, 468, 470, 475, 507, 522–23, 555, 559, 597, 610, 634, 637, 657, 715, 723–24 esoteric/occult 96, 98, 101 figures/characters 384, 645 of spirituality 663 synchronicity 214, 221, 548 syncretism 313–14 synthesis 41, 179, 232, 694

824 taboo(s) 17, 28, 45, 64, 75–76, 90, 92, 163, 169–70, 212, 241, 286, 335, 469, 560, 569, 670 tabula rasa 463, 467 talisman(s) 27, 53–54, 392, 516 Tanzimat period 129, 139 technology/technological 115, 216, 224, 491, 495–97, 506, 508–9, 511, 513, 515, 516 n.81, 518, 521–23, 630, 686, 689 and German identity 505–6 inventions 18, 511, 560–61 modern 511–12, 559–61, 564 power of 504, 505 temptation 77, 91, 493, 526 terror 446, 613, 615 terrorist(s) 399, 592, 598 text(s)/textual 3, 20, 51, 92, 98, 101, 112, 248, 252, 253, 256, 260, 263, 286, 290, 294, 298–99, 302, 304, 314–16, 320, 339, 343–44, 346, 366, 411, 418, 421, 474, 540, 553, 578, 605, 607, 705, 715 coherence of 298, 323, 348, 474, 691, 701 composite 43–44, 49, 226, 381 control of 368, 370, 422, 550, 716, 725 desire for 326, 345 destabilization 391 (See also destabilization) discourses 313 (See also discourses) and double/doubling 528, 720, 724 elements of 257, 260, 435 essential/essence of 299–300, 372, 520 forms of 42, 167, 377, 620, 710 function of 292, 322, 342, 346 historical 414, 698 as infinite/infinity of 266, 287, 316, 545 inserted/embedded 53, 176, 182, 462, 531, 580, 595 interventions 56 (See also interruption(s); interventions) layers/levels 43, 53, 57, 226, 259, 339, 572 and locked/closed rooms 714, 720, 724 manipulation of 315, 322, 342, 345–46 mechanisms of 2, 10, 94, 248, 343–44, 346–47 medium of 262, 264, 268 mystical/sacred 311, 367, 422, 698 nature of 93, 249, 284, 298, 321–22, 336, 418, 544, 547

Index of Subjects of Nights 289, 298, 625–26, 635 objects of/and 249, 263, 268, 316, 336, 458 and reality 51, 56, 57, 151, 225–26, 319, 329, 339, 342, 346, 372, 377, 540–41, 555, 701, 720 reification of 268, 314–15 role of 702, 724 self-reflexive/reflexivity 268, 317, 344 as source/origin 159, 286 strategies 42, 343, 389, 555 and truth 341–42 universe/realm/world 285–87, 298–99, 314–16, 322, 345–46, 357, 372–73 as unstable 546 (See also instability) written 53, 56, 226 textuality 13, 94, 249, 274, 287, 294, 315, 317, 370, 377, 545, 554, 621 textualization 298, 299, 316, 541 theater/play(s) 6, 21–22, 79–80, 89, 132–34, 153, 214, 487, 514, 516, 614, 626–27, 629, 631–33, 635, 645, 650, 695–96, 698–99 Arabic 626–27, 632 Greek tradition of 640 modern tradition of 632, 650 and performance 175, 371 theft 49, 273, 660, 679, 692. See also stealing theme(s) 13, 51, 75, 203–4, 273, 459, 476, 580, 635, 651–52, 655–56, 661, 682, 707. See also motifs; tropes of aftermaths 13, 690 of Auster’s work 701 history as 13, 691 of incomplete(ness) 347 of intertextuality 172, 202 of journeys/peregrinations 57, 597, 732 of metamorphosis(es) 88, 98 of mobility 637 from Nights 655, 732 oriental 618 of politics 13, 628 of survival 168, 171 Third World 598, 667, 670, 674, 679 nations/states 677, 687 Thot (Egyptian god of writing) 101 Thousand and one nights 81, 83, 102, 118, 172, 181, 188, 198, 229, 234, 274, 283, 296, 342, 394, 396, 402, 406, 409, 477, 508, 513,

Index of Subjects 527, 528, 548, 637–38, 655, 656, 659, 668, 690–91, 700. See also translation(s) Arabic tradition of/interest in 4, 6–7, 188, 378, 558, 612, 625–27, 683, 688, 699 audience of 267, 625 and Auster 732–33 and Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveller … 322, 325–26, 328 and Carmatians 685 and Carter, Nights at the circus 209 characters/figures from 202, 533, 558, 563, 569 (See also character(s); figure(s)) concept of 266, 282, 326, 344, 402, 422, 458 and Don Quijote 361 editions of 3–4, 525, 625 Bulaq 4, 625 Edward Dalziel 25 European traditions of 4, 6, 10, 186, 592 fascination with 7, 9, 27–28, 135, 317–18, 327, 348, 413, 459, 509, 733 as feminist work 186 and Harun al-Rashid 563, 569 as iconic 6, 298 idea of 289, 682, 701 images/imagery of 485, 591, 600, 608, 688 influence of 2, 11–12, 25, 27, 33, 39, 44–47, 119, 247–48, 272–73, 317, 356, 395, 410, 459, 507, 560, 621, 732–33 and Khoury, Yalo 460–61 and Mahfuz, Arabian nights and days 652, 658, 661, 664–65 manuscripts of 3–6, 9, 23, 625 as model/example 263, 300, 313, 348, 366, 370, 411, 426, 523, 590, 629, 690, 733 and modern Arabic literature/ theater 632, 665 and Morrison, Beloved 395 number of nights/supplemental stories 4, 626 orphan stories/tales of 4, 6 and Pamuk, The black book 578, 579–80, 585 parallels with 334, 571, 652, 664

825 and Perec, La vie mode d’emploi 332–33, 334–35 as phase of Arabic history 676, 678, 681 popularity of 4, 7, 486 pseudo-translations (of Nights) 9 and al-Rahib, Alf layla wa-laylatan 681 reception of 1–2, 8, 10, 39, 249, 481 in Europe 188, 559, 625–27 in Germany 497 references to 88, 119, 160–61, 176, 202–3, 258, 264, 267–68, 285, 294, 316, 363, 383, 412, 422, 498–500, 504, 507, 512, 532, 545, 547, 551, 593, 676, 691, 705, 732 explicit/direct 63–64, 78, 86, 89, 95, 98, 100, 107, 120, 123, 130, 135, 145–46, 151, 155, 199–200, 220, 225, 227, 231, 254–55, 292–93, 318, 326–28, 334, 339, 389, 396, 402, 529, 534, 541, 572 and Rushdie Midnight’s children 426, 429 Shame 433–34 as source 632, 639, 694, 701 stories of ‘Abu Muhammad hight Lazybones’ 227–28 ‘Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat’ 32, 38 ‘Aladdin and the wonderful lamp’ 4, 485, 486 ‘Ali Baba and the forty thieves’ 4, 14, 485, 529 ‘Ali Sharr and Zumurrud’ 32, 185 ‘As‘ad and Amjad’ 28, 50, 565, 580, 732 ‘Aziz and Aziza’ 572, 579 ‘Baba Abdallah’ 502 ‘Badr al-Din’ 655 ‘Cap of invisibility’ 660 ‘City of Brass’ 37, 484, 502–4, 509–15, 517, 523, 572, 580, 652, 683–84, 692 ‘Hakim, the masked dyer of Merv’ 293 ‘Hasan of Basra’ 76, 203–5, 209 ‘Janshah’ 76 ‘Labtayt’ 293 ‘Ma‘ruf the cobbler’ 135, 145, 655 ‘Maryam the girdle-maker’ 185 ‘Merchant and jinni’ 705

826 Thousand and one nights (cont.) ‘Mock caliph’ 559, 570, 572, 578, 580–84 ‘Porter and the three ladies of Baghdad’ 185–86, 434 ‘Prince Ahmed and Peri Banu’ 485– 86, 507–8 ‘Qamar al-Zaman and Budur’ 28, 32, 185, 198, 580, 655 ‘Qut al-Qulub’ 655, 661 ‘Reeve’s tale’ 185 ‘Second qalandar’s tale’ 95, 97, 100 ‘Shahriyar and his brother’ 124, 149, 209, 440, 655 ‘Sidi Nu’man’ 502 ‘Sindbad of the sea’ 4, 14, 526, 541, 580, 655 (See also Sindbad) ‘Third qalandar’s tale’ 30, 32, 75, 220, 335, 502, 663, 732 ‘Three apples’ 28 and Tawfiq al-Hakim 632, 639 textual history of 3, 14, 625–27 traces of 2–3, 389 threats 26, 37, 65, 197, 205, 279, 326, 427, 441, 451, 455, 458, 475, 486, 498, 506, 566 of death/physical harm 349, 366, 461, 543, 646 of perdition 459, 463 to status 440–41 thriller/spy story 546 throne/rule 61, 198, 582, 647 time and space 18, 33, 37, 41, 59, 92, 104, 123, 241, 280, 282, 321, 333, 335–36, 365, 379, 390, 398, 417, 427, 444, 514, 557, 566, 588, 699, 707. See also spatiotemporal concepts/perceptions of 39–41, 118, 378, 468 destabilization/disruption of 287, 379, 484 disequilibrium of 242, 379 dissociation/disconnection with 32, 116, 277, 315, 514 equilibrium/balance between 32, 112, 115, 123 frameworks 196, 235 limits/confines/boundaries of 86, 292, 535, 631, 639 vs. man 635, 639

Index of Subjects real/Real 379, 640 structures of 283 timelessness 111, 315, 412, 417, 508, 554, 639 time/temporal(ity) 18, 31–33, 72, 126, 143, 150, 151, 188, 195, 213, 237, 277, 314, 330, 337–38, 363, 403, 408, 411–12, 428, 527, 580, 643–44, 652, 671, 686, 710 absence of 105, 123 course/passage/sequence of 17, 32, 35, 40, 64, 71, 73, 75, 89, 92, 106, 112, 115, 127, 132, 144, 149, 183, 205–6, 231–32, 235, 241–42, 311, 314, 318, 338, 417, 419, 510, 515, 522, 555, 588, 689, 691, 699, 727 dimension of 320, 692 disruptions 94, 148, 211, 242–43 effects of 279, 315 enclave 419–20 experience of 121, 133, 169, 242–43 extra-temporal realm 201, 418 forces of 112, 115, 118, 121, 127, 403, 637 frame 221, 366, 440, 468 gap 511, 544 and history 130, 142–43, 224, 350, 379, 410, 419, 476, 510–11 idea/notion of 167, 216, 476 layers/levels of 144, 510, 729 manifestations of 39, 256 manipulation of 13, 116, 123, 128, 148, 211, 222, 242–43, 621 and narration/narrated 38, 150, 169, 222, 242–43, 282 nature of 131–32, 166–67, 199 perceptions of 119, 160, 169, 419 phenomenon of 118, 132, 142, 148, 475–76 and place 228, 242, 297, 386, 416, 483–84 and reality 282, 363 realms/worlds 236, 727 regimes 115, 211, 235, 417, 477, 690 setting 120 stagnation of/standing still 64, 93, 104, 112, 218, 221, 241, 243 structure 243, 378, 417–18, 419 suspension of 155, 210, 319, 338, 417, 689 time-quake 202 vision of 142, 166 warps 214, 560 torture 463, 467, 468, 470, 474–75, 692–93

Index of Subjects totalitarian regimes 522. See also dictator(ship) trade 414–15, 420, 489, 497, 680 unions 595 tradition(al) 47, 50, 139–40, 142, 187, 262, 265, 268, 285, 287, 313, 348, 357, 360, 362, 398, 425, 426, 482, 495, 511, 514, 521, 531, 538, 540, 547, 555–56, 558, 572, 576, 651, 663, 678, 680–81, 685 Algerian 604, 616–17 and/vs. modern(ity) 144, 146, 531, 536, 573, 639–40 Arabic 6–7, 10, 61, 135, 188, 282, 378, 625–27, 626, 629–30, 632, 650–51, 650–52, 651, 665, 668, 682, 683, 685, 688, 699 Arabic-Islamic 292–93, 299, 572, 581, 630 Argentine 284 conventions 9, 52, 540, 612, 680 eastern/oriental(ists) 79, 269, 316, 557, 599 Egyptian 629–30, 640, 661 European 96, 378 French 609 German 22–23, 25, 212 historical 143, 299, 496 Hungarian 532, 536, 538 intellectual/scholarly 685, 688 Japanese 228 literature 9, 22, 96, 228, 248, 284, 288, 290–91, 300, 304, 360–62, 425, 433, 547, 556, 625–27, 629, 632, 652 narrative 332, 664 roles 190, 536 social/of society 425, 532, 612 Spanish 358, 361 theatrical 359, 521, 640, 650 themes 656 Turkish 141–42, 570–71 tragedy 135, 182, 257, 286, 354, 385, 388, 432, 452, 461, 514, 546, 641, 679, 716, 728 Egyptian forms of 629, 631, 635, 639–40 Greek 234, 390, 629, 631 tragicomedy 135 transcendence/transcendent(al) 86, 142, 150, 158, 159, 170–71, 184, 293, 316, 345 forces 100, 293

827 transformation 17–18, 97, 111, 112, 127, 143, 148, 162, 172, 264, 306, 444, 456, 458, 469–70, 514, 560, 572–74, 580–81, 588, 621, 637, 662, 681 of characters/protagonists 93, 108, 173, 175, 186, 199, 201, 205–10, 234, 243, 296–97, 515, 641, 657, 658 of city/town 579, 685 cultural 496, 573 historical 129–30, 133, 139, 405, 645 magical 439, 676, 693, 701 of narrators 127–28, 222 of Shahrazad 206 of society 130, 139–40, 145, 581, 688 of writers/authors 103, 356, 358 of writing 93, 109, 356 transgression(s) 147, 371, 434, 481, 545 transition(s) 30, 34, 51, 77, 101–2, 133, 201, 211, 212, 221, 287, 379, 385, 396, 423, 442–45, 501, 506, 534, 552–54, 599, 603. See also disruption; transformation of author/narrator 83, 359 of/to death 156, 168, 170, 175, 184, 694 translation(s) 11, 326–27, 354, 626 of Nights 1, 3–4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 45, 225, 267, 271, 289–90, 289–91, 294, 334, 625 English 5, 291 German 5, 23, 627 Hungarian 531–32 Ottoman 3 Turkish 525, 571 translator(s) (of Nights) Burton, Richard 225, 263, 267–68, 289–91, 334, 432, 433, 541 de la Croix, Pétis: Mille et un jours 9, 502, 507, 626 Galland, Antoine: Mille et une nuits 4, 8, 119, 151, 267, 289–91, 485, 513, 515, 525, 625 Hennig, [Max] 23 Lane, Edward 267, 289–90, 294 Littmann, Enno 6, 23, 25, 98, 291, 507, 627 Mardrus, J. C. 6, 45–46, 119, 186, 290–91, 334 Vörösmarty, Mihály 531–32 Weil, Gustav 5, 23, 295, 507

828 trauma(tic) 123, 127, 164–66, 261, 377–79, 382, 387, 428, 437, 442, 488, 556, 704, 706, 708, 726–27, 732 events 68, 168, 181, 221, 394, 395, 582–83, 702 existential 256, 266, 725 experiences 78, 93, 121, 124, 128, 136, 146, 148, 238, 241, 242, 247, 258–59, 388, 394, 440–41, 458, 477, 580 historical 23, 129, 211, 381–82, 387, 397, 430–31, 436–37, 442, 447–48, 451, 611, 668 of loss/separation 238, 556 traveler(s) 72, 79, 88, 220, 254, 270, 305, 359, 401, 414, 497, 525, 538, 547, 551, 579, 588, 596, 605–6, 695 travel(ing) 60, 64, 72, 105, 195, 252, 297, 432, 526, 535, 539, 555, 593, 597–98, 638, 663. See also journey(s) accounts/literature 45, 56, 273, 500, 507, 527 phenomenon of 605–6 treasure 64, 71, 74, 108, 362, 421, 502, 516, 519, 542, 659, 697 hidden 289, 293, 486 trials/tribulations 198, 279, 555, 588 trope(s) 26, 40, 61, 252, 363, 389, 483–84, 521, 549, 622, 720. See also Aladdin; motifs; Sindbad adventure 477, 528 of Harun al-Rashid and Shahrazad 570, 645 of journey 526, 554 of Nights 297, 483, 504 of twins/doubles 528, 547, 590 truth 24, 69, 72, 88, 110, 125, 127, 134, 141–42, 172, 275, 286, 288, 310, 341–42, 344, 362, 400–401, 438, 472, 475, 538, 575, 632, 664, 677, 713, 733 and/in reality 126, 144, 467, 473, 567, 732 and/in writing 95, 474 claims 7, 378–79, 397, 424 divine/ultimate 142, 286, 471, 639, 649 hidden 393, 575–76, 634, 641, 728 and history(ical) 134, 379, 397, 401, 406, 513 intrinsic/essential 288, 324, 509 and lies 534, 678

Index of Subjects quest/search for 308, 470, 475, 587, 639 of story 178–79 and storytelling 434, 551 Turko the Terrible 254 twin(s) 51, 145, 162–63, 173, 528, 545, 547, 549, 551, 556, 621, 682, 719 brothers 57, 412–14, 528, 546–47 motif of 545, 549, 551, 553 sisters 551, 556 tyranny/tyrannical 179, 388, 395, 522, 632 tyrant(s) 205, 649 umma (nation) 671–72, 676, 678 uncertainty 59, 74, 83, 136, 146, 168, 311, 339, 388, 430, 525, 569, 574, 581, 657, 665, 667, 716 unconscious(ness) 41, 189, 233, 261, 567 mind 259 underworld 229, 233 unfaithfulness 163. See also adultery; infidelity unity/unification 35, 39, 63, 137, 150, 222, 257, 329, 336, 345, 354, 357, 444, 581, 589–90, 636, 670 of body (image) 356–57, 464, 637 coherent 179, 462 between doubles 571 vs. dualism 28, 36 essential 40, 345, 364 mystical 36, 257, 354, 356, 364, 370, 588, 640, 649, 650 narrative/of story 69, 356, 386, 653 national 367, 688 self 475, 589 ‘spirit’ (Geist) 39 spiritual 212, 470, 635 of texts/textual 19–20, 474 universe 256, 314, 324, 329, 516, 709. See also world(s) unreal(ity) 81, 86, 103, 155, 237, 276, 281, 283, 386, 515, 553, 733 and reality 81, 198, 237–38, 277, 280, 560 realm/world of 68, 392 unseen 564–65, 710 forces of 426, 658 realm of 658, 660, 665 uprooted(ness) 522, 597, 610 urban 284, 573

Index of Subjects life, modern 255–56 vs. rural/hinterland 269–70, 314 utilitarianism 282 utopia(n) 84, 213, 215, 307, 370, 495, 499, 504, 509, 522, 561, 682 vagabond(s) 657 values 513, 529, 587, 651, 664, 699 exchange/use 497 traditional 138, 359, 529, 555, 572, 581, 593 universal 621, 651 vampire(s) 97–98, 101 veracity 294, 606. See also truth verisimilitude 378–79, 547 vernacular 272 vicissitudes (of life) 198, 666. See also difficulty(ies); hardship(s) victim(s)/victimhood 436, 454–55, 462, 466, 475, 477, 595, 619, 695 Victorian (period) 5–6, 267 vignette(s) 261–62, 266 villain(s) 38, 247, 487, 671 violence 66, 71, 101, 225, 247, 273, 432–33, 437–38, 446–47, 451, 458–59, 464–65, 468, 472, 500, 502–3, 505–6, 511, 523–24, 596–98, 601–2, 615, 619, 650, 657, 658, 665–66, 694, 699 and death 64, 207, 349, 459, 461, 465, 597 and eroticism 43, 191 vs. imagination 447, 458, 619, 656 irrationality of 458, 475, 477 and love 64 and narration 102, 377, 442, 447, 462, 475 political 415, 432, 573, 612, 662, 685 vs. rationality 475 and ritual 441, 443, 475–76 of Shahriyar 82, 186, 197, 205, 418–19, 440–41, 620 against women 43, 185–86, 196, 199 virgin(s) 177, 185, 206, 208, 440–41, 533–34, 648 virtual reality 309, 315, 574, 582, 585 virtue 36, 506 of women 400 vision(s) 77, 86, 174, 210, 254, 398, 502, 563, 595

829 mystical 356–57 visual(ization) 115, 602, 605 images 595, 599–600, 608–9 representations 593, 600, 604–5, 607, 610, 620 vizier (of Shahriyar, Qamar) 633–34 voice 328, 370, 372, 386, 447–48, 451, 453, 519, 546 third 389 void 322–23, 330–31, 332, 345, 403–4, 437, 702, 704, 726–27 volition 186, 262, 420, 526. See also will(ful) ‘völkisch’ nationalist sentiments 496 voyeurism 126, 204–5 vulgate, modern 625 wandering 32–33, 37, 40–41, 94, 252, 255, 258, 308, 548, 555, 559, 563, 569, 708 of princes/kings 26, 33 /roaming 30, 65, 254, 308, 573, 578, 592, 594–95, 597, 633, 637–38, 692, 703, 714 through city/empire incognito 254, 563, 569–70, 693 wanderlust 72, 525 Waq al-Waq islands 203–4, 209, 680 warrior(s) 511, 678. See also soldier(s) war(s) 101, 148, 195–96, 197, 211, 222, 242, 273, 425–26, 458, 465, 471–72, 495, 498, 505, 515, 518, 523, 532, 647, 672, 674–75, 677–78 calamities/cataclysms of 128, 136 Iraq/Gulf 363 of June 1967, 669, 680, 687 of liberation/independence 397, 613 and writing 459 wealth 385, 391–92, 403, 432, 437, 490–91, 493, 496, 509, 510, 516–17, 519, 525–26, 561, 652, 655, 659, 661, 662, 689. See also riches material 697–98 renouncing 666 weapon 84, 471, 508 ink as 474 stories as 197 welfare 247, 558, 562, 642 material and spiritual 698 westernization 130, 133, 140, 537, 574

830 West/western 129, 140, 212, 431, 611, 618, 699 colonialism 677 culture 140, 614 hegemony/imperialism 629–30, 687 ideas/lifestyles 572, 587 identities 482, 574 world 507, 571 whore 193, 208, 392. See also prostitute(s) will(ful) 90, 229, 234, 236, 704, 710 human 30, 77 sovereignty of 631 willpower 219, 220, 491 wisdom 74, 83, 392, 537–38, 562, 578, 620, 677, 698 witch(es)/wizard(s) 205, 429. See also sorcerer(s) wives 186, 204, 247, 266, 530, 562, 564, 567–68, 647, 670, 673. See also husbands; spouses womankind 648 women/female 427, 433, 530–31, 637, 657 authors 171–72, 188, 190, 194, 721 beautiful/young 75–76, 108, 203, 220, 538, 566, 579, 619 characteristics of [e.g., as libertine, wily, disloyal, irrational, uncontrollable]  50, 185–87, 441, 537 and counter-discourse 398–99 and death 176, 601 domain of 637–38 empowerment 186, 609 exposure of 204–5, 460 (See also voyeurism) and harem 258, 293, 530, 680 as heroines 185–86, 609 and history/truth 399–401, 406 image(s) of 190–91, 601–2, 604 killing of 62, 441, 469 liberation/emancipation of 176, 187, 189, 193–94, 406, 408, 595, 609 ‘new woman’ 193, 201, 209–10 as objects 63–64, 198–99, 204, 206, 680 and (male) oppression/violence/ repression 43, 185, 196, 399, 402, 432–33, 434, 438, 440, 609 oriental 602–4, 608, 680 quintessential 87, 634

Index of Subjects and rape 460, 466, 473 (See also rape) and relationships with men 185, 533–35, 536, 634, 665, 670, 674, 680 and sacrifice 179, 181, 569 and sex/sexuality of 126, 185–86, 193, 195, 461, 473, 571 Shahriyar’s view of 185, 187, 197, 440, 638, 657 stereotypes of 188, 601–2 strategies 43, 172, 200, 202 sub-history of 400 and survival 172, 404, 438 symbol of/symbolic 202, 207, 569 victimization of 191, 434, 618 winged 200, 203–4, 208–9 womanhood 207, 648 wonder(s) 203, 205, 248, 297, 560. See also marvel(s) of the world 64, 82, 197, 526, 528 words 94, 161, 191, 308, 353, 458–59, 468, 471–73, 542, 727, 729–32 and bodies 308, 471–72 to fill void/absence 323, 704 vs. force/violence 442, 447, 462 and language 262–64, 709, 711, 718 power of 111, 156, 187, 193 and production of stories 225–26 and puns/wordplay 552 and reality(ies) 181, 473, 712 signifiers/meanings of 260, 263, 585, 707 substance of 180–81 vs. sword 440–41 and translation 290 worker 501, 522, 523, 671 rights 595 world(s)/realm(s) 41, 65, 129, 142, 262, 324, 328, 363, 513, 523, 561, 578, 580, 597, 639, 660, 708, 727. See also magic(al) civilized 209, 525 counter-world 214, 268, 507 evils of 37–38 exotic/strange 19, 26, 65, 252, 554, 617 fictional 302, 440 inner/inside 117, 256, 709 of make-believe 648, 680 modern 257, 487, 561, 590 new (world) order 563, 564

Index of Subjects non-European 19 non-western 423 old (world) order 138, 495 other 226, 237–38, 526 physical/material 29, 36, 72, 142, 156, 157, 308, 314–15, 588, 715 splendors/wonders/marvels of 64, 76, 82, 117, 197, 335, 525–26, 528 of unreal/unreality 68, 392 virtual 574, 576 visions of 336, 419, 540, 640 worldview(s) 187, 194, 357, 358, 402, 421, 430, 442, 444, 482, 495, 597, 615, 681, 699 ahistorical vs. historical 379 modern 24, 140, 145, 564 opposing/clashing 197, 447, 454, 615 religious 468–69, 564 World War I/Great War 128, 136, 465, 493, 495–96, 497–98, 503–4, 505, 521, 528, 530, 667 World War II 95–96, 101, 131, 136, 145, 222, 341, 368, 446–47, 493, 500, 504–5, 511, 646 writers/authors 101, 111, 171, 194, 227, 322–23, 339, 348–49, 360, 410, 422, 472, 477, 488, 521, 523, 531, 533, 551, 612, 644, 692, 694–95 as agent 324, 366 Arabic 527, 632, 683, 690 Argentine 314, 372 autonomy/disappearance of 349, 366, 370, 540, 550, 704 avant-gardists 271 becoming/transformation to 93, 100, 102–3, 110, 122, 127, 128, 356, 585 and control of text 368, 370, 422, 550, 716, 725 death of 94, 151, 153–56, 171, 175, 338, 543 development as 350, 504 European/western 248, 527, 639 exhaustion of 556 female 171, 188 freedom of 359, 644 and identification with characters/ protagonists 528, 541, 551, 554, 575, 577–78, 589, 715–16, 718–19, 724–25, 726, 732–33

831 identity as/of 164, 190, 348–49, 541, 548, 701, 708–10, 715 imprisonment/confinement of 93, 325, 715, 716, 719, 724, 727 inspiration for 149, 249, 269, 271, 380, 540, 543, 579, 622, 642, 695, 701 intentions/purpose of 190, 223, 327, 332, 722 Latin American 223 Moroccan 349 post-war 447 as prime mover 52 and readers 213, 278–80, 314–15, 319–22, 324, 329, 345, 347, 368, 370, 418, 540, 542–45, 548, 707, 722, 724 and references to Shahrazad 108, 188, 344, 373, 649–50, 665, 676, 700 role/position of 324–25, 330, 396, 437, 463, 542, 550, 556, 644, 701–2 and text 342, 343–44, 347, 358, 370, 528, 549, 715 and writer’s block 449, 542–43 on writing 111, 277, 320, 324, 350, 356, 359, 370, 451, 453, 542–43, 585, 703–5, 726 writing 103, 108, 167, 277, 281–82, 313, 338, 341, 353–54, 357, 422, 435, 459, 473–75, 528, 538–39, 544, 549, 554, 589, 711–13, 728–29 act/process of 93, 95, 109, 111, 155, 171, 176, 320, 324, 330, 345, 350–51, 356, 366, 369–70, 456, 463, 474, 579, 585, 588, 702–3, 708, 710, 716, 725, 733 art of 95, 101, 102, 453 ‘automatic’ 172, 332 and contingency 277, 703 continuation of 324, 457 and death/survival 111, 149, 153, 155, 176, 184, 459, 474, 607 and deferral/postponement 166, 704 and doubles/mirror-images 157, 716, 718 essence of 351–52, 369–70, 708, 729 experience of 364, 366, 711 function of 350, 451, 462, 606, 732 incentive for 93, 149, 184, 349 and narration 93, 345, 353, 370, 459, 579

832 writing (cont.) nature of 3, 329–30, 356–57, 365, 542, 707 and reality 56, 58, 474, 713, 728 rules/conventions of 47, 328 stopping 731–32 and time 166, 301

Index of Subjects yearning/longing 26, 106, 126, 141–42, 144, 327, 518–19, 524, 536, 555, 633, 637, 646, 648–49, 650, 677 youth 57, 537 Zeitgeist 251 Zinj (black slaves) 684 Zionism/Zionist 671–72, 675–76