Once upon a time—in England, in France, in Turkey, in Arabia, in Persia, in India—a baby-sitter, a governess, an older sister, an aunt, a mother—told a young child a story before bed. Sinbad the Sailor and his seven epic journeys upon seven epic seas; Aladdin with his polished gold lamp imprisoning a powerful djinn; Ali Baba against the forty thieves and their supernatural cave revealed with the importation to “Open sesame!,” a formula as magical as the clichéd phrase which I used at the beginning of this essay.
A fourteenth-century Syrian codex at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris called the Galland Manuscript contains a handful of those tales known variously as The Arabian Nights or One Thousand and One Nights (though the three most famous stories just listed aren’t included), but references to this omnibus go back centuries, the earliest scraps of those tales discovered on papyrus dated to the ninth century. As that compendium has come down to contemporary readers, One Thousand and One Nights has been filtered through any number of voices, or perhaps as is more accurate to say, editors, redactors, scribes.
The Galland Manuscript would be the basis for its namesake Antoine Galland’s translation of the tales into French which he attempted between 1704 to 1717, embellishing the total with stories filched from the Maronite cleric Hanna Diyab. Galland’s edition was so influential that Jorge Luis Borges blamed it for all of Romanticism, while Sir Robert Burton’s erotic and Orientalist rendition launched a thousand ships filled with wide-eyed young men on grand tours to Constantinople, Cairo, Aleppo. Yet the stories included in the anthology, which in the earliest versions number only a few hundred but have over the generations accrued to the full amount promised by the title, can be traced back to the fairytales of the Ottomans and Mamelukes, the Abbasids and Umayyads, then through Persia, and into India, and perhaps further east. Neither of the names emblazoned on the covers of Western editions of the book—Galland, Burton—are the authors but then again neither is the anonymous scribe who penned the manuscript while sitting in France’s national library. A Thousand and One Nights is a book by seemingly everyone and no one.
Those tales that constitute The Arabian Nights, as with all fairy tales, were forged in the collective cultural genius, created, amended, edited, and altered over the centuries in the great network chain of transmission that constitutes oral literature, and which more often than not is shared by an older woman to a child. Abstraction may compel me to argue that there is no identity to the author of that glorious eastern frame tale save for the observation that the author of One Thousand and One Nights, though that designation be but a convenient cipher for a multitude of storytellers, is best imagined as a woman, precisely because of who would have normally repeated those tales. Appropriate as well, because the collection’s major theme is storytelling, and women’s storytelling at that. This is the great narrative device of The Arabian Nights: The beautiful and wily vizier’s daughter Scheherazade is betrothed to the femicidal Sassanid king who has cruelly and heinously ordered her death as punishment for the infidelities of his first wife, but his new bride is able to stay that execution by telling him a story every night that ends with a cliff-hanger by dawn, until the sultan has been converted by the power of fiction into empathy and compassion, the supposed unique provenance of that art.
“A library of books is the fairest garden in the world, and to walk there is an ecstasy,” claims The Arabian Nights as translated by Edward Powys Mathers, and indeed the volume itself is a library between two covers, a garden in vellum. More than that, Scheherazade—the symbol of all those collective sisters, aunts, mothers and wives) who deployed the life-saving technology of literature, albeit hopefully under less stressful conditions—is a library unto herself. Scheherazade, as imagined by the Anglo-French painter Sophie Anderson in a Victorian composition held by the New Art Gallery in Walsall, England, is a young and beautiful olive-complexioned woman with inquisitive, warm eyes framed by thick, arched black brows, her gold-threaded, crimson head-dress topped with a single, resplendent blue-and-green peacock feather. She is a woman, according to the Orientalist Jonathan Scott in his 1811 Arabian Nights Entertainment (a version itself largely based on Galland’s translation), who “possessed courage, wit, and penetration,” the author of a collection encompassing “philosophy, medicine, history, and the liberal arts.” Indeed, One Thousand and One Nights includes philosophy, medicine, and history, as well as crime fiction, thrillers, horror stories, science fiction, and fantasy, but more than being circumscribed by a single genre, more than being about one thousand and one different topics, Scheherazade’s story is about stories themselves.
Such is the nature of the frame tale, the most indispensable of modes, genres, narrative structures (what have you), whereby accounts, parables, fables, discourses, verse, dialogues, and travelogs, fairy and folk tales—all manner of stories—are nestled within a larger narrative. The frame tale, as a means of telling multiple stories through one larger overreaching story, not only prefigures the polyvocal complexity of the novel as a form content to dwell within ambivalence and ambiguity, narrative complexity and negative capability, but also is intimately concerned with the idea of telling stories themselves. Frame tales are about the tale: the telling of tales and what it means to hear tales. “The narrative constructs the identity of the character,” writes the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur in Oneself as Another, “what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told.” Narratologists are fascinated by frame tales, with their complex structures of stories within stories, sometimes resembling a Russian nesting doll, but beyond the engineering marvels from One Thousand and One Nights to Milorad Pavic’s The Dictionary of the Khazars (1984), the frame tale is the great mechanism for examining precisely what Ricoeur describes, the way in which narrative and identity are inextricably connected, how the telling of a tale constitutes the teller.
It would be a mistake to characterize the framing device as mere gimmick or a redactor’s gambit. As Eva Sallis argues in Scheherazade Through the Looking Glass: The Metamorphosis of the “Thousand and One Nights,” “whether by art, or by the accretions of centuries, the frame tale imbues a complexity to the whole,” and serves as a means by which the reader is presented with a “kaleidoscope of impressions on conflict and power, the sexes, art, life, and death.” It is a mechanism for different voices, registers, styles, and modes. Such a powerful literary strategy would inevitably have deep roots and long branches. Scheherazade’s is an early example of such a frame tale, to which can be added the Hindu Ramayana and Mahabharata, Hesiod’s Works and Days, even portions of the Bible), yet the device of a story-within-a-story proved particularly popular during the Medieval and early Modern periods, perhaps the conceit being a prerequisite in literary consciousness before the advent of that most esteemed contemporary form of the novel. Steven Moore in his revisionist The Novel: An Alternative History—Beginnings to 1600, extols the “sophistication of…frame-narrative technique, its reliance on drama and suspense, its skillful alteration between prose and verse.” From One Thousand and One Nights with its tale of the condemned queen saving herself through narrative’s enticements comes Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century The Decameron (now a Netflix series) finding meaning through stories despite the abyss of the Black Death and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in which pilgrims justify themselves through storytelling (both share some loose versions of stories first found in The Arabian Nights).
To the syllabus of frame tales could be added Queen Margaret de Navarre’s sixteenth-century Heptaméron with its heady fusion of the Renaissance and the Reformation, the Polish count Jan Potocki’s nineteenth-century fabulism The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, and David Mitchell’s metafictional post-modern epic Cloud Atlas. Such examples are traditional frame tales, which arrange their discrete narratives that are fictional to both narrator and reader within a larger universe only fictional to the latter, the literary equivalent of those popular nineteenth-century artistic exercises in which a painter renders a scene of a salon, replicating within the (physical) frame versions of several different compositions in an exhibition, often radically different in style. Frame tales are, however, merely intricate and ingenious variations on the trope of a story-within-a-story, whereby from The Murder of Gonzago within Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Ivan’s recitation of “The Grand Inquisitor” in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, characters created by an author become their own creators, they become writers in themselves. Literature can concern many things—personal tribulation or massive wars, speculative fancies and stunningly detailed realism. The entire multitude of human experience is found within poetry, plays, novels. Happiness and horror, devastation and victory. But what frame tales concern themselves with is a very particular aspect of human life—that of storytelling itself.
When considering Scheherazade, nightly making her way to the sultan’s “large halls where the carpets were of silk,” as described by translator Andrew Lang in the nineteenth century, that palace room with “lounges and sofas covered with tapestry from Mecca, and the hangings of the most beautiful Indian stuffs of gold and silver,” I’m put in mind of a different heroine: Penelope, weaving and unweaving a burial shroud every night to stave off the advances of her rapacious suitors as surely as that later Persian queen had to protect herself from her king. Weaving, knitting, quilting, are like storytelling in that they exist to tie the world together, to make sense and order out of chaos and impose meaning, yet what the teller of tales weaves is the world itself. It is no coincidence that in the metaphors used to describe literature we speak of the weft and warp of narrative, where the word “text” itself is a shortened form of “textile.” Weaving and writing involve the careful placement of things into a pattern; both can be rigorous but improvisational, carefully planned and pragmatically serendipitous.
Like weaving, storytelling has also historically been the provenance of women, even while they were long ignored in official literary history. It is collaborative art as well, both between individuals and across centuries. Imagine a group of women working on a rug, perhaps the stunning sixteenth-century Safavid “Emperor’s Carpet” exhibited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As they labored in an Isfahan workshop, weaving threads of green and red, blue and gold into this story rendered in cloth with its depictions of dragons and lions, maybe they repeated stories to each other, tales from what would become The Arabian Nights. A cacophony of murmuring, a multitude of whispering as varied as the voices in the frame tale itself.
They, too, are authors of this work, examples of Virginia Woolf’s contention that “for most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” From that workshop, as with the text of One Thousand and One Nights, this Oriental carpet intended for bazaars in Kandahar and blue-domed and golden minareted mosques in Samarkand would go West—in this case adorning the summer palaces of the Hapsburgs before coming to New York’s Upper East Side—where it would take on additional meanings, gain different significance, just as with the ever-evolving frame tale. Around the border of the rug, a verse claims that a springtime garden is like Paradise. It is the same metaphor Scheherazade used when describing a library, when referring to her own head filled with stories that demonstrate how the world, despite everything, is still capable of such great beauty.