A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS

  We all know about Aladdin, Sinbad, Ali Baba, the rook’s egg, the thieves’ cave. There’s a rule that requires us to begin our lives as children. We will have seen or heard and thereby passed a night or two, in some pop or papped-up version, even if we have never leafed the picture book or read Burton’s luxuriant prose. Splendid stories eminently suitable for children—that’s the line. Yet these tales were originally told not by a campfire, in some mom’s soothing voice, or listened to in the lap of dearest daddy, but—instead of the once-customary cigarette—enjoyed during the calm following copulation, after lengthy and enervating lovemaking: the man a murderer of his mistresses, the woman a willing but oft-tupped victim, while a third, the belabored lady’s sister, naps beneath the bouncing bed, where she’s been staying out of love’s way until tale time comes and she can clear her throat to request a bit of postcoital edification and escape.

  Sex doesn’t save the women the king beds. Their cries of pleasure, faked or real, only remind him of the faithlessness of the female, and the shame that is their game. Fictions, instead, do the trick. They do the trick because they charm, but charm because they never really end—or rather, because the climax of each tale, prolonged sometimes over many nights, occurs only within the words, and affects their always-eager auditors in quite another way than physical release. Tale time is dream time, although everyone’s awake. Replete, the king sinks into story instead of sleep. It is the dream alone that defers the dream spinner’s death—on one thousand and one occasions.

  How shall we say it came into being—this strange, perhaps magical, text? The way small creeks and streams combine to create a river? As alleys in an ancient Arab town stumble and twist into a market square? In order, later, to present for the pleasure of Jorge Luis Borges the offspring of a labyrinth? Or as if many days, over and done with and torn from the calendar, had nevertheless survived their own passing to come together and shape another life—a night life, this time? And who knows when or how this new union may dissolve as Destiny decides?

  At least as early as the middle of the ninth century, a cycle entitled The Book of the Tale of the Thousand Nights was apparently put together and written down in Arabic. In its nearly thousand-and-one-year journey to our time, these Arabian contes drew additions, endured omissions, submitted to revisions, suffered expurgations, were betrayed by translations, fussed over by annotations, and stuffed into editions aimed at special interests, while experiencing normal negligence and the customary incompetence of sellers, scribes, scholars, and consumers: the tattering, dispersal, and destruction of copies, the corruption of the text, the misunderstanding of its meaning, the exploitation of its exotic scenes and settings, as well as the decline of its importance into what, so ironic for the Nights, we call bedtime stories.

  Robert Irwin’s companion to The Arabian Nights will describe how these humble and mainly entertaining street stories grew into an enormously influential masterpiece. He will talk about the way the themes in these stories manifest themselves; he will point out their motifs and explain the uses, often odd, to which they have been put; he will describe the vicissitudes these adventures underwent, and the unlikelihood of their accumulation; he will admire their earthy details, their shrewd understanding, the splendid craft of their contriving; he will walk the same streets the stories do and enjoy the sights; he will learnedly, yet without pomposity, discuss the ambivalence of these tales regarding homosexuals, the character and status of the women in them, the mostly futile attempts to evade what Destiny has writ; and he will comment fairly on the Nights’ love of the ordinary, their attraction to the miraculous, their occasional cruelty, their matter-of-fact but bawdy interests; he will explain the relation of these frequently fantastic tales to the routines of every day, to the fated outcomes of actions, to the relentless harshness or unmerited good luck of one’s lot. (In Arabic, he will point out, sometimes the sentence never stops.) Every dimension of his scholarship is impressive, but most admirable of all is the easy and eloquent manner of its presentation. So I suggest that you think of this book as a true and unstealthy companion, such as Dunyazade, Scheherazade’s sister, was; and keep it conveniently by, though not beneath, your bed, where you can follow the pleasure of the Nights themselves (in Husain Haddawy’s readily available and fine contemporary translation), along with another from Robert Irwin’s chapter on lowlife, or the one on marvels—whatever properly complements the story you’ve just concluded.

  The origins of storytelling are all oral, of course. Some stories are reverently believed and retained in the tribal memory through repeated voice, thereby placing the community in the handhold of its history. But belief by itself is a state of mind easily feigned, a gift as temporary as attention, offered and withdrawn like a smile, so that storytellers plying their trade in the bazaar are both believed and doubted at the same time. They sometimes instruct, satirize, and warn; they sometimes tie their tales to precise times, exact facts; but, more often, their words create a world of might and maybe, both magical and matter-of-fact, far off and nearby, wondrous and banal. They are paid by the ears they please. They learn to entertain. Kings may have their jesters and their troubadours, while ordinary folk get small relief from work and worry, chained to their daily chores; but there are always layabouts, idlers who fill the bars, who hang out in the markets, and whose heads are empty enough to let in the sounds of another life.

  All sorts listen, of course—these stories have a broad appeal—but listening and looking, writing and reading, have always required leisure, whether laziness provided it, or inherited money, or sheer luck. Madame Bovary read too many romances. Villon hung out with a bad lot. The theater is filled with pimps and whores. And the widely running tale takes time to tell, time off to listen to, rest to revel in, and a meditative mind to relish. Proust is several summer vacations long. And A Thousand and One Nights will not pass in a wink, though in some of the stories events may move so fast or be so compressed, life will seem that swift.

  The storyteller has to have a head full of history, narratives and characterizations, epithets and verbal formulas, moral lessons and other upshots. Though no retelling will be word for word and there are many ways to pluck a plot, the essentials have got to be there, the proper effect achieved. The Jewish physician’s tale has to stay the Jewish physician’s tale. Moreover, recital is a slow sit in the seats compared to the rapidity of reading, especially now, when we tend to look at language rather than listen to it; so the rhapsode or the tale spinner, like the Ancient Mariner, will want to keep one hand on our lapel. He will certainly not ignore the response of his audience, but learn what pleases, what bores, what reinforces active prejudices, what brings down the house or sets the table on a roar. But just as surely, he will suit his own fancy, too, and allow his inventions to have their moment in his hour.

  He’ll pick up an anecdote in one town, a colorful phrase in another; from a talkative traveler hear a bit of business too good to be left out of his repertoire. And his stories, like the analyst’s fifty-minute hour, will tend to round themselves off at a point near his listeners’ patience, perhaps at a moment of anxious expectation, so that the audience will return on the morrow for another of poor Pauline’s perils, and her hoped-for rescue from the clutches of the villain by Hairbreath Harry.

  And in the process, stories will pass from one language to another. Action, agent, outcome, lesson best survive such movements, for fancy verbalization is just dress and fashion. It can be added at whim, divested with a wink. The tales will consequently be like large handsome houses with surprisingly cramped interiors (a complaint about the Nights that has been frequently voiced); but I like to think that the readers who listen to Scheherazade, as if they wore the ears of the king, will invent a motive and create a character for this young lady who has willingly placed her life in jeopardy; who allows herself to be fondled while in fear of death; and who boldly figures to ward off the fate of so many others by telling tal
es until dawn interrupts and the sun is suspended, as the king’s interest is, till darkness stimulates desire again (the rhythm is one of love/breath), and the stories can be begun again.

  King Shahriyar has persuaded himself (not without evidence) that the women he wives will betray him during the first half instant of opportunity, and, as he knows, with anyone handy, too—kitchen boys, black slaves—no one is secure, for the king himself, his royalty unknown, has made a cuckold of a demon while the demon slept like still grass through the transports of his accomplished wife’s newest adultery. In order to avoid being deceived a second time, King Shahriyar decides to marry for one night only, devouring, like an ogre, an apple a day, and in this fashion prevent his betrayal and shame, and keep his peace of mind. The community soon begins to feel the drain. The king’s desire has become a plague. So the beautiful, well-read, and wise Scheherazade offers to risk her life—risk it, but not surrender it, because she has a plan.

  The frame for these tales is concerned with one thing: the restoration of the king’s trust. Scheherazade will bear her husband three children before his “fatwa” is lifted, so that she will have been pregnant during at least 710 of their 1,000 nights of love—and, presumably, recovering from childbirth for many of the rest. But these are details that have no bearing on the content or continuity of her accounts; nor is the state of her father’s—the vizier’s—health of any concern, although he must execute his daughter Scheherazade if her strategy fails; nor is the king’s habit of falling asleep on state occasions, neglecting the country’s business, worth a moment’s mention; nor the fact that while the string of these stories protects them like an amulet, the virginal daughters of the kingdom have been regularly spirited away to stay with relatives in London, Berlin, New York, and Paris, so that by tale’s end Scheherazade’s sister, Dunyazade (nightly asnooze beneath the bed, don’t forget), is the only comely maiden remaining in the entire realm.

  Realism in The Arabian Nights is reserved for other things: food, for instance, such as the pomegranate-seed dish (preserved in almonds and sweet julep and flavored with cardamom and rosewater), which plays such an important role in the witty and altogether wonderful “Story of the Two Viziers.” Here, whether there is too little sugar or not enough pepper in the food is crucial. Nor are the little rituals of dining neglected.

  They ate together, and Badr al-Din kept putting morsels, now in ’Ajib’s mouth, now in the eunuch’s, until they were satisfied. They rose up, and Badr al-Din poured water on their hands and, loosening a towel from his waist, gave it to them to wipe their hands with, and sprinkled them with rosewater from a casting bottle. Then he ran out of the shop and rushed back with an earthenware pitcher containing a sweet drink, flavored with rosewater and cooled with snow. (Husain Haddawy’s translation.)

  Perhaps the flattest chapter in Robert Irwin’s otherwise perfectly flavored book is the one called “Formal Readings.” This is not through any fault of his, but because the efforts of scholars, critics, and folklorists to classify and anatomize the Nights seem for the most part quite beside the point, and their remarks on repetition (so central to the structure of these tales as a whole, as well as to their various parts) are relatively tame and predictable.

  I won’t retell the “Story of the Two Viziers,” though I feel temptation take me by the pen and pull me to its paper. It should be sufficient to say that a cook’s shop has been vandalized, the cook thrashed, and then carted about in a locked chest, apparently because he has not put enough pepper in one dish. Here’s how one portion of the cook’s lament sounds in Husain Haddawy’s splendid version.

  Badr al-Din said, “Because the pomegranate dish lacked pepper, you have beaten me, smashed my dishes, and ruined my shop, all because the pomegranate dish lacked pepper! Isn’t it enough, O Muslims, that you have tied me and locked me up in this chest, day and night, fed me only one meal a day, and inflicted on me all kinds of torture, because the pomegranate dish lacked pepper? Isn’t it enough, O Muslims, to have shackled my feet that you should now make a crosslike figure to nail me on, because I have cooked a pomegranate dish that lacked pepper?” Then Badr al-Din pondered in bewilderment and asked, “All right, suppose I did cook the dish without pepper, what should my punishment be?” The vizier replied, “To be crucified.” Badr al-Din said, “Alas, are you going to crucify me because the pomegranate dish lacked pepper?” and he appealed for help, wept, and said, “None has been crushed as I have been, and none has suffered what I have suffered. I have been beaten and tortured, my shop has been ruined and plundered, and I am going to be crucified, all because I cooked a pomegranate dish that lacked pepper! May God curse the pomegranate dish and its very existence!” and as his tears flowed, he concluded, “I wish that I had died before this calamity.”

  The almost fugal return of the missing pepper to the prose—the phrase beginning a sentence for the pleasure of ending it—perfectly mimics poor Badr al-Din’s bewilderment, his futile exasperated outrage, and elevates the absurdity of his crime, as well as his threatened punishment, to operatic heights—well, at least those of Gilbert and Sullivan.

  This frame tale, to distinguish it from its imitators (The Decameron, The Heptameron, The Pentameron, The Canterbury Tales, Borges, Barth, Calvino), might better be called a “chain tail,” because its framing devices do not merely box its stories in, imbed them, as logicians so appropriately say; they link them by beginning a new one while the old one is being told, and continuing it into still a third, as if to staple or stitch (as the ancient rhapsodes were said to do) these narratives together. The frame appears in the very number, now famous, which names them: 1001 … one thousand nights and a night—that is, for a very long time, and then some.

  The frame-tale format seems to spring naturally from the way gossip comes and goes, as well as the way we interrupt ourselves, start several hares at once: Fred told me that Mae said Irene was sleeping with that guy Ralph described as a Don Juan. (Don Juan’s conquests came to 1,003, the odd number always suggesting that additions might be made at any moment.) Do we want to learn more about Ralph before we return to Irene and her guy? He’s a hunk, I hear, who was a lifeguard in Santa Monica once.

  Certainly, Scheherazade admits to no originality. “I heard, O happy King,” she says; or “It is related, O King, that Ja’far said to the caliph …” She has been an auditor, herself, as her sister and the king are (as we are, sitting on Dunyazade’s stool), and now they can transmit the gift she gives them to others, without losing the least feature of the story. For each tale ends in an ear, only to begin life on the tongue again. Moreover, it is the pull of the possible dénouement that gives us the patience to take pleasure in the many delays which lovemaking imposes on the way to its climax; for lovers can be in many places at once, lips and thighs and fingers touching (the parenthetical is an unexpected caress); there is a rhythm to it, as well as a pattern of uncovering and discovering, of encountering developments so surprising, so tender, so alluring, the lovers nearly break into song (or, anyway, into poetry, as the tales often do in their post-mod way); nor can we avoid the resemblance between the king’s two intentions (which amount to taking a maiden’s head), and what goes on in Scheherazade’s bed (since it is truly her bed now), or with what happens when our companion, Robert Irwin’s enticing book, tells us how …

  But morning overtook this reviewer, and he lapsed into silence.

  La Vie Trèshorrificque

  GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL

  So what does our ancient author say is the shape of Socrates’ nose? A nose of such importance, always well into other people’s business, might be imagined to be sharp as a knife, pointed like a whittled stick, nostriled in the style of the truffle pig so as to capture the least whiff of opinionated puffery and to disinhale when the odor proves to be misleading—in truth, a nez pointu, the term our esteemed authority uses for the description of his mentor and his muse; however, Andrew Brown, the most recent translator (2003) of Rabelais’s masterpiece, Gar
gantua and Pantagruel, knows that Socrates is never represented thus, but was given pop eyes and a snub nose whenever his visage was set in stone, so he silently corrects the text and blunts the knife: “… with his snub nose, his eyes like a bull’s, and the face of a madman.” Besides, John Cowper Powys, who Englished his favorite selections in 1948, set the precedent in nose snubbing. One wonders how many such corrections Brown has made, tacit as a Trappist.

  Rabelais writes for the convivial, and consequently for those who must have poisoned their livers and contracted the pox, because syph was the New World’s swap with Europe in their exchange of epidemics; it was the sixteenth century’s AIDS, heedless pleasure’s penance; and, although the clap can now turn on lights, alcohol has never changed its ways. Thus he welcomes us to his feast on what might be Inflation Sunday during Hypocrites’ Holiday in the year of the Warmonger, 2004, or maybe 1532—it’s much the same, since swilling, swiving, corruption and conniving, fanaticism, bigotry, and bloodshed haven’t changed, and the sports bars are still full of opinion.