Andrei Codrescu

University of Baton Rouge, USA

acodrescu@gmail.com

 

 

Some Notes on Sheherezade & The 1001 Nights

 

 

Abstract: Sheherezade’s inventions of timelessness have an interesting millennium-long history, but they are culturally urgent now, in the twenty-first century, when human storytellers are being replaced by storytelling machines. The 1001 Nights are as important now to the survival of humans in general as they were to the survival of women in particular at the time Sheherezade told them. Reading The 1001 Nights in the key of surviving imminent extinction leads to some surprising discoveries, one of which is the accurate measurement of the mythical-human era, a time-bound entity between the animal and posthuman ages. This is the central theme of the present essay.

Keywords: The 1001 Nights; Sheherezade; Stories; Storytellers; Human behaviour; Posthuman era.

 

 

There are three paths to immortality: reproduction, stories, and abandon. I’ve tried the first two so of them I’ll speak. The third, abandonment of self, ego, cosmic meltdown, etc, is the province of mystics and they have written on it so much and for so long, I have abandoned their writings, convinced that the practice succeeded, making writerly immortality unnecessary. This was not the intention of story-telling mystics, I’m sure, but you can’t double up on immortality: you can try them all, but only one will succeed. What’s more, you the immortal, will never know it: you will be immortal but you will be dead. Or you will be someone else (a clone, a self-renewing flesh pod), which is the same thing as being dead. The 1001 Nights, or the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is a syncretic work of three-pronged erotism that weaves ancient mediterranean civilisation with shamanic nomadism and judeo-islamic monotheism. For us, postmoderns, it is just what the doctor ordered as a final test of whether we are still human or not, and it is the (elaborate but precise) results of this test that we are here to deliver, along with a diagnosis drawn from the latest reproductive technologies and their effect on narrative and sexuality.

The Storyteller Sheherezade’s way is the way of stories, but not of stories told for the purpose of immortalising the Author (God or the Storyteller), but for the more urgent purpose of surviving past the morning when the story stops and another day begins. For 1001 nights, Sheherezade tells stories to save herself and the women of the kingdom. Every one of her story is ransom paid for living another day, and, because of their urgent nature, her stories are not like any other stories. For one thing, they are stories within stories that reproduce from themselves, and they are also stories that discuss the nature of reproduction and investigate the three paths to immortality. They are stories of the night, laden with the mystery and sexuality of what the stories of daytime do not allow. They are the last-stand stories of a woman threatened by personal and gender extinction, yet their story-worlds are vast and capacious, timeless and unhurried, as if the emergency they work to forestall is not imminent. Sheherezade’s inventions of timelessness have an interesting millennium-long history, but they are culturally urgent now, in the 21^st century, when human storytellers are being replaced by storytelling machines. The 1001 Nights are as important now to the survival of humans in general as they were to the survival of women in particular at the time Sheherezade told them. Reading the 1001 Nights in the key of surviving imminent extinction leads to some surprising discoveries, one of which is the accurate measurement of the mythical-human era, a time-bound entity between the animal and posthuman ages.

Sheherezade’s stories draw from all the stories told before her, including the Hindu and Greek stories of the gods, told in temples and groves by sibyls, priests, poets, and shepherds. The god-stories, whether attributed to the gods themselves, or to the humans privileged to tell their stories, form the body of myth, a body sometimes vestal-virginal, sometime whorish-holy, and sometime bacchantic-murderous, a body that, in all its guises, served the purposes of philosophy and science through its translations into various logics and languages, a body that birthed professions, specialisations, arts, and sciences. The body of information about the body of myth is larger than the body of myth, so any myth referred to here can be easily found in any chronology the reader likes, whether close to the first recording or placed within a doctrine or an argument as recently as yesterday. A good midpoint is the work of Carl Gustav Jung and the religious comparatist Mircea Eliade, both of whom marked the 20^th century by synthesizing the body of myth without having to retell the mythical stories.

One prong of Sheherezade’s three-headed narrative dragon is composed of the myths of the Greeks and Romans, which started out being all about the gods, but became in time a literature that did not suffer from an opposition between the sacred and the profane, because in them gods mixed with humans; humans enjoyed most those stories that concerned their own kind, so the gods, while present structurally in the form of plot (or fate) and various formalities, such as obligatory addresses, or a chorus full of questions, became slowly extrinsic to stories, providing mostly a way to resolve impossible situations; at its height, Greek and Roman literatures employed all deii ex machina. The stories that placated the gods while pleasing a human audience allowed for the creation of an exilic (or outdoors-body) of oral stories such as fairy tales and fables. Greek and Roman literature had real-estate on Olympus, but it was free to go slumming among the shepherds. The lyre and the flute did not clash. When Greece and Rome faded, along with their stories, the medieval chivalric romances filled in at the courts, while fairy tales and fables kept on flourishing outside the temples among the illiterate.

Around the 1^st century CE the wealth of fancy that blossomed around the Mediterranean began to suffer brutal assaults of self-righteousness from the people of the desert. The monogods who rose out of the desert like sand-demons who sucked all within their tornado-shapes, did not tolerate too great a diversity of stories. Allah and Jehovah and their mouthpieces, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, textually reinforced by repetition of the Testaments and the Quran, felt strongly that they must banish literature and its origin in fancy, or no words, written or spoken, would ever be taken seriously; their mission was to instill gravity and to give weight to each Word, to make it an Oath to Divinity. For all that, neither Christians nor Mohammedans felt strong enough physically and objectively massive to begin banishing literature. For several centuries, literature pushed back. And then there were the Mongols.

“Man’s greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize all his possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding, use the bodies of his women as nightshirts and supports, gazing upon and kissing their rosy breasts, sucking their lips which are as sweet as the berries of the breasts.” (Genghis Khan, quoted on pg. 13 of Justin Marozzi’s “Tamerlane, Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World,” Da Capo Press, 2009. Since it is not clear where J. Marozzi found the quote, or who translated it, we’ll overlook the unintended hilarity of those “supports” and “rosy breasts” and the astonishing progress of Genghis Khan’s hatred of the enemy toward the horniness that overcomes him suddenly with the vision of the enemy’s women, and note instead that this quote occurs in the context of the Mongols’ 1219 swarm into Central Asia, a campaign against the Islamic kingdom ruling Persia and Samarkand. To give an idea of the voluptous savagery of this conquest, here is J. Marozzi on the same page, detailing one of the aftermaths: “Genghis’s sons Ogedey and Chaghatay seized its governor (of the city of Otrar, a.n.) and executed him by pouring molten gold down his throat.”

Sheherezade’s mother was a captured nomad who had been roaming the desert and sailing the seas with fellow nomads, learning tales under the stars and inside the tent she helped fold in the morning and put up again at night. The tales that traveled with her traveled from the ancient worlds of three continents, Asia, (North) Africa, and Europe (the Mediterranean) and rode roughly with her, on horseback, scymitar in hand, over many lands. This untamed, always-willing-to-die-fighting nomad spoke fast and suffered no interruption: she was Mongol and Greek. The Mongol side drove her at great speed, the Greek side kept the surfaces of things in sight. Sheherezade’s mom had been part of Genghis’ great nomad War Machine, then rode for a time with a pirate crew.[1] Her stories, chanted to Sheherezade when she was too young to speak, were harsh outlaw tales in many languages that settled with thick cinnabar-scented smoke in her mind, tales about warriors on horseback, beggar saints, people banished from their countries or charmed magically out of their bodies, about monsters who violated physical, biological, and existential laws and borders, stories that oozed the strange freedom beyond palaces and cities, and ended abruptly like a camp obliterated by a sneak attack at dawn, though they were often reprised at night after the bodies had been burned on the pyre and a new war party rose to avenge the attackers. Her mother’s stories featured thieves, violators of laws, anarchists, loners, mystics, pirates, supernaturals, and wild animals. The languages of their telling were all mixed up because she did not know that they were separate languages, though she was aware that the people she often fought and conquered wanted to keep them separate; she simply took languages the way she took treasure and slaves, and used them whenever appropriate.

When Sheherezade became the Storyteller of the 1001 nights, it was clear that the number of her stories was a nomad number, though she must have settled on Persian as their language. If she had been entirely of the castle, the number would have been 1000, an even number like the business of any well-ordered house. The numeral 1 pointed to nomad wilderness, an exception that she embodied because the numeral 1 was her mother. God is also unique, a 1, which is why the faithful always make an uneven number of prostrations and apply uneven dots to their eyes. God likes uneven numbers and the first to know this preference of the unique God were the nomads, among whom her mother was known to be a great accountant. She had witnessed the Second Fold, which was when the shamans of Genghis foresaw the One God of Abraham. From that vision to the manifestation of the One God in history, time turned and folded in on itself, pulling into that fold millennia of slow evolution. The Second Fold creased the human brain by speeding up time to harmonize with the speed of the Mongol herd and the growing curiosity and impatience of humans thirsty to know what lay beyond conquest, within the objects they had looted, the treasures they held, the earth they trod, the air they drew into their lungs. The men on horseback and the exiles fleeing bondage were folded within algebra in the time of Sheherezade’s mother.

 

The Numbers can vary in function, in combination, they can enter into entirely different strategies, but there is always a connection between Number, and the War Machine… When greek geometrism is contrasted with Indo-Arab arithmetism, it becomes clear that the latter implies a nomos opposable to the logos: not that momads “do” arithmetic or algebra, but because arithmetic and algebra arise in a strongly nomad-influenced world. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari[2]

 

We believe that one of the reasons for the nomads’ algebraic affinity is simply the impossibility of carrying on a conversation on horseback because the winds snatch the vowels and return the sounds to the riders’ ears all scrambled as in the game of Telephone. That sound distortion and the sheer numbers of riders, plus the vast numbers of the conquered, and the difficulty of being able to account at any given time for people and objects gave birth to a X that was algebraic and chromosomal. We tend to think of language now as a self-referential system of signs, but we have to imagine a time when language had no “self” referent because there was no “self” to direct it to, no interiority to address. All words were pointed outwards at a listener and they were issued in the form of a prayer, an order, a seduction, or an account. All words were public to varying degrees, from small cabal circles, to masses being proclaimed at. Stories had no existence until there was an audience for the storyteller who then channeled them and began broadcasting. Where she channeled them from and how they formed was going to be one of Sheherezade’s preoccupations when she began having difficulty with the pronouns “I” and “you,” a difficulty that has re-emerged countless times whenever anyone thinks about narrative. Sheherezade’s study of the pronoun problem predates all others and is of great scope, having been conducted as a basic test of “I,” the storyteller and “you,” the listener, before the study was subdivided for better focus between “I,” the person, and “Thou,”[3] God, and then “I” the lover and “you,” the beloved. For Sheherezade, this was not the subject of her doctoral dissertation, but a matter of life (her own). The question for her was: What story can I tell to stop you from killing me? It was clear to her that the story in this case was different from her mother’s. Her mother told stories without the threat of imminent death, but Sheherezade’s stories were bounded by “I,” the teller at the beginning, and by “you,” the killer at the end. This was a narrow channel to navigate, and what flowed through it was her life, so the answer lay either in an increase of force while pushing the story through its narrow passage, or an enlargement of the pronouns, an operation for which there was no precedent because there wasn’t yet a psychological language. How she solved this dilemma is also one of Sheherezade’s great discoveries, an important revelation that leads to the Third Fold as surely as the sperm is called to the egg. Her answer to the question, What story can I tell to stop you from killing me? became even more urgent for the generations that followed (and forgot her solution). How would I use words to stop you from killing me? received many answers in history, each answer perfectly suited to the situation and to the times, but generally divided between: 1. talking crazy (for centuries, until the Enlightenment, killers were queasy about dispatching crazy people), 2. begging for mercy (this never worked), and 3. inducing curiosity. This last was ½ of Sheherezade’s answer. Curiosity was great in people in her time and though greatly diminished in ours, it still works. The other ½ of her answer was, as we shall see, contained in the stories themselves.

For the whole of her babyhood, Sheherezade breathed deeply the perfume of her mother’s stories. Her child body absorbed the unbroken maternal narrative that was sometimes just a long stream of sound. Fed on these stories along with her mother’s spare but thick milk, Sheherezade developed into a slender, athletic, boyish child, always ready to jump on a horse. When her mother showed her a mirror, she told her that her body had come from her Greek side. She resembled the Greek ideal of physical exercise, good for gymnastics, the mother of all sports. Hers was an early Greek, perhaps a Spartan body that did not resemble the later vitruvian Greek model that called for square architectural harmony, homo quadratus in Latin or aner tetragonas in Greek. She would not grow the body of a Renaissance woman pleasing to Leonardo Da Vinci, the curvaceous Aphrodite ruled entirely by eros, or the feminine ideal carried to the very brink of modern times by Reubens or Renoir. Young Sheherezade had a sporty 20^th century figure, easy to imagine cycling through Bois de Boulogne for a date poolside with her swimmer pal who wears aviator goggles. Sharyar, her future husband, will not be her lover: that privilege is reserved for the Future. Sharyar, whatever else he may have been, will be primarily and essentially her Audience, the Listener. The woman Sharyar will marry will look like a 20^th century modern girl, but six centuries, beginning in his bed on the first of the 1001 nights, will picture her as curvaceous and sensual as a ball of opium and hashish sculpted expertly by acolytes of Kali, the Hindu snake goddess, a.k.a. Ma, whose name means “Mother Time” or “Black Mother.” For six centuries, those were Sheherezade’s attributes, and they fit her well, because she was “black” like a nomad, and she re-authorized Time to fold, but her body was not that of Kali or even that of the earlier Kali image, the Venus of Willendorf. Sheherezade was a tomboy whose body was shaped by nomad war stories, and the Time she folded shaped our time and this is how we see her, pace centuries six![4]

There came a time, let’s set it approximately in the middle of the 14^th century (approximation is the only precise procedure here, so please set your watches to the year 1328), when all literature, scriptural, historical, fabulistic, moralistic, oral, spoken, sung, and otherwise performed, found a single riverbed and rushed forward toward us. That foaming river is called Alf Laylah wa Laylah or The Stories of the 1001 Nights, and that riverbed is the Sassanid Empire in Persia, present day Iran.

Sheherezade’s stories are often the dark side of the holy stories, going freely back and forth inside their domains. She had precursors; the stories of the 1001 Nights arise from the places where civilisations touch. They are, in fact, the night-stories of those encounters. The day-stories are called histories, but the night-stories are where the principal action takes place. The Storyteller Sheherezade’s body is the sea where the underbellies of China, India, Persia, Greece, and Rome brush against each other in the night. The stories she told for 1001 nights came into her from all the illicit, oral life of all those mighty worlds whose diurnal reality was cemented by a wholly other literature. These worlds made her the host of their forbidden contacts, but in order for her to tell these stories it was necessary to commit a radical reversal of teller and listener, a revolution of address within the pronoun “you.” The diurnal stories of empires, as told by chroniclers and historians, were fundamentally opposed to untruth, fancy, imagination, or even daydreaming; they pretended to a reality that had no “author,” and were understood to be records of that reality; they addressed everyone who might hear or read them; their “you” was as impersonal as it was unquestioned; if official histories or founding religious writs had a human conduit, the conduit preferred that it be attributed, through dedication, to the God or King who facilitated the transmission (and paid for it). Sheherezade’s stories are opposed to such truth-pretenders on every level: they are authoritative because each story is told by a character who lived it; they concern humans and human behavior not allowed by the official record: sex of every variety, humor, paradox, a flawed but well-meaning morality, and unabashed delight in the senses greedily wallowing in the smells, sights, textures, and sounds of the world’s marvelous objects, living and crafted.

To establish Sheherezade’s credibility, the great anthologist of the Nights, goes to great lengths. She is brought into our presence via a complex chronological and neurological history based on universal human feelings. This bringing of Sheherezade into the now of storyelling in Sharyar’s bed has been called “the Frame story,” but it is something more complex than a conventional literary device; I will try, as Sheherezade herself does, to rid the vocabulary surrounding the Nights of metaphors such as the “frame,” because the coming into the now is a process that resemble a “frame” no more than a person resembles a number.

Sheherezade’s stories, as well as Sheherezade herself, never acquired the respectability of their diurnal contemporaries. The first written collection of the Nights appeared roughly at the same time as the Quran. Almost immediately, the pre-monotheistic vitality of the Nights was relegated to the underground, the darkness of non-acknowledgment, and almost immediately, Sheherezade and her stories, were placed in an area (or prison) especially created for them, a limbo-shaped bottle called “entertainment” (as in “The Arabian Entertainments,” where they remain to this day.) Now and then an ambitious scholar uncorks the bottle and lets out the genius, but it is quickly sealed back by an Islam not ready for its fanciful and corrupt human side, or by kitsch orientalism in a West that knows how to profit from such material. Pure islamists detest the language of the Nights, a vulgate rarely written and published, and attribute their sensual decadence to Egyptians and Turks, the corruptors of Arab language and moraes. Western renditions and performances inspired by the Nights use them as a cover for their own diurnal proscriptions by confining them to the exotic. Between these ossified efforts at containment, Sheherezade and her 1001 Nights remain as alive as ever, though battered by fates and translation over more than a millenium.

 

Preamble-ramble to:

Whatever gets you through the night:

sheherezade and the arabian entertainments

(Princeton University Press, May 2011)

 

 

Notes