Framing and Meaning

Abstract

Framing in The Thousand and One Nights (Alf layla wa-layla) brings together not only people and their stories but also temporalities, geographies and destinies. It stages coincidental encounters of these in en­tangled story lines (story within story) of the Nights and generates meaning through the strangeness (gharāba) of the narrated coincidences and the wonder (ʿajab) effect of the entanglement of temporalities, geographies and destinies resulting from them. Wonder, this paper argues, is the Nights’ interrogation of the role of language and narrative in structuring ontology and epistemology. I will look at a particular entanglement engineered by framing in the Nights, between, first, the “Hunchback” and other Nights tales, second, between the different stories in the “Hunchback,” and third between this cycle and adab (learned literature in Arabic). In so doing, I explore the context of the extra-diegetic canvas of an imagined infinite universe, and show how narrative framing engages with and pushes the boundaries of narrative in order to capture what narrative leaves out, and produce meaning and generate effect. Three elements of the meaning generated in the entanglement between the Nights, especially the “Hunchback,” and adab will be the foci of discussion: the idealization of kingship and imagination of community, the subversion of the world of adab, and the formulation of a moral universe based in beauty. Key words: Framing, coincidence, entanglement, ʿajīb, gharīb, adab, The Thousand and One Nights, Arabian Nights