Ideological Variations and Narrative Horizons: New Perspectives on the Arabian Nights. Special issue of Middle Eastern Literatures (incorporating Edebiyat) (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ideological Variations and Narrative Horizons: New Perspectives on the Arabian Nights. Special issue of Middle Eastern Literatures (incorporating Edebiyat) Bonnie D. Irwin (bio) Special issue of Middle Eastern Literatures(incorporating Edebiyat). Edited by Wen-chin Ouyang . 7. 2( 07 2004). Evelyn Fishburn, one of the nine contributors to this special issue of Middle Eastern Literatures (incorporating Edebiyat),begins her essay on Jorge Luis Borges's frequent invocation of the Arabian Nightswith the words of the Argentinean writer himself: "Los siglos pasan y la gente sigue escuchando la voz de Shaharazad" ("The centuries pass and still we listen to the voice of Scheherazade"). These words, taken from Borges's story collection Siete Noches,provide an apt description of the work of numerous scholars over the last three years to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of Galland's translation of the Nights.Indeed, the voice of Scheherazade permeates, directly and indirectly, both Western thinking about Arab and Muslim cultures and also international scholarly discourse about narrative. The essays in this special issue are part of the latter [End Page 325]category, the research outcome of a three-year project on "Genres, Ideologies, and Narrative Transformation" sponsored by the British Arts and Humanities Research Board. The strength of these studies is in their diversity. They offer a panorama of Nightsscholarship, linked together by a keen understanding of the complexities of genre studies and an interest in not only how stories work but also how stories and storytelling travel from culture to culture, from language to language, from orality to literacy. Wen-chin Ouyang describes the project and its theoretical parameters in her introduction to the issue and in her essay "Whose Story Is It? Sinbad the Sailor in Literature and Film." The term "genre ideologies" itself is loaded, Ouyang admits, with political, theoretical, and narrative connotations. Medievalists and Arabists will especially benefit from the first grouping of essays. Aboubakr Chraïbi's "Texts of the Arabian Nightsand Ideological Variations" focuses on the "organized and integrated" medieval core of stories and explores how they were incorporated from varied traditions into the medieval Islamo-Judeo-Christian cultural ideology. Julia Bray's "A Caliph and His Public Relations" daringly takes Muhsin Mahdi to task for taking as historically factual certain details of "The Steward's Tale," a part of the Hunchback series. The structure of medieval historiography, Bray argues, can provide evidence to its manipulation and revision. Ulrich Marzolph, complementing his other recent comparative work, has contributed an essay ("Narrative Strategies in Popular Literature: Ideology and Ethics in Tales from the Arabian Nightsand Other Collections") focusing on how various storytellers may manipulate the same tale for their respective purposes. The second set of three articles—by Richard van Leeuwen, Peter L. Caracciolo, and Evelyn Fishburn—demonstrates how the Nightsand its interpolated tales have migrated and influenced European and Latin American fiction traditions. Fishburn's essay, "Traces of The Thousand and One Nightsin Borges," explores the complex and intertextually laden fiction of Borges, who, like American author John Barth, used the Nightsas his primary source of inspiration, adapting both its complexities of structure and its multivoiced nature for use in his own labyrinthine short stories. In "The House of Fiction and le jardin anglo-chinois," Caracciolo compares the arabesque practices of England's first recognized novelist, Fielding, to the structure of the Nightsin an important contribution to the debate over the origins of the novel. Focusing on the multiple-layered Hunchback tale, Caracciolo finds allusions not only in Fielding but through the nineteenth-century British novel tradition. Van Leeuwen extends the comparative range to Eastern Europe in "The Art of Interruption: The Thousand and One Nightsand Jan Potócki," a study of an eighteenth-century [End Page 326]French/Polish author and his use of the "generic conventions" of the Nightsas a way of representing the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. The issue ends with articles by Robert Irwin and Matthew Cohen on the transformations of the Nightsin film and theater and how these transformation both emerge from and contribute to Western notions of Orientalism. The vantage point of Irwin's " A Thousand and One...