The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction: Intertextual Readings by Richard Van Leeuwen

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction: Intertextual Readings by Richard Van Leeuwen Dominique Jullien (bio) The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction: Intertextual Readings. By Richard Van Leeuwen, Brill, 2020, 832 pp. This is an ambitious and capacious survey of twentieth-century fiction, seen through the lens of the Thousand and One Nights as a foundational narrative text and a model for narrative innovation. As Van Leeuwen points out in his introduction, there have been many studies of intertextuality in various national literatures, but a comprehensive survey of the influence of the Nights on twentieth-century fiction as a whole had not been attempted so far. The author is an Arabist and a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Amsterdam, the translator of the Nights into Dutch, and the coauthor (with Ulrich Marzolph) of the two-volume The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (2004). This study is also encyclopedic in its shape, method, and goals. The ambition of this learned and stimulating book is to explore a broad sample of [End Page 337] contemporary fiction. Readers find themselves immersed in an ocean of novels and stories. Admittedly, the book's corpus is limited to its author's area of linguistic and literary expertise: the only Asian representative is Japanese writer Haruki Murakami; there are no novelists from Africa, and only two from Latin America (Gabriel García Márquez, unsurprisingly, and more unexpectedly, the Cuban Abilio Estévez). Even so, this book covers such a range of writers, mostly from the Western and Middle Eastern traditions, and commands such an impressive number of languages (Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Danish, and Arabic) that it is already a world in itself. The study is organized into six thematic parts: "Enclosures, Journeys, and Texts"; "Capturing the Volatility of Time"; "The Textual Universe"; "Narrating History"; "Identifications, Impersonations, Doubles: The Discontents of (Post-) Modernity"; and "Aftermaths: The Delusions of Politics." Some of the framing themes are reminiscent of Proppian fairy-tale functions (enclosures and departures in Part 1), while others follow dominant themes of twentieth-century fiction, such as politics, time, postmodern metatextuality, or doubles. Each of these thematic umbrellas covers three or four chapters, pairing close comparative readings of two or three different writers. At times the writers are joined because they belong to the same literary movement (Oulipo members Italo Calvino and Georges Perec; magical realists Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie), or the same national or cultural tradition (Egyptian novelists Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Husayn, and Najib Mahfuz); other times the affinity is thematic (the Marquis de Sade and Angela Carter, for their entanglement of sexuality and storytelling), or formal (Vladimir Nabokov and Margaret Atwood, for storytelling as a deferral of death). Very often, the surprise pairing of canonical with less well-known writers is suggestive and exciting. There are numerous rewarding analyses: for instance, on the incidence of the signature technique of embedded tales-within-tales on André Gide's novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925), with its narrative open-endedness and philosophical musings on chance. Or the pages on Proust, which tie back to Hoffmannsthal through the theme of the enclosed space as a narrative precondition, and lead forward to the Turkish writer and Proust admirer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–62), in an original pairing that highlights the parallel focus on social and historical upheavals in French and Turkish societies, in tension with the narrator's individual time. Claiming no allegiance to a critical method beyond specific studies of individual novelists and novels, the author describes his book as "a mosaiclike overview of different kinds of intertextual relationships" (13). A wise decision, given the vastness of the field. As Robert Irwin acknowledged in his classic Companion to the Arabian Nights (2004), it is an easier task to list the books not influenced by the Nights; quite sensibly, Van Leeuwen also begins by [End Page 338] recognizing the daunting challenge of tracing that ubiquitous influence. His method (multiple close readings) endeavors to do justice to this multitude of rewritings. The book aims to describe an encyclopedic abundance of novels; it does not aspire to theorize. Yet, as readers venture into...