The Thousand and One Nights: From the One to the Only

Abstract

According to Borges, the title The Thousand and One Nights highlights the tension between the infinite and the one. The plus one opens the text to future editions, translations, and stories, but the same one evokes loving promises. Following Borges’s lead, this article analyzes the title in the context of the Shahryar and Shahrazad story, the narrative starting and end point of the book. The title hints at structural functions that are at work in the text. At the heart of this text, censored for its explicit sexuality, what is evident is the lack of complement between men and women and the struggle to build a bridge from the autistic jouissance to loving another. For men this struggle stems from their relationship to the phallic function: they can reject castration (and pretend that all women can be possessed) or assume the castration. The first position implies jouissance, the sequence, a macabre one like that of sultan Shahryar, while the second position opens the possibility to love. The Thousand and One Nights begins with the chance encounter between Shahryar and the protagonist and narrator Shahrazad, who wishes to put an end to the sultan’s spree of sleeping and executing women every night; an edict that threatens not only the women of the realm, but also the peace and prosperity of every citizen and even the sultan’s sovereignty. Shahrazad employs her own sequence, this one verbal, to detain and question the sultan. The text is relevant today. As in the story, contemporary society manifests the decline of ideals pushing towards jouissance and the text indicates the important, cohesive function of feminine desire in maintaining social bonds at the family level.