Eastern Dreams by Paul Nurse Page A

tend to follow a common, albeit rough, scenario. Following the vizier’s story about the bull and the ass, Scheherazade begins her storytelling by reciting to Shahryar and Dinarzade the tale of the merchant and the genie with its incidental stories, then immediately launches into a second cycle involving a fisherman, a cruel genie and the tales the fisherman tells. Depending on the edition, there then follow cycles of “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” “The Tale of the Three Apples,” “The Hunchback’s Tale” and “The Tale of Nur al-Din Ali and the Damsel Anis al-Jalis.” Most major translations of the
Nights
—with perhaps some minor variationof placement—follow this sequence before veering off into their individual collections, depending on their sources or the wishes of the translators.
    There could well be a structural reason for this basic grouping, since issues of cruelty, envy and preserving life through storytelling occur in several of these narratives, not just in the frame tale of Scheherazade but in the stories themselves, especially those involving the trader and the fisherman and their respective encounters with angry demons, all-powerful beings who would do them harm. Subsequent stories also touch on themes of infidelity (“The Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince”), malicious envy (“The Eldest Lady’s Tale”) and rage leading to murder (“The Tale of the Three Apples”)—literary motifs reflecting the same forces spawning Scheherazade’s predicament. Common as these elements are in storytelling the world over, this particular sequence cannot be a mere accident, and it is possible that it or something like it was the original sequence used to create Arabic versions of
Alf Laila
from the Persian
Hazar Afsanah
.
    It appears, then, that the basic scenario of
The Thousand and One Nights
runs something like this. Having made her decision to marry the sultan to stop his butchery of women, Scheherazade finds that her father, the vizier, tries to dissuade her by reciting his own warning story (“The Tale of the Bull and the Ass”), which he hopes will preserve her life. Shahryar’s vizier thus becomes the first
Arabian Nights
character to relate a tale while introducing the concept of instruction through storytelling. Scheherazade, however, holds firm, marries the sultan and then, as the first night—their wedding night—progresses, begins (with Dinarzade’s collusion) a process of telling stories not only to prevent her execution and the executions of more innocent women but also to plant the seeds of her raging husband’s redemption by an almost subliminal process of inducing the better angels of Shahryar’s nature to reassert themselves.
    She does this by reciting stories involving the arbitrariness of chance and the cruelty of the powerful visited upon the innocent or unfortunate. The genies in the first and second story cycles may be seen as supernatural representations of Shahryar himself, powerful entities holding the fate of others in their hands. The actual guilt or non-guilt of those involved is not at issue in the face of an all-encompassing authority that may be just or unjust according to its inclinations; it is the simple fact of the authority’s power that allows it to dispense clemency or punishment.
    But through her stories, particularly in the first two cycles, Scheherazade demonstrates that the cruelty of power can be defective to the point of self-destruction, and that storytelling has the capacity to thwart death and restore justice. By telling the enraged genie tales, which help Shahryar see that the trader should not die for the accidental killing of the genie’s child, the two sheikhs (some versions add a third old man) calm the demon with entertaining stories, but only after each first extracts a promise that a portion of the trader’s life will be spared if