Eric Ormsby
Stories Told in Bed
Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
By Marina Warner (Chatto & Windus 436pp £28)
Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights
By Robert Irwin (Oxford University Press/The Arcadian Library 256pp £120)
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On certain restless nights, despite the plush furnishings of his royal bed or the soothing melodies of his musicians or even the exquisite attentions of one or more of his 300 concubines, the mighty caliph Harun al-Rashid, fifth in the Abbasid line, could not find sleep. Accompanied by his favourite eunuch, Masrur, who also served as his headsman, he prowled the palace gardens or roamed in disguise through the souks of Baghdad; sometimes he summoned learned scholars for a chat - normally an infallible remedy for insomnia. If these expedients failed, he had his eunuch fetch Ali ibn Mansur, a wit from Damascus, to while away the long hours of the night with his fabulous tales. In the end, only stories could lull the caliph to sleep.
The sleepless Harun al-Rashid figures prominently, of course, in the vast compendium of bedtime stories we know as The Arabian Nights - Alf Layla wa-Layla in Arabic or The Thousand Nights and a Night. As the prolific scholar and novelist Marina Warner notes in her wonderful new study of the work, 'The Arabian Nights is a book of stories told in bed.' She is right to emphasise this. At night stories expand in the imagination; they are made plausible and almost palpable by the darkness lying just beyond the lamp. They would not enchant us so in the light of day. Heard by dark the storyteller's voice seems to emerge from the oldest of human memories; it has the spectral authority of all immemorial voices.
The tales of the Nights have a contagious quality; they demand to be transmitted. Once bitten by a fable, we cannot help passing it on. (This irresistible aspect of storytelling is charmingly illustrated in the 149th Night, in which a fox tricks a wolf into falling into a pit with him where they end up swapping stories and quoting favourite verses back and forth; even in extremis, the need to fabulate prevails.) The same impulse motivates Shahrazad, though such is the charm of her storytelling that we almost forget that she spins her stories under the threat of death; only if she keeps the embittered sultan Shahryar in suspense, night after night, can she escape the fate that has befallen her predecessors, each one beheaded at dawn. As if to remind us of the threat, her father, the sultan's vizier, arrives punctually every morning with a fresh shroud for his daughter.
Warner is herself something of a Shahrazad, though she weaves her account under less threatening auspices. Shahrazad is recounting tales which she has read and memorised; her voice is a link in a chain of tales stretching back to antiquity, and Warner follows her example. Many of the stories in the Nights take place in a legendary Baghdad or draw on older Persian sources, but a few - such as the story of Hayqar the Wise - date back to ancient Egyptian tales from the seventh century BC. Warner is alert to these earlier echoes but she is more interested in the far-reaching cultural and literary impact of the Nights on artists, composers and writers. The Nights were first compiled in Mameluke Egypt in collections intended as prompt-books for itinerant storytellers (hakawati in Arabic), who formed their own guilds and found their audiences in Egyptian and Syrian coffee-houses. Despised by Arab literati, who considered them 'popular trash', the Nights became universally popular only after they were translated into French by the scholar, numismatist and collector Antoine Galland and published in twelve volumes over the years 1704-17. The impact of Galland's translation can hardly be overstated. From Voltaire and Goethe to Hans Christian Andersen and William Beckford down to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino - on all of whom Warner offers illuminating discussions - the influence of the Nights has been pervasive; but composers (such as Mozart), artists and designers, illustrators and film-makers have also fallen under their spell.
To accommodate this huge range of reference, Stranger Magic employs an ingenious structure. The book is divided into five sections and twenty chapters, all arranged around her re-telling of some fifteen of the tales, from 'The Fisherman and the Genie' and the sombre 'City of Brass' - perhaps the greatest single story in the Nights - to 'Aladdin', one of the so-called 'orphan' stories (because no Arabic original has been discovered). Following each story, Warner engages in far-ranging explorations both of its context and its wider ramifications. She is especially interested in what she calls 'the not-sense that magic unfolds'. Whether discussing the lore of magic carpets or the occult properties of talismans, she applies what Borges called 'reasoned imagination' to her investigations. She is particularly good on what she identifies as the 'thingness in the stories', the fateful role that common, often household objects play in human destinies. And she has a splendid chapter on the now-forgotten German film-maker Lotte Reiniger, who created the silent shadow-film The Adventures of Prince Achmed on her Tricktisch, a fabulous cinematic contraption she and her husband designed in 1920s Berlin.
As her title indicates, Warner sees magic in all its forms as a key to the swarming world of the Nights, and in this she is surely right. But the magic of the Nights is not merely fanciful: it rests on at least two unspoken assumptions. In accord with the doctrinaire formulations of the mainstream theology of Sunni Islam, cause and effect are fictions; what we think of as causality is merely God's 'custom'. He recreates the world at every instant and whatever occurs is the direct result of His specifying will. The baffling and wondrous events that pervade the Nights are a dramatic illustration of this radical contingency. Moreover, for many Muslim thinkers, the creation was enwebbed by strands of secret sympathies; there was an occult intimacy - ulfa in Arabic - that bound disparate things together. This sort of thinking, which linked the meanest insect to the farthest star, underlies many of the abrupt reversals and enchanted transformations of the Nights. Things are not merely not what they seem; rather, they have no fixed and abiding essences. Even the distinction between animate and inanimate, between sentient and insentient, is dissolved in the magical thinking of the storytellers. This is one reason, I think, why the Nights rely so consistently on types rather than individuals; the merchant and the beggar, the prince and the princess, the dervish and the sorcerer are all ultimately interchangeable. This shifting conception gives the narratives their quicksilver fluidity.
No figure is more ubiquitous in the Nights than the so-called genie, or jinn in Arabic. These supernatural beings, intermediate between humans and angels, were created, according to the Koran (15:27), 'from a scorching fire'. In Visions of the Jinn, the scholar and novelist Robert Irwin, author of the indispensable The Arabian Nights: A Companion and editor of the complete new translation of The Arabian Nights by Malcolm and Ursula Lyons (2008), has provided a magnificent and beautifully illustrated account of the various illustrators of the Nights from the eighteenth century onwards. Drawn mostly from the collections of The Arcadian Library, the 163 plates are stunning. In his accompanying text, Irwin provides detailed and perceptive accounts of the illustrators, many of them now forgotten. And his captions to the plates are as sparkling as his text: thus, one of Arthur Rackham's genies has a 'knobbly, scrawny look'. Alongside such well-known figures as Aubrey Beardsley, Edmund Dulac and Maxfield Parrish, brilliant artists such as Albert Letchford, Frank Brangwyn and, perhaps most impressive, the ill-fated Edward Julius Detmold (who shot himself in 1957) more than hold their own. Irwin also includes a colour reproduction of the 1943 Classic Comics version of the Nights (which I fondly remember reading as a child). In this vein Irwin notes that 'the ghost of Dulac hovers over the Disney animated Aladdin'. Just as beggars rub shoulders with princesses in the tales, so too these illustrations, the popular as well as the rarefied, merrily collude - a testimony to the all-embracing capaciousness of the Nights. This is a sumptuous book, and so is its price, but even Harun al-Rashid would have been happy to give it a place of honour on his bedside table.
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Eric Ormsby's The Baboons of Hada, a new selection of his poems, was published in May by Carcanet.
