[In the following excerpt, Pinault introduces some of the narrative devices used in The Arabian Nights, including repetitive designation, Leitmotifstil, or, lead-word style, and patterns of theme and form.]

C. A DESCRIPTION OF SELECTED STORYTELLING TECHNIQUES FROM THE NIGHTS

In [what follows] I describe narrative devices used by redactors in numerous stories found in the Alf laylah. …

I. REPETITIVE DESIGNATION

Under this heading I group repeated references to some character or object which appears insignificant when first mentioned but which reappears later to intrude suddenly on the narrative. At the moment of the initial designation the given object seems unimportant and the reference casual and incidental. Later in the story, however, the object is brought forward once more and proves to play a significant role.

A good example of this technique can be found in one of the early episodes in the frame-story of King Shāhrayār and Scheherazade as presented in the Leiden edition of the G manuscript [a certain fourteenth-century text of the Alf laylah know as Bibliothèque Nationale 3609-3611].¹ Shāhrayār's brother Shāhzamān arrives for a visit, and the G redactor offers a detailed description of the guest-quarters where Shāhzamān is housed: a palace overlooking an enclosed garden and facing a second house containing the women's quarters. Furthermore, it is carefully explained that his chambers have windows overlooking the garden. Finally, we are told that the nobleman repeatedly sighs and laments, “No one has ever had happen to him what happened to me!,” a reference to the adulterous betrayal by his wife which opened the story. These references seem incidental enough at first, but in fact the redactor has made mention of all these details—the women's quarters, the garden, the guest-chamber windows which happen to overlook the garden, Shāhzamān's lament—by way of foreshadowing and preparation for the next development in the plot. One day King Shāhrayār departs to go hunting, and Shāhzamān, the redactor tells us, chances to look out his window at the garden which is visible below. Suddenly he sees his brother's wife, followed by an entourage of men and women, emerge from the harem opposite and enter the garden. From his window-perch he sees them all join lustily in sexual congress. Shāhzamān then realizes that his repeated lament is untrue, for his brother too has had happen to him what happened to Shāzamān.

Another instance of repetitive designation emerges in the Leiden version of The Merchant and the Genie.² The tale opens with a description of the protagonist putting loaves of bread and dates in his saddlebag as provisions for a journey he is about to undertake. Trivial enough data this seems at first, a description of the food a man takes on a business trip. But to the contrary: in the next scene the merchant pauses in his journey for lunch and eats his dates, flinging away the date-stones at random. Shortly thereafter a wrathful genie appears, which informs the man that his life is now forfeit: the date-stones he flung away so thoughtlessly at lunch struck and killied the genie's invisible son; in turn the genie must now kill him. The hapless merchant pleads for mercy, a plea which will ultimately trigger the stories-told-for-ransom which comprise the bulk of this narrative-cycle.

Thus in the two examples cited above the initial reference establishes an object (e.g., a garden-window or a saddlebag full of dates) in the background of a scene and readies it for its appearance at the proper moment. Repetitive designation creates thereby an effect of apparently casual foreshadowing and allows the audience the pleasure of recognition at that later moment when the object reappears and proves significant.

II. LEITWORTSTIL

In his work The Art of Biblical Literature Robert Alter explains that the term Leitwortstil (“leading-word style”) was coined by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig and applied to the field of Biblical textual studies. Alter states that the term designates the “purposeful repetition of words” in a given literary piece. The individual Leitwort or “leading word” usually expresses a motif or theme important to the given story; the repetition of this Leitwort ensures that the theme will gradually force itself on the reader's attention.³

In the preface to his German Bible translation Buber discusses the triliteral root system in Hebrew and the opportunities it offers for verbal repetition. He labels this technique of repetition as a Leitwortstil and defines the term as follows:

A Leitwort is a word or a word-root that recurs significantly in a text, in a continuum of texts, or in a configuration of texts: by following these repetitions, one is able to decipher or grasp a meaning of the text … The repetition, as we have said, need not be merely of the word itself but also of the word-root; in fact, the very difference of words can often intensify the dynamic action of the repetition. I call it “dynamic” because between combinations of sounds related to one another in this manner a kind of movement takes place: if one imagines the entire text deployed before him one can sense waves moving back and forth between the words.⁴

What is true for Hebrew triliteral roots and the Bible holds good, I believe, for Arabic and the Arabic Nights. Leitwortstil can be discerned at work in the MN version of The Magian City, a minor narrative enframed within The Tale of the First Lady (which in turn belongs to the story-cycle known as The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad).⁵

Three sisters leave Baghdad to undertake a business trip by sea. Their ship goes off course, and for several days the vessel drifts without direction. Neither captain nor crew has any idea where they are; but after a number of days an unknown shore is sighted. The lookout cries, “Good news! … I see what looks like a city”; and the ship is brought to harbor. The captain goes ashore to investigate:

He was gone for some time; then he came to us and said, “Come, go up to the city and marvel at what God has done to His creatures, and seek refuge from His wrath! (wa-ista‘īdhū min sukhṭihi). And so we went up to the city.

Then when I came to the gate I saw people with staves in their hands at the gate of the city. So I drew near to them, and behold!: they had been metamorphosed and had become stone (wa-idhā hum maskhūṭīn wa-qad ṣārū aḥjāran). Then we entered the city and found everyone in it metamorphosed into black stone (maskhūṭan aḥjāran sūdan). And in it [i.e., in the city] there were neither houses with inhabitants nor people to tend the hearths. We marveled at that and then traversed the markets.⁶

A note by Edward Lane from his translation of the Nights suggests the significance of the verbal root s-kh-ṭ which occurs three times in the above passage:

The term “maskhooṭ,” employed to signify “a human being converted by the wrath of God into stone,” is commonly applied in Egypt to an ancient statue. Hence the Arabs have become familiar with the idea of cities whose inhabitants are petrified, such as that described in “The Story of the First of the Three Ladies of Baghdad.”⁷

In his Arabic-English Lexicon Lane also notes that the primary sense of the passive participle maskhūṭ is “transformed, or metamorphosed … in consequence of having incurred the wrath of God.” In addition, Lane records the gerund sukhṭ, which he defines as “dislike, displeasure, disapprobation, or discontent.”⁸

The term maskhūṭ may of course be understood in a very general sense simply to mean “transformed” or “metamorphosed.” Burton's commentary on this tale notes that maskhūṭ is “mostly applied to change of shape as man enchanted to monkey, and in vulgar parlance applied to a statue (of stone, etc.)”; elsewhere in his edition of the Nights he offers the gloss “transformed (mostly in something hideous), a statue.”⁹ But the connotations enumerated by Lane are brought forward in the MN edition by the captain's exclamation at the beginning of the Magian City episode: ta‘ajjabū min ṣan‘Allāh fī khalqihi wa-ista‘īdhū min sukhṭihi (“Marvel at what God has done to His creatures, and seek refuge from His wrath!”). The redactor uses this sentence to achieve a resonance of meanings between sukhṭ (“divine wrath”) and maskhūṭ (“metamorphosed”), words derived from the same verbal root, s-kh-ṭ. The presence of the noun sukhṭ gives maskhūṭ a religious connotation; and the implication that arises from this juxtaposition of words is that the city's inhabitants were transformed specifically as a punishment for having aroused God's anger.

Of interest to our discussion is a remark by ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. AD 1078) on the subject of context and meaning in his work Dalā’il al-i‘jāz (“Demonstrations of Qur’anic Inimitability”):

It becomes clear then, with a clarity that leaves no place for doubt, that verbal expressions are not remarkable for their excellence insofar as they are mere abstracted utterances, nor insofar as they are isolated words. Rather the worth or lack of worth of a given expression depends on the harmony established between the meaning of a given expression and the meaning [of the word or phrase] which follows that expression.¹⁰

As G. J. H. van Gelder notes in his analysis of al-Jurjānī's work: “The qualities do not depend on the single words but on the ‘wonderful harmony’ (ittisāq ‘ajīb) in the passage.”¹¹ Al-Jurjānī's insight can be applied to the ‘harmony of meanings’ found in a story such as The Magian City. By placing the phrase ista‘īdhū min sukhṭihi immediately before the sentences describing the lost city and its metamorphosed populace, the MN redactor reminds the reader of the root-meaning of maskhūṭ, with its original denotation of God's wrath against the impious. The words sukhṭ and maskhūṭ will recur throughout this narrative-frame as related Leitwörter highlighting the tale's moralistic concerns.

The story continues with a description of how passengers and crew disembark and then wander the lifeless city. The protagonist ventures on her own into a palace where she discovers the preserved corpses of a king and queen, each of which has been transformed into black stone (and each described with the term maskhūṭ). Finally she encounters a young man who alone has survived the fate of all the other inhabitants. He tells her the story of this city, explaining that all its people were Magians and devoted to the worship of fire. He himself, however, was secretly Muslim. Year after year divine warnings visited the city to the effect that the infidel inhabitants must abandon their fire-worship and turn to the true God; to no avail. And so, the young man explains:

They never ceased with their adherence to the way they were, until there descended upon them hatred and divine wrath (al-maqt wa-al sukhṭ) from heaven, one morning at dawn. And so they were transformed into black stone (fa-sukhiṭū aḥjāran sūdan), and their riding beasts and cattle as well.¹²

The Magian City frame ends when the protagonist rejoins her companions and conveys to them the story she has just heard:

I reported to them what I had seen, and I told them the tale of the young man and the reason for the metamorphosis of this city (wa-sabab sukhṭ hādhihi al-madīnah) and what had happened to them; and they marveled at that.¹³

Thus in this story the condition of the city's inhabitants (maskhūṭ, sukhiṭū) is explained as a consequence of divine wrath (al-sukhṭ), with the two states described in terms of the single root s-kh-ṭ. Not only does this motif-word accent relationships among events within The Magian City; it also demarcates this enframed minor narrative at both beginning and end and distinguishes the tale from the surrounding major narrative.

In other Alf laylah stories one notes the operation of what may be termed (as an extension of Buber's model) Leitsätze (“leading-sentences”): entire clauses or sentences which are repeated at salient points throughout a narrative and encapsulate its theme. In chapter 2 we will see how the Leitsatz “Spare me and God will spare you” is used to link minor narratives to the overarching tale of The Fisherman and the Genie. The sentence “This is a warning to whoso would be warned” is a familiar moralistic utterance encountered frequently throughout the Nights; in The City of Brass, however …, the redactor repeatedly introduces variants of this conventional admonition (all built around the Leitwörter ‘ibrah—“warning”—and i‘tabara—“to take warning”) so as to draw attention to the thematic concerns which unite the various episodes in the tale.

III. THEMATIC PATTERNING AND FORMAL PATTERNING

In those stories from the Alf laylah (as with works of fiction in general) which are especially well crafted, the structure is disposed so as to draw the audience's attention to certain narrative elements over others. Recurrent vocabulary, repeated gestures, accumulations of descriptive phrases around selected objects: such patterns guide the audience in picking out particular actions as important in the flow of narrative. And once the audience has had its attention drawn to the patterns which give shape to a story, it experiences the pleasure of recognition: so this is the revelation toward which the storyteller is guiding us; this must be the object which constitutes the story's focus. The reader attempting to discern such patterns in a story, however, should beware of examining too narrowly any one given incident from the tale, for an individual dialogue or isolated event, taken alone, may not have enough context to let the observer establish its significance for the story at hand. The observer's emphasis, rather, should be on the particular event as it exists in relation to the rest of the narrative and the way in which the events and other narrative elements in a story join to form a structural pattern.

In my study of individual tales I have noted two kinds of structural patterning, thematic and formal. By thematic patterning I mean the distribution of recurrent concepts and moralistic motifs among the various incidents and frames of a story. In a skilfully crafted tale, thematic patterning may be arranged so as to emphasize the unifying argument or salient idea which disparate events and disparate narrative frames have in common.

Thematic patterning binds the tales contained within The Fisherman and the Genie. The argument of this narrative-cycle may be baldly stated as: violence against one's benefactors or intimate companions, whether triggered by mistrust, envy, or jealous rage, leads inevitably to regret and repentance. This concept is illustrated both in the major narrative of the Fisherman and in its enframed minor narratives such as Yunan and Duban and The Jealous Husband and the Parrot. … Of course all these stories are also linked thematically to the outermost narrative frame, where Scheherazade is quite literally trying to talk her way out of violent death at the hands of a husband who himself is dominated by mistrust and jealous rage.

Another example of thematic patterning can be found in The City of Brass, a story which at first glance may appear to have little structural unity. The primary action, in which a party of travellers crosses the North African desert in search of ancient brass bottles, is continually interrupted by subsidiary narratives: the tale recorded on inscriptions in the lost palace of Kūsh ibn Shaddād; the imprisoned ‘ifrīt's account of Solomon's war with the jinn; and the encounter with Queen Tadmur and the automata which guard her corpse. But each of these minor narratives introduces a character who confesses that he once proudly enjoyed worldly prosperity: subsequently, we learn, the given character has been brought low by God and forced to acknowledge Him as greater than all worldly pomp. These minor tales ultimately reinforce the theme of the major narrative: riches and pomp tempt one away from God; asceticism is the way to salvation. Thus a clearly discernible thematic pattern of pride—punishment from God—submission to the Divine Will unifies the otherwise divergent stories which are gathered into this tale.

By formal patterning I mean the organization of the events, actions and gestures which constitute a narrative and give shape to a story; when done well, formal patterning allows the audience the pleasure of discerning and anticipating the structure of the plot as it unfolds. An example can be found in The Tale of the Three Shaykhs, where three old men come upon a merchant in the desert about to be slain by a demon which has a claim of blood-vengeance against him (we have encountered the earlier part of this tale already, in my analysis of incidents from The Merchant and the Genie). First the redactor takes care to note that each shaykh has with him some object of interest: the first, a chained gazelle; the second, a pair of black hunting dogs; the third, a mule. Then the first shaykh approaches the genie and pleads with it for the merchant's life: if you grant me one-third of the blood-claim due you from this man, he states, I will recite for you a wondrous tale concerning this chained gazelle. The demon accepts, and the audience can already recognize the symmetries of the formal patterning at work in this story-cycle: each of the three shaykhs in turn will advance to tell a wondrous tale concerning his animal and claim one-third of the blood-punishment. And such in fact is what happens: the merchant is saved by the recitation of the three tales.¹⁴

A more elaborate instance of formal patterning is at work in a story-cycle entitled The Tale of the Hunchback.¹⁵ Four characters, a Christian broker, a steward, a Jewish doctor, and a tailor, are summoned before a sultan and each must tell a satisfyingly amazing anecdote in order to have his life spared. This story-as-ransom motif obviously connects the entire cycle with the Scheherazade frame, where the heroine also recites tales to avert death. But there is more. Each of the four characters in The Hunchback tells a story in which he describes an encounter with a young man who has been mysteriously maimed or crippled. In each encounter the narrator asks the young man how he suffered his hurt, and the latter's explanation constitutes the tale offered to the sultan as ransom. The last of the four reciters, the tailor, tells how at a marriage-feast he met a young man who had been lamed. The youth recounts the misfortunes whereby he came to be crippled; and it turns out that the person responsible for this injury, an insufferably garrulous barber, is seated at the same table as the tailor. No sooner does the youth conclude his tale than the barber insists on offering the tailor and his friends a succession of stories, first one about himself, then a good half-dozen anecdotes about his six unfortunate brothers. The tales narrated by the barber are not demanded as any kind of ransom by the tailor, in contrast to the four tales required by the sultan in the overarching Hunchback cycle. Nor do the barber's stories seem controlled by a common thematic concern or moral argument. All six brothers suffer harm, but some deserve punishment for their foolishness or lust, while others (especially the third and fourth brothers) are clearly innocent victims of malicious sharpsters. But common to the vignettes in this series is that each tells how one of the brothers was blinded, castrated or somehow deprived of lips and ears.¹⁶ This structural pattern of mutilation links the six tales formally to one another and in turn unites the Barber cycle as a whole with The Hunchback, where each of the four enframed tales also displays a formal patterning of mutilation/crippling. Thus the stories contained in The Barber's Six Brothers constitute an example of a narrative cycle where the unity lacking at the thematic level is compensated for by a consistent formal patterning.

IV. DRAMATIC VISUALIZATION

I define dramatic visualization as the representing of an object or character with an abundance of descriptive detail, or the mimetic rendering of gestures and dialogue in such a way as to make the given scene ‘visual’ or imaginatively present to an audience. I contrast ‘dramatic visualization’ with ‘summary presentation,’ where an author informs his audience of an object or event in abbreviated fashion without dramatizing the scene or encouraging the audience to form a visual picture of it. In The Rhetoric of Fiction Wayne Booth analyzes the modern novel by making analogous distinctions between what he calls “showing” and “telling”: when an author “shows” his audience something he renders it dramatically so as to give the “intensity of realistic illusion”; when he “tells” his audience about a thing he is using his authorial powers to summarize an event or render judgment on a character's behavior, without, however, using descriptive detail to make the given event or character imaginatively present.¹⁷

To understand how these techniques function let us compare the wording of analogous scenes in two different Alf laylah stories. Both portray exemplary punishment in the form of amputation which is to be inflicted on the protagonist. The first scene is from The Lover Who Pretended to be a Thief. Khālid, governor of Basrah, is confronted with the men of a family who have caught a handsome young man breaking into their home. They accuse the boy of theft, and the prisoner confesses freely. To Khālid the youth seems too well-spoken and of too noble a bearing to be a thief; yet given the boy's insistence on his own guilt, the governor has no choice but to order the legally mandated punishment. Suspecting nevertheless that the prisoner is for some reason concealing the truth, Khālid counsels him privately to “state that which may ward off from you the punishment of amputation” the next morning when he is to be interrogated one last time by the judge before the sentence is executed (not till the end of the story do we learn that the youth is a lover who had entered the home for a tryst with the daughter of the house, and that he has allowed himself to be labeled a thief so as to protect her honor). The punishment-scene reads as follows:

When morning dawned the people assembled to see the youth's hand cut off; and there was not a single person in Basrah, neither man nor woman, who failed to be present so as to see the punishment of this young man. Khālid came riding up, and with him were prominent dignitaries and others from among the people of Basrah. Then he summoned the judges and called for the young man to be brought. And so he approached, stumbling in his chains; and not one of the people saw him without weeping for him. And the voices of the women rose up in lamentation.

The judge thereupon ordered the women to be silenced; and then he said to him, “These persons contend that you entered their home and stole their possessions. Perhaps you stole less than the amount which makes this a crime legally necessitating such punishment?”

“On the contrary,” he replied. “I stole precisely an amount which necessitates such punishment.”

He said, “Perhaps you were co-owner with these persons in some of those possessions.”

“On the contrary,” he replied. “Those things belong entirely to them. I have no legal claim to those things.”

At this point Khālid grew angry. He himself stood up, went over to him and struck him in the face with his whip, quoting aloud this verse:

Man wishes to be given his desire
But God refuses all save what He desires.

Thereupon he called for the butcher so that the latter might cut off his hand. And so he came, and he took out the knife. Then he stretched out the boy's hand and placed upon it the knife.

But suddenly there rushed forward a young woman from the midst of the women, clad in soiled and tattered clothes. She screamed and threw herself upon him. She drew back her veil, to reveal a face like the moon for beauty. And there rose up from the people a great outcry.¹⁸

The beloved has appeared: she will sacrifice her reputation and their love-secret so as to save the boy from punishment.

We will return to the lovers in a moment, but let us look first at our second amputation-scene, this one from The Reward of Charity. A capricious king has ordered that henceforth no one in his realm is to offer alms or bestow charity under any circumstances; all those caught violating this command will have their hands chopped off. In what follows a starving beggar approaches a woman who proves to be the protagonist:

The beggar said to the woman, “Give me something in the way of charity!”

She replied, “How can I give you alms when the king is cutting off the hand of everyone who gives alms?”

He said, “I beg you in God's name, give me something in the way of alms!”

So when he asked her in God's name she felt pity for him and gave him two loaves of bread as an act of charity.

Thereafter report of this reached the king and he ordered that she be brought to him. Then when she appeared he cut off her hands and she returned to her home.¹⁹

Brief, brutal, and to the point.

But the two passages, juxtaposed as they are here, trigger a question: why is dramatic visualization employed in the amputation-scene from The Lover, while the redactor contents himself with the technique of summary presentation in an analogous episode from The Reward of Charity? The answer I believe is related to the fact that the punishment-scene in The Lover is the climax of the entire story. Throughout the Alf laylah dramatic visualization is reserved especially for scenes which form the heart of a given narrative. Such is the case here. What follows the girl's appearance in the public square is narrated succinctly: the boy's punishment is averted, the couple's love is made known, and Khālid prevails on the girl's father to allow them to marry. But the redactor lingers over the spectacle of punishment: the wailing crowds, the pathetic glimpse of the youth stumbling in his chains, the extended dialogue between judge and prisoner, and the sketch of the frustrated Khālid giving up all attempt to save the boy and lashing out with his whip. The effect of all this visualized detail is to slow the pace of narration; and we are not permitted any resolution till the last possible moment, when the heroine is introduced just as the butcher is about to apply his knife. Thus the technique of dramatic visualization enables the storyteller to heighten the tension in a scene and increase his audience's experience of pleasurable suspense.

By way of contrast the amputation in The Reward of Charity is not the narrative focus of the story at all. The punishment is presented in summary fashion because it is only a prelude to the true climax: the scene where the woman's generous impulse is vindicated. Mutilated as she is and subsequently expelled to the desert with her infant son clinging to her, she wanders until she comes upon a stream:

She knelt down to drink, because of the extreme thirst which had overtaken her from her walking and her fatigue and her sorrow. But when she bent over, the boy fell into the water. She sat weeping greatly for her child.

And while she was crying, behold!: two men passed by; and they said to her, “What is making you weep?”

She answered them, “I had a boy who was holding me about the neck, and he fell into the water.”

They said to her, “Would you like us to bring him forth for you?”

She replied, “Yes,” and so they called on God most high. Thereupon the child came forth to her unharmed; nothing ill had befallen him.

Then they said to her, “Would you like God to restore your hands to you as they had been?”

She replied, “Yes,” and so they called on God—all praise and glory to Him!—and her hands were restored to her, more beautiful than they ever had been before.

Then they said to her, “Do you know who we are?”

She replied, “Only God knows!”

They said, “We are your two loaves of bread, which you bestowed in charity on the beggar.”²⁰

The redactor has reserved dramatic visualization for the scene which most merits it, that episode illustrating the moralistic theme which drives the whole narrative.

Notes

1. Leiden edition, vol. 1, pp. 57-59.

2. Leiden edition, vol. 1, pp. 72-73.

3. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 92.

4. Quoted and translated by Alter, op. cit., p. 93.

5. The MacNaghten (MN) version of The Magian City is found in vol. 1, pp. 123-128. Būlāq (B) (vol. 1, pp. 44-46) and Leiden (vol. 1, pp. 203-207) lack MN's pattern of Leitwörter. The three versions are compared in D. Pinault, “Stylistic Features in Selected Tales from The Thousand and One Nights” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1986), pp. 172-194.

6. MN vol. 1, p. 123.

7. Edward William Lane, The Arabian Nights' Entertainments (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1927), p. 1209, n. 1.

8. Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1968), vol. 4, p. 1325.

9. Richard Burton, Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (London: Burton Club for Private Subscribers, “Bagdad Edition,” n.d.), vol. 1, p. 165, n. 1, and vol. 10, p. 362.

10. ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, Dalā’il al-i‘jāz, ed. Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Khafājī (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qāhirah, 1969), p. 90.

11. G. J. H. van Gelder, Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982), p. 131.

12. MN vol. 1, p. 127.

13. MN vol. 1, p. 128.

14. Such at least is the structure of this story-cycle as found in B [Būlāq edition] (vol. 1, pp. 7-10) and MN [MacNaghten edition] (vol. 1, pp. 12-20); but it is of interest to note that, from the point of view of formal patterning, G (as found in the Leiden ed., vol. 1, pp. 78-86) is markedly deficient. As in the two Egyptian texts, in G the first of three shaykhs advances to claim one-third of the blood-punishment, and the audience is prepared for a pattern of three stories. The first two shaykhs bring forward their beasts and recite wondrous tales concerning them, as in B and MN. But when it comes the third shaykh's turn, he is not described in G's version as having with him any animal; hence he quite literally has no tale worth speaking of. And G in fact at this juncture (Leiden, p. 86) contains no more than the bald statement:

    The third shaykh told the genie a tale more wondrous and stranger than the other two tales. Then the genie marvelled greatly and shook with pleasure and said, “I grant you one-third of the blood-claim.”

    Thus in G we are told only that the shaykh recited his story, but we are not permitted to hear the story itself, in contrast to the pattern followed with the full recitals given by the first two shaykhs. The audience is denied hearing the third tale which it had been led to expect by the narrative's structure. The passage quoted above shows that G acknowledges the structure dictated by the formal patterning of the three shaykhs and the blood-punishment divided into thirds; but G disposes of this structure at the end in very perfunctory fashion.

15. The story is found in Leiden, vol. 1, pp. 280-379; B vol. 1, pp. 73-106; and MN vol. 1, pp. 199-278.

16. Some of these mutilations are central to the given story, others incidental. One significant variant among the three editions occurs in the account of The Barber's Fifth Brother. The Egyptian texts (MN, vol. 1, p. 271 and B, vol. 1, p. 103) conclude this story by having thieves fall upon the barber's fifth brother and cut off his ears, an incident not found in the Leiden version. This act is not essential to the story proper of the fifth brother, but it does link the tale to its larger frame by bringing forward the motif of maiming/mutilation which characterizes all the stories of the Hunchback cycle. As such the Egyptian versions of The Barber's Fifth Brother offer a more consistent example than does the Syrian text of the use of formal patterning as a means of achieving structural unity for a series of otherwise unrelated tales.

17. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 3-9, 40.

18. B vol. 1 (Night 298), p. 471.

19. B vol. 1 (Night 348), p. 527.

20. Ibid., p. 527.

Published editions of the Alf laylah wa-laylah and the Mi’at laylah wa-laylah

Habicht, Maximilian, and Fleischer, M. H. L., eds. Tausend und Eine Nacht, Arabisch. Nach einer Handschrift aus Tunis herausgegeben. 12 vols. Breslau: Josef Max & Co., 1825-1843.

MacNaghten, W.H. ed. The Alif Laila or Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night … 4 vols. Calcutta: W. Thacker & Co., 1839-1842.

Mahdi, Muhsin, ed. The Thousand and One Nights (Alf layla wa-layla) from the Earliest Known Sources. 2 vols. to date. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984.

Other sources

Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Burton, Richard. The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night. 10 vols. [London]: Burton Club for Private Subscribers, “Bagdad Edition,” n.d.

al-Jurjānī, ‘Abd al-Qāhir. Dalā’il al-i‘jāz. Edited by Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Khafājī. Cairo: Maktabat al-Qāhirah, 1969.

Lane, Edward William. The Arabian Nights' Entertainments. New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1927.

Lane, Edward William. An Arabic-English Lexicon. 8 vols. Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1968.

Pinault, David. “Stylistic Features in Selected Tales from The Thousand and One Nights.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1986.

van Gelder, G. J. H. Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1982.