SOURCE: Naddaff, Sandra. “Magic Time: The Movement and Meaning of Narrative Repetition.” In Arabesque: Narrative Structure and the Aesthetics of Repetition in the 1001 Nights, pp. 89-108. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Naddaff argues that The Arabian Nights uses repetition to structure narrative discourse, thus exploring and emphasizing the relation between time, repetition, and narrative; she goes on to examine how these structural devices are used to comment on power and gender in the tales.]

I

We come finally to the crucial connection between repetition and time, a connection that, although of particular interest vis-à-vis the repetitive mode, is of course maintained with all types of narrative discourse. For all narrative must take first root in the temporal realm. Indeed, not only must narrative move within the various confines of its own temporal boundaries, but we as readers can participate in narrative only by following the temporal continuum of our own universe, by establishing a time of reading. What is the relation between these two temporal spheres? How does one clock narrative time so that the reader's sense of time remains mains intact? How can one move forward or backward in narrative time without destroying the limits of temporality? The answers differ according to individual narrative genre and effect. Epic, romance, realist novel: each genre requires a different temporal perspective specific to its narrative structure. But regardless of generic constraints, each must engage on some level with Proust's “jeu formidable … avec le Temps.”

In the cycle of “The Porter and the Three Ladies,” it is primarily the repeated recurrence of certain patterned structures of story and discourse which undeniably and somewhat ironically signals the movement of the cycle in time and the correlative unfolding of the narrative. One must again remember that exact identity between repeated events of whatever nature is, strictly speaking, impossible; that the linear constraints of the temporal realm must necessarily prevent the exact repetition of events no matter how similar, simply because any repeated event occurs at a time later than that of the instigating event. At best, narrative can know only near repetition, the replaying of the same events, the same verbal components at a different time.¹ The very fact that the same phrase exists at one or more points in a text points to the necessary temporal movement of the narrative, its incapacity to maintain a static position. In the third dervish's description of the opening of the forbidden doors, for example, the repetition of both story and discourse underscores not only the significance of the act of discovery but both the temporal movement that accompanies the act and the narrative that describes it. The repeated interruption at the end of each night serves much the same function—only in this case the act being described is that of narration itself. In short, given the insistent foregrounding of repetition as a means of structuring narrative discourse, the 1001 Nights seems to be telling us something significant about the relation between time, repetition, and narrative.

That repetition within narrative is essentially a temporal phenomenon cannot be disputed, since without the context of advancing linear time, repetition has no frame of reference and therefore no meaning. A narrative structured by repetition consequently relies upon and often silently points to its temporal framework. Not surprisingly, then, time is of the essence, both structurally and thematically, in the three ladies cycle. Everyone is trying to beat the clock in both narrative and performative terms, and time's passage accordingly assumes critical importance. Repetition appropriately underscores this temporal movement.

I will return to this crucial relationship shortly, but let me digress briefly here to note that other levels of narrative time are operative within the cycle as a whole. While the repetition of structures of story and discourse is sustained primarily on the horizontal plot axis of the narrative and accordingly manipulates the temporal movement within the individual narratives, there is a corresponding vertical axis along which the temporal movement of the act of narration itself moves. This temporal movement can be designated as narrational time, that time specific to a given act of narration. Given the basic repetition of the narrative act within the cycle, as discussed earlier, the corresponding temporal movement is clearly significant.

We must again go back to the beginning. The first level of time specific to the narrative act—and there is here an equivalence between narrative time and narrative voice—is that in which the storyteller tells his story about Shahrazad telling her stories. This level of primary narration remains largely implicit and substantially unvoiced. It is, in fact, brought to the fore only in the interruption that occurs at the end of each night—“But morning overtook Shahrazad, and she lapsed into silence”—and in the occasional voice markers, “said Shahrazad,” which necessarily follow this interruption. The second level of narrational time and voice is appropriately that of Shahrazad herself. This level is only slightly more pronounced than that of the primary narrator; indeed, since both share the third-person past tense, it is easy to mistake the one for the other. The only time Shahrazad's voice comes through clearly is at the beginning of each night when she refers to herself in the first person and directly addresses the king: “I heard, O happy King.” But it should be emphasized that within the primary narrative of the storyteller, the time and voice of Shahrazad are themselves primary; they repeat the function of the time and voice within which they are embedded. It is within their limits that the most substantial narratives of the cycle unfold.

The Chinese box syndrome continues. The third level of narrational time belongs to the story being told by Shahrazad. This is the realm which is initially indicated by the indeterminate equivalent of the implicit “once upon a time” that opens the three ladies cycle, but which is later specified by Shahrazad as the time of Harun al-Rashid. It is in this time that the characters of the tale exist and tell their own stories. In the case of the three ladies cycle, this level is established initially in the frame story and subsequently reasserted in the intervals that separate the individual tales. It is at this point that the story is evaluated and its narrator summarily dismissed. At the end of the first tale, for example, the dervish concludes: “But God drove us to your house, and you were kind and generous enough to let us in and help me forget the loss of my eye and the shaving off of my beard”; and the narrative continues: “The girl said to him, ‘Stroke your head and go.’ He replied, ‘By God, I will not go until I hear the tales of the others.’ … It is related, O happy King, that those who were present marveled at the tale of the first dervish. The caliph said to Ja'far, ‘In all my life I have never heard a stranger tale.’ Then the second dervish came forward and said: …” (91-92). Again, the third-person past tense prevails. The voice is ostensibly Shahrazad's, but the tone of the narrative bears a strong resemblance to that of an unspecified, omniscient narrator. It would seem that the further back in narrational time we go, the fainter the original narrative voice becomes.

The loss of the primary narrative voice—be it that of the storyteller or of Shahrazad—is finalized in the fourth level of narrational time. This is that time in which the narrative-men and -women speak, a time that is necessarily antecedent to that of the act of narration. These stories are also told in the past tense, but there is here a switch in the narrative voice from the third person to the first person: “Then the first dervish came forward and said: ‘My lady, the cause of my eye being torn out and my beard being shaved off was as follows. My father was a king …” (emphasis added) (86). A complete narrative transition involving the transference of the authoritative narrative voice and a corresponding shift in the level of narrational time has been made.

With the exception of the narrative night markers, nowhere else in the cycle is the passing of time noted with such care as it is in this final narrational realm. Each dervish makes a deliberate point of marking the amount of time spent in any given place. The first dervish spends four days looking for his cousin. The second dervish spends one year chopping wood. The beautiful woman has spent twenty-five years in her underground prison; the demon comes to stay with her once every ten days; and she rather calculatingly informs her new-found companion: “He has been away for four days, so there remain only six days before he comes again. Would you like to spend five days with me and leave on the day before he arrives?” (96). The third dervish in his turn sails at sea for forty days before the storm; he spends forty days with the boy whom he eventually kills, and one year minus forty days with the women in the palace. Clearly, time's passage has a peculiar significance within these tales, as if the careful marking of time were to compensate for the narrative and corresponding temporal distance that has been traveled between the primary narrative and those at the furthest narrational remove. Yet no matter how deep into the past we travel with the dervishes, and no matter how long they stay there, we and they all end up in the same place in and at the same time. In the end, we all rejoin the narrative present.

What results is a fundamental disturbance and confusion of temporal levels within the work as a whole and the cycle in particular. In addition to the standard horizontal range of the temporal spectrum within which narrative can move from left to right at ease, the three ladies cycle offers as well vertical levels of time whose only connection is that the one contains the other. If within each level a certain horizontal progression (or regression as is often the case) occurs, it is eventually confounded by the narrative constraints restricting each level. In short, a simple diachronic, linear connection in time cannot be made among the individual tales within the cycle. As the story unfolds, one must move up and down within the various levels of narrational time as well as back and forth in narrative time. A fundamental jarring of temporal perspective occurs.

Ultimately, one of the main reasons it is so difficult to maintain a distinction among the separate stories of the cycle, to remember what the 1001 Nights narrative of “The Porter and the Three Ladies” is all about—a difficulty I suspect every reader encounters—is because the line against which the narrative unfolds is so deviant. It is a difficulty that the use of repetition as a mode of narrative discourse largely maintains and essentially instigates; indeed, the vertical movement of narrational times and voices is itself little more than the echoing, the verbal mirroring of one time and voice by another. That narrative repetition has no significance without a linear temporal base, indeed derives its essence from its temporal affiliation, is clear. What is not so clear, perhaps, is that by its very nature repetition is an attempt to destroy its own essence, to kill the natural movement of linear time, to turn time back upon itself, to make time repeat itself, reflect itself, do anything but continue its unimpeded advance. That such an attempt is ultimately fruitless is the necessary result of the condition that all narrative must somehow move from one point to another, from beginning to end by way of the middle, if it is to maintain its status not only as narrative but as a linguistic construct. The fact remains, however, that every effort has been made to slow this movement, indeed to subvert this movement, to alter the inevitable march of narrative time without altering the fundamental nature of narrative.

One of the prerogatives of any narrative is to play with time, to create its own time. If the 1001 Nights is a narrative telling about the making and telling of other narratives, it is also necessarily a work about the relation between narratives, or specific types of narrative, and their temporal foundation. The motivating force behind Shahrazad's telling of the 1001 Nights is, as it is for her counterparts in Baghdad, a desire to forestall death, to impede time's natural flow, to ward off the sense of an ending. At the behest of their audience, these tellers of tales must kill time, or be killed themselves. It is ironic but essential that in order to kill time, and thereby to avoid the inevitable end of time, the narrators must make time, create narrative time. Not surprisingly, they narratively manifest this irony by developing their tales according to repetitive structures of story and discourse which counteract the forward movement of time and in so doing undercut the fundamental impulse of narrative.

II

It stands to reason that this effort to forestall the inevitable human end of time, the physical sense of an ending, affects the narrative sense of an ending as well. Given that narrative repetition is essentially a kind of recurrent textual return, a backward narrative movement that seeks to reunite, realign a later textual moment with its original preceding one, it is not surprising that the ending of a work structured according to various patterns of repetition is significantly different from that of a work that progresses more or less straightforwardly from beginning to end. Peter Brooks notes that in the grammar of plot, “repetition, taking us back again over the same ground, could have to do with the choice of ends.”² The pertinent suggestion is that the ending of a repetitive narrative functions differently in relation to the preceding whole. The particular intent of this difference is focused on the narrative beginning.

If one accepts Todorov's premise that the ideal narrative consists in its broadest outlines of a fundamentally stable situation (the beginning), which is subsequently disturbed (the middle), and finally resolved (the end)—that is, that any narrative moves between two equilibriums that are related but not identical (the same but different)—one looks to the ending of a traditional narrative as a resolution marked by its necessarily later difference from the beginning.³ In short, the movement inherent in any narrative structure requires a distance between beginning and end along which the narrative can unfold, and this distance in turn requires a difference between the two limiting points of the narrative. The absence of this distance of difference would seemingly lead to a kind of narrative collapse, an inability on the part of narrative to pursue its necessary course. A repetitive narrative, however, a narrative whose structural impulse is always to look backward, to turn back upon itself, necessarily subverts this sense of an ending as something in the distant and different future.

The cycle of “The Porter and the Three Ladies” drives the point home. When the second woman has finished her tale and the caliph has ordered that it be entered as a recorded history and placed in the treasury, the closing frame of the story as told by Shahrazad to the king follows. This last section of the tale, structurally separated from the preceding section of the narrative by a night break, fulfills much the same function as an epilogue. Not only are the primary characters of all five embedded tales gathered together at one time and in one place, but the future of each one is irrevocably determined by the political and narrative authorities in question, with some assistance from a dea ex machina in the guise of a Muslim ifrit. In sum, the ultimate conclusion of the narrative, the final weaving together of assorted narrative strands, is achieved.

What happens at the end of the three ladies cycle is not unlike what happens at the happy end of a nineteenth-century novel: people are married; losses are compensated; futures are ensured. The ifrit is instrumental in this activity. In gestures that remind us that at a certain point it is potentially the women in this tale who wield the power (especially the narrative power), she helps to bring the cycle to its close by releasing the two sisters of the eldest lady from their inhuman captivity as black bitches and by informing the caliph of the true identity of the second woman's jealous husband, who, conveniently, is both geographically and genetically close at hand. Harun al-Rashid then takes over and asserts his secular authority. He expediently marries the three sisters of the first woman's story to the three dervishes, whom he subsequently enlists as his chamberlains; he reunites the second woman with his son, her estranged husband; and he obligingly offers himself as a spouse to the third woman, the shopper, who curiously is richly rewarded for having no story to tell. A fearful, perhaps because unearthly, symmetry results. It is no wonder that at the close of the entire narrative, the caliph orders that all the preceding stories be recorded and thereby preserved for posterity.

What has happened at the end of this cycle is remarkable for reasons other than its patterned design. Instead of progressing toward a future state, a condition distantly different because later than the beginning, the narrative has moved backward, has restored its characters to a time and a state predating that of the cycle's opening. The narrative has been markedly conservative, even retrograde in its driving impulse. When the ifrit, muttering words that no one can understand, releases the two women from bestial captivity, she expresses in summary form the basic thrust of the cycle's ending. The women return to their original state; the three dervishes reacquire their royal status (the narrative interestingly reminds us of this, as if to underline the socially conservative nature of the caliph's act: “He married the first girl and her sisters who had been cast under a spell to the three dervishes, who were the sons of kings” [150]). And finally, the doorkeeper is returned to her former husband. The happy end of the cycle has not provided a new and different because importantly later equilibrium on which the narrative can rest. It has, on the contrary, done little more than return the narrative to an earlier state, one prior to that of its beginning. The status quo has been reestablished. Time has not doggedly marched onward and taken its inevitable toll; it has, in fact, moved backward and ultimately been frozen through narrative at a still and stable moment.

III

I would like now to move from this discussion about the conservative power of repetition to examine the way in which this narrative pattern relates to issues centering on the female body and questions of gender raised earlier in this study. Such generic issues of narrative time are not, I would suggest, unrelated to the way that gender (the etymological connection between genre and gender is here significant) means in a given narrative context. And they are particularly connected to the kinds of power struggles that gender, almost by definition, elicits.

Such struggles are at the very center of Alf Laylah. Indeed, one might argue that the text itself is instigated by the unanticipated appropriation of power by women. It is worth digressing to reexamine the familiar though crucial first scene. Shahzaman, Shahrayar's brother, has returned to his palace to find his wife in bed with a cook. Shahzaman responds to this scene by cutting his wife and her lover in two, only to discover some time later his brother's wife in a similar situation. This time, however, the treachery is magnified. Twenty concubines initially accompany the queen into the garden, ten of whom quickly reveal themselves to be men, specifically black slaves. Shahrayar's wife then allies herself with another black slave, who descends from a tree in response to her call. The scene is repeated a second time for the voyeuristic and legalistic benefit of Shahrayar, following which the two brothers go forth to seek comfort in the possibility of similar wrongdoing.

In an article entitled “Infidelity and Fiction,” Judith Grossman has examined this scene with an eye to the question of women's subjectivity in the 1001 Nights and has argued that what Shahzaman and Shahrayar are encountering here is “the problem which the recognition of female subjectivity has set for male-dominated cultures”;⁴ that the two brothers are confronting the fact that women have autonomous desires and, perhaps more frightening, the capacity to satisfy these desires at the expense of the “normal” boundaries of patriarchal society and culture. What is particularly interesting, though, is that it is not simply the women in whom these subversive desires are embodied. Shahzaman's wife, one recalls, was found with a cook, a representative of the domestic realm; while Shahrayar's wife, whose garden party suggests the way such subversive gestures are fruitful and multiply, has her male cohorts assume female guise, further intensifying this association between the feminine and the subversive. That her lover is himself black and a marginal figure (suggested by his tree-house location) suggests that such subversive behavior is distributed among all those who are not part of the dominant hierarchy. Clearly, speaking about gender is a constant reminder of the other categories of difference, such as race and class, that structure culture.

The response of the two kings to the potential for social revolution within their realm is to eradicate the threat in an effort to maintain the status quo. Both destroy the actual bodies that have sinned against authority, though it is interesting that while Shahzaman wreaks his own vengeance, Shahrayar delegates the punitive action to his wazir, Shahrazad's father, perhaps thereby formally asserting his unqualified resumption of power. Since it is precisely the declaration of unrestrained sexuality and desire that inaugurates this potential revolution, it makes perfect sense within the logic of the situation to mutilate the body that is the locus of such threatening actions.

It is not for nothing, I would argue, that as the interlude in “The Porter and the Three Ladies” has suggested, the 1001 Nights is haunted by bodies. Bodies scarred, transported, naked, metamorphosed, bodies that seem incapable of maintaining a secure, stable, respectable position in society are, in a sense, the signature of Alf Laylah.⁵ There are three groups of these specifically female bodies both in the frame tale and again in “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad” that are worth examining in order to explore the ways in which sex and text, male and female, come to grips with each other in this work, and to suggest thereby one kind of power struggle generated both in and by the Nights as well as the way the narrative, as suggested above, resolves it.

As Grossman notes, the presence that immediately counters the precipitating actions of those first female bodies, those of the kings' wives, is, surprisingly, not Shahrazad, but the woman possessed by the demon. Having discovered the betrayal of Shahrayar's wife, Shahzaman and his brother have responded by going forth to compare their fate with that of other men. Soon after their departure from the city they encounter a woman whose body, if not spirit, is quite literally possessed by a demon who contains her in a glass box with four padlocks. (The fact that the chest is glass is interesting because it gives the illusion of free will and movement.) It is this woman who forces the two brothers to have intercourse with her, as she has done with many hundreds of men before them, and it is, consequently, this woman who convinces them of the essential depravity and subversive nature of the feminine. It is after encountering her that Shahrayar returns home and implements his plan of daily execution. Grossman remarks that what is particularly noteworthy here is that the authority commanded by the woman is not her own. In clear bondage to her demon husband, she is only able to manipulate her situation within the terms of power established by the one who possesses her body. She can only compel Shahzaman and Shahrayar to do her bidding by invoking the power of her husband. Three times she threatens the two brothers with the wrath and ensuing violence of the ifrit if they deny her satisfaction; and although she brings her encounter with Shahzaman and Shahrayar to a close by pronouncing, “When a woman desires something, no one can stop her” (10), what neither she nor the kings realize is that she is doing so according to the conditions established by a society that legislates the possession of the female body. She is not acting subversively; she is simply appropriating the power that belongs to her husband.

The woman who is eventually summoned by this encounter is Shahrazad. But I would like to return for the moment to those three Baghdadian women, who mirror not only Shahrazad in their commanding narrative presence and power but also—in their ultimate narrative objectification and confinement—those women she sets out to redeem. I argued earlier in this study that what the three ladies are doing in the frame story of their cycle is establishing a specific kind of discourse, a discourse that focuses on the female body and on the relation of this body to metaphoric language. These are, apparently, the first fully self-possessed, seemingly integral and unmarked female bodies that the reader encounters in the Nights (though this cycle is immediately followed by “The Story of the Three Apples,” a story ostentatiously generated by the discovery of a mutilated female body). These are women who, apparently, not only control their own bodies and celebrate their own sexuality but also determine their own language and their own narrative rules. When the women demand further on in the frame tale that the men who have joined them for the evening either tell their tales or be permanently silenced, they are asserting their prerogative as the essential lawmakers in this particular realm.

It would seem that these three women are establishing an alternative society with radically different customs and laws that they themselves have determined. The specifically feminine space that they inhabit and that separates them from medieval Baghdad, the autonomous control they have over their own bodies, their legislative powers, which are backed by both oral and written authority and unquestioningly asserted, all suggest that within the confines of the frame tale at least, the actions and aims of these women are driven by anything but a desire to maintain the status quo of the society from which they have divorced themselves.

Indeed it seems that the three ladies are anxious to throw into question the values of those men who enter their privileged realm. But the facts of the extended narrative tell otherwise. The women's power turns out to be short-lived and confined to the initiating frame. It takes only the simple assertion of the real, historical, and political power of Harun al-Rashid, the embodiment of the dominant, established culture, to override the women's voices. Ja'far states: “You are in the presence of the seventh of the sons of 'Abbas, al-Rashid, son of al-Mahdi son of al-Hadi and brother of al-Saffah son of Mansur. Take courage, be frank, and tell the truth and nothing but the truth, and do not lie, for ‘you should be truthful even if truth sends you to burning Hell’” (134). And once commanded by this authority, the three ladies revoke the essential rule of their realm, Speak not of what concerns you not, lest you hear what pleases you not, and obey the caliph's commands that they tell their own story—the truth and nothing but the truth.

The result of this all-too-ready abdication of power on the part of the three women leads to the reestablishment, or, since it has never really been threatened, the reassertion, of historical authority and the status quo it embodies. Again, the closing frame of the cycle as told by Shahrazad to Shahrayar drives the point home. The potential for a state of change and difference, a state in which the linguistic and social order suggested by the three ladies might be enacted, has been abolished. The interlude initiated by the three ladies has proved to be just that—a playful, insignificant moment prior to real action whose suggestions for rewriting the social and linguistic codes have been appropriated by the proper authorities. In this light it seems important to note that the bodies these three women so proudly reveal in the opening frame are not as whole and unmarked as they initially appear. The back of the doorkeeper bears the tell-tale traces of a previous whipping, and it is these signs that initially excite the caliph's curiosity. Significantly, the caliph himself, by association, is responsible for these bodily etchings since, ironically, it is his son who has engraved them on the woman's back.

There is one more encounter with a dis-rupted body in this cycle that warrants examination. Physical metamorphosis—the transformation of a person from one bodily state to another—occurs almost as frequently in the Nights as physical mutilation. Both men and women are subject to metamorphic transformation, though women seem more likely to lose their human aspect than men. The great example of metamorphosis in the three ladies cycle is, of course, that of the king's daughter, who through her powers of autometamorphosis releases the second dervish from bestial captivity.

The incident is interesting in part because of the way it plays off of earlier moments of physical enclosure or transformation. The dervish whom the princess redeems has been transformed as a result of his encounter with the woman in the underground cave. This woman, held there against her will by an ifrit, is, in essence, a duplicate of that other woman in captivity, discussed earlier, who instigates Shahrayar's revenge. The underground woman is content to entertain her unexpected, and indeed uninvited, visitor until she needs to fulfill her obligations to the ifrit in much the same way that her double economically uses the short measure of the demon's sleep to assert her own desires. Their fates, however, are radically different. The demon husband responds to the woman's infraction of justice by engaging in nothing less than physical torture and mutilation. (The dervish reports first, “Then he [the demon] seized her, stripped her naked and, binding her hands and feet to four stakes, proceeded to torture her”; and later, “I saw the girl stripped naked, her limbs tied, and her sides bleeding”; and finally, “Then he took the sword and struck the girl, severing her arm from her shoulder and sending it flying. Then he struck again and severed the other arm and sent it flying” (98-101).

For his part in the deception, the dervish is transformed into an ape, but an ape who, critically, can still write though not speak. In order to release him, the king's daughter herself willingly undergoes a series of stunning metamorphoses during which she engages in combat with the ifrit, who counters with his own transformations. What is unusual about this encounter is that the princess alone controls what happens to her body. Her intellectual and corresponding metamorphic powers have been transmitted to her by an old woman (emphasizing, perhaps, the connection between such powers and the feminine) and are unbeknownst even to her father, who values her over a hundred sons. In her capacity for autonomy and self-determination, she counters the previous images of contained and possessed women with the image of a female body so supple and unbounded that it can change shape at will. Indeed, in her metamorphic powers, she recalls the three ladies and their metaphoric powers—both united in their potential to alter the given structure of reality. The affiliation, unfortunately, extends further, for like these other women, the princess's power is only temporary and, indeed, self-destructive. In working to release the second dervish from his bestial form, the princess effects not only the death of the ifrit but her own annihilation as well. Her final transformation into a heap of ashes suggests the ultimate ineffectualness of her power. In order to reestablish the “natural” order of things, in order to reassert the “normal” boundaries that structure society—the division between human and animal, between higher and lower, between male and female—the princess must extinguish her own “unnatural” powers precisely because they threaten such order. It is striking in this context that the dervish, who is both the instigator of all this trouble and one of the primary beholders of this scene, escapes almost wholly intact. The lost eye, the only mark he bears of this encounter, is the price he must pay for having borne witness, for having seen what should not be seen or even allowed to become visible. What the king's daughter has done is to stave off the breakdown of all “normal,” established boundaries and limits, a breakdown that would force a reorganization of reality in the same way that the metaphoric language of the three ladies would. In sum, what she has indicated through her metamorphosis and consequent death, and what the three ladies themselves ultimately acknowledge, is the necessity, perhaps even the desirability, of returning society to its earlier patriarchal state.

IV

I would argue that the use of repetition in this narrative is the structural device that has worked its will in this reestablishment, in this conservative movement back to an earlier, more stable moment before narrative became necessary. For the most part, in any case. But what of the stories of the two women, which bring the embedded portion of the cycle to an asymmetric close? Why the growing attenuation of repetitive patterns of story and discourse precisely at that point closest to the final return, the final inversion of beginning and end, achieved by the frame's close? The answer lies in the very nature of the narrative movement associated with repetitive structures. If, as discussed earlier, such a narrative does move in a fashion contrary to that of a more horizontal, linear narrative; if repetition as a mode of narrative discourse structurally urges a narrative to return to its origins, ever to antecede its narrative beginnings, the narrative must, in practical storytelling terms, never end, for it must always and eternally repeat itself at the very point of its real narrative beginning. No matter how hard a narrative might try to counteract the sense of an ending as a future moment, then, it must inevitably concede at some point to the basic dictates of the narrative movement it is subverting. A practical end point must be located, since the potential of and for repetition is infinite. The endlessly repeating is, in fact, the interminable; there is theoretically no way to halt a narrative that has embarked on a fundamentally repetitive course. Just as metaphor must have metonymy in order to achieve its final metaphoric state, so must a repetitive narrative engage in a forward movement not only to assert the very fact of its repetition but also to bring the narrative at some arbitrary point to its practical close.

I would suggest that the final two tales of this cycle gradually provide a counter to this overriding movement of repetition; that in unwinding the ever more complicated structures of the preceding tales, they help to ease this potentially endless narrative to its rest. And I would further suggest that it is important that these are the stories of two of those ladies who sought to overturn the dominant culture in which they, as narrative-women, are embedded, for it is yet another concession to the literary, social, and political norms embodied in Harun al-Rashid.

The way in which the actual story of each of the five major tales is handled in the closing frame is significant. The three dervishes' narratives receive barely passing notice. No steps are taken to counteract their action; no attempt is made to right any of the physical wrongs committed in their course. The response to the two ladies' tales, however, is quite different. Not only is the ifrit necessary literally to undo the damage cited by the two women, but the narrative takes great pains to track this reversal in some detail. The story of the ifrit is repeated by the ifrit herself before she returns the dogs to their former human state, in much the same way that she reminds the caliph of his son's action before al-Amin can confirm it himself. Fortunately, the repeated narratives are relatively brief. The ifrit waxes fairly eloquent about her own personal history but repeats only in shortened form the story of the second lady and her jealous husband. The same narrative attitude is maintained with al-Amin: “Then the caliph, O King, summoned his son al-Amin and questioned him to confirm the truth of the story” (150). The closing frame of the cycle employs in relatively concentrated fashion many of the repetitive patterns discussed in relation to the three dervishes' tales; but what the ifrit's retelling of the ladies' stories suggests is that since the structural underpinnings of the stories are themselves of little use in returning the ladies to an earlier state, since the ladies have apparently lost their metaphoric power, the story and discourse of the closing frame must compensate.

Regardless of the means, we finally arrive at the cycle's end, which predates, in a sense, its beginning, at the point at which all of the characters (with the exception of the luckless porter, who has long disappeared from narrative sight) are restored to their former condition and forever removed from further narrative influence. I have suggested throughout this discussion that the kind of narrative movement that instigates such an ending is intimately linked to an effort to contradict and counteract the forward-moving march of time, which necessitates the kind of change and potential for revolution that the 1001 Nights is apparently arguing against.

But this forward temporal movement also brings us all, characters and readers alike, to our natural end. One might argue that the drive of such a repetitively structured narrative is to achieve the status of the timeless, the eternal, the ultimate conservative state, and to move beyond the boundaries of beginning and end. It is a status achieved on a minimal level by every narrative in its capacity to be reread, reexperienced, repeated, at any time and place. It is, nonetheless, particularly significant in a narrative created according to the structures and restrictions of a repetitive mode. Shahrazad's own narrative is intensely aware of such time-breaking narrative potential. Not only is it structured according to the fundamental repetitive act of narration, which provides the foundation upon which the 1001 Nights is built; but its very title accentuates the narrative drive that actualizes such potential. As Ferial Ghazoul notes, in Arabic the number one thousand (1000) connotes a number beyond count; one thousand and one (1001) suggests that final move into eternity, into the realm where the mere passing of days and nights has no significance.⁶ Shahrazad tells stories for one thousand and one nights in order to move beyond time, to reassert certain deeply embedded cultural norms and patterns of literary and social behavior that are being subject against their will to alteration and reconsideration. The three ladies and their companions in Baghdad do the same.

Notes

1. See Kawin, Telling It Again and Again, p. 7.

2. Brooks, “Freud's Masterplot,” p. 286.

3. See Todorov's discussion of this issue in “La grammaire du récit.”

4. Grossman, “Infidelity and Fiction,” p. 114. I have found Grossman's article particularly suggestive for the terms in which she discusses the problem of women's selfhood and subjectivity in the Nights.

5. The two meanings of the word corpus again intersect. Richard Burton most demonstrably suggests this etymological conjunction when in the “Translator's Foreword” to his Thousand Nights and a Night he remarks, “Before parting we [a colleague and himself] agreed to ‘collaborate’ and produce a full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated copy of the great original” (emphasis mine).

6. I have benefited greatly from the fascinating discussion of the significance of numbers in the 1001 Nights in Ghazoul, The Arabian Nights, pp. 62-65. She addresses the issue of the number 1001 on p. 65.

Bibliography

Brooks, Peter. “Freud's Masterplot.” Yale French Studies 55-56 (1977): 280-300.

Kawin, Bruce. Telling It Again and Again. Ithaca, N.Y., 1972.

Burton, Richard, trans. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. 16 vols. N.d.

Ghazoul, Ferial. The Arabian Nights: A Structural Analysis. Cairo, 1980.

Grossman, Judith. “Infidelity and Fiction.” Georgia Review 34, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 113-26.

Todorov, Tzvetan. “La grammaire du récit.” Langages 12 (1968): 94-102.