Dope

...and of no avail, O my master, is a twice told tale!

So the inspection period is over, and we can see it for what it is: a tale out of the Arabian Nights.

Yesterday we leafed through Robert Irwin's Companion to the Arabian Nights. A.S. Byatt refers to Irwin's book as gripping, which it is, indeed. Byatt's essay on the Mille et Une Nuits, by the way, begins like this:

"The best story ever told? Perhaps the story of the two brothers, both kings, who found that their wives were unfaithful, took bloody vengeance, and set out into the world to travel until they found someone less fortunate than they were. They encountered a demon who kept a woman in a glass chest with four locks; she came out while he slept and showed them 98 rings she had collected from chance lovers and insisted on having sex with the princes to make it a round 100. The princes decided that the demon was more unfortunate than they were and returned to their kingdoms. There the elder brother, Shahrayar, still angry over his wife's betrayal, instituted a reign of terror, marrying a virgin each day and handing her to his vizier for execution at dawn. The vizier's daughter Shahrazad, a woman both wise and learned, beseeched her father to give her to the king. On the wedding night, the bride asked that her younger sister, Dinarzad, might sleep under the bed, so that when the king had "finished with Shahrazad," the younger girl, as the sisters had agreed, might ask Shahrazad to tell a story to while away the time until dawn. When dawn came, the story was not finished, and the curious king stayed execution for a night. Shahrazad continued to tell tales, which gave rise to other tales, all of which were unfinished at dawn. The king's narrative curiosity kept Shahrazad alive, day after day. She narrated a stay of execution, a space in which she bore three children. And in the end, the king removed the sentence of death, and they lived happily ever after. "

Byatt, wonderfully, makes the following comment: "... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends."

One of the wonders of the Net is the hypertext Burton's Arabian Nights. It isn't quite finished yet. It can be found here.
It includes Burton's footnotes, which are one of the bizarries of literature.

Irwin, in his chapter on the translators of the Nights, records the origin of Burton's project. He was originally a friend and informant of Payne. John Payne's translation was intended to replace Lane's, which was much beloved by the Victorians. Lane bowdlerized the text. He was also, apparently, a pretty eccentric guy -- the Arabian Nights, to Lane, were a mere supplement to his great work, the Arabic-English lexicon. According to Irwin, "Lane became so steeped in this great work that he used to complain that reading English writing hurt his eyes." In any case, Payne's translation was stuffed with copious ethnological notes. Burton, deciding that he, too, would have his notes, made them even wilder than Payne's. They included his racial theories, autobiographical reflections, and much, much comment about sex. For instance, here is the part in the framing story where the wife of the shah lewdly disports herself, so to speak:

"Thereupon Shah Zaman drew back from the window, but he kept the bevy in sight espying them from a place whence he could not be espied. They walked under the very lattice and advanced a little way into the garden till they came to a jetting fountain amiddlemost a great basin of water; then they stripped off their clothes and behold, ten of them were women, concubines of the King, and the other ten were white slaves. Then they all paired off, each with each: but the Queen, who was left alone, presently cried out in a loud voice, "Here to me, O my lord Saeed!" and then sprang with a drop leap from one of the trees a big slobbering blackamoor with rolling eyes which showed the whites, a truly hideous sight."

As Irwin points out, nothing in the Arabic justifies the big slobbering blackamoor with rolling eyes remark. But Burton isn't done yet. There is a footnote for this slobbering blackamoor. It reads:

"Debauched women prefer negroes on account of the size of their parts. I measured one man in Somali-land who, when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches. This is a characteristic of the negro race and of African animals; e.g. the horse; whereas the pure Arab, man and beast, is below the average of Europe; one of the best proofs by the by, that the Egyptian is not an Asiatic, but a negro partially white-washed. Moreover, these imposing parts do not increase proportionally during erection; consequently, the "deed of kind" takes a much longer time and adds greatly to the woman's enjoyment. In my time no honest Hindi Moslem would take his women-folk to Zanzibar on account of the huge attractions and enormous temptations there and thereby offered to them. Upon the subject of Ims�k = retention of semen and "prolongation of pleasure," I shall find it necessary to say more."

He does find it necessary to say as much as possible.

Irwin, to my sorrow, points out that some of the great tales (Ali Babba and the forty thieves, Aladdin and his lamp) were probably created out of thin air by the French translator, Galland -- himself worthy of a post. He also points out that the second French translator was a friend of Proust's, Joseph Charles Mardrus. Mardrus's wife, apparently, "presided over a coterie of literary lesbians." Her salon was frequented by Marcel. There is a French critic who has pointed out that A la recherche... takes two texts as models -- Saint-Simon's journals, and the Mille et une nuits. Indeed, the idea of the insomniac tale, the tale that emerges in some interval of wakefulness and is told in lieu of sleep -- a dream substitute -- with a dreamlike branching of other tales, is one of Proust's leit-motifs.

Now, how would Sheherazade have told the tale of this war? I imagine something like this, taking its cue from the cruel morality of the barber's brothers tales:

The tale is about a powerful wicked king and a less powerful wicked king, who had once been allies. The powerful wicked king desired to depose the less powerful. However, he desired an excuse. So he made it his excuse that the less powerful king had arms. Indeed, the more powerful king knew of these arms, since his kingdom had sold them to the less powerful king. Ignoring this past history -- for are not the deeds of the powerful memorable only as the powerful would have us remember them? -- the more powerful king claimed that the less powerful king's weapons were a menace to peace. To show he was reasonable, the more powerful king suggested that a simpleton find the less powerful king's weapons and destroy them. And so, it was thought by the more powerful king's courtiers and flatterers, the less powerful king would be trapped, and war -- upon which king's fasten, as flies fasten on dying animals -- would be the result. But alas, man proposes and God disposes! For the simpleton, whose name, Blix, was like the movement of the eyelid, a thing so minute and quick that it is ignored by all men -- as indeed was Blix himself -- he began to succeed in finding and destroying the lesser king's weapons. The more powerful king was wroth at this, and so were his courtiers and flatterers. And so he thrust aside the simpleton, invaded the lesser king's kingdom, slew him and looted it of all its goods. For the justice of powerful kings consists only in this, that the evil in their hearts find a path through the world of men.