Top Twenty One Metafictional Works: The Story That Swallows Its Tale

Fiction about fiction is metafiction, which allow writers and readers to examine the trickiness of storytelling. Here are the best works of metafiction in chronological order. For a much longer list, see my post 111 Best Works of Metafiction.

1. Cervantes, Miguel. Don Quixote. 1605.

Parodying chivalric romance by contrasting the lofty story-lines with the hard-edge of reality, Cervantes established two genres: metafiction and realism. Often called the first modern novel, it could also be called the first post-modern novel. It’s a book about books and the effects they have upon our lives, especially when we try to live out our fictions in the real world. Cervantes challenges the notion of objective history and blurs the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. The events are told by a series of authors nested one within the other like Chinese boxes, which draws attention to how stories are told and how each teller alters the tale. In the second volume, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza hear of the publication of the first. They meet a reader and talk to him about their own book. Don Quixote, expecting a heroic romance, is angered by his portrayal as a deluded, old fool, thus becoming a critic of his own book. (Learn more about this funny and insightful novel in my book Narrative Madness and my many posts about it.)

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Eros and the Arabesque: An End to 1001 Nights?

Conclusion?

The Syrian manuscripts attempted to preserve and reproduce the “original” which stopped at two hundred and seventy-one nights but the Egyptian branch of manuscripts, Haddawy tells us in the introduction, “shows a proliferation that produced an abundance of poisonous fruits that proved almost fatal to the original” (Nights xv). Haddawy calls such additions “poisonous fruit” because he feels they destroyed its Arabic homogeneity. Besides deleting, modifying, adding, and borrowing from each other, “the copyist, driven to complete one thousand and one nights, kept adding folk tales, fables and anecdotes from Indian, Persian and Turkish, as well as indigenous sources, both from the oral and from the written traditions” (Nights xv). The tale of Sinbad is one such addition (the adventure is old, but its inclusion in The Arabian Nights is not). “The Story of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp” is actually a forgery written by a Frenchman named Galland and then translated into Arabic by a Syrian living in Paris to make it seem authentic, as evidenced by the French syntax and certain turns of phrase (Nights xvi).

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Eros and the Arabesque: Death + Life = Stories, Stories and 1001 More Stories!

Death + Life = Stories, Stories and 1,001 More Stories!

Life and death intertwine in unusual ways in The Arabian Nights. The first tale is interrupted by morning: “but morning overtook Shahrazad and she lapsed into silence” (Nights 23). Morning is usually a sign of new beginnings, life and hope, but here it means death. Sir Richard Burton translated this line, “But Scheherazade perceived the morning–” Haddawy argues that Burton’s translation is not only inaccurate, but loses the poignancy of being pursued and overtaken by morning. Thus, “she lapsed into silence” is potent because silence is the end of the story and death. Will it be a permanent silence?

 

Hermann Emil Sprengel’s Scheherazade

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Eros and the Arabesque: Eros and Shahrazad

Eros and Shahrazad

Freud expanded the concept of the pleasure principle, as he developed his theory of  the death drive, into a broader, more inclusive life drive, which he associated with Eros, the Greek god of sexual love: “the libido of our sexual instincts would coincide with the Eros of the poets and philosophers which holds all living things together” (Freud, “Beyond” 619). Eros represents not only the sexual instincts, but thirst, hunger, self-preservation, reproduction, and creativity. Shahrazad, who holds all the living tales of the book together, is “intelligent, knowledgeable, wise and refined. She had read and learned” (Nights 15). This educated woman approaches her father, the vizier, and demands that he offer her to the killer king.

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Eros and the Arabesque: The Death Drive and King Shahrayar in the Arabian Nights

The Death Drive and King Shahrayar

Confronted with mounting evidence of a compulsion to reenact traumatic events, which the pleasure principle could not explain — victims of railway disasters, soldiers returning from World War I, and even children were obsessively reliving unpleasurable events in dreams, behavior, speech, therapy and games — Freud developed a theory of the death drive, more primitive and fundamental than the pleasure principle. According to Freud, the death drive is an urge to return to an inorganic state — basically a translation of the law of entropy into psychoanalytical terms. The law of entropy states that matter and energy tend toward a state of greater disorder. Organic life, ever recombining in more and more complex forms, runs contrary to entropy, reproducing in defiance of this fundamental law of physics. So, Freud argued, all organic matter longs to return to its original state, suggesting, therefore, that “the aim of all life is death” (Freud, “Beyond” 613).

Scheherazade and Shahryar by Rene Bull

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Eros and the Arabesque: Dangerous Extremes of Pleasure in the Frame Story to 1001 Nights

Dangerous Extremes of Pleasure in the Frame Story to 1,001 Nights

The sexual instinct, which Freud said is so hard to “educate,” can be carried to such extremes that pleasure becomes destructive, even self-destructive. From the point of view of self-preservation, Freud writes, the pleasure principle is “from the very outset inefficient and even highly dangerous” (Freud, “Beyond” 597). The prologue, which establishes the frame story of King Shahrayar and Shahrazad, is dripping with destructive sexuality.

Marc Chagall’s “Shehrezed’s Night”
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Eros and the Arabesque: Pleasure Frames the Story

Pleasure Frames the Story

What gives The Arabian Nights its ageless appeal? Pleasure! The pleasure principle draws in readers (as the promise of pleasure entices the king into Shahrazad’s narrative). Ample evidence of the pleasure principle can be found even before the story begins.

Ferdinand Keller’s Scheherazade und Sultan Schariar (1880)

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Eros and the Arabesque: The Serial Proliferation of Life in The Arabian Nights

Introduction

I have heard, O wise and happy Professor, that the end of the story is death, its continuation, life. For Shahrazad this is literally true. While the story continues, she lives. If the story ends, she dies. Full of jealousy and rage, the king has sworn to take a new wife every night, satisfy himself with her and kill her the next morning before his seed has dried in her womb. Thinking to save himself from the cunning of women, the king has unwittingly placed himself in a vulnerable position between orgasm and murder: under the tongue of the most cunning of women, the quintessential story-teller, Shahrazad.

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10,001 Nights: The Frame Stories Outside the Frame Story

Shahrazad’s story may frame the stories within The Arabian Nights, but many, many, many more stories surround it.

First of all, there is the complicated story of the Nights framing itself. The tales can be traced back to various ethnic origins, especially Indian, Persian and Arabic. In the endless tellings and retellings these stories were gradually reshaped to fit the Arabic culture of the middle ages, which gives the stories a “homogeneity or distinctive synthesis that marks the cultural and artistic history of Islam” (xiv).

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The Power of Stories to Change the World: Another Arabian Night

Arabian NightsAt the end of 1001 Ways to Save Your Life, Shahrayar was trying to save her life by telling a story to the murderous, mysogonistic Kaliph. She says her story “will cause the king to stop his practice, save myself and deliver the people” (21). The first story she told was of a merchant who inadvertently killed the son of a genie, by tossing away the pits of dates he was eating. The demon was about to slay the merchant, he raised his sword in the air–

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