University of Oregon

Review
Author(s): Dan Beaumont
Review by: Dan Beaumont
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Winter, 1999), pp. 81-82
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771459
Accessed: 01-12-2015 11:49 UTC

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 BOOK REVIEWS/81

NOCTURNAL POETICS: THE ARABIAN NIGHTS IN COMPARATIVECONTEXT. By Ferial Ghazoul.

Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1996. 191 p.

Ferial Ghazoul's Nocturnal Poeticscombines a structuralist analysis of The Arabian

Nights with comparative essays on The Nights and other works. Part 1 of the book is
comprised of eight chapters originally published in Cairo by UNESCO as TheArabian
Nights: A StructuralistApproach,for which reason the work was not widely available.
These chapters have now been revised, although the author's comments and my
memory of the original work lead me to believe the revisions are not major. Part 2
of the book is comprised of four comparative essays and a conclusion.
In the first three chapters, Ghazoul lays out her structuralist foundation. In
chapter 1, she begins with a distinction between a "free text" and a "fixed text"; a
poem, where the precise wording is all important, is an example of the latter,
while narratives like the stories from The Nights are examples of "free texts." Chap-
ter 2 discusses the frame story of Shahrazad and Shahriyar under the headings of
"segmentation" and "binarism." By "segmentation" Ghazoul means that the frame
story is constructed to contain other narratives by being itself a composite, a combi-
nation of various narrative "blocks," as she calls them. "Binarism" obviously refers
to pairings, whether of similar or opposed features, which exist on various textual
levels. In chapter 3 Ghazoul makes use of Michael Riffaterre's notion of textual
matrix in combination with Barthes-Riffaterean "codes." According to Ghazoul
two sentences, one regarding wounding and the other about healing, formulate
the matrix of the text: "Oh brother, I have an internal sore"; "And I will relate to
thee a story that shall, if it be the will of God, be the means of procuring deliver-
ance" (p. 30). Three codes, she maintains, are the principal expression of this
matrix: the erotic, the rhetorical and the numerical.
The next four chapters are devoted to analyses of various stories. Chapter 4 treats
the long geste of Umar ibn Numan. Chapter 5 is devoted to animal fables,
chapter 6 to Sindbad, and chapter 7 to what Ghazoul calls "demon stories"-stories
in which ajinni figures prominently. Chapter 8 serves as a summary of the fore-
going analysis.
In part 2 of the book Ghazoul compares TheArabian Nights (or various stories in
it) with other works of literature. Chapter 9 deals with The Panchatantra and The
Nights. Chapter 10 compares the story of "The Sleeper Awakened" with the same
plot as found at the opening of "The Taming of the Shrew." Chapter 11 discusses
the different uses made of The Nights by Jorge Luis Borges and John Barth. Chap-
ter 12 compares the frame story of The Nights with Arabian Nights and Days (Arabic
title, Laytili alflayla), a novel by the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz.
The last chapter meditates on the "travels" of The Arabian Nights-its seemingly
universal popularity made possible by its remarkable "translatability" (for lack of a
better word).
One of the strengths of the book is Ghazoul's discussion of the composite nature
of the frame story and how this creates "generic space" (my words) for the differ-
ent story types that follow, most notably travel stories and fables. Her discussion of
how the story of "The Merchant, the Ox and the Donkey" opens up a textual space
for the animal fables that occur later is quite good. Likewise, her discussion of
"Sindbad" in relation to the trip of the two kings in the frame story is also interest-
ing. (The discussion of the frame story as "anti-sira" compared to Umar ibn
Numan is not, however, convincing to me.) Ghazoul also treats certain stories
from The Nights that are often left out of discussion, and even thought by some
readers to be interpolations in The Nights, most notably the long story of Umar ibn
Numan and the animal fables. Her views here are especially worth considering in
relation to those of Muhsin Mahdi, who edited the Arabic manuscripts from which

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /82

Galland (1646-1715), the first European translator of The Nights, worked. Mahdi
has argued that none of the above material "belongs" in The Arabian Nights.
Ghazoul's analyses show, I think, the limitations of such a view.
Another strength of the book is Ghazoul's spirited defense of John Barth
against two critics who find Barth guilty of the usual "Orientalist" crimes. Her sug-
gestion that narrative art in The Nights brings about cathexis rather than catharsis
also seems apposite to me (pp. 95-97). And this claim leads Ghazoul to a provoca-
tive comparison of the narrative art of The Nights with that of a zar or mystical
seance (p. 97).
On the other hand, many readers will likely have reservations regarding the
kind of structuralist analysis Ghazoul practices. Apart from that, the book has
three principal weaknesses. First of all, the categories of Ghazoul's analysis are
flawed. In her discussion of the various binary elements in the text she makes use
of three "orders in semantics: synonymy, antinomy and heteronomy" (p. 24). But
the last category simply designates all words exceptsynonyms and antonyms, and a
category that subsumes words like "cantaloupe" and "donkey" (my example) sim-
ply because they mean different things has little analytical value. This strain to fit
all of the text into one category or another also manifests itself elsewhere in more
restricted contexts. I have mentioned the argument that the frame story is an
"anti-sira," that is, "anti-geste." Her argument that the structure of Sindbad is an
"anti-folk tale structure" is similarly unconvincing to me. And many of her formu-
lations are simply too pat: ". . .the king is the symbol of law order and sover-
eignty, while the slave signifies anarchy, disorder and destruction" (p. 33). I would
argue that in The Nights the fundamental relation that defines the social order is
that of master and slave; that relation is order.Hence, without the slave there is no
relation and therefore no order. Speaking only of the frame story, it is the wife's
betrayal of her husband with the slave that introduces disorder.
Secondly, in its pursuit of structuralist rigor the argument at times contradicts
itself. For example, at the outset Ghazoul proposes to analyze The Nights as a "free
text" in which "the lexical element varies" (p. 3). However, Ghazoul later proposes
to discuss "stylistic effect" (p. 8). But for the latter one must consider "the lexical
element," that is, the specific words, which we have already been told will vary.
There are also stylistic infelicities that call for more editing than the text seems
to have received. Sometimes it is difficult to unpack the meaning of a sentence;
for example: "The overall structure of The Arabian Nights is that of a principal
preposition enclosing other prepositions connected by conjunctions, and so on"
(p. 17). What exactly does "preposition" mean here?
Finally, it must be said that the structuralist approach of the first part of
Ghazoul's book will seem dated to most of thisjournal's readers. While this may be
understandable, since the first part of the book was written some time ago, it
nonetheless means that the book's value will lie more in its particular observations
than in its theoretical approach.

DAN BEAUMONT
Rochester University

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