Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 357

“SHOULD SHE TELL A STORY …” 355
sation with her husband, the jealous King Shahryãr. Each time he marries,
he has his new young bride killed at the end of the wedding night to ensure
that she will not betray him. Every morning, to save herself from this fate,
Shahrazãd tells Shahryãr a tale so exciting that he stays the execution until
the following night. In this way, she prolongs her life one day at a time.
She is careful not to end any story without promising another, but she also
employs the technique of having a character in one story tell another story,
giving her husband even more reason to let her live.
Among the embedded stories Todorov examines is “The Tale of the
Hunchback.” Here, Shahrazãd tells her husband of a group of four men –
a broker, a steward, a doctor, and a tailor – suspected of having killed the
titular character, who in fact choked on a fish bone. The sultãn, after hav-
ing listened with great skepticism to the four men describing their dealings
with the deceased man, decides to have them all executed unless they can
tell him a more spectacular story than the tale he has already heard of the
hunchback’s fate. The strongest effort comes from the tailor, who claims
that two days earlier, he was at a feast where he met a lame man who told
the gathered guests about his unpleasant interactions with a barber, who
was also present at the feast. When the lame man finishes his account, the
barber describes events from his perspective, reporting that he had gone
to the court of the khalĩfah and told him a series of stories about his six
brothers. In each of the barber’s stories, the brother in question has his
own things to say. For instance, the fifth brother, al-Ashãr, is accused of
theft and multiple murders but saves his life by telling the walĩ (district
governor) “all his adventures from beginning to end.”22 At this stage, we
have encountered five narrative layers in The Thousand and One Nights:
The third-person narrator tells us that …
Shahrazãd tells Shahryãr that …
a tailor tells a sultãn that …
a barber tells party guests that …
he (the barber) has told a khalĩfah that …
al-Ashãr has told the walĩ “all his adventures.”
22 The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, trans. Powys Mathers, vol. 1 (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 352.