ABSTRACT
It is no coincidence that the framing story of the Thousand and one nights begins with a departure. And it is no coincidence either that the event that will become the main starting-point of the narrative – the adultery of Shahzama-n’s wife – takes place at night. These two elements form the basis of a spatiotemporal structure which is elaborated in the framing story and which provides a model referred to in many stories of the collection. It has been remarked above in chapter one that the time-frame is inserted essentially for reasons of narrative strategy, emulating the generic pattern of the mirror for princes genre. In the Thousand and one nights, however, another element is added. The temporal component does not only fulfil a formal function, as a technique to structure the story; here it has become a narrative component in itself, impregnated with its own subtext of metaphors, connotations and annotations. The ‘night’ is constructed as the basis of a pattern which determines the perspective from which the collection should be read, a dimension of meanings added to the inserted stories. In this chapter we will analyse the spatiotemporal model set by the story of Shahraza-d and Shahriya-r1
and relate it to some other stories of the Thousand and one nights. On an ominous evening, King Shahzama-n sets out visit his brother Shahriya-r.
While camping outside his city, he returns to his palace at night to fetch something and finds his spouse in bed with a kitchen-help. This is an event of enormous proportions, not only for the trespassers, who are both slain, but also for Shahzama-n, who sees it as a fatal blow to his authority and integrity as a man and a king. The same thing happens at the court of Shahriya-r, when he goes out hunting, ironically, perhaps, since in many stories hunting is used as a metaphor for setting out in search of the beloved. After witnessing the disaster, Shahriya-r and his brother decide to spend the rest of their lives roaming through the world, leaving their lives which had appeared so secure, their wealth and the paraphernalia of their authority, to live a life of poverty, anonymity and hazards. Only when they have discovered that even a powerful jinni has been betrayed by a woman – a woman whom he carries in a trunk on his back – do they return to install the fateful regime of marrying a virgin every night and having her killed in the morning. That is until Shahraza-d intervenes.
