Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights.

• Author: Damrosch, David

By David Pinault. Studies in Arabic Literature, 15. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992. Pp. xi + 262. HF1 115, $65.75.

David Pinault's book is a significant contribution to the study of the Arabian Nights, and, more generally, a valuable study of non-European narrative in light of modem European and American narrative theory. Pinault employs textual history, oral theory, and narrative theory to study the evolution and workings of selected tales from the Arabian Nights. In so doing, he displays a refreshing directness in style and a love of the pleasures of the text; he himself shares what he aptly calls the characters' "abject inability to resist a good story" (p. ix). In Pinault's case, the story is that of the ongoing creative reworking of earlier material into the subsequent versions found in the different families of Nights texts and in corollary collections; he focuses on the ways in which later redactors have rearranged and modified their materials into new patterns of theme and motif. His close readings of the talcs he discusses are lucid, detailed, and illuminating, with a keen eye for the significance of stories' divergences from earlier chronicles and from other reworkings of the same material. In this respect, of particular interest is Pinault's extensive use of unpublished "analogues" to the Nights in independent collections from Morocco and Tunisia.

Any contemporary study of the Nights in light of its textual history must be conducted in dialogue with Muhsin Mahdi's 1984 edition of the fourteenth-century Syrian text. Mahdi believes the Syrian recension to be far superior, as well as prior, to the full thousand-and-one Nights from the Egyptian tradition which served as the basis for most nineteenth-century editions, as well as for the early European translations by Galland and by Burton. Throughout the course of his study, and particularly in his conclusion, Pinault carries on a friendly polemic against the categorical assertion of the excellence of early as against late redactions, showing in detail how later versions are sometimes superior to earlier versions. Pinault wishes to give eighteenth- and nineteenth-century redactors equal time along with Mahdi's fourteenth-century Syrians. In a series of often witty footnotes, he even extends the process into the present, showing how the materials helped shape accounts of such disparate events as the fall of the Shah of Iran and the discovery of the scrolls of the Nag Hammadi Library, whose...