MARTIN PUCHNER: You've talked a lot about how these stories circulate,

how they were put together by different translators and editors, and collected
and reshuffled and reconfigured.
All of this is of a piece with world literature.
Are the Thousand and One Nights a kind of
paradigmatic work of world literature, given their cosmopolitan provenance?
PAULO HORTA: I think so.
If world literature is the movement of text across time and space,
if it's the circulation of work outside of its culture of origin,
this is the paradigmatic example.
There's no doubt about that.
It's one of the most circulated texts, perhaps after the Bible.
Having said that, I kind of wonder, how do we choose what
is worldly about The Arabian Nights?
Open an anthology of world literature and you
will find the stories that have been selected from The Arabian Nights
are the original, authentic stories that embody a certain moment
in the history of these stories.
The original cycle that we were referring to before.
However, those stories were not considered world literature, or even
high literature, canonical literature in the Arabic speaking world.
It may have circulated not quite in the world literature sense.
And the stories that did circulate, stories like Aladin,
and Alibaba and Sinbad, are nowhere to be
seen because they are not representative or authentic because they were added
in French, and they were maybe co-written by the Syrian traveler
that I like to talk about, Hanna Diab.
And it's very interesting how, in a sense,
we haven't caught up to these problematic examples.
What happens to texts that do exist in this circulation
outside of their culture of origin?
How do you anthologize that?
Do we put that under French literature, 18th century?
That's not how they tend to go.
They tend to be misdiagnosed and misplaced
in anthologies of world literature.
MARTIN PUCHNER: So they're really two alternative conceptions
of world literature at work here.
On the one hand, world literature as a collection of typical literature
from various countries.
And then it makes sense to collect, perhaps,
the stories from the original Arabic cycle.
But if world literature is a set of texts that circulate,
then we should collect the more peripheral, or the ones
that don't come from the Arabic core.
PAULO HORTA: That's right.
Or if they're Arabic, they were very late addition.
MARTIN PUCHNER: Or they were a very late addition.
PAULO HORTA: The Sleeper and the Waker, which
bounces off Shakespeare, and Calderon de la Barca in Life is a Dream.
You'd think that would be a more logical inclusion
and in a world literature anthology.
Oh, but you know, added too late.
And the recension is not very canonical in the manuscript
history of The Arabian Nights.
So let's just stick with The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,
which is harder to actually connect to the other texts you
might be teaching in a world literature core such as this.
MARTIN PUCHNER: So you're saying, let's bring our conception of The Arabian Nights
up to speed with what we're actually practicing when we do world literature.
PAULO HORTA: Exactly.
Scholars of Arabic literature complain of what
they call Arabian Nights syndrome, by which they mean the over-representation
of the Nights in such anthologies.
Or for that matter, public discourse, or popular culture.
Over-representation.
So we have The Thief of Bagdad framed on Prince Ahmad.
We have Aladin, we have Alibaba, which has given so many film
versions throughout the years.
And they would say, well, why not Kamar al-Zaman?
Why not The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad?
Why not The Hunchback, for that matter?
So there's this complaint about this Arabian Nights syndrome.
And in fact, Roger Allen who coined this term,
he complains about only wanting things which
are like the Thousand and One Nights to represent Arabic literature abroad,
and as it circulates abroad.
So it's almost a complaint of a kind of orientalism, or self-fulfilling cycle.
And I'm not sure that's fair to the history of The Arabian Nights,
because what he's describing is a preference for the fantastical,
for the supernatural, which does not necessarily
reflect the way the Thousand and One Nights
was actually read in Europe, for example, in the 19th century.
MARTIN PUCHNER: And as you said earlier, actually,
if you look at the Thousand and One Nights,
there are many different kinds of stories.
Some are more fantastical.
Some are more popular.
Some come out of scholarly traditions.
So there's a great variety within them.
PAULO HORTA: And I think some of the new scholarship on the Thousand
and One Nights points to the influence of the Thousand
and One Nights on realist writing, on Dickens, 19th century.
That's a reminder that, for a lot of European novelists,
reading a collection of stories about merchants and cobblers
and tailors was an inspiration to write about everyday people.
And many of the tales of the Thousand and One Nights are tales of intrigue,
of seduction, of men versus women, in a sense.
They're not necessarily supernatural tales.
The Gothic and the supernatural, the romantic,
they only represent some of the elements, some
of the currents in European literature that borrowed
from the Thousand and One Nights.
At least as deep an imprint was made on George Eliot.
In fact, George Eliot takes her paradigmatic image of realism.
At the beginning of Adam Bede, she says...like the Egyptian sorcerer
in his mirror of ink.;
This is straight out of Edward Lane.
We have to remember that a lot of realist writers--
she later comes back to Arabian Nights in Daniel Deronda in a very deep way,
structuring that novel around Kamar al-Zaman and Lane's retelling.
For a lot of these writers, The Arabian Nights taught them how to do realism.
I would resist the suggestion that The Arabian Nights equals orientalism,
equals the irrational or the supernatural.
MARTIN PUCHNER: Yeah.
That's great.
Well, thank you Paulo, for coming all the way from Abu Dhabi,
from the Middle East to our studio here in Cambridge
to talk to us about The Arabian Nights.
PAULO HORTA: Thank you.
It's a pleasure.