Whatever Gets You Through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments (review)

The great storyteller Sheherezade of Arabian Nights fame already enjoys an impressive legacy in literature. Yet one of her latest reincarnations in print still merits particular note: Andrei Codrescu’s Whatever Gets You Through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments. Codrescu, an essayist, poet, and NPR commentator, delivers pithy observations on modern life, all the while revisiting this ancient storytelling cycle about a murderous monarch and a brilliant storyteller. He cleverly retells one of Sheherezade’s tales: a story from “The Second Dervish’s Tale,” which is about a prince who is transformed into a monkey with a gift for calligraphy. Codrescu also elaborates at length on the events preceding the king’s vow to prevent female infidelity by taking a new wife each night and killing her at sunrise. Whatever Gets You Through the Night is not, however, a large-scale rewriting or modernization, nor does the book attempt to be the story of Sheherezade. Instead, what distinguishes Codrescu’s treatment of the Nights is how he presents a story among many, weaving into his own tale a larger story about the storytellers, translators, writers, readers, and scholars who have kept the Arabian Nights tradition alive.

The book’s opening words, “no telling without retelling” (1), announce an ongoing reflection on storytelling and its evolution. Codrescu’s imaginative account of Sheherezade’s early years and first experiments in storytelling are part of this. Later, Sheherezade becomes a ringleader of Al-Adl, a proto-feminist organization that launches a plan to end the king’s slaughter of women. Sheherezade marries the king herself and, each morning, stops just shy of affording him the satisfaction of narrative or sexual conclusions. She thereby prolongs her life and practices effective birth control (although many of her conjugal duties fall to her sister Dinarzade). At the end, Codrescu humorously pinpoints the shortcomings of many “happily ever after” conclusions to the Nights. But the intricacies of his own conclusion demand careful reading and risk being overshadowed by a sudden confluence of increasingly fantastical elements, temporal shifts, and lexical invention. Codrescu imagines a time when storytelling retains generative powers but human procreation becomes technological and not sexual. He leaves Sheherezade childless, unpardoned, and telling tales ad infinitum and leaves the attentive reader to ponder the form and function of stories in the future.

The book’s hybrid nature and formal experimentation are visible from the start in its 101 footnotes, ranging from scholarly citations to digressive independent story lines that span the bottom and outside margins of several pages. The casual reader can appreciate many of Codrescu’s witty remarks in the notes without fully grasping all the erudite references. However, the readers likely to find the footnotes most disconcerting are those versed in literary and cultural criticism. Codrescu transitions without warning from seemingly scholarly notes into a fictional universe where critical terms and paradigms can be freely redefined and literary history can be rewritten for nonhistorical ends. For example, Codrescu introduces an ahistorical persona called Galland-Lang: a merging of Antoine Galland, the eighteenth-century French translator who introduced Sheherezade to the West, and the nineteenth-century British translator Andrew Lang. Lang did rely heavily on Galland’s text, as Codrescu contends, but worked under vastly different conditions. In another example Codrescu uses identical first and last footnotes to disregard the widely studied narrative frame of the Nights on the ground that the stories themselves are perpetually generative. Codrescu’s unapologetic revisions of literary history and scholarship through his own written storytelling will frustrate some readers and are probably meant to do just that. By blurring the line between fiction and scholarly commentary, Codrescu calls into question how we categorize and understand texts—and the modalities we use to convey our own interpretations.

On one point, however, Codrescu’s ideological position remains unequivocal: the thesis of Husain Haddawy’s introduction to his 1990 translation...