reiher@ucla-cs.UUCP (08/17/85)
> Good heavens! We can't forget Canterbury Tales.
Having moved from stories told in a bar to "The Canterbury Tales", we might
as well go on one step further and deal with story cycles. The two best
known, other than Chaucer, are Boccaccio's "Decameron" and "The Arabian Nights".
The idea behind these works is that, for some reason, characters start telling
stories to one another. In "The Decameron", the stories are told as
entertainment while some folks are waiting out a plague in a closed estate.
In "The Arabian Nights", of course, the stories are (mostly) told by
Scheherazade, in her attempt to forstall her death. The latter is more
interesting to fantasy lovers, as it recounts many fantastic tales. It is
also more interesting to computer scientists, for it has a lovely recursive
structure, in which stories are told within stories within stories. If
your only exposure to "The Arabian Nights" has been through children's versions,
you're in for a treat, as the children's editions trash the basic structure,
remove all sex and bawdiness (and there's a lot), and, since they were
largely written for Europeans, cut all the stories in which Christians appear
as villains. Among other things, this last loses a fantastic extended epic
about the Crusades, told from a Moslem perspective, for a change. Uncut
editions of "The Arabian Nights" are expensive (they run to several volumes)
and can sometimes be hard to find. (Other times Publisher's Clearinghouse
is trying to unload them.) If the full version is unavailable or too daunting
in size, there is a portable version which includes many stories and summarizes
the rest. It's known as "The Portable Arabian Nights", I think, and is put
out by the same people who do "The Portable Faulkner", "The Portable Poe", etc.
On a truly obscure note, there is another story cycle known as "The Saragossa
Manuscript". It was written in the early 19th century by a Polish count
named Potocki, and deals with the adventures of an impoverished but proud
young nobleman making his way across a deserted part of Spain in order to
take up a commission in the Spanish army. The structure is like that of
"The Arabian Nights", but has an additional twist: not only are stories
contained within stories, many levels deep, but stories on different levels
start interacting. The first part is of more interest to fantasy lovers,
but the latter half contains a fine set of semi-comic adventures. Unfor-
tunately, Potocki cops out at the very end. "The Saragossa Manuscript" is
very hard to get hold of, in my experience. The only English language
edition I know of is in two parts, "The New Decameron" and "The Saragossa
Manuscript", both published in the mid sixties. Major libraries may have
copies, and any library can probably track one down for you if you expend
enough effort. The Research Library at UCLA has the only copies I have ever
seen. For those who read Polish, it can likely be found at a good Polish
bookstore (wherever those are), as I understand that Poles are rather proud
of the book. There is also an excellent film version of "The Saragossa
Manuscript", in Polish and infrequently shown, but none the less one of my
favorite movies.
--
Peter Reiher
reiher@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU
{...ihnp4,ucbvax,sdcrdcf}!ucla-cs!reiher