Shahrazade\u27s wake: The Arabian Nights and the narrative dynamics of Charles Dickens and James Joyce

Dickens and Joyce follow in the wake of Shahrazade, retracing and reviving the structures of her Arabian Nights tales. They also conduct a wake for this female storyteller, warding off the ghosts of her narration. As wakers of the Nights, Dickens and Joyce adopt a dual stance towards that Persian text: they change what they intend to repeat, and challenge the ghosts they pretend to revere. In their retelling of the Nights, Dickens and Joyce reveal their differing conceptions of the power of the reader and the female teller in the production of narrative. The Arabian Nights is known as the text of Shahrazade\u27s life-saving narration. But more important to Dickens and Joyce is the text\u27s representation of gender and gesture. Shahrazade\u27s subversion of the King\u27s sexual and verbal power results from her digressive storytelling, and from her gestured narration of the tales for her sister; as the King watches, he becomes a voyeur whose power is compromised. Gender, gesture, and voyeurism are also significant to the pantomime versions of the Nights which Dickens and Joyce see as part of its text. In the spoken and the staged Nights, narrative becomes an exchange of power between male and female, word and body. The first two chapters concern the treatment of the female storyteller in a range of Dickens\u27 texts and in Joyce\u27s later works. Dickens figures the female teller as a rival whose text must be silenced or coded by the narrator as inferior to Dickens\u27 own. Joyce, however, uses what he represents as a female grammar to suspend the articulation of his text into coded meanings. Following an analysis of the pantomime, the last two chapters discuss Joyce\u27s use of gestural language and voyeurism to involve the reader in the production of the text, and Dickens\u27 use of the same elements in order to control the reader\u27s interpretation. This analysis of the borrowing and burying of the Nights enables a re-evaluation of the two writers\u27 narrative dynamics: Joyce\u27s work requires the reader it appears to alienate, while Dickens\u27 minimizes the reader he seems to court