James M. Hutchisson
It is a critical commonplace that Edgar Allan Poe’s tales are usually set in an indeterminate time and place. In striving for universality of theme and effect, Poe rarely grounds his work in a specific social, political, or geographic context. This is true even in those cases where he veers into allegory, or what he called in an 1839 review of Baron de la Motte Foque’s Undine “undercurrents of meaning”—for example, the southern gothic elements of “The Fall of the House of Usher” or the symbolic plague-ravaged country of “The Masque of the Red Death.” Even when Poe seems to want readers to apprehend a text allegorically, in other words, the landscapes of those texts remain otherworldly.
One setting, however, that Poe turned to time and again over the course of his tale-writing career, from his early stories and hoaxes to his late, enigmatic fables and “prose poems,” was that of the Middle East. Many of these tales, among them “Four Beasts in One—the Homo Cameleopard,” “The Sphinx,” and “Some Words with a Mummy,” are read as light satire, poking fun at the crude materialism of Jacksonian America, spoofing popular journalism, and mocking cultural boosterism and America’s infatuation with technology. To be sure, a strong satiric element does infuse these tales, yet I think they go beyond indictments of empiricism, industrialization, and even New England literary arrogance. The most compelling element of Middle Eastern culture that drew Poe was storytelling and the corollary power of narrative. This concept animates “Some Words with a Mummy," “Silence,” “Shadow,” and several other texts, including the most complex of these Eastern stories, “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade.”
Looking at these tales through the lens of Eastern culture allows us as well to explore ancillary thematic concerns that run through all of Poe’s work, such as the deliberately blurred distinction between fact and fiction, the reciprocal acts of death and storytelling, and the production of a fabulist type of writing that was a nineteenth-century forerunner of the postmodernist notion of metafiction. Poe also places importance on the implied contract between reader and writer—between storyteller and audience—that presents fiction as a self-generating process, akin to the work of those postmodernists like Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, and others, whom Poe profoundly influenced.
Poe reflects on and seems to depict the hazards of the European fascination with the imaginative geography of the Orient in the nineteenth century. Unlike the late theorist Edward Said, however, who described and critiqued “Orientalism” as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East, Poe does not aim to show how such representations serve hegemonic ends. Instead, Poe connects these particular and infrequent “Eastern” representations in his tales to the authority of storytelling and its reciprocal relationship with death.
Poe’s interest in the culture of the Middle East was wide-ranging. Saracenic, Arabian, Mongolian, and Islamic motifs saturate many of the stories. Such motifs can be seen even from the start of Poe’s career: the title of his first proposed story collection, after all, was "Eleven Tales of the Arabesque." Although Poe was later to modify the title and to explain in Schlegelien terms how he used both the words “arabesque” and “grotesque,” the modifying genitive case of the word that connects “tales” with the Eastern, or Arabian, character of storytelling points to the generative nature that Middle Eastern culture assumes in his art.
This should not seem unusual, given the interest in the Middle East in nineteenth-century America. Reports from expeditions to the region filled the newspapers and captured Americans’ imaginative hunger for exploration and discovery. Antoine Galland’s translation of the massive Arabian Nights in 1704 was hugely popular. Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early 1800s. There were several translations of Persian and Arabic texts by such scholars as William Jones and Abrhama Hyancinthe Anquetil-Duperron. Such men of letters as Byron, Moore, Scott, and Goethe produced “Oriental” texts, and dozens of Oriental Societies were founded in the early to mid 1800s.
One might even argue, as Malini Johar Schuller does, that “The Arabesque is the engendering force that gave birth to [Poe’s] fiction.”1 Certainly there are early tales that confirm this point. Poe’s first published story was “Metzengerstein,” the tale of a rivalry between a count and “the Saracen Berlifitzing.” Poe created this story as one of the proposed Tales of the Folio Club, with its framing device seemingly borrowed from Washington Irving’s format of a comic literary club in Salmagundi, which appeared in 1807–1808. In Salmagundi, Irving, like Poe, uses the Middle East to spin satires on the American scene, through the letters of his character Mustapha. “MS. Found in a Bottle,” another early tale, might also be considered an “Oriental” narrative. Its narrator seems to be an Orientalist who “imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec [Lebanon], and Tadmore [Syria], and Persepolis [Persia].”2 Similarly, the narrator of “Ligeia” acts in the manner of an Orientalist, as John C. Gruesser notes, in transforming his English abbey into a place of “imaginary geography” that sets the stage for a peculiarly Oriental process of reincarnation.3 Numerous Orientalist motifs pervade the story, from the description of the rooms to the description of Ligeia herself, a dark woman with “raven-black” hair (263) and an exquisite beauty, “the beauty of the fabulous Houri of the Turk” (264). Finally, the poems “Tamerlane,” “Al Aaraaf,” and “Israfel” also employ Eastern themes and use Mongolian, Indian, and Islamic motifs, respectively.
“Four Beasts in One—the Homo Cameleopard” derives from ancient Syrian history. It presents, in mock-heroic fashion, the homecoming of Antiochus IV, monarch of the Seleucid Kingdom of Syria in the second century BC. This story of a tyrant king who so abuses his subjects that they turn on him is a biting critique of mob rule and a denunciation of President Andrew Jackson, whom Poe felt to be a tyrant leading a rabble. Two other humorous stories, “The Sphinx” and “Some Words with a Mummy,” both refer to ancient Egypt. In the former a bespectacled scholar thinks he sees a monster but his myopic perspective has taken a harmless insect and swollen its image into something gargantuan and ugly. In the latter the fad of American Egyptology is lampooned when a revived mummy shows that nineteenth-century American achievements were actually employed by the ancient Egyptians.
By far, the most fictively intriguing of these Eastern stories is “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade.” Poe derived the idea for this 1845 tale by reading an English translation of The Thousand and One Nights. The mouthpiece of the stories is Scheherazade, daughter of the grand Vizier of the Indies. The sultan Schahriah, having discovered the infidelity of his sultana, resolved to have a fresh wife every night and have her strangled at daybreak. Scheherazade entreated to become his next wife, and so amused him with tales for a thousand and one nights that he revoked his decree, and bestowed his affection on her. By arousing the king’s curiosity through storytelling, Scheherazade prolongs her life.
In Poe’s version of the legend, however, the narrator notes that this conclusion is “more pleasant than true.” In consulting a heretofore unknown Oriental text, the Tellmenow Isitsoornot (a punning reference to truth “or not”), he is “not a little astonished to discover” that the fate of Scheherazade, as told in The Thousand and One Nights, is inaccurate. He discovers that Scheherazade had actually withheld from her sovereign the “full conclusion” of the story of Sinbad the sailor and, wishing to remedy the situation, goes on to tell another tale, a thousand and second story, which recounts the natural and technological wonders encountered by Sinbad on his most recent voyage. Scheherazade’s new narrative series combines modern wonders—such as battleships and hydrogen balloons—with decidedly “unnatural” natural history—such as bees displaying mathematical abilities and distances measured in light years. At one point, she comes to the most unnatural and incredible wonder of all, the bustle worn by women in the nineteenth century. Ironically, the sultan simply cannot accept this to be true, and, after querying the veracity of what Scheherazade has been telling him throughout the tale, he loses patience and orders her execution. As Poe does in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, perhaps the most postmodern of all his work, in “Scheherazade” Poe both establishes and blurs the boundary between fact and fiction. When he announces that the commonly received ending of The Thousand and One Nights is “like a great many pleasant things, more pleasant than true” (789), Poe establishes a dichotomy between fancy and truth that corresponds closely to the division between fiction and fact. Poe alerts us to how this strategy may be a dominant element of his version of The Thousand and One Nights in the epigraph to the tale, which warns that “Truth is stranger than fiction.” The epigraph is deliberately misleading since the opposite is the basis for Scheherazade’s storytelling and her survival. In order for her to survive, fiction must be made to be stranger than fact. This adage is similar to the hoaxing framework with which Poe surrounded Arthur Gordon Pym, cloaking a tale that is a fiction in the garb of a reportedly objective scientific report of an actual polar expedition.4 In “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade,” the fabricated Isitsoornot is presented as an actual published book by contextualizing it with reference to the Zohar of Simeon Jochiades and the Curiosities of American Literature, an anthology produced by Poe’s erstwhile friend, Rufus W. Griswold. On the other hand, the adventures of Sinbad related in the ersatz Oriental text, although filled with descriptions of natural and technological realities, are imaginary. As Jerome D. Denuccio says, then, “the ‘true’ functions to correct the pleasant ‘error’ of the original story that is itself an error, a fiction in the garb of truth.”5 Thus the original perceived opposition between fact and fiction is really not an opposition at all, but a mutually nourishing, generative dynamic. Fact and fiction partake of each other and depend on each other for survival.
Yet another layer of meaning is interleaved in the tale as Poe appends a multiplicity of footnotes to the story of Sinbad’s various adventures—thirty-two footnotes, in fact, to a tale that itself occupies only eighteen to twenty pages in a conventionally printed text. These footnotes elaborate on, gloss, and reference the list of marvels described in the story. They seem to confirm the authenticity of the details that Scheherazade is telling the sultan. Yet there is a disconnect here between oral and verbal discourse. We as readers, reading Poe’s version of the original tale and the fabricated overlayer of the thousand and second tale, know the facts to be true because we can read the footnotes and accept their authority. Scheherazade, on the other hand, has no recourse to footnotes and the sultan no ability to receive the documentary information. Thus the storyteller must rely on persuasive ability and rhetorical credibility to convince her audience of the veracity of her assertions and thus save her own life. The use of citation embroils the narrator in an interpenetration of texts that results in dispersed meaning. Scheherazade seems to cite multiple texts to validate her credibility as a storyteller. Yet she instead opens herself up to an intertextuality that confuses fact (the footnotes) and fiction (the imaginary wanderings of Sinbad). In the tale, Poe also presents fiction as a self-generating process. Part of Poe’s theory of fiction, as we might envision it in “Scheherazade,” is a rejection of complete textual closure. Scheherazade originally escapes her fate by telling a story about “a rat and a black cat” (perhaps a joking reference by Poe to one of his own tales) but does not finish it by the time morning comes. The king’s curiosity, however, prevails over his “sound religious principles” and he postpones her execution until the next morning, “for the purpose and with the hope of hearing that night how it fared in the end with the black cat . . . and the rat” (788). Poe emphasizes that the king is left with “no resource” but to defer his next act—Scheherazade’s execution—just as the storyteller Scheherazade must put off the end of the tale until evening comes again.
The aesthetic strategy here articulated is nothing more elaborate, really, than the techniques employed by the great serial novelists of the Victorian age such as Dickens and Thackeray: postponed endings and virtually endless beginnings. Once opened and denied closure, the fictional process continues unabated. As the narrator notes, “The next night there happened a similar accident with a similar result; and then the next—and then the next; so that, in the end, the good monarch, having been unavoidably deprived of all opportunity to keep his vow during a period of no less than one thousand and one nights, either forgets it altogether by the expiration of this outright, or gets himself absolved of it in the regular way, or, (what is more probable) breaks it outright” (789). And so on—an imaginative enterprise that pursues its own logic and creates the conditions for its own survival on into perpetuity.
Even the structure of Poe’s story affirms this logic. We have at the very least four separate but interrelated levels of storytelling—perhaps five if we count Poe’s actual text, the tale he entitled “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade” as one of those levels: a narrator quotes the fictional Isitsoornot, which quotes Scheherazade, the fictional character, who quotes Sinbad, another fictional character, relating the account of his voyages. Each level springs from its predecessor. It is recursive, and therefore theoretically limitless. What Poe creates, in effect, is a kind of tapestry text.
But most important of all, to Poe, is the reciprocal relationship between storytelling and life, or between textual closure and death. After all, Poe’s abiding concern throughout his life and literary career was to understand the nature of death. His characters perpetually devise ways of experiencing death yet not dying, of losing loved ones yet somehow reclaiming them from the hereafter. Storytelling is an interminable, never-to-be-completed project that invisibly alters the author’s relationship to death. It is in some senses a strategy of denial. The boundlessness of narrative replaces the anxiety that comes with storytelling, for to reach the end of the story is to reach the end of existing. No one lives happily ever after, except in storytelling, and more specifically in stories that posit endless permutations. As Pascal is reputed to have once said, life is like living in a prison from which every day different prisoners are taken away to be executed and do not return. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles, and ends. Storytelling is, at bottom, consolatory, for it promises us new beginnings. Paradoxically, it may also signify ultimate endings—that is, finitude. For Poe, the fear of dying is often linked metaphorically with reaching the end of a narrative. A good example is “MS. Found in a Bottle.” In that tale, death and the loss of language are inextricably intertwined. As the narrator moves toward death, he sustains himself through writing, much as Scheherazade preserves herself through the telling of tales. Each sentence is a deferral of the end of writing, a strategy of denial.6 In “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade,” Poe stresses the positive side of this life-equation: at the end of the text, Scheherazade, the narrator says, “derived . . . great consolation, (during the tightening of the bowstring,) from the reflection that much of the history remained still untold, and that the petulance of her brute of a husband had reaped for him a most righteous reward, in depriving him of many inconceivable adventures” (804). Death might usually force the end of storytelling, but storytelling itself might be in danger of extinction, too, if fiction were not aesthetically engineered to be self-perpetuating.
It is interesting that in at least two other of Poe’s Eastern tales, this theme of trying to escape the reality of death pervades. “Shadow” and its companion piece, “Silence,” are set, respectively, in ancient Egypt and along the shoreline of the River Zaire. While Poe is usually purposefully vague in reference to historic or geographic setting, in “Shadow” he is deliberately specific, perhaps because the plague that is referred to in that work actually occurred in the Nile Delta region during the reign of Justinian (527–565). Poe perhaps selected Egypt, moreover, since it was a death-denying culture, the very idea that he is dramatizing in the text. In “Silence,” we find a common motif in ancient cultures: words engraved on rock. Amid the bleak landscape, the narrator, with the aid of the red light from the moon, sees the word “DESOLATION,” inscribed on the rock. We intuit that the word refers not to the landscape, which has already been identified as desolate, but to the relationship between language and the world.7
In “Scheherazade” Poe also layers the text-within-texts with self-reflexive nods to his own fiction, creating another level of interimplication in the story’s narrative authority. Examples abound, beginning with the reference to a “black cat” in Scheherazade’s first tale. Poe then embarks on a comic riff that seems a reference to the color symbolism in “The Masque of the Red Death”: “The night having arrived, however, the lady Scheherazade not only put the finishing stroke to the black cat and the rat, (the rat was blue,) but before she well knew what she was about, found herself deep in the intricacies of a narration, having reference (if I am not altogether mistaken) to a pink horse (with green wings) that went, in a violent manner, by clockwork, and was wound up with an indigo key” (788–89). Scheherazade’s “beautiful black eyes” recall Ligeia’s, and the sultan himself is very similar to Poe’s own earlier King Pest. In speaking of one of the more outlandish modern miracles, Sinbad/Scheherazade echoes Poe’s earlier “Maelzel’s Chess-Player”: “One of this nation of mighty conjurors created a man out of brass and wood, and leather, and endowed him with such ingenuity that he would have beaten at chess, all the race of mankind with the exception of the great Caliph, Haroun Alraschid” (801). A later paragraph begins with the Voltaic motion of corpses (“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”)8 and continues through other miracles to a different “magician” whose procedure of directing the sun “to paint his portrait” (803) alludes to the daguerreotype, about which Poe wrote a series of short pieces published in 1840.9 It is as if Poe is perpetuating his own sense of the fiction-making process through Scheherazade’s thousand and second tale.
Lastly, in the tale Poe asserts that an implicit contract binds storyteller and audience. He suggests that there is a dialectical relationship between the imagination and the rational mechanism of the brain. The “calculating” faculty and the “ideal,” Poe once said, do not oppose each other but “are never to be found in perfection apart.”10 The alchemy of the two produces a kind of magic that a storyteller exploits for fictive effect. This is what Scheherazade does in order to egg the sultan on to one more tale and thus one more twenty-four-hour period of life. She coaxes his threshold for believability to one more level, then another, and so on. Scheherazade expertly takes images from the king’s experience—things he already knows and thus believes to be true—and applies them to the modern marvels that Sinbad is said to have encountered—a rough parallel to the artist’s skills at filtering everyday perceptions of reality through the alembic of the imagination and then re-presenting them to an audience.11
For example, Scheherazade begins the story with bird imagery, presenting a kind of beast fable. She speaks of Sinbad reaching a land in which “the bees and birds are mathematicians . . . of genius and erudition” (799). She then shifts to describing a massive flight of birds that sounds equally unreal but actually is not: “We had scarcely lost sight of this empire when we found ourselves close upon another, from whose shores there flew over our heads a flock of fowls a mile in breadth, and two hundred and forty miles long; so that, although they flew a mile during every minute, it required no less than four hours for the whole flock to pass over us—in which there were several millions of millions of fowls” (799). She then portrays “a fowl of another kind”: “we were terrified by the appearance of a fowl of another kind, and infinitely larger than even the rocks which I met in my former voyages; for it was bigger than the biggest of the domes on your seraglio, oh, most Munificent of Caliphs” (800). The beast, “fashioned entirely out of belly,” turns out to be nothing more unusual than a hot air balloon (recalling another Poe text, “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall”). The point here is that like the king, we as the audience fabricate images based closely on real experience. Taking that a step further in the arena of narrative authority, the king only trusts Scheherazade to the extent that he believes the “facts” related in the Sinbad text might possibly, marginally be true, given their connection—however tenuous—to his own experience. When his mind cannot perceive this possibility—as in the female bustle—he suspends the fantasy and orders the storyteller’s death.
Poe’s tale investigates the relationship between the author and the reader of a text. Recent contributions to reader-response theory suggest that the reader is relatively passive.12 Poe suggests that the relationship is more complex: readers enter into complicity with writers and create the illusion of the writer’s mastery over meaning in order that they might also see themselves as masters and become writers in their own place. The king does not exactly usurp Scheherazade’s role as storyteller/author, but Scheherazade does lose her life because she violates the delicate interdependency of the author-reader contract.
All of these aesthetic ideas, of course, are quite postmodern ones, and it should come as no surprise to speculate that Poe’s textual manipulations in “Scheherazade” may have profoundly influenced later writers. As we know, Poe’s contributions to American literature were vast. He was arguably the first literary theorist in the United States. He helped invent and popularize both detective fiction and science fiction. He made short fiction the finely modulated art form that it is today. And he ranged freely among a variety of literary forms and moods—comedies, hoaxes, plays, poems, philosophical essays, satires—and, of course, literary criticism. As such, Poe was among the most influential of all American writers. His impact on later writers and thinkers, as many scholars have shown, runs the gamut from Nietzsche to Nabokov.13
But Poe’s posthumous influence can perhaps most strongly be seen in the work of those novelists whose narrative methods dominated the late 1960s and early 1970s—and continue to influence millennial writing—the so-called metafictionists, creators of books within books and puzzles within puzzles. In this sense Poe’s influence on the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is obvious, particularly in the story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” as well on the writings of the Italian author Italo Calvino (If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller), on the Russian author Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, on South Africa’s J. M. Coetzee (Foe) and on such contemporary American writers as John Barth, Robert Coover, and Paul Auster, whose 1985 novel, City of Glass, features a detective protagonist named William Wilson. An even more recent example is the British poet James Lasdun’s first novel, The Horned Man (2002), a tale of paranoia and imagined persecution to rival both Poe and Kafka. Among postmodern detective novelists, the French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet’s indebtedness to the verbal trickery and shifting narrative identity that Poe experimented with is probably the most prominent, especially in his thriller The Erasers.
In a sense, the work of John Barth is a touchstone for this view of the role of art in the postmodern age. In such novels as The Floating Opera and Letters, as well as the short story collection, Lost in the Funhouse, Barth consistently illustrated the limits of traditional storytelling by commenting, through the fiction itself, on that very topic. In 1967, Barth published a manifesto of sorts in the Atlantic Monthly that articulated his principles of postmodern writing and served as a rallying cry for his generation of novelists. In this essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” Barth proposed that the conventional modes of literary representation had been “used up,” their possibilities consumed through overuse. The essay was soon vilified as another dirge bemoaning the death of the author—a misreading that Barth addressed in a follow-up piece called “The Literature of Replenishment.” “By ‘exhaustion,’” Barth wrote in the first essay, “I don’t mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities—by no means necessarily a cause for despair.”14 Both essays became exhortations for narratological experimentalism. Barth felt that novelists should, in a sense, thwart readers’ expectations of what a novel should be—for example, defying the traditional chronological ordering of a narrative and directly addressing the audience at times in order to remind them that the events being depicted were wholly fictitious and thus amenable to being shaped, by the author, into an almost infinite number of iterations. This same conclusion is the implied theoretical premise of Poe’s “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade,” which posits an intellectual realm of myriad possibilities in storytelling. Poe illustrates how an artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work while at the same time refuting them.15
Storytelling, the novelist and critic A. S. Byatt has written, is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape.16 Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood, and we need stories like we need genes. They keep part of us alive after the end of our story. Poe’s version of the master storytelling character Scheherazade dies and enters the hereafter not after one thousand and one tales but after one thousand and two. Poe extends her time, promises her a kind of false eternity which in his own life he must have known to be so much illusion. Yet he could console himself with what storytelling could promise: endings that created endless new beginnings and a chance for something to live on past death.
1. Schueller, U. S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 34.
2. Page references are to Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 198. Future references to this and other Poe tales within the essay will be to this edition and will be noted parenthetically.
3. See John C. Gruesser, “‘Ligeia’ and Orientalism,” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 145–49
4. See, for example, see J. Gerald Kennedy, “The Preface as a Key to the Satire in Pym,” Studies in the Novel 5 (1973): 191–96, and Kennedy, “‘The Infernal Twoness’ in Arthur Gordon Pym,” Topic 30 (1976): 41–53.
5. Jerome D. DeNuccio, “Fact, Fiction, Fatality,” Studies in Short Fiction 27, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 365–70.
6. See J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 23–29, for an elaboration of this view.
7. This is similar to the moment in “MS. Found in a Bottle” where the narrator draws the word “DISCOVERY,” an act that is closely related to the act of narrative.
8. Both “Scheherazade” and “Valdemar’ were published in 1845, but there is no precise dating for the composition of either text. Poe may have been writing “Valdemar” at the same time as “Scheherazade,” or even before.
9. “The Daguerreotype” (1840), reprinted in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980).
10. Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, vol. 11, 148. Much of Poe’s criticism argues this idea—as do his tales of ratiocination, in particular the problem-solving processes described in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.”
11. See Barbara Cantalupo, “Poe’s Female Narrators,” Southern Quarterly 39, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 49–57.
12. A notable exception is Dennis A. Foster, Confession and Complicity in Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
13. For the most comprehensive overview of this topic, see Jeffrey Meyers, Poe: His Life and Legacy (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), chapter 15.
14. Rpt. in Barth, The Friday Book (New York: Putnam, 1984), 64.
15. This is also the type of fiction described in Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses simultaneously all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and “fork.”
16. Byatt, Passions of the Mind: Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1992), 22.