"cliff-hanger"

[Joel S. Berson]

Good points, George.

I did take a brief look at a (Mrs.) Burton edition on-line (or at
least one volume of it).  The breaks in the tales are
explicit.  Scheherazade "perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say
her permitted say".  Whether she was clever enough always to
"perceive the dawn" at a crucial point in the tale rather than dawn's
time of arrival would take a closer reading than I plan.  Lisa Ann
Robertson wrote (on C18-L):

>Sharazad's stories break off just when something is about to happen
>that will resolve a question in the plot. They leave the auditor,
>Shahryar, eager to know more. This is why he spares her life for
>1,000 nights and a night--the time it takes for her to bear him sons
>and cure his madness by showing him not all women are lecherous and
>treacherous (there's a Burton-esque rhyme for you). Unless there is
>something about cliff-hangers that wed them to cataclysm, I would
>say this medieval manuscript might be one of the first of that genre.

I suppose a hanging question of the plot is as good as a crisis or a
cataclysm.  But to fit the notion of "cliff-hanger" the 1001 Nights
(or any) manuscript would have to be delivered to its readers in
multiple copies -- or read to an audience -- like a periodical, with
some time elapsing before the next episode (stay tuned for "same
Bat-time, same Bat-channel").  Also, I am looking for instances in English.

Like George, it occurred to me too that multi-volume publications
before the advent of periodicals, newspapers and magazines, would not
lend themselves to the "cliff-hanger" type of suspension.  That would
limit the advent in Britain theoretically to the 1620s (when an
English-language newspaper was printed in Amsterdam) or later, and
pragmatically to about 1679 or later (after the first lapse of the
Licensing Act).  Or even the 1710s, when Defoe, Steele, Addison, and
Swift began activity, although there were a few other London or
regional papers before 1710.

And if the technique was invented by those ingenious and sharp
Yankees, then after 1704.  (It couldn't have been the 1690 Public
Occurrences of Boston, since that appeared only once.)

It's also interesting that my "story" is a news item, not a tale or
essay.  But it's definitely broken just when something's about to happen.

P.S.  A minor error -- the cliff-hanger I found is 1736, not 1739.

Joel

At 1/20/2014 06:08 PM, George Thompson wrote:
>Did Scheherazade's stories break off at the onset of a cataclysm?  Or did
>they just break off?
>I suppose that this is a good reason to reread some of the Arabian Nights.
>I once owned the Viking Portable collection, but where is it now?  (I'm
>tempted to break off this email at this point.)
>
>In any event, Joel's story I would think has a good chance of being the
>first example of the trick in English.  It needs a form of literary
>packaging that would reward the packager for enticing readers to buy the
>next installment.  A Decameron-type setting of a series of stories told to
>pass the time wouldn't present this reward, nor the circulation of stories
>in manuscript, and the practice of publishing novels in parts can't have
>been much earlier than Dickens, I suppose.  Perhaps the practice of telling
>stories around a tavern fireplace?
>1739 is pretty early in the history of newspapers.
>
>GAT
>
>
>On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 4:34 PM, W Brewer <brewerwa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > <<The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval
> > Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and
> > literature>>
> > Arabic 9th c; . . . Antoine Galland, first European translator, Les mille
> > et une nuits) 1704-1717; first English edition, anonymous 1706; Edward Lane
> > 1840, 1859; John Payne 1882; Richard Burton 1885; Lyons & Lyons 2008.
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Thousand_and_One_Nights
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
>
>
>--
>George A. Thompson
>Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
>Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org