La Seconde folie de Shahriar dans Dites-moi le songe d’Abdelfattah Kilito. De l’oralité à l’écriture des Nuits

A Moroccan writer, an essayist, and a literary critic, Abdelfattah Kilito has broadly dealt with Arabic literature, as well as with the Occidental one. His multifaceted and hybrid work is at the same time undeterminable and transgeneric. He is one of the great readers of the Arabian Nights and one of the literary critics who extensively worked on the tales of Scheherazade. In Dites-moi le songe, a work on the edge of narrative and essay, which deals mainly with literature and where reading and writing intersect, the Arabian Nights occupies a special place. The text in this novel brings together four stories written in the first person, apparently independent of each other but also – paradoxically – linked by the characters, the themes and the patterns that come back to create a thread that weaves the text. We are here interested in the second part of the novel, entitled "The Second Madness of Shahriar", where Kilito raises the question of the transcription of these tales and of their shift from speech to writing, a shift that happens under the label of a second bloodthirsty madness of the monarch. This work is part of the global framework of madness in its relation to reading, speaking and writing.