The Arabian Nights - A Companion, page 27
The Nights story of ‘Sinbad the Seaman and Sinbad the Landsman’ is a more complex and sophisticated tale than its (hypothetical) Pharaonic prototype, ‘The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor’. It is plausible that blind word-strings, or stories, acquire more complex forms because these complex forms have more survival value in the complex societies of today in which old stories precariously circulate. By contrast, simpler forms, such as exempla, fables and anecdotal wisdom literature, are all but extinct in modern western society; and although the adventures of Aladdin have survived fairly well in modern popular consciousness, the story of Tawaddud with its heavy freight of Islamic lore and outdated scientific theory retains only a precarious place in the memories of a few academics. In the Nights, stories are the vehicle for saving lives – for example, the tales told by Sheherazade, or the tales told by the old men in order to save the life of the merchant who killed a jinn’s son with a carelessly discarded date stone. In the Nights, knowledge of a story and the ability to tell it may assure the survival of an individual. Analogously it may be that in real life too knowledge of stories assists the survival of communities or of individuals within those communities. Monod himself believes that stories which reassure man about his destiny have a particular survival value. To engage in literary biology is, of course, only to play with a metaphor. Still, it is perhaps a fruitful metaphor.
10
Children of the Nights
From the eighteenth century onwards, translations of the Nights circulated so widely in Europe and America that to ask about its influence on western literature is a little like asking about the influence on western literature of that other great collection of oriental tales, the Bible. An answer to the latter question might include reference to The Divine Comedy, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Middlemarch, Apologia pro Vita Sua, Anna Karenina, Joseph and his Brothers, Ben Hur and Boating for Beginners, to suggest only a few obvious titles. In some cases, the Bible has been a stylistic influence. In others it has provided characters and props for a good yarn. In yet others, the authors’ study of the text has set them moral and intellectual problems which they have then sought to resolve in fictional or poetic form. In countless cases, early and repeated exposure to the Bible has shaped the mentality and temperament of a writer. The Bible is so deeply embedded in western culture that there are many people today who, though they have never opened the book, still have an extensive knowledge of the Bible’s teachings and stories. In the same way, people who have never sat down to read the Nights may know, or at least know of, the stories of Ali Baba, Aladdin and Sinbad. As Jorge Luis Borges (in characteristically paradoxical vein) observed of the Nights: ‘It is a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it.’1 If one asks what was the influence of the Nights on western literature, then one is asking not for a single answer, but rather for a series of answers to a group of questions which relate to one another in complex ways.
Antoine Galland produced his translation of Les Mille et une nuits in the course of the years 1704–17. Even before his translation was completed, cheap versions and extracts from the early volumes were circulating in France and England. In France the instant success of Galland’s work was marked by a rush of imitations and parodies. Thomas Simon Guellette (1683–1766) produced volumes of Tartar, Moghul and Chinese tales in mock-oriental vein. He even produced a collection of wholly bogus Peruvian tales. Popular at the time, they are rightly neglected now.2
Sex and satire were the staples of the pseudo-oriental story in the early eighteenth century. Anthony Hamilton (1646–1720), an Irish Cavalier and one of Charles II’s courtiers, writing in French, produced such light fictions, which were highly acclaimed at the time. Hamilton’s stories, which simultaneously imitate and mock his model, are characteristic examples of the impact of the Nights in the first few decades after their publication. Readers of the Nights in early-eighteenth-century France found in its pages a form of liberation, a flight from solemnity and a disregard of plausibility. Histoire du Fleur d’Epine, ‘The Story of May-Flower’, was written in parody of the Nights in a style which Hamilton claimed was ‘more Arab than that of the Arabs’. In that work Sheherazade narrates a preposterously silly tale involving a questing sage, Pooh Pooh, as well as a musical mare, a luminous hat and a beautiful maiden who kills with a glance. Hamilton has Dunyazade criticize Sheherazade for the prolixity and confusion of her tale. (In Hamilton’s case the reader may well feel that Dunyazade has right on her side.) Hamilton’s Les Quatre Facardins was similarly silly. The four princes, who are all called Facardin (Facardin is Hamilton’s rendering of the Arabic name Fakhr al-Din), attempt to give a coherent account of their magical and amorous adventures. They are not very successful, as their tales are regularly interrupted by other tales and only rarely concluded. The oriental touches in Hamilton’s fabulous farrago are perfunctory, and Perrault’s French fairy tales were at least as much the target of Hamilton’s parody as were the stories of the Nights.3
The frivolous tone of Hamilton’s stories was echoed in the pastiches of Crébillon fils. (His father, a weightier but dimmer figure, was also a writer.) Although he perversely worked as a government censor, Crébillon fils (1707–77) also specialized in the writing of erotic fictions. Le Sopha (1742) makes use of a frame story device and oriental settings. In the frame story, a sultan, whose grand passions are embroidery and patchwork, commands Amanzei, one of his courtiers, to entertain him with stories. The sultan works away at his patchwork and as he listens comments on Amanzei’s tales. Amanzei has had a remarkable and lengthy past. He is able to recall previous lives, in particular a period when he was condemned to be incarnated as a series of sofas, until such time as he should bear the weight of two people consummating their love for the first time. Amanzei tells the sultan six stories of lovers of whose dalliances he has been an intimate witness and support. Crébillon’s use of the oriental tale as a vehicle for a cynical and satirical presentation of the amours of contemporary libertines must have influenced Denis Diderot (1713–84). Diderot allegedly wrote Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748) in a fortnight for a bet, to show how easy it was to write a story in the manner of Crébillon. In Diderot’s pornographic satire on the manners and pleasures of the French aristocracy, Cucufa, a genie, gives the sultan a magic ring which has the power to make his subjects’ sexual organs speak and reveal what they have been up to. Hamilton, Crébillon and Diderot produced brittle fictions which made only trivial use of oriental settings, names and magical devices. The novelist’s Orient was as yet only a playground and not to be taken seriously.
The deployment of oriental motifs in weightier moral tales was equally perfunctory. Les Lettres persanes, published by Montesquieu in 1721, is an epistolary novel in which the author uses the device of letters passing to and from two Persians travelling in Europe, Usbek and Rica, in order to expound his own views on religion, politics and law. Usbek’s and Rica’s accounts of the strange things they have seen in Europe alternate with letters from Persia giving an account of the increasingly tragic intrigues in Usbek’s harem. Though later and dimmer readers may not always have realized this, Montesquieu was not attempting to present a serious picture of family life in Persia; the letters from the harem are really as much about France as the letters that are sent from France. However, to trap out his oriental harem, Montesquieu mainly made use of the seventeenth-century French narratives of travels in Persia by Chardin and Tavernier as sources for oriental matters. At the same time, when he presented contemporary France through the eyes of the Persians as a land of marvels and strange superstitions, Montesquieu seems to have been deliberately and playfully attempting to invest his own society with the illusory charms of one of the Arabian kingdoms, made popular by Galland’s recently published translation. There is no evidence, however, that Montesquieu was an admirer of Galland’s work, and the genuine oriental tales are criticized by Rica in the 137th letter for their tedium and implausibility: ‘I am sure that you would not approve of an army being conjured out of the ground by a sorceress, or of another, a hundred thousand strong, being destroyed single-handed by the hero. However that is what our novels are like. The frequent repetition of these insipid adventures is boring, and the nonsensical miracles are repellent.’
Voltaire pretended to a similarly low opinion of the genuine oriental tale, though he was prepared to make use of its conventions for his own purposes. ‘Enchanter of Eyes, Disturber of Hearts, Light of the Mind, I kiss not the dust from your feet, because you rarely walk, or walk only upon Iranian carpets or on roses.’ This opening sentence of the dedicatory epistle to Zadig sets the light-hearted tone of his philosophic romance. Zadig ou la destinée (1748) was set in Babylon on the Euphrates in a vaguely pre-Islamic Orient. It tells of the adventures of the wise young man Zadig, of his quest for happiness and of the misfortunes he experiences through the fickleness of monarchs and of woman. Voltaire’s fantasy is a satire on religious bigotry and contemporary mores, telling us much more about France in the age of the Enlightenment than it does about ancient Iraq, but it is above all a treatise in fictional form on the nature of chance and destiny. Zadig experiences the sudden reversals of fortune that are so frequently encountered by the heroes of the tales of the Nights. In the end, after many turns of fate and fortune and after having been instructed by an angel, Zadig concludes that, behind the appearance of chance and misfortune in the world, a divine providence does in fact rule over all things: ‘there is no such thing as accident. All is either trial or punishment, reward or foresight.’4 However, the conclusion of Zadig is perhaps a little ambiguous; it was certainly provisional, and Voltaire was later ruthlessly to satirize providential explanations of evil and misfortune in his even more widely acclaimed philosophical romance, Candide.
Although Voltaire was steeped in the stories of the Nights (he claimed to have read them fourteen times) and though he lifted themes and motifs from them for use in several of his fictions, this did not prevent him from mocking the contemporary craze for them. In Zadig he has the Sultan Ouloug question the sultanas on their preference for such tales. ‘“How can you prefer stories,” asked the wise Ouloug, “which have neither sense nor reason?” “But that is just why we do like them,” replied the Sultanas.’ Moreover, though Voltaire was perfectly familiar with Galland’s tales, he was later to tell William Beckford that the chief inspiration for Zadig had come from the romances of Anthony Hamilton. In the hands of Hamilton, Diderot and numerous lesser figures, the mock-oriental tale had acquired a life of its own, more or less independent of its Arabian prototype.
It has been estimated that almost 700 romances in the oriental mode were published in France in the eighteenth century. Guellette, Hamilton, Crébillon and other French writers who wrote in this vein were all translated and eagerly read in eighteenth-century England, and Galland’s rendering of the Nights was at least as popular in England as in France.5 An anonymous English translation of ‘Aladdin’ appeared, probably in 1708, and circulated as a chap-book. More translations of selections from Galland followed in chap-book form, and very soon English writers were engaged in reworking, imitating and parodying the Arabian tales. It would be a mistake, however, to regard Les Mille et une nuits as the only source behind the mania for the Orient in France and England. A taste for Galland and his imitators and parodists was only part of a wider fashion for chinoiserie, turquerie, oriental silks and ceramics, and architectural follies in the Egyptian or Chinese mode. The increased consumption of opium in the eighteenth century seems to have gone hand in hand with an interest in oriental imagery. The translations of Sir William Jones (1746–96) from Hindu, Persian and Arabic classics were widely read. The travel narratives of Chardin, Tavernier, Tournefort, Sherley and Bernier were also popular. The commercial and military ventures of Britain and France in India stimulated an interest in Indo-Muslim culture. Towards the very end of the century, in 1798, Bonaparte and the French landed in Egypt, and, as Edward Said remarks, this ‘invasion was in many ways the very model of a truly scientific appropriation of one culture by another’.6
In general, English writers working in the oriental mode failed to match the wit and the licentiousness of their French contemporaries.7 Indeed, most English oriental tales tended to be leadenly moral. Caliphs, princesses, jinn, calender dervishes and sorcerers become fodder for what are mostly pompous and dreary sermons. The essayist Joseph Addison (1672–1719) held the enlightened view that every child should be encouraged to fantasize. However, if one is to judge by his own retelling of tales from the Nights, fantasy is strictly subservient to moral ends. In ‘The Story of the Graecian King and the Physician Douban’, Addison strove to civilize and Christianize his exotic materials, and as he remarked of his version of ‘Nuschar’s Daydream’: ‘The virtue of compliance in friendly discourse is very prettily illustrated by a little wild Arabian tale’ (only it is not so very wild in Addison’s retelling). Addison’s characteristic tone in his moral tales is politely sceptical, though certainly never to the point of questioning Christian truths. Indeed, his finest essay in the oriental genre, ‘The Vision of Mirza’, is an allegory of the Christian view of life. Though he claimed that this story, first published in the Spectator, was a translation from an eastern tale, the pretence was not very serious. In this grandiose allegory (which may remind some readers of the spectacular canvases of catastrophe painted by ‘Mad’ John Martin), Mirza looks down on the great bridge of life over which humanity must travel. Sooner or later, all who travel on the bridge lose their footing and fall, either to damnation on the rocks or to salvation in a current which carries them to the islands of the blessed. Mirza is told that he is looking on ‘that Portion of Eternity which is called Time, measured out by the Sun, and reaching from the Beginning of the World to its Consummation’. Addison blends oriental fantasy with Christian preaching: ‘“Surely,” said I, “man is but a shadow and a dream.”’
Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia (1759) resembles Voltaire’s Zadig in its use of a fabulous Orient as a field of philosophical enquiry. But its philosophical preoccupations are closer to Voltaire’s other masterpiece, Candide (and curiously the two works were published within weeks of one another). In Rasselas, the eponymous Prince leaves the Happy Valley in Abyssinia, declaring that ‘I shall long to see the miseries of the world, since the sight of them is necessary to happiness’, and he embarks on a pilgrimage of enquiry into the meaning of life and a search for a lasting and worthwhile happiness. Johnson’s melancholy temperament did not allow him to offer his readers a conclusive answer to Rasselas’s enquiry. The heavy freight of moralizing and social satire in both Johnson and Voltaire is quite alien to the original Arabian tales. Johnson, like Voltaire, mocked what he perceived to be the lush ornateness of the Arabian originals. He had no real interest in Islam, the Middle East or Arab literature, but this did not stop him from pandering to the taste of the times and publishing separately sixteen oriental tales in the Rambler and the Idler, which were really sermons tricked out in oriental fancy dress.
It would seem that in the eighteenth century the English could not get enough of being preached at. Otherwise, it is hard to explain the success both of Addison’s and Johnson’s little tales and of Hawkesworth’s rather longer Almoran and Hamet (1761). John Hawkesworth (1715–73), an essayist and journalist, was a friend of and collaborator with Johnson. Hawkesworth influenced Johnson, and vice versa. Almoran and Hamet, a Johnsonian parable about how true happiness may be found, is set in Persia.8 Almoran is a vicious prince, and Hamet is his virtuous brother. Almoran is aided in his vile schemes by a jinn who presents him with a ring which allows him to change shape with anyone he thinks of. ‘I will quench no wish that nature kindles in my bosom,’ declares Almoran. The premise may be promising, but Hawkesworth throws away his opportunities. Almoran fails to deflower the blushfully virtuous Almeida, and the story turns into a dour lecture on the worthlessness of a quest for pleasure unrestrained by any considerations of morality. In the end the despotic Almoran is turned into a rock. He and the reader have learned their lessons.
Similarly boring, if improving, stuff was produced by many other hands – among them the Reverend James Ridley (Tales of the Genii, or the Delightful Lessons of Horan, the Son of Asmar, 1764), Hugh Kelly (Orasmin and Elmira, 1767) and Maria Edgeworth (‘Murad the Unlucky’, 1804). Though tedious, such works were popular at the time. Charles Dickens, for example, loved Ridley’s stories as a child, making several allusions to them in later novels. Although Frances Sheridan’s Nourjahad (1767) is a moral tale in the same exasperating genre, it is redeemed by the strangeness and originality of its conceit. Nourjahad is promised immortality and almost limitless riches by his guardian genius (or jinn), but at the same time he is told that these gifts carry with them a penalty. The genius warns him that he will sometimes and without warning fall asleep for long periods of time – for several years or decades. However, Nourjahad is undeterred, and thus it is that he sleeps through the birth of his son and the death of his wife. Then again, he plans a blasphemous party in which youthful and ravishing members of his harem are to impersonate the wives of the Prophet, but, when he wakes up on what seems like the folowing morning, he finds that the ladies of his harem, who were to have danced before him with roses in their hair, have become stooped and withered hags. Nourjahad continues to fall asleep at inappropriate times and for inappropriate lengths of time, until Sheridan’s novelette concludes with a surprise moralizing twist in the tail. Nourjahad offers an interesting variant of the ‘years-of-experience-in-a-moment-of-time’ motif; and setting the moralizing twist aside, Sheridan’s story can be read as a parable on the theme of time as the destroyer of all man’s hopes. As the sagacious Cozro remarks to Nourjahad: ‘What have all thy misfortunes been . . . that are not common to all the race of man?’9
