The Arabian Nights - A Companion, page 29
The tale of the spectral bleeding nun is framed within Lewis’s story of the damned monk Ambrosio, and it may be that Lewis was influenced by oriental storytelling conventions in his employment of the framing device. This same device of story-within-story was used to greater effect and more elaborately in Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). (In this story, Melmoth, who has sold his soul to the Devil, seeks to find someone who will change places with him. Though he finds many people in horrific predicaments and learns all their stories, no one will take on his burden of damnation.) However, whatever debt the Gothic novelist may owe to the medieval Arab storyteller, the spirit of the Gothic novel, with its chain-rattling, blood-curdling horrors and its cult of the grandiose and the antique, is quite alien to the Arab sensibility. The absence of the ghost story in Arabic has already been noted, and, though there are horrors in the Nights, those horrors are not milked, nor did the authors of the Arabian tales interest themselves in the psychology (or psychopathology) of extreme states.
There are a number of curious resemblances between Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and Potocki’s great work of fiction, The Saragossa Manuscript. Both open with the reading of a discovered manuscript; in each case the manuscript’s contents turn out to be a series of interactive boxed stories (that is to say, of boxed stories of which developments in some stories have consequences in others); and both books feature a hero unjustly condemned by the Spanish Inquisition. It is possible that Maturin read parts at least of Potocki’s remarkable masterpiece and was impressed by them. The life of the author of the The Saragossa Manuscript was hardly less remarkable than his fiction.12 Jean Potocki was born in 1761, a member one of one of Poland’s most distinguished families. He was educated in Switzerland and later at the Vienna Academy of Military Engineering. He proved himself to be an accomplished linguist and knew at least eight languages. (At some point in his life, he mastered Arabic.) As a young man, he travelled widely in western Europe, as well as visiting Tunisia, Constantinople, Egypt and Morocco. In 1779 he was made a Knight of Malta and he joined the Knights on a pirate hunt against Barbary corsairs. (He was later to draw on his experiences as a Knight of Malta in The Saragossa Manuscript.) In Constantinople in 1784, he observed the professional storytellers at work in the cafés and experimented himself in composing tales in the oriental manner. Later, in Morocco in 1791, he hunted without success for a manuscript of the Nights. He was told, however, that the only story collection available there went under the title of The Three Hundred and Fifty-Four Nights, but there was not even any manuscript of this available for purchase. On the way back from Morocco, he passed through Spain, observing the traces of Muslim culture in Andalusia, and he crossed the desolate and bandit-ridden Sierra Morena en route for Madrid. Potocki was fascinated by Islamic culture. It is possible that this fascination pre-dated his visits to the Near East, for Poland in the late eighteenth century harboured substantial communities of Muslims (indeed, there are still some today), and Persian costumes and fashions were the rage among the Polish nobility.
Potocki’s travels in western Europe provided as much material for his future novel as did his travels in the Islamic world. In Paris in the 1780s, he frequented the salons and met leading spokesmen of the Enlightenment. He also investigated the secret aims of the Illuminists, studied cabalism and attended spiritualist seances (this was the age of Cagliostro, Mesmer and Swedenborg). Potocki was intrigued by the occult strain in eighteenth-century rationalism. He was also, at first, sympathetic to the aims of the Enlightenment and of the reformers who were to play a leading role in the French Revolution. In 1788 he returned to Poland, filled with ideas about progress and reform. In the same year, he became the first Pole to go up in a balloon, ascending over Warsaw with M. Blanchard. They were accompanied by Osman, a Turkish valet Potocki had brought back with him from Istanbul, and by his dog Lulu. Though Potocki was later to become disillusioned with the bloody progress of the Revolution in France, as late as 1791 he still had friendly contacts with the Jacobin Club in Paris.
In 1798 Potocki travelled through the Caucasus. He was a pioneer in the study of the ancient cultures and languages of that region. In particular, he learned the secret language reserved for the use of the Circassian nobility. Potocki wrote volumes on the ethnography and archaeology of the Slavic and Caucasian peoples. Among his non-fiction were such imposing works of scholarship as the Essai sur l’histoire universelle et recherches sur la Sarmatie and the Principles of Chronology for the Ages Anterior to the Olympiads. In 1805 he was sent by Tsar Alexander on an embassy to Peking. Though the mission was turned back by the Chinese in Mongolia, he made many valuable observations on the manners and customs of the Siberian and Mongol peoples. In his last years he retired to his estate in Podolia and succumbed to acute boredom and melancholia. It seems that one of his fantasies was that he had become a werewolf, and it is said that when he finally decided to commit suicide he melted down a samovar to obtain silver for the fatal bullet. He shot himself on 20 November 1815.
During the 1780s and 1790s, Potocki had written some short fictions in the oriental mode. (Like Gérard de Nerval later, he embedded them in his travel narratives.) He began work on his masterpiece Le Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (The Saragossa Manuscript) in 1797. Although the work was, in a superficial sense, completed by the time of his death in 1815, the ending is somewhat rushed and perfunctory; and it is possible that, if its author had been able to persuade himself to live a little longer, then The Saragossa Manuscript might have had quite a different ending.
Potocki’s narrative is divided into days, perhaps on the model of the Nights. The story begins in 1739, when a young Walloon officer, Alphonse Van Werden, is travelling across the Sierra Morena, hoping to reach Madrid. However, he is foolish enough to spend the night in a haunted inn, and thereafter he plunges into a series of mysterious and nightmarish adventures. In the course of the first night he becomes entangled with the sweetly seductive Moorish sisters Emina and Zubeida, who claim to be his cousins, but who may be emissaries of the Devil at work to persuade Alphonse to renounce his chance of Christian salvation. Whoever they may be, Alphonse drifts off to sleep in their bed, dreaming of the charms of the seraglio, but when he awakes he finds that he is not in bed in the inn with the bewitching sisters, but is instead lying under a gibbet, which has been used to hang two bandits. Moreover: ‘The bodies of Zoto’s brothers were not strung up, they were lying by my side. I had apparently spent the night with them. I was lying on pieces of rope, bits of wheels, the remains of human carcasses and on the dreadful shreds of flesh that had fallen away through decay.’ As strange encounter follows strange encounter and mystery is piled on mystery, Alphonse wonders if he may not be the victim of dreams, impostures or, perhaps, hallucinations brought on by drugs. He is never sure what to believe, and neither is the reader.
The perplexing adventures of Alphonse serve as a frame for other tales told by people he encounters, including a demoniac, a cabalist, a gypsy chief, a mathematician, a bandit and the Wandering Jew. Their tales in turn serve as frames for yet other stories – of love, honour, revenge, adultery and magic, featuring soldiers, lovers, Inquisitors and supernatural apparitions. The labyrinthine complexity of Potocki’s story collection outdoes even such set pieces in the Nights as the boxed tales of the Hunchback cycle, for Potocki’s tales interlock and overlap, the plot of one story determining the outcome in another. Somewhere, buried in all these stories, is the promise of secret knowledge. Alphonse Van Werden’s interlocutors introduce him to a world of mysteries, initiatic secrets and buried treasure. Emina and Zubeida are subterranean creatures, first encountered in a cellar. Their father, the Sheikh of the Gomelez, masterminds a vast plot, which mirrors and parodies the alleged and real conspiracies of the Illuminists and other politico-occult groups of the late eighteenth century.
Some of the mysteries confronted by Alphonse are sexual ones. In particular, the dangerous delights of troilism are dangled before Alphonse and his companions, first in one form and then in another, in a long series of eerie doublings. Both Emina and Zubeida declare their wish to marry Alphonse (but perhaps their charms are deceitful and their bodies the reanimated corpses of the Zoto brothers). Alphonse is tempted and he will later find his temptation echoed when he hears the story of Pacheco the demoniac about his ill-fated love for the sisters Camille and Inesille; and Pacheco’s story is in turn echoed on a higher plane by Rebecca’s tale of the cabalistic raising of two mystical entities known as the Celestial Twins. And so on. Thus doubles are redoubled in a series of uncanny distorting mirrors. What is going on? Just as in Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (to be discussed shortly), the horror lies in the ambiguity. Potocki’s treatment of this ingredient of the fantastic is masterly, and for most of the narrative Alphonse, like Abu al-Hasan in ‘The Sleeper and the Wakened’, is never sure whether he is awake or dreaming.
Oriental themes, Gothic horrors and occult doctrines and practices fascinated Potocki, but they also repelled him. His mysterious horrors are not entirely serious, and at times mystification gives way to pure comedy, as in the tale of the man in Madrid who wished to contribute to literature but, lacking the talent to write himself, dedicated his life to making ink to serve the literati. Potocki the philosophe kept an ironic distance from his materials and used the props of Romanticism (gypsies, succubi, cabalists and bandits) in the service of Enlightenment values. The Saragossa Manuscript is to some extent a tract on the virtues of tolerance and a satire on outmoded feudal codes of honour. Potocki wished to instruct as well as to entertain, and there is space in over 800 pages for an encyclopaedic collection of discourses on strange customs, ethical systems and contemporary philosophy.
The story of the writing and publication of Potocki’s tales is, if anything, more confusing than the tales themselves. According to a contemporary source, the origins of the work lay in Potocki’s reading of the Nights and his wish to entertain his sick wife by telling stories in the same vein. He started to put the stories on to paper in 1797. In 1804–5 he had the first part of the work (the first thirteen days) printed on his own printing press for distribution among friends. The second section of the work was subsequently commercially published in Paris as Avadoro, histoire espagnole in 1813. Then the two printed versions were joined together in a three-volume edition produced in St Petersburg in 1814. (Pushkin toyed with the idea of a verse translation into Russian.) The last part of the work seems to have been written before his abortive journey to China. The collection of stories had not been fully revised by the time of his death. The Saragossa Manuscript was written in French. In 1847 a complete version was discovered by Edmund Chojecki and translated by him into Polish. Subsequently the original French manuscript was lost, and the integral French edition published in Paris only in 1989 is, for the most part, a retranslation from the Polish into French. Printed versions of Potocki’s tales were only fragmentarily available in western Europe in the nineteenth century. They were nevertheless ruthlessly plagiarized by Maurice Cousin in his Memoirs of Cagliostro, by Washington Irving in Wolfert’s Roost and Other Stories, by Jean Nodier in Ines de las Sierras and by Gérard de Nerval in Les Infernales.
Beckford and Potocki are two of the founding fathers of modern fantasy literature. It is time now to consider a third key figure, Jacques Cazotte (1719–92).13 Cazotte has already been mentioned in an earlier chapter as the collaborator with the Syrian priest Dom Chavis on an early translation of the Nights into French. Cazotte was educated by Jesuits and subsequently employed by the French Ministry of the Marine. In Martinique he landed himself in all sorts of trouble and ended up in prison, broken in health and financially ruined. He returned to France in 1759 and began a new career as a writer. Perrault, D’Aulnoy and Galland had popularized the fairy tale in France, and Cazotte followed the trend. In his La Patte du chat (1741), Armadil, a courtier, is banished by the queen for stepping on the paw of her cat. He subsequently encounters a siren, is lured by her into a lake and travels in strange regions, before he returns to court and, forgiven by the queen, marries the princess. A year later, Cazotte produced a parody of the Nights, Les Mille et une fadaises, in which an abbot is required to cure a society lady’s insomnia by telling her stories. He is very successful in this, as the stories he tells are so dull that they invariably send his audience to sleep. The tales which Cazotte has the abbot tell are light-hearted and gallantly sentimental in the manner of Guellette and Hamilton. Indeed, pseudo-oriental fabulists are one of the targets of Cazotte’s parody. Les Mille et une fadaises and the later and rather similar work Le Lord impromptu (1767) were immensely popular at the time, but are of only historic interest now.
The same cannot be said of Cazotte’s masterpiece, Le Diable amoureux (‘The Devil in Love’) (1772). Some critics have argued that this book is the first fantasy novel to have been written in France. The young hero, Alvaro, after practising cabalistic rituals to raise the Devil in a graveyard, is confronted by an apparition of a camel which cries out in a terrrible voice, ‘Che vuoi?’ (‘What do you want?) A little later Alvaro becomes acquainted with a young woman, Biondetta, whose sole apparent desire is to serve him. Entering Avadoro’s service, she clings devotedly to him. She is never anything but slavishly devoted and sweetly loving, but Alvaro is tormented by doubts. Is she what she seems or is she the Devil in human form? After two months with her, Alvaro is still not sure. In an echo of ‘The Sleeper and the Waker’ theme in the Nights, he muses: ‘But what could I make of my entire adventure? It all seems a dream, I kept telling myself; but what else is human life? I am dreaming more extravagantly than other men, that is all.’ Everything is cast in doubt, everything ambiguous almost to the very end of the novel. Even if Alvaro, and we, could be certain that Biondetta was the Devil, it would be the Devil in a new and unusual light: ‘I am a woman by choice, Alvaro, but still I am a woman, and subject to all the weaknesses of one.’ It may be that Le Diable amoureux was intended as a strange parable on the vulnerability of evil.
Cazotte’s text warned of the dangers of dabbling in the occult. After the book’s publication, he was contacted by Martinists and Illuminists who thought that they could detect elements of genuine occult lore in the fantasy. Martinists followed the teachings of the obscure eighteenth-century visionary Martinez de Pasqually (1727–74). Organized in secret lodges on masonic lines throughout France, they believed in a world of unseen spirits and in the possibility of making these spirits visible and having contact with them. They held that all men were spirits once, but that since the Fall their souls have been trapped in the world of matter. In performing magical rituals, Martinist initiates sought to raise man’s status by contact with the spirit world and to secure the help of good spirits in combating evil ones. They strove to redeem the fallen state of man since his expulsion from Eden and through psychic reintegration to return to man’s original godlike status. In the late eighteenth century, the success of cults such as Martinism and Swedenborgianism, as well as the careers of figures like Casanova and Cagliostro, can, to some extent, be seen as evidence of a revolt against the values of the Enlightenment. But the more one investigates the links between Enlightenment thinking and occult philosophy, the less appropriate does any crudely drawn contrast between reason and superstition seem. (European Freemasons, for example, combated the superstitions of the Catholic Church, while inventing new myths and rituals of their own.) In the latter part of his life Cazotte acquired a reputation as a visionary, and stories circulated about his prophetic powers. His friend La Harpe relates that at a dinner in 1788 Cazotte predicted the execution of Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette, as well as the fates of those who sat around the table, including also the execution of the Marquis de Condorcet and himself. In 1792 Cazotte, who had become a mystical monarchist, was arrested and guillotined as a counter-revolutionary.
Presumably it was Cazotte’s taste for the supernatural and the erotic which drew him to the Nights. As has been noted, Chavis and Cazotte’s Suite des mille et une nuits (which was published as volumes 38 to 41 of the fairy tale anthology Cabinet des fées, 1788–90) is, in part, a genuine translation of Arab tales (being based on the Paris Bibliothèque nationale MS arabe 1723). Chavis provided a crude word-for-word translation which Cazotte then turned into elegant French, modelled on the style of Galland. However, Cazotte also reworked the authentic tales to turn them into mystical Martinist allegories. Moreover, it seems that four of the stories in the Chavis and Cazotte collection were composed by Cazotte himself: ‘The Story of Xailoun the Idiot’, ‘The History of Alibengiad, Sultan of Herak, and of the False Birds of Paradise’, ‘The History of the Family Schebanad of Surat’ and ‘The History of Maugraby, or the Magician’. The last of these stories is the most impressive and the most mystical. In it, Habed-il-Kalib, King of Tadmur, engages in spiritual combat with Maugraby, an agent of Satan. Maugraby specializes in kidnapping children, whom he takes to the caverns of Domdaniel under the roots of the sea where they may be brainwashed and trained in the evil arts of sorcery. Habed receives guidance in dreams, studies magic and undergoes ordeals of initiation, in preparation for his battle with the shape-shifting Maugraby. This weird and grim tale was unmistakably intended by Cazotte to serve as a parable about the Martinist programme for spiritual reintegration and salvation.
