The Arabian Nights - A Companion, page 31
The telling of the story is parodically prolix and extended by the insertion of framed stories and inserted fragments of verse. Though Shibli Bagarag is a humble barber, his speech is grandiose indeed. Faintly ludicrous mock-oriental similes abound, and high sentence is played off against low comedy. Humble Bagarag is both assisted and hindered in his ordeals by high-born women. Meredith’s Asian queens are femmes fatales. In the framed ‘Story of Bhanavar the Beautiful’, Bhanavar possesses a jewel which gives her power over the serpents and, alone in her chamber,
she arose, and her arms and neck and lips were glazed with the slime of the serpents, and she flung off her robes to the close-fitting silken inner vest looped across her bosom with pearls, and whirled in a mazy dance-measure among them, and sang melancholy melodies, making them delirious, fascinating them; and they followed her round and round, in twines and twists and curves, with arched heads and stiffened tails; and the chamber swam like an undulating sea of shifting sapphire lit by the moon of midnight.
Rabesqurat is Mistress of Illusions, ‘surrounded by slaves with scimitars, a fair Queen, with black eyes, kindlers of storms, torches in the tempest, and with floating tresses, crowned with a circlet of green-spiked precious stones and masses of crimson weed with flaps of pearl’. Similarly, the Princess Goorelka is a poisoner and sorceress who keeps men in enchanted captivity as birds and torments them when they displease her. Noorna bin Noorka, on the other hand, is the barber’s guiding good spirit and the woman he will eventually marry.
Today The Shaving of Shagpat is a forgotten novel by an unfashionable novelist. In some respects, the novel deserves its neglect. If it is taken as a pastiche or parody of the Nights, it is not a very good one. As an adventure story, it is confused and rambling. Many current sword-and-sorcery romances have a better grip on narrative. If one reads The Shaving of Shagpat as an allegory, as many critics have done, then the allegory is obscure. In general terms, it is plain that Shagpat, with his magical hair, stands for oppression based on the power of illusion, but whether the oppression is social and class-based or whether it rests on some form of intellectual deceit, or clinging to outmoded ideas, is unclear, and further details of the allegory are impenetrable. However, some of the imaginative imagery in the book, such as Rabesqurat’s mirror made from human eyes, or the bridge of eggs, is brilliant.
Meredith’s novel of Arabian sword and sorcery was inspired by Lane’s translation. Curiously, though, the appearance first of Lane’s and then of Burton’s translations coincided with a decline in the grip of the Nights on the English literary imagination. It may be that those translations, stylistically unattractive and bottom-heavy with annotation, were actually responsible for that decline. Paradoxically, a fuller and more accurate knowledge of the Nights led to a closing of the gates of imagination. From the late nineteenth century onwards, the Nights ceased to be part of the common literary culture of adults. As for children, they now read selected and heavily expurgated versions of the stories. ‘Sinbad’, ‘Ali Baba’, ‘Aladdin’, ‘The Ebony Horse’ and a handful of other stories continued to be read, but it was a much reduced corpus, and the Nights had increasingly to compete for attention with books written specifically for children by Dean Farrar, George MacDonald, Frederick Marryat, E. Nesbit and many others. (Of course, the Nights was often a major influence on this new breed of writer; for example, Nesbit’s Psammead stories obviously owe a great deal to the Arab tales.)
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote both for children and for adults, and it is often difficult to determine whom his stories were intended for. Meredith’s books were a strong influence on him, and like The Shaving of Shagpat, Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights (1882) pastiched the style of the Arabian Nights Entertainments – that is, the style of the commonly available English translation of Galland. Stevenson’s book also has a frame story of sorts, in which Prince Florizel and Colonel Geraldine wander the streets of nineteenth-century London in disguise, as Harun al-Rashid and Jafar had done in old Baghdad. Their wanderings frame six rather good stories of adventure, murder and suicide. In the New Arabian Nights and in its sequel More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, the stress is on plot and on colourful settings, rather than psychological or social verisimilitude (and this was indeed what late-nineteenth-century readers found in the medieval Nights). A later story by Stevenson, ‘The Bottle Imp’, in Island Nights Entertainments (1893), reverses the quest formula, in that the wonder-working bottle is something which must be got rid of, a curse which must be lifted, rather than sought. This inversion of the quest formula echoes the frame story of the Hunchback cycle in the Nights (and it also has affinities with the frame of Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer).26
In the nineteenth century, merchants in the United States carried on a surprisingly extensive commerce with Muslim Zanzibar. Later, American shipping in the Mediterranean was to suffer from the depredations of the Barbary corsairs, prompting the United States government to action. However, unlike Britain, the United States did not rule over an empire of Muslims. It is not surprising, then, that the influence of the Nights on nineteenth-century American literature was relatively slight. Though the influence was slight, however, it was there.27
Washington Irving (1783–1859) has already been mentioned as one of the plagiarists who made use of Potocki. The Conquest of Granada (1829) and Legends of the Alhambra (1832, revised and expanded 1857) are based on his three-month sojourn in Spain in 1829. Legends of the Alhambra is a scrapbook compilation of travel reminiscences, inconsequential encounters and framed stories. Irving was enchanted by the Old World and the vestiges of vanished civilizations. In particular, the Moors of Spain, mysterious and forgotten as the inhabitants of the City of Brass, haunted his imagination. The moonlit ruins of the Moorish palace of the Alhambra served as the setting for moralistic and melancholy reflections that are rich in atmosphere and cliché. The framed tales are of ghosts, hidden treasures, sorcerers, bandits and gypsies. In Irving (as with Cazotte, Potocki, Maturin and Richard Burton) a cult of the Orient went hand in hand with a fascination with gypsies.
‘The Legend of the Moorish Astrologer’ is perhaps the best thing in the book. This is a retelling of a story found in al-Maqqari’s Nafh al-Tibb (a romantic history of the lost Muslim realm of Andalusia written in Damascus in the early seventeenth century). An earlier version of al-Maqqari’s story is found in the Nights. A Muslim Spanish ruler employs an astrologer to use his magic powers to defend the kingdom. The astrologer uses his occult lore to construct a bronze talismanic statue of an armoured horseman as well as armies of miniature figurines. The astrologer’s operation of these miniature figures in the tower secures victories for the king’s armies in the field. When the astrologer seeks his reward, the king is unresponsive, but the astrologer has his revenge, and the kingdom is ruined. ‘The Legend of Prince Ahmed el Kamel or the Pilgrim of Love’ borrows motifs from the Nights, including such stock features as the young prince who is secluded to protect him from a prophesied evil fate, learning the language of birds, falling in love with birds, a magic carpet and a flying horse.28
Although Edgar Allan Poe published a collection entitled Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840, the influence of the Nights on his writing appears decidedly superficial. In characterizing some of his tales as ‘Arabesque’, Poe intended no specific reference to the Arab manner of telling stories. He only used the term to refer to intricately patterned tales (intricate as the design of an oriental carpet) in which the centre of interest lay in the cunningly crafted plot, rather than in the exploration of the characters in the tales. (More generally, words like ‘arabesque’, ‘carbuncle’, and ‘talisman’ and phrases like ‘Barmecide feast’ and ‘Aladdin’s cave’ were part of the age’s common stock of literary bric-à-brac from a cultural attic.)
Poe’s short story ‘The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherezade’ is a lightweight, though heavily laboured, sketch in which Sheherazade starts to tell Shahriyar a story, one of the hitherto untold adventures of Sinbad, featuring an ironclad steamship, an automaton chessplayer, Babbage’s Calculating Machine, the telegraph, the daguerreotype, and so forth. Shahriyar finds her account of the technological wonders of nineteenth-century civilization so preposterous that he loses patience and gives orders for her to be strangled. ‘She derived, however, 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.’ It is possible that Poe, as an early writer of science fiction, found similar difficulties in interesting his audience in stories about future marvels of science.
On the face of it, it is improbable that Arabian or pseudo-Arabian themes should play much part in a novel about a whaling ship out of Nantucket. However, it is fairly clear that Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) does draw heavily on such material. Like every other educated westerner in the nineteenth century, Melville read the Nights as a child. He also travelled in the East and read widely both in other accounts of oriental travel and in such novels as Vathek and Anastasius. In particular, the two despots, Captain Ahab and the Caliph Vathek, share the terrible and intimidating eye, and Ahab’s damned hunt for the thing which should not be sought has a certain affinity with Beckford’s caliph’s quest for forbidden treasure. The seas across which Ahab roams teem with marvels, spirits and omens. Ahab’s favoured harpoonist and familiar, the turbaned Fedallah, is ‘such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent’. It is hinted that Fedallah may be a descendant of the jinn. The text of Moby Dick is enriched by covert embedded references to the Nights and other sources of nineteenth-century culture. In an earlier novel, Mardi and a Voyage Thither (1849), the influence of the Nights is more obvious and more superficial. The book draws heavily on story-motifs that Melville had encountered in his reading of Lane’s translation of the stories. Mardi tells of a quest for an abducted princess in a fantastic archipelago in the South Seas and of the strange societies that are found on those islands. It is a modern version of the voyages of Sinbad, but in Melville political, social and religious allegory takes precedence over wonder.29
In the nineteenth century English and French writers plundered the Nights for oriental props and knick-knacks. The engagement of twentieth-century writers has been more cerebral, and the Nights, containing as it does early and exotic examples of framing, self-reference, embedded references, hidden patterns, recursion and intertextuality, has become a source book for modernist fiction in its playful mode. It has also served as an advertisement for grand pretensions on the part of modern writers.
James Joyce (1882–1941), horribly well read, owned a copy of the translation of the Nights by Burton (or ‘Old Bruton’ as he is called in Finnegans Wake). His masterpiece, Ulysses (1922) gives an account of a single day (Bloomsday, 16 June 1904) in the lives of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold and Molly Bloom. Although Joyce’s narrative is set in Dublin, it is obvious that both the novel’s structure and many of its more detailed allusions derive from Homer’s Odyssey. But behind the wanderings of Odysseus, there is a second range of reference to another tempest-driven, roving seafarer – Sinbad. (It may be recalled that already at the beginning of the eighteenth century Galland had speculated that the Sinbad cycle of stories might have taken some of its details from the Homeric epic.) In Joyce’s novel, mirages of old Baghdad and Basra are discernible in twentieth-century Dublin. In the ‘Proteus’ chapter, a chapter of transformations and disguises, Stephen awakes groggy from sleep and dreaming. One thought he manages to catch at: ‘Remember. Haroun al Raschid.’ It is a prefiguration of Stephen’s encounter with Bloom, who like Haroun al-Rashid wanders round the streets of his city incognito. Will Stephen Dedalus, like Sinbad, return safely to port? Eventually, yes. Towards the end of the book, in the ‘Ithaca’ chapter, Leopold Bloom, who has offered Stephen safe haven, reflects on Stephen’s current sleeping state:
He rests. He has travelled.
With?
Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailor and Whinbad the Whaler and . . . [and so on].
Finnegans Wake (1939), a linguistically rich and notoriously taxing phantasmagoria, treats, among other things, of the cyclical nature of history and myth. The dreams of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker frame stories, in the same way as does one of the novel’s models and sources, ‘the ’unthowsent and wonst nice’ or, as it is also known, the ‘arubyat knychts, with their tales within wheels and stucks between spokes’ or, again, ‘this scherzarade of one’s thousand and one nightinesses’. In alluding to the omnium-gatherum richness of the Nights, Joyce was laying claim to the same quality for his Finnegans Wake and he was setting himself up in competition with the medieval Arab storytellers: ‘Not the king of this age could richlier eyefeast in oriental longuardness with alternate nightjoys of a thousand kinds but one kind. A shahryar cobbler on me when I am lying!’ By the time Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake, he had become familiar with the translation of Mardrus, who appears as ‘the Murdrus dueluct’, and Joyce tells us elsewhere that ‘the author was in fact mardred’. And so the teasing references continue, ‘until there came the marrer of mirth’.30
‘Prost bitte!’ Finnegans Wake also contains many allusions to Proust, and Proust’s masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu (translated in English as Remembrance of Things Past) is also studded with references to the Nights. Early in the first chapter of its first volume, Swann’s Way, the narrator speculates that if his great-aunt had learned of the secret amatory life of the outwardly eminently respectable Charles Swann, whom she used to entertain to dinner, then she might have found it as extraordinary ‘as the thought of having had to dinner Ali Baba, who as soon as he finds himself alone and unobserved, will make his way into the cave, resplendent with its unsuspected treasures’, a scene she was familiar with, ‘for she had seen it painted on the plates we used for biscuits at Combray’. Towards the very end of the last chapter of the last volume, Time Regained, the narrator broods on his approaching death and the possible termination of his storytelling task:
If I worked, it would be only at night. But I should need many nights, a hundred perhaps, or even a thousand. And I should live in the anxiety of not knowing whether the master of my destiny might not prove less indulgent than the Sultan Shahriyar, whether in the morning, when I broke off my story, he would consent to a further reprieve and permit me to resume my narrative the following evening.
Like the Nights, Proust’s novel is a story told against death.
In between Proust’s commencement and his conclusion runs a skein of allusions and comparisons which conduct the narrator’s memory inevitably back to childhood. Comparisons with characters and incidents in the Nights are also used to make the otherwise familiar bizarre and exotic. Thus, to those who do not know her, the Princesse de Guermantes seems as fantastic as the Princess Badroul Boudour. The narrator, wandering at a loss by night in the strange city of Venice, compares himself to a character in the Nights. Paris defamiliarized by wartime and the presence of Senegalese troops and Levantine taxi-drivers similarly appears like old Baghdad. Contrariwise, Bassorah of the Nights has become the Basra from which British troops in Mesopotamia are conducting their campaign against the Ottoman Turks. Then again, the narrator compares his glimpse of Baron de Charlus being flogged in a homosexual brothel to a tale in the Nights, ‘the one in which a woman who has been turned into a dog willingly submits to being beaten in order to recover her former shape’ (that is, ‘The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad’).
As noted above, the Nights first appears in Proust’s novel in a non-literary form, as images on the cake plates in his childhood home in Combray. The plates feature scenes from ‘Ali Baba’, ‘Aladdin’, ‘Sinbad’ and ‘The Sleeper and the Waker’. Subsequently the much loved plates are irretrievably lost. Although the oriental images displayed on the cake plates are less famous than the madeleine dipped in tea, they too play a recurring role in conducting the narrator back to his lost past. Later, in mid-life, his mother talks to him of his childhood in Combray and of his childhood reading there, and the narrator expresses the wish to reread the Nights. His mother sends him copies of the translations by Galland and by Mardrus, though she is hesitant about including the Mardrus version; for not only do the older generation disapprove of the licentiousness of Mardrus, but also Mardrus’s new-fangled manner of transliteration (one can hardly call it a system of transliteration) has a defamiliarizing effect. Even the title is different – not The Thousand and One Nights, as in Galland, but The Thousand Nights and One Night.
Proust loved the Nights, but he was emphatic that Remembrance of Things Past was not intended as a pastiche or some other form of reworking of the Nights in modern dress. In the final sequence of meditations on his end and the end of the book, he argues that ‘you can make a new version of what you love only by renouncing it. So my book, though it might be as long as the Thousand and One Nights, would be entirely different.’ And yet it may be that, in renouncing the beloved fictions of childhood in favour of the truth, the narrator has indeed (and paradoxically) written a Thousand and One Nights for his own times.
If the length of Proust’s novel challenges comparison with the story collection of the Nights, the brevity of Borges’s fictions matches that of most of the stories in that collection. The views of the Argentinian short-story writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) on the merits of the various translations of the Nights have already been discussed. Apart from his essay on its translators, he also wrote an essay on the stories themselves. ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ (published in Siete noches, or ‘Seven Nights’, in 1980). The Nights is a key text, perhaps the key text, in Borges’s life and work. At an early age Borges discovered the Burton translation in his father’s library and devoured it, together with the works of Thomas De Quincey, Robert Louis Stevenson, G.K. Chesterton and others. (The key authors and texts which influenced this famous modernist writer are, for the most part, curiously old-fashioned ones.) Later on, in Spain in 1919, Borges met and was befriended by Rafael Cansinos-Assens, the polyglot poet and translator of the Nights into Spanish. Borges’s stories, like most of the stories in the Nights, are extremely short; and like the Nights stories they are strong in plot and aim to provoke a sense of wonder in the reader, but they usually have little psychological depth. To borrow Edgar Allan Poe’s terminology, Borges wrote ‘Arabesques’.
