Eastern Dreams (18 page)

Given the universal popularity of
Les mille et une nuits
, it is no surprise that along with piracy, imitations and inspirations, the “incomplete” nature of Galland's book invited attempts to capitalize on its success by offering extensions of the work. Shortly before the French Revolution, a Syrian priest named Dom Denis Chavis collaborated with the French fairy-tale writer Jacques Cazotte to foist a fraudulent continuation of the
Nights
on an unsuspecting public. Cazotte fashioned from Chavis's cribbing (the Syrian was responsible for one of the fake Arabic “Aladdin” manuscripts) and his own imagination a work published in 1788–89 as
Suite des mille et une nuits
, part of a massive fairy-tale anthology called
Cabinet des fées
.

Translated separately into English a few years later as
Arabian Tales, or a Continuation of the Arabian Nights
, it proved highly successful in its intention to provide more “legitimate”
Nights
stories to hungry readers, even if for years it remained a suspect text, with some aficionados accepting the
Arabian Tales
as a true sequel to Galland, others deeming it a base forgery and still others considering it at worst an adapted collection of actual eastern stories such as might be found within the
Nights
or the volumes of Pétis de la Croix.

The truth often lies between extremes. It now seems certain that Dom Chavis's Swiss publisher was duped into believing Chavis had discovered the remainder of the “incomplete” Galland Manuscript in Paris, miraculously preserved in the king's library, where Chavis worked as a teacher of Arabic. In truth, his desperate poverty compelled Chavis to copy stories from the Galland Manuscript housed in the library, make some masking changes, then add material from an independent Arabic collection he seems to have brought with him from Syria.

Chavis's poor draft translation—part French, part Italian and all bad—was then given over to the professional fairy-tale writer Jacques Cazotte for revision and polishing into better French. Cazotte not only corrected it but, in the tradition of Galland and others, added new material to “improve” already existing tales, even inserting additional stories based on abstracts provided by Chavis. This “completion” of
Les mille et une nuits
, then, is a compendium of rehashed Galland, some original Arabic material contained in Chavis's manuscript, stories retold by Chavis and Cazotte and other tales that are overwhelmingly Cazotte's invention.

Even so, using the word “fraud” is problematic since it implies a manufactured, unauthorized imitation of a recognized original. In the case of the
Nights
, and especially the Galland adaption which itself contains so much that is probably invented, this “continuation” can be seen as no more fraudulent than the tradition of including inserted material begun in the time of the
rawi
and continued by Galland. Along with outright forgeries like the Arabic
“Aladdin,” Chavis did provide translations of actual eastern stories supplemented by Cazotte's contributions and tales reworked from Antoine Galland.

This raises a difficult point. Can a work like the
Nights
, acknowledged as not having specific origins, be considered authentic enough to even
have
fraudulent sequels? If Galland, as is now accepted, is the true author of “Aladdin,” and made such frequent additions to other stories that he can practically claim joint authorship with the
rawi
, can Chavis and Cazotte be denied their contribution to the corpus of the
Arabian Nights
even as countless generations of storytellers and scribes added to it by their own alterations?

To some extent, yes. Even given the twisty, deceptive history of the
Nights
in the West, aside from material copied by Chavis from
Les mille et une nuits
, none of the stories appearing in the
Suite
are to be found in any manuscript collection of
Alf Laila wa Laila
. The general consensus today is that, taken as a whole, these “additions” to the
Nights
are greatly inferior to those tales translated and adapted by the genuine scholar and storyteller Antoine Galland. The
Suite des mille et une nuits
is no “continuation”—at absolute best, it can be considered a pseudo-translation; at worst, just another attempt to steal some of the original work's epic thunder.

All the same, even the publication of this bogus book served a purpose. Its favourable reception (like the
Nights
, it ran to multiple editions) did much to keep the original tales' mythos alive in the minds of Europeans, acting as a concrete reminder of the wonders found within the eastern storytelling tradition. The 1792 English translation of the
Suite
, which appeared in every major English city in the year of its publication, was included with a new edition of the
Nights
printed in Liverpool a generation later, sealing its legitimacy in the minds of many readers. This gave Chavis and Cazotte's work a prestige and longevity far beyond its deserts, while
reminding many in late-Enlightenment Europe of the pleasure of reading the
Arabian Nights
and helping maintain the original book's reputation. The
Suite
stands as a counterfeit bridge between the original vogue for the
Nights
and the next phase in the
Nights
' history, when the West turned from simply reading it and began investigating the work's origins and background.

But fiction writers were not the only period figures stimulated by their exposure to the
Nights
. Scholars, archaeologists and historians also found themselves inspired by its romance. As a student at University College, Oxford, the celebrated jurist and philologist Sir William Jones—“Oriental Jones”—learned Arabic by persuading a native speaker from Syria to accompany him to university and translate tales from
Les mille et une nuits
into their original language while Jones wrote out his dictation. Noting the affinity between Arabic and modern Persian, Jones began the process whereby he eventually mastered nearly thirty languages, founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta and in time discovered the close relationship between Sanskrit and Ancient Greek and Latin, thus uncovering the Indo-European language group.

“Oriental Jones” wasn't the only one whose life was influenced by the
Nights
. During the 1840s, the young traveller and diplomat Austen Henry Layard, fascinated by childhood tales of ancient Baghdad in his favourite book, spent years excavating the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon in Mesopotamia (Iraq), exhuming the lost records of those ancient empires that once formed the cradle of civilization. A serious and sober man, Layard's description of the Nineveh site still evokes the
Arabian Nights
of his youth:

Visions of palaces underground, of gigantic monsters, of sculpted figures, and endless inscriptions, floated before me…. I fancied myself wandering in a maze of chambers from which I could find no outlet.

Fifty years earlier, the English historian Edward Gibbon described the
Nights
, with Pope's translations of
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
, as three books that “
will always please by the moving picture of human manners and specious miracles,” believing the work, like the
Aeneid
, to be a politically instructive book. Gibbon's magisterial
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
is notoriously critical of medieval Christian Europe while remaining generally sympathetic to the Islamic civilization of the Middle East, especially the Abbasid caliphate. This viewpoint may have been an outgrowth of the delight the sickly and unattractive Gibbon derived from early readings of the
Nights
. In the words of his biographer, G.M. Young, Gibbon's considerations of the Muslim East move “
most freely … and the work of his manhood is shot [through] with a child's vision of grave and bearded Sultans who only smiled on the day of battle, the sword of Alp Arslan, the mace of Mahmoud … and the Golden Mountains, and the Girdle of the Earth.”

Could some of Gibbon's regard for medieval Islam come from his youthful exposure to an imaginary depiction of that world? Like others of his generation, and later figures such as Layard, Gibbon was first exposed to an alternative historical culture through the
Arabian Nights
, which became a significant aspect of his historical education. It's a strange thought: that the man often considered the greatest historical writer of the modern age, creator of one of the most stately and soberly conceived histories ever written, could have been so shaped by a fantastical work read in childhood.

Or perhaps, as literary works, the
Arabian Nights
and Gibbon's
Decline and Fall
are not as far apart as we might suppose. If scholars can view the secular nature of the
Nights
as a legitimate window onto the social dynamics of classical Islam, then this work, fusing the visionary with recognizable socio-historical times, is perhaps a dim, distant cousin to the professional historian's attempt to define the structure of a bygone past through researched recreation.

Chapter 5

THE
NIGHTS
AND
THE ROMANTIC SPIRIT

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise
.

—
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
, “
KUBLA KHAN
”

The western passion for the East, eastern stories and especially
The Thousand and One Nights
did far more than spawn a host of imitations or even aid in European literary developments. Given the diverse elements that can go into fashioning artistic works, influence can be a tricky thing to determine, but the
Nights
' eighteenth-century popularity proved significant in another, more broadly influential way—one continuing to echo in our own age.

In the second half of the century, a new trend began appearing on the European intellectual scene, an attitude rejecting prevailing Enlightenment concerns with reasoned order. In place of the obsession with rationality and purity of form expressed by the cult of neoclassicism, there arose a contrasting worship of “sensibility”—
the capacity to feel deeply, taking joy in extreme emotion—which, by century's end, had developed into the distinctive artistic and intellectual concept known as Romanticism.

A precise definition is nearly impossible, since Romanticism was never a conscious movement per se, but more a sustained revolt against the Enlightenment belief in rationality. There are also a series of Romanticisms to consider, since Romantic attitudes can be found not only in the arts but also in political thought, social reformation—even the study of history. Yet in its focus on deep, almost violent emotion as a substitute for cold reason and an abiding belief in the possibility of actualizing life not as it is but as it
should
be, Romanticism effected so profound a change on practically every avenue of western thought that nothing comparable has since come along to replace it.

The West now speaks of living in a “Post-Romantic” era—a postmodern age where the modernity created by the Enlightenment has collapsed, leaving us divorced from the past with little connection to the preceding Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque or Romantic periods, while viewing the future as a cipher. In this endlessly stalled age, the past is more than disconnected from the present; it has become fuel for postmodernism's proclivity for deconstruction without fashioning anything new. As practically the last conceptual period before the arrival of modernity, Romanticism exists now as a preferred certainty for an uncertain time, with some claiming that the only sure cure for the postmodern blues is the return to a Romantic sensibility.

Romanticism's peak years extended from the late eighteenth century through to the 1830s, a period during which a good deal of modernity's outlook and cultural heritage were forged. It was also a time of expanding European travel and exploration, an age when the far and foreign appeared in travel books and was encountered and absorbed into the Romantic penchant for realms divorced
from the commonplace, bestirring imaginations with the exoticism required for the Romantic quest for self-fulfillment.

Although the
Arabian Nights
did not bring about Romanticism and was only one of its inspirations, it nevertheless proved a major shaper and symbol of the Romantic movement—not a cause so much as a focused representation of Romantic desires and fantasies. In its depiction of an alien, sensual world of often commonplace heroes far removed from the humdrum present, the
Nights
complemented Romanticism's liberal outlook. The book's exoticism both addressed and symbolized the Romantic yearning for a life of the imagination made real—a reactive escape from the grip of heartless rationalism and aristocratic control. Soon the idea of a distant Orient became a cornerstone of the Romantic spirit. Despite its desert backdrops, the East became a fertile realm of the senses where warm feeling ruled chilly logic, and even such negative emotional states as insanity or moral decay could achieve a kind of grandeur.