Eastern Dreams (20 page)

Once the
Arabian Nights
reached America at the end of the eighteenth century, it quickly became required reading for every literate person in the young republic as it had in Europe, selling more than forty thousand copies in its first decade alone in a population of between four and five million.

But the Romantic spirit that the work helped nurture took longer to make the journey. Romanticism in America developed only partially as a spillover from Europe, in part because of the pervasive influence of the Transcendental philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became a signal influence on the four main writers constituting American Romantic literature: Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe.

All four brought eastern elements into their work in some way, but of major American Romantic writers, the most emblematic figure to come under at least the indirect influence of the
Nights
is Poe. As critic, poet and short-story writer, Poe's well-honed emotionalism and taste for the macabre sets him firmly in the spirit of his times and, by extension, within Romanticism. Often read primarily as a supernatural writer, Poe's true forte is the traditional Romantic concern with the unusual as an escape from life's trite realities. His emphasis on the psychological and deep, even miserable, feeling places him firmly in the tradition of the Romantics, drawing strength from the emotionalism found in the earlier Gothic and oriental genres.

It can be safely assumed that Poe read the
Arabian Nights
as a child, especially as his Virginian family spent some years in England when he was a boy. We
do
know that, like Byron, he greatly admired Beckford's
Vathek
, although at first sight the impact of the actual
Nights
seems sparse. It could be that Beckford's Gothic allusions in
Vathek
were the elements Poe responded to most readily, but he also could not have been unaffected by Beckford's use of oriental mysticism and presentation of Muslim customs in creating alternative worlds. Notes, epigraphs and allusions in Poe's
work point to his having some independent familiarity with aspects of Islamic life, so it may be that the
Nights
was only one of Poe's orientalist influences, and perhaps not even the most important.

This indirect Romantic impact of the
Nights
on Poe comes through the book's influence on the short story genre, the pervasive sense of dread appearing in such offshoot works as
Vathek
, and through the works of Washington Irving, whose own literature is rife with oriental themes stemming from his fascination with Spain's Moorish past. Irving's works made a deep impression on Poe; the older writer's use of the macabre in tales like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “The Adventure of the Black Fisherman” insert supernatural features into everyday life, imparting a
Nights
-like patina of reality mixed with the fabulous. But Irving also wrote a number of standard oriental stories that must have made some impression on Poe, inciting his imagination to the presence of unseen forces in scenes evoking eastern mysticism.

Although Poe may not have been as personally affected by the
Nights
as many European Romantics, his work still bears witness to its impact, suggesting that he absorbed elements through cultural osmosis. His first published book of poems, including “Tamerlane” and “Al-Aaraaf” (a reference to the Muslim purgatory), already show evidence of an oriental awareness, and it has been estimated that twenty of the twenty-five stories in his first prose book,
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
, contain eastern allusions and imagery; “Israfel,” for instance, refers to the sweet-voiced angel described in the
Koran
and is meant to evoke a Muslim heaven. Poe's use of such terms as
ghouls, houri glances
and
Mountains of the Moon
in various poems conveys a sense of eastern presence, while several of his stories play with the idea of Providence as a kind of ordained
kismet
.

Even in works lacking recognizably oriental motifs, Poe displays a concern with shadow-worlds such as are associated with the
Nights
. Although inspired largely by Coleridge's
Ancient Mariner
and the voyages of Captain Cook, Poe's longest work,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
(1838), can also be read as a kind of latter-day Sindbad excursion into the unknown. Beginning in conventional sea-story terms, the tale eventually turns into a strange voyage of discovery in uncharted southern seas inhabited by ice bears, black-toothed natives, and strange flora and fauna, and later chronicles the search for an entrance to the mythical Hollow Earth, depicting sights and incidents “
so positively marvellous” that Arthur Gordon Pym joins Sindbad and Jonathan Swift's Lemuel Gulliver as a triumvirate of voyagers in incredible worlds.

Poe's prose and poetry are replete with the bizarre and fantastic. Schooners descend into whirlpools, murderous apes rampage through Paris, ravens perch forever as portents of doom and Death itself, dressed in the vestments of the grave, comes as an uninvited guest to strike down revellers at a ball. Poe's world, like that of the
Nights
, is suffused with the wondrous, but rather than being straightforward oriental pastiche, it is filtered through Poe's own experience and imagination.

The clearest reference to the
Nights
in Poe's work lies in his 1845 short story “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade.” The riposte of an antebellum Southerner to the expansive materialism of his day, this satirical tale is generally not considered top-drawer Poe, but its author still considered it among the favourites of his own work, belying the impression that he was hopelessly mired in perpetual gloom.

The story's narrator stumbles upon a rare eastern book,
Tellmenow Isitsoornot
, wherein he discovers that Scheherazade told her husband an additional, untold story gleaned from one of Sindbad's forgotten voyages. It quickly becomes evident that the land visited is the technological world of nineteenth-century Europe and North America, wherein Sindbad learns of the telegraph, steam power, the daguerreotype and even Charles Babbage's proto-computer,
the Calculating Machine—all of which Scheherazade relates to her disbelieving husband.

Once she begins describing a woman's bustle, however, the sultan, thinking his wife has finally gone beyond acceptable boundaries of invention, orders her execution after all, but not before his sultana comforts herself with the thought that her husband's petulant disbelief will rob him of hearing about countless marvels yet to come. Offended by the notion of modern technology circa 1845, the sultan cannot bring himself to consider the possibility of such wonders, and in a fit of narrow, parochial pique, strikes out at his wife's predictions by belatedly extinguishing her life. Poe's takeoff on the
Nights
' frame story is meant as a kind of anti-oriental tale—a jab at readers who value their culture above all others by reminding them that one society's technology is another's sorcery.

Poe is representative of those writers who, once the
Nights
was absorbed into the fabric of western culture, may not pay much direct homage to the work, but can still be seen to employ its elements in their creations, secure in the knowledge that their readers will recognize the allusions. Decades later another American short-story writer and closet Romantic, O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), would evoke the
Nights
more directly by dubbing New York City “Bagdad-on-the-subway” in such tales as “A Night in New Arabia” and “A Bird in Bagdad,” conjuring stories from a contemporary multicultural city he saw as the narrative successor to the Abbasid caliphate's story-riddled City of Peace. O. Henry had no fear of readers missing his references, for by then the
Arabian Nights
had become a work, in Jorge Luis Borges's words, “
so vast it is not necessary to have read it.”

For many Romantics, the lure of the eastern world lay not in its attraction as a travel destination—since relatively few actually
ventured there—but in the alluring idea of a better, freer place sprung from the well of stories contained within the
Arabian Nights
and its offspring: the wise, primitive, sensuous East. This fantastic realm became a virtual personification of the Romantic desire for the unbridled freedom they imagined was found in the earth's wilder regions. Projecting individual desires on a landscape of natural and imagined wonders, the Romantics believed that the world of the Orient—the “Morningland” of the Sun so many of them first beheld in their mind's eye when hearing or reading the
Nights
as children—contained a fascination separate from anything found in their own familiar homelands.

Liberated from conventions and the confines of the classical tradition, the idea of the Orient became a distinguishing feature of Romantic literature as well as a preferred backdrop for readers. The East remained a dream destiny, a cultural iconography composed of heat, dust, immensity, rudimentary technology, curious costumes, languages, rituals and strange sights, scents and smells—a mingled tapestry affecting western visions of the geographical East.

Above all else, it was the feeling of
distance
from familiar forms that answered Romanticism's longing for sublime transcendence—something found in the sustained removal from the West and the Romantic immersion in alien landscapes. “The Desert,” one nineteenth-century traveller noted, “
is pre-eminently the Land of Fancy, of Reverie; never ending, ever renewing itself in the presence of the Indefinite and the Solitude, which are the characteristics of this open world … in which the past, the present, and the future seemed to blend.”

As the Romantic Age progressed and the
Arabian Nights
entered its second century in the West, the book's enduring power ensured that it remained an important representation of the Orient's remote desirability. But the western search for the true nature of
The Thousand and One Nights
had only just begun.

Chapter 6

SEARCHING FOR
THE
NIGHTS

Thereupon quoth the King, “By Allah I will never return to my capital nor sit upon the throne of my forebearers till I learn the truth about this …”

—“
THE FISHERMAN AND THE GENIE
”

No craze, no matter how popular, lasts forever. While the mock-oriental tale never died out completely—with modifications, it continues sporadically to this day—its status declined markedly in the nineteenth century as more westerners travelled in Asia and more eastern literature became available in the West. The genre's fading power, however, did nothing to dent the popularity of the
Arabian Nights
. By 1793, English translations of the original work reached their eighteenth edition, yet by the early Victorian Age the rate of publication had actually
doubled
over that of the previous century.

Numerous factors helped keep the
Nights
' mythos at the forefront of the western imaginative tradition: the “discovery” of more tales in Chavis and Cazotte's
Suite des mille et une nuits
, increasing
eastern travel and the growing use of illustrations in new editions all contributed. By now the world of the
Nights
was as familiar to the West as King Arthur's England or tales of Charlemagne, their picture of the Islamic Orient more potent than the reality found in any travel book or history. For many in Europe and the Americas, by the nineteenth century, the
Arabian Nights
had become the ideal, as well as the idea, of the Muslim East.

With a growing Asian empire containing millions of Muslim subjects, this familiarity was reflected especially in English literature; although, just as the
Nights
had been transformed as a book over the years, so too had its influence. Western literary culture had become infused with the idea of an alien East taken largely from the
Nights
and its progeny, with direct influence replaced by more covert allusions. Emily Brontë scatters oriental motifs throughout
Wuthering Heights
, Wilkie Collins does the same in
The Moonstone
, while Robert Louis Stevenson wrote volumes of short stories he christened “New Arabian Nights,” tying some tales together through the characters of Prince Florizel of Bohemia and his friend Colonel Geraldine, wandering London's streets à la Haroun al-Rashid and Jafar.