by Paul Nurse
Vathek is book-ended by another work derived from the impact of the Nights on western literature, but which forgoes traditional oriental trappings to evoke the mysterious East within Europe itself. Count Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (a.k.a. The Saragossa Manuscript), published in its whole only after his death, is the traceable by-product of this Polish nobleman’s love of the Arabian Nights and remains a cult novel even today (Jerry Garcia was among its ardent admirers). But, like Vathek, it goes beyond the eastern knock-off to create a new vision of the Nights’ alternative reality.
In his youth, the extensively travelled Potocki wrote a number of mock-oriental stories before searching Morocco for the mythical full Arabic text of the Nights, not to find even a partial manuscript. This failure, however, may have induced Potocki to write his own frame-tale masterpiece as a distraction for his first wife—a kind of Thousand and One Nights for the West. As background, Potocki used a journey he once made through Spain’s eerie Sierra Morena mountains—to Potocki’s mind, a quasi-oriental world steeped in the country’s Moorish past. In the late eighteenth century he began writing episodes for The Saragossa Manuscript, using as its framing device the experiences of a young army officer travelling through the Sierra Morenas on his way to Madrid. In the mountains, the officer undergoes a series of nightmarish encounters over sixty-six days, during which he hears about a hundred stories peopled by an incredible array of brigands, gypsies, Moorish seductresses, cabalists, living corpses and (for good measure) Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.
Like Vathek, The Saragossa Manuscript is an extravagant, over-the-top fantasy. It, too, was first written in French—the universal language of the European upper classes—and was only later translated into Potocki’s native Polish, as well as German and English. Whatever its language, the novel goes beyond its Arabic inspiration by evoking a sustained sense of dread and uncertainty in a haunted mountain world. Potocki’s officer spends more than two months wandering the Sierra Morenas but is never sure whether his experiences are real, or only part of some fantastic dream. Although in the end everything is explained rationally, Potocki takes his cue from the Nights by creating an impossible reality, leaving the reader often as unsure about the certainty of things as Potocki’s protagonist.
With Jonathan Swift and William Beckford, Jan Potocki is often hailed as one of the pioneers of the modern fantasy novel, but both he and Beckford are also among the first generation of authors to take inspiration from the Arabian Nights in order to expand on themes both within and without the work, rather than simply mimicking it. In its own day, The Saragossa Manuscript was popular enough to be plagiarized—there was a sensational court case in Paris in 1842—but even in our time its fascination is undimmed and its reputation as one of European literature’s most curious literary creations remains secure. As Count Potocki may have intended, The Saragossa Manuscript is as near a western counterpart to The Thousand and One Nights as it is likely possible for one writer to construct. But neither it nor Vathek would exist at all if not for the original template of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.
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.
Today, it is accepted that Romanticism was affected greatly by both Gothicism and Enlightenment orientalism. The Gothic tale, with its moody, melancholy atmospheres, and the oriental story, set in sunny, timeless landscapes, helped push western literature toward a greater emotionalism. The deliberate dreaminess of oriental romance abounds in the deep, sometimes sinister emotion associated with eastern life and found extensively within the stories of the Arabian Nights. Beginning with the mock-oriental tale and developing in sensual pre-Romantic works like Vathek, artists of any medium came to revel in expressing a spectrum of emotional sentiments—usually, the more severe, the better.
By the time a distinct Romanticism emerged in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the influence of the Nights on Europ
ean arts had become subtle and diffuse—light scattered through a prism—via the fashion for oriental styles and the popular vogue for eastern stories. With more Persian and Arabic literature appearing in translation, the Arabian Nights no longer held the same influential sway as in previous decades. Henceforth the work was only one of a number of sources providing exotic inspiration, even as the general impact of orientalism on western culture contributed to a penchant for foreign settings and supernatural themes.
Regardless, many Romantic figures do pay tribute to the influence of the Nights and its vision of an enchanted Orient, from William Wordsworth’s nostalgic recollection of a precious childhood treasure, “a little yellow canvas-covered book / A slender abstract of the Arabian Tales,” to Thomas de Quincey’s drug-fuelled visions of a world where he kissed Nile crocodiles and assembled tropical flora and fauna in the vastness of the Far East. Few, however, can better match the impact of both the Arabian Nights and the concept of an eastern “otherness” than three of Romanticism’s premier figures: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and Edgar Allan Poe.
Among the literary Romantics who found solace and inspiration in The Thousand and One Nights and similar works, the writings of Coleridge, Byron and Poe are indivisible from the idea of the East as a place of alien fascination. Each writer’s work is strewn with elements taken from the Nights, the mock-oriental tale or the simple attractiveness of eastern vistas, but each uses this influence for their individual purposes. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetical heart bears the deep impact of an imaginary Orient, the outgrowth of a dreamy nature that saw him drawn like a magnet to such works as the Arabian Nights and related pastiches like James Ridley’s 1764 Tales of the Genii.