Eastern Dreams

by Paul Nurse

  Coleridge claimed to have first read the Arabian Nights at the age of six, which, even given a tendency toward exaggeration, still indicates the extent of his precocity. Unlike most who read the work, however, Coleridge believed he detected a sinister quality to the tales, which he found disquieting. In addition to its glamour, it seemed the world depicted in the Nights had the added capacity for inspiring feelings of terror and grief; to Coleridge, this was a domain where unfettered emotions were not liberating, but all-consuming and therefore dangerous.

  As a child, Coleridge wrote that the Arabian Nights “made so deep an impression on me that I was haunted by spectres, whenever I was in the dark—and I distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness, with which I use to watch the window, in which the books lay….” In the daytime, the young Coleridge sat by a sun-kissed wall of his room and read the Nights obsessively until his schoolteacher father decided they were having an ill effect and burned them to cure his daydreaming son of such mania.

  A destructive act that came much too late. From his earliest reading “of Faery Tales, and Genii etc.,” Coleridge came to the conclusion that his “mind had been habituated to the Vast—and I never regarded my senses … as the criteria of my belief.” For Coleridge, the oriental world of the Nights was a mélange of wonder and fright—a place of grand and lengthy journeys taking the pilgrim into unknown vistas that might devour him. Travel tales abound in the West too, but it was the East, realm of fascination and terror, that presented Samuel Taylor Coleridge with a threatening aspect tied to those issues of fate and retribution displayed so prominently in his poetry.

  Drug addiction didn’t help, as at least part of Coleridge’s attitude was exacerbated by his famous addiction to opium. The increasing use of Chinese opium in Europe during this time, mixed with the idea of the East as an exotic wonderland, gave rise to an astonishing array of orientalized dreams and hallucinations on the part of users, of which those of Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey are among the most famous.

  The images in Coleridge’s recorded opium jags as well as his poetry brim with reflections born of Europe’s imaginary Orient, allied with the threatening element he detected in the Arabian Nights. In one drug-dream, a ghoulish eastern woman, so dark of complexion that she merges into blackness, tries to pluck out one of Coleridge’s eyeballs. Supernatural spirits akin to invisible genies torment the Ancient Mariner while he is on a Sindbad-like voyage in unfrequented southern seas. And Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure-dome of Xanadu is at once grand and ominous in its remote strangeness—a place perhaps too far from home, a land too alien in conception.

  This coded fear was not repulsion, for after childhood, Coleridge remained steeped in the Nights, keeping a copy with him while a student in London and referring to the work many times in his letters and notebooks. Queried about the Ancient Mariner’s killing of the albatross that precipitates tragedy, Coleridge compared the act to the merchant in the first Arabian Nights story cycle who invokes a genie’s wrath by accidentally killing the demon’s invisible child. In the same poem, a supernatural vessel’s ghastly “Life-in-Death” figure—a woman described as white as a leper—functions as a kind of photographic negative of the eastern woman who tried to seize Coleridge’s eyeball in his drug-dream; herself based partly, it seems, on a character in one Arabian Nights story.

  Coleridge may have found the Orient a threatening realm of wonder laced with terror, but for George Gordon, Lord Byron, its world meant freedom in the most absolute sense of the word. Although Byron disliked being associated with the Romantics (seeing himself more in the tradition of the Augustan poets), eastern settings and references pepper his works to such an extent that orientalism may be considered the major literary influence of his life. Where Romantic orientalism goes, Byron is sure to follow.

  Partly raised in Aberdeen, Byron first encountered the eastern world in Scotland through the books that would have a heavy impact on his life and work, forever linking his name with foreign landscapes. Before leaving grammar school, he noted that his reading had come to encompass “Lady M.W. Montague … History of the Turks, the Arabian Nights, all travels, or histories, or books upon the East I could meet with … before I was ten years old.” These works, Byron believed, “had much influence on my subsequent wishes to visit the Levant, and gave … the oriental colouring which is observed in my poetry.”

  From this list, it can be seen that the Nights was only one of a series of works firing the young poet’s imagination with dreams of faraway places and peoples. But at another juncture, Byron notes that after the Bible, he read the Arabian Nights first of all books, and must have liked its tales well enough to be able to recall some of them at will. Once, outdoors with some school friends in Aberdeen, a driving rainstorm forced them to take shelter in the back-kitchen of a draper’s shop, where they waited out the weather with Byron regaling his companions by reciting stories from the Nights by heart.

  No major Romantic poet was more influenced by the notion that the East was a place of free and frank expression. The Arabian Nights was among his earliest exposures to this idea, but there were many others, notably Vathek, which he admired enormously, remarking “For correctness of costume, beauty of description, and power of imagination, it far surpasses all European imitations [of the Nights].”

  At twenty-one, Byron embarked on one of the most famous of all Romantic journeys. Having raised a little money, he and a friend left England for a two-year tour through the Mediterranean, ending at Constantinople. This celebrated excursion came about partly because the Napoleonic Wars had altered the usual Grand Tour of France, Germany and Italy, forcing Byron’s party to venture first to Portugal and Spain, then to Greece and Turkey, but it was also prompted by Byron’s own yearning to see eastern landscapes for himself. Only lack of funds prevented him from continuing to Egypt, India and perhaps other eastern lands.

  He loved every moment of it, especially Greece and Albania, both then under Ottoman rule and their civilization daubed over with the colours of Islam. They seemed, if not the actual Orient, then at least a mysterious gateway to the East. On his return, Byron published what is arguably the epic Romantic poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, making his reputation literally overnight. In future years, he would write four poetical works dealing with eastern themes, what he called his “Turkish Tales”—“The Giaour,” “The Bride of Abydos,” “The Corsair” and “The Siege of Corinth”—and employed oriental imagery in many other works, including his masterpiece, Don Juan.

  In this last work, Byron pays tribute to his childhood reading by playfully inserting the Arabian Nights’ figures of the Hunchback, Sindbad, Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sidi Numan in a gathering, where they join in the celebrations at Don Juan and Haidee’s common-law union. This sly evocation of “stories from the Persian” is a nod toward the universal familiarity of the Nights in Europe—introducing the East through its characters—as well, perhaps, as a foreshadowing of Juan’s adventures in Constantinople, where he is soon to be taken as a galley-slave.

  Byron’s association with eastern vistas continued throughout his life. He had his portrait painted in a gorgeous Albanian costume he brought back from his Mediterranean tour and sometimes talked of settling permanently in the Levant to study languages and literature. When scandal over an affair with his half-sister Augusta overtook him, Byron left England in a kind of protracted repetition of his earlier journey toward Asia. After sojourns in Switzerland and Italy, he succumbed at age thirty-six to fever and poor medical care after joining the Greek struggle for independence from the Turks—effectively dying in an oriental war.

  It may be too much to say that Byron’s destiny was predicated by his boyhood reading in Aberdeen, but the lure of the East as a refuge for outcasts, as he felt himself to be, remained one of the few constants in a thoroughly unsettled life. Through such works as the Arabian Nights, Vathek and others depicting the Orient of his mind, Byron developed one of the most original voices in Romantic literature,
establishing forever the idea of the East as a setting where the individual is not shrunk into insignificance by their vast surroundings, but is enlarged by an epic self-awareness:

  Oh! That the Desert were my dwelling-place,

  With one fair Spirit for my minister,

  That I might forget the human race,

  And, hating no one, love but only her!

  There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

  There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

  There is society, where none intrudes

  By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

  I love not Man the less, but Nature more,

  From these our interviews, in which I steal

  From all I may be, or have been before,

  To mingle with the Universe, and feel

  What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

  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 st
ory-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.