by Paul Nurse
Not all researchers are enamoured. The Baghdad-born American academic Husain Haddawy describes the Burton edition as a “literary Brighton Pavilion,” a reference to the faux-oriental structure created for Britain’s Prince Regent (later George IV). This is not meant as a compliment, implying as it does that the Burton translation is little more than an ornate oddity; arresting to the eye, but still no better than an approximate copy of something far grander. As always when dealing with the multifarious editions of the Arabian Nights, it is left to the reader to make up his or her own mind about their worth.
John Payne outlived Burton by nearly thirty years, dying in 1919 at the age of seventy-seven. In his later years he may have experienced some jealousy over the fame of Burton’s translation and the relative obscurity of his own. When Thomas Wright wrote his rather hostile biography of Burton in the early twentieth century, Payne—although at first reluctant to co-operate—provided Wright with many anecdotes and examples of his and Burton’s correspondence. Payne later praised the younger man for the accuracy of his portrayal of the late explorer, but it is perhaps too much to say that he consciously collaborated on Wright’s literary hatchet job.
That said, any jealousy on Payne’s part would not be surprising, since his Nights, while respected and financially rewarding, did not enjoy the same reputation as Burton’s version, and he saw no official recognition for his many literary efforts. Few today beyond the world of Arabian Nights enthusiasts know the name of John Payne or have read his translation, yet Richard Burton’s name has survived for more than a century as the man who gave the English-speaking world the “real” Arabian Nights in all its ribald glory. A number of editions of the Burton text are available today, and original copies of the Kama Shastra Society edition fetch high prices at auctions. Payne’s work, on the other hand, seldom appears.
Personal considerations aside, for their efforts at providing the English language with censor-free versions of The Thousand and One Nights at a time of social repression, both John Payne and Richard Francis Burton deserve credit and respect—even a measure of literary immortality—for daring to remind the West there is more to the Arabian Nights than simple fairy stories for the young in age and heart. By transmitting the unexpurgated Nights to the English-speaking world in their individual ways, both men brought needed attention to the sophisticated literary merits of the work, redrawing the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments into its original role as literature of, and for, adults of all ages.
*Quaritch later said that turning down the Burtons’ offer was the worst business mistake of his life.
*Burton also mock-gravely warns his readers about an old superstition saying anyone who dares read the entire Nights will die as a result.
Chapter 8
THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
TODAY
And I threw myself down … on the raft … whilst the
stream ceased not to carry me along …
—“THE SIXTH VOYAGE OF SINDBAD THE SEAMAN”
The restoration of the Arabian Nights as earthy folklore marked the peak of the book’s fame in the West, but not its status. Even as the Nights reached its greatest popularity near the end of the Victorian Era, becoming after the Bible “the most popular book in the world … the only book … that … is a favourite with all ranks and times of life,” events were underway that would see it relinquish its place as a premier fabulist work. Henceforth the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments would be acknowledged as a classic of world literature, but would never again be so universally read, nor so treasured.
The development of the fantasy novel, as well as the evolution of literature intended specifically for children, both accelerated during the Victorian years, so that by the early twentieth century, both were established genres. Now the Nights found itself competing with other imaginative tales for the hearts and minds of western readers, a rivalry that had not existed in any meaningful way a century before. Despite the existence of “adult” versions of the Arabian Nights, by the turn of the last century the book had “ceased to be part of the common literary culture of adults,” with most editions falling almost entirely into the new realm of “kids lit,” where they remain today. It could be, too, that the slow accumulation of information about the work played a role in its decline. Knowledge always kills mystery; by answering some of the riddles surrounding the Nights, orientalists constructed a measure of its history, but they also wiped away much of the book’s glamour. Its exoticism became lost in a sea of scholarly concern as the Nights’ very fame served to smother part of its light.
Of greater impact, however, was the emergence of a new literary genre tied to the West’s industrial progress. To many, the developing technology of the modern age was a new kind of magic wrought by sorcerers of science, an industrial witchery mirrored in a type of literature replacing the supernaturally imaginative with the technologically progressive. By employing aspects of actual scientific discovery, a series of authors created works reflective of these discoveries, works that eventually became known as “science fiction.” Direct cause and effect are often elusive entities, but it is perhaps no accident that the Arabian Nights’ decline in readership coincided roughly with the rise of the first fabulist works dealing with the age of machines.
Like the Nights, science fiction has its origins in travellers’ tales of distant lands, from which writers could then construct speculative fiction involving otherworldly journeys. By the early Industrial Age, the first true fictional works incorporating elements of actual science began appearing. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826) are often considered among the first real science-fiction stories, with some of Edgar Allan Poe’s works viewed as proto–science fiction. But the genre found its true legs only after 1863, when Jules Verne published his first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon. Thereafter, the floodgates opened for technologically based speculative fiction, including Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, some of Jack London’s early work and the celebrated “scientific romances” of the young H.G. Wells.
What saved the Nights from relative obscurity—who reads Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther today, although it was a huge international success in the late eighteenth century?—was the extent to which its mystique had become ingrained in western society. Even though fewer readers actually bothered reading the work any more, its name continued to resound across the years and cultures. The book’s ability to transform has never been restricted to print alone, for its general aura has been kept alive by other artistic forms, maintaining its visibility through fresh expressions of the Nights’ cultural empire.
Almost as soon as the work appeared in Europe, alternative presentations of its mythos appeared, and not only in the mock-oriental tale. Stage, musical and artistic presentations of eastern exoticism began cropping up even as the Arabian Nights was still making its way around Europe, and continue to this day. The English pantomime tradition went on tinkering with the “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” scenarios well into the nineteenth century, while musical scores incorporating “oriental” themes appeared practically from day one of the Nights’ publication. Probably, the most famous musical homage, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s four-movement Scheherazade (Op. 35), remains a staple of symphony orchestras the world over to this day.
The visual arts have also played a powerful role in keeping the work alive and familiar. Eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century orientalist art was an outgrowth of the western vogue for eastern motifs. Whether in paintings, book illustrations, travel posters or later product advertisements (think Camel cigarettes, “Arabian” coffee, even Sheik condoms), allusions to the East were as much a part of the general “Oriental Renaissance” as they were direct results of the European vogue for the Nights. Yet the book’s standing as the premier depiction of the Muslim Orient provided artists with a surfeit of material to express western predilections for the distant and alluringly illicit. Through orientalized art, the perceived East became neither a
geographical nor a cultural realm, but rather a psychological playground in which the West could express its exotic (and erotic) fantasies. Western theatrical works dealing with oriental stories and settings undoubtedly have a pre-Galland history, but they increased substantially after the appearance of Les mille et une nuits and persist in such twentieth-century extravaganzas as The Desert Song, Kismet and the Ali Baba takeoff Chu Chin Chow.
Often these presentations do little more than graft new elements onto basic structures; those that directly reference the Arabian Nights usually do so by modifying the original stories while maintaining a general familiarity of setting and mood. Yet the decline in the Nights’ readership parallels the appearance of a new artistic form that would go a long way toward maintaining the book’s fame; by itself, it has come close to replacing traditional storytelling methods as the preferred way of imparting narrative.
Among the late nineteenth century’s scientific marvels was a new medium known as “moving” or “motion” pictures. At first a simple novelty depicting ordinary domestic or street scenes, within a few years, cinematic pioneers were experimenting with “specialized effects”—using camera tricks to create unreal images—transforming the emerging art from straightforward documentary presentations to visual constructions with their own imaginative images.
The dreamworld of the Nights was ready-made for cinema’s ability to manipulate reality, and films depicting actual Arabian Nights stories or takeoffs are nearly as old as the medium itself. Just as Les mille et une nuits spurred creation of the European mock-oriental tale, so too has the familiarity of the Nights provided ample grist for the ravenous medium of moving pictures.
Most films dealing with the Nights are the cinematic equivalent of the lesser oriental knock-offs of the eighteenth century: at best colourful curiosities, at worst Saharas of junk adding to the impression that the work is, if not actually childish, then certainly something juvenile. Known cynically in the film trade as “t and s” productions (for “tits and sand”), these films often include such stock elements as foretold liberators and/or masked avengers, evil usurpers/wizards, disinherited princes or princesses, scantily clad maidens and recycled names like Ahmed or Ali (hero), Kasim, Hasan or Jafar (villain), Abdul or Abdullah (comedic sidekick) and a love interest named Jasmine or Yasmin (Scheherazade is even used on occasion). Add recurrent themes like roses possessing talismanic powers and a rousing revolt/battlefield finale, and the standard “t and s” picture becomes more a substratum of the swashbuckler genre than a story with distinctive Arabian Nights features.
Of the many productions referencing the Nights since the advent of cinema, only the 1924 Douglas Fairbanks epic The Thief of Bagdad, its 1940 Alexander Korda remake and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1974 erotic treatment Il fiore delle mille e una notte (“The Flower of the Thousand and One Nights”) manage to transcend the common herd: The Thief of Bagdad because its general storyline (used in at least six films to date) has become one of the most famous of Nights pastiches—almost an honorary Arabian Nights tale in itself—and the Pasolini film because it dares address the eroticism of the original work, and for that reason is not usually shown uncut.
Animation has also played an important role in keeping the work familiar, particularly to children. Besides such stand-alone offerings as three Technicolor Popeye the Sailor cartoons from the 1930s that use Nights scenarios for their basic plotlines, the earliest surviving animated feature film, Lotte Reiniger’s Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) (which predates Walt Disney’s Snow White by more than a decade) features wonderfully intricate silhouette cut-out figures in a story based partly (like Fairbanks’s The Thief of Bagdad) on “The Tale of Prince Ahmed and the Perie Banu.”
To be sure, there has been controversy over the depiction of the Muslim world in films referencing the Nights. Older Hollywood films depicting the Muslim Orient are prone to heavy stereotyping, and even today there are occasional discordant cultural notes. The 1992 Walt Disney animated Aladdin was released to critical acclaim and genie-sized box-office receipts, but also to some fire from Arab-American groups who thought it catered to the sort of outmoded images of Muslims found in the older “t and s” films.
It’s not hard to see why, since apart from the clear reference to oriental sexual fantasy found in the figure of the midriff-baring Princess Jasmine (portrayed notably as both a princess and a sexy slave), lyrics in the film’s opening musical number, “Arabian Nights,” prompted protests from the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, which argued that the narrator/storyteller singing of his eastern homeland, “Where they’ll cut off your nose if they don’t like your face / It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home,” perpetuated stereotypes of Muslims as prone to inherent violence. In response, Disney changed the offending line to (the actually better-sounding) “Where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense / It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home,” which is how it is now heard on the DVD release.
Critics have also pointed out a questionable racial division among the characters in Aladdin, amounting to a kind of animated discrimination. Heroic figures such as Aladdin (reportedly based on the American actor Tom Cruise, and called by the western nickname “Al”) and Jasmine are portrayed with significantly lighter complexions and more westernized speaking voices than many villainous characters, who are drawn with darker skin tones and often sport mock “eastern” accents. For these reasons, Aladdin is generally considered among the more controversial of recent mainstream films.
Significantly for the idea that the “Greater Arabian Nights” is a worldwide phenomenon and not just an imagined realm embraced only by the West, not all “Arabian Nights” features have been produced by western filmmakers. The developing world also has a decades-long history of using the Arabian Nights as material for the indigenous national cinemas that began appearing during the early “talkie era” of the late 1920s and early 1930s. It is a mark of the way the westernized storybook has penetrated Asia that at least as many films involving stories or characters from the Arabian Nights have appeared in Middle and Far Eastern cinema as they have in the West.
India, especially, has a long history of making Bollywood versions of “Aladdin,” “Ali Baba” and “Sindbad” dating back to the early 1930s, while Turkey and Egypt have each produced multiple versions of “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” for domestic audiences. Following the western pattern seen in The Thief of Bagdad, the eastern world has also released generic fantasy films inspired by the Nights, works not adhering to standard Arabian Nights stories but that still evoke the book by their attention to familiar motifs. This amounts to another transformation, as the screen has now become the single most important venue whereby audiences become familiar with the world of the Arabian Nights and assimilate its component parts.
“Arabian Nights” pictures may provide escapist entertainment around the globe, but the general western attitude toward the eastern world has met with heavy criticism in the postwar era. The dismantling of the European colonial system and the rise of “post-colonial” studies in academic and literary circles has seen established intellectual traditions infused with a desire to critique the West’s historical attitude toward formerly colonial peoples. The idea that western perceptions of a realm thought of as the “Orient” are mostly selfish inventions constructed for the West’s benefit has gained enormous sway in the decades since colonial independence, and continues to resound today in an ongoing debate about cultural perceptions.
A blockbuster work dealing with these very issues—practically post-colonialism’s founding text—appeared in 1978 and has sparked dispute, some of it quite bitter, ever since. That year, Edward Said (1935–2003), a Palestinian Christian and professor of comparative literature, published his celebrated Orientalism, a seminal book whose intent is to demonstrate that western perceptions of the eastern world, reflected in western literature, are based on an ongoing series of false assumptions and preconceptions. Said contends that European peoples have used the
se same flawed perceptions to assign the East an inferior status relative to the West, one excusing and sometimes demanding western intervention in eastern (here Said is referring chiefly to Muslim) affairs.
By taking his cue from the dictum of the French philosopher Michel Foucault that knowledge represents a form of power, Said argues that the western absorption of systems of eastern knowledge, and the writing that results from such absorptions, amounts to a kind of power-grab—a cultural appropriation done purely for the West’s benefit, and which has led European peoples to make conclusions about easterners that make it impossible to regard these easterners as human beings like themselves. They are therefore reduced to the status of “the Other”—individuals separated from the human community by a complex series of interlocking historical, social, political, economic and intellectual dynamics that the West deems alien and subordinate. In Said’s view, western perceptions about the “Orient,” however defined, are nothing less than a self-serving construct meant to assign inferiority.
The full value of Edward Said’s argument lies outside the scope of this book, although it is notable that in his writings, Said’s actual consideration of the Arabian Nights and its translators is surprisingly cursory. He tends to dismiss the book as a beneficent fantasy fit only for the young—one of those “childish things” best left behind with the greater sophistication maturity brings. He therefore ignores not only the adult nature of the original Nights but also the prominent way in which popular western visions of the Muslim Orient have been shaped by versions of the book and those literary works inspired by it. On its own, Galland’s Nights played a vital role in introducing visions of a torpid, timeless East steeped in colour, spectacle and sensuality, implanting images westerners carried with them during actual eastern journeys. Whether these same travellers found their expectations denied or confirmed, many came with preliminary visions distilled either partly or largely from the Arabian Nights, and therefore with various notions taken from what was reasonably thought to be an actual eastern text.