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The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 38, Number 2, 2009, pp. 183-187 (Review)

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bcq/summary/v038/38.2.williams.html

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 R E F R A M I N G T H E O R I E N TA L TA L E 183

nearly lost, unjustly neglected ( p. 52) is as brave as some scholars will

find it contentious. Unlike the Handbook, Daviss manifesto will capture the
attention of a wide readership of intellectuals and serious readers alike
who will appreciate his rigorous discussions and insightful analyses, for
while he directs such readers away from questions merely academic and
critical, he is not afraid to reveal the personal significance of Victorian lit-
erature to modern sensibilities.
So why does Victorian literature still matter? If we are to take part in
attempting to respond to the title of Daviss stimulating study, perhaps it is
that Victorian literature is fundamental to understanding ourselves and
our past. Like the Victorians, with their fascination with origins (culminat-
ing in Darwins Origin of Species), perhaps we too feel the need to trace who
we are and where we come from. The Victorians left their legacy in our
architecture and designs, music and art, politics and science, and even (or
especially) our theories of life and death. Yet, most of all, perhaps we find
ourselves in their literature. We should start with Willis and Warwicks
book, then, and move towards a greater understanding, as Davis asserts,
not of what the Victorians were (that is ultimately impossible to capture),
but of what they mean to us. Willis and Warwick ask us to think about
what the Victorian era was; Davis asks us to think about how we engage
with it.

doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfp005

Reframing the Oriental Tale

Laurence Williams
The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West edited by Saree
Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum. Oxford University Press, 2008. 55.
ISBN 978 0 19 955415 7

THE EDITORS OF THIS NEW COLLECTION of essays make the provocative

claim that the Arabian Nights, or Alf layla wa layla, has changed the world
on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text ( p. 1). Even if this over-
states the case, it is certainly arguable that, from fourteenth-century Syria
to twentieth-century Latin America, the Nights appeal to readers across
184 T H E C A M B R I D G E Q UA RT E R LY

geographies and historical periods has surpassed even that of the other
great story-cycles, such as the Metamorphoses, the Norse Edda, or the
Panchatantra. Jorge Luis Borges, in a quotation used by one contributor,
evocatively suggests why this might be so: The Nights are Time, which
never sleeps. Keep reading as the day declines. And Scheherazade will tell
you your own story ( p. 297). As the introduction and twelve essays collec-
tively explore, the world has found in the Nights unparalleled possibilities
for narrating its own stories to itself. From Scheherazades lips come
oriental tales that speak to a vast range of topics of human interest: moral-
ity, adventure, magical realism, sexual fantasy, bawdy farce, political com-
mentary, and national allegory.
One reason for the current level of scholarly interest in the Arabian
Nights is the perception that the oriental tale might be made the focus
of an alternative history of contact between Islam and the West, one
not dominated by cultural Othering, political suspicion, and war.
Instead, as the subtitle of this book, Between East and West, suggests,
the Nights have often functioned as a site of literary connection and
exchange between these two geographical regions. This aesthetic hybrid-
ism extends back to Antoine Gallands translation of a Syrian manu-
script as Les Mille et une nuits in 1704, celebrated as the first appearance
of the tales in Europe. In fact, Gallands creative influence on this text,
which became the definitive European version of the tales for over a
century, is more profound than the title of translator suggests. Not only
does Galland adapt his sources in subtle ways to suit European tastes,
but also many of the tales most cherished by modern readers such as
Aladdin and Ali Baba appear to have been largely his own inven-
tions. Madeleine Dobie, in this books opening essay, explores the vexed
question of Galland as translator-originator, proposing that we under-
stand his Nights as shaped in a broad contact zone between civilisations
( p. 26). This includes the prior literary contacts between East and West
(the story of Sindbad the Sailor, for example, was known to medieval
Europeans), Gallands many years of residence in Constantinople; and
his mysterious encounter, back in Paris, with a story-telling Syrian
Maronite named Hanna Diab, who seems to have inspired a number of
the later tales.
Inevitably, not all literary uses of the Nights embody this spirit of tol-
erance and exchange. Essays by Nabil Matar and Khalid Bekkaoui
explore how, at times, the oriental tale has resembled a battlefield
between East and West rather than a contact zone. Matar compares an
1835 Arabic edition of the Nights with the fourteenth-century Syrian
manuscript used by Galland. He argues that, compared with the
earlier text, the nineteenth-century tales tend increasingly to present
 R E F R A M I N G T H E O R I E N TA L TA L E 185

Christians as undifferentiated Others, and to turn all narratives invol-

ving Europeans into tales of conversion and the triumph of Islam. By
contrast, Bekkaoui examines eighteenth-century English oriental captiv-
ity narratives by Penelope Aubin and Elizabeth Marsh, arguing that
the Orients perceived ability to unbalance English assumption[s] of
cultural superiority ( p. 166) leads to a recurrent obsession with poli-
cing the bodies of white women against the advances of Moorish
assailants.
Other essays focus less on these Saidian ideas of cultural alterity and
will-to-power, and more on how the oriental functions as a productive
source of literary possibilities for British writers. Robert L. Mack and
Donna Landry both take up the idea of the East as a site of untamed
fecundity and erotic power. Mack studies the botanical metaphors
often associated with the Nights. He explores how writers and editors
have seen the stories as a garden of imaginative lushness, but also as
an organic eruption into English literature that risks stifling indigenous
growth: an oriental Triffid made safe only by vigorous pruning. In
Landrys imaginative reading of William Beckfords Vathek, the Orient
becomes a terrain containing multiple sites for authorial sexual identifi-
cation, in the manner of a medieval psychomachia. One memorable
digression suggests that Beckford empathises even with Vatheks mon-
strous camel Alboufaki as Romantic solitary, as Gothic monster, as
queer outsider ( p. 192), which might encourage us to re-evaluate the
later nineteenth-century orientalist obsession with the camel by
Flaubert and others.
Following Sandra Naddaff s Arabesque (1991) and Ros Ballasters
Fabulous Orients (2005), several essays in this collection examine the nar-
rative possibilities that European writers find in the Nights: the frame
story, the arabesque meanderings through time and space, and the use
of genii and the supernatural to direct events. Nasser Al-Taee analyses
the links between literary narrative and music in Rimsky-Korsakovs
symphonic suite Sheherazade (1888), focusing on the way that the rep-
etition and variation of motifs imitate the cyclical movement of the
Nights frame story. Srinivas Aravamudan proposes that the Nights
became a crucial opposing literary form in the development of the
realist novel. His important essay argues that the oriental tale is not a
marginal curiosity in the English literary pantheon, but a repository
for narrative structures that, becoming increasingly unthinkable within
a national realism ( p. 255), are identified as alien and geographically
separate. Aravamudan suggests that Joyces fiction successfully recom-
bines the modes of realism and Oriental adventure, pointing out
that Ulysses, like the Nights itself, explores the relationship between
186 T H E C A M B R I D G E Q UA RT E R LY

travel and home, adventure and the bedchamber, and kinesis and
stasis ( pp. 260 1).
Ros Ballasters essay argues that British women writers have found nar-
rative inspiration perhaps less in Scheherazade than in an often over-
looked figure by her side in the Sultans bedroom: her loyal sister
Dinarzade, at whose request the stories are told. In this idea of the sisters
as political collaborators, using storytelling to reform Sultan Schahriars
misogynistic suspicion, Ballaster finds a model of sisters resisting despotic
authority that influences a range of female-authored works, including
Austens Persuasion and Sophia Lees The Recess. Ballaster also proposes
Dinarzade as a point of identification for female readers in general who
are often, like her, positioned as accidental auditors of a tale intended for
a male audience: as we read as women, we often become aware that the
story passes through us or around us, whistling past our ears in its passage
to its true addressee ( pp. 89 90).
Several contributors focus chronologically on the early nineteenth
century, analysing the effects on British orientalism of Romanticism,
imperialism, and the discovery of the Nights by a broader reading public.
Tim Fulford argues convincingly for the influence of the Nights on the
early versions of Coleridges Rime of the Ancient Mariner, particularly on the
poems frame story and its disturbing and radical projection of a world
governed by supernatural intervention rather than conventional rules of
morality ( p. 220). He reads Coleridges decision to revise the poem in
1817 along more Christian lines as indicative of the nineteenth-century
disappearance from English poetry of an oriental trope that once could
defamiliarize the local, estrange the familiar, [and] decentre the British
from themselves ( p. 232).
James Watt also examines evolving Romantic uses of the East through
the prism of the often strained relationship between William Beckford and
his obsessive, controlling editor Samuel Henley, compiler of a voluminous
set of academic notes for the first edition of Vathek. Watt finds an ideologi-
cal clash between Beckfords amoral, sensuous Orient and Henleys
attempts to control and legitimise oriental excess by stressing Vatheks
(dubiously) moral ending, and by reading the tale as a source of genuine
information about the customs of the East. Often these attempts to
impose scholarly order on Beckfords imagination produce hilarious
results. What must be said of the Spoons of Cocknos?, a despairing
Henley wonders, in a lovely illustration of how the attempt to rationalise
Vathek might itself be a form of madness ( p. 200).
Bridget Orrs analysis of the late Georgian stage finds that from the
early 1800s dramatists turned away from exploring themes of political
governance, and towards those more populist tales which narrate the
 R E F R A M I N G T H E O R I E N TA L TA L E 187

fantastic material and social transformations in the lives of plebeian or

middle-class characters who begin life oppressed by power and poverty
( p. 126). She argues that, as a result, in the popular Orientalism ( p. 103)
of writers like John OKeeffe, a previously broad eighteenth-century inter-
est in many of the Nights tales is replaced with the restricted canon of the
modern pantomime: Aladdin, Sindbad, and Ali Baba.
However, if there is a temptation to suppose that the Nights has been
primarily associated with an apolitical realm of pantomime or escapist
fantasy ever since, this is challenged by Maher Jarrars concluding essay
on the modern uses of the Nights by Arabic authors to reframe questions
of feminism and nationhood. One of Jarrars most interesting discussions
centres on Emile Habibis Secret Life of Saeed (1972 4) and Elias Khourys
Gate of the Sun (1998). He argues that the Alf layla wa layla is used by both
authors to explore the recuperation of a national identity out of the frag-
mented and disenfranchised experiences of Palestinian refugees. A
Nights-inspired framing device binds together scattered individual narra-
tives, while the trope of magical realism creates a space for the memories
of the displaced and uprooted to recuperate the lost voices and discarded
fragments that imperialist cognitive structures have pushed to the margin
( p. 310).
The Arabian Nights in Historical Context showcases the range and quality
of literary scholarship that the oriental tale is currently attracting. One
regret might be that the focus of most contributors on more imagina-
tive, Romantic uses of the Nights leaves little space for the philosophi-
cal, moralising orientalism influential in the first five or six decades of
the eighteenth century. As a result, oriental tale-tellers such as Joseph
Addison, Samuel Johnson, or James Ridley receive little attention.
However, scholars of eighteenth-century and Romantic literature will
find much to interest them here, and this collection is also highly rec-
ommended to anyone involved in the continuing challenge of mapping
out the wider cross-cultural influences of the Nights. If the Arabian Nights
has been, in Georges Mays words, a chef-duvre invisible 1 a foun-
dation stone of the world imagination whose centrality often leads us
to overlook it the essays in this volume continue the important task
of bringing it back into view.

doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfp007

1
Georges May, Les Mille et une nuits dAntoine Galland, ou, le chef-duvre invisible
(Paris 1986).