by Paul Nurse
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.
It is left to an unhappy boy named Charles Dickens, however, to best describe the lasting effect of the Arabian Nights on English readers. For Dickens, the Nights did more than provide solace from a miserable childhood; he and many other writers found it acted as a powerful teacher in the art of storytelling. Dickens would later pay homage to the book in several of his works, but most particularly in his 1850 essay “The Christmas Tree,” in which he wonderfully evokes a child’s imagination on reading the Arabian Nights:
Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me. All lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans. Common flower-pots are full of treasure … trees are for Ali Baba to hide in; beef-steaks are to be thrown into the Valley of Diamonds…. When I wake in bed … on the cold, dark winter mornings … I hear Dinarzade, “Sister, sister, if you are not yet awake, I pray you finish the history of the Young King of the Black Islands.” Scheherazade replies, “If my lord the Sultan will suffer me to live another day, sister, I will not only finish that, but tell you a more wonderful story yet.” Then, the gracious Sultan goes out, giving no orders for the execution, and we all three breathe again.
In Europe, the Nights went some way toward inspiring indigenous folklore collections. Both the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen recall childhood readings of the Nights as among their earliest memories of literature, just as all three later noted or used sources from the Nights in their own work. The Grimms believed a number of their collected “Household Stories” from the German states had their origins in The Thousand and One Nights—residue, perhaps, of eastern tales that had penetrated the West centuries before. Andersen almost certainly had stories from the Nights or similar collections in mind when composing some of his original fairy tales, including “The Little Mermaid” (parts of “Julnar the Sea-Born”), “The Tinder Box” (shades of “Aladdin”) and that classic of toadyism run amok, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”—versions of which appear in several folklore traditions, including “The Lady’s Twelfth Tale” in the fifteenth-century Turkish book The History of the Forty Viziers.
Surprisingly, for all the esteem with which the West held the Nights, for almost a hundred years, the Antoine Galland edition remained the only translation in existence, the source of every adaption since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Claims in some versions that its tales were “taken from the Arabic” were true only in the most roundabout way, since Galland adapted his volumes from Arabic manuscripts with supplementary material taken from other sources, making all other western editions of the Nights “Arabic” only by one degree of separation.
There were and are problems associated with translating the Nights into European languages, problems that sometimes add to the difficulty of determining the actual text of specific stories, let alone the work’s contents. Modern written Arabic contains a number of punctuation and diacritical marks designed to convey proper meaning and intent. With pre-modern Arabic manuscripts of the Nights lacking most of these marks (through quick or careless transcription or the difficulties of reading the original manuscript), European translators were forced to rely on their intuition to interpret words and context as best they could. Trusting to their own judgment and having few if any supplementary texts for comparison, it was a near-certainty that in places translators would misconstrue meaning. Sometimes they excised obscure or unfathomable words or passages altogether, altering the text by leaving out necessary details or important information.
Inevitably, however, translations independent of Galland began appearing early in the nineteenth century, including the first actual English edition, created by the orientalist Jonathan Scott in 1811. Scott used Galland’s text as well as an Arabic manuscript housed in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, but edited his work on the side of wholesomeness to avoid offending readers. Considered “vapid, frigid, and insipid” by some, it nevertheless proved highly popular and stands as the first true literary edition of the Arabian Nights in English, as well as the end of the monopoly of Les mille et une nuits.
Like a persistent itch, though, the feeling among some that the West was being exposed to only part of a great Arabic original would not go away. There was a haze of mystery to the Nights that intrigued the curious, but which also proved frustrating since so little was known about the work. In time, the expanding European presence in Asia and the development of oriental studies prompted a number of individuals to delve into the Nights’ history to uncover what Antoine Galland had left unanswered or had been unable to unmask. The Frenchman’s Syrian manuscript, while old, was believed incomplete, partly because of the difference between its title and the number of Nights contained in the text, but also because of Galland’s own statement that he used at least one more manuscript in his adaption, as well as the puzzle surrounding the orphan stories.
Now, many decades after its publication, the Arabian Nights was becoming more than an influential storybook. Its fame saw it pulled inexorably into the growing body of eastern literature deemed worthy of investigation. This situa
tion prompted two linked activities, beginning about fifty years after the first appearance of Les mille et une nuits: the search for additional Arabic manuscripts of the Nights and its scholarly study in hopes of learning about its background. In the first half of the nineteenth century, these trends would intersect with the creation of exhaustive, printed Arabic editions of the work containing an actual 1001 Nights, although most of these compendiums were created by westerners anxious to see a beloved book reach literary fruition.
The first mystery to be addressed was the question of Alf Laila wa Laila. Part of the adventure of the Nights’ progress in the West is bound up with the desire to uncover a full Arabic manuscript of the work or, failing that, at least one including everything within Galland’s text, including his orphan stories. The growth of Asian trade in the last quarter of the eighteenth century facilitated this search as increasing numbers of Europeans travelled and worked in the Muslim East, giving some the opportunity to hunt for Arabic sources of the Nights. As eastern studies established itself as an actual scholarly field, western interest in manuscript copies of Alf Laila wa Laila also increased, in hopes of adding to the small store of knowledge about the work.
Caught up in the romance of the quest for lost treasure, travellers went to Indiana Jones–like extremes to seek out manuscripts. They consulted scholars, interpreters, diplomats, traders or anyone else who could help locate native book dealers or scribes who might have Arabic copies of the Nights for sale, or possess relevant information.
Antoine Galland was the first of these arcane treasure-hunters. Although he never left Europe after beginning Les mille et une nuits, Galland searched actively through agents and acquaintances for the remainder of Alf Laila wa Laila to add to his sources, never knowing that by a brilliant quirk of fate, he already owned the earliest and most extensive Arabic manuscript of the Nights in existence. Succeeding hunters included many sometimes-nameless western travellers or employees in the East who either sought out, or happened to come across, texts they were able to bring back from the Middle East.
A number of Alf Laila wa Laila texts were found by travellers, with more than twenty such manuscripts surviving to the present day.* But neither extensive nor partial manuscripts were easy to obtain. While there does not appear to have been a great number of texts to begin with, many were owned by the rawi, who were understandably reluctant to give up part of their professional life’s blood. There is also the suspicion that eastern copyists catering to foreign tastes fashioned compendiums of Alf Laila wa Laila stories in simple response to a market need. And a number of manuscripts were fragmentary or in disrepair from years of handling, making their contents hard to understand, even for western Arabic readers.
Those hoping to prove the legitimacy of Galland’s orphan stories were also doomed to disappointment, since none of his intruded material appears in manuscripts predating Les mille et une nuits. Moreover, readable texts often proved different in their number of Nights as well as in many of the details in those stories they actually had in common, making it nearly impossible to determine what constitutes the body of the Arabic Nights. With few if any manuscripts bearing the same contents, over time it became clear that ordinary concepts of bibliography do not apply to The Thousand and One Nights, leaving its composition variable to the point of inconstancy.
Yet, searching for the Nights was never a lost cause, since additional manuscripts meant added information, even if much of it was contradictory or incomplete. And tantalizing hints of unsolved mysteries did appear. One large manuscript brought to England from Egypt by the notorious rake Edward Wortley Montague—in a lifetime of misdeeds, he was only incidentally an Arabist—contains a number of stories not appearing in other sources, including one (“The Tale of the Fisherman’s Son”) bearing strong similarities to “Aladdin.” Overall, though, Europe’s growing collection of Alf Laila wa Laila manuscripts only added to the West’s fascination with the Nights without solving definitively the many riddles surrounding it, keeping the work shimmering indistinctly like a desert mirage.
Shimmering, that is, until western scholars began deciphering the mysteries behind the book’s origins. At the same time as travellers searched for Arabic texts of the Nights in the East, another development ran parallel with the hunt. By now the study of the Asian world had become sufficiently formalized that learned societies along the lines of France’s Société asiatique and Britain’s Royal Asiatic Society were established to further the study of eastern life, providing focused organizations for the growing number of orientalists to publish their findings and debate relevant issues.
Not coincidentally, this period also saw the earliest attempts at identifying the history of the Nights as Europeans began investigating the tale lying behind these great eastern tales. Antoine Galland had begun the process by speculating that some stories may have come from outside sources; in his third volume he notes the similarities between Sindbad and The Odyssey, but for the most part, the fairy-tale charm of his work overwhelmed any real curiosity about its origins.
At the end of the eighteenth century, however, the English literary critic Richard Hole sounded the gun for educated inquiry into the Nights’ background by publishing the first book devoted entirely to a study of the work. Hole’s 1797 Remarks on the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments focuses mostly on the Sindbad voyages, but it also theorizes about the origins of the larger book. Hole is among the first to promote the idea that there is more to the Nights than simple “Arabic” stories brought to the West. Recognizing that “we are … as much acquainted with the merits of the original [Nights] as we should be in respect to the former beauty of a human body from contemplating its skeleton,” Hole postulates that the tales come from a variety of regions and may be infused with parts of stories already known in the West.
Like Galland, Hole was struck by the similarities between Sindbad and Odysseus, believing the former story cycle might as well be called The Arabian Odyssey since it bears “the same resemblance … as an oriental mosch [mosque] does to a Grecian temple.” Presciently, he bemoans the fact that the Nights was fast becoming a work thought fit for children only, rather than one seen in its proper light as a collection of folk tales intended for adults. Largely for this reason, Hole believed the Nights urgently needed retranslation to provide versions independent of Galland, restoring the book to its rightful place as cultural folklore.
Several years later, the French orientalist Louis Mathieu Langles went further by speculating that the oldest Nights stories ultimately originated in India, but found their way into the Middle East to be added to regional tales. Langles was not the only one advancing the idea of multiple sources at this time. While preparing his English translation, Jonathan Scott recalled similarities between the Nights and other stories he’d heard during his days with the East India Company in Bengal, leading many to regard the Arabian Nights as “probably a tissue of tales invented at different times, some of them entirely fictitious, others founded on anecdotes of real history, upon which marvellous additions have been engrafted … altered and varied by different reciters.”
Such mobility, it was argued, accounted for both the book’s varied tone as well as similarities to such European stories as the fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales, where such creations as the Nights’ “Enchanted Horse [is] evidently [the same as] the Horse of Chaucer.” As the Napoleonic Wars raged in Europe and oriental studies assumed a structured outlook, attention was being redirected away from the Nights as a collection of entertaining stories, or even as literary inspiration. At last, the book was being seen as something to be studied as well as read. The gathering of more manuscripts stimulated interest in its background, in turn creating a desire for new collections and sparking fresh analysis, speculation and debate.
No one did more to bridge these trends of manuscript-hunting and inquiry than an Austrian nobleman, Baron Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Von Hammer-Purgstall stands at the apex of the search for the Arabic Nights and the inquir
y into the book’s history. Not only was he a searcher for a full Alf Laila wa Laila copy as well as a translator, he was also the most important of the Nights’ early theorizers. His conjectures about the work’s background did more for the study of the book than most other scholars combined.
His career resembles Antoine Galland’s without the poverty. Born at Graz in 1774, Joseph Freiherr (“Free Lord” or Baron) von Hammer-Purgstall exhibited an early proficiency in languages, studying Turkish and Persian in Vienna before becoming an influential linguist (he eventually mastered ten languages) and oriental scholar. Like Galland, von Hammer-Purgstall spent part of his youth in Constantinople as an embassy interpreter and secretary. On his return to Europe, he was ennobled and became a privy councillor before joining the Austrian chancery under Prince Klemens von Metternich, retiring in 1835 to become a full-time writer.
Respected scholar though he is, von Hammer-Purgstall was as eccentric as William Beckford or Jan Potocki, obsessed with secret societies in general and the Knights Templar in particular. Some of his books read today like early conspiracy theories, abounding as they do in Freemasons and Templars worshipping Gnostic deities; in one he yammers on at length about alleged connections between the Knights Templars, the Jesuits, the medieval Persian sect of Shi’a “Assassins” and eighteenth-century French revolutionaries. Somehow, it made sense to him but, for all that, von Hammer-Purgstall can never be dismissed as a crank, since he also wrote highly regarded histories of the Ottoman Empire and the Mongol presence in Russia, made graceful translations of Persian poetry and acted as president of Vienna’s Science Academy (an institution founded partly on his suggestion). Austria’s oriental society, the Österreichische Orient-Gesellschaft Hammer-Purgstall, is named for him.
