Things oriental since time immemorial have constituted a source of inspiration for Western imagination and creativity. Geographically, the East is not only the direction of sunrise (‘ex oriente lux’), and thus the immediate source of life, but also—as has aptly been expressed by George Eliot (1856)—the place where beautiful flowers, strange animals, precious fabrics, and valuable spices originated, besides the great religions—and the world's internationally renowned collections of tales (‘ex oriente fabula’).
Historically, the notion of how to define the Orient has been shifting in accordance with the changing centres of power. In antiquity, the encounter between the Greeks and the Persians in the 5th century bc is one of the starting‐points of the ensuing relationship between the East and the West, which until the very present has remained essentially political. While Herodotus still preserves fragmentary testimonies that the early Greeks regarded the Northern barbarians as similarly exotic as, for example, the Egyptians, the Hellenistic era inaugurated by Alexander the Great's conquests to some extent integrated the Orient, shifting its eastern boundaries to the far side of the River Indus. In Roman times, when the whole Mediterranean belonged to a single dominion, the Orient constituted a minor factor on the outskirts of a strong and highly self‐conscious empire. When, in the Middle Ages, the European centres of power had shifted to the north, not only had Greek antiquity largely been obscured, but also the reality of the Orient had been relegated to the realm of fantasy, largely nourished by fictitious narratives based on the oral tradition of merchants, pilgrims, and travellers. The crusades brought parts of the Islamic Orient back into European consciousness, but the fall of the crusader states and the ensuing political development once more prevented the free flow of information between the East and the West that alone could have contributed to creating an unbiased mutual apprehension of both sides. The conquest of Constantinople by the Turks (1453) documented the imminent ‘oriental’ threat to the whole of Europe, whereas, on the other hand, the political consolidation at the end of the 17th century engendered an unprecedented enthusiasm for everything oriental, be it food, clothing, music, architecture, or tales. The introduction of The Arabian Nights to Europe at the beginning of the 18th century until the present constitutes the single most important event in the inspiration of Western creativity through oriental models and elements. Though Napoleon's expedition to Egypt (1798–9) is usually interpreted as having inaugurated a more scientific line in creative orientalism, still at the turn of the 20th century exact and reliable first‐hand information about the Orient appears to be available to fewer specialists than would be needed to liberate the Orient from being exploited as a mine of fictitious and often heavily biased depictions.
Psychologically, the Other has contributed as much to the definition of the Self as the relevant individual's or culture's own apprehension of itself. In this respect, the Orient as the West's neighbouring Other has always served as a matrix for Western creative projections, whether they be purely invented and innocent in an uncompromising and friendly way, or whether they be ignorant, malicious, and aggressive. None of these projections was seriously intended to make available or distribute knowledge about the Other. Rather, as Edward Said has argued in his highly influential study Orientalism (1978), in attempting to document the Orient (the Other, the opposite), the Occident came to document itself. At the same time, paradoxically, the West has yet fully to acknowledge the fact that its culture relies on a threefold legacy, constituted by Greek, Latin, and Arab elements, of which the latter is largely ignored. Since exact knowledge in certain ways is counter‐productive to imagination, the lack of knowledge appears as a prerequisite to imaginative reception. Imagination, on the other hand, relies on specific preconceived conditions, which in their turn are outlined by the accessibility of information as well as the cultural background of the informant, writer, or artist. This implies certain misconceptions and prejudices, since all parties implied are highly susceptible to the influence of their societies. Their presentation of the Orient as well as the resulting literary production proved that obviously, in the Western mind, imagination and reality possessed little overlap, or rather that imagination overruled reality.
These are, in terms of cultural history, the general outlines one has to consider when researching the reception of oriental narratives in Western literature.
Oriental fiction in the European literatures prior to 1700 had contributed to a more or less vague and general imaginative acquaintance with the Orient. As for English literature, as far back as the 11th century, fictitious descriptions of the marvels of India are found in Anglo‐Saxon translations of legends concerning Alexander the Great; moreover, the romance of Alexander itself, so popular all over Europe (and the Islamic Orient), to a large extent is indebted to oriental sources. The Middle Ages witnessed scholarly (Latin) translations of some of the great oriental collections of tales, such as Sendebar (Syntipas), Kalila and Dimna or The Fables of Bidpai (the Persian/Arabic adaptation of the Indian Panchatantra). The Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alphonsi, a Spanish Jew converted to Christianity, while drawing on oriental material, constitutes the first European collection of short novellas, inaugurating a new genre in European literature. The narrative of Barlaam and Josaphat, one of the most popular legends in medieval Europe, derived largely from an Indo‐Persian version of the legend of Buddha's youth. Medieval romances, apologues, legends, and tales of adventure drew heavily on oriental motifs. Famous English examples besides Arthurian romance include John Mandeville's Travels or Chaucer's ‘Squire's Tale’. Romances of chivalry, travel (such as the Navigatio Sancti Brendani) and adventure all over Europe, even up to the Icelandic saga incorporate oriental motifs. Collections of jocular tales such as the Facetiae by Poggio Bracciolini (compiled around 1450) constitute a precursor to European literature of the chapbook and vademecum genre and document the fact that even minor genres such as jokes and anecdotes formed part of the large narrative stock exchange taking place between Europe and the Orient. Beginning with the 16th century, the great period of translation, popular versions of the important narrative collections were produced in the regional languages and continued to transmit oriental motifs to the Western readership.
A case in point here is the collection Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del re di Seren (Voyage of the Three Young Sons of the King of Ceylon), published 1557 in Venice and written by a certain Christoforo Armeno. This author, whose identity has only recently been confirmed, compiled an adaptation of the Persian Hasht Behesht (Eight Paradises) by Amir Khosrau of Delhi (1253–1325), itself inspired by the famous Haft Peikar (Seven Portraits), by Nezami (d. 1209). The Peregrinaggio's frame story is about three princes who prove their extreme sensitivity and cleverness to the Persian emperor Bahram Gur; within this frame, a number of tales are told, the best known of which probably became the ‘tall tale’ about the lucky hunter who shoots the foot and the ear of a deer with one arrow. The Peregrinaggio was extremely popular in late 17th‐ and 18th‐century Europe. Following several Italian editions (1577, 1584, etc.), it was translated into German (1583, 1599) and French (1610). A French reworking was published by the chevalier de Mailly (1719), again inspiring German (1723), English (1722), and Dutch (1766) translations. It was Horace Walpole (1717–97) who after reading what he labelled a ‘silly fairy tale’ coined the term ‘serendipity’, defined as ‘the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident’. In the 17th century one of the most influential authors with respect to the adaptation of oriental narrative was the French poet Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95). His Fables, published in 1668–93 in twelve books, notably in their latter half draw on the oriental collection of fables Kalila and Dimna. La Fontaine in the course of the 18th century was translated and adapted into most major European languages.
All previous instances of the adaptation of oriental narrative in the West are outshone by the overwhelming success staged by the reception of The Arabian Nights in Europe. Though single tales from the Nights, as well as its frame tale, had already been known in Europe at least from the 14th century onwards (Giovanni Sercambi (1347–1424), Novelle; Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), Orlando furioso), a comprehensive edition was published by the French orientalist scholar Antoine Galland only at the beginning of the 18th century. Two arguments help to understand the extraordinary success Galland's publication met with. The French interest in the Orient had been growing throughout the 17th century in connection with the colonial and commercial expansion of France in the reign of Louis XIV; moreover, The Arabian Nights were ‘discovered’ in an atmosphere thoroughly impregnated by the narrative conventions and fashion of the conte de fées and their craving for the extravagant. The magic elements in the Nights combined with the explicit and unpretentious representation of sexuality created a powerful inspiration for the European imagination. Contrary to the widespread depreciation of contemporary oriental people (who were predominantly characterized as proficient liars and thiefs, at best as culturally degenerate), the Nights represented things oriental in an attractive garb which was all the more appealing to the European taste since in Galland's adaptation the tales were Europeanized (and, in fact, Frenchified).
No serious author of French, English, or German literature of the 18th and 19th centuries could avoid the challenge of the Nights, and most of them in some way have shown that they read (and loved) the Nights. In France, the Nights first of all prompted the publication of other similar collections, such as the Mille et un jours (Thousand and one days, 1710–12) by François Pétis de la Croix, and Thomas‐Simon Gueulette's numerous compilations (Les mille et un quarts d'heure, 1712; Aventures merveilleuses du mandarin Fum‐Hoam, 1723; Sultanes de Guzarate, 1732; Mille et une heures, contes peruviens, 1733). The oriental mode these works inaugurated also inspired Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), and Voltaire claimed to have read the Nights 14 times—though he did not necessarily share the sympathetic attitude towards the contemporary oriental craze.
W. F. Kirby in his survey of ‘Imitations and miscellaneous works having more or less connection with the Nights’ (1885) classified the aftermath of the Nights according to seven categories, which are not always clearly defined: (1) Satires on the Nights themselves, e.g. Anthony Hamilton; (2) Satires in an oriental garb, e.g. William Beckford (1760–1844), History of the Caliph Vathek (French original 1787, unauthorized English translation 1786); (3) Moral tales in an oriental garb, e.g. Frances Sheridan, Nourjahad (1767); (4) Fantastic tales with nothing oriental about them but the name, e.g. Robert Louis Stevenson, New Arabian Nights (1882); (5) Imitations pure and simple, e.g. George Meredith (1828–1909), Shaving of Shagpat: An Arabian Entertainment (1855); (6) Imitations more or less founded on genuine oriental sources, e.g. the Tales of the comte de Caylus; (7) Genuine oriental tales, e.g. Mille et un jours by Pétis de la Croix.
The literary merit of the European production inspired by oriental fairy tales has been evaluated highly divergently over the centuries. While W. A. Clouston (1843–96) regarded Frances Sheridan's Nourjehad as ‘one of the very best of the imitations of Eastern fiction’, Robert Irwin (1994) concedes only with a certain reluctance ‘strangeness and originality’ to this moral tale, a genre he evaluates as boring, extremely exasperating, and ‘leadenly moral’. Irwin, in his chapter on ‘Children of the Nights’, presents a number of European authors who alluded to, borrowed from, or were influenced in one way or another by the Nights. The list of names he discusses in addition to those already named includes Joseph Addison (1672–1719), Samuel Johnson (Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia (1759)), John Hawkesworth (1715–73), Jean Potocki (1761–1815), Jacques Cazotte (Les Mille et une fadaises, 1742), Robert Southey (Thalaba the Destroyer, 1800), Thomas Moore (Lalla Rookh, 1817), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe (‘The Thousand‐and‐Second Tale of Scheherazade’), James Joyce (1882–1941), Marcel Proust (1871–1922), Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), and Salman Rushdie (Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 1990). Many more writers were influenced by the Nights, such as the French Flaubert, Stendhal, Dumas, and Gobineau; the English Walter Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Conan Doyle, and Angela Carter; the Russian Pushkin and Tolstoy; the German Goethe, Wieland, Mirger, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Rückert, Hauff, Grillparzer, and Chamisso. Indeed, according to Irwin, it might be easier to discuss those writers who were not influenced by the Nights.
The term ‘orientalism’, in the coinage it has acquired in recent decades, primarily denotes the Near East or Middle East. Taken in a wider sense, a similar attitude of cultural and intellectual hegemony applies to other areas of the Orient, and terms such as ‘Egyptomaniac’, ‘Chinoiserie’, or ‘Japonaiserie’ have been coined to denote comparable uncritical and self‐revealing attitudes of exploiting the oriental Other. One specific aspect that separates oriental fairy tales in Western literature (or fairy tales à l'orientale) from the literature of other regions is that the tales in general are evaluated as the Islamic Orient's major contribution to world literature. In the Western evaluation, they are foreign enough to be appealing, yet they appear familiar enough not to remain entirely exotic. It might, however, be useful to keep in mind that the Orient as depicted in its tales portrays a narrative world with a similar degree of fantasy and imagination as do its Western adaptations. Especially in the 19th century, many Europeans believed the world of The Arabian Nights to present a faithful reproduction of oriental reality, so they confused the real East with the East of the stories. The decidedly negative response of the Arab‐American community to the depiction of oriental reality in Disney's Aladdin proved, if such a proof be needed after the affair (1989) initiated by Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, that towards the end of the 20th century a different kind of sensitivity might be required in dealing with the narrative adaptation of oriental fairy tales.
Bibliography
- Caracciolo, Peter L. (ed.), The Arabian Nights in English Literature (1988).
- Conant, Martha P., The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (1908).
- Irwin, Robert, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994).
- Kabbani, Rana, Europe's Myth of Orient: Devise and Rule (1986).
- Meester, Marie E. de, Oriental Influences in the English Literature of the Nineteenth Century (1915).
- Sardar, Z., and Davies, M. W., Distorted Imagination: Lessons from the Rushdie Affair (1990).
— Ulrich Marzolph
