Chap title The Arabian Nights and Orientalism The Arabian Nights and Orientalism Chap title The Arabian Nights and Orientalism PERSPECTIVES FROM EAST & WEST YURIKO YAMANAKA and TETSUO NISHIO I.B. TAURIS LONDON AND NEW YORK The Arabian Nights and Orientalism Published in 2006 by IBTauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010175 Copyright © 2006 National Museum of Ethnology The rights of Yuriko Yamanaka and Tetsuo Nishio to be identified as the Editors of this work has been asserted by the Editors in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988 All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 1 85043 768 8 EAN 978 85043 768 8 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Production co-ordination by M & M Publishing Services, 33 Warner Road, Ware, Herts SE12 9JL, UK Typeset in 11.5 on 13.5pt Goudy OS by FiSH Books, Enfield Middx, UK Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Chap title Contents Preface vii Robert Irwin Introduction: The Imagined Other and the Reflected Self xv Yuriko Yamanaka, Tetsuo Nishio I. Motifs and Formulas 1 1. The Arabian Nights in Comparative Folk Narrative Research 3 Ulrich Marzolph 2. Mythological Constituents of Alf layla wa layla 25 Hasan El-Shamy 3. Formulas and Formulaic Pictures: Elements of Oral Literature in the Thousand and One Nights 47 Kathrin Müller 4. Repetitiveness in the Arabian Nights: Openness as Self-foundation 68 Etsuko Aoyagi II. Sources and Influences 5. Alexander in the Thousand and One Nights and the Ghaz¯al¯ı Connection 93 Yuriko Yamanaka 6. The Arabian Nights in Modern Japan: A Brief Historical Sketch 116 Hideaki Sugita v The Arabian Nights and Orientalism 7. The Arabian Nights and Orientalism from a Japanese Perspective 154 Tetsuo Nishio II. Text and Image 8. The Evolution of the Arabian Nights Illustrations: An Art Historical Review 171 Kazue Kobayashi 9. Body, Voice and Gaze: Text and Illustration in the Frame Story of the Thousand and One Nights 194 Akiko Motoyoshi Sumi and Claus Clüver 10.The Image of Sheherazade in French and English Editions of the Thousand and One Nights (Eighteenth–nineteenth centuries) 219 Margaret Sironval Bibliography 245 Index of Subjects 265 Index of Cycles and Tales from the Nights 269 vi Preface Preface THE CONFERENCE ON the Arabian Nights held in Osaka, Japan in 2002 was held to mark the tercentenary of the publication of the first volumes of Antoine Galland’s Les Mille et Une Nuits in 1704. In that year and almost overnight the antiquarian and Orientalist Galland, hitherto best known as a numismatist, became the talk of the salons and academies. Society ladies, scholars and children read his translation. He was mobbed in the streets by people demanding more of the Arabian stories. In the course of the eighteenth century, his translation from the Arabic into French would be in turn retranslated into most of the other European languages. Complete editions of his translation sat on the shelves of gentlemen’s libraries. Extracts were peddled as chapbooks at marketplaces and fairs. In La Crise de la conscience européene, (Paris, 1935), the intellectual historian, Paul Hazard sought to set out the elements that shaped the modern Euro- pean mind around the beginning of the eighteenth century and he pointed out that some of those elements were not so very European: When Scheherazade began to recount her stories of the night, to unfold the infinite wealth of an imagination enriched with all the dreams of Araby of Syria and the great Levant: when she began to tell of the manners and customs of the peoples of the East, their religious ceremonies, their domestic habits, the details of their dazzling and colourful existence; when she showed how mankind could be held and enthralled, not by abstruse intellect- ual ideas, not by recondite reasoning, but by the charm of colours and the lure of fairy tales, all Europe was fain to listen. Then did the fairies Carabosse and Aurora make way for the throng of Sultanas, Viziers, Dervishes, Greek doctors, Negro vii The Arabian Nights and Orientalism slaves. Light fairylike edifices, fountains, pools guarded by lions of massy gold, spacious chambers hung with silks and tapestries from Mecca – all these replaced the palaces where the Beast waited for Beauty to open her loving eyes... As the researches of Hazard and others have shown, the reception of Galland’s translation of the Arabian Nights was only one of the unexpectedly exotic constituents of the Enlightenment. European identity was in large part shaped by a widening awareness of other cultures, other sensibilities and other ways of doing things. The accounts by Jean Chardin and others of seventeenth-century Safavid Persia fed into Montesquieu’s Letttres Persanes (1721), as well as informing some of the socio-political considerations of the same author’s De l’espirit des lois (1748). Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil- Duperron introduced Europe to the ancient religions of India. Sir William Jones, the presiding genius of the Asiatick Society of Bengal, argued for the affinity of Sanskrit with the Latin Celtic and Gothick languages. Reports from Jesuit missionaries in China introduced Europe to Confucian philosophy and Mandarin culture. Western drawing rooms became crowded with a clutter of chinoiserie. Only Japan remained largely closed to Western scrutiny. What little that was known in Europe about Japanese culture in the eighteenth century depended on second- and third-hand reports from the solitary Dutch trading colony in the proximity of Nagasaki. This was to change in the Meiji period (1868–1912). Under the slogan Bunmei Kaika, or Civilization and Enlightenment, Japan sought to appropriate and, if possible even surpass almost all aspects of Western culture and science. An inevitable concomitant was that Japanese culture began to be studied, imitated and occasionally even parodied in the West. In the 1880s Japanese themes and colouristic effects started to appear in the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and James Whistler, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikadowas first performed in the same decade. Lafcadio Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan was published in 1894. When Japan opened its doors to the West there were many visitors who compared the country to something out of the Arabian Nights. Indeed that comparison became something of a cliché. As Baron von Hübner put it when describing his encounter with the Court of Japan in his Promenade autour du monde (1871): viii Preface I do not think that I shall ever forget the scene of this morning; that fairy garden, those mysterious pavilions, those statesmen in full dress, pacing with us in the shrubbery; this oriental potentate who looks like an idol, and believes himself a God are things which surpass the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. But Japanese study of Western culture was both more intense and more comprehensive than early Western studies of Japanese culture and it even embraced those aspects of Middle Eastern and Islamic culture that had become familiar to the Western reading public, including the Arabian Nights. Two of the chapters in Arabian Nights and Orientalism (by Hideaki Sugita and Tetsuo Nishio) trace the story of the introduction of the Nights to Japan and the numerous ways in which Japanese versions of the great Arab story collection influenced Japanese literature and culture more widely. As Sugita points out it was ‘in 1875, eight years after the Meiji Restoration, that the first Japanese translation of the Arabian Nights was made...’. That translation depended on an adaptation of an English translation of Galland’s French translation of the original Arabic. That was usually the way of it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Very few scholars outside the Middle East had a good command of Arabic and presumably many of those who were competent to translate the stories believed they had more serious tasks ahead of them than the translating or retranslating of Oriental fairy tales. Therefore for a long time translations of the Nightsinto such languages as Hebrew, Polish or Russian tended to be based on French or English intermediaries. Even the Turks came to prefer to translate from Galland’s French. The Arab stories that were then published in, say, Eastern Europe, Turkey or Japan were subtly Europeanised, as, in the process of their trans- mission, they tended to acquire something of Galland’s courtliness, or Lane’s ponderous, pedagogical, glossing approach, or Burton’s raunchy exaggerations, or the sugar-sweet, louche whimsicality of Mardrus. In a chapter in my The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994, reprinted 2004), I discussed the influence of the Nights on European and American literature and suggested, at the risk of hyperbole, that that influence was so all-pervasive that ‘it might have been an easier, shorter chapter if I had discussed those writers who were not influenced by the Nights. A discussion of the lack of influence on, say, ix