The Arabian Nights and Orientalism: Perspectives from East and West

289 Pages·2006·4.99 MB·English

by  Yuriko Yamanaka

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
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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
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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
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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):
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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