Eastern Dreams (12 page)

This was one of the functions, if not actually an explicit goal, of the
rawi
, who provided social instructions for listeners through their stories. As an outgrowth of this tradition, the literary
Nights
expresses this aim in its introduction: “
Verily the works and words of those gone before us have become instances and examples to men of our modern day, that folk may view what admonishing chances befell other folk and may therefrom take warning….”

Galland's views on the
Nights
' purpose as a vehicle for moral instruction are similar to beliefs held by other writers throughout literature. In a tradition extending from the classical world to the early modern age of Galland's time and beyond, authors have often paid heed to the moral power of literature and its potential as a social force. In this regard, as well as possessing the ability to entertain, fiction and poetry have the added capacity of instructing, warning or condemning by providing illustrations of ethical behaviour or the results arising from unethical action.
Aesop's Fables
, the works of Plato and Aristotle, Dante's poetical journey through the afterlife, Sir Philip Sidney's
Defense of Poesie
(1595), John Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress
(1678)—even a children's author like Theodore Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss—have all employed literature as a medium for conveying moral lessons or have produced considerations about literature's capacity to effect change. Contemporaries of Galland's held that fiction, however pleasing, nevertheless has as its primary function a distinct moral and political agenda whereby virtue must always triumph and vice, no matter how alluring, meet with inevitable defeat and reprisal. By reinforcing the idea that virtue is the desired path to follow (even if for no other reason than to avoid retribution), readers are thereby educated to their responsibilities as integrated members of society.

Traditional European folklore that has been altered to provide moral direction for readers—the Brothers Grimm come readily to mind—almost invariably follows this scenario of seeing righteousness
triumph over wickedness, offering the comforting hope that good is rewarded and villainy always punished. Despite the abundance of arbitrary cruelty found within the world of the
Nights
, to Galland's way of thinking the work remains overwhelmingly moral both in its spirit and general intent, as numerous exemplary lessons are provided and dozens of villainous characters are punished (often ingeniously) for their crimes against others, in a world that is not merely fantastical but often just, as well.

Once again Galland's remarkable luck held. Not only was he among the new generation of orientalists produced by the Enlightenment surge of interest in the East, and thereby had an enormous sphere to work from, but he also knew he had arrived on the folklore scene just as a vogue for French
contes de fées
(national fairy tales) was starting to run its course, leaving the field open for something new.

During much of the preceding century, salon society had enjoyed a craze for oral folk tales French peasants supposedly told their children and which were then collected, read and passed among sophisticated, upper-class circles. In 1697 eight such tales, including “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Red Riding Hood,” “Puss 'n Boots” and—surprisingly—”Bluebeard,” were compiled into a single volume by the lawyer and author Charles Perrault. Entitled
Contes du temps passé
(“Stories of the Past”) but subtitled
Contes de la mere l'Oye
(“Mother Goose Stories”) after the famously garrulous female goose-herders of the rural districts, Perrault's work proved an immediate and enduring classic, spawning countless other collections.

Although academics of the time dismissed
contes
as foolish romances used to put children to sleep, these and similar tales created a fashion in literary salons for stories involving supernatural
episodes, setting the stage for the appearance of other imaginative narratives. Galland was aware of this trend, remarking in a February 1701 letter that his forthcoming
Nights
contains “
tales just as good as the fairy stories published these last years in such profusion.” For his part, the man who started the literary fashion for the fairy tale, Charles Perrault, was likewise aware of the growing interest in oriental matters, praising d'Herbelot's
Bibliothèque orientale
as introducing readers to something new—the heaven and earth of the Muslim world about which Europeans had previously been so unaware. They shared the same publisher, and sources indicate that Perrault and Galland were at least acquaintances, very possibly friends, but because he died in 1703, Charles Perrault did not live to see the next stage in the emerging European imaginative tradition, though he unconsciously passed the torch to the first volumes of Galland's
Mille et une nuits
.

If parallels can be made between the
Nights
and the Bible, they can also be made between the
Nights
and the
contes de fées
that almost immediately preceded it. While by definition nearly all European fairy tales involve fantastical elements, not all
Arabian Nights
stories contain supernatural plots or references, even as such tales remain essential parts of the work's mystique. Many stories, especially the humorous anecdotes or those involving historical characters, revolve around ordinary, reality-based situations with nothing of the miraculous about them. Yet in the western imagination of the early eighteenth century and even today in most abridged editions, European fairy tales and the
Arabian Nights
are linked by the perception that they are similar collections of imaginative tales. The setting of the
Nights
—the romantic, magical-seeming lands of the East—imbued even the most commonplace tales with mythic qualities, endowing otherwise ordinary stories with the sense of exotic distance necessary to associate western fairy tales with those appearing as their eastern counterparts.

For French readers, the very world of the
Nights
had the effect of transforming its stories into exotic things. Readers who consumed volumes of Galland's work as if they were
petites pâtisseries
did so with the comforting notion that they were perusing
contes
largely removed only in setting from their own indigenous folklore. If the
Holy Bible
acted as the
Arabian Nights
' historical forerunner in bringing eastern wonder tales to the West, the
Nights
' new cosmos had its trail blazed first by a European cousin, the western fairy tale.

The first two volumes of
Les mille et une nuits
were published by Claude Barbin in January 1704, followed by Volumes 3 and 4 later that same year. As all eastern versions of the
Nights
existed only in handwritten manuscript at this time, this was not only the first publication of
Alf Laila wa Laila
in the West but also the first printed version to appear anywhere. The next year two more volumes were published, with the seventh appearing in 1706. Thereafter, successive volumes arrived at irregular intervals, with Volume 8 in 1709, 9 and 10 three years later and the final two issued in 1717, two years after Galland's death. Unlike some of the massive editions that appeared in the following centuries, Galland's volumes were small in size and content—about three inches by five inches, and only between two and three hundred pages long.

The tales in the first six volumes corresponded roughly to the sequence in Galland's Syrian text. By then he had nearly exhausted the contents of his three Arabic volumes, so after Night 236, Volume 6 is supplemented by another story, “Qamarazzaman,” taken from an unidentified source. Volume 7 contains the two remaining stories in Galland's manuscript, completing what he had bought from Syria. But there were still five volumes to come, containing a host of tales that do not appear in Galland's surviving
source material. Where did these come from, how did Galland happen upon them, and are they in fact actual
Alf Laila wa Laila
stories?

The answer to all these questions is that Galland used whatever material he deemed appropriate and worthy, including at least one more Arabic manuscript of
Nights
stories now lost. In the dedication of the first volume to the Marquise d'O, Galland states that he had worked from four—not three—Arabic manuscripts of
Alf Laila wa Laila
. This is not a slip, for in addition to “Qamarazzaman,” some later stories for which Galland provides translations exist in Arabic manuscripts of the
Nights
postdating the work he obtained from Syria. Galland probably believed that the Sindbad voyages he inserted in Volume 3 existed in some fuller Arabic version of the
Nights
(as he had been told), and so felt justified by including them as part of his work.

But he also included stories that did not appear in his Syrian manuscript, some of which have their counterparts in other Arabic compilations of
Alf Laila wa Laila
, but a number of which are considered orphan stories without provenance, since they find no counterpart in surviving Arabic manuscripts of the
Nights
predating Galland's translation.
*
Believing a complete Arabic version existed somewhere in the Arab world, Galland was stymied for years by his inability to find one, and remained under near-constant pressure from publisher and public to come up with more stories. He was never to know that a “complete”
Alf Laila wa Laila
manuscript with an actual 1001 Nights is as mythical as the Man in the Moon, or that his search would inadvertently muddy the waters for all those coming after him.

Ironically, Galland's surviving three-volume manuscript is now held to contain the earliest and best Arabic collection of
Alf Laila wa Laila
stories in existence, although there is evidence that the great British orientalist Sir William Jones possessed another, more extensive Syrian copy which is now lost, but which may have been as much as twice the length of Galland's work. In the meantime, Galland used whatever stories he had at his disposal for further volumes of his
Nights
. Even if he suspected he was misinformed about the Sindbad voyages, he still could have believed it
might
be part of a greater work, and so had no qualms about including it in his text. The mysterious, lost fourth volume Galland employed was in all likelihood not a sequential continuation of his Syrian manuscript but a different
Alf Laila wa Laila
with additional tales, which Galland came across and used once his first source was depleted.

It was not for lack of trying, however, that Galland failed to find an “entire”
Alf Laila wa Laila
. For years after receiving his Syrian manuscript, he hunted for a full version of the Arabic
Nights
to augment his sources. From mention of four manuscripts in his
avertissement
, Galland must have found the fourth text sometime between 1701 and publication of his first volume in 1704. This would have given him sufficient reason to believe that more stories were available in Arabic, and it would only be a matter of time before he found a complete version.

There
was
some reason for hope. In 1711, Galland received a letter from a M. Brue, a secretary attached to the French embassy in Constantinople, informing him that a Jew residing in the Ottoman capital supposedly owned an Arabic manuscript containing the entire
Thousand and One Nights
. Galland's correspondent went on to say that he would do his best to buy it and have it forwarded to France. This must have been a false trail, for in subsequent mentions in his journals, Galland grows increasingly discouraged
about the ability of Brue or anyone else to procure such a work; by late 1712, he refers to the subject no more, probably having resigned himself to the fact that he would be unable to find a full
Alf Laila wa Laila
in whatever years were left to him (he was then sixty-six).