Eastern Dreams (17 page)

The success of the mock-oriental tale was directly caused by the general admiration for the
Arabian Nights
, but imitations were only part of the book's impact. The appearance of eastern stories from both East and West did much more than create a fashion for fictional material dealing with a mysterious Orient. In important ways, the pseudo-oriental story inspired by the
Nights
helped the development of fiction itself as a legitimate literary category. By providing the popularity needed for an acceptance of fictional works designed for entertainment (and not simply as vehicles for religious allegory or moral instruction), fiction lost much of its bad reputation for flighty falsehood and became recognized as a worthy literary genre. What is not so apparent, however, is that as a series of short fictions linked by a narrator enmeshed in her own story, the
Arabian Nights
also helped develop the genres of the western short story and the novel, as well as fantasy and picaresque tales. A taste was being created for imaginative fiction with narratives such as those found in fairy tales and works like the
Nights
, and the latter's frame-tale structure, allowing for stories to appear within stories, likewise permitted the appearance of variety and changes of mood within a single text. Such frame-tale works as the
Canterbury Tales
and the
Decameron
had appeared in Europe before, but the publication of Galland's work caused such a collective stir that a vogue for similar works centring on the marvellous was created in western literature.

Great Britain was the main beneficiary of this trend. It may be no accident that when the first English novels began appearing in the early decades of the eighteenth century, the
Arabian Nights
was already established as a standard English-language book, sparking
the first imitations even as its stories were still being translated across the Channel. At the same time as proto-novels like
The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers
arrived around 1712 (one of its authors, Joseph Addison, also dabbled in oriental stories), the
Arabian Nights
was making its mark, providing multiple examples of narrative fiction's essential elements of character, setting and incident for writers to create novels along the lines of Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe
and Jonathan Swift's
Gulliver's Travels
.

Both works appeared in the decades following the Grub Street edition of the
Nights
, and both bear strong similarities to the older work. Each can be read as a takeoff of Sindbad's fabulous voyages into imaginary worlds, even marvel worlds, of continuously linked dramatic incidents recounted by a single narrator. Like Scheherazade's stories, the adventures of Crusoe and Lemuel Gulliver are fictional, yet describe events accepted as real within the context of the story, melding actual times, places and sympathetic figures with the unusual and sometimes fantastic. Jonathan Swift, as well as enjoying French fairy tales, was certainly among the
Nights
' first English readers, receiving the dedication to a 1709 book with the wittily inverted words, “
The Arabian and Turkish Tales were owing to your Tale of a Tub.”

The two literary genres inspired by the
Arabian Nights
—the European oriental tale and the English-language novel—are offspring of the same parent, linked by the extravagant allure given the West by the
Nights
and creating a demand for more such romances. In England, where the oriental tale genre flourished for more than a century, this linkage is so strong that the early twentieth-century literary scholar Martha Pike Conant states emphatically—and in a highly appropriate analogy—“
the
Arabian Tales
was the fairy godmother of the English novel.”

And not only of the English novel, but also of one of literature's most enduring and universal genres. While some tales smack
of proto–science fiction or horror fiction, literary scholars are almost unanimous in proclaiming that one of the work's core stories—“The Tale of the Three Apples”—is the earliest surviving example of a murder mystery. Although “The Three Apples” becomes more of a “Who is responsible” story than a simple “Whodunnit,” it does contain elements of traditional detective fiction, with an investigator (Haroun al-Rashid's companion Jafar) working against the clock to reveal the murderer of a young woman, but finding that the case is more complex than he first thought. Eventually, he discovers that the denouement touches him personally. After more than a thousand years, “The Three Apples” remains a thrilling tale of suspense equal to any contemporary mystery story.

The general European concern with eastern styles, expressed through words, music, theatre, art and even architecture, had more lasting influences than simple homages. The success of the
Nights
also breathed life into new genres by providing impetus to developing trends. As antitheses of the Enlightenment emphasis on rationality, the oriental tale, celebrating an emotionalism believed to be a typical feature of Asian life, went hand-in-hand with the parallel development of the Gothic story to fire the opening salvoes in a revolt against the predominant attitudes of the age.

Once the vogue for the mock-oriental story settled down somewhat in the second half of the eighteenth century, original works using the
Nights
only as part-inspiration began making their mark on western literature, creating some of the earliest European fantasy works. Two period novels, neither strict oriental knock-offs, can be linked to their respective authors' passion for
The Thousand and One Nights
, but both went further than the standard eastern
pastiche by blending elements of the oriental and Gothic genres in a fresh literary concoction.

Little read today outside of university classrooms, William Beckford's
Vathek
and Jan Potocki's
Saragossa Manuscript
are nonetheless considered major precursors to the modern fantasy novel. Both were original works exploring new thematic venues, but scratch below their surfaces and it becomes clear both are tied to the
Nights
in various ways, chief among them the interest the two über-eccentric authors (Beckford was obsessed with towers and Potocki shot himself with a bullet made from the strawberry-shaped knob of a sugar-bowl) showed in the older work. William Beckford—fabulously wealthy from Jamaican sugar and multitalented (Mozart is suppose to have been his private piano tutor as a boy)—was so besotted by the
Nights
and the idea of the Orient that his guardians tried to stem his youthful interest by burning his collection of eastern books and paintings.

A terrible waste of art and literature, since Beckford's interest was sincere and lifelong. Preferring French to English, he went on to study Arabic and Persian, then later indulged himself by living behind four-metre walls on his estate as a kind of quasi-oriental potentate. At one point, Beckford even spent time translating into French sundry
Arabian Nights
stories that appeared in manuscripts different from Galland's, but only found true satisfaction when he decided to construct his own “Arabian” tale as an expression of his innermost desires.

At twenty-two, Beckford sat down and in a three-day burst of creative energy wrote
The History of the Caliph Vathek
(1786), a grim tale of decadence and damnation that was among the most widely read novels of its day. Although written originally in French (it only appeared in English after Beckford's agent had it translated and published without his knowledge),
Vathek
ranks with Horace Walpole's
Castle of Otranto
and Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
among
the foremost English Gothic novels. It also stands as a kind of culmination of the period oriental story, taking the genre further in its depiction of excess and misdeeds than previous works by ending in a memorable underground hell where the damned wander forever with their hearts encased in flames. Although it is set in a fictional Muslim East,
Vathek
merges European Gothic and pseudo-oriental conventions in a polished, original book—an orientalized horror story that stands as one of the earliest examples of European Romantic orientalism.

Further separating it from the bulk of eastern imitations is the fact that parts are distinctly autobiographical, with the caliph Vathek the fictional counterpart of Beckford himself, his Calvinist mother the sorceress Carathis, Vathek's illicit paramour Nouronihar a stand-in for Beckford's cousin Louisa and Nouronihar's effeminate fiancé modelled on another cousin, the young William Courtenay. Venturing beyond standard oriental fare,
Vathek
stands as a kind of literary confessional, since the hedonistic Beckford (forced to flee England for a decade over a homosexual scandal) created his amoral protagonist as a vision of himself: a man sated by pleasure who longs for the esoteric knowledge that will allow him to achieve a union with the absolute. Disdaining conventional morality in the pursuit of a higher understanding, Beckford/Vathek reaches for the sublimity of heaven, only to pay for his crimes by eternal damnation.

Vathek
is book-ended by another work derived from the impact of the
Nights
on western literature, but which forgoes traditional oriental trappings to evoke the mysterious East within Europe itself. Count Jan Potocki's
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
(a.k.a.
The Saragossa Manuscript
), published in its whole only after his death, is the traceable by-product of this Polish nobleman's love of the
Arabian Nights
and remains a cult novel even today (Jerry Garcia was among its ardent admirers). But, like
Vathek
, it goes
beyond the eastern knock-off to create a new vision of the
Nights
' alternative reality.

In his youth, the extensively travelled Potocki wrote a number of mock-oriental stories before searching Morocco for the mythical full Arabic text of the
Nights
, not to find even a partial manuscript. This failure, however, may have induced Potocki to write his own frame-tale masterpiece as a distraction for his first wife—a kind of
Thousand and One Nights
for the West. As background, Potocki used a journey he once made through Spain's eerie Sierra Morena mountains—to Potocki's mind, a quasi-oriental world steeped in the country's Moorish past. In the late eighteenth century he began writing episodes for
The Saragossa Manuscript
, using as its framing device the experiences of a young army officer travelling through the Sierra Morenas on his way to Madrid. In the mountains, the officer undergoes a series of nightmarish encounters over sixty-six days, during which he hears about a hundred stories peopled by an incredible array of brigands, gypsies, Moorish seductresses, cabalists, living corpses and (for good measure) Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.

Like
Vathek, The Saragossa Manuscript
is an extravagant, over-the-top fantasy. It, too, was first written in French—the universal language of the European upper classes—and was only later translated into Potocki's native Polish, as well as German and English. Whatever its language, the novel goes beyond its Arabic inspiration by evoking a sustained sense of dread and uncertainty in a haunted mountain world. Potocki's officer spends more than two months wandering the Sierra Morenas but is never sure whether his experiences are real, or only part of some fantastic dream. Although in the end everything is explained rationally, Potocki takes his cue from the
Nights
by creating an impossible reality, leaving the reader often as unsure about the certainty of things as Potocki's protagonist.

With Jonathan Swift and William Beckford, Jan Potocki is often hailed as one of the pioneers of the modern fantasy novel, but both he and Beckford are also among the first generation of authors to take inspiration from the
Arabian Nights
in order to expand on themes both within and without the work, rather than simply mimicking it. In its own day,
The Saragossa Manuscript
was popular enough to be plagiarized—there was a sensational court case in Paris in 1842—but even in our time its fascination is undimmed and its reputation as one of European literature's most curious literary creations remains secure. As Count Potocki may have intended,
The Saragossa Manuscript
is as near a western counterpart to
The Thousand and One Nights
as it is likely possible for one writer to construct. But neither it nor
Vathek
would exist at all if not for the original template of the
Arabian Nights' Entertainments
.