The Arabian Nights and Orientalism: Perspectives from East and West (review)

This collection of essays is the product of one of the many conferences held in 2004 in commemoration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Antoine Galland's translation. The conference was held in Osaka, Japan, and six of the essays were written by Japanese scholars, which makes this collection especially interesting; as Robert Irwin notes in his preface, the history of the Nights in Japanese culture complicates the notion of "Orientalism."

The essays are presented under three headings: "Motifs and Formulas," "Sources and Influences," and "Text and Image." Under the first heading are essays by Ulrich Marzolph, Hasan El-Shamy, Kathrin Muller, and Etsuko Aoyagi. Marzolph's essay, "The Arabian Nights in Comparative Folk Narrative Research," describes the influence of the Nights on "folk narrative research," and concludes with an eight-page index of the tale types in the major European translations. "Mythological Constituents of Alf laylah wa laylah," by Hasan El Shamy, explores "some of the quasi-sacred (religious) and the quasi-historical components" found in a recent Arabic edition, which are again categorized according to the Aarne-Thompson indexes. Kathrin Muller's essay, "Formulas and Formulaic Pictures: Elements of Oral Literature in the Thousand and One Nights," describes three sorts of formulas: introductory, concluding, and transitional. The next essay, "Repetitiveness in the Arabian Nights: Openness as Self Foundation," by Etsuko Aoyagi, treats the same general issue but from a decidedly different perspective, a Derridean perspective on the relations between repetition and singularity.

The second part of the book, "Sources and Influences," begins with Yuriko Yamanaka's essay "Alexander in the Thousand and One Nights and the Ghazali Connection," which examines the often overlooked didactic tales in the Nights. Chapter 6, by Hideaki Sugita, reviews the history of Japanese translations of the Nights, all of them until recent years made from European editions. In the next chapter Tetsuo Nishio builds on this to examine Orientalism in Japan coming to the paradoxical conclusion that Japan took the Nights to be "a constituent part of European civilization."

The final section of the book is devoted to illustration of the Nights. In chapter 8 Kazue Kobayashi writes a survey of the entire history of Nights' illustration. He provides a chronological list of all the major illustrated editions of the Nights prior to World War II. Akiko Motoyoshi Sumi and Claus Cluver discuss how the frame tale is illustrated in three twentieth-century editions of the work, two of them French and one Japanese. The final chapter by Margaret Sironval considers the changing image of Shahrazad from Antoine Galland's translation through the major nineteenth-century editions of Richard Burton and Edward Lane. Sironval discusses illustrations and musical representations; she argues that Shahrazad was not nearly as prominent as heroine in the first century of translations, and we may conclude that the changing status of women in European society had much to do with this.

As this summary should make clear, the book's title indicates only some of the topics covered by the ten essays, and as one might expect in such a volume, the essays not only take a number of different approaches but also have different aims. The essays by Marzolph, El-Shamy, Hideaki, and Kobayashi are surveys; that is, they aim less at breaking new ground than at summarizing past work, much of which will, nevertheless, be new to many or most readers. Each of these essays will be a useful tool for further research into their topics, and even as surveys they still contribute new insights into the multifarious literary phenomenon of the Nights. Marzolph, for example, points out that out of a total of some 550 tales in the major Arabic versions and European translations, less than a quarter "enjoy an international diffusion" according to Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. In other words, three quarters of the tales are...