Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade: variations modernes sur les 'Mille et une nuits' (review)

Examining the impact of the Mille et une nuits on the French literary world over the last two centuries, Jullien's volume is divided into four thematic sections which also correspond roughly to a chronological division of the texts discussed. These themes are political, aesthetic, feminist, and introspective. Her emphasis is, naturally enough, not so much on the Nuits themselves as on their relation to French literature; this can sometimes lead to passages in which the link to the Nuits seems more a pretext than a subject in its own right, such as the discussion of the politics of the nineteenth-century roman-feuilleton in the first section, or of Butor's modernist aesthetics of the quotation in the fourth. Such apparent digressions are however narrated so smoothly that the reader's interest is never lost. The first section, taking up the 'political' theme of the disguised Caliph, looks at the use of the Nuits in the nineteenth century, particularly in the hands of Sue and Dumas. The rest of the volume concentrates on the later translation by Joseph-Charles Mardrus (1899-1904). In a section ostensibly dealing with aesthetics, Jullien summarizes the polemic surrounding Mardrus's claims to have produced a faithful version of the original text(s), to which he in fact added considerably, while adopting a technique of literal translation that made his version of the Nuits more 'oriental' than the Arabic sources. He contributed significantly to the visual Orientalism of the turn of the century through his pursuit of the exotic detail, in contrast to Galland's earlier classical attempts to downplay cultural specificity. He also made additions that were all the more popular because they appealed to associations of Orientalism with eroticism. The third section begins by showing how Mardrus's additions to the framing narrative made it a psychological 'novel' in which narration is used as an educative and healing tool. Based on Mardrus's version, early feminist interpretations (Lahy-Hollebecque, 1927) saw the Nuits as ending in the education of the Sultan; in marked contrast, Assia Djebar's Ombre sultane (1987) rewrites the narrative frame of the Nuits in a sombre tone that precludes any such sense of progress. The fourth section deals with the Nuits as a metaphor for writing, or as providing a narrative structure for a Künstlerroman. Most space is devoted to Butor's use of the Nuits as a subversion of autobiography, but there are some significant pages on Proust, building on Jullien's earlier work. These later sections will be of particular interest to anyone working on modernist uses of intertextuality; other parts will be relevant to theorists of translation. While each chapter offers a series of individual studies rather than the overviews suggested by the four themes, this contributes to the volume's elegant concision; and who could complain that the Nuits should have inspired a series of interlocked tales narrated with clarity as well as erudition?