Les Mille et une nuits: Entre Orient et Occident (review)

In many respects Jean-Paul Sermain's Les Mille et une nuits: Entre Orient et Occident reads more like an essay than a scholarly book, at least as scholars in the American tradition might expect a book to be structured and written. Sermain focuses on the poetic value of the Arabian Nights, and throughout he looks at the ways Antoine Galland rewrites the Nights to create a hybrid Oriental-Occidental text. However, the book's meanderings do not necessarily follow a clear development and at times read like ruminations. For example, chapter 4 revolves around Galland and his "putting the Arabian Nights into French" and all that this implies, arguments touched on earlier in the book, which creates some unnecessary repetition. This chapter would have been better situated at the beginning of the book, setting up the context for the other chapters about the formal and moral structures of the Nights, as well as what the Nights say about French and Arab cultures. I also would have liked to have seen more solid documentation and depth to statements regarding, for instance, the contribution of Antoine Galland's translation to the cultivation of "scholarly curiosity about the Orient and more specifically about the Nights" (14, all quotations are my translation). This remark leads one to wonder what was happening at the level of official institutions of Orientalism and the organization of knowledge about the Orient before and after the publication of the Nights. Finally, Sermain insists on the nonideological quality of the text, which his own readings at times appear to contradict and which ignores the complex ideological tensions inherent in the creation of such a hybrid text.

Sermain opens by comparing Galland to the porter of "The Story of the Porter and the Three Dervishes." As "porter" of oriental tales, Galland seeks to share Arab morality and civilization with a Western public. For Galland's readers, these tales are simultaneously strange and familiar (Sermain mentions at one point the uncanny), because despite the strangeness of oriental culture expressed through the tales, they nevertheless articulate a political spirit, a sense of humanity, and a taste for magnificence with which French readers could identify. At the same time, Galland renders the tales familiar to French readers by grafting elements of French language, culture, and literature onto his version of the Nights.

In the same way that Sermain tries to create a parallel between Galland and the porter, he also establishes a parallel between the quartered body of Cassim, Ali Baba's brother, that is sewed back together, and the texts of the Nights that Galland unites into a coherent, overarching narrative. Sermain notes some of the changes Galland made to the source story related to him by the Syrian storyteller Hanna, including Ali Baba's name (Galland transcribed the name of Hanna's hero as "Hogia Baba") and the title (originally "The Ruses of Morgiane"). Sermain associates the opening of the cave door and the magnificent treasures it hides to Western fantasies of the East. Sermain reads the tale in terms of the concealment of crime (as essential elements of the narrative) and the revelation of crime, which is the story itself. He views the tale as "the articulation between a struggle of power and ability … and the solidarity among criminals" (31). Through his reading of "Ali Baba" Sermain also insists on the emphasis in the Nights on "the production and manipulation of signs" (32).

I found Sermain's insistence on the nonideological nature of the Nights problematic. He states: "The relation between the frame and the stories in The Arabian Nights is not ideological, but dramatic. As such, it conforms better to the nature of the tale" (41). Later Sermain insists, and rightly so, that characters who tell stories in an attempt to communicate a moral or political message find that the message itself never quite gets delivered, for the embedded listeners—including Scheherazade—often do precisely the opposite, for better and for worse...