Fables of the East : Selected Tales, 1662-1785

Fables of the East ?M This page intentionally left blank Fables of the East ?M?M?M "K"K"K Selected Tales 1662–1785 Edited by Ros Ballaster 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Ros Ballaster 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Fables of the East : selected tales, 1662–1785 / edited by Ros Ballaster. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–19–926734–0 (acid-free paper) — ISBN 0–19–926735–9 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Fables, Oriental. 2. Fables. I. Ballaster, Rosalind. PN981.F33 2005 398.20095—dc22 2005020146 Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–926734–0 (Hbk.) 978–0–19–926734–7 (Hbk.) ISBN 0–19–926735–9 (Pbk.) 978–0–19–926735–4 (Pbk.) 13579108642 Contents ?M Textual Note vii Introduction 1 1.The Framed Sequence 13 From The Arabian Nights Entertainments, ‘translated’ by Antoine Galland (1704–1715) 15 ‘The Fable of the Mouse, that was Changed into a Little Girl’ from The Fables of Pilpay, translated by Joseph Harris (1699) 43 ‘The History of Commladeve’ from Tales, from the Inatulla of Delhi, translated by Alexander Dow (1768) 49 ‘The Adventures of Urad’ from James Ridley, Tales of the Genii (1764) 71 2.The Pseudo-Oriental Tale 101 ‘The History of the Christian Eunuch’ from Eliza Haywood, Philidore and Placentia (1727) 103 Joseph Addison, Spectator, no. 512, 17 October 1712 120 Horace Walpole, ‘Mi Li. A Chinese Fairy Tale’ from Hieroglyphic Tales (1785) 126 v Contents 3.Travels and History 139 ‘A Voyage to Kachemire, the Paradise of Indostan’ from François Bernier, A Continuation of the Memoires of Monsieur Bernier, translated by Henry Oldenburg (1672) 141 From The General History of the Mogol Empire, compiled by François Catrou from the memoirs of Niccolo Manucci (1709) 175 From Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M——y W——y M——e (1763) 191 4.Letter Fictions 205 From Giovanni Paolo Marana, The Eight Volumes of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, translated by William Bradshaw (1687–1694) 207 From Charles Secondat de Montesquieu, Persian Letters, translated by Charles Ozell (1722) 239 From Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World (1762) 258 Glossary 269 vi Textual Note ?M Copy-texts are from first editions where possible. Otherwise, I have used later editions as close as possible to the first. Each text is prefaced by an introduction giving the author, date of first publication, and edition used, with relevant context, information about the text and its author and/or translator, and explanation of its significance. The editor’s notes concentrate on explaining references to contemporary history and intertextual connections with other writings about oriental cultures. All texts have been corrected to use speech marks (where often there are none in the original). I have not modernized spelling and punctuation except where it is needed for sense, and usually on the authority of a later edition. Otherwise, I have made no substantive changes to the original texts and hence individual emendations have not been recorded. Since the critical work that accompanies this anthology, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), provides a full bibliography, I have simply given full references to all works cited in introductions or footnotes. Readers should consult the glossary at the back which offers explana- tions of oriental terms, general and geographical. vii This page intentionally left blank Introduction ?M The trope of the Orient in eighteenth-century England is ‘back- wardness’. To travel to oriental territories, to consume oriental narrative, is to travel ‘backward’ in time (to retrace ancient history), in space (from the ‘new’ to the ‘old’ world), and in identity (from contract and civility to despotism). Accordingly, the kind of story associated with the Orient is the most elementary and ancient form: the fable. Thus, James Beattie commences his 1780 essay, ‘On Fable and Romance’, with ‘General remarks on Ancient and Oriental Prose Fable’ as though the two terms were equivalent: it may be proper to observe, that the Oriental nations have long been famous for fabulous narrative. The indolence peculiar to the genial climates of Asia, and the luxurious life which the kings and other great men, of those countries, lead in their seraglios, have made them seek for this sort of amusement, and set a high value upon it. When an Eastern prince happens to be idle, as he commonly is, and at a loss for expedients to kill the time, he commands his Grand Visir, or his favourite, to tell him stories. Being ignorant, and con- sequently credulous; having no passion for moral improvement, and little knowlege of nature; he does not desire, that they should be probable, or of an instructive tendency: it is enough if they be astonishing. And hence it is, no doubt, that those oriental tales are so extravagant. Every thing is carried on by inchantment and prodigy; by fairies, genii, and demons, and wooden horses, which, on turning a peg, fly through the air with inconceivable swiftness.1 Beattie goes on to identify Antoine Galland’s early eighteenth-century ‘translation’, known in England as The Arabian Nights Entertain- ments, as the most familiar example of oriental fable, and defends it, despite its incredibility, on the grounds that ‘It conveys a pretty 1 James Beattie, ‘On Fable and Romance’, in Dissertations, Moral and Critical,inThe Works of James Beattie, ed. Roger J. Robinson (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1996), 505–74, 508–9. 1 Introduction just idea of the government, and of some of the customs, of those eastern nations’ and in the story of ‘a barber and his six brothers’ there are ‘many good strokes of satire and comick description’ (510). A paradox emerges. Oriental fable is both ancient and contemporary, both then and now, both there and here, both fantastical and a faithful representation. And oriental fable is both a fable and not a fable. Samuel Johnson in his 1755 Dictionary gives as his first definition of the term that it is ‘a feigned story intended to enforce some moral precept’.2 Yet, Beattie claims that the eastern prince seeks pure entertainment without moral precept. His interest is in the feigning not the moral. And so too, the western reader seeks in his or her reading of the same tales not morality but an acquaintance with the ‘real’ nature of eastern government and customs or the pleasure of comedy. To complicate the picture even more, Beattie acknowledges that ‘whether the tales [of The Arabian Nights Entertainments] be really Arabick, or invented by Mons. Galland, I have never been able to learn with certainty’ (509). So, western readers’ acquaintance with an authentic East may itself be a fable, a feigned story designed by a Frenchman to convey, as Beattie puts it, ‘the fashionable forms of Parisian civility’ (510). Fables transport their consumers into other places, other times, other bodies, other species, in order to instruct those consumers about where they are, who they are, and what they are. This anthology explores the different fabulous means by which western writers deployed the Orient for just these ‘instructive’ ends. It does so fol- lowing Edward Said’s injunction that we recognize that Orientalism has more to do with the Occident than with the Orient; these tales are part of a wider cultural project which creates the object it feigns identifying. Put simply, the Orient is only located geographically as east of the West. As Said explains, Orientalism ‘not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world’.3 2 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language on Cd-Rom the First and Fourth Editions, ed. Anne McDermott (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 12. 2 Introduction

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