Literary Transfers Between the Orient and the West, 17Th–20Th Century by Anne Duprat

Literary transfers between the Orient and the West, 17th–20th century by Anne Duprat This article re-examines one of the aesthetic foundations of orientalist discourse. It focuses on the circulation of literary themes, techniques and motifs between Europe and Arab Muslim countries prior to the historical structuring of knowledge built up by Enlightenment Europe into a network of images and representations which could be used in support of colonial ambitions. We illustrate the degree to which the content of this discourse hinges on European nations’ desire to obscure certain cultural phenomena which often emerged from philosophical or artistic ideas common to these two strategically opposed spaces. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Orientalism and literary transfers 2. The stages of a literary transfer: the example of the Arabic fairy tale 3. The "Oriental Renaissance" in poetry 4. Literary echos of the Fall of Granada: story of loss, story of origins 5. The art of the Other: from transcendence to counterpoint 6. Appendix 1. Literature 2. Notes Indices Citation Orientalism and literary transfers For the last thirty years, the problem of the literary relationship between the Orient and the West during the expansion of European colonialisms (➔ Media Link #ab), from the Indian subcontinent to East Asia, from the Levant to North Africa, has been inextricably linked to Edward Said's (1935–2003) (➔ Media Link #ac) theoretical framework (➔ Media Link #ad). While it is essential if one wants to analyze the "invention" of the Orient by the West, it should not be forgotten that his work did not intend at all to study the complex phenomena of cross-fertilization of forms and genres between the literary cultures of Europe and the Americas on the one hand, and the Middle East on the other. On the contrary, the point was precisely to analyze the appearance of orientalism as a western discourse, that is, to show the historical structuring of knowledge developed in Europe during the Enlightenment (➔ Media Link #ae)into a network of images and representations that could be used to support colonial ambitions, most notably in France and England, over an area that Europeans themselves defined as oriental, whenever it suited their own purposes. ▲1 Investigating the problem of literary transfers between the Orient and the West means shifting this framework slightly, in order to allow the establishment of pre- and postcolonial national literatures in each of the cultural areas involved in this cross-construction, to be seen in a new and fruitful light, particularly in the Muslim world, from India to the Middle East and the Maghreb. Furthermore, studying the relationship between European and oriental literatures represents an opportunity to look back on the aesthetic foundations of orientalism itself, seen as a specifically European phenomenon. Taking into account the often very ancient exchange of themes, techniques and literary motifs between Europe and Arab Muslim countries, one can see clearly that the creation of a world imagined as oriental, from the 17th to the 20th century, actually shows a willingness by European nations to distance themselves from them. These cultural phenomena were made into external objects of study, and thus strategically designated as opposites, even though there existed common philosophical and artistic foundations between the two areas. ▲2 More than an alius, a radical Other, the Muslim Orient has long represented for the medieval Christian West an alter, a symbolic opposite whose existence is absolutely necessary to one's own self-definition (➔ Media Link #af). Régis Poulet (born 1966) (➔ Media Link #ag) suggested, well before strategies of domination of a weakened and exploited Other were set up, that there might be in this dual structure the persistence of a world view based on the ancient myth of the androgyne. The Orient and the West were, to each other, two inseparable sides of a whole universe.1 Poulet thus emphasizes the way Christian and Muslim civilizations historically shared the same dual world view, founded on a cosmology first derived from Neoplatonism and then from Aristotelianism. The reality of these shared philosophical and religious foundations can alternatively explain the shock that resulted from the discovery of the radical otherness of Far Eastern cultures, from the 15th to the 18th century in western Europe, in the Middle Ages in the Arab world.2 ▲3 Thus, the contrasted relationships that the literatures of western Europe formed with China, India or Japan, on the one hand, and with the much closer literatures of the Arab world on the other, shed an interesting light on the dissemination of oriental themes that developed from the 17th century on – that is, right at the moment when Ottoman conquests in the Mediterranean (➔ Media Link #ah) started to slow down and then stopped altogether, and when European countries started expanding overseas (➔ Media Link #ai). With the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1609, no part of the European continent was shared between Christianity and Islam for the first time in many centuries. Similarly, the ancient and medieval sharing of themes, motifs and literary techniques between the Orient and the West disappeared as such from the history of literary modernity, which from then on was based on a canon of vernacular works specific to each nation. And if these had a common origin, as the numerous quarrels of the ancients and the moderns serve to remind, it was to be found in a classical Greco-Roman corpus that was increasingly thought of as occidental. Consequently, the oriental part of the literary, philosophical, medical or religious culture of western Europe, being separated from national cultural identities – this was particularly true of Spain, where from the 16th century on only the Christian and Castilian part of its history was recognized –, and being also definitely dismissed by the various European classicisms of the 17th and 18th century, had to be rediscovered from the outside, associated with a fascination that was directly linked to its foreignness. Related to the images, the knowledge and the new texts brought to Europe by the travelogues and the scientific expeditions to the Maghreb, the Levant (➔ Media Link #ak), to the Indian subcontinent and to Asia, it became a proper discourse. Orientalism, i.e. the representation of an exotic otherness used to define a modernity shared by the colonial nations of western Europe, seems to come right out of this process of cultural separation (➔ Media Link #al). ▲4 The stages of a literary transfer: the example of the Arabic fairy tale The fairy tale, which first symbolized oriental inspiration in the European literatures of the 18th century, and then became the central element in the development of the orientalist aesthetic in the 18th and 20th century, exemplifies perfectly this complex phenomenon. From the 12th to the 16th century, European fairy tale traditions borrowed narrative motifs from Arabic stories, which themselves had been inspired by Persian or Indian stories. This constant flow, helped in part by the propagation, during the Middle Ages, of collections of exempla from Spain to Italy, then to England, France or Germany, sped up dramatically following the widespread diffusion of the great Italian novellieri, as demonstrated by the analysis of the sources of Boccaccio's (1313–1375) (➔ Media Link #am) Decameron. By the same token, elements that came out of collections of animal fables with sapiential or political purposes – the "Mirror for princes", such as the collection Kalila wa Dimna (➔ Media Link #an) – moved freely, for a long time, between major Muslim cultural centers of North Africa and the literatures of Christian Europe, via Al-Andalus Spain.3 ▲5 During the second Italian Renaissance, however, these motifs were increasingly christianized, particularly in Spain, as a cultural cleansing followed the end of the Reconquista and carried on all through the 16th century. Even though this transformation of the literary traditions towards a purely Christian and western identity was nearly total, a few motifs kept on displaying their ancient cultural hybridity, most notably through the toponyms of the Mediterranean spaces in which their stories were set, or in the persistence of certain narrative structures typical of the Medieval exempla. As a whole, this hybridity had already faded away in the French and English collections of tales, short stories and fables of the 17th century, as they assimilated more and more influences from antiquity and classicism. This is even truer in the case of sapiential structures. The origin of these motifs, felt to be foreign, was thus cast out to the border areas, the commercial centres and the great ports of Christian Europe. The stories that form the core of Shakespeare's (➔ Media Link #ao) theatre, for example, are deemed to be "Italian". The same is true of Jean de la Fontaine's (1621–1695) (➔ Media Link #ap) tales, in the 17th century. ▲6 Against this classical and wholly westernized background, the tales and fables from India, Persia or the Arab world, rediscovered and translated by the orientalists, starting in the middle of the 17th century, stand out as an entirely new and exotic vein. La Fontaine, for example, introduced in his second collection of Fables choisies (1668) (➔ Media Link #aq) a series of stories inspired by the "Apologues of Bidpai". It is in this context of a great fascination with the Orient that Antoine Galland (1646–1715) (➔ Media Link #ar), who had already been translating the travels of Sindbad, began translating at the end of the century the first volumes of a manuscript dating from the 14th century (➔ Media Link #as) and which contained the greater part of the Les Mille et Une Nuits (One Thousand and One Nights) (➔ Media Link #at).4 ▲7 Antoine Galland very obviously frenchified the tales of Les Mille et Une Nuits, in order to adapt its moral and religious strangeness to the classical tastes of the court of Louis XIV (1638–1715) (➔ Media Link #au).

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