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Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade: Variations modernes sur les Mille et Une Nuits

2009; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 38; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sub.0.0043

1527-2095

Alison James,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Reviewed by: Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade: Variations modernes sur les Mille et Une Nuits Alison James Jullien, Dominique. Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade: Variations modernes sur les Mille et Une Nuits. Geneva: Droz, 2009. Pp. 224. The tales of the One Thousand and One Nights have been a source of fascination and inspiration for Western writers since they were translated by Antoine Galland in the eighteenth century. Dominique Jullien’s new book Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade explores the fertile territory of modern rewritings of the Nights, focusing on the French-language tradition (from Restif de la Bretonne to Assia Djebar), but also situating it within a larger context: Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, A.S. Byatt, Naguib Mahfouz, and John Barth are only a few of the authors mentioned in the course of the discussion. The book maps out a complex and varied intertextual field in which the diverse rewritings harness different potentialities of their model, and reveal the rich interpretative possibilities available to readers of the Nights. Faced with the profusion of rewritings, Jullien identifies four dominant interpretative currents: political readings, aesthetic readings, feminist readings, and introspective readings. Rather than attempting to exhaustively catalogue each of these tendencies, she offers in-depth analyses of exemplary cases. The first chapter studies the motif of the prince in disguise in the French popular novel of the nineteenth century. While the Caliph Haroun Al-Raschid of the Nights wanders the city both in search of adventure and in order to reestablish social order, his modern incarnations engage in an ambiguous project of philanthropy as entertainment. The depiction of urban reality, although anticipated in the Nights, here takes on a political and social meaning apparently absent in the model (27). The aristocratic righter of wrongs thus becomes the central protagonist in Restif de la Bretonne’s Nuits de Paris, and appears later as Prince Rodolphe of Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris—a character whose attempts at social reform are mocked by Marx. Committed to charity and social justice, the figure of the disguised prince becomes the vehicle for contemporary debates in which the serial novel (formally analogous to the Nights) is attacked from both right and left ends of the political spectrum for either revolutionizing or enthralling the masses. In subsequent incarnations of the Parisian Caliph figure—Alexandre Dumas’s exoticized Monte-Christo, the Baudelairean flâneur, Proust’s Charlus—there is a gradual weakening of the political in favor of the aesthetic dimension. The aesthetic reading of the Nights is the subject of the second chapter, which studies the translation that Joseph-Charles Mardrus published [End Page 160] between 1899 and 1902. A detailed examination of this text’s reception shows that Mardrus’s orientalizing embellishments of the original were misread by his contemporaries (Gide, Jarry, and others) as signs of authenticity. Taking up Borges’s evaluation of Mardrus’s translation as an “illustration” of the original (71), Jullien shows that this recreation of the Nights bears an essential relationship to the literary and artistic culture of “Belle Époque” Paris. Influenced by symbolist poetics and by the contemporary “decadent” taste for the erotic and the exotic, Mardrus’s text is inseparable from the context that produced the music of Ravel, the Ballets russes and the “oriental” fashions of Paul Poiret. The point here is not to criticize Mardrus for his deformation of the original, but rather to emphasize his role as a creator who draws on the Nights as a source of an essentially visual inspiration. Mardrus’s version, by amplifying the frame story and emphasizing the evolution of Shahryar’s feelings towards Scheherazade, lends most support to twentieth-century feminist readings of the Nights. Thus Marie Lahy-Hollebecque’s Le Féminisme de Schéhérazade (1927) argues that Scheherazade successfully undertakes the intellectual, moral and sentimental education of the brutal sultan. Jullien’s third chapter contrasts this optimistic reading with the more somber feminist rewriting offered by the contemporary Algerian novelist Assia Djebar. Djebar’s Ombre Sultane (1987) is an ambiguous recasting of the story of Scheherazade and her sister, in which female emancipation comes at a price...