Between Cultures. Jerrold Seigel

whose personal reference we will easily recognize, Burton explained that “the grand source of pleasure in Fairy Tales is the natural desire to learn more of the Wonderland which is known to many as a word and nothing more, like Central Africa before the last half century: thus the interest is that of the ‘Personal Narrative’ of a grand exploration to one who delights in travels.”⁷² Although Galland and other translators, by leaving many tales out and cleaning up the language of others, sought to separate the Nights as a gateway to a world of fantasy from the frank and direct talk about sex contained in the original, the continuity between them was central to what made the collection so attractive and significant to Burton. In his eyes the power of the sex talk to inspire fantasy was twinned with the ability of the fairy-tale atmosphere to license talk about sex. We see this especially in a comment he made about a story in which a eunuch makes clear that his physical maiming did not leave him void of desire. Burton noted that eunuchs could be created by removing or damaging their sexual organs in various ways, “but in all cases the animal passion remains, for in man, unlike other animals, the fons veneris [the spring of amatory desire] is the brain. The story of Abelard proves this.”⁷³ The continuity between sexuality and fantasy was hardly a new idea, to be sure, but it was the essential ground on which Burton located the Nights.

      It is just this positive valuation of fantasy that Burton now portrayed as foreign to the spirit and letter of original Islam. The change from what he had said earlier was chiefly one of emphasis but it is striking nonetheless. In his earlier essay on “El Islam, or The Rank of Muhammadanism among the Religions of the World,” Burton described the terms of the Prophet’s revelation as “so lofty and majestic that they sank for ever into the heart-core of his followers,” but blamed some among the latter for turning the message into “a mass of stringent ordinances so disposed as to provide for every contingency … a well-organized system of practical precepts.” Now, however, the attempt to make Islam a legalistic and prosaic system of permitted and forbidden things, and from which “Persian supernaturalism” was specifically excluded, began with the Prophet himself, albeit under the influence of his milieu:

      Mohammed, a great and commanding genius, blighted and narrowed by surroundings and circumstance to something little higher than a Covenanter or a Puritan, declared to his followers, “I am sent to ’stablish the manners and customs”; and his deficiency of imagination made him dislike everything but “women, perfumes, and prayers,” and with an especial aversion to music and poetry, plastic art and fiction.

      The Prophet took over some miraculous and magical notions from Judaism (which had borrowed them, against Moses’s original intention, from the Babylonians) but violently repressed a movement to allow “certain Persian fabliaux” to achieve recognition alongside the stories of the Qu’ran. Thus it was he who inspired the “furious fanaticism and one-idea’d intolerance which made Caliph Omar destroy all he could find of the Alexandrian Library and prescribe burning for the Holy Books of the Persian Guebres [the Zoroastrians]. And the taint still lingers in Al-Islam: it will be said of a pious man, ‘He always studies the Koran, the Traditions and other books of Law and Religion; and he never reads poems nor listens to music or to stories.’ ” In other words, the founder of Muslim faith saw his task as setting limits not just to belief and behavior but to imagination and the materials that could nourish it; resources for overcoming these constraints had to come from somewhere else, and in the Nights this meant access to the materials of a different culture, to the poetic sense of wonder infused by the Persian progenitors of the tales. Without this alien fertilization, the form of life the Prophet instituted remained no less confining and restrictive than was the European culture whose limits Burton sought to transcend through his involvement with Islam.

      The Islamic world did not wait idly for what Persian storytellers would contribute to its culture, however; the receptivity to some such infusion of foreign content was prepared by something in human nature that spontaneously rebelled against such restrictions. Before this need found its voice in the Persian accents of the Nights, “human nature” itself, “stronger than the Prophet” and “outraged” by the “arid, jejeune, and material” dispensation Mohammed provided, “took speedy and absolute revenge”:

      Before the first century had elapsed, orthodox Al-Islam was startled by the rise of Tasawwuf or Sufyism, a revival of classic Platonism and Christian Gnosticism, with a mingling of modern Hylozoism; which, quickened by the glowing imagination of the East, speedily formed itself into a creed the most poetical and impractical, the most spiritual and the most transcendental ever invented; satisfying all man’s hunger for ‘belief’ which, if placed upon a solid basis of fact and proof, would forthright cease to be belief.⁷⁴

      It was to the same Sufism (Tasawwuf is another name for the spiritual teaching it promotes) that Burton himself had long been attracted, receiving instruction and training in it during the 1840s, and it gave life to the character of the wandering Dervish that he chose for his disguise on the pilgrimage. The “Hylozoism” Burton refers to here—the notion that all matter is in some sense alive—appeared in the fusion of Hindu metempsychosis with Darwinist materialism he effected in Stone Talk, and it was the mystical implications of this mix of physicalism and vitalism that informed the behest the Kasidah addressed to lovers of truth not to make the object of their quest too definite and concrete: “leave it vague as airy space, / Dark in its darkness mystical.” The dream world of boundless wonder provided by the Nights, where imagination was free to break through the confines set by both European culture and by original Islam, provided a continuation and supplement to the Sufi’s poetical approach to all things, unrestrained by practical considerations.

      Thus the Nights stood as testimony to the need that arises for people in Islam no less than in the West—Burton did not explicitly extend the point to include every culture, but these were the two he knew best—to find escape from the particular world of their formation in order to liberate the human powers of creativity reined in or suppressed by established ways of life. Here Burton’s commentary on his translation generalized his long-pursued quest to inhabit a space between cultures, making it exemplify a necessary response to the situation all people face once they become enmeshed in the webs of meaning and nonsense they create in order to give bounded coherence to their collective lives.

       C h a p t e r 2

      Commitment and Loss: T. E. Lawrence