La Perse dans la littérature et la pensée française au XVIII e siècle: De l'image au mythe (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 259 Bulûqiyyâ and Djânshâh. Bencheikh argues that Bulûqiyyâ and Djânshâh each pursue quests, the former for the fountain of youth and ultimately the possibility of seeing the coming of Muhammad, the latter for the love of an otherworldly genie. As Bencheikh summarizes, "Les deux quêtes se nourrissent de la même profonde inquiétude, et de la même tension de l'homme vers l'au-delà de luim ême" (p. 223). Hâsib listens to the tales of Bulûqiyyâ and Djânshâh told by Yamlîkha, the Queen of the serpents, as part of a process of initiation that will lead him to knowledge. Bencheikh hypothesizes that this rite of initiation might originally have had immortality as its goal, and thus that immortality might be the generative schema for all three stories. What is perhaps even more important , Hâsib is the "dépositaire de la parole" (p. 219), the listener for Yamlîkha, who plays the same role as Shahrazâd. It is he who establishes communication with the world of the imaginary; "il permet à la parole de se faire entendre du fond du temps" (p. 217). Although Bencheikh does not make the connection explicitly, Hâsib's search for immortality might be linked to his role in allowing the transmission of the tales, ensuring their immortality. Bencheikh's overarching thesis is that the tales from the Arabian Nights allow a desire that is excluded from other realms of Islamo-Arabic culture, a parole prisonnière, to express itself. And just as the collection as a whole represents a desire that is necessarily in conflict with the cultural order, so within the individual tales the same battle between desire and the law is waged. Thus the tales are generated by "cette lutte entre un sens qui cherche à se dire et des discours historiques qui, de par leur nature, s'instituent en censeurs de la parole" (p. 93). The role of the Arabian Nights is to put the real world into communication with the repressed world of the imaginary, the au-delà. While Islamic culture has treated the Arabian Nights as the remains of a process of degradation, Bencheikh proposes that they be viewed instead as "un lieu-refuge, un espace où pouvait s'exercer une parole tenue ailleurs prisonnière" (p. 158). Elizabeth J. MacArthur University of California—Santa Barbara Olivier H. Bonnerot. La Perse dans la littérature et la penséefrançaise au XVIIIe siècle: De l'image au mythe. Paris: Champion; Genève: Slatkine, 1988. 379pp. Olivier Bonnerot approaches the theme of Persia in eighteenth-century French thought in a very original manner. Unlike previous studies such as Marie-Louise Dufrenoy's L'Orient romanesque en France, Paul Vemière's "Montesquieu et 260 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 2:3 le monde musulman, d'après L'Esprit des Lois," or Alain Grosrichard's Structure du sérail, he does not offer a systematic investigation of the role of Persia in any particular genre, or an exhaustive examination of Persia in the works of any individual writer, or an in-depth analysis of any single theme. The subject of the book is the "myth" or the "image" of Persia in the collective imagination of the period. By exploring the relationship of the myth to the ideas, prejudices , desires, dreams, and struggles of the century, Bonnerot aims to make a contribution to what he calls "l'histoire des mentalités." He emphasizes the intensity of interest in Persia, the multiplicity, the permanence, the variety, and the confusion of views. The diversity of opinions is seen as a reflection of conflicting aspirations and of tensions within French society, such as those between the Church and the philosophes, between atheists and deists, and even between different types of deists. The organization of the book is designed to bring out to the maximum the complex, contradictory, and kaleidescopic nature of the image . Each of the various chapters confronts material drawn from the writings of travellers, missionaries, diplomats, and encyclopaedists, as well as from Persian and European literature. The first two chapters bring out the sharp contrast between the two...