So my name is Ros Ballaster, I'm professor of 18th century studies in English literature at Oxford.
I started becoming interested in the Oriental tale in the 18th century because I've been reading a very famous book by Edward Said,
published in the late 1970s called Orientalism, which has been very influential in historical and literary studies and cultural studies.
And it makes the argument that the Orient is constructed as other historically through time as a kind of alien and
dangerous force by Western writers for resistance and critique and to imagine their own superiority to the east.
But when you look at early modern accounts, sort of 17th, 18th century representations of the East,
there's a much more positive version of these that you encounter as a place of
kind of wisdom of ancientness an alternative to Greek and Roman Western origins.
Chinese Confucianism is celebrated as a sort of ancient and with wise religion,
and Islam itself is often paralleled, in fact, to Christianity and Muhammad to to to Christ.
So I became interested in sort of thinking about why this is and tracing that enthusiasm for this and also perhaps thinking about
the East less as something that's constructed this opposite to the West as something that's constructed is analogous to the West,
something that you could say you could compare to Western culture or see as being at a very often in the 18th century,
it's imagined as kind of a sort of earlier or return to an ancient and classical world that you can encounter by travelling east.
So this coincides with travellers accounts of the east, but also the rise of the novel.
So I'm particularly interested in how the novel comes into being in the 18th and 17th century.
We tend to think now of the novel as a sort of central literary form.
But in the 18th century, it's a very new form, a kind of all that the word word means is novel.
It means new and central. I thought to the emergence of the novel was this enthusiasm for the Oriental tail,
the Arabian Nights, the first translated in the first two decades of the 18th century into English.
And they're immensely popular. The serialised in periodicals, you hear them echoing different stories echo through the novels of the 18th century.
Writers are particularly fascinated by them. Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the end of the 18th century, early 19th centuries,
talks about his mesmeric kind of attraction to the Arabian Nights as a book and how he immersed himself in it.
And after that, after the first two decades of the 18th century,
when we see this translation as Arabian Nights from French into English, it's a Frenchman who first translates them.
You see English writers starting to imitate the Arabian Nights and tell Eastern tales like Eastern tales as well alongside those travel accounts.
So all the same concerns being expressed in this Oriental fiction as in domestic fiction at the time.
Yes, well, I suppose I think what I think happens is that that Enlightenment project to talk about sort of free and rational mind and its
play across geographical and temporal spaces as it's as it's immense liberty that that can be expressed in the Oriental tale.
So the Oriental Oriental tales often involve characters who, for instance, chans migrate or transform.
So the Buddhist tradition of rebirth is imagined as a kind of narrative device where you can
tell stories about people reincarnating in different forms from animal to human species.
There's also, of course, the attraction, the immense attraction of the Oriental fable. Aesop's tales are translated in numerous forms.
His fables. In the early 18th century, gay John Gay is perhaps the most famous translator of the Mathabane also has.
In the late 17th century theologian of Aesop's Fables, Aesop is recognised as a sort of Oriental informant.
This image of the wise Oriental storyteller who corrects corruption in government,
introduces social reform, or trains up a young prince to take his responsibilities seriously.
That comes from a long tradition of Oriental stories, the Tanesha,
the Indians tell sequences translated in the mid 17th century into Italian and then into English, something called the fables of Dony, very popular.
So this idea of sort of short tales that deliver morals and the play of the mind, as I said,
across different territories, coincides with the enthusiasm for travel writing as well,
of course, and collections of travel literature as so travel literature obviously is quite popular in India as well, which is sort of now.
Would you say that that Lurdes that you've described in 18th century fiction is is the same as that Oriental Interpol that you get later?
Well, I think Edward Syeed is right to say that something happens at the end of the 18th, early 19th century.
Obviously, historically, what happens is Western Empire starts to really gain a foothold.
So most obviously for England, the acquisition of India in the late 18th century means that the English and the British are starting to
imagine themselves as territorial governors rather than traders in relationship to wealthy Eastern states.
And they're gaining access to that wealth. So I think Victorian 19th century writing does have a less open attitude to the east,
is more inclined to see it as a territory that needs to be controlled and managed, is more inclined to represent native cultures, Hinduism and.
And and sort of popular Islam as something that's dangerous force for insurrection that needs to be controlled and managed.
So I think you get a shift towards that. What Saïd sees as the Orient, his other and away from the orienteers analogue.
And you can see why that would happen. If you want to trade with a culture, you need to understand it.
If you want to dominate and govern it, it might not be that you need to understand it.
You need to contain it and control it and vindicate your own actions,
particularly as opposed to kind of defence of Christianity and attempt to spread
Christianity and in those cultures that that European states are now governing in the east.
So I think there is a definite shift.
That said, the sort of 18th century fascination with the exoticism of the East is you can still hear that chiming.
So some wonderful 19th century texts. There's a there's a beautiful sequence of poems by Tom Moore called La Rook,
which is a great sort of poetic epic version of the Arabian Nights with multiple tales.
Tom was a great friend of Byron. Byron's Oriental Tales from the Early 18th Century is a series of epic.
So it's a Oriental poems which are full of sort of sturm und drang and excitement.
And Byron himself, of course, his travels through Albania. And it's very his imagination is absolutely gripped by his experiences in the east.
So it's not that there aren't writings like that,
but I think the shift generally is much more towards a less open, less enthusiastic representation of the East.
SP2 -And Samuel Johnson, of course, was in the forefront, at the forefront of this movement in some ways.
And why should we study him as a writer of Oriental fiction?
OK, so Samuel Johnson publishes this little book.
For those of if anyone knows anything about Samuel Johnson, they probably think of him as a writer of great copiousness,
editor of the dictionary, one of the first pictures of the English language in the mid 18th century, accounts of the lives of the poets.
But this is what he calls his little story book. And it's 49 short chapters.
It's a lovely it's a small little book. He published it in seventeen fifty nine and he wrote it a great speed in the evenings of January 1759,
because his mother was seriously ill and then died and he had to find the costs to find something to pay for her funeral.
So he did write it as a kind of commercial endeavour.
And it's a short tale about a prince called Rasselas from Abyssinia, which is now modern day Ethiopia,
who is brought up in the Happy Valley, his the fourth son of an absent king.
And he starts to long to escape this place where every luxury is given to him.
But in a way, the mind is contained and controlled.
Sometimes I think Johnson only chose the words or the location of Abyssinia because it contains in it that word,
Abis, and the idea that his mind is enclosed in an abyss and he needs to escape from the happy valley,
which he finally manages to do, takes him a long time, takes him months and months of imagining his freedom before he gets away.
And he leaves in the company of his sister, Niscayah, and her maid servant, Piqua, and with a wise sage poet character called Imlach.
And they travel to Cairo and Egypt and there they in the keyer and Rasselas brother and sister set about trying to identify what it is
that brings happiness in the world and what they discover through their encounters with various different people who appear to be happy.
And then they discover they aren't, is that happiness is not obtainable in the world and that even when you seem happy, it's not actually there.
And you have to come to terms with disappointment, disillusion, grief, loss.
And most of the novel, it's only 49 short chapters, as I said,
consists of little conversations, reported conversations between Rasselas and the Keyer.
There's also a wonderful little insect tale about Pecola, the maid servant who's abducted by Arabs when they go to visit the pyramids and the keyer.
Her mistress falls into a terrible decline, missing her, and they finally managed to ransom her back.
Now, one of the reasons we might want to read this short fiction now is if you think about the
current political world climate and think about the centrality of Egypt to the Arab Spring,
to debates about what's going on in the east. In that novel, Johnson clearly identifies Egypt as, if you like, the centre of Oriental culture.
This is where Rasselas and Nicoya go to get their information.
If we think about them as sort of surrogates for ourselves and they find they're a place of kind of great wisdom and diversity,
but also it's a space where they come to recognise that we all have.
Belonging to or an attraction to despotism and attraction to tyranny,
we all want to see our own wishes brought about so so and they have to learn to contain
and to and kerb that despotism and recognise that we can't all have our wishes met.
So one way in which the EU is functioning is as a kind of parable for the West about the sort of
complain that the East consists of of of people who can only recognise despotism and tyranny.
We can still hear that, too, in our current news reporting about Syria, about Egypt,
that language is sort of saying that Eastern peoples need to be controlled by tyranny and
can't be controlled by can't be managed by democracy or can't accommodate democracy.
Johnson's, I think throwing all of that on its head and challenging our preconceptions and and stupidities and our prejudices about these differences,
saying humanity is all the same. We all have unspoken desires and wishes.
We manifest them in different ways, and we all need to find ways of governing those desires and wishes.
So in that respect, I would say it's a great little parable for our own time.
But it also tells you something about enlightenment,
18th century understandings of what constitutes the humane and what constitutes human desire in other respects.
It's interesting to me. It's a lovely little story which gives women's voices great power and authority, which I think is very interesting to us.
And the kyre has a kind of equivalence with Rasselas.
In some ways it's not unsurprising, but it's pretty conventional that it's Rasselas who goes out and finds out how political government works.
And the kyre is interested in finding out how marriage works and whether you can ever be happy in marriage.
I always like the fact that she concludes that you simply can't, although she says celibacy is pretty miserable, too.
But also she's she's an equal disputant with her brother.
She's a rationalist. She's a thinker. But she's also understood to be the voice of loss and grief.
This connexion to Pecola.
It's also true that the characters who need to be healed from their delusions are partly healed by spending time in mixed company.
So there are a number of men.
There's a mad astronomer who believes that he can control the weather and this is because he spent too long on his own and in a tower and away.
That he's cured is by spending time with Rasselas and with his and with the women.
So being put back into company for Johnson and Johnson was a man who suffered from
depression and clearly found company an important part of managing his depressive moments.
So there's lots of really wonderful little kind of pockets of experience for you as a reader of Rasselas.
Whilst it's also a quick and enjoyable read, which isn't always true of many of the Oriental tale sequences I've read, which can be very,
very long and have wonderful little delightful insect stories,
but don't have the kind of tightness and order and playfulness that you find in Johnson's little as he called his little story book.