The Book of Travels. Hannā Diyāb
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mansions, carrying the cage with the two jerboas to present them to the royal family, Diyāb, dressed in a turban, bouffant pantaloons, and a fancy striped overcoat, and wearing a silver-plated dagger in his belt, came to be regarded as a curiosity in his own right. In Diyāb’s account, it is at this moment that he becomes the protagonist of his own story. By sharing with the French court his knowledge of the Orient, he outdoes his master, the supposed authority. Recollecting these events more than fifty years later, Diyāb reveals to his readers his patron’s unreliability, correcting the record of what Lucas attempts to convey about his own experiences.
A further element of Diyāb’s relationship with Lucas is the medical knowledge he believed he had acquired by association with him. On his journey home, Diyāb used those skills to treat people in exchange for accommodation and food. Dressed as a European, he came to be known in Anatolia as a “Frankish doctor,” (Volume Two, §11.83) modeled on his master. Like Lucas, Diyāb recounts how rumors of his medical skill spread as he traveled through Anatolia, and that the masses flocked to him to receive treatment.20 However, while Lucas regarded himself as a genuine master of various treatments and procedures, Diyāb’s self-portrayal is decidedly less confident. He presents himself as overwhelmed by the difficulties of masquerading as a physician. His humility, confusion, and reliance on God’s guidance stand in clear contrast to the self-confident mastery Lucas ascribes to himself. Setting these two accounts alongside each other, one might read Diyāb’s description of his experience as a traveling doctor as a parody of Lucas’s account. But it is unlikely that Diyāb meant it that way. Whereas Diyāb mentions Lucas’s journaling and the fact that he had sent his book manuscript to the printer after arriving in Paris, it is unlikely that Diyāb read much of Lucas’s book or earlier notes. That said, he would have known Lucas’s perspectives on their shared adventures.
The relationship between Ḥannā Diyāb and Paul Lucas was one of mutual dependence. Lucas was an antiquarian with little knowledge of Arabic and other Southern Mediterranean languages and literary traditions. His dependence on local Eastern Christian guides who could move flexibly within a Western Christian context is indisputable, even if that dependence was not reflected in his own accounts. On the other hand, Lucas seems to have served both as a source of personal protection and, to some extent, as a model for the young man from Aleppo. Diyāb’s interest in Lucas’s professional activities during the long journey to the “lands of the Christians,” as well as his emulation of his medical practices, mean he was not merely an “Oriental” servant to a French traveler, but also a Catholic familiar with global institutions such as the missionary movement and Mediterranean trade.
Oral Storytelling and The Book of Travels as a Frame Narrative
By the time Ḥannā Diyāb met Antoine Galland, the latter’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights was already enjoying immense popularity in Parisian court society. The prospect of discovering new material to add to his translation must have excited the French Orientalist. Even so, Galland was scrupulous in his choice of what to publish, preferring to rely on written rather than oral sources whenever possible. At his disposal was a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Nights that he had received from Syria some time before meeting Diyāb. Using it and a few other written sources, he had completed eight volumes of his translation, at which point he ran out of stories. His first encounter with Diyāb, which took place on March 25, 1709, at the house of Paul Lucas, a colleague with whom he shared an interest in antiquity and numismatics, seemed promising.21
After this first meeting, Galland recorded in his journal a description of the young man from Aleppo as a learned person who spoke several languages and possessed a knowledge of “Oriental” books. Diyāb told Galland about the existence of other tales, including those collected in The Book of the Ten Viziers,22 and promised to put some stories into writing. In a note written six weeks later, on May 5, Galland reports that Diyāb had “finished the story of the lamp.”23 Titled “Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp,” this would come to be the most famous story in the Nights. It was only in November of the following year, however, that Galland explicitly refers to a written version of the story.24 Whether Diyāb had written it down himself while in Paris, dictated it to a commissioned scribe, or even sent it to Galland at a later stage remains an open question. Yet there is good reason to doubt that Diyāb wrote it down himself, at least during his time in Paris in 1709. He makes no mention of writing anything during his meetings with Galland, even though he stresses his ability to write single words, letters, and also, of course, his own Book of Travels. As for the Nights, he mentions only his oral contribution to the collection of stories, and that the old man was very appreciative of his service (Volume Two, §10.9).
From Galland’s Journal we learn that after Diyāb performed or wrote down the story of “Aladdin,” the two met several more times. During their meetings, Galland took notes on stories recounted for him by Diyāb. These stories would become the basis of volumes nine through twelve of the French translation (published between 1712 and 1717), marking a break with Galland’s previous practice of relying exclusively on written sources. One might envision these meetings between Diyāb and Galland as collaborative sessions in which the former used both Arabic and French to convey the stories to the French Orientalist. Of these stories, only the tale of “The Ebony Horse” has an attested written origin beyond Galland’s notes. All the others can be identified only to the extent that they contain well-known motifs from oral folk narratives.25 As they do not have a written source, they have been referred to by scholars as “orphan stories.”26 Of the sixteen tales he heard from Diyāb, Galland chose to publish ten. These include “ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn,” the equally famous “ʿAlī Bābā and the Forty Thieves,” and “Prince Aḥmad and the Fairy Perī Bānū.”
A further link between Diyāb’s Book of Travels and the Thousand and One Nights emerges from the narrative mode Diyāb adopts in his own book, one that makes ample use of embedded narratives—the central structural paradigm of the Nights and The Book of the Ten Viziers, as well as The Book of Sindbad the Sailor. Diyāb’s travelogue contains almost forty secondary stories, most of them diegetically independent of the main narrative. Some consist of only a few lines, whereas others extend over three or more manuscript pages. The stories are a mix of historical and hagiographical anecdotes, although they also include a few tales of crime and horror. The narratives seem to stem mainly from oral sources, but a few have well-attested written origins. Among the popular early-modern motifs that make an appearance are the figure of a person buried alive, the legend of the philosopher’s stone and the water of life, and reports of wonders such as the hydraulic Machine de Marly in Versailles and the Astronomical Clock in Lyon. Many of the stories are told at the point in the journey at which they were supposed to have taken place, while others are grouped according to theme.
Diyāb uses the classical Arabic categories of khabar (“report” or “account”) and ḥikāyah (“story”) as generic frames to indicate independent narrative units. These units are also highlighted through the use of colored ink and textual indentions. As is typical of classical frame narratives, about one third of the inserted stories are introduced not by the primary narrator, Diyāb himself, but by the characters from the story world—that is, by the people Diyāb meets during his voyages. This telling of a secondary tale by direct quotation, though common in Diyāb’s narrative, is unusual in early-modern travelogues. A skilled storyteller, Diyāb drew upon a repertoire of narratives he had probably acquired from collective reading sessions in coffeehouses and elsewhere, as well as spontaneous oral accounts, and fashioned these along recognizable plotlines. It is likely that, standing