The Book of Travels. Hannā Diyāb
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recitation of Eastern fables and tales, partakes somewhat of a dramatic performance. It is not merely a simple narrative; the story is animated by the manner, and action of the speaker. A variety of other story books, besides the Arabian Nights Entertainments, (which, under that title, are little known at Aleppo) furnish materials for the storyteller, who, by combining the incidents of different tales, and varying the catastrophe of such as he has related before, gives them an air of novelty even to persons who at first imagine they are listening to tales with which they are acquainted.27
The way Diyāb employed the skills Russell describes becomes clear when we examine how he combines plotlines and details known from other narratives.28 For example, in one passage in The Book of Travels, he enters the home of a nobleman and sees a stunning trompe l'oeil painting of a man holding a bird that seems to jut out of the wall it is painted on (Volume Two, §9.41). He proceeds to elaborate on the theme by providing a biography of the artist (who may have been a Fontainebleau painter of the Renaissance school) in three episodes. In the first episode, a shoemaker’s apprentice falls in love with a princess. Her father laughs at the apprentice’s proposal but says he will give him his daughter’s hand in marriage if he can paint her portrait. The suitor agrees, and succeeds in painting a beautiful portrait that deeply impresses the prince. But the latter refuses to give his daughter to the apprentice, offering his second daughter instead. This breaks the young artist’s heart. He leaves the prince’s service, goes insane, and becomes a famous painter wandering the world. More than any other story in The Book of Travels, this episode exudes the spirit of the Thousand and One Nights.29 The prominent role of the image recalls the motif of falling in love with a portrait, which appears in Diyāb’s story of “Qamar al-Dīn and Badr al-Budūr” (omitted by Galland from his translation). Second, the motif of becoming an artist out of lovesickness appears in the Majnūn Laylā story cycle, which may have been familiar to Diyāb from Khosrow and Shīrīn, a Persian retelling popular during Ottoman times. Finally, demanding an impossible or difficult task of a suitor is a motif known from the fifth tale told during the tenth day in Boccaccio’s Decameron, a book that itself is believed to have been inspired by “Oriental” models of frame-narrative storytelling.
In the second episode, Diyāb reports that the apprentice painter once painted on one of his master’s portraits a fly so realistic that the master tries to shoo it away. Though Diyāb presents this as part of the biography of the painter whose work he had seen, the same story is told by Giorgio Vasari (d. 1574) about Giotto di Bondone (d. 1276). To this episode Diyāb adds a third episode in which the painter, now named Nīkūlā, challenges his master to a contest of realism. The master creates an image of fruits so lifelike that birds come to peck them. But Nīkūlā wins by painting a curtain so realistic that his master tries to draw it aside to see the painting behind it. This story evidently stems from the one told by Pliny the Elder (d. 79) about the contest between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Both tales include a variant of the line attributed by Pliny to Parrhasius and given by Diyāb as follows: “It doesn’t take much skill to fool a few birds [. . .] Fooling a master painter like you? That takes some doing,” (Volume Two, §9.51). Although the motif is attested in traditions other than the Greek, it may have come to Diyāb’s attention in France, since it was deployed by eighteenth-century European intellectuals in their theorizations of art.30 In his account of Paris, Diyāb mentions in passing that he had taken painting classes there.
Diyāb produces these episodes and combines them into a whole at a moment in his travelogue when he has just narrated his confrontation with the trompe l’oeil painting in Paris. He is as amazed by this painting as he is by a realistic depiction of Jesus Christ in Livorno, and by the Paris opera stage, which is populated by real animals, convincing landscapes, and royal chambers. The common theme is art that can be easily confused with reality, but Diyāb’s accounts of such works appear in different places in the travelogue. Creating his own piece of art as a narrative, both in the Thousand and One Nights and in his Book of Travels, Diyāb combines motifs and known episodes, and adds new names and details to them, giving them “an air of novelty,” as Russell puts it. The orphan tales, most prominently “ʿAlī Bābā,” are novelistic and complex. “ʿAlī Bābā,” as Aboubakr Chraïbi has shown, consists of a parallel structure in which two plot lines converge.31 Admittedly, as Chraïbi notes, Diyāb may have modeled the orphan tales on originals that were already complex. Still, tales like “The Two Sisters Who Envied Their Cadette” and “Prince Aḥmad and the Fairy Perī Bānū” have the additional feature of combining tales of two different types into one. The story of “Aladdin” may be the result of a similar process.32
The frame narrative structure, the modeling of new tales on old ones, and the compositional style are all features that Diyāb’s Book of Travels shares with the Thousand and One Nights. Structurally, the parallels between the two books are grounded in the way the storyteller’s memory functions and in his manner of refashioning existing narratives and motifs. Although some features may be unintended, in general Diyāb’s storytelling in The Book of Travels reflects an oral practice mostly based on oral accounts. Yet, we know that Diyāb did not tell stories only from memory—he also owned books, and contributed to a new practice of travel writing that emerged in the 1750s and ’60s.
Writing an Autobiography in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Aleppo
Diyāb was one of several Maronites and other catholicized Christians who composed accounts of their experiences in the Western Catholic world. Though interested in travelogues, he composed his Book of Travels very much as a personal narrative, and it consequently exhibits, both in plot and the perspective, specific features characteristic of autobiography.
We can get some idea of the literary models available to Diyāb by looking at his library. Besides his own Book of Travels, written at the end of his life, Diyāb owned at least six other books. Four are handwritten copies of devotional works:
1 a Treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Virtues (Sharḥ mukhtaṣar fī al-sabʿ al-radhāyil wa-mā yuqābiluhā aʿnī al-sabʿ faḍāyil), translated from Latin, and bound in a volume dated July 1753;
2 A Useful Book on Knowing One’s Will (Kitāb Mufīd fī ʿilm al-niyyah), another treatise on moral theology;33
3 The Precious Pearl on the Holy Life of Saint Francis (al-Durr al-nafīs fī sīrat al-qiddīs Fransīs),34 a vita of Saint Francis Xavier (d. 1552), the founder of the Jesuit order, based on the account by Dominique Bouhours (d. 1702), and translated into Arabic by a Jesuit missionary in Aleppo, dated December 1753; and
4 a four-volume collection of hagiographic tales (Kitāb Akhbār al-qiddīsīn) translated into Arabic by Pierre Fromage (d. 1740), dated between 1755 and 1757. The owner’s name, being partially struck out, is not entirely legible, but the handwriting of this codex resembles that of the works above, as well as that of The Book of Travels.
The two other books are travelogues, probably copied in the 1750s or ’60s, and bound in a single volume:
1 a copy of The Book of Travels (Kitāb al-Siyāḥah) by Ilyās al-Mawṣilī (d. after 1692). A struck-off name deciphered by Antoine Rabbath (d. 1913) as “Ḥannā son of Diyāb” appears as a former owner.35
2 an Arabic translation of the Turkish sefâretnâmeh