Edgar Allan Poe’s creation of C. Auguste Dupin inaugurated the inception of modern detective fiction. Some of his world-famous literary successors, amongst them Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, evince structures similar to those employed by Poe in the short-stories featuring Dupin: a highly intelligent but idiosyncratic protagonist, the first-person narration of a friend or confidante and a police force that is either unable or unwilling to solve the case at hand.^[1] But notwithstanding Poe’s crucial role in the emergence of detective fiction, he did not write in a vacuum. Just as, for example, the literary robinsonade flourished in the wake of Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), it relied on a wide range of literary precursors, both domestic and foreign. On the one hand, Defoe is likely to have modelled his sole castaway on Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish seaman who spent more than four years on a desert island in the South Pacific and whose story caused a considerable stir in the early eighteenth century; on the other, Ibn Tufail’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a philosophical allegory from Islamic Spain that proved influential amongst many European Enlightenment thinkers, provided some cross-cultural inspiration for Defoe.^[2] In similar fashion to Crusoe, then, Dupin is at least partially indebted to Western representations of the so-called Orient, especially to Voltaire’s Zadig: or: The Book of Fate (1747). Drawing on a diverse range of material, this novella represents the confluence of ancient Egyptian, Zoroastrian and early Islamic elements, synthesising them into a philosophical Orient that is characteristic for the cultural production of the Enlightenment. Accordingly, this two-part blog will examine Voltaire’s seminal tale within eighteenth-century Orientalism, trace the roots of Zadig to both Thomas Parnell’s poem ‘The Hermit’ (publ. 1732) and the Quran, and finally shed light on those chapters of Zadig that inspired Poe’s eccentric detective.

Following the influential lead of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), several generations of critics have often contextualised the novel as a distinctly Western genre within the framework of national realism.^[3] By contrast, Srinivas Aravamudan’s Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (2012) has drawn attention to the ‘retroactive view’ that ‘singles out the novel’s domestic origins and ignores the great success of the oriental tale and other sister genres.’^[4] Viewed in this way, the novel’s evolution as a domestic genre is inextricably intertwined with other cross-cultural texts that gained traction after Antoine Galland’s Les Mille et Une Nuits (1704 – 1717) had exploded onto the European literary scene and inspired a plethora of transcultural narratives, which defy the narrow purview of national realism: ‘And without examining Enlightenment Orientalism as a fictional mode, one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – both the novel and the Orient politically, sociologically, ideologically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.’^[5] In the eighteenth century, however, fictional Orientalism was not the kind of Western ‘corporate institution for dealing with the Orient’ that Edward Said has described for the age of high imperialism.^[6] Enlightenment Orientalism was rather, in Aravamudan’s phrase, ‘a fictional mode for dreaming with the Orient’ whose ‘images of the East […] were nine parts invented and one part referential’, without being ‘ideological, as they did not tend principally toward domination of the East in any single register.’^[7]

Zadig (1747) fits squarely into this fecund and flexible literary environment by combining European modes of storytelling with Oriental themes. And just as Poe’s Dupin ‘was of an excellent – indeed of an illustrious family’, with ‘[b]ooks [being] his sole luxuries’, Voltaire’s eponymous protagonist was also ‘born of illustrious parents, who bestowed on him an education no ways inferior to his birth.’^[8] But whilst Dupin is firmly rooted in nineteenth-century Paris, Zadig travels extensively in the fictional and composite Orient of the eighteenth century, in which elements borrowed from ancient Babylon, the early Arab-Muslim civilisation, as well as fragments from Egyptian and Iranian cultures, converge.^[9] And in addition to this panoramic view of the East, Voltaire offers his readers an abundance of plot twists that subject his inquisitive hero to frequent reversals of fortune during his search for personal happiness.^[10]

In characteristic fashion of the conte philosophique, or philosophical tale, many chapters set in the fictional East traversed by Zadig function as didactic vignettes that could just as well stand on their own. The resulting form appears somewhat fragmentary and is thus reminiscent of the literature of sentiment and sensibility that became a vehicle for articulating social reform in contemporary Britain. As Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave have argued, sentimental literature ‘repeatedly offers us gaps, silences, and inaction or inadequate action in the face of suffering, injustice, and large-scale social ills.’^[11] This form, so their argument continues, then ‘allows for the inclusion of politically controversial material.’^[12] Frequently attacking slavery and economic acquisitiveness, as well as eliciting sympathetic responses to prostitution and representing chastity as laudable virtue, the literature of sensibility gained in popularity as the eighteenth century progressed, eventually becoming a powerful literary means to advocate for more social justice. But by virtue of its emphasis on emotions and the language of feeling, the sentimental novel hardly ever moved beyond the fictional representation, albeit an elaborate one, of suffering to the root causes of social and economic issues.^[13] It was thus a reformative rather than a revolutionary genre.

Since Voltaire spent two years in England (1726-1728), which resulted in his Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733), he was probably aware of the developments surrounding the nascent sentimental novel. To be sure, its subject matter seems to have appealed to him, and he must have closely followed British cultural trends even after his departure, since his play Nanine (1749) is a thinly-veiled attempt to capitalise on the popularity of Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela (1740).^[14] Both, then, sentimental literature and the Oriental tale represent two possible trajectories of the novel in the course of the eighteenth century, which not only defy the monolithic narrative of national realism but also show, as Aravamudan has demonstrated, that ‘[f]iction comes of age through transgeneric experimentation.’^[15] Their fragmentary structures are thus essential to their complementary cultural functions: whereas the sentimental strand of eighteenth century fiction invites readers to contemplate domestic social affairs that cause suffering at home, the extensive corpus of Oriental tales lends a cross-cultural perspective to political reflections by borrowing characters, tropes, and plots from abroad. Both thus invite the audience’s active participation in social and political reform, and, as the second part of this article will demonstrate, were vital to the novel’s richly diverse and multi-faceted evolution during the eighteenth century.

[1] C. Auguste Dupin appears in three short-stories by Edgar Allan Poe: ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842-43), and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844).

[2] For the influence of Selkirk’s story, consult: Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Ibn Tufail’s influential text was translated into English in 1708: Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail, The History of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, translated from the Arabic by Simon Ockley, revised, with an introduction by A.S. Fulton (London: Chapman and Hall, 1929). According to Srinivas Aravamudan’s, ‘Ockley’s translation seems as significant as the story of Alexander Selkirk for Daniel Defoe’s Rbinson Crusoe.’ See: Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

[3] Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957).

[4] Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, p. 20.

[5] Ibid., p. 8.

[6] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; rpt. London: Penguin, 1995), p. 3.

[7] Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, p. 8 and 4.

[8] Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in: The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays and Reviews, edited with an introduction and notes by David Galloway (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 141-176, here: p. 144; Voltaire, ‘Zadig or the Book of Fate’ in: Candide and Other Works, translated and edited by James Fowler (Ware: Wordsworth, 2014), pp. 1 – 73, here: p. 7.

[9] Pierre Larcher, ‘Voltaire, Zadig et le Coran,’ Synergies Monde Arabe No 6, 2009, pp. 295 – 306, here: p. 298: ‘L’Orient étant ici un paravent, on ne s’étonnera pas qu’il soit fort composite, mêlant des éléments appartenant à des lieux et des temps très différents: cela va du plus ancien passé babylonien à l’époque arabo-musulmane, en passant par des éléments égyptiens et iraniens.’

[10] Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, p. 150.

[11] Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave, ‘Introduction,’ in Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. by Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), vii-xxiv, here: p. xvi.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 86.

[14] James Fowler, ‘Introduction’ in Candide and Other Works, pp. vii-xxv, here: p. xxii.

[15] Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, p. 159.

Image: Gate of the Great Mosque, Dasmascus, by Gustav Bauernfeind, accessed here