Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights by Marina Warner (review)
2014; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1536-1802
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoStranger Magic: Charmed States and Arabian Nights. By Marina Warner. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012. 560 pp.In addition to two dozen color plates and numerous illustrations and ornaments throughout text, Stranger Magic includes a glossary, a list of abbreviations, a list of stories and their various sources, fifty pages of notes, a brief bibliography, and an index.Marina Warner's beautiful new book explores effect Arabian Nights has had on Western thought. It aims ambitiously to present a different perspective on interaction of and reason, on history of intellectual inquiry and scientific invention in Europe, and thus to move toward reassessment of exchanges between East and West (20). arrival of Nights, in its first translation by Antoine Galland (1704-1717), is fraught with contradiction: it was established as a masterpiece of in Europe of rationality and Enlightenment, was received with rapt enthusiasm, and yet was also dismissed for its irrationality, and magic that permeates its stories was both infantilized and exoticized-relegated to nursery or to primitive cultures-in a process that coincided with West's rejection of its own tradition of magical thought.Stranger Magic is organized into five parts, each taking up a facet of magical thought. Fifteen individual tales, clustered around five themes and summarized in lively detail, provide points of departure from which Warner's commentary sallies forth in multiple directions, weaving together in suggestive patterns Oriental and ideas of enchantment in book's afterglow (29), in both Eastern and Western cultures, ancient and modem.Part 1, Solomon Wise King, opens, aptly, with story The Fisherman and Genie, which brings up question of jinni characters so important in Nights. Warner discusses role of jinni both in relation to plot (they introduce a dynamic of pure chance which runs alongside larger designs of fate, adding the energy of unpredictability to plots [43]) and in terms of their preferred mode of transportation (flying). flying carpet, an image that epitomizes Nights for our Western imagination, appears in Galland's story of Ahmed and Fairy Peri Banu; although we have some reason to suspect that tale was cobbled together by inventive translator himself, Warner reminds us that it quickly became one of favorite tales and also led to rich cinematographic recreations in twentieth century, in particular Lotte Reiniger's Adventures of Prince Achmed, two Thieves of Baghdad films, and Disney's Aladdin. flying carpet is discussed both in cultural context of Enlightenment and its scientific experiments on flying, which culminated in first hot-air balloons, and as an archetypal symbol of transport as both travel and rapture. To understand thinking that turned folk motif of a flying carpet into such a prime symbol of fantasy today it is necessary to press a little further into analogies between carpets, desire and narrative, specifically narrative of dreamthoughts and fantastic, oriental plots (79). This Warner does with breathtaking dexterity and grace, transporting us from Solomonic lore, to art of rug weaving and pleasures of pattern recognition, to Rudolf Nureyev's tomb adorned with a mosaic rug.Part 2, Dark Arts, Strange Gods, turns to witchcraft, clustering three stories in which black magic features prominently (The Prince of Black Islands, Hasan of Basra, and A Fortune Regained) and weaving readings of these stories with commentaries on witchcraft (Egypt, land of hermetic knowledge, dominates this fabulous geography [99]) and dream knowledge. chapter sketches complex relations and blurry borders between religious orthodoxy and magic arts from Renaissance onward, until splitting of magic and science that occurred in eighteenth century, when imagination and reason [came] to be seen as irreconcilable processes (111) and quest for rationality relegated occult knowledge to unspeakable margins of thought. …
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