Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights - Softcover

Marina Warner is Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and a distinguished writer of fiction, criticism, and history.

“My favorite work of non-fiction this year was Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. In her exploration of this immense, protean and much-translated Arabic collection of folk and fairy tales (fifteen of them banded in here at intervals) she has found a subject which seems an ideal fit for her own particular cast of mind. This book is like one of the densely patterned carpets it describes, rich in overlapping narrative strands and in associative weave of thought. A gorgeous last chapter, ‘The Couch: A Case History,’ glides from the coded site of passion, the flying sofa, to the magic carpet via prayer mat, festive balcony hanging, nomadic house, Smyrna rug on Freud’s analytical couch―recalling the structural importance of eavesdropping in the Arabian Nights―then a description of Gabbeh, an Iranian film about tribal carpet-weaving, and back to Freud and his thoughts on levitation and sexual delight (with a side swoop over Goethe’s Faust calling for a magic cloak).”―Helen Simpson, Times Literary Supplement

“Marina Warner is a veteran magus, and an adept mythographer of the vast global traditions of magic, metaphor and myth... Pursuing the enigmas of imaginative desire throughout her career, Warner persuasively redefines The Arabian Nights as an overgrown garden of the delights and hazards of desire... Warner quests for contemporary meaning in the major traditions of literary magic and carries with her, back to The Arabian Nights, our sore need for another way of knowledge... Warner’s Stranger Magic harbors many richnesses, of which I find the most beguiling what she names, in her subtitle, ‘charmed states.’... Warner takes an honored place in the sequence of those who have studied what Isaiah Berlin and others have called the Counter-Enlightenment, the speculations that renewed Neoplatonic and Gnostic heterodox versions of ancient wisdom. Her choice of The Arabian Nights, as a vital strand in the Counter-Enlightenment, is refreshing, since she shows some of the ways in which storytelling is essential to this kind of knowledge. As a contemporary scholar of myth and magic, she aids immensely in the struggle for literary values that has to be ongoing, whatever the distractions of our moment.”―Harold Bloom, New York Times Book Review

“Stranger Magic is an unabashedly joyful work of scholarship, a study of the history of the human imagination as it shapes and reinvents reality through stories. Here, Warner comes close to inventing a genre of literary criticism: she takes fifteen tales from the Nights and uses them as her own frame tales to embark on a series of erudite adventures. She performs a kind of intellectual free association based on rigorous research and enhanced by handsome illustrations, a number from her own collection. In homage to the Nights, this is a scholarly entertainment...Warner demonstrates that there is nothing idle about imagining.”―Patricia Storace, New York Review of Books

“[A] wide-ranging, erudite, wondrously polymathic exploration of the tales of magic, bound to the ‘huge narrative wheel’ with which Scheherazade enchanted the Sultan Shahryar through one thousand and one nights of storytelling. Warner, too, is a beguiling storyteller: her fascination with true knowledge embedded in realms of wonder. She releases the jinn of cultural modernism and scientific progress from the bottle in which it has been long confined by Western tradition.”―Iain Finlayson, The Times

“Ebullient... With Stranger Magic, Warner has written a nimble but daring work of criticism that draws on her work as a novelist and scholar, combining aspects of literary history, formal analysis, personal essay, and cultural forensics into topics as disparate as the ‘Smyrna rug’ that draped Freud’s couch to the flying turtles that Danish artist Melchior Lorck sketched in the 1550s. It’s a remarkable feat of synthetic knowledge, with particularly rich forays into those whom the Arabian Nights provided both fantastic inspiration and parodic ‘cover’: from Voltaire, Goethe, who taught himself Persian to compose West-Eastern Divan, and William Beckford to such unexpected veins of influence as Sir Walter Scott. There are historical personages both familiar (Richard Burton, Edward W. Lane) and less so (John Wilkins, Robert Patlock) brought into an encyclopedic sweep of French, German, and British sources. Even given the thoroughness of her investigation into just how deep an impression Orientalist fantasies left on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, especially after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, she offers an inspired reading of why it was cinema―particularly the phantasmagoric chic-of-Araby ‘Easterns’ of the early silver screen―that offered a germane new life to Aladdin and Ali Baba... Warner has created a sparkling work of criticism, full of graciousness, learning, and fascination.”―Eric Banks, National Book Critics Circle blog

“I was entranced by Marina Warner’s encyclopedic and pathbreaking study, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights.”―Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian

“Wonderful... Warner is herself something of a Shahrazad, though she weaves her account under less threatening auspices... Many of the stories in the Nights take place in a legendary Baghdad or draw on older Persian sources, but a few―such as the story of Hayqar the Wise―date back to ancient Egyptian tales from the seventh century BC. Warner is alert to these earlier echoes but she is more interested in the far-reaching cultural and literary impact of the Nights on artists, composers and writers... From Voltaire and Goethe to Hans Christian Andersen and William Beckford down to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino―on all of whom Warner offers illuminating discussions―the influence of the Nights has been pervasive; but composers (such as Mozart), artists and designers, illustrators and film-makers have also fallen under their spell.”―Eric Ormsby, Literary Review

“In Stranger Magic Warner surveys just how pervasively The Arabian Nights has influenced art and literature since the eighteenth century. On the surface, her book covers what more dogmatic critics would call the West’s cultural appropriation of the East... Stranger Magic is packed with information and insight... Warner writes with clarity, and sometimes with exquisite beauty... Warner possesses an exceptionally synoptic mind, almost Sherlockian in its sensitivity to connections and repeated motifs... Stranger Magic is, in fact, simply the latest in an exhilarating series of studies that reexamine the West’s fantastic imagination. From the Beast to the Blonde, No Go the Bogeyman, and Phantasmagoria explore the cultural meanings of folktales and Mother Goose stories, children’s literature, and fairy tales, the fearful monsters, beasts, and ogres of nightmare, and all the ways humankind has attempted to represent the spiritual. Ranged together, these substantial works, now joined by Stranger Magic, look solid and magisterial on the bookshelf, calling to mind the encyclopedic scholarship we associate with an earlier age. Nonetheless, while Marina Warner is as learned as any Victorian polymath, she also employs contemporary feminist theory and the insights of cultural studies to make us look once more, or look more deeply, at the history of cinema, art, theater, and literature. Each of her books is an Aladdin’s cave of wonders.”―Michael Dirda, Barnes & Noble Review

“Insightful... It’s fascinating and highly informed.”―Doug Johnstone, Big Issue

“[Warner] astonishes with the granularity of her accounts of the impact of these stories on their original European readers... What kind of stories is Shahrazad telling us now? Immediately obvious is the relevance of Arabian Nights to crucial questions of perception of the East by the West during this season of Arab thaw and Iranian freeze... Warner does a good job, especially in her ‘Conclusion: “All the story of the night told over...”’ to tease out these new interpretative figures in the textual carpet.”―Brad Gooch, Daily Beast