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Marina Warner

Marina Warner Books

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“This government has represented benefits as somehow shameful. The point about universal benefits is that they affirm the value of such social tasks as having children, rearing them, or caring for relatives; they make benefits themselves an expression of collective approval for the endeavour, not begrudged hand-outs, stigmatising the recipients as beggars and failures.”

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Book:Into the Dangerous World: Some Reflections on Childhood and Its Costs
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“Britain was the last developed country where beating schoolchildren was respectable. This was outlawed last year [1988] - by one vote in Parliament. Parents are now almost the last people left who can hit children without fear of penalty, as long as it's moderate and fitting punishment...the language of authority still derives from violence, mistakenly, tragically.”

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Book:Into the Dangerous World: Some Reflections on Childhood and Its Costs
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“Above all, love must be freely given, by mutual consent on both sides, through the exercise of free will. Because it is thus freely chosen, it is an act of humanity and civilisation, neither a daemonic possession such as hurled Dido upon her funeral pyre or Medea upon her children, not the base stirrings of concupiscence.”

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Book:Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary
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“When virtue is pictured as innocence and innocence equated with childlikeness, the implication is obviously that knowledge and experience are no longer media of goodness, but have become in themselves contaminating. This is a very despairing outlook, in its way as black as Augustine's original sin, for it supposes that original goodness will in all likelihood be defiled...It surrenders the attempt to represent virtue in a mature phase.”

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Book:Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism
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“I do think that this represents a kind of shift towards myth, a recovery of myth, largely through the popularity of writers like Philip Pullman. Somehow myths have returned as a serious subject. It used to be scorned...really scorned. It was part of a nursery tradition, and it was also rather tainted - but not in an immovable way - by the association with right-wing ideologies after the World Wars.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“I have always argued that we can't live by or be made to exist outside of mythology, and that every group and nation has, possibly unacknowledged to themselves, some myths by which they live. It remains important to revisit them, understand them and possibly retell them - or at least own up to them - and then it becomes possible to move something. If it's obscure or invisible to you, you can't budge those understandings.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“I always have done work on mythic relations since I started writing. I really want to be a novelist, or at least a writer of imaginative work... I do try to make my critical studies imaginative and try to write them in ways that are more like literature than philosophy, but I have disappointed myself because I am still so wedded to criticism.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“Though it's marvelously entertaining, and I had fantastic fun writing the book, it's not terribly easily, the material, and it's not all that familiar...although we think it is familiar. The processes of the wonderful narratives are very intricate. It's about the charm - the spellbinding charm - of ingenuity, and it's not so easy to remember the plots or the structure or even the names.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“True to their history, the English are very domineering and have manipulated it in different ways. I wouldn't say that there was an original, but there is a lot of expurgation in some of the Victorian translations, and there's a lot of additional salacious nonsense in some of them, too. I also like the early French one, much-derided for being fanciful but which is actually very elegantly done. It's very big, very capacious.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“Although the stories are very present in my book, and very present in my mind, what I was most interested in was the question of why it had attracted such a following in the 18th Century. It's less mysterious that it attracted a following in the Romantic period, and in the 19th Century, but the early 18th Century when the Rationalists fell in love with it...that was mysterious. What I wanted to look at was the forms of enchantment.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“I consider it as a foreshadowing of modernity in many different respects, and the consistency of character is interesting to the emerging modern psychology. The emphasis on dream knowledge relates quite deeply to psychoanalysis, although I suppose psychoanalysis wouldn't like to say that... Freud was always saying he was a scientist.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“Many of the enchanted things in the book are lamps, carpets, sofas, gems, brass rings. It is a rather different landscape than the fairy tale landscape of the West. Though we have interiors and palaces, we don't have bustling cities, and there isn't the emphasis on the artisan making things. The ambiance from which they were written was an entirely different one. The Arabian Nights comes out of a huge world of markets and trade. Cairo, Basra, Damascus: trades and skills.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“For example, John Law's Mississippi Company venture printed shares, and the money had gone up in smoke when it had been inscribed objects. The inscription made it magic and changed its meaning. That's how objects become charmed in The Arabian Nights, and they are often originally ordinary objects. The carpet is an ordinary, paltry object. The lamp is a rusty old lamp, and the bottles jinns are imprisoned within are old bottles. They are changed by the magic and the jinn's presence, and the jinn's presence is often embodied in the seal or inscription.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“It seemed to me to be a parable of the exchange of goods, rather Marxist in some ways, in the new world of global forces. What the forgers do is write the brand name to try and change it, and it works! Loads of people buy fake Prada handbags, or Chanel sunglasses; they've been changed. They have been truly, really changed.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“If you want a good handbag and glasses, it's hard to get something without the brand name on it because it's so important to have the charmed inscription. The only way you do it... This handbag was the only one in the shop without a charmed inscription. It's just an ordinary bag. I went into the department store in Sloane Square, because I needed a new bag, because my old one lost its handles. Then I found this one, and I said "Why is it so cheap?" and the seller said, "Because it doesn't have a name!"”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“I think that a true economics thinker or a Marxist thinker would make nonsense of my argument, although I have given massive seminars and no one has demolished it so far. I did think that this idea from an artisanal and trading perception of the auratic quality of goods when they are given character and inscription, made the stories of phantasmic wealth read more powerfully in the 18th and 19th centuries than the stories of Cinderella's wealth, because they are conjured out of nothing by these magic means.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“The Grimm brothers always said that their informants were women, which is possibly not true, women of the people. There is the constant evocation of women's voices, in the collecting and arrangement of these stories, and yet the message of so many of them is incredibly misogynist. I was very puzzled by that, and that book explores that contradiction.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“There are a range of women not represented in the Western fairy tale tradition. Husband-beaters are particularly interesting, as well as male pederasts. Children are often told in The Arabian Nights, "This man likes to abduct boys, be careful of him." These issues are explored through the medium of the stories, but actually the architecture of the book is such that there are many examples of women who are loyal, brave, devoted - especially to their lovers.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“There is humanist enterprise of the book, and amongst that there are many, many stories. And that is why at the end, when he says that the stories are so illuminating that they must be engraved and encased in gold and put in the palace library, the people who compile the book are telling us that this is a collection of human wisdom.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“An interesting example is that the worst woman in the book, who is so cruel and violent, is the sorceress in "The Prince of the Black Islands." She's a beautiful young woman, and she has turned her husband into stone from the waist down. A traveling sultan finds him, in his dreadful state, and the man petrified from the waist down tells his sad story...how his wife comes every afternoon and beats him until the blood runs down. She's just unwontedly, arbitrarily cruel.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“The other thing about the Nights is that it is quite racist. One parentheses is that I think this is one of the negative things that appeal to people, that The Arabian Nights could be used as a disguise for racism. It suited the West. You could smuggle racism into children's literature, you see. The African magician in the story of Aladdin, he's labeled explicitly as the "African Magician." He's not a character but a stereotype, and a lot of this got into nursery literature in this Oriental disguise.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“I don't think that there's a target audience at all. These stories were in circulation. The stories were told by men, told in the marketplace by men, but also behind doors by women, but there's no real record of this. It's likely they were told by women to children in their interior rooms. The story could be a negative story, they could be presented as a, "Watch out! Women will get round you, do things to you, weave you in their toils." It could be buried in it an old cautionary story about women and their wiles.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“I am not a great believer in dialectical struggle. I am much more of a fusion person. I see it as a dialogue, or trialogue, or polylogue: many, many, many voices, going back a long way. The cultural picture is much more mutually enriching at many different levels, manufacturers...absolutely, design and calligraphy. It's an amazing amount of cross-interests between people.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“There's a whole slew of wonderful speculation of flying in a fanciful way. Gulliver is one of the central examples; Swift has the hum of Arabian Nights in his ear with Gulliver's Travels. The difference is in scale - Gulliver as a kind of Sinbad kind of figure, the way he is picked up and carried. Just to finish up with Scheherazade, I do think that The Arabian Nights could be considered as a great book on women's position in the world.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“One of the metaphors of the book is the carpet. Not just the flying carpet, but the carpet as a woven surface in which many repetitions and motifs recur and mirror one another. This is very much reflected within the stories: they have borders within borders, repeated motifs which change. They have their feet in oral conventions, and for the mnemonics, the storyteller needs to have a structure in order to remember the stories.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“I see the carpet reflecting that narratological structure of the storytelling, with Scheherazade as the outside frame story on the outside, with the stories woven on the inside. It's also demonstrative of the infinity of it, with no beginning and no end. The carpet is also a kind of metonym for cinema, this idea that the flat surface carries a terrific depth of imaginative field while remaining totally flat.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“One of the things I try to do is try to make repetitions, rhymes, and mirrorings across the subject matter of my own books so that the chapter titles and the epigraphs and pictures all kind of form a tapestry. In this book, I retell fifteen of the stories. You have the critical frame, and then you have these rosettes like the motif in a carpet.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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“The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.”

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Author:Marina Warner
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