From the Archives: Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic (aka Fairy Tales, Pt. 3)
While I was checking the archives to be sure that I hadn't previously written about Antoine Galland's Thousand and One Nights, I ran across this review from 2012, which led me to pull Stranger Magic off the shelves and dive in.
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I'm fascinated by the Arabian Nights. By the stories themselves and the way they fit together into their complicated frame story. By their transformation from Arabic street tales to a established position in the Western canon. By their echoes in Western culture, from the Romantic poets to Disney.
So I was delighted to get a chance to review historian and critic Marina Warner's new work on the tales.
Marina Warner's Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights is a multi-faceted study of the popular tales of wonder and magic known as the Arabian Nights.
Warner discusses the tales in the Arabian Nights with the interdisciplinary approach that she used to good effect in her earlier study of Western fairy tales, From the Beast to the Blonde. She examines them through the lenses of literary criticism, history, folklore studies, feminist theory and popular culture. She pays particular attention to the history of the Arabian Nights in the west, from the reception of the first translation from the Arabic by Antoine Galland in the eighteenth century through its influence in works as distinct as Mozart's operas and the Harry Potter books.
Not assuming that readers will have the same familiarity with "The Prince of the Black Islands" as they do with "Sleeping Beauty", Warner retells fifteen tales before she unravels them into their constituent themes, symbols and assumptions. She moves easily from the Biblical story of King Solomon to magic carpets, from the reputation of Egypt as the home of ancient magic to Sir Isaac Newton's alchemical experiments, and from the wealth of the Islamic world in the twelve century to post-Reformation anxiety about Catholic religious practices.
Warner succeeds once again in balancing entertainment with erudition. Like her earlier works, Stranger Magic is accessible enough for the general reader and rich enough to keep a specialist scribbling in the margins.
Fairy Tales, Pt 2: Antoine Galland and the Arabian Nights
When I sat down to write about Charles Perrault and Tales of Mother Goose, I had no intention of writing more about the writers who “created” fairy tales as we know them . But as I wrote about Perrault I remembered some of my favorite stories,[1] and stumbled across a new one. Suddenly a small series of blog posts presented themselves.[2]
Next up, Antoine Galland (1646-1715) : classical scholar, linguist, diplomat and the man who made Les Mille et Une Nuits (The Thousand and One Nights), better known in English as The Arabian Nights, a canonical work in Western literature.
Trained as a classical scholar, Galland worked as an interpreter for the French diplomatic mission in Constantinople, from 1670 to 1675, where he studied Turkish, modern Greek, Arabic and Persian. Back in France, he became the curator of the royal collection of coins and medals.[3] He held the chair of Arabic at the Collège Royal in Paris from 1709 until his death in 1715. Over the course of his career, he collected, transcribed, and translated many Turkish, Persian and Arabic manuscripts.
The Thousand and One Nights was a diversion for Galland. He worked on the tales after dinner as a way to unwind after a long day of serious scholarship—I picture candlelight, a glass of wine, and perhaps a large cat purring next to him on the work table.[4] (
Galland drew most of his stories from several Arabic manuscripts of collected tales. The collections were drawn from a a body of oral tradition—popular tales told by street entertainers, based on folklore that stretched from India to Egypt. Each storyteller augmented plots, embroidered descriptions, and filled the tales with literary allusions and quotations to reflect both his own taste and that of his audience. Over time, Arab literati collected the stories, much as Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm collected fairy tales from German peasants in the 19th century, and the tales in the resulting manuscripts varied according to the time and place they were heard and the taste of the man compiling the collection.
In some ways, Galland was not unlike the Arab coffeehouse storytellers who recounted—and often tailored—familiar tales to their audiences. Galland selected the stories he deemed most suitable for a European audience, and in so doing established a canon of tales for Europeans that is distinct from the original material. Aimed at a courtly rather than a scholarly audience, Galland’s translation was often deliberately inaccurate. As he wrote to Cuper, his version was not “attached precisely to the text, for that would not have given pleasure to the readers. To the extent that it was possible, I have rendered the Arabic into good French without being slavishly attached to the Arabic words.”
Galland’s Thousand and One Nights was published in France in 12 small volumes between 1704 and 1717. He deliberately targeted the audience who had enjoyed Perrault’s fanciful tales. If anything, he was even more successful. The ladies of the court were so impatient to know what happened next that Galland had to lend them manuscript versions that they passed from hand to hand until the next volume was published. That’s the kind of audience an author can only dream of.
[1] Including one outlier in the mid-nineteenth century.
[2] And happy I was to see them. I have a long list of possible posts, but none of them were calling my name.
[3] Just to make the timing clear, Galland , like Perrault, worked during the reign of Louis XIV
[4] It’s a seductive image. It’s taken me several years to break myself of the habit of going back to work after dinner. I can imagine all too well the lure of working on something that isn’t really my work. Luckily I have My Own True Love to keep me honest. (Ms. Whiskey would be all for going back to the desk.)
Charles Perrault: The Father of the Fairy Tale?
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- Puss-in-Boots
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- Dick Whittington and His Cat
I recently had reason to track down a few details about the story of Puss-in-Boots, which I frequently confuse with Dick Whittington and his cat[1]. Along the way I fell down rabbit hole or two about the story’s “author” Charles Perrault (1628-1703). (Does this surprise anyone?)
Charles Perrault (no cat)
Perrault is best known for the collection of fairy tales known as Contes du temps passé (Stories of Times Past), more widely known by its subtitle, Tales of Mother Goose. But Perrault didn’t come to writing fairy tales until late in life.
The youngest of three sons of a wealthy Parisian family,[2] Charles Perrault trained as a lawyer, like his father before him, but he spent most of his life working as a civil servant.. When his brother older Pierre purchased the position of principal tax collector of Paris in 1654,[3] he became his brother’s clerk. In 1663, he became secretary and cultural advisor to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s powerful finance minister, a position that held a certain amount of clout. Among other things, Perrault used his position to successfully argue that the Tulieres Gardens should remained open to the public[4], persuade Colbert to establish a pension fund for writers and scholars, and get his other older brother Claude appointed as architect for the Louvre.
That same year, Perrault became Secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Letters, a learned society created by Colbert for the purpose of composing Latin inscriptions for public monuments and the medals issued to celebrate events of the king’s reign. During his years in this position, Perrault was involved in the artistic world of the court in a a number of ways. He wrote a book titled La Peinture (Painting) to honor the Louis XIV’s favorite painter, Charles LeBrun and scripts for royal celebrations. He was responsible for the inclusion of thirty-nine fountains, each representing one of Aesop’s fables, in the labyrinth of the gardens of Versailles. And he built a reputation in the court’s literary circles for light verse and love poetry, the type of thing that was recited as part of an evening’s entertainment at society parties.
Perrault was elected to the Académie Française in 1671,[5] where he played a prominent role in the literary controversy known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. The “Ancients” argued that the literature of ancient Greece and Rome was the unchanging model for literary excellence. The “Moderns” believed that just as the science of their day had surpassed that of the ancients[6], modern literature, too, had progressed alongside a more civilized society. Perrault was on the side of the moderns. In fact, he set off the argument when he read a long poem at a meeting of the organization, titled The Siècle de Louis le Grand (The Age of Louis the Great), in which he argued that the modern world was superior to the ancient world in every way, thanks to the enlightened rule of the Sun King.
Frontispiece of Tales From Mother Goose, with Mother Goose herself spinning a tale, and some yarn
In 1695, at the age of 67, Perrault lost his secretarial post. (None of the accounts I read said why.) Left with time on his hands, he began to write stories inspired by existing folk tales, including “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” "Puss in Boots” and “Bluebeard.” The stories may have been familiar, but the style was his own[7]. They were embellished, modernized versions of traditional stories, set in a fairy tale version of seventeenth century society that would have been familiar to his readers. (In their own way, the tales were another salvo in the Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns.) Published in 1697, Tales from Mother Goose, was aimed at the same audience that enjoyed his light poetry.. It was an instant and enduring success.
Perrault is often credited with creating the genre of the literary fairy tale, but while he is the most well known and arguably the most important of writers in the genre, he wasn’t the first member of the Parisian literary salons to write such tales. Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy (1652-1705) not only preceded him, but she coined the term “fairy tale” to describe the genre.[8]
Making Perrault the genre’s favorite uncle, in my opinion.
[1] And why not, since in both stories a poor orphan boy rises to high estate with the help of his cat.
[2] Sounds like a fairy tale right from the start, doesn’t it?
[3] Buying official government positions (and military commissions) was common in the seventeenth century, without reference to the office holders’ qualifications for the post. That said, the Perrault brothers seem to have been talented and hardworking
[4] Louis XIV wanted to make them private.
[5] A different Académie, originally created to maintain standards of literary taste. It has been in existence since 1634, with a brief interruption during the French Revolution. Today its primary role is to regulate the French language.
[6] There is a lot of stuff packed into that premise that I am not going to touch in this post.
[7] Much like Antoine Galland, who, a decade later, took Arabic street tales and transformed them into the canonical work of Western literature known as The Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights. A story that I realize I’ve never told here on the Margins. Hmmm.
[8] She may need a blog post of her own soon. I make no promises.