[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARINA WARNER: Well, thank
you all very much for coming.
I wrote this little book for
the OUP series, "A Very Short
Introduction."
And since then, I've
gotten very interested
in the presence of stories
in the current times
of dislocation and migration.
So there's an actual angle
to this talk which follows on
from the definitions and
discussion in the book,
but it's not quite
exactly the same.
This is a wonderful work.
You probably know her.
She does these cutout
sculptures from old books.
And it seems to me this
captures brilliantly the idea
of the secrecy of the story--
the secrecy, the intimacy,
the hidden knowledge
deep in the forest and the
idea of the illumination
that the story might bring.
There are many ways to approach
the definition of fairy tale,
but one of the
interesting aspects of it
is that it's frequently
associated with women's voices.
Now, this may be to some extent
derogatory, because Plato,
for example-- as
early as Plato--
he says, oh, those are
just old wives' tales.
So the idea of the
old wives' tale,
which is exactly
what it is in Greek,
is a sense a story
that is kind of what
we call now "fake news."
It's a sort of nostrum full
of superstition and ignorance.
So very, very early on there's
this derogatory aspect,
and that may have led to the
association of such material--
fairy tales, fables,
there's a vast body of work,
but I'm going to
stick to fairy tales--
it might have lead
to this association
when attributing them.
You know, we don't do it.
We authority
figures don't do it.
Those old women do it.
But that's probably
not the case.
It's probably also
true that this
was a body of
stories circulating
in family and private circuits,
because one characteristic
of fairy tales is that
it's not associated
with literate elites.
Now, that doesn't mean that
it wasn't written down.
A lot of them are
written down, and I'll
show you some very
famous collectors.
But on the whole,
you didn't have
to be somebody with
an education to be
able to pass on a
version of Cinderella.
And that means
that it is actually
the body of imaginative
discovery and creation
that links us all together, the
numerous cultural variations,
many different aspects of
societies are affected.
If you are in a
polygamous society,
you have fairy tales
about polygamy, et cetera.
Monsters take on the shape
of local fears, and so forth.
But basically, the structures
are a form of language.
They are what I've called an
Esperanto of the imagination.
We can talk to somebody from
Finland or from Australia
through the language
of fairy tale.
One of the earliest
fairy tales written down
is Cupid and Psyche, which is
a beauty and the beast story.
And it's interestingly
set up in the middle
of a remarkable novel,
which some of you will know,
Apuleis's "The
Golden Ass," which
is about the transformation
of Lucius, the hero,
into a donkey.
And as a donkey, he
experiences many sufferings,
the brutality of people,
but also a lot of comedy.
And then it ends with
a religious initiation.
But in the middle of
this story, a young woman
is abducted on her
wedding night by bandits,
and she's taken to a cave.
Her husband is seized by the
bandits, and taken elsewhere,
and she fears for his
life quite rightly.
And she's taken--
she's called Charite--
and she is taken by the bandits
to their cave, their lair,
and she's given into the keeping
of a disreputable old woman.
And the disreputable old woman--
when she's weeping and weeping
because she's lost her husband,
and she has been
raped and abducted--
the old woman says,
let me tell you
a story to make you
feel a little better.
And this is absolutely
to the heart--
I mean, this is a
very early version
of a fairy tale in print--
this goes to the heart of
the characteristic defiance
of the fairy tale.
It's not exactly optimism.
The happy ending is
never elaborated.
The story of cruelty,
and unkindness,
of infanticide, and starvation,
and so forth, and maltreatment,
will unfold, fully
occupying the story.
And then, at the end,
it will be the promise
that this will be changed.
So it's an act of defiance
more than an expression
of how hope can take place.
But that spirit,
that spirit of what
Walter Benjamin called
cunning and high spirits,
flows through the
conventional fairy tale--
the traditional idea we
have of a a fairy tale,
and it differs it from a myth.
A myth will not necessarily come
to a conclusion that is hopeful
or that's defiant.
It will often be tragic.
And it differs from a ballad.
A ballad, like the one you
were hearing when you came in,
which is very famous,
with numerous variations,
both verbal variations
and musical variations,
that is now called binary
in the Scottish tradition.
And that one is called
"The Two Sisters."
Emily Portman was singing it.
And that's the story
of two sisters who
are rivals for the same man, and
one sister kills the other one.
And then after
she's murdered her,
she buries her in the
mud of the river bank.
And then someone coming by sees
a bone sticking out of the mud,
thinks it's an animal
bone, and takes it out.
And he either makes
it into a pipe
or he makes it into a
harp from her breastbone.
And then he goes to
play, this minstrel.
This shepherd who's made
this instrument for himself
goes to the King's hall,
and starts trying to play,
and the musical
instrument will only
play the song of the murder.
So when he pipes on it, this
pipe sings, I was your sister.
You killed me.
And if it's a breastbone
that's been strung for a harp,
the harp sings, you are
strumming my hair on your harp,
and then tells the
story of her murder.
So that is an example
of a story that
has no happy resolution,
except there's
a revenge on the murderer.
But otherwise, it's not
at all a happy story.
But it belongs to fairy
tale in one sense.
It's supernatural.
And it's the idea of
the eloquent bone,
which of course is very central
to the idea of the oral voice.
So there are numerous examples
in high literature of this idea
of the circle of storytellers.
And very frequently,
as I said, female.
So here, Boccaccio,
they're fleeing the plague,
and the women dominate
the storytelling scene.
So there, in Boccaccio, you
have a tremendous collection
of wonderful, inventive stories
that are, again, attributed
to women's passing on, to
the traditions of exchanges
between women.
The first famous
collection that we all
know because it
contains Bluebeard,
it contains Red Riding Hood,
it contains Sleeping Beauty
is Charles Perrault. So
here you have the example
of a very
characteristic pattern,
which is that a man comes
along who is highly educated--
he was a very high court
official under Louis XIV--
and he collected stories, he
said, that were just sonnet.
They were just little trifles.
They were absurdities.
But he collected them from his
grandmother and his servants,
and then he wrote them
in these very elegant--
very, very elegant French.
Ironic, delightful,
sophisticated stories
which have been retold and
retold many, many times
in a different tone of voice.
He's much more
feline, and savvy,
and sort of knowing
them than the way
we do we produce the
stories for children.
He had a contemporary, and so
he signed the book Mother Goose.
So there you have an
example of someone
who is a worldly courtier
taking on the identity
of a poor old woman--
and a slightly absurd
figure, Mother Goose--
Mere L'oie in French--
and it translated into English
culture almost directly.
We still have Mother
Goose collections--
Mother Goose books.
Though he had a contemporary
who has interestingly rather
vanished as a name
from the history.
So Marie-Catherine
d'Aulnoy was a contemporary
of Perrault's, as I
said, and she wrote many,
many fairy tales which
were turned into British
pantomimes--
like the golden goose,
the yellow dwarf--
these were all turned
into Victorian pantomimes.
And theater and film
are chief conductors
of this form of literature.
At the same time--
and this is often forgotten,
because unfortunately we
are formed to think
of the Islamic world
and the Christian world
as kind of cloven apart,
somehow existing in
separate spheres.
This is not at all the case.
They were deeply entangled.
And one of the ways
they became very deeply
entangled in our fairy tale
tradition was interwoven
with the eastern Oriental
and Middle Eastern
fairytale tradition, was
through "The Arabian Nights."
"Les Mille et Une Nuit"-- it
was published in French first.
It was the first print edition
of this immense collection
of incredibly brilliant and
elaborate stories of fantastic
range of human
experiences, which I'll
tell you in a second about.
But that, as you
know, it takes place
as a storytelling scene in bed.
So the sultan is killing all
the women in his country,
because he believes that
all women are perfidious,
treacherous
adulteresses, so he's
decided to murder them all.
And Scheherazade, who's
the daughter of his vizier,
actually volunteers
to marry him,
knowing that she's under threat,
that the following morning he
will have her head cut off,
or he'll have her strangled.
But she holds him by
telling him stories.
And in "The Arabian Nights"
you have a very clear picture
of how stories were associated.
But it's not only with
this idea that you
can make you feel
a little better,
like the bride in the cave,
but that actually, you
could save your life.
And I think that that
might seem preposterous,
but I think in our kind
of very disruptive times,
and you know, turbulent and
hostile times, the function
of stories matters
more and more,
because they have
this power, actually,
to impinge on reality,
and to change reality.
The frameworks of narrative
through which we work
are more important
than we perhaps allow.
It's not a frivolous,
out-to-the-side activity.
It's very central
to human thought.
I mean, I feel I'm
speaking to an audience who
knows this extraordinarily
well, because the internet is
in some sense a material
expression of this network
of stories, and we're seeing
a lot of the consequences
of people being
frightened of that power,
and my kind of
mission as a writer is
to harness that power for the
ends of justice, and equality,
and understanding, and deeper
intelligence, and so forth,
rather than for disinformation,
and propaganda, and other uses
which at the moment
are gaining ground.
They don't necessarily
need to gain ground,
but they are gaining ground.
There are three
quotations which I'd just
like quickly to mention to you.
One is Ursula Le Guin,
who unfortunately
died, as you know, last year.
She says, resistance and
change often begin in art--
very often in our art.
She was addressing an
audience of writers--
very often in our
art, the art of words.
So she's making the same point
which the story Scheherazade is
making, that you can influence
and shape the experience
and reality through
the power of words.
Scheherazade tells many,
many varied stories
across a gamut of very
terrifying situations,
to the sultan, and
the ultimate aim
is that he should see
the error of his ways,
that he should see that there
were other ways of responding
to adultery than cutting
off the heads of all women.
So the story eventually
goes in a full arc
after 1,001 nights, to
the resolution whereby
he is a changed man.
Unfortunately, we
know from the world
that this has not happened.
Because when I was
reading the Arabian Nights
very intensively, it was the
beginning of the war in Syria.
And it was clear--
Assad kept coming up in my mind
as I read about this sultan who
was so extreme and violent.
And of course we know
that however many stories
we tell Assad, he
doesn't change his views.
So there is a problem.
But the second quotation
I wanted to mention to you
was Hannah Arendt, who wrote
in her excellent book, called
"Human Condition After
the Second World War,"
stories are a form of action,
the way we insert ourselves
into the human world.
And that-- as she went on--
the ability to
produce stories is
the way we become historical.
She says, produce
stories, but actually, you
can modify that
to, retell stories.
The way we take our
traditions and refashion
them makes our history,
makes the history
in which we are living.
And third is from
Walter Benjamin,
in which he stresses that these
individual acts of telling
stories are part
of the community.
They're part of
the collectivity.
And he, too, writing at the
end of the second World War
said, every morning brings
us the news of the globe,
and yet we are poor
in noteworthy stories.
And he went on, calling for
more speculative fiction that
would build an experience
in this sort of mayhem
of the aftermath of the war.
Folk art and the world
view of the child
demand to be seen as
collectivist ways of thinking.
And I was very interested
that you have such an emphasis
on play in your reception
area, because it seems
to me that connects quite--
Walter Benjamin was very,
very interested in play,
and wrote wonderful
things-- wonderful stories
for the radio for children.
And there is a connection there.
There is something
about the fairy tale
that is connected to the idea
of the imagination at play.
You're not tied to the objective
representation of reality.
You are speculative,
and you move freely
within this Esperanto
of fantasy in order
to build possible
alternative worlds.
OK, so "The Arabian
Nights" were disseminated
throughout the world in
hundreds of different versions
and variations, in both
English and French, and then
finally in Arabic.
It came into print in
Arabic in the 19th century.
So these are just [INAUDIBLE]
So there are the Grimm brothers.
They were the major collectors
of the other famous stories
that you know--
"Hansel and Gretel"--
anyway, we'll
look at them on the way out.
And they've dominated the scene.
But they did themselves
invoke female sources.
And when they came
into English--
so this is one of their
principal sources, a very,
very nice portrait by
the younger brother,
who didn't collect stories,
but was an artist--
of one of their principal
sources of fairy tales.
She knew very many of them.
Then when they were translated
into English, interestingly,
the English were anxious
about the cruelty.
So George Cruikshank, who was
a cartoonist and a campaigner,
actually, he was a
teetotaler, and so
when he re-translated
"Cinderella" in the Grimm
version, he had the
fountains at the wedding flow
with lemonade because
he wanted to make sure
that he was campaigning
against drunkenness in England.
But the emphasis in England
tried to shift it to comedy,
and you can see that
in this frontispiece.
The stories become jollier, and
more cheerful, and more absurd.
There's a desire
to pull away, which
has now come back, actually.
We now are back with
cruelty and violence.
People now acknowledge
strongly that that's
a very intrinsic part of
the fairy tale tradition.
The Cinderella that the Grimm
brothers collected is the one
where these ugly sisters'
cut off their heels,
and cut off their toes to
fit into the glass slipper.
And the prince realizes that
it's not the right bride
because there's
blood in the shoe.
It was very bloody.
And then, at the end,
the enchanted birds
peck out the eyes of the
sisters at the wedding--
Cinderella's wedding.
So they're both
maimed in their feet,
and blinded in their eyes.
(FACETIOUSLY) Very happy ending.
Very happy ending.
That has an interesting
little coda,
which is that they collected it
from the poor house in Marburg.
They were students in Marburg.
They began when they were very
young, collecting stories.
So they were students
at Marburg University,
and they heard that
there was a old woman
in the alms house, i.e.
in the poor house, who
knew a lot of stories.
And they asked to see her,
and to collect her stories,
and she didn't want to see them.
She refused.
So they paid the daughter
of the alms house director.
They gave her a little--
she was a little girl--
and asked her to go in, and
ask her to tell you a story,
and then you come out
and tell it to us,
and we'll write it down.
And the little girl did this.
And this is the
Cinderella she told.
And my feeling, my
interpretation of this,
is that the old woman
in the alms house
was passing on a female secret,
a very, very cruel version
of revenge amongst women.
And she didn't want the fine
gentlemen from the University
to know this kind of story.
It was a kind of
promise between women,
between generations of women,
that if you're badly treated,
you will escape.
And there will be a
wonderful revenge.
So it's an interesting example.
We didn't have many actual
scenes of that kind.
We don't know the
exact circumstances
of a lot of collecting.
And there's a lot of, of
course, massaging and changing
of the sources.
Even the Grimms pretended to
be setting it down verbatim,
but they couldn't.
They kept rewriting them,
because we have the drafts.
OK.
So there are many
definitions of fairy tales
that I can't go into here.
One of them is obviously the
presence of the supernatural.
That's a very important and
defining characteristic:
the enchantment of
the supernatural.
But there is a way in which
the supernatural is there
because reality can't be
tolerated, can't be born.
It is so unbearable.
Because the real hear of fairy
tale content is suffering.
It's a domain of pain.
And then every kind of human
aberration, crime, ordeal
are represented.
In spite of their supernatural
clothing, the enchantments,
their improbabilities,
they're actually
very close to real experience.
So for example,
this "Donkeyskin"--
I don't know if
any of you know it.
It's the one that's least
reproduced from Perrault's
collection because it's
about father-daughter incest.
And so in the story,
her father wants
to marry her after the
death of her mother,
because she looks
just like her mother,
and he's promised never to
marry again unless somebody
was as good as her mother.
So he asks to marry her.
She doesn't want to
marry her father,
and there's a lot of
magic to help her.
And part of the magic
is that she's given
a kind of magic donkey skin.
And this is her
in that disguise.
And then she takes a job as
a scullion in the kitchen.
She flees her father.
And interestingly, the story--
and it's rather lightheartedly
written by Perrault--
the story upholds the
girl against her father.
So here you have a story
of filial disobedience.
She refuses to marry her
father as he asks her to do.
But the story is covertly--
not covertly-- is
overtly upholding.
The story is on her side.
It is the wrong
thing for him to ask.
So this story, if you
imagine it being passed on,
is a way in which the
customs of the tribe
are being communicated
without actually
telling a story of child abuse.
I mean, it's very fanciful.
It feels like-- it's once
upon a time, far away,
in a great palace,
a king, et cetera.
So it sort of distanced by the
act of literary imagination,
but at the same time it carries
this seed, a very important
seed.
I mean, if you could imagine
how different it would
be if the child abuse stories
were told in this way,
we would understand.
I mean, it's in a
way a lack of them
that has caused some
of the difficulties
that we're experiencing today.
Children, if they
were brought up
with lots of fairy tales about
Harvey Weinstein in disguise
as a king, they would have
been more of an understanding,
instead of being constantly
promoted by the tabloids
into being beautiful for,
to please, and so forth.
So this is a great lost art.
I mean, it's coming back.
It's coming back.
But it's to some extent a
lost art of communication.
It was made into a wonderful
film in 1970, by Jacques Demy,
with Catherine
Deneuve in the role.
And I wanted to put this
in, not only to remind you
of what a great film this is,
but also that film is probably
one of the ways that most of you
have encountered fairy tales.
It's the chief channel
of communication,
even for children.
They've not really read fairy
tales so much as seeing them.
Because of this being this
language of Esperanto,
this Esperanto language,
the big blockbuster studios
love it, because it can actually
communicate across cultures.
OK, so "Cinderella"
is about stepmothers.
The same stepmother role
is, in some languages,
the same as the mother-in-law--
the same word.
So belle-mere in French means
stepmother and mother-in-law.
That's quite common
in several societies.
So the situation
that Cinderella is
in, or being turned into
sort of skivvy, and abused,
and not given food--
very, very widespread
in many, many cultures.
Either the unwanted child
of an earlier marriage,
or the daughter-in-law
is turned into a servant.
So again, in the heart of this
fanciful tale of enchantment
lies a very true representation.
We're very imprinted
by the film tradition.
And I'm sure many of you--
probably all of you
have seen "Snow White."
I mean, it's incredibly
early, I think 1937.
I mean, he used the
medium early on.
And here, there's another catch.
There's a catch, which is that
this evil stepmother figure--
and perhaps you
can ask me about it
later, because I
won't linger now--
has become an archetype.
And here the reality
flips over in the sense
that a lot of stepmothers
today, of whom there
are very many, because
of easier divorce,
are really very
well-meaning, and long to be
loved by their stepchildren,
and don't maltreat them at all.
But the children
have all seen Disney.
And so there you have
the reflection of reality
in the stories from
a different era
impinging and passing
on, reflecting
on the reality of
experience in the present
with a dangerous effect.
And this means that the
fairy tales need constantly
to be rewritten and reworked.
"Maleficent," the "Sleeping
Beauty" that was recently done,
did a very interesting
reworking, which
we can talk about again later.
This was a superb "Snow White,"
which took on Disney directly.
It didn't do anything
kind of glib like reverse
the stepmother figure,
but it made "Snow White"
herself so interesting, and so
appealing, and so beautiful.
But it didn't have
a happy ending.
The film does not
have a happy ending.
So it's an example of how the
new reworkings and recreations
of classic fairy tales actually
often edge them into myth,
and edge them into tragedy.
"Hansel and Gretel,"
probably one
of the most famous
stories in the world,
is about child abandonment
due to starvation.
And that is a very,
very common predicament,
not only in the past.
Quite a lot of the refugees
who are arriving in Europe
are exactly in that situation.
It's not exactly infanticide.
In the story it says that
we will leave them to die.
But actually what happened
in the early modern period,
and probably before that,
and is happening now
in some of the war torn
areas, is that families
are saying, leave.
We're going to leave.
We're going to put
you on the boat.
You've probably read many
of these refugee stories.
We take you to the frontier.
You're nine years old.
We'll take you to the frontier.
We're going to leave you
there, because they will come,
and they will help you.
So there's this sort of modern
version of infanticide, which
is sending children to
a place where they might
be safer, and have
something to eat,
and have some which they don't
have in the place they are.
These are wonderful,
wonderful illustrations
that David Hockney did
with the children being
cooked for supper--
again, aspect of famine, famine
being one of the dominant spurs
to the sufferings
reflected in fairy tales.
Angela Carter once said
a very famous thing.
She said, the definition
of a fairy tail
is a story in which one
king goes to another king
to borrow a cup of sugar.
Famine-- only the
kings have sugar.
Only some kings have sugar.
So here he's being
mischievous with Rapunzel.
Rapunzel is a story
about a childless woman
who takes the new baby of the
couple who live next door.
And again, this is
actually a story
which I was inspired to write
a short story from the point
of view of the witch,
because it seemed to me
that it was very much about
childlessness and adoption.
She adopts Rapunzel,
and then she
wants to keep her really safe.
And then the prince comes by--
and you probably know the
story-- and climbs up her hair.
And then one day she
says to the old witch who
looks after her,
she says, you know,
why are my clothes
getting a little tight?
And the old witch, you
know, loses her temper,
realizes that someone
has been getting in,
and that Rapunzel
is having a baby.
And she beats and abuses
her, and cuts off her hair.
That of course was cleaned up.
Originally it was--
the Grimms couldn't
bear the fact that
Rapunzel was pregnant,
so they just had her say
something completely different,
which makes nonsense
of the story.
But the story is
about over-protection
of a woman who didn't have a
child, and has adopted a child.
And that seemed to
me to be incredibly
recognizable as a
contemporary experience.
So that's one of the images.
Rackham.
We had a fantastic tradition of
illustrators in this country,
including Arthur Rackham.
Walter Crane, another one.
The "Beauty and the
Beast" corpus of stories,
which comes down from "Cupid
and Psyche" pretty directly,
is the vehicle of
an enormous number
of explorations of the state
of marriage to a brute.
So in the hope that's held
out in "Beauty and the Beast"
is that with love
and time, the brute
will turn into a
wonderful, lovable husband.
The story as we know best of
all, which is this version,
was written by a governess
here in England, in French--
she was a French governess--
for her charges who were
all in arranged marriages.
So it's the story that comes
out of the arranged marriage,
in which you will
find the stranger who
you will have to
marry, and you must
trust that all will be well.
But of course some versions,
it's not always well.
And that's like "Bluebeard.".
"Bluebeard" is
another classic story
that looks at the inside
of an abusive marriage.
"The Arabian Nights" opens
with a very interesting example
of a storyteller thinking
about conditions in the world.
So the two kings we see
off hidden in the tree,
and have both found
their wives supposedly
cavorting with slaves, and
having sex with them in a very
raunchy and extreme fashion.
The book is quite explicit--
not for children,
but the original.
And so they both decide
the world is not for them.
They're disgusted.
They kill both their
wives, and then
they decide the world
is not for them,
and they go wandering
across the world.
And they come across--
out of the sea
comes a vast jinn.
And on his head, he's
carrying a glass casket
in which there is the body
of a beautiful young girl--
a naked body of a
beautiful young girl.
And she again, it turns out,
has been abducted on her wedding
night.
It's interesting
these motifs recur.
And also, you will notice the
glass box, which of course gets
into "Snow White."
So this glass coffin,
which she is still alive,
he lets her out, and the kings
climb a tree to hide from it.
They're scared of this jinn.
And the jinn falls asleep.
And when he's asleep,
she solicits the kings.
She's noticed them in the tree,
and she solicits the kings,
and beckons them down, and
then orders them to make
love to her.
And they say no, no, no.
Absolutely, we're not
that kind of person.
And she insists.
She says, if you
don't, I will murder--
I will raise the jinn.
I will wake him up,
and he will kill you.
So they agree very reluctantly.
And then after they've
both done the evil deed,
she takes out of her
clothes a string of rings.
And she demands that they give
her a ring as a pledge of her,
of what's just happened.
And they say, no, they won't.
And she says, well,
I'll wake up the jinn.
So they give her the rings.
And when she puts
them on the string,
in the English version,
that makes her 98
rings so far into 100,
and in the Arabic version,
she's got 365.
So that was censored in
the English translation.
It was reduced.
So interestingly, one of
the scholars of this story--
the obvious, sort of the
surface of the story,
is rather misogynist.
You know, here's this
lascivious a woman
who demands sex, and
is taking this revenge,
and she's sort of
uncontrollable.
She fulfills in the story
all the worst imaginings
of the two kings, who seen
their adulterous wives.
They now say, well, all
women are like that.
So they go back
home, and that's when
they start killing all women.
So it's presented
as women's wiles.
But actually what's happened,
and what you can also
interpret the story,
that is telling you what
will happen if you do wrong.
If you take a woman
from her wedding,
and abduct her, and
keep her in a glass box,
women will not obey that.
They will not submit.
And this is a fundamental wrong,
and you will suffer for it.
There will be a consequence.
So while it's put in a
sort of fairy tale setting,
it has actually a kernel of
thinking about justice in it,
especially if you imagine the
beginning of the story in which
we're going to hear
many, many, many stories,
and which at the end,
the King will realize
that he has come to
the false conclusions,
and he must mend his ways.
All right.
One of the other important
aspects of fairy tales
that I have become
increasingly interested in
is their portability.
They seem to transcend
difficulties of translation.
This is a very, very
mysterious process.
I mean, there are trade routes,
there are traveling scholars,
there are traveling
missionaries,
there are traveling
voices that possibly
translate these stories.
But at the same time, it
seems more fundamental
than that, in that the
sort of human desire
to make stories, and
transmit them, and hear them,
overcomes cultural barriers
in a very, very, very
remarkable way.
So we have stories like
"The Epic of Gilgamesh,"
which is probably the earliest
extent imaginative piece
of literature we have.
It written down in 800 BC,
but it's much, much older
in actual creation.
And many, many of its elements--
it's a fantastic book,
which Alice was telling me
she read when she was studying.
It's a fantastic, and exciting,
and wonderful, wonderful poem
full of deep human
scenes of loss, and love,
and exploration, and power--
everything.
It's elements--
it was only found
in the mid-19th century in
the desert in the library
of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh.
So it actually was
only read then.
So it's like a modern book.
For 2000 years, it wasn't read.
It burst on the scene,
and many things in it
were recognizable, because
the elements of the story
have traveled.
So for example,
there's one whole cycle
of stories within "The
Arabian Nights," which
is very close to Gilgamesh,
in which the hero goes down
to the bottom of the sea pick
the plant of immortality,
and many other aspects.
And why the Victorians
loved it was
that it contained the
story of the flood.
It contains the story of Noah.
He's got a different name,
but it's the same story.
And they thought-- because
they were Christians--
they thought, oh, this proves
the truth of the flood,
because we have
another source for it.
But actually, what it proves
is that stories circulate.
They pass.
This is a-- the British Museum
is full of these absolutely
wonderful miniature stories,
a wonderful form which I would
love to use myself,
in which you--
you roll this on wax.
So the story's incised into it,
and then you roll it on wax,
and you get the
frieze, like that.
The example of another
enormous body of fairy tales--
northern, Scandinavian--
this became--
"The Ring of the
Nibelungen," it's
sort of Icelandic
sagas, Norwegian Sagas,
became the Wagner,
"The Ring Cycle,"
a huge, living body of myth
that then gives us Tolkien.
Tolkien, as you know,
such an incredible success
as a film that New
Zealand has now
got its highest
proportion of GNP
comes from its CGI industries
that was driven by the fact
that the director decided to
film Tolkien in New Zealand.
So that's another
different sort of example
of the material effect of
fantasy and fairy tale.
Another very important crossing
point between east and west
was the Mediterranean,
and the island
of Sicily, which for a while
was under Arab rule, and then
changed to Norman
rule, the same Norman
family that conquered Britain.
And we have one collection--
this is another body of
tales that are proverbial,
which are animal fables.
So when you say, one swallow
never makes a summer,
or, a dog in the manger, or many
other proverbial phrases that
use animals as they
reflect humans,
they all come from
Aesop's Fables,
and Aesop's Fables have an
earlier version in India,
and they get into this
Arabic book written in Sicily
in the 12th century, where
he expresses it as being
between women telling stories.
And he makes variations.
They're not the same
as the Indian stories,
nor are they the same
as Aesop's Fables.
But they have jackals, and
lions, and snakes, donkeys--
all that vast cast
of animal characters
that then gets into "The
Lion King," and into much
of popular literature.
This is the ballad
that I played you.
So that's-- because we
played it at the beginning.
And Angela Carter does
a variation on that.
When I was teaching
fairy tales, my students
all wanted to know
about Angela Carter.
I don't know if you
want to know about her,
but her wonderful
story, "The Erl King"
in "The Bloody Chamber" is
based on the story of the two
sisters.
And the Erl King,
in her version--
she's put the stories together--
the Erl King in her version
turns all his victims
into singing birds,
and then she has
to rescue them, the narrator.
All right.
So this is the coda.
This idea of stories as
the place you dwell--
the place that you
create where you dwell,
the way you furnish
your imagination
and use it to
apprehend and engage
with the world
through the narratives
that you have a
structure, and that this
could form a sanctuary.
There was one very nice example
of it in this man's book.
He became a very prominent
literary critic in Germany,
but he was in the ghetto
in Warsaw as a young man,
and he'd just got married.
And he and his wife fled--
managed to get out of the
ghetto before the massacres.
And they were hidden by
two Protestant Germans
in their cellar.
The Protestants
were out of work.
It was very bad times.
There was very little
to eat during the war.
But they didn't
shelter the two Jews
for reasons of benevolence.
They sheltered them
because they enslaved them,
and they made them
roll cigarettes
for the contraband
traffic in cigarettes.
So they were in the
dark in the cellar,
and very much at the mercy of--
very frightened that at any
moment they would be denounced,
that it would not in the
end be worth the while
of their shelterers to
keep them and feed them
in return for what they
got for their cigarettes.
But one day, the
woman came down,
and she said, I'm so
bored, I could scream.
And this man in his
20s, Marcel, decided
that he would tell her a story.
And he ransacked his mind for
everything he'd ever read,
every film he'd ever
seen, every opera plot
he'd ever heard about, every
sort of nursery rhyme--
absolutely everything.
And the atmosphere
completely changed.
They became very dependent
on hearing more stories.
And then, by the end of the
war, they were not denounced.
The end of the war came
amid great hardship.
And though they were not
exactly sort of best of friends,
they were definitely
on terms that
were different from the
terms that the Germans
and their Jewish victims
had been on before he
told them the plot of Aida.
It was this most extraordinary
modern example of--
I think he must have
been very good at it,
because it's not always--
and he must have been very
good at remembering, too.
So I think that the concept
of sanctuary was a legal--
Alice is a lawyer.
I don't know if she
knows about the legal.
For 1,000 years,
there was the concept
of sanctuary in this country
until Henry VIII abolished it.
You could establish a place
that was a safe place.
It was not an armed place.
It had no fence or lock.
It was simply a
symbolic place that was
created by the decree of words.
So the place was designated by
custom, tradition, and language
as the sanctuary.
So this is an example
that still exists.
And you will notice that it
has on it this monstrous face.
And they frequently, sanctuary
places such as still survive--
that's another one that
doesn't have a monster--
but they often have-- the door
knockers of sanctuary buildings
have a monstrous face on them.
And I think the connection-- so
this is another one in Norwich,
and this is a famous
one in Durham.
And I think the connection
is that it connects
to the fundamental recognition
that the patent words have
what's technically called
performative power.
They will institute.
They can institute
something like a safe place.
And I think that
presents an analogy
for what stories can do.
They can demarcate
a space in which
you are free to do certain
things, like imagine
delicious revenges or
reparation, or redress.
But you are still
held safely within it.
It's not going to
endanger you, this speech.
The speech of imagination
is not quite the same
as direct communication.
And the other thing is
that words have efficacy
to institute reality.
This is something--
obviously, this
is partly magical
thinking, and a lot
of people dissent from it.
But it's something
that I have pretty much
come to acknowledge,
and accept, and even
support throughout
my work, which
began with looking at religious
symbols, which certainly have
this power.
And I'm now looking at
secular storytelling.
So I started-- this is the end--
I started a project in
Sicily with the refugees
there, because Sicily
is this crossing point.
Right here is a map
from the 17th century,
showing Sicily right in the
middle of the Mediterranean.
They all arrive there,
600,000 in the last two years.
And one of the problems of the--
you know, we were talking about
traveling stories, and how
they leap cultural barriers.
But actually, how do you
tell a story to someone
who doesn't know your language?
So we wanted to find a
way of creating stories
from imagination--
not their own stories,
not their testimony,
a very different kind
of story: stories
they might remember
themselves from their culture,
stories they want to
invent themselves now,
and how are we going to do it?
And of course, Sicily has
a tremendous tradition
of puppetry.
And so there are many
languages beyond language
that are communicative.
So there is puppetry, there's
music, there's gestural dance.
And so we've--
working with puppets.
This is the traditional
puppet theater in Palermo.
Here they are
learning the puppets.
They took to it--
they really loved it.
We do dancing-- ask them how
they dance in their countries.
We do group-- this
is sort of word game.
As it comes around
to you-- the ball--
as you throw the ball
and make this web,
you say a word, either
as part of a story, or--
you give a structure
ahead of time.
And that works also rather well.
And so here's a group
session on sound--
making sounds.
And this is part of
the Gilgamesh workshop.
So here they're making the
sounds of the City of Uruk
as a sort of chorus.
So they did bird songs, and
you know, animal sounds,
and not exactly traffic
sounds, because there
wouldn't have been so
much traffic in Uruk then.
And here is, I think, Gilgamesh.
That's his visor.
Yes, that's the sort of
beginning of the Gilgamesh
puppet.
And here they are
doing an animation.
We took an animator with us,
and they really loved this.
This is to do animation
on your phone,
and they really really
liked doing that.
Here are three of
the characters.
If you know the epic, that's
Siduri, the innkeeper,
the tavern keeper, on the right.
I think probably
Enkidu in the middle.
That's the plant of immortality.
We made it with balloons.
And here's another Gilgamesh,
a different Gilgamesh.
And we got a very good writeup
in the local paper which
we were very pleased with.
So this was an idea of taking--
really conforming to my
ideas about the transmission
and the freedom of the
language of stories,
and trying to adapt
it to our present day
crisis of young people
arriving, and hoping
to make a better world for
themselves, and for us, too.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER: If you have a question
and want to put your hand,
I'll come to you with a mic.
And I'll start us
off with a question.
You talked about the
"Cinderella" story,
and how that was given to
a young girl by a woman.
So obviously we receive these
stories quite differently now.
We see them en masse on film.
How does that change
the way we receive
the story when we're not getting
it woman to woman or father
to son?
MARINA WARNER:
Well, there has been
a return, actually,
to women's presence
in the fairy tale transmission.
I mean, "Maleficent" was
produced by Angelina Jolie,
and the script is, I think,
by Linda Woolverton, who did
"Beauty and the Beast" as well.
So there's been a recognition
within the industry
that actually--
and it's not just for reasons
of the are women coming up.
It's actually women being
identified with that genre,
and wishing to rewrite
it themselves in order
to transform it.
I mean, I was pleased that I
have some men in the audience,
because normally when I
speak about fairy tales,
it's almost always women.
And there's a very strong
feeling for the relationship
of fairy tales and women.
And it's partly that it's one
of the main literary bodies
of work in which women
feature prominently.
I mean, the characters--
the prince character
is often not
very colorful, and rather dim.
So there's more interest in
the women's characters, even
the malignant women.
There's a real-- in the same
way as in Greek myths, too.
Women are attracted
to the Greek myths,
because they're full of women,
full of different scenarios
around women.
I mean, Medea is a great
favorite with women directors
and actors.
So but the other aspect is sort
of in a sense less positive,
and it's also a
problem of the web,
and that is that there's
a sort of homogenization,
because you're not speaking
in particular to a group.
You're speaking more widely.
So you need to please
kind of too many people,
or to please a particular
group without actually
troubling them.
So the mass audience creates
a difference of specificity.
There is a
"Cinderella" variant--
a "Donkeyskin" variant, which
actually shows this quite
clearly, which is it was
collected by an anthropologist
from a very poor part
of Spain, Extremadura.
And in the "Donkeyskin" version,
she doesn't wear a donkey skin.
She wears a pelican skin.
And he couldn't understand
why this heroine is disguised
as a Pelican, because
there are absolutely
no pelicans in Spain.
And then when he went
there to do his--
I mean, he realized that the
endemic illness in the area
was goiter.
So in this story, she is loved
in spite of being a donkey--
or wearing a smelly,
horrible, filthy, donkey skin.
The prince recognizes her true
beauty underneath her disguise.
And in Extremadura, this
pelican-disguised girl
is also recognized in the story
for her beauty and goodness
beneath her dark
pelican skin, which
of course is standing in
for the illness of goiter
in that particular area.
It wouldn't work if
you put it in a film,
because it wouldn't make
the same particular sense.
AUDIENCE: I think you began to
touch on it just now already,
but how do kind of
myths and legends--
are they seen as
separate to fairy tales,
or are they seen as sort of the
male power versions of the more
domestic fairy tale issues.
How do they interrelate?
MARINA WARNER: Yes, I mean,
one of the main differences--
there are obviously overlaps.
And as I said, I think,
there's a tendency now,
a trend that the fairytale
mode is becoming more mythical.
But one of the
main differences is
that the characters
in fairy tales
are humans with some magic.
They're not gods.
And the other is that while
there were some people
in different
cultures who believe
in some of the supernatural
elements in fairy tales,
on the whole, they are not
connected to official religion.
I mean that's a fairly--
sort of rule of thumb.
I mean, the jinn
are in the Quran,
so the jinn actually
should be believed,
whereas the fairies
are not in the Bible,
so we don't have to believe
in them according to doctrine.
But there have been
communities that
certainly believed in fairies,
and still do probably.
I mean, I think there
are quite a lot.
Like witches are
sort of coming back.
People believe in them.
So there are aspects that
are connected to real belief,
but on the whole, the fairy
tale is a space of unbelief.
It's a space of imagination.
You're not requested to
consent to its structures.
That's pretty different.
I mean, with Greek myths, we
don't consent to the Olympians
anymore, but they
did in the past.
AUDIENCE: If I
understood you right,
I think you said earlier
that we had for a period
lost the ability to
tell fairy tales,
or to create new fairy tales,
but that it was coming back.
I was just wondering
if you could tell us
why you thought that was.
MARINA WARNER: Well, it's
very complicated and difficult
to understand, because the
Romantics were very interested
in fairy tales.
I mean, the "Lyrical Ballads,"
Wordsworth and Coleridge,
contains poems they
wrote because they'd
collected some of the oral
traditions in Scotland and so
forth.
So if you think of a famous
poem like La Belle Dame
sans Merci, in which the
night is palely loitering,
and meets a fairy by
a lake who kisses him,
and takes him into her world.
I mean, this is a fairy tale.
So but at exactly the
same time, the fairy
tales began falling down
the ladder of esteem,
and became associated
with children.
It was partly an
effect of the market,
because there was a rise
in children who could read.
The rise of the bourgeoisie
in Victorian England
meant that more
children could read.
And there was a market, and some
of these beautiful books that
were made were made
were children--
elite children whose parents
could afford these nice books.
So but that put it
into a kind of niche.
And in that niche
was the romantic idea
that the imagination was
the property of the child.
When Wordsworth wrote, not
in entire forgetfulness,
and not in utter nakedness,
but trailing clouds of glory
do we come.
A child as a sort of
marvelous creature
full of connections to other
worlds and imagination.
But that made it childish.
And also, we were
very strongly then
sort of encouraged
or enjoined not
to yield to fantasy
and imagination,
that we, adults,
should be rational,
and we should be objective,
and we should assess evidence.
You, know all this
stuff about fairy
lands and things was
nonsense, and it was only
fit for children.
So it fell under a huge kind
of cloud of incomprehension,
because you don't have
to think of this as--
it's a way of thinking.
Thinking with the imagination
is a way of thinking.
It's not to be dismissed.
It's probably essential.
It's probably inevitable.
There's also essential.
Because you have
to model thought.
I mean, they've now discovered
with lots of cognitive studies
that the imagination is
not separate from reason
in the brain.
The same synapses fire
if I say to you, lady--
that is a wonderful line.
A unicorn sat under
a juniper tree.
If I say, a lady with a unicorn
sat under a juniper tree,
you bring it up in
your mind's eye.
And when you're doing that, it's
the same as if I say to you,
I met your mother last week.
Your mother comes up
in your mind's eye,
and you assemble it
with me in your mind,
but you're using
the same faculties.
The same place fires.
So thinking models thought
using imaginative powers.
You're looking--
AUDIENCE: I think that's
really interesting on--
so you think maybe the
invention of childhood
in the Georgian and
Victorian periods
compartmentalized
different kinds of stories
as belonging to different
kinds of imaginative domains.
But why then are fairy
tales coming back?
Is it something to do
with adults reclaiming
childhood for themselves?
MARINA WARNER: Well there
has been a lot of very, very
powerful work on play.
I mean, Winnicott,
wrote very powerfully
on the development of
children, and the capacity
to play in order for
them to become fully
achieved adults, has this has
been a cornerstone of Piaget,
of Winnicott, of Melanie Klein.
And I don't think people
have overturned that at all.
Now, Adam Phillips has written
about this very importantly.
I mean-- and I think, you
know, you have this ethos here,
because in order to think up the
projects that are new thinking,
it requires play.
You can't just stick to
what's already known.
So I think there's been a
recuperation, re-evaluation,
a trans-valuation of
fantasy and imagination.
They're slightly different,
but nevertheless,
the two contiguous, contingent.
But there are attendant dangers.
I mean, the people who
insist on objectivity
and so forth, they
have identified
a danger, which is we can't
live entirely in imagination.
What exactly needs to be tested?
I mean, just the
great task of our time
is to how to inspire people
to question what they imagine,
and what they think,
but not by using
only the yardstick of
objective verification,
because that will just trap
us in what we already know.
SPEAKER: Thank you very much.
We have to wrap up there.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
