another way of knowledge

Imaginative literature itself, in Warner’s view, finds its representative in Scheherazade, the muse of all great fantasy writing. Postponing death is one of the motives for metaphor, the desire to be different or elsewhere. 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. Shakespeare, as she knows, is the largest field of such enchantment, with Proust his worthiest modern descendant. 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.

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“It did not seem enough to invoke escapism as the reason for the popularity of ‘The Arabian Nights’ in the age of reason. Something more seemed to be at stake. Magic is not simply a matter of the occult or the esoteric, of astrology, Wicca and Satanism; it follows processes inherent to human consciousness and connected to constructive and imaginative thought. The faculties of imagination — dream, projection, fantasy — are bound up with the faculties of reasoning and essential to making the leap beyond the known into the unknown. At one pole (myth), magic is associated with poetic truth, at another (the history of science) with inquiry and speculation. It was bound up with understanding physical forces in nature and led to technical ingenuity and discoveries. Magical thinking structures the processes of imagination, and imagining something can and sometimes must precede the fact or the act; it has shaped many features of Western civilization. But its influence has been constantly disavowed since the Enlightenment and its action and effects consequently ­misunderstood.”

- Harold Bloom reviewing and quoting Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, in the New York Times. March 23