Stranger Magic by Marina Warner

Author:Marina Warner [Marina Warner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

Nebuchadnezzar has acquired the pretty ways of the metamorphosed victims of the Arabian Nights, who in their animal form understand language and give speaking looks to their masters, like the gazelle-wife of ‘The First Old Man’, and the clever ape from ‘The Tale of the Second Dervish’.

The princess demands to be given the bull for a playfellow, but ‘Miss Endor’ refuses outright, and Mambres then confesses that with old age his powers are diminishing, so he recommends that the princess consult the serpent:

‘He is clever, he knows how to put things, and he has long been accustomed to taking a hand in ladies’ affairs.’ When the princess obeys, she remarks that his reputation has gone before him:

‘. . . you started with our common mother, whose name escapes me.’

The serpent answers:

‘People malign me. I gave her the best advice in the world . . . Is it not necessary to know both good and evil that we may do one and avoid the other? There is no doubt about it, I should have been thanked.’33

Voltaire’s fable issues a manifesto for the uses of knowledge, spoken by a fallen angel in the form of a talking snake. He is imitating the irrational flights of traditional storytelling, as found in the Arabian Nights, to show that credulity and myth flourished just as well at home. When Zadig the ingénu observer and hapless protagonist is replaced, three decades later, by the older alter ego of Mambres, magus and eunuch, Voltaire is taking up a similar position on the periphery from which he can challenge lazy thinking and prejudice, awaken idle minds, and shake received ideas. But in another respect, the old sorcerer of the Pharaohs aligns the philosopher with prohibited speech, with heresy and outsider status from which he can voice his outrageous dissidence – with a little help from the serpent.

‘The White Bull’ decisively unmasks the oriental magician, for he has provided the most liberating point of identification for the philosopher, a role in which he can comment freely, beyond the constraints of orthodoxy; the ultimate escape route from every church and every club.

Hugh Haughton explores the dynamics of drollery in his introduction to The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry: he is talking about nineteenth-century English children’s classics but what he writes throws light on Voltaire’s methods too: ‘This Victorian Nonsense Renaissance . . . forms part at any rate of the inspiring critique of seriousness generated by a culture with a huge investment in ideas of social and intellectual authority and a dedication to the ideal of moral earnestness – a critique played out in the children’s books of Lear and Carroll . . . [and] the elegantly subversive dialogues and plays of Oscar Wilde.’34

His comments apply equally to the earlier resistance of Enlightenment writers like Voltaire who adopted comic arabesque and silly nonsense to mount their deepest criticisms.

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