A pocketsize book, Marina Warner's Once Upon a Time is much like the magical nut that, when cracked open in fairy tales, yields precious and timely gifts.
In nine compact chapters plus prologue and epilogue, Marina Warner addresses the questions posed in the book's inside jacket—“What is a fairy tale? Where do the stories come from? What do they try and communicate to us about morality, sexuality, and society?" She also thinks through other questions: what distinguishes fairy tales from myth, fantasy, and novels; how magical fictions relate to reality; and how fairy tales do not exist in one fixed medium. But the book, as a whole, is less about instruction and more about exploration. Warner conveys historical knowledge by taking readers on a journey to map the fairy tale's "web of routes" (xiii) and in the process leads us into the genre's story-house, which—being in the woods and made of human language—has dazzling rooms, "unhomely" (119) ones, and others still to be built. These are not my metaphors: the prologue immediately presents readers with "the prospect" (xiii) of mapping faerie territory; and the image of the story-house is first triggered by Su Blackwell's cover art, the eerie image of "The Woodcutter's Hut," a book sculpture. By the end of the prologue, Warner interpellates her readers as fellow explorers: "You have a sketch map and a rough guide; the lights are lit in the windows of that house in the deep forest ahead of us. We can begin to move in, listening out, eyes open, trying to find our bearings" (xxiv). That this "mov[ing] in" is not disassociated from "listening out" means Warner is attentive to and values how tales in history have established connections across cultural boundaries. She says so poetically: "fairy tales migrate on soft feet, for borders are invisible to them, no matter how ferociously they are policed by cultural purists" (xv).
Read in sequence, the chapters tell a condensed history of both fairy-tale genre and scholarship, and cumulatively they offer a multimedial picture of the genre. Individually, these chapters, however, maintain an exploratory--thematic or methodological--focus; they also feature specific fairy-tale tellers, collectors, writers, and artists. While in each chapter Warner conducts a conversation with a wide range of scholars, Italo Calvino and most persistently Angela Carter are her interlocutors throughout the book. Sixteen black-and-white illustrations take us far and wide in faerie lands to meet the Russian Vasilissa, Blake's fairies, the Arabian Nights' jinn, Paula Rego's "Secrets and Stories," and Pablo Burger's stepmother in Blancanieves. Warner verbally invites readers to revisit these images at different points of the journey, in a back-and-forth associative movement that breaks the linearity of reading. An intrepid and inspiring trailblazer in fairy-tale and cultural studies, Warner continues to be a spellbinding storyteller. Regrettably, here and there are small factual errors (French director Breillat's first name, Giuseppe Pitrè's location in Sicily, the identification of the male rescuer in the Grimms' "Little Red Cap" as the protagonist's father) that can mislead a newcomer to the study of fairy tale, and so for undergraduate teaching purposes I look forward to a reprint.
Among the most impressive chapters are "With a Touch of Her Wand: Magic & Metamorphosis," which discusses the magic of nature, metamorphosis, and words; and "Potato Soup: True Stories/Real Life," where the historical reality that girdles fairy tales is found not so much in extreme violence but in "daily sufferings, needs, and desires—and dangers, especially of dying young" (91). "In the Dock: Don't Bet on the Prince" is an animated and terse discussion of feminist readings, which Warner acknowledges have as a whole "transfigured the genre" (143). But what stands out to me even more is how she successfully places women's concerns with and uses of fairy tales center-stage throughout the volume, so that gendered historical experiences and interventions in the genre are presented as forces shaping fairy-tale history. It is not surprising, then, that along the way, Warner is explicit about rejecting a universalizing approach to fairy tale, choosing instead to foreground and historicize how cultural differences "produce different imaginary features for the population of fairytale settings" (2). That said, her chapter "On the Couch: House-Training the Id" is critical of psychological readings of fairy tales not simply because of their universalizing assumptions, but because "the impenetrability of destiny and the helplessness of humans in the grip of chance count among the sharpest messages of fairy tales, and the explanatory tools, psychoanalytical or other, blunt themselves on their mystery" (128).
This mystery, as I read her, is not religious or mythical; it is made of secrets for the purpose of survival, yet to be known experiences and possibilities, "the life force that runs through nature" (29), seductive pleasures, weirdness and horrors, and resilient hope. Warner asks whether one should trust the tale or the teller, and what that trust really amounts to in the face of reality (77). Early on in the book, she offers six—not three or seven—“defining characteristics" of the fairy tale. But as the title of that section, "The Thorny Hedge: Questions of Definition," warns us, these generic features are points of departure, not answers. In the end, she writes: "fairy tales are stories that try to find the truth and give us glimpses of greater things—this is the principle that underlies their growing presence in writing, art, cinema, dance, song" (178). Not so much a definition, this is an invitation, based on the fairy tale's long and various history, for twenty-first-century humans dwelling in dire times not to reject the genre as "easy solution" or "deliberate falsehood" (178), but engage with its wonder. Once Upon a Time is a magical nut that we'll do well to crack open more than once.
--------
[Review length: 958 words • Review posted on March 23, 2016]