Marina Warner’s speech at the Award Ceremony

Marina Warner på talerstolen i Håkonshallen. Foto: Ole Kristian Olsen.
Marina Warner på talerstolen i Håkonshallen. Foto: Ole Kristian Olsen.

Your Royal Highness Crown Prince Haakon, Minister, representatives of the Holberg Prize, esteemed members of the Holberg Committee, my fellow laureate Rebecca Adler-Nissen, most beloved family and friends – those who are here and those who are far away – dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen.

The Holberg Prize is a most unexpected honour and I thank you for this generosity and recognition from the bottom of my heart.

Before I could read, I remember entering worlds that were vividly present to my mind’s eye, but not available to my bodily senses.

Yet they seemed so. From the terrace of my family’s flat in Gezira in Cairo, we could see the pyramids, and on holidays my parents would picnic at Giza and take me for a gentle donkey ride in the desert. The pyramid’s keyhole aperture, placed oddly high up the structure, opened, I was told, onto a passage deep into its core where the tomb chamber was concealed; the mental picture this conjured inspired in my childhood self-thrilling, yet terrified speculation, and I felt I had entered into this mysterious enclave because in my imaginings I could do so. Also, at that time I had a favourite doll, a small, stuffed, cloth fairy queen with stiffly wired gauze wings and a sparkly garland on her head; in one hand she had a wand with a star on its tip, but when I came back from the playground one afternoon, it had slipped from her stitched hand. I was distraught and made my nanny retrace our steps again and again to find it. This loss is one of my earliest memories: I feared that the other world that my doll had commanded with a wave of her wand was now forfeit.

Childish things, perhaps, to be put away, as St Paul writes; but in my work I have tried to understand the creations of imagination and to transvalue often despised areas of human activity. When I began reading, I discovered that through books – which became my passion – the limits of my immediate circumstances fell away: past, present and future exist in the time of story, and reading gives admittance to multiverses: I could go to ancient China, Africa, India, rise to the moon, or plunge 10,000 leagues under the sea; I could tumble down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, or through the centre of the earth with Nils Klim. Not all my imaginative journeys were fictive: as Rousseau recommended for Emile (he mistrusted the fervid fantasy of children), I also learned about natural wonders and human accomplishments from a children’s encyclopaedia and its tales of geysers spouting, glaciers’ slow motion, the life cycle of a butterfly, a sloth hanging upside down from the branch of a tree, rope bridges across chasms, the spinning jenny. I have still not seen many of these things in reality, and though I know from experience that the real thing is always denser and richer than the mind’s eye can manage to create, yet I – and you – have experienced them to a degree, not in fact but in thought – in phantasmata.

Every culture has created stories which respond to palpable and verifiable features of the world: stars, animals, the sea, fire and the infinite conjugations of human relations with one another and the world, and have projected them onto unverifiable horizons. Every culture has devised patterns of its own which provide settings, and sometimes dreamed up causes, which shape values, moral and aesthetic, and institute order through rewards and prohibitions and exceptions- ethical systems, with which one may or may not agree. When Columbus left the friar Ramon Pané on the island of Hispaniola, he told him to learn the languages of the inhabitants and then find out what they believed and ‘where they go after they are dead.’ One of the most elusive aspects of the puzzle I have struggled with has been the extent and location of the mythical itself. Where is it to be found? Where does it begin and end? Only in the religions of other people? Why not in faiths nearer home? In the epic history of a nation? In the crown jewels of the Queen of England?

 The concept of myth shifts and turns: one person’s history is another’s legend; one person’s credo is another’s stuff and nonsense. Roger Caillois, the French thinker, founded the Collège de sociologie in l937 to investigate the presence of the sacred in everyday life. His approach is important to my work, because the sacred is made manifest through rituals and symbols and images, which are infused by story, historical and legendary. In English, the word myth itself quickly slides from high to low, positive to negative: ‘Oh, it’s a myth’ is tantamount to dismissing something as a lie. But ideals are also often expressed by the work of the mythical imagination: postulating other worlds where arrangements are better has been one of the crucial and enjoyable tasks of invented stories. When I read the fantastic tale of Nils Klim’s descent into the hollow earth and his encounter with another planet inside our own, it gave me a delighted shock of recognition; Ludvig Holberg is writing in a lineage that I revel in, practising what Jorge Luis Borges calls, ‘reasoned imagination’ in order to mock folly and ignorance, and propose instead how things might be, suggesting how justice might be improved, how reasonable and right it would be for women to be treated equally to men, and prophetically imagining that another society, where trees were wise, articulate and mobile, might mistake him, a human being, for a strange monkey – and this over a hundred years before The Origin of Species! As Paul Ricoeur perceptively commented, implausible fables test the social structure in which they are circulating.

 When Natalie Zemon Davis was given this award five years ago, she paid tribute, as a historian, to the people about whom she has written, who did so much to make our world in the past. Natalie’s work has taught me a great deal and I revere her example, so it is an immense and astonishing privilege for me to be following in her footsteps. The invisible company who have made it possible for me to stand here before you includes not only scholars, teachers, editors, colleagues, readers, and friends – real figures from my individual life and our collective lives – but many subjects who have never existed in reality, but only in art, made by imagination: as I am here now in Scandinavia, they include Hamlet and Gertrude and Ophelia and Polonius; Aladdin, a figure of natural knowledge in the play by Adam Oehlenschlager. Then there is The Little Mermaid, and Babette of the wonderful feast and Athena the giantess ad dreamed up by Karen Blixen’s imagination, and, for me, one of my most favourite myths, the story of Baldur the beautiful, killed through the cunning malice of Loki by his blind brother who loved him.

 Terence Cave, the literary scholar and someone who has been very important to my work, has recently written, ‘Human cognition is alert, attentive, and responsive. Above all, it is imaginative: it can think beyond the constraints of immediate experience, do strange things with words, conjure up futures and histories of all kinds, bring to life people who never existed and invent for them plausible stories and environments. Despite the tangible evidence that this is so, the word ‘cognition’ has traditionally been used to refer to the rational knowledge-seeking processes of the mind as opposed to other modes of engagement with the world.’

Literature and art are preeminent among these modes of engagement, and all my life I have inquired into the effects of ideas as carried by narrative. The relationship between imagination and thinking, the perceived distinction between fantasy and reason have been the central puzzles that I have struggled with and continue to do so. How do the products of the imagination interact with verifiable reality? Do the experiences that words shape into stories then shape experience in turn? How and why does picturing something – an angel, the Minotaur, the interior of a giant tomb – provoke feelings (shivers, thrills) – that differ from the sensations that the experience itself would inspire?

As the poet Michael Symmons Roberts writes, ‘You are on a mission to discover / Why mermaids still swim in our dreams.’

And then, what about irrationality, superstition, credulity, ideological abuses, fatalism, received ideas, prejudice? What do the stories convey? And what they can be made to mean?

That childhood encyclopaedia of mine would be riddled with errors by now, according to the state of knowledge today and changing values, especially in relation to gender, colonial history and religious tolerance. The other day I took down a much loved old story book from my library to give to my grandson and found out – just in time – that it was filled with unspeakable racism. While my work has wished to engage with mythic narratives as fundamental to human mental activity and to culture, I have also wanted to remain alert to the abuses of enchantment – political propaganda, totalitarian systems, the exploitation of credulity by prophets and churches and ideologues, and the dream factory’s social engineering, in fairytale films, for example.

 My mother was Italian and a Catholic, and I was brought up in her faith, the faith that builds community and fellow feeling from a foundational story, or rather from a book of stories, augmented with myriad vivid saints’ lives, and all kinds of meditative and liturgical practices that involve more stories: the mysteries of the life of Mary as conjured by the rosary and the prayers – the Stations of the Cross – picturing the Passion of Jesus on the Via Dolorosa. In an early study of mine, about the cult of the Virgin Mary, I inquired into the interactions between the lives and destinies of women brought up to model themselves, as I had been, on this ideal of femininity: back in the Seventies, the research for that book revealed to me the importance of historical and social conditions in the evolution of a myth and its instrumentalisation. I have tried ever since to keep in view these crosscurrents: a work of literature bears meaning in relation to the times and circumstances of its making – but also of its reception.

 Feminist concerns run through all my writing, alongside an interest in the common ground: vernacular, often unauthored forms besides fairy tales and myths – ballads, proverbs, entertainments, advertisements – form an inexhaustible archive. Exploring how the Arabian Nights, an astonishing exuberant cycle of tales – comic, tragic, magical and down-to-earth – began to circulate in Europe and cross-fertilise our culture could help, I hoped, redraw the contours of the map that has been marked by stories of conflict and hatred and mutual contempt. While holy warriors were busy buffing up their weapons, artists and artisans were gossiping with one another about velvet, glass, gilding, bridges, tulips, inks, metallurgy, navigation, astronomy – and above all, exchanging stories and ways of telling them. From my point of view, the idea that the imagination can save your life – Scheherazade’s strategy – rightly places the emphasis on finding the myth to live by. The struggle for common ground, justice, co-existence without murderous strife needs words – not the single scripts of the fundamentalists of all kinds, but the complex, patterned, nuanced and yet no less enthralling literature made by anonymous voices in the past and authors today.

 In l952, during the fiercest uprising against colonial interests in Egypt, the bookshop my father had opened in Cairo after the war was burned down, late in the afternoon of a day that saw most of the European – foreign – businesses and meeting places attacked. Visiting the charred remains of the bookshop a few days later with my father gave me a never to be forgotten insight into the intense conflicts that seethe around words and made clear to me – without my necessarily being able to express it then consciously – that I was willy-nilly part of a regime that not everyone consented to, and that books participated powerfully in those claims to authority and to the struggle for autonomy, that they were bearers of ideas, forms of expression, uses of language, and stood in a relation to power that needed to be examined. Manuel Castells, one of my esteemed predecessors on this platform, declared that ‘the fundamental power struggle is the battle for the construction of meaning in the minds of the people.’ In an era when the concept of hate speech has been defined in law, replacing in many ways the magical curses of past belief, I am committed to its counterpoise: to what Natalie Davis called ‘rituals of peace’, or I might term, the language of speaking fair. This does not mean that everything should be expressed sweetly or the stories told soft and nice and cuddly – far from it. But that the story-telling drive of the human mind can strive towards the good through what it imagines and how it imagines it.

I have tried to serve the life and energy of the imagination, and to follow the example of those who speak fair and true, and pursue peace and justice through acts of thinking and writing. I hope to contribute some of this most generous award you have given me to this principle, in relation to the many people today whose links to culture have been severed by our wars and the poverty and exile that follow. I wish I could express how overwhelmed I am and how grateful to those many friends and colleagues who have helped me along the way, and to the Holberg Committee and the Holberg Board for this extraordinary honour.

Professor Marina Warner

Holberg Prize Laureate 2015

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