Fairy Tales: Arabian Nights Without THAT Word

The best part of The Arabian Nights: Their Best Known Tales, edited by Kate Doulgas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith, illustrations by Maxfield Parrish...

....is the introduction in which the editors agree that yes, one can be educated factually on customs and history from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia but...

beyond and above the knowledge of history and geography thus gained, there comes [with these tales] something finer and subtler as well as something more vital. [Although the tale's locations] can be found on a map, [they] live more truly in that enchanted realm that rises o'er 'the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn...The marvellous imaginativeness of the Tales produces an insensible rightness of mind and an increase of fancy-power, making one dream that behind them lies the new and unseen, the strange and unexpected--in fact, all the glamour of the unknown.

It is fantastic defense of fairy tales for their own sake, not for a moral lesson, carefully delineated sermon/theory, or appropriate messaging--or even, for that matter, for the sake of Victorian-swooning-personal-offense. The passage is a defense of fairy tales for themselves, for pleasure, for delight. 

Unfortunately, this argument must be made in every generation. The lecturing moralists with their theories and proper explanations and stern rebukes are always lurking to take over. In Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis writes, "After a lecture of my own I have been accompanied from Mill Lane to Magdalene by a young man protesting with real anguish and horror against my wounding, my vulgar, my irreverent suggestion that The Miller's Tale was written to make people laugh."

As the editor of The Arabian Nights: Their Best Known Tales states,

We have removed no genies nor magicians, however terrible; have cut out no base deed of Vizier nor noble deed of Sultan; have diminished the size of no roc's egg...

So there!  

Except, actually, they did remove stuff--specifically, the frame story of Scheherazade. 

Researchers previously claimed that The Arabian Nights was a literary production by eighteenth-century Europeans--however, recent research indicates that its roots are more multifaceted than chiding analysis allows for. Like with the Grimm Brothers, oral storytellers/contributors played a role. As Marina Warner points out in Fairy Tale: A Very Short Introduction, "The distinction between genuine folk tales and literary fairy tales is difficult to maintain" (41). No culture, despite the current pressure of surprisingly reactionary modern-day academic theorists, remains pure and isolated. Everything travels.   

Now, I'm going to mention THAT word. When I viewed the Hollywood film--Arabian Nights (1942) with Jon Hall and Maria Montez--I expected it to be "exotic."

It isn't. 

I expected, that is, something like the garden in The Secret Garden (2020) (I didn't like the movie--the garden is still fantastic) or Rivendell in any of Jackson's renderings or Bread & Tulips, the whole movie. 

That is, I expected something romantic, beautifully photographed alongside gorgeous music, like the end of 127 Hours. Or the cast-of-thousands' end of Moulin Rouge. 

Nope. The movie reminded me of detective mystery shows from the 1970s (with the exception of Columbo), the ones that invariably include at least one fist-fight. Time for Rockford or whomever to punch someone out. Ho hum. (At least, in Numb3rs, Colby kept getting dunked in water, which became a kind of running gag.)

The lecturing moralists would approve.

Is it truly better to have one's culture perceived as the equivalent of Buffalo, New York? Rather than as something unique to others and itself? 

I grew up in New York State. Buffalo is not a place to emulate. 

There have been other movies based on the tales in The Arabian Nights. Still, thank goodness for that introduction! 

Enter into this "treasure house of pleasant things," then, and make yourself at home in the golden palaces, the gem-studded caves, the bewildering gardens. Sit by its mysterious fountains, hear the plash of its gleaming cascades, unearth its magic lamps and talismans, behold its ensorcelled princes and princesses.

Why should the Grimm brothers have all the fun?

This movie impressively retains the

humor and varying backgrounds of

the tales.