In today's interesting fan theory: Knowing of the threat muggles posed to wizards and witches, Salazar Slytherin planned ahead and built a saferoom where the students and staff of Hogwarts could hide. This secret chamber even contained a guard animal to protect them. Getting to the saferoom was something he entrusted only to members of Slytherin, because any other wizard would have muggle relatives, and therefore could be compromised in a crisis situation.
Later, there was a falling out among the founders of Hogwarts, one so bad that even Godric Gryffindor and Salazar Slytherin parted ways, though they had been best of friends previously.
Over the centuries, bigots in Slytherin twisted the legends so that the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets came to be seen as a plan of Slytherin's to purge the impure and mudblooded from the wizarding community.
Canto IV begins as Dante awakens in the first of nine circles of hell.
There are no levels of hell mentioned in the Bible, which generally assumes hell to be a miserable place, if not a place of actual, eternal torment. The Greek word most commonly translated as hell in the New Testament is hades, which is more or less equivalent to the Hebrew sheol used in the Old Testament. The term refers to a more or less universal destination for the dead; good, bad or indifferent, everyone ends up here.
Whether Alighieri based his detailed soteriography of hell on ideas he inherited, or created it from scratch, I have no idea. The hell of “Inferno” is an inverted cone of nine concentric circles, gouged into the earth by the impact of Satan when he was cast out of heaven. Overseen by devils who see that the damned are appropriately tormented for their sins, each circle is marked by the type of sin that defined the character of those imprisoned there, with the sin worsening the deeper into hell you go.
Damnation in the First Circle isn't that bad, all things considered; actually, eternal separation from God is easier for those imprisoned here than for the undecideds whom Dante saw chasing the banner in Canto III.
That's because the First Circle is home to the righteous pagans and unbaptized infants, people who would have believed in God if they had been given the chance. In their commentary novel “Inferno,” Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle remark that this is the saddest circle of all because the absence of torment allows those imprisoned here to maintain an illusion of contentment.
It's here that we see the first actual example of any sort of biblical teaching about hell. Dante, hearing the woe-begotten sighs of those confined to the First Circle, asks his guide if any have ever left this circle. Those whom Virgil names are a brief Who's Who of personalities of the Tanakh, such as Adam, Noah, Abraham and David.
Church teaching is that the Old Testament saints, some of whom Virgil names, waited in Limbo until the coming of Christ, whom the Apostle Paul wrote descended into hell (Greek hades) and freed those imprisoned there.
But it wouldn't be much fun to have Limbo empty save for the souls of unbaptized infants, so Alighieri fills the First Circle of hell, many unnamed souls packed so thick that he compares them to a wood, until he comes to a castle that houses a laundry list of exalted ancients. On the way there, he is greeted by a group of ancient poets who (naturally) hail Virgil as their chief.
The castle is an interesting thing. Dante notes that it has seven walls circling it, each with a gate that leads inward, and at the center is a meadow filled with the somber, quiet shades of the most righteous. This probably is the Elysian Fields, where Virgil claimed in “The Aeneid” is where the virtuous dead reside, which makes his pre-eminence among the dead here ironically appropriate.
The dead whom Dante names here are an interesting mix. He begins with heroes, mixing mythological figures like Hector and Aeneas, with historical figures like Caesar and Brutus -- not the Brutus who killed Julius Caesar, but the Brutus who liberated Rome from the Tarquins.
Surprisingly, at least to me, he also includes here Saladin, a Muslim leader who fought the Crusaders during the Middle Ages, and who was so well known for his compassion and dignity that there were legends that he actually was a secret Christian. (According to one story, when Richard Lionheart became ill, Saladin not only refused to press an advantage against him, he sent supplies and medical help to his ailing foe.)
Following the warlike souls, Dante notes the philosophers: Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and others who are noted for laying the foundations of mathematic and scientific disciplines, like Euclid and Ptolemy, and Galen the physician, and a few other classic names like Cicero and Seneca and the mythical singer Orpheus.
We are told that these people are in Limbo because they were great thinkers whose name and fame remained until Dante's time. As a consequence for this, God was inclined to be merciful and spared them any punishment beyond the oblique sadness that permeates the First Circle. And that is telling about Alighieri.
While a lot of the sins depicted in his hell get a poetic comeuppance in their punishment, it seems he's only too willing to make exceptions for those he likes and approves of, since, like the rest of us, he supposes that God must feel the same way that he does. Thus the damned souls are damned for the actions that he believes are worthy of damnation, and those who are granted respite or a commuted sentence get it because he believes they should.
If that's revealing about Dante, it's revealing about all of us who are quick to pronounce God's judgment on others. Too often, it's not God's judgment that we are pronouncing, but our own, and the presumption we have in ascribing to God our own petty biases and hatred should chill us to the bone.
After he beholds all those magnificent souls in the castle of the First Circle, Dante takes his leave of the First Circle and, with Virgil as his guide, follows the path to a region where nothing shines.
The third canto contains what the most recognizable line in "The Divine Comedy," and possibly one of the best-known lines in Western literature. It is the sign above the entrance to hell: "Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here."
That line encapsulates the miserific vision of hell: no hope, no escape, just unrelenting torment, day after day, year after year, until even the mountains have been worn down to grains of sand, and even then, there is no relief. The finality of such a sentence is one of the reasons I don't particularly care for the doctrine of hell.
As avoidable a fate as it may be to those who set the doctrines, an eternity of searing torment is still too much, too late. The torments of Dante's hell offer no redemption to those incarcerated there, as the sufferings of this life may; nor is there an escape, as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle provide in their own "Inferno" novel.
And yet readers have returned to "The Divine Comedy" for centuries, despite objections to the severity of hell.
A lot of the reason for the poem's appeal begins to come clear in this very canto. Alighieri uses some apocalyptic imagery in Canto I, placing savage animals in Dante's path that commentators see as representing both political states and worldly vices; and Canto II saw garden-variety mysticism in the intercession Beatrice makes on Dante's account to rescue him from the dark wood; but so far we have seen none of the turn-your-head sorts of images that we associate with "The Inferno." Until now.
Here at the entrance to the land of the dead, unearthly moans assault Dante's ears with a din that he renders in a manner both poignant and unsettling. The people uttering these tormented cries run through the vestibule of hell, stung by hornets and wasps as they chase a banner that flutters in the breeze, just beyond their reach. Their tears mix with blood as they fall to the ground, where they are consumed by worms.
And this picturesque torment is just what occurs in the vestibule to hell. The sin for which these people are being tormented is merely one of cowardice. Those punished could not bring themselves either to follow God nor to live lives of open sin. Virgil likens them to angels who neither fought with God when Satan rebelled, nor sided with the devil. The price of their cowardice is that neither heaven nor hell will admit them.
And in this procession of banner-chasers is where we find a cipher for one layer of interpretation of "The Inferno." Dante claims to recognize several members of the crowd, but comments only on one, whom he accuses of "cowardice in making the great refusal." Alighieri makes no further comment on this, but commentators apparently believe it was Pope Celestine V, who resigned the papal office five months later and gave it to Pope Boniface VIII..
From what I can tell, Celestine V's papcy is remarkable only for its brevity. The issue Alighieri has with Celestine seems to be solely that he relinquished his papal office. And to a man like Dante, who took a bullet not once, briefly, but over much of his adult life, for his views, that decision to reject the Seat of Peter must have been not only incomprehensible, but reprehensible as well.
And, after all, what is hell is all about? Setting aside our theological basis for hell, the people we most would like to see in hell are the people who are unlike us. A hundred years ago in the United States, native fundamentalists conflated dislike of hard-drinking Irish workers and Italian immigrants, with religious differences that Protestants have the Roman Catholic Church, and condemn them all.
Today it's not uncommon to hear conservative preachers calling down God's wrath upon pro-choices, gays and lesbians, and environmentalists; or for liberal Christians to get snarky and suggest that when things go wrong for the GOP, it's because conservatives aren't following God. Hell's a great place to send people who aren't like us, because they clearly deserve it. If they didn't, they would be more like us.
Canto III is also where we see Alighieri begin to draw more fully upon Greco-Roman mythology to flesh out his vision of hell, from its soteriography to its personalities. Virgil here refers to the Acheron, one of the rivers that flowed through Hades; and Dante himself beholds Charon, the ancient oarsman whose job it was to ferry the dead across the River Styx.
A widely held religious view in the Middle Ages was that anyone who worshiped pagan gods actually was worshiping a devil, a belief Alighieri indulges in his poem, if not actually embracing it. He portrays Charon not just as an old man, but as a devil "with eyes of glowing coal," with no patience or pity for any who dawdle.
The entire experience is too much for poor Dante. Although he had resolved at the end of Canto II to put aside fear, he notes that even years after this experience occurred, he still trembles at its mere recollection. Now having crossed the Styx a living man, he is witness an earthquake accompanied by a bright light, and he passes out.
The first time I ever tried the high dive, I was too scared to jump.
It was agonizing. The whole time we had been at the pool, I had been watching one kid after another climb the ladder, walk or even run the length of the board, and then dive in. Some of them had jumped. Some of them had cannonballed. A few actually had dived, arms stretched out to part the water before them. It looked like a lot of fun, and so I had decided to give it a shot.
It didn't feel as easy as it looked, though. For one thing, the top of the ladder seemed much higher off the ground than when I was on the ground. And the diving board didn't feel very safe once I was standing on it. I walked carefully out to the end of the board, and froze. There were kids down in the water, playing and splashing about, and having a grand old time, and I knew that it was perfectly safe just to jump off.
But I couldn't do it. Heart in my throat, I carefully turned around and walked back to the ladder, which I climbed back down to terra firma.
So I think I can understand the reaction Dante has at the start of Canto II. At this point, he is still in the dark wood, in sight of the holy mountain and not yet on his way down into the circles of hell. It's at this point that Dante has the only sensible reaction anyone can have at the mouth of hell: What am I thinking? I can't go down there!
When I stood at the end of the diving board, I'm fairly sure I tried to psych myself into making the jump. I'd been off regular diving boards plenty of times. I'd seen dozens of kids jump off the high-dive that day alone. (I had the same problem trying the zip line at an Afs camp in New Zealand in 1987.)
Dante does the same thing. Journeys into hell are a pretty common thing in literature, after all. Odysseus made such a trip in “The Odyssey”; Heracles went there at least twice; the Bible teaches that Jesus descended into hell to free all those who had died in faith; and so on. Dante calls to mind two other such stories, in an attempt to put his impending descent into perspective.
The first tale he mentions is Virgil's own “Aeneid.” In that poem, Aeneas, one of the surviving members of the royal family of Troy, visits hell and discovers that he is destined to be the ancestor of the Roman Empire, which will restore a golden age to the earth under the august leadership of its first emperor. (Coincidentally, I'm sure, Virgil wrote “The Aeneid” during the reign of Augustus Caesar.) The other tale Dante mentions, which I've never read, comes from a medieval account of a vision of the Apostle Paul descending into hell. (2 Corinthians 12 tells of Paul having a vision of heaven.)
What's interesting about these reminders is that, to Dante, they underscore his unworthiness of such an undertaking, which he is sure he will regret. He is neither a great Trojan lord, nor a hero of the faith, like Paul, and he is fairly sure he is going to regret such an undertaking once it has begun.
Perhaps it would be useful here to differentiate between Dante the character in the poem, and Dante Alighieri the poet. Dante the character is practically shaking with fear here, humbly considering himself unworthy of the task set before him. Dante Alighieri is using this to lay the foundation for declaring his worthiness to his readers.
And that justification comes swiftly from the mouth of Virgil, who as the premiere poet of ancient Rome naturally is going to make an impression on Dante. Virgil explains that he was in Limbo, the first circle of hell, where, as Alighieri explains in a later canto, virtuous pagans and unbaptized infants go when they die.
Virgil explains to Dante that he was sent to his side from Limbo by Beatrice, who came to him straight out of heaven to see him lead Dante away from the wild beasts that had been threatening him on the hillside. And not only Beatrice, but two other women from heaven, are calling for him. (Though I count three besides Beatrice: the Virgin Mary, Lucia and Rachel.)
Dante finds this heavenly encouragement more than enough, and he resolves anew to go into hell, with Virgil as his guide.
So what's at work here is that Alighieri, in presenting his Dante avatar as fearful and unnerved by the trip, essentially is casting himself as a humble sort of fellow who would never presume on his own to say any of what follows in the remaining cantos of his own poem. As a result, the journey he takes, the things he claims to see, and the political ramifications of what he finds there – such as political foes suffering the torments of the damned – acquire a gloss of greater credibility.
The closest I've ever come to hell was attending middle school for three years, but at the time, that high dive felt pretty close. I tried it again later that same day, and after some of the other kids in line teased me for wanting to chicken out a second time, I made the jump.
Probably one of the most important things to remember as we started reading "Inferno" is that it's about a man who is going through a mid-life crisis.
The first canto of "Inferno" sets the story at halfway through Dante's life, roughly around the time he was 35. Dante's family were associated with the White Guelfs, which political alliance had fallen out of favor with the ruling class in Florence, forcing him into exile away from his wife and children. To some extent, though the poem is thoroughly imbued with religious meaning, the despair that marks this first canto reflects the sense of grievous wrong Dante feels he has suffered and his hopes that justice one day will prevail, both spiritually and politically.
The canto begins in a dark wood, where Dante has been suffering deeply, and where he encounters a brace of wild animals. First, a beautiful leopard blocks his way for all that it is enchanting to look at; secondly, a fierce lion; and lastly a terrifying she-wolf also oppose him. The animals all keep Dante from mounting the hill that he is trying to climb, presumably to escape the fearsome woods and gain some perspective on where he is.
It's a common device to use animals to represent either an attitude that matches that animal's demeanor, or at least a person who possesses that attitude. The notes in my copy of "Infero" mention that these animals all represent political powers -- the leopard, Florence; the lion, the royal house of France; and the wolf, no less than the papal see. Yet the same three also correspond to mortal vices: worldly pleasure, ambition, and avarice.
At this point, Virgil arrives and explains to Dante that he can never make it up the hill, because the she-wolf (Rome and avarice) eats all who pass that way and becomes only the hungrier for having eaten. Dante's only escape is downward, through the depths of hell, where he will witness the torments of those confined to eternal fire; but of greater importance to the poet Dante, it seems, is the coming of the Greyhound that will destroy the she-wolf and return her to hell from whence she was set loose, and that will deliver Italy.
The writing about this Greyhound is decidedly messianic in style, to the point that the greyhound feeds on virtues like wisdom, love and "manfulness," which fits the other apocalyptic imagery of the canto. But it also works on a political level, apparently, since it may refer to any number of other political figures from Dante's life, especially given the rather limited range of the Greyhound's dominion.
I've always found Dante's choice of Virgil for his guide to be interesting, but in many regards it makes sense. Dante was Italian, and Virgil himself was an Italian, from the Golden Age of the Roman Empire. As a scholar, Dante doubtless had studied Virgil's "Aeneied" extensively, and in any event, he refers to himself as Virgil's disciple and student.
One thing that is mildly worth noting: Virgil's epic "Aeneid" also depicted a trip to the Underworld, as Aeneas sought counsel from the shade his father Anchises, as the Greek hero Odysseus also once had done. Anchises spoke of a coming golden age for Aeneas' descendants. The terms of Virgil's prophecy were clearly intended to describe Augustus Caesar, but some people have tried to interpret them around Christ.
Which of course is only fitting. The messianic expectation is archetypal, common to all people; just as we all believe that things used to better Once Upon a Time, we all have the hope that One Day Things Will Be Better Again.
And I suppose, when we're in a situation where our hopes and dreams have been thwarted by political machinations and bad luck, as many of Dante's had been, such an expectation and hope only makes sense.
If you read back over the past few years that I've been blogging, you're quickly going to reach a few conclusions:
I write a lot.
I write about a lot of things.
Some of the things that I write about, I write about a lot, like a man picking at a sore, or like a man who is hopelessly in love. (Sometimes even like a man hopelessly in love with picking at a sore.)
If something about my writing has struck your fancy, it can be hard to deal with all the other crap on the blog to follow the thread all the way through.
I decided tonight that I want to try something different. Starting tomorrow, I want to blog exclusively about Dante's "Inferno," one canto a night, until I have finished. Then, perhaps, I will continue through the rest of "The Divine Comedy," although the last time I tried reading Dante's masterpiece, I never made it more than halfway through "Paradiso."
Dante's epic poem is a phenomenal piece of literature. Although he did not invent the doctrine of hell, nor even create the doctrines and images expressed in it, there can be no doubt that it is his vision of hell; his beautifully haunting pictures of the circles and cornices of hell, filled with the damned who are buffeted by gale-force winds, submerged in muck, burned in fire or frozen in ice; that has defined hell in popular understanding for all the centuries since.
Some of the details are changed -- Satan is more commonly seen as king in hell, rather than a prisoner there, each of his three mouths chewing on a different traitor -- but our grotesquely exaggerated sense of elaborate punishments, too ironically chosen for the person's defining sins, has its deepest root in Dante's poem. The Wood of Suicides appears in "Sandman"; Dr. Strange once led Marvel's band of mutants through the Nine Circles in the pages of "Uncanny X-men," and authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle were once inspired to journey through hell themselves, in their own "Inferno."
Starting tomorrow, I'm going to hell. I hope you come with me.
This past Sunday night my oldest daughter began to take possession of the folk rock song"Who'll Stop the Rain."
We were in the car, returning from a trip to visit relatives, and — as is our practice on long car trips — we were making the time pass by singing as a family. It was raining, and as one might expect, one of the songs selected was that old standby of Credence Clearwater Revival. The girls both know it well.
The song had ended, when Evangeline, who is entering fifth grade a little more than a month from now, spoke up.
"He's not talking about the rain, he's really talking about ..." And with those words, Evangeline began to deconstruct the song.
Her analysis: Rather than a weather report, Fogerty's song is a social commentary about all the things that are wrong with society, and how we all cry out for someone to set things to rights. She even rattled off the names of some people through the ages who have been "trying to find the sun": Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy and Barack Obama.
I felt for a moment like I was sitting astride a flying horse that had been Mrs. Whatsit, and talking with Charles Wallace as we looked down upon a shadowed world. She didn't deconstruct the entire song, but what she got still was impressive.
I didn't entirely realize that she had reached this level of abstract thinking. The educational psychologist Jean Piaget said people generally don't until they're 18 or so, and many don't reach it even then. Listeners naturally will associate the song with rainfall, but its social implications won't occur to them unless someone points them out.
And even they do realize that the song is about the pursuit of social justice, many listeners probably won't catch the cynicism about governmental five-year plans and New Deals, nor the barren view of Woodstock in the third verse. The verses, instead of being filled with hunger for the redemption of society, instead become a maze of disjointed images, pointing nowhere and meaning nothing.
I said that Evangeline began to take possession of the song. That's because songs exist in three distinct forms.
The first form is the essence of the song itself, whatever it may be in isolation, if in fact it is anything. Usually we come closest to that when we look at the intent behind its composition.
Second is the song as the singer performs it, with his own interpretation of its meanings, import and motivation. Note that this can change over time, as the singer's own associations with the lyrics may shift, and the "crowds of people" in the third stanza may refer specifically to the youth at Woodstock at one point, and years later to the idealistic youth of another generation, or to the bitter and angry adults trying to force society to their will.
The third is the song the listener hears and understands herself to be listening to. The five-year plans to one listener may refer to an effort in the war on drugs, for instance; while someone else may see it as a comment on the war on terror; or to something else entirely. There is a lot of divergence on this end.
This happens to every song or story. The song exists as an entity to itself; the performer imbues it with a meaning and direction of her choice, driven by the context of her own life experiences; and audience members receive the song in themselves, coloring it according to their own prejudices and experiences.
In many cases the gulf between the song as the performer delivers it and as the audience receives it is so vast that it's unclear what shared experience they have had, if any. That's particularly true with shallow readings of a song or a story, such as the woman who hears Elton John's "Daniel" and associates it with her grandson, who is not leaving tonight on a plane and whose eyes are just fine, simply because his name is Daniel.
But that disparity persists even with more mature readings of songs. Earlier in this post, I shared my own understanding of "Who'll Stop the Rain": that it views Woodstock, the cultural flower of the 1960s counterculture, as an effete exercise in changing the world.
That's based on my own understanding of the first two lines of the third verse of the song -- I have no idea what Fogerty intended, nor to be honest, have I given it much thought what happened in Virginia that he would have sought shelter from the storm there, or what tower burned. (Maybe someone will tell me, and it'll be so obvious in hindsight that I'll feel a need to drool.)
But even if I did have specific interpretations of those lines, they would be informed by the context of my own life, and the weight I give each line or word would reflect those biases.
That's apparent from all the readings of Don McLean's "American Pie." McLean wisely has never said what the song is about, with the result that "definitive" readings have it as a chronicle of the 1960s, as seen through the changes in America's music scene; as a response to the assassination of President Kennedy (and, one presumes, to the assassinations of his brother and Dr. King); and to the Vietnam War.
I've even come across interpretations that tie it to the Crucifixion, because of the references to the king with his "thorny crown," and to satanic figures like the jester and the devil himself.
In the end, as I told Evangeline, songs belong not just to the performer, but to listeners as well. She's free to impart her own meaning to symbols of rain, towers, golden chains, and clouds whenever she sings "Who'll Stop the Rain," and even to change words to suit her fancy and preference more.
I learned the song by listening to a CD, and Evangeline has learned it by singing with me, words misheard and words misremembered, in true folksong style. The song no longer belongs to CCR or to the label the band recorded it for. Through that chain of passage, it has come into her possession as freely as any song sung on the bayou. She already rearranges it for her own vocal range, just as I did for mine, and one day, she may even play it on the piano, choose her own chords, and compose a whole new bridge between verses.
It's her song. The arrangement, the lyrics and the notes are all her own to choose.
Don McLean has never come out and said exactly what "American Pie" is about, and though the most common (and probable) explanation is that the song chronicles the upheaval of the 1960s as seen through pop music, beginning with the death with Buddy Holly and ending with the Rolling Stones at Altamont Speedway, I've seen interpretations of varying degrees of improbability, ranging from the assassination of President Kennedy to an unlikely dissertation on the spirtual dissolution traditional Christians see in the 1960s' rejection of the outward-seeming righteousness of the 1950s.
My girls know the chorus and parts of the verses to "American Pie" and belt them out with great enthusiasm. They know who The Beatles are, and who Bob Dylan is, but they've never heard a song by the Stones, by Buddy Holly, or by a number of the other groups mentioned in the song. (Evangeline does know a different cover of "Turn, Turn, Turn" from the one covered by the Byrds.)
I think for a lot of people, the music died when John Lennon was assassinated. I wonder if someone more familiar with pop music than I could compose lyrics connected to 9-11 and the fall of the Twin Towers, which ignited a cultural shift in many ways as profound as the one spearheaded 40 years ago by The Beatles.
But I think it likely that the music died, either with the debut of "Funkytown" or some other discoworthy moment; or during some period of horror during the 1980s, such as the debut of "The Best of Tiffany" on 8-track, or perhaps with the onset of the career of Rick Astley.
But whenever it kicked the bucket, I think it's been dead on the table for a while now.
One of the big things at our house the past few weeks has been the Stephen Sondheim musical "Into the Woods."
I bought Natasha the soundtrack to the 2000-ish Broadway revival with Vanessa Williams, and for her birthday we bought Evangeline a DVD of the original production, with Bernadette Peters, and the girls have been going around singing one tune or another from the show for more than a month. Rachel's humming "You are Not Alone," one of the songs from the show, right now.
The first act of the musical weaves together the fairy tales of Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, and original Sondheim bridging material that can be called "The Baker and His Wife," into one more or less cohesive story.
The stories go pretty much the way you expect to, with some pretty good music along the way, and some rather hilarious comments on the tales themselves, such as when one of the princes comments, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel. What kind of a name is that?"
The first act ends like you would expect a fairy tale to end. Jack is wealthy, the Baker and his Wife are expecting their child, Rapunzel and Cinderella each have married their princes, and so on. Everything has ended "happily ever after," just as you’d expect it to.
And then the curtain rises on Act 2. Everyone is still happily-ever-aftering when the giant's wife comes down another beanstalk, looking for the boy who repaid her hospitality and generosity by stealing from her husband and then killing him. On top of that, Rapunzel has gone mad from years of living in a tower all by herself and then suddenly being thrust into palace life after giving birth to twins, all by herself, in the middle of the desert.
Oh, and the princes, having had everything they ever wanted and having believed themselves to have fallen in love with women they couldn't have ― Cinderella kept running away at midnight every night of the festival, and Rapunzel lived in a tower with no door ― have grown bored with their lives now that they once again have everything they ever wanted, and are in love with two new women, one of whom is in enchanted sleep within a forest of briars, and the other who lies in an enchanted sleep within a casket made entirely of glass.
It’s an incredible story, although it does get a little intense when everyone's arguing over how to stop the giantess and whether they shouldn’t just hand Jack over to her. (They tried having her kill the Narrator, but that didn’t work out.) When we watched it last week, Rachel -- who took a haunted house in good stride ― was so wigged out that she started shaking during that scene.
Like any good story, the show functions well at several levels. The first act is memorable because of the way it retells the fairy tales with all the charm and excitement found in the originals, albeit with a little more characterization. But by the time the second act is drawing to a close, the protagonists have been forced to grow up and assess their fairytale lives to find out what went wrong.
There's the message about letting someone else tell our stories for us, and letting them decide what should happen to us. Cinderella of course has lived the life her dead mother told her to, even going regularly to her grave for further guidance; and the Baker is horrified when the others kill the Narrator (God), because "Now we'll never know how our story ends."
In the end, the four who remain -- Cinderella, Jack, Red Riding Hood and the Baker -- are forced to determine how their story will go. Rather than running from its unpleasantness, they realize that the bulk of the misery everyone's experiencing comes from focusing only on what they wanted, and not considering how a blind pursuit of their own goals would affect everyone else.
So in the end, Sondheim uses the vehicle of fairy tales to critique the message of fairy tales and to pass on a lesson to adults about the life lessons we teach our children through the decisions we make.
One thing I find amusing is that while the decision to kill the Narrator is essentially an effort to throw off the yoke of subservience to God and experience freedom and self-determination, the characters don't really do that. The story remains scripted, orchestrated, and choreographed down to the final drop of the curtain.
No one got killed at all. At best, all they did was shake off the familiar representation of him that was at the moment engaged in pointless moralizing about their situation. His hand and his guidance remained on them no matter what they did.
Jack and the Beanstalk is an interesting sort of fairy tale.
Like other stories, fairy tales have a function besides mere entertainment value. "Red Riding Hood" serves to warn children not to talk to strangers, who pose the danger of death and sexual assault. "The Frog Prince" is a lesson in honesty and keeping one's word, while "Hansel and Gretel" speaks of the value of courage, teamwork and quick-wittedness. Even the stories of Chaunticleer at least have a sort of gallows humor going for them, the way death can come from any direction, as it too often did during the Middle Ages.
But "Jack and the Beanstalk" is about a boy who breaks some of the oldest laws of civilization, by betraying his hostess and killing her husband after stealing one treasure after another. It's an adventure story, to be sure, but it's not much of a morality tale.
In fact, as fairytale heroes go, Jack is neither particularly smart nor brave, He's just lucky. A stranger tells him that beans are magical, and Jack is gullible enough to trade away his cow for these beans rather than getting enough money from the sale of the cow to buy a calf or a couple goats. To his good fortune, it turns out that the beans actually are magical, and his life changes.
When I was a child, I always assumed that the man who gave Jack the beans was some sort of con artist, taking advantage of Jacks's naivete to get a cow for the cost of beans. But this doesn't make much sense; the man who gave him the beans told him that the beans were magical and they were.
It's far more likely that the man knew they were magical and sold them to Jack to effect change in Jack's life. This deliberate of benevolence sets in motion the events of the fairy tale. In a fit of anger over Jack's apparent foolishness, his mother throws the beans through the window and they grow overnight into an enormous beanstalk that reaches into the very heavens,
At this point Jack goes from the childish faith in believing in magic beans to a more adult outlook that fills him with curiosity and boosts his courage enough for him to seize the opportunity before him and climb the beanstalk.
At the top of the beanstalk, Jack also finds wealth and the story becomes more complicated. In many versions of the story, the items that Jack takes -- gold coins, a hen that lays golden eggs and finally a magic harp that plays tiself -- belong to the giant, making Jack a simple thief. The Brothers Grimm throw an interesting wrinkle in when they reveal, via Jack's mother, that these things all had belonged to Jack's father until they were stolen years before.
I'd suggest that this doesn't make as big a difference as we might thing. The fairy tales that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected were stories that were told by peasants and lower-class workers all over what we now call Germany. The heroes of the stories invariably were simple people like they were, people who made progress by old-fashioned work or by simple cleverness that in the imaginary fairytale world won them the gratitude of kings and the hands of beautiful princesses.
Fairytale heroes like Jack, in other words, were people who lived under a feudal system where the fruits of their labors were taken from them by kirke and by king, by clergy and by rulers who were distant and removed from day-to-day life. They were unmoveable and unreachable, and lived a life of comfort so far off that they might as well have lived atop a beanstalk in a kingdom in the sky.
In this sense the giant represents the king or lord of the manor. With this reading, "Jack and the Beanstalk" becomes a mildly subversive tale about taking back from the rulers what they themselves have unjustly taken from the people who produced it.
Now let's revisit the man who gave Jack the magic beans. We've already established that he wasn't a simple con artist out for Jack's cow. He knew what the beans would do, and he gave them to Jack so that they would grow the beanstalk. He knew that if Jack climbed the beanstalk it would take him to the giant's castle, and he knew that once Jack was there, he would find the treasure. Presumably he also intended that Jack should take the treasure.
This is no con artist. In the framework of the story, the man with the beans is an agent of justice. He is a Christ figure in the literary sense, giving the oppressed Jack the opportunity to regain what was taken from him and to punish the perpetrator at the same time. If the giant does in fact represent the lord of the manor, "Jack and the Beanstalk" isn't just an interesting fairy tale.
Where is Christ in "Red Riding Hood?" Is he the grandma, who is killed by the wolf, and who satisifies the wolf's hunger so that he spares Red Riding Hood? Is he Red Riding Hood herself -- no, I think perhaps what is striking about "Red Riding Hood" is itslack of chrisocentric imagery. It is a world of lawlessness, where the mighty and the powerful prey upon the weak and defenseless with remorse. It is a land given over to savagery, and the innocent cannot survive.
One could contend that it is Red's failure to obey the rules of her world that gave the wolf the means to destroy her. That is certainly the traditional reading, which we despise for its cruel savagery -- that if little girls do not listen to their parents, they will be raped and killed in the worst ways imagineable.
That's the chief reason we've added the huntsman and the impossible salvation that he brings. We would much rather celebrate the myth that says that the innocent will be avenged and the wicked punished, and more importantly we want to believe that no mistake is so bad that we cannot be rescued from it and its consequences ameliorated.
So perhaps that is the better story: The wolf kills Grandma, and he kills Red Riding Hood, but the woodsman kills him and ends the wolf's reign of terror in the woods/forest community. One can see wolf and hunter locked in a battle of wills, the hunter giving or losing all he has, to fight until at last he lays the wolf low.
Another story I can draw from this is one of lawlessness and nihilism. There is no God, no Christ, and each does as he wants. The wolf kills Red Riding Hood because he can. She feasts on her dead grandmother's flesh because she is hungry, and the woodsman kills the wolf out of spite, the way a child might kill an ant simply because it amuses her to do so.
A story like that is simply horrifying, and though I can imagine it, I rather doubt I would have the stomach to write it. It is too raw, too violent, too decidedly animlistic and lacking any virtue that separates us from the animal world. I imagine that nearly all of us would pull away from such a tale rather than immerse ourselves in it. In such a world, which lacks all sense of God or any law of morality, even the fruitless injunctions of Red Riding Hood's parents to stay on the path and talk to no one lacks any talismanic power to protect, or any authority to compel Red Riding Hood to obey.
"Open Season," a movie about a docile grizzly bear's return to the wild at the start of hunting season, is a richly rewarding experience, bursting with christophanies and flowing with deep spiritual currents that will stir the soul and leave the contemplative soul with many new and interesting thoughts for days and weeks to come.
Set in and around the fictitious town Timberline, "Open Season" sets its sights upon a grizzly bear named Boog (Martin Lawrence), raised since he was a cub by a forest ranger. He has grown up, practically a pet, staying in the ranger's garage and performing tricks for her audiences as she presents lectures and shows on nature. Compelling metaphoric for modern humanity, Boog is bamboozled by the treats and easy life he has, unable to recognize his enslavement for what it is.
Rescue comes in the form of Elliott (Ashton Kuchner), a buck expelled from his herd for the crime of being different, whom a hunter (voiced by Gary Sinise) hit with and mounted upon his pickup truck. Elliott uses his apparent vulnerability to appeal to Boog, who severs the ropes that hold him.
This spiritual awakening, marked by Boog's first awareness of the needs of others, continues as Elliott leads Boog into town, and convinces him to revel in all that the world that he is so accustomed to, offers. Again, the very things that mark success and comfort in America are the things that make Boog sick, and the next day Boog, still ill from an orgy of self-indulgence, loses control at the show and must be tranquilized and transported back to the wild.
The metaphor continues as Boog, not realizing that he is where he belongs, continues to search for a way back to captivity, much as Scripture tells us the ancient Israelites longed for the chains of Egypt once they had tasted freedom. But Elliott, fulfilling his role as Christ figure, rejected by his herd for the sake of his righteousness, leads Boog ever deeper into the wild, hoping to awaken the true and lost self to the glories of his proper identity.
Tension in the movie comes as the hunter, cast in the role of Satan the Destroyer, continues to seek those he considers his lawful prey. Lesser hunters, mere demons, enter the wild as well, reveling in the destruction and slaughter of innocents that they can bring.
A near encounter with Satan the hunter awakens Boog to his need for a relationship with Elliott, and formerly having spurned his savior, he now returns and works to restore their friendship, reciprocating for the first time the selfless agape love Elliott has shown him.
The spiritual awakening, now continued, bursts into full flower during the deadly confrontation with the hunters. Although the lower demonic hunters easily are repelled, the captain of the fallen host is too elusive and mighty, and fires a deadly shot at Boog -- a bullet that Elliott takes. One is reminded again of the example of Christ, who "being in very nature God did not consider equality with God as something to be grasped, but became a servant; and being found in the form of servant, humbled himself and was obedient, even to death on a cross."
With Elliott's substitutionary death for Boog, the awakening is now complete. Boog remembers that he is a grizzly bear, and with the power and might of a grizzly bear, in Elliott's name he overpowers and defeats the mightiest of the hunters, disarming him and utterly destroying his weapon.
And now we find at this point that Elliott is alive, returned from the dead, and as the movie ends, clearly come to instate a new and heavenly period for the animals of the forest, one where they never will need fear the hunter, and one where the lion will lie down with the lamb, or even the doe with the bear.
My daughter is in 4th grade this year, which makes her old enough to join our church's puppet troupe. Overall, I think this is a good thing, as they are a creative group which allows kids to use their talents to express their faith in a positive manner. However, I am a little annoyed at the blurb about their annual Christmas Dinner Theater in the latest church newsletter:
"This year the troupe will be performing an "original" musical entitled "A Christian Christmas Carol." The story takes place in Iowa where Scrooge finds out the REAL meaning of Christmas."
Excuse me, but isn't that already the point of Dickens' novel?
I have to admit, just the idea of a "'Christian' Christmas Carol" makes me want to barf. Dickens was writing against the exploitation the rich often had of the impoverished in industrial England, a situation too often seen elsewhere in history and the world. You could view it as a works gospel, if that's how you choose to see it, but it also stresses the importance of community and our obligation to other people, an aspect of the gospel often ignored by the evangelical community today despite its prevalence in the teachings of Jesus, James and others.
Chances are the bulk of the people seeing the play already know What Christmas Is Really About™ and are just going to feel warm and fuzzy seeing the same basic message hammered home again. There's more meat in the original story as Dickens tells it than that, but I suppose it doesn't make us feel as comfortable as the other way.
In today's interesting fan theory: Knowing of the threat muggles posed to wizards and witches, Salazar Slytherin planned ahead and built a saferoom where the students and staff of Hogwarts could hide. This secret chamber even contained a guard animal to protect them. Getting to the saferoom was something he entrusted only to members of Slytherin, because any other wizard would have muggle relatives, and therefore could be compromised in a crisis situation.
