The Little Prince

A L S O+T O D A Y

Forever young
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T A B L E++T A L K

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BROWSE THE WILD THINGS ARCHIVE

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Mamafesto
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Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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Grown-ups are perplexing at best, and downright dangerous at worst. In the celebrated first paragraph of the book, our narrator explains how, as a young child frustrated by adults consistently misconstruing his drawing of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant as a picture of a hat, he gave up "what might have been a magnificent career as a painter" to pursue the sensible professions endorsed by adults. In so doing, he surrendered his own powers of childlike vision. "Alas," he says, unable to see through the walls of boxes like the little prince, the odd yellow-haired child who appears before him one morning in the Sahara desert, "I am a little like the grown-ups. I have had to grow old."

Duped by images, obsessed with the inessential, adults are unable to truly see. And seeing is precisely the point, for the little prince trades in the currency of the invisible. "The eyes are blind," he tells our narrator, "one must look with the heart." "The thing that is important is the thing that is not seen." "Beauty is something that is invisible." Like the children who see angels in Wim Wenders' film "Wings of Desire," the little prince lives in that pristine realm of childhood where values dwell in the heart and the invisible reigns -- that heady, dreamy universe that dissipates when we grow up and succumb to the furious imperatives of the concrete, of matter.

Cast upon our planet only to find that the Earth is nonsensical and as curiously bleak as his own desolate asteroid, it's no small wonder that the little prince is sad. In fact, he is filled with unrequited longing and nostalgia. His melancholy is so expansive that even the narrator is stricken by an undefinable "sense of grief," and it is this very sadness that challenges the persistent notion that children are, and must be at all times, happy.

Posits psychoanalyst Thomas Szasz, "Happiness is a condition formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children." The zany mechanical glee and frenetic happiness of most children's products are no match for the feelings of emotional disenfranchisement and disenchantment that come hard and early in the playgrounds of youth. It doesn't take much for children to realize that the world is not full of happy purple dinosaurs and obsessively cheerful friends endlessly repeating their ABCs. (Thank God. To quote Aldous Huxley, "There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.") The little prince, in his quest for meaning in a seemingly meaningless world, offers children something that falls between the artifice of entertainment and the disappointments of the real world, a tiny foothold on the slippery shoals of reality. In this he bears the stamp of the country and time that bore him: Saint-Exupéry and Jean-Paul Sartre were contemporaries, after all, and so was Martin Heidegger, who called "The Little Prince" "one of the great existential books of the century."

But the little prince goes beyond existentialism for kids and into the mystical. In challenging the conventions of happy endings, he does what storybook heroes are not supposed to do: He dies.

Or does he?

"I shall look as if I were dead," the little prince says of his imminent departure, "and that will not be true." Of his ultimate destination he adds, "You understand ... it is too far. I cannot carry this body with me. It is too heavy." Compared to an old abandoned shell, his body disappears by daybreak. But where exactly did it go? Is it the same place (your child might ask) where Grandma went when she left? Will you go there too? And the terrible, inevitable corollary: Will I go there, too? "A couple generations ago," explains Penelope Leach in "Your Baby & Child," "the most general taboo was 'the facts of life.' Now, it's the facts of death." These may be ironic words in a culture where death is a frequent if not regular prime-time guest in everyone's living room. But just as our relentless insistence on being happy is often a means for abating a looming fear of being depressed, so too does our overwhelming preoccupation with death (from cartoon indestructibility to cinematic carnage) underscore deep-rooted feelings of despair in the face of the Big End. "The Little Prince" may not tackle hardcore mortality issues, but it does offer a transcendent perspective on the question with overtones that have been interpreted by some as quasi-religious. "A fairy-tale transposition of certain episodes in the life of Christ," is how literary critic Victor Graham describes it, referring to the prince's planetary peregrinations -- his wanderings through the desert followed by his star, his implicit preaching of brotherly love, his transcendent purity and predetermined death.

Christian metaphors aside, "The Little Prince" suggests that we belong to a much vaster realm than the tiny sphere we inhabit; that our passage on Earth is but a momentary detour on a mysterious journey Elsewhere. In this itinerant cosmology a celestial road map exists: "I wonder," ponders the prince, "whether the stars are set alight in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own again."

Stumbling upon our narrator in the middle of the desert, the little prince recalls the ancient belief that strangers encountered by chance might in fact be mystical emissaries, "a god in disguise," according to T.V.F. Cuffe. These powerful and fleeting encounters with strangers, through some ineffable and startling communion, can change one unequivocally, shift the course of one's path, present a metaphor for something lost or deeply sought after. As a wayward, lonely planetary traveler searching the universe for answers, the little prince is a sort of curious reflection of our own condition in time: The 20th century began and may very well end with the Titanic in the collective mind -- a symbol of the hubris of human beings in their quest for dominion over nature. Interestingly, on the night the Titanic sank it was so still and clear that the ship, according to passenger reports, was entirely surrounded by stars, lit by starlight above and below, by stars reflected on the ocean's surface.

With this haunting metaphor of almost childlike extravagance, we have literally sailed into the stars throughout the century: We have "rediscovered" our universe -- collected rocks on the moon, found water on Mars and organic matter on Jupiter, discovered galaxies blooming like strange flowers across the light years. If we were to suspend grown-up disbelief for just one moment and walk back into the country of childhood, we might recognize our home Earth ("the loveliest and saddest of landscapes") in the context of an even greater world, and offer our children metaphors for their journey into the unknowable future. We could take them outside and stand together in the dark, turning our eyes upward to the night sky. Look up, we might say, pointing to the stars. That is, we could tell them, where you came from.
SALON | Dec. 22, 1998

Debra Ollivier is a frequent contributor to Salon.