As we get ready to head back to school, Acculturated is reevaluating some of the “classic” books routinely assigned to children to read during the school year. Do they still deserve to be granted the label of “classics”? Are there better books kids could be reading? And what ideological and cultural messages are these books really sending our children?
“‘The grown-ups are very strange,’ the little prince said to himself, as he continued on his journey.” Yet surely by now there must be some love lost between the little prince and the grown-ups, especially when they dispatch cosmic voyagers of their own, (like Mars Rover Curiosity) and have it snap a photo of itself as homage to Le Petit Prince.
I revisited The Little Prince recently, after a friend insisted that the book’s beloved story is actually about codependency: that what seems the spare beauty of its love story is corrosive, both for its child audience and the adults they grow up to become.
When the little prince first meets the fox—who will play little prince to him—the fox says that each is nothing to the other, no different from a hundred thousand other foxes or little boys. “‘But if you tame me,’” says the fox, “‘then we shall need each other,’” and be unique.
Later, after the taming, the little prince recounts how out of a hundred thousand similar foxes, this one had become his own. The story has changed—the prince had never seen a fox before, and on first sight had told the fox it was very pretty—though it’s not clear that he, or the storyteller, realizes this. The prince recounts the fox’s lesson: “‘Men have forgotten this truth. . . . You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.’” One begins to get a sense of my friend’s co-dependency concerns.
The middle passage of The Little Prince unfolds like a retelling of Gulliver’s Travels or Candide or Flatland: travels, half dream and half nightmare, through lands with strange ways. In Little Prince, the subjects are grown-ups—a king, a geographer, a businessman, a man with a very fancy hat—each the sole inhabitant of his own tiny planet, each considering his little powers and plights of great consequence. As in the other stories, the absurdity of these dwellers is shown through the window of our voyager’s naiveté.
It is not clear whether these grown-ups are consumed with their trifles because they have no one to love, or the other way around. But the message is that they have forgotten a truth very pure and simple, about what in this world is of real consequence.
The little prince, of course, has not forgotten, and is sure he never will. The anchoring story is his love for the one beautiful thing on his planet: a rose. “‘My flower is ephemeral,’” he says. “‘She has only four thorns to defend herself against the world.’”
And so the little prince must protect her against volcanoes, and invasive baobab trees, and the indiscretion of the sheep deployed to mow the baobabs. The grown-ups are at once far from this love and near the thing that threatens it, for they “‘fancy themselves as important as the baobabs.’”
The businessman and the king are grotesques. But there is a certain commonality between their totalizing regard for their own world’s affairs, and the little prince’s. Each peers over the boundaries of his own world with bafflement at the other.
This is curious, for by the time the little prince takes his journey, he has learned how material concerns, and protection of the sovereignty of one’s home, may spring out of a nurturing of love. Yet he never wonders whether the warped versions of these interests that he finds in the businessman and the king could have begun as something like his own. Wasn’t the little king once a little prince?
What has lingered with me in the years since I read The Little Prince is not the love story or its lessons, but the spare beauty of the Sahara Desert, in which our narrator meets the prince while stranded by his broken plane. The sense stays more powerfully still on a second reading; I must at last take up Saint-Exupéry’s travelogue of his real aviation adventures—including his weeklong stranding in the Arabian desert—from which I once pawned a lovely epigraph.
More than the flower, the fox, the airplane, or the little prince himself, it is the desert that defines this book’s austere vision of love. For the lovers are defined not only by their chosen devotion, but the set-apartness of the place where their love springs, and must forever be watered. Like the desert, its beauty is bound up in its loneliness; it is fated to tragedy if ever it is breached by the world outside.
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