lassie

Hedging the Sleeping Beauty Again (Sequel to Dec. 23 Post)



I listened to The Sleeping Beauty again last night. I must touch it again. You see, every time it is heard, it is heard with new powers of hearing. It folds in on itself, revealing another surface, in a story that is all surface, whose only "point" is that it is all surface and no point.

The crone decides the girl must die how? By pricking her hand on a spindle. Everyone who was paying attention in English class understands the status of sewing and spinning metaphors: they are text per excellence--the text chronicling its own production and therefore, therefore, therefore not coinciding with "itself."

And what does the king do, the broken-hearted patriarch who will pass any law to preserve his daughter from destiny, from her unfolding to the rhythm of sleep and awakening that awaits her? He passes a law, upon penalty of death, that no one in the kingdom is to spin yarns. No one is to own even one little spindle. And the whole kingdom thinks this is fine, that it is a good compromise, because this girl, this child, was so lovely, so waited for. Of course, this proclamation is as impossible as it is significant to the yarn thus spinning into our ear, since the story must out, since the conflict must happen. What did Edgar Poe write in "Ligeia"? Ah, "There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion." This is to say, there is no sense of perfection without some flaw.

The young girl tracks down the 13th faerie herself, spinning yarns in a tower at the margin of the kingdom. Out of curiosity she takes the spindle, immediately piercing her own hand and falling into the 100 years' slumber. Now, grasp this: as soon as the kingdom discovers her body and as soon as word gets out about her sleep, the kingdom as a whole begins to fall into a sleep, too. Once again, but from the opposite "side," so to speak, the spinning of yarns, the telling of tales, is the destiny of flaw, sleep, falling away from habitation of the moment. The story's pinnacle is its own fade . . .

Now, the ruby-throated Cantadora narrating this retelling deliberately tells us that, after the Sleeping Beauty meets the dread fate and falls asleep, along with the whole kingdom, the story itself, the story with a dreaming life of its own abroad, "changes." It becomes mistranslated and embellished, so that the story then goes, "only true love can awaken her." Not only that, but the story evolves such that the true lover that awakens her shall inherit the whole kingdom. And what happens as a result of this mistelling of the story as theme (will, love) instead of unmediated destiny? Oh, the Cantadora tells us, "In response to this, perhaps, a hedge grew up around the girl." No one could penetrate it to approach her and fulfill the tale as translated into its familiar, if bastardized, storybook form.

The hedge is impenetrable, and the white bones of all the suitors trapped while trying to penetrate it gives pause to waves of future suitors. Why does the hedge open for the last suitor, then, closing behind him again? Well, we are told, because he camped outside the hedge and considered (simply waited, slept); he could imagine the Sleeping Beauty as just herself. And the possibility of seeing such a creature restored to herself is this clear directive to him, giving him patience, not a lust or even an objectifying attraction, let alone quest for inheritance. It is a focus on her, not on them as lovers, not on narrative, not on exchange, not on inheritance, not on destiny-subverting triumphal theme (his willful role as savior). It is almost an ascetic's renunciation, instead, another falling away from what the story was supposed to be.

The strangest thing about this story, as you listen to it, if you do, in other words, is that it keeps resisting its own narrative. On first hearing, it strikes you as plotless. It is a series of meaningless twists, repetitions, reverses--all imagistically gorgeous, excessive, and consequently empty (irreducible to paraphrase, retelling, analysis).

Love is not enchantment; love is the awakening from such. "It wasn't that true love had arrived; it was simply that the 100 years were over." This is hard to pin down, anathema that it is. We are told at the beginning of the Sleeping Beauty, that her parents are so beautifully married, precisely because they didn't marry for love, which the teller equates with marrying for inherited wealth. They didn't "fall in love" with one another. Oh no. They married well because they could see each other "as a soul." No more.

Well, I'm ruining it, as a literary critic does, all the while salivating over the paper (book?) I once meant to write on faerie tales, post-feminist, or some other unlovely little "ist" I blush to associate with anymore. This is also the (anti)theme. Make like you forgive me, for I am feverish and beside myself. No, really. Literally, clearly, transparently--beside myself.