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April 29, 2014

The Strange Triumph of The Little


Prince
Posted by Adam Gopnik

Of all the books written in French over the past century, Antoine de Saint-Exuprys Le Petit Prince is
surely the best loved in the most tongues. This is very strange, because the books meaningsits
purpose and intent and moralstill seem far from transparent, even seventy-five-plus years after its first
appearance. Indeed, the startling thing, looking again at the first reviews of the book, is that, far from
being welcomed as a necessary and beautiful parable, it bewildered and puzzled its readers. Among the
early reviewers, only P. L. Traverswho had, with a symmetry that makes the nonbeliever shiver,
written an equivalent myth for England in her Mary Poppins booksreally grasped the books
dimensions, or its importance.
Over time, the suffrage of readers has altered that conclusion, of course: a classic is a classic. But it has
altered the conclusion without really changing the point. This year marks an efflorescence of attention,
including a full-scale exhibition of Saint-Exuprys original artwork at the Morgan Library & Museum,
in New York. But we are no closer to penetrating the central riddle: What is The Little Prince about?

Everyone knows the basic bones of the story: an aviator, downed in the desert and facing long odds of
survival, encounters a strange young person, neither man nor really boy, who, it emerges over time, has
travelled from his solitary home on a distant asteroid, where he lives alone with a single rose. The rose
has made him so miserable that, in torment, he has taken advantage of a flock of birds to convey him to
other planets. He is instructed by a wise if cautious fox, and by a sinister angel of death, the snake.
It took many yearsand many readingsfor this reader to begin to understand that the book is a war
story. Not an allegory of war, rather, a fable of it, in which the central emotions of conflictisolation,
fear, and uncertaintyare alleviated only by intimate speech and love. But the Petit Prince is a war
story in a very literal sense, tooeverything about its making has to do not just with the onset of war but
with the strange defeat of France, with the experience of Vichy and the Occupation. Saint-Exuprys
sense of shame and confusion at the devasation led him to make a fable of abstract ideas set against
specific loves. In this enterprise, he sang in unconscious harmony with the other great poets of the wars
loss, from J. D. Salingerwhose great post-war story, For Esmwith Love and Squalor shows us
moral breakdown eased only by the speech of a lucid childto his contemporary Albert Camus, who
also took from the war the need to engage in a perpetual battle between each mans happiness and the
illness of abstraction, meaning the act of distancing real emotion from normal life.
***
We know the circumstances of the composition of The Little Prince in detail now, courtesy of Stacy
Schiffs fine biography, Saint-Exupry. Escaped from Europe to an unhappy, monolingual exile in
North America, engaged in petty but heated internecine warfare with the other exile and resisting groups
(he had a poor opinion of DeGaulle, who, he wrongly thought, was setting the French against the French,
rather than against the Germans), Saint-Exupry wrote this most French of fables in Manhattan and
Long Island. The books desert setting derives from the aviator Saint-Exuprys 1935 experience of
having been lost for almost a week in the Arabian desert, with his memories of loneliness, hallucination,
impending death (and enveloping beauty) in the desert realized on the page. The central love story of the
Prince and Rose derives from his stormy love affair with his wife, Consuelo, from whom the rose takes
her cough and her flightiness and her imperiousness and her sudden swoons. (While he had been lost in
the desert in 35, Schiff tells us, she had been publicly mourning his loss on her own asteroid, her table
at the Brasserie Lipp.) The desert and the rosehis life as an intrepid aviator and his life as a baffled
loverwere his inspiration. But between those two experiences, skewering them, dividing them with a
line, was the war.
In the deepest parts of his psyche, he had felt the loss of France not just as a loss of battle but also as a
loss ofmeaning. The desert of the strange defeat was more bewildering than the desert of Libya had
been; nothing any longer made sense. Saint-Exs own war was honorable: he flew with the GR II/33
reconnaissance squadron of the Arme de lAir. And, after the bitter defeat, he fled Europe like so many
other patriotic Frenchmen, travelling through Portugal and arriving in New York on the last day of 1940.
But, as anyone who lived through it knew, what made the loss so traumatic was the sense that the entire

underpinning of French civilization, not merely its armies, had come, so to speak, under the scrutiny of
the gods and, with remarkable speed, collapsed.
Searching for the causes of that collapse, the most honest honorable mindsMarc Bloch and Camus
among themthought that the real fault lay in the French habit of abstraction. The French tradition that
moved, and still moves, pragmatic questions about specific instances into a parallel paper universe in
which the general theoretical questionthe modelis what matters most had failed its makers.
Certainly, one way of responding to the disaster was to search out some new set of abstractions, of
overarching categories to replace those lost. But a more humane response was to engage in a ceaseless
battle against all those abstractions that keep us from life as it is. No one put this better than the heroic
Bloch himself:
The first task of my trade (i.e. of the historian, but more broadly the humanist properly so called)
consists in avoiding big-sounding abstract terms. Those who teach history should be continually
concerned with the task of seeking the solid and concrete behind the empty and abstract. In other words,
it is on men rather than functions that they should concentrate all their attention.
This might seem like a very odd moral to take from the experience of something as devastating as the
war. But it wasnt merely intellectual, an amateurs non-combatant epiphany. At a purely tactical,
military level, the urge to abstraction had meant the urge to fetishize fixed, systematic solutions at the
expense of tactical fluidity and resourcefulness. The Maginot line was an abstract idea that had been
allowed to replace flexible strategy and common sense. (One recalls Picassos comment to Matisse,
when the troubled French painter asked him, in 1940, But what about our generals, what are they
doing?: Our generals? Theyre the masters at the Ecole des Beaux Arts! Picasso responded, meaning
men possessed by the same rote formulae and absence of observation and obsessive traditionalism as the
academic artists.
From an experience that was so dehumanizing and overwhelmingan experience that turns an entire
human being with a complicated life history and destiny first into a cipher and then into a casualty
Saint-Exupry wanted to rescue the person, not the statistic. The statistics could be any of those the men
on the planets are obsessed with, the counting fetish that might take in stars if one is an astronomer or
profits for businessmen. The richest way to see Le Petit Prince is as an extended parable of the kinds
and follies of abstractionand the special intensity and poignance of the story is that Saint-Exupry
dramatizes the struggle against abstraction not as a philosophical subject but as a life-and-death story.
The book moves from asteroid to desert, from fable and comedy to enigmatic tragedy, in order to make
one recurrent point: You cant love roses. You can only love a rose.
For all of the Princes journey is a journey of exile, like Saint-Exuprys, away from generic experience
towards the eroticism of the particular flower. To be responsible for his rose, the Prince learns, is to see it
as it really is, in all its fragility and vanityindeed, in all its utter commonness!without loving it less
for being so fragile. The persistent triumph of specific experience can be found in something as
idiosyncratic and bizarre as the opening image of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant, which, the
narrator tells us, the grownups can only see as a generic object. (This is where Saint-Ex and the

Surrealists who admired hima tracing of his hand appears in one of the issues of the Surrealist
journal Minotaurtouch. Rene Magrittes paintings, with their very similar obsession with middle-class
hats, suggest that every time you see a bourgeois derby there may be a boa constrictor inside. The X-ray
of every hat reveals a boa constrictor in every head. That could be the motto of every Surrealist
exhibition.)
The men the Prince meets on his journey to Earth are all men who have, in Blochs sense, been reduced
to functions. The Businessman, the Astronomer, even the poor Lamplighter, have become their
occupations, and gone blind to the stars. It is, again, the essential movement we find in Camus, only in
The Little Prince it is shown to us as comic fable rather than realistic novel. The world conspires to
make us blind to its own workings; our real work is to see the world again.
A version of this essay first appeared, in French, in the magazine France-Amerique; it was also the
subject of a lecture at the Morgan Library & Museum.

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