Samuel Puopolo

An Introduction

I’ve been rereading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. I was 15 when I first read it – a little outside of its target age-demographic, perhaps – and it was a profound experience. I understood that it was an articulation of a childlike sense of wonder more concentrated than any other I had read.

But, now I’m rereading it, and I think there’s something very profound going on here beyond that – something almost esoteric. Perhaps that’s a little nutty, though.

The Little Prince can be broken up like this:

  • The shiboleth of the drawing numbers 1 and 2
  • The sheep drawing
  • Three revelations of the Prince
    • He fell from the sky
    • The tininess of his planet (coupled with the tale of the Turk astronomer)
    • The baobabs
  • The Prince’s 2 loves
    • Sunsets
    • The Flower
  • His journey
    • The king
    • The vain man
    • The drunkard
    • The businessman/accountant
    • The lamplighter
    • The geographer
    • The earth
      • The serpent
      • The three-petaled flower
      • Mountain and echo
      • Roses
      • The fox (The essence is invisible to the eyes; It is the time that you have lost for your rose that makes her so important; You become responsible forever for that which you tame)
      • The signalman
      • The merchant
  • Ascension of Prince
    • The well
    • The serpent

Some of these events have meaning that feel apparent to me. For example, it is stated three times that the Prince never lets go of a question once he has asked it — when the Prince insists on asking our narrator about the thorns of plants, when the Prince insists on asking the businessman about what he has millions of, and when the Prince insists on asking the geographer what “ephemeral” means. Is it not the proper quality of a seeker that he never desist from questioning?

I’ve been thinking about the sheep drawing – it reminds me of Platonic idealism. The idea of the sheep which our narrator draws is more real than the notion of its being a drawing. The ideal/prototype exists in a plane above the material. The Prince does not want a sheep, but a drawing of a sheep.1

The Prince, then, is a seeker, an idealist (in the philosophical sense, although also perhaps in the sense of “optimist”). What does he seek? He seeks a transcendent experience after a love affair that left him bitter and confused. He wants to understand both his flower and their place in the universe. The flower may represent a woman, but the relationship of (relatively) permanent lover and ephemeral beloved resembles man’s relation with God in Sufi mysticism.

And, our Prince voyages through seven worlds – the number of planets in the old geocentric universe. But, there’s a catch – unlike Scipio in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, who journeys from the Earth up to the celestial sphere, the Prince goes backwards from his planet to Earth. It is written “no one has seen the kingdom of God except the One who descended from heaven, that is the Son of Man” – is our Prince Christlike? Or, rather, is the Prince like us traveling from a familiar planet to a different Earth?

The seven figures the Prince meets obviously satirize seven types of ridiculous behaviors which adults exhibit. Interestingly, what creates the satire is that these adults perform their actions and roles despite the absence of others, that is, of society. The message seems to be for us to dare to seek meaning in life beyond the ones we create in society. It is ridiculous to think we have lived well when we, like, the lamplighter merely follow orders unthinkingly without sleep. Yet, we do that, don’t we? Doesn’t the lamplighter merely have a job? It is ridiculous to amass heaps of non-physical wealth (even more than physical gold) – the businessman in some ways lampoons paper money, but he also prefigures credit cards or crypto-currency.

The seven planets do not seem to correspond to the seven planets of the geocentric universe in order– it may make sense for the King to be like Saturn, but it would make more sense for the King to be Jupiter, the king of the gods. The fop is vaguely venusian, one might argue, in his vanity. The drunkard could only correspond with Bacchus, who regrettably lacks a planet. The businessman is akin to Mercury, the god of merchants, or else Pluto, the god of wealth. The Lamplighter again may be Venusian – the morning star– or else akin to the Sun which gives light. The geographer is unlike any god, and the Earth must be the Earth, which is not a planet in a geocentric universe (since it does not “wander” – the Greek meaning of “planet” –from our perspective).

For the Prince’s time on earth, it seems he wanders the wilderness, like Jesus, being tempted by the serpent and ministered by the beasts. Yet, he also meets two additional characters who point out the vanity of man, but in a social context, unlike the satire of man on the other planets.

The Prince, again like Jesus with the woman from Samaria, leads the narrator to water that is endowed with wonder beyond potability – “the water that was not in the well.” The narrator describes the experience of the water as akin to Christmas – the birth of Christ. Of course, the Prince’s death seems to also resemble the guiltless death of Jesus at the hands of evil. Yet, like Jesus again, the Prince’s body disappears and he ascends (although unlike Jesus, the Prince does not appear to his disciples after death).

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Notes:

  1. It may be objected that the Prince could not get a physical sheep in the desert even if he wanted to – that may be, but the fact remains that a drawing of a sheep is what he seeks. If the Prince were a materialist, he would think that a drawing of a sheep couldn’t help him at all. ↩