Words&Dirt

Apparently I have become too much of a stuffy grown-up to appreciate this book. I can’t vouch for how younger versions of me would have reacted to this, and I’ll admit that it could have made a big impression at the right age or moment of development. As it is, I cannot figure out why this silly and boring story is so beloved by so many people.

The Little Prince opens with a shockingly superficial and false distinction between the cognitive styles of adults and children. Saint-Exupéry wastes no time letting the reader know just how little regard he has for adults, and laments having become one himself. “Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves,” he whines, “and it is exhausting for children to have to provide explanations over and over again” (2). The narrator draws this conclusion because adults don’t understand the particulars of a pictures he has drawn (they think it looks like a hat when in fact it’s a boa constrictor digesting an elephant). How unbearably tragic, how painful to find oneself so alarmingly misunderstood! One can only imagine the trauma.

The saccharine glorification of childhood that ensues is both trite and absurd, but taps cleverly into a child’s desire to believe that he or she is secretly smarter than everyone else. Saint-Exupéry’s little prince goes around critiquing straw men who are nothing more than the most reductive caricatures of adult life, always positing his own naive worldview as superior to theirs. The little prince accuses all adults of having an indefensible superiority complex, all the while proving himself the most haughty and judgmental character of all. He seldom learns anything from anyone, despite being fond of asking questions.

The worst part of Saint-Exupéry’s disdain for adults is that it cuts us off from an important truth about human development, which is that there is no “ideal” stage where we “see the world as it truly is.” Children do not see things more clearly than adults, and adults do not see things more clearly than children. Each sees things differently, according to his/her personal background and stage of development. Denigrating adults for not thinking like children is akin to persecuting a grown bull for wanting to graze and fuck heifers instead of suckle its mother’s udders. The final irony is that Saint-Exupéry quite obviously conceived of The Little Prince during his adult years, which proves he is quite capable of making the kind of imaginative leaps that his tale would have us believe are unavailable to mature human minds.

Another fatal flaw is Saint-Exupéry’s insufferable penchant for making statements that are too vague to contain any substantive meaning, but just intellectually slippery enough to throw up a flimsy sheen of profundity. He waxes philosophical about topics like the functionality of a rose’s thorns and the difference between meaningful and meaningless labor, but offers little in the way of useful ideas or lessons that could be applied to anything beyond the bizarre internal logic of his text.

In the one moment where Saint-Exupéry seems to explain himself, he performs a magnificent face-plant by rolling out what is perhaps the biggest and most deceptive cliché in literary history: “One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes” (63). It is difficult for me to think of a message that would be more damaging to children––or to adults––than this one.

The human heart is often a liar and an idiot, and deserves no special place in the complex and fluctuating emotional and informational landscapes adults must navigate. The eyes aren’t perfect either, but they do a damned good job of helping us get around, and they reveal plenty of things that count as “essential” for the continuance and betterment of human life. Saint-Exupéry ignores such nuances, preferring instead to frolic with talking foxes and flowers. The Little Prince, therefore, is nothing more than a child’s handbook for becoming the kind of solipsistic brat that increasingly dominates our schoolyards and social media.

Teaching kids to look inside their hearts for answers to life’s difficult questions doesn’t make them more intelligent or capable of dealing with adverse conditions; it shackles them to a circular, self-gratifying internal existence that ignores the crucial projects of interpersonal inquiry and compassionate interrogation of the natural world. The Little Prince masquerades as a parable about overcoming loneliness and melancholia, but readers who buy into this kind of thinking will likely become more isolated from their surroundings and loved ones, not less.

Rating: 1/10