Children’s Bible Stories, Beowulf’s Lament, Plot Armor, And The Open Wound of Innocence
Last fall we took Beatrice to her first real, adult play at the Getty Villa, where every fall they produce a classical play in a Greek-esque amphitheater. Last year it was Iphigenia in Aulis — which, yes, is a lot for an eight-year-old, but she’d already read the story of Iphigenia, so I figured she’d be able to handle it. We talked it up as a very special privilege, just Beatrice with me, Zac, and our friends Lucas and Veronika, dressed up and staying up late with the grown-ups..
On the long drive from Burbank to Malibu, I reminded her to stay quiet during the show, so when she started shifting around in her seat during the second act, I leaned in to reprimand her. I put my hand on her back and I could feel her heart pounding through her tiny bird body. Tears were streaming down her face. ““I’m scared,” she said.
Well, of course she’s scared, that little girl is going to die.
Last month Beatrice started reading a children’s abridged Bible during a drive to Underwood Family Farm, where we go to pick vegetables and pet baby goats every spring. She piped up from the backseat to say she was reading the story of Esther. “Oh, that’s great,” I said fatuously, “she’s a great hero who saved the Jewish people.”
“I didn’t know how it ended yet!” she said, angrily.
I thought it was very funny to expect a spoiler alert for a story 2500 years old, but then everything’s new once. No one’s born knowing Hamlet is going to die, or Jesus isn’t.
Beatrice’s illustrated children’s Bible is the same one my grandmother gave me when I was about five. One of my earliest memories is of my grandmother reading to me about Moses being denied entry into the Holy Land. I started crying hysterically, almost convulsively, so hard and for so long my parents debated calling a doctor. I remember more than sad; I felt helpless because this tragic thing had already happened and there was nothing I could do to fix it now. I felt the injustice (as I perceived it) so acutely that it made me physically sick.
Today, this story sounds sweetly precocious, but my experience of engaging with art as a child was largely one of feeling terrible. I was a sensitive child, easily depressed and often anxious, a bird-thin little girl walking around like an open wound, my capacity for receptive empathy vastly ahead of my emotional resilience. I was plagued with psychosomatic nausea and stomach aches. I remember being so sad over a melancholy Peanuts comic that I couldn’t sleep, being so afraid of a scary Disney cartoon that I vomited. I felt everything like a shirt on a sunburn.
By the time Iphigenia succumbed at last, Beatrice had stopped fidgeting. She sat perfectly still, her face bathed in tears, as mute and resigned to horror as the little girl marched offstage to be murdered.
The kids watch movies like this, too — they don’t realize that there is no way Moana is going to die in a movie with her name in the title. It’s extremely funny to me, but then plot armor isn’t only there to armor the hero, it also armors the audience.
Now I spent a lot of time chasing that high, trying to feel my way into an unmediated connection with art. There are a few things that I will always experience viscerally, that i will never defend myself against: Macbeth’s “river of blood” speech, the first time the strings swell in “My Girl,” Regan spinning her head around.
Traditionally, we think of childhood innocence as a pure state spoiled by corrupting knowledge — of sex, of sin, of the worst things in the world. Innocent children are supposedly fearless. In some ways, knowledge of the world made me feel safer. It gave context and a sense of scale to the overwhelming emotional landscape of childhood. I lost the ability to cry through Iphigenia, but I gained the ability to go through my day without being utterly destroyed by Peanuts.
One of my favorite pieces of art is the passage known as “The “Father’s Lament” from Beowulf. Even though I spent years reading and writing and translating Beowulf, I never developed a callus for this passage, which makes me ache every time I think of it. In this section, a king and father is grieving the loss of his executed son.
From Seamus Heaney’s translation:
He gazes sorrowfully at his son’s dwelling,
the banquet hall bereft of all delight,
the windswept hearthstone; the horsemen are sleeping,
the warriors under ground; what was is no more.
No tunes from the harp, no cheer raised in the yard.
Alone with his longing, he lies down on his bed
and sings a lament; everything seems too large,
the steadings and the fields.
“What was is no more.” What is so astounding about this passage to me is the shock of sadness. More than heartbroken, the father is surprised. It’s like the father just discovered grief and he is completely overwhelmed by it. He sounds disoriented, almost physically stunned, like he’d suffered a ringing blow to the head.
Though even in this moment, 1300 years ago, grief is old already, it feels new. “Everything seems too large.” Grief has torn us open and we are undefended. It’s new to the father, to the Beowulf-poet, to all the world. It feels like the moment real human emotion entered English* literature, with all the texture and dimension of Great Art, a sudden chasm opening beneath our feet to reveal a new depth of feeling, leaving us reeling, unarmored.
* Well, not necessarily English, but the debate about who wrote Beowulf and when and where and why is for another Tiny Letter.
