Yet our culture has inverted these timeworn symbols, and to the extent that we mix up our symbols-that we take a giant, which has always meant evil, and call it good instead-we risk mixing up our morals. And Jack climbs his beanstalk to teach our children the only proper response to evil: “Giants should be killed,” Chesterton wrote, “because they are gigantic.” Anything less would turn the world on its head. Giants are real, then, because evil is real. This symbol puts hands and warts and jaundiced teeth on an otherwise invisible truth. A giant is shorthand, a symbol that conveys immediately to the imagination what can’t be readily explained by other means. Giants are real.” Sure, they don’t have flesh and blood, as you and I do, but they embody for us, and especially for our children, something deeply true. “Ah,” I reply, “that’s where you’re wrong.
Sure, scorpions sting and snakes bite, but they’re real and your giant is only make believe.” “Ah,” you protest, “that’s where you’re wrong. Try as I might, there’s precious little I can do about it. It’s a morbid story, yes, but that’s hardly my fault. Sometimes, depending on my mood, I add an epilogue in which the giant grinds Jack’s remaining bones in the gristmill, bakes a delicious loaf of bread, enjoys it with butter and honey and a tall glass of milk, and lives happily ever after. Look, here’s an idea: Why don’t you put some tea on, and we can have a nice chat.”Īnd the giant laughed and reached out and took Jack in his sweaty fist and lifted him off the ground and-crunch!-bit off his tasty little head. Jack spoke: “Why does it have to be like this? We could be friends, if we just took the time to get to know each other. No boy in the long history of boyhood had ever done something like this before. He was fast approaching the cupboard when Jack, taking a deep breath to steady his nerves, bravely stepped out and shouted, as loud as he could, “STOP!” First beneath the table, and then-getting closer and closer all the time-behind the chair. The giant burst into the room and began snuffing around for Jack. Jack hid in the cupboard as the giant came THUD-THUD-THUDing down the hall, sniffing his horrible sniffs and shouting at the top of his giant voice: Where the original Jack felled his towering foe, my new postmodern Jack instead extends the olive branch of peace. So I tell Jack (my son) a different story about Jack (the heretofore slayer of giants). Above all, we need a story in which the power of love and understanding overcome the cruelty of this oversized bully in the clouds. No, what we need is a story in which Jack tries to understand the giant, tries to empathize with him. Who says giants have to be bad? In this world, the real world, Jack’s true enemy isn’t the giant, it’s his ignorance of the Other. It’s too black-and-white and far too modern for the morally graywashed world we live in. The original story is too crass, I thought, too bloody, too hateful.
The second story, one of my own devising, is called Jack the Giant-Hugger, and it follows much the same plot except for the ending. The first is known to most of us as Jack and the Beanstalk, and it follows the traditional storyline: a tumbledown shack, a cow, some magic beans, a beanstalk, fee-fi-fo-fumming, bravery and derring-do, and, at the end, a very dead giant. I tell my son, who is conveniently named Jack, two different versions of that classic story, Jack the Giant-Killer.