"It was the cook who woke her, when he smacked the kitchen boy; the smack resounded with all the pent up force of those long years and re-echoed through the castle. A fair child sleeps behind the thorny pages that follow".
The quotation is taken from Walter Benjamin’s Preface to his unpublished doctoral thesis written in 1925 and tells the story of Sleeping Beauty, but the author has changed the story to suit his more pressing needs:
- I am the brutal master chef waking up the whole castle and Sleeping Beauty under her to thorn with his resounding and re-echoing smack.
Or…
- I am the abandoned and forgotten ‘fair child’ asleep under her thorn bush, waiting and waiting and waiting (after the prohibitory prick of the needle upon the robe "she wanted to weave herself among the tattered rags').
The above authorial options are suggested by Esther Leslie’s in the conclusion of her book on Benjamin - Overpowering Conformism (2000), but a host of other actors manifest from out of the uproar in the castle which follows the smack administered by the master chef (…the butcher, the baker, the candle-stick maker, and so on are all clamouring to tell their story). However, whoever I may be, I am not the Prince Charming: "The last thing to come near her should be a Prince Charming in the shimmering garments of science, He would be bitten as he kissed his betrothed", writes Benjamin.
IT is in the ‘Can’t go on, Will go on’ spirit that it is possible to write and read again, and this time to completion even.
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