https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=qUAlxC8F92s
All right, so George Elias for 9 Likes asks, Hey Jonathan, congratulations on your work on the Snow White story. It was very profound and beautiful. Could you perhaps give us a hint as to why Snow White tastes a small part of the food of every dwarf in a similar way that the youngest dwarf will then sleep one hour in the bed of every other dwarf. I’ve been wondering about the meaning of this pattern. And so, well, the first one is based on in the Grimm story, you have this. Like in the Grimm story, you have the idea that Snow White comes in and eats the food of each dwarf. And it is, you know, you can see when you read it that it’s a parallel to the Goldilocks story. And in the Grimm story, there really is that parallel as you can see it in the way it’s written. So I thought it would be interesting to bring that out more clearly in my book because one of the things that happens in Snow White is that we often think of Snow White as being completely innocent. And so she’s not completely innocent. One of the things that happens in the story is that she transgresses the laws of hospitality. And she does it, you know, she does it in the most innocent way. Like it’s not the same as Goldilocks because Goldilocks is represented as a, you know, as a naughty girl who’s not listening to her parents and basically goes into the house of the bears and eats the food and sleeps in the bed. But Snow White does it out of necessity. She’s thrown out. And so she does maintain her innocence, but she nonetheless has to deal with the problem of a kind of transgression of hospitality. It has to be kind of part of her fall, which is that by eating the food of the dwarves, she is now, you know, you could say, it’s weird to say it like she’s trapped in the world of the dwarves. She’s not trapped, in her case, it’s not trapped negatively, but this is related to the story of Persephone, who goes into Hades and is tricked into eating food from Hades. And because she eats food from Hades, then she is trapped in Hades. And I think we see the same in the story of Hercules and his friend. I think that’s where you see that. Where the idea is that if you go into hell and you eat the food of hell, then it’s like you basically are trapped in that world. And so that is something that is going on in Snow White. Basically, she is kind of given over to the stranger for a certain amount of time in the story, and she has to be kind of brought out of that world by the prince. So it’s a descent into the underworld, it has all those connotations, but it’s important to understand that it’s not, it’s a structure. In the story, it’s not necessarily represented as a sin in the same way that it’s represented for Goldilocks, but it is nonetheless a transgression in that sense. And transgression in a way that is not completely moral, in the way that she transgresses her identity and takes the food of the stranger. And so because of that, she now, she dies in the stranger’s bed. She falls asleep in the stranger’s bed. And the second part of your question, which is the dwarf, that one is tougher. Like, it’s weird because when I saw it in the Grimm’s version and it was so particular, it was one of those things where I have the intuition that it’s very deeply meaningful, but I don’t completely understand it. And so this is actually maybe a way to help you kind of understand how tradition works, is that, you know, there’s a way in which tradition sometimes works despite the people that make it, right? So it’s like, even though I don’t completely understand that structure, it jumped out at me in a way that made me want to keep it in the story. So I left it there despite how I, I can’t completely understand it. You know, I think in some ways has to do with the remainder. I think that that’s what it is. You know, the least of the dwarf, the youngest dwarf, is now a kind of remainder that doesn’t have a home. So it has to kind of wander from bed to bed. And I think that that is somehow supposed to represent the situation. It’s like, it’s an image of the whole situation, which is of Snow White and her moving into the forest, her, you know, becoming a, being housed by the stranger, you know, moving into that. And then also the whole idea of the remainder in general in terms of menstruation, you know, and Snow White kind of entering into the space of being a teenager. So it’s all of that seems to be what that is about, but like, I’m really, you can see because I’m like, I’m still skipping from one thing to the other. I’m basically giving you the analogies without totally clearly seeing into what it is that’s going on. You know, one day I’ll get it. Like one day, you know, I just leave it to, as Mathieu says, you know, you just have to ruminate on some things. And then at some point, at some point it will come. So, yeah.