Unlocking ‘Mockingjay’: The Spiritual Allegory

It’s been almost two weeks now since we started the contemplative “slow mining” of Mockingjay, the thoughtful digging that John Ruskin said fine art required to come to the gold and jewels beneath its surface. The conversation for the most part has focused on the surface narrative features, i.e., Gale’s choices, the new Peeta, and Katniss’ “boy troubles,” as well as on the violence of the moral and allegorical layers. With the exception of the conversations about ‘The Hanging Tree‘ and ‘The Meadow Song,’ then, we haven’t got much deeper into this powerfully painful book than parsing the romantic partnership possibilities and deciphering the transparencies about the evils of war and television.

Guess what? I don’t think the Katniss-Peeta-Gale love triangle is why we love The Hunger Games. I’m pretty sure, too, that the postmodern morality message of ‘Real/Not Real‘ acts as little more than another hook, along with the romance and the allegorical tit-for-tat content about war and teevee, to engage the reader profoundly.

The real reason we love The Hunger Games and are moved and disturbed by the Mockingjay finale is the spiritual allegory and literary alchemy of the trilogy, the meaning we enter into and experience consequent to our engagement at the surface. Hunger Games is a retelling of Dante’s divinization; traveling alongside Katniss Everdeen on her harrowing journey through the Inferno and Purgatory to the White Rose of spiritual perfection in Paradise, we share imaginatively in her transformation from child of the Seam to Mockingjay-Phoenix and union with God.

For many readers, no doubt, this interpretation is simply ridiculous. As citizens of the Capitol who have grown up on CGI soma and with very little exposure either to literature or Dante-esque literary criticism (what Frye called “iconological criticism,” reading at four layers of meaning), I understand this reaction. We are immunized against the belief that there can be any knowing greater than sense perception, opinion, and deductive inferences made from data (‘science’) with the daily booster shots of materialist propos that matter and energy, i.e. physical quantities, are the only reality and our desires and pleasure the greatest good. The idea, consequently, that the power of literature and the purpose of its traditional artistry is to bring us into contact with immaterial realities and to transform us spiritually is nonsense; there are no such realities and the human being, at least according to the conventional view, has no greater faculty than mind which, ultimately, is no more than brain chemistry. Contemporary criticism, consequently, is restricted to narrow compare-and-contrast cattiness about degrees of political correctness (e.g., this Salon piece by Laura Miller about the relative virtues of Twilight and Hunger Games).

I understand the resistance to reading at depth. I am obliged, however, to point out that this essentially atheistic approach to art in general and literature specifically is a novelty of very recent vintage and contradictory not only to the understanding of every traditional culture in human history but, more importantly, to our empirical experience while reading. Some novels, certainly, serve only as a distraction and ‘break’ from the grind of our mundane ego concerns (if it would be an error to ignore why it is that fiction of any sort makes such a salutary ‘break’). There are special stories, though, that pull us into them and, after this immersion, we find that our view of the world has changed, and, to risk spiritual language, even that we feel uplifted.

These are the stories that we read and re-read. My thesis for why this is so, the heart really of each one of the books I have written and talks I have given on the artistry and meaning of C. S. Lewis, Joanne Rowling,and Stephenie Meyer’s works, is something I learned from an aside Mircea Eliade made in his The Sacred and the Profane. Eliade believed  that in a secular culture such as ours that entertainments, especially fiction, serve a mythic or religious function; seeing man as homo religiosus based on the objective observance of the species across history, cultures, and present experience, he concluded that, deprived of liturgical experience of the sacred, secular man satisfies the human design requirement for spiritual experience by finding it in novels, spectator sports, and cinema. Eliade is most famous, of course, as a professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago; it is good to remember, though, that he was also a fantasy novelist whose work featured hermetic themes and alchemical images.

My thesis, really a corollary to Eliade’s aside, has been that, as fiction serves a mythic or religious function in a secular culture, those books which best serve this function, i.e., those with the artistry to deliver archetypal experience, will be the most popular.

• Potter-mania and Potter-panic, accordingly, were not just another example of extraordinary popular delusion and the madness of crowds but a function of Ms. Rowling’s use of traditional and innovative images, story structures, allegorical types, and anagogical meaning from English Gothic and fantasy literature after Coleridge (see Deathly Hallows Lectures for more on this).
• Likewise, the Twilight books are as popular as they are, not because the millions of readers who love them — and you’re much mistaken if you have bought the media meme that this is a teen girl phenomenon — are stupid, but because Mrs. Meyer crafted an intricate alchemical drama inside a Gothic romance, an allegory of the seeking human heart’s pursuit of union with the Divine Mind (read Spotlight for the full story).

Both Harry Potter and Twilight are stories told within different genres (make that “different genre melanges”) with remarkably similar story elements. They each feature a young person with two friends, a child-becoming-adult protagonist whose adventures combating evil involve sacrificial death and resurrection, specific alchemical images and Christian symbols, and the transformation of the lead character into something of a world savior or super-hero. Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games books, though as different from Twilight and Harry Potter as story genres and settings can be, share these same mythic pieces and traditional artistry — and, not very surprisingly, Katniss Everdeen’s adventures are becoming as popular as the Forks and Hogwarts Sagas. Imagine the madness if Games had been a seven book set rather than just three!

Northrup Frye in Anatomy of Criticism explained that, on the spectrum of fiction, stories that work are those that exist between the ends of realism and pure myth. These fictions, those Frye qualifies collectively as ‘Romance,’ are just realistic enough to engage us sufficiently for our suspension of disbelief and experience of poetic faith. When we enter into the story through this realist door and imaginatively become the lead character, it becomes possible for us to experience the supernatural or mythic referents through the story symbolism, by which I mean specifically the transparencies and translucencies of the narrative line, the story structure, and of the principal characters.

I mentioned in my first long post on The Hunger Games back in February that the series was meant to be read as a re-telling of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The surface structure of the books tells us as much and Mockingjay confirms it with a single detail.

The story structure that is most obviously suggestive of Dante is the the host of 3’s in the three book series. In itself, of course, this clever use of threes — a trilogy of books, each having three sections, each section having 3-squared chapters, for 3-cubed chapters in each book, and 3-to-the-fourth chapters in the series — could be meaningless or just an affectation. Even if so, it is also, nonetheless, a marker or red flag for Dante’s influence. His Divine Comedy is in three books or canticas of 33 chapters or cantos each, all of it in rhyming three-line stanzas or tercets in the terza rima rhyme scheme. When a writer makes a point of stacking threes in her story structure, the serious reader asks herself, “Is she telling me to think Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso?”

I think she is. The appearance of the white rose in Mockingjay is the detail that nails this possibility down because Dante’s journey to and within Paradise begins its climax with the beatific vision of the heavenly Empyrean in the form of a white rose. If you think that’s an obscure rather than an unmistakable  literary reference, recall that Ms. Rowling makes even a more subtle reference to the same Dante marker in her Deathly Hallows Epilogue, a vignette of Harry’s later life about the first Hogwarts Express trip of his son Albus, whose name means “white, resplendent” in Latin and Ron and Hermione’s daughter Rose. It’s a reference better writers assume their readers will know and recognize.

This is important for at least two reasons.

(1) Dante in his letter to Con Grande explains to him how to read the Commedia, namely, at the four levels of human knowing: surface, corresponding with sense perception, moral, corresponding to opinion, allegory, corresponding with deductive knowledge, and the anagogical layer, corresponding with wisdom. (This letter’s relevant sections are quoted in the previously mentioned post, ‘Unlocking Hunger Games.’) The Dante links in Games story structures and symbolism strongly suggests that we are on the right track in reading these novels beyond the surface story elements and political messages embedded in it.

(2) Dante’s tour of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise is the experience of the soul’s alchemical passage and transformation from the greatest distance from God to the vision of His energies, a knowledge beyond the Beatific Vision that Dante cannot and does not share.If Hunger Games is built on the model of the Commedia, than it is not a stretch to read it as a three part parable or allegory of the soul’s journey to Paradise, the beatific vision, and alchemical perfection.

As painful as it may be for readers immunized against ‘a Christian reading’ of the books (which includes, alas, too many Christians and otherwise thoughtful readers), this will mean understanding the major characters in the three Hunger Games novels as allegorical transparencies or story-ciphers for spiritual realities. More to the point, the narrative line and story formula repeated in each book should be read allegorically as a 21st century soul’s travels through salutary trials to an end much like Dante’s Easter theophany in 1300.

Katniss Everdeen’s Journey as Pilgrim and Christian ‘Everyman’

What makes this sort of reading easier than it might be is the evident un-real qualities of Katniss’ story. She has two teenage boys who love her, one of whom is frequently alone with her in the woods outside of any external stops to physical intimacy, the other who sleeps with her on a regular basis, and neither of whom violates her virgin purity. Much like Twilight, this fairy tale quality of the narrative invites an allegorical and spiritual interpretation.

Once the short hurdle of dystopian realism is cleared, deciphering the allegory by looking through the character transparencies to recognize the traditional referents is not a very difficult thing at all. In large part, it is a futuresque re-telling of Man’s fall in the Garden. Katniss is Adam and her story is the Man’s Fall, Redemption, and hope of Perfection in Christ.

Our first clue to this is Katniss’ relationship with her Father, the ‘God the Father’ of the story. He is never named in the book which corresponds to the human incapacity to know God in His essence or to name Him per se. She loves him and remembers her time when she hunted with him in the forest surrounding District 12. Everything she knows that makes her different comes from her time with him, the period in her life that corresponds with Adam and Eve’s time “walking and talking” with God in Eden (Genesis, Chapter 3). The song that her father teachers her is ‘The Hanging Tree,’ which, as explained in a previous post, corresponds to the Tree of Life or World Axis and Cross of Calvary, what in Genesis is called ‘The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.’

Katniss’ father departs from the story and she is betrayed by her mother, who retreats into something like catatonic shock at his absence. This disappearance and betrayal is the beginning of the Hunger Games story in several ways because it reflects the Fall of Man both in Eve/Mrs. Everdeen’s part in it and the agony of Adam and Eve in a life apart from God’s company and presence. Man, of course, is not left without a means of returning to the Garden and life with God. The Garden of Eden or Paradise, as explained in another post, is Ms. Collins’ story Meadow that Katniss sings about to Rue in Games and in her Mockingjay Capitol battle.

Enter Peeta, when Katniss, having forgotten how to find herself and be saved as her father taught her (by naming her after a nourishing root vegetable), is near death and desperate to save those her father left in her care. Like the Canaanite woman in the Gospel narratives who begged crumbs from Christ’s table like a dog (cf., Matthew 15: 21-28) and the Prodigal Son who was reduced to eating with pigs in his estrangement from his father (cf., Luke 15:16), so Katniss is reduced to searching the baker’s trash and to despair at the fence of a pig sty (Games, chapter 2, pp. 29-30).

The ‘Boy with the Bread’ saves her by giving her two loaves of bread. This gift is notable on allegorical grounds in several respects:

• Peeta is beaten for this gift, i.e., it comes at the price of his physical sacrifice;
• Eating this “hearty” bread (ibid, p. 31), Katniss feels that “spring had come overnight” (ibid, p. 32).
• Katniss looks into Peeta’s blackened eyes at a distance the next day and, looking away in humility, she has a saving vision, “the first dandelion of the year” which reminded her of the family book her father had given her and that she could survive by using the knowledge she had learned from her father and what was recorded in his book (ibid).

Katniss, when Peeta is chosen at the reaping, thinks, “Why him?” (ibid, p. 26). “To this day, I can never shake the connection between this boy, Peeta Mellark, and the bread that gave me hope and the dandelion that reminded me that I was not doomed” (ibid, page 32). She returns to this moment both in her first real conversation with Mutt-Peeta after his rescue (Mockingjay, Chapter 16, page 231) and in Mockingjay’s close:

What I need [to survive] is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that. (ibid, Chapter 27, p. 388)

To risk offending the thoughtful reader by pointing out the obvious, Peeta is the suffering Christ whose sacrifice is given to those living in His mystical Body, the Church, as bread for the illumination of their hearts and minds (see Luke 24: 13-35 about the eye-opening effect of sacramental bread).  Katniss eats Peeta’s “hearty” bread and looking to him sees the promise of the resurrection, “rebirth instead of destruction,” in the Paschal light of first life in the spring. Though his gift of sacrificial love, she remembers the Father who can only be known through Christ (cf., John 14:6) and his words, those she has learned from him herself and in his book. This book is a story cipher for scripture.

‘Peeta,’ the ‘Boy with the Bread,’ has a name that means bread (pita) as well as a vocation as a bread baker and artist.  His bread saves Katniss. In a world named ‘Bread’ (Panem is the accusative case form of the Latin word for Bread), beyond the reference to Juvenal’s Panem et Circenses I think it is transparent that Peeta or ‘Peter’ is an icon of the Christ, the world creator, Who in St. Peter’s church at least, is received as Bread, and Who loves the world and every soul in it sacrificially. As artist, actor, and self-less lover, he is, as the story’s Christ, Culture and Faith that are fostering  Katniss’ purity, vision, and individual will without ever demanding she surrender them to him.

Peeta-as-Christ is anything but a stretch, even in Mockingjay. From the several suicidal sacrifices he makes in the Games to his rising from the grave in Hunger Games and his CPR assisted resurrection in Catching Fire, not to mention Katniss’ commitment to serve him even at the cost of her life in the Quell, he is consistently the incarnation of “unconditional love,” as Katniss recalls in Mockingjay, during his recovery from Capitol hijacking (Chapter 14, p. 195). as discussed in previous posts, his gift to Katniss of a Pearl in Fire, is a not-especially opaque revelation of his role as the Light of the World giving “solid light” to his beloved in the luminescent Pearl of Great Price (cf., Matthew 13:44-46).

Think of Peeta’s father, another story stand-in for God the Father. He loved Katniss’ mother (cf., Games, Chapter 22, p. 300), call her ‘Eve,’ and reaches out to Katniss by visiting her after the first Reaping with a gift of cookies. He has “no words at all” (ibid, chapter 3, pp. 37-38; note the difference between the silent father and his his eloquent son whose words have magical effects), except that he will “keep an eye on the little girl” and feed her. His assurance that he will be watching over Prim relieves “the pressure in my chest” (ibid).

This link of Peeta’s father and Katniss’ father with the same spiritual referent is evident, too, in Haymitch’s Mockingjay report to Katniss about the first positive development in Peeta’s recovery. He remembers Katniss’ father singing ‘The Hanging Tree’ , “the first connection to [Katniss] that hasn’t triggered some mental breakdown” (Chapter 15, p. 211). In a book that is largely about spiritual memory, as we’ll see, that Peeta’s breakthrough is his recall of the song about Christ’s crucifixion and invitation to his beloved to take up her cross is no small thing. The Cross and Resurrection are the end and aim of the Incarnation, Peeta’s Christ identity.

We’ll return to Peeta to explain his superficially un-Christ like behaviors in Mockingjay, but we need to look at Gale through our allegorical glasses first. Who or what does he represent in this story of the pure heart’s spiritual transformation?

This is the first of three ‘Unlocking Mockingjay’ posts. Tune in tomorrow for more on the allegorical meaning of Gale and Peeta — and the alchemical alembic of Mockingjay! ‘Unlocking Mockingjay: The Literary Alchemy’