I recently read Roald Dahl's The BFG. I was surprised by how lighthearted the tale was in comparison to other popular Dahl works.
The giants, though flesh eating and barbarically hideous, were not really enough to offer much fright to my imagination. Not even the more childish bits of my mind were spooked by the idea. The image of large hands groping in through my bedroom window and stuffing me head first into a large gaping mouth was not enough to writhe the dark parts of my fancy.
I lay in bed the night I first began reading the book and I watched the branches of the tree outside my window as they bobbed closer and further, closer and further, and I thought to myself that, in the dark, it looked very much like a grapnel hand groping in the night, waiting for me to look away so it could break its mundane pattern and reach out to grab me.
I thought the hand was friendly enough though, and, if I'd have to imagine the giant at the other end of it, I'd say it was more than likely the fingers of the Big Friendly Giant I was looking at.
The snow rested on its knuckles and wrists as if it had been standing there a good long while, waving at me to notice it so it would have no choice but to take me away and be my friend.
It made the hand look old, pale, and wrinkled, and somehow lonely.
It was enough to tickle my fancy, I admit, but I slept fine that night. I did not dream of giants and large hungry hands. I had no nightmares about a short lived life ended with one final speculation as one slides helplessly down a giant's dark throat.
But then Roald Dahl did something else, something strange and I dare say frightening. He stuffed the giants beneath the earth, not as a tool of horror, but as a way to get rid of them.
Now that, I thought, that was a way to scare me, to put my imagination out in the dark and let it go wild imagining the outcomes of such a story.
As I fell asleep that second night having completed the book and thus having left those nine hungry giants in their deep dug pit, I could not help but think about how gloriously frightful that image was.
I don't know why the giants once imprisoned were so much more frightful to me than when they lurked free in the streets, leaning on rooftops and looking into windows for children to devour. Maybe deep dark pits are simply easier to imagine than humongous humanoid hands grabbing me.
Maybe everyone that was once a child knows the fear of deep dark spaces, basements and closets and such, and abysmal nightmares about falling into such pitch black holes.
I was reminded of a painting by Francisco Goya entitled Saturn Devouring His Son, a painting that would have been enough to frighten me as a child.
That image is exactly what I imagined it would look like, I thought to myself, picturing an ignorant soul going on a walk late at night with a flash light only to come across a deep pit, too dark to see down.
Some horrid sound would come out of it, like someone ravenously enjoying their dinner, and they, not knowing any better, would shine their beam of light into the pit.
Look up the painting and maybe you will understand the deep bedded terror of this image, if you do not already.
Why did Dahl think that putting the giants beneath the earth would solve the problem, I wonder?
Story-wise it does, at least. It actually gets rid of them quite neatly, with very little trouble along the way as the nine beastly creatures are deposited into their prison.
He puts the giants out of sight and out of mind, or at least, he pretends to.
Really though, Dahl embeds them effortlessly into the child's mind. Likely they will not mind them there, not until they ask the question of what happens after.
Do the giants ever get out? What if there is an earth quake? Or, worse, what if someone falls in?
Thus, narratively Dahl creates a horror. Few things are more frightful than stories that let us do the imagining. Books can be sealed up once finished. But hooks like these, they linger in one's head, reshaping into frightful scenarios.
I wonder if Dahl intended it? Was a deep pit really the best thing he could think of when trying to tuck the giants away? Or did he mean for us to imagine the echoes of their hungry howls on quiet windless nights?
I wouldn't put it past him.
How far is this pit from civilization? The book doesn't tell us. But it must be close enough, surely. After all, we are told about the so called single disaster to come out of it: the time three silly drunk men fell in and all that was hence heard of them was the crunching of their bones and the giants below as they howled in delight.
I gulp to think that there are nine hungry giants in that pit and only three silly men to feed them.
I wonder if Dahl considered that too. It would not surprise me.
The story tells us that a sign is put up after that, a sign reading "it is forbidden to feed the giants"; a fine way to make light of the situation; enough to make any child laugh at the idea of flesh eating giants tucked away beneath the earth, right?
Until you think twice about it, then it makes one shiver.
I myself imagine that gaping black pit is itself like an open mouth leading directly to the colossal stomach of the hollowed out earth. I imagine at times you can hear nine enormous stomachs gurgle and growl and the giants as they wail out in horrid sounds of despair.
It is no easier to think that the pit closed over eventually. In fact, it is almost worse. Crammed into their tightly collapsed holes, the giants would become utterly deformed; crooked from bowing; sightless from the lasting dark; left only with their tactual hands, always fingering and groping to see what's around them. The giants would mutter into the silence as the walls of the earth near in on them. Every so often the earth would tremor above as they shift, sleeping in its bowels.
Soon, the people would forget there ever was such a thing as giants.
And so, the grisly giants would sit, hunched forever beneath the earth, ingesting dirt and sucking the worms and centipedes out of the soil; always there, but never any less hungry.
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