So it was not the condemned making the choice in The Lady, or the Tiger, it was his beloved. I had completely forgotten that. The choice is not what would you choose for yourself, but what do you think the barbarian princess chose for her lover: Brutal death or life in the arms of another.
I did not in any way remember this part. I really think I only remembered how much I hated not knowing the ending; I'm not sure I ever engaged in the actual question of what did she choose. I'm not sure I care. I came back to this from Life of Pi, where I (sadly true) delighted myself with the comparison of choosing stories with or without tigers. And they do parallel. But where the story is asking the reader to extrapolate what is most likely the course of action taken by the character as written, the movie (and its preceding novel) is asking the viewer to choose which they would prefer. Maybe the two could be the same, but I think there's a huge difference. I guess you could choose your ending to the short story based on what you think will follow and what you'd rather see if you could keep reading, but I think you're constrained by the parameters of the character making the choice. Who is not you.
Or maybe it's the chronology that makes it so different. In Lady, it's about what will happen to this man. In Pi, it's already happened to him and your decision of which story you prefer does not affect him in any large degree. In Pi, it's more about you. So of course I prefer that.
But in first making the connection, I thought it was about the man in the arena. (BTW, this is all tying into Spartacus as well, so my pop culture serendipities continue to multiply). I knew he didn't know what was behind each door. I thought the question was which would he prefer. I thought my answer at the time was probably the lady because duh, but now I might think that was too safe a choice. Following Pi logic, choose the tiger because that's a better story. But it's not his choice.
Reading Jacob's Bates Motel recaps. The latest referencing, as the show did, Blake's The Tyger. Seriously, it's all coming up tigers lately. When it's not the Other. Can the tiger be the Other? Should it? And let's not get into where the tiger stands in societal privilege, the other recurring theme I keep coming across recently. The tiger can stand for so many disparate things. Are pop culture Tigers always male?
Yeesh. In what furnace was my brain? Anyway, it's all a mess in my head, not knowing what connection I really want to make here.
"Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future." -- Sonmi-451, Cloud Atlas
Arena boy sure is bound to his princess, and we can imagine bother crime and kindness coming his way, even if we disagree with which is which. Because we never hear what choice he would make. We wonder if the barbarian princess would choose his death to avoid seeing him with another, but couldn't he conceivably make the same choice?
I guess I'm just thrown by how different the story is than what I thought I remembered. Also weird it was written in 1882, and the person taking control of fate is a woman, and the person without real agency is a man. Isn't that odd? Maybe we're supposed to fear the power of this woman, who is bound to make a choice based on her barbarian emotions. Another example of how women shouldn't be in charge of things.
Why can't I ever think straight, untangle the webs to a readable skein? Time to end this ramble.
"while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger."--Sylvia Plath
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