The Inconsolable Secret of Dean Winchester

[ramblin_rosie]

Spoilers have made me nervous, so I'm posting this now before it can potentially get Jossed. Needn't have worried. No spoiler warnings at present, though there could be spoilers in the comments after the ep airs.


I will start by admitting my biases very frankly. I’m a Christian, and that fact colors the way I view everything. So does the fact that I’ve studied Christian theology in some detail—not seminary-level, granted, but more than the average bear. I will also admit that this meta is very likely at least somewhat eisegetical, reading things into the text of the show that the writers never intended. Show is, as missyjack and others have argued, strongly flavored with Jewish sensibilities that don’t necessarily mesh with Christian understandings of how the world works. Yet I can’t shake the sense that there is a message here that is not one the writers intended or even necessarily recognize—one that reflects the intent of a different Author altogether.

Let’s look at Dean. Specifically, let’s look at Famine’s lie that Dean was dead inside and wanted nothing. gaelicspirit’s Adagio notes, as I’ve long thought, that Dean’s problem isn’t that he can’t feel; it’s that he feels everything too deeply. I’ve also suspected for about as long that the reason Famine couldn’t trigger a craving in Dean that could be amplified to a fatal degree is that Dean’s deepest longing is for something Famine couldn’t provide, like food, sex, or booze. It can’t even be for death, per se, because he’s not suicidal in that episode—depressed, certainly, but still able to say with Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

(Keep in mind here that “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” was supposed to air before “My Bloody Valentine” but that the order was switched by the network. In terms of story continuity, there should not have been any break between MBV and “Dark Side of the Moon.” This fact will be relevant later, I promise.)

I happened to reread C. S. Lewis’ sermon The Weight of Glory last week, however, and that finally cinched for me what seems to be going on with Dean. What Lewis calls “the inconsolable secret in each one of you” is a deep, innate desire for something that cannot be fulfilled in this life. We get hungry, and there’s such a thing as food; we experience physical desire, and there’s such a thing as sex. Yet:

we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? “Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.” But I think it may be urged that this misses the point. A man’s physical hunger does not prove that that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will.

Now Heaven exists in SPN-verse. Going there should satisfy Dean’s longing, right? Wrong. Here’s how Lewis goes on to explain both the Bible’s promises and our inability to understand them properly:

Here, then, is the desire, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies. Our sacred books give us some account of the object. It is, of course, a symbolical account. Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience. The scriptural picture of heaven is therefore just as symbolical as the picture which our desire, unaided, invents for itself; heaven is not really full of jewelry any more than it is really the beauty of Nature, or a fine piece of music. The difference is that the scriptural imagery has authority. It comes to us from writers who were closer to God than we, and it has stood the test of Christian experience down the centuries. The natural appeal of this authoritative imagery is to me, at first, very small. At first sight it chills, rather than awakes, my desire. And that is just what I ought to expect. If Christianity could tell me no more of the far-off land than my own temperament led me to surmise already, then Christianity would be no higher than myself. If it has more to give me, I must expect it to be less immediately attractive than “my own stuff.” Sophocles at first seems dull and cold to the boy who has only reached Shelley. If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know.

The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised, firstly, that we shall be with Christ; secondly, that we shall be like Him; thirdly, with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have “glory”; fourthly, that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and, finally, that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe—ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God’s temple.... The variation of the promises does not mean that anything other than God will be our ultimate bliss; but because God is more than a Person, and lest we should imagine the joy of His presence too exclusively in terms of our present poor experience of personal love, with all its narrowness and strain and monotony, a dozen changing images, correcting and relieving each other, are supplied.

Now, as others have argued, Dean seems to be the most instinctively Christian character of the lot, despite his early agnosticism. In trying to convince Cas not to open Purgatory, for example, Dean distinguishes free will from license (“Just because you can do what you want doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want”) in a way that sounds very like Paul in 1 Corinthians 12. So it’s not surprising that he’s quite a lot like Lewis in his pursuit of this particular longing, even if he doesn’t know precisely what it is, and in his instinctive acknowledgement that Heaven as it exists in that universe is deeply unsatisfying. If he had to put a name to his desire, I suspect Dean would say something about wanting to make his parents proud; “that’s what Dad would have wanted” is now “that’s what Bobby would have wanted,” but it seems to be the same general idea, and notice that the memory that Dean is most anxious to savor in DSOTM is a moment that epitomizes his mother's love for him. Yet we know that Mary and Bobby had their faults, and John was notoriously not forthcoming with praise—he was proud of his sons, definitely, but he seldom said so in front of them. What, then, is the proper object of Dean’s desire? Look how Lewis defines “glory”:

When I began to look into this matter I was shocked to find such different Christians as Milton, Johnson and Thomas Aquinas taking heavenly glory quite frankly in the sense of fame or good report. But not fame conferred by our fellow creatures—fame with God, approval or (I might say) “appreciation’ by God. And then, when I had thought it over, I saw that this view was scriptural; nothing can eliminate from the parable the divine accolade, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” With that, a good deal of what I had been thinking all my life fell down like a house of cards. I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child; and nothing is so obvious in a child—not in a conceited child, but in a good child—as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. Not only in a child, either, but even in a dog or a horse. Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures—nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior: the pleasure of a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its Creator.... And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex for ever will also drown her pride deeper than Prospero’s book. Perfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself; “it is not for her to bandy compliments with her Sovereign.” ... It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God...to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness...to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.

Were he to actually experience it, I believe that this description is exactly what would define Heaven for Dean: finding out that God is pleased with him. And that is exactly what he does not get in DSOTM. Rather than a place that is better than human experience and where the soul can be with God for eternity, Heaven in SPN-verse is made up only of individuals’ memories, the Axis Mundi, and the Garden, where Sam and Dean not only don’t find Yeshua Meshiach but also find a mere angel with a message from God phrased in words calculated to hurt: “Back off,” “He doesn’t see how it’s his problem,” “He’s done helping you.” Taking authorial intent into account, this encounter comes immediately after Dean’s heartfelt plea for help at the end of MBV, so it cannot be seen as anything other than a direct rejection of Dean’s request. And that is what has driven Dean to despair.

Did Joshua lie? It’s always possible, given the circumstances, but Zachariah’s reaction seems to indicate that Joshua’s intrusion was not part of the grand scheme he had to force Dean to say yes, and two episodes later, Michael doesn’t seem to be aware that the message has made Dean suicidal enough to say yes. There’s precious little evidence to contradict Joshua’s message, especially from the boys’ perspective—apart from bringing Cas back twice and maybe giving Dean the location of the showdown (if we buy the idea that Chuck is God or that Chuck could receive a vision from God that the angels couldn’t manipulate), and apart from Dean answering Cas’ prayer by telling him a truth that he didn’t want to hear, there’s been very little indication that God’s even paying attention anymore. And also, if Joshua had gotten the message wrong, God could easily have found another means of getting it to Dean. We have the Primary World example of Balaam’s donkey, of course, but there’s also the example of Jonah. God told Jonah to preach against Nineveh, presumably with the intent of giving the people a chance to repent (given that He wouldn’t let Jonah get away with leaving the city to its fate); when Jonah finally gave in and preached, his sermon was “Forty days and you’re toast,” no mention of repentance at all. Yet the king had ears enough to hear the Holy Spirit whispering what Jonah refused to say and declared a fast and a time of repentence on the off chance that Yahweh would take mercy on them anyway. Are we to believe that none of our heroes, including Bobby and Chuck, could have known in their deepest heart of hearts that Joshua was Michael’s pawn instead of the divine messenger he appeared to be?

So, then, absent clear evidence to the contrary, we have here a universe where Heaven is Memorex, the Bible is inaccurate, and God doesn’t want to be known. This leaves humanity in general, and Dean in particular, subject to a longing that cannot be fulfilled in that world, even in Heaven. And if that is the case, there seems to be only one conclusion.

Dean’s inconsolable secret is that he’s in the wrong universe.